Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is for landfills, not wastewater. "The facility takes in landfill leachate — essentially rainwater that filters through landfills, collecting chemicals and other contaminants. The raw leachate is pushed through three treatments that separates the PFAS compounds from the leachate. That concentrated material is then run through the “PFAS Annihilator,” which uses super-critical water oxidation, or SCWO, to break the extremely durable PFAS chemical bonds."

That's a far lower volume of water than comes through a sewerage disposal plant.

Here's a location which might use that.[1] This is Bedwell Bayfront Park. It's in Menlo Park, CA, near Facebook HQ, and it used to be a dump. That's a small sewerage disposal plant to deal with the leachate from the dump. There was also a small power plant with Diesel engines running off the methane from the dump, but it's no longer needed now that the dump has decayed.

The hills near Google HQ were a similar dump. Palo Alto also had one, at what's now Byxbee Park.

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@37.49539607,-122.17552873,7.18...

SCWO has been eyeballed for decades as a way to clear superfund sites. It’s used from time to time for chemical cleanup.

The hard part is building a ceramic that can handle heat, pressure and the corrosive salts produced during the reaction. Apparently it’s a Pick Two situation.

What does "superfund" mean? Non-American who has to leave his desk before having time to google here.

To add to what others said, it can be any kind of pernicious pollution, including but not limited to: nuclear waste leakage, creosote from wood preservation, PCBs from power distribution equipment, toluenes (including TNT), aromatic hydrocarbons and other nasty solvents from industrial processes, to just people dumping bad batches of chemicals for years without getting caught, often once the money runs out, at which point there's no money to pay for cleanup and the company goes bankrupt.

So then the Feds have to step in and pay for it.

A number of these compounds have benzene rings in them, or nasty chlorine or fluorine bonds. Supercritical water, injected with oxygen, is literally liquid fire. You can fully oxidize anything that can be oxidized, and unlike incineration most of the product is in aqueous solution at the end where it can be filtered and collected instead of ejected into the atmosphere to become someone else's problem.

That’s a typo, it’s supposed to say “superfun.”

Just kidding, superfund is a big pool of money that was created to clean up toxic waste sites around the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

The US EPA, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has a large fund of money -- literally the "super fund" -- set aside to address very large, high impact environmental disasters or issues.

In other words, a superfund site is an environmental disaster site targeted for cleanup by the FedGov.

It's less water, but wouldn't likely have a higher concentration of PFAS chemicals?

I couldn't say because I'm not a scientist or anything, but I don't understand the whataboutism; both / all sources should be handled, not just whichever source might be the biggest one at this time.

Incredible how much is a Bay Area is a superfund.

Yes, they went from poisoning the earth to poisoning our brains. There was a golden era in the middle that I will always remember fondly.

Probably ever major city for the past century. Heck I am in a small city and we have one.

Privatize the profits, socialize the costs (like toxic cleanup).

It's literally the American way.

> Privatize the profits, socialize the costs (like toxic cleanup).

Any business would love to do the same, if possible. Because that's the businesss: increase the profits.

Should it then be considered a "natural" way? And where should we draw a line (if any) on what's ok?

> Privatize the profits, socialize the costs (like toxic cleanup).

Of course you privatise the profits. Profits come after public taxes.

You mention taxes, that's part of the issue here.

In America we aren't particularly good market capitalists and bail out corporations (see 2008) when they fail and then generally never have any sort of similar process for when they succeed (see Big Energy companies right now). So we're all for market capitalism when things are going well...but not when they're going poorly.

The concept that seems to be missing/underused is "windfall tax".

Google tells me we tried it in 1980 under Carter and apparently did a horrendous job of it but the concept seems sound enough.

I'm not sure I understand. I'm saying one of the first things we do is take tax. So we always get taxes, but businesses don't always get profits. And by definition those profits are private, because the government has already taken money out.

Profits are what's left after doing things useful enough people voluntarily pay for them, paying others for their share in achieving that, and then the government taking the amount of money it decides it wants to take. How could the leftovers not be private?

You should see Houston

Not-so-fun fact: When superfund sites are cleaned up, there's no monitoring of what is done with the waste.

I wouldn't be surprised if the soil removed is then just sold to construction projects than need fill.

Often soil is washed with solvents to remove the Dense Non Aqueous Polar Liquids (DNAPL). These are chloro/fluoro - carbon liquids that settle down to the bottom of the water table and flow downhill over many years - deep in the ground, and finally emerge as a DNAPL 'spring' on a river bank. Many of the super fund sites are these. Here is the rabbit hole for them

https://www.google.com/search?q=DNAPL+super+fund&rlz=1C1CHBF...

https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-waste-management

there are a lot of regulations around what monitoring and remediation is required for superfund waste material.

they probably ship it on a train to poor states like Alabama (kinda like this: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/603718526...). Alabama doesn't give a fuck about the environment even though we have the most ecological diverse state in the country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com