Obama Sends Nuclear Experts To Tackle BP Oil Spill 389
An anonymous reader writes "The US has sent a team of nuclear physicists to help BP plug the 'catastrophic' flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from its leaking Deepwater Horizon well, as the Obama administration becomes frustrated with the oil giant's inability to control the situation. The five-man team — which includes a man who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb in the 1950s — is the brainchild of Steven Chu, President Obama's Energy Secretary." Let's hope this doesn't mean they actually try the nuclear option. In other offshore drilling news, reader mygoditsfullofdoom informs us that a Venezuelan gas rig has sunk in the Caribbean (with no loss of life). This one is being laid at the feet of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA, which hasn't exactly been regarded as uber-competent "after President Hugo Chavez fired half the company's managers and senior engineers following a 2002 strike."
The Nuclear Experts will use the LHC... (Score:4, Funny)
They are planning to use the LHC to create a small black hole and drop it into the gusher to suck up all the oil.
I think that would silence the critics of both the LHC, the oil drilling industry, and Apple's restrictive rules about apps!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Nuclear Experts will use the LHC... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... A vertical shaft containing oil. Isn't that already a blackhole?
Re: (Score:2)
I believe the correct term is African-American hole, but to you other point, no, I don't think it's 'African-American' enough
Re:The Nuclear Experts will use the LHC... (Score:4, Funny)
create a small black hole and drop it into the gusher to suck up all the oil.
First contact with aliens: "Hey idiots, here's your oil back!!"
Re:The Nuclear Experts will use the LHC... (Score:4, Funny)
BP isn't American either. Sorry to burst your pendantasy?
Nuclear physicists? (Score:2, Interesting)
Has the oil industry become so corrupted that the only way to get a useful opinion is to recruit a team from a completely different field?
Re:Nuclear physicists? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
from that everything ever is physics.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No.
There are dozens or hundreds of industry people working to solve/address the problem (at a minimum, they are working on the relief well, which has a very high probability of success, it will just take 2 months to complete).
These 5 people had a meeting where they were briefed in on the specifics of the problem.
Corruption and lack of imagination are not the problem, the sheer difficulty of the situation they have put themselves into is the problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's at least three "The Problem"s here.
1. Stopping the existing leak.
2. Cleanup and damage mitigation.
3. Figuring out what is and isn't reasonable to attempt for oil drilling in the future.
Maybe there's a meta-problem, which is that people will eventually do one, but then act like two is solved as well, and not even bother to address three.
Re: (Score:2)
That's our viewpoint.
BP's viewpoint is
1. disclaim all responsibility efficiency
2. reduce litigation and repair costs
3. restore production at the leak point
They don't want it plugged permanently, but to rebuild the platform and reuse the shaft
They don't care about environmental impact outside of how much that costs them. So they prefer to shift the blame than to repair the damage.
Also, what brings more money than it costs money is reasonable. If the platform brought in more money than it cost BP to solve cur
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
How is it that you translate the fact that no one has every tried to plug a leak like this in these depths to mean the oil industry is corrupted?
Or do you think BP's shareholders would be contempt with standing around and doing nothing while millions are wiped off the company's value?
Re: (Score:2)
> Or do you think BP's shareholders would be contempt with standing around
> and doing nothing while millions are wiped off the company's value?
Why, yes of course: everyone knows that the sole purpose of a "corporation" is to do as much evil as possible. Business men only make money in order to have it available to spend on evil (and, of course, because making money is evil in and of itself).
"Let's hope" (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm curious at the usage of the phrase "let's hope". A correctly placed nuclear device in the that seals off the oil as well as causing a collapsing void that traps any fission products generated sounds a lot better than pouring yet more megagallons of oil into the ocean.
(your milage may vary in practice a fair bit from theory of course)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've always liked the phrase "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is". I think it's rather pertinent here!
Don't you read slashdot? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a while ago we were warned by a computer scientist (whatever that is) that this huge oil reservoir is under so much pressure that if 3 miles or rock spits, it could blow up the planet and end life as we know it...
Presumably kdawson read this slashdot story... oh wait... editor reading story... I see where I went wrong there.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+whatcouldpossiblygowrong
Using nukes will make it a small problem for a long term rather than a big problem for a small time.
Sounds like something are shortsighted business and political leaders would be interested in.
Oh yea, and +whatcouldpossiblygowrong
Why the bias? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's hope this doesn't mean they actually try the nuclear option.
Thanks for the environmental message. A little late for that, don't you think?
At this point, a small controlled nuclear explosion to simply fuse the entire mass together into a big piece of molten glass and metal might be what's needed.
Re:Why the bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05/11/1440206/Oil-Leak-Could-Be-Stopped-With-a-Nuke?from=rss [slashdot.org]
Actually, there is, the soviets have used this method five times. Next objection?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This was a Pravda article. Pravda makes the National Enquirer look like a quality paper.
Blowing shit up (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not only is this well not on fire, it is underwater. Last time I checked, water not only doesn't burn, it actually puts out fires.
Hay for Cleanup? (Score:2)
Someone showed me this [youtube.com] demonstration today and I don't see any reasons it could not work. It's using hay to soak up the oil. What do you think?
Re: (Score:2)
We're talking about an absolutely ludicrous amount of crude oil here. I'm not convinced at all that enough hay could be procured in the time-frame needed to effectively act.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Mow Your Lawn For Saving The Sea action? ...in no time.
Every white picket fence house donating some hay?
Re: (Score:2)
They're using 5-6 big handfuls of hay to cleanup about 1/2 cup of motor oil (not crude).
There's 672 cups in a single barrel of oil (1 barrel = 42 gallons).
The lowest estimate is that there's around 5,000 barrels of oil being released EVERY DAY. The difference in scale is why this, and the hair idea, don't work. They may work for localized cleanup on a specific beach, but like people washing birds with detergent, this isn't a large-scale solution.
Re:Hay for Cleanup? (Score:4, Interesting)
he put no more than 1/20th of a gallon of oil into that container and said it took 1 pound of hay to clean that up.
The explosion and resulting leak happened 25 days ago.
It's been leaking about 50k barrels per day according to recent (non-computer scientists) estimates.
At that rate, it's going to require ~525,000 tons of hay.
According to a quick search for some kind of US hay production values, in 2008 we produced about 145,000,000 tons in 2008
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Missouri/Publications/Brochures/Hay_Facts.pdf [usda.gov]
Although noting is said about how much of that was used to feed livestock. However I suspect that it was most of it.
So this would be less than half a percent of the US annual hay production. That doesn't seem completely unrealistic to me. Difficult and our infrastructure is likely not set up for this kind of thing, sure, but not flat out unrealistic from some 10 minutes worth of estimating. Add in other realistic aspects of the situation however, and things could get out of control pretty easily, but I would at least say this warrants further exploration of this idea.
why not nuclear? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I don't see a big problem with the "nuclear option". Underground nuclear explosions have been used quite a bit and they are not a significant radiation hazard. The geology of the area is presumably also fairly well understood. I wonder, though, if they even need a nuclear bomb. The drill hole is tiny compared to the 3 miles of rock it goes through. I would think even a conventional explosive placed some distance to the drill hole about a mile or so down into the rock might be enough to shift the rock and seal it off with little risk of making things worse. In any case, it's good to see people besides BP employees are on the case.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd prefer to try MOAB before nukes. The hole is pretty small, do we *need* that much power that a nuke is necessary*?
*if the math says nuke to collapse the tube, then so be it, I'm just wondering if it really requires that much.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, I think stuffing entire Utah town down that hole would stop the leak, and it wouldn't require any oxygen. We could remove all humans first.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is there's a hole in the seafloor. Explosives are not known for making *fewer* holes in things.
Re: (Score:2)
The hole is much deeper than the sea-floor, USSR has done this, they exploded bombs to stop leaks like that, it collapses the shaft by applying a lot of pressure from above.
However they did it 6 times and only succeeded 5 times doing that.
I lived in this city [wikipedia.org] from 86 to 91 and there is at least something to say about living in a place you know is only a few kilometers away from a nuclear crater. In case of the Gulf of Mexico there would be no visible crater though, and the radiation most likely will not ma
Re: (Score:2)
However they did it 6 times and only succeeded 5 times doing that.
The Russians used it to extinguish gas, which sounds harder to me.
The only problem is that if it does NOT work or even makes the situation worse
Well, BP is interested in making money, the administration is interested in getting reelected, which gives me some confidence that they'll try to avoid making things worse. And they could still drill a relief well, as before.
Re: (Score:2)
> I would think even a conventional explosive placed some distance to the
> drill hole about a mile or so down into the rock might be enough to shift
> the rock and seal it off with little risk of making things worse.
Drilling that hole would probably take as long as drilling the relief well.
Re:why not nuclear? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I don't see a big problem with the "nuclear option".
Look more closely...
Underground nuclear explosions have been used quite a bit and they are not a significant radiation hazard. The geology of the area is presumably also fairly well understood.
Understanding the geology (which is put in question by the accident) is necessary but not sufficient. Sites for underground nuclear tests are not simply understood, they are selected and prepared. They are not selected under a mile of water, and test chambers are not prepared by connecting them to large high-pressure oil and gas deposits.
I wonder, though, if they even need a nuclear bomb. The drill hole is tiny compared to the 3 miles of rock it goes through. I would think even a conventional explosive placed some distance to the drill hole about a mile or so down into the rock might be enough to shift the rock and seal it off with little risk of making things worse.
The risk of making things worse is quite real. The root cause of the accident according to some reports was the destabilization of an unrecognized clathrate layer, and setting off a large explosion in that sort of formation would be a crapshoot. Even if the clathrate is a small localized issue, the concept of trying to plug the hole by shattering the cap layer around it carries the risk of trading one pipe of known characteristics in a known location for a giant sieve leaking more gas and oil from a myriad of unknown random seep points.
There isn't much relevant history to look at for troubleshooting accidents like this one but in general, throwing high-energy chaos at a piece of complex engineering gone wrong is a tactical class that has a vanishingly small success rate. .
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Methane is quite harmless in the absence of an oxidizer. As it is underwater.
Wrong team! (Score:2, Funny)
Crack in the World . . . (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_in_the_World
Worked fine, the last time it was tried on the silver screens in the 60's . . .
Bad reporting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bad reporting (Score:4, Interesting)
After an explosion in 2005 killed five workers at PDVSA's 955,000 barrel per day Paraguana Refining Complex -- one of the biggest refinery complexes in the world -- the manager conceded that the frequency of fires, blasts and oil leaks had almost doubled compared with the previous year.
Not good.
Re:Bad reporting (Score:4, Interesting)
And the Texas City refinery explosion also happened that same year and killed 15.
Neither BP nor PDVSA look to be doing a great job.
They don't really want to stop the flow (Score:2)
risk and reward (Score:5, Insightful)
So the oil still flows, and the government has to step in for what should be a problem solved by the private sector that has claimed they are more than capable of regulating themselves. The private businesses that are destroyed from Louisiana to Florida due to BP negligence will be limited to fighting over the $75 million dollars, hardly enough when all your memorial weekeend guests have cancelled.
Here is the thing. I am one of the few people not in the oil industry that will actively defend the high price of gasoline, and even say it go higher. Oil production is risky, and the rewards should be commiserate. What I find maddening is that when the risk does manifest, the executives claim they have no money to pay for liabiliy. BP has made a profit of 5.5 billion this quarter. It is only natural that all that is forfiet to pay for the accident. That is how the free market works. As long as one is efficient and keeps one nose clean, one can make a huge profit. On big mistake an put one out of business. We should not be making laws to protect incompetent firms, any more than we should have laws to protect incompetent employees.
And for those who think there is a greater competency issue in the Venezuela explosion, remember that BP is responsible for the death of 11 good people, while no one died in the Venezuela situation. If you think that killing people is competent, something is wrong.
Nuclear option (Score:2)
Dust off and nuke the site from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
I'm not an expert but (Score:2, Informative)
Are they really trying to plug it up? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are they trying to plug the leak, or are they really trying to salvage the bore there and get back to pumping oil?
The reason I ask is..why not a chernobyl style containment effort. Drop a 200 (whatever, hugemongous, the biggest they can move) ton solid concrete and steel cube on that thing, then add to it, until the leak totally stops. The first big chunk would smash the pipe flat, effectively sealing it.
It has looked to me right along as more an effort to salvage what they did so far, not actually just plug it up.
Re:Are they really trying to plug it up? (Score:5, Informative)
Are they trying to plug the leak, or are they really trying to salvage the bore there and get back to pumping oil?
They're trying to plug the leak. At the same time, there's another drilling platform nearby drilling another well, which will be used to take the pressure off and get back to pumping oil. But that will take months.
Bear in mind that this is all going on a mile down. That's 160 atmospheres, and at that pressure, the water temperature is forced to 4C because that's the lowest density of water. Under those conditions, methane is a solid, and methane ice from escaping natural gas is clogging up the repair operation.
Once the hole is plugged, or at least slowed down, it takes about four months to four years for natural processes to dispose of the oil. The heavy components like asphalt sink; the light ones like gasoline evaporate off. Fishing and tourism might suffer for a while, but that's not a big deal.
Re:Are they really trying to plug it up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fishing and tourism might suffer for a while, but that's not a big deal.
Unless your family's livelihood depends upon fishing and tourism. Then it's a very big deal.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I think I'll leave the guessing to those that are smarter then I am and are employed to do it to fix the problem
Ok, why? (Score:2)
Terribly inaccurate - team is multidisciplinary. (Score:5, Informative)
As a far better article over at PopSci [popsci.com] notes, the team includes a variety of physicists and engineers, only two of whom have done anything in the nuclear field.
While Richard Garwin did design the first proof-of-concept H-bomb way back in 1951, he spent most of his career at IBM, and held a symposium after the first Gulf War on how to close all those burning oil wells in Kuwait.
And although Tom Hunter has a couple degrees in nuclear engineering and is (until he retires in July) director of Sandia National Lab, his strengths appear to be more in the area of managing "big science" these days.
George Cooper, Alexander Slocum and Jonathan I Katz, though? Not nuke guys.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, what? No, really? He's back?
The better nuclear option (Score:3, Insightful)
Obama should just issue an executive order dissolving the corporate charters of Transocean and the US subsidiaries of BP using his authority to protect our territorial waters.
It's different when it's someone else! (Score:5, Insightful)
When Reagan broke the ATC union, he was standing up to the Big Bad Union. When Chavez did it, he was being an autocratic commie.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
When Reagan broke the ATC union, he was standing up to the Big Bad Union. When Chavez did it, he was being an autocratic commie.
Probably because Chavez IS an autocratic commie.
One who is driving Venezuela into the ground, by the way.
Venezuela electricity shortage [google.com]
Venezueala oil production decline [google.com]
Venezuelan inflation [google.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I see your crushing, err, Google search and raise you an article by Krugman on Reagan's legacy [nytimes.com].
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:5, Insightful)
The clearest, most obvious contrast is with inflation. Reagan knew it was a bad thing, and kept it low. Chavez embraces it (prints more money and then threatens anyone who dares to raise prices). This is such an obvious mistake that even high school students understand it. At least Reagan got that right.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the biggest understatement since Noah said "It looks like rain." And I'd say that those weren't experiments at all, but a concerted effort to sink the entire safety net, not to mention turn around the increasing wealth of the working and middle class that had been going on since WWII. Not to mention arming Iran.
"End the Cold War" you say? No, he just transformed it into the Forever War on Terror.
We're just now starting to see the some of the full effects of the virus Reagan injected into our system. May he burn in Hell.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:4, Insightful)
When it comes to the two-term administrations of Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, the first question one must ask any critic is, "what didn't you like, the peace or the prosperity?"
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:5, Informative)
Peace? You are truly a clueless American. No one else would consider those to be peaceful presidencies.
Eisenhower oversaw the final months of the Korean War and got the US military involved in Vietnam. Still, he was the best of the three.
Reagon participated in El Salvador's violent civil war, got militarily involved in Lebanon, invaded Grenada, pushed Honduras towards war with Nicaragua, bombed Libya, and attacked Iranian oil platforms.
Clinton bombed Iraq (repeatedly), Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Serbia.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:4, Interesting)
By the way, Volker was appointed by Carter, and attacked inflation pretty aggressively. As a consequence,, unemployment worsened and we had a recession. Still, he stuck to his guns and Reagan benefited when inflation was subdued and the inevitable recovery happened about two or three years into Reagan's first term.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:5, Insightful)
When Reagan broke the ATC union, he was standing up to the Big Bad Union. When Chavez did it, he was being an autocratic commie.
Kind of like when the US bombs someone, they're being heroes, but if anyone tries to bomb the US, they're being terrorists.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And I bet you can't identify the US on a globe either. Go back to school and pay attention to your history teacher when they cover Pearl Harbor. Here's a hint: Hawaii is one of the fifty states and was one in 1942. Japan most certainly did bomb the US when they sank our pacific Fleet. Just what do you think made the Arizona (among others) blow up?
And I don't count the WTC terrorist attacks as a bombing. More like a human guided missile than a bombing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The Japanese actually did bomb mainland USA with fire balloons [wikipedia.org], albeit with very little military effect. There were also other attempts [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nagasaki. Hiroshima.
You should try to recall a little harder.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:5, Insightful)
When Reagan broke the ATC union, he was standing up to the Big Bad Union. When Chavez did it, he was being an autocratic commie.
When Reagan broke PATCO, A) he had overwhelming support from the public, which was tired of constant strikes and exhorbitant demands, and B) Reagan made sure experienced AC's were in place so safety was maintained.
Chavez did it because they dared oppose him, and like a Stalinist goon, he chased off all the smart and talented people without replacing them with other smart and talented people. Comparing the two situations is either blind union fanboyism, or silly cheerleading for Chavez.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure Reagan would have tolerated PATCO and airport managers halting service to demand early elections seven months after a coup attempt.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:5, Informative)
"Um, which overwhelming support are you talking about, the general public or the limited public that used and ran the airlines?"
Both: Reagan's support on this issue in public polls topped 60 percent [google.com].
Even though it's illegal for a Federal worker to strike (a condition of Congress allowing Federal unionization in the fist place), numerous federal unions did it anyway in the late 70's. It wasn't Reagan that started to bust the fed unions; it was Carter. There were 22 strikes by fed unions in the late 70's, and the public was sick of them. And then PATCO threatened the biggest strike of all... 3/4's of their members... during the busiest travel period of the season. The public was sick of it.
Exorbitant demands, they were striking to have the already budgeted money released to upgrade the towers instead of hiding the deficit and relief for jobs that were rapidly being overloaded to the point of failure.
They were asking for an across the board 10,000 dollar raise per member [stfrancis.edu], and they already had wages well above the national average. They were also demanding a 32 hour work week and full retirement after 20 years. This is exorbitant, and it killed whatever public sympathy they ever had.
"How many major plane crashes were there in the U.S. after the controller firings during the 1980's? How many people died? '
Accident rates didnt' change, much to the chagrin of PATCO, whose members sometimes openly hoped for "aluminum rain" after their firing. The measures that the FAA took... puting supervisors back on duty, bringing in military ATC's, limiting flights during peak hours temporarily while training new controllers... kept the accident rate the same. The following year, when all of the replacement ATC's were in place, the FAA decertified PATCO, with wide public support.
"Reagan blew it and like everything else he did never took responsibility for it."
Obviously, America didn't agree. In 1984, Reagan carried every state except for Minnesota. Mondale got a grand total of 13 electoral votes.
yes, yes he could (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets face it, this is the US way. I remember countless jokes about the Mir space station that after years of faithful service was retired while the space shuttle was blowing up all over the place. When you can't be proud of your own stuff, ridicule what others do. It works.
The Venezuela incident seems without side effect so far, and the firing of all the engineers and directors? Well, BP didn't and that one blew up... so what is the relation? But no worry, logic has nothing to do with propaganda.
What do you expect from a country where fox-news is not a contradiction in terms?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Only 1 shuttle exploded before Mir was deorbited, and that happened before space-side construction of Mir had even begun.
Also, calling a hyphenated word a contradiction in terms is pretty bad style.
Re:yes, yes he could (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't even think there's a need for hyperbole on this (my, uh, previous post aside). Shuttle and Mir both worked, both developed problems and dangerous conditions developed over time. The only difference is which side of which border they were developed on, and national origin is a piss-poor standard upon which to judge the overall success of a project or decision, or even the ethics underlying such.
Canning the upper echelon of staff for political reasons rarely, if ever, has good results (I suspect PDVSA had some difficulty replacing that many people with that much experience). Neither does going cheap on the failsafe gear and deciding regulations don't really need to be followed that closely when dealing with complicated, ecologically-significant projects.
Re:yes, yes he could (Score:4, Insightful)
Jokes would happen during and after recent retirement, being 2001 (remembering that we're talking space science timescales, not Internet meme timescales). By the third week of 2003, 40% of US space shuttles had been destroyed, even while old timers were still tediously proclaiming US victory over the evil Reds.
SFC would have had a stronger argument if he'd mentioned technical and bureaucratic US space programme fuck-ups in general, rather than just the shuttle... no-one said it was easy, but you don't deserve any slack when you start claiming that you're better than everyone else.
Re:BP's fucked.. but look, over there, a communist (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, why shouldn't we use the nuclear option to control the oil leak? This is an ENGINEERING problem, not a fucking moral one. Let the engineers decide of a nuclear bomb would best control the oil leak.
Nonsense statements like "nuclear weapons are always bad" don't help anyone. According to the previous article on slashdot the Russians have used nuclear blasts five times to control things like this with an 80% success rate. Obviously, there are risks and problems, just like there are with every option. If the ENGINEERS (not idiots that think "nuclear ANYTHING is ALWAYS bad") decide that a nuclear blast is the best option then we should go for it.
Tell me, kdawson, where did you get your degree in nuclear engineering? You don't have one? Well then how about your degree in environmental engineering? No? Then how can you say that the nuclear option is a bad idea before trained scientists that actually know what they're doing have even evaluated the situation?
Re:BP's fucked.. but look, over there, a communist (Score:5, Insightful)
If we allow Venezuela
Fuck off
I'd like to apologize on behalf of the people in my country, the United States. We're extremely paranoid, uneducated, and religious, and our entire every day consists of being endlessly pummeled by sophisticated government and corporate public relations/propaganda, making us impressively easy to manipulate. We do indeed have the mindset that we (as a country) have an inherent, God-given right to allow or disallow Venezuela (or anyone else in the world, for that matter) to do anything, and there's no real sign that we'll cease acting on that mindset anytime soon.
Re:BP's fucked.. but look, over there, a communist (Score:5, Insightful)
Pop quiz:
Britain declared war on Germany ___ days after the German invasion of Poland.
Venezuela has invaded ___ allies of the US.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
declared war, sure...
no military activity followed the declaration for months though.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
What are you doing on Slashdot when you should be in Venezuela mandatorily fighting Chavez?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no shortage of examples of times when outside intervention is not only warranted, but should actually be mandatory.
Yes, that's why I told you to fuck off. The Iraq civil war [foreignaffairs.com] might have been prevented if bullies like you were convinced to fuck off instead of invading it for Windmills of Mass Destruction.
Re: (Score:2)
We no longer have to invade a country anymore to change its politics, that has been true since WWII. Saddam made the invasion of Iraq inevitable after he showed that he was prone to invading neighboring countries in the region and threatened to upset decades of hegemony that have allowed the US, Europe and China access to the largest energy market on the planet.
Force and Force Multipliers we have at our disposal include assassination and agitprop, automated air strikes are new but somewhat effective. Soci
You are talking to a Fabian (Score:2)
I have no problem with communism as I am a socialist albeit more of a Fabian [wikipedia.org] than a fan of Marx, but I do have a substantial problem with totalitarianism. Force and Political Will is what is needed in dealing with any regime that would usurp the will of the people for the will of a single party or worse a single individual, no matter how charismatic he may be or how much of the population they claim to represent.
An open society [wikipedia.org] is one in which one can have political change without violence. Once the thres
Re:BP's fucked.. but look, over there, a communist (Score:4, Insightful)
Contrast this with South America, which is populated by 3 types of people: un-educated peasants, druglords, and warlords.
Oh, at least 4! You're forgetting the resident agents of the appropriate US government department who've spent the past 50+ years trying to keep them that way.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The Russians claim that it works...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Russians also thought that this [wikipedia.org] would work.
They don't exactly have a flawless track-record when it comes to this sort of thing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It stopped the methane from leaking into our atmosphere, so it did work.
Re:Obama is a genius!!! (Score:4, Informative)
You have also a burning coal mine in the US that has forced at least one town, Centralia, PA [roadsideamerica.com] to be more or less abandoned.
Re: (Score:2)
You have also a burning coal mine in the US that has forced at least one town, Centralia, PA to be more or less abandoned.
NO! the town you're thinking of was called Silent Hill, duh... ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It may have a chance to work on land based situations, but it can also cause a major disaster.
In the mexican gulf there is a lot of hydrocarbons dissolved into the water, and there is a risk that you can get this "mint in a soda" effect if you are unlucky. And on a gigantic scale. In worst case it can be a termination event. It may not be that, but there is still a risk of a tsunami and other nasty things to happen if things goes wrong. Imagine New Orleans and a large area along the south coast of the US dr
Re:Obama is a genius!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why would the nuclear option be bad? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
hmm lets see about this
Small Yield Nuclear warhead = 200,000 pounds
Transportation of warhead = 10,000 pounds
13 Scary Fat Blokes to secure and deploy warhead= 25,000 pounds (each)
Not having to do this again EVER = Priceless
the is a measure thrice cut once thing (Score:2, Informative)
the problem is if they make a mistake in the maths then things could go very bad very quickly (like chunks of tar washing up in Australia kind of bad).
so i would think that they would need a couple guys that didn't get a c minus in astro^Hnuclear physics to make sure of things.
Re: (Score:2)
For this, you'd need geophysicists and demolition eperts.
Nuclear physicists will know how to make a bomb to explode, sure, but how will they know how to make it seal the leak instead of blowing up a mile-wide hole to the oil deposit?
Re: (Score:2)
This is Slashdot. At least a third were all for nuking it even before reading the earlier article. Another third were horrified at the thought, and the last third thought it was a really cool idea but were afraid (from bitter experience) they'd be thought of as nuts if they didn't act horrified.