Nickel-gold plating a whole board

It's probably under an apartment complex by now. This was late 60's, before there was an EPA. I was just a kid, in college with a wife and two jobs, hardly the situation to start a career as an environmentsl wistle-blower. Back then the refineries and chemical plants up-river were dumping many million times as much gunk into the Mississippi as that little shop was dumping used etchant into a vacant lot. And a lot worse than iron and copper.

John

What part of 'NOT THE GOLD' do you not understand, idiot?

Nothing you ever say applies, AlwaysWrong. What's new?

Wrong again, AlwaysWrong.

You know *nothing*, as you constantly prove here.

All the more reason to report it. Iron - from the ferric chloride etching agent - and the copper that it etched away may have been the major pollutants by weight, but modern boards do seem to depend on electroless nicket to start the plating of plated-through holes, which adds another metal to the mix, plus the phosphorus-based reducing agent. Iron and copper won't be the only pollutants.

Back when I was graduate student in chemistry in the 1960's, we used chromic acid to clean up anything that needed plating or etching, and we weren't allowed to throw it down the sink, any more than your board shop was allowed throw its waste into the regular sewers.

I don't think that the refineries and the chemical plants on the Mississippi were allowed to dump toxic wastes into the non-tidal part of the river, even then. Chicago had a very elaborate sewage treatment system - the Zimmerman process -

which cleaned up its sewage enough to let them dump it in the Missouri, where the cleaned up water constituted a substantial proportion of the flow.

Reputedly the water went through three sets of kidneys - on average - on its way down to New Orleans.

The pulp and paper mill in Burnie, Tasmania had a rather larger Zimmerman process wet oxidation unit than Chicago's for disposing of the lignin you extract from wood in the process of turning it into cellulose pulp and eventually paper. My father was deeply involved in buying the system and got to see the Chicago sewage works in the process.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

As I mentioned, they plated a mil of gold directly onto copper. They bought some expensive gold plating solution and, when it was depleted, sent it back to recover the residual gold content.

They didn't do PTH, either. For vias we used thru-hole leads, soldered on both sides, or wire jumpers. Makes for interesting layouts.

Well, they sure did. You could taste the various chemicals in the drinking water in New Orleans. I recall phenols as being my least favorite.

That was yet another reason to move to San Francisco. We drink melted snow, piped in from Hetch Hetchy in the Sierras.

John

I don't think that's possible. IF it were, all he'd have left is a brain stem.

Oh? What are your favorite earrings? Do you have any really nice necklaces or ankle bracelets?

John

Right. The 2010 findings should've definitively affected the 1996 settlement. Brilliant.

The epidemiology and proofs always follow the allegations, (and the exposures) by decades, long after the lawyers have been paid.

A particular point of the Hinkley allegations was that the complaints were various, not consistent as would be expected from a single cause / agent.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

See?!

He needs ankle bracelets like these:

I didn't say a goddamned thing about owning any, nor anything about styles or preferences, idiot.

You really are totally dishonest with your unmarked snips.

What you ignored was

"If you follow up the link to groundwater contamination in Hinkley,

you find that the same sentence is directly followed by the observation that "However, considering the survey spanned a time period of 22 to 32 years after PG&E=92s discontinued use of hexavalent chromium, it is unknown how many cancer cases were not included in the study due to the relocation of families or the untimely deaths of afflicted residents of Hinkley."

In other words, the cancer survey doesn't have much to do with the period when people were exposed to hexavalent chromium in their drinking water. "

Which is to say that that particular bit of evidence had very little to say about the effects of the ground-water contamination that prompted the law-suit.

If you've got access to other studies, do point us to them - one could scarcely trust your interpretation of stuff that you might be implicitly claiming to have seen.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's more likely to have been from agricultural chemicals. It's possible to inspect refineries and chemical plants, but farmers do what they like, and there's a lot of farm land on either side of the Missouri-Mississipi system, all of which drains into the rivers.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

hat

No, I just didn't read all your stuff. I didn't see the point. You think a 2010 study should've governed a 1996 settlement. Further, to you that's some sort of indirect proof of the allegations.

Was perfectly worth ignoring. None of that FUD's dispositive of anything, and none is responsive to my point that the afflictions were various yet the alleged exposure singular; that doesn't scan.

So you're saying, implicitly, that there hadn't been enough time for people to get sick as of the lawsuit? In which case those who were sick weren't so from the alleged exposure? And the settlement was paid to people not sick from the exposure?

Oh I'm not that interested. You don't believe science anyhow.

Maybe you could supply a study indicating that everyone got the same kind of cancer or ailment, indicating a common exposure to a single agent?

It's my recollection the plaintiffs had every condition under the sun, which is totally inconsistent with a single cause / agent.

That is, for the thick-headed, if 100 people had liver failure or bladder cancer that's a clear indication of an environmental exposure. But bladder cancer indicates a carcinogen that's been consumed and excreted. Lung cancer =3D inhaled, etc.. Different mechanics, different mechanisms. Thyroid has different affinities to liver, stomach different vulnerabilities still.

A single agent does not generally cause a broad spectrum of ailments-- toothaches, headaches, diverse cancers, autoimmune, rashes, etc--at roughly non-remarkable rates above background--that's a witch hunt.

Pollution is bad, of course. But don't make it worse than it is.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I bet you have one of those cute navel piercings.

John

Idiot. The nasty stuff in the water was from refineries and chemical plants upriver. Farmers don't dump mass quantities of phenols into the water. And nobody was inspecting the refineries because there was no EPA, no Clean Water Act in those days.

Richard Nixon proposed the EPA, and it started up in late 1970. The Clean Water Act passed in 1977.

John

Here's the full scoop on Brockovich and Hinkley:

Brockovich writes in with her response, which could easily be confused for Bill's writings,

and Fumento disposes of her in detail.

It's just as I said. The residents complained of all sorts of illnesses, not one. And, more damning, the EPA flatly states there is no evidence of oral toxicity, only inhaled.

So, the whole contaminated water thing is a red herring. You get ill from decades of grinding and welding stainless, not water.

If you poke around a little, it's just been discovered that Chicago has mega-levels of Cr-VI in their water.

(Personally, I hear Obama blames George Bush.)

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Register your bet and one year of your salary at Las Vegas.

Then, I get the money. I have no piercings and no tattoos, you pathetic, immature idiot.

..and that is why only certain ladies left these marks, and only during certain times of their period? ..and furthermore, cleaning of the surface was of no help?