The meaning of fail-safe:

[hartree]

Fail-safe. It's a term we hear often. It also is misused much of the time

Comments

[hartree]

Indeed. I can understand some of the legal points of needing to not admit fault, but this has gotten a bit ridiculous.

I'm largely one of those pro-drilling types, but take it from me: It's a spill.

And no matter what it's called, spill, leak, seep, spring rain from heaven, unicorn rainbows prancing on the waves, it's going to be very ugly when it hits shore in a major way rather than just the brushes with islands and coast that it's had so far.

[tehrasha]

Nice that you mentioned the movie Fail-Safe.
One of my favorite all time cold-war era, what-if doomsday movies.
I think I like it better than Andromeda Strain.

[hartree]

Great movie, but I'd still give the edge to the original Andromeda Strain.

And, in the genre of nuclear war by accident movies, I still love Slim Pickens riding the bomb down. :)

[jbadger]

Well not only this term, everyday some snippet of words are used by non-tech types wrongly to make them "sound smart".

[dakhun]

Personally, I see this as an examination of whether anyone should be drilling at those depths. Not without a complete re-design of the equipment, anyway. Whenever you have solid methane hydrates forming around everything that is both exposed to methane and water (ie: potentially everything at the well head, basically), that's obviously a design consideration. And I don't think they've taken this properly into account. Recent events make it clear it hadn't even occurred to them.

[hartree]

I disagree, at least on some points. The regular wellhead equipment seems to be compatible with the hydrates. Hydrates also form at smaller depths and down under the seafloor. The problem wasn't that the pressures from that exceeded the wellhead equipment, it's that they got up to areas they shouldn't have

[dakhun]

Well, the depth does make a big difference in how fast the methane hydrates form at the temperature of the ocean. Add in a little bit of heat from the oil itself, and it becomes very difficult for them to form above this depth. Sure, they can form in cold, undisturbed seabed over a long period of time at much shallower depths, but that's not the situation here

[hartree]

The disturbing thing about all of it is that though the safety problems may have been made more problematic because of the depth and greater pressure, they were all things that would have been safety hazards on any well.

When you find a brake failure due to poor maintenance on a truck that runs away in mountainous terrain, it's probably good to check what the maintenance is like in the ones running on the plain too.

[crim_ferret]

The proper use of the word is also what Underwriter Labs looks for when failure testing a product. That UL tag isn't saying it won't fail. It might be the crappiest product ever made and fail 2 days after you buy it. They are saying it will fail in a way that isn't a hazard.