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BP Oil spill, Russians say to Nuke it

R

ryanwheelock

Member
Just read a thing about some russians saying to nuke the oil well and it will stop the leak. Said they did it on a land well that was leaking for 3 years and it worked. Said shouldnt matter being under water. Cost would be 10 million. Wonder about radition and long term animal life. Just wanted to hear all your 2 cents worth.
Ryan
 
I think a better solution is to make a long tapered plug out of a ship properller shaft or other solid stock just bigger than the pipe I.D.
Maybe 15' long. On the tail of this needle like spear, put a same size pipe about 20 feet long. Fill this with depleated uranium (cheap and needing disposal, and not very radioactive at all) then lower it into the pipe at the preventer to slowly cap it off. The U is so heavy that it will force the plug into the well pipe. Jim
 
I think they considered nuking the well. Since there is no precedent in water some government agency(EPA?) voted no.
 
A hydrogen warhead is fairly clean after the initial blast of heat,gamma, neutrons, trace tritium and the pressure shock wave.
The atomic warhead used to trigger the hydrogen bomb is the dirty part.U235 uranium or worse plutonium PU 239. Plutonium is dirty nasty stuff that is a chemically poisonous heavy metal.
The atomic fission daughters tend to be unstable isotopes of iodine, cesium, strontium and potassium. Which are chemically close enough to calcium or potassium and readily absorbed by the body to build bones etc. Or into the thyroid.
External gamma radiation while a concern The real problem is an internal uptake and exposing yourself with Beta and Alpha particles.The same amount of Beat or Alpha externally on your skin would be little to no dose due to the limited penetration.
Lets not forget how people expose themselves to an barely shielded hydrogen fusion reactor 93 million miles away. That will turn your skin red and peeling in minutes or hours.
If you were dosed with 1/10 that much radiation from a nuclear incident. Imagine all the screaming?
Yes you could let a hydrogen warhead go BANG on top of the oil well. The most disturbance would be the shrill cries of the anti's.The 2nd worst reaction would be some dishes rattling in nearby cupboards.
After the pharting around this long via engineers with plenty of theory but woeful little practical experience. May as well hold our noses, wipe up the oil slicks and wait for the relief wells.
 
Actually that is a pretty good idea. I would make the point/stem/guide longer.
A wee charge of C4 on top would drive that plug in right tight is weight alone couldn't. Might even friction weld the plug to the casing.
The questions remain long after the horse was stolen from the barn.
#1 How pray tell did the blow out preventer not operate properly?
#2 Who ordered the short cuts to finish the well drilling before turning it over to production?
This makes recovery of under sea hydrate deposits, salt water algae farming, nuclear hydrogen and cellulose ethanol look good.
 
What occurs to me is that is stead of having a hole about a foot accross with oil leaking out of it you would have one several hundred yards accross leaking oil out of it. At best you might be able to seal the area near the center of the blast with some sort of glassification seal effect but the perimeter of the blast would surely leak oil on a scale that would stagger the imagination.

A marvelous suggestion indeed...from the perspective of a Russian.
 
How would "nuke the oil well" be any faster than what they are doing now???
It is not like you just sit a bomb on the sea floor and blow it up. You need to drill a well next to the original well (they are doing that now and it is called a relief well) and put the bomb down in the new well shaft. You then cap the new well with concrete and detonate the bomb. The explosion pinches off the original well deep underground stopping the flow. In theory any and all radioactive material is trapped deep underground.

You can be assured if this relief well does not work they will be looking more closely at the bomb theory.
 
If they nuke it,and it fixes it,great.What probably will happen is they will nuke it,a big chunk will fall off of the roof of the oil well and the Gulf of Mexico will drain into it,and have a worse mess than now.The Russians probably didnt do it,and just want us to do it to see what happens!
 
The problem is that the casing is leaking at about 1000 feet down. Any capping at the top may cause more damage & leaking where the casing is bad. That is why the top kill didn't work. They lost too much mud due to the leaky casing. They then cut off the top to let it flow freely before it came out of another hole. It will have to be stopped at the bottom. That casing must be pretty thin by now. It started out 2 inches thick & after 60 days it was wore to an inch or less. There is sand, gravel and rocks coming up with the oil & with that much pressure is is wearing fast. It will keep wearing bigger & the flow will keep getting worse.
 
I wonder why they can't stick a 1-2 inch sealed pipe bomb down to the very bottom of the well and then explode it wayyyyy down there it should plug the bottom of the pipe, I think...
 
There're some very interesting sites on the web discussing what could be the plugging problem: very high pressure (beyond our technology) methane.
Google Gulf methane leak and some pro and con sites should come up.
Some indicate the methane deposits are BELOW the oil levels, that BP allegedly deliberately drilled past (below) their "authorized" oil depth into the methane layer(s), but then found something they couldn't handle...
 
The only comparable oil well blowout was the Mexican offshore well, Ixtoc 1. Ixtoc 1 was closed with a relief well; since then relief well are considered the standard by which other methods of well closure are judged. Technology has progress considerably since Ixtoc 1; current technology allows the blown-out well to be intercepted faster and more accurately than before.

The claims that the Soviets have used nuclear devices seems to be anecdotal, and even then they don't claim a 100 percent success rate. If it fails, what then?
 
Why don't we just hire planes to drop oil dry in the gulf, fix the leak, then let all the rain water from Iowa refill the gulf.
 
Instead of trying to cap the leaking pipe, why don't they simply put a bigger pipe over the top of it, then push it deep into the mud. The bigger pipe can have eyelets on it. Robots could screw auger ankers into the mud around the pipe to help hold it in place.
 
for some reason i do not have any confidence with the russians and their nuclear advice, they did not have too much luck with chernobyl did they? al
 
trucker40, the nuclear detonation specialist. I've never seen anyone who thinks they know more about everything than you, and still gets it wrong every time. You think you call mull something over in your brain for 30 seconds and know more about it that people who've done it thier while working lives.

Russians have nuked leaks multiple times. If you would just check something quickly and easily, (i.e. GOOGLE), before engaging your mouth you wouldn't look so foolish. But then, that's what you do best.

"And the Gulf of Mexico will drain into it"??? Unbelievable.
 
This took me all of 5 seconds to find. Much more available if you just look.

Underwater nuclear test, 1958.

As BP prepares to lower a four-story, 70-ton dome over the oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians — the world’s biggest oil producers — have some advice for their American counterparts: nuke it.

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.
Nuke It
 
If you read truckers statement in tool talk, it would come as no surprise. He said if you give advice and someone gets killed using it, you shouldn't worry about it too much. That's beyond unbelievable. Insane might be a better term. Dave
 
Then, whem the nuke splits the rock layer over the reservior; you will release all the now radioactive oil; all at once, to wash ashore.
Enable the skimmers to work after dark to pick up the glowing oil.
Whadda plan!
 
What is it,a slow day for you?This is all you could find to ridicule?Man you are pathetic!As if we are going to nuke an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico because the Russians think it might work!If you dont know,the Russians also lie a lot too!There is no telling what they would say.It doesnt surprise me that you would believe them since you believe whatever is on Fox news.
 
Were you dropped on your head as a baby or was it more recently? You hold the record for the highest number of dumb comments and the number is growing! Dave
 
MN Scott, what I don"t get is, there is that giant flange with 20-30 bolts holding it on. Make a new flange with a 10-20" pipe extension on it and a couple cross unions in the pipe. Each of these unions to have a shutoff valve in them. Looks kind of like a swimming pool sand filter "spider" only there"s a valve on the end of each pipe. Open all the valves including the one at the top, and bolt the darn thing on the blowout preventer flange where they decided to cut the pipe off. Then put your standard connectors on the top pipe and open that valve. Then close as many of the side pipes as you can.

Unfortunately, Horizon never explains anything to you when they send you the "thank you, we"re either already doing that, didn"t think it would work, or someone else had a similar idea."
 
Trucker 40,... I'm still waiting to hear your explaination of "why" external_link spent over a million $$$ to have all of his records SEALED.

What is he hiding????????????
 
The rock layer is 1000's of feet thick. There is no way for a nuke to blast through.
Radiation? Anybody know of a couple of Japanese cities that were blasted flat and a few years later they fully populated again?
 
It wouldn't blast through. There is a video showing how it worked for the Soviets. The rock crumples and compresses sealing the shaft. They apparently did it 5 times, worked 4 times.
 
Since when is an 80 percent success rate acceptable when you have a 20 percent chance of a global catastrophe? The one thing that is unacceptable is for something to happen that will make the blowout worse. Relief wells are proven to work. It's unlikely the Soviets had access to drilling technology anything like BP has at its disposal; if they had perhaps they wouldn't have resorted to something as drastic as a nuclear explosion.
 
Hey Kook, I didn't say we should nuke it, I only said it had been done. Slow down, read a little more thouroughly and maybe you would've seen that before you started spouting off.

Best to you and yours.
 
Well, Red. Maybe you didn't actually say "Nuke, baby, nuke!", but your numerous posts gush with admiration for the Soviets. You didn't get picked up in the recent roundup of Russian agents did you?
 
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