Tesla headquarters spills gallons of lime-green liquid into Bay Area street
Tesla headquarters spills gallons of lime-green liquid into Bay Area street
66 comments
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The headline saying “gallons” doesn’t really imply “550 gallons“ which was the actual amount. That’s a lot of pollution.
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Well, 12 gallons, contaminating 500 that they pumped out.
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The liquid, which the Palo Alto Fire Department has deemed to be a nonhazardous mixture of borax, lye (also called sodium hydroxide) and green dye, spilled out of the Tesla office at 1501 Page Mill Road onto Hanover Street.
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How is lye nonhazardous? Can't it cause serious chemical burns? Maybe it's just in low enough concentration that that's not a concern.
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Okay, now I have more "why" questions.
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Water cooling for a set of computers. Additives prevent bacteria growth.
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The liquid, which the Palo Alto Fire Department has deemed to be a nonhazardous mixture of borax, lye (also called sodium hydroxide) and green dye,
One of the workers told Hedblom that the liquid was a coolant. That’s also what the fire department told the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, which wrote in its Oct. 18 spill report that the liquid was “used for the chiller system to cool the Tesla Artificial Intelligence Supercomputer.”
“The Palo Alto Fire Department recovered approximately 550 gallons of the mixture from the storm drain,” the report said. “The incident occurred while Tesla personnel were draining the system.”
That's quite a liquid-cooled computer that they've got going on.
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The article mentions that they said the initial spill was 12 gallons but then mixed with water in the drain, which is where the 550 gallon number comes from. That's coming from Tesla, so it might be them trying to downplay the incident, so take it with a grain of salt. But it does seem to make more sense than a single computer needing 550 gallons of coolant.
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That’s quite a liquid-cooled computer that they’ve got going on.
Well... it's air-cooled now.
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I suspect it was the entire building's chiller in which that really isn't that much. When you consider the run of pipes depending on where the outdoor tower is.
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“The Palo Alto Fire Department recovered approximately 550 gallons of the mixture from the storm drain,” the report said. “The incident occurred while Tesla personnel were draining the system.”
Put Lonnie in jail, ffs.
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Elon probably told them to dump the coolant in the street because he thought it would be a very funny joke. And probably also told them to put the green dye in first.
Sounds like the sort of thing he would think is hilariously funny.
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Is lye a common thing for people to use as coolant? I’m not saying it’s not, I’ve just never heard of it.
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mildly concentrated sodium hydroxide solutions would corrode the living fuck out of aluminum pretty quickly (https://www.calpaclab.com/aluminum-chemical-compatibility-chart/), especially when hot and circulating, so no
could have been a kind of additive maybe? but then it won't be a lot of it. borax forms a gel or at least high viscosity solution when mixed with glycols so both can't be used at the same time as a coolant
Dye might be fluorescein, it fluoresces under UV (duh) could be useful in checking what's this thing
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It's possible they didn't properly treat the liquid they were using as coolant and needed the lye and borax to remove scaling and that it actually wasn't the coolant itself. That would also explain not having the proper permits for storing the chemicals if they were just being used for cleaning. Though wouldn't be surprised if they were then just going to dump it down the drain anyway...
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I have absolutely no idea.
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It continued into a stream where it didn't touch natural areas.
What a bizarre double-think sentence.
"It's beyond the environment. There's nothing out there! All there is sea, and birds, and fish. And 20,000 tons of crude oil. And a fire. And the front of the ship that fell off. But there's nothing else out there. It's a complete void!"
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Musk spewing bile, as usual.
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Tesla out here trying to kill the Toons from ToonTown!
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"Because at this point, why the hell not"
—Elon Musk, probably
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Sounds yummy
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Really. Someone spills a few gallons of nonhazardous cleaning fluid on a street, and this becomes a highly-upvoted article with dozens of comments on a global news community?
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Tesla broke the law on storing hazardous materials and as a result spilled 550 gallons of mildly dangerous cleaning fluid onto a public street.
It's not a national news story, you're right, but it's also not nothing. Mostly it's just interesting as one more tidbit of information about how they do things.
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It's not a national news story, you're right
And this is fundamentally my point here. This is a trivial little story that at most warrants a paragraph in a local newspaper somewhere. Big companies have little spills of random stuff all the time. But since this particular company is the current hot target for Internet rage, its clickbait potential is vast and people are eager to dive in to it for their Two Minutes Hate.
If people really want a meaningful story about Tesla's bad environmental practices or safety procedures or whatever to get angry about, do a little legwork to find some actually meaningful incident or perhaps some kind of study to determine larger scale patterns. The focus on this particular news item should be embarassing for Tesla opponents. Is this really all that it takes? Or all that they can find?
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If only people cared about what you think as much as you seem to.
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Wait, this comment is satire right? Please?
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66 comments