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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."
Well, that's just a shitty thing to do.
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It's got what plants crave!
Intel processors stink.
Water filters aren't magical devices. They can only filter so much crap out of the water before they need to be replaced. It might not make financial sense to continue operating the plant if they have to replace the filter for every fifty gallons of water they use.
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/
You are closer to the truth than you think: the fertilizer they were spreading was actually urea!
RO is just one step of many to make Ultra Pure Water - Urea has been a problem in semiconductor fabs for a long time - enough can sneak through the reverse osmosis, electrodeionization, ion exchange, etc, to get incorporated in the photoresist, which then breaks down under the UV light when it gets exposed, and splits into two ammonia molecules, which shifts the pH and causes under cutting of the photoresist. Intel in Portland OR added a few million dollars of processing equipment to react out the urea before it can cause a problem.
How do I know all of this? I make 20,000 gallons per day of Nano-Research grade water, which is even purer than semiconductor fab water. Which means I hang out with the all the ultrapure water people from Intel, TI, AMD, IBM, etc
Urea contamination is old news........
100% pure water will do no harm to you, whatsoever. Or your gut bacteria. I'm not sure how this meme got started, but it is not only wrong, but indicative of a confusion of ideas that makes me doubt the rationality of anyone who espouses it.
planet texture maps and more
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.
Your statement is true for pure water instilled directly into the bloodstream, but not for ingested water. The human digestive system is a polymer (poly-phospholipid) lined tube that is impervious to water absorption. Water and ions have separate transport mechanisms that allow them to be absorbed in specific parts of the intestines. If you drink a sufficient amount of any fluid which is not a balanced salt solution, you will eventually throw yourself into an electrolyte imbalance state.
The fluid which eventually reaches the gut bacteria has a ton of secretions in it, from the salivary glands all the way down to the liver and pancreas, and bears no resemblance to the originally swallowed fluid. As such makes no physiological sense that drinking pure water is toxic to the beneficial gut bacteria (any more so than drinking whiskey).
I work on this site and here's what really happened. Ireland, especially the Dublin area had a 1 in 100 year event, with the lowest ever recorded temperatures, that lasted for over 3 weeks. As road salt was running short all over the country (and across Europe) and it was getting hard to get deliveries into the country, Kildare County Council switched to spraying urea on the roads instead of just rock salt.
Levels of Ammonia in the local water supply shot up, especially as the water reserves are way below normal (our drinking water at home, 5 miles from the plant, has been shut off every night for 12 hours since 7th Jan). Our systems were not prepared for this as it was such an unlikely event and for a period of several days we were unable to use the local water supply. The levels in the water did not make it unsafe to drink at all, we were unable to purify enough for use in our oldest factory (over 15 years old). The other 2 fabs on site were not affected. We brought water in via tanker until our off-site testing confirmed that it was once more safe for use.
Quite how this becomes news is beyond me, we dealt with it as an internal matter, laid no blame on the council as it was such an unexpected event, and made no public statements as we didn't want to cause a fuss. I guess someone else did want to rant on about it though...
And yes, I'm posting anonymously because I'm not authorised to speak for the company...