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DoE Posts Raw Data From Oil Spill, Coast Guard Asks For Tech Help
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy this week opened an online portal where the public can get all the technical details it can stomach about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. The DoE site offers online access to schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the malfunctioning blowout preventer and other problems in the ongoing mess. This comes alongside news that the US Coast Guard has issued a call for better specialized technology to help it respond to the ever-widening spill. The Coast Guard is looking for all manner of technology, such as advanced wireless sensors to help it track the movement and amount of oil in the Gulf, or devices that could help to contain and control the underwater leak."
Reader freddled points out a story at the Guardian that illustrates how the location of an oil leak is frequently the primary factor in its perceived importance.
Has anyone seen the new "Visit Florida" ads?
They discuss the fact that potential tourists are worried about the Gulf spill, and then say something like ...
"Florida has 835 miles of coastline. Northeast Florida has 221 miles of crystal clean beaches..."
In other words, "Come to Florida! Only 3/4 of our coast is covered in oil!!!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Do you know what the amount of pressure was from the leak when BP's 3 failsafe's failed? 20k+ psi. The NOAA has that info; at least they did yesterday.
Crude is extracted at +/-1,500 psi, so they were drilling deep enough to hit magma pockets (I forget the proper nomenclature for those types of pockets).
Only Russia has successfully drilled that deep...but they weren't dumb enough to try that kind of depth under the pressure and weight of the freakin' ocean.
20,000+ psi will destroy anything man can make to "plug" the leak. Is our only option nuking it?
If so, even if they do angle drill and drop a nuke, what if it cracks the strata further?
IMHO this will help to shuttle in that BS carbon tax. The longer the leak remains, the more damage, the more "reason" for the aforementioned tax. ...But, of course, this is conspiracy stuff. :)
Because it isn't going through rock, it's going through mud. If you think it's hard to stop a gusher from a 2' diameter pipe, imagine how hard it would be to stop a 40,000 BBL/dy, methane propelled ooze from a 500 foot radius area with no containment.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Pick one:
The RUSSIANS did that sort of thing. The RUSSIANS. RUSSIANS.
There's a one-in-a-billion chance it could make things SLIGHTLY WORSE by making the oil come up at SEVERAL spots in the area instead of the one shitstream we hope to maybe have under better control in a few months.
If we blew it up, we couldn't reuse that well.
I like how completely ambiguous this page is. It would be substantially more effective to vote in favor of a one child policy. At least that has a transparent metric for success.
Ethanol and traditional photo-voltaics are as dirty, if not dirtier than oil respectively because of inefficiency and heavy metals.
I am in support of clean energy if we are talking about building some gigantic nuclear power plants next to major population centers to decrease transmission inefficiencies.
Unfortunately, as the BO website stands, I would not be in support of a carbon tax while also giving subsidies to turn natural gas and corn into ethanol that is then mixed with gasoline for some reason.
The RUSSIANS did that sort of thing. The RUSSIANS. RUSSIANS.
Yes the Russian successfully performed the procedure on land. This is underwater at 5000 feet.
As for the explosives, I offer you this car analogy:
After the mechanic ruptured my gas tank while performing a routine checkup, he blurted out the excuse "there's a lot of pavement out there so don't worry about it" and offered to install a nitrous system instead. Do I really want that nitrous system?
Let's call Chuck Norris, he'll roundhouse-kick the oil back into its hole.
Not unless you build special duckies that are suspended at 50m, 100m, 150m, 200m, etc. all the way down to 1500m below the surface. This spill is manifesting itself in 3 dimensions.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I like the picture of all the eyesore windmills standing above the tree - because that's what it would take, everywhere, in order to adopt wind power as our primary generation method.
You say that like it's a bad thing. "Eyesore"? Come down here to the Gulf and have a look, pal.
This demonstrates, again, how it's really the freakishly skewed perceptions of people playing politics that drive "environmentalism" as it is currently practiced, and it doesn't have much of anything to do with the real environment.
Actually, the people who are serious about environmentalism do care when it happens in Nigeria or other "off the radar" places. They actually expend a lot of energy trying to draw people's attention to these areas.
What you are seeing has nothing to do with environmentalism, but with the mass media, which naturally reports on things that are sensational, easy, and nearby.
My suspicion is that if this were a story about environmentalists trying to expose an environmental disaster in Nigeria, you'd be lambasting them for focusing on such a trivial issue that's not relevant to you.
... and then they built the supercollider.