Social unrest and coronavirus news is bad enough. Then I read the New York Times:
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has declared a state of emergency in a region in northern Siberia after a huge oil spill turned a river crimson and threatened to inflict significant damage to the Arctic environment.
More than 20,000 tons of diesel leaked into the Ambarnaya River near the city of Norilsk last Friday, after a fuel tank collapsed at a power plant. Norilsk Nickel, which owns the plant, said in a statement that thawing permafrost had caused one of the tank’s pillars to collapse...
Norilsk Nickel is the world’s largest producer of platinum and nickel, and the company is no stranger to environmental disasters. It was responsible for a “blood river,” also in Siberia, in 2016, and one of its plants has belched so much sulfur dioxide, a major cause of acid rain, that it is surrounded by a dead zone of tree trunks and mud about twice the size of Rhode Island.
Special containment booms were installed in the Ambarnaya River in an effort to prevent the spill from entering the nearby Lake Pyasino and after that the Kara Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean.This is not a spill of 20,000 gallons. No, this is 20,000 tons, which is equal to about a bazillion Olympic-sized swimming pools [maybe some reader can make the conversion]. And note that this type of fuckup is going to happen over and over again in coming years as the Siberian permafrost begins to soften.
And a "dead zone" surrounding the factory twice the size of Rhode Island.
Seriously, WTF?
On a lighter note, a link about "Rhode Island as a unit of measurement."
This is way too grim. I'm going to blog me some Calvin and Hobbes.
20,000 tons of diesel or 40 million pounds assuming about 7.4 lbs/gallon density is about 5.4 million gallons. In the US, spills are always under-reported for liability reasons, I would assume in Russia they under-report for reasons of prestige as well. So 5 million gallons is probably low.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Chris. I wasn't too sure about the weight-to-volume conversion.
DeleteNot a bazillion, only 7,000 Olympic poolsful of diesel. Pools vary but LxWxD 50 x 25 x 2 m is typical. 2500 cu.m. = tonnes water. But diesel weighs [0.83 kg/L] lighter; so a pool has 3,000 tonnes of diesel. Although maybe ~20,000 Bbl /pool would be a more appropriate unit.
ReplyDeleteIt turns out the specs for Olympic swimming pools require the lanes to be 50m +/- 3cm long. Swimmers correctly reckon that it is therefore silly to measure speeds to thousandths of a second because at champion swimming speed 0.001s = 2.4mm: a distance far smaller than the potential difference in lane lengths. So Olympic swimmers are deemed to have tied if their clocked speed is equal to the nearest 1/100th of a second.
The article ought to specify whether these are metric tons or long tons discussed, but assuming the midpoint of the two and an API gravity of 38, it's around 6.4 million gallons (approximately 152,000 barrels).
ReplyDeleteSource: I used to work in oil.
The internet seems to think an olympic sized swimming pool is 660,000 gallons. My figures above are gallons at 60 degF so this suggests the spill would fill 10 Olympic swimming pools. The lesson being that these pools contain quite a lot more water than one might think!
ReplyDeleteSo, somewhere between 10 and 7,000.
ReplyDeleteMy bad. Make that 7 not 7,000. I clearly shouldn't be allowed out.
ReplyDeleteNot at all Bob! I enjoy seeing your comments here, lots of great knowledge.
ReplyDeleteThis is a test. I submitted an answer using Chrome with both my Google account and as anonymous but neither showed up, so I wanted to see if IE would work like you suggested by email.
ReplyDeleteWell, this is here - if you can figure out which browser you sent it from. :-)
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