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?
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.