Stuff You Should Know - How Reverse Osmosis Will Save the World

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

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! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Slash host hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place? Because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life

Tell everybody yeah, everybody About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to frosted tips with the Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts 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 Remembering and this is stuff you should know I think it's pretty funny that I used to love Cypersill

Oh, I downloaded their album again. Yeah 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 now. I think about I don't remember the other dude's name either I just remember their DJ was DJ mugs, right? That sounds about right. Yeah, I remember his name I don't remember the other like the 2m. I don't remember. I think they liked marijuana smoke if I remember here there. Yeah, yeah Yeah, they had a song about a bong. I believe yeah hits from the bong That's right. I'm gonna go 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. You're just like come on now You don't do anything like that. No, they don't but

You know there are other stuff the other stuff they talked about it's pretty good Yeah, so I am literally gonna go listen to that now and you can talk about reverse osmosis All right, so Chuck you made a reference before we started Recording that sounded really familiar to me But it's probably only gonna sound familiar to like eight other people you referenced osmosis Jones, right? I did And I was like who is that it 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 I now I kind of know what you're talking about actually and now I'm doubting myself Okay, I think osmosis Jones is

Is a movie Okay, yeah, I think you're thinking of Nash Pluto. No, no, no osmosis Jones is a Chris Chris Rock animated movie Okay, I got it mixed up with something our one of 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 it Chuck and I'm really appreciative that you brought up osmosis Jones is because we're talking about Osmosis today 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 this is basically like if you took chemistry in high school and you have forgotten everything about it since then Mm-hmm. You might hear the words osmosis 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 101 is Let's just talk about salt water lay it on us

Salt water is gonna figure in have a Almost said heavenly heavily here because as you'll see reverse osmosis is a great kind of modern way to Sort of the hip new way to take salt from water so we can drink it Like if you make a cup of if you make a cup of salt water and you gargle it, you know for your throat Mm-hmm. You have some leftover you could use reverse osmosis to convert it back into regular water That's right. I don't waste it and we talked about I know we've done stuff on desalination It's been a while. Yeah, we did we did an episode way back in the day. Yeah hauled Is it possible to drink the ocean or something like that?

What exactly what happens when we run out of water, I think is what it was. Yeah, I was way off and And then I'm pretty sure we talked about drinking the ocean We also did one on manufacturing water too, but yeah, yeah, we talked about this Desalinating before that's right. So back to chemistry 101. It's very simple I don't 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 solute Which is the salt or I think you dissolve in the water. Yeah, or Or whatever else you wanted to have in there and this whole thing together is called a solution

and if you put this solution in a YouTube not why oh you to you be e 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 Gore-Tex in this case because that's what that is shout out Gore-Tex And you poured this stuff in there 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 until it reaches that equilibrium because that's where it wants to be And that's us Moses. Yeah, because nature is seeking equilibrium and because the 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 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? So reverse osmosis so osmosis what you just described as a passive process it happens because

The atmosphere 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 would weigh about 14 and three-quarter pounds So another way to put it is there's fourteen point seven five pounds per square inch of pressure at surface level on earth And because of that pressure we have that osmotic pressure And so these 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's a passive process. There's nothing moving

This is not it's not requiring energy to take place Okay, with reverse osmosis 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 osmotic 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 at you that no this is wrong. This is an importance against nature 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 in this case

The water so what you have on one side is salt water and then salt water concentrate and what you have on the other side Is just pure water what they call ultra pure water and that's basically reverse osmosis Yeah, so if you're looking to To make salt water not salt water and you had a couple of tanks and on one side you had that That solution of salt water or let's just call it salt water Okay, and it's under that, you know regular osmotic pressure that we were talking about It's all happy and well you got to apply I think about 50 to 60 bars of pressure And you got to push that thing through there and those salt molecules are too big to pass through the membrane

And it's it's 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 what's left over is salt or you know, sort of a briny solution right and What you're saying is like 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 push it You're just increasing the pressure in that concentration and then reverse osmosis happens by magic because you've overcome that natural Osmotic pressure and now you know to the to the solution or the salt water and the ultra pure water

You know, what's up is down nothing makes sense anymore all bets are off because you've overcome that natural osmotic pressure So it's not exactly like pushing it through a membrane, which is how my brain kept going 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 pores in it are so small That only water can make it through and water it turns out is really small Chuck. Do you want to have small water is sure? Well prepare for it because I'm about to lay it on you the average Actually, it wouldn't be average. It'd be exactly the same size the size of a water molecule is point two seven nanometers Which is twenty seven hundred thousandths of a micron and a micron is a millionth of a meter

So a human hair's diameter is about 70 microns a water molecule is 2700 thousandths 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 water to get through but not much larger than that It's gonna keep a lot of other stuff from passing through that membrane as well That's right 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

Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place? Because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh god. Seriously. I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man, and so my husband Michael Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life Step by step not another one. Uh-huh kids relationships life in general can get messy

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody Yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen So we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology But from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life in India It's like smoking you might not smoke But you're gonna get secondhand astrology and lately

I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast Tantric curses major league baseball teams canceled marriages kpop But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology My whole world can crashing down situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father And my whole view on astrology It changed

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are gonna change too Listen to skyline drive in the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts All right, so if you want to I mean water 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 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 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

Kind of to try and get ahead of this a little bit and the ocean is an obvious place to look because there's a lot of water out there Sure So the efforts have been made since I believe about the 1950s To try and turn that that salt water into something that people can drink or at least use, you know for other purposes You know, not necessarily like potable water, but you know using in industries and stuff like that. Yeah And in particular, we've known how to like distill or to get water from salt water pure water from salt water 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

And that was kind of the first attempt, but I think in the 60s they started to say Maybe we could take this osmosis thing that's happening all over the place and reverse it and and we started to say That's happening all over the 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 at ucla came along One was named sydney lobe and the other was named

Srinivasa Suri Rajan Boy, I think I nailed 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 Okay, and of course this only works is if you're pronouncing the parts correctly, but I just like I look them up on the internet

I call them and ask them how to say their name. Well, you could sometimes I look on youtube to 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 else they'll scribble a underline or you know, none of it's like uh, like real dictionary style No, what is that called the schwa? Yeah, I don't I don't even know what a schwa is. It's the upside down e

Oh, that's a schwa Yes, what's the word we were talking about the other day that I loved in terabang swing. Oh, yeah Schwing I hate schwing. You hate schwing. Oh, I think everybody hated schwing for a little while there. Yeah, not a fan So all right, so I nailed those two names. They were grad students at UCLA And they were the two gentlemen who came up with this basically the first practical Uh reverse osmosis membrane using cellulose acetate And it was the first time that they could actually use this on a large scale and they did so

Uh, this is actually more of a small-scale operation, but the idea was the same uh at a place in uh, colinga, california in 1965 that was online for seven years, uh, 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 this new acetate 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'd need if you're going to ramp this up for industrial style production And they definitely did that was 1965. You said it went on online. Yeah So today is as of 2019 there's now 177 different countries. It's great producing desalinated water using reverse osmosis and in fact

There's I think 16,000 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 1965. This has developed Where a hundred million cubic meters of fresh water can be produced every day worldwide That is just not so from taking Sea water and in 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 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 and 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 be one of those technologies that's 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 plants that, um, desalinate seawater built pretty close to the sea, um, because Transportation is is a big cost. So if you can just pipe it right from the sea into your plant that saves on a lot of cost and time and energy

Um, it's ramped up using pumps and then it's run through the the reverse osmosis filters And under pressure that like you said, I think 60 bars of pressure So it's pressurized so that it it overcomes the natural osmotic pressure and it 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 the Concentrate the the salt keeps going, but the water that's in that concentrate that salt that solution

Goes through the membrane into that inner tube And the inner tube pushes that fresh water that that reverse osmosis water along Into what's called the production water stream And then that 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 that's how like you would desalinate water It is reject reject water stream. Sure. Although just the reject stream Sure. Okay. There you go. When you have three names. I think there'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 Well Are the imaginary band we'll go song by song on their debut album. Yeah, and who's playing what? Uh, so reverse osmosis is not the kind of thing that you can just use 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, we did a show on fluoride like a thousand years ago. I remember that one. Yeah, I think it's this fluoride making us stupid That way I feel like that was one of our like 15 minute episodes or something. Yeah easily at most Uh, I think some you talked about the ultra pure water, which is the you know one side of the result And some companies need that stuff and some industries need that stuff. So sometimes you're filtering out things Just to get that ultra pure water to use uh as an industry application I think uh when you're manufacturing electronics sometimes or pharmaceuticals

Um different kind of chemicals certain medical applications Uh, we talked about wastewater a lot of the toilet to tap thing. That's using reverse osmosis Right. That's one of our best episodes. I think Do you think so wastewater treatment? Yeah, I mean it's hard to say best episode when we've been doing this for 80 years, but uh, I thought it was a good one. No Yeah, I thought it was good too. I was just surprised to hear you say that but yeah, I thought it was really cool Yeah, and toilet this happens. It's just gross, but it it it's It's sensible for sure

And the the the point of it is 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, just despite what homeopaths say There's nothing in that water except for the water. There are some things that make it through Um, what are called contaminants 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 reverse osmosis Um, and one of the reasons that uh, or one of the other industries that use it chuck is like the beverage industry Yeah, 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 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, they use it Separating way 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 in the sap What else? Let's see. They use it for recycling one of the other this is a big big deal as we'll see Um When you when you produce all sorts of stuff Through industrial processes or if you recycle things you have to use all sorts of other chemicals

You produce also like sorts of wastewater as 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 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

But some of these and you know not all of them there, you know, there's nothing That gets me going more than a contained system Yeah, and some of these are contained systems, which is when you have a system that kind of feeds itself Uh, we talked about these high pressure pumps that force out. What did you call it again? What was the band? Uh reject stream the reject stream No, not the god help you if you call them the reject stream just reject stream That's like a letterman misstep or something And you got a cool logo with just an r and an s that sort of are snaking around each other or something like that

This is what I see Do you know you remember the grateful dead kid with the ice cream going on his head? Sure Something along those lines, 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 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 get further down this road But I the other day I saw that there was some big festival in europe with all these metal bands and I was like Oh, it's kind of cool and white snake was playing. I was like, are those guys still playing? It's like, 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 put in 2019. Let's say do they just play all their old hits or are they making new music? Oh, well, I don't know. I can't speak to that the old hits or what's on youtube Okay, um, it's not it's not great. David. So is it still okay?

I'm so glad 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 It makes you forget That's the most important part. Yeah, it's it's not great. It's uh, just just go check it out Boy, this covid's got you trashing everything the radium girls movie white snake 2019. I know. I love white snake You know tonic a stain passed away. Maybe that's something to do with it. What? Yeah, she died a couple years ago. I think I didn't know that. Yeah, or maybe even last year. It might have been covid. No, I don't know. I'm I'm

You're riffing. Yeah Are you on meds right now? No, no, I'm high on like stuffy-headedness I got you, you know the natural high Sure, so where was it? Oh, yeah contained system. So they're pumping out this stuff Uh with high pressure and as we'll see Uh, 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 friend spinning a turbine

And basically reusing that stuff to to make it a closed system where it's operating itself Yeah, pretty amazing. I get jazzed by that as well. 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 now. I think about it. But it's a u-shape at least. How about that? Yeah Yeah, you can also get them under your sink or on your countertop in your kitchen like it sounds like the most

You know large-scale scientific thing you could imagine, but if you just go to a big box Hardware store that in you look up water filtration systems. A lot of them are reverse osmosis Yeah, yeah, you're um, you're going to be hard-pressed actually to find one that doesn't have that like one of those under sink Like multi filter multi stage. Yeah water filters that comes with its own faucet that you have to install but they don't I was looking they're actually, you know, um I think they've actually come down since this article was written a couple of years back, right? Yeah, something like that. It seemed like you can get a pretty good one for about 200 $250 like basically everything you need Yeah, and then there's also countertop versions too if you want to just have one on your countertop

But I say I say we take a break Okay. Yeah, because we've talked all upside Right. There's a dark side to this Well, not really, but you know, there's some down downsides or drawbacks. Nothing dark. I would say that might be overstating it. Agreed All right, well, we'll be back right after this everybody Hey, I'm lance bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with lance bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Oh, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself?

What advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh god Seriously, I swear and you won't have to send an sos because I'll be there for you Oh, man. And so my husband Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life Step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh kids relationships life in general can get messy You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now If so, tell everybody you everybody

About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye. Bye. Bye. Bye Listen to frosted tips with the lance bass on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts Okay, chuck, welcome to the dark side of reverse osmosis Whoa Very nice. You got compliments on your um, bella legosi. Oh, yeah Yeah, it was very good. I don't remember what episode that was. I don't know. I'll take it. I'll take any compliment Sure. Same here unless you're really good at not doing podcasts. Well Yeah

Took you a second, didn't it? It really did. I think I have sympathetic covid I'm a little foggy myself. That's sweet. Well, you know, you got to 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 43 3% of perth's drinking waters made from desalinated seawater from reverse osmosis They have two plants there. We probably drank some while we were there. I'll bet we did. I'll bet we did. I didn't know it couldn't even tell Best So, uh, it was right

So, uh, you know, it's funny is everyone outside of australia got that joke because I guarantee you they didn't show that ad in australia And they also think that tom brokaw runs motel six. That's right So we were talking about the dark side of of uh, 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 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 Yeah, like the energy usage scales up

So the cost can scale up and then also So does the carbon footprint of these things 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 uh, another problem that we we teased earlier was the um I guess what do you call it a 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 brine It is there's a lot of it left over And you 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 it's salt water in 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 Well, sure it's salt water, 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 uh, my instinct was right. It's not uh, I think australian Center for uh, water research says Things get back to normal at about 1600 feet 500 meters from the source It's pretty pretty far. Um, so anything within that that 1600 feet It's it's really bad news when they're pumping 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 if you're something that crawls along on the seafloor or or plant life on the seafloor Then that's really bad and it's going to 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 very easily And then in addition to that too, they actually introduce certain kinds of chemicals and metals Into the um, the stream the feed the feed water stream To keep the membranes from fouling up right as which happens really easily you can imagine if you have a Membrane that has pores that are just big enough to allow Something that's 2700 thousandths of a micrometer a micron across through like all that stuff

That's left behind is going to gunk up the membranes really quick. It's going to get insane in that membrane So they take exactly so they take steps to keep this from fouling from getting clogged up by adding additional stuff Well that additional stuff also gets pumped out in the ocean too, which is a problem as well there are calls for um 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 Or maybe they need to filter out some of the stuff and reuse like the chlorine and the copper that they're introducing There are things that we could do 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 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 to spread it out a lot more if you could I mean maybe that's not practical and that's just like a A dumb guy who doesn't know how it works talking, but You know I would disperse it more

Yeah, I mean I guess you kind of could you could you could put like a Like a sprinkler head on the end. So it's not just one big column. It's just kind of yeah, it's diffuse Just when I thought it was a dumb idea. No, it's a great idea Now we need to go invent like a giant sprinkler head and patent it and use it It's not just a danger for oceans too. Um, most of these plants obviously are near the ocean Um, but if there are plants that are more inland and they're storing this stuff in tanks Uh, you could just like you have an oil spill you could have a saline 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 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 Was out of the national laboratory in Idaho Um, that uses something called switchable polarity solvents. Did you see that? No

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 they add a kind of chemical called a switchable polarity solvent, which when you add it to 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 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 setup where when they they do the the water treatment Basically in batches where they add it to that barrel that has the hollow barrel going through with the membrane involved The actual reverse osmosis filter in on an industrial scale They add it in batches and they use a piston to push the water through And then as the pistons moving there's another chamber opening up behind it that's getting filled with seawater 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's seawater that's being treated or filling up to be treated next

So you don't have downtime, but then also the seawater that's coming in is pushing the piston the the other way too So it requires 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 trying to find more uses for that brine instead of trying to put it in the ocean

They're like, you know, surely people can use brine, right? Sure. And there are some aquaculture applications in commercial aquaculture I think tilapia farms If if you like tilapia, I'm not a big fan But tilapia love really I think high high salinic. Would that be it? Sure high salinic water Sure, I mean at this point it doesn't matter All right, great. They like really salty water. That's how I should have said it salt salt water

And I think brine do as well. So they're they're starting to ship some of that stuff there and I think um Sometimes it can be used to grow So stuff like sea beets Or an animal feed or in biofuel But I don't think it's like They're still going to be that byproduct even if they even if every tilapia farm on earth wanted this water, you know This brine stuff and especially the more we produce the more brine we're going to have because I don't know if we said it or not for every one Leader of fresh water you produce you've got 1.5 liters of briney water higher salty

Concentration water that you're sending back out to see to kind of mess with the salinic count So that's reject streams um first album What what is it again? Salinic count salinic count rejects game. All right. So chuck There's actually we got to finish on this one point. There's a debate especially it seems like on facebook um as to just how uh Healthy reverse osmosis water is and in a lot of ways it makes sense on its face to tell you the truth

Is it really on facebook? That seems to be the kind of Like the the kind of sites that are really okay touting this seem to to have their links promoted on facebook a lot gotcha gotcha That's as diplomatic as I can okay so um So the idea is that reverse osmosis is all well and good for preventing pathogens viruses chemicals Minerals metals from passing through and when you run water through reverse osmosis filter The ultra pure water you have on the other side is is great

But the the 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 A hydrogen and 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 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 metabolism's optimal function. It makes a lot of sense I didn't see a lot of academic debate over it. 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 a remineralization picture. Just give yourself a little Himalayan salt Or a little bit of sea salt. You should have that anyway

That's more than just salt that contains a lot of other beneficial elements and Metals alkali earth metals and stuff and just put a little little sprinkle in there. Yeah, there you go a little dabble to 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 and then the record company came to call in and they said Sign us up. I love that first king of kings of leons album. And then they uh They said, all right hillbillies go get a haircut

Yeah, and get rich They're like get hot. Yeah Uh, you got anything else about kings of leon? Nope Okay, uh, well if you want to know more about kings of leon reject stream reverse osmosis desalination any of that stuff Um, go check it out on the internet. See what happens when you search all that at once Maybe the universe will explode since I said the universe will explode. It's time for listener mail Uh, I'm gonna call this conveniently an email from peth Oh, wow, isn't that crazy? It's a full circle man. That's

It's synchronicity. Uh, I'm not simplicity serendipity I'm not gonna read it in my terrible posse accent though. I wish you would I can't do it. I'm fading. Uh, hey guys big fan here from far far away western Australia My husband and I spent two years traveling and exploring Australia in a yute towing a caravan I don't know what that is SUV 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 Uh, we have sent return home to our city of uh, peth Because of cobit put an abrupt end to 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 kuber 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 uh that town in the selects cave dwelling episode Uh, I listened to that one recently despite most of the town living underground And having some beautiful underground churches. Check it out on google Uh, there's another any who

Keep up the good work. I'll keep listening warm wishes. Uh, that is from tamra Well, thanks a lot tamra any who appreciate that did tamra spell it h o o or w h o Uh, a and y h o o Oh, yeah, there's two kinds of people in the world and it's divided by how you spell any who there are three kinds They're You know what the third is what the people who don't use any who? I don't know chuck. I think we all have a little bit of any who user in all of us I think you're right that brings you can take the person out of the any who but you can't take the any who out of the person

You sure said it Uh, well, thanks again tamra and uh shout out to perth for a third time. Why it might as well make it a hat trick And if you want your town to get shouted out, why don't you get in touch with us or build some massive desalination plants? One of the two or a statue of us That would help a lot actually You can get in touch with us via email at stuff podcast at iheart radio dot com Stuff you should know is a production of i heart radio For more podcasts my heart radio visit the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

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