by Joe Weisenthal
May 29, 2010

from BusinessInsider Website

Now that BP's Top Kill attempt has failed, and it's dawning on people that the leak really could go on until August (provided the relief well works, which is no 100% guarantee, which is why they're drilling two of them), here's what's going to happen.

First, expect BP to be "off the job" in the coming days. Having BP run the show has been a disaster for a couple of reasons. One is that Obama has to defend the company's actions, and two is that BP is HORRIBLE at PR, waiting hours to give updates that everyone is clamoring for. Watch for the military to take over, though using BP's resources and of course BP's dime.

Next, the so-called "nuclear option" is about to get a lot of attention. In this case, of course, nuclear option is not a euphemism. It's the real idea that the best way to kill this thing is to stick a small nuke in there and bury the well under rubble.

Supposedly it's been done in Russia (below report), and by the middle of the coming week, it will be all over cable news, as pundits press The White House hard on whether it's being considered and why not.

The BP Disaster
Nuke That Slick
by Julia Ioffe
May 4, 2010

from TrueSlant Website

Underwater nuclear test, 1958.
 

As BP prepares to lower a four-story, 70-ton dome over the oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians - the world’s biggest oil producers - have some advice for their American counterparts: nuke it.

Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes:

“the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”

Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petro-calamities.

The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers.

KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals.

Click above image

These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, however, were carried out only five times, with the last one occurring in 1979. And there was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.

Happily, with a track record like that,

“the chances of failure in the Gulf of Mexico are 20%,” KP writes. “The Americans could certainly risk it.”

Via KP.ru, and the inimitable Kevin O’Flynn of The Moscow Times