On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 19:19:03 -0400, axolotl
wrote:
Gunner wrote:
That was the time I spent working in 20 odd states and several
countries "doodlebugging" on seismograph crews..Bendix and Western
Geophysical. I ran a shot hole rig.
Gunner,
Can you fill me in on how a hole is profiled using a radioactive source?
My wife and her sister are convinced that their father died (eventually)
of radiation poisoning caused by an accident at a well. The story, as
I heard it, was that he (working for Wellex/Halliburton in the 50's) was
on a crew shooting a well. The drill hit a gas pocket and drill, pipe,
and radioactive source were shot into the air. The container holding the
radioactive source ruptured mid-air and covered the crew in a white
powder. The crews' exposure badges were lost by Wellex. The guys on the
crew were transferred to different areas of the country, and all died
young from old age (the girls' father died at 47 fighting kidney, liver,
and heart failure).
I there any possibility that this could have happened? How hot is the
radiation source?
Or have the girls whipped up a conspiracy theory?
Kevin Gallimore
Id have to say that at least a good portion of that story are
bull****. As best as I know..radioactive logging is only done by
lowering a source into a well and reading the bounced back radiation
from detectors sheilded from the source. Like shining a flashlight at
th walls of a tunnel. Every material will absorb more or less of the
radiation "beam".
Other forms of logging include reading the natural radioactivity of
the subformations.
http://www.greatgeophysics.com/logginginfo.html
So the drill string is unlikely to have been in the hole. And if there
was a gas pocket that came up, or a blow out even with the drill
string in the hole..that container is the least of their problems..as
having several thousand feet of heavy heavy pipe, mud and water coming
out of the hole straight up....is not condusive to standing around for
very long. Think of it as steel toothpaste...it flys upwards, bends
and then starts kinking, bending and falling back down on the the
drilling floor, the rig itself and the crew.
Some of the radioactives that are used are pretty nasty stuff though.
Based on what I know of the roughnecks of yore..dying at 47 was not
all that unlikely..they lived hard, played hard..and died hard.
On the gripping hand..there are lots of radioactives used in the
pipeline industry for X-ray photographs of pipe weldments. Some of
those can be pretty gnarly.
Cesium-137 being one of them.
Gunner
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"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.
Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner