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Comment by anon84873628 | Hacker News Reader

Instead the stinky will be spread through time.

The solution to pollution is dilution, and the ocean would metabolize it away fairly quickly.

The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.

Is fish sauce a toxin?

It's the dosage that makes the poison. If you dumped it all in the ocean in a single spot then yes, it would probably kill the local ecosystem.

Yeah sure I’m deep ocean it would kills the local ecosystem

Which is something humans do regularly e.g. every time a house is built

This stuff is barely pollution. Everything there is a natural part of the environment and biological processes. Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it. Dumping it in the ocean is an ideal course of action. Failing that it should be dumped out in the wilderness, not in bags, but just on the ground. It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.

The risk of dumping it in the ocean is that some asshole will see that happening and think "gosh, i should slip my barrels of hazardous toxic waste in with that dumping activity."

> ”It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.”

The fish would make for great fertilizer, but the salt would not. High salt concentrations will kill many plants and probably would stick around in the soil for a long time.

There's not enough salt to sterilize the land where dumped. The salt in fish sauce preparation may be as high as 20% initially but by the time it's done, after having been drained and refilled multiple times, it's 2-4%. To sterilize land requires 5-10kg/m^2 of salt applied repeatedly.

I’m not talking about sterilizing land. Just that salt is not a desirable ingredient in fertilizer. Most plants will not thrive in salty soil, even if it doesn’t kill them.

The ocean seems to contain a great deal of salt though.

Absolutely. So the ideal solution would be to return it to whence it came, but presumably that’s easier said than done if they’re going to all this trouble to bury it in a plastic sarcophagus instead.

Or someone gets paid a lot more for the plastic sarcophagus.

The scientists who have been testing it since 2016 have looked at the evidence and they disagree with you. CBC had to do an access to information request for the results - it took four years. Here is their coverage:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-st-m...

> "All fish placed in the effluent died within 15 minutes,"

The suggestion was to dilute it while slowly releasing it into the ocean. The quote from the report tells us nothing useful.

That article doesn't have any extra information that wasn't in the original poster on this thread.

As fas as everybody here knows, it's rotten fish, salt and vinegar.

They could mix it with woodchips and compost it and it would be an excellent soil amendment full of trace marine minerals.

Mix it with auto shredder fluff and burn it. I bet it won't smell any worse than that stuff usually does.

oh, a stinkier compost? sign me up!

> Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it.

And the fact that there is 900k litres of it.

That just sounds like it's a knee jerk reaction from regulators. For decades their reaction to pollution was "yeah just dump it in the ocean", then we figured out it was bad. So now the pendulum swung the other way where we can't dump anything in the ocean, even if it's probably benign, because if it turns out to be not benign, it'll super bad on you. "You did what? Approved dumping pollutants in the ocean? Haven't you learned anything from us dumping radioactive super-mustard gas in the oceans decades ago?" Better to play it safe. After all, you're not picking up the tab.

This sludge was actually tested and analyzed- it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss and also why they’re doing the work now - the factory itself has been battered by waves and the vats are in danger of being washed into the sea.

>it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster

And this can't be solved by dilution?

Do you really think the super basic idea of diluting it wasn't considered by anyone involved? Why are you so hung up on this?

Someone bounced from "let's dump 40 vats at once" to "we can't allow even a slow leak". No, I don't think we're seeing rigorous scientific competence.

It's not like we humans have any aversion to killing individual wildlife, as long as the ecosystem is okay.

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