High schoolers create filter to remove lead in water
freethink.com
freethink.com
I'm speaking about XRF analyzer. Currently it's still expensive : a 30K$ portable device, but that's because it's a low volume production.
These are gun-like devices that you point to a material, it shines x-ray on it and analyze the rays that comes back, which allows it to determine the elemental composition and percentages of the material for free in a few seconds. Like magic.
Today they are used for checking the paints for lead. They are used by precious metal buyers and sellers to identify precisely the content.
But I dream of the day where anybody can just check its steak or salmon with it for traces of anything toxic. It won't detect all food safety problems like bio contamination or organic pesticides, but it can definitely make heavy metal poisoning a thing of the past, by helping track the supply chain, the same way that having an air quality monitor can help improve your air quality.
xrf can spot higher concrntrations, but one can concentrate beforehand and then use xrf. while xrf fixed cost is 30k usd its cost is a dropjn the bucket compared to icp and solid state keeps on going.
forgive my typos commenting via phone
It went from "pointing a gun at an item" to "concentrating a sample".
I've done analytical chemistry before and sampling accurately is not a trivial thing.
Side note, is this what archaeologists use, to figure out the composition of a coin, etc.?
There is the question of trust of the measurement where they will just sell you an approval stamp for 100$.
There is also the problem that some actors have incentives to cheat, like feeding insects to your salmon, and feeding the insects from literal garbage that may get contaminated by electronic components in the dumpster. Or maybe the specific salmon just ate a ball of mercury but was not selected for testing.
A generic tool, that can analyze your immediate environment without having anyone else involved is empowering and can catch a wide variety of problems that you can track further if necessary; feels like a freebie offered by Science. Although it will still need some years of work to make it as sensitive as they show it in Science-Fiction.
Humans have not evolved alongside everything we extracted from the ground since the industrial revolution. It's like a new pair of eyes that would help you avoid a bad apple or smelly fish.
If we could also get a cheap and easy to use Raman spectrometer to complete the XRF analyser it would also be a great addition.
(I don't know what archaeologists use but they definitely can use a XRF analyser to find the composition of coins)
Is this inherently true? Do the raw materials and parts the final factory buys to make the machine really cost <$100 (or so) and the cost is all in the up-front investment in the machinery to make it?
They were pretty affordable then, and I expect that now they can be made even more cheaply if there is demand for them.
I agree that you can generate 60 kV pretty easily, though. You can do it in a smaller volume if you fill the electronics with oil, but it's not essential.
Measuring exact contents with XRF is difficult if you do not have homogeneous samples due to all kinds of complicated effects where the XRF from one element interacts with the XRF of another element. To get within 1% accuracy you often need a controlled (vacum) environment and callibrate your instrument with a set of standards at regular interfalls. At least that is how it was 20 years ago when I developed software for a company that produced high-end industrial XRF measurement devices.
But yeah, a hand-held machine isn't viable.
Hasn't that been around, in handheld form since the 60s? I think they're called tricorders.
Then they replaced the pipes running from the mains to the house. That helped a lot (entire sections of the city are lead free) but those still having problems believe it's in the pipes in the house. There isn't a will among state government to tear up the houses to replace all the pipes. If this works it could help those still suffering.
Nor is there money to fund such a project.
The billions are coming from Federal COVID money. The state caused Flint's problem by discontinuing water from Detroit and pulling from a local river without adding a required chemical.
This decision was made by an emergency manager appointed by the then governor to save money. This manager took power away from the elected mayor and city council.
1 industrial job may lead to : - 1-2 jobs in private services in the same area - 1-2 jobs in public services in the same area - industrial activity that can be taxed later - in the case of electric batteries, there may even be some environmental benefits that have value - once the facility is located to some location, it may be expected to grow over time, creating even more jobs and taxable corporate profits
In other words, each direct job can easily be around 4 jobs total. Future taxes from 4 jobs + corporate profits (and other taxes) + expected growth + the value environmental benefits may very well be worth the $750 up front investment.
Also, there are not going to be environmental benefits, the only difference is that the batteries would be getting built somewhere else.
>Michigan just gave General Motors $2 billion to build two EV battery plants, one in Lansing and the other in Detroit which will create 3,000 jobs.
This is fake news, Michigan state did not give money out to GM.
>The state caused Flint's problem by discontinuing water from Detroit and pulling from a local river without adding a required chemical.
>This decision was made by an emergency manager appointed by the then governor to save money.
Voted almost unanimously by the city council. Everyone loves to leave that detail out.
Yes, seems like its just $666Mil (such an odd number lol)[1].
[1] https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2022/03/michigan-lawma...
It's ironic as well given how they spend a trillion in the military which seems like an unprofitable investment. They coax kids into joining the army to get or pay for an education, instead of the much cheaper and more profitable option, just pay the kids' education directly.
Capitalism is the best system ever invented to get money into the hands of people. It's done more to take people out of poverty than any other system in human existence. Capitalism isn't to blame here.
>It's ironic as well given how they spend a trillion in the military which seems like an unprofitable investment.
Military is federal, Flint water is municipal. This is basic civics. The military is not designed to be a profitable investment.
>They coax kids into joining the army to get or pay for an education, instead of the much cheaper and more profitable option, just pay the kids' education directly.
They do both, federal government backs student loans, grants, etc. that literally pay for kids' education directly. And again, most education is State, not federal.
Thanks to capitalism!
>And capitalism is only like 250 years old.
And the rate of humanity leaving poverty in that time span is greater than any other time in history.
>You could have made your same argument 500-1000 years ago about feudalism pulling people out of poverty
Err, no? If anything, that pushed even MORE people into poverty. No one sane would ever make that argument.
>yet I doubt anybody would be all that happy to switch to a feudalist system and would heavily criticize any claims that feudalism was the main driving factor behind improvements in technology and living standards.
Because you're inventing a fictional strawman. Feudalism did the opposite of your claim.
I would like some citation for this one. Pretty large claim. For example China brought out 2/3rds of their population from poverty to middle class, pretty large number. Now there can be a debate on whether Chinese system is communism or not, but it definitely is not capitalism the way people in US like to define it.
Yes... Thanks to capitalism. Communismn killed tens of millions in China when they attempted to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes.
>Now there can be a debate on whether Chinese system is communism or not,
There is no debate. There are billionaire capitalists in China.
>but it definitely is not capitalism the way people in US like to define it.
It is 100% the way people in the US define capitalism. Sure it has it's Chinese spin, but it is undoubtedly capitalism.
And other countries that do give out money are capitalistic?
Hint, it’s capitalism. High tax rates to pay for social programs but it’s still capitalism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex...
Not the most capitalistic wealth creation
They could waive code requirements and grandfather in exceptions that would allow focus on the plumbing but there isn't necessarily a simple answer to the issues facing these people. Who wants to spend a ton of money on a property declining in value in a notorious market? And even if there was a clear and easy path to fix things what effect is lead exposure having on their cognition?
Gotta solve for potential pathologies, obstinacy economics, labor rights, and so forth - it's not a simple home project even if it should be. Filters start to look like a better solution in the face of politics and bureacracy.
Honestly, I'd probably sneak a pex run and pay a friend of a friend and not notify the authorities if faced with lead issues, but my exposure to lead might have my brain mangled to the point that I don't care or can't effectively plan a surreptitious fix. Flint is just all sorts of fucked.
(As corroborating evidence, Montreal has a problem with lead in some pipes. So, they're replacing the pipes, in every residential building, on the island. The mains past the property lines have already been replaced. On the private side of the line, there are two options: You either have it done yourself or the owner pays $3000 for the government to do it. There is no opt-out. It's been going on for two years, and in three more years, there will be no more lead. Problem solved. No reputational hazard. No valuation considerations. It just gets done because it's the correct thing to do.)
Ok, are you going to pay for it?
Who is going to pay for it? Well if we don’t pay for the infrastructure work needed, it will continue to be the innocent children of Flint Michigan who are paying for the shoddy infrastructure with sacrifices to their health and well being.
Or at a bare minimum, add a lead-free faucet for the drinking water.
Does it not freeze in Europe? If they did that in Flint the pipes would freeze in the winter.
It's probably easier to replace pipes in an older European house anyway; less insulation / less layered walls, less things embedded in concrete, sometimes even wood beam floors. I lived in a >100 year old house that was renovated at some point, newer pipes and electricity was put up against the walls, then a layer of drywall was applied everywhere to make things look tidy.
Otherwise you’re just building a house around your outside pipes.
No amount of insulation is going to help your pipes outside overnight under a certain temperature. The water isn’t moving because you aren’t using any of it.
We had some pipes inside under the floor of an old addition of an older farmhouse which regularly froze despite being inside, our wellhouse had hundreds of watts of heating. There’s no chance of pipes exposed outside in a northern US climate not freezing.
Keyword is "self-regulating pipe heating cable".
I don't know why you're making it out like it's rocket science and with such confidence.
Another way is to put the valve below the freeze line in the ground. Opening the valve to the water would close a drain valve in the pipe leading from it to the faucet, and closing the valve would open the drain valve.
I have a setup like this at my house, although the two valves are not linked. It works fine.
The study, which appears in the Journal of Pediatrics, found a decrease in Flint childhood blood lead levels, from 2.33 micrograms per deciliter in 2006 to 1.15 micrograms per deciliter in 2016 — a historic low for the city. The mean blood lead level in 2015 during the height of the water crisis was 1.3 micrograms per deciliter, up from 1.19 in 2014 before the water source switch.
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(17)31758-4/fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7969125/#t2
Incredible that lead in the water had such a relatively small effect, though.
The lead isn't an immediate problem if the water chemistry is correctly maintained, the pipes develop scale and there isn't a lot of material being dissolved into the water. The presence of lead infrastructure of course requires that the water chemistry be correctly maintained so that it does not disturb the pipe scale.
So it can be the case that the total exposure from the problem was somewhat limited.
I mean that would still cost a lot of money and time to implement in every house that still has lead pipes, but it's probably cheaper than replacing all the pipes.
I'm not sure how it will translate to much narrower pipes with tighter bends.
The other side of this is, if these houses have lead pipes and need a full water system gut (and probably the replacement of every device that touches the water); why stop there and just seal everything else back up. You're _going_ to find all of the horrific issues that existed but no one had seen in the light of day before. Or make all new issues. (For a good reference program on this, watch any of the highlighted construction / make it right shows made by "Mike Holmes" (OK, just the Canadian ones, in the US he's been in new build series only.))
When going that deep to fix the problem there's a substantial risk the whole thing is going to just have to be demoed and something new build to really fix the problem.
This is easily an area where HN should not tread at all if it can't get that right.
Edit-clarified sentence
Regularly replacing filters is how filters always work.
It reminds me of those news stories that pop up from time to time about some high schooler inventing a robot to clean up plastic waste from the ocean. A neat concept, and laudable, but the design they've produced has a whole litany of flaws that they did not address because they don't have real world marine engineering experience - susceptibility to corrosion, bio-fouling, etc.
The other problem is that there are 10 other kids who are doing things better (learning to contribute in the long term) who don't get glowing articles written about them.
Compare that to a whole-home filter: under $500 with a five year warranty. Filters are a couple hundred bucks every 100,000 gallons. The time savings alone is worth it, but the real value is knowing that you're not relying on $1 plastic filters.
Nothing about these $1 filters is good for children. The idea that a household with kids has the time and energy to change filters on every faucet once a month (ignoring all the time your kids spend at school with lead water there!) is laughable.
You just need it for the one faucet in the kitchen you'd be drinking water out of.
Would that completely eliminate all your lead consumption? No, when you are brushing I'm sure you swallow some water, etc, but it would eliminate at least 90% of it.
That's still $150/year and 36 filter changes.
And have you ever met a child? They'll play with and drink almost any source of water. Telling them not to drink from certain faucets is Sisyphean.
I don't understand why it took high school students to do this.
The science behind it seems simple enough this should have been a product already.
The chemistry teacher will have already solved the problem, and then guided her students through to a solution, then just let her students take the credit.
Also the $1 is linkbait; it may be $1 in materials, but especially if the housing was 3D printed, the actual cost would be higher.
That said, no reason this product commercially available should be more than $10, and/or given away for free along with refills to the people most impacted while they work on a more permanent solution.
Maybe the calcium phosphate (dibasic I assume?) suggested in the article is a better approach, though, and the lead-iodide coloring is a nice touch. Why doesn't all the potassium iodide dissolve away long before the calcium phosphate, though?