alt Hacker NewsHow does this work on a practical level? Do you scrape the soil to a depth of a foot and submit it to electrolysis or is the soil washed and the sludge then processed? How many grams of halogens does this recover per square acre of contaminated site? Does this sterilise the site?
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Yeah, this makes no sense.
It sounds like it could be used to decontaminate a waste stream, but how do you select out the offending materials from a site?? What magic breaks halogenated bonds while leaving others (which are easier to break) alone? And how does the solvent work?? Remember, teflon only became practical when they found a solvent for it--and it's the solvent that's the real problem. Teflon is non-reactive enough for the body to pretty much ignore, the solvent (which of course isn't 100% removed from the final product) has one reactive spot and is a problem. They've tried to hide behind a game of musical chairs, using "different" solvents, but the dangerous part of the molecule is unchanged as that's what's needed to do it's job. A longer or shorter inert tail makes it "different" from a legal standpoint, not meaningfully different from a toxicity standpoint.
Why am I thinking scam?
It could be used to decontaminate open water bodies as well as ground water. We have ways of producing electricity cheaply enough these days and so using that electricity to perform electrolysis makes sense - - even if it needs to be done only during times of the day where there is good sunlight.
The real practical and immediate help would be ground water contamination. How many bad chemicals now permeate the water supplies around farming communities. Can this be used to treat the drinking water supply?
Way more than a foot, but that's the general idea.
There's a soil remediation project near my workplace (former railway depot). They've dug up several meters deep by now.
The soil is mixed with water to create a slurry which is then passed through filtration units which are sensitive to particular chemicals. Now the soil is fine but your filtration media is highly contaminated.
I think itd be meant for the facility that uses the halogenated compounds in the first place, integrated into their process.
Today we scrape however many meters deep of soil and haul off to a landfill. I assume you'd scrape it up, run it through something to pull out everything bigger than a pebble. Wash the pebbles, the rinse water goes with the soil through the cleaning process.
Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.