druidsbird wrote:
John_Browning wrote:
A nuclear bomb wouldn't do any good. A regular bomb wouldn't work well either except for maybe removing that busted cutoff valve and burying the pipe in concrete.
I've wondered about that, why would they consider using a nuclear explosion? The only reason I can come up with is that maybe a nuclear blast will turn the sand down there into a large enough surface area of glass (like the giant glass-lined craters in Nevada from the '50s nuke tests), to seal off the pipeline. But I don't know if it would work, or be worth it, and it seems very risky, and I haven't looked into it yet.
Because nuclear explosions are very big. The idea, so far as I know, is to send a massive shock which collapses the tunnel walls rather than fuse the rock.
It has, apparently, been done before. Just not on the ocean floor.
Radiation etc. would be absolutely minimal, but that wouldn't be enough to stop a public outcry. There'd be screams of public outrage from all over, and never mind the fact that nuclear weapons were routinely tested on the continental US...
_________________
No one has gone missing or died.
The year is still young.