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.
"The solution to pollution is dilution, except when accumulation is a violation upon creation"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> just above the lab’s reporting limit of 0.01 mg/L.
> just barely above the California drinking water standard
I ... just can't even say anything to this.
Perhaps it'd be best for all to drop the snide and review the HN comment guidelines.
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.
These are pretty much the only two concerning contaminants. Everything else in the report is just fear-mongering, like the BS about manganese.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
or unsustainably: e.g.: PFAS. For bonus points you can do internal research and hide the reports detailing the effects accurately.
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’.
Are you actually suggesting that we rely on the good will of a for profit corp? When has that ever worked?
Your car, heating, toilet and soap and all the rest release zero pollution, right?
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...
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.
There is lead in dirt!
That's the definition of law. As long as it is legal it won't be charged.
Is there an alternative?
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?
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.
The US regulatory standards are terrible. https://www.loudounwater.org/information-hexavalent-chromium...
The actual limits are orders of magnitude lower. Educate yourself.
more about PG&E contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...
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.
I think it is used in small quantities for industrial applications like welding, which seems a more likely source here.
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.
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.
I include bismuth as stable even though technically it is radioactive with an extraordinarily long half life.
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).
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.
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.
Here is the first good reference I could find, which surveys some of the other literature. It mentions lead in rat models.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0d522f-5688-83eb-b80c-0f7b157fae... https://gemini.google.com/share/e2e52489a41e
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.
Also, just in general debate terms, the one who makes a claim is the one who has the burden of substantiating it.
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.
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...
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.
* 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...