“This may have been asked and answered on other threads, but are there other countries capable of handling this situation?”
I’ve read that Russia had a very simliar situation. It didn’t get near this bad. Of course they didn’t have a leader who was more interested in being interviewed by a sports caster either.
They nuked it. They were laughing at us way back on May 4 for attempting to put a dome on it.
http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/04/nuke-that-slick/
Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”
Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities. The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals.
I have read specifics somewhere on why a nuke is not correct for the geologic makeup of the deep horizon well.