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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

The cost of this remediation nationwide is going to be brutal.

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/

> By the EPA’s standards, Anaheim’s remaining wells are now considered contaminated. Lyster says the city will expand its PFAS treatment capacity to comply with the federal rule by 2029. All told, building PFAS filtration for all 19 of Anaheim’s wells is projected to cost $200 million.

> Anaheim and Yorba Linda are part of the Orange County Water District — a public agency that manages the region’s groundwater and which helped to design, fund and build the PFAS filtration plants. Across Orange County, more than 100 wells have exceeded the EPA’s new standards. Fixing the problem in the county is expected to cost $1.8 billion dollars over 30 years, according to OCWD.

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> cost of this remediation nationwide is going to be brutal

"$1.8 billion dollars over 30 years" in a county of 3mm [1] is about $20 per person per year. Scaled nationally, that implies a cost of about $6bn a year, which sounds amply doable.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/california/ora...

Other resources seem to agree with me with regards to unaffordability at this scale. Maybe we’re just arguing the scale of “a few tens of billions here and there.”

> PFAS can be bought for $50 - $1,000 per pound (according to MPCA estimates), but costs between $2.7 million and $18 million per pound to remove and destroy from municipal wastewater, depending on facility size.

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/groundbreaking-...

> A new report by Milliman estimates that PFAS remediation costs for U.S. water districts could reach as high as $175 billion, helping companies and insurers quantify the potential exposure.

Report: https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/pfas-liability-estimate-...

https://riskandinsurance.com/costs-to-remediate-pfas-water-c...

These absurd numbers are unaffordable, but we're forced to pay them one way or another. PFAS in the water supply is costing the world just as much in healthcare expenditures.

A few tens of billions really isn't a big deal...

It's kind of funny that you are like an enthusonaut when it comes to businesses and other private entities doing things and then can't imagine that pretty much the only thing government needs to do whatever is the political will.

I can be optimistic about things that don’t matter, but pessimistic when it comes to basic human needs and the historical pattern of people being poisoned by companies without recourse or government not holding polluters accountable. Will it get cleaned up eventually? Maybe. Will it be expensive? Absolutely. Will people be harmed and die in the meantime from PFAS contaminated water. Also true.

The Inflation Reduction Act demonstrates your point about political will, but it still requires will, and once done, the policy and fiat takes time to have outcomes come out of the machine.

Nuance!

> pessimistic when it comes to basic human needs and the historical pattern of people being poisoned by companies without recourse or government bit holding polluters accountable

The damage and solution are both local. That reduces the minimum scale of action, which makes organising easier. It also makes benefits personal: you aren't paying $1.60 a month so someone across the world breathes easier or isn't flooded, you're paying so your family doesn't drink PFAS. And you get that benefit if your town or county agree they don't want to be poisoned; you don't need to worry about what Arizona or West Virginia are doing.

No, drinking water is only one source of PFAS poisoning. Other sources include food packaging, cosmetics, cookware, paints, cooking oils, and more.

Still local and locally controllable. Totally different coordination problem from e.g. emissions reduction.

Pfas levels in the US are far below where they were in 2000. We are making solid progress.

I would not disagree we are making progress, but people will still be harmed and die from drinking water PFAS until remediated. Do we agree on that point?

> EPA Administrator Michael Regan last month made one of his agency's strongest statements to date about the danger of "forever chemicals." New restrictions on those pollutants in drinking water would "prevent thousands of deaths and prevent tens of thousands of serious PFAS-related illnesses," Regan said.

https://www.epa.gov/pfas/key-epa-actions-address-pfas

https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/tap-water-st...

https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP10393

I don't know what your intent with those links is? Are you arguing that my characterization is wrong? That nothing matters but 0?

Please note that I wrote my comment before you edited in text.

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/us-population....

Do we agree on that point?

So why are you balking at committing resources towards doing what is needed?

Back and forth and back again.

Just to put things in perspective, even that (total, apparently multi-year) $175B is "only" 20% of the US annual military budget.

I wonder if this could be a lever to help sell people on taxing externalities, e.g. A carbon tax

$18 million per well. 16 million wells in the United States. So that’s $288 trillion dollars, which is about 1000% of US GDP — ten years of GDP assuming all other spending halts.

> $18 million per well

Where are you getting this?

Could have done the math wrong. Doesn’t really make any difference, but corrections welcome!

Did you take the cost per pound and assume that is the cost per well? (And where did wells come from? The number is quoted in relation to municipal wastewater treatment plants.)

I encourage you to do your own research and see what figures you come up with; I would love to be very wrong, but school demands most of my time, so I haven’t more to spare here.

My cynical thought here is that, without any useful profit or revenue from such investment, that it doesn’t matter if it’s $288 million or $288 trillion: it won’t happen because capitalism simply doesn’t care if workers have bad water, so long as it doesn’t kill them quickly, same as the lead pipes problem has demonstrated.

Are you talking federal intervention? Because half our governing system (you can guess which) just thinks that water suppliers shouldn't be saddled with the responsibility of ensuring water is clean.

But yeah maybe municipalities can pull it together piece by piece. Not that that'd help all the other countless sources of PFAS and similar, though.

I hope PFA manufacturers will have to help pay for this. Especially if they know about the dangers. Makes no sense for them to keep all the profits while the state pays for the remediation.

I wonder if the costs associated with this will go down over time. Either way, your first link says 7500 sites are affected, so that’s something like $135 billion if we go off of the Orange County cost? Sheesh. Or is that multiplication not how it works?

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