I'm with you. From what I've been hearing, whether it's actually working won't be known until at least this evening. However, so far the reports are if not fully positive, at least not negative.
Am looking at the live feed (from the CNN link) now. Appears to me that the leak is stopped. Not seeing anything flowing out.
The problem faced is a new situation that has never been encountered. Major challenge dealing with a "structural problem" under the weight of 5000 feet of water. Not sure how you conclude that the lack of success to this point translates to ineptness??
Because it is not a new problem. We have had underwater leaks in the past.
This time there's a Democrat in the White House.
I was under the impression that this leak was unprecedented in terms of its depth and volume. Is that not the case? (Serious q)
I looked into it. Previously with some stuff I read was that the Russians had dealt with leaks in the past at a similar depth. However, their preferred method (nukes) would be a PR disaster.
At that pressure, you are going to have to keep the metal extremely hot to keep it molten. Much, much hotter than having it molten at sea level. I can't find the calcs though.
I believe that the plan was to seal it with concrete once the top-kill stopped the flow. With the oil flowing out I don't think it's feasible to get any kind of sealant into the well.
Well that is essentially what a nuke would do: it would compress a massive amount of rock against the well, shutting it. Part of the problem was that BP initially wanted to see if it could salvage the well since it already drilled it. So they used a lot of standard methods to conservatively shut off the leak. Every method used so far has been exactly what was used back in 1979 for the Ixtoc blowout. All those methods failed then, and likewise, they all failed now. The technology has not changed, only the willingness to take more risk with the environment. Ixtoc if you remember, spewed out of control for 9 months until a relief well could be drilled. 140 million barrels was spilled in that disaster.
History will probably show BP's response will be only a prologue in their book of sins. Additionally, BP has a fiduciary responsibility to its stockholders to underestimate and minimize the size of the spill as much as possible. And now you know why third-party scientists independently have calculated the rate of flow to be 5 to 20 times higher than BP's estimates.
How do you figure? There's no fiduciary responsibility to lie.
This is all true, but damages will be based on actual figures. This will have nothing to do with the current short term estimates. BP's eventual liability is unlikely to be reduced simply because they lowballed the figured now.
I'm not sure how you arrived at this number, but that's absolutely not possible. BP's market cap is only $130b. Total actual damages in the Exxon Valdez case were only $287m, so unless this spill is 17000 times worse than that one, costs won't approach $5T.
True, but you have to prove they were lying rather than simply calculating conservatively. There is a lot of room for manuevering in making estimates. Someone would have to define the point at which lowballing becomes lying. For example, the range of some independent estimates runs from 20,000 barrels per day to 80,000+ barrels per day, a range of plus or minus 30,000 barrels. That's a big range.
I already made the corrections, but you must have missed them. I got off a couple magnitudes, from a combination of errors, one arithmetic, one from baseline data. I double-checked the data after that. Just so you know, the error was the number I remembered was the gallons figure, 140 M gallons, not barrels. That changes the number quite a bit. Add to that a decimal place slip and you get a double magnitude error. But as you pointed out, it was an obvious high number which I quickly double-checked and fixed.