> 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:
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.
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?
Something passive could be submerging the tank in a pool of water (also good for proving spill containment won't leak).
It's cheaper.
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.
That's exactly the story of Bisphenol A: once banned it just got replaced by variants of unproved (but likely even higher) toxicity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because Regulation might not be an on/off switch but Deregulation is a complete hard no for most people.
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...)
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.
I doubt any pithy slogan would have encompassed all of it, but the least they could have done was avoid something that most people would reject instantly for being insane. It's amazing that so many people managed to get past the slogan at all to get into the "well actually what we mean is..." and it was totally predictable that the slogan would be weaponized against the movement by opponents
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
From one angle, that is all modern corporations are: a mechanism for offloading costs onto the public, while privately pocketing the profit.
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.
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.
I have lived in places with more rules, but that meant we just didn't do it. We eventually gave up.
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.
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
If we as a people pass environmental laws & labor laws because we feel that these things are important then why are we accepting products that are made in violation of our standards.
Snark aside, the widespread lack of understanding of basic economic concepts is actually a real problem. On one side, you got an utter buffoon like Trump acting like taxes and tariffs are his personal revenge sledgehammer to wield however he wants, and on the other side you got (an awful lot of) short-term rewarders who will accept just about any predictable long-term consequence for short-term "lower prices for consumers".
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.
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.
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!