British Petroleum's well capping antics are looking more and more like just that – public relations stunts with very low probabilities of success.
The relief well solution has always been the thing most likely to work, but our media is getting this wrong, too. Relief wells have a 60% - 70% chance of success, which is why two or more are required. British Petroleum was drilling two, but now have cut back to just one. You, dear taxpayer, should be holding on to your wallet very tightly, because it is we and our President who are being set up to take the fall for this mess.
I have been following this story closely and today I took a little time to look into the nuclear option …
First of all let me say this: there is an amazing amount of magical thinking on DailyKos with regards to radiation in general. Your world is full of it, from the EM coming off your cell phone to the alpha, beta, gamma, and neutrons coming from naturally radioactive substances.
Alpha and beta, being helium nuclei and free electrons, are pretty harmless unless you inhale or ingest an emitter. Gamma rays and loose neutrons are badness for your DNA. Nuclear weapons and nuclear accidents, like Chernobyl, are truly ugly, spreading biologically active radionuclides like Iodine-131.
You, yourself, are radioactive.
Some of the essential elements that make up the human body, mainly potassium and carbon, have radioactive isotopes that add significantly to our background radiation dose. An average human contains about 30 milligrams of potassium-40 (40K) and about 10 nanograms (10−8g) of carbon-14 (14C). Excluding internal contamination by external radioactive material, the largest component of internal radiation exposure from biologically functional components of the human body is from potassium-40. The decay of about 4,000 nuclei of 40K per second makes potassium the largest source of radiation in terms of number of decaying atoms. The energy of beta particles produced by 40K is also about 10 times more powerful than the beta particles from14C decay. There are about 1,200 beta particles per second produced by the decay of 14C. However, a 14C atom is in the genetic information of about half the cells, while potassium is not a component of DNA. The decay of a 14C atom inside DNA in one person happens about 50 times per second, changing a carbon atom to one of nitrogen.
This being said, a nuclear interdiction of the runaway Deepwater Horizon well would occur at such a depth below the sea bed that no radiation would escape.
Here's a cold war era video from the Soviet Union, where a massive runaway gas well was shut down using a nuclear blast.
If you didn't care to watch this Oscar winner all the way through the executive summary is this: assuming the geology is right, a nuclear weapon detonated in the vicinity of the well bore would crush the well casing for quite a distance and deform the rock, forever sealing the bore.
The next question becomes what sort of a nuclear weapon might be employed. We've built all sorts nuclear weapons over the years and there are five main delivery modes: bombs, atmosphere missile, suborbital missile, artillery shell, and anti-submarine torpedoes.
Which would you choose? Most of these are to big to fit down the 21” relief well bore. Rule out bombs and atmospheric missile warheads. The suborbital weapons are hardened for heat and vacuum. We're facing cold and pressure, so that's a non-starter. Any solution we have will come from the torpedoes or artillery rounds.
And now we have the final rub. The W79 203mm artillery shell was retired in 1992. And the Mark 45 torpedo was shelved in favor of more accurate conventional weapons in 1976. The Soviet well sealing was done in a couple of thousand feet of rock, an environment which was entirely normal for nuclear weapons testing. Nuclear torpedoes needed to go no deeper than the 400 meter 'test depth' of the Russian Alfa submarines they were built to catch. No one has ever built one to withstand 5,000' of water and an additional five or ten thousand feet or rock on top of it. Even if we had something the right size we'd be building a special container to deliver it.
Starting to feel that “No one could have predicted” vibe? I sure am. And I don't care to find out what the big surprise might be.
Here's a nuclear option that will stop not only this well but will ensure that all future wells are handled more carefully. Nuke British Petroleum.
Not literally, but figuratively. Wipe the stock holders out. Wipe the bond holders out. Basically put the company into receivership and run it until we're sure that every single human victim of this mess is compensated and we break our dependence on oil. And immediately arrest anyone involved in a naked credit default swap anywhere near the scene of this crime. If we can't put a stop to gambling events like this are just going to continue to be seen as opportunities by our careless, useless oligarchy.
The dollars that come in will be spent to pay for the health care of those already exposed to who knows what is actually in Corexit 9500. The dollars that come in will be used to implement the national rail electrification and attendant infrastructure upgrades that the Railroad ReModelers Club is pulling together right now.
This is not a technically difficult program, this getting free of oil. We mostly had it done eighty years ago, until General Motors bought up and ripped out all of our streetcars.