BP In the Gulf: Not The Cutting Edge

Amidst all the depressing news from the Gulf of Mexico and worries about the future of the Gulf economy, the environment, and even the viability of sectors of the oil industry, we still have to marvel at the technology of offshore oil.  For example, this passage from today's bad-news article, regarding the next stab at controlling the escaping gunk:

With robotic submarines, the company will sever the leaking, kinked riser pipe that emerges from the top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-tall contraption on top of the wellhead. Then engineers will guide the LMRP cap onto the pipe. The cap is fitted with a grommet designed to keep out seawater and prevent the formation of slushy methane hydrates that bedeviled an earlier containment dome effort.

Really, isn't it amazing that we can do these things, more than three miles under water?  Even the malfunctioning blowout preventer is a pretty interesting bit of technology.  It looked as if it should have worked, but I suppose there wasn't any real way to test it in real-world conditions.  Overall, this technology isn't even cutting-edge any more, but it's impressive nevertheless.

After a minor failure in another energy technology at the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in 1979, even though the danger was contained, interest in nuclear energy took a nosedive (although some deny the accident was the cause).  I wonder if greater caution in offshore drilling will be a result of the current mess, and whether already-reawakening interest in nuclear power will be spurred by a failure in oil exploitation technology. 

Comments

[Anonymous]

The quote from the Washington Post is only the latest in a long string of references from all over the news spectrum to call the Blowout Preventer a "contraption".
In my view, a contraption is an unlikely, improvised, cobbled together, junky, off-hand answer to some technical problem. Although the damn thing failed, similar articles have, in fact, worked in the past. Is this another example of the general scientific/technical illiteracy of the press? How many "contraptions" are underpinning the other 3800 wells in the Gulf?

NPR, I think, was the first to blow off the item this way. Not a good sign.