South Korean Tanker with Acrylic Acid capsizes

[woodchucker]

I am keenly aware, that it is a drop in the bucket. The reality of daily life is no matter how much I care, businesses throw out millions of times more junk into the env than I can save from it. I was just letting you guys know about what happened. A lot of lives lost too.
The fish don't know to stay away, so they got a big gulp of acid.

In the scheme of things it was a small amount of acid compared to other things. Still like John says, it all adds up. Natural things we can't stop (volcanoes above and below sea level), but we can do a better job. A recent report from Nasa says we can't survive on Mars due to the radiation, that 4 years is the max. There are those scientists that thought we could keep our species going on Mars, because politically they don't believe we can save the earth, there are too many forces pulling us from doing that.

There are those that say we don't have anything to do with the earth's current situation.. Galileo was blasphemous, Columbus believing the earth round was laughed at. There are always the nay sayers. I always chose to believe we could do something, but not anymore. The factions are too extreme. I hope we survive, but I don't think we will.

 

[rabler]

There are those scientists that thought we could keep our species going on Mars,

Never did buy that logic. We're going to terraform Mars but we can't save Earth?

 

[woodchucker]

Never did buy that logic. We're going to terraform Mars but we can't save Earth?

we can't save the earth. There are way too many who believe we have no effect on it, or that it's too costly. I'm going to stop here before I get banned again.

 

[pontiac428]

I used to enjoy fishing for trout in the lower Truckee river. The water treatment plant does a pretty good job of cleaning up. The city population went up, as well as the number of people taking hormones. I caught a few fat trout one day some years back, and gutted them to take them home for dinner. They were full of eggs and testes. They had both. The signal hormone for fish is called vitellogenin, and it can be mimicked by birth control metabolites coming out of the water treatment facility. Darnedest thing. These fish are not reproductively viable, and I did not want to find out if they were edible. I no longer fish downriver.

Acrylic acid will eventually break down in the water, but it is substantially toxic to life as are its degradation products. It is absorbed through the skin and can be quite lethal. Also causes birth defects if you drink it in your water. Not in a Prop 65 sort of way, either, it's a real deal poison.

 

[Ischgl99]

This results in headlines like "Testing Shows Significant Amounts of Birth Control Hormones in Fish" in a local creek that has no connection to any possible source for those hormones. Did it get there from runoff from the streets?

It's coming from the waste treatment plants. All the drugs we take work their way to the treatment plants where it gets discharged into the rivers. The government knows its a problem, but as of a few years ago when i was still active in that industry, there was not a scalable solution to implement at treatment plants to remove it, but that day will eventually come.

 

[woodchucker]

Here's another video , as the weather channel can be problematic

MSN

 

[Provincial]

Correct,

Having previously owned a small plane that ran on 100LL at one time, and being a turbocharged plane it was no where near being feasible for a mogas STC. Also having changed my own plugs witnessing a bit of lead fouling on those, I'm well aware of avgas. Didn't stop me from enjoying the plane. But then comparing avgas consumption to leaf blowers buries the point that while leaf blowers pollute, they don't use lead. So you're jumping from comparing lead toxicity to overall emissions. While it might not be your intention, that type of leap, in any reasoned discussion, is often used to mislead people. So it is bothersome to me. Call that my return nit-pick, lol.

Perhaps not well stated, but I was trying to point out a few things that people here enjoy as examples where awareness and a certain degree of caution can allow such things safely. The toxicity of some of the things used in semiconductor industry found in all of our cell phones is another example. My point is that, in my mind, jumping to blanket "x is bad, we need to totally eliminate using x" is usually reactionary rather than well reasoned logic. And the reality is that such materials do need to be shipped, where some accidents are inevitable. So my post really was asking How serious this was from a global risk and cost perspective?

Yes, it is kind of apples to oranges, but with almost no leaded gas used in the USA, what else is there to compare to? On the other hand, it was widely used elsewhere and only stopped being used as general motor fuel worldwide in 2021. The problem for aviation is that big changes in altitude (hence vapor pressure) is a problem for unleaded motor gas in aviation engines that use higher than 80 octane or are turbo- or super-charged. Taking the lead completely out of aviation fuel has been a goal for nearly 50 years, and still is beyond practical implementation. 100LL is an intermediate step that seems to be hanging on. My point is that there isn't that much of it being used, and the "car gas" STC's allowing unleaded fuel to be used in lower-performance aircraft engines are reducing the lead emissions even more.

I'm much more worried about the emissions from China's coal-powered electrical generation.

 

[Provincial]

It's coming from the waste treatment plants. All the drugs we take work their way to the treatment plants where it gets discharged into the rivers. The government knows its a problem, but as of a few years ago when i was still active in that industry, there was not a scalable solution to implement at treatment plants to remove it, but that day will eventually come.

That particular creek, as I mentioned, but not clearly enough, did not have any exposure to water treatment plants, and the storm sewers were separated from the sanitary sewers decades before. Blaming it on the sewer system is a real stretch.

 

[Ischgl99]

That particular creek, as I mentioned, but not clearly enough, did not have any exposure to water treatment plants, and the storm sewers were separated from the sanitary sewers decades before. Blaming it on the sewer system is a real stretch.

I misspoke and I should have said wastewater system instead of plants, the wastewater system includes septic systems. If you think about the entire system, it is not a stretch at all. Wastewater treatment plants typically discharge into lakes and rivers, but septic systems discharge into the aquifer through the ground above it, and the aquifer feeds steams. The effluent discharged in the septic system leach fields percolates through the ground and pollutants are converted to harmless forms by time it reaches the aquifer, provided the system is not saturated, but many pharmaceuticals do not get broken down and end up in the aquifer unchanged. These can then get into small streams over time. Wastewater treatment plants operate basically the same, just at a much bigger scale, and they will require a special process to remove these contaminants, I’m not sure if that will be possible with septic systems. It’s possible it is a different source for the particular creek you are talking about, but it is a well known problem of septic systems causing pollution in streams, so it is a likely source.

 

[7milesup]

It is all about the rate of change in the last 100 years. The PPM CO2 rate of change is unsustainable.
I'm hoping that I will be dead before this all falls apart. I feel bad for my kids. One of my daughters is considering children. I advised her not to. The chances of my grandchild making it to an old age are slim. That is the reality.