Why don't we just detonate a nuclear bomb on the Macondo oil well, and seal the Deepwater Horizon spill that way? I keep hearing this suggestion in comments here and in conversations out in the real world. Frankly, whether it's plausible or not, that tactic isn't ever likely to get an OK. But a few good stories have been written about the nuclear option recently and, for the sake of armchair speculation, there's a couple of facts we should keep in mind:

Nuclear bombs have been used to seal leaking wells before, but the situations aren't analogous. Those successful detonations were used on leaking gas wells, located on dry land. If tactics that can stop a surface gas leak could naturally be applied to deepwater oil leaks with a high chance of success … well, we'd probably have this thing stopped already.

The explosion would happen deep under the seabed. Nobody's talking about just detonating a bomb underwater. Instead, the idea is to drill a hole near the broken well and drop a bomb down that. The goal of an explosion isn't to cap the top of the well, but to pinch it off further down.This fact matters, because underground detonations are much less of a threat—from a radioactive fallout perspective.

Consider the source. Who are the most public proponents of nuking the oil spill? Mostly aging engineers from the U.S. and Russia who were part of 1960s efforts to use nuclear bombs in peaceful ways—like blasting through mountains to make highways, and quickly "digging" huge canals. The U.S. scrapped its plans for nuclear-assisted infrastructure development because of concerns over the rather obvious ecological impacts of surface explosions. (I like to imagine scientists waking up in the morning with a horrible hangover, looking at their notes from the night before, and making a bunch of frantically apologetic phone calls.)

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had no such qualms. They nuked their own country peacefully at least 124 times between 1958 and 1989. Almost every instance is described as a success, but, as you might expect, outside sources say that the full truth hasn't really been reported.

Reuters: Should BP Nuke Its Leaking Well?



The Oil Drum: Nuking the Oil Slick

Image courtesy Flickr user Coso Blues, via CC