[lolitics]Has anyone considered this?

The 'leak' is fixed, right? No more oil gushing out of the well at several thousands of gallons per day, right?
"Right."
But there's still a little seepage, as evidenced by videos of of oil oozing up through beach sand, back yards, etc, right?
"But that's just left over leakage from the breach, or something..."
Yeah... see, that is my problem; Nobody has properly explained the seepage, ever.
"And I suppose you can."
You remember how I eventually had to admit that nuking the leak, no matter how carefully, would cause the chamber/reservoir to collapse?
"Yeah, I enjoyed that."
Yeah, well, under normal drilling circumstances they put something in as they take oil out. Why? Because as you remove the oil you remove the pressure, and as you remove the pressure you remove the support, and as you remove the support...
"So you're saying that the reservoir is going to collapse?"
No.
"Then what are you saying, fruitloop?"
I'm saying that thanks to the several thousands of gallons per day 'leak' the chamber has lost a massive amount of support, support which nobody has ever tried to replace, by pumping in water or gas at the same rate they take out the oil, in the traditional way.
I'm saying the reservoir has already collapsed.
"Bull****, y' psycho nutjob"
Then where is the oil coming from?
"..."









So... can we nuke it now?

Lizard Of Oz said:

No. It'd only make the leaks worse.

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If applied and timed properly there would be nothing left to leak, only a series of voids that eventually form craters on the sea floor.

Now don't take this the wrong way, but the fact that you had to make that statement is a clear indication that you don't fully understand how nuclear explosions work, as evidenced by your thinking that after the boom there would be any oil left to leak.

Grobut said:

What possible good would come of that? if the chamber has indeed collapsed, how is a nuke going to fix that?

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No oil, no leak, no seep, no problem. Ever.

shoulden't you rather be advocating that we pump in a bunch of concrete or even Pritt Stick to try and seal any leaks from a collapse?

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Personally I'd much rather BP did their fecking job properly in the first place.
Personally I'd much rather pump out the oil as fast as possible and simultaneously pump in something like concrete.
Personally I'd much rather avoid pumping something into the now sealed chamber, thereby raising the already phenomenal internal pressure, thereby worsening any leaks and seeps.

Or do you just advocate blowing it up because we're rather cross with it, and it would feel theraputic to see it go bang? a bit like taking a sledgehammer to your desktop when it has it's third BSOD of the day?
Yeah that allways feels good in the moment, but not so much when you have to hoover bits of printboard out of the carpet and buy a new one afterwards..

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So you'd much rather spend the next century cleaning up oil and dead sh!t?
Oh, and if that turns out to be a jab at my condition, or some kind of attempt at using my condition to weasel out of logical thinking, I'll get rather cross.
__________

As for the rest of you, you may want to think about why I so clearly seperated the "nuke" part of my OP, k?

Grobut said:

Ok i'll bite, i haven't exactly studied the effetcs of nuclear explosions at any great leangth, so by all means, explain, how will the blast accomplish this? how will it get rid of the oil and not just redistribute it in potentially unsafe/unpredictable ways? and what would happen the the now vacant chamber and surrounding environment if it does work?

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At the heart of a standard ground-based nuclear detonation you have several "zones", now for simplicity I shall concentrate on three:

Zone 3: Superfire
Like Cuprinol Quick-Drying Woodstain, this does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a super fire, it burns everything, even metal. Some say even concrete. Depending on the initial warhead yeild this zone of superfire can be anything from 5 to 10 miles thick.

Zone 2: Barren
This is where there is nothing but radiation and bare earth/rock, all else has been vapourised. Oh, there's probably a nice warm glow here, too.

Zone 1: Ground Zero
Here there is nothing but a crater. Effectively, here there is nothing. The crater, again depending on the intitial yeild, can measure anything up to 5 miles accross and 2 miles deep. Here nothing can survive, not even the Earth itself.

Well you wont hear me disagree there, it would have been very nice if this whole mess had never happened, absolutely, or if they had ateast managed to stop it sooner, that would have been good.
But barring the invention of a timemachine, we're rather stuck with it, aren't we?

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I do not think we have to be "stuck with it", but I think we will be. I think we'll have to be stuck with it for however long it takes for it to seep itself to empty, or untill people finally say "Hey, why didn't we just nuke the damn thing, it would have caused less damage".

But i have yet to see any concrete evidence that your idea is the propper step to take, that it will infact solve the problem and that it is safe, and untill i see that, i shall remain sceptical.

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Was going to be sarcastic... wasted several minutes thinking about that...
Anyway:

Starting point (if you're that interested):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/effects.htm

And this is quite interesting (shortcut):
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Explosion-US-City.htm
It is correct, but I'm not sure about the source.

Now that would be rather silly of me, considdering that i am in that same boat, now woulden't it?

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Lieseses (>_<)

Nope, i'm just injecting a bit of humour into my posts, because that tends to be fun.

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Shush. (¬_¬)

Hadmar said:

I thought they pump in stuff when the pressure goes down to get more oil out. I mean, there's "phenomenal internal pressure" inside. What kind of support does pumping in more stuff provide?

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If there is nothing in the chamber it collapses, as evidenced by the results of the discussion in the original BP oil-spill thread.
If there is something in the chamber, it doesn't collapse.
If the chamber is rapidly drained, as it has been, under uncontrolled conditions, as they were, without monitoring, as it wasn't, then we have no idea what condition the chamber is actually in, because we don't actually know how much oil is left.
It could be fixed by pumping in a crapload of concrete, but the success of that depends on the location of any... cracks.

Now given that there is seepage occurring, even though the well is now "sealed", nobody can honestly say "the leak is fixed" unless the seepage stops.

The seepage is a new problem... I could be simply because the leak-oil is having a hard journey out of the layers of rock, and therefore could die down.
Or it could stay as a steady seep for hundreds of years.

Or it could get slowly worse and worse as the chamber fails at what could be a fairly geometric rate, E.G. 1 crack, 2 cracks, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048...

D66 said:

Didn't the Russians Nuke a wellhead leak a few yeas ago?

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So I've heard, but that's it, just heard.
They're being quite quiet through all of this... wonder why...
...either it never worked, or it did work and they're sitting back and giggling at the billion-dollar-space-pen people and saying "Let 'em figure it out for themselves"...

...and occasionally taking notes with a pencil.