Alaska gold mine arsenic discharge

Let me tell you that a lot of people have been drinking water that has ten or a hundred times as much lead as the EPA allows. And it wasn't lead, it was actually arsenic — they built a gold mine in Alaska, and the environmentalists said you cannot release any water from your facility — you're going to have river water coming in, you're going to process the gold, and you must be below something like one part per million of arsenic in the water. The interesting thing is, the river coming in had seven parts per million arsenic. So they had to lower the arsenic and put the clean water back into the river that had seven ppm. That was the natural level of arsenic in that water. So there are environmental problems, but a lot of these requirements don't make a lot of sense. They are real socio-engineering problems.