Groundwater contamination is the worst that's happening with this process since seismic anomalies created by the same will most likely be isolated and easily blamed on nature-Fracking is pretty frikkin' whack, it seems akin to the gold mining industry returning to 1890s technology to uncover the juice.

Recycled mix (using old asphalt with other "stuff" that can be put into mix to get rid of it..like rubber tires) doesn't lay as well as new asphalt mix or hold up as well.

Since old mix uses old asphalt, it typically has oil, gasoline, diesel, etc soaked into it. All of these substances degrade/eat asphalt over time. It's why they don't use asphalt around fuel pumps, because all of the constant and pure spillage would eat holes in it. Turns the asphalt gummy...goes right into it and sometimes thru to the sub-grade rock and then soil. Also motorcycle kick stands don't do well on asphalt, contaminated or not..especially on hot days. Asphalt will become pliable on really hot days and a focused direct pressure like a motorcycle kickstand can punch a hole into it that be deep enough to let the bike tip over. Use a wood block or piece of plywood to fix this and spread the pressure.

I used to work in the asphalt business, mostly rolling it. My dad worked in it more substantially than myself working on airport jobs, highways, etc. Many of those jobs won't allow old asphalt to be used in their mix. And they are big enough to force plants to switch over from remixed (old and new) to all new mixes. You'll notice that jobs done with the new mixes hold up much longer, look better, lay better, hold their heat better during the laying process, and come out much smoother looking and less "dirty looking" upon finish. I am guessing at this, but I believe it to be because the asphalt has more tar and less other chemicals and the tar is able to absorb any dirt you might pick up when you move to existing surfaces onto the new asphalt. Where the remix (containing old) has gasoline, etc breaking down the tar and less fresh tar to begin with, so that little bit of dirt you pick up transfers to the remix asphalt like a magnet.

Highways probably won't have as much surface area covered in long term spillage as stop and go traffic where it will be focused at the lights, stop signs, along edge of the streets where people park. But the highway will have big sections of highly contaminated asphalt where semis flip, car wrecks occur, etc. So these same sections if they are remixing it on the go, will end up with a bunch of really bad asphalt on or just after it if they don't throw it out.

And to clarify a few things upon incase people are unfamiliar.

Asphalt plants are usually multi purpose. They are usually a stone quarry with an asphalt plant situated somewhere on site. They filter and crush the stone into piles for sub grade work of various needs. And they draw from these piles to feed the asphalt plant. They do new mix and recycled mix (old mix) which I'll explain below. They also often times have sealer (the black coating you put on parking lots and driveways), I'll explain it below. Roofing tar, regular/asphalt tar, and crack filler..and I'll cover these below as well.

The plants have some human guesswork involved, they have to estimate tonnage and how much tar should be added. They screw up pretty often. It wasn't unheard of for us to get super tarry asphalt mixes where it was like goo coming out of the truck. Or no-tar mixes where it was just slightly black painted rocks. Or mixes where we called them "burnt" where they pumped in their cleaning mixture into the mix and it was breaking down the mixture to help get it out of the hoppers of the plant. These were usually people being trained who hit the wrong button without realizing it.

The plants have to clean the mixtures out of the hopper (where they dump it into the truck) to cycle over to a new mixture they keep in on-site silo looking things that stir and heat it. Which the silos also have to be cleaned at the end of the day or heated all night lest they hardened and stop up the whole thing. They usually stop heating all night as it gets closer to winter season because they don't do enough business to make it worthwhile.

Ok mixtures:

I didn't mention base mix anywhere...but it's why they typically have to switch over to different mixes, because places need base mix instead of finish layer....the layer you see when finished looks less rocky than base and is pliable.

Base mix = larger aggregate rocks, much more rocky. Doesn't have much fine rock in it. It's meant to be something you can quickly lay that will hold up the weight of heavy vehicles right away. Usually this is only used on fresh roadways where they are laying directly over rock sub-grades. It makes it easier to lay the finish layer smoothly, makes for a cleaner looking job by locking the rock and it's dust in...and is cheaper than using all finish. You can almost go from laying base mix to laying finish layer right on top of it with no delay. You can't do this with two layers of finish, because it's too pliable and it has to cool down for the heavy vehicles to drive over it without squishing it out and messing up the layer you just laid.

New mix asphalt = Tar mixture with aggregate like fine almost sand like rocks along with larger rocks to give it stability larger rocks are maybe the size of your pinkie nail at the largest. Tar is mixed throughout, the whole mix is constantly stirred and heated inside the plant, drawn into the hopper and dumped in a truck that pulls underneath. I am told that this mix used to be even better in the past, but now air regulations require them to "inject" their dust from rock crushing into the mixes so again this can cause the mix to be less tarry due to the dust being absorbed and they can completely ruin it by injecting too much.

SCAM ALERT: Look below remix as it pertains to both.

Remix (old and new) asphalt = Very similar to new mix, except they grind up old asphalt that they have sitting on-site in the stone quarry congealing into a big pile depending on it's contamination. This will depend on percentage they are legally required/allowed to put into these mixes. Less of the remix in the mixture, the better it is....less contaminates. Sometimes they even put rubber tires and other rubber products into the mixture. Although they don't do that much here. SOMETIMES it is desirable to have rubber in the mixture like running tracks, where they are springy. This is a special mixture, and it's a massive PITA to lay because it's really gummy and sticks to everything along the process.

SCAM ALERT: They typically do this to older people. But someone will stop and tell you they are working on a big site close, and they are going to have some extra material at the end. Usually you would dump this at the plant or somewhere you have set aside. They want to help you get a new looking driveway. They will lay the asphalt less than an inch thick. It will look really good when they finish. A year later it will be broken apart in most cases. Because they didn't tar, and they laid it too thin. You can lay asphalt thinner if you tar really well....but you want to lay it at least a inch and a half per layer or so. Sometimes you have to lay it thin near man holes and drains to not block water. So don't go crazy on somebody because of this if you see them doing it in certain places. Generally they try to average an inch and a half across a job per layer on finish. Thicker on base mixes since it has larger rocks in it and it has to be at least as thick as the biggest rock in it.

Sealer (the black coating you put on parking lots and driveways) - This is almost like a black paint in some circumstances. Some of it has chemicals, I think creosote, which react to the sunlight and cure it to seal it to the asphalt. Depending on what you buy, you may have to mix water into it to make it suitable for the task. Some come pre-mixed and you just have to stir. Usually you put two coatings on new asphalt, one coat if it's been sealed before. Sealer WILL NOT make your driveway last longer by any noticeable degree. It will make it look dark, and repel chemical spills to some degree. However chemicals will still penetrate as you can't clean up everything that drops. ALSO, sealer makes your driveway much slicker. This is why they don't use sealer on roadways, if they are using some kind of treatment it's something else because sealer fills in all of the fine holes in asphalt and makes it more slippery because of this..especially in the rain. Sealer has to cure for a couple days, you can't drive on it and it can't get wet. So listen to them when they say they don't want to seal it due to weather. Don't let them seal it in the spring or fall. Do it in the summer so it's nice and hot and not much moisture. Sealer looks more brown going down than black. But it cures to black.....it almost looks like chocolate cake mix. Dunno if they taste the same.

If you are sealing your own driveway, do not get it on you. It burns like a mother, I've gotten it on myself and if you don't clean it off right away it will burn you like a really bad sunburn after being exposed to sunlight for awhile. Some people are not bothered by creosote (if this is the correct chemical in sealer)...but better to not find out..because it hurts if you are.

SCAM ALERT: People will seal your driveways with motor oil or even too watered down sealer. They look very similar going down. There is no easy way to tell the difference besides knowing what they smell like. The first rain will turn your motor oil covered driveway into a mess. We have gypsies in the area pretend to be local businesses and pull things like this, it's bad. They disappear at the end of summer and the businesses are left with people pissed off.

Roofing tar - Runnier and less thick than regular tar. It's meant to be pumped onto roofs and run down to fill in holes and places water can get in. If you use this on your driveway, you're pretty much going to end up with a huge mess for years. Because it will continually heat up in the sun and liquify again being tracked into your house over and over and over.

Regular/asphalt tar - Use this, like in the video, along curb sides and between old and new layers to help seal out water and keep the layers sticking together as you put down the new layer. You wouldn't need to tar between a base and finish layer if they were laid a day or two apart because the base layer would heat up again from the finish layer and stick. However if the base layer is older..like a couple weeks or a month. You would probably tar between them. Anything else..you tar between...concrete, old asphalt. The only exception would be sub-grade rock, however sometimes you even tar this, especially if it's in a grade critical location...where you can't have the asphalt humping up even a little. But on a typical driveway, the rock layer has enough jags and spaces that a layer of asphalt will cling to it just fine.

Crack filler - You would use this before sealing your driveway, not after. You can also use it alone to fill in gaps in your driveway and try to seal out water. So it doesn't get into the crack, freeze and blow your driveway up. The best crack filler is rubberized, so it will expand and contract. Plus it also isn't as prone to liquify again in the heat and stick to your car tires and shoes. It has to be heated up substantially to liquify, but I've seen non-rubberized begin to liquify in direct sunlight on a 95+F degree day. I try not to step on the cracks on the really hot days, as I'd rather not find out if it's going to stick to my shoes.

Local news service Interfax is reporting that nearly 500 tons of fuel from the craft has contaminated the crash site
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Russian-Rocket-Explodes-After-Launch

Remember what Loki said to all the peeps in that Iron Man flick, enoch??...It's in our nature to bow-down and grab our ankles so we can be told what we a re supposed to do; Robotic apes can't help it, we're predictable creatures with shitty habits!

Sooooo...hesitant beating the term "paradigm" into oblivion, but until our collective way of being makes the next leap in societal/spiritual/biological evolution, the world is doomed to a continual cycle of power and resources consolidated and exploited by the few.
Our current archetypical criterion have been used as whips and chains, and the distillation or contamination knowledge has always wielded the most effective results for those who would dictate humanity's course.

I guess I need to quote @chingalera:
Monsanto is the reason heath care is unaffordable-
Monsanto is the reason gasoline no longer lubricates rubber and composites in combustion engines

As for Percy Schmeiser, I agree he should have won in his case, and it was a bad legal wrangling. I also, however vehemently disagree with your characterization of him as one of the many small farmers just like everyone I know.

Schmeiser admits that he deliberately sprayed his own seed crop with round up, harvested the surviving plants, and used them for seed the following year. You can't make a much more concerted and deliberate effort than that to get seed that is from Monsanto's GMO plants. Schmeiser's complaint was not that his seed that he'd used for decades was contaminated, his complaint was when Monsanto found out and came to sue him for planting their seed without paying the patent tax. I agree he was legally correct and should not have had to pay anything to Monsanto. But I don't see how Schmeiser is anything like farmers intentionally buying and planting Monsanto GMO crops, or anything like farmers choosing to continue to grow and replant their own seed. Nobody growing and raising their own heritage seed has made it part of their rotation to deliberately kill off their seed crop before they could harvest it. Even if they did, there would plainly never be any seed there to plant. Monsanto's 'attacks' on small family farms have not come against those that buy from Monsanto, nor have they come against those that choose to user any other seed from any other source including their own. Monsanto's suits have been limited to those farmers that ARE planting and growing Monsanto's seeds without buying it from them.

The situation between Monsanto and farmers is nothing like the ridiculous half truth extremes shown in this video or the one you linked. I didn't just base this opinion on some video a watched, but instead on multiple first hand accounts, and extensive searches through scientific journals on Google Scholar. If you want to dismiss that as anecdotal while pointing at some agenda laden video as 'real' evidence then you may have hit upon the problem here...

But @EMPIRE, the precious snowflake must be fully encapsulated to prevent contamination. Who needs an immune system??

My understanding is that the fracking isn't very easy to control. Basically, they're using pressure to fracture shale, but it's impossible to know exactly how it will fracture. You end up with these little natty gas springs everywhere.

That said, it's important to note that this sort of thing can also occur naturally. That's really been the issue with all of the legal challenges is that you need to demonstrate beyond all doubt that the contamination was the direct result of a fracked well nearby, not just natural geological activity.

KnivesOut is correct, yet keep in mind that "clean coal" does next to nothing to reduce the amount of CO2 released from coal combustion. It also does nothing about the dangers of mining coal, as mentioned by Sagemind, and does nothing about reducing the contamination of the environment via mining.

We've had a natural brand of lollies here in Aus for a while, they are pretty good, they don't use organic ingredients though so it's awesome to hear about those being used. @gorillaman some preservatives are pretty nasty (e.g. the nitrates used to preserve many meat products), and there is plenty of legitimate science looking at GMO foods, this article looks in detail at many of the safety issues if you're interested:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-313X.2001.01119.x/full

Plus there's the fact many GMO crops have substantial roundup residue, certainly not something I would want to eat too much of. Lastly, there is the issue of cross-contamination, once that happens there is no turning back, and the proof many GMO crops are safe is rather thin on the ground (the safety studies are generally very poorly designed and implemented).

My only comment on the ingredients of the lollies would be that agave is not a good sugar substitute or sweetener - it's often sold in health food stores as such, however it's extremely high in fructose, so much so that it's essentially HFCS on steroids.

@spoco2 The most dangerous kinds of mercury are compounds. Mercury in the raw can be easily handled in bare hands or light gloves. Short term use and exposures like this will not likely result in any toxification. More great is the risk of toxification by mercury compounds from coal fired power plants. Their methylmercury is far more toxic and very widely consecrated in food stuff now via bio accumulation.

Your childhood experience most likely didn't result in any serious contamination. Life is full of risk, driving a car is hugely risky, you just have to ask yourself what are the risks vs the payoff. Short of ingestion, the risks from this activity are very low. Greater your risks would be from sunburn which over time can cause skin cancer than mercury poisoning from this type of activity.

What would be nice, however, is an online guide of ways to handle chemicals safely. The problem is such things usually go kind of overboard and error on too much caution. Remember those "this is your brain on drugs" commercials? They were basically lies; cautionary tails that were overblown for the "don't risk it" mentality. I think a better strategy is full disclosure and personal responsibility. To much fear and dishonesty, and people just blow you off...and complete lack of guides and rules is about the same level of chaos. Some middle ground of rational behavior for dangerous substances should be the goal, but I haven't found a good mechanism for implementing such a system, and to that end, better safe than sorry like you advise is a good policy.

He deserves a medal, if only for getting into that contaminated s**thole.

*kill

Cant edit it, the mess up on the title indicates people where voting if I cook naked ( obviously I do) BUT I wanted to know if YOU cook naked.

I feel I was not clear enough, contaminating the votes.

American beer? Don't worry, it'll probably taste better after "contamination".

Suffocatingly-nest.

Personally I'd suspect the hell out of that air filtration system....that it's picking up something at the higher altitudes that it's not able to deal with and creates the wrong mixture and pumps it to the pilots or flat out doesn't filter for whatever it's picking up.

If you've ever driven a vehicle with a leaky exhaust, you'll notice you feel fine for a long time and then suddenly you just kind of wake up and go...something is wrong. Roll down the window and feel almost instantly better and more clear headed even when it's crazy hot or cold out because the air is not contaminated.

If religion is the disease, then why did we have over 100 million deaths from atheistic regimes in the 20th century? They made it their express goal to exterminate religion and in the process committed some of the worst atrocities in history. No, the problem is clearly human nature. When man tries to get rid of God he just replaces God with himself. I agree with you, that religion itself has contributed to the suffering and degeneration of the planet. Jesus hated religion. That's why He drove the moneychangers out of the temple. That is why He railed against the pharisees. He said, these people worship God with their lips but their hearts are far from Him. Scripture says this about religion:

James 1:27

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

The problem has always been that people follow the traditions of men rather than demonstrate the love of God. Even just a few decades after the cross, Paul wrote about men who preached a different gospel, one that glorified men rather than God. The contamination is universally human nature. Nothing is pure in the hands of an impure heart.

Examine history and see the parallels. Humanity is just repeating the same story, over and over again. There is nothing going on today that hasn't already happened before. The set and props have changed, but our nature hasn't changed. Man corrupts everything he touches because his scheming is against the will of God. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end are the ways of death. The problem is outlined in this video. Yes we have more knowledge, but knowledge doesn't help us. What we need is wisdom. However, wisdom doesn't come from man, it comes from God. Wisdom isn't something you can engineer..explore some philosophy and you will see that ultimately it has no real answers.

The divine wisdom, however, ordained that Jesus Christ would come in the flesh to give us our answer. It says that message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. The world in its wisdom knows nothing of the ways of God, so God chose what the world would consider foolish to shame the wise. God chose to save us in a way people would consider foolish, because the foolishness of God is wiser than mans wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than mans strength. You think it's ridiculous, but God is simply showing up the wisdom of the world for what it is: foolishness.


>> ^Fletch:
Religion is the disease, Blurry. You're feverish rants, nonsense ramblings, and tone-deafness are primary symptoms. Reason is the only thing that can save you or this planet, but I fear it is too late for you and your fellow carriers. The infection has mutated into hundreds of different, self-preserving variations, and reason, although a powerful medicine (and requisite for wisdom), cannot cure those who refuse treatment in the first place, or have simply become immune to it's healing due to past, repeated undertreatment. Religion has evolved into a superbug.
Can the next version of VS please hide ignored comments that have been quoted in a subsequent comment?