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Fertilizer Dump Spoils Intel's Pure Water
An anonymous reader writes "Intel had to shut down part of its Irish plant for a while because of the extreme cold and the fact the local council polluted the water supply with fertilizer. Apparently it got down to -12 degrees C at the Intel plant in Leixlip, County Kildare. But to make matters worse, the local council ran out of rock salt to grit the roads and opted for fertilizer instead. There were fears that ammonia and nitrates in the fertilizer might have contaminated the local water supply. The problem for the chipmaker is that it needs extremely pure water for its manufacturing processes."
Somebody did not consider the long-term consequences of their acts. Apparently, whether that was on the Intel or County Kildare side is currently unknown.
But if they have to distill their water anyway, I don't see the problem. Unless the salts mess up their still.
Why they even bother salting roads when there is -12 degrees Celsius? Salting is only sensible when there is about -4 degrees (at least that is a rule of thumb here in Finland). Also, using fertilizers is so completely boneheaded move because that's plain and simple polluting. I guess that someone made a risk analysis and decided that polluting groundwater supplies causes less deaths than icy roads. But I can't help but wonder what the long-term effects are for environment and groundwater.
What had actually happened, as we found out three months later, was that on Christmas Eve the engineers at the local reservoir decided to celebrate. They were supposed to stay on site, so what they did was to dump 100 times the standard level of chlorine into the water supply, then go off and have a Christmas party. That chlorine totally ruined our semiconductor plant. The result was that the Americans said, "These Brits don't know what they're doing. Get rid of them!". The semiconductor facility was taken away and put under the control of the Americans who were deemed to understand these things.
Seems the the Yanks can't defend themselves against this sort of thing either! http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/CCS/res/res33.htm/
I work in a semiconductor foundry, although not something on the scale of Intel. Foundries need ultrapure water not to get electrical insulation, but to remove contamination. Sodium, for example, acts as a mobile charge centre in silicon dioxide and changes the electrical properties of the devices.
Foundries use reverse osmosis filters (not distillation) to get their deionized water, where they push water at pressure through a semipermeable membrane (i.e. permeable to water, not contaminants). RO membranes can get destroyed by unexpected contaminants, and so usually there are prefilters in place to take care of them. Some years ago we lost a (very expensive) membrane when the prefilter was accidentally swapped out but not replaced. My guess is that the fertilizer in the water supply had something that the prefilters/RO membrane couldn't handle, or couldn't handle so much of. Either they lost the membrane or shut things down as a precaution.