Imperial Oil pipeline spills 843,000 litres northwest of Cold Lake, Alta. | CBC News

It's a nasty mix of PAHs and volatiles, viscous and as it ages the bitumen is denser than water and so it gradually dives into the groundwater. Able to sit there and create a groundwater contamination plume for centuries or longer. I studied remediation of subsurface tars like this in grad school and it is just super hard, the best way to do it is to quickly dig it up and incinerate the affected soil which is just like insanely expensive, in-situ thermal remediation doesnt really work as you just boil out the volatiles and lighter PAHs, but then due to like relative solubility vapour pressure effects you actually end with higher concentration PAHs in the groundwater. You can dewater it and light it on fire underground and like have wells that blow air into it to keep it burning in the subsurface which is pretty cool but novel. We mostly just set up monitoring wells around spills like this and make sure that the plume doesn't make it into drinking water, delineate and monitor, looking for pathways to human health effects is the industry standard because almost anything else is ludicrously expensive and/or legitimately ineffective. I do think that biological remediation strategies are quite good, breeding up microbes to eat contaminants is already highly effective in a bunch lf cases and will continue to get moreso as the technology improves.

Tbf they are "planning" to install nuclear and i do believe actually will. I also believe the political driver for the nuclear push is because the timelines are far enough out they can claim to be doing something while not actually doing something. Its not a real good faith effort to reduce emissions, increase supply, diversify, etc.

Coal burning in and of itself isn't really an issue when it comes to emissions. With carbon capture tech used in modern or upgraded plants, what comes out at the end is basically water vapour. The big issue is the fly ash created which is toxic and can't be recycled in the qualities it's produced in. What normally happens is that they bury it. Saskatchewan is sort of an exception to the coal burning transition because they have one of the last fly ash depositories left in Canada. Once it's full they will have to fully transition too. When the NDP created legislation in Alberta to force the transition from coal to Natural Gas or Hydrogen for power plants they gave the industry in Alberta 15 years. It was already underway and is now complete, because of the fly ash issue.

As far as why they don't use nuclear is cost. A single plant is a huge expense to build and with such as small population Saskatchewan doesn't really need one. Building a fission reactor that costs a huge amount of money and still creates nuclear waste that has to be disposed of is pointless. Once fusion tech is functional that will change pretty much everywhere.

Umm they aren't? There are numerous fusion energy projects in progress all over the world. The day of the fission reactor are definitely numbered, but fusion is getting close to being viable. Once it is, the game changes completely. There are still years worth of research and testing to go through before it's going to be a thing.

They literally aren't what a silly ass comment

>You realize that, we don't use oil as an electricity source right? Yes we f****** do, dummy. [80% of the world's energy comes from burning fossil fuels \(oil, coal or natural gas\).](https://www.eesi.org/topics/fossil-fuels/description) [Over 40% of plastics are single use. That's a shit ton of waste.](https://www.plasticoceans.org/blog/the-facts) [80% of plastic toys end up in a landfill.](https://www.ballardbear.com/blogs/wooden-wonder-chronicles/plastic-pollution-and-playtime-how-much-plastic-waste-is-generated-by-toys-globally-every-year) [Over 95% of the world's vehicles are internal combustion engines.](https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in-electric-car-markets-2) Continuing to burn fossil fuels for energy and transportation and the frivolous use-and-discard mentality towards plastics is accelerating the fastest growing mass-extinction event in the history of the planet. edit: You say you are a "master electrician" and didn't know that people burn diesel for energy? And I don't mean small portable generators, but actual countries like some island governments. https://www.theenergymix.com/renewable-energy-ousts-diesel-for-islanders/ 2.6% of *electricity* production comes from burning oil in the form of diesel or other fuels, but that number climbs higher in countries with poor energy infrastructure like island nations and some Latin American, African and Asian countries.

Of course it wouldn't take out our reliance on petroleum entirely but Nuclear power and renewables if used for transportation only would knock out an overwhelmingly large percentage of fossil fuel use.

I don't understand, how many football fields of oil? That will help me understand the gravity of this situation a little better.

[deleted]

Right. Unless you’re living in a yurt off-grid (and probably still) if you depend on oil, stuff is going to happen. Gross negligence is one thing but the machinery of the world runs on humans and imperfection.

Yes, the apology is sufficient. /s

They did admit it was irrational, to be fair

Oil spills are an inevitability due to basic human nature.

Albertabama, baby!

At least you acknowledged it was an AI comment. These sort of copy paste things really irk me though. The next AI will be trained on these. It'll become 100% circular and information will degrade. What a world.

They're an American company bringing jobs home to Arizona and laying off Calgarians. I bring it up because it's what it's about.

Krill, baby, krill!

[Here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148112000857?via%3Dihub) is a study on bird deaths from power generation from a few years ago. [According to MIT](https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds), the study reports that wind turbines kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour generated, roughly ten times fewer than the 5.18 birds killed per gigawatt-hour generated from fossil fuels. Birds also fly into coal plants, it turns out, but the study also considered habitat loss from coal mining, and environmental degradation and climate change from coal pollution. Also, housecats kill more birds than all other sources combined by a significant margin. They don't generate much power though.

.... but if birds aren't real