AquaDiary: Water Mysteries, Science & News

Micron Is Coming to Clay, NY. What Does That Mean for Your Water?

Micron Technology is building the largest semiconductor fabrication complex in U.S. history in Clay, New York, and its wastewater will carry ( mostly unregulated) PFAS, the "forever chemicals," into a river system that connects to drinking water for half a million people. I'm an environmental scientist, and today we're doing the math the press releases aren't doing: what a $100 billion megafab and a projected 60% population boom in Onondaga County actually means for Central New York's water supply. This episode covers PFAS in semiconductor wastewater (what the science actually shows, including a Cornell study that found 133 PFAS compounds in fab effluent), the demand math for 250,000 new residents on a drought-stressed water system, and the specific concern the Skaneateles Lake Association has formally raised about the region's most critical (and most vulnerable) drinking water source. Skaneateles Lake feeds 220,000 Central New Yorkers unfiltered. Its 18-year water retention time means that by the time a problem shows up in the water, the cause is years in the past. The planning window is now. This is not a "stop Micron" episode. The jobs are real, the economic case is real, and this region has been waiting for a growth driver like this for decades. It's a planning story. And right now, the planning is not matching the scale of what's being built.

PFAS & Poisoned Water: Hoosick Falls, NY

In 2014, a man in a small New York town did something almost no one does: he tested his own tap water. What he found, PFOA, a “forever chemical,” at hundreds of times the level regulators consider safe, would expose a national scandal and take roughly 18 months to be officially acknowledged. This is the story of Hoosick Falls, the frying-pan chemistry that poisoned a town’s drinking water, and why the same invisible contaminant may be sitting in your tap right now. I’m Ally, an environmental scientist in the Finger Lakes region — and on AquaDiary I turn everyday people into the kind of person who can read a water-quality report and know when to actually worry. This episode breaks down PFAS and PFOA in plain language: what “forever chemicals” are, how they got into drinking water, what they do to the human body, how one ordinary resident (Michael Hickey) cracked the case before any agency did, and — most importantly — the concrete steps you can take to check and protect your own water at home. If you’ve seen the movie Dark Waters, this is the same chemical. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a pattern. And once you can see it, you can’t unsee it. Check your own water: * EPA — Find your local Consumer Confidence Report (annual water quality report): https://www.epa.gov/ccr * EPA — PFAS in drinking water (the federal limits & why): https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-regulations-pfas * EPA — Drinking water lab certification (find a state-certified lab for private wells): https://www.epa.gov/dwlabcert/learn-about-laboratory-certification-drinking-water * CDC / ATSDR — PFAS and your health, in plain language: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/ * NSF — Look up filters certified to reduce PFOA/PFOS (NSF/ANSI 53 & 58): https://www.nsf.org/consumer-resources/water-quality/water-filters See the whole script and today's sources on Patreon:

Update: City Tracks Me Down. I Drink Radioactive Water

A few weeks ago I was at a conference when someone from the City of Rochester's water bureau found me in person to ask for a follow-up deep dive into their water supply. On the drive home, I stopped in Saratoga Springs, and tried the water. I later learned that peer-reviewed science has found it contains radium isotopes and radon gas. The state tests the popular one. Not all of them. I want to solve that issue. This general update episode covers where the show is going this summer, the Onondaga Lake investigation, and why I need your help to fund independent water testing in Saratoga Springs. Please consider supporting the show on Patreon: The AquaDiary Podcast | Podcast for water science, news and mysteries. | Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/c/TheAquaDiaryPodcast]

Onondaga Lake: Sacred Site, Founder of Democracies, and America's Most Polluted

The scientists who worked on this cleanup all signed NDAs and wouldn't speak with me. And mercury is still being found. In April 2026, routine marina renovations at Onondaga Lake uncovered mercury in sediment nobody had ever tested, in a lake declared cleaned up. The DEC says the origin is "unknown." The Onondaga Nation says they've been ignored for twenty years. And the experts who know the most about what's really in that lake cannot legally speak about it. This episode covers the full contamination history of Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, NY, once designated as the most polluted lake in America. We dig into the Solvay Process Company's century of industrial dumping, 165,000 pounds of mercury discharged between 1946 and 1970, the mudboils in the Tully Valley still delivering salt and silt downstream through Onondaga Nation territory every single day, and the roster of companies — Honeywell, General Motors, National Grid, Crucible Specialty Metals, and others — that turned a sacred Haudenosaunee site (and the founding site of both the US and Haudenosaunee democracy) into a federal Superfund site. We also explore what the Onondaga Nation has said from the beginning: that this cleanup was never enough, that their legal claim to their own homeland was dismissed on a technicality, and that the water their people have given thanks to for over a thousand years was declared clean without their agreement. This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Next time, we will cover the cleanup, the eagles that came back, the fish that are still toxic, and the question with no clean answer: what does it mean to remediate a lake when the polluter gets to decide when it's done? Further reading:Onondaga Nation land rights: onondaganation.orgRobin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013)Glenn Coin, Syracuse.com/NNY360, May 2026This episode had 28 citations. You can see them all by supporting the show on Patreon for $3 a month: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheAquaDiaryPodcast

Love Canal: They Called Her Hysterical

21,800 tons of toxic chemical waste buried under a neighborhood and a school. Hundreds of families in Love Canal had no idea. This is the story of America's most infamous environmental disaster, and the woman whose anger created federal law. Lois Gibbs was a 27-year-old housewife when she discovered her children were being poisoned by groundwater contamination seeping up through the soil beneath their home. State officials dismissed her community health survey as "useless housewife data." They told her to go home and tend her garden. She organized 90% of her neighborhood, held two EPA representatives hostage, and forced the creation of Superfund , the federal law under CERCLA that has since forced cleanup at over 1,300 hazardous waste sites across America. As an environmental scientist and a woman, I'm telling this story the way it has never been told: through the water science and groundwater chemistry that made the contamination possible, the institutional misogyny that almost stopped the fight, and the fury of a mother who refused to leave her toxic neighborhood until every family was safe.