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What about the fallibility of the system? If there's a set of processes feeding into each other taking sewage and producing clean drinking water, I feel that t
by rlpb 15y ago
What about the fallibility of the system?
If there's a set of processes feeding into each other taking sewage and producing clean drinking water, I feel that there's a much higher possibility of a failure causing contamination to the drinking water. Engineers can be complacent about fail-safes and politics may compromise good engineering.
If there's a river in the way, then although the water must be processed again, this apparent wastefulness also has the effect of preventing engineers (or their managers) from taking shortcuts.
- abstractbill 15y agoAny system for producing drinking water is fallible - why is this one special? Why should we be more suspicious of it than any other process? Just for one example, I remember in 2004 when Dasani launched in the UK [1]. Aside from a bunch of other rather hilarious mistakes, their purification process (applied to regular mains drinking water) introduced bromate - a suspected carcinogen. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_Kingdom