First off, water standards were weak in the first place (because of lobbying from the chemical industry) and have been weakened several times since, so they've become a joke. If you're over the federal limits, you're in pretty bad territory.
It's also not a "nothingburger." How much area do you think one liter covers in ground area? Now go look at the giant cargo planes dropping the stuff thousands of pounds at a time?
All that crap washes down into waterways or leeches into the soil, then into the water table.
> Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
...that's not what that indicates, no. It could also be that lead is very inconsistently spread through the chemical.
Chromium doesn't have a safe level, just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
Before you start hammering away that the chances to you or me are extremely low: so are house fires, murder, etc. They still happen, and they happen to somebody. A low concentration of chromium consumed by a large population will definitely cause health impacts.
There are areas on Earth where the natural background radiation is literally dozens of times higher than normal. People there don't have elevated cancer risk or shorter life spans.
Radon does cause elevated lung cancer risk, though.
> just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
This is absolutely untrue. Living organisms _must_ deal with damaged DNA all the time or they wouldn’t be able to live for very long. There are many ways our environment can cause DNA damage, and radiation is definitely one of them. At low levels of radiation our own self–repair mechanisms easily fix the damage and no harm is actually done. This is especially good since we live in a constant bath of radiation all the time. We cannot escape it so it’s a good thing we don’t need to.
What isn’t good is that because of politics and fear most government regulations do not recognize this. Flawed safety regulations like this cost us a huge amount of money every year, both directly in the form of higher costs and indirectly in the form of lost opportunities.
It's also not a "nothingburger." How much area do you think one liter covers in ground area? Now go look at the giant cargo planes dropping the stuff thousands of pounds at a time?
All that crap washes down into waterways or leeches into the soil, then into the water table.
> Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
...that's not what that indicates, no. It could also be that lead is very inconsistently spread through the chemical.
Chromium doesn't have a safe level, just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
Before you start hammering away that the chances to you or me are extremely low: so are house fires, murder, etc. They still happen, and they happen to somebody. A low concentration of chromium consumed by a large population will definitely cause health impacts.