Comment by robocat
20 hours ago
Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
After a big earthquake you don't want to have to also deal with other emergencies (à la Fukushima).
Aside: One good side-effect of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake being so horrific is that it stopped the self-obsessed whinging in my city (Christchurch was still trying to recover from an earthquake).
Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.
It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.
> The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.
Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245
I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.
I was thinking maybe have those chemicals sitting in a glass or temperature sensitive container inside the tank. So when there's too much pressure or heat, the container containing the neutralizing chemical is broken like a fuse and the chemical is automatically released.
Having the chemical in one location doesn't make it active all over, you need to disperse it. Like you need to shake glow-in-the-dark bracelets.
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That is active.
Something passive could be submerging the tank in a pool of water (also good for proving spill containment won't leak).
Typically you don't have enough surface area for that. The walls are thick enough that thermal conductivity into an ambient-temperature liquid alone is not going to be sufficient.
Uh, you can't just disconnect a pressurized 35,000 gallon tank and drop it into a an enormous pool you just keep full under it at all times.
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Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient.
It's cheaper.
> Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they showed up, supposedly things were too damaged to inject it. That neutralizer should have been a Big Red Switch away.
They also should have had a deluge system, for example, to cool the tank. With a standpipe for firefighters if there's no water available onsite. Was there? Nope! No requirement for it. Despite the dangers of this stuff being very well documented, it having caused disasters before, etc.
Consider that the chemical industry can invent a new chemical and the onus is on everyone else to prove it is hazardous. So what does the US chemical industry do? Spend lots of time "innovating" new versions of chemicals to constantly leverage the 'innocent until proven guilty' scam. Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."
Protection systems cost money. If something really bad happens the cost of the disaster far outweighs whatever assets the company has hanging around, and in the US, we basically never hold anybody responsible for what they do in the course of their job running a corporation. GM willfully ignored problems with Chevy Cruze ignition switches that caused countless people to die because they'd randomly shut off _and shutting off meant the airbags would get disabled_. Did anyone in those teams, or their managers, ever get held accountable? Nope, not except in some civil suits, where Chevy repeatedly claimed they didn't have any documentation. Well, at some point Congress went after them for something, and in the massive pile of documents lo and behold there wer piles and piles and piles of documentation about the ignition switch issues.
A company like that isn't even required to carry a lick of insurance, far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, and I wish I were joking on this - if I want to get a permit to set aside space in front of my apartment building to park a moving truck, I have to carry a million dollars insurance that protects the city.
If I park my car blocking an ambulance I get charged with at least one crime, possibly even manslaughter or homicide. Ditto for blocking a fire truck trying to get to a fire. A railroad can do it to half a county, dozens of times a year, and everyone just shrugs as people are harmed or killed, or half a neighborhood burned down. All because private equity is milking the railroad so tight that it's making trains that are miles long instead of lengths that are appropriate for the tracks they're on and won't block fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school busses, and the general population as a whole.
The free license corporate America gets to shit all over society has got to stop.
> Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."
That's exactly the story of Bisphenol A: once banned it just got replaced by variants of unproved (but likely even higher) toxicity.
Hell, it’s still amazing there was so little fallout after Bhopal.
I worked with someone whose father drove his whole family out of the killing zone in Bhopal on a two wheeler. There might not have been a strong international movement to enforce safety first behavior on transnationals, but there was fall out.
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US government actions demonstrate the value placed on a life in another country can be much lower than the statistical value here in the US. We could save a life for a few thousand dollars with malaria nets (or so it's claimed); domestically a value of $12M per saved life is considered enough to justify some safety improvement.
Because it happened in India, from perspective of US public: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Frankly, I'm not in the least surprised.
In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.
This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.
The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
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That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation.
Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas? Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?
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But then no one would build Jurassic Park. And man, I want to pet Raptors and take selfies with T-Rex you know. Its a conundrum.
>Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
>Chemical A is found to be cancerous
Chemical A is assumed to be cancerous by the state of California, you mean?
Are you alleging that California claims stuff to be carcinogenic without evidence?
Do you have a supposed motive?
Any evidence?
Whilst it's a bit of a meme, isn't it just true that a lot of stuff is carcinogenic.
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> And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
I'll bet a ton of that regulation is insufficient, and/or paid for, or even written by, the industry to make it harder for competitors or to allow them to increase their profits by cutting corners.
Regulation isn't some on/off switch that always makes things better or worse. What matters is what those regulations are and who they serve.
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Complaining about the Chevy Cruze like that is hilarious. Did you go out of your way to pick up a particularly harmless example?
What about all the other cars that kill significantly more people by design? Like, I don’t know, any SUV or pickup truck? In that context, picking on the rather innocent Cruze seems a bit obtuse.
I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt, the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the I believe on-going lawsuits.
AFAIK there were no similar ignition switch failures or associated deaths with the Cruze (or other >2011 model year vehicles), although I think it might have been part of the recall.
Shouldn't any design that is killing people, no matter how petty you think it is, be reason for homicide investigation against the companies executives?
I guess if you viewed customers as actual people the 'the dow is 50k - why do you want us to stop war crimes?' might also get a response requiring the treatment of humans with dignity.
If your executives can't kill people to make a couple of million what's the point of even being a wage-slave./s
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I feel like these arguments are always framed as an evil corporation wants to take advantage of consumers. Except that's misdirection. The guilty party isn't the corporation, it's you, the consumer. And the corporations are already regulated. Heavily.
You want Gore-Tex (expanded PTFE) boots, Cobalt EV batteries (Child labor in the DRC), Solar Panels (Open pit quartz mines), Wind Turbine Blades (Epoxy Resins & glass-like fibers), and so on. All those things sound nice and good for the environment but don't appear out of some magical horn of plenty. All those things require intensive chemical and industrial processes that cost a lot of money.
"Just make the government solve the problem by criminalizing their entire operation" isn't a serious solution. It's a generic anti-corporation/NIMBY argument to outsource uncomfortable things to another country without labor or safety protections. Consumers need to accept that if they want nice things those things come with some amount of cost to the environment and level of risk. The government needs to work with corporations to find the safest _practical_ mitigation that doesn't bankrupt them. If that's done correctly you will actually avoid accidents like this because everyone is working together on the same page.
You’re reversing causality. People don’t want gore-tex, and they don’t want cobalt batteries. They want dry boots and transportation.
If some corporation comes along and says they have dry boots and electric cars, it is not realistic to expect every single consumer in a society to become expertly informed on fluorochemistry or the economics of mining, and then also expect them to make the decision that is best for all of us.
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You write as if it would not be possible to work with these chemicals safely at a reasonable cost, and that's just not true. Other jurisdictions manage this.
Corporations naturally seek to improve margins, all the time, constantly. They will push and push against rules and regulations. It's the proper role of government to balance the costs to the corporation against the interests of the public. And it can be done well. But in the US, it's becoming more and more rare.
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Wow that is a hell of a lot of responsibility to heap on the consumer. I think the right/rational argument is properly regulated safety procedures for storing large quantities of extremely hazardous chemicals. There is a middle ground. This is in my view a regulatory failure if I ever saw one… who was inspecting this tank and what were they looking for? I am willing to bet the gas pump nearest me gets more attention from whoever is responsible for weights and measures.
You present this as if consumers were truthfully informed of all the ecological and labor impacts of products they buy. In many cases contrary is true, companies don't inform the customers, try to hide the impacts or downplay the impacts. Using outsourcing and very difficult to trace supply chains is often way to prevent informed public.
The idea that "If corporations can't do whatever they want, including put everyone's lives at risk, nobody will be able to have anything nice" is a commonly seen argument but of course it's a lie. Companies might make less profit if they had to act responsibly but they'd still make profits. Those that failed to don't deserve to exist and should get out of the way so that a more efficient and capable company can take their place.
The same argument could be made for all kinds of unreasonable demands. If there were products that couldn't be profitably made and sold without slavery do you think we should all just accept that slavery? We, as a society, make choices all the time that certain products, industries, and practices aren't worth the costs. Sometimes it's perfectly fine to bankrupt companies and kill entire industries to do it.
By all indications child porn could be a massively profitably industry. For a long time it was. As a society we decided that crossed a line, and we petitioned our government to outlaw it and enforce that regulation on the porn industry. The economy didn't collapse when we did. It's just as reasonable for the public to decide to demand better safety from the chemical industry and ask the government to regulate that as well. It's been done many times in various forms already. The economy didn't collapse then either.
We'd agree that there is a middle ground to aim for most of the time though. The problem we have now is that government is being bribed to ignore what voters want and roll back many of the regulations we demanded. Incidents like this one remind us that companies should be expected and required to do better, but as long as government can keep accepting piles of cash in exchange for ignoring the rest of us it's not going to be easy to convince the government to do their job. There's also been an increasing amount of voter suppression to make it harder to fire and replace corrupt government with people who will do their job.
Consumers don't control zoning laws or risk mitigation details.
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It may well be quite valid in context to let a company or even an entire industry go bankrupt if the net negative is large enough and give zero fucks if the mitigation required is practical or affordable. It may also be valid from the perspective of one group of citizens to foist the cost and risk on another nations less organized or represented citizens in another nation. Unkind but we don't pay our lawmakers to represent our citizens and theirs equally.
The average person is dumber than a box of rocks and the ones that aren't have limited time, attention, and expertise. They can't be relied on to make practical decisions while shopping on amazon regarding the practical effects of their buying power. The only hope to have sane decision making is by subject matter experts which is why we are a nation of laws which basically say follow the rules set down by these unlected assholes who actually know <insert subject> because it is literally the only practical way forward in our nation of 338M stupid assholes.
I don't want any of those things, really (besides solar panels I suppose). I avoid plastic as much as I can. But, let's take your boots example. I recently went looking for a pair of well-made boots that don't contain plastic. But that eliminates something like 99% of the available offerings, and most of the remaining are luxury brands that can cost upwards of 600 dollars. I don't have that kind of budget, so I had to compromise. Do you see the problem here? If I want decent boots without a luxury brand fee, I HAVE to give these chemical companies my money. Extend that to clothing, groceries, furniture, devices, etc etc.
I avoid this stuff as much as I can without upending my life, and I'm still forking over much of my spending to companies that can pollute my land, water, and air with near impunity. I didn't choose this shit!