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Nebakenezzer posted:Mercury pollution combines with other pollution to form Methyl Mercury in Northern Ontario River: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/grassy-narrows-first-nation-methylmercury-study-1.7211750 While the wastewater coming from the mill today does not contain mercury, it does contain high levels of sulfate and organic matter, which "feed the bacteria that produce methylmercury from inorganic mercury in the environment," the study says. Well that's a new way of getting poisoned I never knew existed.
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May 23, 2024 15:01
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It's the "normal" way of mercury poisoning in the 21st century. Bioaccumulation starts with microorganisms fixing mercury into organic mercury compounds. Complex organisms then eat them and in turn tend to taste real good. The whole situation in the article describes an unfortunate amount of ecosystems in the developed world where mercury was dumped 50 years ago before current regulations where causing blooms is now a big lever in how bioavailable mercury travels through the food chain. In contrast to the developing or less regulated world where the mercury is still dumped in quantity and bio availability tracks with that amount at least until they stop and now they are also operating in the mercury reserve model.
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May 23, 2024 15:30
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My first job was back in the 2000s when the Clean Air Act was to be amended to cap-and-trade mercury emissions -- and our plant was to install activated charcoal scrubbers -- and everything was "Ontario Hydro method, this," "Ontario Hydro method, that." I guess that explains why.
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May 23, 2024 15:41
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The local canal is no longer used for commercial purposes but is for pleasure craft, and the speed is capped so they don't disturb the interesting mercury gel sitting on the bottom.
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May 23, 2024 17:27
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Feed a fever, war crime a cold.
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May 23, 2024 17:41
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it's fine
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May 23, 2024 17:54
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Groda posted:My first job was back in the 2000s when the Clean Air Act was to be amended to cap-and-trade mercury emissions -- and our plant was to install activated charcoal scrubbers -- and everything was "Ontario Hydro method, this," "Ontario Hydro method, that." I guess that explains why. The plant in question is a pulp and paper mill, not a power station. I assume mercury organic compounds are as bad to life below us as it is to us? Sidebar: so in recent years I was made aware of that hydroelectric projects sometimes float a hell of a lot of mercury into the ecosystem when the project creates its lake. Does mercury get neutralized like oil over time, or what happens when it is released into nature? I'm under the impression nation eventually cleans itself up.
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May 23, 2024 18:32
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Nebakenezzer posted:The plant in question is a pulp and paper mill, not a power station. as always, it depends on concentration but it can actually be worse for lower lifeforms. Like, environmentally relevant concentrations will gently caress up some bacteria real bad. As for persistence... it's an element, rather than a compound, that gets put into various coordinate complexes with ligands, some less directly harmful (to humans) than others but which can still enter into various biochemical pathways in bacteria or animals that lead to severe damage. The issue for people in "developed" nations with rules about dumping is that mercury can be persistent in the environment even if it's put into different, less directly harmful, complexes. Then it bioaccumulates as it goes up the food chain, same with pcbs, pbbs. Concentrations get higher as it goes up in the food chain with bigger animals have larger concentrations present.
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May 23, 2024 18:46
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also even if mercury is in a less-harmful complex it can be transferred into a more harmful one by biochemical pathways in nature or the body. It depends.
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May 23, 2024 18:56
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The bottom line on mercury removal is you can get it out of a waterway by: Remediation, an imperfect environmental engineering project that is expensive and/or slightly impossible for certain sizes of waterway or configurations of how and where mercury is. Or Letting bioaccumulation do its thing so that birds and mammals (including humans) eat fish and die on land returning the mercury whence it came.
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May 23, 2024 18:56
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Simply blast the mercury with neutrons until it all becomes radioactive and turns into other elements
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May 23, 2024 19:02
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zedprime posted:The bottom line on mercury removal is you can get it out of a waterway by: yeah I didn't mention it but it's in large part a marine (and also aerial) issue but it's also a concentration/aggregation issue. This stuff was in rocks, often underground and spread out. Then it was taken, concentrated, used as reagents or coming out through burning of coal and huge amounts were dispersed into the biosphere that doesn't really have a good way of dealing with it. Returning it to something close to it's original state or at least getting out of the way is a monumental and difficult task. toxicology and more specifically marine toxicology has some really cool chemistry involved
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May 23, 2024 19:28
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Zopotantor posted:Was that what happened to Brsen? I mean no people died, the works of art got saved, a stock exchange that used to be the site of witch trials burned down. I'm not loving crying. zedprime posted:The bottom line on mercury removal is you can get it out of a waterway by: I seem to remember some remediation projects being a combination of the two, focused on setting up a lot of plants(which don't move around) and are likely to accumulate the offending substance/element, which can then be harvested and put somewhere safe and far away from people. So, yeah, imperfect, impossible at certain scales, slow and expensive, I guess, but the best we've got.
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May 23, 2024 20:07
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean no people died, the works of art got saved, a stock exchange that used to be the site of witch trials burned down. I'm not loving crying. The major problem I see is rebuilding it will gently caress up traffic between Sjælland and Amager.
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May 23, 2024 20:21
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Rust Martialis posted:The major problem I see is rebuilding it will gently caress up traffic between Sjælland and Amager. I mean no people died, the works of art got saved, a stock exchange that used to be the site of witch trials burned down, and car traffic will get hosed up. I'm close to celebrating.
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May 23, 2024 20:22
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean no people died, the works of art got saved, a stock exchange that used to be the site of witch trials burned down, and car traffic will get hosed up. I'm close to celebrating. A lot of buses via Kongens Nytorv pass that way. Not everyone lives/works walking distance from the Metro, dude.
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May 23, 2024 20:26
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BMan posted:Simply blast the mercury with neutrons until it all becomes radioactive and turns into other elements LANL employee spotted
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May 23, 2024 20:34
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PurpleXVI posted:I seem to remember some remediation projects being a combination of the two, focused on setting up a lot of plants(which don't move around) and are likely to accumulate the offending substance/element, which can then be harvested and put somewhere safe and far away from people. So, yeah, imperfect, impossible at certain scales, slow and expensive, I guess, but the best we've got. I got super into bioremediation a few years ago thinking it would be a twofer to sequester carbon and heavy metals and one of the more interesting things I learned before stalling out is that some plants will hyperaccumulate enough mercury or arsenic or whatever that it'll poison you on contact, no food web neccessary. The flip side of this though is that hyperaccumulation can be really tissue specific, which is how you get lavender oil farms being planted on coal mine tailings where nothing else can grow without the still house turning into the Appalachian cousin of DuPont's "House of Butterflies." Bioremediation is cool as hell
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May 23, 2024 21:04
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Plant crops that bioaccumulate mercury, lead and arsenic. Design pressure furnace that turns them into charcoal briquettes. Return the artisanal free range superfund pellets to the bottom of a deep rock coal mine, interspersed with colorful plastic pellets proclaiming 'no honored deed'.
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May 23, 2024 22:07
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:Plant crops that bioaccumulate mercury, lead and arsenic. Design pressure furnace that turns them into charcoal briquettes. Return the artisanal free range superfund pellets to the bottom of a deep rock coal mine, interspersed with colorful plastic pellets proclaiming 'no honored deed'. Solar powered carbon sequestration
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May 24, 2024 03:47
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mycomancy posted:Solar powered carbon sequestration Literally the entire carboniferous period.
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May 24, 2024 22:49
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:Literally the entire carboniferous period. So we just kill off any fungus or bacteria that can break down cellulose? That should be easy and have no repercussions whatsoever.
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May 24, 2024 23:54
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Kvantum posted:So we just kill off any fungus or bacteria that can break down cellulose? That should be easy and have no repercussions whatsoever. We just need to genetically engineer a plant that can produce diamonds, which nothing knows how to eat! (a few hundred million years later, nature finally figures out how to crack diamonds and put all that carbon back into circulation again...)
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May 25, 2024 00:01
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:We just need to genetically engineer a plant that can produce diamonds, which nothing knows how to eat! Teaching plants to fix nitrogen would be really loving awesome. Stupid plants, its right there. Just eat it.
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May 25, 2024 00:12
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Phanatic posted:Teaching plants to fix nitrogen would be really loving awesome. Stupid plants, its right there. Just eat it. That actually sounds plausible, insofar as plenty of plants can already do it. We just need to figure out how to transplant those reaction pathways in a useful way to the other crops. ...now get them to find their own phosphorous...
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May 25, 2024 00:14
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Phanatic posted:Teaching plants to fix nitrogen would be really loving awesome. Stupid plants, it’s right there. Just eat it. Well, Nitroplasts just got discovered. ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z ) Of course the real mad science geoengineering carbon fixing idea is to just create a mirror-chirality algae and unleash it into the oceans, aince nothing can eat them, then unleash a mirror pathogen when you're done to wipe out the algae clones.
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May 25, 2024 00:16
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Kvantum posted:So we just kill off any fungus or bacteria that can break down cellulose? That should be easy and have no repercussions whatsoever. Someone already suggested blasting everything with neutrons, let's try that.
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May 25, 2024 01:03
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Tunicate posted:Well, Nitroplasts just got discovered. ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z ) Just because something can't eat it doesn't mean it won't try. Also good job inventing a parallel ecosystem that wants to kill us just by existing.
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May 25, 2024 01:18
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Phanatic posted:Teaching plants to fix nitrogen would be really loving awesome. Stupid plants, it’s right there. Just eat it. Plants don't know how to do anything on their own, they just force bacteria to do their bidding. Stupid, Lazy Eukaryotes. You can't even perform respiration without a prokaryote slave.
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May 25, 2024 01:19
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:We just need to genetically engineer a plant that can produce diamonds, which nothing knows how to eat! I wonder how hard it would be to engineer something that eats LDPE.
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May 25, 2024 01:50
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It certainly is possible. The real trick is not getting to overspread after initial application. Also getting it to break down plastic into harmless byproducts instead of toxic chemicals. The really real trick is getting your bacteria to do it in the wild, as it were, instead of a temperature controlled laboratory environment.
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May 25, 2024 01:58
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:I wonder how hard it would be to engineer something that eats LDPE. Biodegradation of Unpretreated Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE) by Stenotrophomonas sp. and Achromobacter sp., Isolated From Waste Dumpsite and Drilling Fluid
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May 25, 2024 02:03
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Deteriorata posted:Biodegradation of Unpretreated Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE) by Stenotrophomonas sp. and Achromobacter sp., Isolated From Waste Dumpsite and Drilling Fluid I can feel the caveats from here without even opening the article.
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May 25, 2024 02:11
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Now do Teflon without it farting fluorine.
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May 25, 2024 03:23
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Mustached Demon posted:Now do Teflon without it farting fluorine. Perflourinated compounds are pretty incompatible with life but hey, how else are we going to stop McChicken wrappers from getting soggy?
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May 25, 2024 04:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:We just need to genetically engineer a plant that can produce diamonds, which nothing knows how to eat! Or make something marine that makes excessive amounts of calciumcarbonate, that might even be healthy for the sea while fixing carbon at the same time.
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May 25, 2024 06:24
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Zudgemud posted:Or make something marine that makes excessive amounts of calciumcarbonate, that might even be healthy for the sea while fixing carbon at the same time. Good news. This also leads to an increase in the population of fish and animals which eat those phytoplankton.
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May 25, 2024 06:48
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It's gonna be awesome when we can select for the good algae and not the frat bro algae that binges all the fertilizer and starts puking everywhere.
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May 25, 2024 13:36
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DildenAnders posted:Perflourinated compounds are pretty incompatible with life but hey, how else are we going to stop McChicken wrappers from getting soggy? Don't forget dry-fit clothing!
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May 25, 2024 15:51
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darthbob88 posted:Good news. This also leads to an increase in the population of fish and animals which eat those phytoplankton. But the article does say the evidence for any significant carbon sequestration as a result is contested at best.
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May 25, 2024 22:29
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