Russian paper: Nuke the oil geyser

Russian paper suggests ‘nuclear explosion’ could cap gulf oil geyser

As British Petroleum scrambles to affix a four-story, 70-ton dome over the massive oil geyser venting toxic sludge into the Gulf of Mexico, people everywhere are wondering what else can be done to stem the deadly tide.

Komsomoloskaya Pravda, Russia's best-selling daily publication, has an idea: Why not just nuke it?

During the Soviet years, Russia's communists had to deal with numerous oil disasters and on five different occasions they employed controlled, underground nuclear blasts to quickly solve the problem.

[The] underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel," Pracda reported.

"It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities," added Moscow reporter Julia Ioffe, writing for True/Slant. "The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals."

And those 169 underground blasts do not count the Soviet military's tests of various atomic-yield weapons, the paper noted.

Russia's success in capping major oil leaks with nuclear demolitions has an almost perfect record of success: only one detonation failed to accomplish its purpose. The last such explosion took place in 1979, according to Ioffe.

Read the full article here

So while we wait for this "dome" to be built and more and more oil gets spilled into the Gulf.

Right when the story emerged about this horrendous amount of oil being purged into the Gulf there were numerous ATSer's bringing up the idea of a possible nuke or some sort of explosion to collapse the rig on it self (somewhat of an implosion of the earth to cover the leak for a more temporary solution until something else could be done).

As you can see in this article we have the Russians who did this back in the 60's & 70's with almost 100% success (only one explosion didn't work).

I say we do this. The idea of putting a dome over this massive oil leak is just a ploy [IMO] so they can salvage as much of the oil as possible. Basically from what I understand they want to place this dome over the leak, then pump out the oil from under the dome. Seriously, this oil leak is a horrible disaster that is killing marine life, and suspending a lot of jobs ATM, and yet BP is acting selfishly trying to get as much oil out of this as possible... it just doesn't seem right.

Related thread: Mother Of All Gushers Could Kill Earth

Terrible idea... Instead of 5 foot hole leaking out, you could end up with a 1/4 mile hole leaking oil! Nope, they need a better and more viable solution - and fast!!!

I believe that a nuclear explosion is to big of a risk. It may close or it may enlarge it. We need a solution with smaller risks.

reply to post by kozmo


How do you know that? No offense to you, but are you a specialist in this area? If you read the article it says the Russians did this many times with great success, what is the difference in this situation?

I'm not saying it's a definitive way to fix the problem (especially not for good) but don't you all think it's a possibility? That more should be done research wise about the area before this is not even given a chance?

Someone posted this a day or two ago, but I'll give the same response. If I thought it would definitely work and that there was no risk of opening up a bigger leak, I'd be 100% in favor of it. The problem is, what happens if you miscalculate it and turn it into a fifty foot wide hole in the sea floor? You've gone from a problem that could take months to fix in the worst case scenario and turned it into a problem that can *never* be repaired.

If all else fails, maybe its a solution you turn to, but until all other reasonable options are exhausted, its not something I'd do at this point.

did the soviets use that method for any deepwater rigs? or any offshore leaks?

Would they have to put the nuke 1.5km deep in the water? or 1.5 km in the seafloor? i dont know much about that stuff but it seems that that would take a decent amount of time to do also.


Also would a nuke used like this have any harmful side effects? This rig is pretty close to some highly populated areas, and the US gets 1/5 of our seafood from that area.