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Comment on Could wastewater plant simply heat up water past 500C to decompose all chemicals and output clean water?

At the risk of sounding silly - Instead of focusing on burning the solids, boil the water. Water boils at 100C, at which point the water vapor should separate and leave all the solids behind. Then capture the vapors and condense it back down into clean water. Now, if you later want to incinerate the leftover solids, sure, go for it, fire’s always cool in my book.

I’ll add, simply boiling water is energy intensive. What you are proposing probably won’t work at any scale.

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MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

fire’s always cool in my book.

I think you’re doing fire wrong, friendo.

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I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Golly gee, if only there were some form of energy generation that required boiling vast amounts of water to turn into steam. But no, that would be silly.

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- neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  You definitely wouldn’t want to drink the water from any of those systems you’re describing though :)
  
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  - Rakonat@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The steam you see coming off a cooling tower is not the water than went through the reactor or turbine, a secondary cooling loop is used specifically cause the plants are not allowed to release radioactive material in any form, including the cooling processes.
    
    The real reason this idea would not work is the same problem desalination has, making clean and safe drinking water is the easy part, it’s what are you doing with all the contaminants and water products left behind that quickly becoming a concentrated pool of filth and toxins at the bottom of your heat exchanger.
    
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x00z@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I thought about this too for a while but I learned that even rain contains microplastics.

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sploosh@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Yeah, turning wastewater plants into sewage distilleries doesn’t seem like a public health win.

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- GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  What exactly do you think evaporation ponds are doing, then?
  
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  - sploosh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Evaporation is a component of distilling, but if you don’t capture the vapor and condense it it’s just evaporation.
    
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    Tja@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Why would you capture it? It’s waste water, evaporation into the atmosphere should be fine.
    
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