Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Hay for Cleanup? (Score 4, Interesting) 389

well, doing some quick back of the napkin math
he put no more than 1/20th of a gallon of oil into that container and said it took 1 pound of hay to clean that up.
The explosion and resulting leak happened 25 days ago.
It's been leaking about 50k barrels per day according to recent (non-computer scientists) estimates.

At that rate, it's going to require ~525,000 tons of hay.

According to a quick search for some kind of US hay production values, in 2008 we produced about 145,000,000 tons in 2008
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Missouri/Publications/Brochures/Hay_Facts.pdf

Although noting is said about how much of that was used to feed livestock. However I suspect that it was most of it.

So this would be less than half a percent of the US annual hay production. That doesn't seem completely unrealistic to me. Difficult and our infrastructure is likely not set up for this kind of thing, sure, but not flat out unrealistic from some 10 minutes worth of estimating. Add in other realistic aspects of the situation however, and things could get out of control pretty easily, but I would at least say this warrants further exploration of this idea.

Slashdot Top Deals

It is masked but always present. I don't know who built to it. It came before the first kernel.

Working...