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May 21, 2012
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May 17, 2012
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Josh Mitnick: Netanyahu's 'centrist' coalition is already proving it's anything but
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The Kosher Gourmet by Faith Duran : Cheesy Potato Breakfast Casserole with Cheddar and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
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Carmen Terzic, M.D., Ph.D. : Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: A variety of exercises can help improve balance
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The Kosher Gourmet by Joyce White : GOODNESS GRACIOUS: GREENS! 4 winning recipes that are no longer just for down-home folks (Includes expert tips & techniques)
May 15, 2012
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The Kosher Gourmet by Chef Mario Batali: The famed chef's vegetable dish that tastes true to the season: FAVAS AND SUGAR SNAP PEAS WITH POTATOES AND TARRAGON
May 10, 2012
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Sharon Palmer, R.D. How you can reduce your risk -- or delay -- chronic diseases associated with aging
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Jewish World Review
How Stuff Works: How supertankers work
By
Marshall Brain
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT)
The biggest ships in the world are the supertankers that carry oil. The United States depends on these ships because the U.S. imports millions of barrels of oil every day. Most of it arrives on supertankers.
A typical supertanker holds about 2 million barrels of oil and is approximately 1,000 feet long. The biggest supertankers weigh more than a billion pounds once they are loaded up. The biggest supertanker ever built is named the Knock Nevis. It holds 4 million barrels of oil (about 170 million gallons) and is more than 1,500 feet long. After a long career on the open ocean, it is now a floating storage tank.
How do you get a ship this large moving? It takes a huge engine - the largest diesel engines in the world. A typical engine might produce 30,000 horsepower. The size of these engines is difficult to visualize, but imagine two or three city buses stacked on top of each other. An engine like this burns tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel per day.
Loading a ship this big takes time. A loading platform for a supertanker might have three flexible pipes to fill the ship. The pipes are 16 inches in diameter and each one pumps 75,000 barrels of oil per hour. Even with all that, it takes nine or 10 hours to load the ship.
There are lots of things to worry about while loading. Tides, waves and weather cause motion, and all pipes have to be able to handle the motion without leaking. Keeping the ship balanced is also a concern. For example, if oil flows into front tanks and is not balanced by oil or ballast in the rear, the ship will tip forward. And then there are the vapors, which are highly flammable. As the supertanker fills, it pushes out these vapors. Usually the vapors are captured and piped back to shore. Then the remaining airspace in the supertanker is filled with inert gas to eliminate the possibility of the vapors catching fire and exploding.
Because supertankers are so large, they often cannot enter normal ports once they reach their destinations. Special offshore platforms are used instead. These platforms connect to land with large underwater pipelines. Huge pumps keep the oil flowing from the tanker to land. Once onshore, pipelines carry the oil to refineries or storage tanks.
Supertankers are very hard to maneuver. For example, stopping a supertanker that is under way at its cruising speed can take about 10 miles in an emergency situation. What happens when one is close to shore and a storm comes up? Or what if the captain makes a mistake and hits a rock? You can get a very big mess because of an oil spill.
By 2015, all supertankers in U.S. water will have to have two hulls in order to reduce the number of spills. The inner hull is the lining of the ship's oil tanks. The outer hull is the part in the ocean. The air separation between the inner and outer hulls makes an oil spill less likely in low-speed incidents.
One of the worst oil spills in U.S. history happened in Alaska when the Exxon Valdez tanker ship hit a reef in 1989. It spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. They tried burning some of the oil. They tried skimming the oil out of the water. They tried adding chemicals to disperse the oil. Nothing worked, and an ill-timed storm drove the oil onto miles and miles of beaches. Hundreds of thousands of animals died, and many beaches are still contaminated today, many years later.
There is an oil spill of 10,000 gallons or more somewhere in the United States roughly every other day. A spill of over a million gallons happens about twice a year. But supertankers are only responsible for about 2 percent of these incidents. The vast majority occur around pipelines and storage facilities. It's still a big number - roughly three spills per year due to supertankers - but it must be considered in the context of the huge volumes of oil carried by these ships.
The next time you pull up at the pump, consider the gigantic ships that make your fill-up possible. Several of them dock in the U.S. every day.
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Previously:
How poisons work
How corn works
How dog ID chips work
How President Obama's limousine works
How emergency power works
How aircraft carriers work
How antibiotics and vaccines work
How mucus works
How iron and steel work
How aspirin works
How igloos work
How the Predator UAV works
How retention ponds work
How water absorbers work
How melamine works
How digital music works
How coal mining works
How an economic depression works
How the liver works
How 3D movies work
How oil pipelines work
How jet packs work
How seismographs work
How Olympic technology works
How Personal Rapid Transit works
How 3G works
How the Global Position System (GPS) works
How octane works
How cruise missiles work
How submarines work
How miles work
How octane works
How food preservation works
How beer works
How holding your breath works
How smoke detectors work
How heat pumps work
How your night vision works
How concentrating solar collectors work
How your key fob works
How the common cold works
How the Large Hadron Collider Works
How making a TV show works
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How exoskeletons work
How an oil refinery works
How landfills work
How the Orion spacecraft works
The cutting edge in HDTV
Redefining the CD
How the HDMI cable scam works
How glow-in-the-dark toys work
How the subprime mortgage crisis works
How gift cards work
How Tasers work
How giant TV screens work
How foreclosure works
How Air Force One works
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How the Dawn mission works
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How the North American Eagle works
Why aren't we flying to work?
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How Colony Collapse Disorder works
How airbags work
How the U.S. income tax works
How gum works
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How Daylight Saving Time works
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How snow making works
© 2007, How Stuff Works Inc. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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