7 ms·
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
by porphyra 5mo ago
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/drinkingwater/Chromium6.html https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...
- Waterluvian 5mo agoIf I wanted to fall under that reporting limit, can I just dilute my wastewater a bit more?
- cwal37 5mo agoThe classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".
- munk-a 5mo agoThe 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.
- Terr_ 5mo agoIn 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.
- Zigurd 5mo agoAccumulation makes the... what rhymes here?
- Terr_ 5mo agoI like where you're going with this. "The solution to pollution is dilution, except when accumulation is a violation upon creation"?
- imron 5mo agoLitigation
- Wrongful8276 5mo agoThe complication of this realization is bio-accumulation
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- MisterTea 5mo agoThat 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!
- SoftTalker 5mo agoIs 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.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoYes, 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.
- MisterTea 5mo agoDepends on the vehicle. Again, I was in a medium duty truck where this system was used.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoNo, it does not "depend on the vehicle." Stop spreading bullshit. Failing that, do it elsewhere.
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago>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.
- IshKebab 5mo agoPresumably. But they are also limited on the volume of wastewater they are allowed to discharge, so it probably wouldn't be an ideal "solution".
- phkahler 5mo ago>> 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.
- sandworm101 5mo agoUnless you run it along a ditch so much of the water, and bad stuff, soaks into the soil before "discharge" at the property line.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 5mo agoThat 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.
- AngryData 5mo agoYeah but the volume of water you can release is still limited so does still reduce pollutants if you are running up against that limit.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- SilverElfin 5mo agoBut 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?
- gdudeman 5mo agoI 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.
- bayindirh 5mo agoSo, 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.
- cyberax 5mo agoArsenic 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.
- gegtik 5mo agoits all-natural
- bluGill 5mo agoThey 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.
- cyberax 5mo agoFrom 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.
- dvt 5mo ago> 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?
- lovich 5mo ago[flagged]
- baggy_trough 5mo agoYes, past the limit of drinking water, which is something different.
- Aniket-N 5mo agoplease 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#:~:text=Why%20are%20the%20California%20and,%E2%80%A2 https://www.loudounwater.org/information-hexavalent-chromium... The actual limits are orders of magnitude lower. Educate yourself.
- riversflow 5mo agonah, 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- everfrustrated 5mo agoThis refinery is situated miles away from any other Tesla factories.
- bluGill 5mo agoI 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)
- rmu09 5mo agoThey couldn't sell those cars in europe.
- hansmayer 5mo ago[flagged]
- f33d5173 5mo agoAre we doing "i just cant even" posting in 2026? Wastewater is not expected to be safe as drinking water, so it meeting the standards for drinking water shows how safe it is. If you have a reasonable argument to the contrary then please post it.
- hansmayer 5mo agoThis is what social media and LLMs have done to the average member of the society - one has to explain to folks like you everything literally, because you're not able to infer anything on your own any more. Where do you think the wastewater goes eventually genius? Do you think Elon Musk transports it safely into outer space? Or does it have a chance of eventually polluting your own drinking water too? It does not even have to pollute the drinking water directly, as the stuff maybe filtered out by the processing plants, but it will land in the ground, pollute the plants, the food that you eat etc. Is that a bit clearer now? Or do you need more words ?
- f33d5173 5mo agoYes, if you're going to bother to respond, you should use words, and not mere guttoral gestures like a cave man. I consider this an advancement of society and not a regression, but perhaps that's my particular bias.
- hansmayer 5mo ago"guttoral" ? I'd learn to write first, before holding others lessons :)
- teddyh 5mo agoThis is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.
- zoomthrowaway 5mo ago> It is the substance the Erin Brockovich case was built around. more about PG&E contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...
- numpad0 5mo agoyaaaay hexavalent chromium and arsenic, the classics. Are they melting or plating something? Or is it just ores being ores?
- lazide 5mo agoBased on other comments, the levels are well below drinking water in the area - and probably within safe drinking water limits.
- MisterTea 5mo agoMy 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.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoWhat 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.
- landl0rd 5mo agoNot 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.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoYes 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium I guess I didn't realize that strontium had a stable naturally-occuring isotope.
- pfdietz 5mo agoThere 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.
- jcranmer 5mo agoEvery 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).
- unglaublich 5mo agoSure; 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.
- jandrewrogers 5mo ago> 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.
- nradov 5mo agoCould 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.
- selectodude 5mo agoIt’s not hard to figure this stuff out yourself.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoPerhaps 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.
- nradov 5mo agoIt 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?
- pegasus 5mo agoIt's super easy with ChatGPT, for example. See my other reply in this thread, I've included the responses there.
- Aurornis 5mo agoThose 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.
- jandrewrogers 5mo agoOut 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-arsenic-violation-even-as-latest-sample-drops-below-federal-limit https://www.kristv.com/running-dry/ncwcid-3-gets-third-arsen...
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoReading 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.