Letter to the Editor: Intel Needs a Better Way of Managing Emissions

Submitted by Barbara Rockwell, Placitas resident and the author of “Boiling Frogs, Intel vs. the Village”

Intel plans to use a new version of the old oxidizers/incinerators, emission control technology in its new expansion, a technology that is now more than thirty years old. Burning off the emissions was always unreliable resulting in breakdowns that sent the full blast of toxic emissions into the surrounding neighborhoods. Intel’s own Excess Emissions Reports document that the thermal oxidizers are down an average of two days a month.  Not only that, some of the dozens of chemicals are made more toxic by burning, e.g.  HMDS or hexamethyldisilazane is converted into crystalline silica by burning it at the high temps used by the incinerators.  Crystalline silica causes deadly pulmonary fibrosis.  Several villagers have died of this relatively rare disease.  Intel denies this fact even though the material safety data sheet for HMDS clearly states that it should not be exposed to high temps.  

There are other better methods for controlling toxic emissions.  One is composting, another is supercritical carbon dioxide (SCORR) a method developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory 20 years ago.  This method uses no toxic chemicals in a closed-loop system that wastes no water, saving hundreds of millions of gallons of water that Intel sucks up from our declining aquifer.  SCORR was touted as “the next stop on the superconductor highway.”  IBM and Intel both tested it and had “good results but not better results”  as though saving the water and eliminating the toxics was not a better result in itself.  

What happened to SCORR?  I have no idea and have never been able to get an answer.