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Another Gulf Oil Rig Explodes
A few readers have noted that another gulf oil rig has exploded. This one is off the coast of Lousiana. So far all the workers are accounted for, but they are in immersion suits waiting for rescue.
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JUST MAYBE, we should look into this stuff.. I know, it happens off of the land so "civilians" are safe, but I am about 99% sure when big metal buildings *EXPLODE*, something is wrong. Once in a year? Extremely bad. Twice in a year? Something is broken.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Oh yeah, that 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling seems like an overreaction now...
slashdot = stagnated
Yeah, it's kinda funny how a news aggregator doesn't seem to post news before any other sites, isn't it?
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Anyways, fires happen all the time on oil rigs, it's nothing new, or even exceptional: "The U.S. Minerals Management Service reported 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injuries, and 858 fires and explosions on offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico from 2001 to 2010." [wikipedia.org]
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Remember after the massive earthquake in Haiti, the news started reporting earthquakes about once a week? Accidents and casualties are nothing new to the oil industry.
Clean coal? I hate to tell you this... No, actually, I love to tell you this. Clean coal is a lie.
You would get more energy out of coal if you were to filter the radioactive particles from it and use that in a nuclear reactor than if you had burned the coal normally.
All that ash and coke, full of mercury, heavy metals and other toxic stuff has to go somewhere, It either goes in the air for us all to breath or it gets stored and eventually makes its way into our soil and water supply.
CO2 sequestration can not work, you are talking about pumping billions of tons of gas underground into pockets in the rock. This has been shown to cause minor earthquakes, those earthquakes will eventually result in a blowout event, a blowout event will kill everyone in the area as the CO2 suffocates everyone, similar events happen all the time in Africa with natural CO2 sources.
Nuclear? sure, but we need to reprocess waste instead of storing it, preferably inside the reactor.
Solar? sure.
Wind? Ok, but it is unreliable so you can't rely on it for than a relatively small amount of the grid power.
Clean Coal? make me laugh.
The Chilean mine is for gold and copper. You might argue that it's even less important than "energy", or that it's more important, or that it provides some sort of "economic energy" or psychological energy, or whatever. But good luck getting gold and copper anywhere else (other than recycling).
There's a yougottobeshittingme tag missing in the article.
my personal preference is that we use up foreign oil while it's still relatively cheap. when it hits $500 barrel, then maybe we should tap into offshore wells and sell some back to OPEC for 20x what we paid for most of theirs.
in the mean time we should probably focus on perfecting blow-out preventers.
just mah opinion.
I entirely agree. US politicians yelling about how we need to drill more to make ourselves more energy independent are selling false goods. Even if we tripled the amount of oil that we were producing domestically, it would still be a small fraction of the oil that the country uses, and would at best reduce prices by a few pennies per gallon. It would earn big piles of money for a relatively small number of people in the oil industry, and the rest of us wouldn't notice anything different.
We should consider the rest of that oil as a strategic reserve, in case one day we really need it, or somebody else really needs it and is willing to pay out the nose for it.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
It's really not that much of a spin. The GP's point is completely correct. If self-described environmentalists (actually just anti-nuclear activists) hadn't scared the American public away from a nuclear-based energy policy with scientifically bankrupt scare tactics, the United States would rely far, far less on fossil fuels today (probably almost exclusively for cars by now) and the chances of oil rigs exploding would be lessened by the fact that there would be far less oil rigs in the first place.
Not only that, but extracting oil from deep-water drill sites would probably not yet (if ever) be cost-effective for the prices wrought by demand and so the major Gulf spill of 2010 quite possibly would never have happened either.
So while they're not directly to blame, it's not a huge stretch to draw a line between the lies and ignorant actions of past anti-nuclear activists and the environmental disasters happening all the time in our fossil fuel draining little world.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
no it's just people cutting corners to save cash sometimes it's cheaper to pay on then death of a working then to pay the cash to make it safer it's time for some big time fines for doing that.
Second time suggests that sector of industry is corrupt to the point of endangering everyone. If you have property near a filling station, petroleum pipeline, tank farm, transfer site, refinery, or anything else involved in processing petrochemicals, it is time to start agitating for some third party safety audits to make sure that your property's value isn't about to get blown to smithers.
I'm not saying that your stuff is directly at risk. But if we have another explosion, pipeline leak, or similar event anywhere within USA jurisdiction, your property values will get tarred by a very broad brush. Anyone at risk of this needs to get politicking for some kind of review that will assure potential buyers that they won't be shafted by their petrochemical neighbors.
BTW, there is absolutely no need to lay this kind of thing off to enemy action. Not when 8+ years of ineffective oversight coupled with corporate "long term" planning that fails to look beyond next quarter's profit and loss statement are more than adequate to account for these incidents. (I was about to say "accidents", but it appears that these are far from accidental. They look much more like the productive of short term greed multiplied by long term stupidity.)
Will
Meh. Industrial accidents kil, maim, and injure thousands of people every year.
There need be no conspiracy. Shit happens, sucks to be the victim, but that doesn't make it anything special.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."