Submission + - Oil leak could be stopped with a nuke (trueslant.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Oil leak in the Gulf of Mexican could be stopped with an underground nuclear blast, a Russian newspaper reports:
Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: "the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel." Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities. ...
These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, however, were carried out only five times, with the last one occuring in 1979. And there was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.
Happily, with a track record like that, "the chances of failure in the Gulf of Mexico are 20%", KP writes. "The Americans could certainly risk it."
Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: "the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel." Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities.
These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, however, were carried out only five times, with the last one occuring in 1979. And there was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.
Happily, with a track record like that, "the chances of failure in the Gulf of Mexico are 20%", KP writes. "The Americans could certainly risk it."
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Oil leak could be stopped with a nuke
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