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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point you missed and everyone’s autism is preventing y’all from seeing that the fact that we have water and elecricity flowing to most houses in the USA. Things which were deemed impossible back in the day. Imagine the energy cost of conditioning the air individually at everyone’s house let alone their moving car too. It would be iMpOsSiBlE.
It’s not 100 perfect so let’s do nothing.- great idea enjoy your day.
An idea that requires 11.5 times more energy production on a daily basis than the entire country’s output is a lot more than “Not perfect.” So maybe you pipe down before you go calling everyone who disagrees with you autistic, m’kay?
You’re right technology never improves. I loved you in that movie “Idiocracy” Red_october he’s got what plants crave! Enjoy your job at Costco.
Heating water is a matter of physics, not technology. The amount of energy used to increase the temperature of water is literally how the units are defined. Do feel free to make a breakthrough on Fusion power though, I hear it’s still only 20 years away.
That involves convincing your polluting cousin, who doesn’t believes climate change doesn’t exist, not to buy non-stick pans or not to dump their pills into the toilet.
Edit:
That’s the question I’m asking btw.
You could always regulate and ban toxics at the point of production or sale, before they get into the waste stream