How a California county got PFAS out of its drinking water | Hacker News Reader

How a California county got PFAS out of its drinking water

npr.org

76 pointsadomasm344 comments

The cost of this remediation nationwide is going to be brutal.

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/

> By the EPA’s standards, Anaheim’s remaining wells are now considered contaminated. Lyster says the city will expand its PFAS treatment capacity to comply with the federal rule by 2029. All told, building PFAS filtration for all 19 of Anaheim’s wells is projected to cost $200 million.

> Anaheim and Yorba Linda are part of the Orange County Water District — a public agency that manages the region’s groundwater and which helped to design, fund and build the PFAS filtration plants. Across Orange County, more than 100 wells have exceeded the EPA’s new standards. Fixing the problem in the county is expected to cost $1.8 billion dollars over 30 years, according to OCWD.

> cost of this remediation nationwide is going to be brutal

"$1.8 billion dollars over 30 years" in a county of 3mm [1] is about $20 per person per year. Scaled nationally, that implies a cost of about $6bn a year, which sounds amply doable.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/california/ora...

Other resources seem to agree with me with regards to unaffordability at this scale. Maybe we’re just arguing the scale of “a few tens of billions here and there.”

> PFAS can be bought for $50 - $1,000 per pound (according to MPCA estimates), but costs between $2.7 million and $18 million per pound to remove and destroy from municipal wastewater, depending on facility size.

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/groundbreaking-...

> A new report by Milliman estimates that PFAS remediation costs for U.S. water districts could reach as high as $175 billion, helping companies and insurers quantify the potential exposure.

Report: https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/pfas-liability-estimate-...

https://riskandinsurance.com/costs-to-remediate-pfas-water-c...

A few tens of billions really isn't a big deal...

It's kind of funny that you are like an enthusonaut when it comes to businesses and other private entities doing things and then can't imagine that pretty much the only thing government needs to do whatever is the political will.

I can be optimistic about things that don’t matter, but pessimistic when it comes to basic human needs and the historical pattern of people being poisoned by companies without recourse or government not holding polluters accountable. Will it get cleaned up eventually? Maybe. Will it be expensive? Absolutely. Will people be harmed and die in the meantime from PFAS contaminated water. Also true.

The Inflation Reduction Act demonstrates your point about political will, but it still requires will, and once done, the policy and fiat takes time to have outcomes come out of the machine.

Nuance!

Pfas levels in the US are far below where they were in 2000. We are making solid progress.

I would not disagree we are making progress, but people will still be harmed and die from drinking water PFAS until remediated. Do we agree on that point?

> EPA Administrator Michael Regan last month made one of his agency's strongest statements to date about the danger of "forever chemicals." New restrictions on those pollutants in drinking water would "prevent thousands of deaths and prevent tens of thousands of serious PFAS-related illnesses," Regan said.

https://www.epa.gov/pfas/key-epa-actions-address-pfas

https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/tap-water-st...

https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP10393

I don't know what your intent with those links is? Are you arguing that my characterization is wrong? That nothing matters but 0?

Please note that I wrote my comment before you edited in text.

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/us-population....

Do we agree on that point?

So why are you balking at committing resources towards doing what is needed?

Back and forth and back again.

> pessimistic when it comes to basic human needs and the historical pattern of people being poisoned by companies without recourse or government bit holding polluters accountable

The damage and solution are both local. That reduces the minimum scale of action, which makes organising easier. It also makes benefits personal: you aren't paying $1.60 a month so someone across the world breathes easier or isn't flooded, you're paying so your family doesn't drink PFAS. And you get that benefit if your town or county agree they don't want to be poisoned; you don't need to worry about what Arizona or West Virginia are doing.

No, drinking water is only one source of PFAS poisoning. Other sources include food packaging, cosmetics, cookware, paints, cooking oils, and more.

Still local and locally controllable. Totally different coordination problem from e.g. emissions reduction.

$18 million per well. 16 million wells in the United States. So that’s $288 trillion dollars, which is about 1000% of US GDP — ten years of GDP assuming all other spending halts.

> $18 million per well

Where are you getting this?

Could have done the math wrong. Doesn’t really make any difference, but corrections welcome!

Did you take the cost per pound and assume that is the cost per well? (And where did wells come from? The number is quoted in relation to municipal wastewater treatment plants.)

I encourage you to do your own research and see what figures you come up with; I would love to be very wrong, but school demands most of my time, so I haven’t more to spare here.

My cynical thought here is that, without any useful profit or revenue from such investment, that it doesn’t matter if it’s $288 million or $288 trillion: it won’t happen because capitalism simply doesn’t care if workers have bad water, so long as it doesn’t kill them quickly, same as the lead pipes problem has demonstrated.

These absurd numbers are unaffordable, but we're forced to pay them one way or another. PFAS in the water supply is costing the world just as much in healthcare expenditures.

I wonder if this could be a lever to help sell people on taxing externalities, e.g. A carbon tax

Just to put things in perspective, even that (total, apparently multi-year) $175B is "only" 20% of the US annual military budget.

Are you talking federal intervention? Because half our governing system (you can guess which) just thinks that water suppliers shouldn't be saddled with the responsibility of ensuring water is clean.

But yeah maybe municipalities can pull it together piece by piece. Not that that'd help all the other countless sources of PFAS and similar, though.

I wonder if the costs associated with this will go down over time. Either way, your first link says 7500 sites are affected, so that’s something like $135 billion if we go off of the Orange County cost? Sheesh. Or is that multiplication not how it works?

I hope PFA manufacturers will have to help pay for this. Especially if they know about the dangers. Makes no sense for them to keep all the profits while the state pays for the remediation.

Was just in the news here in Norway that a local study[1] of 300 boys found a overall positive correlation between the total amount of the majority of PFAS species and delayed onset of puberty. Overall the effect was around a 1 year delay between those that had were in the lowest PFAS group and those that were in the highest PFAS group.

Though if I interpreted it correctly, certain specific PFAS species had a negative correlation, so it could swing both ways depending on the mix of PFAS species one accumulated.

[1]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c06062

I highly recommend Dark Waters (it's on Netflix in the US as of a few days ago). It covers a lot of PFAS history and politics in the US. It also finally convinced someone I know to stop thinking it's fine to eat teflon flakes and stop scratching up the nonstick.

Very good movie, just watched the other day. Michael Clayton is good too, though fictional.

I know it’s a cliche as this point, but just go get a cast iron skillet and a set of stainless steel pots (with metal handles).

The maintenance is easier than teflon because you can scrape stuff off it, and use metal implements while cooking.

Make sure you use the skillet on a regular basis, and you shouldn’t need to reseason it more than once every 5+ years.

Reseasoning consists of scraping all the crap off with a metal implement, wiping some canola oil on it, and baking at 350F for an hour or so.

Edit: Make sure the stainless is induction compatible, since it’ll last longer than your current kitchen. Also, if money is no object, get a nice enameled cast iron dutch oven.

Also if you treat stainless gently , like Teflon , it can be fairly non-stick. The slicker the surface, the less sticks to it, as long as you season properly before cooking.

I use to get rough with my stainless pans but it made them more “sticky”. You can polish them in pretty easily back into a good state, which can’t really be done with teflon…

I got both a carbon steel skillet and a stainless steel skillet. The latter is especially nice for sauces. Haven't reached for my old Teflon pan in ages.

Reminder to in home reverse osmosis. Ensure integrity right before consumption.

Carbon filter is a lot cheaper/easier and works just fine for this.

There area lot of potential things in your water to worry about. Ro gets a lot more out than carbon filters. At a previous house I had lab results to show my well water needed that. most of you have safe water

There's a comparison on EWG.org that lists compounds Reverse Osmosis removes that carbon filter doesn't:

Hexavalent Chromium (Erin Brockovich carcinogen, no legal limit, found in my water supply)

Nitrates and nitrites (a top carcinogen of processed red meats)

What about fluoridation? They still putting rat poison in the water?

> What about fluoridation? They still putting rat poison in the water?

Fluoride naturally occurs in groundwater at levels in excess of not only what we add to water but to levels we consider unsafe [1]. Humans have been consuming water with some level of fluoride in it for thousands of years; animals, millions. PFAS, meanwhile, are entirely anthropogenic.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6572649/

This type of moving goal post rationalization always occurs on this topic. I can agree with you. And I don’t think added fluoride in my water is going to have any obvious health effect on me. But your points don’t justify why it’s still being added. What they do is rationalize why it’s not going to have any obvious health effects

I’m arguing less for or against fluoride in drinking water than pointing out it’s irrelevant whataboutism (literally) in a discussion about PFAS.

The key issue with water fluoridation is that you can't control the dose. There's not really a strong consensus among countries whether it's optimal to add fluoride to drinking water, otherwise it would probably be the default choice everywhere. But we have better modern interventions that are just as effective: school-based dental care!

That's a poor argument. There are many things that can occur naturally in groundwater that you don't want to be drinking.

Yes because, like the available science says that PFAS are dangerous, the available science says that fluoride is not (at the levels its used).

Hope that helps!

I like to give analogies to those who think fluoridation is dangerous.

Why do you drink water at all? Don't you know they make nuclear bombs out of hydrogen? Why are you willing to consume nuclear fuel?

Meanwhile, every US dentist I see is amazed at my teeth (middle-aged with no cavities) and asks if they use fluoride where I'm from (yes they do).

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