Snippets of this story have been all over TV and the Net. According to this article from Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Soviets used the technique of nuking out of control well heads five times – although never on the ocean bottom. According to columnist Vladimir Lagovskiy, however, it should work just as well a mile below the Gulf.
For Komsomolskaya Pravda, Vladimir Lagovskiy writes in part:
It’s possible that fruitless attempts to stop the oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico with underwater robots will compel specialists to take extreme measures. Namely – to blow up the damaged well head with a nuclear warhead.
It sounds nightmarish and incredible – like an idiotic joke. But in fact there have been several instances where oil field disasters have been fought this way – five times on the territory of the former USSR. Nothing else was working, just as today in the Gulf of Mexico.
The first underground nuclear explosion used to extinguish a burning gas well took place at the “Urta-Bulak” field (50 miles from Bukhara) on September 30, 1966. The power of the explosion measured 30 kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 20 kilotons – but was detonated at the height of 2,000 feet, whereas at Bukhara, the bomb was triggered at a depth of 1 mile.
Expressing more confidence in American science than many Americans seems to hold at present, Lagovskiy writes:
The probability of the technique failing in the Gulf of Mexico is 20 percent. The Americans could take the risk. The chance of their astronauts dying on one of their flights to the Moon was greater. Of course, we used the peaceful atom on land, whereas the Americans will have to use it at sea – under water at a depth that reaches 5,000 feet.
But in principle, there’s no difference – you still have to drill a hole a distance from the leaky one, in which the bomb would be lowered – as in the movie Armageddon with Bruce Willis in the role of the driller. It’s preferable that the calculations are made correctly. And there is reason to hope they will be: the United States is full of smart scientists and powerful computers. And Russia could assist. Experts at peaceful nuclear demolition are still alive here.
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