contaminant

What's the fear of "contamination" if the so-called contaminant doesn't harm?

The State is not a contaminant whose influence on small children should be avoided at all costs. But they're not an unmitigated blessing whose opinions should supplant those of parents in all cases either.

The previous production process just happened to include a contaminant that turned out to be a critical ingredient. This is what we had to discover.

Methane is a natural contaminant of groundwater and is commonplace in water wells. A simple solution is to run the well water into a holding tank; the methane readily comes out of solution.

Or adding one of every possible contaminant molecule at every possible location? What about more than one?

You would need to spend US$40 to see the references for the statement that "Caffeine, a biologically active drug, is recognized as a contaminant of freshwater and marine systems." Or make an interlibrary loan request and wait a few weeks.

Depleted uranium is a pretty harmless environmental contaminant as heavy metals go. In the US we routinely dump thousands of tons of uranium around population centers in the form of coal ash.

This doesn't fix the problem, but it does reduce the scope of the problem dramatically by keeping the contaminant in place rather than wandering away with the ground and surface water. Would it better not to release radioactive strontium into the environment?

Given that the contaminant is a pesticide, specifically designed to inflict death upon insects, bees are uniquely affected by even trace amounts of the toxin, in ways that humans are not. This is not unlike the unintended side-effect DDT has on ospreys.

Under such conditions, I am sure that a lot of the fired rounds ended up as dust, to either be inhaled immediately or to become a soil contaminant later. Turning every battle site into a Superfund-style cleanup is unlikely according to the local economics.

So lead from leaded gas drips into the barrel representing the local ecology, and the lead contaminant drips out of the biosphere at a rate that obviously must depend on local climate. Presumably lead contaminant flows into the oceans or gets buried in the ground at a rate dependent on local weather.

In other words, just more fuel for speculation about some alien contaminant, a pathogen or pollutant, that we can blame for the obesity epidemic. We have all the explanations for human obesity that we could possibly need, but we continue to wish for some cause that does not operate through our behavior.

Com/ I was thinking that the bigger problem that would be bandied about about reprocessing would be with having the middle-lifetime contaminant isotopes concentrated in one place, for convenient pilfering and then manufacturing of a dirty bomb. Plutonium is obviously a worry as well, though.

In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants. This is completely false, in the absence of state environmental regulations there will still remain an enormous demand for pristine environments. Why are the contaminant levels in your local theme park well below the regulatory levels allowed in all cases?

As pdonis notes, radioactive contaminants dilute just as well as any other contaminant in water. Assuming it more-or-less evenly mixes within the Pacific Ocean, you could essentially dump all of Fukushima into that ocean and not see large changes in overall ocean radioactivity.

It looks like a cost/benefit decision not to recover it: Of the 200 kilogram lanthanide mass removed by liquid metal extraction, we estimate that approximately 20 kilograms will be actinide contaminant with a longer half-life similar to SNF. It may be most practical to leave such a small quantity embedded in the ceramic granules, as it would be well distributed and would not materially extend the time for the overall waste form to reach background levels. If desired, however, the actinides can be further separated offsite with additional post-processing techniques.