Unusual Spill Solutions: A Nuclear Bomb
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Lots of ideas have been suggested to plug BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, but none as incendiary as using a nuclear weapon. And yes, this has actually been tried before in previous petro-calamities.
On today’s Backstory segment we’ll talk to NYU Professor and author of Sun in a Bottle, Charles Seife about the Soviet Union’s experience with Project No. 7, which sought to harness the power of nuclear explosions for public works project, including five atomic blasts aimed at stopping runaway fires in gas wells.
Guests:
Charles Seife
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Comments [8]
This actually occurred to me two weeks ago... So it's probably not a good idea...
jtt,
Good call. Perhaps another cartoon holds the answer.
This nuclear option is "absolutely wacko," as your guest stated. One of the many terrible things we can pin to the USSR is their terrible environmental record, which even surpasses the US, thanks to our environmental movement.
Take that Rush, Beck, Palin, Inhofe, et al...
Decades ago the Father of the H Bomb, Edward Teller, proposed 'dispersing' hurricanes by detonating H-bombs in the storms. Turned out it would work -- if you used something like 1,000 H-bombs.
Is there any chance of a chain reaction igniting all of the oil in the Macondo Field or beyond?
Is Communist era data reliable?
lost?
i think i once saw thison "bevis and butthead".
A saw gets stuck and we start talking about using a nuclear bomb?
Haven't we learned anything from "Lost"?
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