Fluoride falls out within thirty kilometres. Sulfur and nitrogen oxides ride the wind for hundreds. Perfluorocarbons never come down at all. Run a year of wind and watch each one travel its own distance.
A smelter is not one emission. It is a heavy particulate that drops out close to home, a gas that becomes regional haze days later and hundreds of miles away, and an inert gas that joins the atmosphere permanently. Any honest map has to show all three at their own scale.
The September proposal lowers the potline fluoride cap to 0.64 lb per metric ton of aluminum, according to KJRH. This is not a whole-facility annual total. Deposition and exposure depend on emissions, weather and other site-specific factors; the illustrated bands are not a regulatory dispersion study.
Sulfur and nitrogen oxides oxidise over hours to days into sulfate and nitrate aerosols — acid deposition and fine particulate haze. This is the tier that reaches Class I wilderness areas in Missouri and Arkansas, and it is the one federal law protects them from.
Released during anode effects in the smelting process. Chemically inert in the lower atmosphere, with lifetimes measured at 10,000 to 50,000 years. There is no distance at which these stop. They will outlast every institution now arguing about the permit.
What is real. The site coordinates, every town and receptor position and its distance, the published emission figures, and the cited travel distances for each pollutant class. Northeast Oklahoma's prevailing wind genuinely does run out of the south and southeast most of the year.
What is modelled. The year of hourly wind driving the animation is a seeded synthetic climatology matched to this region's statistics — not a recorded NOAA year. The smoke plume and the hours-over-schools counter both run on that synthetic wind. The impact zones use the cited distances as their downwind extent, deformed by that same wind rose.
What this is not. It is not a regulatory dispersion model. An AERMOD or CALPUFF run for this specific site produces the binding numbers, and that analysis sits inside EGA's permit application — any member of the public can request it from ODEQ. This map shows the publicly defensible envelope. If the official modelling shows something smaller, we will publish it here beside this one.
Six documented risks — air, water, cattle, traffic, the grid, and the region — each one traceable to the permit application or the published literature.
Read the risks →