Quote Originally Posted by jemidiah View Post
; solar would eventually cool the planet, which is warmed, oddly enough, by solar;

Sorry for the stream of consciousness, but this is the chit chat forum .
It takes a math based topic to bring jemidiah to Chit-Chat.

Solar does warm the planet, but it is not the reason that the core is molten, nor the reason that the temperature increases greatly the further down you go, so is it what warms the planet? Only partially.

Also,if the assumption behind that statement was that the radiant energy from the sun is converted into electricity means that it is not available as heat, that wouldn't really be valid. For one thing, it isn't the IR that the solar cells are converting, and more importantly, that energy will be released as heat through resistance (whether electrical or mechanical).


As for the original topic, there was a flaw. The current leak in the gulf is not the first catastrophic failure of a well, it is just the worst and most visible. This particular failure came during the cementing process. Several reports have mentioned that the cementing process has been implicated in most catastrophic well failures. Though most of the reports I have heard have not listed other failures, the very statement shows that there must have been others (one report did go over a few). In most cases, the failure was catastrophic only to the rig operator.

Therefore, your expectation that there will be more failures will be borne out. However, there may not be another failure that will be both as catastrophic and as visible as this one for decades.