God forbid but maybe it IS time to nuke the hole...

Sorry the thought came from me. Rumor says that the Russians did it once.

At first I, like yourselves was horrified at the mere concept of any "peacetime" nuclear explosion. Would it even work? What about the precedent of a President/Congress okaying the wretched, unspeakable thought? Pretty grim idea I thought.

Then I looked over the idea as a problem of simple eighth grade physics. Put a kink in the straw!




Physics as Wiley sees it: Hole in floor of ocean 5000 ft. deep. OK but the actual source of the oil goo is another 3 to 3 & 1/2 miles down. A long, long loonnng skinny tube separating ocean water from underground petroleum cavern. That's the area to focus on stopping the nasty leakage. It's only a small tube. An area of weakness to be exploited in the fix. And quick the fix would be.

We're all used to those macabre videos of above ground tests. Burning the sand into glass and sending plumes of highly radioactive fallout over Utah. Strontium 90 in your milk. Isotopes of Cesium, Iodine and God knows what else in your bones.

However at least from a blast level it isn't all that terrific. At 5000 ft BELOW the surface of the ocean a well programed limited yield nuke oughta have it's blast area confined to and measured in a matter of hundreds of yards. Maybe even just tens of feet. Water and earth being far denser than air where we've seen those horrifying above ground test common in the 1950's.

A quick nuking of the God damned infernal hole and presto! No more leak. Faster acting than your "Plumber's Friend"

Hole immediately kinked, plugged and forgotten. Sand, dirt and stone turned to glass. Cooled within minutes both from heat loss to solids and seawater. Or as my friend and fellow cartoon actor Bullwinkle said: "Presto"



Though I wouldn't want to be a marine mammal within 70 miles or so. Blow the poor things eardrums to hell and back that's for sure.

There's always some engineer down at the NRC ready to cum in his pants in desperation of exploding a nuclear device. Where are our mad scientists when we need them? Don't ask. Then again the precedent is dangerous. But the situation is at least so.

Shall I change my name to "Wiley Strangelove"?

I hope not.

Your resident genius,



Comments welcome. It would work though. An awful idea admittedly.

Just to be sure.

But what if it made it worse? A larger gaping gusher? Nothing else has worked and there are no guarantees that this would (and besides I hate nukes).................... What if?

One epic disaster coupled with another epic disaster. Just doesn't seem sane to me.

:evilgrin:

Declare a state of emergency and tell the Pentagon to get it done.

Or fine BP one hundred million dollars a day till its sealed. I bet they buy their own nuke and do it themselves. North Korea could use the money.

MAYBE IT IS REALLY AND TRULY IMPOSSIBLE.

Add it to "The Soviets did it a couple of times," and

"It worked for the Soviets four out of five times they tried it."

THERE IS NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE THAT IT'S EVER BEEN DONE.

There's other wells, pipelines, all kinds of stuff down there that wasn't designed to withstand a shockwave from a nuclear blast in the vicinity.

It could work, it could also fail to stop the leak and start a dozen others in the process.

Oil and gas wells, pipelines, communication cables, and a whole lot of biomass that ultimately feeds people.

They used special nukes to do it. No one has ever done it in the water.

...source to verify the claim.

:nuke:

but I believe the Russians did it on land, using special nukes, and only for gas well fires.

I'm no physicist but placing a nuke under the ocean floor seems very risky. What if it fractures the floor and then we have oil spewing from thousands of fissures? What then?

I think they're working on it already

I'm not slamming you in any way Catherina - :hi: - but I think you're being misled by a slanted article.

According to this article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1648553/gulf-oil-spill-team-obama-scientists-slocum-garwin-katz-robotics-diving-nuclear
Obama has gathered experts from a number of different fields.

Saying something like "Obama Sends Nuclear Physicists In" may be literally true but it's very disingenuous. Some of them are nuclear physicists. There are also civil engineers and robotic experts among others. I think the idea is to get the brightest minds he can find thinking about solutions.

This sentence from the article I linked to above may show a completely different reason for bringing in those physicists:
So it's possible they're being brought in to try to image exactly what's going on underground.

Maybe the idea of a nuclear blast is being considered by some as a last resort, I can't say one way or the other, but I don't think the presence of nuclear physicists on the team proves that they're already planning such a thing.

My God, I feel like I'm discussing the plot of a bad SyFy channel movie. :cry:

And let's face it, the pollution it might cause is a drop in the bucket compared to the poison that has already been spewed into the gulf and would continue to be fed into the gulf. It pains me to say it, but any sea creatures still alive in the immediate vicinity of the gusher are surely doomed to a slow death already. And I don't expect to see any more fishing or swimming in that area in my lifetime. Assuming this solution could be effective without making the problem worse, I can't come up with any objections.

According to Mark Lynas

I'm not an engineer.

What if setting off a nuke makes the hole much bigger (wider and deeper) to where it is a gaping hole that can't be remediated under any known circumstances?