Quick! Somebody make an enormous blue dress to soak up the overflow!

I watched the video. Clinton called Obama "articulate." That's RACIST!

It's been said already, and I like Clinton, but he has no idea what he's talking about here.

The best in the business have weighed in, and this just isn't an option. The ocean floor in that part of the gulf is just too soft, the pressures you're dealing with are just too great, and the fluid hammering you'd have to deal with makes an immediate shutdown like that impossible to work with.

I'm no fan of BP. Hell, I wouldn't mind seeing the CEOs extraordinarily renditioned and tar-ball-boarded. I'll gladly extend that to everyone in the MMS and in Cheney's secret meetings that had so many regulations lifted which could have prevented this... But it's time to realize that there are no quick and easy solutions to this disaster. Sadly, we're going to have to wait for the relief well to be drilled, most likely.

No, instead of looking for quick-fix solutions, we should be focused on reforming the system that let this disaster happen in the first place. We should look at requiring relief wells to be drilled at the same time the producing well is drilling. We should strengthen our oversight and our regulations, so that this is never allowed to happen again - or, heaven forbid it does, we assure the corporations have the assets in place to immediately deal with the situation. We should be pumping billions of dollars into research and development, into rebuilding our power grid so that it can handle the switch to electric vehicles, into subsidies to encourage people to put solar panels on their house or a turbine in their yard, into creating a standardized nuclear reactor design that can avoid the regulatory hurdles before being installed, into mandating energy efficiency (watch this talk with Dr. Chu, before you complain about how government mandates hurt industry), put money into tokamaks...

There is so much we should be doing. So much we could be doing. I'll gladly pay 10%, 20%, even 30% more in taxes if that's what we put that revenue towards. The future is now, America. Let's join in. Let's take this opportunity, and use it to make our country better than it has ever been.

I'm ready.
Are you?

ryebread:

That video I linked to was pretty long, here's a shorter one that's more to the point: Dr. Steven Chu at the National Clean Energy Summit (new window)

ryebread: instead of looking for quick-fix solutions, we should be focused on reforming the system that let this disaster happen in the first place

THIS

timujin: Crosshair: No, they didn't want to do it because fracturing rock with explosives is a good way to INCREASE oil flow in a formation. It was done all the time in the earlier days of oil drilling and research is still being done on various ways to use it.

We're talking about a what? 1.5' drill pipe with a 10" inner diameter? I had thought perhaps they could use shaped charges to direct the blast inward, using the rock to seal off the top of the hole. Basically, just pinch it shut.

/not a drilling nor explosives engineer.
//oh, hey, here's and article where they talk about the relative merits of using (non-nuclear) explosives.

Pinch it shut and the pipe is guaranteed to blow further down. The well is already in dire straits, and it's getting worse every day.

As well, the sea floor is completely different. It's about the consistency of custard all the way down.

MisterSpoot: If this were to occur, things would look good for my presidential campaign platform: Let's Blow Up the Moon!


"We will destroy the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard!"


Worst case, if the BP explosion doesn't stop the leak, maybe'll we'll have nuked some whales. Gotta nuke somethin'!

You were thinking of this weren't you?

Even Bill Nye knows that blowing up the well is a complete failure of an idea. Right now the problem is limited to a relatively small area. Blowing it up would likely result in fracturing of the rock which would allow oil to come up in a much larger area. Bill Nye summed it up by saying that it would probably not help and would likely make it worse. The relief wells are the single best option for stopping the flow.

Jeebus, Yanks!

Haven't you fixed it yet???

JonnyBGoode: Blowing it up is a really STUPID idea. That would most likely just cause a MASSIVE hole in the ocean floor and thousands of times more oil gushing out all at once and no way of ever stopping it after that. Possibly creating a huge tsunami in the process.

Not so much "making a hole in the ocean floor" as "collapsing the ground above the well." This would release all of the oil left in the well, or very nearly all of it, into the Gulf at once. The good news is that you wouldn't have to worry about stopping the spill after that, because there would be nothing left to stop. The bad news is that this is a trillion or so barrels of oil going into the Gulf in one shot, likely causing an extinction event (possibly localized to the Gulf itself, but perhaps not).

Would that happen? Maybe, maybe not. It is said that the Soviets tried nukes on five of their own oil spills, and that it actually worked four times. But it did fail once.

Dufus: "Unless we're gonna send the Navy down beep to blow the well up... and cover it up with rocks and debris. You don't need nukes to do this; I've seen ll that; cover it over... we need to continue to let BP use their expertise and technology"

Awww, shoot. I thought Bill was gonna advocate using a MOAB for 4th of July.

Sure, being an ex-president qualifies you as an expert on ANYTHING.

JonnyBGoode: AdamK: btw it's worth noting that an underground blast doesn't create a hole the size of an above ground nuclear blast

you wouldn't actually be creating a "hole in the floor of the ocean", something like that would require a pretty massive amount of nuclear explosives

Depends on how deep below the surface the reservoir is, and how destabilized the drilling and the spill have made the ocean floor over it. It doesn't have to vaporize a hole, just split existing weak points and stress cracks wide open.

We're not talking nukes. The reservoir is way below the bedrock, it would be hard to release that with explosives near the top of the pipe. Basically looking to seal off the flow by opening the pipe just below the surface and letting rock and sediment flow into the hole. The relief well may be finished in August but it will take a while to relieve the pressure enough that the gusher will stop.

next up jay leno wants to know what is up with airline food