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To: bentway who wrote (251013)	5/31/2010 1:14:28 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 306849

I think that will make a much bigger leak. Imagine a 7" pipe with something like 7000 psi. Thats the size of the pipe at the bottom, and something on the order of the net pressure differential accounting for everything else. That will flow a heck of a lot more oil than the current leak. Someone here posted a link to the Wiki article on underground nuke testing, and that clarifies why the nuke to close a well needs to be placed underground. They give an equation for depth vs yield, required not to have a surface collapse. It is pretty deep. That shows that the nuke does not seal the local region unless contained by quite high pressure. However, at the depths sufficient to contain the explosion without surface collapse, this is still way lower than the well pressure. So any surface explosion will simply make a surface crater which the well pressure will easily blowout, and then you will have a flow rate from a diffuse source (rubble in the bottom of the crater) equal to the capacity of the well casing, which will be orders of magnitude higher than the current leak. How will you then fix that mess? All the written descriptions I've found on the Russian uses of nukes (and the video link someone posted here yesterday) show a very deep placement well drilled to place the nuke deep enough for containment. IIRC, the gas well nuked in the video took 3 months to drill the placement well. The gas well had burned for 3 years.