OT: Green Washing

Nope - easier to clean and recycle. Taking the green foamy stuff from a city is expensive to clean. If gold is there in the mix - get the gold. If other chemicals... get them and save some money in the short term.

Power plants have Ultrapure water in the boilers. Can't have sulfur or calcium in a high temp steam plant. The turbines would be a lump of rust or limestone

Was in semi for some years and consulted to many a Electrical power house.

Martin

Mart> >

Making wafers is zonal refining. Simply a big pot that is run through or the coils run over creating near pure material. Then it is sawed. The 300mm wafer boule is something to behold! It weighs several tons.

Some are made >> >>

Actually the Solar wafer is a large diode. They are sawed from whole wafers. So they are quick and easy. Not a dozen or so processes deep.

The wafers really run through a fab - can overload sections not used to certain flows. Cypress built a custom fab just for solar and the flow was much better than a normal fab.

Mart>>> >>>

Right. The problem here is that all of that water feeding plants in the American West never returns to where it's needed. It tends to wind up wherever it's least wanted.

That's the real issue with all of these industrial water-use issues. Gunner's suggestion that the water doesn't disappear is correct, of course. But it might as well disappear, if it was supplied in an arid area.

-- Ed Huntress

Here in the valley it all ends up in the Rio Grande which flows on down to the next town which "re-cycles" it again. :-) ...lew...

Whatever, it's not the place to build water-consuming industries. When you have to artificially replace the natural water cycle with industrial-scale recycling processes just to get enough water to drink, you're in a place that's marginal for the support of anything else that consumes water.

-- Ed Huntress

We are getting lots of interest from the Atlanta area about water reclamation systems, as opposed to waste water treatment and out the door. It is very tough to do. We have a contract service job for a major automobile manufacturer that has just gone outside their discharge limits on COD (chemical oxygen demand) We are currently renting frac tanks to store the water, about 10,000 gallons a day. The next step up in filtration is going to cost a bundle.

Gary H. Lucas

Any idea what their cost will be per gallon?

-- Ed Huntress

Ed, I seldom see those figures. However when I say costly it means costly relative to the wastewater treatment which we are doing now. Wastewater treatment is almost always much more expensive than clean water treatment.

I have seen the figures for one job we did for landfill leachate. They were paying $0.10 total per gallon at 50 gpm for physical chemistry treatment while our system cost $0.01 total per gallon. The 100 to 1000 times concentrated waste from our process though still goes to the old phys-chem system for conversion into solid waste that goes back into the landfill.

On a PCB removal system the amount of PCBs was so low that we have been concentrating the same tank of wastewater for over 2 years, and still have not hauled any away! So that is very cost effective.

The tough thing for us to get customers to understand is that we can not destroy wastewater, we can only concentrate it. At the end of the process there is nearly always something getting solidified and hauled to a landfill. So NOT making wastewater is still the best bet.

Gary H. Lucas

Interesting. If you concentrated the municipal wastewater in Los Angeles, I'll bet you'd get some really interesting soup at the tail end of the process. d8-)

-- Ed Huntress

They do this Ed. Orange County, just south of LA, uses reclaimed water for barrier injection and lawn watering as well as industrial process. OC sits on one of North America's largest aquifers and it's a well managed resource.

What's "barrier injection"? And do they smoke the grass that's watered with that reclaimed water?

-- Ed Huntress

We were getting salt water migration into the LA and Orange County water table from over pumping the aquifer. The Pacific was infiltrating the water table. To counteract that, injection wells were built along the coast to recreate the barrier that naturally existed.

Ask Gunner. LOL He's the one claiming that water is water. See if you can get him to drink from an OC garden hose for a year and he'll learn something about water quality. That water starts out as raw sewage. Come to think of it, and in light of his attitude, he may have been drinking the stuff for years.

See this recent article:

There may have been another one too, though that one looks an awful lot like the one I read about in our local paper maybe a week or so ago.

Jeez, water is getting complicated.

-- Ed Huntress

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Hey Ed, if the midwest doesn't do something soon they will be sitting on a mud pie, not water. IIRC, they have already drawn down to 3500 feet and the bottom is around 5K.

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I just skimmed that article quick, but the one I remember reading mentioned that the treated water was actually pure enough to drink. They couldn't get approval to use it that way though so they were going to inject it instead.

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And if you guys think you're all moving out here when your water dries up, think again. We have it, we're keeping it.

But we'll trade you gallon-for-gallon for oil. d8-)

-- Ed Huntress

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Our small plant in the Baltimore are produces water from sewage that would easily pass the drinking water tests in any large city. Next year they will probably start using it to water the lawns. Even in a terrible drought they will have lush green lawns. The big issues with using it for drinking water are perception, and what happens if you system fails. It is possible to put out real shit! However the older technologies like clarifiers have to have everything running perfectly, or they do in fact send shit downstream, sometimes for long periods of time. With absolute barrier technologies like ultrafilters, that can only happen if the barrier fails by physical damage. That's easy to isolate, so it can be corrected rapidly.

Gary H. Lucas