An Interactive Map of Severely PFAS Contaminated Sites in the US.

[NNadir]

These are the perfluoralkanoates, widely used persistent organic chemicals where all, or most of the hydrogens have been replaced with fluorine. It appears that their physiology of these compounds is problematic.

There are probably no human beings who are not contaminated with them at some level, but some are far more contaminated than others. (The dose makes the poison.)

I was able to click on sites near my home, and found that a small commercial airport for commuter traffic and served by at least one commuter airline was a former military base that has profound PFAS contamination.

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2019_pfas_contamination/map/

[Igel]

1. Thanks.

Houston' sole listed site is apparently Ellington Field. Still, ya gotta wonder.

[NNadir]

3. I don't mean to upset you, but there is selection pressure here.

The reason that Michigan looks so bad is that the State of Michigan - post Flint - has a program of detection.

Other States do not, and discovery may be connected with known violations and not

If you don't look for it - and this involves fairly sophisticated mass spectrometry equipment, LC/MS/MS or GC/MS/MS even HRMS, particularly if one wishes to understand speciation of metabolites, you won't report it because you won't detect it.

The most serious human contamination is in China, which has a fairly good program of detecting these compounds in human matrices using LC/MS/MS because they have historically "recycled" our "stuff." I've seen papers measuring these compounds in breast milk in China.

I would suspect that areas without measurable PFAS contamination are relatively rare. The issue comes down to concentration.

The sink for these compounds is radiolytic. Supercritical water will also mineralize them in the presence of zero valent iron.

[lunasun]

2. Michigan ! 👀

Good map link

[NNadir]

4. Michigan has a program for detection. Other states don't. Michigan may only "seem" worse.

[lunasun]

5. Thanks for the explanation

[SCantiGOP]

6. The biggest polluter in the country, by far

has been the US military. They never had to comply with any environmental laws.
The Hanford plant in Washington and the Savannah River site in SC are probably two of the most polluted sites in the Western Hemisphere.

Nature will eventually detoxify both sites - in about 10,000 years.

[NNadir]

7. I disagree on Hanford and Savannah River.

As is always the case people obsess on anything radioactive at the expense of ignoring more obvious cases with demonstrably higher risk, particularly in terms of expectation value.

The highest risk polluted site in the world - in terms of expectation value in any case - is the planetary atmosphere.

[SCantiGOP]

8. No sense arguing, but...

There are not parts of the atmosphere that have been sealed off with steel and concrete because they will be deadly (as in: would kill you in a matter of minutes) for thousands of years.
I am very familiar with the Savannah River Site. There is no way to clean it, even with no additional toxins (not just radioactive material) being introduced to the site.

If your post is intended to point out that the atmosphere impacts everyone while the SRS pollution is confined to a tiny part of the world, then of course you are correct.

[NNadir]

10. By your definition, a gasoline storage tank...

...represents an irretrievably dangerous severely polluted site. If not sealed off from the environment the contents would instantly kill anyone exposed to the contents.

I have many hundreds if not thousands of publicly available scientific documents, many from OSTI, on the Hanford tanks, and scientific journals routinely write papers about them.

If you insist there's no solution, you're clearly reading at a level that is not very serious in my opinion.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent that will actually save few lives, because few lives are at serious immediate risk.

7 million people die each year from air pollution.

That means 19,000 people will die today.

Which would save more lives, a 100 billion dollars spent eliminating gas, petroleum and coal, or a hundred billion spent cleaning up Hanford to the satisfaction of people with superficial knowledge of the contaminants?

I'm convinced I know the answer to that question.

[NeoGreen]

9. Film: "The Devil We Know"...

...
https://thedevilweknow.com/

The Devil We Know
Overview

When a handful of West Virginia residents discover DuPont has been pumping its poisonous Teflon chemical into the air and public water supply of more than 70,000 people, they file one of the largest class action lawsuits in the history of environmental law.

As the citizens of Parkersburg rise up against the forces that polluted their town, the story builds out to dozens of other American cities. In fact, as many as 110 million Americans may be drinking water tainted with PFAS chemicals. Exposure to this class of chemicals has even become a global phenomenon, spreading to places like Italy, the Netherlands, and China.

Parkersburg is ground zero for this story, but this clearly is not about one place or one chemical: because of the power of the chemical lobby, PFOA is one of more than 80,000+ untested chemicals that have been approved for use, their dangers unknown.