Nuke the Whales!

The news today has been mostly about the BP well blowout. I agree that the bureaucracy established to prevent this sort of thing failed miserably, which is both a scandal and a good reason to reject more bureaucratic fixes. This morning on C-Span I listened to callers who all had the answer for an immediate fix, including the use of explosives, which I didn't quite understand. Maybe the guy thought that since explosives are used to put out oil fires on land, they would work for this, too. Or maybe he knows something I don't, like how a nuclear weapon would stop that sucker forthwith. I wonder how the Gulf States would like that solution.

One thing that seems clear in hindsight is that drilling under 5000 feet of water was a new thing, in many ways experimental. It certainly seemed clear that they knew that attempting to contain the leak with the so-called dome would be foiled by the formation of hydrates which form at such depths and pressures. Shouldn't some trials have been made before sinking this well? They supposedly had a blowout preventer/arrester, but it failed. I hope they do some experiments at depth and develop new technology before we allow more of these deep wells to be drilled. Maybe they just aren't able to be made safely, but I'm not interested in just giving up on all offshore drilling. We should be developing oil shale deposits which are vast, and keep working to find better alternatives. Electricity will someday replaced gasoline, but how we'll generate the electricity to take over that load will involve nuclear generation almost certainly, and more methane and clean coal, if we can ever get over the obsession with carbon dioxide.