Post by account_disabled on Feb 21, 2024 23:51:40 GMT -5
Husband and wife Ted Smith and Amanda Hawes spent decades working to expose toxic working conditions and pollution at the semiconductor plants that made Silicon Valley its name. Now, as the Biden administration works to bring back the once-thriving industry, they are gearing up for another fight. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act last year, setting aside $52.7 billion in funding for domestic chip manufacturing. The move was supposed to ease the pain of a global shortage of chips used in everything from cars to game consoles, while creating tens of thousands of good jobs for Americans.
He promises a return to the days before the Luxembourg Mobile Number List when the United States was a top producer of semiconductors, before global competition pushed many manufacturing jobs to Asia. But the old semiconductor manufacturing plants, known as fabs, had an ugly side. Toxic chemicals seeped into the soil and water sources near the semiconductor plants and found their way into the bodies of workers and even their children. Thanks to Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County has more Superfund sites than any other county in the United States. These are sites so contaminated that the federal government has included them on a National Priorities List for cleanup.
At a site where Intel manufactured semiconductors between 1968 and 1981, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency lists more than a dozen different “contaminants of concern,” including arsenic, chloroform, and lead in groundwater. The agency has been working to clean up groundwater since 1982, and it will still take “many decades” to reach safe levels of trichloroethene (TCE), a known carcinogen. While the semiconductor industry has phased out some hazardous substances, without more transparency about the types of chemicals they are now working with, Smith and Hawes fear that a new generation of semiconductor workers could be blindsided by the risks. Health and labor advocates tell The Verge that the United States still lacks critical protections for workers.