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."
Re:yes, yes he could (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:Obama is a genius!!! (Score:3, Informative)
It stopped the methane from leaking into our atmosphere, so it did work.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (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]
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.
I'm not an expert but (Score:2, Informative)
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:Blowing shit up (Score:1, Informative)
Blowing something up is always the best option. Detonating a large fuel reserve to stop it from leaking makes perfect sense to me. Absolutely nothing to worry about.
Here, here...and when it doesn't work, we can escalate..er.. I mean surge the situation and then get Haliburton to take matters in hand.
That shouldn't cost too much, should it?
I mean they're doing such a fine job in Iraq and Afghanistan that it wouldn't be more that a few trillion, a price any American would gladly pay on top of everything else. (endorsement approved by Halliburton stockholders)
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: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 then throw out my own crazy ideas.
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:Why the bias? (Score:2, Informative)
This was a Pravda article. Pravda makes the National Enquirer look like a quality paper.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (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:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:It's different when it's someone else! (Score:2, Informative)
Under Reagan's facile gaze, the economy was sent into the worst* recession in our lifetime. It did then grow, _modestly_, from the hole that it was cast into, but it wasn't until the small business incentives under Clinton that the ice broke. I would go further and say that the economy has never recovered fully from those years.
You may be making a common mistake of pointing to certain specious statistics describing the "economy" of the top 2% of tax-payers, in which case it was indeed awesome.
(*excepting Bush's current clusterfuck, following similar pirate-policy)
Re:why not nuclear? (Score:3, Informative)
Methane is quite harmless in the absence of an oxidizer. As it is underwater.
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: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].