You’ve probably heard people arguing that the US should detonate a nuclear warhead adjacent to the drill hole in the Gulf (presumably BP doesn’t have it’s own arsenal?) to permanently seal the leak. And while I think it’s probably still just a really bad idea to start using nuclear warheads on the sea floor to stop oil leaks, the engineering and physics behind the idea actually aren’t as crazy as you might think.
But this weekend Rep. Phil Gingrey (R) of Georgia gave a good example of why it’s good to have engineers running the relief efforts and not congressmen. Said Gingrey: “For the life of me, I can’t understand why BP couldn’t go into the ocean floor, maybe 10 feet lateral to the – around the periphery – drill a few holes and put a little ammonium nitrate, some dynamite, in those holes and detonate that dynamite and seal that leak. And seal it permanently.”
He seems to be approaching the task with a Faisal Shahzad level of technical sophistication.
