> 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 the right to use public or private property for wastewater conveyance.
I'm confused, does Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
> The drainage district that manages the ditch the pipe was discharging into was never notified that the permit existed
This should be on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; they issued the permit, so it should be on them to notify the affected area.
> 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 says, that is a legitimate argument.
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 pollution cost that is being externalized to Texans to pay, justified and a net win for them, and if it is, than what's holding up the permits, and if not, then why is this permitted at all, even if partially.
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.
> I'm confused, does Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
If you have a permit to dump wastewater into a river, you are not allowed to dump your wastewater wherever in that river's basin on the assumption that it will eventually flow into the river. You are supposed to use a pipeline for wastewater transfer.
But according to the article the permit is for dumping wastewater into a ditch. And Tesla appears to deliver the wastewater to that ditch by pipe. And it doesn't appear like the pipe is the topic of contention here, but where it ends and what comes out of it. All things that seem to be properly permitted, from what the article is telling us
They have a permit to dump water but not put it in the ditch where the pipe runs.
They need to get it to a body of water, not a ditch. Dumping into the drainage ditch or running a pipe in the drainage ditch requires a separate permit.
The water quality is also questionable. Tesla and the drainage company are at odds on the testing method.
Doesn't the article state that "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..."?
>> 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 says, that is a legitimate argument.
That's some top notch weasel wording right there. If sampling from the ditch reveals contaminants that are not natural to the area but are the same contaminants that are measured from the output of the pipe, then a natural question could be "are the contaminants leaking from upstream and leaching into the ground run off into the ditch?" which would still be a Tesla problem.
My reading is that Tesla's contention is those contaminants are not coming from their pipe, hence the objection to the measurement being taken from somewhere other than the output of their pipe. And while the contaminants may well be coming from Tesla's pipe, given the apparent lack of coordination between the various governmental agencies involved, it seems reasonable to me to say that they need to sample from the pipe output in order to actually say what Tesla is or isn't putting into the ditch, since apparently they might be able to just walk a few hundred feet further up the ditch and find other discharge pipes they don't know about yet.
Sure, but that's also the same thing someone would say that knows they are leeching contaminants from other parts of their property but are not coming out this output pipe.
It's also the same thing someone would say that knows they're running a satanic cult sacrificing whales in the sub-basements of the property but knows the evidence of that isn't coming out of this output pipe. And at least so far, the government has not alleged that the contamination is coming from some other here-to-fore undiscovered but connected to the tesla factory location, nor that they are running a satanic whale sacrificing cult in their sub-basements. So speculating about that seems a bit pre-mature.
Perhaps more crucially though, it's also the same thing someone would say who is actually innocent of leeching contaminants. Whether they are or not, nothing in this article is providing any useful evidence.
> Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
My guess is this is a question of overlapping jurisdictions. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is presumably responsible for water quality, and so gets a say on what kinds of discharge in the state are safe. The drainage district has to manage the actual ditches and water on the ground, so they get a say (or at least notice) of new users of their infrastructure.
Just like how the DOT gets to create rules about locomotives but Railways still get to decide who can run trains on their tracks.
> Just like how the DOT gets to create rules about locomotives but Railways still get to decide who can run trains on their tracks.
Fun fact, in 2005, as of Texas Railroad Commission no longer has anything to do with railroads and moved that oversight to the DoT. The TRC now is only involved with oil&gas. It is one of my favorite dumb things about Texas. Why not just rename the group and eliminate the TRC altogether, oh right, politics.
> allowed up to 231,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day
What I'd like to know is what "treated" means here and whether the pollutants measured in the water are in compliance of that definition.
After all, the problem that there is an important fishing area downstream does not go away, whether there is a permit or not. So in my understanding, the whole reason why the permit could be issued in the first place was the assurance that the water was treated enough to not be a danger to downstream consumers. But pitch black fluid with questionable analysis results doesn't exactly seem like that.
> As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.
Technically yes, but I think it's somewhat unlikely that there just happens to be a chromium/arsenic/lithium/strontium deposit somewhere along the length of the ditch that would re-pollute Tesla's pristine wastewater and make the readings look bad.
Or at least, the question whether there are any potential other sources for the substances should be easy to answer, by looking at a map or sending someone to check the ditch for any other unexpected pipes.
This Inside Climate News article is a little clearer.
> TCEQ began its investigation after workers for Nueces County Drainage District No. 2, which presides over the ditch area, found an unfamiliar pipe stretched across the district’s easement, expelling black liquid into the ditch
> The permit didn’t allow Tesla to use private or public property to transport the wastewater. Under the permit, it was Tesla’s responsibility to acquire whatever property rights were required to use the discharge route, the TCEQ permit states.
So one issue is that while they may have had a permit to dump wastewater, they didn't have a right to build a pipe on land controlled by the drainage district. Tesla, not TCEQ, needed to notify the drainage district because Tesla was the one building on land controlled by that district.
Keyword here is TREATED. Now Telsa will probably argue they added a dash of salt which they contend is "treated" wastewater. Billionaires don't care about you or your health.
> Lithium and vanadium at concentrations Lazarte’s letter described as abnormally high relative to rainwater or normal groundwater.
> 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.
> Strontium at 1.17 mg/L. Mazloum’s technical report on the findings noted that long-term exposure can affect bone density and kidney function in humans and wildlife.
Some of the elements of note that were detected. These are all well above background levels. The point about not measuring at the outfall is valid, but probably not relevant. Unless we think there are other lithium and hex sources nearby.
The real crime is that a permit was issued at all and that it was not so comprehensive. But that's the beauty of Texas - their citizens love this kind of thing.
Per ggreer's comment [0], there are other potential sources nearby.
It's pretty annoying all told. It invalidates the results; it takes them from "this is clear evidence of a breach" into "maybe it's in breach. Or maybe someone else is. Or maybe both are within their respective limits"
Per the article, sounds like everyone would have benefited from more discussion and transparency either way. I find it surprising that these types of permits are issued without formal review at a town council style setting.
Ultimately, the people living in these areas should have an outsized say on what is piped into their way supplies. Same forum could also be used to show it is safe. Or discuss the safety of the ask.
The lab tested for chromium in two ways: one test (ICP) measures all chromium of any kind, and the other measures hexavalent chromium specifically. The ICP test returned a concentration that was an order of magnitude smaller than the hexavalent test. That is to say, the tests contradict each other (because the whole is smaller than the part), and are both at the bottom of range for the tests performed.
Would Eurofins be able to set up monitoring on Tesla's property?
What other sources would have similar pollutants to a Lithium factory? It seems pretty specific and if there was some other obvious source why wouldn't Tesla point that out?
Hexavalent chromium can come from many industrial sources, including welding stainless steel. If you go to Tesla's lithium refinery in google maps[1] and follow the drainage ditch along highway 77 (to the northeast) about a half mile, you'll see a company called Tex-Isle Processing. They supply steel pipes and coating services for oil drilling.[2] It could be that one of their manufacturing processes creates hexavalent chromium.
In my opinion there isn't enough information to blame anyone for the slightly-above-drinking-water levels of hexavalent chromium. The drainage ditch goes along a highway and a rail line, so pollution could come from all kinds of places.
The lab tested for chromium in two ways: one test (ICP) measures all chromium of any kind, and the other measures hexavalent chromium specifically. The ICP test returned a concentration that was an order of magnitude smaller than the hexavalent test (0.0003 vs 0.0104 mg/L). That is to say, the tests contradict each other (because the whole is smaller than the part).
But I agree, measuring at the end of the ditch was the wrong thing to do if they take issue with that specific factory (though it was the right thing to do to prove a harmful pollution exists in general)
So another measurement directly at the pipe would be in order.
The measured levels of arsenic, strontium, and vanadium are below the limits for drinking water, even in California. And 4% of drinking water sources in California have higher hexavalent chromium content than the water in that ditch.[1] Besides sodium from salt, the only metal that was particularly high was lithium, at 0.0714mg/L or 71 micrograms per liter. A significant fraction of drinking water in the US has higher concentrations than that.[2]
The level of salt shouldn't affect much. Adding up the chloride and sodium content gets you 684mg/L, which is on the low end of brackish water (500-30,000mg/L). The limit for agricultural irrigation is 2,000mg/L, and photos of the pipe show plenty of grass growing around and in the water.
The phosphorous could come from fertilizers, as there's plenty of farm land in the area. That would also explain the higher ammonium levels, as both anhydrous ammonia and ammonium phosphate are common fertilizers.
The article is really about how sensitive our scientific instruments are, not how dangerous the water is. It reminds me of articles like Vice's American Honey Is Radioactive from Decades of Nuclear Bomb Testing[3], where the most radioactive honey they could find was 10 times less radioactive than a banana.
They list 6 pollutants, but only two of them seem relevant to the legality of this.
One is an amount of arsenic that is a quarter of what's allowed in drinking water. So technically, someone dumping drinking water in the ditch could contaminate this measurement.
The other is hexavalent chromium, which is 4% higher than allowed. According to wikipedia that is "indeed one of the more widely used heavy metals in various sectors and industries (metallurgy, chemicals, textiles, etc.) with particular involvement in the metal coating sector" and used in the production of all kinds of dyes, paints, plastics, etc. It can also be formed by welding stainless steel, and is found in drinking water ... that doesn't sound very specific to me.
I don't know where that ditch is, but on google maps the Tesla lithum plant is right next to a place storing drilling equipment outdoors. Runoff from any kind of industry nearby could end up in that ditch. After all, 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 that filter out and layer into a ditch and can then concentrate over time (subject to terms and conditions).
A reasonable question, that should be asked of any industrial area, is whether dirt ditches, leaky pipes, the whole deal, are accumulating toxins over a decade or more ... and what the impact and remediation plan is for that.
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")
Not insurmountable, something to be wary of, these things have happened.
>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 that drives me up the wall is the two faced capricious nature of all this.
I have a grass parking lot and everyone screeches about tire rubber concentrating in the dirt.
I pave the lot and everyone screeches about the rubber in the runoff
I pay an engineering firm to say that my grass strip on the side of the paved parking lot is an engineered feature that per their calculation will catch yada yada yada blah blah blah and I get my permit.
Seems to me like you can't put anything anywhere. You just go in circles until you've the right rings for the right amount and then they say "this is fine".
Whether the ditch is dirt and grass (nature's filter) or lined with something, hexavalent chromium is just the big boy big dollar version of the same stupid parking lot problem.
Say they filter the chromium out. So then it winds up concentrated in something. Where does it go then? Seems like the only way to permanently deal with waste is to sell it into another jurisdiction where the buyer has kissed the right rings to let it be used as some input to some other process where it then goes from waste to something else.
Obviously, discharging "dark and murky" polluted water is bad. But some of the figures from the lab report don't seem that terrible:
* 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 below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present.
The hexavalent chromium is also just barely above the California drinking water standard [1]
That is well below the noise floor. Like the similarly toxic selenium, arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology. It is possible to be deficient in arsenic, though rare in practice. Natural background levels are far higher in many locales with no adverse effects.
I often see trace quantities of arsenic trotted out by the popular media for scaremongering purposes. Examples like the above are an immediate red flag.
Could you expand on what makes arsenic an essential micronutrient? What are the clinical signs and symptoms of severe arsenic deficiency? I've never heard of this before.
IIRC, severe deficiency of arsenic leads to a type of wasting. The precise role is uncertain. Based on animal models the rough estimates for human requirements are similar to selenium.
Humans get enough arsenic from water and other background sources that deficiency is virtually unknown. My understanding is that there was historical anecdotal evidence for rare arsenic deficiency from animal husbandry that caused it to be investigated.
These days they systematically test for the trace micronutrient status of e.g. heavy metals by inducing extreme deficiency using mammal models. Most of the time nothing happens but it is difficult to eliminate the possibility of contamination creating a null signal.
Probably the most surprising element for which they have suggestive evidence of biological necessity is lead.
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.
It is hard. I did some searches before commenting and couldn't find anything about arsenic deficiency. I don't know much about arsenic biochemistry so could you kindly point us to a good source?
Perhaps not. At the same time, when a person makes a claim, and several (or several hundred) people read it, it seems more efficient to ask the person who made the claim to supply the documentation, rather than making the several (hundred) people all do the looking. The looking does not have to be hard for this to be true.
Also, just in general debate terms, the one who makes a claim is the one who has the burden of substantiating it.
The dosage makes the poison - but if it sticks around in the body dilution may slightly alleviate effects but at the cost of more widespread buildup. This is out of my field so I'm not certain if that's a concern here.
In some cases it still is, but we need to emphasize the exceptions, which can be rather serious.
For example, we can hardly "dilute" CFCs or CO2 any more than we did, by putting them into a whopping 5.15×10^18 kg of the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Yet both still cause bad things, because there's no (sufficient) process to break them down or move them to a safe state.
That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!
The ECU turns on the secondary air system and enriches the fuel mixture so the exhaust temperature goes up, heating the catalytic converter rapidly. Catalytic converters must be hot to work, so getting them hot quickly is important.
EDIT: OP drove an older truck. In earlier days, the extra air injection into the exhaust was to provide some air for the secondary exhaust gasses to fully burn. It had to be done early in the exhaust where the exhaust gases are hot.
>That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!
I'm sure that people of a certain bent will eat your comment up but that's just not true.
Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.
Emissions have been measured by mass rather than concentration since 1972. So like yeah it "could've been done" but standards before that were light enough that they could just screw with other things that add $0 to the BOM to clean it up enough to pass.
> Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.
My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter, only a muffler. It featured not one, but two air pumps, each feeding a set of pipes that led to metal tubes which entered the exhaust manifold opposite each exhaust port. Another odd thing about that truck was it had a choke lever, something I thought was long gone by 1988, and was a pain to start in the winter.
Perhaps other vehicles had a cat but this truck certainly did not.
> My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter,
Catalytic converters were required on most vehicles starting in 1975 in the US and the requirement was expanded to cover all vehicles in the early 80s.
I don't think that's right. I believe this is the relevant EPA regulation: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2004-title40-vol17/p.... This mentions emission limits but does not require a catalytic converter for medium duty (14,000lb-26,000lb GVWR) trucks like the GMC 6000.
> This mentions emission limits but does not require a catalytic converter
IIRC, technically if the vehicle meets emissions limits without a catalytic converter then it doesn't need one.
The emission limits are set such that a catalytic converter is required to meet them. They don't have to say "catalytic converter required" but the targets are chosen so that a catalytic converter can reasonably achieve them.
If the laws simply said "catalytic converter required" then manufacturers could put a tiny little square of catalyst in the exhaust and call it a day. Formula 1 isn't the only place where rules have to be written explicitly to avoid clever workarounds.
Well, FWIW the air pumps still can -help- with unburnt fuel...
It's not as good as a Cat for emissions but it's better than nothing, so they actually started being used before Cats; they just are used different now.
In 1988 the factory put a cat in the exhaust. It also would have had fuel injection and a computer, and thus no choke. In short this truck was very much not stock (or possibly you are not in the US?) and so it is interesting but not helpful for the discussion.
350ish (or less) + 4spd trucks kinda fell out of favor over the course of the 70s for bigger engines and 5spds (usually with a 2spd rear end but I digress). I'm sure you could still get one, but who would when you could get something better on the lot for the same money.
Sounds like someone swapped a 70s-80s engine from a lighter application in.
I don't think that truck would've had manual choke from the factory. Lots of stuff could've happened over the years.
The amount of air your engine breathes is monumental compared to what the smog pump moves. The math of dilution just doesn't work. What does work is pissing a light stream of oxygen (remember, not much of that coming out of the engine, especially on warm up while it runs rich) to help the catalyst burn those hydrocarbons off of itself a wee bit faster.
I'm not sure if an 80s gas MDT would've had cats from the factory.
Is that what a "smog pump" is (was)? LOL. I had heard the term but never knew what it was.
Along the same lines then as other emissions equipment that reduced fuel economy but achieved the ppm criteria in the exhaust. Yes, let's address pollution by burning more fuel.
Yes, and it has absolutely nothing to do with increasing air volume. The idea is to lower hydrocarbon emissions by burning them off in the exhaust manifold.
Those levels are low enough that they might be coming from the water going into the plant.
Arsenic and hexavalent chromium are both naturally occurring substances in low quantities. You can pull uncontaminated water out of the ground in remote locations and detect low levels of arsenic and hexavalent chromium.
That hexavalent chromium number would be just barely about California's strict limit for drinking water, but it's 1/10th of the EPA's limit.
Out of curiosity, I checked the water records re: arsenic.
Test wells for the region in question have had arsenic levels several times that being discussed here for years. In fact, the water district started failing Federal arsenic standards last summer[0] and has received three formal violation notices.
They were nearly in violation a year before the lithium plant even opened. At least in terms of arsenic, the levels coming out of the plant are significantly lower than background.
Reading between the lines here the local .gov knows this and didn't mention it specifically or at least they weren't quoted as such.
The journalist got their hands on the report saw "arsenic" and just copypasta'd without understanding the context and now everyone is screeching about something that's less than the local baseline.
My guess is the hexavalent chromium is leeched from plated metals in processing equipment. Very common plating substance and was more common before restrictions were put in place.
Sure; if you run a "hazardous substance processing" company, you just take up an enormous amount of clean water and enrich it with the maximum amounts of arsenic, chromium, etc, and charge your clients a nice penny.
Not really; strontium is quite common in the crust. In the oceans it occurs in the single-digit mg/L. This isn't a meaningful datapoint.
The entire article doesn't show particularly concerning findings and the protests read more like nimbyism than environmental concern. Industrial processes have some non-zero level of impact and complaining when someone runs one that's not very polluting at all is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or it's just an attempt to outsource all the pollution to china, which is fine for many things (I'd rather they were polluted than us) but not critical minerals.
While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is radioactive and is one of the most dangerous components of nuclear fallout, as strontium is absorbed by the body in a similar manner to calcium. Natural stable strontium is not hazardous to health at low levels.
Every element up to and including bismuth, excluding technetium and promethium, have stable primordial isotopes (i.e., have been on Earth since it was made), and in addition, thorium, uranium, and maybe plutonium (Pu-244 is on the very edge, so it's not clear if any primordial nuclei of it remain) also have primordial isotopes. Every element with bismuth or higher atomic number has no stable isotopes, and the elements from astatine through neptunium naturally occur largely via decay sequences of uranium or natural nuclear reactions in uranium ore.
Nuclear fission reactions tend to result in the daughter nuclei being considerably smaller than the mother nucleus--like a 70/30 or 60/40 split, which means that the fission products of uranium are firmly in the range of elements that have stable isotopes. (Although due to larger elements being richer in neutrons, most fission products have too many neutrons, hence undergo radioactive decay themselves).
But does the amount per liter matter? The quantity matters too right? How much of these substances are being released in total? And since it’s into a drainage ditch that goes past what looks like farmland, does the higher local concentration cause more problems for the population in the area?
I think it does. Crops pull up a set amount of water. If it's concentrated, then they'll pull up a lot of heavy metals. If it's at very low levels, then they won't.
nah, there is no reason they should be discharging any hexavalent chromium, we have better, less insanely toxic ways of chroming things. trivalent chromium is much less toxic, hexavalent chromium should be banned world-wide.
what's more, i'm not finding a reason that tesla would need hexavalent chromium in battery production, which leads me to speculate that this is waste from one of their other car factories where they presumably have a hexavalent chrome line (it's a cheaper and more robust process than trivalent chrome) and they are mixing/discharging on purpose at the limit at this plant.
I used to work in a factory that did chrome plating (I didn't work in that area, but since it was the same building), as part of my mandatory training before I was allowed to step foot in the building I had to learn there was a sewage plant just for the output of that line and if I had to dispose of waste water for any reasons I had to make sure I got it into the right system. Our sewage system couldn't treat toilet water, the city system can't treat chrome waste. (my waste disposal was limited to toilet and washing my hands - as you would expect from an engineer, but I still had to know about the system just in case)
How about when it enters the food chain and starts to accumulate? Will the elements say that "we're under legal limits, and accumulate slowly, so we will act nice and don't poison the organism we're in?"
Emissions regulations are a balancing act. Industrial processes are inherently filthy. If you want copper, gold, lithium, or anything else that makes up the modern world, somewhere on earth was dirtied for that to be possible, and some of the pollution will get into the surroundings because zero emissions simply isn't possible. So we set certain levels of "acceptable emissions" as a balancing act.
I also agree that emissions should be tighter, but the location question is more interesting, because we can also choose where emissions happen.
For example, we might choose them to happen near cities/factories so the products are close to where they're used. We've mostly stopped doing that since the industrial revolution for pretty good reasons though. We could place them in the pristine landscapes not otherwise used by humans, like national parks. That's unpopular for hopefully obvious reasons. We could place them in sparsely inhabited deserts abroad, as Europeans did [0], before we collectively decided colonialism was a bad thing.
And lastly, we could place them in figurative deserts away from conservation land and people like monoculture farmland, but then we get to your question.
So, what's left? What are you suggesting as a better alternative?
In some vague abstract sense? Wouldn't protesting specific instances where bad laws are letting companies get away with environmentally damaging practices be more effective? As and when there's a pattern of events that is best addressed by adjusting the law, politicians and voters can figure that out for themselves.
I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise. So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).
It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?
It kind of falls apart when large companies can lobby and bribe the people in charge of writing and enacting laws to make exception and write around their problem areas. Or can just make strategic donations to ease any risks of enforcement. Or collude to make sure the fine for whatever infraction is well below the profit margin of doing said infraction.
I don't care to argue semantics, just pointing out your reply was as hollow as your criticism to the person saying legal doesn't mean safe. It's a pretty reasonable thing to draw attention to methinks...
>I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise.
It might be news to you, but the laws don't dictate what's fine, and what isn't.
Aside from things like slavery being legal and homosexuality being illegal in the past, I'll note that it's perfectly legal for you to drink bleach, but it wouldn't really be fine for you to do that.
(I hope we can agree that advising people to do something "fine" isn't rude, but telling someone to go drink bleach would be) .
> So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).
So, to boot, "it's fine as long as it's legal" doesn't apply to those things, youthinks.
Also, "we" is a peculiar pronoun that needs a lot of expansion, considering that the "we" negatively affected by "not fine" things isn't the same "we" that benefits from them, and it's the latter "we" that has direct influence on legislation.
Some interesting terms to read up on include "negative externality" and "corruption" (assuming youreads).
>It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?
If we turn to historical examples, the French Revolution certainly provides an example for alternative ways to resolve disparities between what's legal and what's fine.
There are plenty of others, but that question wasn't asked in good faith, methinks, and so doesn't deserve a more in-depth answer.
We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked. There are some areas where it could obviously be better, but also some areas where regulation is too strict (blocking housing, renewables, transit) and the system is evolving to address those.
I think the loss of local media has made it harder for misdeeds to come to light, but I don't want to throw up my hands and cede everything to commercial interests et al.
I think a look at other countries would do well. There are many with much tighter regulations (e.g. EU countries, Singapore, Japan) and they seem to have good results with that.
> We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked.
I think prevention of pollution is one area where very tight regulation is absolutely needed, and this seems to be an argument for that.
Of course regulation can be weaponized and used as a tool to serve entrenched interests as well - but this is then more a problem with the overall political system. Also, I think a proof that this is the case is necessary instead of assuming it by default.
Taking this as a good faith engineering argument. What does that mean? What do you constitute a pollutant and how much is zero?
I guess as a contrived example your breath releases 40k PPM Co2. Have you tried aiming for no pollution?
The reality is we make things which involve pollutants, which we create laws to govern the safe disposal of. Engineers optimise for these constraints the same way you do. You wouldn’t have one k8s pod per request to ‘strive to keep the response times as low as possible’.
In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water used in bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication has a lot more than 1 atom of arsenic per glass. In the far future humanity might obtain the technology to create water with literally no pollutants in it but that age has yet to arrive.
Arsenic and lead occur naturally through the food chain. If the levels of discharge are not significantly above the normal levels (and they aren't) then it's harmless.
They are still not harmless. They are normal. However if they are at all above natural (that is your input levels) you should treat and remove them. It is not unusual for the output of a sewage treatment plant to be cleaner water than what goes into your drinking water system.
From a quick lookaround, it looks like a lot of water sources in the area have similar natural levels of arsenic. I could not find chromium content information, and it's plausible that it can be leached from stainless steel.
These are pretty much the only two concerning contaminants. Everything else in the report is just fear-mongering, like the BS about manganese.
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.
> What [the wastewater discharge permit] 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 existed.
I find it kinda worrying that so much of the legal weight of this case doesn't seem to be about the untreated wastewater discharge at all but only about the detail that they used a county-owned ditch to do so.
So if Tesla had dug their own ditch or built the pipe all the way to Petronila Creek, the discharge would have been no problem?
(Well, that's not completely true as the additional pollutants aren't covered by the permit either - but without the ditch issue, probably no one would have commissioned an analysis of the water?)
Can a big and rich company be fined for some minor technicality? Maybe! If the cost of the attempt is lower than the amount of the possible fine, why not try and find out? This may sound cynical, but this also one of the driving forces that often keep big companies from breaking rules.
DOGE explicitly made gutting the EPA a top priority, which is probably why drainage workers are making these discoveries and not inspectors. Pretty much any company linked to Musk should be under increased scrutiny now. The trouble is, anyone who performs that scrutiny is likely to face intimidation and "lawfare".
Americans should carefully watch what happens to these workers and their county in the coming months. Beyond that, they should ask who is still keeping an eye on polluters in 2026.
That must be it. I can see if they are normally published or announced publicly somewhere, then it makes sense but if it's not done for other permits then it's sounds like they are implying nefariousness.
my knowledge is from long ago, but, it would be expected for the state to communicate to the counties/cities about infrastructure permits such as this one. the counties/cities need to ensure their infrastructure planning accounts for everything in the area, regardless of the original permitting authority.
You've put in my head the picture of a jester announcing "hear! Hear! In which thereby the king allowth the forgerer so known as Tesla Mechanical Horses to discharge..."
I'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 below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present.
Strontium at 1.17 mg/L. Mazloum’s technical report on the findings noted that long-term exposure can affect bone density and kidney function in humans and wildlife.
Lithium and vanadium at concentrations Lazarte’s letter described as abnormally high relative to rainwater or normal groundwater.
Elevated levels of manganese, iron, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and potassium consistent with industrial discharge. Manganese, a battery process tracer, can have neurological effects at chronic doses. Excess phosphorus can cause algae blooms that strip oxygen from waterways.
Ammonia in the form of nitrogen at 1.68 mg/L, amplifying the algae bloom risk.
None of these are violating the permit.
Ultimately, I view this as a values question: Is it permissible to manufacture in the US or not?
> 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 existed. Its workers found out the way drainage district workers in any small Texas county find out about things: by walking the ditch and seeing something new.
A state investigator visited on February 12, sampled the water flowing from Tesla’s outfall pipe, ran the standard panel of conventional pollutants: dissolved solids, chlorides, sulfates, oil and grease, temperature, dissolved oxygen. Everything in that panel came back inside the bounds of Tesla’s permit. TCEQ approved its investigation report on March 20, finding no permit violation.
The article then proceeds to explain how they did all kinds of non-standard tests and still found nothing above the federal drinking water standard nor in violation of the permit. Yes Tesla is still evil and responsible because supposedly some nearby town is having a drought and people are "running out of water."
Shit like this and we wonder why the US is dependent on China for all rare earths.
what a coincidence, all they want to do is report negatively on anything that Tesla touches, I've grown skeptical on all these sort of reports, most likely other refineries have similar or worse track records, but that doesn't fit the narrative right?
its basically Musk derangement syndrome .. anything Tesla/musk touches instantly gets turned into some giant scandal while similar or worse stuff from other companies gets ignored because it doesnt fit the narrative ..
PS: 99% of these keyboard warriors couldnt create 0.1% of what Musk and his companies have done for EVs,space, manufacturing, internet access .AI etc
>Notably, no party has alleged that Tesla is in violation of any law. TCEQ [(Texas Commission on Environmental Quality)] has not found one. Tesla is operating under a permit the state agency issued. The dispute, instead, is about what the permit was supposed to cover, and what got left out of it.
> Neither hexavalent chromium nor arsenic appears in Tesla’s TCEQ discharge permit as an allowable pollutant. Neither was tested for during TCEQ’s February investigation.
And also
> What [the permit] 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 existed. Its workers found out the way drainage district workers in any small Texas county find out about things: by walking the ditch and seeing something new.
As we all know, laws as written are perfect and just, especially in Texas, especially in relation to the environment. They should stop looking into it at all, really.
> 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 below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present.
> Strontium at 1.17 mg/L. Mazloum’s technical report on the findings noted that long-term exposure can affect bone density and kidney function in humans and wildlife.
> Lithium and vanadium at concentrations Lazarte’s letter described as abnormally high relative to rainwater or normal groundwater.
> Elevated levels of manganese, iron, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and potassium consistent with industrial discharge. Manganese, a battery process tracer, can have neurological effects at chronic doses. Excess phosphorus can cause algae blooms that strip oxygen from waterways.
> Ammonia in the form of nitrogen at 1.68 mg/L, amplifying the algae bloom risk.
Strip away the sensationalism, and it just doesn't seem like much? None of these levels seem to be high enough to impair health. The 1.68ppm of ammonia would likely contribute to algae growth, but not majorly, especially if properly diluted. Home aquariums regularly run between 0 and 0.25ppm of NH3 without major issues, so as long as this is diluted 6x it shouldn't impact things.
I hate elon as much as the next guy, and they should have disposed of the water properly, but it doesn't seem to be anything like them running their unpermitted power plants in Memphis.
If I am reading this correctly, the Erin Brockovich hexavalent chromium was detected in Hinkley at levels of 1.2 to 20 ppb (ug/L). Contrasted here with 10.4 ppb (ug/L). Sounds notable to me if they are regularly flooding the zone with this.
Lithium production produce lots of toxic material. That's why I was happy the chinese were doing it for a penny. Of course driving carbon neutral but releasing tons of poison in the nature is a questionnable equation.
Isn't China great? First we make them produce all our stuff, then we bash them for polluting slightly more than us westerners, who produces nothing.
We win political points for globalism, we win political points for lower cost goods, then we win political points by virtue signaling about the environment! So convenient.
Obviously China should reap all the advantages of producing everything while bearing none of the responsibility, how could poor China be ever accountable for anything. Clearly the United States government should get involved to take care of the pollution caused by the Chinese industry, all out American taxpayer's pockets preferably.
It is even better: we grew cheaply by polluting freely, even doing absurd things like adding lead to gasoline knowing that lead is toxic. When we got rich, we leveraged that wealth to reduce some pollution, sending the worse industries to the developing countries.
Not saying that it was intentional, but we should not point fingers.
He’s talking about outsourcing/pollution economics, not rhat Chinese people are inferior .. not every inelegant sentence needs to be turned into a civil rights case .. [insert clown emoji here]
First thing I thought of, except in this story the outfall seems to have been discovered through the ordinary diligence of government, rather than by a plucky eco-buccaneer.
I wonder how many gallons of polluted wastewater are discharged per day by overseas refineries. Does anyone know where Tesla stacks up in the global list of lithium refiners?
There's a lot of missing information here. I'm no fan of Tesla and I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing something inappropriate but there's a lot of unanswered questions here.
Why wasn't the sample taken at the outfall? That seems like such an obvious thing to do that there must be a reason it wasn't done. Is the outflow accessible?
What other facilities exist in the area? This is described as a ditch, not a creek or river, which implies to me that it is artificial. Is this an industrial area with other contamination?
> 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.
I'm not sure I am parsing this correctly. To the best of my understanding this means it is just above the noise floor? What was the exposure in the Erin Brockovitch case?
Trying to boost numbers by using units people can't picture or comprehend is not very useful.
231000 gallons is 1000 cubic meters, ie a 10 metre cube.
Perhaps the number of olympic size swimming pools of a standardized depth may be more useful. Perhaps the number of 3m deep Olympic sized swimming pools or gas/oil storage tanks.
Now I think US knows what it meant like building things in the nation, they should consume product and their waste both, enough that east world had all this since last 140 years.
Although I hate Tesla, think the greater issue is that since we're probably going to have to move a lot of material sourcing and industrial plant capacity back to the United States in the coming decades...
The US is probably going to need to make another pass at how we're going to do that without creating polluted wastelands and super fund sites.
> Ammonia in the form of nitrogen at 1.68 mg/L, amplifying the algae bloom risk.
:facepalm:
If you're fear-mongering, then at least take care to fear-monger correctly. From the numbers they report, it seems like Tesla is doing a good job with wastewater treatment.
Edit: clarification for people who are not chemists, it should be the other way around: "Nitrogen in the form of ammonia".
God this is classic journalistic lying with true facts. I read all the way up to the start of Tesla's response and couldn't tell what they had supposedly done wrong. If there's an accusation in there, it's buried in worthless innuendo and bluster. Luis Reyes doesn't seem to understand the problems involved in comparing the value of a continuous quantity to zero - or more likely, he's trying to mislead his readers. Of course any industrial waste will contain some contaminants in higher concentrations than rainwater!! That doesn't mean there's anything wrong.
There is a reason China does so well refining metals like lithium and rare earths: it's difficult, resource intensive and polluting. They have about a 80% global share in lithium processing.
That doesn't matter under a communist dictatorship, but in more civilized countries people don't want it in their backyard.
> 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 the right to use public or private property for wastewater conveyance.
I'm confused, does Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
> The drainage district that manages the ditch the pipe was discharging into was never notified that the permit existed
This should be on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; they issued the permit, so it should be on them to notify the affected area.
> 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 says, that is a legitimate argument.
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 pollution cost that is being externalized to Texans to pay, justified and a net win for them, and if it is, than what's holding up the permits, and if not, then why is this permitted at all, even if partially.
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.
Texas is notoriously lax. State regulators are quick to dismiss any concerns when there is money to be made.
https://news.utexas.edu/2014/03/27/air-pollution-and-hydraul...
https://publichealthwatch.org/2024/12/12/houston-air-polluti...
> I'm confused, does Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
If you have a permit to dump wastewater into a river, you are not allowed to dump your wastewater wherever in that river's basin on the assumption that it will eventually flow into the river. You are supposed to use a pipeline for wastewater transfer.
But according to the article the permit is for dumping wastewater into a ditch. And Tesla appears to deliver the wastewater to that ditch by pipe. And it doesn't appear like the pipe is the topic of contention here, but where it ends and what comes out of it. All things that seem to be properly permitted, from what the article is telling us
They have a permit to dump water but not put it in the ditch where the pipe runs.
They need to get it to a body of water, not a ditch. Dumping into the drainage ditch or running a pipe in the drainage ditch requires a separate permit.
The water quality is also questionable. Tesla and the drainage company are at odds on the testing method.
At least that’s my understanding of the situation
Doesn't the article state that "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..."?
They don’t own the drainage ditch. They can still dump the water into the local watershed/river whatever body of water per the permit you stated.
But the permit is to discharge into a ditch. And that is also the ditch that they are discharging into.
“A ditch” and “this ditch specifically” are two entirely separate concepts.
Yeah. And we are dealing with the latter.
>> 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 says, that is a legitimate argument.
That's some top notch weasel wording right there. If sampling from the ditch reveals contaminants that are not natural to the area but are the same contaminants that are measured from the output of the pipe, then a natural question could be "are the contaminants leaking from upstream and leaching into the ground run off into the ditch?" which would still be a Tesla problem.
My reading is that Tesla's contention is those contaminants are not coming from their pipe, hence the objection to the measurement being taken from somewhere other than the output of their pipe. And while the contaminants may well be coming from Tesla's pipe, given the apparent lack of coordination between the various governmental agencies involved, it seems reasonable to me to say that they need to sample from the pipe output in order to actually say what Tesla is or isn't putting into the ditch, since apparently they might be able to just walk a few hundred feet further up the ditch and find other discharge pipes they don't know about yet.
Sure, but that's also the same thing someone would say that knows they are leeching contaminants from other parts of their property but are not coming out this output pipe.
It's also the same thing someone would say that knows they're running a satanic cult sacrificing whales in the sub-basements of the property but knows the evidence of that isn't coming out of this output pipe. And at least so far, the government has not alleged that the contamination is coming from some other here-to-fore undiscovered but connected to the tesla factory location, nor that they are running a satanic whale sacrificing cult in their sub-basements. So speculating about that seems a bit pre-mature.
Perhaps more crucially though, it's also the same thing someone would say who is actually innocent of leeching contaminants. Whether they are or not, nothing in this article is providing any useful evidence.
Wait, are they sacrificing the whales by putting them in toxic wastewater, in your ridiculous example?
Otherwise, someone’s industrial process is responsible for those samples…
and if the only business in the area that matches the waste is…
> Tesla have the right to dump water or not? I would assume that this is exactly what a permit is for?
My guess is this is a question of overlapping jurisdictions. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is presumably responsible for water quality, and so gets a say on what kinds of discharge in the state are safe. The drainage district has to manage the actual ditches and water on the ground, so they get a say (or at least notice) of new users of their infrastructure.
Just like how the DOT gets to create rules about locomotives but Railways still get to decide who can run trains on their tracks.
> Just like how the DOT gets to create rules about locomotives but Railways still get to decide who can run trains on their tracks.
Fun fact, in 2005, as of Texas Railroad Commission no longer has anything to do with railroads and moved that oversight to the DoT. The TRC now is only involved with oil&gas. It is one of my favorite dumb things about Texas. Why not just rename the group and eliminate the TRC altogether, oh right, politics.
> allowed up to 231,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day
What I'd like to know is what "treated" means here and whether the pollutants measured in the water are in compliance of that definition.
After all, the problem that there is an important fishing area downstream does not go away, whether there is a permit or not. So in my understanding, the whole reason why the permit could be issued in the first place was the assurance that the water was treated enough to not be a danger to downstream consumers. But pitch black fluid with questionable analysis results doesn't exactly seem like that.
> As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.
Technically yes, but I think it's somewhat unlikely that there just happens to be a chromium/arsenic/lithium/strontium deposit somewhere along the length of the ditch that would re-pollute Tesla's pristine wastewater and make the readings look bad.
Or at least, the question whether there are any potential other sources for the substances should be easy to answer, by looking at a map or sending someone to check the ditch for any other unexpected pipes.
ggreer did the work for us https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199824
This Inside Climate News article is a little clearer.
> TCEQ began its investigation after workers for Nueces County Drainage District No. 2, which presides over the ditch area, found an unfamiliar pipe stretched across the district’s easement, expelling black liquid into the ditch
> The permit didn’t allow Tesla to use private or public property to transport the wastewater. Under the permit, it was Tesla’s responsibility to acquire whatever property rights were required to use the discharge route, the TCEQ permit states.
So one issue is that while they may have had a permit to dump wastewater, they didn't have a right to build a pipe on land controlled by the drainage district. Tesla, not TCEQ, needed to notify the drainage district because Tesla was the one building on land controlled by that district.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19032026/tesla-lithium-re...
Keyword here is TREATED. Now Telsa will probably argue they added a dash of salt which they contend is "treated" wastewater. Billionaires don't care about you or your health.
> Lithium and vanadium at concentrations Lazarte’s letter described as abnormally high relative to rainwater or normal groundwater.
> 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.
> Strontium at 1.17 mg/L. Mazloum’s technical report on the findings noted that long-term exposure can affect bone density and kidney function in humans and wildlife.
Some of the elements of note that were detected. These are all well above background levels. The point about not measuring at the outfall is valid, but probably not relevant. Unless we think there are other lithium and hex sources nearby.
The real crime is that a permit was issued at all and that it was not so comprehensive. But that's the beauty of Texas - their citizens love this kind of thing.
Per ggreer's comment [0], there are other potential sources nearby.
It's pretty annoying all told. It invalidates the results; it takes them from "this is clear evidence of a breach" into "maybe it's in breach. Or maybe someone else is. Or maybe both are within their respective limits"
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199824
Agreed.
Per the article, sounds like everyone would have benefited from more discussion and transparency either way. I find it surprising that these types of permits are issued without formal review at a town council style setting.
Ultimately, the people living in these areas should have an outsized say on what is piped into their way supplies. Same forum could also be used to show it is safe. Or discuss the safety of the ask.
A counterpoint is this
The lab tested for chromium in two ways: one test (ICP) measures all chromium of any kind, and the other measures hexavalent chromium specifically. The ICP test returned a concentration that was an order of magnitude smaller than the hexavalent test. That is to say, the tests contradict each other (because the whole is smaller than the part), and are both at the bottom of range for the tests performed.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28055380-j2673-1-uds...
Fair comment re hex. Elevated levels of some other elements need to be similarly reviewed.
These types of permits should really need to be discussed in town forums, regardless of the outcome here.
Would Eurofins be able to set up monitoring on Tesla's property?
What other sources would have similar pollutants to a Lithium factory? It seems pretty specific and if there was some other obvious source why wouldn't Tesla point that out?
Hexavalent chromium can come from many industrial sources, including welding stainless steel. If you go to Tesla's lithium refinery in google maps[1] and follow the drainage ditch along highway 77 (to the northeast) about a half mile, you'll see a company called Tex-Isle Processing. They supply steel pipes and coating services for oil drilling.[2] It could be that one of their manufacturing processes creates hexavalent chromium.
In my opinion there isn't enough information to blame anyone for the slightly-above-drinking-water levels of hexavalent chromium. The drainage ditch goes along a highway and a rail line, so pollution could come from all kinds of places.
1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/7iNTbiPcs1sZ9CqP8
2. https://www.texisle.com/
Something else to note:
The lab tested for chromium in two ways: one test (ICP) measures all chromium of any kind, and the other measures hexavalent chromium specifically. The ICP test returned a concentration that was an order of magnitude smaller than the hexavalent test (0.0003 vs 0.0104 mg/L). That is to say, the tests contradict each other (because the whole is smaller than the part).
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28055380-j2673-1-uds...
Ok, that's one of the pollutants...
But I agree, measuring at the end of the ditch was the wrong thing to do if they take issue with that specific factory (though it was the right thing to do to prove a harmful pollution exists in general)
So another measurement directly at the pipe would be in order.
The measured levels of arsenic, strontium, and vanadium are below the limits for drinking water, even in California. And 4% of drinking water sources in California have higher hexavalent chromium content than the water in that ditch.[1] Besides sodium from salt, the only metal that was particularly high was lithium, at 0.0714mg/L or 71 micrograms per liter. A significant fraction of drinking water in the US has higher concentrations than that.[2]
The level of salt shouldn't affect much. Adding up the chloride and sodium content gets you 684mg/L, which is on the low end of brackish water (500-30,000mg/L). The limit for agricultural irrigation is 2,000mg/L, and photos of the pipe show plenty of grass growing around and in the water.
The phosphorous could come from fertilizers, as there's plenty of farm land in the area. That would also explain the higher ammonium levels, as both anhydrous ammonia and ammonium phosphate are common fertilizers.
The article is really about how sensitive our scientific instruments are, not how dangerous the water is. It reminds me of articles like Vice's American Honey Is Radioactive from Decades of Nuclear Bomb Testing[3], where the most radioactive honey they could find was 10 times less radioactive than a banana.
1. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26906838
They list 6 pollutants, but only two of them seem relevant to the legality of this.
One is an amount of arsenic that is a quarter of what's allowed in drinking water. So technically, someone dumping drinking water in the ditch could contaminate this measurement.
The other is hexavalent chromium, which is 4% higher than allowed. According to wikipedia that is "indeed one of the more widely used heavy metals in various sectors and industries (metallurgy, chemicals, textiles, etc.) with particular involvement in the metal coating sector" and used in the production of all kinds of dyes, paints, plastics, etc. It can also be formed by welding stainless steel, and is found in drinking water ... that doesn't sound very specific to me.
I don't know where that ditch is, but on google maps the Tesla lithum plant is right next to a place storing drilling equipment outdoors. Runoff from any kind of industry nearby could end up in that ditch. After all, collecting runoff is what ditches are there for
> 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 that filter out and layer into a ditch and can then concentrate over time (subject to terms and conditions).
A reasonable question, that should be asked of any industrial area, is whether dirt ditches, leaky pipes, the whole deal, are accumulating toxins over a decade or more ... and what the impact and remediation plan is for that.
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")
Not insurmountable, something to be wary of, these things have happened.
>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 that drives me up the wall is the two faced capricious nature of all this.
I have a grass parking lot and everyone screeches about tire rubber concentrating in the dirt.
I pave the lot and everyone screeches about the rubber in the runoff
I pay an engineering firm to say that my grass strip on the side of the paved parking lot is an engineered feature that per their calculation will catch yada yada yada blah blah blah and I get my permit.
Seems to me like you can't put anything anywhere. You just go in circles until you've the right rings for the right amount and then they say "this is fine".
Whether the ditch is dirt and grass (nature's filter) or lined with something, hexavalent chromium is just the big boy big dollar version of the same stupid parking lot problem.
Say they filter the chromium out. So then it winds up concentrated in something. Where does it go then? Seems like the only way to permanently deal with waste is to sell it into another jurisdiction where the buyer has kissed the right rings to let it be used as some input to some other process where it then goes from waste to something else.
>> The permit requires monitoring at the outfall point...
The permit is a license to pollute, but go on:
>> ...and the company has pointed out that ditch samples can pick up contaminants from sources that have nothing to do with Tesla’s wastewater.
Downstream, others are picking up contaminants from a source that has nothing to do with them.
> As the article itself says, that is a legitimate argument.
OK, lovely, glad that's settled.
NEXT!
Obviously, discharging "dark and murky" polluted water is bad. But some of the figures from the lab report don't seem that terrible:
* 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 below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present.
The hexavalent chromium is also just barely above the California drinking water standard [1]
[1] https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...
> Arsenic at 0.0025 mg/L
That is well below the noise floor. Like the similarly toxic selenium, arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology. It is possible to be deficient in arsenic, though rare in practice. Natural background levels are far higher in many locales with no adverse effects.
I often see trace quantities of arsenic trotted out by the popular media for scaremongering purposes. Examples like the above are an immediate red flag.
Could you expand on what makes arsenic an essential micronutrient? What are the clinical signs and symptoms of severe arsenic deficiency? I've never heard of this before.
IIRC, severe deficiency of arsenic leads to a type of wasting. The precise role is uncertain. Based on animal models the rough estimates for human requirements are similar to selenium.
Humans get enough arsenic from water and other background sources that deficiency is virtually unknown. My understanding is that there was historical anecdotal evidence for rare arsenic deficiency from animal husbandry that caused it to be investigated.
These days they systematically test for the trace micronutrient status of e.g. heavy metals by inducing extreme deficiency using mammal models. Most of the time nothing happens but it is difficult to eliminate the possibility of contamination creating a null signal.
Probably the most surprising element for which they have suggestive evidence of biological necessity is lead.
Could you give us some specific citations for evidence of biological necessity for arsenic and lead? I searched on PubMed but couldn't find anything.
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/
It has no known physiological role in humans. Selenium has similar stuff going on. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_biochemistry]
It’s not hard to figure this stuff out yourself.
It is hard. I did some searches before commenting and couldn't find anything about arsenic deficiency. I don't know much about arsenic biochemistry so could you kindly point us to a good source?
Perhaps not. At the same time, when a person makes a claim, and several (or several hundred) people read it, it seems more efficient to ask the person who made the claim to supply the documentation, rather than making the several (hundred) people all do the looking. The looking does not have to be hard for this to be true.
Also, just in general debate terms, the one who makes a claim is the one who has the burden of substantiating it.
If I wanted to fall under that reporting limit, can I just dilute my wastewater a bit more?
The classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".
The dosage makes the poison - but if it sticks around in the body dilution may slightly alleviate effects but at the cost of more widespread buildup. This is out of my field so I'm not certain if that's a concern here.
In some cases it still is, but we need to emphasize the exceptions, which can be rather serious.
For example, we can hardly "dilute" CFCs or CO2 any more than we did, by putting them into a whopping 5.15×10^18 kg of the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Yet both still cause bad things, because there's no (sufficient) process to break them down or move them to a safe state.
Is that so? The amount of atmosphere stays the same, but we're constantly adding more CO2. So wouldn't this continually reduce the dilution?
Accumulation makes the... what rhymes here?
I like where you're going with this.
"The solution to pollution is dilution, except when accumulation is a violation upon creation"?
Litigation
That level of arsenic is so low that diluting it with groundwater might cause the arsenic number to go up, depending on where this is located.
>> If I wanted to fall under that reporting limit, can I just dilute my wastewater a bit more?
It said the permit is for up to a certain amount of water per day. If you're at the volume limit there's no way to dilute by just adding more water.
Unless you run it along a ditch so much of the water, and bad stuff, soaks into the soil before "discharge" at the property line.
Yeah but the volume of water you can release is still limited so does still reduce pollutants if you are running up against that limit.
That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!
This is completely false.
The ECU turns on the secondary air system and enriches the fuel mixture so the exhaust temperature goes up, heating the catalytic converter rapidly. Catalytic converters must be hot to work, so getting them hot quickly is important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_air_injection
EDIT: OP drove an older truck. In earlier days, the extra air injection into the exhaust was to provide some air for the secondary exhaust gasses to fully burn. It had to be done early in the exhaust where the exhaust gases are hot.
>That is how car manufacturers worked around the old tail pipe emission laws. They added air pumps plumbed to the exhaust manifold(s) to increase the exhaust mass diluting the stream enough to pass emissions tests. Problem solved!
I'm sure that people of a certain bent will eat your comment up but that's just not true.
Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.
Emissions have been measured by mass rather than concentration since 1972. So like yeah it "could've been done" but standards before that were light enough that they could just screw with other things that add $0 to the BOM to clean it up enough to pass.
> Air pumps were for catalyst efficiency. The old ones needed extra oxygen molecules floating around for the big stuff (hydrocarbons) to oxidize with until the catalyst was up to operating temp and working at peak-ish efficiency.
My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter, only a muffler. It featured not one, but two air pumps, each feeding a set of pipes that led to metal tubes which entered the exhaust manifold opposite each exhaust port. Another odd thing about that truck was it had a choke lever, something I thought was long gone by 1988, and was a pain to start in the winter.
Perhaps other vehicles had a cat but this truck certainly did not.
> My experience comes from driving and working on a 1988 GMC 6000 truck with an anemic 350 small block with a Muncie SM465 behind it. There was no catalytic converter,
Catalytic converters were required on most vehicles starting in 1975 in the US and the requirement was expanded to cover all vehicles in the early 80s.
Your truck was modified by someone.
I don't think that's right. I believe this is the relevant EPA regulation: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2004-title40-vol17/p.... This mentions emission limits but does not require a catalytic converter for medium duty (14,000lb-26,000lb GVWR) trucks like the GMC 6000.
> This mentions emission limits but does not require a catalytic converter
IIRC, technically if the vehicle meets emissions limits without a catalytic converter then it doesn't need one.
The emission limits are set such that a catalytic converter is required to meet them. They don't have to say "catalytic converter required" but the targets are chosen so that a catalytic converter can reasonably achieve them.
If the laws simply said "catalytic converter required" then manufacturers could put a tiny little square of catalyst in the exhaust and call it a day. Formula 1 isn't the only place where rules have to be written explicitly to avoid clever workarounds.
Medium duties are weird beasts indeed.
Well, FWIW the air pumps still can -help- with unburnt fuel...
It's not as good as a Cat for emissions but it's better than nothing, so they actually started being used before Cats; they just are used different now.
In 1988 the factory put a cat in the exhaust. It also would have had fuel injection and a computer, and thus no choke. In short this truck was very much not stock (or possibly you are not in the US?) and so it is interesting but not helpful for the discussion.
350ish (or less) + 4spd trucks kinda fell out of favor over the course of the 70s for bigger engines and 5spds (usually with a 2spd rear end but I digress). I'm sure you could still get one, but who would when you could get something better on the lot for the same money.
Sounds like someone swapped a 70s-80s engine from a lighter application in.
I don't think that truck would've had manual choke from the factory. Lots of stuff could've happened over the years.
The amount of air your engine breathes is monumental compared to what the smog pump moves. The math of dilution just doesn't work. What does work is pissing a light stream of oxygen (remember, not much of that coming out of the engine, especially on warm up while it runs rich) to help the catalyst burn those hydrocarbons off of itself a wee bit faster.
I'm not sure if an 80s gas MDT would've had cats from the factory.
The 6000 was a commercial truck. It appears to have had a carburetor for most if not all of the 1980s.
Is that what a "smog pump" is (was)? LOL. I had heard the term but never knew what it was.
Along the same lines then as other emissions equipment that reduced fuel economy but achieved the ppm criteria in the exhaust. Yes, let's address pollution by burning more fuel.
Yes, and it has absolutely nothing to do with increasing air volume. The idea is to lower hydrocarbon emissions by burning them off in the exhaust manifold.
Presumably. But they are also limited on the volume of wastewater they are allowed to discharge, so it probably wouldn't be an ideal "solution".
Those levels are low enough that they might be coming from the water going into the plant.
Arsenic and hexavalent chromium are both naturally occurring substances in low quantities. You can pull uncontaminated water out of the ground in remote locations and detect low levels of arsenic and hexavalent chromium.
That hexavalent chromium number would be just barely about California's strict limit for drinking water, but it's 1/10th of the EPA's limit.
Out of curiosity, I checked the water records re: arsenic.
Test wells for the region in question have had arsenic levels several times that being discussed here for years. In fact, the water district started failing Federal arsenic standards last summer[0] and has received three formal violation notices.
They were nearly in violation a year before the lithium plant even opened. At least in terms of arsenic, the levels coming out of the plant are significantly lower than background.
[0] https://www.kristv.com/running-dry/ncwcid-3-gets-third-arsen...
Reading between the lines here the local .gov knows this and didn't mention it specifically or at least they weren't quoted as such.
The journalist got their hands on the report saw "arsenic" and just copypasta'd without understanding the context and now everyone is screeching about something that's less than the local baseline.
My guess is the hexavalent chromium is leeched from plated metals in processing equipment. Very common plating substance and was more common before restrictions were put in place.
> It is the substance the Erin Brockovich case was built around.
more about PG&E contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...
Sure; if you run a "hazardous substance processing" company, you just take up an enormous amount of clean water and enrich it with the maximum amounts of arsenic, chromium, etc, and charge your clients a nice penny.
What about:
Strontium at 1.17 mg/L
That seems like a misprint? Strontium is a fission byproduct. And that seems like a high amount if that's milligrams per liter.
It is a normal metal. For example, the intense red color in fireworks is commonly strontium nitrate.
I think it is used in small quantities for industrial applications like welding, which seems a more likely source here.
Not really; strontium is quite common in the crust. In the oceans it occurs in the single-digit mg/L. This isn't a meaningful datapoint.
The entire article doesn't show particularly concerning findings and the protests read more like nimbyism than environmental concern. Industrial processes have some non-zero level of impact and complaining when someone runs one that's not very polluting at all is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or it's just an attempt to outsource all the pollution to china, which is fine for many things (I'd rather they were polluted than us) but not critical minerals.
Yes just searched it and found:
While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is radioactive and is one of the most dangerous components of nuclear fallout, as strontium is absorbed by the body in a similar manner to calcium. Natural stable strontium is not hazardous to health at low levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium
I guess I didn't realize that strontium had a stable naturally-occuring isotope.
There are only two elements below the actinides that have no stable isotopes (technetium and promethium).
I include bismuth as stable even though technically it is radioactive with an extraordinarily long half life.
Every element up to and including bismuth, excluding technetium and promethium, have stable primordial isotopes (i.e., have been on Earth since it was made), and in addition, thorium, uranium, and maybe plutonium (Pu-244 is on the very edge, so it's not clear if any primordial nuclei of it remain) also have primordial isotopes. Every element with bismuth or higher atomic number has no stable isotopes, and the elements from astatine through neptunium naturally occur largely via decay sequences of uranium or natural nuclear reactions in uranium ore.
Nuclear fission reactions tend to result in the daughter nuclei being considerably smaller than the mother nucleus--like a 70/30 or 60/40 split, which means that the fission products of uranium are firmly in the range of elements that have stable isotopes. (Although due to larger elements being richer in neutrons, most fission products have too many neutrons, hence undergo radioactive decay themselves).
Cesium too. Makes all sorts of cool fireworks happen.
yaaaay hexavalent chromium and arsenic, the classics. Are they melting or plating something? Or is it just ores being ores?
Based on other comments, the levels are well below drinking water in the area - and probably within safe drinking water limits.
But does the amount per liter matter? The quantity matters too right? How much of these substances are being released in total? And since it’s into a drainage ditch that goes past what looks like farmland, does the higher local concentration cause more problems for the population in the area?
I think it does. Crops pull up a set amount of water. If it's concentrated, then they'll pull up a lot of heavy metals. If it's at very low levels, then they won't.
nah, there is no reason they should be discharging any hexavalent chromium, we have better, less insanely toxic ways of chroming things. trivalent chromium is much less toxic, hexavalent chromium should be banned world-wide.
what's more, i'm not finding a reason that tesla would need hexavalent chromium in battery production, which leads me to speculate that this is waste from one of their other car factories where they presumably have a hexavalent chrome line (it's a cheaper and more robust process than trivalent chrome) and they are mixing/discharging on purpose at the limit at this plant.
I used to work in a factory that did chrome plating (I didn't work in that area, but since it was the same building), as part of my mandatory training before I was allowed to step foot in the building I had to learn there was a sewage plant just for the output of that line and if I had to dispose of waste water for any reasons I had to make sure I got it into the right system. Our sewage system couldn't treat toilet water, the city system can't treat chrome waste. (my waste disposal was limited to toilet and washing my hands - as you would expect from an engineer, but I still had to know about the system just in case)
This refinery is situated miles away from any other Tesla factories.
They couldn't sell those cars in europe.
“Just barely above the California drinking water standard” is a really long way to say “past the limit”
Yes, past the limit of drinking water, which is something different.
please stop please stop and educate yourself. I dislike that this is the top message in a forum where we’re supposed to dig deeper.
The US regulatory standards are terrible. https://www.loudounwater.org/information-hexavalent-chromium...
The actual limits are orders of magnitude lower. Educate yourself.
So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?
How about when it enters the food chain and starts to accumulate? Will the elements say that "we're under legal limits, and accumulate slowly, so we will act nice and don't poison the organism we're in?"
Love that way of thinking.
Emissions regulations are a balancing act. Industrial processes are inherently filthy. If you want copper, gold, lithium, or anything else that makes up the modern world, somewhere on earth was dirtied for that to be possible, and some of the pollution will get into the surroundings because zero emissions simply isn't possible. So we set certain levels of "acceptable emissions" as a balancing act.
I also agree that emissions should be tighter, but the location question is more interesting, because we can also choose where emissions happen.
For example, we might choose them to happen near cities/factories so the products are close to where they're used. We've mostly stopped doing that since the industrial revolution for pretty good reasons though. We could place them in the pristine landscapes not otherwise used by humans, like national parks. That's unpopular for hopefully obvious reasons. We could place them in sparsely inhabited deserts abroad, as Europeans did [0], before we collectively decided colonialism was a bad thing.
And lastly, we could place them in figurative deserts away from conservation land and people like monoculture farmland, but then we get to your question.
So, what's left? What are you suggesting as a better alternative?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bou_Craa
> we're under legal limits
That's the definition of law. As long as it is legal it won't be charged.
What if the law is formulated to be convenient for corporations and not to protect the public and/or the environment?
Then we should work together as a society to fix the law and make sure it's applied evenly. Hard to do, but necessary.
Is there an alternative?
Then we should protest the law.
In some vague abstract sense? Wouldn't protesting specific instances where bad laws are letting companies get away with environmentally damaging practices be more effective? As and when there's a pattern of events that is best addressed by adjusting the law, politicians and voters can figure that out for themselves.
> So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?
> Love that way of thinking.
I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise. So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).
It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?
It kind of falls apart when large companies can lobby and bribe the people in charge of writing and enacting laws to make exception and write around their problem areas. Or can just make strategic donations to ease any risks of enforcement. Or collude to make sure the fine for whatever infraction is well below the profit margin of doing said infraction.
I don't care to argue semantics, just pointing out your reply was as hollow as your criticism to the person saying legal doesn't mean safe. It's a pretty reasonable thing to draw attention to methinks...
The issue lies in how the laws are decided and by whom.
>I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise.
It might be news to you, but the laws don't dictate what's fine, and what isn't.
Aside from things like slavery being legal and homosexuality being illegal in the past, I'll note that it's perfectly legal for you to drink bleach, but it wouldn't really be fine for you to do that.
(I hope we can agree that advising people to do something "fine" isn't rude, but telling someone to go drink bleach would be) .
> So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).
So, to boot, "it's fine as long as it's legal" doesn't apply to those things, youthinks.
Also, "we" is a peculiar pronoun that needs a lot of expansion, considering that the "we" negatively affected by "not fine" things isn't the same "we" that benefits from them, and it's the latter "we" that has direct influence on legislation.
Some interesting terms to read up on include "negative externality" and "corruption" (assuming youreads).
>It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?
If we turn to historical examples, the French Revolution certainly provides an example for alternative ways to resolve disparities between what's legal and what's fine.
There are plenty of others, but that question wasn't asked in good faith, methinks, and so doesn't deserve a more in-depth answer.
It's also a complete fiction in a world dominated by commercial interests, entrenched lobby groups, corrupt politicians and regulatory capture.
Is there an alternative?
We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked. There are some areas where it could obviously be better, but also some areas where regulation is too strict (blocking housing, renewables, transit) and the system is evolving to address those.
I think the loss of local media has made it harder for misdeeds to come to light, but I don't want to throw up my hands and cede everything to commercial interests et al.
I think a look at other countries would do well. There are many with much tighter regulations (e.g. EU countries, Singapore, Japan) and they seem to have good results with that.
> We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked.
I think prevention of pollution is one area where very tight regulation is absolutely needed, and this seems to be an argument for that.
Of course regulation can be weaponized and used as a tool to serve entrenched interests as well - but this is then more a problem with the overall political system. Also, I think a proof that this is the case is necessary instead of assuming it by default.
Dunno, maybe strive to release no pollutants at all? Then we wouldn't need all the pesky big government overreach.
Taking this as a good faith engineering argument. What does that mean? What do you constitute a pollutant and how much is zero?
I guess as a contrived example your breath releases 40k PPM Co2. Have you tried aiming for no pollution?
The reality is we make things which involve pollutants, which we create laws to govern the safe disposal of. Engineers optimise for these constraints the same way you do. You wouldn’t have one k8s pod per request to ‘strive to keep the response times as low as possible’.
In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water used in bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication has a lot more than 1 atom of arsenic per glass. In the far future humanity might obtain the technology to create water with literally no pollutants in it but that age has yet to arrive.
How would you do that, assuming you wanted to keep up the material standard of living that the people you care about are used to?
Um, I'm pretty sure we can all get behind corps striving for the ideal. Fines align incentives.
Are you actually suggesting that we rely on the good will of a for profit corp? When has that ever worked?
To exist is to pollute.
This seems to be the credo of too much of the tech industry lately.
But you can pollute sustainably. e.g.: Composting, biodegradable materials, etc.
or unsustainably: e.g.: PFAS. For bonus points you can do internal research and hide the reports detailing the effects accurately.
Arsenic and lead occur naturally through the food chain. If the levels of discharge are not significantly above the normal levels (and they aren't) then it's harmless.
They are still not harmless. They are normal. However if they are at all above natural (that is your input levels) you should treat and remove them. It is not unusual for the output of a sewage treatment plant to be cleaner water than what goes into your drinking water system.
From a quick lookaround, it looks like a lot of water sources in the area have similar natural levels of arsenic. I could not find chromium content information, and it's plausible that it can be leached from stainless steel.
These are pretty much the only two concerning contaminants. Everything else in the report is just fear-mongering, like the BS about manganese.
its all-natural
What a ridiculous comment for something that is obviously extremely +EV for the environment.
I mean... if it's got a similar amount of toxin X to drinking water... then it's probably not making things much worse.
There is lead in dirt!
The upper limit does not mean that water actually has that amount in it regularly.
Wonderful to see so many people here embracing skepticism when it comes to government institutions, bureaucrats, and their "experts".
> But some of the figures from the lab report don't seem that terrible
> just above the lab’s reporting limit of 0.01 mg/L.
> just barely above the California drinking water standard
I ... just can't even say anything to this.
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 a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.
> What [the wastewater discharge permit] 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 existed.
I find it kinda worrying that so much of the legal weight of this case doesn't seem to be about the untreated wastewater discharge at all but only about the detail that they used a county-owned ditch to do so.
So if Tesla had dug their own ditch or built the pipe all the way to Petronila Creek, the discharge would have been no problem?
(Well, that's not completely true as the additional pollutants aren't covered by the permit either - but without the ditch issue, probably no one would have commissioned an analysis of the water?)
Can a big and rich company be fined for some minor technicality? Maybe! If the cost of the attempt is lower than the amount of the possible fine, why not try and find out? This may sound cynical, but this also one of the driving forces that often keep big companies from breaking rules.
DOGE explicitly made gutting the EPA a top priority, which is probably why drainage workers are making these discoveries and not inspectors. Pretty much any company linked to Musk should be under increased scrutiny now. The trouble is, anyone who performs that scrutiny is likely to face intimidation and "lawfare".
Americans should carefully watch what happens to these workers and their county in the coming months. Beyond that, they should ask who is still keeping an eye on polluters in 2026.
> Quality, the state environmental regulator known as TCEQ, had quietly issued Tesla a wastewater discharge permit on January 15, 2025.
Are permits issued loudly usually?
i think they just meant "quietly" as in not notifying the Nueces County drainage department that a permit was granted in their area.
That must be it. I can see if they are normally published or announced publicly somewhere, then it makes sense but if it's not done for other permits then it's sounds like they are implying nefariousness.
my knowledge is from long ago, but, it would be expected for the state to communicate to the counties/cities about infrastructure permits such as this one. the counties/cities need to ensure their infrastructure planning accounts for everything in the area, regardless of the original permitting authority.
not sure if that is the standard in texas or not.
It was probably unceremoniously posted on a website somewhere. Letter of the law satisfied.
You've put in my head the picture of a jester announcing "hear! Hear! In which thereby the king allowth the forgerer so known as Tesla Mechanical Horses to discharge..."
Yes, there's usually a chorus of trumpets, followed by fireworks.
The state of journalism in 2026
I'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 below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present. Strontium at 1.17 mg/L. Mazloum’s technical report on the findings noted that long-term exposure can affect bone density and kidney function in humans and wildlife. Lithium and vanadium at concentrations Lazarte’s letter described as abnormally high relative to rainwater or normal groundwater. Elevated levels of manganese, iron, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and potassium consistent with industrial discharge. Manganese, a battery process tracer, can have neurological effects at chronic doses. Excess phosphorus can cause algae blooms that strip oxygen from waterways. Ammonia in the form of nitrogen at 1.68 mg/L, amplifying the algae bloom risk.
None of these are violating the permit.
Ultimately, I view this as a values question: Is it permissible to manufacture in the US or not?
> 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 existed. Its workers found out the way drainage district workers in any small Texas county find out about things: by walking the ditch and seeing something new.
As long as the factories are on the wrong side of the tracks and not in Beverly Hills absolutely!
A state investigator visited on February 12, sampled the water flowing from Tesla’s outfall pipe, ran the standard panel of conventional pollutants: dissolved solids, chlorides, sulfates, oil and grease, temperature, dissolved oxygen. Everything in that panel came back inside the bounds of Tesla’s permit. TCEQ approved its investigation report on March 20, finding no permit violation.
The article then proceeds to explain how they did all kinds of non-standard tests and still found nothing above the federal drinking water standard nor in violation of the permit. Yes Tesla is still evil and responsible because supposedly some nearby town is having a drought and people are "running out of water."
Shit like this and we wonder why the US is dependent on China for all rare earths.
what a coincidence, all they want to do is report negatively on anything that Tesla touches, I've grown skeptical on all these sort of reports, most likely other refineries have similar or worse track records, but that doesn't fit the narrative right?
its basically Musk derangement syndrome .. anything Tesla/musk touches instantly gets turned into some giant scandal while similar or worse stuff from other companies gets ignored because it doesnt fit the narrative ..
PS: 99% of these keyboard warriors couldnt create 0.1% of what Musk and his companies have done for EVs,space, manufacturing, internet access .AI etc
The article just... ends? "None of those facts are in dispute. What they mean is."
it ends. its just ambiguous writing.
"None of those facts are in dipsute. [However,] what [the facts] mean is [under dispute]."
Ah, I misread it.
The sniper got em just in time.
Maximum tokens reached
apparently, despite my thoughts going into this:
>Notably, no party has alleged that Tesla is in violation of any law. TCEQ [(Texas Commission on Environmental Quality)] has not found one. Tesla is operating under a permit the state agency issued. The dispute, instead, is about what the permit was supposed to cover, and what got left out of it.
> Neither hexavalent chromium nor arsenic appears in Tesla’s TCEQ discharge permit as an allowable pollutant. Neither was tested for during TCEQ’s February investigation.
And also
> What [the permit] 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 existed. Its workers found out the way drainage district workers in any small Texas county find out about things: by walking the ditch and seeing something new.
As we all know, laws as written are perfect and just, especially in Texas, especially in relation to the environment. They should stop looking into it at all, really.
that is a weird extrapolation from my comment. did you mean to reply to someone else?
i made no comment on whether the laws, as written, are appropriate or not.
This is the report from testing the water:
> 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 below the federal drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L, but present.
> Strontium at 1.17 mg/L. Mazloum’s technical report on the findings noted that long-term exposure can affect bone density and kidney function in humans and wildlife.
> Lithium and vanadium at concentrations Lazarte’s letter described as abnormally high relative to rainwater or normal groundwater.
> Elevated levels of manganese, iron, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and potassium consistent with industrial discharge. Manganese, a battery process tracer, can have neurological effects at chronic doses. Excess phosphorus can cause algae blooms that strip oxygen from waterways.
> Ammonia in the form of nitrogen at 1.68 mg/L, amplifying the algae bloom risk.
Strip away the sensationalism, and it just doesn't seem like much? None of these levels seem to be high enough to impair health. The 1.68ppm of ammonia would likely contribute to algae growth, but not majorly, especially if properly diluted. Home aquariums regularly run between 0 and 0.25ppm of NH3 without major issues, so as long as this is diluted 6x it shouldn't impact things.
I hate elon as much as the next guy, and they should have disposed of the water properly, but it doesn't seem to be anything like them running their unpermitted power plants in Memphis.
If I am reading this correctly, the Erin Brockovich hexavalent chromium was detected in Hinkley at levels of 1.2 to 20 ppb (ug/L). Contrasted here with 10.4 ppb (ug/L). Sounds notable to me if they are regularly flooding the zone with this.
Looking at this: https://www.standardmethods.org/doi/10.2105/SMWW.2882.053:
> in streams it averages about 1 μg/L, and in groundwaters it is generally 100 μg/L
Seems like it's no more polluted than normal water. Somewhere in between groundwater and streams.
I dug up the actual results instead of an article about and article about an article talking about the lab results, they're here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28055380-j2673-1-uds...
That earlier link is to the method they used for detection.
And if it is just sitting there, it is concentrating
> I hate elon as much as the next guy
I honor your refusal to presume guilt and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
It's mostly just excessive amounts of snark, gets exhausting, wouldn't recommend.
Lithium production produce lots of toxic material. That's why I was happy the chinese were doing it for a penny. Of course driving carbon neutral but releasing tons of poison in the nature is a questionnable equation.
Isn't China great? First we make them produce all our stuff, then we bash them for polluting slightly more than us westerners, who produces nothing.
We win political points for globalism, we win political points for lower cost goods, then we win political points by virtue signaling about the environment! So convenient.
Obviously China should reap all the advantages of producing everything while bearing none of the responsibility, how could poor China be ever accountable for anything. Clearly the United States government should get involved to take care of the pollution caused by the Chinese industry, all out American taxpayer's pockets preferably.
It is even better: we grew cheaply by polluting freely, even doing absurd things like adding lead to gasoline knowing that lead is toxic. When we got rich, we leveraged that wealth to reduce some pollution, sending the worse industries to the developing countries.
Not saying that it was intentional, but we should not point fingers.
> That's why I was happy the chinese were doing it for a penny.
This is what all those pennies earned them: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
I was thinking about exactly that story when I read about this. It's all fine until it happens in your own backyard.
> This is a racist sentiment. Shame on you.
He’s talking about outsourcing/pollution economics, not rhat Chinese people are inferior .. not every inelegant sentence needs to be turned into a civil rights case .. [insert clown emoji here]
Anyone else remembering Neal Stephenson's "Zodiac"?
First thing I thought of, except in this story the outfall seems to have been discovered through the ordinary diligence of government, rather than by a plucky eco-buccaneer.
To be honest I'm more worried about the data centres spaceX is powering through gas turbines just sitting in a parking lot.
both
I wonder how many gallons of polluted wastewater are discharged per day by overseas refineries. Does anyone know where Tesla stacks up in the global list of lithium refiners?
There's a lot of missing information here. I'm no fan of Tesla and I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing something inappropriate but there's a lot of unanswered questions here.
Why wasn't the sample taken at the outfall? That seems like such an obvious thing to do that there must be a reason it wasn't done. Is the outflow accessible?
What other facilities exist in the area? This is described as a ditch, not a creek or river, which implies to me that it is artificial. Is this an industrial area with other contamination?
> 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.
I'm not sure I am parsing this correctly. To the best of my understanding this means it is just above the noise floor? What was the exposure in the Erin Brockovitch case?
Trying to boost numbers by using units people can't picture or comprehend is not very useful.
231000 gallons is 1000 cubic meters, ie a 10 metre cube.
Perhaps the number of olympic size swimming pools of a standardized depth may be more useful. Perhaps the number of 3m deep Olympic sized swimming pools or gas/oil storage tanks.
Now I think US knows what it meant like building things in the nation, they should consume product and their waste both, enough that east world had all this since last 140 years.
Although I hate Tesla, think the greater issue is that since we're probably going to have to move a lot of material sourcing and industrial plant capacity back to the United States in the coming decades...
The US is probably going to need to make another pass at how we're going to do that without creating polluted wastelands and super fund sites.
> Ammonia in the form of nitrogen at 1.68 mg/L, amplifying the algae bloom risk.
:facepalm:
If you're fear-mongering, then at least take care to fear-monger correctly. From the numbers they report, it seems like Tesla is doing a good job with wastewater treatment.
Edit: clarification for people who are not chemists, it should be the other way around: "Nitrogen in the form of ammonia".
My eyes glaze over any time an article uses the term "heavy metals" unironically.
This could be bad or it could not, but I simply can't take anything seriously that uses ambiguous terms so linked to woo.
The term is used by the EPA and has legal definitions and weight. But I'm glad you somehow found a way to put yourself above it all
God this is classic journalistic lying with true facts. I read all the way up to the start of Tesla's response and couldn't tell what they had supposedly done wrong. If there's an accusation in there, it's buried in worthless innuendo and bluster. Luis Reyes doesn't seem to understand the problems involved in comparing the value of a continuous quantity to zero - or more likely, he's trying to mislead his readers. Of course any industrial waste will contain some contaminants in higher concentrations than rainwater!! That doesn't mean there's anything wrong.
There is a reason China does so well refining metals like lithium and rare earths: it's difficult, resource intensive and polluting. They have about a 80% global share in lithium processing.
That doesn't matter under a communist dictatorship, but in more civilized countries people don't want it in their backyard.
Do you want to be reliant on a communist dictatorship for multiple critical inputs to your economy?
There is very little that is communist left in China.
Texas is going to be the superfund cleanup state in 20 years that Silicon Valley was in the 1980s from all of the sinning in the 1960s.
And how long before this gets flagged off HN?
Being able to afford a US President has its perks.