Could wastewater plants simply heat up water past 500C to decompose all chemicals and output clean water?
Could wastewater plants simply heat up water past 500C to decompose all chemicals and output clean water?
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?
In a practical sense, making lead hot won't break it down. But I wonder if there is any temperature where lead would stop being lead and continue to not be lead after the results cool down again?
Alchemy! Now this is the out-of-the-box thinking that I like!
In all seriousness, lead is lead because it's made of lead atoms. It can't not be lead. (The reference to alchemy was because before we knew about atoms, many alchemists tried their hand at turning low-value metals like lead into high-value metals like gold).
To answer your question in a silly but scientifically accurate way, there is a temperature to which lead can be heated to become something else, but these are nuclear fusion temperatures, like you get in the Sun.
Lead being an element means you would either need to make it radioactively decay somehow(which I'm not sure any form of lead is want to do) or perform some kind of alchemy.