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?
Yes; this is something that has been studied. However as other commenters have said it requires a lot of energy, and is better suited for processing smaller quantities of water with a high level of PFAS contamination than massive quantities of water with an extremely low level of PFAS. It’s also not a standalone solution, as plenty of harmful chemicals survive heating past 400/500C (heavy metals like cadmium, lead, and mercury do not break down at any temperature).
Thank you for the only response that actually answers the main question and linking to a scientific paper. Much appreciated.
Regarding harmful chemicals that do not decompose beyond 500C, could it be more likely that the number of such chemicals/materials (known and unknown) is much lower than the number of chemicals/materials at the temperatures used for current clarification processes?
As you can see, these communities are an absolute fucking joke, and only like 15% tops of the comments are actually helpful or backed up by reputable sources.
Yeah, a lot of responses forget the name of the community and go straight into debate mode about something that isn’t even asked. I don’t think it’s a surprise that people are enjoying AI so much more than engaging with humans. AI will just give you an answer (be it wrong or not) without trying to one up you or prove that “you’re stupid, shut up”.
Yea but AI also makes shit up or gives answers from sarcastic Reddit comments without knowing it’s sarcastic. It’s all shit honestly.
Always good to do a quick search of the literature to make sure your intuition about something is actually correct; I too thought “no way” when I first saw your question.
I don’t think only heating water to 500C would remove more harmful chemicals than a typical full treatment process, as they have a lot of steps to filter various things out, but I don’t have a source for that.
Even if it did, there’s still the issue of heating up the water taking an enormous amount of energy, which is probably a dealbreaker. My local wastewater plant treats 40 million gallons a day, which by a quick calculation would take 150 GWh to heat, 83% the daily energy consumption of the whole of Minnesota. That can be reduced significantly with heat exchangers but even 1% of that would be far too expensive.
In a practical sense, making lead hot won’t break it down. But I wonder if there is any temperature where lead would stop being lead and continue to not be lead after the results cool down again?
Alchemy! Now this is the out-of-the-box thinking that I like!
In all seriousness, lead is lead because it’s made of lead atoms. It can’t not be lead. (The reference to alchemy was because before we knew about atoms, many alchemists tried their hand at turning low-value metals like lead into high-value metals like gold).
To answer your question in a silly but scientifically accurate way, there is a temperature to which lead can be heated to become something else, but these are nuclear fusion temperatures, like you get in the Sun.
Much higher than the sun, unless you’re also adding the pressure of a star.
My mother is busy sitting on something else that afternoon
Magnetic fields should be able to extract lead.
How would that work? You gonna ionise the lead? 🤔
Why would that be necessary? Does led not react to magnetic fields?
Very few metals do!
Lead does not.
Edit. Here’s a list of things you can pickup with a magnet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ferromagnetic_materials
Well… The Large Hadron Collider can smash lead nuclei together at nearly the speed of light, which turns them into something that is definitely no longer lead.
Lead being an element means you would either need to make it radioactively decay somehow(which I’m not sure any form of lead is want to do) or perform some kind of alchemy.
Artificial elemental transmutation of lead into other elements is not just fantasy, it’s entirely possible and happens in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors. It’s just extremely impractical as it’s an extremely slow process at anywhere near the particle fluxes we can practically achieve. Plutonium is made through a similar process (though the exact mechanism used to produce plutonium is relatively more efficient) as well as small quantities of useful radioisotopes, but it is also possible with lead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation