People are SO stupid
Nuke it? Cameron? Let's trade dumb oil spill fixes for a real one
Alia Sabur calls her proposed containment plan the "seabed retread." Clever ANDa prodigy!Photo by Toby Armstrong
I know what let's not do: ask James Cameron.
The oil is spreading and all we've got are some ridiculously dumb ideas and acorporation who won't return calls about the good ones.
We've heard some pretty outlandish ideas for how to stop the gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Hair-covered booms, nuking the damn thing, and perhaps the dumbest idea — asking James Cameron.
Engineers have debunked the hair-covered boom idea and asked well-meaning collectors to kindly stop sending hair balls to the Gulf. Hair does absorb oil, but it also absorbs water — logging the booms and causing them to sink, which doesn't do a helluva lot of good.
Russian editor Vladimir Lagowski wrote of the Soviet Union's (somewhat under-the-table) success in plugging oil leaks with nuclear weapons. Although he estimates the chance of successfully plugging a leak so deep in the ocean with a nuclear explosion at only about 20 percent, he suggests we "take a chance."
And finally, James Cameron has been enlisted as a consultant in a meeting of the minds over the disaster in the Gulf. After all, he filmed Titanic! Between that and The Abyss, he's got to know an awful lot about submersibles. (Seriously — that's the argument).
Sounds to me like a lot of time wasted and not a lot of action taken (though I am glad BP was equally as unreceptive to the nuke idea as it was to Houston's still-waiting MacGyver's).
It's time for a real fix: The New York Post is reporting that a young (21-year-old) prodigy (she started her engineering PhD when she was 14, was the youngest-ever college professor at 18 years old and has received fellowships from NASA and the Department of Defense) has a solution for the spill. Terming it a "Seabed Retread" (and she's clever!), Alia Sabur thinks the leak should be tackled from the inside, rather than from above or around.
After watching BP fumble with top kills, junk shots and top hats (don't those all sound like locker room pranks?) much the way fairgoers fumble with those arcade crane games that can never quite grab the prize, I think Sabur may be onto something.
Sabur proposes inserting deflated tires into the leak and then inflating them, creating a seal that could then be reinforced from above and redirecting the oil to the surface. "It's not completely out there, considering that tires are used for everything and they're expected to withstand a lot," Sabur told the New York Post.
Now that makes a lot of sense.
