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?
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.
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.
You definitely wouldn’t want to drink the water from any of those systems you’re describing though :)
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.
Yeah, turning wastewater plants into sewage distilleries doesn’t seem like a public health win.
What exactly do you think evaporation ponds are doing, then?
Evaporation is a component of distilling, but if you don’t capture the vapor and condense it it’s just evaporation.
Why would you capture it? It’s waste water, evaporation into the atmosphere should be fine.
There might be things in the vapor that haven’t decomposed or that have decomposed, are toxic, and become airborne.
Like what? Heavy metals would precipitate, organic compounds would break down. (I’m not a chemist, just have general science background).
not a chemist, but couldn’t chemicals with boiling points near 95-100C like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylmercury survive?