July 15, 2021 • 43 mins
Can we save the future of the human race with some thin membranes riddled with ultra-tiny holes? Science says yes! Thanks to reverse osmosis filtration, we can turn saltwater to fresh and finally say, Water, water everywhere so let’s all have a drink!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's over there somewhere on the
other side of the membrane because she's insane in the membrane,
(00:22):
and this is stuff you should know. I think it's
pretty funny that I used to love Cyper Hill. Oh.
I downloaded their album again, like the other day. Yeah,
and it's it still holds up, insane, got no brain.
I love that guy. I don't remember his name actually,
(00:43):
now I think about I don't remember the other dude's
name either. I just remember their DJ was DJ Muggs, right.
That sounds about right. Yeah, I remember his name. I
don't remember the other like the two ms I don't remember.
I think they liked marijuana smoke if I remember here
there Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had a song about a bomb,
I believe. Yeah, it's from that's right. I'm gonna go
(01:05):
listen to that now. You should listen to the album again.
It's still pretty good. They I mean they're talking about
like shooting people and everything, just like come on, no,
you don't do anything like that. But um, you know
there are other stuff. The other stuff they talked about.
It's pretty good. Yeah, So I am literally going to
go listen to that now and you can talk about
reverse Osmosis. Alright. So, Chuck, you made a reference before
(01:28):
we started um recording that sounded really familiar to me,
but it's probably only going to sound familiar to like
eight other people. You referenced Osmosis Jones, right, and I
was like, who is that? That sounds really familiar and
I cannot, for the life of me place it, and
then you said it's from our TV show. Still can't
really place it, but now I kind of know what
(01:49):
you're talking about. Actually, and now I'm doubting myself. Okay,
I think Osmosis Jones is uh is a movie? Okay, yeah,
I think you're thinking of Nash Pluto. No no, no,
Osmosis Jones is Chris Chris Rock animated movie. Okay, I
got it mixed up with something. Are are? One of
(02:11):
our co star actors used to say a lot, which
was to say Jones on the end of anything That's right,
And I think it reminded me of Osmosis Jones. But
I have COVID, so I'm all over the place. You
are all over the place. But one thing where you
really nailed at, Chuck, and I'm really appreciative that you
brought up osmosis, Jones, is because we're talking about osmosis today,
(02:32):
and in particular, we're gonna focus mostly on reverse osmosis,
although we'll have to talk about regular osmosis as well.
How does that sound? Yeah? I mean, can I go
ahead and talk about regular osmosis? I mean, is there
any better time? I can't think of a better time,
certainly not in our Radium Girls episode. Yeah. I mean
(02:55):
this is basically like if you took chemistry in high
school and you have forgot everything about it since then,
you might hear the words ostomosis and reverse osmosis and
be like, wait a minute, that's that's tickling my brain
a little bit. I know I knew that at one point.
So just a little basic chemistry. One oh one is
(03:15):
let's just talk about saltwater. Lay it on, um. Saltwater
is going to figure in. Have almost said heavenly heavily here,
because as you'll see, reverse osmosis is a great kind
of modern way too, sort of the hip new way
to take salt from water so we can drink it
like you're talking of. If you make a cup of
(03:36):
salt water and you gargle it, you know for your throat,
you have some left over, you could use reverse osmosis
to convert it back into regular water. That's real. Don't
waste it. And we we talked about I know, we've
done stuff on desalination. We did. We did an episode
way back in the day hauled um, is it possible
(03:58):
to drink the ocean or something like that. Uh, what
exactly what happens when we run out of water? I
think is what it was. That was way off And
then I'm pretty sure we talked about drinking the ocean.
We also did one on manufacturing water too, but yeah, yeah, yeah,
we talked about this desalinating before. That's right. So back
to chemistry one on one. It's very simple. I don't
(04:21):
know if you folks remember what a solution is, but
a solution is when, in this case it's with salt water,
you have a solvent, which is the water, and then
you have the salute, which is the salt or dissolve
in the water or whatever else you want to to
have in there. And this whole thing together is called
(04:43):
a solution and if you put this solution in a YouTube,
not y o u t ub dot com, but a
literal beaker shaped like a tube, and you had a
semi permeable membrane in the middle. Let's just go ahead
and say gortex in this case, because that's what that is.
Shout out cortex. And you poured this stuff in there
(05:04):
on one side, and then you poured regular water on
the other side. That water on the other side is
gonna want to just balance out. It's gonna want to
seek thermodynamic equilibrium, and it's gonna fight its way through there,
through that membrane until everything is nice and level. It's
got this osmotic pressure and it's gonna push through there
(05:25):
until it reaches that equilibrium because that's where it wants
to be. And that's yeah, because nature is seeking equilibrium.
And because the the higher concentrated side is separated by
a membrane from the lower concentrated side, it's got to
make it through that membrane to even things out, and
as it does, it's actually gonna push the concentrated side
(05:48):
up the beaker because it's moving into that side through
the membrane. It's pretty amazing stuff, but yeah, that's I mean,
that's osmosis, Chuck, nicely done. Why don't you tackle reverse
osmosis m so reverse osmosis so osmosis what you just
described as a passive process that happens because the atmosphere
(06:09):
above us has weight like air has weight. And in fact,
if you took one square inch of a column of
atmosphere of air from the surface of the Earth all
the way up to the exosphere, the tippy top of
the atmosphere, that one square inch column with way about
fourteen and three quarter pounds. So another way to put
it is, there's fourteen point seven five pounds per square
(06:32):
ince of pressure at surface level on Earth. Because of
that pressure, we have that osmotic pressure, and so the
stuff can kind of move from one side to the other,
from lower concentration to higher concentration to balance things out.
And it's all because of that. But the whole thing
is a passive process. There's nothing moving. This is not
it's not requiring energy to take place. Okay, with reverse osmosis,
(06:58):
you're doing the opposite of what you just described, and
it actually does take energy. You have to create more
pressure that will overcome the the natural osmotic pressure. And
what you're doing in that case is actually taking the
solvent in this case water and moving it out against
its natural will, against every fiber of its being screaming
(07:20):
at you that no, this is wrong, this is an
importance against nature. UM. It's moving it through that membrane
to the other side, to the lower concentration. So what
you're doing is taking a concentrated solution and making it
even more concentrated by taking out the the in this
case the water. So what you have on one side
(07:40):
is saltwater and then saltwater concentrate, and what you have
on the other side is just pure water what they
call ultra pure water UM, and that's basically reverse osmosis. Yeah.
So if you look into UH to make saltwater not saltwater,
and you had a couple of tanks and on one
side you had that UM, that solution of salt water
(08:02):
or let's just call it saltwater, and it's under that
you know, regular osmotic pressure that we were talking about.
It's all happy and well. You gotta apply I think
about fifty to sixty bars of pressure and you gotta
push that thing through there, and those salt molecules are
too big to pass through the membrane, and it's it's
(08:23):
really pretty easy. It's not the most I mean, I
can't go out and build one of these, but it's
not the most complicated process. It's really just if you
think about trying to fit something too big through a
small hole, it's not gonna go. Everything else will, so
it's left over is salt or you know, sort of
a briny solution, right, And what you're saying is like
(08:44):
using pressure to push it through, Like that's that basically
makes sense. But but when you're almost you're not using
pressure to to push it. You're just increasing the pressure
in that concentration. And then reverse OUs moostis happens by
magic because you've over come that natural losmotic pressure. And
now you know to the to the solution or the
(09:04):
salt water and the ultrapure water. You know, what's up
is down. Nothing makes sense anymore. All bets are off
because you've overcome that natural losmotic pressure. So it's not
exactly like pushing it through a membrane, which is how
my brain kept going. Um, there's like it's it's a
little more magic than that. But the upshot of it
is that that membrane you're using is so small, the
(09:26):
pores in it are so small that only water can
make it through, and water, it turns out, was really small, Chuck.
You want to know how small water is, well, prepare
for it, because I'm about to lay it on you.
The average, actually it wouldn't be average, would be exactly
the same size. The size of a water molecule is
point to seven nanometers, which is twenty seven hundred thousands
(09:51):
of a micron, and a micron is a millionth of
a meter, So a human hair's diameter is about seventy microns.
A water molecule is hundred thousands of one micron. So
it's really really small, which means that if you can
make a membrane that is small enough, large enough for
(10:14):
water to get through, but not much larger than that,
it's going to keep a lot of other stuff from
passing through that membrane as well. That's right. Uh, maybe
we should take a break and we'll talk a little
bit about what we've been teasing, which is desalination right
after this. All right, so if you want to, I mean,
(10:57):
water is is a commodity. We've been talking about that
a lot on the show for a while and kind
of trying to bang that drum that potable drinking water. Uh,
you know, it could be a crisis in the near
or far future for the world. So there have been
a lot of efforts over the years, uh, kind of
to try and get ahead of this a little bit.
And the ocean is an obvious place to look because
(11:19):
there's a lot of water out there. So the efforts
have been made since I believe about the nineteen fifties
to try and turn that that salt water into something
that people can drink or at least use, you know,
for other purposes. Um, you know, not necessarily like potable water,
but you know, useing in industries and stuff like that. Yeah. Um.
(11:39):
In particular, we've known how to like distill or to
get water from saltwater pure water from saltwater using distillation,
but that uses a lot of energy where you boil
the water. It takes a lot of energy to boil
water and boil the salt out of water. Um. And
that was kind of the first attempt. But I think
in the sixties they started to say, um, maybe we
could take this ousmosis thing that's happening all over the
(12:02):
place and reverse it and and we could use that
to get salt out of water. Yeah, And they figured
out how to do it and it was going pretty well,
but they didn't have a great way to do it
on a large scale that made it kind of financially
practical to do until a couple of engineering grad students
that U c l A. Came along. One was named
Sydney Loebe and the other one's name Strini Bassa surre Rajan. Boy,
(12:28):
you're gonna nail that. Yeah you did? Would you say
it another way or no? No? And I don't have
their names in front of me, but I think that
you it sounded pretty believable, Chuck. You know what I do.
Here's a little trick for you. And of course this
is only works is if you're pronouncing the parts correctly.
But I just like I looked them up on the
internet and call them and ask them how to say
(12:50):
their names. Well, you could sometimes I look on YouTube
see if they're interviewed, but um, I just spell it
out dictionary style, like syllable by syllable with big spaces
in between. Oh yeah, yeah, and then do you make
the one with the emphasis the syllable with emphasis like
in all caps or something like that sometimes, or they'll
scribble underline or you know, none of it's like like
(13:12):
real dictionary style. Uh, yeah, I don't. I don't even
know what swat is. It's the upside down. Oh that's
a schwa. Yes, what's the word we were talking about
the other day that I loved swing? I hate swing?
You hate I think everybody hated schwing for a little while.
(13:36):
They're yeah, not a fan, So all right, So I
nailed those two names. They were grad students at u
C l A. And they were the two gentlemen who
came up with this basically the first practical reverse osmosis
membrane using cellulose acetate. And it was the first time
that they could actually use this on a large scale
(13:57):
and they did so. Uh, this is actually more of
a small scale operation, but the idea was the same
at a place in Coalinga, California, nineteen sixty five that
was online for seven years and worked pretty well from
what I understand. Yeah, and at the very least it
was a very good um proof of concept, I guess,
you know. And it's showed that yeah, with this new
(14:18):
this new ascetate membrane, you know, like you were saying,
you can get a lot more through it at a
much faster pace. Um, and that's kind of what you
need if you're going to ramp this up for industrial
style production. And they definitely did. That was nineteen sixty five,
you said it went on online. As of two thousand nineteen,
(14:39):
there's now a hundred and seventy seven different countries producing
desalinated water using reverse osmosis. And in fact, there's I
think sixteen thousand desalination plants in the world by far,
the most are in Africa and the Middle East, but
there's a total capacity now today, just since nineteen sixty five,
this is developed where hundred million cubic meters of fresh
(15:02):
water can be produced everyday worldwide. That is just not
so from taking seawater and using reverse osmosis to turn
it into pure fresh water. That's right. And uh, those
numbers are growing and they need to, which is which
is a great thing. I love it when we figured
(15:22):
out how to do something and then it's just a
matter of sort of getting more and more of it going. Yeah, yeah,
I mean yeah, And I think from what I understand,
you know, everybody's trying to figure out like UM, you
know how to build on efficiencies or how to continue
to scale up and how to use less energy and
time and all that. But it's it's it seems to
(15:45):
be one of those technologies as roughly the same as
it was when they invented it initially and basically UM
to kind of give just a little bit of detail
on on how it goes, it's it's you you take
in seawater. Most reverse osmosis plant that UM desalinate seawater
built pretty close to the sea. UM because transportation is
(16:06):
is a big cost. So if you can just pipe
it right from the sea into your plant, that saves
on a lot of costs and time and energy. UM.
It's ramped up using pumps and then it's run through
the reverse osmosis filters and under pressure that like you said,
I think sixty bars of pressure, so it's a pressurized
so that it overcomes the natural osmotic pressure. And it
(16:30):
is it goes over, not through like I keep wanting
to think of it going through, like there's a membrane
in the water's way and it has to go through
this membrane. That's not how it goes. It goes through
a tube and in the center of the tube is
another tube um that's wrapped in the membrane and the
(16:51):
concentrate the salt keeps going, but the water that's in
that concentrate, that salt, that solution um goes through the
membrane into that inner tube, and the inner tube pushes
that fresh water, that that reverse osmosis water along um
into what's called the production water stream, and then that
(17:14):
salt water just continues along its way back out to
the ocean under pressure and what's called the reject stream,
which is not nice, but it's you know, an accurate description.
And then that's how like you would desalinate water. It
is reject reject water stream. Sure as the reject stream. Sure, Okay,
(17:34):
there you go. When you have three names, I think
that's more an album title. So maybe just reject stream. Yeah,
I think reject stream is great. And we'll talk about
that more later. Not the band, but are the imaginary
band the album? Yeah? And who's playing what? Uh So,
(17:56):
reverse osmosis is not the kind of thing that you
can just you for salt water. It's a great application,
of course, but it can you know, you're filtering something out,
so you can filter out almost anything. Um, if you
have a local water source that has way too much fluoride,
you can filter out some of that fluoride in a
much more efficient way than you can using charcoal filtrations. Uh.
(18:17):
We did a show on fluoride like a thousand years ago.
I remember that one. Yeah, I think it's a floride
making a stupid that. I feel like that was one
of our like fifteen minute episodes or something. Yeah, easily
at most, I think some kind You talked about the
ultrapure water, which can is the you know, one side
of the result, and some companies need that stuff and
(18:38):
some industries need that stuff. So sometimes you're filtering out
things just to get that ultrapure water to use as
an industry application. I think when you're manufacturing electronics sometimes,
or pharmaceuticals, um, different kind of chemicals, certain medical applications.
We talked about wastewater a lot of the toilet to
(18:59):
tap that's using reverse osmosis. Right on our best episodes,
I think, do you think so wastewater treatment? I mean,
it's hard to say best episode when we've been doing
this for eighty years, but uh, I thought it was
a good one. Yeah, I thought it was good too.
I was just surprised to hear you say that. But
that's yeah, and toilets just happens. It's just gross, but
(19:22):
it's it's sensible for sure. And the point of it
is it's gross entirely in your mind. Like when you
raise that glass of water that used to be waste water,
it's just water after it's undergone reverse osmosis. Like that's it.
There's nothing else in it. There's not even a memory
of that kind of stuff, you know, because despite what
(19:44):
homeopaths say, there's nothing in that water except for the water.
There are some things that make it through UM, what
are called containments of emerging concern UM. Some kinds of
pharmaceuticals can actually make it through. They're small enough that
they make it through with the water molecules. But for
the most part, most everything else is filtered out by
(20:04):
reverse osmosis UM. And one of the reasons that are
One of the other industries that use it chuck is
like the beverage industry, because you can take tap water
from anywhere, run it through reverse osmosis filter and move
even more of it through faster because you're not having
you're not dealing with a briny salt solution. Like this
(20:26):
is just tap water and you're convert you're basically turning
it into a blank slate. So you could make like
a soft drink taste the same anywhere in the world
just by using the local tap water to produce it,
you know, and now you have production facilities all over
the world, so you don't have to transport it because
you're able to start with reverse osmosis water. Oh yeah,
(20:46):
they use it, uh, separating away from milk. They use
it in the wine industry some now they use it
to make maple syrup. They remove that that sugary goodness
from the water and the sap. What else, um, let's see,
they use it for recycling. One of the other this
is a big big deal is we'll see um. When
(21:10):
you when you produce all sorts of stuff um through
industrial processes or if you recycle things, you have to
use all sorts of other chemicals you produce, like sorts
of wastewater is a byproduct, and wastewater is really hard
to get rid of without contaminating other water because it
mixes really well. So one of the good things you
can do is take wastewater, run it through reverse osmosis,
(21:32):
and you're basically catching all of the stuff that was
once mixed in with the water um and making it
into a much more disposable, much closer to solid form,
and then also producing reverse osmosis water that you can
use for all sorts of other applications as well. And
speaking of recycling, a little bit different kind of recycling.
(21:54):
But some of these, and you know, not all of them,
they're you know, there's nothing that gets me going more
than it contained system. And some of these are contained systems,
which is when you have a system that kind of
feeds itself. We talked about these high pressure pumps that
force out what did you call it again, what was
the band? Rejects stream, the reject stream. That's not the
(22:17):
God help you if you call him the reject strange,
that's reject stream. That's like a letterman miss step or something.
And you got a cool logo with just an RN
and S that sort of are snaking around each other
or something like that. This is what I see. Do
you know remember the grateful dead kid with the ice
cream cone on his head? Sure, I remembering along those lines,
(22:38):
But then rather than an ice cream cone, he's got
a reverse mohawk like the bad guy in Death Wish three. See,
I was thinking more like the White Snake logo. Oh no,
it's I don't think so. No, you just blew my
mind a little bit. I'm trying to recover here by
tap dancing. But I don't know, man, maybe not to
(22:58):
get further down this road. But the other day I
saw that there was some big festival in Europe with
all these metal bands, and I was like, oh, looks
kind of cool, and White Snake was playing. I was like,
that was guys still playing. It's like, let's let me
go check them out and see what they sound like.
Just do yourself a favor and go to YouTube and
watch like a White Snake festival from like just like
(23:19):
put In twenty nineteen. Let's say, do they just play
all their old hits? Are they making new music? Oh? Well,
I don't know. I can't speak to that. The old
hits are what's on YouTube. Um, it's not it's not great.
So is it's still okay? You said his name too,
because I almost said David Copperfield. It's great. He makes
the stage disappear beneath his feet. That's right. You forget.
(23:44):
That's the most important part. Yeah, it's it's not great.
It's uh, just just gotta check it out. Boy, This
COVID got you trash and everything. The radium girl, White Snake,
I know, I love White Snake. You know Tanny Containe
passed away. Maybe that's what to do with it? What? Yeah,
she died a couple of years ago. I think I
(24:06):
didn't know that. Yeah, or maybe even last year. No,
I don't know. I'm yeah. Are you on meds right now? No?
High on stuffyheadedness? I got you, you know, the natural high.
So where was I? Oh? Yeah, contained systems. So they're
pumping out this stuff with high pressure, and as we'll see, uh,
(24:29):
that can go just go out into the ocean again
and we'll talk about that more later. But they can
also use that that force of pumping this stuff out
to use it to spin a turbine. Our old friends
spinning a turbine and basically reusing that stuff to to
make it a closed system where it's operating itself. Yeah,
pretty many, amazing. I get jazzed by that as well.
(24:50):
And I just realized, Chuck, basically, these desalination plants that
are close to the ocean are basically a giant YouTube
and in the middle there's that membrane. But really also
in the middle is the the entire desalination plant. But
it's just coming up one side and passing through the other. Actually,
it's not a very good analogy, and I think about it,
(25:11):
but it's a U shape at least, how about that. Yeah,
you can also get him under your sink or on
your countertop in your kitchen. Like it sounds like the
most you know, large scale scientific thing you can imagine.
But if you just go to a big box hardware
store and you look up water filtration systems, a lot
of them are reverse osmosis. Yeah, yeah, you're um, you're
(25:34):
gonna be hard pressed actually to find one that doesn't
have that, Like one of those undersink like multi filter
multi stage water filters that comes with its own faucet
that you have to install, But they don't. I was
looking there actually, you know, um, I think they've actually
come down since this article was written a couple of yeah,
something like that. It seems like you can get a
pretty good one for about two fifty dollars, like basically
(25:57):
everything you need. Yeah, and then there's also own our
top versions two if you want to just have one
on your countertop. But I say, I say we take
a break. Okay, yeah, because we we've talked all upside right,
there's a dark side to this. Well not really, but
you know there's some down downsides of drawbacks. Nothing dark,
(26:17):
I would say that might be overstating it. All right,
Well we'll be back right after this, everybody, Okay, okay, Chuck,
(26:47):
welcome to the dark side of reverse osmosis. Very nice.
You've got compliments on your bellow Legosi. Yeah, it was
very good. I don't remember what episode that was. I'll
take it good. I'll take any compliment. Sure, same here,
unless you're really good at not doing podcasts. Well, yeah,
(27:11):
it took you a second, didn't it it really did.
I think I have sympathetic COVID. I'm a little fogging myself.
You know. You gotta get out of that bunk bed
underneath me. You might catch it. So first, before we
get started, I want to shout out Perth, Australia, Chuck,
get this. Forty three of perth drinking water is made
(27:31):
from desalinated seawater from reverse osmosis. They have two plants
that we probably drank some while we were there. I'll
bet we did. I'll bet we did. I don't know,
it couldn't even tell, so it was right. So do
you know what's funny is everyone outside of Australia got
that joke because I guarantee you they didn't show that
(27:53):
ad in Australia and they also think that Tom Broke
All runs Motel six. That's right. So we're talking about
the dark side of of of reverse osmosis. Plants are
desalinating using reverse osmosis, and reverse osmosis in general, there's
some problems with it. For one, it's really I don't
(28:14):
want to say it's really energy intensive. It's actually not
as bad as you would think. But the more you
scale up and you know where you're supplying say almost
half of your your town's drinking water through reverse osmosis desalination, like,
the energy usage scales up, so the cost can scale up,
and then also so does the carbon footprint of these things,
(28:36):
because you know they're burning fossil fuels to run those
pumps to pressurize that column of water when they send
it across the reverse osmosis membrane to overcome the osmotic pressure.
That's a that's a real big, that's a that's a
problem with it. I guess you could say, yeah, I
would say that. Another problem that we we teased earlier
was the um I guess what do you call it?
(29:00):
Harmful byproduct or just a waste waste byproduct reject stream? Yeah, sure, okay,
but it is it is a byproduct that basically it's salt,
it's brian it is there's a lot of it left over,
and you've got to do something with it if you're
not going to run it back into a closed system.
And some places they just say, all right, well, it's
(29:21):
it's saltwater and very concentrated form, so let's just pump
that back into the ocean. And I'm glad I kept
reading because my first thought was like, I'll sure it's saltwater,
but that can't like the ocean has a certain amount
of salinity on purpose probably and that that can't be
great to just add a lot more. And my instinct
was right, it's not. I think Australian Center for Water
(29:44):
Research says things get back to normal at about sixteen
hundred feet fives from the source. It's pretty pretty far
um so anything within that that sixt feet it's it's
really bad news. When they're up and that stuff back
in and you know it's a fish can get out
of there pretty quickly. But if you're not a fish,
(30:06):
if you're something that crawls along on the sea floor
or plant life on the sea floor, then that's really
bad and it's gonna kill off a lot of stuff
in that area. Yeah, which is problematic. I mean, high
salinity decreases the dissolved oxygen, and fish and sea life
need oxygen in the water, so it's it is a
real problem for that that life that can't move away
(30:29):
very easily. And then in addition to that too, they
actually introduce certain kinds of chemicals and metals into the
um the stream the feeds the feed water stream um
to keep the membranes from fouling up as which happens
really easily. You can imagine if you have a membrane
(30:50):
that has pores that are just big enough to allow
something that's twenty seven hundred thousands of a micrometer a
micron across through, like all that stuff that's left behind
is gonna gunk up the membrane is really quick. It's
going to get insane in the membrane so they take
exactly so they take steps to keep this from fouling,
(31:11):
from getting clogged up by adding additional stuff. Well, that
additional stuff also gets pumped out into the ocean too,
which is a problem as well. There are calls for
um uh additional steps to be added onto that reject
stream so that before it hits the ocean, it runs
through like a UV light that kills off pathogens maybe
(31:32):
UM or maybe they need to filter out some of
the stuff and reuse like the chlorine and the copper
that they're introducing. Um there are things that we could
do to to make the whole thing a little more
environmentally friendly for sure. Yeah for their uh. I think
the plant operators in Australia say that they're like, you're
pumping it out so fast, made it mixes in a
(31:54):
really quick And I don't know if I buy that.
I mean, it makes sense that it mixes faster than
if you're just like leaking it out slowly. But I
would say, just spread it out a lot more if
you could. I mean, maybe that's not practical and it's
just like a a dumb guy who doesn't know how
it works talking, But you know, I would disperse it more. Yeah,
(32:18):
I mean I guess you kind of could. You could
you could put like, ah, like a sprinkler head on
the end, so it's not just one big column. It's
just kind of Ye, it's diffug Just when I thought
it was a dumb idea, No, that's a great idea.
We now we need to go invent like a giant
sprinkler head and patent and use it. Uh. It's not
just a danger for oceans to um. Most of these
(32:39):
plants obviously are near the ocean. Um. But if there
are plants that are more inland and they're storing this
stuff in tanks, you could just like you have an
oil spill, you could have a sailine like a brine spill,
and that would be really really harmful to the dry
land vegetation and plant life and the whole ecosystem. And
you know, I don't think we uh, we kind of
(33:00):
walk past the fact that when you're pumping this stuff
in the sea, it's not just like, oh, some lobsters
and coral dyes, like that's part of the ecosystem that's
going to set off a chain reaction uh to everything
around it as well. Yeah. Um, so there there are
people who are trying to come up with, like we
were saying, like more efficiencies and ways around some of
these problems. One of the things I saw um was
(33:22):
out of the National Laboratory in Idaho, UM that uses
something called switchable polarity solvents. Did you see that. So
there's a different kind of osmosis that they're using that
doesn't require um the artificial pressure built up using pumps
and all that, so automatically it's less energy intensive. And
(33:43):
they added kind of chemical called the switchable polarity solvent,
which when you add it to UM the solution, it
actually raises the osmotic pressure itself, so the water comes
out of solution um on its own without having to
be pressed. And then that switchable polarity solvent comes with it.
(34:04):
You hit it with some heat and it basically shocks
the sps that chemical out of the water UM, and
then you have you've just got your water. And then
you just remove that switchable polarity solvent. So it requires
far less energy, which is a big improvement for sure.
That's pretty amazing it is. And I saw another one
that uses a double piston set up where when they
(34:26):
they do the water treatment basically in batches where they
added to that barrel that has the hollow barrel going
through it with the membrane involved the actual reverse osmosis
filtering on an industrial scale, they added in batches and
they use a piston to push the water through, and
then as the pistons moving, there's another chamber opening up
(34:46):
behind it that's getting filled with sea water. So there's
no downtime where like the piston moves to one side
and then seawater fills up, and then the piston moves
to the other side. It's just constantly going back and forth,
and on either side there seawater that's being treated or
filling up to be treated next, so you don't have downtime.
But then also the sea water that's coming in is
pushing the piston the other way too, so it requires
(35:08):
less energy as well. Um And I think that one's
out of Purdue. So there's some people figuring out how
to make this a little better, less energy intensive, a
little faster um and we'll probably see a lot of
a lot more solutions, especially as water becomes more and
more precious, you know. Starting now. Basically, yeah, they're also
(35:29):
trying to find more uses for that Brian instead of
trying to put it in the ocean. They're like, you know,
surely people can use Brian, right, And there are some
aquaculture applications in commercial aquaculture, I think talapia farms if
you if you like talapia, I'm not a big fan,
but tapia love really I think high high selinic would
(35:51):
that be it? Sure? High selinic water? Sure? I mean
at this point it doesn't matter. Alright, great, they like
really salty water, that's how should salt water, and I
think bream do as well. So they're they're starting to
ship some of that stuff there, and I think, um,
(36:12):
sometimes it can be used to grow stuff like sea
beats or an animal feed or in biofuel. But I
don't think it's like there's still going to be that
byproduct even if they even if every tilapia farm on
Earth wanted this water, you know, this bright stuff. And
especially the more we produce, the more Brian we're gonna have,
because I don't know if we said it or not.
(36:32):
For every one leader of fresh water you produce, you've
got one point five liters of briny water, higher salty
concentration water that you're sending back out to see it
kind of mess with the silin selenic count. So that's
reject streams um first album. What is this selnic sound?
(36:54):
Selnic count reject stream Alright, so Chuck, there's actually we
gotta finish on this one point. There's a debate. Especially
it seems like on Facebook, um is just how healthy
reverse osmosis water is. And in a lot of ways
it makes sense on its face to tell you the truth.
(37:15):
People are like that seems to be the kind of
like the kind of sites that are really touting this
seemed to to have their links promoted on Facebook a
lot um that's as diplomatic as I so. UM. So
the idea is that reverse osmosis is all well and
(37:35):
good for preventing pathogens, viruses, chemicals, minerals, metals from passing through.
And when you run water through reverse osmosis filter, the
ultrapure water you have on the other side is is great.
But the point of these that these people are making
is that it's actually too great, it's too pure, and
that humans actually need more stuff than just hydrogen and
(38:00):
oxygen mixed together, that we need other kinds of like
trace minerals in our water and UM that reverse osmosis
strips it out. So there's this, um, there's remineral remineralization
filters that you can actually get for your reverse osmosis
filter to where it goes through all the stages pre treatment, treatment,
(38:20):
reverse osmosis, and then on the other side, the last
filter is remineralization where it might add a little bit
of boron, a little bit of you know, sea salt,
something like that. Um, it's got a little calcium in it,
and now the water is ultra pure but also beneficial
for your metabolisms, optimal function. It makes a lot of sense.
I didn't see a lot of academic debate over it.
(38:43):
It was happening more peripherally, it seemed like. So that's
why I'm a little a little incredulous of the whole thing.
But it makes a lot of sense. You know, I
like a good mineral water. Yeah. And apparently also if
you um, if you want, if you have reverse osmosis
at your house and you are like, I can't afford
to REMI no realization picture s get yourself a little
Himalayan salt or a little bit sea salt that's more
(39:06):
than just salt, that contains a lot of other um
beneficial elements and um metals, alkali, earth metals and stuff,
and just put a little little sprinkle in there. There
you go, a little taple, do you? That's right? That's
the second album from Reject Stream. They're going pop. They're
like Kings of Leon. They started out kind of edgy,
(39:27):
and then the record company came to call in and
they said, sign us up. I love that first King
of Kings of Leon's album. And then they they said,
all right, hill billy's go get a haircut, yeah, and
get rich. They're like, get hot. Uh, you got anything
else about Kings of Leone? Okay, Well, if you want
(39:48):
to know more about Kings of Leon, rejects, Streame, reverse Osmoses, desalination,
any of that stuff, Um, go check it out on
the internet. See what happens when you search all of
that at once. Maybe the un verse will explode. Since
I said the universe will explode, it's time for a
listener mail. I'm gonna call this conveniently an email from Peth.
(40:11):
Oh wow, isn't it crazy? It's a full circle, man,
that's synchronicity. Uh. I'm not going to read it in
my terrible pasty accent. Though I wish you would, I
can't do it. I'm fading. Hey guys, A big fan
here from far far away Western Australia. My husband and
I spent two years traveling and exploring Australia in a
(40:32):
ute towing a caravan I don't know what that is
sub van truck uh, and in the process discovered the
delights of stuff you should know. It was great for
days with long outback drives. I remember our very first
episode that I randomly selected when we lost our podcast,
Virginity Cave Diving totally nuts and we were hooked. We
(40:56):
have since returned home to our city of Peth because
of COVID put in an abrupt into their travels and
now they listen on their daily drive to and from work. Luckily,
there are so many years worth of shows for me
to catch up on. On our travels, we spent a
week in the outback town of kuber Petty, that is
p E d y c O O b e R
(41:20):
couber Petty, where a lot of worlds of the world's
opals come from. You should do an episode on opals
any who I couldn't help, but notice that you failed
to mention that that town in the Selects Cave Dwelling episode.
I listened to that one recently despite most of the
town living underground and having some beautiful underground churches. Check
(41:42):
it out on Google. Uh, there's another any who. Keep
up the good work. I'll keep listening. Warm wishes that
is from Tamra. Well thanks a lot, Tamara. Any who
appreciate that? Did Tamras spell it h o o or
w h o A and y h o oh? Yeah?
(42:03):
There's two kinds of people in the world, and it's
divided by how you spell any who? There are three
kinds there. You know what the third is what the
people who don't use anything? I don't know, Chuck. I
think we all have a little bit of in any
who user in all of us. I think you're saying
you can take the person out of the any who,
but you can't take the ani who out of the
person you sure said it. Well, thanks again, Tamara, and
(42:27):
shout out to Perth for a third time. Why might
as well make it a hat trick And if you
want your time to get shouted out, why don't you
get in touch with us or build some massive desalination plants.
One of the two that would help a lot. Actually,
you can get in touch with us via email at
stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
(42:52):
Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's over there somewhere on the
other side of the membrane because she's insane in the membrane,
(00:22):
and this is stuff you should know. I think it's
pretty funny that I used to love Cyper Hill. Oh.
I downloaded their album again, like the other day. Yeah,
and it's it still holds up, insane, got no brain.
I love that guy. I don't remember his name actually,
(00:43):
now I think about I don't remember the other dude's
name either. I just remember their DJ was DJ Muggs, right.
That sounds about right. Yeah, I remember his name. I
don't remember the other like the two ms I don't remember.
I think they liked marijuana smoke if I remember here
there Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had a song about a bomb,
I believe. Yeah, it's from that's right. I'm gonna go
(01:05):
listen to that now. You should listen to the album again.
It's still pretty good. They I mean they're talking about
like shooting people and everything, just like come on, no,
you don't do anything like that. But um, you know
there are other stuff. The other stuff they talked about.
It's pretty good. Yeah, So I am literally going to
go listen to that now and you can talk about
reverse Osmosis. Alright. So, Chuck, you made a reference before
(01:28):
we started um recording that sounded really familiar to me,
but it's probably only going to sound familiar to like
eight other people. You referenced Osmosis Jones, right, and I
was like, who is that? That sounds really familiar and
I cannot, for the life of me place it, and
then you said it's from our TV show. Still can't
really place it, but now I kind of know what
(01:49):
you're talking about. Actually, and now I'm doubting myself. Okay,
I think Osmosis Jones is uh is a movie? Okay, yeah,
I think you're thinking of Nash Pluto. No no, no,
Osmosis Jones is Chris Chris Rock animated movie. Okay, I
got it mixed up with something. Are are? One of
(02:11):
our co star actors used to say a lot, which
was to say Jones on the end of anything That's right,
And I think it reminded me of Osmosis Jones. But
I have COVID, so I'm all over the place. You
are all over the place. But one thing where you
really nailed at, Chuck, and I'm really appreciative that you
brought up osmosis, Jones, is because we're talking about osmosis today,
(02:32):
and in particular, we're gonna focus mostly on reverse osmosis,
although we'll have to talk about regular osmosis as well.
How does that sound? Yeah? I mean, can I go
ahead and talk about regular osmosis? I mean, is there
any better time? I can't think of a better time,
certainly not in our Radium Girls episode. Yeah. I mean
(02:55):
this is basically like if you took chemistry in high
school and you have forgot everything about it since then,
you might hear the words ostomosis and reverse osmosis and
be like, wait a minute, that's that's tickling my brain
a little bit. I know I knew that at one point.
So just a little basic chemistry. One oh one is
(03:15):
let's just talk about saltwater. Lay it on, um. Saltwater
is going to figure in. Have almost said heavenly heavily here,
because as you'll see, reverse osmosis is a great kind
of modern way too, sort of the hip new way
to take salt from water so we can drink it
like you're talking of. If you make a cup of
(03:36):
salt water and you gargle it, you know for your throat,
you have some left over, you could use reverse osmosis
to convert it back into regular water. That's real. Don't
waste it. And we we talked about I know, we've
done stuff on desalination. We did. We did an episode
way back in the day hauled um, is it possible
(03:58):
to drink the ocean or something like that. Uh, what
exactly what happens when we run out of water? I
think is what it was. That was way off And
then I'm pretty sure we talked about drinking the ocean.
We also did one on manufacturing water too, but yeah, yeah, yeah,
we talked about this desalinating before. That's right. So back
to chemistry one on one. It's very simple. I don't
(04:21):
know if you folks remember what a solution is, but
a solution is when, in this case it's with salt water,
you have a solvent, which is the water, and then
you have the salute, which is the salt or dissolve
in the water or whatever else you want to to
have in there. And this whole thing together is called
(04:43):
a solution and if you put this solution in a YouTube,
not y o u t ub dot com, but a
literal beaker shaped like a tube, and you had a
semi permeable membrane in the middle. Let's just go ahead
and say gortex in this case, because that's what that is.
Shout out cortex. And you poured this stuff in there
(05:04):
on one side, and then you poured regular water on
the other side. That water on the other side is
gonna want to just balance out. It's gonna want to
seek thermodynamic equilibrium, and it's gonna fight its way through there,
through that membrane until everything is nice and level. It's
got this osmotic pressure and it's gonna push through there
(05:25):
until it reaches that equilibrium because that's where it wants
to be. And that's yeah, because nature is seeking equilibrium.
And because the the higher concentrated side is separated by
a membrane from the lower concentrated side, it's got to
make it through that membrane to even things out, and
as it does, it's actually gonna push the concentrated side
(05:48):
up the beaker because it's moving into that side through
the membrane. It's pretty amazing stuff, but yeah, that's I mean,
that's osmosis, Chuck, nicely done. Why don't you tackle reverse
osmosis m so reverse osmosis so osmosis what you just
described as a passive process that happens because the atmosphere
(06:09):
above us has weight like air has weight. And in fact,
if you took one square inch of a column of
atmosphere of air from the surface of the Earth all
the way up to the exosphere, the tippy top of
the atmosphere, that one square inch column with way about
fourteen and three quarter pounds. So another way to put
it is, there's fourteen point seven five pounds per square
(06:32):
ince of pressure at surface level on Earth. Because of
that pressure, we have that osmotic pressure, and so the
stuff can kind of move from one side to the other,
from lower concentration to higher concentration to balance things out.
And it's all because of that. But the whole thing
is a passive process. There's nothing moving. This is not
it's not requiring energy to take place. Okay, with reverse osmosis,
(06:58):
you're doing the opposite of what you just described, and
it actually does take energy. You have to create more
pressure that will overcome the the natural osmotic pressure. And
what you're doing in that case is actually taking the
solvent in this case water and moving it out against
its natural will, against every fiber of its being screaming
(07:20):
at you that no, this is wrong, this is an
importance against nature. UM. It's moving it through that membrane
to the other side, to the lower concentration. So what
you're doing is taking a concentrated solution and making it
even more concentrated by taking out the the in this
case the water. So what you have on one side
(07:40):
is saltwater and then saltwater concentrate, and what you have
on the other side is just pure water what they
call ultra pure water UM, and that's basically reverse osmosis. Yeah.
So if you look into UH to make saltwater not saltwater,
and you had a couple of tanks and on one
side you had that UM, that solution of salt water
(08:02):
or let's just call it saltwater, and it's under that
you know, regular osmotic pressure that we were talking about.
It's all happy and well. You gotta apply I think
about fifty to sixty bars of pressure and you gotta
push that thing through there, and those salt molecules are
too big to pass through the membrane, and it's it's
(08:23):
really pretty easy. It's not the most I mean, I
can't go out and build one of these, but it's
not the most complicated process. It's really just if you
think about trying to fit something too big through a
small hole, it's not gonna go. Everything else will, so
it's left over is salt or you know, sort of
a briny solution, right, And what you're saying is like
(08:44):
using pressure to push it through, Like that's that basically
makes sense. But but when you're almost you're not using
pressure to to push it. You're just increasing the pressure
in that concentration. And then reverse OUs moostis happens by
magic because you've over come that natural losmotic pressure. And
now you know to the to the solution or the
(09:04):
salt water and the ultrapure water. You know, what's up
is down. Nothing makes sense anymore. All bets are off
because you've overcome that natural losmotic pressure. So it's not
exactly like pushing it through a membrane, which is how
my brain kept going. Um, there's like it's it's a
little more magic than that. But the upshot of it
is that that membrane you're using is so small, the
(09:26):
pores in it are so small that only water can
make it through, and water, it turns out, was really small, Chuck.
You want to know how small water is, well, prepare
for it, because I'm about to lay it on you.
The average, actually it wouldn't be average, would be exactly
the same size. The size of a water molecule is
point to seven nanometers, which is twenty seven hundred thousands
(09:51):
of a micron, and a micron is a millionth of
a meter, So a human hair's diameter is about seventy microns.
A water molecule is hundred thousands of one micron. So
it's really really small, which means that if you can
make a membrane that is small enough, large enough for
(10:14):
water to get through, but not much larger than that,
it's going to keep a lot of other stuff from
passing through that membrane as well. That's right. Uh, maybe
we should take a break and we'll talk a little
bit about what we've been teasing, which is desalination right
after this. All right, so if you want to, I mean,
(10:57):
water is is a commodity. We've been talking about that
a lot on the show for a while and kind
of trying to bang that drum that potable drinking water. Uh,
you know, it could be a crisis in the near
or far future for the world. So there have been
a lot of efforts over the years, uh, kind of
to try and get ahead of this a little bit.
And the ocean is an obvious place to look because
(11:19):
there's a lot of water out there. So the efforts
have been made since I believe about the nineteen fifties
to try and turn that that salt water into something
that people can drink or at least use, you know,
for other purposes. Um, you know, not necessarily like potable water,
but you know, useing in industries and stuff like that. Yeah. Um.
(11:39):
In particular, we've known how to like distill or to
get water from saltwater pure water from saltwater using distillation,
but that uses a lot of energy where you boil
the water. It takes a lot of energy to boil
water and boil the salt out of water. Um. And
that was kind of the first attempt. But I think
in the sixties they started to say, um, maybe we
could take this ousmosis thing that's happening all over the
(12:02):
place and reverse it and and we could use that
to get salt out of water. Yeah, And they figured
out how to do it and it was going pretty well,
but they didn't have a great way to do it
on a large scale that made it kind of financially
practical to do until a couple of engineering grad students
that U c l A. Came along. One was named
Sydney Loebe and the other one's name Strini Bassa surre Rajan. Boy,
(12:28):
you're gonna nail that. Yeah you did? Would you say
it another way or no? No? And I don't have
their names in front of me, but I think that
you it sounded pretty believable, Chuck. You know what I do.
Here's a little trick for you. And of course this
is only works is if you're pronouncing the parts correctly.
But I just like I looked them up on the
internet and call them and ask them how to say
(12:50):
their names. Well, you could sometimes I look on YouTube
see if they're interviewed, but um, I just spell it
out dictionary style, like syllable by syllable with big spaces
in between. Oh yeah, yeah, and then do you make
the one with the emphasis the syllable with emphasis like
in all caps or something like that sometimes, or they'll
scribble underline or you know, none of it's like like
(13:12):
real dictionary style. Uh, yeah, I don't. I don't even
know what swat is. It's the upside down. Oh that's
a schwa. Yes, what's the word we were talking about
the other day that I loved swing? I hate swing?
You hate I think everybody hated schwing for a little while.
(13:36):
They're yeah, not a fan, So all right, So I
nailed those two names. They were grad students at u
C l A. And they were the two gentlemen who
came up with this basically the first practical reverse osmosis
membrane using cellulose acetate. And it was the first time
that they could actually use this on a large scale
(13:57):
and they did so. Uh, this is actually more of
a small scale operation, but the idea was the same
at a place in Coalinga, California, nineteen sixty five that
was online for seven years and worked pretty well from
what I understand. Yeah, and at the very least it
was a very good um proof of concept, I guess,
you know. And it's showed that yeah, with this new
(14:18):
this new ascetate membrane, you know, like you were saying,
you can get a lot more through it at a
much faster pace. Um, and that's kind of what you
need if you're going to ramp this up for industrial
style production. And they definitely did. That was nineteen sixty five,
you said it went on online. As of two thousand nineteen,
(14:39):
there's now a hundred and seventy seven different countries producing
desalinated water using reverse osmosis. And in fact, there's I
think sixteen thousand desalination plants in the world by far,
the most are in Africa and the Middle East, but
there's a total capacity now today, just since nineteen sixty five,
this is developed where hundred million cubic meters of fresh
(15:02):
water can be produced everyday worldwide. That is just not
so from taking seawater and using reverse osmosis to turn
it into pure fresh water. That's right. And uh, those
numbers are growing and they need to, which is which
is a great thing. I love it when we figured
(15:22):
out how to do something and then it's just a
matter of sort of getting more and more of it going. Yeah, yeah,
I mean yeah, And I think from what I understand,
you know, everybody's trying to figure out like UM, you
know how to build on efficiencies or how to continue
to scale up and how to use less energy and
time and all that. But it's it's it seems to
(15:45):
be one of those technologies as roughly the same as
it was when they invented it initially and basically UM
to kind of give just a little bit of detail
on on how it goes, it's it's you you take
in seawater. Most reverse osmosis plant that UM desalinate seawater
built pretty close to the sea. UM because transportation is
(16:06):
is a big cost. So if you can just pipe
it right from the sea into your plant, that saves
on a lot of costs and time and energy. UM.
It's ramped up using pumps and then it's run through
the reverse osmosis filters and under pressure that like you said,
I think sixty bars of pressure, so it's a pressurized
so that it overcomes the natural osmotic pressure. And it
(16:30):
is it goes over, not through like I keep wanting
to think of it going through, like there's a membrane
in the water's way and it has to go through
this membrane. That's not how it goes. It goes through
a tube and in the center of the tube is
another tube um that's wrapped in the membrane and the
(16:51):
concentrate the salt keeps going, but the water that's in
that concentrate, that salt, that solution um goes through the
membrane into that inner tube, and the inner tube pushes
that fresh water, that that reverse osmosis water along um
into what's called the production water stream, and then that
(17:14):
salt water just continues along its way back out to
the ocean under pressure and what's called the reject stream,
which is not nice, but it's you know, an accurate description.
And then that's how like you would desalinate water. It
is reject reject water stream. Sure as the reject stream. Sure, Okay,
(17:34):
there you go. When you have three names, I think
that's more an album title. So maybe just reject stream. Yeah,
I think reject stream is great. And we'll talk about
that more later. Not the band, but are the imaginary
band the album? Yeah? And who's playing what? Uh So,
(17:56):
reverse osmosis is not the kind of thing that you
can just you for salt water. It's a great application,
of course, but it can you know, you're filtering something out,
so you can filter out almost anything. Um, if you
have a local water source that has way too much fluoride,
you can filter out some of that fluoride in a
much more efficient way than you can using charcoal filtrations. Uh.
(18:17):
We did a show on fluoride like a thousand years ago.
I remember that one. Yeah, I think it's a floride
making a stupid that. I feel like that was one
of our like fifteen minute episodes or something. Yeah, easily
at most, I think some kind You talked about the
ultrapure water, which can is the you know, one side
of the result, and some companies need that stuff and
(18:38):
some industries need that stuff. So sometimes you're filtering out
things just to get that ultrapure water to use as
an industry application. I think when you're manufacturing electronics sometimes,
or pharmaceuticals, um, different kind of chemicals, certain medical applications.
We talked about wastewater a lot of the toilet to
(18:59):
tap that's using reverse osmosis. Right on our best episodes,
I think, do you think so wastewater treatment? I mean,
it's hard to say best episode when we've been doing
this for eighty years, but uh, I thought it was
a good one. Yeah, I thought it was good too.
I was just surprised to hear you say that. But
that's yeah, and toilets just happens. It's just gross, but
(19:22):
it's it's sensible for sure. And the point of it
is it's gross entirely in your mind. Like when you
raise that glass of water that used to be waste water,
it's just water after it's undergone reverse osmosis. Like that's it.
There's nothing else in it. There's not even a memory
of that kind of stuff, you know, because despite what
(19:44):
homeopaths say, there's nothing in that water except for the water.
There are some things that make it through UM, what
are called containments of emerging concern UM. Some kinds of
pharmaceuticals can actually make it through. They're small enough that
they make it through with the water molecules. But for
the most part, most everything else is filtered out by
(20:04):
reverse osmosis UM. And one of the reasons that are
One of the other industries that use it chuck is
like the beverage industry, because you can take tap water
from anywhere, run it through reverse osmosis filter and move
even more of it through faster because you're not having
you're not dealing with a briny salt solution. Like this
(20:26):
is just tap water and you're convert you're basically turning
it into a blank slate. So you could make like
a soft drink taste the same anywhere in the world
just by using the local tap water to produce it,
you know, and now you have production facilities all over
the world, so you don't have to transport it because
you're able to start with reverse osmosis water. Oh yeah,
(20:46):
they use it, uh, separating away from milk. They use
it in the wine industry some now they use it
to make maple syrup. They remove that that sugary goodness
from the water and the sap. What else, um, let's see,
they use it for recycling. One of the other this
is a big big deal is we'll see um. When
(21:10):
you when you produce all sorts of stuff um through
industrial processes or if you recycle things, you have to
use all sorts of other chemicals you produce, like sorts
of wastewater is a byproduct, and wastewater is really hard
to get rid of without contaminating other water because it
mixes really well. So one of the good things you
can do is take wastewater, run it through reverse osmosis,
(21:32):
and you're basically catching all of the stuff that was
once mixed in with the water um and making it
into a much more disposable, much closer to solid form,
and then also producing reverse osmosis water that you can
use for all sorts of other applications as well. And
speaking of recycling, a little bit different kind of recycling.
(21:54):
But some of these, and you know, not all of them,
they're you know, there's nothing that gets me going more
than it contained system. And some of these are contained systems,
which is when you have a system that kind of
feeds itself. We talked about these high pressure pumps that
force out what did you call it again, what was
the band? Rejects stream, the reject stream. That's not the
(22:17):
God help you if you call him the reject strange,
that's reject stream. That's like a letterman miss step or something.
And you got a cool logo with just an RN
and S that sort of are snaking around each other
or something like that. This is what I see. Do
you know remember the grateful dead kid with the ice
cream cone on his head? Sure, I remembering along those lines,
(22:38):
But then rather than an ice cream cone, he's got
a reverse mohawk like the bad guy in Death Wish three. See,
I was thinking more like the White Snake logo. Oh no,
it's I don't think so. No, you just blew my
mind a little bit. I'm trying to recover here by
tap dancing. But I don't know, man, maybe not to
(22:58):
get further down this road. But the other day I
saw that there was some big festival in Europe with
all these metal bands, and I was like, oh, looks
kind of cool, and White Snake was playing. I was like,
that was guys still playing. It's like, let's let me
go check them out and see what they sound like.
Just do yourself a favor and go to YouTube and
watch like a White Snake festival from like just like
(23:19):
put In twenty nineteen. Let's say, do they just play
all their old hits? Are they making new music? Oh? Well,
I don't know. I can't speak to that. The old
hits are what's on YouTube. Um, it's not it's not great.
So is it's still okay? You said his name too,
because I almost said David Copperfield. It's great. He makes
the stage disappear beneath his feet. That's right. You forget.
(23:44):
That's the most important part. Yeah, it's it's not great.
It's uh, just just gotta check it out. Boy, This
COVID got you trash and everything. The radium girl, White Snake,
I know, I love White Snake. You know Tanny Containe
passed away. Maybe that's what to do with it? What? Yeah,
she died a couple of years ago. I think I
(24:06):
didn't know that. Yeah, or maybe even last year. No,
I don't know. I'm yeah. Are you on meds right now? No?
High on stuffyheadedness? I got you, you know, the natural high.
So where was I? Oh? Yeah, contained systems. So they're
pumping out this stuff with high pressure, and as we'll see, uh,
(24:29):
that can go just go out into the ocean again
and we'll talk about that more later. But they can
also use that that force of pumping this stuff out
to use it to spin a turbine. Our old friends
spinning a turbine and basically reusing that stuff to to
make it a closed system where it's operating itself. Yeah,
pretty many, amazing. I get jazzed by that as well.
(24:50):
And I just realized, Chuck, basically, these desalination plants that
are close to the ocean are basically a giant YouTube
and in the middle there's that membrane. But really also
in the middle is the the entire desalination plant. But
it's just coming up one side and passing through the other. Actually,
it's not a very good analogy, and I think about it,
(25:11):
but it's a U shape at least, how about that. Yeah,
you can also get him under your sink or on
your countertop in your kitchen. Like it sounds like the
most you know, large scale scientific thing you can imagine.
But if you just go to a big box hardware
store and you look up water filtration systems, a lot
of them are reverse osmosis. Yeah, yeah, you're um, you're
(25:34):
gonna be hard pressed actually to find one that doesn't
have that, Like one of those undersink like multi filter
multi stage water filters that comes with its own faucet
that you have to install, But they don't. I was
looking there actually, you know, um, I think they've actually
come down since this article was written a couple of yeah,
something like that. It seems like you can get a
pretty good one for about two fifty dollars, like basically
(25:57):
everything you need. Yeah, and then there's also own our
top versions two if you want to just have one
on your countertop. But I say, I say we take
a break. Okay, yeah, because we we've talked all upside right,
there's a dark side to this. Well not really, but
you know there's some down downsides of drawbacks. Nothing dark,
(26:17):
I would say that might be overstating it. All right,
Well we'll be back right after this, everybody, Okay, okay, Chuck,
(26:47):
welcome to the dark side of reverse osmosis. Very nice.
You've got compliments on your bellow Legosi. Yeah, it was
very good. I don't remember what episode that was. I'll
take it good. I'll take any compliment. Sure, same here,
unless you're really good at not doing podcasts. Well, yeah,
(27:11):
it took you a second, didn't it it really did.
I think I have sympathetic COVID. I'm a little fogging myself.
You know. You gotta get out of that bunk bed
underneath me. You might catch it. So first, before we
get started, I want to shout out Perth, Australia, Chuck,
get this. Forty three of perth drinking water is made
(27:31):
from desalinated seawater from reverse osmosis. They have two plants
that we probably drank some while we were there. I'll
bet we did. I'll bet we did. I don't know,
it couldn't even tell, so it was right. So do
you know what's funny is everyone outside of Australia got
that joke because I guarantee you they didn't show that
(27:53):
ad in Australia and they also think that Tom Broke
All runs Motel six. That's right. So we're talking about
the dark side of of of reverse osmosis. Plants are
desalinating using reverse osmosis, and reverse osmosis in general, there's
some problems with it. For one, it's really I don't
(28:14):
want to say it's really energy intensive. It's actually not
as bad as you would think. But the more you
scale up and you know where you're supplying say almost
half of your your town's drinking water through reverse osmosis desalination, like,
the energy usage scales up, so the cost can scale up,
and then also so does the carbon footprint of these things,
(28:36):
because you know they're burning fossil fuels to run those
pumps to pressurize that column of water when they send
it across the reverse osmosis membrane to overcome the osmotic pressure.
That's a that's a real big, that's a that's a
problem with it. I guess you could say, yeah, I
would say that. Another problem that we we teased earlier
was the um I guess what do you call it?
(29:00):
Harmful byproduct or just a waste waste byproduct reject stream? Yeah, sure, okay,
but it is it is a byproduct that basically it's salt,
it's brian it is there's a lot of it left over,
and you've got to do something with it if you're
not going to run it back into a closed system.
And some places they just say, all right, well, it's
(29:21):
it's saltwater and very concentrated form, so let's just pump
that back into the ocean. And I'm glad I kept
reading because my first thought was like, I'll sure it's saltwater,
but that can't like the ocean has a certain amount
of salinity on purpose probably and that that can't be
great to just add a lot more. And my instinct
was right, it's not. I think Australian Center for Water
(29:44):
Research says things get back to normal at about sixteen
hundred feet fives from the source. It's pretty pretty far
um so anything within that that sixt feet it's it's
really bad news. When they're up and that stuff back
in and you know it's a fish can get out
of there pretty quickly. But if you're not a fish,
(30:06):
if you're something that crawls along on the sea floor
or plant life on the sea floor, then that's really
bad and it's gonna kill off a lot of stuff
in that area. Yeah, which is problematic. I mean, high
salinity decreases the dissolved oxygen, and fish and sea life
need oxygen in the water, so it's it is a
real problem for that that life that can't move away
(30:29):
very easily. And then in addition to that too, they
actually introduce certain kinds of chemicals and metals into the
um the stream the feeds the feed water stream um
to keep the membranes from fouling up as which happens
really easily. You can imagine if you have a membrane
(30:50):
that has pores that are just big enough to allow
something that's twenty seven hundred thousands of a micrometer a
micron across through, like all that stuff that's left behind
is gonna gunk up the membrane is really quick. It's
going to get insane in the membrane so they take
exactly so they take steps to keep this from fouling,
(31:11):
from getting clogged up by adding additional stuff. Well, that
additional stuff also gets pumped out into the ocean too,
which is a problem as well. There are calls for
um uh additional steps to be added onto that reject
stream so that before it hits the ocean, it runs
through like a UV light that kills off pathogens maybe
(31:32):
UM or maybe they need to filter out some of
the stuff and reuse like the chlorine and the copper
that they're introducing. Um there are things that we could
do to to make the whole thing a little more
environmentally friendly for sure. Yeah for their uh. I think
the plant operators in Australia say that they're like, you're
pumping it out so fast, made it mixes in a
(31:54):
really quick And I don't know if I buy that.
I mean, it makes sense that it mixes faster than
if you're just like leaking it out slowly. But I
would say, just spread it out a lot more if
you could. I mean, maybe that's not practical and it's
just like a a dumb guy who doesn't know how
it works talking, But you know, I would disperse it more. Yeah,
(32:18):
I mean I guess you kind of could. You could
you could put like, ah, like a sprinkler head on
the end, so it's not just one big column. It's
just kind of Ye, it's diffug Just when I thought
it was a dumb idea, No, that's a great idea.
We now we need to go invent like a giant
sprinkler head and patent and use it. Uh. It's not
just a danger for oceans to um. Most of these
(32:39):
plants obviously are near the ocean. Um. But if there
are plants that are more inland and they're storing this
stuff in tanks, you could just like you have an
oil spill, you could have a sailine like a brine spill,
and that would be really really harmful to the dry
land vegetation and plant life and the whole ecosystem. And
you know, I don't think we uh, we kind of
(33:00):
walk past the fact that when you're pumping this stuff
in the sea, it's not just like, oh, some lobsters
and coral dyes, like that's part of the ecosystem that's
going to set off a chain reaction uh to everything
around it as well. Yeah. Um, so there there are
people who are trying to come up with, like we
were saying, like more efficiencies and ways around some of
these problems. One of the things I saw um was
(33:22):
out of the National Laboratory in Idaho, UM that uses
something called switchable polarity solvents. Did you see that. So
there's a different kind of osmosis that they're using that
doesn't require um the artificial pressure built up using pumps
and all that, so automatically it's less energy intensive. And
(33:43):
they added kind of chemical called the switchable polarity solvent,
which when you add it to UM the solution, it
actually raises the osmotic pressure itself, so the water comes
out of solution um on its own without having to
be pressed. And then that switchable polarity solvent comes with it.
(34:04):
You hit it with some heat and it basically shocks
the sps that chemical out of the water UM, and
then you have you've just got your water. And then
you just remove that switchable polarity solvent. So it requires
far less energy, which is a big improvement for sure.
That's pretty amazing it is. And I saw another one
that uses a double piston set up where when they
(34:26):
they do the water treatment basically in batches where they
added to that barrel that has the hollow barrel going
through it with the membrane involved the actual reverse osmosis
filtering on an industrial scale, they added in batches and
they use a piston to push the water through, and
then as the pistons moving, there's another chamber opening up
(34:46):
behind it that's getting filled with sea water. So there's
no downtime where like the piston moves to one side
and then seawater fills up, and then the piston moves
to the other side. It's just constantly going back and forth,
and on either side there seawater that's being treated or
filling up to be treated next, so you don't have downtime.
But then also the sea water that's coming in is
pushing the piston the other way too, so it requires
(35:08):
less energy as well. Um And I think that one's
out of Purdue. So there's some people figuring out how
to make this a little better, less energy intensive, a
little faster um and we'll probably see a lot of
a lot more solutions, especially as water becomes more and
more precious, you know. Starting now. Basically, yeah, they're also
(35:29):
trying to find more uses for that Brian instead of
trying to put it in the ocean. They're like, you know,
surely people can use Brian, right, And there are some
aquaculture applications in commercial aquaculture, I think talapia farms if
you if you like talapia, I'm not a big fan,
but tapia love really I think high high selinic would
(35:51):
that be it? Sure? High selinic water? Sure? I mean
at this point it doesn't matter. Alright, great, they like
really salty water, that's how should salt water, and I
think bream do as well. So they're they're starting to
ship some of that stuff there, and I think, um,
(36:12):
sometimes it can be used to grow stuff like sea
beats or an animal feed or in biofuel. But I
don't think it's like there's still going to be that
byproduct even if they even if every tilapia farm on
Earth wanted this water, you know, this bright stuff. And
especially the more we produce, the more Brian we're gonna have,
because I don't know if we said it or not.
(36:32):
For every one leader of fresh water you produce, you've
got one point five liters of briny water, higher salty
concentration water that you're sending back out to see it
kind of mess with the silin selenic count. So that's
reject streams um first album. What is this selnic sound?
(36:54):
Selnic count reject stream Alright, so Chuck, there's actually we
gotta finish on this one point. There's a debate. Especially
it seems like on Facebook, um is just how healthy
reverse osmosis water is. And in a lot of ways
it makes sense on its face to tell you the truth.
(37:15):
People are like that seems to be the kind of
like the kind of sites that are really touting this
seemed to to have their links promoted on Facebook a
lot um that's as diplomatic as I so. UM. So
the idea is that reverse osmosis is all well and
(37:35):
good for preventing pathogens, viruses, chemicals, minerals, metals from passing through.
And when you run water through reverse osmosis filter, the
ultrapure water you have on the other side is is great.
But the point of these that these people are making
is that it's actually too great, it's too pure, and
that humans actually need more stuff than just hydrogen and
(38:00):
oxygen mixed together, that we need other kinds of like
trace minerals in our water and UM that reverse osmosis
strips it out. So there's this, um, there's remineral remineralization
filters that you can actually get for your reverse osmosis
filter to where it goes through all the stages pre treatment, treatment,
(38:20):
reverse osmosis, and then on the other side, the last
filter is remineralization where it might add a little bit
of boron, a little bit of you know, sea salt,
something like that. Um, it's got a little calcium in it,
and now the water is ultra pure but also beneficial
for your metabolisms, optimal function. It makes a lot of sense.
I didn't see a lot of academic debate over it.
(38:43):
It was happening more peripherally, it seemed like. So that's
why I'm a little a little incredulous of the whole thing.
But it makes a lot of sense. You know, I
like a good mineral water. Yeah. And apparently also if
you um, if you want, if you have reverse osmosis
at your house and you are like, I can't afford
to REMI no realization picture s get yourself a little
Himalayan salt or a little bit sea salt that's more
(39:06):
than just salt, that contains a lot of other um
beneficial elements and um metals, alkali, earth metals and stuff,
and just put a little little sprinkle in there. There
you go, a little taple, do you? That's right? That's
the second album from Reject Stream. They're going pop. They're
like Kings of Leon. They started out kind of edgy,
(39:27):
and then the record company came to call in and
they said, sign us up. I love that first King
of Kings of Leon's album. And then they they said,
all right, hill billy's go get a haircut, yeah, and
get rich. They're like, get hot. Uh, you got anything
else about Kings of Leone? Okay, Well, if you want
(39:48):
to know more about Kings of Leon, rejects, Streame, reverse Osmoses, desalination,
any of that stuff, Um, go check it out on
the internet. See what happens when you search all of
that at once. Maybe the un verse will explode. Since
I said the universe will explode, it's time for a
listener mail. I'm gonna call this conveniently an email from Peth.
(40:11):
Oh wow, isn't it crazy? It's a full circle, man,
that's synchronicity. Uh. I'm not going to read it in
my terrible pasty accent. Though I wish you would, I
can't do it. I'm fading. Hey guys, A big fan
here from far far away Western Australia. My husband and
I spent two years traveling and exploring Australia in a
(40:32):
ute towing a caravan I don't know what that is
sub van truck uh, and in the process discovered the
delights of stuff you should know. It was great for
days with long outback drives. I remember our very first
episode that I randomly selected when we lost our podcast,
Virginity Cave Diving totally nuts and we were hooked. We
(40:56):
have since returned home to our city of Peth because
of COVID put in an abrupt into their travels and
now they listen on their daily drive to and from work. Luckily,
there are so many years worth of shows for me
to catch up on. On our travels, we spent a
week in the outback town of kuber Petty, that is
p E d y c O O b e R
(41:20):
couber Petty, where a lot of worlds of the world's
opals come from. You should do an episode on opals
any who I couldn't help, but notice that you failed
to mention that that town in the Selects Cave Dwelling episode.
I listened to that one recently despite most of the
town living underground and having some beautiful underground churches. Check
(41:42):
it out on Google. Uh, there's another any who. Keep
up the good work. I'll keep listening. Warm wishes that
is from Tamra. Well thanks a lot, Tamara. Any who
appreciate that? Did Tamras spell it h o o or
w h o A and y h o oh? Yeah?
(42:03):
There's two kinds of people in the world, and it's
divided by how you spell any who? There are three
kinds there. You know what the third is what the
people who don't use anything? I don't know, Chuck. I
think we all have a little bit of in any
who user in all of us. I think you're saying
you can take the person out of the any who,
but you can't take the ani who out of the
person you sure said it. Well, thanks again, Tamara, and
(42:27):
shout out to Perth for a third time. Why might
as well make it a hat trick And if you
want your time to get shouted out, why don't you
get in touch with us or build some massive desalination plants.
One of the two that would help a lot. Actually,
you can get in touch with us via email at
stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
(42:52):
Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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