Burning Forever Chemicals With Water

Forever Chemicals, also known as PFAS, are extremely useful industrial chemicals, but they can also leak into the environment, your drinking water, and your blood. And they last (practically) forever. But now chemists have a new way to destroy them: burning them with water.
#chemistry #supercritical #pfas

You might also like other Reactions videos:

You Don't Understand Water (and Neither Does Anyone Else):

The End of Haber Bosch:

Making Drinking Water From Sewage:

The Leidenfrost Effect:

What is Amorphous Ice?

Time to Strike Antifreeze Off Your List of Usable Poisons:

Can We Make Ocean Water Drinkable -- and Should We?

Credits:
Executive Producer:
Matthew Radcliff

Producers:
Elaine Seward
Andrew Sobey
Darren Weaver

Writer:
George Zaidan

Host:
George Zaidan

Scientific Consultants:
Max Krause, Ph.D.
Michelle Boucher, Ph.D.
Leila Duman, Ph.D.

Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell

Reactions is a production of the American Chemical Society.
© 2023 American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.

Sources:

Full article: Developing innovative treatment technologies for PFAS-containing wastes

Supercritical water oxidation: A technical review - Bermejo - 2006 - AIChE Journal - Wiley Online Library

The When and Where of Water in the History of the Universe - ScienceDirect

Properties of supercritical fluids | SpringerLink

Modern Supercritical Fluid Technology for Food Applications | Annual Review of Food Science and Technology

Supercritical Water Oxidation as an Innovative Technology for PFAS Destruction | Journal of Environmental Engineering | Vol 148, No 2

Oxygen (O) and water

Current and Foreseeable Applications of Supercritical Water for Energy and the Environment - Loppinet‐Serani - 2008 - ChemSusChem - Wiley Online Library

Destruction of perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) in a batch supercritical water oxidation reactor ScienceDirect

[ACSReactions]

Supercritical fluids are useful for all kinds of stuff. For example, supercritical CO2 can remove caffeine from coffee without pulling out anything else. Check out our shorts content for more about that coming soon.

[DH-bfxb]

I like the honesty of this channel. A lot of science media over-hypes things for the clicks. This channel is pretty honest about the likelihood of these cool reactions becoming actual solutions to our problems.

[tiaxanderson]

To be fair, at 370+ degrees C and 200+ atmospheres of pressure, I too completely change my personality.

[majorfallacy]

This is the only well researched videos about pfas i've seen on the internet so far. Even mentioned that firefighting foams are the main culprit and not pans. This video should have a lot more views.

[FerusLywin]

I don't usually comment, but I have to say this is fantastic scicomm. Came for the PFAS, stayed because I learned so much about supercritical fluids. Loved the theater-style demo in the kitchen. Makes chemistry relatable!

[em]

Came for some hopefully good news about PFAS.

Was almkst overwelmed with highly entertaining presentation.

Thank you for your excellent efforts.

[SoonRaccoon]

Sign me up for super critical water cremation. I mean, not like right now. Gimme a few decades. I've still got stuff to do.

[Sykdude]

I'm in the U.S. Navy and I can tell you that PFAS and PFOSes are currently the bane of my existence.

[drrocketman]

I was warned about the extreme dangers of HF in electronics school. Our instructor had been a chemical safety officer at Intel. He knew about the OG bone hurting juice that is hydrofluoric acid.

[mountiedm]

I love the part "I don't know what you want from me!!"

[blue_champignon]

10:25 We may not have supercritical water cremation, but we still have regular water cremation lol

(Some states allow you to basically pressure cook a body with lye into goo, which uses way less energy than fire cremation, and technically you're compostable at the end of the process)

[microwave]

Just found out about supercritical water remediation while researching exactly how bad the foam we still use is, and how hard l should be pushing them to switch to something else. I was glad to see that there is a scalable process for breaking this junk down, because there is so much of it. So much. There's a few thousand gallons at my facility alone, and enough has been flowed at the training center that the ground suds when it rains.

[Skynettt]

Very interesting, the absorption would absolutely help concentrate the majority of the pollutants into a liquid slurry I’d imagine? This could be very helpful in my work with mycoremediation, or fungal bio degradation. Fungi possess the unique ability to break down forever chemicals. These are mainly white rot fungi that can do this, due to their ability to break down large chain carbon molecules like lignin. They employ the same techniques and methods to break down the PFAS emitting peroxides, ligases, etc.

[Phootaba]

I Sweden we have a recycling fee on bottles and cans.
Shouldn't be to difficult to have the same on pfas products.
The paper recycling from newspapers is debited when you buy the paper etc.

The only big issue I can see is to stop illegal exportation.
The threat of stuff like pcb is still fresh in most adults, shouldn't be too difficult to get something like that going.

[zbret]

While HF is certainly scary as is, you hit it on the nose at the end, a little cheap base like NaOH for example and you have NaF (toothpaste fluoride) and Na2SO4 (food additive). Also Both H2SO4 and HF are industrial valuable chemicals. It might be worth finding ways to recycle them back out of the process but probably easier to just have a base-adding second phase.

BTW, if you think those are scary, go look up ClF3 and FOOF. They make HF look like a cuddly kitten..

[devluz]

4:30 I just tried to clean that smudge off my screen but it turned out to be super critical fluid all along...

[dggarb]

I work in the industry and you did a great job!

[sangomasmith]

One of my favorite uses of supercritical water is supercritical water oxidation for power production. Basically you pump oxygen and fuel into your supercritical water reactor and it becomes an internal combustion steam engine.

It's very hard to do and the power output is limited by the amount of input energy you need to get it running. But it means that you can in theory create an engine that can use anything organic as a fuel source - wet biomass, dry biomass, factory waste, sewage.

[jaymayhoi]

just wanna say your videos are so good and i learn something new i've never heard before everytime - and i subscribe to lots of science channels too!

[rkeil]

HF varies a lot in danger with water content. Dilute HF is used as a glass etching solution by artists without much trouble. Anhydrous HF is truly awful stuff to work with.