26 thoughts on “The Nuclear Option”

  1. The FReepers had a thread or two on this a couple weeks back.
    I’m not a roughneck, but it sounds like a bad idea to me.
    The radioactive plume should be be small (or at least, smaller than the oil slick), but as I understand it, there’s a chance (how big depends on who you ask) the overpressure wave could make the current leak worse (either widen the hole, or make a lot of new ones), or possibly even rupture neighboring pipelines and well-heads.

  6. I say let it leak until the relief well is finished. Why waste such all the capital investment that went into drilling this well. All these fix it efforts are just window dressing.

    Globally, the size of this spill only ranks in the top twenty. There have been much bigger spills in the last thirty years.

    The Gulf of Mexico is quite big and the spill is relatively quite small. The gulf of Mexico has 6.43*10^17 gallons of water and if a total 2.565*10^6, per the TNR article, leak into it; then the ratio of oil to water has increased by 2.5 parts per 10^11. Puny.

    What many commentators fail to mention is that there is natural seepage of 20 to 30 million gallons of oil and tar per year which is readily absorbed by the eco system in the gulf.

    What many fail to ask is what we would do with all the leaking oil if it weren’t leaking. We would turn it into fuel and burn it in the atmosphere or turn it into fertilizer and put it in the soil or turn it into plastic and polymers which would eventually find their way into a land fill.

  8. The problem with the nuclear option is it might work. As it is now, B.O. is taking a lot of flack (thanks to years of environmental fantasies making this the worst disaster since the invention of time.) It’s time the media see their god for what he is… an incompetent boob (the rest they never will see.)

  9. I don’t think the leak shows Obama is incompetent. He, like 99.99% of the rest of us, has no knowledge or power to stop the leak. That’s a tough job best left to the industry experts.

    It’s the government’s response to the leak that shows Obama is incompetent. That is something he does have control over. His administration dropped the ball. Ultimately, BP must pay the costs of the cleanup but for now, they need to concentrate their resources on stopping the leak. Mitigating the environmental impact immediately is something government agencies like the Coast Guard are better prepared to do.

  11. It’s worth noting that “Plan H”, the relief wells being drilled, is actually Plan C (the thing tried after Plan B, the blowout preventer failed). These other things are attempts to mitigate the harm (and liability) from the oil leak prior to completion of Plan C.

  12. How about a few square miles of polyethylene to contain the oil at zero pressure as a plastic dam and start skimming it off from the surface for refining?

  13. I’m kind of with jardin here. I understand having filth all over your nice beach, or floating around in the water, or gumming up your nets and slaughtering the fishies is nasty, and folks have reason to be upset.

    But…they’re also acting like this is some kind of hideous toxic evil that will poison the Gulf for generations. It’s just oil. Plain hydrocarbon. Chemically speaking, hardly different than 2 million gallons of fish guts or rotting palm trees, which would also make a giant honking stinking mess, but ultimately be just as innocuous.

    Most of what would have gone to make gasoline is going to evaporate, and then be quickly broken up by UV. Tons of microbes will feast on the rest, or it will lie in the sun and decompose in the UV. And the final products are CO2 and water, about as harmless of stuff as can be imagined.

    What is it with people and oil? It’s like this new generation’s nuclear radiation, anathema in some weird way. I swear, if the stuff didn’t exist naturally, and some geeky lab had come up with this magic energy-storage fluid, which you could generate naturally by solar power, with the use of green plants, and then it combined with plentiful oxygen to generate amazing amounts of energy per gram, and produced mere carbon dioxide and water — just like you do when you metabolize your food! — it would be hailed as the most wonderful “green” invention of the century.

  15. Carl Pham: I agree that ‘it’s just oil.’ But the reason to freak out is justified. When you’re at record high unemployment for your state, and a huge portion of your state’s economy depends on tourists from all over the world coming to frolic on your pristine white sandy beaches, your economy can be devastated when they turn into tar filled oil slicks.

    Yes, the beaches and sea life will recover. But for many, their livelihoods may not if the worst comes to pass.

  16. The problem with this option is that we push the button and it goes “click.” No boom.

    Who do we call then? North Korea?
    How do our enemies see our nuclear deterrent?
    When was out last full up bomb test?

  18. I dunno, Bob. In the first place, there’s not that much oil. There’s about 1,500 miles of Gulf coastline exposed to this spill. In the worst case, if 3 mllion gallons of oil spill, and assuming about half of it goes out to sea instead of towards the shore, and half of what’s left evaporates (both reasonable numbers), we’re left with a paltry 500 gallons of heavy oil per mile of coastline. 500 gallons of crude fits in a box 4 feet on each side. That’s hardly a Biblical flood coating every foot of beach in tarry scum.

    This is, of course, an average, and what will actually happen is that the distribution will be far from uniform. A few beaches may be inundated, yuck, many more will have some nastiness, and still more will be untouched. The idea that this will devastate the tourism industry seems unlikely, and that a shock to the tourism industry will devastate the economy of even Florida — I don’t think Mississippi has a lot of tourism, and tourists do not go to Louisiana for the beaches — seems unlikely. Florida has a lot more going on than just beaches, I believe. We’re not talking about the Caymans here.

    What seems more problematic are, first, the damage done to the oil industry of Louisiana — which is a big part of its economy — by the Obama Administration’s dipshit six-month PR freeze on Gulf oil activities — as if they’ll learn anything useful and be able to deploy it in 6 months! — plus the much larger damage to the fishing industries by the ban on commercial fishing (which strikes me as stupid), plus the still unknown damage to the marsh spawning grounds of Gulf shrimp and other fisheries.

    But is all that worse than, say, the impact of every hurricane season? Or half a million extra gallons of fertiilizer runoff in the Mississippi because of flooding in the Midwest? Got me. The problem is, you hear these figures for economic impact and they’re all calculated as declines from some theoretical ideal year — but such a thing never happens. There’s always something going on; bad weather, hurricanes, floods, recession, oil spills ha ha. It’s a strange quirk of modern psychology that we imagine that we can insulate any part of our economy from the random fluctuations that time and Nature (and ourselves) bring.

    I vaguely recall the most lasting damage to Prince William Sound was to the fisheries, but I don’t know if the comparison is apt. The Sound is a fairly enclosed body of water, where the Gulf of Mexico is not, and the water is cold and life slow-moving, whereas the Gulf is warm and the marine life robust and fast-growing. I don’t recall the percieved damage of the Ixtoc I spill (so far about 50 times larger) was nearly as significant as the Exxon Valdez spill.

    Who knows? In any event, my point was only that of all the odd things of which one can dump 2 million gallons into the Gulf, oil is one of the more benign.

  20. When it comes to oil spills, hurricanes are your friend. Those beaches will be cleaned up no matter what people do.

  21. Sam

    a few square miles of Polyethylene is a sail of monstrous proportions.
    Try to remember the Gulf is an active body of water, with currents, waves,
    etc.

    If you put a solid barrier down, it needs to be anchored.

  22. Ken, wouldn’t a hurricane just pick up the oil and rain it down over a wider area inland?

  24. Thanks Paul, now I’ve got the image of Ol’ Snakehead riding a burning gator stuck in my head. I’m going to be giggling all day….

  25. There is one spot deep in the Gulf where hydrocarbons seeping up from the sea floor actually sustain life. 650ft beneath the surface of the water there is a briney lake that has a shoreline filled with mussels that feed off of methane seeping up from the ocean floor. The mussels metabolize the methane and release hydrogen sulfides that in turn feed tube worms that are normally found living around black smoker hydrothermal vents. Because the briney water is super-salinated it is much denser than the surrounding water and collects in pools and channels on the ocean floor. The same processes that bring the methane up through the ocean floor also continues to feed briney water into the lake.

    I think this is a mind blowing and truly amazing discovery. Really it shows that we are just scratching the surface of discovering how life sustaining processes function on this planet.

  26. …wouldn’t a hurricane just pick up the oil and rain it down over a wider area inland?

    Not historically. We’ve had spills in the gulf before. Cleanup crews were unable to complete the job. One hurricane season later you couldn’t tell a spill had occurred.

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