On-topic: More BS in the Granola State

Pardon me, but what threshold level are they using to get high enough to shut down a whole water supply? Kosdon bathes in the stuff and he is no wackier than when he started.

Jerry

That's just funny!

Ted Novak TRA#5512

Wait until he finds out that the water supply has been contaminated with highly corrosive dihydrogen monoxide, the major component of acid rain.

Ad Astra! Bill Sullivan

A large part of this kind of problem is that we have gotten so good at instrumentation and detection that you can see this sort of stuff at the part-per-billion and part-per-trillion level if you know what you are looking for. Just to put this into perspective, one person at an Ohio State football game is about 10 parts-per-million. Six to seven people in an elevator is about one part-per-billion of the earth's entire human population. 0.006 of a person (about a pound) is about a part per trillion. There was plenty of other stuff in that water at this level too, most of it unidentified. I've seen GC/MS data for jet fuel where they could only identify about 40% of the constituents - it looks like a forest. But if there was a chlorine or phosphorus compound in there you could spot it at *very* low levels with the right detector. Look at these guy's detection limits at the bottom of the page - some are down to parts per quadrillion:

There is actually *less* "active" ingredient than this in some homeopathic remedies (the supposedly "higher strength" ones), which makes the contaminants much more abundant than the "active" ingredient.

Brad Hitch

Pardon me, but what threshold level are they using to get high enough to shut down a whole water supply?>>

Not only that, but what constitutes a "user" of AP? Would that include end-users such as hobbyists, or is it limited to only large-scale industrial users? Knowing the way things work in the PRK, I doubt they bothered to make any distinction in the law.

__________________________________________________ From the EPA:

How Can Perchlorate Affect Human Health? Perchlorate interferes with iodide uptake into the thyroid gland. Because iodide is an essential component of thyroid hormones, perchlorate disrupts how the thyroid functions. In adults, the thyroid helps to regulate metabolism. In children, the thyroid plays a major role in proper development in addition to metabolism. Impairment of thyroid function in expectant mothers may impact the fetus and newborn and result in effects including changes in behavior, delayed development and decreased learning capability. Changes in thyroid hormone levels may also result in thyroid gland tumors. EPA?s draft analysis of perchlorate toxicity is that perchlorate?s disruption of iodide uptake is the key event leading to changes in development or tumor formation. __________________________________________________

If people would just quit bitching about dying from cancer, there wouldn't be any perchlorate problem.

Zooty

I'd bet that half the legislature in the PRK (or for that matter, DC) would actually fall for this!

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

Given that is the precise logic congress uses *most of the time* I would not rule it out.

They are already looking for phantoms with the "perchlorate levels" found in water now. They are infatessimal and almost exclusively caused by GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS which are exempt from dumping laws and exaserbated by policies that discourage repurposing of AP batches.

Naturally a problem that is caused BY THE GOVERNMENT will be used as a lever to extract fines, fees from business and saddle them with additional regulatory burdons.

Where is the department of common sense so I can bring these obvious facts to their attention. The input stations at congress and AQMD are broken.

Jerry

Do they bother anywhere to report what levels are required to have an actual effect as opposed to being "barely detectible".

Some things like lead and mercury and other heavy metals are additive. But most other things are ot and dissipate after exposure has ended (when you return from your shi trip at the Colo River).

And finally ALL the reports I have seen refer specifically to "perchlorate" not "potassium perchlorate" or "ammonium perchlorate" or any other particular perchlorate. The chemical differences are HUGE.

Jerry

This is the stuff that *should* be banned....

Based on the proposed mechanism, this would be cumulative.

Jerry, ever take chemistry? This is covered in most high school classes:

Ammonium and potassium perchlorate are both listed as "soluble" in water. If it's the perchlorate ion that causes the problem, then no, there won't be a significant difference in the biological response.

There are times when the cation can make a difference. There's a cute trick with cyanide, for example. With one cation, it's insoluble in water unless the pH is fairly low. I think it was Isaac Asimov who based a murder mystery on this trick.

Me? I don't take lemon with my tea....

Zooty

You know how some people intellectually haze over in High School when they discover girls? Well, my advanced placement chemistry teacher ignited a DETONATOR in class. Same effect for me. It was the rocket track ever since.

Narrowcast.

Oh I fogged over with girls too but once narrowcast set in I had a built in prophylactic :)

And no I am very short on BIOLOGICAL impact of chemicals. Just wahat the MSDS says and that is mostly horribilizations.

Jerry

Agreed. MSDS are on the order of the "use safety glasses" labels on tools such as screwdrivers... like they think I'm going to unscrew myself in the eye or something?

-dave w

It's because these compounds dissociate into solvated ions in water - the potassium or whatever the perchlorate was originally bound to gets lost with all of the other positive ions dissolved in the water (like K+, Ca++, NH4+, etc.). You can detect the perchlorate ion ClO4- at

*very* low levels because of the chlorine, but the identity of the original compound is lost because the positive ion originally attached to the perchlorate looks just like one that was already present in the water. While the differences in properties of the concentrated, dried compound may be huge, when it is dissolved in water at low levels the difference between potassium perchorate and ammonium perchlorate would be about zero since the offender is the perchorate ion.

That has nothing to do with setting the regulatory limit at the correct level, of course. The benefits of a technological & industrial civilization don't come for free no matter how much people try to avoid the consequences. If pre-industrial society was so great why don't we see people moving to third-world countries to enjoy its benefits? (This is not the same as moving to Costa Rica to live at the top of the social order on your Social Security check). The real problem is that there isn't a good feedback loop in place that will quickly punish people who try to over-regulate with no cost/benefit analysis.

Brad Hitch

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." -- Voltaire

The Bush administration just released a paper showing that air quality regulations save 5x (in health care and other services) their cost to business.

I understand the Bushies are going to punish whoever did that report, although I doubt they'll try the "Your wife is a CIA agent" schtick again.

Zooty

I always thought the MSDS for sucrose was good for a perspective:

A bad one:

A better one: There is so much variability and CYA in MSDS's that its often difficult to assess the real hazard.

Brad Hitch

snipped-for-privacy@tda.com (Brad Hitch) wrote in news:d99c50fc.0310010953.781c9b3 @posting.google.com:

I don't know what to make of the oral rat LD50: 29730 mg/kg. Half of the rats fed 30 times their body weight of sucrose died. How do you feed anything 30 times its body weight of anything? Did the rats burst?

len.

I think you dropped about three decimal places...

29730 mg = 29 g = .029 kg

but that's still a pretty big fraction of the total body weight.

- Robert

Hmmm... I think the opposite may've happened Len..

corpulentia: cf. F. corpulence.]

I suspect that based on definition 2, they've may've expanded and then collapsed under their own mass... neutron star-like..

What a mess in the lab that day, I'll bet...

Haven't you ever heard of a "rat-hole"?

Tod "Mind the event horizon please!" Hilty