from Hacker News

Nord Stream: Tie-ins and hyperbaric welding

by bluehorseray on 9/28/22, 3:45 AM with 271 comments

• by rendall on 9/28/22, 7:11 AM

  Everyone seems to know it was Russia and is just casting out ideas to find a plausible motivation. I find that completely baffling.

  For opportunity, consider that while setting up the pipeline needs a weird high-pressure residence and special training, blowing it up takes a fishing boat, scuba gear and underwater explosives. The equipment and training is cheap and available. So, those with opportunity is almost anyone. Practically, anyone with access to the Baltic Sea, boats, scuba equipment, underwater explosives; it doesn't have even to be anyone with military training, just skills in underwater demolition.

  For motivation, consider who benefits from permanently reducing European dependence on Russian energy?

  Resist going for "Clearly, Russia!". Just spitballing here, but why not a German opposition group? Norway? Poland? Any activist group opposed to EU dependence on Russia? Shit, why not Danish anarchists, for that matter?

  It could be Russia who suddenly decided for some reason that sanctions will never end and blowing up the means of selling hundreds of billions of euros of energy to Europe is a better use of the pipeline. But before getting there, you have to explain why it wasn't any of the myriad other groups who did not have hundreds of billions of Euros riding on it.

• by c_o_n_v_e_x on 9/28/22, 4:54 AM

  I worked in oil and gas in a previous life. The absolute wildest people I've ever met are saturation divers - divers who live in pressurized chambers on ships for months at a time to avoid having to decompress after dives. Fantastic money but you need a few screws loose to handle the work.

• by aetherspawn on 9/28/22, 4:38 AM

  The fact that someone actually built this, sent it to the bottom of the ocean, and then put people inside it to weld a 1200km pipeline underwater boggles my mind.

  Meanwhile we inexplicably struggle to figure out clean/cheap energy at scale.

• by teraflop on 9/28/22, 4:41 AM

  I found this section from another page on the same site amusing:

  > Nord Stream developed a high environmently-conscious logistic concept which guarantees that transport vessels have not to travel more than 100 nautical miles (185 kilometers). [...] This concept of short trips and environmentally friendly transport saves roughly 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide when compared against other options and the use of existing concrete coating plants.

  -- https://www.wermac.org/nordstream/nordstream_part4.html

  For comparison, each of the two Nord Stream pipelines can (well, could) deliver enough natural gas to create more than 150,000 tons of CO2 emissions per day.

• by triggercut on 9/28/22, 5:55 AM

  After working in O&G previously, some of the technology surrounding it still amazes me. Take the submersible hot-welding habitat probably used here, or one like it. We have found a way to (somewhat safely) put humans on the bottom of the ocean, in a box, around a metal pipe full of explosive gasses at pressure, for the purpose of shooting molten metal at, or cutting into that metal pipe.

  What are we doing?

• by owenfi on 9/28/22, 4:28 AM

  …comprised of dodge gears and bearings, reliance electric motors, and Allen Bradley controls…

• by weinzierl on 9/28/22, 5:39 AM

  I wonder with what these pipelines are filled during construction?

  An inert gas like Nitrogen or Argon is probably too expensive, natural gas might be too dangerous when welding is still necessary. Seawater is probably too dirty and aggressive.

  And as a related question: Should the pipeline fill up with sea water completely (for example because of large scale damage and loss of pressure) is it possible to make the pipeline usable again?

• by hotz on 9/28/22, 9:19 AM

  My money's on nato or the usa. Western politicians are stupid enough to go along with the idea and America's got a long history of causing chaos internationally.

• by throwaway102233 on 9/28/22, 9:09 AM

  we all know it was the Thalmor, they’ve been plotting against the Nords since before Tamriel merged into a single continent.

• by SanjayMehta on 10/1/22, 4:39 AM

  Cui bono?

  1 Russia? 2 Germany? 3 Poland? 4 Ukraine? 5 China? 6 India? 7 USA

  Who said back in Jan/Feb that they would stop NS 2?

  1 Blinken? 2 Biden? 3 Nuland? 4 All of the above

  Cui bono

• by WHA8m on 9/28/22, 8:53 AM

  I like this thread. A bunch of possibly above average intelligent people going all in on discussing why and how such an attack was done. Very entertaining to read.

  What struck me, was that a few of you seriously think about the US as a contender for this attack. Does anyone has an recent example of the US being that hostile to friend nations?

• by alexose on 9/28/22, 5:07 AM

  Hey. Let me walk you through the Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim-riding rip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats, and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps, and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one half meter from the damper crown to the spurve plinths. How? Well, we bolster twelve husk nuts to each girdle-jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically composited patch-hamplers. Then, pin-flam-fastened pan traps at both maiden-apexes of the jim-joist.

• by jupp0r on 9/28/22, 4:31 AM

  What a giant waste of taxpayer money, built when many - especially in east European countries - were already warning something exactly like this year would happen.

  Cool technology though.