It's the Water (And A Lot More)

    Heavy water, dark water, cool water.  From the days of non-color television came that beer phrase from the state of Washington, a catchy jingle from Olympia when both breweries and distilleries did such things as create melodies that stuck in your head, even as a child; I would hum tunes to Hamm's and Blatz beers while still trouncing though the hallways of my middle school, all while not really knowing what product I was "advertising."  Most of the beers with such jingles are now gone or have been bought up by a conglomerate and revived in a somewhat tasteless, generic fashion, Schlitz and Rainier being just two examples, the beers still around in some stores but perhaps best epitomized by their original factories once barely standing with their broken windows and faded concrete walls and now turned into something entirely different in the case of the latter.  But just as I was unaware of what the melody stuck in my head represented, I was also unaware of how much water it took to create beer, or the heavy water created in nuclear reactors.  Here's a "simple" explanation from Wikipedia: A molecule of heavy water has two deuterium atoms in place of the two protium atoms of ordinary "light" water.  The weight of a heavy water molecule, however, is not substantially different from that of a normal water molecule, because about 89% of the molecular weight of water comes from the single oxygen atom rather than the two hydrogen atoms.  The colloquial term 'heavy water' refers to a highly enriched water mixture that contains mostly deuterium oxide D2O, but also some hydrogen-deuterium oxide (HDO) and a smaller amount of ordinary hydrogen oxide H2O.  For instance, the heavy water used in CANDU reactors is 99.75% enriched by hydrogen atom-fraction—meaning that 99.75% of the hydrogen atoms are of the heavy type.  For comparison, ordinary water (the "ordinary water" used for a deuterium standard) contains only about 156 deuterium atoms per million hydrogen atoms, meaning that 0.0156% of the hydrogen atoms are of the heavy type.   Ah, so that explains it...not.  But the explanation does go on to add: With the discovery of nuclear fission in late 1938, and the need for a neutron moderator that captured few neutrons, heavy water became a component of early nuclear energy research.  Since then, heavy water has been an essential component in some types of reactors, both those that generate power and those designed to produce isotopes for nuclear weapons.  Hmm, still a puzzle unless you're really into that stuff (it also says that, like those breweries of old, most modern reactors now use ordinary water).  And then there's dark water...

    The recently released movie Dark Waters* is based on the book Exposure by attorney and author Robert Bilott and talks about his 20-year battle to get DuPont to release their data on PFOA and PFOS, technically perfluorooctanic acid or more commonly popular as a chemical used in creating Teflon...and even if you don't use such cookware, its basically everywhere from those stain-resistant rugs to water-repelling coats and jackets since PFOA is the chemical used in making such products (yes, even cling wrap, microwave popcorn bags, and ski wax**).  Water and grease sliding off really easily...it was probably made with a by-product of PFOA.  No biggee, you say?  Except that it's likely already in you since it's thought to be in the blood of 99% of people living in the U.S. and possibly equally present in all humans (it's thought that virtually every baby born today has PFOA in its blood).  Okay, so there's lots of stuff found in our blood these days, except that PFOA is biocumulative, that is, it takes so long to break down (both in the environment and our bodies) that is just progressively adds up.  It's in our water, our oceans, our bodies and apparently DuPont knew all of this for 50 years, even dumping it in rivers and sending barrels and barrels of it out to sea (as with the decaying barrels of nuclear waste stored at the Hanford facility in Washington state and the one in Columbia, South Carolina, Sweden and elsewhere, the rusting barrels are a waiting disaster seeking a solution).  Since 2015 Teflon no longer contains PFOA but a new chemical called Gen-X which is already facing similar lawsuits because of it having almost the same fluorine chemical signature as PFOA; did I mention that it doesn't break down in our bodies?  Sunlight doesn't break it down.  Microbes don't break it down.  And it has been produced since the early 1950s.  Oh, and it's also not regulated (one of 88,000 chemicals currently in use with no regulations).

   3M, the original creator of PFOA/PFOS in 1948, realized some 30+ years later that they had a problem on their hands, this after animal studies were showing toxic and carcinogenic effects.  So they told their shareholders that --after 50 years of manufacturing PFOA-- they had agreed to voluntarily stop production of this $300 million revenue-maker...which is when DuPont saw the same data but instead saw additional revenue potential and decided to keep manufacturing the chemical emulsifier (DuPont, facing a series of lawsuits, came to a similar agreement with the EPA some 15 years later).  Most PFOA production is now limited to variants of the process.  And the lawsuits continue (the book, itself an ongoing story that reads like a thriller, ends with this: ...senators and representatives have introduced bipartisan bills in both the US House and the Senate that would require federal government regulation of PFAS in drinking water by a specific date, though the legislation has not yet passed.  Other bills were introduced in early 2019 to require EPA to designate PFOA and PFAS "hazardous substances" under the federal Superfund statute by a specific date, but that legislation also has not yet passed.  As for the dozens of other PFAS chemicals, EPA promises to "close the gap on science as quickly as possible." )  The amount of PFOA thought to affect our bodies was marked by DuPont at 1 part per billion, or a single drop in an Olympic-sized pool.  In the documentary above, the comparison marker used to get that figure was supposed to be based on those who didn't have PFOA in their blood but DuPont and others were unable to find any man, woman or child who did not already have PFOA in their blood (during the first class action lawsuit, Dupont said that 150 ppb was acceptable)..

   So picture the beautiful and powerful flow of water coming over Niagara Falls, its horseshoe shape a stunning natural wonder that continues to remind us of the force of nature.  Only instead of that amount of water, picture it as a toxic combination of arsenic, mercury and radiation and have that coal ash slurry flow over the falls for two and a half minutes...that's the amount that was released on a town 40 miles outside of Knoxville, Tennessee a decade ago.  In a situation similar to DuPont, the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, who managed the coal plant and stored the slurry in a similar earthen holding area made of "hardened" ash, knew of the radioactive and toxic properties long before the spill, as far back as 1981 said documents from a piece in Men's Journal.  But TVA, being a federal company, was exempt from being sued; as with the other 400 coal plants in the US, the plant continues to produce 100 million tons of coal ash annually.  Both PFOA and coal ash are released into the air during their production, it's their stored slurry and sludge that is later released into the water; said National Geographic: The US has 1400 ash dumps.  Trump recently rescinded earlier restrictions that prohibited releasing such coal slurry into rivers and streams...

    Added a story in Mosaic: At the end of the World War II, the US, British, French and Soviet authorities faced a big problem – how to get rid of some 300,000 tonnes of chemical munitions recovered from occupied Germany.  Often, they opted for what seemed the safest, cheapest and easiest method: dumping the stuff out at sea.  Estimates are that at least 40,000 tonnes of chemical munitions were disposed of in the Baltic Sea, not all of it in designated dumping areas.  Some of these locations are marked on shipping charts but comprehensive records of exactly what was dumped and where do not exist.  This increases the likelihood of trawler crews, and others, coming into contact with this dangerous waste.  We may treat the ocean as a toilet but perhaps sooner than we expect, it too will get plugged.

   Today in the U.S. it is Thanksgiving, a day of giving thanks for all that we have and a day of gobbling down turkey and variations thereof.  Turkeys were once dinosaurs, said a post in National Geographic, and early eaters sometimes ate raccoons for the holiday celebration.  A few days from now is also World AIDS Day.  But while we gather with family and toast our blessings, itself a ritual we should do more often, perhaps our planet, our home, is feeling less sanguine.  From our oceans and streams to our air above, we are filling all of it with particles and chemicals unseen...and as with the dinosaurs, we too may unexpectedly find ourselves back in the soil sooner than we thought.  The question then might be, would we be replenishing or contaminating it further.


*The multi-award winning documentary The Devil We Know more closely detailed the DuPont alleged coverup of PFOA and its effects; it was released last year (available for viewing on Netflix).

**That fluorinated ski wax you used that caused you to smoothly glide over the snow as if you were flossing your teeth (oops, another use)?...turns out that it goes into the snow, then into the water, and yes, has PFOA.  Europe plans to ban the $50 million industry by 2022, although in the U.S. the EPA is only just now studying its effects, said a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek.