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Top kill fails to plug leak
- erlanger 16y agoHacker news!
- campnic 16y agoThis sad attempt at questioning the merit of the article is truly part of the problem with this oil leak. We're talking about one of the greatest ecological disasters in the history of the United States and people seem uninterested. It's pretty sickening. For another perspective see http://www.businessinsider.com/matthew-simmons-dylan-ratigan-deepwater-2010-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/matthew-simmons-dylan-ratigan...
- erlanger 16y agoWell I certainly knew nothing of these developments until they appeared on this website. This is where I go for national news.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- DrJokepu 16y agohttp://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Constant engineering failures and desperate measures to avoid the imminent unnatural ecological destruction of the Gulf of Mexico is something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, in my opinion. The point is not the (un)natural disaster (which is while quite sad, it is certainly off-topic here in itself), it's the engineering problem.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ErrantX 16y agoIMO this article is fine; it's clearly a problem that interests a lot of us. I'd much prefer this than another bunk article about apple or techcrunch rubbish :-) what usually happens is a more technical discussion appears here in the comments hacker news != exclusively technology news Also; adopting a combative tone in comments is usually frowned on even more than off topic submissions. Just sayin.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ErrantX 16y agoYour sounding very angry about it... Perhaps hn just isn't a good fit for you. Anyway; I think were going to see such posts as these. In all honesty I much prefer these to 20 rehashing the same piece of apple or facebook news :p (which is happening quite a lot at the moment). Don't expect people (particularly here) to pay much attention if you sound like a jerk :(. And that is all I have to say on the matter.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Tichy 16y agoMalaria happens all the time, the oil spill is a pretty singular event. If there was a sudden massive malaria outbreak I'd hope to hear about it, too.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rriepe 16y agoIt's relevant as an unsolved engineering problem. We're all waiting to see which "hack" is going to finally work.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tumult 16y agoTotally off-topic, but I'm posting this here, since it's where most of my other posts were: I was being hugely inappropriate and venting my frustrations in an entirely idiotic manner. I apologize (sincerely) to everyone, and their good taste, that I offended.
- campnic 16y agoPhew. Accepted. Lets continue having fun and a sense of acceptance on HN. Its (part of) what makes it better then other sites.
- staunch 16y agoIt is time for Plan C: http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/04/nuke-that-slick/ http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/04/nuke-that-slick/
- dasht 16y agoIt's an interesting question, that one, isn't it? I don't think "nuke" is the operative word because they would want a tiny nuke so "conventional" explosives might do. From what I hear Prof. Bea and some other sources saying I infer that the real danger of that approach is that it can make things much, much worse. (Namely, while it might collapse the pipe, it might also create a large total volume capacity of escape paths for the oil, spread over a larger area. There is already a new leak from the sea-bed 400ft away.).
- asdflkj 16y agoProbably a dumb question, but since I don't know the answer, I'll ask it: why not blow up the entire reservoir with a big thermonuclear bomb? Or otherwise set it on fire such that it all burns up before getting out?
- SapphireSun 16y agoOil needs air to burn. You can't burn all of that sucker at once, you'd start a hurricane as all the air started swirling into feed it and then there CO2 would create an outward pressure wave that would prevent it from staying lit. Complicated and messy.
- holygoat 16y agoNot sure about the hurricane. Hurricanes have orders of magnitude more energy than atomic bombs. It would have to be helluva fire.
- SapphireSun 16y agoI didn't mean that it would generate one by itself, but it could disturb the air currents significantly in the area, possibly allowing one to form via some kind of feedback loop. Disclosure: I am not an atmospheric scientist.
- ErrantX 16y agoIt's not too surprising. Sad, but not surprising. Yesterday I sat and read up on the past examples of this happening. It's hardly a big field of literature but the overriding result seems to be it takes a long time to fix these things. The one thing that hacks me off is the way the us govt is jumping up and down banning this and questioning that. Clearly at some point we need to assess what occured and set out blame where appropriate - but it seems to me right now we should quit the politcal posturing and focus solely on stopping the leak.
- jbooth 16y agoWhich parts of the us govt, specifically? Questioning or banning what?
- ErrantX 16y agoObama has banned deepwater drilling (I can buy that at a stretch, but I'm not convinced he's done it for the "right reasons") and the Senate is already hearing testimony.
- jbooth 16y agoOk, so you seriously don't think temporarily banning deepwater drilling is reasonable, given the circumstances?
- ErrantX 16y agoIt might be reasonable - we aren't experts so it's impossible to know if this incident is part of a wider risk. But this big thing about banning it till 2011 is political posturing. Suspend things, let the experts review and decide on the safety, then make a decision.
- jbooth 16y agoLet's say the experts do a 6 month review, starting today. That takes us to 11/30/10. 2011 is totally unreasonable?
- gometro33 16y agoAs interesting of a problem as this is, I don't quite understand how a) BP and other oil companies aren't required to have solved it prior to drilling and b) after more than a month of the world watching, all they could come up with was a solution that might work. I'm inclined to call to question the caliber of the engineer s working to resolve the leak. Maybe I'm being too harsh? EDIT: To clarify point (a), I would have assumed that oil rigs would be required to build-in some sort of kill-switch in the event that even the smallest part of the process didn't go as planned.
- j_baker 16y agoThey did build in a kill-switch, but it failed. To be fair to the engineers, this is the first time they've encountered a leak at 5000 feet below the ocean.
- jsz0 16y agoI appreciate how much of a challenge those conditions must be but I still don't understand why they were so unprepared to fix a leak. Couldn't a 5,000ft leak have been simulated by a computer or in a lab environment? It seems like they're just throwing untested solutions at the problem hoping something will work. With the amount of money these oil companies make there is no excuse to not be fully prepared.
- ErrantX 16y agoIt's for much the same reason you'd struggle to stop an avalanche or a hurricane. All of the remedies they've tried are ones already tested and modelled like you mention - but at the end of the day this happens so infrequently and under such varying circumstances it's hard to cover every eventuality. One of my friends pointed out that it's much akin to running one of the mars landers - it takes a long time to sort out what to do, send down the ROV's and give it a shot.
- j_baker 16y agoI'm sure they did run computer simulations. However, this is the first time they've had to physically stop the leak.
- matt1 16y agoI've been reading many of the news articles about the leak, but most seem to stray away from the long term effects of the leak if it's not fixed soon. If the engineers don't stop the leak within, say, a month, what kind of ecological damage can we expect? What about three months? A year? Longer? Is there a chance that it will just "run out" anytime soon?
- ars 16y agoI've been wondering that too, and the best answer I have is to look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill It spilled for 10 months! At that spill was 2 to 6 times worse in terms of barrels per day. The only difference was that it took 2 months to reach the US coast, so we were a bit more prepared for it. I have not yet read about the long term effects. But my quick skimming did not come up with anything major. (Just short term effects.) And no, it won't run out anytime soon.
- Encosia 16y agoThe relief well they're drilling should resolve the issue sometime in August. Everything else they're trying in the meantime are just stop gap measures to mitigate the flow until the relief well is finished.
- seldo 16y agoBP knew for weeks in advance of the explosion that the well was unsafe, and had deliberately dialled-down the federally-required tests they were running on the well, which strongly suggests they knew it wouldn't pass the real tests: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html This is not an engineering puzzle; good engineers in the oil industry have been drilling much deeper wells than this for years: http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-09/mf_jackrig http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-09/mf_jackrig http://factoidz.com/the-deepest-offshore-oil-rig-in-the-world-the-perdido-spar/ http://factoidz.com/the-deepest-offshore-oil-rig-in-the-worl... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_platform#Deepest_oil_platforms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_platform#Deepest_oil_platfo... This accident is the result of greed and a failure of regulation; an economic and political problem. Once we have found the engineering solution to shut down this well, the pressure to prevent it happening again must focus on politics, not technology.
- ojbyrne 16y agoBut I thought regulation was always bad? Isn't that the consensus here?
- seldo 16y agoI would love to hear the libertarian defence of a private enterprise's accident that is putting thousands of people out of work and destroying an entire coastline's worth of ecosystems.
- mynameishere 16y ago#1 On the whole these wells are net positive. #2 It's the government capping BP's liability. Not a libertarian, but please.
- anigbrowl 16y agoAgree with #1. but on #2, that $75m liability cap is a crock - it only applies in cases where there has no been gross negligence or willful misconduct. If it can be shown that BP lied to the MMS or created the situation by failure to comply with regulations (even if they started complying once they realized they had trouble), then the limit doesn't apply. See http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode33/usc_sec_33_00002704----000-.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode33/usc_sec_33_0... subsection c.
- vaksel 16y agothey tried all these retarded ideas back in the 70s with the Ixtoc oil spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill the only thing that worked was drilling the relief well I bet the reason they are doing these retarded ideas while they drill the relief well is to make people think that something is being done
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- brianobush 16y agoWell to a non-oil expert, they seem to have some merit. To me, the execution seems flawed.
- vrode 16y agoAll businesses work this way to day, but only few has such a high risk. What BP did there was practically a 50/50 game of chance, and they've lost. It seems that in the shadow of profit, the risk becomes transparent. Sometimes other risks, like 'losing market value' seem more real than the risk of bursting such well. Maybe it is because economists are in charge and their lack of technical expertise, makes the technical risk less real.
- ck2 16y agoThis proves the #1 regulation that should be created after this is a relief well MUST be drilled at the same time a main well is drilled, regardless of cost if they want to do business. A few of these per century will really destroy the environment, and who knows how much worse this is going to get with just one hurricane in the next few months.
- rjett 16y agoThis might be a naive question, but why are they still estimating how much oil is leaking? If they have pumped x amount of heavy mud in which temporarily capped the leak but was subsequently blown out because of the pressure of the escaping oil, couldn't they determine the exact pressure that the oil is coming out, and if they know the size of the opening, a flow rate?
- proee 16y agoThe pipe is leaking both oil and gas. The ratio of the two is unknown and therefore makes calculating the oil flow difficult.
- philfreo 16y agoYou may want to follow BP's PR Twitter... http://twitter.com/bpglobalpr http://twitter.com/bpglobalpr ;)
- tmsh 16y agoSo I looked at this link (via the above) from the WSJ: http://bit.ly/cqsUZV http://bit.ly/cqsUZV Anybody know why digging a hole say 500 feet deep, 50 feet side by side with the gushing well and putting some c4 in there wouldn't work? At any rate, I read this: http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=158297 http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=158297 Particularly, the non-nuclear option. I think they should run models and truly consider it. Perhaps they need to run models and then f-ing blow that up (if the models say that the resulting rubble will sufficiently re-cover the well). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KkhbbX4AcU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KkhbbX4AcU They could assemble a massive amount of dirt around the well. Create a large circular mound, and then just collapse it from underneath. That's what I would do. And I didn't even stay a Holiday Inn last night. Jk. I'm sure everyone has an opinion. I couldn't find a place to really say anything here: http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/546759/ http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/546759/ So I posted this. Anyway...
- earnubs 16y ago1. The leak is at 1,500m. Doing anything is difficult and dangerous. 2. The well has a measured depth of +10,000m, the pressure acting on the reservoir is ejecting the hydrocarbons with a very large force.
- wsbail29 16y agoMy layman's idea for stopping the leak: Insert a drill pipe into the well with some sort of expandable yet sturdy bag tucked into the end. Once the pipe is fairly deep inside the well, pump a dense liquid into the pipe expanding the bag similar to an angioplasty procedure. Then cap the well from the top once the flow is stopped or reduced significantly. Another similar solution would be to attach high explosives to the drill pipe and collapse the well from deep inside. Have these approaches been considered?
- brown9-2 16y agoI think that a problem with this idea is that the "expandable yet sturdy bag" would have to be able to withstand great pressure, not just of the oil itself but to survive a mile underneath the ocean.