TerranFenrir@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Let’s assume that heating water to 500C does what you want it to do. Even then, the sheer amount of energy required to do this would be massive. It would just be incredibly uneconomical to do this, when other cheaper solutions (like not polluting in the first place) exist.
Heat exchangers are extremely efficient. You use the 500C water to heat 400C water, then use your 400C water to heat 300C water etc etc. It still takes energy, but you recover over 90% of it.
Stopping pollution is difficult, and filtering water is expensive, but boilers are well established technology.
Now explain making steel.
There isn’t a steel supply tap to every house is it? I don’t think I’ve had to replace or buy any steel pieces over the last two months or so. Different story with water.
Why would you need to purify the water locally at everyone’s individual house? Your logic makes me chuckle. Just wait untill you find out about a steam engine. Image
Their point, which you quite clearly missed, is that people don’t need a steady, reliable, high volume flow of steel delivered to every single home and business.
And maybe you should look into steam engines a little more and check out things like how hot that water actually gets. You’re gonna discover that for all the prodigious fuel use, the temperature is far below the goal of 500C and the flow rate far below requirements. But keep up the sass.
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.
You’d have heat exchangers, like a desalination plant
…wikipedia.org/…/Multi-stage_flash_distillation
Such plants can operate at 23–27 kWh/m3 (appr. 90 MJ/m3) of distilled water.[5]
So still impossible, but not unfathomable
Waterdoc@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Unfortunately, even if we stopped using PFAS entirely it will remain a legacy problem in wastewater and landfills because so many consumer products contain PFAS. That said, some places are working towards banning PFAS in new products and some of the really nasty ones are already banned in many countries. Here is Canada’s plan to phase PFAS out of industrial and consumer goods:
canada.ca/…/per-polyfluoroalkyl-substances.html#a…