Choked by Beth Gardiner

Author:Beth Gardiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

8

Reluctant Innovators

Air and the Automakers

Smoke billows into the chamber, thick and hot, laden with poisons. It wafts into tiny channels, hundreds of them, a honeycomb of passageways. Walls big enough to cover two football fields,1 folded together into a space hardly bigger than a toaster. Their surface dotted with tiny flecks of precious metal, extraordinary materials found in just a few spots on earth. The fragments coat the walls, layer upon layer. Platinum. Palladium. Rhodium. Metals, dug from deep underground, with the power to wrench apart the smoke’s components, and reshuffle the poisons into something new. Conditions must be perfect for them to do their work, so sensors monitor oxygen levels and temperature. Over and over again, the exhaust’s molecules—hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides—land on the metals, bond with them. Atoms separate from one another, then recombine. Oxygen pulled away from some clusters, added to others. Transforming them into something new. Harmless. They separate now from the metallic catalysts and drift away, into the air.

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