How do you think the amount of radiation released at Fukishima compares to the 105 Nuclear Bomb tesst the US conducted in the Pacific?
Posted on 04/30/2014 6:04:37 AM PDT by thackney
A flowline to a well operated by BP Exploration, Incorporated Prudhoe Bay leaked on Monday. High winds at Prudhoe Bay have resulted in a spray of natural gas, crude oil and water that covers an area larger than 20 football fields.
According to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, operators with BP were working at a well, when a flowline leaking. Ashley Adamczak is an Environmental Program Specialist with DEC. She says 30-mile-an-hour winds on the North Slope sprayed leaking natural gas, water and crude oil across an estimated 27 acres of snow-covered tundra. “What has not been delineated at this time is the part that has been moderately or lightly misted” she says.
The leak was isolated roughly two hours after it began. With temperatures still below freezing on the North Slope, Adamczak says the entire well pad has been shut down in order to protect other wells from freezing or leaking.
“There is millions of miles of pipe and thousands of wells on the North Slope, then spills do happen," she says. "Fortunately, we don’t get a lot of these spills coming through, but I can’t say that this is the first time that a spill like this has occurred.”
It’s still unclear how many gallons of gas, oil and water have spread across the tundra. Adamczak says cleanup will be challenging. “Due to the fact that a lot of it was spilled to tundra, they have to go out there with less aggressive means, so that they don’t actually make the response activities cause more of an impact than the spill did, so a lot of the cleanup will probably be done with hand tools and that’s a lot of area to address with hand tools at these temperatures.”
DEC is working with the North Slope Borough, BP Exploration and the Environmental Protection agency to respond to the incident. There’s no estimate on how long it will take, but Adamczak says the agencies hope to complete cleanup before migrating geese start to arrive on the North Slope.
Pure eco-insanity!
Give us a break from such nonsense.
The many islands where the nuclear test were preformed by the US have recovered.
They were exposed to thousands of times as much radiation as Fukishima has released in it's entirety.
In the similar line of thought, if a caribou blocks the road, we were only allowed to sit and wait. Getting close to the caribou (or other wildlife), or even blowing your horn to encourage it to move, was a firing offence. I suspect violators were at risk for never being permitted to work on the North Slope for any employer after getting caught.
How do you think the amount of radiation released at Fukishima compares to the 105 Nuclear Bomb tesst the US conducted in the Pacific?
While it this doesn't apply in this high pressure leak, often on the Alaskan North slope we would get slow, low volume leaks, that run inside the insulation to a low point until it gathered enough volume to dump out, often hundreds of feet from the actual leak. Stripping off the insulation in a cold, dark Alaskan winter at -20 to -50 was not a job I ever wanted.
I was on a job on gov’t property in the desert. The sagebrush is protected! A piece of equipment broke a hose and a cup or so of hydraulic fluid spilled on the ground. The guys were prepared and had buckets and shovels and soak pads to clean it up.
And they reported it right away. Job was shut down for a few weeks in order for the gov’t to inspect the job site, go over the equip. maintenance, etc.
That would be inline with my experience on the North Slope. 2,300 reported spills could be a low number since the Alaskan North Slope production began.
Dropping a used oil filter from the pickup would be reported spill.
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