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Comment by dx034 | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that. To me, London tap water never tasts like chlorine, I suspect it's chlorinated much less than most tap water in the US.

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Coming from Central Europe it tastes like chlorine for me. Not as extrem as US water - but absolutely noticeable.

I thought that you use fluorine in the USA instead of chlorine.

Fluorine is an additive to prevent teeth decay; chlorine or chloramine is to prevent disease in the water. Both are routinely added in the US.

Exactly. Worth adding if you live in USA and have a chance to visit your local water treatment plantation (they always welcome visitors), go see their state-of-the-art system for treating water. What I didn't know is that there is very complicated system that forbids flushing water back into the central system to poison it. The idea is that a terrorist could plug themselves into pipe and inject poison that will travel back to the treatment plant and obviously from there go to each sink, sort of like an online virus :) very cool stuff.

Is it really because of terrorists? Or because it's simply common sense?

That’s probably just the justification for the grant used to get federal money for the system.

The reality is that if you have people equipped to poison the water supply, they will be able to. Most water systems have multiple interconnects with neighboring systems to allow exchange of treated water. Security is typically nonexistent.

The good news is that that type of attack isn’t particularly useful as a terrorist event and is likely low risk.

Going to call "urban legend" on the terrorist angle.

Texas is putting it back into the municipal system.

https://www.texastribune.org/2012/06/11/texas-gets-creative-...

Basically, water treatment plants have to make human-safe water, but then they dump it into rivers or the aquifer, where it mixes with other water and is pulled out again downstream for purification. The logic is that we may as well skip the "mix it with untreated water" stage.

Google "toilet to tap" for more examples.

Bill Gates drank some:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/10/3761823...

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