Sounds like a job for Cajun Man
Posted on 05/09/2010 9:33:00 PM PDT by valkyry1
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) – Concern grew Sunday that the US Gulf coast is facing a whole new level of environmental disaster after the best short-term fix for a massive oil spill ran into serious trouble.
BP's giant containment box lay idle on the seabed as engineers furiously tried to figure out how to stop it clogging with ice crystals.
The British energy giant, which owns the lion's share of the leaking oil and has accepted responsibility for the clean-up, has tried to banish the notion that the dome is a "silver bullet" to end the crisis.
But should efforts fail to make the giant funnel system effective, there is no solid plan B to prevent potentially tens of millions of gallons of crude from causing one of the worst ever environmental catastrophes.
Untold damage is already being done by the 3.5 million gallons estimated to be in the sea so far, but the extent of that harm will rise exponentially if the only solution is a relief well that takes months to drill.
This could be risky as experts have warned that excessive tinkering with the blowout preventer -- a huge 450-ton valve system that should have shut off the oil -- could see crude shoot out unchecked at 12 times the current rate.
There are also fears the slick, which covers an area of about 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers), could be carried around the Florida peninsula if it spreads far enough south to be picked up by a special current.
"If this gusher continues for several months, it's going to cover up the Gulf coast and it's going to get down into the loop current and that's going to take it down the Florida Keys and up the east coast of Florida,"
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
How would a nuke be useful for this problem?
Sounds like a job for Cajun Man
They will pump in junk: shredded tires, gold balls etc. But it may not work
It would fuse everything together. And, it wouldn’t have to be that big. I think the Russians have already done this.
Unkus is correct re the fix, not sure about the Russia thing.
that will not work, a quick set concrete might.
My first thought was that the nuke would superheat the seafloor. Turning the sand into a solid - glass. I’m not sure that it would heat it deep enough and reach into impermeable materials - probably not. Then it would just make the problem worse. Say the sand was turned into glass for a diameter of one mile. In two years you might have a bunch of oil leaking around the rim a a two-mile wide problem instead of a 36-inch (or whatever) problem.
A nuke would not be all that devasting to the area. We tried, and so did the Russians - more so, in using nukes for underwater “excavations” to create harbors.
Well the BP engineers aren’t treating this like the rantings of environmentalist whackos nor is the Coast Guard. The Louisiana fishing industry has a temporary ban in certain areas.
Florida senator Bill Nelson said
“You are talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, to our fisheries, very possibly disruption of our military testing and training, which is in the Gulf of Mexico,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
I said its a bad situation, you disagree with that?
If this fix does not work their only other choice right now “is drilling a first relief well one week ago, but that will take up to three months to drill — by which time some 20 million gallons of crude could have streamed into the sea”
Did the Russians do it over land or in water?
So if a politician says it, it must be Gospel. Didn’t Obama tell us that if we didn’t pass his Economic StuffItToUs that our nation would crumble. Of course Bill Nelson is going to go against BP on this one because Florida has a vested interest in all this what with the potential of multi-billion dollar lawsuits just beyond the horizon. My view may be twisted, but I look at this as a great potential for economic stimulus. Look at the myriad of “cleanup” jobs that will be created.
Don’t ask me, I never said the Russians used nukes to seal a leak, but if they did it would have been an under water leak a land leak could be fixed easily without a nuke.
Halliburton is involved in high risk, high tech, complex, dangerous and expensive operations in the energy industry for the same reason that the US Marines were the ones who landed on Iwo Jima — They are the most qualified to do so; and the ones most likely to succeed. I find it laughable that they are made out to be villains.
It is not a matter of if a solution is found, but when.
I suppose the relief well will work (3 months from now) but something sooner would have been nice. I live right on the Texas coast so I guess some of this slick will come to my house (Hey, maybe I can sue too?). The spill is going to put a lot of people out of work for a long time. Businesses and jobs will be lost. There have been bigger splits but this one is in a very bad area.
Your idea of heating the choke point in the funnel makes sense. By lowering a special heating element in the proximity of the iced up funnel, just the elevated water temperature in the area should warm up the water in the area and transmit that heat into the chamber to melt the ice. A better idea would be to raise that chamber and fit it with a heating element.
The blowout occurred three weeks ago. Very, very little (if any) has washed up on shore and so far I think they’ve cleaned a total of two birds.
Don’t you think this is a little strange? What has been happening for three weeks?
I think more is now starting to wash up. But now that you mention it yes it is.
Last time I looked, Deepwater Horizon was owned and operated by TRANSOCEAN.
Well, I guess TRANSOCEAN was the organization that thought its toy could not sink. My bad.
Of course. Political correctness precludes andything else.
"“You are talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, to our fisheries, very possibly disruption of our military testing and training, which is in the Gulf of Mexico,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union” program."
Hype.
"I said its a bad situation, you disagree with that?"
Yes, it's an unfortunate occurrence, but hardly the unprecedented catastrophe it is being made out to be. Google "Ixtoc oil spill". Also read up on what Saddam Hussein did in the Persian Gulf before the invasion of Kuwait.
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PI/PDFImages/ESPIS/3/3973.pdf
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