So I was on the Internet, such as you do, and someone brought up the idea of using a nuclear “bunker buster” bomb to seal the Gulf oil leak. Now, I thought this sounded like a fairly hideous idea - if only because you’re taking an already significant environmental disaster and adding radiation to it - but I don’t know enough about geology and oceanology to be able to exactly say why an explosion couldn’t solve this problem, just like Hollywood taught us. Can someone help me out here?
Why wouldn’t we want to go to a place that’s geologically unstable and blow things up at a spot that’s already weak? In a way that would cause at the very least a tsunami, if not trigger quakes?
Aside from that detail of irradiating the Caribbean, I don’t think its shores or islands need water in that particular form…
Perhaps you could explain in what way it would help. How would an explosion of any size seal the hole, instead of blowing it wide open (as would be the most likely result, I would think) ?
The way a bomb could seal a leak is by exploding underground NEXT TO the shaft in the ground that oil is coming out of. The shockwave then pinches the shaft shut and blocks the flow of oil. Done right, the explosion is kept entirely underground, so radiation isn’t really a danger.
If you can engineer a way to get to the sea floor, dig a parallel shaft, get a bomb down the shaft, and guarantee the safety of the entire procedure, then you should have been the one setting up the oil rig in the first place, you’ve got your act together.