Nitpicking I suppose, but we ‘know’ it ‘could’ work. We ‘think’ it ‘will’ work. Lots of problems to overcome in that proposed solution also.
bolding and snipping - mine.
Sadly - this is the key. Clearly we should have known better - since this exact thing has happened before. More than once. One good example is the Ixtoc I rig which exploded and sank in the southern Gulf of Mexico in 1979. That rig spewed oil at a rate of up to 50,000 barrels per day (compared to ~12-19,000 for the current disaster). The killer part - the leak from 1979 took 10 months to contain, but was in only 160 feet of water. The current leak is in 5,000 feet of water.
Here is a good comparison of the 2 incidents.
I really hate to hijack my own thread by belaboring this, but I will anyway. You’re missing the point of the metaphor. The problem isn’t going great speeds in the dark; it’s going great speeds with your headlights on – but faster than your ability to react within the limited range of the headlights. The invention of headlights did not solve that problem.
I would say that that becomes a very loose definition of “work”. If (hyperbolically, but bear with me) the relief well stops the flow after all the sea life in the Gulf is dead, would that be a success?
I’m not missing it. You point out we don’t have the equipment necessary to deal with unforeseen catastrophes linked to the technology we’re using.
I’m pointing out that we typically don’t and it’s the failures that drive the creation of the equipment needed to deal with the catastrophes.
Hence deep sea drilling is finding out that current “headlights” aren’t sufficient “fast” to respond and so “faster” ones will have to be developed.
Lawyers, demanding that ‘the talent’ come up with the solution that will make their tech-venture-startup profitable sometime within the next six months.
Works every time! 
This is an excellent example. We know that it’s theoretically possible to achieve ongoing controlled fusion with existing technologies, and in fact have demonstrated momentary, unstable controlled fusion for over 50 years. What is missing is bringing engineering to bear on the problem in a way that will result in “profitable” controlled fusion – “profitable” meaning it makes more than it takes both in terms of energy prduction/usage and financial investment.
Another example might be the Beanstalk, the space elevator, which is theoretically possible with present-day technology but requires engineering innovation to become practical.l
OK, glad we’re on the same page re: metaphors, but I think we’re drawing different conclusions. One solution is brighter headlights; the other is driving slower.
I’ve solved the problem: shove what is essentially an upside down umbrella down the pipe until it reaches the end and then pull up.
It’s worth noting that BP has a checkered recent history on safety. Possibly relevant may be the Texas City Refinery explosion, which wasn’t that long ago (2005).
I watched an episode of National Geographic’s Seconds from Disaster on the explosion, and it was just amazing how much went wrong, particularly operator error by the refinery operators.
Short version: there was a “raffinate tower” where petrochemicals were heated to separate out different grades. Safety regulations permitted only 7 feet of liquid hydrocarbons in the base of the tower. One device would signal 7 feet of fill, and a backup alarm would signal 10 feet. But BP employees routinely overfilled the tower to 10 feet to “save time.” On the day of the disaster, the backup alarm at 10 feet malfunctioned, so the staff continued to pump in hydrocarbons. 13 feet was reached, at which point a heating element elsewhere in the pipeline was turned on to begin ramping up the temperature and pressure in the already-overfilled raffinate tower. The staff kept filling the tower, more and more. 30 feet (!), 100 feet, 138 feet. The tower “burped” fluid. They kept filling it. All the way to the top, out the escape pipe, down the side of the tower, into the overflow stack. Now hydrocarbons began filling the overflow stack.
At some point an effort was finally made to divert some of the fluid, but that diversion went through a heat exchanger to recapture some of the energy, and that heated the fluid still entering the tower another one hundred degrees.
Like Mickey Mouse’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, they’d turned on the process, and instead of being unable to turn it off, they just never really attempted to do so. More fluid filled the overflow tower all the way to its top, and then vented what was basically a huge cloud of gasoline vapor across the facility. This fuel-air explosive then did what it does best, killing 15 people and injuring 180, and destroying the enormously expensive facility.
What really stands out about the whole affair is not the failure of some alarms and the misunderstanding of how the heat exchanger would affect the tower, but the fact that the staff just kept filling the tower, hour after hour after hour, much longer than they had ever done so before, and it never seems to have occurred to anyone to stop pumping.
These are the kind of people who brought us the current situation.
Yeah, the harsh environment of the deep sea is why many of the attempted fixes have failed. One of the big confounding factors is that high pressure and cold temperatures lead to formation of clathrates, a weird sort of hydrated methane “ice”. Clathrate formation is what stymied the first attempts to contain the leak. Oh, and if you heat up clathrates too much they’ll decompose rather violently. They’re a known problem in oil and natural gas extraction (and possibly contributed to this most recent blowout). We know enough about them to successfully drill under “normal” conditions, but we lack a thorough scientific understanding which would help us predict and prevent catastrophes.
In other words, this sort of deep sea catastrophe and recovery isn’t a simple engineering problem that can be tackled with equations and money. I believe BP is doing the best they can to fix the well – they’re future existence is at risk. But on short notice their best attempts are a handful of jury-rigged fixes with no guarantee of working (short of drilling that relief well).
The headlight metaphor is quite good in this situation…
You are right-the engineering problems (in extracting energy from a fusion reactor) are insoluable-materials we have now would fail within hours.
It makes me wonder-at some point, we ought to be able (to predict) if a sustained fusion reaction is possible. If it is not, we should put our research dollars into breeder reactors.
I don’t remember where I saw it, but the fusion researchers seem to be realizing that themselves. But a nuclear reactor is a catastrophe waiting to happen. It’s not the science that I don’t trust, it’s who ever is in charge of that reactor.
Not quite as old but nearly is the Door to Hell.
Think Centralia but you can see it.
Basically someone was mining for gas or oil or something, hit and underground pocket and everything collapsed into a big ass hole. Poisonous gas was escaping and the only thing they could figure to do about it was set it on fire.
Been burning ever since (check out the pics…kinda cool in an ominous way).
Depends on the reactor. As it happens this is one place engineering has caught up to solve your concerns. There are now designs out there for fission reactors that are inherently safe. That is, you could not make it blow up if you tried because the very physics of the reaction make it self limiting. As it starts getting out of control physics takes over and limits the reaction.
There are other issues (iirc one is a serious hassle to refuel) but such a thing could be built if they wanted to today.
Why’s that? A modern nuclear reactor is no more dangerous than a coal fired power plant - more so, because the primary boiler systems are behind thick concrete.
The biggest threat to a generating plant is a steam explosion, and both nuclear and coal rely on steam to actually drive the generators.
If you put someone in front of the controls for a modern reactor and told them to do as much damage as possible I’m sure they could destroy the core. All if would do is turn into a molten mass of fuel.
Meanwhile, your coal burning plant is pumping far more radioactive material into the atmosphere per day than 20 nuclear plants put together.
This is misleading.
Yes a reactor running properly puts out no radiation (at least no more than the normal background radiation). That said if a coal fired plants blows up there is not much to it beyond damage to the plant. When Chernobyl (as an example) went boom it rendered an are 30 kilometers in diameter uninhabitable.
You didn’t get what I said. It is not the science that is the problem. Nuclear plants need maintenance, security, management. I don’t trust business or the government to do the job right. Who will build that nuclear plant? Who will make sure it was built right? Who will make sure that all maintenance is performed on schedule, and properly? We had regulations that could have stopped BP from making that mess, if they had been followed. Now we have to worry if BP can clean up the mess they made, and if they don’t, guess who pays. How much money can compensate for a nuclear catastrophe that will make an area of land uninhabitable for ages, even no radioactivity was emitted? Spent fuel isn’t the only problem either. Every part of those reactors bombarded by neutrons becomes part of the problem.
If you want to use technology, why aren’t we pursuing geothermal energy? Its everywhere on the planet, works day and night, every day and night, and the least estimate I’ve seen has 3000 years before depletion, and most are in the range 10 to 100 times that length of time. People with money are already drilling their own geothermal wells. Problem free, no. But compared to wind, solar, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear it looks way better.
You didn’t get what I said.
There are reactor designs out there that are inherently safe. If you went in there and pressed every button you could to overload the reactor, if you blew up all the coolant lines, the reactor can not melt down. Physics itself intervenes. The very laws of the universe work to save the reactor from a catastrophic melt down. The reactor is self limiting as it heats up eventually moderating its own reaction. There is no way around it even if you did your level best to try.
Sure the reactor is radioactive but unless you want to sleep in the reactor the radiation hazard to you is nil.
I suppose if someone actually set a crap load of explosives around it (those reactor vessels are tough) then perhaps you could expose the core but nothing short of that will get you.
As for geothermal there are significant challenges there. Unless you live somewhere that is geologically active near the surface (e.g. Yellowstone, Iceland) it is very hard to impossible to access geothermal energy. The deepest hole ever drilled was in Russia (the Kola Superdeep Borehole) and it reached a bit over 40,000 feet deep. Mind you they started in 1970 and reached that depth in 1989 (although they ran in fits and starts…not continuously).
The average thickness of the continental crust is 20-30 miles. So, even at 20 miles the deepest hole ever drilled missed getting through the crust by about 12.5 miles (give or take).
Granted, they probably do not need to get all the way through but they need sufficient continual heating such that you can boil a continuous stream of water sufficient to power turbines.
Anyway, the tech simply does not exist to drill deep enough in most places of the world to access geothermal power. Believe me they’d do it if they could…nearly free energy.
ETA: Not to mention the steam will cool off as it travels the 20(ish) miles back to your power plant and most likely be water again.
Somebody needs to do a calculation and see how bad it would be if all the ash and CO2 produced by a coal fired power plant over 2 to 5 decades was kept within a 15 kilometer radius of the plant.
I suspect it would fall just a bit short of eden…