

How Steven Chu Used Gamma Rays to Diagnose the BP Oil Spill - rywang
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/exclusive-how-steven-chu-used-gamma-rays-to-save-the-planet/56685/

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tptacek
Chu:

 _Here's what's happening. After the [Space Shuttle] Challenger accident, the
U.S. government formed a panel of very, very bright scientists and engineers
to come together and figure out what happened and what could be done in the
future to prevent it. Most of the people on that panel were not aeronautics
experts, not rocket experts or NASA experts. They were very smart people who
had a broad range of knowledge and experience. This is actually what you want:
you want a set of fresh eyes, people who can propose potential out-of-the-box
solutions, who might foresee what might go wrong. If you're an expert and
you're used to certain things done certain ways, that limits your ability to
cast a wider net, and so one of the most important things that we're doing at
the national laboratories is putting together these scientific teams, many of
whom would be considered non-experts. In times like this, those are many of
the people you want. BP and the oil industry have the lion's share of the
experts that are exactly germane to this. So this is how we think we can best
add value._

Chu here is talking about the committee for which Feynman gave the famous
O-ring demonstration.

I think whatever you think about Obama's politics, you've gotta be happy that
we have someone like Chu running DOE.

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URSpider94
The sad joke is, if you read Feynman's account of that committee, it's pretty
clear that they were intended to come in, look around, and declare the whole
thing an un-preventable accident. Feynman pulled his o-ring stunt because he
felt that he HAD TO in order to get the story out.

In this case, it seems like the government labs are providing some honest-to-
goodness assistance that hasn't been available from any other source so far.

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mieses
Did they discuss using underground nuclear explosion to pinch off the well? It
seems like a simple and proven solution.

[http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0513/Why-don-t-we-
just...](http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0513/Why-don-t-we-just-drop-a-
nuclear-bomb-on-the-Gulf-oil-spill)

Would this not work? Is it just politically incorrect?

~~~
mieses
to answer my own question ... Apparently the concern is that the rock layer
above the oil is thin. (Any sources for how thin?). A nuke could fracture the
rock layer and release all the oil at once.

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RK
I'm guessing this author must not be their science editor.

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tptacek
Nope. Dem politics writer.

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asdf333
what a badass

