An oil spill may refer to the release of crude oil, refined oil (eg gasoline) or any heavier fuel or oily substance. There have been several cases of large oil spills, including:
- "Deepwater Horizon", the large BP oil rig that exploded and sank. ~4500 thousand barrels of oil spilled.
- "Ixtoc I" Mexico's state-owned Permex company suffered a blowout during underwater drilling. ~3400 thousand barrels of oil spilled.
- "Atlantic Empress I" a Greek oil tanker collided with "Aegean Captain", another Greek oil tanker. ~2100 thousand barrels of oil spilled.
Included in the category of oil spill are the massive incidents at Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War, wherein the Iraqi military set alight many oil wells. The resulting release of oil into the environment was estimated at around 1,000,000 thousand barrels.
Now, to tie this back in to our discussion: oil spills are modeled, similar to the dispersal of radionuclides in water. Using techniques such as he meteorological modeling of weather, as well as sea current and fluid dispersal, an idea is found as to the area of a spill and it's likely path.
Unlike radiation, oil has one "advantage" in modeling, which is that the results can be easily verified by looking at the path of visible oil in environment.
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| http://www.nature.com/news/specials/deepwater/index.html |
Since they can only see the surface, I wonder if they are able to somehow verify their models of oil deeper in the ocean, if it even goes deeper. I'm having second thoughts due to the differing densities of oil and water...
ReplyDeleteI wonder how the costs and expected environmental impact compares to nuclear incidents. They should be able to put a dollar sign to both the repairs, environmental cleanup, and damage and then do a comparison. I would be shocked if oil costs weren't massively worse. Or maybe a cool statistic would be the cost of cleaning a drop of oil vs a energetically similar "drop" of nuclear release. Then the relative frequencies of such release. There are a lot of interesting questions for study.
ReplyDeleteThe picture provided is marvelous - makes me consider studying petroleum engineering so that I can help solve some of the problems that using oil causes.
ReplyDeleteOn an innovative note, maybe it's possible to engineer a bifocal-like apparatus to see radiation. That would be so cool.
I wonder what the flow effects are below the surface of the water? It would be interesting to study these events as well as compare the with other nuclear accidents.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you used oil spill models to compare to radiation pathway models. Oil spills are something that people can more readily understand when it comes to modeling since it is much more visible than radiation when there is a spill or an accident.
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