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In Light Of BP’s Failures, Russian ‘Nuclear Option’ For Stopping Leak Gaining Traction

by Frances Martel | 11:03 pm, June 2nd, 2010

» 7 comments

America may have reached the peak of desperation for finding solutions to the open oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. After a Russian newspaper suggested the tried and true tactic of sticking nuclear weapons under oil leaks to stop the flow, the idea of sticking a plutonium bomb in the Gulf is popping up everywhere as the only hope to save what little remains of the Gulf as it is now. The plan is only slightly less insane than it sounds.

The plan first appeared in the context of BP’s oil leak in Russian newspaper Komsomoloskaya Pravda, where writer Vladimir Nagowski noted that Russia and, previously, the Soviet Union, had dug a hole deep and large enough for a small plutonium bomb near the oil well and detonated it underground, making the hole collapse on itself and stopping the leak (Gawker dug up an instructional video of the plan). Yes, there is an Armageddon reference in his piece.

He also notes that nuclear “plugs,” sometimes three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, had been used five times successfully, with only one failure in 1972 that “mysteriously” left a mushroom cloud where the gusher was supposed to be. According to Nagowski, the risk of a mushroom cloud in the Gulf of Mexico is “only” 20%, so why not take a chance?

Some people are listening. Over at National Review Online, Daniel Foster is hoping the President is coming around to it. As long as the fallout is “a limited amount of radioactive material across the vast Gulf,” which is “preferable to the blanketing of thousands of miles of American coastline in ribbons of tar,” he seems to like the idea. Yes, you just heard the “Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean” argument again, this time to justify dumping a nuclear weapon in it. To Foster’s credit, the list of ideas BP has come up with, which he goes through in detail, don’t sound any more successful. He writes:

“The simple fact is that the leak has confounded all conventional efforts to quell it, forcing British Petroleum and its federal overseers to resort to a series of untested, increasingly unwieldy, and heretofore unsuccessful backup plans as the American people’s impatience and rage grow at geometric rates. In the madness that is Deepwater Horizon, The Bomb may be the sanest choice.”

Raw Story reports that the idea is also gaining some traction among energy experts like Mark Simmons, founder of energy investment bank Simmons and Company:

“Simmons said the US government should immediately take the effort to plug the leak out of the hands of BP and put the military in charge. ‘Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,’ he said.”

Adding weight to the possibility of using a nuclear weapon to solve the oil spill is the fact that President Barack Obama has assembled a team of nuclear experts to come up with solutions for how to handle the leak and the subsequent damage to the ocean, according to the UK Telegraph. The team, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, was described by BP CEO Tony Hayward as “lots of nuclear physicists and all sorts of people coming up with some quite good ideas actually.”

The most perplexing thing about this argument is why no one is suggesting a large amount of conventional weapons, rather than a small nuclear one, since conventional explosives would actually be available to BP without major government involvement, and would not mean the risk of significant radioactive contamination. So far, it appears that the largest members of America’s mainstream media are abstaining from bringing it up or supporting it, but as the idea seems to be floating around the internet, and worst case scenarios have the leak gushing well into August, we might be hearing more about the nuclear option as time goes by.

Gulf of Mexico, National Review, nuclear weapons, oil spill, Russia

AmericanCowboy

I blame Obama for the slow clean up. I want to see the Commie out there with a mop and bucket. Now there is a job he might be qualified for. Scrub Commie Scrub!!!!
schleifnet

wouldn’t a nuke heat up the gulf thus opening us the the same warm waters that encouraged the extremely active 2005 hurrican season? The russians have frozen lakes, we have a tropical gulf
GerhardWMagnus

The environmental record of the former Soviet Union makes the US look as green as a Christmas tree. The Russians, with their mania for secrecy, turned vast areas of their country into a toxic waste dump and assumed nobody would be brave enough to notice. They probably used nukes on many leaking oil wells before the technique was “perfected.” I sure wouldn’t want to live in the vicinity of any of their little experiments.

We don’t care ’bout no lil’ spill!
To fill my tank we gotta drill, baby… drill!
http://www.partizane.com NewHampster

Sorry but I believe a nuke would work and safely too. But the administration has ruled it out because of the treaties we pushed on the rest of the world. No use of nukes even for peaceful means etc.

What people propose is an underground blast. Bore 1000 or 2000 feet beneath the ocean floor, to place the bomb next to the leaker. Let her rip and it should fuse all the rock into a very nice cap.

BP doesn’t like this because they still want the oil. All their efforts have been towards capping and capturing rather than plugging.

I vote for a nuke or a bunker buster. If they work at that depth, let the Sub Mariners take a few shots with conventional torpedoes to see what happens.
http://www.partizane.com NewHampster

and please don’t misunderstand me. I hate the idea of nukes and would love to see them all sent to the sun, but this is one time that a peaceful use makes sense.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Darren-Duvall/1442003535 Darren Duvall

The argument for nukes is that you realistically can’t pack three Hiroshima bomb’s worth of conventional explosives (45,000 tons, or 90 million pounds) of conventional explosives into a 2000′ well that is only a 12-18″ in diameter. This isn’t opinion, it’s just math. Doing the math on a 1′ circular bore x 2000′ long, that is about 1570 cubic feet. Converted to cubic centimeters, that’s a little under 45 million ccs, and using a density of C4 of 1.63g/cc that works out to 73,350 kg of C4, or about 161,000 pounds of C4. Compared to a 45kT nuke, that’s only 89,839,000 pounds short of equivalent explosive power. To put it another way, a 45kT nuke is about 500 times more powerful than all the conventional explosives you could pack into a 2000′ well.

The other advantage of nukes is the heat — enough to fuse the rocks well below the surface and hopefully plug the bore. The pressure those rocks are under is incredible — the weight of the water alone at the sea bed is over a ton per square inch. Add in another couple of thousand feet of solid rock pushing down on the oil formation and conventional explosives seem inadequate to the task. The primary from a W80 nuclear warhead is only 11″ in diameter, you’ll need to put it into a sealed package that can take the pressure of more than a ton per square inch until you get it into place down the well, but the detonation will work.

A well-designed boosted-fission nuclear weapon will only use 4kg of actual fissile material, and considering that only traces of that will make it into the Gulf — 5000′ below the surface — if the relief wells fail it may be the only option. Compared to the tons of oil that are escaping every day, the few grams of nuclear material that might make it into the Gulf in the short run is a negligible risk. Hundreds of kilograms of plutonium were used in the nuclear tests in the Pacific, mostly above-ground and a few in the water, not to mention the thermonuclear tests where hundreds more kilograms of fissile material (the U-238 jacket around the fusion core) were released in every thermonuclear test. We’re all still here.

Capping this well is not an option. If the “top kill” had worked, then the well would be cappable and in fact would already be capped. The subsurface structure of this well is failed and the “cap” used to suck up the escaping oil is simply to catch as much of it as possible before it gets to the surface. The oil that BP manages to catch from the leaking well is burned at the surface, not sold. The relief wells be used to “shut in” the well by intercepting the current bore and packing it full of drill mud and cement, and then capping the relief well. BP (or whoever gets the MC-252 lease in the future, a more likely outcome) may drill into this field from a different place at some time in the future, but not any time soon, and not with much in the way of fanfare. Even if BP could recover all the oil from the MC-252 formation, they’re already $20 billion in the hole (so to speak) for the compensation fund, so they won’t be making a dime off of all the oil down there.

The risk of any large subsurface detonation is that the explosion will shatter the rock around the bore and the oil will simply leak through the shattered rock to the surface through all the new cracks in the seabed. There is probably better understanding of the geology of the MC-252 site than was ever obtained for our underground tests, if this is a major risk then the nuke isn’t an option. But if it is likely that the whole field (1.5-2 billion barrels) will leak out through BP’s well, then treaties be damned we need to close the well and if it takes a nuke the President should authorize it.
Co10

do you think the russians may just want to contaminate the wests oil and push the price up?
decadent times