Everything in this article sounds right to me and it would be great to get rid of lead pipes, but it's not like lead pipes turn water into a nerve agent.
The linings of lead pipes are oxidized to form a coating that keeps water out of chemical contact with elemental lead. For comparison, aluminum is a strong enough reducing agent that it reacts spontaneously with water (to produce hydrogen) and oxygen (if you don't know about aluminum air batteries, look it up, it's a fascinating story). However, it forms a self-limiting layer of aluminum oxide that keeps, for example, the contents of a can of soda pop from dissolving the thin walls of an aluminum can. Also many boats are made of aluminum. This is less of an issue now, but you cannot bring mercury thermometers on airplanes because mercury dissolves aluminum oxide and, in theory, a broken thermometer could compromise the structural integrity of the plane. If you've never seen what mercury does to aluminum, go have some fun on YouTube.
What Matt was describing in DC is essentially the same thing that happened in Flint. If the pH gets off (and/or certain ions are introduced to the water) the protective layer dissolves. In the case of DC it was caused by switching chemical treatments, in Flint it was switching the water source and the story about why they didn't check for that is scandalous.
The point is, lead pipes are perfectly safe if used properly. Nowadays you can easily replace them with copper, plastic (which can also leach toxic chemicals), ceramics, etc. But that wasn't always true. There was a time when expanding indoor plumbing and bringing fresh water into houses meant using lead because plastics and ceramics didn't exist, copper was too expensive and, unlike lead, iron oxides (rust) are brittle and flake off, meaning the pipes don't last. So, surely there was a point at which Big Lead was pushing its products needlessly, like leaded gasoline or continuing to use lead paint and lead pipes when better alternatives existed, but there was a time when there were legitimate reasons to build out infrastructure with lead pipes.
Tetraehtyl lead was really horrible because it volatilized the lead and spread it around. And since lead is an element, it cannot be broken down and instead enters the food chain. Besides the horrors of particular emissions, coal-fired electricity plants are horrible because they volatilize mercury, which is also and element and also a neurotoxin. Ditto for burning waste electronics, which are full of toxic elements.
Nope. Whether lead passivates or not is irrelevant. It forms corrosion cells in contact with other materials that can only be limited but not eradicated by corrosion inhibitors.It is never safe to use in plumbing.
Isn't at least part of the point that scandalous incompetence by local government is sort of guaranteed to happen somewhere over the long term? Failing safer is a real benefit.
As a minor cavil, there might be no lower limit to a damaging level of lead (the issue is probably untestable), but a true zero lead level is not possible. Measuring the level of a toxicant depends on the measurement technology, which has improved vastly over the past 50 years. Supposing that one molecule of lead in a glass of water is dangerous might have a certain logical appeal but is unrealistic at multiple levels.
Lead is also bad in soil, but the problem might resemble that of asbestos in walls. The technical issue is beyond my knowledge, but the surface of undisturbed soil becomes less hazardous over time (if lead is no longer emitted), and besides the cost, it might actually be less dangerous to leave the soil alone than to try to remove it. Probably there are some sites so contaminated that it would be wise to remediate, but it's a non-trivial task to figure that out.
Yes I agree with all this, except I’d just add that heavily contaminated sites don’t seem to be all that rare. We have never really tested soil systematically, but the urban farming fad led a lot of Brooklyn gentrifiers to get tests done and problems were pretty widespread.
DC tested the soil in the playgrounds run by DC Parks and Rec and found problems in a lot of them. But the National Park Service doesn’t test the NPS parks that are all over the city.
I don't know the details necessary to craft appropriate policy, but procedures like "soil testing" tend to disregard the realities of easy measurement and clear rules, vs actual assessment of danger. For example, if one collects a sample (say) from the top 4 inches, the measurement may be accurate, but likely fails to reflect true hazard, which probably arises mainly from the top 1/4 inch.
As an aside, I'm consistently impressed by your essays despite our differing political perspectives. A good deal of our differing views probably arises from your residence in major urban centers.
Another issue for soils is that remediation is actually pretty blunt. We take away the soil containing the lead and put in new soil. The old soil has to go somewhere - landfill. And the new soil came from somewhere else and it will also contain things. If my backyard contained lead contaminated soil, I'd put a layer of sod on it.
In California they dug up all the old gas stations tank areas and re paved it in the 2000's that makes a difference. back in the day people used to ideal their cars when filling up. That could be done on a national biases we know where the old gas stations are and we know how to rip up and replace concreate.
If the soil sometimes gets churned up by vehicles or digging or dust storms or whatever, it seems likely that some ends up getting inhaled. Presumably that is basically not an issue in grassy medians in humid cities, but on a dirt lot that is used for parking it might be (unless the lead dust has all been blown away over the decades by this same effect).
Also in CA. They have a rule that all dirt by roads must be disposed of as a hazard when even there is construction along the road. Road construction contractors complain about it and point to it as a dumb rule that increases the cost of building roads. My dad was a project in CA and carting away old dirt seamed like a dumb environmental rule at the time but it is a way to deal with the lead in city dirt issues. Or just live in a suburb that was built 1980+
I'm pretty skeptical about hormesis, but the alarm about infinitesimal quantities of radiation is weird. Nowadays it's exceedingly difficult for a researcher to obtain 10 mg of thorium (a radioactive element), but it's no problem at all to get a ton of potassium chloride (which contains 0.01% of a potassium isotope that's ten times more radioactive than thorium).
There is a difference between public perception and sensible regulation. People freaking out over infinitesimal quantities of "radiation" is on par with the great gluten panic, but the actual rules around radioisotopes are based on over a century of study. For one thing, not all radiation is created equal; some is penetrating (Gamma) and some is not (Alpha/Beta). Others can sustain nuclear chain reactions. A Beta particle here and there might cause some local DNA damage, but its comparable to radiation damage from sunlight and cosmic rays and there is specific cellular machinery tasked with fixing it.
I'm not an expert in nuclear chemistry, but I do know that you and I are full of 40K and 14C, which are among the common radioisotopes of light elements that organisms evolved with and that they emit Beta particles (e.g., high-energy electrons) and decay to harmless light elements. Enriched 14C (or 40K) can be harmful, but a bag of KCl is just as benign as a tree or graphite or anything else containing lots of carbon.
Wikipedia tells me that the natural abundance of 232Th is apparently 99% and it decays by spontaneous fission to create heavy elements like Ra and U. And the half-lives of 40K and 232Th differ by a factor of 10, but that is not the same thing as "ten times more radioactive".
I also think the idea that your immune system would respond to ionization radiation is about as sound as homeopathy. But stated above, it is definitely true that each and every exposure to ionizing radiation increases your risk of cancer, et al. Of course, the degree matters a lot here. Spending five hours in an airplane exposes you to an increased intensity of cosmic rays amounting to something like a chest X-ray equivalent of irradiation.
You're right that the dangers from thorium and potassium are different, but not all THAT different. You're right that when thorium disintegrates it gives rise to a cascade of radioactive elements, so the net dose/atom is considerably increased, probably ten-fold. Spontaneous fission of Th-232 is rare.
There's an extensive body of knowledge on the relative risks of different forms of radiation. One important variable is the form of exposure. Highly-penetrating gamma rays are almost as dangerous on your skin as inside you, but beta and (especially) alpha particles are much more dangerous when they're inside you. One of the reasons people used to worry about strontium-90 is that it deposits in your bones, and stays there.
No, they really are very different in you are talking about naturally abundant isotopes. That is self-evident by the fact that we need to ingest potassium to live.
232Th does not spontaneously initiate fission, but it does decompose by fission. 40K does neither of those things. And 232Th is the most common isotope. The Beta radiation given off by KCl is almost entirely absorbed by surrounding KCl because 40K is somewhere South of 1%. You cannot compare a mole of Th to 1000 moles of KCl and conclude that they are equally dangerous because the contain the same number of radioactive nuclei.
You don't need a study to know that it is true that exposure to ionizing radiation increases your risk of cancer and company. Ionizing radiation is so called because it is energetic enough to strip electrons off of atoms, which breaks/rearranges chemical bonds. There is a finite probability that one of those bonds will belong to a peptide or nucleotide or something else that causes a cell to reproduce uncontrollably. Therefore, every event increases the likelihood.
But I think we agree with each other --- I'm not saying it is a linear relationship in an occupational setting. That will depend on the type of radiation and where it is administered---e.g., getting a high dose of X-ray radiation is not the same as breathing radioactive particulates. And you definitely need studies to unwind all of that.
I agree that the anti-nuclear power movement has been destructive on balance, but people are unfortunately starting to forget the truly horrifying dangers of nuclear weapons.
Yes, I will admit that I know rationally that coal kills more people yearly than nuclear energy probably has done ever but the idea of radiation exposure freaks me out way more than the idea of breathing in coal particulates—and I spent two years as a pipette monkey in a toxicology lab focused on particulates, so I know how dangerous they really are.
(This was at a national lab adjacent to a nuclear waste cleanup site so there was a lot of talk about radiation hazards too.)
It’s a particularly stupid bias because isn’t not like the harms of coal and nuclear are that different on a personal level—elevated cancer and heart disease exist do or both—but coal is deadlier and nuclear is freakier.
Posts like this are one of the reasons why I subscribe to Slow Boring. Anyone who thinks a 2009 study of the costs and benefits of lead paint removal is a "must read" is part of my tribe.
The boilerplate lead paint documents you need to sign for any rental are pretty dystopian when you really read them. In DC at least you just accept you need to sign it since every landlord makes you (they just assume there’s lead paint in the homes). Imagine having to sign away for floorboards that have holes in them, or a furnace putting out dangerous levels of CO.
Lead paint is the bigger issue than lead pipes for most kids in the US. Philly is a good example of this. We have the oldest water infrastructure of any major cities in the US -- our last Water Commissioner had lead service lines -- but high lead levels in kids are almost always a due to lead paint in the home. More specifically, lead paint in rentals which are out of compliance with lead regs.
I attended an interesting panel several years ago on lead by the Harvard project on the sciences of the human past. They had obtained an ice core from the alps that allowed them to trace lead levels back thousands of years. They were able to show that there is no natural background lead levels in the atmosphere. Silver production has led to measurable atmospheric lead levels since the Roman times. They were able to show this by the signal from the Black death when the mines temporarily closed due to the death of the miners and one saw the lead levels briefly drop to near zero.
This was meaningful because alot of the safe levels of lead is based on the notion that there is a natural lead background that produces a "safe" level of lead. But it turns out this is a myth. To a small degree, we've been poisoning ourselves for millenia.
Just because something is at a natural background level doesn't mean it is "safe". The natural level of UV light causes plenty of skin cancer. We can only think in terms of increased risk due to human activity that we may want to modify but dichotomizing this into "safe" and "unsafe" is inherently misleading.
Apparently there isn't much that environmental factors can do to enhance IQ, but there are a lot of ways that the environment can have a negative impact on IQ.
Makes sense - nothing can make you smarter by as much as getting smacked in the head with a shovel can make you dumber.
So while you probably cannot, like, make your baby smarter by playing Mozart to them in the womb, you can try to remove any negative impacts on IQ (lead poisoning, malnutrition etc.) and we can and should do this society-wide.
It *could* be a real thing caused *entirely* by the removal of environmental factors detrimental to intelligence.
How could you tell the difference between a population getting inherently smarter bc of biology and a population better reaching their potential intelligence bc of a better environment?
To be clear, I'm not at all expert in this area. But my understanding was, IQ scores went up through much of the 20th Century, though now levelled off. This is probably not caused by genetic selection for intelligence, but by environmental effects.
As Mike M notes, this could be caused entirely by a reduction in the no. or severity of environmental factors that negatively impact intelligence, such as poor nutrition, then later phaseout of leaded fuel.
Hi Eric. We can cancel your subscription, which will give you a pro-rated refund, and then you can repurchase using the educator's discount here: https://www.slowboring.com/education . Would you like us to do that?
Sorry to troubleshoot this in the comments section. I got the discount offer, but it wouldn't let me use it with this email. Happy to switch the account over to my school email (eric.kumbier@asd.edu.qa), but I can't seem to figure out how to do so.
Sorry to be such a bother. I got the notice in my work email and logged in with it. It only gave me access to the free plan (So I couldn't click on Friday's post). When I tried to sign up for a different plan, the educator discount wasn't available.
If we zoom out here...if we were recommending what a developing country could do to improve its infrastructure, of course water systems would be in the mix of policy considerations. No question about that. Water systems are infrastructure.
I worry about lead levels in urban/metro gardens. That's a much smaller problem but at this point, living in a city, I would pay to have lead testing for my soil if I were to plant vegetables.
"The interstate highway system, he said, raised productivity and GDP a lot."
Where do I go to report this incredibly specious claim? I think this is the great American myth. Like Rome has Romulus and Remus and America has this stupid highway system that everyone thinks was a good idea when it was really an unmitigated disaster.
I mean there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve destroying every black neighborhood and waging chemical war against your own population for 50 years.
There are lots of ways to do that, but they may be slower or more expensive.
The problem with the interstate highway system is the routing through downtowns; the Cross Bronx Expressway, for example, should never have been built. But having a road network to connect cities to outlying areas with lots of stops that can handle different types of vehicles is clearly a good thing. It's just that they should had the interstates go around metro areas rather than raze minority neighborhoods to have them go straight through.
For the most part those parts of the Bronx were not minority neighborhoods when the highway was built. They were white working-class neighborhoods that became minority neighborhoods when the white inhabitants moved out and rents and property values plunged. This is all in Robert Caro's book.
I agree that highway placement in urban areas could be deeply punishing for poorer communities and that the explosion of gas-fueled car driving has had obvious downsides. But the IHS exists now and without it, we would be a far poorer country. So, let's not tear down poorer communities to build new highways, and let's move to electric vehicles. But the IHS will still be critical to maintaining the quality of life almost all of us prefer.
Are you having a conversation with yourself or is that a weird coincidence. I am not sure if you are arguing that Highways are so bad we are better with nothing or if you are arguing highways are not as good as electric trains. Because those are different arguments it is easy to prove that interstate highways are better than off road or little 2 lane roads that do not connect the country.
I think the real American myth, widespread on the left, is that the Interstate Highway System caused suburbanization. It's tied to the idea of induced demand, which is not quite a myth, though overrated.
Discussion of suburbanization doesn’t emphasize enough the role of social conflict caused by left policies such as busing. This put the whole suburbanization project on steroids.
I must commend you, you've been incredibly consistent on this issue and increased my education over the years. With the exception of the Flint (and briefly East Chicago) flashpoint moments, it doesn't seem to capture any public attention.
I have few critiques, it seems obvious to me as well. I gotta say, it's a low ticket price relative to the complete circus that some of these train projects are likely to produce. Count me in.
Great post and as a believer in the Kevin Drum Unified Theory of Lead, I'm a big proponent of any and all actions to get the lead out. So Biden's proposal is great. But I do wonder how much of a *federal* action this has to be. Are states and localities moving out on this? If not, why not? Can it only happen if the federal government pays for it? I know that in California they have just started moving on this, by first requiring community water services (CWSs) to inventory lead service lines and then calling for a timeline for the CWSs to replace the pipes. Presumably this will be captured in future utilities bills, so local users will pay the cost. (And since rich people in California use vastly more water than poorer ones, this could actually be a progressive tax.)
California has a relatively small proportion of lead pipes, so it's less of an issue here. But have other states and cities been forward-thinking on this? And would the Biden bill reward the slothful ones while the ones who took more proactive action lose out?
One thing I don't understand about the lead issue is that as urban areas gentrify and we see more higher-earning families in urban areas, then shouldn't we see an increase in learning disabilities in high-income families that corresponds to their return to cities?
Most people in my age and income bracket would have lived in the suburbs 20 years ago, but like a lot of millennials, I live Instead in a building built in 1925 that prob has lead paint in an old city that also has lead water service lines. Shouldn’t we see a generational effect?
Kevin Drum has all of the data but cities have lower levels of easily accessible lead than they used to, but yeah, there probably is greater lead exposure among those kids than their suburban-raised parents. But rich families probably have less exposure than poor families even in the same city because of greater distance from expressways and less chipping paint among other reasons. Having the advantages of yuppie parents also may disguise some of the impact of similar exposures too.
Thanks for bringing more attention to this. As for cleaning up lead in soil, one relatively easy mitigation strategy is to spread mulch over the soil in areas that have high lead concentrations & where children are likely to spend time i.e. around the outside of houses and in playgrounds. It's not a national, long-term strategy for preventing lead poisoning, but some local grant programs to do mulch mitigation would be really cheap and could help.
If we can credibly guarantee that there will be money for this type of labor, over the next decade, maybe we also get more people to move into the industry? System-scale plumbing contractors start hiring people as apprentices for on-the-job training? The other "real economy" concern is whether you need to build some new factories to produce the replacement pipes -- how does this project compare to the normal consumption of new plumbing mains?
Everything in this article sounds right to me and it would be great to get rid of lead pipes, but it's not like lead pipes turn water into a nerve agent.
The linings of lead pipes are oxidized to form a coating that keeps water out of chemical contact with elemental lead. For comparison, aluminum is a strong enough reducing agent that it reacts spontaneously with water (to produce hydrogen) and oxygen (if you don't know about aluminum air batteries, look it up, it's a fascinating story). However, it forms a self-limiting layer of aluminum oxide that keeps, for example, the contents of a can of soda pop from dissolving the thin walls of an aluminum can. Also many boats are made of aluminum. This is less of an issue now, but you cannot bring mercury thermometers on airplanes because mercury dissolves aluminum oxide and, in theory, a broken thermometer could compromise the structural integrity of the plane. If you've never seen what mercury does to aluminum, go have some fun on YouTube.
What Matt was describing in DC is essentially the same thing that happened in Flint. If the pH gets off (and/or certain ions are introduced to the water) the protective layer dissolves. In the case of DC it was caused by switching chemical treatments, in Flint it was switching the water source and the story about why they didn't check for that is scandalous.
The point is, lead pipes are perfectly safe if used properly. Nowadays you can easily replace them with copper, plastic (which can also leach toxic chemicals), ceramics, etc. But that wasn't always true. There was a time when expanding indoor plumbing and bringing fresh water into houses meant using lead because plastics and ceramics didn't exist, copper was too expensive and, unlike lead, iron oxides (rust) are brittle and flake off, meaning the pipes don't last. So, surely there was a point at which Big Lead was pushing its products needlessly, like leaded gasoline or continuing to use lead paint and lead pipes when better alternatives existed, but there was a time when there were legitimate reasons to build out infrastructure with lead pipes.
Tetraehtyl lead was really horrible because it volatilized the lead and spread it around. And since lead is an element, it cannot be broken down and instead enters the food chain. Besides the horrors of particular emissions, coal-fired electricity plants are horrible because they volatilize mercury, which is also and element and also a neurotoxin. Ditto for burning waste electronics, which are full of toxic elements.
Nope. Whether lead passivates or not is irrelevant. It forms corrosion cells in contact with other materials that can only be limited but not eradicated by corrosion inhibitors.It is never safe to use in plumbing.
Isn't at least part of the point that scandalous incompetence by local government is sort of guaranteed to happen somewhere over the long term? Failing safer is a real benefit.
Your title says it precisely; well-done.
As a minor cavil, there might be no lower limit to a damaging level of lead (the issue is probably untestable), but a true zero lead level is not possible. Measuring the level of a toxicant depends on the measurement technology, which has improved vastly over the past 50 years. Supposing that one molecule of lead in a glass of water is dangerous might have a certain logical appeal but is unrealistic at multiple levels.
Lead is also bad in soil, but the problem might resemble that of asbestos in walls. The technical issue is beyond my knowledge, but the surface of undisturbed soil becomes less hazardous over time (if lead is no longer emitted), and besides the cost, it might actually be less dangerous to leave the soil alone than to try to remove it. Probably there are some sites so contaminated that it would be wise to remediate, but it's a non-trivial task to figure that out.
Yes I agree with all this, except I’d just add that heavily contaminated sites don’t seem to be all that rare. We have never really tested soil systematically, but the urban farming fad led a lot of Brooklyn gentrifiers to get tests done and problems were pretty widespread.
DC tested the soil in the playgrounds run by DC Parks and Rec and found problems in a lot of them. But the National Park Service doesn’t test the NPS parks that are all over the city.
I don't know the details necessary to craft appropriate policy, but procedures like "soil testing" tend to disregard the realities of easy measurement and clear rules, vs actual assessment of danger. For example, if one collects a sample (say) from the top 4 inches, the measurement may be accurate, but likely fails to reflect true hazard, which probably arises mainly from the top 1/4 inch.
As an aside, I'm consistently impressed by your essays despite our differing political perspectives. A good deal of our differing views probably arises from your residence in major urban centers.
Another issue for soils is that remediation is actually pretty blunt. We take away the soil containing the lead and put in new soil. The old soil has to go somewhere - landfill. And the new soil came from somewhere else and it will also contain things. If my backyard contained lead contaminated soil, I'd put a layer of sod on it.
In California they dug up all the old gas stations tank areas and re paved it in the 2000's that makes a difference. back in the day people used to ideal their cars when filling up. That could be done on a national biases we know where the old gas stations are and we know how to rip up and replace concreate.
That seems like a good idea
Getting lead tested on NPS land sounds like a good project for a junior member of Congress seeking to make an impact
How does lead in the soil affect people (if they're not farming in it)? Is it mostly kids playing in the dirt or what?
Yeah, little kids get it on their hands and then wind up eating it.
If the soil sometimes gets churned up by vehicles or digging or dust storms or whatever, it seems likely that some ends up getting inhaled. Presumably that is basically not an issue in grassy medians in humid cities, but on a dirt lot that is used for parking it might be (unless the lead dust has all been blown away over the decades by this same effect).
Also in CA. They have a rule that all dirt by roads must be disposed of as a hazard when even there is construction along the road. Road construction contractors complain about it and point to it as a dumb rule that increases the cost of building roads. My dad was a project in CA and carting away old dirt seamed like a dumb environmental rule at the time but it is a way to deal with the lead in city dirt issues. Or just live in a suburb that was built 1980+
I'm pretty skeptical about hormesis, but the alarm about infinitesimal quantities of radiation is weird. Nowadays it's exceedingly difficult for a researcher to obtain 10 mg of thorium (a radioactive element), but it's no problem at all to get a ton of potassium chloride (which contains 0.01% of a potassium isotope that's ten times more radioactive than thorium).
There is a difference between public perception and sensible regulation. People freaking out over infinitesimal quantities of "radiation" is on par with the great gluten panic, but the actual rules around radioisotopes are based on over a century of study. For one thing, not all radiation is created equal; some is penetrating (Gamma) and some is not (Alpha/Beta). Others can sustain nuclear chain reactions. A Beta particle here and there might cause some local DNA damage, but its comparable to radiation damage from sunlight and cosmic rays and there is specific cellular machinery tasked with fixing it.
I'm not an expert in nuclear chemistry, but I do know that you and I are full of 40K and 14C, which are among the common radioisotopes of light elements that organisms evolved with and that they emit Beta particles (e.g., high-energy electrons) and decay to harmless light elements. Enriched 14C (or 40K) can be harmful, but a bag of KCl is just as benign as a tree or graphite or anything else containing lots of carbon.
Wikipedia tells me that the natural abundance of 232Th is apparently 99% and it decays by spontaneous fission to create heavy elements like Ra and U. And the half-lives of 40K and 232Th differ by a factor of 10, but that is not the same thing as "ten times more radioactive".
I also think the idea that your immune system would respond to ionization radiation is about as sound as homeopathy. But stated above, it is definitely true that each and every exposure to ionizing radiation increases your risk of cancer, et al. Of course, the degree matters a lot here. Spending five hours in an airplane exposes you to an increased intensity of cosmic rays amounting to something like a chest X-ray equivalent of irradiation.
You're right that the dangers from thorium and potassium are different, but not all THAT different. You're right that when thorium disintegrates it gives rise to a cascade of radioactive elements, so the net dose/atom is considerably increased, probably ten-fold. Spontaneous fission of Th-232 is rare.
There's an extensive body of knowledge on the relative risks of different forms of radiation. One important variable is the form of exposure. Highly-penetrating gamma rays are almost as dangerous on your skin as inside you, but beta and (especially) alpha particles are much more dangerous when they're inside you. One of the reasons people used to worry about strontium-90 is that it deposits in your bones, and stays there.
No, they really are very different in you are talking about naturally abundant isotopes. That is self-evident by the fact that we need to ingest potassium to live.
232Th does not spontaneously initiate fission, but it does decompose by fission. 40K does neither of those things. And 232Th is the most common isotope. The Beta radiation given off by KCl is almost entirely absorbed by surrounding KCl because 40K is somewhere South of 1%. You cannot compare a mole of Th to 1000 moles of KCl and conclude that they are equally dangerous because the contain the same number of radioactive nuclei.
No, that was radium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls Strontium-90 is produced in an atomic bomb explosion. Its accumulation in the environment was an important motive for the atmospheric test ban. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_Nuclear_Test_Ban_Treaty
You don't need a study to know that it is true that exposure to ionizing radiation increases your risk of cancer and company. Ionizing radiation is so called because it is energetic enough to strip electrons off of atoms, which breaks/rearranges chemical bonds. There is a finite probability that one of those bonds will belong to a peptide or nucleotide or something else that causes a cell to reproduce uncontrollably. Therefore, every event increases the likelihood.
But I think we agree with each other --- I'm not saying it is a linear relationship in an occupational setting. That will depend on the type of radiation and where it is administered---e.g., getting a high dose of X-ray radiation is not the same as breathing radioactive particulates. And you definitely need studies to unwind all of that.
Yea I don't think hormesis can be excluded, I just don't think it's very likely. But also I don't think linearity at low doses is very likely.
But the whole very "hot" (sorry) topic of radiation is off-topic. Matt was writing about lead.
I agree that the anti-nuclear power movement has been destructive on balance, but people are unfortunately starting to forget the truly horrifying dangers of nuclear weapons.
Yes, I will admit that I know rationally that coal kills more people yearly than nuclear energy probably has done ever but the idea of radiation exposure freaks me out way more than the idea of breathing in coal particulates—and I spent two years as a pipette monkey in a toxicology lab focused on particulates, so I know how dangerous they really are.
(This was at a national lab adjacent to a nuclear waste cleanup site so there was a lot of talk about radiation hazards too.)
It’s a particularly stupid bias because isn’t not like the harms of coal and nuclear are that different on a personal level—elevated cancer and heart disease exist do or both—but coal is deadlier and nuclear is freakier.
Risk perception is maybe 20% based on cognition and 80% on visceral reactions. We do our best to be sensible, but it's not so easy sometimes.
I'd say that lead paint abatement in dwelling places is similarly low hanging fruit.
Yes, Elise Gould’s cost-benefit calculation on lead paint is a must read
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717145/
Posts like this are one of the reasons why I subscribe to Slow Boring. Anyone who thinks a 2009 study of the costs and benefits of lead paint removal is a "must read" is part of my tribe.
The boilerplate lead paint documents you need to sign for any rental are pretty dystopian when you really read them. In DC at least you just accept you need to sign it since every landlord makes you (they just assume there’s lead paint in the homes). Imagine having to sign away for floorboards that have holes in them, or a furnace putting out dangerous levels of CO.
Lead paint is the bigger issue than lead pipes for most kids in the US. Philly is a good example of this. We have the oldest water infrastructure of any major cities in the US -- our last Water Commissioner had lead service lines -- but high lead levels in kids are almost always a due to lead paint in the home. More specifically, lead paint in rentals which are out of compliance with lead regs.
I attended an interesting panel several years ago on lead by the Harvard project on the sciences of the human past. They had obtained an ice core from the alps that allowed them to trace lead levels back thousands of years. They were able to show that there is no natural background lead levels in the atmosphere. Silver production has led to measurable atmospheric lead levels since the Roman times. They were able to show this by the signal from the Black death when the mines temporarily closed due to the death of the miners and one saw the lead levels briefly drop to near zero.
This was meaningful because alot of the safe levels of lead is based on the notion that there is a natural lead background that produces a "safe" level of lead. But it turns out this is a myth. To a small degree, we've been poisoning ourselves for millenia.
Just because something is at a natural background level doesn't mean it is "safe". The natural level of UV light causes plenty of skin cancer. We can only think in terms of increased risk due to human activity that we may want to modify but dichotomizing this into "safe" and "unsafe" is inherently misleading.
Apparently there isn't much that environmental factors can do to enhance IQ, but there are a lot of ways that the environment can have a negative impact on IQ.
Makes sense - nothing can make you smarter by as much as getting smacked in the head with a shovel can make you dumber.
So while you probably cannot, like, make your baby smarter by playing Mozart to them in the womb, you can try to remove any negative impacts on IQ (lead poisoning, malnutrition etc.) and we can and should do this society-wide.
is the Flynn Effect not a real thing? (a sincere question!)
It *could* be a real thing caused *entirely* by the removal of environmental factors detrimental to intelligence.
How could you tell the difference between a population getting inherently smarter bc of biology and a population better reaching their potential intelligence bc of a better environment?
To be clear, I'm not at all expert in this area. But my understanding was, IQ scores went up through much of the 20th Century, though now levelled off. This is probably not caused by genetic selection for intelligence, but by environmental effects.
As Mike M notes, this could be caused entirely by a reduction in the no. or severity of environmental factors that negatively impact intelligence, such as poor nutrition, then later phaseout of leaded fuel.
It's real in terms of measurement, but no one has a bulletproof theory of why it's happening.
Educator here. Just wondering about the educator discount and how to access it.
Hi Eric. We can cancel your subscription, which will give you a pro-rated refund, and then you can repurchase using the educator's discount here: https://www.slowboring.com/education . Would you like us to do that?
Me too please! Technically I'm an educator and a student as I'm teachers training college! Those discounts are multiplicative right ;-) ?
Canceled!
Sure, Marc! Thanks. Let me know once you have done so.
I have done so!
Sorry to troubleshoot this in the comments section. I got the discount offer, but it wouldn't let me use it with this email. Happy to switch the account over to my school email (eric.kumbier@asd.edu.qa), but I can't seem to figure out how to do so.
Update: I resubscribed then switched the email address. I paid another $80 though.
Sorry to be such a bother. I got the notice in my work email and logged in with it. It only gave me access to the free plan (So I couldn't click on Friday's post). When I tried to sign up for a different plan, the educator discount wasn't available.
If we zoom out here...if we were recommending what a developing country could do to improve its infrastructure, of course water systems would be in the mix of policy considerations. No question about that. Water systems are infrastructure.
I worry about lead levels in urban/metro gardens. That's a much smaller problem but at this point, living in a city, I would pay to have lead testing for my soil if I were to plant vegetables.
"The interstate highway system, he said, raised productivity and GDP a lot."
Where do I go to report this incredibly specious claim? I think this is the great American myth. Like Rome has Romulus and Remus and America has this stupid highway system that everyone thinks was a good idea when it was really an unmitigated disaster.
Imagine moving Oregon blueberries cross-country in the 1940s. Then multiply by a million other examples.
I mean there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve destroying every black neighborhood and waging chemical war against your own population for 50 years.
There are lots of ways to do that, but they may be slower or more expensive.
The problem with the interstate highway system is the routing through downtowns; the Cross Bronx Expressway, for example, should never have been built. But having a road network to connect cities to outlying areas with lots of stops that can handle different types of vehicles is clearly a good thing. It's just that they should had the interstates go around metro areas rather than raze minority neighborhoods to have them go straight through.
For the most part those parts of the Bronx were not minority neighborhoods when the highway was built. They were white working-class neighborhoods that became minority neighborhoods when the white inhabitants moved out and rents and property values plunged. This is all in Robert Caro's book.
Fair enough - point still stands that those neighborhoods shouldn't have been razed regardless of their population demographics.
I agree that highway placement in urban areas could be deeply punishing for poorer communities and that the explosion of gas-fueled car driving has had obvious downsides. But the IHS exists now and without it, we would be a far poorer country. So, let's not tear down poorer communities to build new highways, and let's move to electric vehicles. But the IHS will still be critical to maintaining the quality of life almost all of us prefer.
Are you having a conversation with yourself or is that a weird coincidence. I am not sure if you are arguing that Highways are so bad we are better with nothing or if you are arguing highways are not as good as electric trains. Because those are different arguments it is easy to prove that interstate highways are better than off road or little 2 lane roads that do not connect the country.
Well, I have many many conversations with myself, but not in this particular case
I'd never spell my name "mark"
I think the real American myth, widespread on the left, is that the Interstate Highway System caused suburbanization. It's tied to the idea of induced demand, which is not quite a myth, though overrated.
Discussion of suburbanization doesn’t emphasize enough the role of social conflict caused by left policies such as busing. This put the whole suburbanization project on steroids.
Matt -
I must commend you, you've been incredibly consistent on this issue and increased my education over the years. With the exception of the Flint (and briefly East Chicago) flashpoint moments, it doesn't seem to capture any public attention.
I have few critiques, it seems obvious to me as well. I gotta say, it's a low ticket price relative to the complete circus that some of these train projects are likely to produce. Count me in.
Extremely annoyed that as a first day full year subscriber I can no longer login
And then, magically, I can.
Also welcome reading this every day makes my life slightly better.
Great post and as a believer in the Kevin Drum Unified Theory of Lead, I'm a big proponent of any and all actions to get the lead out. So Biden's proposal is great. But I do wonder how much of a *federal* action this has to be. Are states and localities moving out on this? If not, why not? Can it only happen if the federal government pays for it? I know that in California they have just started moving on this, by first requiring community water services (CWSs) to inventory lead service lines and then calling for a timeline for the CWSs to replace the pipes. Presumably this will be captured in future utilities bills, so local users will pay the cost. (And since rich people in California use vastly more water than poorer ones, this could actually be a progressive tax.)
California has a relatively small proportion of lead pipes, so it's less of an issue here. But have other states and cities been forward-thinking on this? And would the Biden bill reward the slothful ones while the ones who took more proactive action lose out?
On California, see https://blogs.edf.org/health/2017/01/19/california-sb1398-on-lsls/
One thing I don't understand about the lead issue is that as urban areas gentrify and we see more higher-earning families in urban areas, then shouldn't we see an increase in learning disabilities in high-income families that corresponds to their return to cities?
Most people in my age and income bracket would have lived in the suburbs 20 years ago, but like a lot of millennials, I live Instead in a building built in 1925 that prob has lead paint in an old city that also has lead water service lines. Shouldn’t we see a generational effect?
Kevin Drum has all of the data but cities have lower levels of easily accessible lead than they used to, but yeah, there probably is greater lead exposure among those kids than their suburban-raised parents. But rich families probably have less exposure than poor families even in the same city because of greater distance from expressways and less chipping paint among other reasons. Having the advantages of yuppie parents also may disguise some of the impact of similar exposures too.
Hey, did youse see that Joe Biden once said Andrew Cuomo's balls were infrastructure?
Thanks for bringing more attention to this. As for cleaning up lead in soil, one relatively easy mitigation strategy is to spread mulch over the soil in areas that have high lead concentrations & where children are likely to spend time i.e. around the outside of houses and in playgrounds. It's not a national, long-term strategy for preventing lead poisoning, but some local grant programs to do mulch mitigation would be really cheap and could help.
That's exactly right. Much remediation is leaving things in place so long as it won't make it to the water supply and we can eliminate human contact.
During wildfire season, mulch is a fire hazard. Having it around your house is especially bad as it makes it more likely that your house will burn.
What does one do with the old lead pipes?
If we can credibly guarantee that there will be money for this type of labor, over the next decade, maybe we also get more people to move into the industry? System-scale plumbing contractors start hiring people as apprentices for on-the-job training? The other "real economy" concern is whether you need to build some new factories to produce the replacement pipes -- how does this project compare to the normal consumption of new plumbing mains?