Russian solution to gulf oil leak: Nuke it!
What is it that they say about destroying a village in order to save it?
In past days there have been many reports of what BP might do to close the leaks that have caused millions of gallons of oil to spew into the Gulf of Mexico since April 20. Some of the ideas have bordered on the outlandish.
But the latest proposal probably crosses that border. A Russian newspaper is apparently suggesting that BP try the Soviet Union's successful tack in arresting four natural gas leaks between 1966 and 1981: detonating a nuclear bomb at the site of the leak.
Yes, a popular Russian daily — the Komsomoloskaya Pravda (if you read Russian) — thinks we should go there. Julia Ioffe of True/Slant translated bits of the article, the thrust of it being that an "underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel." The newspaper puts "the chances of failure" at 20 percent, a gamble "the Americans could certainly risk."
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."
While this method may have worked for the Soviets, the circumstances in the Gulf of Mexico are much different. As LiveScience's Jeremy Hsu points out: "The Russians were using nukes to extinguish gas well fires in natural gas fields, not sealing oil wells gushing liquid, so there are big differences, and this method has never been tested in such conditions."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100513/t...ews_ts2052
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Russian solution to gulf oil leak: Nuke it!
