The radius is based on visual observation. We have good theories and models about what's happening inside the star. We are quite sure that it's mostly empty space inside the radius. But that's not a good enough reason to say that the star's radius is anything other than what we see through our telescope.
Importantly, this works for stars relatively close to us (the farthest I can find is 16,000 light years for one hyper giant) but the majority of the stars catalogued in even our own galaxy have only been assigned a radius via taking the temperature (via color) and luminosity.
There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
If you're gonna build a bunch of tanks on the surface to store that saturated salt solutions, you might as well store the oil in those tanks. The point of this salt cavern system is how little infrastructure it needs to store the huge volume of liquid.
Yes but the risks associated with storing brine are far less than oil. Brine leaks out? It might kill the flora nearby but rain will eventually wash it away. Someone blows up the brine tank? Divert some freshwater until you can rebuild.
But in reality, storing all of that brine would be a massive undertaking on its own. The largest salt cavern is 37M barrels which equates to a circular pond that's 600m across and 20m deep. That's huge. And of course you don't want the brine seeping into the ground water so it needs a good liner. But I suppose you really don't need a pond that big, how often are we completely draining the cavern anyway? We're at half capacity right now and that's the lowest it's been in 50 years. Normally it's been much much higher. So you really don't need all that brine, just enough for the normal ebb and flow of the reserves, maybe like 10%. In the event the reserves get drained, divert some freshwater to compensate.
Do they really have brine storage tanks for enough brine to pump out all the oil? If true, they would have just exectly the right volume of above-ground tanks to just store the oil in the first place and not mess with all these caverns and brine and whatnot.
You could store the salt. You go up far beyond saturation. Salt sediments on the floor (which also might seal it). When you need brine you pump in seawater into a tunnelsystem in the sediment. The saturated brine should be lighter and further up. Overflow to second basin, where it's pumped into the cavern. Thus size comes down to whatever size is needed to store enough salt and or, be big enough to guarantee a certain rate of volume of fully saturated water per time; so basically dimensions that guarantee a phase separation and high enough diffusion rate. And some bad ass pumps (or have the basin be below sealevel and a dam with gates; probably the pumps for reasons of security>efficency in that case)
You don't need tanks to store the brine, just a huge pit/pool. If you look at satellite imagery, that giant pit with brine in it is exactly what they have next to the storage facilities.
Please, literally every other country in the world store their petroleum reserve in surface tanks. We have fifty years of experience in designing the safety systems around oil tanks, and the only recent major incidents are from drone strikes in Russia and Saudi Arabia. Just because the US luck out in having the specific geological formation to store oil cheaply doesn't mean the alternative is untenable.
> It would be sufficient to store dry salt
Absolutely impractical. Storing and moving around solids in the megatons is very difficult compared to liquids that can be pumped. For comparison, the absolute largest solids moving operation in the world is a copper mine in Chile, it moves 300,000 metric tonne of mineral per day. The east-west pipeline in Saudi Arabia can move three times that in liquid, 1,000,000 metric tonne per day.
How do you get the salt to make the brine? You'd need to evaporate the water from the brine which means you either need very large evaporation pools or lots of energy to boil the water (and money to maintain the immense amount of scale you create).
They used an even easier method than what's described in the other comments: the salt comes from the initial construction of the SPR caverns.
When they first built the SPR, they filled it with water to wash away any easily-dissolvable salt features as well as any impurities inside the cavern. The result of filling the cavern and letting it sit for a while is saturated brine: eventually all the salt that can be dissolved is dissolved. Then they pumped that brine to aboveground brine ponds.
Those brine ponds contain exactly the amount of salt water needed to completely fill the cavern with saturated brine. So future drawdowns just use the same water that has already been saturated. Some of the water will evaporate on the surface, leaving behind salt crystals at the edges of the brine pond, but the crucial thing to remember is the quantity of salt in the newly created brine pond is equal to the amount of salt needed to generate enough saturated brine to completely fill the cavern. Because that's where it came from in the first place. So if you need to replenish it with more water, you just pump in fresh water, it dissolves the extra salt in the brine pond, filter out any surface guck, and then pump it back into the cabin.
Periodically you might want to add a little extra salt if say the cavern expands or wind erosion carries salt away from the dry brine pond bed. But this quantity is much less, it's the delta in cavern size, not the full initial size of the cavern.
Agreed, considering that sor.say future wars will be around (drinking) water it seems reasonable to at least link some cost to the brine or the water required.
These are problems with it being a smart ring RELATIVE to a smart watch.
- wrist size changes far less dramatically, and even if it do change, a strap swap for a smartwatch is far cheaper and easier than a whole-device change for a smart ring
- wristwatch doesn't interfere with any hand activity
- wristwatch far less likely to trap debris from your activities.
Yeah, that's fair. I was thinking only locally. However, I would hope they are dropping both stages somewhere relatively responsible. I guess I don't know where that is for polar orbits.
When it comes to being a financial hub English as a global language is paramount in modern world. You wouldn't expect a C-level executive from other side of the world to speak German. Further, if you've ever been in the financial scene in Frankfurt, it's unfortunately predominantly in German because most of the old people working in the institutions can only speak vacation English and they switch to German as soon possible.
Also from where did you hear that Frankfurt gets the business that's leaving London? What is your source? That was the hope for the Germans with the Brexit, but it never happened. German laws and bureaucracy is still far too hostile and outdated compared to London.
Agree, the younger generation, or at least every young German (mostly millennials/GenZ) I’ve met is completely fluent in English, almost like native English speakers.
Some even with an American accent which they picked up by watching YouTube videos
Consider that, from the justice system's point of view, there's no distinction between between someone breaking house arrest for a drug fix versus due to GPS error. They don't have the resource to investigate every single violation, so they always just assume that the device is infallible and that the human is lying.
That's why there's no data for someone getting rearrested due to GPS, and why the few instances where someone do prove an error is concerning.
The current set of planets, we are quite confident to be complete, there are no more planets out there. The set of known dwarf planets is likely to be incomplete, we think there are many more out there. I think that's a useful distinction.
Russia actually did the legally correct action, in giving refuge to a stateless person.
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