05/08/2026
No one mentioned this!!! 😳
31,400 square miles. One year of emissions.
DEC's Title V air permit for Micron — the one nobody is talking about — authorizes roughly 80 tons of fluorinated air pollutants per year from the first half of the Clay campus. About 65 of those tons meet the international definition of PFAS. The single largest line item is 57 tons of CF₄, a greenhouse gas that lives in the atmosphere for fifty thousand years.
Some of it stays airborne. Some of it breaks down into trifluoroacetic acid — TFA — and falls back to the ground in the rain.
The red circle is 100 miles from the stack. That's 31,400 square miles. About the size of South Carolina. More than half of New York State. Syracuse is in it. So are Rochester, Watertown, Utica, Ithaca, and Cortland. So is the Finger Lakes wine country.
Here's the math. 65 tons of PFAS per year is 59 trillion nanograms. Spread evenly across 31,400 square miles, that works out to about 725,000 nanograms landing on every square meter every year. Central New York averages 40 inches of rain a year — enough water to dilute that PFAS to roughly 713 nanograms per liter in the rainwater that hits the ground. The EPA drinking water limit for PFOA and PFOS is 4 nanograms per liter.
Even if 90% of those emissions ride the prevailing winds out of the circle entirely — leaving only one-tenth behind — local rainwater would still average 71 ng/L. Eighteen times the federal limit.
DEC required Micron to run an air dispersion model for those PFAS emissions. The model is on file at DEC. The public has not seen it.
We've filed a FOIL.
👉 foreverchemicalsny.com/the-air-permit.html