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.
Sewerage discharge pipes are ideally built to take post processed human waste residues far enough out to sea to not be trapped in small bays but to disperse and diffuse through a greater volume of water.
The ideal here might be (I haven't dug into site specific details here) to take any industrial runoff far out to a large volume of water so that it can disperse and not be concentrated in a manner that creates a time bomb for human food / water inputs.
If that is the intent, then unsealed ditches crossing watersheds is a bad idea compared to sealed pipes with deep water discharge.
Strict liability is only permitted for minor violations, like a citation or fine. If you make it up to misdemeanor speeding, it's no longer reasonable to claim you weren't aware you were speeding.
It's tempting to dismiss them like that, but that doesn't fix anything.
The reality is much more complicated. The Democratic party is far from perfect (they kinda suck, in fact), and if they aren't attracting voters, "the other side is just stupid" is a useless, arrogant way to go.
Attracting voters with things like repeatedly promising to drastically cut consumer prices on most everything ‘from day 1’, repeatedly promising no new wars/stopping being ‘the world police’, quickly ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc?
Hey, I'm not saying Trump and the GOP are great. They disgust me. But they talk to people in a way they find engaging. Even when they lie, somehow. But regardless, I'm not sure how what you said has anything to do with what I wrote.
The Democratic party often sounds like a bunch of elitists, and that turns off many voters, even those who might consider themselves liberal or progressive. I'll likely vote for Democrats in every election until I die, but I don't think of myself as a Democrat, and haven't registered as one in decades (fortunately the Democratic party has open primaries in California, so I don't have to declare a party).
Oh I absolutely agree. I'm not trying to "both-sides" this. I'm just saying that calling conservatives stupid/idiots isn't productive and isn't going to solve anything.
The voters are the source of the problem and we need to focus on them instead of Trump because once he is gone they'll just elect another piece of shit.
A large portion of the population doesn't vote but if they understand the real danger of Trump supporters maybe that will motivate them
Plurality, not majority. (Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates).
Which is functionally a vote for the status quo. Someone who can't bother to vote isn't going to bother e.g. protesting or otherwise affirming their rights.
> Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates
Sounds like both candidates were terrible enough that quite a few didn't bother?
Many taxpayers are non-citizens or convicted felons and cannot vote. Turnout of citizens who were eligible to vote last election was 65%. Of those, 49.8% voted for Trump. Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.
9 out of 10 experts agree. It's that last one. That one person is just enough for people to latch on. Then, of the 9, 6 of them get tired of yelling at clouds and quit. The 6 get replaced with those that believe the one so that there's not 7. That goes on for long enough, you get people in charge that do away with vaccinations and measles has a come back.
That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain.
Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy.
But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen.
The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
> That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
> What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine.
My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like.
Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter
- love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks,
Those "well-read antivaxxers" are the same as e.g. people with a fear of flying: they spend too much time looking at extremely rare catastrophic outcomes (dying or being seriously injured because of a plane crash or a vaccine side effect) and then think that it will surely happen to them or their children. The only difference is just that when someone who's afraid of flying doesn't take a plane, it only affects very few people (if that), whereas lowering herd immunity affects us all.
The difference between yesteryear, when everyone ignored the nutter ranting about lizardmen in the town square, and today is that the nutters can now find company and reinforcement for their beliefs thanks to the Internet. And ultimately it leads to people like Elon Musk getting high on their own supply of toxic disinformation and causing the death of thousands of people by shutting down USAID because they believe some far-right nutter on X more than what "the establishment" has been saying for decades...
Flying is safe, but I think it is not because some rules/regulations or due to "science".
A plane falling out of sky is a pretty big event and cannot be suppressed or silenced. It affects a large number of people at once. If planes starts to fall out of sky often, then the commercial aviation will come to a halt in a month. Given this eventuality, if you want to make money by flying people, it in imperative that there is no other way than to * do everything possible to make sure* planes don't fall from the sky.
If planes could fall out of sky without everyone knowing about it (For example, imagine that when a plane crashes, instead of killing the passengers right away, they only get hit after a month or so, and it is hard to link the deaths with the flight they took a month before), and affecting their business, then I bet that flying will no longer be very safe as companies will start cutting expenses with maintenance etc and paying off regulators/inspectors..
A stock market crash is also a pretty big event that cannot be suppressed or silenced, but they still happen regularly. The sad truth is that people (and companies) are greedy and will gladly cut corners with safety if it means making more money. So regulations (and enforcement of those regulations) are needed to prevent a race to the bottom that will eventually lead to a crash. Coming back to aviation, you only have to look at countries like Nepal (https://kathmandupost.com/money/2025/11/10/nepali-sky-remain...) to see what happens when there are no regulations, or regulations are not enforced.
Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible.
(I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there)
Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because:
1) Many vaccine clinical trials only monitor outcomes for a few days to a couple weeks.
2) Most vaccine clinical trials have no placebo control. If they have do have a control group in most cases the control group gets a different vaccine.
3) Most kids in vaccine clinical trials are also getting 10-30 other vaccine injections during their first two years of life during the period that they're being monitored for the one vaccine in their trial. So the only way this could even produce a signal would be if the one vaccine under trial was the only one that caused harm and all other vaccines did not.
I am not saying that vaccines do cause chronic disease in 1% of kids - just that it seems to me we don't have a good way to know.
Furthermore, even if it was proved that vaccines caused harm, vaccine manufacturers are not liable for harms from vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule.
Your claims about vaccine trials are not true. I’m not an expert and don’t have time to go and find citations to argue each of your points one by one, but I’ve read enough studies to know that vaccine trials aren’t nearly as sloppy / poorly designed as you believe.
For example, even when speed was extremely important and everyone was trying to get Covid vaccines out as fast as possible a few years ago, they still ran large randomised placebo-controlled trials (in places with high infection rates so they could get good comparison data relatively quickly).
So please stop spreading false claims about this stuff / spend time actually learning the facts. Claims like these do real harm by undermining trust in vaccines and helping fuel avoidable outbreaks of diseases like measles.
I'd be much more inclined to believe they were holding genuine, consistent opinions of that if they applied the same concern to the other end: unstudied long-term problems from measles infections. But they don't. It's the same for COVID/vaccines. Endless concern over spike protein or long-term risk in the vaccine, but happy to get the spike protein or long-term risk from the viral infection.
But that’s “natural.” This is the underlying idea, that nature absent human influence is inherently more pure and good.
I used to associate antivax with the loony left and with primitivism, which is the idea that if we abandon technology and civilization we will get to LARP as the Na’vi in Avatar. Then this stuff jumped across the horseshoe gap to the far right.
Or… maybe the new age and certain types of greens always were far right. If you dig into the origins of the new age you run into figures like William Dudley Pelley and Savitri Devi.
Disease, disability, pain, and death are also natural.
That's a good point. I would like to see long term problems from measles infection studied and better understood, but I also understand how they really can't be studied in the US where measles is extremely rare and I wouldn't advocate bringing it back to find out.
It is similar with covid but I wouldn't say it's quite the same. The measles vaccine seems very effective at preventing infection, while the covid vaccine is not. It might reduce harm from the infection, and whether this reduction in harm outweighs potential harm from the vaccine is not well understood. It may have done so early on when covid itself was more dangerous, and it might not with current strains of covid. I would similarly like to see long term studies comparing two similar populations where one took the vaccine and the other didn't. It's complex.
With covid, in the beginning there simply wasn't time to know if the vaccine was safe. And now that we've had some time, it turns out that longer term placebo controlled studies just were never done, so we still don't know. Once it became clear that the vaccine was very ineffective at preventing infection the choice became a lot easier - get the virus, or get the virus and the vaccine, which are categorically different things.
I'm not happy to get either of them, but I'd rather the one than both. The virus itself appears to have been modified and was certainly novel to humans. The vaccines are novel and hard-to-understand in many many more ways than.
There is also a point to be made about the body being a complex system and introducing novelty to a complex system can have consequences that are unpredictable and hard to understand. Still worth studying though.
One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc.
Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
In the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, they don't.
But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races.
The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the time.
Today Wakefield is on the anti-vax circuit giving talks and continuing to lie.
Measles is a Solved Problem. Polio is a Solved Problem.
But the toons are running the Fed now, canceling science and telling lies. So we'll have to wait until 2028 to get a final death count, assuming anyone is still tracking it.
Let's not pretend that nothing was being censored during COVID or that no one remembers it. The backlash is the primary reason we ended up with RFK.
There are also multiple ways to solve problems. If the Wakefield theory is that vaccines using mercury as a preservative can cause autism then you don't even need to challenge it to make it irrelevant. It has memetic power because having mercury in medicine seems intuitively bad and conjures images of 19th century quacks. So all you have to do is use a different preservative. Then you have a one-line killshot any time anyone brings it up -- there's no mercury anymore -- and you don't have to try to explain statistical sample sizes to people who failed high school math.
The reason we ended with RFK is because of the massive number of lies Trump and his allies told compared to the Democrats, the majority of people are not sufficiently intelligent to overcome this, and the economy.
Don't forget how violence is considered wrong no matter what. It's created a situation where the rich are protected by their money and exaggerated value of human life pushed by the rest of the population
AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate (lower is better) measures how often the model answers incorrectly when it should have refused or admitted to not knowing the answer. It is defined as the proportion of incorrect answers out of all non-correct responses, i.e. incorrect / (incorrect + partial answers + not attempted).
Grok 4.2 which was just released in the API just benched the best at this benchmark.
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?
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