Cleaning up Oil Spills with Electromagnetism
Hi,
Taking a break from my HDS (Hillary Derangement Syndrome--where I search the web relentlessly to find negative articles on HRC to justify my feelings about her) I came across this incredibly important advancement in cleaning up one of the giant messes that the FFI (Fossil Fuel Industry) like to make, quite regularly.
This video highlights, in my mind, why it's important to fund "basic scientific research."
This is an incredible advancement in cleaning up oil spills and the physicist who came up with it works at Fermilab's Nuclear Magnetic Laboratory (where among other things, including nuclear medicine, they study electromagnetism to improve the electromagnets used to contain the particles in the accelerator). [Full disclosure, I got my Masters and Ph.D. in High Energy Physics working on experiments at Fermilab]
Fermilab, btw, is the largest particle accelerator lab in the US; previously larger than CERN, until the construction of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) aka "The God Particle Machine" at CERN in Switzerland/France. Fermilab is located in Batavia IL, in the far west suburbs of Chicago.
Many people think that basic scientific research is dealing with stuff that only has long term usefulness; this is wrong because to do basic research like particle physics, requires tremendous advancements in technology which have practical applications in the short to mid-term.
This is a fairly long video, but it is total "joy candy" for those of us who are concerned about the environment and keep humanity's house clean.
[video:https://youtu.be/lYM324yDH-Q]
PS (and I love pointing this out) another small thing that basic physics research (High Energy Physics in this case) brought us that was immediately applicable was the Hyper Text Transport Protocol, which was developed at CERN and the NCSA in IL to allow physicists (in particular particle physicists working on the LHC) to share scientific papers and diagrams with each other quickly and easily all over the world (because the LHC was a world wide collaboration). The Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) transports Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) documents between computers (servers and clients); it is also known as the World Wide Web.
Comments
Wow, it's hard to re-watch the footage
from the Deepwater Horizon. Not sure I'm gonna make it through it.
It's a trigger for me; I grew up on the Gulf Coast.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Not that this isn't incredibly welcome news
if it actually works!
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
It works, but can it scale?
It definitely works on the small scale as we see. The question is will it scale like he envisions? There are definitely some engineering issues to work out, immediately/short term the collector/scoop seems like the trickiest part, and that looks not that different from the skimmers they use now.
But then, longer term, how do deploy this over hundreds of miles? Thousands of square miles. That's a problem they have today, and will have then.
I think a key is to have the buoys readily available for very rapid containment before the spill gets too big.
____________________________________________________________________________
"I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it. "
-Niccolo Machiavelli
"Sorry Hillary"
-TheJerry
I thought Al Gore...
invented the internet! Magnetic cleaning is an interesting concept. Maybe it's a better idea to just leave it in the ground.
Here's a take on the idea from MIT http://news.mit.edu/2012/how-to-clean-up-oil-spills-0912
And a short 2 min video
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
The MIT one uses more complex magnetic particles...
Which, in the video, appears to absorb better and provide a lot more bang for the buck. It looked to me that their control of the oil was stronger. Of course, there are lots of factors, they may be using different liquids as well.
Their particles are much smaller, much more processed and thus likely to be more efficient. The trade off is that it would be a more expensive solution, and not being completely natural, unlike the Fermilab guys, might have environmental repercussions.
But, for me, studying this and weighing efficiency, cost and impact and comparing them is part of what makes science so exciting. You are looking for the best solutions, and doing it in government funded labs, vs corporate funded labs, there is much less risk of being influenced by corporate profits.
The fermilab guys is gvt funded, and I'd sort of assume the MIT guy is as well, or at least joint.
One thing that was troubling when I was still in physics was that a LOT of universities are doing joint corporate projects because, quite frankly they are starving for money for research because the government has been cutting back for a long time.
In order to ensure we get unbiased research, we need more government funding to keep the corporations from influencing the science performed at universities.
____________________________________________________________________________
"I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it. "
-Niccolo Machiavelli
"Sorry Hillary"
-TheJerry