The Gulf is acclimated to having oil in it's environment - 2000 barrels per day from natural seeps. That means lots of microorganisms used to eating oil.
The Gulf waters are much warmer.
The oil from the BP spill is a lot lighter fraction - more will evaporate and it is less toxic.
The use of dispersants makes the oil easier for microorganisms to degrade.
Previous large spills into the Gulf have had recovery times in about a 3 year time span.
In Summary - analogies with the Valdez are not appropriate.
The Gulf is very different from Prince William Sound. There was another large blowing in the Gulf in 1989 - the IXTOC I released 3 million barrels of oil over 8 months. About 10 times more than the BP spill.
Environmental assessments showed it took about 3 years for sea life to fully recover. My guess is it will be faster this time because of the much smaller quantities of oil and the heavy use of dispersants to break up the oil which makes biodegradation much faster.
The problem is that the approach Genachowski wants to use means adding ISPs into the existing structure used to regulate telcos. While this would insure net neutrality it would also open a giant can of worms in applying the rest of a giant regulatory structure to ISPs.
You won't like that.
The correct approach IS new legislation that narrowly addresses the issue of net neutrality.
Why wasn't this done during the drilling and cementing process, as part of a fall-back contingency plan?
It wouldn't do any good to have X-Rays of the structure BEFORE the explosion.
Why wasn't the risk profile updated continuously, so that it's available immediately if something did not go according to plan?
Because a risk profile isn't something that can be done instantly. You can't update daily if the assessment takes weeks to do.
Why weren't the side effects planned in advance? Why weren't careful considerations put into the design of this project before the accident?
That is a more reasonable question, and one that should be asked of both BP and its regulators.
In a routine live surgery there over a dozen fall-back plans if something goes wrong, and that does not even count all the sub-options. And that is with a single human life and perhaps a few hundred thousands of dollars of human productivity at risk.
Bad example. Lots of people die in failed surgeries every day.
BP has drilled at an unprecedented depth of 5000 feet, in a known-extremely-risky environment, into a reservoir of oil under a pressure that is 15,000 times that of atmospheric pressure. The mistake has cost a dozen human lives already, has already caused billions of dollars of damage and will cost billions of dollars further damage.
The depth is not unprecedented at all, lots of wells are deeper, down as much as 8,000 feet. And your pressure numbers are high by a factor of 100. And yes billions of dollars of damage were done. But that is counterbalanced by the economic value of of offshore oil production which is on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
Safety needs to be improved, and especially in the area of making these operations fail safe, and improving the engineering behind some of the safety mechanisms. But you really should spend some time researching the issues here so you understand why things happen the way they do.
Not so much in my area, possibly because I am covered by FIOS. A year ago I started getting very spotty service on my Verizon POTS line. When I called them up to complain they gave me a song and dance about the fact I had AT&T as my local carrier, that I should dump my cable and switch to FIOS and basically told me that there was no way they were going to fix my POTS line.
After that disgusting call I am now using my Cable company's VOIP service. And I won't go NEAR anything with a Verizon logo on it.
Just off the top of my head, how about always drilling two wells in parallel; so that if one has the big whoopsie, the relief well is already there and ready go go?
Maybe because that would double the likelihood you would get a blowout?
who understands the concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery.
You are assuming a level of incompetency the flat out doesn't exist. Even with fail overs and redundancy there will be events that overwhelm the planning. Failovers fail. Backup power dies when you can't deliver diesel fuel to the generators because two airliners were crashed into nearby skyscrapers. (I had servers located at a datacenter in Manhattan on 9/11). Vent flares for Methyl isocyanate don't work because somebody shut them off and you get a Bhopal disaster.
All failovers and so on do is reduce the failure rate. They don't guarantee there won't ever be a failure.
There was redundancy in this system at multiple levels. For example the blowout protector had multiple triggering mechanisms, fail safes and cutoff valves. The cutoffs were triggered and went into action even after an explosion and fire that wrecked the platform they were connected to.
The problem is that they didn't cut off the flow. All they did is restrict it somewhat. BP's X-Rays showed that they cutoffs partially cut off the flow, but not completely. Nobody will know why they failed until the valve is taken to the surface and disassembled.
No dice on the blow off valve? Next day try the cap, next day try the plug, then the current 'top kill' method; we'd be at the current progress within a week.
Even if the equipment to do all this is available on site ready to go you could not move that rapidly. For example with the "Top Kill" BP is having to carefully X-Ray the existing valve structure at a depth of 1 mile using robot subs to determine if the structure can withstand the pressure of pumping mud through the system. They have working on determining the risks of this process for at least two weeks. Just rushing ahead without careful consideration of the side effects could do a hell of a lot more harm than good.
The BP well is the deepest well to ever blow out. It is not surprising that there is difficulty getting it under control. In fact things are moving far more quickly than in the case of the IXTOC-1 blowout which was also in the Gulf but at a depth of only 165 ft. That took nearly 10 months to cap. Total oil released by IXTOC-1 was about 3,000,000 barrels.
The reason that chaplains in military bases and prisons are supported constitutionally is that the prisoners or soldiers are not permitted to freely attend services elsewhere. This would deprive the subjects the ability to practice their religion which counterbalances the establishment issue.
Martin Gardner is known to many for his writings in recreational mathematics, but I also came to admire his persistent and vigorous work promoting naturalistic and scientific rigor and his work to discredit fringe science and junk science.
Some of the areas he wrote on were creationism, organic farming, Charles Fort, Rudolf Steiner, Scientology, Dianetics, UFOs, dowsing, extra-sensory perception, the Bates method, and psychokinesis.
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952, revised 1957) is a classic and should be required material in our school systems.
I don't see this at all. I can certainly use photons to send information, and last I heard most people are going with the idea that photons don't have mass.
But what's to say the Bad Guy will? I mean when Kim Jong-Il IV creates his monster bug to wipe out all humanity (excepting his descendants and a few breeding women), why would he Open Source it?
Oh you are missing a lot of facts here. There are nuclear plant construction permits going forward right now. I personally was involved in the construction of a new chemical plant post-Bhopal. There are definitely coal burning power plants going forward. The reason that no new refineries are being built in the US is because of lack of profitability in that business.
The liability cap was part of an agreement that led to the establishment of the Oil Liability Trust Fund into which oil producers pay a tax. Last I heard there was about 2 billion in this trust fund. The idea was that the trust fund could be used in cases where the oil company could not pay for damages and to help small oil companies who would otherwise not be able to get insurance.
Horse manure and horse carcasses filled the streets of New York, Chicago, and other major cities in the US at the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s, NYC had 1,206,299 people, and about 170,000 horses for transportation. Because they were overworked and abused, the average streetcar horse had a life expectancy of only two to four years. They'd die on the street, where they were left or dumped into nearby rivers or bays.
In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from the street. Chicago removed 9,202 horse carcasses in 1916.
Moving the 1,300 pound carcasses was no easy task - special trucks that hung low had to be made. An 1886 article in the Atlantic Monthly described Broadway as congested with "dead horses and vehicular entanglement" -- and we think today's traffic is bad.
And the manure! It's estimated that each horse produced 15-30 pounds of manure per day. That means the 170,000 horses in New York and Brooklyn created 3-4 million pounds of manure EACH DAY. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that every street in the city would be buried 9 feet deep in horse manure by 1950. A New York editorial estimated that horse manure would rise to Manhattan's 30 story buildings by 1930 -- imagine that skyline! Also, each horse produced about a quart of urine daily. That makes about 40,000 gallons per day in NY & Brooklyn.
From horse pollution to car pollution: In 1898, the first international Urban Planning Conference was held in New York. The topic: how to deal with horse pollution. Luckily for them, the automobile was just beginning to usurp the horse's role for transportation. Experimental motor cars had been around for quite some time, but cities had previously banned them or limited their use for reasons varying from cars frightening children and horses, to cars being "rich men's deadly toys." The most well known regulation was Britain's Red Flag law which required all cars to be preceded by a man of foot carrying a red flag. That's pretty interesting.
The horse pollution crisis in the 1890s ignited fears of pollution, traffic jams, coupled with the rising prices of hay, oats, and urban land, and ultimately led governments and urban city dwellers to embrace the automobile. By the early 1900s the horse had become unprofitable and a great environmental hazard. The car, the modern-day environmentalists' nemesis, was, at the time, a savior. I wonder what will be ours.
I'm not disagreeing with you. My figures for the Gulf came from an NRC report that claimed 140,000 tons per year and the same accuracy.
The issue here is to realize that while the BP leak is a major news event, and a point source, the spread of the oil through the Gulf is not going into a pristine environment which is not adapted to the presence of oil. Far from it; the Gulf has been exposed to these materials for millions of years, and the BP leak is the same order of magnitude as the natural exposure.
All of this makes me believe that this isn't going to amount to the "end of the world".
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be surprised if 40% of the US were BP shareholders through pension plans and mutual funds.
It's not still leaking.
The Gulf is acclimated to having oil in it's environment - 2000 barrels per day from natural seeps. That means lots of microorganisms used to eating oil.
The Gulf waters are much warmer.
The oil from the BP spill is a lot lighter fraction - more will evaporate and it is less toxic.
The use of dispersants makes the oil easier for microorganisms to degrade.
Previous large spills into the Gulf have had recovery times in about a 3 year time span.
In Summary - analogies with the Valdez are not appropriate.
The Gulf is very different from Prince William Sound. There was another large blowing in the Gulf in 1989 - the IXTOC I released 3 million barrels of oil over 8 months. About 10 times more than the BP spill.
Environmental assessments showed it took about 3 years for sea life to fully recover. My guess is it will be faster this time because of the much smaller quantities of oil and the heavy use of dispersants to break up the oil which makes biodegradation much faster.
The problem is that the approach Genachowski wants to use means adding ISPs into the existing structure used to regulate telcos. While this would insure net neutrality it would also open a giant can of worms in applying the rest of a giant regulatory structure to ISPs.
You won't like that.
The correct approach IS new legislation that narrowly addresses the issue of net neutrality.
You completely missed my point. Backup and redundancy features fail too. Your illustration listed a whole bunch of ways they can fail.
All backups do is reduce the likelihood of failure. There is no such thing as fail-proof.
Why wasn't this done during the drilling and cementing process, as part of a fall-back contingency plan?
It wouldn't do any good to have X-Rays of the structure BEFORE the explosion.
Why wasn't the risk profile updated continuously, so that it's available immediately if something did not go according to plan?
Because a risk profile isn't something that can be done instantly. You can't update daily if the assessment takes weeks to do.
Why weren't the side effects planned in advance? Why weren't careful considerations put into the design of this project before the accident?
That is a more reasonable question, and one that should be asked of both BP and its regulators.
In a routine live surgery there over a dozen fall-back plans if something goes wrong, and that does not even count all the sub-options. And that is with a single human life and perhaps a few hundred thousands of dollars of human productivity at risk.
Bad example. Lots of people die in failed surgeries every day.
BP has drilled at an unprecedented depth of 5000 feet, in a known-extremely-risky environment, into a reservoir of oil under a pressure that is 15,000 times that of atmospheric pressure. The mistake has cost a dozen human lives already, has already caused billions of dollars of damage and will cost billions of dollars further damage.
The depth is not unprecedented at all, lots of wells are deeper, down as much as 8,000 feet. And your pressure numbers are high by a factor of 100. And yes billions of dollars of damage were done. But that is counterbalanced by the economic value of of offshore oil production which is on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
Safety needs to be improved, and especially in the area of making these operations fail safe, and improving the engineering behind some of the safety mechanisms. But you really should spend some time researching the issues here so you understand why things happen the way they do.
Not so much in my area, possibly because I am covered by FIOS. A year ago I started getting very spotty service on my Verizon POTS line. When I called them up to complain they gave me a song and dance about the fact I had AT&T as my local carrier, that I should dump my cable and switch to FIOS and basically told me that there was no way they were going to fix my POTS line.
After that disgusting call I am now using my Cable company's VOIP service. And I won't go NEAR anything with a Verizon logo on it.
TWITS.
Just off the top of my head, how about always drilling two wells in parallel; so that if one has the big whoopsie, the relief well is already there and ready go go?
Maybe because that would double the likelihood you would get a blowout?
who understands the concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery.
You are assuming a level of incompetency the flat out doesn't exist. Even with fail overs and redundancy there will be events that overwhelm the planning. Failovers fail. Backup power dies when you can't deliver diesel fuel to the generators because two airliners were crashed into nearby skyscrapers. (I had servers located at a datacenter in Manhattan on 9/11). Vent flares for Methyl isocyanate don't work because somebody shut them off and you get a Bhopal disaster.
All failovers and so on do is reduce the failure rate. They don't guarantee there won't ever be a failure.
There was redundancy in this system at multiple levels. For example the blowout protector had multiple triggering mechanisms, fail safes and cutoff valves. The cutoffs were triggered and went into action even after an explosion and fire that wrecked the platform they were connected to.
The problem is that they didn't cut off the flow. All they did is restrict it somewhat. BP's X-Rays showed that they cutoffs partially cut off the flow, but not completely. Nobody will know why they failed until the valve is taken to the surface and disassembled.
I am sure that BP wouldn't be working on feeds if it weren't for idiot Congressmen trying to get their names in the news.
Personally I'd rather have streaming feeds of what my Congressmen were up to at all times - and double that when they are meeting with lobbyists.
No dice on the blow off valve? Next day try the cap, next day try the plug, then the current 'top kill' method; we'd be at the current progress within a week.
Even if the equipment to do all this is available on site ready to go you could not move that rapidly. For example with the "Top Kill" BP is having to carefully X-Ray the existing valve structure at a depth of 1 mile using robot subs to determine if the structure can withstand the pressure of pumping mud through the system. They have working on determining the risks of this process for at least two weeks. Just rushing ahead without careful consideration of the side effects could do a hell of a lot more harm than good.
The BP well is the deepest well to ever blow out. It is not surprising that there is difficulty getting it under control. In fact things are moving far more quickly than in the case of the IXTOC-1 blowout which was also in the Gulf but at a depth of only 165 ft. That took nearly 10 months to cap. Total oil released by IXTOC-1 was about 3,000,000 barrels.
Rendezvous with alien spaceships of course.
The value of something depends on what someone is willing to pay for it, not what it cost to produce.
It is very clear cut.
The reason that chaplains in military bases and prisons are supported constitutionally is that the prisoners or soldiers are not permitted to freely attend services elsewhere. This would deprive the subjects the ability to practice their religion which counterbalances the establishment issue.
Martin Gardner is known to many for his writings in recreational mathematics, but I also came to admire his persistent and vigorous work promoting naturalistic and scientific rigor and his work to discredit fringe science and junk science.
Some of the areas he wrote on were creationism, organic farming, Charles Fort, Rudolf Steiner, Scientology, Dianetics, UFOs, dowsing, extra-sensory perception, the Bates method, and psychokinesis.
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952, revised 1957) is a classic and should be required material in our school systems.
I don't see this at all. I can certainly use photons to send information, and last I heard most people are going with the idea that photons don't have mass.
m1014 eV is close enough for my day to day needs.
Sorry, but prayer led by state paid employees in a state-funded institution i.e. public school is obviously establishment of a state religion.
But what's to say the Bad Guy will? I mean when Kim Jong-Il IV creates his monster bug to wipe out all humanity (excepting his descendants and a few breeding women), why would he Open Source it?
HAH. Turns out I was right. Coast Guard analysis shows that the tars balls are NOT from the BP spill.
At your local BP station of course.
Oh you are missing a lot of facts here. There are nuclear plant construction permits going forward right now. I personally was involved in the construction of a new chemical plant post-Bhopal. There are definitely coal burning power plants going forward. The reason that no new refineries are being built in the US is because of lack of profitability in that business.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS278&=&q=new+coal+burning+power+plants&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/energy-environment/17nukes.html
The liability cap was part of an agreement that led to the establishment of the Oil Liability Trust Fund into which oil producers pay a tax. Last I heard there was about 2 billion in this trust fund. The idea was that the trust fund could be used in cases where the oil company could not pay for damages and to help small oil companies who would otherwise not be able to get insurance.
Hope you like the smell of rotting horse manure.
Horse manure and horse carcasses filled the streets of New York, Chicago, and other major cities in the US at the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s, NYC had 1,206,299 people, and about 170,000 horses for transportation. Because they were overworked and abused, the average streetcar horse had a life expectancy of only two to four years. They'd die on the street, where they were left or dumped into nearby rivers or bays.
In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from the street. Chicago removed 9,202 horse carcasses in 1916.
Moving the 1,300 pound carcasses was no easy task - special trucks that hung low had to be made. An 1886 article in the Atlantic Monthly described Broadway as congested with "dead horses and vehicular entanglement" -- and we think today's traffic is bad.
And the manure! It's estimated that each horse produced 15-30 pounds of manure per day. That means the 170,000 horses in New York and Brooklyn created 3-4 million pounds of manure EACH DAY. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that every street in the city would be buried 9 feet deep in horse manure by 1950. A New York editorial estimated that horse manure would rise to Manhattan's 30 story buildings by 1930 -- imagine that skyline! Also, each horse produced about a quart of urine daily. That makes about 40,000 gallons per day in NY & Brooklyn.
From horse pollution to car pollution: In 1898, the first international Urban Planning Conference was held in New York. The topic: how to deal with horse pollution. Luckily for them, the automobile was just beginning to usurp the horse's role for transportation. Experimental motor cars had been around for quite some time, but cities had previously banned them or limited their use for reasons varying from cars frightening children and horses, to cars being "rich men's deadly toys." The most well known regulation was Britain's Red Flag law which required all cars to be preceded by a man of foot carrying a red flag. That's pretty interesting.
The horse pollution crisis in the 1890s ignited fears of pollution, traffic jams, coupled with the rising prices of hay, oats, and urban land, and ultimately led governments and urban city dwellers to embrace the automobile. By the early 1900s the horse had become unprofitable and a great environmental hazard. The car, the modern-day environmentalists' nemesis, was, at the time, a savior. I wonder what will be ours.
Talk about extrapolation.
http://www.bayoubuzz.com/News/Louisiana/Government/New_BP_Oil_Spill_Victim__Louisiana_State_Bird_Brown_Pelican__10842.asp
20 birds = end of human race.
I'm not disagreeing with you. My figures for the Gulf came from an NRC report that claimed 140,000 tons per year and the same accuracy.
The issue here is to realize that while the BP leak is a major news event, and a point source, the spread of the oil through the Gulf is not going into a pristine environment which is not adapted to the presence of oil. Far from it; the Gulf has been exposed to these materials for millions of years, and the BP leak is the same order of magnitude as the natural exposure.
All of this makes me believe that this isn't going to amount to the "end of the world".