Let's drop the Big One and see what happens

Admittedly, I'm intrigued by the idea of using a nuclear bomb to stop the Deep Horizon spill. The science is fairly straightforward: drill down very deeply into the sea floor in the general area of the well head, plant an A-bomb, and kablooey! The rock formations are superheated by the nuclear fireball, converting them to glass and sealing the oil reservoir. Problem solved.

The Russians, naturally, have already done this kind of thing, although never underwater. When I read that the Soviet Union had exploded five A-bombs between 1966 and 1981 to seal off natural gas wells (usually because of uncontrollable fires), I thought: well, of course they did. If it's big and loud and environmentally catastrophic, the Russians have already tried it. Just the way they do stuff. We've got a natural gas fire burning out of control here, Comrade. What shall we do? Is pooting it out with nuclear bomb! It must be all the vodka.

But before I get Dmitri Orlov all pissed off at me (because he only likes comparisons where the Soviet Union comes out on top), we should probably consider just how bad this oil problem could get. I think that people (including your humble blogospondent) are having trouble coming to terms with this catastrophe. We're in a state of denial. We allowed a foreign company with a miserable record of safety compliance to drill a well under five thousand feet of water into a huge oil reservoir with no effective plan for dealing with a blowout of precisely the kind that occurred. We don't know how bad this situation will become, how far the oil will spread, how much oceanic water will be affected. We can't foresee the ecological consequences of this much oil contaminating the seas. You start thinking: given the intricacies of the web of life, the continuity of the seas, the inability to seal anything off from anything else, the delicate structure of the food chain - could we all wind up dying from this, directly or as the result of an unforeseeable and incalculable chain of causation?

Thus, people are getting freaked out. Matthew Simmons, the Oil Guru, doesn't help when he talks about the failure of "down hole" structures below the superstructure of the blowout preventer (BOP). Julia Whitty in Mother Jones was writing about that. Simmons is adamant that oil is leaking not just from the well head, but from the sea floor at some distance from the BOP. Which suggests that the uncontrolled rush of oil is eroding and damaging the subsurface piping. That's the true nightmare scenario, because if the subsurface pipes fail, there isn't going to be any way to confine the control efforts to the BOP superstructure. The relief wells thus become a race against time in a different sense: can they get there while the existing well is still mainly intact?

Simmons urges the use of a nuclear bomb.

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.

In some ways, I like this approach just because I'd love to hear Barack Obama, who tends to be a little on the cautious and measured side, announce the plan. "The beaches of the Gulf will be more beautiful than ever," he intones, "but first we have to hit them with an A-bomb."

It's all kind of surreal. We currently won't even let Dutch skimmers help us out with technology they possess but we don't, which involves sucking up oil-contaminated seawater, separating out the oil, and discharging the seawater overboard, the reason being: there is a small residue of oil in the discharge. (h/t Gary). This is the kind of fussiness which prevented Louisiana from constructing sand berms on a hurry-up basis. We're determined to use bureaucracy to get in our own way in dealing with the problem, but not to prevent the problem in the first place.

Of course, no one has ever drilled down 18,000 feet into a sea bottom 5,000 feet beneath the surface and detonated a nuclear bomb. No one can say for certain it will work, although the Russians are confident. But then they think that nuclear explosions are the answer to everything.

Unless BP has a nuclear capability (and maybe they do, they have more resources than some of the countries that have A-bombs), it looks like it's time to call in the guys from Lawrence Livermore and order up something kind of special.

Robert Frost, slightly updated

Stopping by the Gulf on an Oily Evening

Whose gulf this is, I have no clue,

Does it belong to me and you?

Well, you won't mind me stopping here,

To watch our gulf fill up with goo.

My SUV must think it queer,

To stop without a BP near,

Between a dying duck and drake,

The shittiest evening of the year.

My Navigator gives a shake

To ask if there is some mistake;

The only other sound's the seep

Of all that oil we had to take.

The gulf was lovely, dark and deep

Till we drilled oil wells on the cheap

And left this place without a peep,

And all the dolphins went to sleep.

Oh Gulf of Mexico, Never Really Been & I Don't Wanna Go

Not completely true: when my uncle worked for Nabisco, he lived in Galveston with my aunt and their three boys. We visited them in the summer, and I remember that the Gulf felt like a warm bath. My maternal grandmother could never get the name right; kept calling it "Galwestern," so it's just as well my uncle and family moved back to Arlington. That kind of confusion can get on your nerves after a few decades. And Jimmy Webb would have gotten nowhere writing a song about Galwestern.

before I dry the tears she's cryin',

before I watch your sea birds flyin'...

but all gucked up!

They're all f**ked up!

It does not appear that any method of capping the Deep Horizon well is going to work after all. One might note, if one tended toward the cynical, that British Petroleum chose their order of solutions in a way consistent with maximal commercial recovery of the spouting oil. There was the box, which clogged up with methane hydrates, but would have allowed BP a way to pump oil from the gusher to a surface ship. And then sell the oil. The "topkill" and "junkshot" approaches are end-of-the-line methods, seemingly easier, but with no oil-sale payoff.

Anyway, nothing worked, and that's not really surprising. This is a formidable gusher, rising with enough force to overcome water pressures of 1,700 pounds per square inch at the seabed. So - great news! - there must really be a lot of oil in that reservoir BP tapped into! So the race is on: will BP's relief well get there before the reservoir plays itself out? I imagine that someone on Wall Street is figuring out a credit default swap on that one so we can all wager.

It's difficult to find a consistent figure for the quantity of oil entering the Gulf of Mexico. The ranges I have read go from 5,000 barrels on the low side up to 70,000 barrels. Again, I would imagine there is a huge margin of error involved here; while it's easy to talk about fixing this thing, or measuring the flow, it's difficult, for me at least, to envision what it's like to try to operate machinery in an intricate manner, by remote control, in pitch blackness, at a depth 5,000 feet beneath the surface. It's a wonder they can even find the well.

A consensus guess puts the flow at 20,000 barrels. Figuring 55 gallons to the barrel, we're looking at 1.1 million gallons a day. To give myself some mental picture of what that number means, I looked up the cubic volume of an Olympic swimming pool 50 meters long, 25 meters wide and 2 meters deep. Such a pool holds about 660,000 gallons. So we're not far away (or maybe even over, if the higher end estimates of oil flow are more accurate) from two Olympic-sized pools full of black, gooey petroleum entering the seas off Galwestern on a daily basis, as has been the case for about the last 6 weeks. And which will continue, probably, until August, unless the "riser cut" approach pans out, which does not look promising. So looking at 120 days of this stuff, we will dump about 240 Oly-sized pools into the Gulf of Mexico before this thing is brought under control. Since oil has a lower specific gravity than water (at least at comparable temperatures), eventually all of this goo will get to the surface where it can coat everything and do maximal damage.

Sun's so hot, I forgot to go home, guess I'll have to go now...

As for Presidential "optics," I don't personally care whether President Obama spends every day on the beach in Louisiana or not. He's got the wardrobe part down pat, having watched other "hands-on" Presidents take their turn at natural disaster management. No tie, windbreaker, some kind of hokey shoes, like Timberlands. Bending over thoughtfully and picking up a tar ball. A dead pelican would be more like it, or even...an albatross, but it doesn't really matter. I assume that Obama has no independent expertise in plugging deep-water oil wells. Modern politicians specialize in photo-ops and image creation rather than substantive competence. They're more in the way than anything else, and while they're in town there must be so much trouble over "advance men," and making sure the right local political hacks are in the frame with the Head Man, and the right Moments of Empathy are caught on film that it's probably better if Obama stays in D.C., or Chicago, or wherever, and allows the other federal know-nothings to nod sagely as people who actually work in the field of oil drilling talk out loud about their next futile strategy.