Earlier quoted context omitted.
The classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".
Accumulation makes the... what rhymes here?
The complication of this realization is bio-accumulation
Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
241–250 of 272 posts
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is damn near impossible to search on Google for this literature today. Fortunately, some of the links have been posted to this site before, which is searchable. :) Here is the first good reference I could find, which surveys some of the other literature. It mentions lead in rat models. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2246629/
Since maybe half a year ago, the best way to search stuff like that, by a huge margin, are frontier models like ChatGPT or Gemini. Here's what they found, the TLDR is that lead is much less likely to be essential (in extremely minute amounts) than arsenic, which has been proven to be beneficial in trace amounts for a bunch of mammals. Since those experiments cannot be done on humans, we don't know if it is the same s…
That is an accurate summary of the literature as I remember it. Arsenic has been replicated in a bunch of animals including non-mammals. It seems to generalize well and the background is substantive. There are also plausible hypotheses for mechanisms of action. The assumption is that a common effect across a sufficiently diverse set of animals applies to humans, which is probably a good heuristic.
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.
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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This is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.
I guess you need to understand the deeper meaning implied by that comment. It's OK if you don't - unfortunately social media and now LLMs have strongly impacted the average Joe's or average Teddy's ability to understand something like this.
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#244Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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.
This 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 ?
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.
I guess you need to understand the deeper meaning implied by that comment. It's OK if you don't - unfortunately social media and now LLMs have strongly impacted the average Joe's or average Teddy's ability to understand something like this.
Nearly as much as they have impacted the ability of some to articulate clearly?
Perhaps it'd be best for all to drop the snide and review the HN comment guidelines.
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I find all these "do they have the necessary approvals or not" discussions are besides the point that matters. For business, those are red tape, wasted time, and unnecessary bureaucracy. For residents and citizens, what permits were approved or not don't matter, but if we tolerate the pollution cost that results, no matter if it was legally approved or not. I'd rather an article that argues about if this…
The permits are supposed to provide a review of the proposed discharge, usually requires a public notice and review period, and ensures compliance. I assume this Texas permit is typical to that end. While permits CAN be “just red tape”, permits SHOULD be, and frequently are, the conclusion of an appropriate review process that industry standards are being implemented.
Does any of these laws matter to rich, given amount of lobbying going on in US?
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#248I'm no lover of Elon Musk but this article reads like a hit piece and I literally laughed when I read the findings: > 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 bel…
> Neither hexavalent chromium nor arsenic appears in Tesla’s TCEQ discharge permit as an allowable pollutant Also the fact that this pipe was not included in the permit is a problem: > What it did not do, explicitly, was grant Tesla the right to use public or private property for wastewater conveyance. The drainage district that manages the ditch the pipe was discharging into was never notified that the permit existe…
A journalist claiming that some government was never notified of something by some other government does not pass the whiff test. We have no idea what the internal process is for communication between them.
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> collecting runoff is what ditches are there for Sure. What ditches aren't for, and vary greatly wrt, is discharging all inputs out to sea or or a large body of water for "sufficient" dilution. Ditches can be sealed (concrete lined, with a membrane underneath) or, say, just dirt. Dirt ditches with a long run filter .. heavier particles drop out, weeds and other organics grab onto various compounds, etc. Those things…
>Worst case, ditch line concentrates leach down into a water table close enough to an extraction pump that goes to water food or be drunk by people. (Or later in time earthworks for housing kick up a dust layer that just happens to be mostly "20 years of bad ju-ju") Pretty much all water discharge rules are built around filtering stuff out. I thought we wanted it in the dirt so it would't be in the water? The part th…
Sewerage discharge pipes are ideally built to take post processed human waste residues far enough out to sea to not be trapped in small bays but to disperse and diffuse through a greater volume of water.
The ideal here might be (I haven't dug into site specific details here) to take any industrial runoff far out to a large volume of water so that it can disperse and not be concentrated in a manner that creates a time bomb for human food / water inputs.
If that is the intent, then unsealed ditches crossing watersheds is a bad idea compared to sealed pipes with deep water discharge.
Re: Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day
#250> The permit, a Texas Pollutant Discharge Elimination System authorization known as TPDES, allowed up to 231,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day to be discharged into an unnamed ditch that flows into Petronila Creek and from there into Baffin Bay, a longtime South Texas saltwater fishing destination. Ok, so sounds like Tesla got the necessary legal provisions. > What it did not do, explicitly, was grant Tesla t…
>> Tesla also argues that the Eurofins sampling methodology was inappropriate, because the lab placed its sampling equipment in the ditch downstream of the outfall pipe rather than at the outfall itself. The permit requires monitoring at the outfall point, and the company has pointed out that ditch samples can pick up contaminants from sources that have nothing to do with Tesla’s wastewater. > As the article itself s…