8 thoughts on “FriendFeed: “Top kill” halts …

  1. B. Minich

    If this fails, we go to the “top hat kill” plan, which combines the top hat with the top kill strategy, along with anything else they throw against the wall to see if it sticks.

  2. Brendan Loy

    I’m waiting for the “abject PANIC!!!” plan. Followed, of course, by the brilliant “Nuke the Gulf of Mexico” plan. (No, really.)

  3. B. Minich

    Hey, it never hurt anybody in the Pacific!

    If nuking the Gulf breaks 13 other pipelines, I’m not sure what the next plan would be.

  4. Joe Loy

    Next year at the Seafood restaurant: “Waiter, I’d like an appetizer; what do you recommend?” / “Our Radioactive Shrimp cocktail is excellent today.”

    No, let’s just Stay the Course for now. Put the old mud-&-CEEment Cork in it, then Suck that sucker dry with the old Relief Well in August. / THEN, when they’re all finished with the fix, we can Nuke BP. (After all, they’re the Responsible Party. I know cuz I keep hearing it on the old Tee Vee. 🙂

    “Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, [Admiral Allen] said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.”

    Ah HA! So it’s actually the old supercombination TopHat/TopKill/JunkShot, after all!

    btw, Rachel Maddow has Outed the obscure & Ancient historical fact that there was a very similar Blowout off the Mexican Gulf Coast in 1979. The massive Leakage continued until the Relief Well came on line some months later.

  5. dcl

    Joe, that depends on how big of a nuclear device is used. Though conventional under water explosives are sufficiently more advanced than they once were that a conventional demolition run by the masters of blowing stuff up, the US Navy, would probably work. But you need to weigh the environmental impact of nuking the oil well versus not stopping it. Both are pretty obviously bad, but a small nuke would likely not have much impact outside the area that has already been destroyed by the oil slick.

  6. Joe Loy

    dcl – admittedly I’m just talkin’ through me Helmet here ;} but it seems to This layperson that if what you’ve got [actually, what you’ve Made] is a Hole in the ocean floor which needs to be Closed, detonating a Bomb (atomic or chemical) in its vicinity could be an excellent way to make it Bigger.

    “Joe, that depends on how big of a nuclear device is used.”

    Well then if we Must irradiate the petroleum, may I suggest deploying something about as Big as the original North Korean Half-kiloton 2006 model. (Why, I’ll bet Kim Jong Il would even Proliferate one to us, if Hillary just Whispers in his ear that we don’t really believe he sank that South Korean ship. 🙂

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