The EPA wants total removal of lead pipes | Hacker News Reader

The EPA wants total removal of lead pipes

washingtonpost.com

266 pointsMilnerRoute210 comments

Lead exposure is a global health problem that we have a clear path to solving - enable governments to track and remove sources of lead. If you're looking for a worthy recipient of your EOY donations, do check out the Lead Exposure Elimination Project:

https://leadelimination.org/

There are better causes to donate to, in my opinion. Pb is nasty stuff, but the purported risks have been inflated beyond what's actually grounded in solid evidence.

The term "Pb poisoning" has two different meanings: traditionally it's referred to blood lead levels above about 50 mcg/dL, at which demonstrable symptoms occur (slowed reaction times, etc). But in recent decades, it's also used to describe much lower levels (>15 mcg/dL, >10 mcg/dL, or even >5 mcg/dL), for which the only evidence of harm comes from observational studies.

Observational studies establish correlation, not causation, and there are good reasons to doubt that the observed correlations are due to Pb neurotoxicity. The relationship between Pb exposure and cognitive/behavioral outcomes is intractably complicated, because for most children Pb exposure is primarily from dirt/dust ingestion, which in turn correlates with a child's developmental status, household cleanliness, and subtle aspects of parenting behaviors (in addition of course to more widely appreciated factors like age/condition of the home). Poor nutrition also causes higher BLLs.

It's been demonstrated that publication bias in the Pb literature has steadily risen over time, as reported effect sizes have increased. Several studies have found Pb correlations which resemble a U curve, where children with the highest blood lead levels have better cognitive/behavioral outcomes than those with intermediate BLLs (because outside the range of BLLs which are primarily driven by dirt/dust ingestion, "something else is going on", which doesn't correlate as well with cognitive/behavioral outcomes).

Dirt/dust ingestion (and therefore, BLLs) drop precipitously around age 2, because this is around the time when children outgrow mouthing behavior - some children a bit earlier, some children a bit later. BLL measurements at this age therefore a metric of developmental status. Or alternatively, this is the age at which "lead causes the most harm".

My argument is of course not that you should go paint your child's nursery with chrome yellow. Ingesting paint chips can be enough to put a child into the "actual lead poisoning" BLL range (drinking water from lead pipes generally cannot). But excluding exposure from leaded gasoline (which was formerly the dominant source of exposure, but which has fortunately been banned almost everywhere) and people living near smelting facilities, it's probably not the scary ubiquitous IQ-point larcenist that it's made out to be.

Leaded gasoline, like that still found in aviation gas? Hope you never have small panes flying over your living spaces.

It sucks that leaded aviation fuel has persisted so long, but the resulting Pb exposure is insignificant relative to what people were exposed to from leaded gasoline in cars back in the day. Mean BLLs in the mid-70s were ~15 mcg/dL; nowadays mean BLLs are significantly below 1 mcg/dL, and ~1 mcg/dL is 95th percentile.

Why you should drain your hot water heater regularly and not use hot water for drinking:

https://blogs.edf.org/health/2018/02/26/lead-hot-water-issue...

They’re lead traps.

I was always taught to use cold water for anything to do with food. Never thought of lead.

Probably because hot water is stored and if it happens to go below a certain temperature bacteria can multiply

Water that's been sitting in a heater tank is oxygen-deprived and tastes dull when you use it for food preparation. That's the main reason to use aerated cold water instead of water from the hot-water system.

In some houses, the hot water is fed by an open header tank in the ceiling. Whatever dust, dead mice or bird poos fall into that, can contaminate the tap water. I went off drinking hot water as a kid after seeing the deep layer of fine dust built up in the bottom of it.

As pointed out in a different comment thread here, that’s a header tank which was used in older, multi-level buildings where city water pressure was not adequate for the rise to upper floors. Builders would set up a tank that slowly filled using the lower pressure and could act as a sort of mini water tower for the building. This did not contain hot water, but there is a chance a hot water tank was using this supply.

Where I lived, the cold water was at much higher pressure than hot. I assumed it was common for cold to be mains pressure and hot to be from a header tank when present. Maybe it was an unusual case of retrofitted hot water (house was likely built before the invention of hot water).

Unless you have a tankless water heater and no lead pipes in your house, in which case it’s fine to use the hot water from the tankless water heater for food / coffee / tea. At least that’s my understanding.

That's my understanding also. I only do it if I was already using hot water recently though. It seems pretty wasteful to pour all of that perfectly good cold water down the drain while I wait for the hot stuff to get to the faucet.

I have a tankless water heater. Does anyone know how accurate these things are? https://www.amazon.com/Safe-Home-LEAD-Drinking-Water/dp/B091... I'm down to do some weekend science.

I have a tankless, too, and after reading the article and these comments had the same thoughts...

Water sits in the pipes so I would still run it and still use cold water.

Does this mean I shouldn't be doing my dishes with hot water?

I assume if you have a newer house with PVC or PEX piping, this is not a concern.

Should we worry about plastics instead?

PEX (and polyethylene in general) is one of the least concerning plastics, it’s not worth worrying about on that front. (I wouldn’t want to drink out of PVC though since it often contains phthalates as a plasticiser).

Rigid PVC has few if any plasticizers. (This makes sense: it isn't very plastic!) This is the type usually used for water pipe, at least around here. It's probably not very dangerous.

Flexible PVC is nasty.

Almost certainly, though most of the problematic plasticizers (anecdotally) probably work themselves out in the first couple years. We likely won't see any real studies on it for awhile though, but [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...] is concerning.

"In the US, PEX pipe manufacturers often request a pipe to be certified in accordance with the NSF International/ANSI 61 Standard leaching procedure (NSF International, 1988). However, the results are not made public and the water that contacts the pipe for its first 90 days is discarded and not tested. Therefore, there is a general lack of available data to be used for an LCA on US PEX pipe products."

Water in plastic pipes is pretty stanky at first, especially the first couple months/weeks.

PEX has issues with permeability - it's highly oxygen and chemical permeable. Also contaminants from manufacture working themselves out.

PVC has a lot of plasticizers and stabilizers, and warmer temps make it leach faster. Many of them endocrine disruptors.

That said, no such thing as a free lunch. And as long as the water is kept moving, chances are it's fine after awhile. Avoid the 'stanky water fountain' effect by letting the water run a bit before drinking/using it if you're worried.

> Water in plastic pipes is pretty stanky at first, especially the first couple months/weeks.

This is mostly from the glue used at the pipe joints, which has a lot of volatile components.

unfortunately not, the pipes themselves are also an issue. PEX doesn’t use any glue, and all 62 distinct chemical compounds identified in that paper I linked came straight from the pipes themselves.

PVC is even worse in my experience.

I remember that one of the plumbers or house inspectors recommended plastic pipes to us and I thought the same thing: lead solder or plastic leaching into the water.

this is more about the distribution lines running to houses than the plumbing in the house.

There are no safe levels of lead exposure and there plenty of homes with lead piping as well as lead service lines: https://www.nrdc.org/resources/lead-pipes-are-widespread-and...

I really doubt any relevant amounts remain on the cleaned dishes.

If you drink the dish water OTOH...

If it’s a lead trap… wouldn’t that mean the water that comes out has less lead in it than the water that goes in? Assuming the water going into the heater is the same as the water coming out of your cold tap.

No, the article states that lead particles from upstream get trapped inside the water heater, which then gradually dissolve, especially when left stagnant overnight.

Right but all those particles just end up in your glass in the cold water supply right? Better they get trapped in heater.

Whether or not it's a good idea would really depend on what percentage of hot versus cold water ends up consumed (versus used for non-consumption purposes). Over the lifetime of the undissolved lead accumulation.

I believe elemental lead is not terrible when ingested, but lead ions are much worse.

Yeah, metallic lead is pretty safe to handle overall, as long as you don't inhale the dust. I wouldn't want to go trying to ingest it, but the amount of incidental exposure you'd get from handling, say, a lead brick at room temperature, is not much of a worry. Wash your hands after handling it, wear proper PPE, and you should be fine.

Edit: this isn't counting stuff like using lead solder. In that case, ventilate the crap out of your work area (preferably doing the work under a hood), wear PPE, and clean any equipment used.

Leaded solder is no more dangerous than lead bricks. The lead never vaporizes (look up the boiling point of lead if you don't believe me), so the same hazards of skin contact and lead dust are the relevant ones. And lead dust is less of a problem for solder because of the alloys used being a lot less prone to making dust than lead bricks (source: extensive personal experience with both).

The fluxes used in solder are far more dangerous than any lead.

However, carefully washing one's hands only goes so far. Your work area will still be covered in small amounts of lead residue just from all the transfer via tools and fingertips. It is very reasonable to avoid leaded solder entirely these days in favor of newer alloys like SN100C, which have performance very close to Sn63Pb37 (though not the same).

I’ve switched to lead-free solders for all new work, but still do any repair/rework of old products with leaded solder as I’ve never found a lead-free solder that works well (plus, I’ve now got 5 lifetimes’ worth of leaded solder supplies).

Have you found any that work well in repairs/cross-contamination cases? I suspect a lot of the early complaints about lead-free solder being a dire problem functionally were from people using the wrong temp or cross-contaminated tools. (I use a cheaper segregated station for leaded as I got tired of changing tips on the nicer station.)

...honestly we play pretty fast and loose with mixing alloys around here. We really shouldn't since it can be very bad, as you know.

The three RoHS alloys I have experience with are SAC305 (blech, no idea why people tolerate this stuff), SN100C (seems to be great on new assemblies, never much tried mixing it), and REL22 from AIM (this is on our "high strength" spool holder, next to the Sn62Pb36Ag2 silver solder, so people tend to graduate toward it for no better reason) which seems to do pretty well in typical lab conditions after being used to rework either SAC305 or SnPb joints. We don't do real testing around here.

When I am knowingly mixing alloys I will try to clear or flood the joint or both (remove as much old solder as possible with braid, or add new solder in excess). We are pretty good around here about using Way Too Much flux, which is of course the correct amount. This might help. Either way we seem to do okay for this light use.

“The flushing helped significantly in almost every case. Among water heaters where water levels first tested above 50 ppb, flushing dropped the lead levels on average from 456 ppb to 20 ppb”

They took samples from the tank as I understand before and after flushing. If it’s in the sample some of it presumably goes to the water you use.

Right so the hot water tank was trapping lead that, in your cold supply, just passed right through to your faucet.

All that extra lead in the tank didn’t go to a faucet. Seems better.

Of course, it's complicated because the pre-dissolved lead and lead that's formed into salts, etc, is more bioavailable and less likely to pass through you.

Presumably the water heater reaches equilibrium and doesn't remove lead forever-- you get equal rates of lead in and lead out. But the water heater may be making the lead more bioavailable.

Perhaps. Or perhaps hot water picks up more leas from copper pipe solder out whatever downstream.

That’s why this is a really dumb testing method considering a good one (just testing at the faucet) would have been as easy to do.

Testing at the faucet is definitely going to end up identical in concentration (plus whatever it picks up in pipes in the house), but not necessarily bioavailability.

I can’t find anything indicating there’s any difference in bioavailability between hot and cold water, or that it’s a concern at all.

I’d just assume whichever has less lead in it is what I’d rather drink. If the hot water tank is removing lead from the supply and trapping it, I think I’d rather use it for cooking. (Of course I’m not trying to drink warm water out of the tap in any case. )

And in any case what this study is measuring seems to have little relation to what you actually want you know. But I’d guess you’re right, the hot water tank is probably removing some lead (hence the higher concentration) but not enough to matter much.

I strongly suspect the people who say you shouldn’t drink hot water are just parroting something that may be entirely mumbo jumbo, or may be true in some instances for homes with older plumbing but not anymore.

I’ve replaced all the plumbing between the street and my kitchen with Pex so there’s no solder after the water heater. (Perhaps hot water does dissolve more lead from that, though I still have a hard time believing it is significant.)

> I can’t find anything indicating there’s any difference in bioavailability between hot and cold water, or that it’s a concern at all.

Bioavailability of lead salts (like that form when you have a lot of hot water, metallic lead, and other contaminants in a tank for a long time) is higher than of metallic lead.

Similarly, bioavailability of dissolved lead is higher than that of metallic lead particulate. The mechanism we're discussing is metallic lead particulate sitting in water heaters and dissolving.

> I strongly suspect the people who say you shouldn’t drink hot water are just parroting something that may be entirely mumbo jumbo, or may be true in some instances for homes with older plumbing but not anymore.

I suspect the people who say you shouldn't drink hot water have looked at the grody water that comes out when you drain a heater that's sat for a long time and see all the sediment and yuckies that accumulate at the bottom.

I suspect so too and again, their thinking is obviously incorrect. Those sediments and yuckies were all taken out of the hot water supply, but passed right through to the faucet on the cold side.

Every time I drain my water heater, I dumped a bunch of sediment and yuckies down the drain that otherwise would have been in me, if I were drinking from the hot side rather than the cold.

The logic you’re describing is like looking at a gross filter you’re replacing and saying “look at all this junk in the filter, I’m never filtering my drinking water again!”

Filters look gross when you replace them for the exact same reason that hot water tank is full of sediment. It removed them.

> I suspect so too and again, their thinking is obviously incorrect.

That crap usually sits in the bottom of the water heater but it can become less safe with time (e.g. forming lead salts or dissolving lead, as mentioned, or grow legionella cultures). It can also get stirred up and you can get a whole bunch more of it all at once.

It also doesn't all come from the input supply; a lot of it comes from the hot water heater itself corroding over time.

Most dishwashers are connected to hot water. Some higher end dishwashers can work with cold water, but the cheaper ones don’t. Does this mean using a dishwasher is a problem as well?

This must be a US-centric thing, having had many dishwashers in my time and having never seen one with anything other than a cold water inlet.

I assume this is related to the availability of 230v/15A for the heater element.

Must be. I'd say most dishwashers are connected to the mains supply and not pre heated.

If you have hot water, why wouldn't you use that for the water connection?

My dishwasher has a heating element, but the colder the water is, the more it has to work.

So if it's cheaper to use gas-powered hot water from the boiler than to heat it electrically, why wouldn't you? And it's there in the kitchen right next to the sink which has hot water available anyways, so it's kind of a no-brainer.

Yes, I'm in the US -- you can see on a kind of average dishwasher installation manual [1], it specifically instructs you to connect it to a hot water line.

[1] https://www.whirlpool.com/content/dam/global/documents/20101...

My dishwasher uses sufficiently little water that it would get mostly cold water from the hot water pipe.

Yeah, the standard advice is actually to run your kitchen faucet on hot until you get hot water, before you start the dishwasher.

I'm always rinsing off the bigger gunks of food with hot water anyways as I load the dishwasher, so it's hot already.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter that much. The main point is just, if you have hot water available, it's hard to see why you wouldn't take advantage of that.

I’d assume that wasting a lot of hot water before running the dishwasher negates any price benefits from heating the water with gas instead of electricity. Not to mention the CO2.

> If you have hot water, why wouldn't you use that for the water connection?

Two protein related reasons: hot water can denature detergent enzymes making them less effective, and hot water can cause food proteins on the dishes to harden and set.

European manufacturers claim that detergents work better when starting the program with cold water, and recommend doing so. The situation might be different in the US, where using the hot water seems to be the norm.

Probably not. Most of the water runs off the dishes. A very thin film remains that evaporates in the dry cycle, and even at that a lot of it will bead up and run off completely.

I have found that new dishwashers with good eco ratings leave easily detectable amounts of soap on the dishes. Even apart from any health impact, I make it a point to never use them on their default eco programming, but switch to sth that uses more water. I want my dishes clean, that includes soap residue.

I got rid of a perfectly fine 35 yo dishwasher that cleaned fine even without soap, due to heat and water use. I got rid of it because it was loud, but I always wondered if running it without soap was perhaps not as eco friendly as a modern washine using less heat and water.

Use less soap. I use about half as much and the dishes come out fine. I've had better luck with liquid based soaps too as they mix immediately with the water.

You cut those tablets up?

I don't use those, I use liquid dishwashing gel.

Sounds like you're probably using too much detergent.

There's only tablets, how can you use less? Even those that they recommend have this.

The tablets are popular but at least here you can still get liquid or powder detergent for automatic dishwashers.

Havent seen those in over a decade.

What country do you live in?

Buy powder or liquid instead?

I use either Cascade powder or the Walmart brand equivalent and only put a teaspoon or so of powder in the cup per load and a few dozen granules of powder on the door for the prewash.

This is a really stupid testing method. They should have tested both water supplies at the faucet. This does seem to indicate the hot water tank is removing lead from the water and thus you would be better drinking it than cold unless something is going on between the heater and your faucet.

drinking hot tap water is really dumb considering this and also legionnaire's disease potential

Other way around. This would indicate cold water has more lead.

Also, Legionnaires isn’t a risk from your water heater.

it is if you don't turn the temperature up high enough.

This remarkably old advice from a time before modern water treatment, sacrificial anodes, and automated temperature control is also why so many recipes instruct to "fill a pot with cold water" before it's boiled.

Although, seeing the inside of an old water heater is all anyone would need to convince them to leave the hot water for washing.

Given that many people leave their plumbing/water system in their homes be just the way it is for decades, it's still wise advice.

There are places where the hot water is in an open (!) container in the attic and it could have dead rodents, etc. in it. Ireland, for one - which is part of the persistence of separate hot/cold taps in bathrooms.

Yes, that's called a header tank. It's common throughout the UK too. It means low water pressure, especially upstairs. The actual hot water is still in an insulated tank within the house. The header tank holds cold water. Most new installations are unvented systems with no header tank, but this comes with its own tradeoffs.

The hot/cold tap thing is funny. We were just taught not to drink from the bathroom tap at all. It still seems gross to me when people do or like in hotels where you have to.

The header tank is to maintain pressurisation in the radiator heating system; modern "combi" boilers don't need a header tank.

I think you might be thinking of the cold water tank in the attic that was historically used to feed decent cold water pressure to the upstairs taps only.

This is why I was told to never drink out of the taps upstairs as a kid. Think these up much rarer these days.

Hot water is always stored in an insulated hotwater cylinder in the UK, not open.

Hot water is ~never in an open tank. You’re thinking of cold water tanks; historically these were often open, in Ireland and the UK, though this isn’t allowed under modern building regs. However, the water for the hot water tank usually came from the cold water tank, where present, so you have much the same concern. (There are other concerns with hot water tanks, particularly Legionaries Disease, so even if the cold supply is clean the hot may not be.) This is why water from bathroom taps etc isn’t considered drinkable in countries where this is common.

> which is part of the persistence of separate hot/cold taps in bathrooms.

This was a separate but related issue; for a long time plumbing regs required this due to concerns about the possibility of hot water (considered unsafe due to the above) being forced back into the public cold water system. This isn’t possible with modern mixer taps.

>Although, seeing the inside of an old water heater is all anyone would need to convince them to leave the hot water for washing.

You're talking about all the mineral sediment gunk that accumulates in them? But that's stuff that was in the cold water supply to the water heater but not in the hot water it emitted. It's evidence of its cleaning action.

And you dont want it to clean the seals of pipes, that contain lead. Lead in pipes normally gets a oxide layer that unless disturbed it usually safe, heat disturbs these and causes said problem. Is it realistic to remove every pipe at once? No but they will work on it probably over 10-20 years, since as long as they don't add oxide inhibitors/removers (mostly what caused the flint disaster) or add heat, it is relatively safe.

I think the point is that a cold water line is easily flushed before use, and it's less likely to breed or incubate biologics.

I wouldn't call water standing in accumulated scale and sediment "clean" any more than I'd prefer to drink from a stagnant pool than a stream!

We have a hot water dispenser in one of our kitchen sink popouts; it's tremendously convenient. It's an on-demand heater that makes 82C instantly for tea.

Anecdotally, many homeowners are unaware of the existence of the sacrificial anode, and suffer premature water heater failure as a result.

Also anecdotally, some water heater replacement specialist contractors take every precaution to keep customers ignorant on this: No post-mortem examination, no mention of the issue, withholding of the printed manual accompanying the new replacement.

Lol, imagining this post-mortem examination cracked me up-- CSI's Bradford White division.

Most homeowners should not be messing with their own plumbing besides fixtures, the commentary on this thread should be more than enough evidence enough for that.

To replace the sacrificial anode on my water heater you need to:

1. Dig the plug bolt out from the spray foam insulation with some tiny picks. 2. Get a breaker bar to get enough torque to unseat the nut. 3. Strap the tank to a wall to avoid it moving when using the breaker bar.

The manufacturers don't want you replacing them either. It took over an hour to do something that in theory could take less than 5 minutes.

That said, if you have an non-heat pump electric water heater like mine you're probably better of letting it die and replacing it with a heat pump based model.

I don't follow. My hot water is heated up about 60cm before the tap, as it runs through. Is that a regional thing? Are you saying that you're keeping a large quantity of water at temperature at all times just in case someone might need it later? Wouldn't that be super inefficient energy-wise?

This is the standard North American approach, we have large insulated tanks that hold water at generally 38-48 degrees Celsius. My home uses a 40 gallon "water heater" using natural gas with an always burning pilot light. It's possible to "run out of hot water" as a result.

The common statistics I've heard is 30% of household energy usage goes to keeping the hot water heater at temp. How much of your power usage is water heating?

Looked at my natural gas usage. In the summer it only used for water heating/keeping it hot at 10 therms/month. Total annual gas usage is 700+ therms. 12*10/700 = 17%. And this includes both heating and keeping it hot.

This site [1] quotes 0.0113 therms to heat a gallon of water. 120 therms / 0.0113 / 365 = 29 gals of hot water per day. This place [2] estimates 41 gallons of hot water per day used during peak demand. My estimate is that we use more for showers, less for washers/dishwashers, same for faucets. Looks like I would spend all of my BTUs on heating these 29 gals of water every day. Most likely close to single digits %% for keeping it hot.

[1]https://webbsupplycompany.com/scalesafe/what-does-it-cost-to...

[2]https://michaelandson.com/blog/what-size-water-heater-do-i-n...

Does a tankless/instant water heater avoid this problem?

All environmental sources of lead that can readily contaminate humans should be removed. This is a good move. It would be great to see an international treaty on this, with goals and enforcement for signatories.

I live near a small airfield. The kind celebrities and wealthy people fly out of every day, mostly recreationally.

Every single small plane still uses leaded gas.

Flying overhead, all days, every day. At low altitudes.

And no one is changing that any time soon. As in tens of decades. Just leaded gas everywhere in the sky.

Sure? I mean we can’t remove lead everywhere all at once but taking them out of pipes is better than nothing right?

Why do you want to rip out pipes before banning small/private jets?

Jets don’t use leaded aviation gas.

Also came here to point out that celebrities aren't traveling the world in these cheap slow planes ...

Yeah I think the original commenter wanted to drum up support for their idea by also blaming movie stars and CEOs (kind of like shooting fish in a barrel on HN).

Jets? I thought lead was added to fuel to prevent "pinking", which is the pre-ignition of fuel in the cylinders of a piston engine. Why does jet fuel need lead?

I think you’re right. Leaded additive is an octane enhancer to prevent knocking but it’s also good for valve seats and whatnot. That’s the bit what makes it difficult to just switch to other octane enhancers as far as I know.

Suggested explanation: jet fuel doesn't need added tetraethyl lead. But aviation fuel is standardized; it's convenient to use the same fuel for jet planes and planes with piston-engines, so that airstrips don't have to store more than one kind of fuel.

Jet fuel and avgas are kept carefully separate and are incompatible - Jet fuel has no added lead.

Most piston aircraft use avgas (usually leaded) though some use jet fuel (diesel powered). Larger propellers are usually powered by turbines burning jet fuel.

Thanks for clarifying!

Leaded AvGas is the fuel for piston powered aircraft. Typically your small, general aviation propeller aircraft. Not jets. They burn JetA (kerosene).

Presumably because having lead in drinking water is more likely to be a source of lead poisoning than background AvGas emissions from the small piston powered aircraft at the nearby flight training school

Metallic lead has very low bioavailability. Lead compounds - particularly organolead compounds like tetraethyllead - are vastly more toxic. Replacing lead pipes is a good idea, but it should be a scandal that leaded avgas is still legal.

why not do both in parallel, ban the fucking planes AND restore the pipes. Are you OK?

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/20/2023-23...

> We estimate that piston-engine aircraft have consumed approximately 38.6 billion gallons of leaded avgas in the U.S. since 1930, excluding military aircraft use of this fuel, emitting approximately 113,000 tons of lead to the air.

My rough estimate of the amount of naturally occurring lead in the air is 5 million tons. So 113 000 tons makes it 2% more than what it would have been with no human activity. Doesn't seem terribly serious, but not nothing either.

Natural concentration of lead in atmosphere: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/chemicals-m...

Volume of atmosphere: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rf7tn/volume_of...

I'm neglecting the variation in density with altitude and assuming that all that 100 years of aviation lead is still there, so it might be way off.

That 2% will tend to be concentrated around human settlements. Every airplane starts and ends up at an airport, which will be in/near a population center.

The figures are for USA only, but you're counting the whole world.

>>> import pint >>> r=pint.UnitRegistry() >>> usa = r.Quantity(9833517,"km*2") >>> h = r.Quantity(35000, "ft") >>> v = usa * h >>> naturally = r.Quantity(0.1, "ug") / r.Quantity(1, "m * 3") >>> natural_total = naturally * v >>> natural_total.to('ton') <Quantity(11563.6821, 'ton')>

Natural total in USA, up to 35,000ft is 11,000 tons, and added is 113,000 tons.

So the leaded avgas has added 10x.

Assuming uniform distribution up to that height, and that it doesn't disappear. Neither of those things are true, especially as the lead is absorbed by people and animals.

I mean, I’ve got to imagine the days of piston-engine aircraft are limited for other reasons in any case; if charged sensibly for CO2 emissions they wouldn’t be particularly economic for most use cases.

that's doubtful. Sure they will eventually go away but they're still popular amongst the moderately rich. However I can see forcing conversion of everything over to non leaded fuel spread out across 20 years or something.

So, currently, as I understand it, piston engine planes are attainable to people who merely have more money than sense (my possibly unfair mental image is the sort of person who buys a 100,000 EUR car while still having a mortgage), but private _jets_ are the domain of the actually very rich. Any cost increase is likely to hurt them in a way that it wouldn’t hurt private jets.

You don't need to be particularly wealthy to own a single engine prop plane. My contractor who I had a decade or two ago flew one and, while successful enough, it's fair to describe him as working middle class.

I started flying in the 90s. Most of the pilots I met were not rich, but rather just enthusiasts with a particular hobby. The last 30 years have seen fewer people overall, but also skewing more wealthy as the costs have also risen faster than general inflation.

It’s like going to the marina; some people there are notably rich, but most aren’t and are instead just modestly successful folks who put their discretionary money into a hole in the water.

A small piston single gets low double digits miles per gallon on trips. There’s a range, but it’s roughly half the mpg of a car. It seems unlikely that planes would be uneconomical for most current use cases unless ICE cars are also made uneconomical for a significant fraction of their current uses.

An unleaded fuel for small planes was approved last year by the FAA, but it seems it's not available from distributors yet. I found a story about plans for Half Moon Bay to switch to it next year, maybe:

https://www.hmbreview.com/news/airport-plans-transition-to-u...

It is changing fast. Now that the lead free avgas is available for a trivial paperwork STC for all engine types, almost all the pilots I know are pestering their fields to switch. For GA aircraft.. things are in a wild shift first now.

My favorite part in the bay area is how those small planes fly from Palo Alto airport, right through East Palo Alto to make sure poor kids stay underprivileged so that a bunch of rich folks can keep their hobby.

It’s refreshing to see the EPA seemingly doing it’s job.

Its been on the books since the 90's, but it would cost too much just to repaint lead painted homes, so nothing much has gotten done. Highlights of the program: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/about/2000s.html

This seems like a lame excuse. Surely the USA can up their water plumbing requirements without replacing lead-based paint on other surfaces. Other nations have regulated this for decades now. It's about progress, not perfection.

In the US, lead pipes in new construction were banned almost 40 years ago. This is not a matter of the pipes not being regulated, it's an issue of replacing older pipes.

I also think it’s one of those , “if we just wait long enough the problem fixes itself” type of things. That said, the question becomes, how long does a lead pipe work without failing? I suspect that amount of time is longer than anyone wants to admit. Apparently we’d rather give the externalized cost to prisons instead of plumbers.

$17B for 10 years https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/12/18661193/l...

Assuming that it doesn't balloon like any real projects

This should have been done 20 years ago.

Second best time is today.

At the cost of hundreds of billions and disruption of nearly every road in the USA, yes.

Doing it in the more vulnerable areas should be done first and if the lead solder has stabilized, work those areas last. Over a period of 20-30 years is better since that's roughly how long it took to install in the first place. This would lower the price and economic costs too. (this is what they do btw)

How harmful is lead in solder used to join copper pipes? Lead free solder was mandated only around 1986, so presumably there are a lot of copper pipes around using solder containing lead.

The exposed/wetted area of a soldered joint is pretty damn small and I’d expect those 40 year old joints have reached an acceptable steady state by now.

That’s not an excuse to use leaded solder on supply pipes as plumbing with lead-free solder is perfectly easy, but I don’t sweat* the old copper pipes in my 1920s home.

https://www.copper.org/applications/plumbing/techcorner/sold...

* That pun was inadvertent.

I'd imagine the extremely tiny portion of solder exposed to the water supply is nothing compared to the "lead-free" brass fittings which were permitted to contain various non-zero amounts of lead depending on the year, and still do.

But with most things, the dose makes the poison.

you have two problems with new formulations though. one is lead-free solder seldom works as well as the box claims. two, antimony is somewhat concerning from a toxicity standpoint though i'd say less than lead

i wonder if we don't just quit and go to brazing all joints. rod is pricier than solder and takes more heat but probably less toxic and certainly more dutable

Tin/silver soldering (~95/5) would probably be better than brazing for water supply piping as brazing will tend to anneal the hard drawn copper tubing, which isn’t desirable from a strength standpoint.

non-zero harm but it's necessarily a lot less than making the whole thing out of lead. think about the difference between a square inch of lead exposed per joint versus many square feet. not a one-to-one comparison since the shear stress at a joint will be higher, but such a relatively smaller area it will have a relatively tiny impact.

America's Water Problem Is Way Worse than You Think

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY0IscIvue4

Not in US but I feel much better having an RO system and drinking that water

It costs about the same as an entry level iPhone. So if you can put up with a lower spec phone, you can afford it :-).

What’s the yearly maintenance/filter cost though?

Converted to USD I think I spend $100/y average. Depends what filter needs replacing.

It seems like removal of lead pipes is overkill? Typically lead pipes develop a layer of deposits that pacify the metal, stop corrosion and prevent lead from leeching out.

The Flint water crisis was a cock-up by the water utility that resulted in loss of pacification and leeching of lead, but that a mistake that can be prevented.

Seems like regular water testing (already done) is a reasonable solution. I could see decommissioning of lead pipes (i.e. an work done needs to replace them) but a wholesale "removal all lead pipe whether or not they contribute to lead exposure" seems like overkill.

Even with biofilm-protected lead pipes, you still need to flush the system, by letting the water run for a minute or three, before you drink it.

Lead pacification results in a layer of insoluble material on the interior surface of the pipe so that the drinking water doesn't contact lead. It's typically done at the source - at the drinking water plant.

It can result in undetectable levels of lead in the water, despite the pipes being made of lead.

This summarizes the chemistry quite nicely: https://www.acs.org/education/resources/highschool/chemmatte...

There is no need to "flush" the water, because it doesn't contain any lead.

This is part of the reason why engineers in antiquity always explicitly favored hard water when choosing the headwaters to route aqueducts from.

It is probably wise to flush though as unless you have tested recently you have no idea if the lead protection is working. My own home (70 years old) recently failed lead tests (3 samples with ranges 14-45 μg/L) that we had to request from the city. Otherwise we would have had no idea.

I agree that testing is key if there is a risk of lead exposure.

> Typically lead pipes develop a layer of deposits that pacify the metal, stop corrosion and prevent lead from leeching out.

Was going to come here to say this. Saying that, old pipes do need to eventually be replaced. But I wouldn’t freak out if you have lead pipe running into your house, especially no new ones have been installed for many decades.

> Following the rule's adoption, chemical engineer Abigail Cantor started testing the water after it was treated with phosphate that authorities recommended they use to prevent lead from leaching into water. But what she found was shocking.

> "[I] found that the lead increased four times over the untreated water using the highest recommended phosphate product," Cantor says.

https://www.npr.org/2016/03/31/472567733/avoiding-a-future-c...

It would probably be better to have a longer term solution. $45 billion for lead today. I'm guessing in another generation they're choose to remediate some other contamination like PFOAs or some plastics used in pipe liners.

At this point it'd be better to just give grants for installing home water filters and then use the money from chlorination to supply an annual filter stipend. Cover all the issues at once.

https://archive.is/Fcvcg

We should go back to wood: https://www.hiddenhydrology.org/the-water-in-the-wood/

Finally... should have been done decades ago.

First thought was how is this not already a thing.

I wish we had a public database of who approved lead pipes after a date when they were known to be dangerous. Same with all of the other health and environmental threats we face with micro plastics, PFAS, glyphosate, freon, etc etc etc, going back 100 years.

With that database, we could create liens on the corporations/families/individuals which profited from passing their externalities onto the public. Then they could pay for the cleanup and/or go bankrupt.

Where I'm going with this is that the current power structure in the US is built on ignorance. Many millionaires and billionaires are only wealthy because they've gamed the legal system to dodge most claims against them.

Examples are the Sackler family, the Koch family, the Walton family, the list is long:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2020/12/17/billion-...

Now, I have nothing against wealth creation through hard work and building things. But when it's done by corrupting the system, at some level that must be considered unpatriotic. Yet a politician wears a lapel pin and claims to love America while accepting money from the people who hurt us. This is a failure of leadership.

I'd propose that wealthy individuals can start setting an example by doing the right thing in a very public way, or risk bringing the wrath of the masses against them. And it wouldn't take much to pull the wool off people's eyes, especially with AI. How hard would it really be to use historical precedents as training data? We're in the midst of a Global Awakening where everyone can see in real time that the mainstream news doesn't match what they see reported by real people on social media. We've also reached a level of technological development where people are starting to provide resources for themselves outside the system via renewable energy, automation, hydroponics, 3D printing, etc. Those trends point to a reduction in wealth concentration and authoritarianism.

Yet the wealthy and powerful manipulate the system even harder, running authoritarian candidates, spreading anti-intellectual propaganda, starting proxy wars.. and soon using AI to trick people to vote against their own self-interest at even more unbelievable levels. At a time when people are barely able to earn enough money to make rent and put food on the table. You don't do that when people are struggling, you do it in the boom times like the mid-2000s. I almost wonder if they have a guilt complex, like they want to get caught?

Glyphosate is one of the most studied chemicals, and it's okay. (The issue is that farm workers are not given protective gear.) Lead in pipes is also not that big of a problem as it was in gasoline.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38500123

We still don't know much about PFAS.

It's definitely not great that we have strange stuff in our blood and food, but eating charred food is a lot more carcinogenic. Just to keep that in mind. Especially when you are throwing around the charge of ignorance.

That's not the point though. The point is that companies and individuals continue to profit long after dangers are discovered, then we have to foot the cleanup bill. I looked it up and the US didn't ban lead pipe until 1986:

https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/use-lead-free-pipes-fittings-fixtur...

1986! Which means that someone lobbied for lead's continue use for decades. Most likely fossil fuel companies for leaded gas, and lead manufacturers, but maybe even plumbers unions. Looks like the dangers of lead were well understood by the 1950s but probably as far back as 2000 BC:

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_o...

There is overwhelming evidence on the dangers of the other substances I mentioned. And the list of dangerous substances is too long to list here, easily going into the hundreds or thousands.

Your point about the dangers of eating charred meat, while potentially true, doesn't discount these other dangers.

What concerns me is that ignorance is so prevalent in our discourse now that my mention of it triggers people more strongly than the topic at hand. It's become the very tool that the wealthy and powerful use to manipulate us. They know that equivocating arguments like yours are given equal airtime with the facts.

And a public not trained in civics or critical thinking skills is easily manipulated into voting against its own self-interest. That process forms the basis of center-right political strategy (adopted by republicans and establishment democrats), especially when aligned with regulatory capture of the government by corporations.

Whereas the direct strategy I mentioned, of auditing and billing the guilty parties is considered laughably naive, even cruel to the hardworking snake oil salesmen. So the narrative becomes: We should wait and see if there's more evidence. Too much work, might as well give up. It's all grandfathered in now, nothing we can do anyway.

And the really great part about all of this is that any guilty parties actually were grandfathered in by the EPA's 1986 SDWA amendment, exempting them from any liability from the time before then, to the tune of I don't know, $100 billion or $1 trillion or something. So it wouldn't surprise me if people in the lead business read the writing on the wall and pushed for the amendment to protect themselves. Many laws are like that, where the puppeteer can't be seen while the public focuses on the marionette.

Leaving me with the inevitable conclusion that maybe we shouldn't grandfather in anything. Which is impractical, and why I say that in a very real way, great wealth is built on ignorance.

Thanks for the reply!

I agree with the need for better (real) consumer protection, real health and other externalities accountability.

> It's become the very tool that the wealthy and powerful use to manipulate us

I don't know what this means. (More exactly it seems meaningless to me.) It seems like a rhetorical device. Everyone has biases, manipulation is ever-present, wealth is power, and of course many (most) powerful people don't shy away from using their power.

But equivocating wealth/power/influence/airtime with manipulation is ... strange to me. I'm sure you know about the NIMBY activists voicing their concerns on council meetings, I'm sure you know the "the character of the neighborhood" phrase. It's a structural problem. Just like the electoral college, the senate, and so on.

I like these market based libertarianish insurance-like concepts, I'm happy to try them, it's a nice way of trying to account for a lot of things. But there's zero chance of that passing due to the aforementioned structural obstacles.

> And a public not trained in civics or critical thinking skills is easily manipulated into voting against its own self-interest.

Yes. But I think that phrasing is very poor. Because we see they zealously believe they are voting for their interests, based on a professed alliance between them and the leader they are devoted to. (Of course, classic populist stuff. Usually with a heavy dose of arrogant anti-elitism and chauvinistic/xenophobic nationalism, etc.)

That said, let's not forget that the most and best educated public was in Germany in the 1930s. I know you directly said critical thinking and civics, but we are unfortunately very far from effective education. Maybe some future generation will figure out how to do it.

Also, regarding sunsetting bad stuff (and paradigm shifts), I guess you know perfectly how bad society is with this. I know nothing about the lead industry, but we know how the car, oil, and coal lobby fucked everything thrice. And when finally globalization and some progress (both technological and environmental) made the emitters "disappear" from the "Western world" the response was resentment/resistance from the miners and factory workers and shrugs from the rest of us. As long as the Chinese shit is cheap on Amazon no one cares. (And the libertarian minded folks just scold the miners that they forget to appreciate how cheap things are, and the liberal folks scold them that they should unionize and vote differently, and ... and ... and meanwhile the majority sadly doesn't even care about them or about the issue.)

Well, what I was getting at is that my camp has warned of pretty much all of the crises we face now since the beginning. And the same thing that always happens is going to happen: the public will get to pay to clean up the mess that made the private profit. It's like the monorail episode of The Simpsons times everything. Or how South Park used to be a comedy, but now it's a documentary. How could we have seen this coming?! Please.

But I'm a little disappointed in myself for how I've been responding on HN lately. My comments have been low-vibration/egocentric/projective. Is it constructive to try to go after titans of industry who fleeced the public? Will they even pay? Will it solve anything? I don't know.

What I really wanted to say originally is that I wish we could look to the future, and that us hackers could come up with a machine that could cut out the lead pipe in-place and replace them with something like PVC, instead of digging trenches. If the problem seems insurmountable, then we should innovate a way to make cleanup 10 or 100 times less expensive.

But see, the powers that be that created this problem for us are the same ones that drive wealth inequality. So we don't have the time, money or freedom to do the real problem solving, because we spend all of our time working on mainstream tasks to make rent. Instead what will happen is we'll get pork barrel projects at enormous expense, and established players will profit a second time around from the cleanup. Pay to dig a hole, pay to fill it in.

From a progressive standpoint, I see how an informed populace participating in a democratic republic with well-funded public education could almost trivially solve (and prevent) these problems like healthy European social democracies do. But since roughly the GW Bush era of the 2000s, the libertarian voice to dismantle everything has managed to undo countless environmental laws, get the former president elected and pack the courts, among other things. Revisionist history has turned my Star Wars rebel beliefs into elitism and liberal rhetoric.

So I feel a crushing level of "equivocating wealth/power/influence/airtime with manipulation". I blame the uber rich for that lack of leadership, letting us succumb to divisive politics. But I acknowledge that many of them probably witnessed the public making stupid decisions and were just as powerless to stop it as we are. I just wish that one of them would step up and set a better example, instead of behaving as NPCs due to how their wealth is tied up in voting shares. I don't know how they don't know about the dangers of their attachments from a spiritual perspective.

the public doesn't care about the environment in general, they are in a frenzy about prices, inflation is the big boogie man.

so it's not surprising that as long as its not in my backyard it doesn't matter.

and you can see this in other problems too. there's a very unfortunate hivemind-level congnitive dissonance in this, you can easily find a few million very dedicated voices that want action (let's say in foreign policy, trade policy, crime, education, drugs, etc...) and then of course many millions who want low taxes, etc.. and that's how you get half-assed semi-solutions.. out of sight out of mind

of course propaganda works. there's a feedback loop. no doubt about it.

also, regarding commenting vibe, of course it makes sense to advocate for a more progressive taxation/redistribution system. and for more foresight, exactly because of these biases of society. of course many would then raise the usual excuses. the tyranny of the FDA, how public procurement wastes money, the defense budget, etc.

regarding cleanup. trenching is already extremely cheap. sure, for many big diameter pipes it's possible do do it without, and with higher pressure usually the same flow rate is achievable with the smaller plastic pipe. usually the cost is the last "mile", meaning to change the pipes in the buildings. but that's why usually adding these chemicals that prevent the lead from dissolving in water (and thus from leaving the surface of the inside of the pipes) works best. also pretty cheap too. what's expensive is shitty backwater towns with near zero economic value. and that's the real problem, not the lead pipes. the problem is that people are ossified into these hellholes, and then propaganda tells them to be proud of it, as that's real living. and so on.

...

people benefited from cheap prices, of not having to redo pipes (or to replace engines more frequently). was it worth it? I don't think so, but millions would swear that it did!

it's easy to fall into despair, became a libertarian misanthrope because the general public is irredeemably dumb/brainwashed. but it's easy to do the opposite, to say that it would be amazing if everyone would run around with PhDs. but reality is somewhere between. just look at how shitty academia is, and it's definitely not due to a lack of brainpower.

and, well, there's maybe some minimal comfort to he had that in the fact that these same Fortune 500 companies that of course fund a lot of lobbyists also tend to care a bit about their brands, and the same Disney that absolutely botched the last 2-3 SW movies also doesn't want to advertise next to neonazi posts on Musk's X. (and maybe it's just because they are shameless opportunistic amoral bastards who maximize profits through ads depending on public sentiment, but then this means that the same dumb public at least doesn't find neonazi content a good palate cleanser before/after ads. and of course due to historical path dependence even a minority can elect a President and Senate)

I don't object but honestly lead paint is a much bigger issue and I wish we'd invest there instead.

>instead

I wish we could somehow do two things at once.

Does everyone else have a subscription to the Washington post? Could we just have a system where we don’t post pay walled articles?

It seems hacker news community members are okay with posting web archive links (there are none here) in the comments but why are we even playing this game at all? Let’s not post articles without free sources.

I don't disagree. On my mobile browser, though (Cromite), I can disable the Javascript for that site in 3 taps, which fixes the problem.

Usually someone would post a link to the article on a web archive which has the paywall removed, take a look for that.

People post the archive links, so it is fine. Enjoying paid content without paying has been a common thing in the hacker community all the way back to the days of warez on Usenet and BBSs.

It's a long settled issue on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Accessible link: https://wapo.st/3T5QYnt

I'm always surprised that there are people that read Hacker News that don't know how to get around paywalls.

1. The comments on paywalled articles are often (as is the case for this particular story) useful and interesting even if you have not read the article. I don't see why we should be deprived of an interesting thread just because some people might not have access to the article.

2. No one has to read every HN submission and participate in every thread. If a particular thread does require reading the article to get much out of the thread, do what I do--skip it.

3. If #2 is happening a lot with articles from a particular paywalled source, and it sounds like I really would have enjoyed or found the thread useful, that provides a strong hint that maybe that source is one that I should considered subscribing to.

Add this to the custom filter in uBO...

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...

Why? Would we prefer forcing every publication to use and advertiser-only supported model to fund their work?

The problem isn't really the pipes themselves (lead by itself isn't reactive with water), it's the fact that we keep messing with various additive chemistries, which may cause reactions with the lead pipes.

All in all another gov boondoggle to enable another another gov boondoggle framed as "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" panicbait. (Because adults never get lead poisoning, and are immune to its effects completely and utterly). </sarcasm>

Meh.

the EPA could be concerned with lead pipes leaching into the natural environment, but civil engineered lead pipes leaching into drinking water is not the EPA's bailiwick.

The EPA sets drinking water standards. https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/drinking-water-regulations

While I like the idea, I've also "fixed" enough mostly working systems over the years to know that if it's not done carefully, this could cause more problems than it fixes.

Then it should be done properly, rather than not at all, no?

Is it such a terrible thing? If there’s money to make it happen then by all means. Know my home town though it could plow through all that money and get all of one neighborhood worth of service lines replaced. Atrocious inefficiency would be an understatement.

WE NEED MAKE WORK INFRASTRUCTURE DITCH DIGGING JOBS IN THE US

DO THE MATH ON MUNGER'S WEALTH VERSUS WHAT IT COULD DO IF DIRECTLY INVESTED IN LOCAL CCC TYPE PROJECTS.

Why not? Oh, you wanna be the rich class too? Enjoy your crumbling kingdom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com