[robocat]

Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?

After a big earthquake you don't want to have to also deal with other emergencies (à la Fukushima).

Aside: One good side-effect of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake being so horrific is that it stopped the self-obsessed whinging in my city (Christchurch was still trying to recover from an earthquake).

[largbae]

Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.

[itishappy]

It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.

> The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.

Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:

https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...

The comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245

[dan_sbl]

I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.

[kenhwang]

I was thinking maybe have those chemicals sitting in a glass or temperature sensitive container inside the tank. So when there's too much pressure or heat, the container containing the neutralizing chemical is broken like a fuse and the chemical is automatically released.

[coryrc]

Having the chemical in one location doesn't make it active all over, you need to disperse it. Like you need to shake glow-in-the-dark bracelets.

[thinking_cactus]

Well then... make a matrix of such fuse-containers? (say every 20cm or whatever) I guess manufacturing such a matrix would be pretty expensive though, you'd need to carefully automate its production I think. It would also definitely interfere with flow of fluid in the tank.

[kenhwang]

I was thinking multiple long skinny tubes with etchings that make them more likely to split lengthwise. Maybe with a spring loaded/powered agitator so when the tube breaks there's some mechanical flinging/mixing of the inner chemical.

But I'm not a chemical processes engineer, so I don't know how much mixing is needed. But the existing emergency plan was to inject the the chemical through a single valve, so it seems like the dispersion and mixing requirements in this case seems to be low.

[tardedmeme]

Easy to imagine protective mechanisms in hindsight, now imagine you have to build a system for every tank of every chemical in the world

[robocat]

I am imagining some sort of regulations that enforce the creation and installation of appropriate safety systems upon all similar sites in the affected jurisdiction.

And a standard to prevent similar danger elsewhere in the world.

Or is that too fantastic? Perhaps I should stick with the distopian fiction I so love. Why haven't flying cars taken off yet?

[robocat]

That is active.

Something passive could be submerging the tank in a pool of water (also good for proving spill containment won't leak).

[cyberax]

Typically you don't have enough surface area for that. The walls are thick enough that thermal conductivity into an ambient-temperature liquid alone is not going to be sufficient.

[colechristensen]

Uh, you can't just disconnect a pressurized 35,000 gallon tank and drop it into a an enormous pool you just keep full under it at all times.

[bagels]

I think the passive version is the tank stays in a pool all the time.

[robocat]

Riiight. That is exactly what I was thinking.

[colechristensen]

It's really unclear what you were thinking

[cratermoon]

Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient.

It's cheaper.

[KennyBlanken]

> Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?

Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.

There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they showed up, supposedly things were too damaged to inject it. That neutralizer should have been a Big Red Switch away.

They also should have had a deluge system, for example, to cool the tank. With a standpipe for firefighters if there's no water available onsite. Was there? Nope! No requirement for it. Despite the dangers of this stuff being very well documented, it having caused disasters before, etc.

Consider that the chemical industry can invent a new chemical and the onus is on everyone else to prove it is hazardous. So what does the US chemical industry do? Spend lots of time "innovating" new versions of chemicals to constantly leverage the 'innocent until proven guilty' scam. Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."

Protection systems cost money. If something really bad happens the cost of the disaster far outweighs whatever assets the company has hanging around, and in the US, we basically never hold anybody responsible for what they do in the course of their job running a corporation. GM willfully ignored problems with Chevy Cruze ignition switches that caused countless people to die because they'd randomly shut off _and shutting off meant the airbags would get disabled_. Did anyone in those teams, or their managers, ever get held accountable? Nope, not except in some civil suits, where Chevy repeatedly claimed they didn't have any documentation. Well, at some point Congress went after them for something, and in the massive pile of documents lo and behold there wer piles and piles and piles of documentation about the ignition switch issues.

A company like that isn't even required to carry a lick of insurance, far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, and I wish I were joking on this - if I want to get a permit to set aside space in front of my apartment building to park a moving truck, I have to carry a million dollars insurance that protects the city.

If I park my car blocking an ambulance I get charged with at least one crime, possibly even manslaughter or homicide. Ditto for blocking a fire truck trying to get to a fire. A railroad can do it to half a county, dozens of times a year, and everyone just shrugs as people are harmed or killed, or half a neighborhood burned down. All because private equity is milking the railroad so tight that it's making trains that are miles long instead of lengths that are appropriate for the tracks they're on and won't block fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school busses, and the general population as a whole.

The free license corporate America gets to shit all over society has got to stop.

[stymaar]

> Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."

That's exactly the story of Bisphenol A: once banned it just got replaced by variants of unproved (but likely even higher) toxicity.

[daedrdev]

In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.

This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.

[fc417fc802]

The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291

That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.

[MisterTea]

> I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.

It's par for the course of many US companies and likely others outside the US. I have been in a lot of manufacturing/industrial facilities and find a lot of machismo coupled with greedy asshole bosses/owners/managers. You wind up with corporate culture of "keep your head down, do as your told, don't question, and get paid."

It leads to a normalization of deviance where you end up with resentful workers who don't give a shit. Then when things go wrong, management can then easily blame them for their crappy work ethic and fire them. Then hire a new person to demoralize in exchange for money. It's a scam really.

The only way to curb that behavior is to hold people responsible but we seem to be incapable of doing that because the people who need to be held responsible have too much money and power.

[lambdaone]

The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.

[fc417fc802]

It depends a lot on context. That's certainly a reasonable approach in some situations. However in this instance it's not clear to me that there's any possible way to comply with modern regulations. My impression is that in general it isn't permitted to keep massive tanks of hazardous industrial chemicals 500 feet from residential housing units in the middle of the city.

I think this is an example where it might have been reasonable for the taxpayers to foot a bill to facilitate their relocation 20 or 30 years ago.

[galangalalgol]

Take this into context with the outsourcing of all such work to China though. Environmental regulations are assessed to be one of the largest impacts US GDP. We take that hit to protect human life, and then by all the stuff from China that they make without those regulations. We minimize any risk of harm to our citizens at the cost of their jobs, while putting the citizens of China at risk instead. My only point is that there is no right answer. It is a judgement call about how much risk we think is acceptable in trade for what modern conveniences. If paying to move the plant would cost more than what it produces provides us, we should decide whether we do without, or just accept that sometimes industrial accidents kill a few hundred people.

[daheza]

That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation.

Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas? Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?

[mschuster91]

> Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas?

Because the tank was there first and morons came later on and said they wanted to build housing, the land was cheap and no zoning was in place to prevent someone from building housing there.

Zoning saves lives.

[MereInterest]

Based on this comment’s [0] comparison of historical aerial photographs, the houses were there first.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291

[CalRobert]

Hell, it’s still amazing there was so little fallout after Bhopal.

[lanstin]

I worked with someone whose father drove his whole family out of the killing zone in Bhopal on a two wheeler. There might not have been a strong international movement to enforce safety first behavior on transnationals, but there was fall out.

[CalRobert]

Sorry, the human impact was enormous. I meant in terms of holding the people who caused it to account.

[pfdietz]

US government actions demonstrate the value placed on a life in another country can be much lower than the statistical value here in the US. We could save a life for a few thousand dollars with malaria nets (or so it's claimed); domestically a value of $12M per saved life is considered enough to justify some safety improvement.

[leonidasrup]

Because it happened in India, from perspective of US public: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

[GJim]

Frankly, I'm not in the least surprised.

[hfcjy65]

But then no one would build Jurassic Park. And man, I want to pet Raptors and take selfies with T-Rex you know. Its a conundrum.

[protocolture]

>Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.

And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.

>Chemical A is found to be cancerous

Chemical A is assumed to be cancerous by the state of California, you mean?

[pbhjpbhj]

Are you alleging that California claims stuff to be carcinogenic without evidence?

Do you have a supposed motive?

Any evidence?

Whilst it's a bit of a meme, isn't it just true that a lot of stuff is carcinogenic.

[ceejayoz]

California’s threshold is far too low to be useful. The end result is basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

[PaulHoule]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide

is the one that gets me. Fried snacks from Asia frequently have a Prop 65 warning. Thing is it is produced by ordinary cooking techniques from ordinary and can be found in both traditional and ultra-processed foods.

[voakbasda]

Well, the “experts” say a charred steak is carcinogenic. At that point, I stopped listening to anything out of their mouths. It might be true, but it’s also a matter of degree.

California has set such a low threshold that one cannot take their label seriously about anything. It applies to nearly everything, making it effectively a useless warning.

[robocat]

  In the seventies, the view was often expressed to me by lay audiences that there was no point in stopping smoking, since everything was a carcinogen and so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable. This view was certainly pushed by the tobacco companies with the bizarre support of many environmentalists,

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0273230087...

Also see carcinization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

[lanstin]

It also never lists the specific substances nor what one can do about it (not enter the building, don’t lick the ceiling, wear a mask, whatever). Good intentioned but utterly useless.

[dlcarrier]

Pretty much every state, national, and international health or safety organizations deals with possible carcinogens, or sometimes probable carcinogens, because testing to prove something is a carcinogen is expensive.

[autoexec]

> And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.

I'll bet a ton of that regulation is insufficient, and/or paid for, or even written by, the industry to make it harder for competitors or to allow them to increase their profits by cutting corners.

Regulation isn't some on/off switch that always makes things better or worse. What matters is what those regulations are and who they serve.

[protocolture]

Yep and I bet if I reviewed every bit of it line by line I couldnt convince many people to remove any of it.

Because Regulation might not be an on/off switch but Deregulation is a complete hard no for most people.

[autoexec]

I'd agree that deregulation is a complete hard no for most people, but that's because removing bad/watered down regulation isn't enough. Calling for "deregulation" is like saying "defund the police". A very small number of radicals claim to actually want that, but most people think that something better has to fill the void. Bad regulation needs to be replaced by good regulation.

If what you mean by "Deregulation" is "different/better regulation" most people will happily support it. For example, most people would love to have the government just automatically mail them their tax refunds with the paperwork they need to verify it was correct. Standing in their way are companies who have been spending a lot of money on bribes to make sure filing our taxes is as expensive and difficult as possible (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...)

[protocolture]

There was a pretty decent campaign locally to make it legal to deliver fixed line broadband services.

But once you convince someone that the legislation exists and the penalties exist for supplying fixed line broadband services, the next goal posts slide into place, and they reflexively defend the idea that the government would fine people more for overbuilding the national carrier to a greater extent than importing several kilos of cocaine. They parrot absolutely bonkers shit like "Internet is a natural monopoly" when they literally have to fine people to make it a monopoly.

Most people defend the status quo with extreme vigor. And most people aren't even slightly qualified to analyse the status quo. The supplied alternative doesnt matter. Some person they dont know, doing something they are ambivalent about might find their profession easier. Thats completely verboten.

[TylerE]

"Defund the police" was such a dumb slogan. "Demilitarize the police" would have been much better.

[joxdosba]

Complaining about the Chevy Cruze like that is hilarious. Did you go out of your way to pick up a particularly harmless example?

What about all the other cars that kill significantly more people by design? Like, I don’t know, any SUV or pickup truck? In that context, picking on the rather innocent Cruze seems a bit obtuse.

[saalweachter]

I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt, the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the I believe on-going lawsuits.

AFAIK there were no similar ignition switch failures or associated deaths with the Cruze (or other >2011 model year vehicles), although I think it might have been part of the recall.

[pbhjpbhj]

Shouldn't any design that is killing people, no matter how petty you think it is, be reason for homicide investigation against the companies executives?

I guess if you viewed customers as actual people the 'the dow is 50k - why do you want us to stop war crimes?' might also get a response requiring the treatment of humans with dignity.

If your executives can't kill people to make a couple of million what's the point of even being a wage-slave./s

[pfdietz]

No, because some killing is necessary for the economy to function. Reduction to zero means elimination of the product.

The way this statistical background of economic death is handled is by assigning a finite value to a human life. In the US it's about $12M. If you think this is inhumane, consider that this is the cutoff for government actions for reducing deaths (from traffic accidents, disease, etc.) Actions where the cost per life saved are higher than this figure mean we're leaving on the table actions that could have saved more lives for the resources spent.

[joxdosba]

All cars inherently kill people, we should focus on the cars that kill many people in predictable ways rather than the cars that kill few people in surprising ways.

[oceanplexian]

I feel like these arguments are always framed as an evil corporation wants to take advantage of consumers. Except that's misdirection. The guilty party isn't the corporation, it's you, the consumer. And the corporations are already regulated. Heavily.

You want Gore-Tex (expanded PTFE) boots, Cobalt EV batteries (Child labor in the DRC), Solar Panels (Open pit quartz mines), Wind Turbine Blades (Epoxy Resins & glass-like fibers), and so on. All those things sound nice and good for the environment but don't appear out of some magical horn of plenty. All those things require intensive chemical and industrial processes that cost a lot of money.

"Just make the government solve the problem by criminalizing their entire operation" isn't a serious solution. It's a generic anti-corporation/NIMBY argument to outsource uncomfortable things to another country without labor or safety protections. Consumers need to accept that if they want nice things those things come with some amount of cost to the environment and level of risk. The government needs to work with corporations to find the safest _practical_ mitigation that doesn't bankrupt them. If that's done correctly you will actually avoid accidents like this because everyone is working together on the same page.

[nearlyepic]

You’re reversing causality. People don’t want gore-tex, and they don’t want cobalt batteries. They want dry boots and transportation.

If some corporation comes along and says they have dry boots and electric cars, it is not realistic to expect every single consumer in a society to become expertly informed on fluorochemistry or the economics of mining, and then also expect them to make the decision that is best for all of us.

[GolfPopper]

But it is a nice dodge for those profiting from outsourcing costs on the public.

From one angle, that is all modern corporations are: a mechanism for offloading costs onto the public, while privately pocketing the profit.

[autoexec]

Which is they they all should be regulated to make sure that they're doing more good for society than harm.

[Terr_]

Exactly, the burden for better behavior lies with the people with the power, agency, and information.

The consumer is did not decide on the formulation of Chemical X, they weren't there to see the day it accidentally melted through the floor, and if the customer was somehow a hyper-motivated scientist with the right training, the company isn't gonna share the data.

[lokar]

You write as if it would not be possible to work with these chemicals safely at a reasonable cost, and that's just not true. Other jurisdictions manage this.

Corporations naturally seek to improve margins, all the time, constantly. They will push and push against rules and regulations. It's the proper role of government to balance the costs to the corporation against the interests of the public. And it can be done well. But in the US, it's becoming more and more rare.

[IcyWindows]

Which "Other jurisdictions manage this"?

I have lived in places with more rules, but that meant we just didn't do it. We eventually gave up.

[lokar]

I have read the rules are tighter in most EU nations.

There is jurisdiction shopping of course. If china or wherever wants to have really lax rules, and that means production moves there, I’m not sure what the answer is.

But, for this product (making plexiglass like things), I expect all the consumer production has gone overseas anyway. This is defense / aerospace, so it probably can’t move.

[jyounker]

The answer is actually really easy, and it's been implemented successfully before: selective import taxes.

You set import taxes so that they offset price advantages. If a country has shitty environmental laws, crappy labor protections, etc. then you prices that into their import taxes. That way they don't gain any advantages in a race to the bottom based on things that you care about in your own country.

If a country adopts better environment laws, labor projections, etc. then you lower the import tariffs you charge on that country's relevant goods

[cogogo]

Wow that is a hell of a lot of responsibility to heap on the consumer. I think the right/rational argument is properly regulated safety procedures for storing large quantities of extremely hazardous chemicals. There is a middle ground. This is in my view a regulatory failure if I ever saw one… who was inspecting this tank and what were they looking for? I am willing to bet the gas pump nearest me gets more attention from whoever is responsible for weights and measures.

[leonidasrup]

You present this as if consumers were truthfully informed of all the ecological and labor impacts of products they buy. In many cases contrary is true, companies don't inform the customers, try to hide the impacts or downplay the impacts. Using outsourcing and very difficult to trace supply chains is often way to prevent informed public.

[autoexec]

The idea that "If corporations can't do whatever they want, including put everyone's lives at risk, nobody will be able to have anything nice" is a commonly seen argument but of course it's a lie. Companies might make less profit if they had to act responsibly but they'd still make profits. Those that failed to don't deserve to exist and should get out of the way so that a more efficient and capable company can take their place.

The same argument could be made for all kinds of unreasonable demands. If there were products that couldn't be profitably made and sold without slavery do you think we should all just accept that slavery? We, as a society, make choices all the time that certain products, industries, and practices aren't worth the costs. Sometimes it's perfectly fine to bankrupt companies and kill entire industries to do it.

By all indications child porn could be a massively profitably industry. For a long time it was. As a society we decided that crossed a line, and we petitioned our government to outlaw it and enforce that regulation on the porn industry. The economy didn't collapse when we did. It's just as reasonable for the public to decide to demand better safety from the chemical industry and ask the government to regulate that as well. It's been done many times in various forms already. The economy didn't collapse then either.

We'd agree that there is a middle ground to aim for most of the time though. The problem we have now is that government is being bribed to ignore what voters want and roll back many of the regulations we demanded. Incidents like this one remind us that companies should be expected and required to do better, but as long as government can keep accepting piles of cash in exchange for ignoring the rest of us it's not going to be easy to convince the government to do their job. There's also been an increasing amount of voter suppression to make it harder to fire and replace corrupt government with people who will do their job.

[michaelmrose]

It may well be quite valid in context to let a company or even an entire industry go bankrupt if the net negative is large enough and give zero fucks if the mitigation required is practical or affordable. It may also be valid from the perspective of one group of citizens to foist the cost and risk on another nations less organized or represented citizens in another nation. Unkind but we don't pay our lawmakers to represent our citizens and theirs equally.

The average person is dumber than a box of rocks and the ones that aren't have limited time, attention, and expertise. They can't be relied on to make practical decisions while shopping on amazon regarding the practical effects of their buying power. The only hope to have sane decision making is by subject matter experts which is why we are a nation of laws which basically say follow the rules set down by these unlected assholes who actually know <insert subject> because it is literally the only practical way forward in our nation of 338M stupid assholes.

[rockinghigh]

Consumers don't control zoning laws or risk mitigation details.

[somat]

In a democracy they do, or at least that is the theory.

[konmok]

I don't want any of those things, really (besides solar panels I suppose). I avoid plastic as much as I can. But, let's take your boots example. I recently went looking for a pair of well-made boots that don't contain plastic. But that eliminates something like 99% of the available offerings, and most of the remaining are luxury brands that can cost upwards of 600 dollars. I don't have that kind of budget, so I had to compromise. Do you see the problem here? If I want decent boots without a luxury brand fee, I HAVE to give these chemical companies my money. Extend that to clothing, groceries, furniture, devices, etc etc.

I avoid this stuff as much as I can without upending my life, and I'm still forking over much of my spending to companies that can pollute my land, water, and air with near impunity. I didn't choose this shit!