@Cody:
“…why not just drop an enormous rock on the pipe?” — One reason is that the shock would likely shatter the well casing somewhere not too far below the sea floor. Then the high-pressure oil would spurt out into the surrounding sediments and find its way to the surface, emerging from all around the well. Very soon you’d have an oil-gushing crater, which would swallow up the blowout preventer, much like what happens after a water main breaks and washes away a city street. This possible outcome hasn’t been mentioned much in public, but it may have influenced BP’s hesitancy about trying the “top kill” procedure, and maybe even their reluctance to close off the vents on the current collector cap. I note that when they fitted the cap to the riser pipe, they kept one camera trained on the sea floor near the BOP, watching for signs of seepage. Somewhere down below, the casing or the cement that secures the casing may already be damaged, making this worst-case scenario all too possible.

@Paul Houle:
I know this isn’t exactly your point, but perhaps one could argue that it was the TMI accident that led the nuclear power industry to clean up its act, but it was too late by then. The public had turned against it. Likewise, the Deepwater Horizon may lead the petroleum industry to invent or adopt technologies that will allow safe deep ocean drilling. But again it may be too late; if we the public have lost trust, we’re not going to believe anything they tell us.

Also, thanks for the pointer to “Light Water,” which I’ve never seen, and which looks interesting.

The TMI accident caused the destruction of an expensive piece of hardware, but it did not injure or kill workers at the reactor. TMI did release measurable quantities of radiation into the environment, but it did not have any obvious impact on local citizens, agriculture or industry. The worst consequence of TMI was that people in the area experienced considerable psychological stress during and after the accident.

People often think that “TMI killed the Light Water Reactor in the US”, yet, the book “Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved” came out a year before the accident, see

http://www.energyfromthorium.com/LightWater.html

Roughly, an excessive number of LWRs were ordered in the early 1970s, LWR construction was plauged by cost overruns, and LWR operations were problematic in the early days (some reactors had less than 55% uptime.)

Looking back over the last 30 years of experience, the LWR looks quite different. Uptimes above 90% are common, and occupational exposure to radiation (never any worse than what airline pilots get) has dropped dramatically. Fuel performance improves steadily year after year; we now know that an LWR built to modern standards could last 85 years or more, so the expensive initial capital cost can be paid off over a very long lifetime.

It’s not clear if improved designs and modern project management could solve the cost escalation problems of large LWRs; however, these problems can almost certainly be solved by the factory constructed small reactors that are being developed by Babcox & Wilcox and by Nuscale. Initially these will be installed in clusters of 3 to 12 reactors that would compete head-on with today’s LWRs. In a decade or so, these may be relicensed for extended operation between refueling (20 years or more), smaller exclusion areas and less regulation, opening up more market opportunities.

And then on the radio I heard that at the sea floor, 5000 feet down, the pipe travels another 15,000 feet into the ground, and someone (an expert?) explained that it is essentially just a straw, and that collapsing the straw is fairly easy, with explosives. (They said Russia has more than once used nuclear weapons to collapse out-of-control pipes. A critic said we don’t want to set a precedent of using nuclear weapons for engineering purposes because it would legitimize other nations seeking weapons, while someone else counter-argued that if someone wanted to use them for construction we could always provide the devices.)

Then they explained that the reason BP hasn’t talked about those approaches (specifically the explosives one), is that they want to preserve the well! And that if they were to destroy this particular well, they’d have to redrill, but expected public opposition would be too great to redrill, so they want to recover this particular well.

If that is true, then they should have destroyed it as soon as possible, because without all that oil pumping into the gulf the public opposition wouldn’t exist to redrill, and as one method after another fails to regain control, destroying it will seem like an increasingly attractive option. Though the idea that we ought to be capable of fixing the thing is still a pretty persuasive argument.

Brian, I really like your proposal for a investigative agency akin to the NTSB. It is so strange that a portion of our society has comprehended the power of science, and scientific methods have taken us so far, and yet as a group we still haven’t learned that science is usually the most efficient way to improve the world. Separating the investigation from the regulation is an excellent point.

Also, a lot of interesting info here, thanks Brian!

Now given the fact that they drilled DEEPEST oil well in history - Why the hell they made an assumption that standard leak-stopping procedures would work in such depths ?
From this I can only make conclusion that they DIDN’T tested/calculated/examined deep water leak-stopping procedures before. And this is so arrogantic, stupid, destructable and greedy way of doing business which I could ever imagine.
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Sometimes business makes VERY risky projects for the very big planned income. But as this incident shows - such way of doing business should be terminated in any way.
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BTW. Current global economy crisis can be analyzed as another very risky management of loans in BANK’s. (Too easy conditions for getting loans). And here we are !
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There are no limits to human greed and stupidity.

“Fail-safe systems fail by failing to fail safe.” –John Gall, Systemantics

Unfortunately, there is a third competing story (and who knows, it may even turn out to be true): that BP did everything right, and that the accident was really an accident, unforeseeable and unpreventable. Surely this is the tune that BP itself will sing when it opens up.

Yes, accidents like this happen all the time. And had this one happened on shore or in shallow water, it would have been fixed by now.

What I — and all of the science/engineering types I know — find so stunning is that we lack the ability to stop the leak. How is it that we have the technology to dig a hole 40 miles off shore, 1 mile under water, and 5 miles deep, but lack the technology to fill it in again?

And given that we lack that technology, what the *^#@ were we thinking digging that hole in the first place?

Seriously, how much hubris and greed does it take to tear a hole in the earth that you know you cannot mend? That is the problem, not the accident itself. That arrogance, combined with our insatiable demand for cheap oil, is what annihilates ecosystems.

Until the human race develops the technology to respond to disasters at these depths, we simply have no business being down there. None whatsoever.