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Some responses to the idea of “nuking the oil spill”

Using a nuclear device in an attempt to shut down the GOM oil spill seems like using a battleship to cross a river.Success is not guaranteed and the side effects could be horrendous.”

Nuking The Oil Slick? The Oil Drum by Big Gav on May 31, 2010 –  ]A recent interview with Matthew Simmons on Bloomberg discussed the possibility of a nuclear explosion being used to seal the leaking  Macondo oil well.This idea was floated a couple of weeks back by the Russian periodical Pravda, which noted the technique was used 5 times to seal leaking wells in the old Soviet Union (once unsuccessfully in attempt to stop a gas leak in the Ukraine – though the likely environmental damage might cause you to wonder what the definition of “success” is). The first use of this technique was in Uzbekistan in 1966, with the blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers…………………

Below – just 3 of the 90+ comments on this article:

“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.
The USSR did all sorts of wild and wonderful things and now the Russian Federation is faced with the very dirty consequences.

Using a nuclear device in an attempt to shut down the GOM oil spill seems like using a battleship to cross a river.Success is not guaranteed and the side effects could be horrendous.”

The lack of data is a darn good reason for not trying it. What could possibly go wrong in nuke-fracturing the caprock strata of a huge oil reservoir under a mile of ocean?………..And there’s no way the USSR wouldn’t spin ANYthing they tried as a success, even to the extent of imprisoning those who disagreed.)Nuking the well would be rolling the dice on a situation which is currently difficult-but-probably-fixable, in exchange for we know not what. After it went off, we’d be on terra incognita with no “next plan”.

“if the idea is to bulldoze material over the leak or to crush-and-seal the well and some of the geology around it but either way you’d skip the radiation risks with conventional explosives. Wouldn’t a nuke give a blast effect in an undesireable all-around direction as well?From what I understand the principle of shaped charges was discovered by accident. When miners were setting off dynamite in the 19th century they’d notice that the lettering impressed into dynamite by its manufacturers was somewhat visible in rock surfaces after blasting.

So, surely with digital design we could come up with a big explosive package that would suffice. Sure, there would be time issues. But then, an off-the-shelf nuclear weapon might not provide the right kind of explosion and engineering a custom-made one would take time as well.

The world’s arms industries seem able to come up with plenty of “stuff” so how hard would it be to rush thousands of tons of amatol or TNT or fertilizer or whatever to the Gulf of Mexico? The level of technology available in the 1940s probably would’ve sufficed?”

The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | Nuking The Oil Slick?

June 1, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | AUSTRALIA, nuclear, nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, radiation, radioactive