EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after partial ban | Hacker News Reader

EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after partial ban

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399 pointsanigbrowl393 comments

Mesothelioma from household exposure is very rare, nearly all cases come from industrial exposure, involving chronic exposure to concentrations of airborne particles millions of times higher than you would ever find in a residential setting, even during a renovation that disturbs asbestos.

I looked into this when I discovered some old asbestos paper in my basement that I had abated by professionals (which I always recommend). I was freaking out about my family being exposed to the fibers for years before that, so I went digging for hard numbers. To my surprise, there is almost zero good quantitative data on the risk of mesothelioma from residential asbestos exposure. The best info we have suggests about a doubling of the risk of MM from residential exposure, from about 1 per million person-years to 2.5 per million person years:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...

> However, the chief interest from this study will be in the more than doubling of risk of mesothelioma in men who had lived in an affected house, compared with unexposed males (SIR 2·54, 95% CI 1·02–5·24). ... The background incidence of mesothelioma without exposure to asbestos is very low (highly age-dependent and roughly one case per million person-years), so any rise would be indicative of previous asbestos exposure

Other studies indicate that home renovations that disturb asbestos could increase the risk by about a factor of 5 from baseline, which sounds high until you realize that it means about 5 per million person-years. The base rate is very low! And there is no such thing as zero exposure to asbestos: there are a couple fibers, on average, in every liter of air you breathe. Everybody is constantly exposed to a very small amount of these fibers, and it's not the case that it gives everybody MM:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721955/#:~:tex....

So the bottom line is: get your asbestos abated by professionals, but don't freak out if you have been living with the stuff. It's not the same as being an asbestos miner, your risk is higher but still very low.

> Mesothelioma from household exposure is very rare

> To my surprise, there is almost zero good quantitative data on the risk of mesothelioma from residential asbestos exposure

Love it when comments state something so confidently, yet contradict themselves a few sentences later

There is no contradiction there

There isn't?

Rare but difficult to precisely quantify.

We know the rate of mesothelioma in people with no known occupational exposure, but we have very little quantitative data about how much a given amount of asbestos exposure might increase one's risk. The disease takes decades to develop after exposure.

Deducing that something is rare from limited evidence is really easy. If there is no good evidence regarding something, that default position should be that the thing is rare.

There’s a handy cliche: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In concrete terms a zero is different from a missing value.

The cliche is wrong. The absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Not conclusive evidence.

There are an infinite number of things that don't exist and that we don't have any evidence of. It is nice if we can positively disprove them, but that is not necessary to justify disbelief.

I think the point that are trying to make is that if it was more common, it would be noticeable and more quantifiable. Otherwise, most of the cases seems to have been tracked to industrial exposure.

This is really interesting, thanks.

My parents house (in the EU) was covered in plates of asbestos. As far as I know it only is dangerous when you install / remove it as these plates break and release chemicals to the air. I’m no expert though.

I believe the interaction with asbestos is material, not chemical. It breaks into tiny shards that are light enough to breathe, and sharp enough to cut up your lungs.

Which is why a single exposure will damage your lungs, but it takes lots of cycles of damage and repair to chance into getting cancer.

While true, domestic use is super problematic and balloons any bill. E.g. our house in germany is from 1968. We where lucky and the builder did not use any asbestos so I could do most renovations myself. If you have asbestos, you need specialized equipment and procedures or involve experts. That is really expensive and can easily double or triple your estimated cost. You can ofc ignore it, but especially with small children it seems ill advised to do so. NTM there are fines if you expose the public.

If you involve a specialised removal firm it's super expensive and stalls your project by weeks. I was advised by the builder I could just remove a few plates of asbestos myself, about half a day of work, most of which was spent getting the right plastic bags and then driving them to the correct dump, the actual removal of the asbestos plates took minutes. Used mask etc, but really a single exposure was a very acceptable risk for me to save on cost and time. (There's different types of asbestos, some more dangerous than others, so you should do a bit of research into what you're doing)

Meanwhile in America I am allowed to self-remove asbestos as a homeowner no verifications required. Whereas a commercial builder is required to have certifications.

Another “fun fact,” when the asbestos ban went into place builders were still allowed to use any remaining stock they held in their warehouses. No new product could be purchased. So homes could still be built years later with a now banned substance.

Fascinating bit of law there.

In The Netherlands you can remove asbestos yourself and bring it to the local trash collection and recycling center for free. You do have to get a permit (free, but takes a few days) and follow some simple guidelines for handling and packaging. But, this applies only to private homeowners.

In my case, my house had a facade made of aluminium frames with prefab slabs slotted in. The slabs had a layer of asbestos on the inside. I just slotted the slabs out, packaged them in two layers of plastic and took them to the recycling center.

> nearly all cases come from industrial exposure

That is how my grandfather got mesothelioma. He insulated ships in WWII and didn't have proper protection. He had a rather painful last year of his life.

At this point, I would only allow asbestos when there are no safer alternatives. I didn't know if any cases where asbestos is the only practical option.

While most mesothelioma (a rare cancer) is known to be caused by asbestos and not other agents, asbestos is known to cause other cancers of the lung, larynx, and ovary, with limited evidence of some other cancers as well.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...

These are more common cancers, and not usually possible to map to a precise cause when they occur.

Leading the world in protecting Americans by following the lead of more than 50 countries. That’s my EPA. Good job!

Not sure what purpose the snark serves – the way you phrased your comment seems to imply someone involved claimed they are "leading the world", but that isn't the case.

Not sure what or who your comment serves, at all.

Trying to nudge the conversation into a more productive direction than misleading snark. First rule[1] of the HN comment guidelines.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This helps nothing and you started whining about it.

Yet regardless of your nudging, the conversation moved into a productive and importantly curious discussion, which is one of the most important things when it comes to HN comment sections.

How do you know it is regardless of my nudging?

He’s making fun of the fact that a majority of the US population assumes the US is leading in, quite simply, any area.

Is he making fun of the actual fact or just the majority of the US population? If it's the latter, wouldn't it be more worthwhile to make fun of whatever institutions cause them to believe this simple flattery?

Chuckle and move on. :)

Doesn't really fit in with the "hacker" vibe, though, does it?

I don't think that majority assumes that.

Quite contrary, majority believes US falls back behind on almost everything (as it should be statistically).

You're right, if you include people living outside the US. To those outside its easy to see the flaws.

But I belive the original snark, and explanation, wete referring to the majority of people living inside the US. From that perspective there's an implicit understanding that the US leads the way (in every field) and their approach to society is best (in all contexts.)

This is of course evidenced by the number of people who desire to live there, and hence the immigration issues. (Immigration issues being a uniquely US phenomenon.)

I'd wager the majority inside the US knows that it's behind in many fields but don't know exactly which ones. We learn to disregard people speaking blanket praise but don't learn enough about other countries from our media and schooling to argue against them. From the outside then this looks like most of our population thinks we're the best in every respect, but on the inside there's a very large and growing sentiment of dissatisfaction and pessimism.

No, I mean exactly US residents.

I live in US. I keep hearing stories how everything is better in Europe (they tend to cherry-pick good stories from different EU countries). The only areas where we get a consensus that US leads the way are probably gun rights and large pickup-trucks.

Do you really believe the US doesn’t lead in any area?

Their usage of “any” is clearly different than yours: “any [and all]” versus “any [at all]”.

Their usage is improper. If that was their intention, it should have read “every area”.

Their usage is fine, and I couldn’t have imagined interpreting it any other way until I saw your misunderstanding. But if you’re more interested in correcting arbitrary grammar rules than gaining a better understanding of the conversation you joined, that’s my cue to drop it and go do something better with my time.

It's not my misunderstanding, it's their inability to communicate clearly. I already explained why it's wrong so there's nothing to understand.

yeah, we vote in people, regularly, whose mission it is to dismantle the EPA/FDA/CDC/etc. in the name of "progress"

The basic premise of political conservatism is not progress, it is literally to “conserve” the current status or restore the recent past.

Isn’t the basic premise of political conservatism is to minimize public intrusion in private lives? Conserving the primacy of the individual rather than the collective?

With any global term/movement there will be variations, but it generally started with support for maintaining monarchy and aristocracy.

2 points to make on that:

1) "Conservatism" these days would arguably be a US phenomenon as leading democracy in the Anglophone world. They certainly didn't get started supporting a monarchy.

2) And it is really interesting to note that, while I think monarchies are stupid, it was a remarkably good strategy. As far as I know (my history might be about to betray me) the UK didn't have an equivalent of the Terror after the French revolution or the period where the French killed off people like Lavoisier. To say nothing of the debacles in places like Russia (Communists) or Germany (Nazis) when they moved away from monarchism.

The UK probably should get rid of the King; but in hindsight a slow transition is arguably the cleverer path. It is a complex topic; the aristocrats in Europe are systematically underwhelming.

Italy and Spain kept their king while being a fascist and sort-of-fascist country respectively, so I’m not sure the theory is correct.

The UK didn’t have the Terror, but afaik it did have at least a civil war because of the monarchy, a few centuries ago.

Rather than the monarchy in itself, I suspect it’s the monarch(s) that make it or break it…

>The UK didn’t have the Terror, but afaik it did have at least a civil war because of the monarchy, a few centuries ago.

Cromwell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_English_Civil_War

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_English_Civil_War

Yeah, ask an English catholic…

At this point its hard to understand the premise of conservatism. It seems to just be outrage and pretty much anything and everything.

I'll avoid suggesting the root is racism, but more and more its becoming harder to do that. Between the pretty blatant racist rants of the leader, to the embrace of far-right fundamentalists, it seems like a common thread.

As for public intrusion of private lives, even that seems hazy. Where does public intrusion end and private life start? For example are private medical choices a matter of public policy? Are the choices about which books to read at the library public or private?

In a two party system many voters can be left without a home when their preferred party swings off in a different direction. And while no voter is going to always be happy with their chosen group, the risk of homelessness goes up as the preferred choice swings away from traditional premises.

For many conservatives (small c) the current direction of Conservative Leaders (big C) is not ok. But changing allegiance is mentally traumatic.

I think your premise can be both accurate, and currently invalid. It sure doesn't seem like "minimal public intrusion" right now. If you had to decide which party represents "live and let live", which party wants personal freedoms, which party prioritizes individual choices, well, I'd argue it's not the nominally "conservative" one.

I concur with everything you said, and to be clear, I wasn’t specifically referring to big C Conservatives, GOP or otherwise, which I agree are straying from small c conservative values. I was referring specifically to political conservatism which I understood to be about minimal intrusion in private affairs. It would appear no mainstream political parties still stand for this.

Im thinking Libitarianism is perhaps more into "individual freedoms" than conservatism, but there's certainly overlap.

If I had to put a fence around it, I'd suggest the root of conservatism is more "govt working in the interests of the rich/aristocracy/establishment." The "people in power before there was a vote".

Charitably described as "keep things the way they are", or less charitably as "return to when our group had riches and power".

So "labor" is getting govt to work for the masses, "conservative" us getting govt to work for those already established, and libitarianism is scaling govt back, and letting people do whatever they like.

Political parties try and be all things to all men.

In some countries (where there are more than two parties) there's more likely to be different parties to cover these bases.

No, that's libertarianism. Libertarianism and conservatism often overlap, especially in the US (which has a long tradition of limited gov't to conserve), but are not the same thing.

As a self-identified conservative, if I had to give as short a summary as possible of what it means to me: we (US, other developed nations) have a pretty good thing going. The least well off 10% here live better lives than the top 10% of a large number of places. That didn't happen by magic or accident, it happened because the people who preceded ud, over centuries of history, made some very good choices. We should figure out what they did right, and then keep doing it.

> The least well off 10% here live better lives than the top 10% of a large number of places.

You're absolutely blind if you think that. Tell me, in what place do the top 10% live worse life than the bottom 10% in the USA? Keep in mind, the bottom decile of income in the USA is $10k/year - think about how a person that earns that lives.

> the bottom decile of income in the USA is $10k/year

That's before taxes and transfers. It's much more than that once you account for them.

Meanwhile, around 50% of the world's households make less than $10,000/yr: https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...

1. Now try to figure out how well people can live on $10k a year in most places.

2. We're talking about comparing with the top 10%. Try to follow the context before replying.

>> We should figure out what they did right, and then keep doing it.

Slavery, settler colonialism modulo a bit of indigenous genocide, toppling democracies and supporting dictators all over the place, exploiting the natural world until it cried "mommy" and then keeping at it until we now have a gigantic environmental and climate crisis, and let's not forget investing more than anyone else on the world's most powerful military which was then used to invade agrarian societies armed with their grandparents' hand-me-down pea-shooters, and of course dropping two atom bombs and killing a couple hundred civilians in one of the worst atrocities of the worst war in history just to show who's boss.

etc etc etc.

Edit: as a matter of fact, the US did get something very right that everyone else keeps getting wrong: it invested in human capital by keeping its borders relatively open during at least some periods of time, so that people could keep coming in that eventually became the most dynamic sections of society. Very few others have done that, and almost nobody got it as right as the US. And yet, it is the "conservatives" today in the US that try their damnedest to kick the door shut against the windfall of human capital that keeps dropping in their lap, even as they keep outsourcing the US' most productive industries to one of its biggest competitors, China. That's not conservative, it's reactionary and completely idiotic to boot.

>and of course dropping two atom bombs and killing a couple hundred civilians in one of the worst atrocities of the worst war in history just to show who's boss.

It'd be helpful if you read about historical events before adopting an opinion on them:

https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-Invasion/...

I read the blurb on the page you linked me to and I don't understand why you say that. Could you please clarify why you linked me to that book so I don't have to guess?

It’s quite easy to get a summary of a book. Open minds create futures.

Giangreco's book explains why what you said isn't correct.

I said a few things, as you quoted from my comment:

>and of course dropping two atom bombs and killing a couple hundred civilians in one of the worst atrocities of the worst war in history just to show who's boss.

Is the book saying that:

a) two atom bombs were not dropped,

b) that they didn't kill a couple hundred civilians,

c) that it wasn't one of the worst atrocities in WWII,

d) that WWII was not one of the worst wars in history, or

e) that it didn't show how's boss?

or all of the above? To be honest I can't see any of the points above discussed in the summary of the book on Amazon. Explain?

Establishment Democrats and Republicans are the conservative parties in this sense. Tea party and their anarcho-capitalist descendants aren't really conservative.

Either party is not a monolith -- this has become increasingly clear. We can and should support candidates in primaries who are more aligned with us.

I suspect that a lot of people who say they want to do this have a delusion that at some point in the past the whole country/world was aligned with the fantasy envisioned in their head.

In July 1989 the EPA issued the Asbestos Ban and Phase-Out Rule, which would have been a total ban on asbestos. The incredibly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1991 that ban was invalid in Corrosion Proof Fittings v. Environmental Protection Agency, because the EPA failed to show that it was the "least burdensome alternative" in regulating asbestos. The George HW Bush administration chose not to appeal the ruling.

Over the past three decades the EPA believes it has finally done the work to show that this ban is the "least burdensome alternative," but there is no guarantee that the courts will agree this time either. The politicization of the judiciary is not new, certainly, but seems to have gotten worse over the past three decades.

> 5th Circuit Court of Appeals

Ah yes. Well-known for its general view that the United States is a diktat-by-judge, and that mere laws are irrelevant.

The 5th circuit has become a joke over the past decade or so. I'm sure all the other circuits refer to it as a way on how not to conduct themselves.

According to the article, this ban is "thanks to amendments that Congress made in 2016 to fix the Toxic Substances Control Act".

Wouldn't a change in law override the judges? (Unless the judges based their ruling on the constitution, which doesn't sound like the case here.)

In this case, likely yes

To be clear, hell yea it would.

what the hell is wrong with specifically the 5th Circuit Court? they're in the news now too because the SC is fed up with their right leaning rules

The US is actually the leader here, but typical of the discourse on HN, people love to promote their own ideas above facts.

This ban eliminates immediately all use in the US, including chlorine plants.

The 2005 EU “ban” on asbestos has an exception for chlorine plants. This will eventually be phased out in 1 July 2025.

Jeeze EU, get with the times! Why does the US have to demonstrate the right path before you take it? /s

https://chemycal.com/news/e6b71d43-1892-454c-80a9-740207f556...

Asbestos has been completely banned in Australia since 2003.

Australia also probably has some of the worst deployments of asbestos in the developed world. Drive around even nice neighborhoods in Sydney and you’ll see plenty of cracking and breaking “fibro”, a cement asbestos sheet. Canberra is full of asbestos. They had to completely remove an asbestos mining town (Wittenoom) from the map because it was so contaminated.

There is a ton of asbestos currently in Australian households. Plenty of aussies drink water collected in tanks off of asbestos cement roofs.

Yes - unfortunately we have a lot of leftover usages of asbestos.

Historically, it was used a lot. My father even remembers playing around in the bush as a kid, and using asbestos for chalk a bunch of time to mark stuff on trees. My friends dad also remembers coming home covered in asbestos after work a bunch of times too.

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment about seeing asbestos in nice neighbourhoods. It depends how you define nice.

Asbestos was banned in 2003,but hasn't been used in housing since the 80s, so it's only going to be in older developments that you'll really encounter it.

Your wording regarding "plenty of Aussies" is also unclear to me. The numbers as a percentage are going to be very low, but it undoubtedly is a thing.

I was visiting a relative in their $3M+ house in Bronte and saw plenty of it. Not in the front facades of the homes, but drive through the back alleys, and you can spot some in < 1 min. I remember an uncle there who's neighbor had a fibro cement mail box which was built into some stone work.

I agree my usage of "plenty" was more in absolute terms. It is probably thousands to tens of thousands, which is small in percentage terms. I also spent a lot of time on Australian farms, and they have lots of asbestos sheets buried in places. Most farmers would rather pile it up or bury it then pay the costs of having it removed properly.

The new ban does not immediately eliminate all use in the US, it allows up to twelve years from now (depending on number of facilities) for companies to phase out their usage, including chlorine plants.

Not that I care about downvotes, but it’s interesting that posting actual facts, correcting a highly upvoted false comment, gets you down-votes.

It's because you come off as the typical arrogant american.

And the comment I replied to came across as the typical “America bad” stereotype.

Yet it’s heavily upvoted?

We’re both wrong. Apparently Australia is the actual leader.

Sometimes the US is suprising to me. The EU has done that 2005, getting 25 countries on board. Germany in 1993.

Then again, in a free market, why regulate at all? I understand the regulation in the EU, but with all the free market fundamentalism, why is the US regulating this? Shouldn't people decide if they want to buy stuff with asbestos or live in an asbestos home? Or get a job with asbestos exposure?

If you believe in free market fundamentalism, why regulate anything? Just label things.

Forcing companies to label things is government over-reach.

If government isn’t protecting the people it represents, why have one?

It's not like the people are asked, or have a choice on the matter of having a government

Lots of things pre-date their users: plates, wheels, farming, aeroplanes. The lack of choice in the matter isn’t in itself a reason to discount the phenomenon. The nature of the phenomenon is more important. In the case of government (or lack), its nature should inform its form and behaviour.

My earlier point was more like “what is this government doing if not looking after those it represents?” If its not doing as it should, we should change it.

(I’m open to ideas of anarchistic self determination. Most “good” implementations seem to have some form of coalition and/or committee-with-sphere-of-responsibility which looks like government if you squint so I’m a bit hazy how you do it. Happy to learn)

Can’t tell whether this is ironic or not.

In case it isn’t: the US has the best politicians money can buy.

So things that are bad for the general public but good for a certain minority of wealthy individuals take longer to take effect than in other countries. But most eventually do pass.

EPA isn't run by politicians but by normal workers also known as buerocrates.

While I'm no expert, I'm under the impression that the leadership of most 3 letter agencies can participate in the "revolving door", where bought and paid for politicians can extend their own benefits and the benefits to their owners by taking high paid, leadership roles in certain agencies. This leads to most agencies having the same kind of "is someone paying me not to do this" culture around actually fixing things.

> If you believe in free market fundamentalism, why regulate anything? Just label things.

I'll answer like you're not sarcastic.

In the free market, things won't be labeled. Why? "Just don't buy the products without labels!". What if 100% of the available products isn't labelled, because you have no one in position of power (those who sell those products or houses) that benefits from it. You have to buy homes anyway, it's not something you can skip.

Also, realistically, no actor in the free market has 100% of the knowledge in existence at any moment. Some (and probably most TBH) people will not know that asbestos is carcinogen.

Now, I believe you were sarcastic, because I can't think you imagined that there are no power dynamics at play.

I'm not sarcastic, why would I? I really don't understand how you can be for free market fundamentalism and for regulation of asbestos at the same time.

From watching the US from the outside and from several visits, it looks like a huge amount of people in the US are free market fundamentalists. People did label me socialist for suggesting market regulation.

You're right. I haven't thought that one through.

Consumers could band together and pay labs for lists of products, or subscribe to a labeling service.

Or if there is a market, companies will label their products for a segment.

(If it isn't clear, I'm no free market fundementalist)

> From watching the US from the outside and from several visits, it looks like a huge amount of people in the US are free market fundamentalists. People did label me socialist for suggesting market regulation.

Honestly there’s a very loud vocal minority here on things like this. Most people in the US are not free market fundamentalists.

There are still things sold in the US that are harmful for you. Look at cigarettes. Smoking in the US is at an all-time low; part of that is e-cigarettes, but a large part is the constant education and reminders here that it’s bad for you. If it were up to the free market, as it used to be, cigarette manufacturers would not label their products at all. That’s what they used to do, and far more people smoked back then—sans forced education and labeling.

And the so-called free market fundamentalists rarely follow free market principles.

Yes and:

Open markets require rules. And some referees.

Fair rules and impartial referees are anathema to the plantation class. They prefer incumbency protection enforced by the government at the expense of everyone else.

Regulation is a scary word for rules.

Socialism is a scary word for collective action.

"Free markets" is doublespeak for might makes right; with the "freedom" to act without consequences.

Hey. I'm sorry for bothering you in this thread. I found your old comment about your business processes built around literate programming and I can't reply there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988792

Is this approach documented anywhere? Honestly, this would be a cool blog post. I'd love to know more. I use org-mode for literate programming, but jupiter would do as well I guess.

So, my question is more about the business side of it.

People in favor of the most free market possible will always blame individuals for making bad choices. You're in a bad health, because you're overweight? It's your fault.

But I don't believe in that. I believe it's structures fault. I believe that there are already people who are more powerful than others, because they're shareholders, they already have money or their parents do, they own physical properties such as lands or houses, etc. And those people in power, if you make the market even more free, they will just increase the power they have over others. Some other will randomly (because they're lucky) also aquire wealth sometimes, and become more powerful, but it's highly unlikely according to many scientific studies.

And I didn't even talk about other kind of things that can lead to more inequalities, such as the skin color, your gender, whether you're trans or not, etc. It has been shown (in the US) that even well born black people are disavantaged at school compared to white people. So being rich alone isn't enough. You just have to check the top 10 of richest people in the world, and see how similar they are: cis, white, men.

So that's where I believe they're wrong: the "free market" isn't free (or as they say meritocratic) if you don't first do a big reset, and make everyone equal first. Which can't happen realistically.

Are you trolling, or what? The US has mountains and mountains of regulations about every possible thing. You can't even receive money to cut someone's hair without a certification. Just because other countries have yet more doesn't mean it's surprising that one more thing is banned.

Asbestos is a wonder material, and insanely cheap. They put it in everything from roads to siding for homes to insulation for ventilation ducts, and everything inbetween. And it's "totally safe" for these purposes - so long as it is never touched again. Once a housing siding tile is cracked or broken by say, a baseball, it degrades and starts being released into the local environment.

So you have a highly toxic material, but it's encapsulated and totally safe for 30 years, well past the average age of home ownership. "It's somebody elses problem"! So the result is, every house built in 1940-1970 has asbestos in it, and while their children weren't directly exposed to asbestos, now it is breaking down and our generation (and future generations, asbestos sticks around for a very, very long time - that's part of it's "wonder material" story) now have to deal with the problem.

So yes, just label it "hey this stuff is crazy toxic, but not for your family, and not the family after, so there's no risk to you, and no economic downside since it won't impact your property value" so it ends up being purchased as both the best and cheapest building material, but now you're building 250,000 houses that double as toxic waste dumps for future generations

Just labeling asbestos as toxic and letting the market decide, in this specific situation, is peak boomerism.

I'm curious as to why they banned the use of asbestos by the chlor-alkali industry. It seems that the asbestos is relatively inert (i.e. it's not going anywhere), perhaps they had some evidence that there were asbestos fibers getting into the final products?

That stuff almost always gets into the lungs of the workers making it. Oftentimes stuff gets banned because nobody can handle it properly.

Its actually kind of like nuclear power. The electricity isn't more dangerous to consumers, but observation of the mortal nature of man lead to the conclusion that it'd be better to keep corporations away from it.

If we had kept up the pace of nuclear construction, we would have finished decarbonizing our electric grid by now. Instead, we've barely started. Was it worth the extra 100Gt of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Yes. Extra CO2 and global warming is far less likely to scuttle your reelection attempts, and voter deaths don't matter if they're diffuse enough no-one will point their finger at you.

Diffuse isn't the most important bit, the main point is that they happen during the next election cycle.

People clearly prefer slow silent mass death (and messing up world for good for grandchildren) over few-per-century bigger accidents (when literally everybody in the world takes notes and massively improves).

Similar to car massive amount of death (not even going into secondary and tertiary effects) and nobody bats an eye, even if they know personally somebody who died like that. Yet every single plane crash and tons of folks are getting panic attacks.

Human psychology fascinates me, but at the same time makes me outright sad. So much potential often wasted on utter stupidities, and even worse - its trivial for skilled people to manipulate masses into literally shooting off their own feet with 12 gauge shotgun buckshot, just play the fear tune well enough for long enough.

I think you might be interested in Adam Curtis' "century of the self" if long documentaries are your thing.

See also, economic policy of the last 100 years or so.

I think you're right to be sad about it, and I would add "deeply concerned" as well. Our society is at a point where the most dangerous risks are ones that the human mind is pretty bad at reasoning about. That's a big problem, to put it mildly.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, bio threats, and runaway AI all pose immense risks, at scales that are hard to reason about intuitively. Hopefully we develop ways to better manage current and future risks before a big one blows up.

Yearly added renewable generation (not capacity, but actual generation) is already much larger than added nuclear power ever was.

Strange, that same observation and the corresponding 3 million worldwide deaths yearly didn’t change our attitude towards fossil fuel combustion and its air pollution.

Even more remarkable, the fact that nuclear is kept out of the hands of corporations, but the oil industry is not might have been the cause that the latter put so much money and effort into the nuclear fear campaign.

More people die of fossil fuel air pollution per year than have died of COVID. We might have saved more lives during the lock down by the reduction in pollution than the actual virus containment.

> Strange, that same observation and the corresponding 3 million worldwide deaths yearly didn’t change our attitude towards fossil fuel combustion and its air pollution.

Stranger still, alcohol is still legal even though there's "no safe level of consumption"[1].

[1] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...

Every activity carries risk of one form or another.

True, but as we remove various forms of risks and prolong life, for sure there will be a point in the future where our 200-year-living descendants will say: why were those idiots actively, massively and collectively poisoning themselves?

Probably not. They’ll understand it was the best we could do at the time, just like we understand that about our ancestors.

In a world where a decent amount of people are teetotalers, your explanation strikes me as optimistic :-)

I don't understand. Are you saying it is good that people are teetotalers and that is an example of doing your best?

Yeah, since there are multiple studies that show that alcohol in any quantity is bad for you. People are (slowly) poisoning themselves as replacement for therapy or lack of a support network.

It's different when someone wants to put something into their own body vs someone wants to put something into the air and water we all share. Stop pretending it isn't.

> 3 million worldwide deaths yearly

Is this a count or a statistic?

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p...

So, a retrospective estimate, based on a community maintained model, constructed from historical satellite data, that relies on too many other parameters to be taken seriously in this (or any other) context.

Meanwhile, an actual control experiment could easily be conducted anywhere on earth, and is never even approached by these "model only scientists."

>the fact that nuclear is kept out of the hands of corporations

American nuclear plants are ran by corporations.

Vastly more people have died from hydro accidents, let alone coal pollution, than have ever died from all the world’s nuclear accidents combined.

The very same meticulous regulatory oversight that make plants safe makes them impossible to get through permitting cost-effectively. The result of the "soft ban" are a number of extremely safe plants that it's not economical to make more of. You could hypothetically enforce a similar "soft ban" for leaded gasoline or asbestos - by requiring elaborate filtration, containment and disposal procedures, plus monitoring and redundant process oversight. They'd never show up on consumer vehicles or in homes, but they may show up in a handful of specialty applications, complete with extraordinary amounts of paperwork and large government departments. Some people might start talking about "clean fiber," or "safe leaded."

P.S. if you are wondering what's wrong with allowing corporations to take on endeavors with a risk of causing large amounts of damage, it's because the value of a company isn't allowed to go negative due to bankruptcy and the corporate veil. If you're able to incorporate, you can profit from a series of "-$1,000 if I lose, +$1 if I win," bets, because creating $1000 liabilities on an entity with no money in the bank costs little more than the equipment you'd be forced to liquidate.

China seems to be building next gen reactors in reasonable amounts of time.

Let's check again in 50 years, after the safety systems have had time to deteriorate, and we've had Chinese Glasnost for a look into the archives from 2056. (The Soviet Union would have kept Chernobyl a secret if Sweden hadn't detected the radiation. If the accident had been limited to the boundaries of Ukraine, it might never have been revealed as long as the regime lasted.)

Virtually all plants being built in China today are third-gen evolutions of proven second-gen PWRs, themselves very safe.

Hiding a Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster would be far more difficult today; even in China, total news blackouts are a lot more difficult to pull off than they used to be. And the designs in use are inherently a lot safer and more conservative than the RBMK type (which was really pretty innovative and impressive for the time, if you ignore the unfortunate tendency to explode, but certainly _not_ conservative).

It doesn't have to be Chernobyl level which are unlikely. It could just be radioactive waste contamination in ground water or things like that.

> The Soviet Union would have kept Chernobyl a secret if Sweden hadn't detected the radiation

they would try but it would leak one way or another. Simply too many people involved...

Chernobyl was not a result of safety systems deteriorating over a long period of operation. We have plenty of reactors in the world that have operated for decades and their safety systems still work just fine.

Chernobyl was the result of an insane reactor design (positive void coefficient of reactivity and no secondary containment) which then had uncontrolled experiments run on it during operation. Nobody is going to repeat that bonehead move.

Fun fact, there were four reactors at Chernobyl. Only one - Unit 4 - was destroyed in the flagship incident. The other three were retrofitted after the incident and continued to produce power (relatively) safely for many years. Unit 2 was shut down in 1991 after a turbine fire. Unit 1 was decommissioned in 1996. Unit 3 was decommission in 2000 after the international community forced their hand in exchange for funding the New Safe Containment sarcophagus over Unit 4.

I believe there are still 7 (retrofitted) RBMK reactors in use today. Kursk-3 and 4, Leningrad-3 and 4, and Smolensk 1-3. Last one won't be shut down until 2034.

>Nobody is going to repeat that bonehead move.

Maybe not that exact one, but curious humans continue to do boneheaded stuff.

> ...it'd have to involve a serious overhaul of the very concepts of corporations and liability in America

Don't insurance companies solve this problem? Require the nuclear corporation to have liability insurance by regulation. Then the liability is shifted to an underwriter who has much more diversified risk.

That sounds like a great idea, if you can get it implemented. Policymakers seem to be going in the opposite direction with things like tort reform (dollar value limitations on damages), and insurers who make exceptions for "acts of God," like major natural disasters. Hundred-billion-dollar insurance policies on the habitability of areas several counties in expanse, along with courts willing to resettle entire cities as part of treble damages is far from the system we have! These astounding things would be necessary to fully replace regulation with liability, even for the often-seen-as-less-apocalyptic chemical industry, which is nonetheless capable of killing thousands in extremis, and that would have to be insured.

There'd just be a run down to lowest policy price, and then after a disaster the government would have to bail out. Which it does with glee.

They would solve the problem by making nuclear power too expensive for anyone to consider. Insurance companies don't like risks they can't quantify reliably. They either won't underwrite such risks at all, or they charge unreasonable premiums.

The risks of nuclear power are still largely unknown, as there have been only two major disasters over a few decades. Both of them cost ~$200 billion, at least according to some estimates. We don't know how much worse the reasonable worst case could be. Chernobyl and Fukushima were also one-off disasters with specific causes. Insurance companies would also have to be prepared for multiple disasters in a short period of time caused by systemic issues in the design of a particular reactor type.

> The risks of nuclear power are still largely unknown, as there have been only two major disasters over a few decades.

No, the risks of nuclear power are very well known, as there have been only two major disasters over quite a few decades, and the root causes of both of them are well known and easily avoidable.

> We don't know how much worse the reasonable worst case could be.

Yes, we do. We know that Chernobyl was worse than any reasonable worst case for any other reactor, because nobody is going to build another reactor with a positive void coefficient of reactivity and with no secondary containment, and then run uncontrolled experiments on it. And we know that Fukushiman was a reasonable worst case, because it subjected a just shut down reactor to zero decay heat removal for an extended period, and that is going to be the consequence of the worst possible accident that could happen to a running reactor, since any such accident will shut the reactor down.

In other words, in a sane world, the risks of nuclear power would be more insurable than the risks of, say, coal power, precisely because the nuclear risks are contained. No insurance company is going to sign up to liability for deaths due to respiratory failure from breathing coal dust over a period of many years. But in our insane world, we don't hold anyone accountable for such risks, so we end up treating nuclear, which is far safer per unit of energy generated than any source except solar, as if it were the riskiest of all sources.

Yep, it's a perception issue that isn't helped by the fact that to normies, "nuclear" means "bomb", and the oil and gas industries have massively more lobbying dollars to get politicians to push their solutions above all others.

> No, the risks of nuclear power are very well known, as there have been only two major disasters over quite a few decades, and the root causes of both of them are well known and easily avoidable.

I think the statement that you were responding to would be better phrased as: "The risks of nuclear power are still largely unknown, since there have been only two major disasters over a few decades." Insurance companies are typically okay with insuring against high cost, high frequency occurrences as long as they can quantify it. If they can quantify it, they can set a price on it.

It is also worth noting that insurance companies were among the first adopters of digital computers because the better they can quantify frequencies and costs, the better they can set rates.

> I think the statement that you were responding to would be better phrased as: "The risks of nuclear power are still largely unknown, since there have been only two major disasters over a few decades."

That was how I interpreted the statement when I responded to it.

> Insurance companies are typically okay with insuring against high cost, high frequency occurrences as long as they can quantify it.

Insurance companies are also good at specifying insurable risks and providing incentives to the insured to manage them properly, even for rare but high cost events. That includes refusing to insure people who the insurance companies judge to not have good judgment. For example, no sane insurance company would ever have insured Chernobyl given its insane reactor design, nor would any insurance company have agreed to pay a claim when they found that the reactor operator ran an uncontrolled experiment on the reactor and that was what caused the accident.

As for Fukushima, as I commented elsewhere upthread, an insurer covering a reactor in an earthquake/tsunami zone would probably either not include tsunami inundation coverage in the policy, or would require a separate rider that would be priced separately. And such a rider would also have a list of requirements for coverage, which would include things like "don't site your backup power and switchgear where a tsunami might inundate it".

In other words, as I pointed out, the risks of nuclear power are well known, because we understand how reactors work and what the failure modes are and insurers therefore know how to write policies that set the right incentives for managing risk. That is true even though we have had only two major disasters over quite a few decades; in fact, as I pointed out, the fact that we have had only two such disasters, and both of them were due to root causes that are easily avoidable in the future, is a reason to be more confident that the risks are well understood and insurable.

Three Mile island was very close to being a major disaster, and upon further review had more radiation escape than was initially disclosed.

The list of all of these nuclear incidents is interesting, many of them seem to be various components of the system exploding for various reasons, which could have led to horrible outcomes but luckily did not: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide...

> Three Mile island was very close to being a major disaster

No, it wasn't. In fact, the plant operators made just about every possible mistake they could have made--and still no harm to the general public. TMI was actually an illustration of how good design of safety systems can protect the general public even when reactor operators make multiple bonehead mistakes. Unfortunately the media narrative, as in so many other cases, drastically misrepresented what actually happened.

> and upon further review had more radiation escape than was initially disclosed.

Yes, but still zero harm to the general public.

> many of them seem to be various components of the system exploding for various reasons, which could have led to horrible outcomes but luckily did not

I do not see any incidents with commercial power reactors that fit this description.

You are talking about risks in a narrow technical sense. Insurance companies are more interested in the consequences of the disaster.

A reasonable worst case is something that could plausibly happen once in a century in the entire world with 10x more reactors than today. Maybe the reactor is located close to a major city. Maybe the company operating it has become incompetent and corrupt. Maybe the weather conditions are particularly unfavorable and most of the fallout goes towards the city. Maybe the meltdown was caused by a natural disaster that also makes evacuating the city harder. Maybe there are also widespread protests happening for an unrelated reason.

Or maybe the worst case is the incompetent and corrupt power company upgrading its reactors in a way that leads to a large number of meltdowns.

Remember that we are talking about what happens when the power company cannot pay and we don't want to socialize the risks. This is not something where the insurance company is allowed to set the terms. If courts and/or politicians ultimately determine that the power company is liable for $1 trillion, but its assets were only worth $100 billion, the insurance company must cover the rest.

That is a mistaken view; he's actually talking about liability. The risk of nuclear is smaller than the damage of the status quo, but it is so unexpected that we hold people liable when it materialises.

The damage from coal (not risk because the risk is technically 0 - the bad outcome is guaranteed by design) is substantially greater than the risk of a nuclear disaster. We just don't hold anyone liable for fossil fuel damage because then society would collapse. It is pretty stupid that we don't move to nuclear and highlights the inability of the anti-nuclear crowd to do cost-benefit analysis.

> Insurance companies don't like risks they can't quantify reliably. They either won't underwrite such risks at all, or they charge unreasonable premiums.

I believe there is a gap in the market for a new type of insurance company which regulates/inspects the insured to reduce the risks (and hence increase their profit margins while premiums get lower).

In the US we get 20% of our power from nuclear, we have for 40 years, and most of those plants were built before we invented safety. How much risk for 100%? <5x. Probably much less, because we learn.

I'm not sure what you mean by, "invented safety," but the NCR keeps a close watch on old plants as well as the new ones.

Some levels of safety must be designed in, and those designs have the attractive property that they do not necessarily rely on continued organizational competence. Not that that's a bad thing. The more layers of defense the merrier, of course.

Some designs are resistant to one failure, reactor runaways; but the larger and more expensive problem is keeping radioactivated coolant and parts out of our waterways and waste/recycling streams.

If only the overall amount of waste were small, the transport secure, and we had geological formations in which to bury the stuff that by their very dissolvable-but-not-dissolved existence proved that water left only by evaporation!

Ah well. I'm just glad that renewables are finally moving forward. Better late than never.

> Better late than never.

Most likely too late as we kept burning fossil fuels too long and we are now facing the danger of civilization-ending climate change. All thanks to doomer propaganda like whatshisface's.

Amazing how powerful fear is - to manipulate and keep people down.

I come to the conclusion that the results will most likely be "civilisation supressing" worst case. It won't be fun but we won't end up in caves or extinct.

And I'd add that nuclear power is worse here than even standard capitalism. In the US, the federal government provides a massive subsidy in the form of free insurance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

And that's before we get to all of the other subsidies, cataloged here: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-via...

I'm a big fan of free and fair markets, and think that they have been woefully underapplied in recent decades. Happily there's an uptick in antitrust regulation, so maybe we're moving in the right direction.

All regulated industries receive liability breaks as "compensation" for being regulated. For example, many classes of product approved by the FDA are considered immune from liabilities related to dangers discovered in application[0], in particular, medical devices[1]. I agree that it is likely to distort the markets and incentivize regulatory capture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDA_preemption [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riegel_v._Medtronic,_Inc.

Do you have more examples for this "all"? There are a lot of regulated industries out there, and I haven't heard of liability exemptions for them. E.g., food is highly regulated, but there are plenty of lawsuits over that. Ditto cars. Or banks. Or airplanes.

From what I've seen, I think things like the Price-Anderson Act are less about universal liability protections for regulated activities, and more about special pleading by people with money. It seems to me that the correct response for "this is so dangerous nobody will insure it" is not "well fuck it, go ahead and the government will cover your losses."

> In the US, the federal government provides a massive subsidy in the form of free insurance

While I'm no fan of this act on general principles and would be fine with seeing it repealed, to call it a "massive subsidy" ignores the fact that, as the Wikipedia article you link to notes, the secondary insurance provided under it has never been used. Every claim has been within the amount of primary insurance coverage, which is bought on the open insurance market at normal rates. This is strong evidence that nuclear power is in fact an ordinary insurable risk and the government does not need to take measures like this act.

No, insurance doesn't work like that. The cost of the Fukushima disaster is something like $200 billion. An insurer isn't going to say, "Well gosh, no US plant has ever had a problem, so we're happy to write a $250 billion policy for the same price as a $15 billion policy." ($15 billion being the liability cap beyond which taxpayers are on the hook.)

The subsidy here is the price difference between having full insurance and price of only having to insure to the cap, cumulatively since 1957, for every nuclear plant in the US. It's hard to put a number on that, but it's wildly larger than zero.

> The cost of the Fukushima disaster is something like $200 billion.

Yes, and the root cause is well known and easily avoidable, so any insurer can simply require that it is not present in an insured system--in this case, that backup generators and switchgear for decay heat removal are sited where they can't be inundated by a tsunami. Exactly as the backup generators and switchgear for all other reactors at the same site were.

In fact, that very observation highlights a problem with the absence of insurance: nobody was independently checking for exposure to risk. An insurer would have asked why the backup generators and switchgear for that one reactor were sited differently from all the others at the site before agreeing to provide coverage.

Also, insurance is not necessarily blanket coverage for everything at a single price. An insurer of a reactor might not include tsunami inundation in the policy--or might require a separate rider, priced separately, for that particular risk, which will have a different risk profile than other risks associated with the reactor.

> The subsidy here is the price difference between having full insurance and price of only having to insure to the cap

While this was true back in 1957, when there was no real data on commercial nuclear reactor operational risks, that is not the case now and has not been the case for quite some time. I would expect the fact that no claims have gone over the cap for decades to be reflected in pricing for insurance up to the cap being basically the same as it would be for insurance to a higher maximum liability.

OTOH, if insurance for this particular risk is not a very competitive market--which it might well not be precisely because of government interference in this area--then the "subsidy" the government is providing is just canceling out what would otherwise be an unwarranted increase in premiums by insurers who effectively have monopoly pricing power.

All that said, I'll reiterate that I would be fine with having this law repealed and letting nuclear compete in a free market with other energy sources--of course provided that we treat all those other energy sources the same and the government does not favor or penalize any of them. I just think that nuclear would do better in such a regime than many others appear to think.

> root cause is well known and easily avoidable

Your belief is that American insurers carefully check not only that particular risk but all other potentially catastrophic risks for every reactor they insure? I'd like to know the basis for that belief.

> I would expect the fact that no claims have gone over the cap for decades to be reflected in pricing for insurance up to the cap being basically the same as it would be for insurance to a higher maximum liability.

I see. And what's your expertise such that your personal belief is relevant to what actually happens here?

The tricky bit about nuclear construction today isn’t really _safety_ so much as public acceptance; you’ll get tied up for decades in disputes which are nothing in particular to do with the safety regulation, and everything to do with public opposition.

China and Korea manage to build nuclear plants under budget with no significant accidets to date. So it's empirically possible

Death rate is just one measure for safety, there are also other ways of harm like evacuation.

Another way risks of nuclear are underestimated are compound effects over long durations. A million years and a thousand years are easily grouped together under very long, but at a incidence of once per thousand years it's the difference between 1 and 1000.

Vastly more electricity has been supplied by hydro. Nuclear is tiny.

... no, it's not. They're similar order of magnitude. Nuclear provides about 10% of global electricity, and hydro around 17%. In the US nuclear is about 18% while hydro is around 6%. [1]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Hydro actively saves lives by reducing flooding. It’s net death toll is negative.

While you are correct, this is one of those cases where statistics can be misleading.

"The other source which is heavily influenced by a few large-scale accidents is hydropower. Its death rate since 1965 is 1.3 deaths per TWh. This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind." [1]

While there are reasons for and against nuclear and hydro, their safety difference is not material.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I mean, you could probably say the same thing about nuclear - its dominated by a small number of very bad accidents like chernobyl.

Yes, both are inherently safe with only a small number of mishaps. From a safety point of view they are intrinsically "the same".

More people have died from wind turbines than in all the nuclear accidents combined.

Here’s some data from just Scotland: https://scotlandagainstspin.org/turbine-accident-statistics/

It is hard to say how many people died from chernobyl. Some accounts say more than 30k(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...)

Your link shows ~200 from wind turbines.

Absolutely not, the USCEAR report is pretty much the gold standard, and the number is no more than 4,000. I've read the report and I'd suggest if you're curious that you do the same. The 4,000 number includes fully realized expected number of people who would contract cancer in their lifetimes, etc. And it uses the contested and very pessimistic linear no-threshold dose response model for very low doses. It also includes increase in suicide risk due to people believing they're 'contaminated.'

As your link shows the direct deaths were around 78. Everything else beyond that is a statistical estimate, and the more anti-nuclear the group running the numbers is, the exponentially larger the "death toll." The largest estimate came in at a staggering 985,000 -- despite there only being 350,000 people in what is now the CEZ.

The wind number seems to include everything, i.e transport etc. To have a fair comparison, one would need the number of premature deaths in uranium ore mining etc. Without that, it is kind of apples to oranges. (And I don't want downplay wind turbines, I fully aware that maintanance on a 200m high pole is dangerous)

> Here’s some data from just Scotland:

No it's not (putting aside that they seem to be a bunch of anti-wind cranks).

> Total number of accidents: 3493

If you drill into the PDF they link to:

> 3493 Miscellaneous 31/12/2023 Whispering Willow North windpower facility, Franklin County, Iowa USA

Last I looked, the USA hasn't been part of the UK in almost 250 years.

But also their data is nonsense - they've counted one turbine catching fire as two separate incidents, and conveniently ignore that it was during a named storm when the turbine was exposed to winds gusting >70 knots and thousands of people lost power due to downed power lines [0].

Even if you take their number as gospel, which seems unwise given they're counting this as an accident:

> "World's biggest wind farm makes bid to force land sales". Report that SSE Renewables, owners of the Berwick Bank wind farm project off the cost of East Lothian, Scotland, are seeking to force landowners to sell land to operators of the Berwick Bank project.

> Their application to Scottish Ministers to use a Compulsory Purchase Order for lands has brought a stream of objections from private land owners, Network Rail, and EDF who operate Torness nuclear plant. The application will now go to public enquiry.

The FT [1] claims 2202 deaths due to Fukushima:

> There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide

0: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi...

1: https://www.ft.com/content/000f864e-22ba-11e8-add1-0e8958b18...

American nuclear plants are ran by corporations though

Nuclear power is safely handled by humans, even accounting for every accident. Humans just have a lot easier time dealing with deaths that happen gradually for no definitive cause, like that caused by say burning coal, than sudden dramatic events which leave no doubt as to what killed people.

If a nuclear accident killed 10k people tomorrow that still wouldn’t really change my mind.

This has an overview: https://www.etui.org/sites/default/files/ez_import/Asbestos_...

Nothing is in the final product, and there is no worker contact except around every 10 years as the cell is replaced.

Thanks for the link. Seems strange that this industry would be singled out considering that asbestos exposure seems really limited.

I think they now use a polymer membrane that works better at keeping the two products separate.

Someone still has to mine it.

I recall reading some rather concerning accounts from plant maintenance workers in chlor-alkali plants. It wasn’t some nicely contained chunk of asbestos — it sounded like fluffy asbestos got everywhere.

Given sentiments about regulations and government agencies these days, I fully expect a new TikTok trend of snorting lines of asbestos to pop up very soon.

It would be a bit like washing your hands in tetraethyllead to show that it's totally safe.

Asbestos is a two-faced material.

On one hand, it really helped to reduce frequency of devastating fires in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many lives saved.

On the other hand, especially for people working with it, it is a harbinger of doom.

The R101 was a British hydrogen airship with 50 passenger cabins and a smoking room (despite being filled with hydrogen) - but the smoking room was lined with asbestos for safety.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R101

> On the other hand, especially for people working with it, it is a harbinger of doom.

That's overstating it. We know how to work with the stuff safely, but yeah, you don't want to put it in places where unskilled people have access to it.

If we can safely work with trans-uranic compounds and things like hydrofluoric acid, we can safely work with asbestos.

We know, as a civilization, yes, but that doesn't mean we do it.

Especially in the developing world, manual workers' rights aren't very strong and plenty of people working in shipbreaking or material recycling don't have any PPEs, or barely any.

People working with trans-uranic compounds are usually lab employees/scientists, whose employers value them higher and are willing to spend more money to protect them.

> That's overstating it. We know how to work with the stuff safely, but yeah, you don't want to put it in places where unskilled people have access to it.

Which includes everyone renovating their home. I recently backed out of a purchase because the sellers couldn't find out if there was asbestos used in the tile glue. If there were asbestos, it would have added a significant cost and especially >> 3 months of delay in moving in because people certified to work on that shit are more rare than gold.

> If we can safely work with trans-uranic compounds and things like hydrofluoric acid, we can safely work with asbestos.

The compounds you list are generally highly regulated, very difficult to get your hands on if you can't prove why you have a legitimate need for it, pretty expensive, and you won't find them outside of places that need to have it.

As for asbestos, there are enough "jack of all trades" type handymen who don't give a fuck about safety - neither their own nor those of their client. That's why it got banned in the EU even for theoretically harmless usages.

to be perfectly honest, we can't really work safely with trans-uranic compounds, just look at rock mountain flats

We should consider ourselves lucky that it is not somehow cheaper for low cost homebuilders to fill their drywall with plutonium.

I mean, we can work with, say, plutonium, in extremely small amounts, in extremely controlled circumstances, and there are still problems. That’s very different to how asbestos was used, though. It used to be used _everywhere_.

Except you really can't, for the same reason in both cases. Asbestos is only useful if you can use it everywhere, that's it's whole value - cheap and available.

But it's literally worse then radiation because it's inert: you can't detect it easily, the dust persists and goes everywhere, and there's no way to reliably know without expensive testing if it's in a place. And once contaminated, you probably can't get rid of all of it.

My backgarden is filled with the products of people demolishing asbestos containing fiber-cement board from some time in the 70s where evidently they just tossed it all into a section of retained wall and buried it (guess how I found out? Because I had to dig up the sewer pipe, and then discovered the reason the whole area is subsiding because it didn't magically compact itself over time either).

> asbestos containing fiber-cement board from some time in the 70s where evidently they just tossed it all into a section of retained wall and buried it

I wonder if they did this out of habit or because regulations made it difficult to dispose of otherwise?

did it wind up being like a big prominence in the backyard?

I've found where the builders of my home buried tons of stuff. I have had to haul it all off myself. Thankfully most of it is just plaster and stuff. Oddly enough I think at least one employee was committing some form of sabotage, as I found a pit of never used materials like nails at one point.

> If we can safely work with trans-uranic compounds and things like hydrofluoric acid, we can safely work with asbestos.

'We'? Certainly some highly-competent people can be trusted. But 'we'?

Have you seen an average Builders in Britain? Have you witnessed the level of training of the tradesmen, the level of not not giving a flying **, and the level of cost cutting and skirting of regulations from the management?

I've seen walls that aren't straight, windows installed upside down, insulation that it outright missing - the wall was just empty. Just this week my wife was closing 'professionally installed" blinds and the mechanism fell off the ceiling and hit her on the head - the moron was too lazy to install the retaining screws.

These are not people that should be trusted with anything more dangerous than a nail gun. maybe not even that. They behave like Javascript developers!

The question though is do we need to safely work with asbestos? I've seen it removed properly by professionals, but I've personally witnessed too many times of people who should know better (mostly tradesmen who are working around this stuff frequently and should have proper training) doing dumb things and exposing themselves and others (one instance needing our whole 1960s era office building vacated for decontamination). This is in a country with a complete ban on new asbestos products since the '90s and strong building regulation, so it'd be even worse in countries with weaker regulation.

And why use it? My house had a lot of asbestos-cement wall sheeting (fibro), I had much of it professionally removed and the safe plaster (for general rooms) and cellulose fibre-cement sheeting (for kitchen, bathroom) is just as good or better (the new fibre cement can be jointed nicely whereas the old asbestos cement sheeted rooms had visible seams).

For insulation etc., fibreglass, rockwool, etc. can work just as well, maybe you need slightly thicker insulation but who really cares?

There are safer alternatives for basically every application of asbestos, so why bother using something that is dangerous at every step (mining, transport, processing, manufacture, modifications (drilling, cutting, etc.), disposal) instead of alternatives?

The US produced ~31.5 megatons of asbestos between 1900 and 2003,[1] where it was widely used in construction, manufacturing, industrial processing, clothing, and even film sets and Christmas decor.[2]

The US produced less than 112 tons of plutonium,[3] the principle trans-uranium element used industrially or militarily in the US, between 1944 and 1994.[4] This was, absent nuclear testing and grossly misguided military handling, not casually spread throughout the environment and most especially not in manufactured and constructed artefacts. And where plutonium contamination did occur it's been a multi-billion-dollar, multi-century environmental catastrophe.

Your argument is specious and utterly disconnected from reality in the context of asbestos's past and present uses and distribution.

______________________________

Notes:

1. <https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2006/1298/>

2. Snow & film sets: <https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fake-snow-asbestos/>, cigarette filters: <https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kent-cigarettes-asbestos-f...>.

3. Others include curium, used in RTG "nuclear batteries"; americium-241, used in smoke detectors; and californium-252. All are effectively produced in trace quantities, on the order of kilograms at best, rather than tonnes.

4. <https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/pu50yc.html>

On yet another hand, house fires wouldn't be so devastating if they weren't making multifamily balloon framed timber structures.

In another life I sandblasted heat exchangers in power plants and oil refineries - the first refinery I ever worked in had pipes overhead wrapped in asbestos insulation. It was all very well marked and had plenty of warnings to not go near it unless authorized and properly protected. Honestly though, I was crawling into a hole I could barely fit my body through to blast out thousands of pipes which flow liquid sulfur through them, with a grit that should the blast hose split was under enough pressure to inject sand straight through your heart, while wearing a sensor on my hard hat that I was told if it starts to beep I had 60 seconds to climb up out of the hole before I’d be dead. Asbestos exposure wasn’t a worry I had in those places, because everything else was trying to kill me too but much more urgently.

My building still has some asbestos pipes. Removing that stuff can be expensive and annoying, so it is usually delayed again and again.

They're essentially harmless as long as they're in there. Removing the stuff is the dangerous part.

Harmless, until some contractor accidently disturbs it, and people have to have their home vacated (just happened to a friend of mine).

That story might just be an anecdote, but the US has really normalized the "it's ok to live with poison, just don't awaken it". Same with lead pipes, lead paint, etc.

Government remediation is long overdue. This is a price we pay as a society, we should treat it as a society.

idk "it's in a bucket forever" sounds like a pretty good remediation strategy to me. dollar-for-dollar that government money probably has more impactful things to do. eg plastering public spaces in cities with bollards (see the awful awful west portal crash)

Pretty harmless to the building occupants. The contractor is at risk it they are doing it everyday for a decade.

no, it's dangerous for everyone, not just contractors.

Care to explain?

If it's dangerously unknown to the contractor, chances are inhabitants won't know better. The contractor only exposed for a few hours, inhabitants live there.

Average construction zone concentrations of ACM during demolition hover around 1fcc. It can be higher for some specific cases (zonolite or high concentration asbestos insulation) but for general things like contaminated drywall, duct wrapping etc it is generally low. This is during actual demolition of ACM mind you, not just disturbing a little drywall here and there.

When disturbance is completed, concentrations fall of with the air exchange rate and clear usually with 24-48 hours back to background levels.

Diluting that by the volume of the entire building not under construction would generally put that at or below the 0.1fcc OSHA limit without PP. The OSHA limits assume 1 extra cancer death/300 workers for someone with maximum exposure limits for 8 hours per day, 250 days / year for 30 years.

That is to say… A contractor spending a day kicking up asbestos results in 1/7500th ish of the dose required to cause an excess of 1/300 deaths.

And this assumes that acute low exposures hold the same linear dose response rate as high dosage chronic exposure. That is a controversial assumption in the literature.

My information is based on reading over 50 asbestos related journal articles, EPA and OSHA policy documents etc.

From all the informarion available, it’s just not that big a deal for the average building occupant.

Contractor disturbs aesbestos, HVAC systems could spread the particles around the whole building. That's a simple example.

Excellent. It’s nice to see a comment with more substance than “nu uh”.

It's as harmless as a defective WW2 grenade in a garage.

Said no epidemiologist ever.

> Harmless, until some contractor accidently disturbs it, and people have to have their home vacated (just happened to a friend of mine).

That's inconvenience. Which was systematically invoked because the harms are well understood and tended to.

This is a community based out of San Francisco, the once city levelled by the San Andreas Fault. Accepting low probability dangers to reduce costs is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff.

The hazard with most asbestos is when it’s disturbed: usually by construction, repairs, renovation work, etc.

As long as it doesn’t need to be disturbed by such work, and the hazard is well known/well marked to anyone contemplating it, in many cases the lowest-risk option is just to leave it be.

Also known by this age old wisdom: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

For another point of comparison: Asbestos has been banned in new construction in Japan for a long time, but asbestos in old construction are all still there. They are only dealt with when the building is demolished, because the risk of just leaving it there is close to nil.

…the hazard is well known/well marked to anyone contemplating it

But is it always marked? Or can a homeowner demo a wall and find themselves with lung cancer?

Yes and no are essentially the answers to your questions.

What about earthquakes?

It's still in schools in Canada, especially older grade schools, many of which still don't have AC. I sometimes wonder where all the taxes went to.

I'd wager it's in most institutional sorts of buildings built in the 50s and 60s.

It's not an issue until you demo the building

Great news, friend is currently dealing with asbestos remediation headaches. Can't imagine having to deal with someone so dangerous every day.

Googling this it seems it doesn’t cause headaches. Also if you’re doing the remediation, you should have PPE and good protocols to protect you.

I think they meant metaphorical headaches dealing with asbestos remediation. As in difficulties.

I don’t know what I’m more surprised-but-not-actually-surprised by: the fact that the US is this far behind the rest of the world, or that the comments are packed full of American debating the merits of this ban as if they’re in some sort of vacuum. When it comes down to it, the typical born-and-bred American truly cant help but engage in some good old fashioned American exceptionalism.

This is great news, worldwide. Presumably the US was a major buyer of some of the asbestos products that were up-til-now legal to sell. As that market gets smaller, there’ll be less of a chance of asbestos-laden products fraudulently making their way into other markets with more same asbestos bans. As a resident of one of those countries, thank you for getting your act together, I guess.

I would rather not categorically ban anything. I don't want lots of arsenic in my food, but arsenic also has unique industrial uses where it can be prevented from leaching into the environment. Maybe asbestos turns out to be the only thing we can think of to enable exploration of other planets, or heat storage of zero carbon energy. Or maybe in time asbestos can be treated to prevent release of airborne fibers. I certainly wouldn't use asbestos in residential buildings or consumer products barring unforeseen breakthroughs to make it safe. But treat each use case separately, there could be rare ones where it's worth the risk.

Product shouldn't be on market and should have global bans on its sale and installation/use. It's everywhere in building, and because it has dangers when removed or worked on, nobody wants to pay to get that work done correctly. Resulting in situations like we now have asbestos fibers found in mulch distributed across sydney. From kids playgrounds to the local council garden bed. All because someone wanted to avoid a fee whilst holding the perspective of "It's not that dangerous".

Have pulled raw asbestos when drilling from like 300m+ down. Stuff is crazy pretty but is a pita to handle and keep safe. Looks almost like spicy fairy floss.

The reason no one wants to pay the fee is because the exposure standards are so unreasonably low, that remediation costs huge $$$. And since we’ve made everyone terrified of the stuff, only specialized dumps handle it.

Reasonable precautions that prevent 95% of exposure could be had at a fraction of the cost if people were more reasonable about the stuff.

You ah wanna go roll that dice for that 5 percent exposure risk? Or are you just willing to pay me to roll that dice? Because if it's the latter we'll guess what I value my life fairly highly so you can pay up the high rates. I find most of the folks whinging about the costs are rarely involved in doing the work or taking the risk.

Yeah, I will roll those dice. I am steeped in the literature of asbestos demolition, exposure, health hazards etc.

The current policy around ACM and its handling makes you _LESS_ safe because everyone looks the other way. It could be easily, cheaply disposed of by relaxing a number of protocols on how it’s handled during demolition.

But because everyone has to follow the crazy moonsuit protocols, which improves the safety of the general public by absolutely zero, contractors just go find unknowing immigrant labor to blitz in and tear shit up.

“The current policy around ACM and its handling makes you _LESS_ safe because everyone looks the other way.” is your own personal view, based on a hypothetical. You can be as steeped in the literature as you want. If you’re unable to separate the “I think”s from the “I know”s then you’re untrustworthy, no matter how knowledgeable you are.

My opinion is largely in agreement with many in the policy community.

You are mistaking the opinions of a government regulatory body with that of expertise.

The literature on risk is very clear. Occupational level exposure is the critical hazard. Transient exposure is meaningless.

And of course you are missing my central argument. People are at more risk today because existing policy makes asbestos a taboo. Everyone is afraid of it and no one wants to talk about it on a construction site because it screws everything up. And so lots of construction workers, mostly immigrant labor etc pay the price so that some soccer mom can feel certain her kids didn’t get exposed to 0.1fcc hours of asbestos.

That's your opinion and definitely not fact. I talk about asbestos on site. Hell I've even called work cover and reported the company I worked for, for improper handling. Some of us take safety seriously. Even if we come across as cowboys I'm not gonna risk your future just because some office monkey chose the wrong product. They want the risk, pay the hell up.

Finally. Corruption prevented it from happening more than 30 years ago.

Here here. Lobbying has nothing to do with corruption. It's here to counterbalance over-zealous regulators who are detached from business reality. Please think of the shareholders.

Are they banning it in safety gear like bunker gear?

Were these remaining uses harmful? Is this just a PR victory?

Brake linings in particular were a harmful use, because they are worn away into dust during use, and mechanics in particular are exposed to a brake dust as an occupational hazard.

Mechanics should be wearing sufficient PPE if they are working with particulate pollution. Take asbestos out of the brake dust but they still do things that generate plenty of particulate, which is only an occupational hazard when coupled with improper ppe.

How often do you see mechanics with any kind of PPE?

Almost all professional mechanics are wearing coveralls. That's PPE.

I've certainly seen a lot that wear gloves. That's PPE.

Goggles or safety glasses are common but not ubiquitous in the shops I've seen. That's PPE.

Ignoring masks that seem responsive to COVID, I haven't seen a lot of masks or respirators outside of shops where they're doing paint work, but I also don't get to see all the shop space and masks are intrusive, so probably if mechanics wear them, it's only when they perceive an accute risk. You don't usually keep your welding mask on all day, unless there's a lot of welding.

How is this an argument to them not needing to wear PPE? Asbestos isn't the only particulate risk they face. PPE on the other hand would solve the others. You can say you don't see mechanics wearing PPE but thats because its not presently regulated. How many kitchens today lack a handwashing sink? Zero, if they have passed a health inspection.

Health inspection failures are very common. Health inspections also only capture a specific a point in time. I have personally eaten at restaurants that initially passed a health inspection, yet failed later for not having a functional handwashing sink.

e.g. https://medium.com/@michaelkduchak/predicting-chicago-health...

Ensuring complete compliance at this level is very difficult.

It’s not an argument, but an observation. They deal in all kinds of chemicals and other nastiness, and I’ve never seen one wear PPE. I’ve even talked to mechanics about it and they don’t seem to care.

Service your car at a dealer instead of the cheapest shop in town and you will see people gladly using ppe.

My younger brother worked at an independent BMW shop for a bit and they wore gloves all day. Anyone actively using airtools also had on ear muffs. Grinding, they'd wear a face shield. Yes, often ppl are dumb but they don't have to be.

Unfortunately PPE is not always taken seriously by automotive tradespeople (and their employers). It is common to see both professional mechanics and home mechanics doing brake jobs without PPE, in many places.

Also, smaller amounts of brake dust are distributed everywhere in the environment where vehicles are operated.

Sure, but ensuring all mechanics everywhere have access to use PPE, and then enforcing its correct use is way less effective in practice than removing the hazardous material from the workplace entirely. Being exposed to any fine particulate matter over long periods will be detrimental to health (we aren't evolved to breath large amounts of dust), but not every particulate is an acute carcinogen.

We can play whack a mole getting every source of particulate out of the garage (can we even do that? consider sanding, grinding, painting, etc, not just the brakes are making this), or we can use our existing workplace safety enforcement mechanisms to enforce ppe in this industry like they've enforced ppe in many other industries.

>_or_ we can

Or, and hear me out because I know this is crazy... we can do both! By trying to get rid of the bad stuff from the workplace and get better at enforcing ppe use.

> we aren't evolved to breath large amounts of dust

We are doing that evolution at present!

The best way to do evolution is something that kills children before they breed. Second best for evolution is killing adults before they breed. Mostly ineffective is killing adults after they breed: although in theory loss of an adult can affect the population breeding chances downwards for children.

Just a reminder that evolution is about breeding children and not so much about death.

I'm just spitballing here, but I'd wager that the human toll required to evolve effective resistance to regular and prolonged asbestos exposure is more than most of us would be willing to pay.

We already evolved these massive craniums filled with (to date) the most intricate and powerful general computers in the world - it seems like the solution to asbestos exposure is simply engineering a way to avoid it. No evolution necessary.

Sounds like my shadetree approach means I’m steps ahead of the pros.

Independent mechanics never wear PPE and they are covered in dust and automotive fluids daily.

So take out the asbestos and they are still at risk because the fundamental issue is a lack of PPE. You can regulate PPE. Many industries have done it. Shadetree work, sure, people do dumb things like cook hotdogs in shopping carts and sell that too, that will always happen. But for a brick and mortar mechanic they are already going though many regulations (e.g. how they deal with oil). PPE requirements are nothing in comparison to having to deal with things of that nature, or even just general small business requirements.

How? Staff an OSHA inspector to stand around in every garage? If Jim at Jim's Auto Service doesn't want to wear a mask, he's not going to wear one. It's not like oil where there's an evidence trail and a big mess if he decides to dump 50 gallons in the back lot.

Yes, there's more that could be done in regards to PPE enforcement, but I think that's really an orthogonal issue. Asbestos isn't necessary in brakes, and can be banned regardless of PPE enforcement.

The same way they manage to conduct health inspections even in the most random hole in the wall greasy spoon locations. You have an expectation for certain things to be there. You have an expectation that procedures are followed. When an incident occurs or an inspection happens where its clear that certain protections were not in place or certain procedures were not followed, you drop the hammer on them. Its not hard and we already have the bureaucratic apparatus to do this. Saying we can't do it for mechanics while we simultaneously do it for other industries like farming, construction, manufacturing, or food service, is just lazy.

What you are describing is exactly how it is already enforced today. But an "incident" regarding asbestos (or other particle) inhalation might not appear until decades after exposure. Many tradespeople, automotive or otherwise, use the amount of PPE they personally are comfortable with. Construction is notoriously similar. You will see more compliance at larger organizations where there is more governance, but at smaller orgs, people often do as they please.

> shadetree

https://shadetreehq.com/what-is-a-shadetree-mechanic/

Not a term I've heard in New Zealand.

RIP, McQueen :pray:

Normally modern brakes do not contain asbestos. All major car manufacturers have not used it in decades. Why was it still being used at all?

Global OEMs haven't used asbestos for a while. They don't want the liability, and it makes logistical sense for them to use brakes that are legal in all markets.

But some low-cost aftermarket replacement brakes imported from countries where it is still legal to manufacture them, have contained asbestos. Asbestos is cheap and functional.

An acquaintance was trying to argue that Lamborghini brakes contained asbestos. There are places where asbestos is the ideal engineering material but my guess is that brakes is not one of them.

The phrase "ideal engineering material" doesn't make any sense. You can't define what is ideal until you define the design goals.

If you want to optimize price and fire resistance, and you have no other goals, asbestos is ideal.

But yes, VAG quite likely has other goals when designing a Lamborghini.

You are being uninformatively pedantic, "There are places" is enough context for a throwaway sentence. Analysing every word or phrase is not productive and I think my meaning was clear enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html doesn't specifically mention nitpicking: I admit I have the same fault (Edit: rephrased this).

Edit 2: perhaps I should have added that I think engineering is the art of making good compromises.

I'm not being pedantic, as far as I understand the meaning of your comment. Asbestos is a very good material for making very cheap brakes, and in developing countries brakes are sometimes still made with asbestos for that reason.

I mean… it seems incredibly unlikely, given that the EU banned the manufacture, import and use of asbestos items, except for one extremely narrowly defined case where no acceptable substitute existed at the time (electrolysis diaphragms for chlorine production plants), about 25 years ago. Is their theory that Lamborghini ships the US models to the US brake-less, then adds special US-only brakes, for some reason?

Thanks - I'm in New Zealand where we only banned it in 2016 and I didn't know about EU rules.

It seems unlikely that Lambo would use asbestos. I had made an off-the-cuff bet against a pig-headed acquantance that asbestos brakes were banned here before I knew anything. He rang up his mate with a Lambo who had some other story!

NZ has some import exceptions but it looks to me that the exceptions are mostly for something like QC training kits for recognising asbestos: https://www.worksafe.govt.nz/topic-and-industry/asbestos/imp...

About 5 years ago so Chinese auto manufacturers had to recall some models as they had asbestos in the brakes, contrary to Australia's laws.

It's crazy that this particular use case wasn't already banned. I mean, the stuff is only dangerous in particulate form – so why on Earth was it permitted to be used for things that by their very nature wear down to particulates during use?

There were previous attempts to ban it but they were overturned by courts in the 90s

Because the dose makes the poison.

Low levels of asbestos exposure is statistically unlikely to harm you, and the concentrations from brake dust are relatively low. As long as a brake shop ventilates its work spaces it’s a negligible risk to workers.

> Low levels of asbestos exposure is statistically unlikely to harm you

This is not correct. One could say that low levels of asbestos have not statistically been shown to cause harm, but that is quite different from statistically showing evidence of no harm. Harm may very well be occuring, but it is below the sensitivity threshold of our instruments to detect it.

What ever harm it might be causing, is below the detection threshold, and thus meaningful risk tolerance of everyday life.

Living near a freeway for instance is substantially more dangerous to your health than occasional incidental exposure to asbestos.

You are breathing asbestos right now. In every breath.

> What ever harm it might be causing, is below the detection threshold, and thus meaningful risk tolerance of everyday life.

The sensitivity of an instrument to detect harm has no relationship to whether there is some ground truth harm. In many cases, like smoking cigarettes or getting hit on the head repeatedly, harm is incremental and compounding---a single event may not be detectable, but it is almost certainly still harmful.

Everything is harmful, from sunlight to food to driving. At issue is cost benefit.

> Because the dose makes the poison.

This is a thought-terminating cliche, not a useful position.

Talc, ie baby powder. Its still too common in cosmetics too afaik

Talc has sometimes been contaminated with asbestos, but it isn't a use of asbestos.

One tainted batch of talcum powder from J&J and now I have to use much less effective corn starch to powder my nether regions.

Check back in 30 years.

Someone has to mine it, pack it/assemble it.

> “For too long, polluters have been allowed to make, use and release toxics like asbestos and PFAS without regard for our health"

Criticizing politican-speak about science is almost pointless, but this is a ridiculous conflation of two wildly different things: asbestos, which is a specific mineral, and for which the link to lung cancer in humans is indisputable; and "PFAS", which is a hazy conglomeration of things for which the scientific link to harm is weak, and mostly based on animal studies or bad observational data.

When you're gonna compare two things and say one is indisputable and the other is weak, cite some claims. PFAS are real, test your water from your tap today. Any carcinogen is detrimental to health but depends on exposure, same goes for PFAS.

The thing about PFAS to me is it is a build up over time. So it's like heart disease as a silent killer. You can live with it for a long time before you start to notice the effects

The worst part is that it doesn't really degrade either. There's literally no way around it, the world just gets increasingly polluted by it.

Smoking causes cancer? Stop smoking, and prevent people from smoking near bystanders. Asbestos causes cancer? Ban it in new products, and mandate secure removal for existing stuff. It's not that hard to deal with: just stop using the harmful thing and it'll be fine.

PFAS causes cancer? Permanently condemn all contaminated land, kill all wildlife trying to get out, mandatory cremation for all humans who lived there, and a total ban on breastfeeding for mothers who lived there.

PFAS might not yet be definitively proven to be harmful in limited quantities, but the bio-accumulation is bad enough that we just cannot take that risk.

> Any carcinogen is detrimental to health but depends on exposure, same goes for PFAS.

I think you can emphasize your point by noting two categories, those which bioaccumulate and those which don't, but the exposure of things bioaccumulated is, to your point, endlessly extended.

Bioaccumulation is certainly a factor to be concerned about, but you can't skip over the part where you definitively demonstrate harm.

Lots of things bioaccumulate, but cause no problems at all.

Are you saying that the dozen studies listed in wikipedia about PFAS harm to humans are flawed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...

Yes. Specifcally, anything that is an observational epidemiology study (which is much of it) is extremely low credibility. Observational epidemiology is historically terrible, low-quality research that gets lots of hype but doesn't stand up to rigorous analysis.

Chronic toxins that affect us over decades are difficult to detect. For starters, few studies last the long.

That PFAS are very unreactive is meaningless. They still occupy volume and therefore affect kinematic rates and occupy reaction sites.

> That PFAS are very unreactive is meaningless. They still occupy volume and therefore affect kinematic rates and occupy reaction sites.

They're surfactants so they can interfere with basic processes in the intracellular matrix like cells sticking to each other and forming tissue. The long term epidemiological effects and in vitro studies are just getting started understanding the effects.

> They're surfactants so they can interfere with basic processes in the intracellular matrix like cells sticking to each other and forming tissue.

You know what else is a surfactant? Soap.

Literally every surfactant "interferes with basic processes in the intracellular matrix" -- they disrupt lipids (fats). That's how they work. They're not inherently dangerous as a category of chemicals. You slather yourself in them daily.

This discussion is veering into "the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide" territory now. You can make pretty much anything sound scary if you try hard enough.

PFAS are different from soap in that your body can't break them down or excrete them well, so they bioaccumulate. Eating soap is absolutely not good for you, and if it also built up in your body people would be really worried about small exposures to it.

Funny how you speak of "dihydrogen monoxide" - a very polar solvent which is incredibly safe.

Just because DHM is fairy will tolerated, I wouldn't go around drinking a pint of, say, methanol another polar solvent.

> I wouldn't go around drinking a pint of, say, methanol another polar solvent.

Yes, exactly: saying "it's a solvent, therefore it's dangerous" is equally dumb in both directions: you wouldn't drink a pint of methanol, and you wouldn't be scared of a pint of water. Likewise for "surfactant", and a ton of other terms you see on this comment thread.

In chemistry, details matter. The folks who run around parroting sciencey-sounding technical terms like "steric interference" to scare people are, unfortunately, often effective, because it takes ten times as many words to explain why they're talking gobbledygook as it does for them to make a ridiculous claim.

Ok, I like this because we're converging.

PFAS are a special set of surfactants because, being perfluorinated, evolution is unlikely to have endowed us with effective ways to neutralize them. Im not afraid of ingesting traditional fat soap because my bile will break it down. Dishwasher detergent freaks me out.

I think our (the anti PFAS crowd) concern stems from being able to identify many chemical pathways that can make these very dangerous and therefore believe that they should be proven safe by studies (including long term) as opposed to assumed safe of the common dismissal "no studies have demonstrated <insert noun here> are dangerous"

> PFAS are a special set of surfactants because, being perfluorinated, evolution is unlikely to have endowed us with effective ways to neutralize them.

I mean...maybe? That's a huge statement without any evidence. There are tons of other organic fluorines in common use, so while I'm not rushing out to bathe in firefighting foam, if I got hit with some while escaping a burning building, I'd be OK with it.

> I think our (the anti PFAS crowd) concern stems from being able to identify many chemical pathways that can make these very dangerous and therefore believe that they should be proven safe by studies

That's not how empiricism works. You can't prove that something has no bad effects. That's called "proving a negative", and it's an infinitely high bar. Remember: millions of people die from dihydrogen monoxide exposure every year! We must ban it until proven safe!

Also, this:

> stems from being able to identify many chemical pathways that can make these very dangerous

...is pseudoscience. Everything is resting on the "can make" part of that sentence. There are so many "chemical pathways" (most of which we know nothing about) that any claim about a particular chemical triggering a particular pathway to negative human outcome absolutely must be backed by solid empirical evidence, and not just speculation or theory.

See also: "the dose makes the poison." Even completely innocuous -- or beneficial! -- chemicals are harmful if you consume too much of them. There are "chemical pathways" that can absolutely kill you if you take too much Tylenol, or drink too much alcohol, or eat grapefruit when taking certain statins, or a large number of other innocent things.

My current summary of the state of evidence around PFAS is that there's a constellation of weak/bad studies suggesting that the water-soluble variants might have bad effects in some animals. Bioaccumulation clearly occurs, and therefore caution is warranted (particular with certain manufacturing processes or pollution), but the people who are extending that to egg pans and sandwich wrappers are way out over their skis.

Aren't the concentrations of concern down in ppt range? Surely that can't be the explanation for why so low a concentration would affect much of anything.

I think the concern is the endocrine system that does work on the high side of ppt

What's you suggested alternative? Deliberately exposing large groups of people to likely-harmful chemicals and seeing at what concentration they die?

My suggested alternative is doing good, well-controlled science.

No, you don't need to deliberately expose people to toxins to do that. That's a straw man, when much of what passes for observational epidemiology is loaded with obvious uncontrolled confounders (like poverty).

Could you describe how you would design a "good, well-controlled science" study/experiment on the effects of PFAS in humans?

I could describe any number of study designs. But the burden is not on me, it's on the people who are in the research area to do good science.

More to the point, my ability (or lack) to come up with an experiment is not an excuse for you or anyone else to cite bad science with impunity. Likewise, if a study design is bad, it's bad regardless of my ability to correct it.

I think the burden could be on the chemical producer: do “good science” to show this material is safe, or don’t use it at all. That conservative mindset seems very reasonable to me.

The question remains - what is “good science?”

This isn't a question of burden but of communication.

You're slinging shade but parlous little illumination here. Adjusting that balance would make for a rather more substantive discussion.

This line of questioning always goes to the same place: it's not about educating the OP of better ways to do science, but them attempting to argue with me about whatever suggestions I make. I'm not getting sucked into it. My ability to do a "better" study is not relevant here.

If you want to think I'm "wrong" because I don't, then you're more than welcome to do so. But it doesn't change the fact that most observational epidemiology is riddled with bias, and is of low quality.

You of course cannot determine how others will respond to you, as I cannot determine how you'll respond to me.

If, however, you do answer in good faith, credibly, and substantively to a specific question or request, you'll know, and fair-minded readers will generally recognise, that you've done so.

Or you could, say, contribute over a half-dozen responses within the thread with roughly a quarter of them explicitly withholding or defending the withholding of that substantive contribution.

Your call.

So your argument is basically observational epidemiology study = low quality hence we cannot make conclusions? It would be a fair point if this were a single observational (non experimental) study. However when you look at a dozen studies on humans which all exhibit the same pattern where high PFAS in blood correlates with higher cancer rates then the burden of proof shifts to prove that PFAS is safe, not the other way around.

Theoretically it's conceivable that there is a separate, common factor in all the studies that causes the illness (e.g., people who are prone to cancer are somehow attracted to working with PFAS) but I think after the n-th human observational, plus experimental animal studies that at least show hormone disruption - we probably should on a go forwards basis operate with the assumption that PFAS are likely very toxic for humans, unless proven to be mostly safe.

I see this kind of argument so often from PFAS apologists - "we don't have conclusive proof yet that it's harmful so we should keep producing and using this substance which is known to bioaccumulate and never break down". Shouldn't the onus be on those who want to use it to prove that it's safe? If the studies we have are truly as inconclusive as they claim, doesn't that just mean that we don't have good evidence they're safe?

this is completely wrong approach.

PFAS were released into environment in massive quantities. They are now, basically, impossibly expensive to remove. Same for microplastics.

Suppose tomorrow we come up with indisputable evidence that they are toxic. Now what? Will the companies that put them into environment be able to pay for a global cleanup effort that cost more than those companies are worth? Should we allow someone to make 1 million, knowing that remediation will cost $10 billion and they won't be able to pay for it?

It might be more possible than you think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Also the danger of asbestos is specifically when it is breathed in over extended periods of time. There are forms of asbestos that are really not all that dangerous to the general public, but people freak out when they hear the word.

If there are suitable alternatives its good to ban it and move on.

> There are forms of asbestos that are really not all that dangerous to the general public

Source?

Any form that doesn't have loose fibrils, microparticles, or dust.

I'd compare it to wood from walnut trees, which is perfectly safe to handle and use in dining tables, etc., but dust from its' woodworking is toxic.

> Any form that doesn't have loose fibrils, microparticles, or dust.

Encasement breaks, materials erode, have to be manufactured and disposed. That's not a valid argument at all.

> I'd compare it to wood from walnut trees

Well, then you are very uninformed. The toxicity characteristics are nothing alike. If you want to point to a similar hazard, I'd suggest beryllium compounds.

Bedrock, for one. Asbestos occurs naturally in many common rocks. A map of asbestos-containing bedrock includes many population centers in the U.S:

https://www.mindat.org/photo-1146434.html

Basically any situation where the asbestos is not shedding dust or fibers into air that'll be breathed by humans is pretty safe. Contact with asbestos causes virtually no health risks; it really has to get into the lungs to do damage.

That's not a source at all. For some places with naturally occurring exposed asbestos minerals (e.g. Turkey) you do find a significantly higher incidence in specific lung cancers. That's also true for areas around mines (e.g. Canada).

It is hard to establish a mesothelioma baseline, because fibers can be found in the air everywhere at all times, but it is believed to be a specific disease caused by exposure, more or less always.

> not shedding dust or fibers into air

Which they all do, at some point in time. Even short exposure has been linked to mesothelioma and there is no safe exposure levels for any type of asbestos.

> Contact with asbestos causes virtually no health risks; it really has to get into the lungs to do damage.

This is not true. It is suspected to cause cancer and other issues upon ingestion and it does cause skin disease too.

Floor tiles in your home. Lots of homes in the 50s/60s had asbestos floor tiles installed. These tiles aren't going to kill you. You can leave them alone, cover them with another layer of tile.

If you remove them, you can hire an abatement company which takes a tremendous level of precuation, but when you consider the tiny amount of asbestos in the tiles, the fact that its not really breathable, and your exposure is not over an extended period of time, removing tiles yourself with some basic precaution should be fine.

The sorts of asbestos you find around the house that you absolutely don't want to mess with would be things like pipe insulation. That stuff is loose, lightweight and can easily be breathed in.

Basically just use some common sense and understand what makes asbestos dangerous.

Yeah, no source...

Every asbestos product erodes at some point. Yes, you can cover or encapsulate it - that's trivial. Ultimately someone has to deal with it tho, and that's when it is always gonna be dangerous. A new home owner may also not know about your cover-up.

Your prior statement is misleading. You are talking about mitigations, not inherent risk.

> Yeah, no source...

I don't get the snark, but I do get the point -- but i'd be remiss not to point out that a lab or individual seeking funds to try to prove the sensibility and health benefits of asbestos, in any form, would be laughed out of town.

So, when asking 'for source' regarding niche topics with controversial opinions, well, it's not strange that the study or source is nowhere to be found; but it's more complicated than just "source doesn't exist, so premise must be false.".

I agree, however, that due to the unstable and ever changing nature of entrapped asbestos that it should be avoided wherever possible.

One nit: there are PLENTY of materials in use that degrade to a more dangerous thing over time, and it hasn't really kept us from using them. Carbon black dust is famously dangerous and we are pumping out more carbon fiber than ever before, it's nearly unrecycable and degrades terribly both structurally and potentially chemically depending on the matrix that binds it. We are only hard-fisted against asbestos at this point in time because we have sensible alternatives.

> I don't get the snark

The snark comes with annoyance about the "asbestos really isn't that bad" contrarian talking point, which tends to be sourced in hearsay from other online "hasn't killed me" edgelords.

> So, when asking 'for source' regarding niche topics with controversial opinions...

Are you kidding me? The health dangers are known since the 30s or something. If anything, scientific consensus on asbestos dangers had to fight decades of well-funded industry resistance and lobbying. Look at the regulatory history in Canada...

> there are PLENTY of materials in use that degrade to a more dangerous thing over time, and it hasn't really kept us from using them.

The question is about severity of health impact, persistence and quantity of emission, to compare health hazards here. Cured meat and plutonium are both class I carcinogens, but their dangers are vastly different. Many bad substances can be detoxed by the liver, their ROX-burden blunted by antioxidants within cells, to some extent. There are NOT PLENTY of materials with similar hazard characteristics as asbestos.

I do agree, some carbon fiber products may be the "new asbestos". Looks like their different crystal structures pose different risks, and some erode to asbestos like particles - which altogether really does raise the question why they are not more thoroughly investigated and regulated. However, I suspect a mesothelioma association would probably have shown by now. Although bio-persistent and of similar shape, CF-particles may interact differently with the immune system.

I do absolutely cringe about carbon fiber usage in e.g. 3D-printing. I think, something like CF-rods/rails in the Bambulab printers may be a really bad idea in a living room space, and some people even casually mention acute eye and skin irritation symptoms when printing CF-filaments...

I'm not really clear on the asbestos risk. Everything I've read and heard seems to indicate that the panic around asbestos might be overblown. Asbestos is unsafe but it is a matter of degrees. In certain cases like loose-fill insulation or certain situations where workers grind/cut asbestos regularly, it seems to cause a meaningful level of risk. Especially for those who are already smokers.

But having gone through a remodel in a house with asbestos, I have been blown away at the extreme level of regulations, the meticulous procedures that remediation companies have to follow, the tens-of-thousands spent on remediation and repeated testing, and the tens-of-millions being thrown around in courts whenever Asbestos comes up.

As best as I can tell, the risk is close to zero for minor and occasional exposure in otherwise healthy individuals. I'm open to seeing hard evidence to convince me otherwise.

In 100 years I bet those same stringent policies will exist for fiberglass batt

They'll exist for a lot of nanotech like carbon nanotubes too. Pretty much any rigid nanostructure has potential for same effect on the lungs as asbestos since it's caused by mechanical damage.

It depends on bioaccumulating, i’ve read. Inert things can’t have bonds broken by macrophages, etc, labeling them with an ion. Carbon chains i supposemight break down biologically , but maybe won’t.

Asbestos repeats the injury, endlessly, with near immunity to any chemical decomposition. Mechanical decomposition just makes it more dangerous, as it cleaves into sharper, tinier needle like structures. Other nanostructures aren't nearly as chemically stable, especially inside the body, and can be metabolized or expelled from the body through natural processes. Asbestos sticks, shatters, and all the jagged little needle pieces stick where they are.

Fiberglass, dust, and so forth can be expelled by the body and don't represent nearly the same level of harm as asbestos. The material's mechanical and chemical properties make a huge difference in how dangerous they are. Asbestos is chemically robust and mechanically fragile in a way that makes it more dangerous and sticky over time.

A nanotube that damages a few cells, then gets metabolized or oxidizes, and then expelled, is far different from a slowly exploding needle bomb that will reside in your body for decades, endlessly killing the cells it contacts, resulting in infections, inflammation, cancer, and sometimes even dead septic chunks of tissue.

Asbestos is, on balance, a terrible, horrible thing, and the harm it does can't be justified by the potential for good uses. Fiberglass insulation or carbon nanotubes aren't good for your lungs, but the dangers they pose can be reasonably considered against their benefits. these materials present a very different scale and magnitude of harm, especially over time.

From your mouth to God's ear.

Probably not. Fiberglass has been studied for carcinogenicity specifically based on the experience with asbestos: https://connect.mayoclinic.org/discussion/fiberglass-insulat... ("Fibers deposited in the deepest parts of the lungs where gas exchange occurs are removed more slowly by special cells called macrophages. Macrophages can engulf the fibers and move them to the mucous layer and the larynx where they can be swallowed. Swallowed fibers and macrophages are excreted in the feces within a few days.

Synthetic vitreous fibers deposited in the gas exchange area of the lungs also slowly dissolve in lung fluid. Fibers that are partially dissolved in lung fluid are more easily broken into shorter fibers. Shorter fibers are more easily engulfed by macrophages and removed from the lung than long fibers.").

We also have been unable to find clear evidence of health harms in longitudinal studies of fiberglass manufacturing workers: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp161-c2.pdf ("Studies of workers predominantly involved in the manufacture of fibrous glass, rock wools, or slag wools have focused on the prevalence of respiratory symptoms through the administration of questionnaires, pulmonary function testing, and chest x-ray examinations. In general, these studies reported no consistent evidence for increased prevalence of adverse respiratory symptoms, abnormal pulmonary functions, or chest x-ray abnormalities; however, one study reported altered pulmonary function (decreased forced expiratory volume in 1 second) in a group of Danish insulation workers compared with a group of bus drivers.").

> Everything I've read and heard seems to indicate that the panic around asbestos might be overblown. Asbestos is unsafe but it is a matter of degrees.

Oh definitely. Like, if you ask the EPA, they'll tell you that there's "no safe level of exposure"...which is true at a population level (and completely understandable for a regulatory body to say), but terrorizes the kind of people who panic at the idea of chemicals.

You don't want to be breathing the stuff when it's floating in the air, but people absolutely freak out over the idea of being near anything containing asbestos, even if the stuff is sealed in plastic or ceramic -- tons of old floor tiles contained it, for example. That's pretty obviously harmless, unless you grind it up and aerosolize it, but it triggers the same level of response as fraying asbestos pipe insulation.

Part of what we're dealing with here is that asbestos present in a home harms not only your health but... potentially the perceived $$ value of your home. Your biggest financial investment.

I'm not just talking about homes. Plenty of schools, museums and other public places spend huge amounts of money removing otherwise undisturbed asbestos.

That said, it's more-or-less the same thing with old homes -- the "we found asbestos; give us a discount" thing is not really about rational perceptions of risk. If you buy an old home, you basically have to assume that it's going to have asbestos in it.

Banning asbestos prevents people from using asbestos in new houses / remodels. We bought a house, and only later found out that the materials used in its post-2000 remodel contained asbestos.

Yeah, I get it. I'm not making an argument about banning the stuff in new construction.

Believe it or not, that isn't even correct. The original ban allowed the usage of existing stocks of materials in all forms of construction until depleted. There is no tracking of all materials containing asbestos that were ever imported. Somewhere today there are still new builds going in with asbestos in them as a result.

> spend huge amounts of money removing otherwise undisturbed asbestos.

I mean, the legitimate concern here is that someone accidentally disturbs it, and in a stupid way, and now your kids are exposed.

Even floor tiles, I assume if you cut into them with the wrong kind of saw in the wrong conditions could be spreading fine particles. Maybe.

In any case, people don't behave rationally around risk. Nor do they understand statistics (evidence: lottery tickets get sold). But at the same time, overall it doesn't really hurt to get rid of this stuff, if done properly.

Yep, and sometimes asbestos exposure is better than being burned alive.

Life is a matter of trade offs.

We may have better trade offs now with advances in material science, but all those uses of asbestos were not made by mustache twirling villains.

> As best as I can tell, the risk is close to zero for minor and occasional exposure in otherwise healthy individuals. I'm open to seeing hard evidence to convince me otherwise.

Asbestos is interesting in that the mechanism of carcinogenicity is very well-studied and well-understood. The fibers get into the lungs; the body can not get them out of the lungs; they cause persistent cell-damage as they mechanically rupture lung cells; and then the resulting chronic inflammation eventually causes cancer.

Because it's so well understood, we also know how to protect against asbestos. If the fibers are never airborn, they can't get into the lungs. If you're wearing an N95 mask or respirator, they can't get into the lungs. If you can cough them out in the moment, they don't stay in the lungs. Once they're in the lungs, you're pretty well screwed. It's a sliding scale of how screwed, with more exposure causing more cancer risk, but the fibers are not coming out and will continue rolling cancer dice while they're in there.

Having asbestos in your walls or ductwork is not going to kill you - the asbestos fibers aren't in the air. Doing a DIY reno on your asbestos-containing walls absolutely can kill you, and there have been cases of mesothelioma linked exactly to that.

Is there any way to wash them out of the lungs?

At the same time could smokers get a lung cleaning treatment?

It probably could[0] be done, but good luck getting an FDA approval.

[0]Speaking of smokers specifically, it is entirely possible to 'breathe' oxygenated liquid per fluorocarbons ('PFAS') which would very likely dissolve and 'wash out' tar from the lungs.

No. Because of their needle shape, they wander deep into the tissue. The notoriously associated cancer is found in the mesothelium, a layer around the lungs.

Lots of non-banned substances are more dangerous to breathe than asbestos. I understand the risks because I spent 20 years working in a building containing asbestos, and received annual notifications and warnings. It's been banned for use in construction for over 30 years, so I don't see how the EPA ban will make much difference.

> the fibers are not coming out and will continue rolling cancer dice while they're in there

This is rather alarmist. The truth is more nuanced. This resource [1] lists a variety of biological mechanisms that work to remove asbestos fibers from the lungs beyond simply coughing them out, such as via "alveolar macrophages".

> Doing a DIY reno on your asbestos-containing walls absolutely can kill you

This is true, but if this made any readers anxious, it's important to note that "light, short-term exposure rarely causes disease" and that it is "not uncommon for homeowners to do a renovation and then realize afterward that they disturbed asbestos products. Fortunately, the risk from this is low." [2]

My advice is that if you are going to renovate your home, unless it is quite new and you have good reason to believe there is no risk of asbestos contamination, you should assume that materials like tiles, plaster, drywall, insulation, etc., may contain asbestos, and get them tested before commencing. However, if you have renovated in the past and are anxious about exposure, chill out. You can't change anything now, and unless you were renovating regularly, you'll very likely be fine.

Remember that if you live in a rural area, you can be exposed to asbestos via natural weathering of rock. If you live in an urban area, you have likely been exposed to asbestos via construction and demolition work taking place nearby.

[1] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/asbestos/biological_fate_of_a...

[2] https://www.asbestos.com/exposure/short-term/

> If you're wearing an N95 mask or respirator, they can't get into the lungs

A random N95 mask is not gonna save a random Joe from asbestos. If you study how masks and respirators work, you will find that you need to be clean-shaven, the respirator must match the shape of your face and have a good seal, etc. People who work with hazardous substances spend a good amount of time on this.

NHS had to discard huge number of masks during COVID because they weren't the right shape and weren't forming a seal.

In some cases, that's good enough - general dust, woodcutting, etc. For highly toxic substances, it won't save you.

It's also under-appreciated how risky many common substances are when ground or cut. Cutting concrete, for example, can cause silicosis of the lungs[1] if precautions aren't taken. Wood dust is also potentially carcinogenic[2].

Then there's stuff like metal fume fever[3], which seems to be temporary but who knows what long term effects we'll discover in the future.

[1] https://www.elcosh.org/document/1930/d000852/Dry+Cutting+%25...

[2] https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/chemicals/wood_dust.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fume_fever

The general rule of thumb should be "don't breathe dust", not regulating specific types of dust. Almost all forms of dust are bad for you.

Quartz has a similar effect to concrete, too.

Berylliosis is the truly unexpected one for me. Something as harmless looking as a piece of ceramic can basically wipe out your lungs

My dad died of it some years ago, and we never knew where his lungs came into contact with the stuff. He never worked in construction, but sometimes near it. There is typically about 30 years between the contact with asbestos and getting ill.

It's a very depressing diagnosis, there is no remedy and you just get gradually worse over a year or so until you die.

I’m very sorry about your dad and how his death must have pained your family.

My dad also died from asbestos exposure leading to mesothelioma. His final months were a lot like what you described.

It takes one asbestos exposure to get a fiber hooked in your lung. It's worth some hassle. It's not just about you, but also the people who handle it downstream in the waste disposal pipeline, people who are involved in unrelated construction, etc. Asbestos killed a lot of people.

It always amazes me that for every type of potentially hazardous substance or situation there will be people state 'Everything I've read' or 'From my own research' and the downplay or dismiss the concern.

There are a LOT of people that have worked with asbestos that went on to develop severe lung disease.

I feel very disappointed in many of people commenting here. Because it looks like - as long as I'm not the one hurt, who cares that it's their health and life at risk.

As long as I can have my stuff cheap.

Also things like the asbestos house siding and floor tiles that were ubiquitous for a while. If you have an older house there's a decent chance you either have it or it's lurking underneath what you do have when people just covered it up.

Getting rid of it is a huge hassle because it qualifies for full asbestos remediation. But yet it's nowhere near the danger to get rid of than the loose-fill insulation.

PFAS will mess you up. Badly.

"How bad could they be?" You ask. "They're incredibly unreacitve!"

Enter steric interference.

Also, there's a very good reason we do animal studies; because, unless there's a really good reason why something (say burnt food -> we've coevolved with cooking) wouldn't affect humans, if it kills animals, it kills us.

It is a completely different risk profile.

Asbestos is dangerous, mostly for people who work with it, but other than that, it is just rock, and it occurs naturally. After a few years of not using it and disposing of the decaying remains of stuff made with it, it is unlikely to stay a problem.

PFAS on the other hand are not natural, we are putting out tons of stuff that can last for thousands of years and is very hard to get rid off. Maybe it is a problem, or maybe not. If it is not, then we are lucky, but if it is, then our grandchildren and their own grandchildren who may only remember asbestos from history books will be left with a major problem to deal with.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Plenty of stuff occurs naturally, like poison hemlock.

Asbestos certainly does not break down and decay. It stays permanently in your lungs until you die.

Asbestos is also naturally occurring and as a result there's an ambient level of asbestos in the air regardless of how hard you regulate.

I find asbestos to be such fascinating substance. As a kid I thought it was cool as hell ("a fluffy rock!?") and even now I think it's pretty neat in its natural form. Because asbestos has so many useful properties - ridiculously insulating and non-flammable - many of the substances that replaced the asbestos are the PFAS this sentence is complaining about. As far as I know there's still not a good non-PFAS substitute in many cases.

How long will EPA survive? Trump promised to bring asbestos back last time. Will probably do it again if re-elected.

If he didn't bring it back last time why would he bring it back the 2nd time? He'll probably do it right after he mandates lead piping in all schools.

He kept it legal. https://apnews.com/article/ea3d87fb8ef741c3bc255f1921892c9d

The US has in my opinion the exact wrong approach to regulation here. The deny-list approach of regulation may very well foster innovation, but it also fosters lawlessness and exploitation.

If a company can get away with not needing to really care about the negative side effects of their products, they will most certainly do that.

The entire model needs to be inverted.

Modern technology wouldn’t exist if we had this philosophy 200 years ago. I hardly think it’s a worthwhile trade off.

With respect, I don't entirely agree.

I do think you're right in sentiment; things would look very differently. If given a choice, I'd rather live in a slower-paced society where development was held to higher standards.

What we have now is a complete shit show.

> Modern technology wouldn’t exist if we had this philosophy 200 years ago

This is a really bad line of thinking - 200 years ago humanity was small and helpless. In year 1788 Britain, the centre of industrial revolution, produced 32,000 tons of iron. Today we produce billions. Our ships weigh more than all the fish in the ocean combined. The chickens we eat weigh more than all the wild animals left on the planet.

200 years ago we did not have the ability to create completely new synthetic chemicals that last thousands of years, today we have put so much plastic in the ocean, it will soon outweigh all the fish.

We didn't have to care about the planet because we couldn't break it- now we can

The deny-list model is fine if 1. You deny quickly and decisively, 2. Actually deny, without loopholes, grace periods, or grandfather clauses (which will all be abused) and 3. Actually enforce, rather than just throwing a law over the wall and ignoring violators.

The US is pretty slow with #1, absolutely terrible and ineffective with #2, and uneven/spotty with #3.

If we assume that those are the three conditions under which a deny-list model is fine, then I think the US' inability to meet those conditions more or less disqualify it from it being a fine choice.

The alternative is the government keeping a gigantic register of materials I may or may not use, a completely insane proposition.

Are they going to ban tiger's eye

An EPA ban can't do anything about natural mineral asbestos that occurs near many residential areas. Floods continue to contaminate residential areas with natural asbestos and have done so for millennia. Recent report from Washington state:

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

California's state rock is serpentinite, which is known for its often beautiful green coloration, and for containing chrysotile asbestos:

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

There's an outcrop near the Golden Gate bridge (scroll down for photo):

https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/education/serpentinite-faq.ht...

What's your point? Just because natural dangers exist doesn't mean we should go ahead and create human-made dangers of our own.

Under this logic we shouldn't have structural engineering standards because rock falls happen all the time in nature.

I never said the EPA ban was bad. My point was to point out that natural asbestos sources remain a threat. I was quickly massively downvoted though because readers assumed I was criticizing the EPA when I in fact was not. I will have to be more careful in the future to understand that many readers don't carefully read what one actually writes, but rather read what they think someone might be implying.

Are you sure that the multiple people who are assuming your implication and downvoting as a result are wrong?

I think it’s quite clear and obvious that your comment’s intention was to downplay the importance of the EPA’s ban and frame it against or redirect it toward the topic of naturally occurring threats.

If that’s NOT what you were doing, then your comment was essentially irrelevant.

Again, my intention wasn't to downplay the importance of the EPA's ban. My intention was to point out that natural sources of pollution remain, as natural sources of pollution is something I have been fascinated with for a long time. For example, certain tree forests can emit sufficient unhealthy levels of hydrocarbon smog that the smog becomes visible in the air, kinda like Los Angeles before catalytic converters. But I certainly think eliminating man-made smog is a great thing, even if tree-made smog remains. And again, I have come to see now that my wording to the effect of, "An EPA ban on pollution X can't prevent natural sources of pollution X" has been interpreted as a statement logically identical to "EPA bans of pollutant X are pointless because natural pollutant sources of X still remain." But those two statements are not, in fact, logically equivalent. And again, I need to better learn that humans frequently suspect implications and insinuations in words that the speaker did not intend.

I still think there’s more suggestiveness in your words than you’re giving them credit for:

It’s in the very first sentence: “An EPA ban can't do anything about natural mineral asbestos that occurs near many residential areas.”

You’re saying an EPA ban can’t do something. That’s a place where you’ve pointed out a weakness of the ban, right in the first sentence. None of the remainder of your comment mentions any redeeming value to this EPA policy, so we have to assume that your main objective is to criticize it. After all, your very first sentence is a criticism of the policy’s effectiveness.

If you recall persuasive writing from grade school, we put our overarching opinion/objective right in the first sentence/paragraph as an introduction and then follow it up with supporting evidence throughout the rest of the piece. That’s exactly how your comment was structured.

It’s not some kind of flaw of human nature to assume that your main objective was to criticize the merit of this EPA policy, because you essentially directly stated that it was.

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