Going into the future
Well with Obama the President Elect and Bush 72 days away from completing his lifetime goal, of being an insignificant has-been, the focus here will be shifting more and more to what’s going on in the environment and less about politics. To that end here are two articles I ran across today that I think are quite significant.
Reducing Pollution: Green Future For Scrap Iron
Going forward it is not enough to solve the global warming problem, although that certainly is the highest priority. We also need to clean up the mess industrial society has created in other parts of the environment.
Tis article really amazed me, Who would have thought that scrap iron could be used to remove industrially contaminated water?
“Before this project,” says Ma, “few people believed scrap iron could work in a wastewater treatment plant. We have developed a copper-activated iron and used a systematic approach – from benchtop to pilot to full-scale tests – to show that ZVI-enhanced treatment can achieve dramatic improvements over biological processes used by themselves.”
While biological methods, including biofilms and aerobic organisms, are effective at treating municipal wastewater, Zhang and Ma wrote in the ES&T article, they enjoy limited success in treating the less biodegradable and often toxic compounds in industrial wastewater, many of which are synthetic organic chemicals.
These chemicals are attracted to the surface of the iron, where they share electrons with the iron and are degraded and detoxified. The ZVI, [zero valence iron - i.e. iron that has not oxidized] which undergoes oxidation during this exchange, has a useful lifetime of about two years in the treatment process.
Here’s another innovative way that iron is being used to clean up the environment as well. In this case, municipal sewage.
As to why these processes are so important (emphasis mine)
A new study suggests that a holistic approach is needed in assessing the potential environmental and health effects of toxic effluent from industry.
Studies of industrial effluent toxicity usually focus on a single contaminant, such as an environmental or marine pollutant, a potential carcinogen, or a toxic heavy metal. However, according to Tatjana Tišler of the National Institute of Chemistry, in Ljubljana, and Jana Zagorc-Koncan of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, toxicity tests of effluent using bacteria generally underestimate the total toxicity.
Effluents from industrial or municipal sources may contain hundreds to thousands of chemicals, but only a few are responsible for aquatic toxicity. Simply adding together the individual toxicities of each chemical present is not a reliable way to predict the total toxicity of effluent, the researchers say. An underestimation of whole-effluent toxicity could have seriously detrimental effects on the marine environment.
The researchers point out that the prediction of waste water toxicity usually does not take into account any possible interactions between the compounds in the wastewater sample. The presence of a particular chemical may make another more easily absorbed by aquatic creatures or plants, for instance. Moreover, some highly toxic chemicals may go undetected in a complex waste water mixture.
Utilities putting new energy into geothermal sources
I am a big fan of geothermal. There is enough geothermal potential in North America to power every home and recharge electric cars for each of those homes. It beats all the other renewable energy sources because it is predictable, it generates power continuously and produces very little greenhouse gases
There is 50,000 times more heat energy contained in the first six miles of the Earth’s crust than in all the planet’s oil and natural gas resources, according to the environmental organization Earth Policy Institute.
Now that’s a very important statistic. What’s held back the development of geothermal, aside from the high startup cost, is that, until recently, it could really only be tapped if there were existing reservoirs of hot water and steam sitting on top of the hot rock. That, however, is no longer the case with the recent development of enhanced geothermal systems that pump water down the hole to crack hot rocks, absorb the heat, rise to the surface to generate power then are pumped back after dissipating their heat energy. A closed system (so no objections about using up precious water supplies like say the tar sand operations do to extract oil.)
Some say the key to harnessing this energy source on a massive scale lies with a technology known as enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS for short. The idea is to engineer the necessary conditions by pumping water into the Earth’s crust and fracturing the hot rocks below. Heat from the Earth warms the water, whose resulting steam is channeled back to the surface, powering turbines to create electricity. The water is then pumped back underground.
Though still in its infancy, EGS has the potential to open up much of the planet to geothermal development. Tiny plants are already online in France and Germany. More than 30 EGS firms are engaged in exploration and development in Australia.
This is exciting stuff! I hope this is something Obama will get behind in a very big way. Combine a massive geothermal generation infrastructure with a new secure electricity grid and kiss goodbye to foreign oil, well within bthe time limits he has stated he wants to meet.
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