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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

Obviously, discharging "dark and murky" polluted water is bad. But some of the figures from the lab report don't seem that terrible:

* Hexavalent chromium at 0.0104 milligrams per liter, just above the lab’s reporting limit of 0.01 mg/L. Hexavalent chromium is classified as a known human carcinogen by the US National Toxicology Program. It is the substance the Erin Brockovich case was built around.

* Arsenic at 0.0025 mg/L. That is below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present.

The hexavalent chromium is also just barely above the California drinking water standard [1]

[1] https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...

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> Arsenic at 0.0025 mg/L

That is well below the noise floor. Like the similarly toxic selenium, arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology. It is possible to be deficient in arsenic, though rare in practice. Natural background levels are far higher in many locales with no adverse effects.

I often see trace quantities of arsenic trotted out by the popular media for scaremongering purposes. Examples like the above are an immediate red flag.

Could you expand on what makes arsenic an essential micronutrient? What are the clinical signs and symptoms of severe arsenic deficiency? I've never heard of this before.

It’s not hard to figure this stuff out yourself.

Perhaps not. At the same time, when a person makes a claim, and several (or several hundred) people read it, it seems more efficient to ask the person who made the claim to supply the documentation, rather than making the several (hundred) people all do the looking. The looking does not have to be hard for this to be true.

Also, just in general debate terms, the one who makes a claim is the one who has the burden of substantiating it.

It is hard. I did some searches before commenting and couldn't find anything about arsenic deficiency. I don't know much about arsenic biochemistry so could you kindly point us to a good source?

It's super easy with ChatGPT, for example. See my other reply in this thread, I've included the responses there.

It has no known physiological role in humans. Selenium has similar stuff going on. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_biochemistry]

IIRC, severe deficiency of arsenic leads to a type of wasting. The precise role is uncertain. Based on animal models the rough estimates for human requirements are similar to selenium.

Humans get enough arsenic from water and other background sources that deficiency is virtually unknown. My understanding is that there was historical anecdotal evidence for rare arsenic deficiency from animal husbandry that caused it to be investigated.

These days they systematically test for the trace micronutrient status of e.g. heavy metals by inducing extreme deficiency using mammal models. Most of the time nothing happens but it is difficult to eliminate the possibility of contamination creating a null signal.

Probably the most surprising element for which they have suggestive evidence of biological necessity is lead.

Could you give us some specific citations for evidence of biological necessity for arsenic and lead? I searched on PubMed but couldn't find anything.

It is damn near impossible to search on Google for this literature today. Fortunately, some of the links have been posted to this site before, which is searchable. :)

Here is the first good reference I could find, which surveys some of the other literature. It mentions lead in rat models.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2246629/

Since maybe half a year ago, the best way to search stuff like that, by a huge margin, are frontier models like ChatGPT or Gemini. Here's what they found, the TLDR is that lead is much less likely to be essential (in extremely minute amounts) than arsenic, which has been proven to be beneficial in trace amounts for a bunch of mammals. Since those experiments cannot be done on humans, we don't know if it is the same situation in our case, but the null hypothesis at this point is that it is.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0d522f-5688-83eb-b80c-0f7b157fae... https://gemini.google.com/share/e2e52489a41e

That is an accurate summary of the literature as I remember it. Arsenic has been replicated in a bunch of animals including non-mammals. It seems to generalize well and the background is substantive. There are also plausible hypotheses for mechanisms of action. The assumption is that a common effect across a sufficiently diverse set of animals applies to humans, which is probably a good heuristic.

The evidence for lead is much more sparse. It is interesting, and plausible, but without more evidence it is more of a curiosity. For better or worse, there has been zero interest in investigating that anomaly further. People should avoid lead exposure regardless.

Thankfully elements like mercury never show up in these studies. Nothing in my chemistry training suggests that mercury by nature could ever be anything but toxic to life and the evidence seems to support that. It would be weird to find out that was wrong, though I would accept it with sufficient evidence.

Those levels are low enough that they might be coming from the water going into the plant.

Arsenic and hexavalent chromium are both naturally occurring substances in low quantities. You can pull uncontaminated water out of the ground in remote locations and detect low levels of arsenic and hexavalent chromium.

That hexavalent chromium number would be just barely about California's strict limit for drinking water, but it's 1/10th of the EPA's limit.

Out of curiosity, I checked the water records re: arsenic.

Test wells for the region in question have had arsenic levels several times that being discussed here for years. In fact, the water district started failing Federal arsenic standards last summer[0] and has received three formal violation notices.

They were nearly in violation a year before the lithium plant even opened. At least in terms of arsenic, the levels coming out of the plant are significantly lower than background.

[0] https://www.kristv.com/running-dry/ncwcid-3-gets-third-arsen...

Reading between the lines here the local .gov knows this and didn't mention it specifically or at least they weren't quoted as such.

The journalist got their hands on the report saw "arsenic" and just copypasta'd without understanding the context and now everyone is screeching about something that's less than the local baseline.

If I wanted to fall under that reporting limit, can I just dilute my wastewater a bit more?

The classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".

The dosage makes the poison - but if it sticks around in the body dilution may slightly alleviate effects but at the cost of more widespread buildup. This is out of my field so I'm not certain if that's a concern here.

In some cases it still is, but we need to emphasize the exceptions, which can be rather serious.

For example, we can hardly "dilute" CFCs or CO2 any more than we did, by putting them into a whopping 5.15×10^18 kg of the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Yet both still cause bad things, because there's no (sufficient) process to break them down or move them to a safe state.

Is that so? The amount of atmosphere stays the same, but we're constantly adding more CO2. So wouldn't this continually reduce the dilution?

the volume of CO2 is negliglible (ppms) and it uses often Oxygen from the air.

Accumulation makes the... what rhymes here?

I like where you're going with this.

"The solution to pollution is dilution, except when accumulation is a violation upon creation"?

Litigation

The complication of this realization is bio-accumulation

That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!

Is that what a "smog pump" is (was)? LOL. I had heard the term but never knew what it was.

Along the same lines then as other emissions equipment that reduced fuel economy but achieved the ppm criteria in the exhaust. Yes, let's address pollution by burning more fuel.

Yes, and it has absolutely nothing to do with increasing air volume. The idea is to lower hydrocarbon emissions by burning them off in the exhaust manifold.

Depends on the vehicle. Again, I was in a medium duty truck where this system was used.

No, it does not "depend on the vehicle." Stop spreading bullshit. Failing that, do it elsewhere.

>That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!

I'm sure that people of a certain bent will eat your comment up but that's just not true.

Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.

Emissions have been measured by mass rather than concentration since 1972. So like yeah it "could've been done" but standards before that were light enough that they could just screw with other things that add $0 to the BOM to clean it up enough to pass.

> Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.

My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter, only a muffler. It featured not one, but two air pumps, each feeding a set of pipes that led to metal tubes which entered the exhaust manifold opposite each exhaust port. Another odd thing about that truck was it had a choke lever, something I thought was long gone by 1988, and was a pain to start in the winter.

Perhaps other vehicles had a cat but this truck certainly did not.

350ish (or less) + 4spd trucks kinda fell out of favor over the course of the 70s for bigger engines and 5spds (usually with a 2spd rear end but I digress). I'm sure you could still get one, but who would when you could get something better on the lot for the same money.

Sounds like someone swapped a 70s-80s engine from a lighter application in.

I don't think that truck would've had manual choke from the factory. Lots of stuff could've happened over the years.

The amount of air your engine breathes is monumental compared to what the smog pump moves. The math of dilution just doesn't work. What does work is pissing a light stream of oxygen (remember, not much of that coming out of the engine, especially on warm up while it runs rich) to help the catalyst burn those hydrocarbons off of itself a wee bit faster.

I'm not sure if an 80s gas MDT would've had cats from the factory.

The 6000 was a commercial truck. It appears to have had a carburetor for most if not all of the 1980s.

Totally had a carb since it had a choke lever.

> I'm sure you could still get one, but who would when you could get something better on the lot for the same money.

It was almost certainly cheaper to get the small block and if that's all you need why spend more to burn more gas? The 1988 GM Medium Duty Truck brochure lists the 5.7L (350CID) V8 and SM-465 as standard equipment. I have no idea what the sales numbers were but it's not far fetched for a 1988 truck to have been configured with a small block and a 4 speed from the factory.

https://xr793.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/1988-GMC-Medium...

Hey, thanks for finding that brochure. Same one I have.

Neat! What do you do with it? I spent my summers in college driving C60 grain trucks. They were real workhorses! The 1979 with a 5 speed, split axle, and 427 was the best of the bunch but the 82 with a 366 did great work too. Sometimes I wish I could hop in one and split a few more gears but these days I shower before work.

> Sounds like someone swapped a 70s-80s engine from a lighter application in.

Nope, factory. I have the brochure to that truck and clearly remember the gasoline engine options: 350, 366 and 427 (tall deck big blocks) The 350 + 4spd was billed as a low cost drive line option for local work trucks that did not travel long distances. It had a rater tall rear end (tall is slang for deep reduction ratio) something like a 5:1 or better. On a flat road with your foot to the floor it could barley approach 50 MPH.

In 1988 the factory put a cat in the exhaust. It also would have had fuel injection and a computer, and thus no choke. In short this truck was very much not stock (or possibly you are not in the US?) and so it is interesting but not helpful for the discussion.

Sigh. You didn't even try thinking and vomited out a bunch of nonsense. See the brochure this poster found, same one I have somewhere at home: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203115

> My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter,

Catalytic converters were required on most vehicles starting in 1975 in the US and the requirement was expanded to cover all vehicles in the early 80s.

Your truck was modified by someone.

I don't think that's right. I believe this is the relevant EPA regulation: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2004-title40-vol17/p.... This mentions emission limits but does not require a catalytic converter for medium duty (14,000lb-26,000lb GVWR) trucks like the GMC 6000.

> This mentions emission limits but does not require a catalytic converter

IIRC, technically if the vehicle meets emissions limits without a catalytic converter then it doesn't need one.

The emission limits are set such that a catalytic converter is required to meet them. They don't have to say "catalytic converter required" but the targets are chosen so that a catalytic converter can reasonably achieve them.

If the laws simply said "catalytic converter required" then manufacturers could put a tiny little square of catalyst in the exhaust and call it a day. Formula 1 isn't the only place where rules have to be written explicitly to avoid clever workarounds.

> Catalytic converters were required

You claimed they were required by law, but they weren’t. Now you claim they had them anyway, but I can find no evidence of that either. Do you have some evidence that 1988 GMC 6000 trucks had a catalytic converter from the factory? I can find nothing online to support that claim.

Medium duties are weird beasts indeed.

Well, FWIW the air pumps still can -help- with unburnt fuel...

It's not as good as a Cat for emissions but it's better than nothing, so they actually started being used before Cats; they just are used different now.

This is completely false.

The ECU turns on the secondary air system and enriches the fuel mixture so the exhaust temperature goes up, heating the catalytic converter rapidly. Catalytic converters must be hot to work, so getting them hot quickly is important.

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

EDIT: OP drove an older truck. In earlier days, the extra air injection into the exhaust was to provide some air for the secondary exhaust gasses to fully burn. It had to be done early in the exhaust where the exhaust gases are hot.

Presumably. But they are also limited on the volume of wastewater they are allowed to discharge, so it probably wouldn't be an ideal "solution".

>> If I wanted to fall under that reporting limit, can I just dilute my wastewater a bit more?

It said the permit is for up to a certain amount of water per day. If you're at the volume limit there's no way to dilute by just adding more water.

Unless you run it along a ditch so much of the water, and bad stuff, soaks into the soil before "discharge" at the property line.

That level of arsenic is so low that diluting it with groundwater might cause the arsenic number to go up, depending on where this is located.

Yeah but the volume of water you can release is still limited so does still reduce pollutants if you are running up against that limit.

My guess is the hexavalent chromium is leeched from plated metals in processing equipment. Very common plating substance and was more common before restrictions were put in place.

> It is the substance the Erin Brockovich case was built around.

more about PG&E contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...

But does the amount per liter matter? The quantity matters too right? How much of these substances are being released in total? And since it’s into a drainage ditch that goes past what looks like farmland, does the higher local concentration cause more problems for the population in the area?

I think it does. Crops pull up a set amount of water. If it's concentrated, then they'll pull up a lot of heavy metals. If it's at very low levels, then they won't.

Sure; if you run a "hazardous substance processing" company, you just take up an enormous amount of clean water and enrich it with the maximum amounts of arsenic, chromium, etc, and charge your clients a nice penny.

What about:

Strontium at 1.17 mg/L

That seems like a misprint? Strontium is a fission byproduct. And that seems like a high amount if that's milligrams per liter.

Not really; strontium is quite common in the crust. In the oceans it occurs in the single-digit mg/L. This isn't a meaningful datapoint.

The entire article doesn't show particularly concerning findings and the protests read more like nimbyism than environmental concern. Industrial processes have some non-zero level of impact and complaining when someone runs one that's not very polluting at all is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or it's just an attempt to outsource all the pollution to china, which is fine for many things (I'd rather they were polluted than us) but not critical minerals.

Yes just searched it and found:

While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is radioactive and is one of the most dangerous components of nuclear fallout, as strontium is absorbed by the body in a similar manner to calcium. Natural stable strontium is not hazardous to health at low levels.

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

I guess I didn't realize that strontium had a stable naturally-occuring isotope.

There are only two elements below the actinides that have no stable isotopes (technetium and promethium).

I include bismuth as stable even though technically it is radioactive with an extraordinarily long half life.

Every element up to and including bismuth, excluding technetium and promethium, have stable primordial isotopes (i.e., have been on Earth since it was made), and in addition, thorium, uranium, and maybe plutonium (Pu-244 is on the very edge, so it's not clear if any primordial nuclei of it remain) also have primordial isotopes. Every element with bismuth or higher atomic number has no stable isotopes, and the elements from astatine through neptunium naturally occur largely via decay sequences of uranium or natural nuclear reactions in uranium ore.

Nuclear fission reactions tend to result in the daughter nuclei being considerably smaller than the mother nucleus--like a 70/30 or 60/40 split, which means that the fission products of uranium are firmly in the range of elements that have stable isotopes. (Although due to larger elements being richer in neutrons, most fission products have too many neutrons, hence undergo radioactive decay themselves).

Cesium too. Makes all sorts of cool fireworks happen.

It is a normal metal. For example, the intense red color in fireworks is commonly strontium nitrate.

I think it is used in small quantities for industrial applications like welding, which seems a more likely source here.

yaaaay hexavalent chromium and arsenic, the classics. Are they melting or plating something? Or is it just ores being ores?

Based on other comments, the levels are well below drinking water in the area - and probably within safe drinking water limits.

nah, there is no reason they should be discharging any hexavalent chromium, we have better, less insanely toxic ways of chroming things. trivalent chromium is much less toxic, hexavalent chromium should be banned world-wide.

what's more, i'm not finding a reason that tesla would need hexavalent chromium in battery production, which leads me to speculate that this is waste from one of their other car factories where they presumably have a hexavalent chrome line (it's a cheaper and more robust process than trivalent chrome) and they are mixing/discharging on purpose at the limit at this plant.

This refinery is situated miles away from any other Tesla factories.

I used to work in a factory that did chrome plating (I didn't work in that area, but since it was the same building), as part of my mandatory training before I was allowed to step foot in the building I had to learn there was a sewage plant just for the output of that line and if I had to dispose of waste water for any reasons I had to make sure I got it into the right system. Our sewage system couldn't treat toilet water, the city system can't treat chrome waste. (my waste disposal was limited to toilet and washing my hands - as you would expect from an engineer, but I still had to know about the system just in case)

They couldn't sell those cars in europe.

please stop please stop and educate yourself. I dislike that this is the top message in a forum where we’re supposed to dig deeper.

The US regulatory standards are terrible. https://www.loudounwater.org/information-hexavalent-chromium...

The actual limits are orders of magnitude lower. Educate yourself.

So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?

How about when it enters the food chain and starts to accumulate? Will the elements say that "we're under legal limits, and accumulate slowly, so we will act nice and don't poison the organism we're in?"

Love that way of thinking.

> So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?

> Love that way of thinking.

I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise. So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).

It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?

Dunno, maybe strive to release no pollutants at all? Then we wouldn't need all the pesky big government overreach.

How would you do that, assuming you wanted to keep up the material standard of living that the people you care about are used to?

To exist is to pollute.

But you can pollute sustainably. e.g.: Composting, biodegradable materials, etc.

or unsustainably: e.g.: PFAS. For bonus points you can do internal research and hide the reports detailing the effects accurately.

This seems to be the credo of too much of the tech industry lately.

Taking this as a good faith engineering argument. What does that mean? What do you constitute a pollutant and how much is zero?

I guess as a contrived example your breath releases 40k PPM Co2. Have you tried aiming for no pollution?

The reality is we make things which involve pollutants, which we create laws to govern the safe disposal of. Engineers optimise for these constraints the same way you do. You wouldn’t have one k8s pod per request to ‘strive to keep the response times as low as possible’.

Um, I'm pretty sure we can all get behind corps striving for the ideal. Fines align incentives.

Are you actually suggesting that we rely on the good will of a for profit corp? When has that ever worked?

GP suggests that it's fine if it's not forbidden yet. My (sarcastic) suggestion is that it is not, because corporations never act in good faith.

In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water used in bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication has a lot more than 1 atom of arsenic per glass. In the far future humanity might obtain the technology to create water with literally no pollutants in it but that age has yet to arrive.

I assume you hold yourself to that same standard?

Your car, heating, toilet and soap and all the rest release zero pollution, right?

It's also a complete fiction in a world dominated by commercial interests, entrenched lobby groups, corrupt politicians and regulatory capture.

Is there an alternative?

We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked. There are some areas where it could obviously be better, but also some areas where regulation is too strict (blocking housing, renewables, transit) and the system is evolving to address those.

I think the loss of local media has made it harder for misdeeds to come to light, but I don't want to throw up my hands and cede everything to commercial interests et al.

I think a look at other countries would do well. There are many with much tighter regulations (e.g. EU countries, Singapore, Japan) and they seem to have good results with that.

> We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked.

I think prevention of pollution is one area where very tight regulation is absolutely needed, and this seems to be an argument for that.

Of course regulation can be weaponized and used as a tool to serve entrenched interests as well - but this is then more a problem with the overall political system. Also, I think a proof that this is the case is necessary instead of assuming it by default.

It kind of falls apart when large companies can lobby and bribe the people in charge of writing and enacting laws to make exception and write around their problem areas. Or can just make strategic donations to ease any risks of enforcement. Or collude to make sure the fine for whatever infraction is well below the profit margin of doing said infraction.

I don't care to argue semantics, just pointing out your reply was as hollow as your criticism to the person saying legal doesn't mean safe. It's a pretty reasonable thing to draw attention to methinks...

>I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise.

It might be news to you, but the laws don't dictate what's fine, and what isn't.

Aside from things like slavery being legal and homosexuality being illegal in the past, I'll note that it's perfectly legal for you to drink bleach, but it wouldn't really be fine for you to do that.

(I hope we can agree that advising people to do something "fine" isn't rude, but telling someone to go drink bleach would be) .

> So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).

So, to boot, "it's fine as long as it's legal" doesn't apply to those things, youthinks.

Also, "we" is a peculiar pronoun that needs a lot of expansion, considering that the "we" negatively affected by "not fine" things isn't the same "we" that benefits from them, and it's the latter "we" that has direct influence on legislation.

Some interesting terms to read up on include "negative externality" and "corruption" (assuming youreads).

>It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?

If we turn to historical examples, the French Revolution certainly provides an example for alternative ways to resolve disparities between what's legal and what's fine.

There are plenty of others, but that question wasn't asked in good faith, methinks, and so doesn't deserve a more in-depth answer.

The issue lies in how the laws are decided and by whom.

I mean... if it's got a similar amount of toxin X to drinking water... then it's probably not making things much worse.

There is lead in dirt!

The upper limit does not mean that water actually has that amount in it regularly.

Arsenic and lead occur naturally through the food chain. If the levels of discharge are not significantly above the normal levels (and they aren't) then it's harmless.

its all-natural

They are still not harmless. They are normal. However if they are at all above natural (that is your input levels) you should treat and remove them. It is not unusual for the output of a sewage treatment plant to be cleaner water than what goes into your drinking water system.

From a quick lookaround, it looks like a lot of water sources in the area have similar natural levels of arsenic. I could not find chromium content information, and it's plausible that it can be leached from stainless steel.

These are pretty much the only two concerning contaminants. Everything else in the report is just fear-mongering, like the BS about manganese.

> we're under legal limits

That's the definition of law. As long as it is legal it won't be charged.

What if the law is formulated to be convenient for corporations and not to protect the public and/or the environment?

Then we should work together as a society to fix the law and make sure it's applied evenly. Hard to do, but necessary.

Is there an alternative?

Then we should protest the law.

In some vague abstract sense? Wouldn't protesting specific instances where bad laws are letting companies get away with environmentally damaging practices be more effective? As and when there's a pattern of events that is best addressed by adjusting the law, politicians and voters can figure that out for themselves.

Emissions regulations are a balancing act. Industrial processes are inherently filthy. If you want copper, gold, lithium, or anything else that makes up the modern world, somewhere on earth was dirtied for that to be possible, and some of the pollution will get into the surroundings because zero emissions simply isn't possible. So we set certain levels of "acceptable emissions" as a balancing act.

I also agree that emissions should be tighter, but the location question is more interesting, because we can also choose where emissions happen.

For example, we might choose them to happen near cities/factories so the products are close to where they're used. We've mostly stopped doing that since the industrial revolution for pretty good reasons though. We could place them in the pristine landscapes not otherwise used by humans, like national parks. That's unpopular for hopefully obvious reasons. We could place them in sparsely inhabited deserts abroad, as Europeans did [0], before we collectively decided colonialism was a bad thing.

And lastly, we could place them in figurative deserts away from conservation land and people like monoculture farmland, but then we get to your question.

So, what's left? What are you suggesting as a better alternative?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bou_Craa

What a ridiculous comment for something that is obviously extremely +EV for the environment.

Wonderful to see so many people here embracing skepticism when it comes to government institutions, bureaucrats, and their "experts".

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