Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    49·
    2 days ago

    Not only that, but given that heating up volumes of water is basically the metric around which energy units and calculations are all derived, it’s easy to determine just how much energy.

    Assuming an inlet temperature of a fairly optimistic 60°F or 15.56°C, it takes 12,934,470.48 joules to heat one US gallon of water to 500°C. Or if you prefer, possibly because you’re an American used to reading your electricity bill, 3.59 kWh to heat that gallon. Just one.

    The EPA estimates that just in the US alone, wastewater plants treat 34 billion, with a B, gallons of water per day. No need to get out your calculator, that’s 122,060,000,000 kWh or if you prefer, just under 11.5 times the existing average daily power production of the entire country (10,640,243 MWh, if you’re wondering).

    So, uh. Yeah. Probably not feasible.