Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

288 If there were a spill and oil on the shore, advanced nanomecha- nisms could do an excellent job of separating oil from sand, removing oil from rocks, and cleaning crude oil from feathers on birds and the feathery legs of barnacles. Oil contamination is a pollution problem, and nanotechnology will be a great aid in cleaning up pollution. But why should the oil reach the shore? Economical production would make it easy to stockpile cleanup equipment near all the major shipping routes, along with fleets of helicopters to deliver it at the first distress call from a tanker. Oil cleanup equipment built with nanotech- nology could surely do an excellent job of scooping oil from the water before it could reach the shore. But why should the oil leave the tanker? Economical production of strong materials could make seamless hulls of fibrous materials far tougher than steel, with double, triple, or quadruple layers. Smart mate- rials could even make punctures self-sealing. Hulls like this could be run into rocks at highway speeds without spilling oil. But why should anyone be shipping crude oil across the sea? Even if oil were still being pumped (despite inexpensive solar energy and solar-derived fuels), efficient molecule processing systems could refine it into pure, fluid fuels at the wellhead, and inexpensive tunnel- ing machines could provide routes for deeply buried pipelines. Any one of these advances would shrink or eliminate today's problem with oil spills, and all of them are feasible. This example sug- gests a general pattern. If nanotechnology can provide so many differ- ent ways to avoid or deal with an oil spill – one of the largest and most environmentally destructive accidents caused by today's industry – it can probably do likewise for industrial accidents in general. The most direct approach is the most basic: the elimination of anything resembling today's bulk industrial plants and processes. The shift from messy drilling activities and huge tankers to small-scale dis- tributed systems based on solar cells is characteristic of the style in which nanotechnology can be used. The chemical industry today typi-