Comment by porphyra
11 hours 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/drinki...
> 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.
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.
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It has no known physiological role in humans. Selenium has similar stuff going on. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_biochemistry]
It’s not hard to figure this stuff out yourself.
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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.
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Accumulation makes the... what rhymes here?
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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.
>> 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.
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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.
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!
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.
>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.
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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.
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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".
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...
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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)
This refinery is situated miles away from any other Tesla factories.
They couldn't sell those cars in europe.
“Just barely above the California drinking water standard” is a really long way to say “past the limit”
Yes, past the limit of drinking water, which is something different.
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.
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
> 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?
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> 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?
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...
The issue lies in how the laws are decided and by whom.
>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.
It's also a complete fiction in a world dominated by commercial interests, entrenched lobby groups, corrupt politicians and regulatory capture.
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Dunno, maybe strive to release no pollutants at all? Then we wouldn't need all the pesky big government overreach.
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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.
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.
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its all-natural
What a ridiculous comment for something that is obviously extremely +EV for the environment.
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.
[dead]
Wonderful to see so many people here embracing skepticism when it comes to government institutions, bureaucrats, and their "experts".
> But some of the figures from the lab report don't seem that terrible
> 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.
Are 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.
You had troubles in school, didn't you?
This is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.