R with the tidyverse package is amazing once you get over the learning curve. It’s so much easier to simply type a few lines of code then to fiddle with the Excel GUI, plus the ability to customize the plot is much, much better in R.

Yes making a simple plot in Excel is relatively easy, but try making something evening remotely complex and it’s terrible. A box plot is a great example of this, 2 lines of plotting code in R for a basic plot but an absolute nightmare to create in Excel.

As stated in the article, this isn’t a big problem for communities with centralized water treatment systems, rather for individual homes drinking well water which is contaminated by agriculture.

In a municipal treatment plant you have a few options for removing nitrates including reverse osmosis (membrane filters with very small pores, allowing them to reject very small molecules), ion exchange (swap nitrate with another, less harmful ion), or biological treatment (use microorganisms to turn nitrate into nitrogen gas).

In your home, reverse osmosis is really the only feasible option, which can be expensive to install and costly to maintain. Ideally, some sort of tax on fertilizer would be used to pay for these in house treatments, but that would increase the cost of food.

Sadly this is pretty common. Here are some nasty pictures from a recent one in greater Vancouver.

I’m a water engineer with a PhD, so not a tech nerd but definitely a nerd :) I came here mostly because I find the Reddit app annoying and the app I was using came here.

I don’t know the details about alum production (assuming that is what you are referring to), but there are many alternative coagulants available now. Sure the supply logistics would be incredibly challenging and many people would have to boil their water or use point-of-use filters, but this take is pretty doomer in my opinion. Most plants use alum because it’s cheap and easy, not because it’s their only option.

This is very interesting. Currently, most ion exchange systems that remove PFAS have to dispose of their brine as hazardous waste, which is very costly and doesn’t necessarily destroy PFAS - in Florida, for example, they inject the brine into a deep aquifer.

A lot of novel technologies target PFAS destruction in these concentrated waste streams, but often further concentration is required before you can effectively destroy PFAS with advanced oxidation processes. If they could use low-UV to destroy it without further concentration or additional chemicals (beside the salt already used to regenerate the resin), ion exchange would become a much better solution for treated PFAS contaminated water.

Water is disinfected with either chlorine, chloramine (ammonia + chlorine), ozone, or UV light. In North America chlorine is almost universal because it provides disinfection residual, which keeps water safe while it is travelling from the treatment plant to the consumer. Fluoride is added solely as a supplement to improve dental health.