Hmm 2 nuclear bomb people, an astrophysicist, a space mining expert, and a maverick.<p>They are planning to divert an asteroid and crash it into the leak.
I don't understand the 'junk shot' plan. They're talking about shooting old golf balls, knotted rope scraps, and shredded tire chunks in, followed by cement? I guess I just assumed that in such a highly engineered industry, they'd have a design and spec for the 'junk', rather than relying on what sounds like random, uncontrolled, scrap.<p>Maybe that's just popular description, and in reality the junk in the junk shot is very well controlled?
> He [Alexander Slocum] has a lot of creative ideas. One in 10 are really brilliant ideas, but nine are dumb,” said MIT professor Wai K. Cheng, a colleague in Slocum’s department.<p>I don't understand why some scientists come public with this type of negative commentary. It only reinforces the type of closed-off competitiveness that plagues academia. Sometimes I wonder what great advancements haven't been made as a direct result of the lack of collaboration and inherent selfishness within scientific fields.
Steve Wereley's particle analysis estimate 70,000 bbls / day leakage.<p>The much publicized 5,000 bbls/day figure is from a surface only estimate by NOAA. It's been discovered that much of the leak is forming large sub-surface slicks. One such below surface slick is 10 miles long, by 3 miles wide, by 300 feet thick.<p>These guys are not going to be visible til / if they come ashore.
Is it just me or does this not really seem like that hard of a problem? I mean, it obviously is, but I don't see why they can't just attach an open value to the tube, then close the valve when it's on. I mean look at it:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYFYVNvgg-A&feature=player_embedded" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYFYVNvgg-A&feature=playe...</a><p>Why not just get bulk carriers full of gravel and start dumping it until it's buried? Are you saying that oil can get through a million tons of gravel?<p>If that sounds crazy, BP itself was talking about injecting golf balls into the tube.<p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/may/10/deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-oil-spills" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/may/10/deepw...</a>