I'm just going to link farm today. Subject, fracking, the propagation of fractures in layers of rock in order to draw through the rock the buried petroleum, natural gas, or other valuable stuff.
According to Schlumberger's oilfield glossary, "engineered fluids are pumped at high pressure and rate into the reservoir interval to be treated, causing a vertical fracture to open." Who is Schlumberger? The "leading oil field services provider," according to the company webpage.
Some residents in Oklahoma reportedly suspect that recent seismic activity there owes something to the practice, but this article in The Christian Science Monitor takes a skeptical view.
Fracking is a more likely culprit for small earthquakes near Blackpool in England recently though.
Earthquakes aside, the usual complaint against fracking involves the potential for water pollution.
The Oil and Gas Accountability Project says bluntly that "our drinking water [is] at risk" due to the practice.
The OGAP cites a white paper prepared by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory which described "produced water," i.e. the waste products. "The many chemical constituents found in produced water, when present either individually or collectively in high concentrations, can present a threat to aquatic life when they are discharged or to crops when the water is used for irrigation."
Joseph Nocera is among those who defends the practice of fracking. He said America "needs the Marcellus Shale," which has 500 trillion cubic feet of reserves, so that we ought to "accept the inconvenience that the drilling will bring" and insist that the drilling be done in ways that address the environmental issues.
There is a spirited discussion in the comments under this post in The Volokh Conspiracy.
Showing posts with label chemistry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chemistry. Show all posts
17 November 2011
20 April 2008
Marie and Pierre Curie
Today, April 20, is the anniversary of the day, in 1902, when the Curies successfully isolated radium salts from pitchblend. Contemporary subatomic physics may as appropriately be dated from that accomplishment as from any other.
Pitchblend,which as the name suggests is a black pitchy substance, had already been an item of scientific inquiry for some time before the Curies started work on it.
The German chemist Martin Klaproth isolated uranium from pitchblend in 1789. Why (in an era before the development of the whole idea of radioactivity) was uranium interesting? Because it was an element, and identifying the elements was the crucial task of the "Lavoisierian school" at the time -- it was that task that made what they were doing real chemistry rather than old disreputable alchemy.
The search for elements intensified after the 1860s, when the Russian chemist Mendeleev published the first version of the "periodic table." The table had holes in it, and it stood to reason that there should be undiscovered elements out there, which would enable its completion.
That is the task the Curies set themselves in the 1890s. Isolate elements. They went about it through the re-investigation of pitchblend, to see what Klaproth might have missed. The first element they discovered in this way, in 1898, is now known as Polonium, in honor of Marie nee Sklodowska's native country.
So on April 20, 1902, radium salts came out of the same blend. And the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1903 (as well as the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911) in turn came out of that. The Physics award for the investigation of the new element's radioactive properties, the chemistry award (which was given to Marie alone, since these awards are never given posthumously) for the isolation of the element as such.
Pierre died in 1906, after being hit by a horse-drawn carriage while walking the streets of Paris in a snowstorm.
Marie labored on after his death, and became if you will the matriarch for the emerging field of science, until her death (almost certainly of radiation poisoning) in the 1930s.
She remains the only Nobel Prize recipient even to be honored in two distinct fields.
Pitchblend,which as the name suggests is a black pitchy substance, had already been an item of scientific inquiry for some time before the Curies started work on it.
The German chemist Martin Klaproth isolated uranium from pitchblend in 1789. Why (in an era before the development of the whole idea of radioactivity) was uranium interesting? Because it was an element, and identifying the elements was the crucial task of the "Lavoisierian school" at the time -- it was that task that made what they were doing real chemistry rather than old disreputable alchemy.
The search for elements intensified after the 1860s, when the Russian chemist Mendeleev published the first version of the "periodic table." The table had holes in it, and it stood to reason that there should be undiscovered elements out there, which would enable its completion.
That is the task the Curies set themselves in the 1890s. Isolate elements. They went about it through the re-investigation of pitchblend, to see what Klaproth might have missed. The first element they discovered in this way, in 1898, is now known as Polonium, in honor of Marie nee Sklodowska's native country.
So on April 20, 1902, radium salts came out of the same blend. And the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1903 (as well as the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911) in turn came out of that. The Physics award for the investigation of the new element's radioactive properties, the chemistry award (which was given to Marie alone, since these awards are never given posthumously) for the isolation of the element as such.
Pierre died in 1906, after being hit by a horse-drawn carriage while walking the streets of Paris in a snowstorm.
Marie labored on after his death, and became if you will the matriarch for the emerging field of science, until her death (almost certainly of radiation poisoning) in the 1930s.
She remains the only Nobel Prize recipient even to be honored in two distinct fields.
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