Domain: epa.gov
Stories and comments across the archive that link to epa.gov.
Comments · 1,291
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Parent Obviously Trolling
I can't understand how the parent can be modded +5 insightful...
First he makes an odd reference to sheel negceba..."furry artpron", apparently.
Then, he claims that there are "lethal poisons" in capacitors. In fact, according to the wikipedia, capacitors generally contain fairly harmless boric acid or sulfuric acid at worst. Not to mention, I find it hard to believe that there are animals digging through dumps and eating electrolyic capacitors.
Finally, PCB electric transformers have been banned since 1977. I think that we can assume that most power supplies in personal computers were manufactured after 1977 :).
Conclusion: parent is full of it, mod down and ignore. -
Can someone tell me which is true?
I have seen numerous theories on the climate subject.
The following viewpoints have been presented over the past 30 years:
- Global Cooling. We will freeze to death shortly.
- Global Warming. We will warm up the earth and either melt or be drowned.
- Climate Change. The earth will have rapidly chaging temperatures resulting in the destruction of humankind.
- "Run out of oxygen" theory. We'll ruin the atmosphere to the point we can't breathe it.
- Nothing. All of the above are bunk.
Which is true? All these viewpoints have been presented at one time or another, and, up to now, none of them (including the last one) have been true.
Is this just another Waaahhhhhmbulance to ignore, or does this article have revolutionary proof that is worth my effort to read?
I'm willing to understand that science changes over time. But to have various scientists publicizing all possible viewpoints as the truth over the past 30 years is too much for me to handle. -
links
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Grandiose claims do not substitute for factsI didn't see any relevant facts in your link.
It was also said that the toxic output of this blast contained nearly a thousand times the ozone depleting chemicals that humans have created since the Industrial Revolution."
I've heard this claim before, investigated it, and found it to be ridiculous.
From this reference: "...[T]he large explosive eruption of Mount Pinatubo on 15 June 1991
... injected about 17 million tonnes of SO2 into the stratosphere. ." The fossil-fuel derived output of SO2 was roughly equivalent to 68 Tg/yr of S (68 million tonnes/yr) in the late 80's (source: Global Environment: Water, Air, and Geochemical Cycles, by Berner and Berner, 1996). Since this number is only for the sulfur component, the total mass of SO2 is even larger, 136 million tonnes/yr.. A year's worth of human sulfur dioxide production far outweighs Pinatubo's production. The sulfate aerosols resulting from SO2 act as surfaces for ozone-destroying chlorine. The lifetime for these sulfate aerosols is 3 years, as compared to 45-100 years for common manmade (and ozone destroying) CFCs (ref).Also from the 1st ref."...[V]olcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons). Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes...."
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Re:Lead is the least of our worries
Former MOS Technologies manufacturing site cleanup:
http://epa.gov/reg3hwmd/super/PA/commodore/pad.htm -
When proposed
AFAIK these are traded on the futures exchanges, check the CME, CBOT, NY mercatile before you decide they aren't tradeable. There was a story about a group of school kids who raised money for a sulfer emisssion permit, that was then kept by the school reducing emissions at their onset. The EPA says that anyone can buy NOx and SO2 permits including members of the general public, and they list several suspiciously non power company sounding names in the winners list (I'm pretty sure Bates College Environmental Economics doesn't operate a small coal fired plant).
If you offer Cantor a reasonable return on their investment, I'm sure they would sell them to you (you do the math on how much they paid. Their contact number is listed on the broker page (and they bought 25,000 units). Enron (don't worry they sold the trading business to UBS) will likely have to short them (and then buy from Morgan or Cantor). -
Re:Fruits of reckless privatization
Your fears are born of ignorance; have no worry.
Environmental Issues are not self-regulated; "fortunately" (tongue-in-cheek) we have the government to police it for us. Bulk power generators are very regulated on emissions, even to the point that generators will take outages for "opacity" indicating they have reached their "pollution credit" limit and can't generate electricity anymore.
Market Monitoring, however, is self-regulating, and so far has proven to be a critical source of improvement. They are tasked with finding market power issues, and defusing them so noone has unfair advantages over any other players. For the east coast players, PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE... California ISO used to have one, until they dismantled their market, not sure what happened to it. S.E.Trans (~4 states in SouthEast) agreements fell apart. ERCOT (Texas) is pretty well along (I seem to recall a market overhaul brought on by recommendations on local pricing), and MISO was going to start a market, but after the blackout decided to delay theirs... and the rest of the country is barely ready to de-regulate.
I fear more about the regulated utilities, because they operate in a closed fashion, socializing the cost of their problems over all their customers, and preventing outside entities from building improvements in their systems...
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Re:The StatesHaving said that, the specifics of Kyoto are not exactly endearing, such as the carbon sink offsets and emissions credit trading. Countries coud pump CO2 like crazy by buying emissions credits to countries that have large forests.
Erm, that's exactly the point. You allocate every country a CO2 quota. Those that don't need theirs sell it to a country that needs to produce more CO2. You can still reduce the overall CO2 emissions (which afterall is what matters) by lowering those quotas in future years; besides which, the countries buying quotas have an incentive to become cleaner themselves. This lessens the economic pain by efficiently reallocating resources where they are most needed and using the market to properly price those resources.
Cap and trade has been shown to work in more limited contexts, eg in the US with SO2. It's a good thing about Kyoto, not a bad thing.
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Re:Deserted town in the USAThe town is now gone, and the cleanup of Times Beach is complete, according to the EPA:
The town of Times Beach, Missouri, captured the attention of the nation when EPA closed it down after discovering dangerous levels of dioxin. Roads to the town were blocked off, and the site was patrolled around-the-clock by security guards. Thus began one of the most extensive cleanups in Superfund history. The contamination happened when the town regularly sprayed dioxin-contaminated waste oil on its streets and parking lots to control dust. In 1983, EPA added the site to its list of hazardous waste sites needing cleanup. After the site was listed, EPA permanently relocated more than 2,000 people and tore down all of the homes and businesses. By the end of 1997, cleanup of the site was complete, and the state, which now owns the property, took advantage of its easy highway access and riverside location to develop it as a park. In the fall of 1999, a new 500-acre state park, commemorating the famous Route 66, will replace what was one of the most highly contaminated sites in the country. When the park opens, thousands of visitors will again be able to enjoy the scenic riverside area.
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Re:Not So Bad
People tend to forget that one solid volcanic eruption puts out more CFCs than all of human industry ever has.
I don't think that's quite accurate. Volcanos can emit quite a bit of HCl and sulfate aerosols. The latter tend to amplify the effects of human-generated CFCs. Check out this link -
Re:Deserted town in the USABack in the early 80's a small town - Times Beach, Missouri was found to have dioxin sprayed on the dirt streets and caused the government to buy out the whole town and relocate everybody.
Any locals from St. Louis area care to elaborate further and update what is going on and if the town is still there?
Contaminated soil and other debris from Times Beach was completely incinerated by 1997. The buildings and houses were leveled years before that. Know what you mean, though--when I was a kid, I used to hold my breath when we drove by on 44.
Googling for "times beach cleanup" turns up this PDF summary. A quote:
The Times Beach cleanup has been completed. All residents and businesses were permanently relocated, the purchase of the remaining parcels by FEMA has been completed, and the ownership of the parcels of land has been conveyed to the State of Missouri. The demolition and disposal of the structures at Times Beach has been completed. Excavation of dioxin-contaminated soils, interim placement in temporary on-site storage, and final destruction of site contaminants by incineration has been completed. Thermal treatment of dioxin-contaminated soils from Times Beach and other sites was completed in June 1997, and the site has been restored to a state park.
--Tom -
Re:You're both right - wrong argument.
The inability of the US to rein in pollution.
Um... World wide pollution levels are down dramatically over the last 20 years. Mostly due to American environmental policies. The US has some of the cleanest air and water in all the world.
If you really want to blame someone for any poor environmental policies it should be the Third World and Eastern Europe.
Toxic Emissions down nearly 55%
Polluted Coverage, good links. -
Hydrazine: Bad Stuff
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A law like Superfund?
I mean, imagine that a law was passed to penalize big businesses from dumping garbage in rivers, and it would cost them $100,000 per incident. But since "incident" was so vaguely defined, even dropping a gum wrapper off a canoe would mean you violated the law.
You mean a law like Superfund? I've read that a pizza restaurant was forced to pay for toxic cleanup in a landfill because a few of its pizza boxes were found there. And you probably thought you were being facetious! -
Re:Marsh is happy as a clam..
Huh? Which business? Are you actually trying to claim that voluntary trade is inherently evil?
How about all of the companies that dumped chemicals in the rivers in the 1800's-1950's, toxic dump sites, mine tailings, and other bullshit that companies could have done (ethically) right, had they spent the money and time to do so?
Check out the EPA's superfund EnviroMapper No doubt, some of those are sincere accidents, but most of those are there because of corporate neglect.
I live around 10 SuperFund cleanup sites that I could name--within 30 miles of my home. One's just down the way: a big arsenic (and other heavy metal) contamination site. The corporation is long gone, but we're still here to clean it up, and our great-great-grand children will be dealing with it too.
Some other examples: a big pile of radioactive uranium tailings spewing out Radon like you can't belive, a tunnel through a mountian that lets out about 100,000 gallons of highly acidic water (also containing huge amounts of heavy metals) a day, numerous smelting operations, mines, and even government operations (Military bases and weapons facilities). It's a hundred times worse back east.
The idealogoy back then was "Let's do anything in the name of progress. We'll progress so fast that our grandchildren will learn to clean up our mess in less time than it caused us to make it, and it'll cost less for our grandchildren down the line than for us to do it correctly right now."
Corporations are not our friends. -
Re:Who to believe?
Perhaps its because the US, with around 5% of the worlds population produces 25% of its emissions.
Source: EPA. Scroll to the bottom for a pie chart... -
According to whom??From Title 42, Chapter 85, Sub-chapter II, Part A, Sec 7522.a.3 of The Clean Air Act
"The following acts and the causing thereof are prohibited...
A. or any person to remove or render inoperative any device or element of design installed on or in a motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine in compliance with regulations under this subchapter prior to its sale and delivery to the ultimate purchaser, or for any person knowingly to remove or render inoperative any such device or element of design after such sale and delivery to the ultimate purchaser; or
B. for any person to manufacture or sell, or offer to sell, or install, any part or component intended for use with, or as part of, any motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine, where a principal effect of the part or component is to bypass, defeat, or render inoperative any device or element of design installed on or in a motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine in compliance with regulations under this subchapter, and where the person knows or should know that such part or component is being offered for sale or installed for such use or put to such use...."
From Title 42, Chapter 85, Sub-chapter II, Part A, Sec 7524.a of The Clean Air Act
"Any person who violates sections [1] 7522(a)(1), 7522(a)(4), or 7522(a)(5) of this title or any manufacturer or dealer who violates section 7522(a)(3)(A) of this title shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than $25,000. Any person other than a manufacturer or dealer who violates section 7522(a)(3)(A) of this title or any person who violates section 7522(a)(3)(B) of this title shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than $2,500. Any such violation with respect to paragraph (1), (3)(A), or (4) of section 7522(a) of this title shall constitute a separate offense with respect to each motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine. Any such violation with respect to section 7522(a)(3)(B) of this title shall constitute a separate offense with respect to each part or component. Any person who violates section 7522(a)(2) of this title shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than $25,000 per day of violation."
See for the full text of The Clean Air Act.
http://www.epa.gov/region5/defs/html/caa.htm -
Re:What about noxious gasses in production?
Titanium dioxide is a very stable mineral that is mined and refined, not "produced".
Wikipedia reference
Its the normal pigment in white paint.
The binder for most emulsion paint is polyvinyl chloride (PVC) which is where I guess you got the connection with chlorine.
(vinyl paint) This is certainly not without risks.
Health risks with vinyl chloride monomer
and here
The only novel hazard here is the formulation of Titanium dioxide as nanoparticles, and the potential health risks associated with such stable nano particles.
Given that these are long term bound into the paint binder, this is possibly one of the lower risk applications of nano particles, though TiO2 is worryingly stable.
Shoka -
Re:Damn the irony!
Yes, I too pine for the days of leaded gasoline, lead pipes, CCA-treated lumber and asbestos!
And really, boiling down the two shuttle failures to material replacements? Perhaps a more important factor is its design. -
Re:Can I read Darl's?
You don't need to ask. You just need to have twenty five cents
Thank-you former Governor Mike leavitt for sending us Utahns DOWN THE RIVER!
No wonder that President Bush likes you so much
P.S. Come near my house and I will "Enlibra" you!! -
Re:Said it before, I'll say it again
I am not sure if the medical estabilishment agrees with you on this one. What about all those warnings against sun-tanning? Virtually all the dermathologists are jumping up and down waving arms about how sun-tanning (exposure to UV radiation but it would be the same kind of principle) can lead to skin cancer later on in life (they are talking 40 years of age and later).
The simple answer is that they don't know why the skin doesn't seem to fully repair the damage. There are however some theories.
Also should there ever be a release of some tiney particles of a few thousand atoms each of radioactive material which then would get into food/air/whatnot and get absorbed into the body and sit in one spot irradiating a small area of it, there is your continuous exposure scenario.
As I said, there is already radioisotope particles in the environment and most likely in your body. However, the small amount of isotope is not sufficient to guarantee any sort of ill effects. Only large doses of 1000 or more REM per year will do that.
e inherent issues like the fact that the sillica shield around the bulb can just explosively fail (because it is under pressure from inside and outside and is in fact that "mechanical" stress point I was eluding to earlier) and no amount of "scram" devices will help that one.
You can't get any more force out of an explosion like that than the structural materials are designed to handle.
Here's how I understand the engine. (I may get something wrong here, but I'll try to be as correct as possible.) The silica shield is thin like a light bulb. It's purpose is not to maintain gases under extreme pressure, but to maintain separation between the hydrogen and the uranium. The uranium itself is kept spinning in a vortex to reduce the amount of pressure on the silica. The uranium is hot enough to eat through most materials, so it wouldn't be advisable for the materials to be in constant physical contact.
Here's what I see happening in a situation where the uranium vortex failed and pressure were applied to the silica: The silica would quickly break (not much force there) and the uranium would splatter against the outer walls of the engine. The heat from the plasma will start to eat through whatever shell it's contained in, but it will cool quickly, and the materials will act as a moderator to stop the reaction. The hydrogen may continue pumping, but it would suddenly fail to become plasma. Since hydrogen cannot become radioactive via fission (only tritium via fusion) it presents no health risk. -
Great - now you don't even need to buy landmines
...all you need is a few bags of NO2-heavy debris sprinkled in the surrounding meadows.
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Re:Is there REALLY anything wrong with Fission pow
Then would you like to explain why we're not all dead yet. Unlike a typical slashdotter, I *have* done my research. I'm not always right, but that's why I'm willing to listen when someone has a point. In any case, I was referring to it being buried. It doesn't last millions of years like some of the other stuff. In fact, it wouldn't be much of a hazard at all within about a century. Of course, the stuff that lasts millions of years isn't really the hazardous stuff anyway. People just forget to mention that fact.
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Re:If I know something about batteries...
Won't this create cleaner air AND dumps filled with highly toxic battery-waste?
Lead-acid batteries are highly recyclable. (Though, like computers, because of poor regulation such batteries are often just dumped on third-world nations.)
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Re:Shhhh!
2 930 footnotes
his choice of data
So he "chose" data? Did this person perform any experiments or observations of his own, or is this more crack armchair science from a person who did all their research from the first 2930 hits on google?
This exact same thing came up when someone presented "research" to the us government showing that nanoscale particles were harmful when inhaled (something that I suspect has been somewhat common knowledge since coal miners started getting black lung). The whole "research" was assembled from other people's research with very little in the way of original work, for which the US government paid a pretty penny in a grant.
Mankind currently lacks the instrumentation, knowledge, and experience to Prove most complex phenomenon. We still have no working Proof of how gravity actually works, we just know that it does empirically.
Global warming? Who knows? All I know is that my freshman year of college, the university opened late due to snow, and it has not snowed here since then. There is no Proof that the cows farting, the cars driving, the factories belching, the volcanoes erupting, and whatever other factors people say take part cause global warming. But theres no Proof the other way either.
Lets take the ozone hole. Nobody has ever traced the path from individual CFCs in an old refrigerator in the US to the antartic circle, so CFCs were not Proven to cause the hole. However, shortly after CFCs (which are proven to destroy ozone through a well understood chemical process) were banned in industrialized nations, the ozone hole began to shrink (compare 2001 to this page which details a decade of loss. Note that the color scales are different, the EPA defines the ozone hole as less than 220 Dobson Units which is the small blob in the middle of Antartica in 2001, while the 220 Dobson Unit level marks most of the antartic circle in blue and purple in 1991. You can also see on the EPA picture that ozone depletion is also taking place over countries in southern Asia and Africa where CFCs were not banned, but very little is taking place over South America. Thus there is very strong empirical evidence for a link between CFC release and ozone depletion. -
Re:An Environmentalist will choose digitalhydrofluoric. A former chem prof of mine threatened to fail assignments which contained that particular typo. Dissolved. Also, insoluble is the correct spelling. But hey, you spelled silver correctly.
Anyways, semiconductor process chemicals are treated (at least in Europe / North America, and they're getting better than they used to be in India, Taiwan, etc). HF is easily neutralized. Look at the environmental permitting at Intel's fab 12 in Arizona - waste discharge is a huge issue; they don't just dump HF out a pipe. Once neutralized, fluoride salts are about as toxic as toothpaste (toothpaste is approx 0.243% NaF, which is nasty stuff).
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Even with no link, we still need cleaner energy
I'm not so concerned with the global warming/cooling. I think that all sane people will agree that it is now cooler than when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, warmer than the mini-ice age.
What I am concerned about, however, are things like mercury in fish, which acts as a neurotoxin in humans that eat it. -
Re:Thought of evaluating the data, not the biases?
See other reference in other response.
The monotonically increasing curve in the graph (not the spiky one) shows the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. If Pinatubo had released any significant amount it would have showed on this graph. Instead the CO2 content in the atmosphere continues to increase at exactly the same rate as a result of man's activity I presume.
The articles that you cite are again somewhat incorrect. Eruptions generate HCL (hydrochloric acid) which have an effect on the ozone layer and acid rains, but it is a short-lived effect, see this link.
The US throw out relatively little SO2 now, compared with some developing countries thanks to more stringent emission regulations, so comparing with the US emission is not very interesting. I don't have the figure for the whole world, sorry.
Sure, Man `only' generates a few puny billion tonnes of C02 compared with the oceans and forest, but both forest and oceans are `carbon neutral'. Both absorb again the exact same quantity by making new trees and new plancton. Man on the other hand releases CO2 over a short time that had been trapped in geological layers aeons ago over a very long period. This carbon cannot be absorbed again at a sufficient rate.
Most scientists agree that it is industrialization which is the root cause of CO2 rate increase in the atmosphere. What they disagree upon is whether this is having a warming effect or not, and over which timescale.
All the best (I would give more references but I have to go now, pick up my daughter, please continue this discussion if you are interested). -
Some days I just love a good straw man.I just can't resist this one, it's too easy:
Your claim that travel by car is polluting your air is not scientifically valid.
Define "pollution". For some pollutants, cars produce the vast majority of what's emitted. If you bothered to look at http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/trends/trends98/appeTeh vast majority of pollution in this coutry does not come from cars.
n dix_a.pdf (which I found with a few minutes on the EPA website) you'll see that cars still emit a clear majority of all carbon monoxide emitted in the US (over 50 million short tons in 1998; most other categories top out at around a million tons or less). The total for "light duty gas vehicles and motorcycles" (27,039 thousand tons) and "light duty gas trucks" (18,726 thousand tons) is 45765 thousand tons, well over half the all-sources total of 89,454 thousand tons. When you add off-road engines and vehicles the fraction goes up to over two thirds.Regarding other pollutants, on-road vehicles account for a shade under a third of all nitrogen oxide emissions too (albeit a large fraction of that comes from diesels), and so far as VOCs are concerned road vehicles are just about equal to all processes involving solvents (each being a bit under a third of the total) with most of that coming from cars and light trucks.
It amuses me to see someone whose favorite epithet is best applied to the face that greets them in the mirror in the morning.
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Re:Sanity check please
There are some Aerobic landfills out there. Unfortunately, not enough
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Re:certainty
Bullshit. My mentioning floods wasn't an attempt to "proove" anything in itself, it was just an example for damages caused by global warming. That GW does cause increased flooding is something most
experts
on climate
will
tell you.
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Re:So sad
How do you get rid of nasty infections? Autoclave! Heat things up enough to smoke out all those nasty hoomins and things can get back to normal around here.
As for volcanos, it looks like the production of CO/CO2 in eruptions can have an effect on global warming. It turns out, however, that the ash/SO2 released into the atmosphere has a cooling effect. It also helps scatter sunlight, allowing for more robust tree growth which leads to more carbon being taken out of the atmosphere.
So, all we need to happen is for the Yellowstone (NetBSD) volcano to erupt (supposed to be violent enough to wipe out hoomanity) and fill the skys with enough ash and SO2 to bring on Fimbulwinter to slow down global warming. Or have a big rock smack into the Indian Ocean. -
CO2 is not the worst greenhouse gas.
The reason why you can burn a nutshell and save greenhouse gases may be partly due to the fact that the alternative is to let it rot. Dozens of swimming pools worth of nutshells will produce tons of a different type of greenhouse gas, namely methane. According to energy.qld.gov.au methane has 21 times the effect of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. (Nitrous oxide has 310 times the effect.) This is partly why there is an increasing interest in converting methane from dump sites into liquid natural gas or other types of convertible energy. According to the epa at yosemite, municipal solid waste amounted to 309 teragrams of methane in 1997 alone. What's a teragram? a trillion grams.
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Awsome troll!
You are confusing natural gas with propane. Natural Gas is just scrubbed methane. Methane is produced from innumerable sources, and is absolutely renewable; while it is often found in the same pockets as oil reserves, there is no reason at all that natural gas has to be obtained by mining; any decaying plant or animal waste will produce ample quantities of methane.
LOL! Now that is the best troll that I have seen in quite some time! I usually do not respond to them, but some people migh fall for the parent comment.
Propane is certainly not a gas that came straight from the ground. It requires more processing than gasoline. It is no more renewable than it's parent source and was created by a fellow who thought gasoline companies were ripping everybody off.
Natural Gas is the stuff that comes from the ground and is non-renewable.
Methane is "renewable" and the EPA also identifies it as a "greenhouse gas" (for those of you who believe in that greenhouse nonsense).
Now, if you have the instructions to a gas grill, see what those instructions have to say about propane, methane and naturel gas. They usually say the three are not interchangable or that modifications must be performed before switching.
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Re:Why all the research?
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Re:Biodiesel, baby!
Why does the EPA rate a supposedly fuel efficient, environmentally friendly 2003 diesel Volkswagen Golf as Tier 1 as and give it a 1 out 10 for an air pollution score?
Check it out yourself: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/findacar.htm
NOx is the problem: http://www.epa.gov/autoemissions/faq.htm#diesel -
Green Vehicles
A good source of general information on fuel economy is the EPA's Green Vehicle Guide. This will provide some good information and cold, hard numbers. Of course, the only way to know you'll be really satisfied is by taking one for a test drive.
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Your name's FUD. Elmer FUD.I'll take on some of those statements.
The half-life of radioactive waste that comes from nuclear power plants is measured in hundreds of thousands of years.
False and grossly misleading. The majority of the radioactivity in the spent fuel is in isotopes with half-lives less than 50 years, much of them less than 30. That gives 20 or 30 half-lives in a thousand years, or from hot to dead in about the age of the Coliseum.There are some long-lived isotopes in the mix, but we're fairly good at separating isotopes from each other. There is no reason we couldn't filter those out (e.g. Tc-99) and package them for multi-million-year disposal. The beauty is that the hot isotopes are short-lived, and the long-lived isotopes aren't hot.
Keep in mind when you government tells you how 'safe' nuclear power is that they are using ammunition made from 'depleated' uranium which they claim is 100% safe...
100% safe... to sit next to. You know, like blocks of lead and sealed vials of mercury? Just don't take any internally.It might interest you to know that good old stable arsenic is a serious problem in parts of Asia. Turns out that the wonderful high-tech (not) invention of tube wells for drinking water allowed the over-pumping of aquifers, which let air into them. The air oxidized the formerly-stable arsenic, which became soluble in the water and came up via the wells. Now people across large parts of India have chronic arsenic poisoning. I can't think of any problem with Yucca Mountain affecting so many people or so large an area.
Think of the trouble the world is in over oil. Uranium will be no different. If you base the world's energy needs on a scarce resource, it will result in eternal military conquest.
Yeah, someone is bound to lay claim to the world's oceans and all their dissolved uranium, and all the world's thorium while they're at it. And every bit of granite on the planet, and all the coal ash (the uranium in granite gives it more potential energy than coal, and the U and Th in coal ash has more energy potential than the carbon in the coal).iving in Australia, with one of the world's richest known sources of uraniam, I am petrified at the thought of what will happen when the oil runs out and the US comes looking for alternative sources. Renewable is the only answer.
I've got nothing against renewables, just badly-thought-out renewables. So what are you doing to support Bryan Roberts and his gyromill generators? -
Re:industry problem?
I was looking around for an article I read a few years ago, I thought in one of the valley papers, but stumbled on this , which seemed to cover the same points and might have just been republished out there. You might also want to take a look at this from the EPA.
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It is actually a relief to hear this
At least they weren't shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency
Can you imagine how bad a media play would have to be to be considered an environmental hazard? -
Re:Even water is toxic; dosage is allThat's a great link on carcinogens. I looked up celery and found that as with most natural carcinogens, its risk is far less than that of manmade carcinogens.
Specifically, celery is 20,000 times less dangerous than the #1 carcinogen on the list, manmade ethylene dibromide (EDB). One of the uses of EBD is as a pesticide for fruits and grains.
As you can see from this publication by the EPA concering EBD. Note there is no report from the EPA on "caffeic acid" that I could find. As a separate substance, not in any natural form, caffeic acid has been shown to be a RODENT carcinogen. In caffeic acid's natural forms that humans digest (coffee, apples, plums, pears, lettuce, potatoes and celery), it has not been shown to be a carcinogen. The daily dose of caffeic acid for most people is a small fraction of the carcinogenic dosage for rats.
Short-term: EPA has found EDB to potentially cause the following health effects when people are exposed to it at levels above the MCL for relatively short periods of time: damage to the liver, stomach, and adrenal glands, along with significant reproductive system toxicity, particularly the testes.
Long-term: EDB has the potential to cause the following effects from a lifetime exposure at levels above the MCL: damage to the respiratory system, nervous system, liver, heart, and kidneys; cancer.
You can go down the list from the link you posted and realize that ALL the top dangers are from manmade chemicals.
All I can ask is people take the effort to THINK. Most of these exceedingly carcinogenic and dangerious manmade chemicals were put into the environment without much care or study. Much the same thing is happening with nanotechnology today. Haven't we learned any sort of lesson?
Thank you for taking the time and patience to educate me on natural carcinogens. I do walk away with a greater understanding of how man-made substances are so deadly compared to what is found in the natural world.
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find /.|grep sco|xargs wc -l == 1,000,000,000,000announced today that they are splitting from and are combining forces to bring to you SlashSco-For-Fucktards.com. The new site will feature one or two normal Slashdot stories, followed by 40 daily articles about , and related information.
"We're excited about this unique opportunity to whore around 's name for free. Now we no longer have to get paid under the counter from for doing so. I'm really excited considering I was about to hit the unemployment line pretty soon." stated Slashdot's Hemos who was watching streaming video from
.Industry insiders say the move was planned all along and that staff secretly conspired to generate free publicity for which is no longer struggling thanks to 's repeated mention of their name. "We think that, all along the plan was for to keep posting about until at least one in every one article mentioned because after all has become such a hot topic that we poop or just thinking about it.
staff would not elaborate more on this but stay tuned for upcoming posts regarding this groundbreaking news. And now for real news you can lose: Folks over at posted maps of the nations infrastructure free for terrorists to Download. Hooray you go Department of Homegrownland InSecurity. Folks over at have posted the guidelines for "National Information Security Systems" and it can be viewed at . A hacker snitch is in 's website after being caught doing sleazy shit. Now he wants the people at to violate his as promised. And finally, Scientists
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SCO who?announced today that they are splitting from and are combining forces to bring to you SlashSco-For-Fucktards.com. The new site will feature one or two normal Slashdot stories, followed by 40 daily articles about , and related information.
"We're excited about this unique opportunity to whore around 's name for free. Now we no longer have to get paid under the counter from for doing so. I'm really excited considering I was about to hit the unemployment line pretty soon." stated Slashdot's Hemos who was watching streaming video from
.Industry insiders say the move was planned all along and that staff secretly conspired to generate free publicity for which is no longer struggling thanks to 's repeated mention of their name. "We think that, all along the plan was for to keep posting about until at least one in every one article mentioned because after all has become such a hot topic that we poop or just thinking about it.
staff would not elaborate more on this but stay tuned for upcoming posts regarding this groundbreaking news. And now for real news you can lose: Folks over at posted maps of the nations infrastructure free for terrorists to Download. Hooray you go Department of Homegrownland InSecurity. Folks over at have posted the guidelines for "National Information Security Systems" and it can be viewed at . A hacker snitch is in 's website after being caught doing sleazy shit. Now he wants the people at to violate his as promised.
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Re:Practical?It may be clean and efficient, but is it practical?
whoa! efficient maybe, but clean? read the section of the article below:
So how does Community Power's BioMax work? In one end you pour a sack of wood chips, nut shells or pellets (considered the optimal fuel because they are small and dense) into an oxygen-starved tank- shaped gasifier, which heats the solid fuel until it forms a combustible gas (up to 800 degrees Celsius, or 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit).
they're talking about ch4 - aka methane (please, leave the roadwarrior jokes for later). when it comes to climate change this is a Bad Thing. burn oil and you get yr carbon as c02 which is a greenhouse gas... but molecule for molecule, methan is way worse than co2. don't trust me, trust the epa:
Methane traps over 21 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide
the epa from this sitethis is not about the environment. it's about energy self-sufficiency and the whole middle-easter instability thang. read the article, 9/11 comes up every third paragraph.
now. where are my damn solar panels?
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Re:not complicated
They need EPA's superfund to clean up after their toxic waste.
They need huge government subsidies to keep their huge hog farms running.
The government pays unemployment benefits to jobs lost from gross corporate mismanagement
The government pays dearly when defrauded out of billions of dollars.
In fact, it sounds like the worst thing our economy has suffered through is the rich.
Easy Peasy Japanesey. -
Re:Hoover dam is not a vacuum cleaner
A couple of points-- in dammed rivers, the water temperature is warmer, not colder, than in the free flowing river pre-dam (except maybe in the immediate vicinitity of the dam). See this report on the columbia river warming as an example. Dams slow the river, slow==warm. The warmer water has a dramatic effect on the wildlife, just in another direction.
As far as the water loss, the dams make it possible to use the water from the seasonal floods year round for irrigation. If you take water from a large single channel (i.e. a river) and spread it out over a vast area (i.e. millions of acres of farmland), your loss due to evaporation is going to be hellacious. That's why the colorado is a trickle when it hits the sea of cortez, and the area around it is an incredible salt desert. -
Re:You think war for oil is bad?
Actually, the #1 use of fresh water is irrigation. Followed closely by thermoelectric plants, then industrial/mining, then domestic, then commercial. In fact, all commercial use (which includes golf courses) accounts for only 1% of fresh water consumption. Check out more info from the EPA. http://www.epa.gov/water/you/chap1.html.
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Re:Methanol 101
That post looked all a bit too karma-whoringly familiar.
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Widening Doesn't Help
Because Widening Roads Worsens Traffic Congestion.
Seriously.
Read here and here and here
and see some primary sources here and here and these:
Phil Goodwin, "Empirical Evidence on Induced Traffic," Transportation, Vol. 23, No. 1, Feb. 1996, pp. 35-54. This is in a special issue of the journal Transportation devoted to induced travel. It has several very good articles.
Robert Noland, Relationships Between Highway Capacity and Induced Vehicle Travel, Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting Paper 991069 (www.epa.gov/tp/trb-rn.pdf), January 1999.
Harry Cohen, "Review of Empirical Studies of Induced Traffic," Expanding Metropolitan Highways: Implications for Air Quality and Energy Use, Transportation Research Board, Special Report #345, National Academy Press (Washington DC), 1995, Appendix B, pp. 295-309.
Cairns, Hass-Klau and Goodwin, Traffic Impacts of Highway Capacity Reductions: Assessment of the Evidence, London Transport Planning (London; www.ucl.ac.uk/transport-studies/sc1.htm), 1998.
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Re:It won't :)
Feh! Everyone knows that the UFO bit is just a smokescreen. The military is using Roswell's cloak of secrecy to get around environmental regulations.There are three superfund sites listed for the city in the including a former airforce base, groundwater contamination, and one site with no details "at State request". Active military facilities are exempted from EPA oversight. But, of course, fences and guards only work above ground to keep people out, not below ground to keep Tetrachloroethanen in.