Environment & Energy

It is a fact the fluorocarbons are a major problem but this article is all over the place and is misleading.

Pretty much every refrigerator on Earth has what the journalist calls "f gases" and I note that while it is true that the semiconductor industry is a major player in this area (which includes solar cells) their chief environmental risk is associated with their role as greenhouse gases. There is a serious scientific distinction been gaseous fluorocarbons which are generally inert and not carcinogenic and what are generally discussed as "PFAS" found in liquid and solid matrices which have known biological effects, of which cancers are a subset. The latter represent the bulk of the wide array of compounds numbering in the thousands, although many of these thousands are metabolites of parent compounds or represent other types of degradation generated by radiolysis.

It is true that the most common degradation is trifluoroacetic acid, TFA, but while anthropomorphic sources overwhelm its presence, it has been claimed to occur from some natural sources. Monofluoroacetic acid is produced by some plants in the southern hemisphere to protect again predation. It's far more toxic than TFA.

I have acquainted son with the idea of using gamma radiation from fission products to mineralize water soluble fluorocarbons and have been working on and off to prepare some documents describing the approach to do so.

The article for what it's worth is poorly written and I'll add to the list of cases in which I consider my oft stated less than half serious joke that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.