Water + Salt + Energy = Clean! 374
codesmith.ca writes "CTV News is reporting about a device built at the Russian Institute for Medical Engineering that can convert standard water and salt into an antimicrobial solution. Apparently it's works on almost anything (virii, bacteria, cysts...) and it's safe for human consumption to boot. I can't find a site for the institute, but there are articles around. This one is fairly detailed, but hard to reach. Here's the Google cache. Here's one about a paper shows it's not exactly super-new technology." Any chemist care to comment on what sounds to be too good to be true?
This is SO snake-oil (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an experiment I did in elementary school.
It's called electrolysis. You separate salt water into
Use enough voltage, and maybe you bump oxygen to ozone, a superoxidizer (see above).
None of this takes any kind of chemist to see.
Note also that these chemicals are extremely hazardous in their uncombined forms. Remember Apollo 1 and its pure oxygen atmosphere at full sea-level pressure? Skin catches fire almost explosively in that sort of atmosphere - it's truly horrible what pure oxygen can do. Combine hydrogen and oxygen in the right proportions and they will explode. Sodium is poison and explosive when combined with water. Chlorine is poision.
Some of the more recent explorations into silver as a disinfectant with good tolerance in the body might be more profitable to follow, but also have snake-oil potential because too few people recognize that as another century-old technology that has a mass-market application in swimming pools today.
Were I you guys, I'd kill the story.
Bruce
Re:Just a Swimming-Pool Chlorine Generator? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Cl- ions form chlorine gas> If you can keep it involved in the water, the whole thing works. It does, however, produce lots of NAOH, which is not a nice thing to have around either!
Oh, and the design I used (I found it somewhere around town) used asbestos to separate the positive and negative regions.
In general, it was your all around chemical warfare and carcinogenic dream!
A clear and concise explanation... (Score:3, Interesting)
No doubt the electric field applied causes small bubbles to form within the solution, and then rapidly collapse. This collapse leads to extroardinarily high temperatures and pressures, which in turn cause nuclear fusion to take place. Stray gammas generated by this fusion result in the destruction of nearby pathogens.
Seriously, this technique sounds like a load of crap, for the most part. I can buy the electrochemical action bit, sort of. Pure molten NaCl (salt, hereafter) will electrolyze to form sodium and chlorine gas, sure enough. With a little creative engineering, it is possible to separate these to products and collect them for later use. Indeed, this is exactly what is done for commercial production of these two elements.
On contact with water, pure Na will form a solution of (aggressively basic) sodium hydroxide plus some hydrogen gas. (This, I assume, is the catholyte we hear about.) Chlorine in water forms an acidic solution which is, to be fair, definitely germicidal.
I see two problems. The first is technical. In a water solution, the electrolytic yields of sodium and chlorine are typically both very low, because oxygen and hydrogen gas are preferentially formed first. (There are sound thermodynamic reasons for this.) Maybe these experimenters have gotten around this somehow, perhaps using exotic catalysts or something.
The second problem is a bit more difficult. If the two component solutions (sodium + water and chlorine + water) are kept separate, individually they would be quite toxic. Brought together, there is a very quick reaction that brings us right back to salt and water--not a particularly powerful disinfectant, and what we started with before we had a mystical black box.
I can think of some other more creative possibilities, as well. Perhaps they're talking about generating some sort of activated state oxygen to do the dirty work (the salt just makes the water conductive)--in which case, they're definitely frauds. There just aren't any activated oxygen states that are stable long enough (in water) to get to the surface to be disinfected. Atomic oxygen might do it, but that's already been invented--and I'm pretty sure it won't last very long in solution either.
Finally, from the article, we have the quote:
f a letter is suspected of containing anthrax spores, it could be passed through a dry mist made from the Emerald solution and the letter would be sterilized.
The letter wouldn't even get wet. Anyone exposed to the spores could bathe in the solution and be germ free.
Erm. Dry mist. Sure. What's in this dry mist, exactly? Chlorine? Nope--it's way toxic. Sodium? Nope--it's a metal. Hydrogen? Um. Yeah. Oxygen--maybe, but atomic oxygen generators already exist (they're used for restoring artwork and whitening teeth). Singlet oxygen will kill things, but it only lasts a few nanoseconds in water.
So, to conclude this lengthy post--I call bullshit!
We'll never see the benefits (Score:2, Interesting)
Proven medical treatments, such as silver, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. (proven not by a few piddly years of research, but in most cases many decades or centuries of use) will never be embraced by the mainstream medical establishment as long as the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to dictate medical policy and control the way we are permitted to keep ourselves healthy.
Armed response (Score:1, Interesting)
had to had be bought from pharmaceutical industry?
I expected an armed raid by law enforcement
agencies to shut down any practitioners.
Similar to that experienced by Oxygen therapy clinics.
Money talks.
There is no growth market in selling salt instead of disinfectants.
not exactly super-new technology (Score:3, Interesting)
H2O + NaCl + e- -> Cl2 + H2 + NaOH
is one of the most important in chemistry and has been in industrial use for well over 110 years. To say this is "not exactly super-new technology" is a HUGE understatement, since this is the same basic technology that has been chlorinating drinking water in the U.S. since 1908.
The new (relatively speaking) technology here appears to be the miniaturization of the electrolytic cell and membrane. While this is interesting in and of itself, I cannot see how this will be the big lifesaver they are claiming. One would think that most hospitals can and do purchase disinfectants already and would not really need to generate these hazardous chemicals onsite, even in small quantities. I mean, think of the risks: Cl2 (poisonous gas), H2 (explosive gas), and NaOH (caustic soda). If a hospital does not have the resources to buy these relatively cheap chemicals, why would they have the resources (electricity to name one) to buy and operate these little machines?
Just my $.02
Re:High School Chemistry (Score:2, Interesting)
While your chemistry is correct, this is not the reaction they are talking about. The production of sodium hypochlorite is not an electrochemical process. It takes place without the aid of an electrical current. This is why NaOH is commonly used as a scrubbing fluid to remove Cl2 from a gas stream.
The reaction we are talking about is the electrolysis of salt water:
H20 + NaCl + electricity -> NaOH + Cl2 + H2
A mixture of chlorine gas and weak brine called the anolyte leaves the cell on one side, and the caustic soda (NaOH) and hydrogen gas mixture called the catholyte leaves on the other.
Picture of lady who took colloidal silver (Score:3, Interesting)
That scares the hell out of me (Score:4, Interesting)
A while ago I read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, which mentions chlorene. This post rang a bell, so I dug it up and pawed through it to find what it had to say. The book only tells you about the situation in bits and pieces, so this really took some searching:
Ionic chlorene's easy to get. It's in seawater. If you want to manufacture a whole catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.
And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook up a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current - a stream of electrons - flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye and alkali, depending on how educated you are.
If you're an engineer, and you're not very bright, it's easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls. They are cheap, stable, and easy to make and they take heat very well. That's why they end up in heat exchangers and electrical transformers. It's how they got into that machine in Japan and, when the pipes started to leak, it's how they got into a lot of rice oil.
Unfortunately, rice oil is for human consumption, and as soon as humans enter the equation, PCBs no longer look very good. The problem with humans is that they have a lot of fat in their bodies, and PCBs have this vicious affinity for fat. They dissolve themselves in human fat cells and they never leave. They are studded with loose chlorine atoms that know how to break up chromosomes. So when that heat exchanger started leaking, the city of Kusho, Japan started to look like the site of a Biblical plague. Newborn babies came out undersized and dark brown. People started to waste away. They developed a fairly disgusting skin rash called chloracne and felt very sick.
A benzene ring is a six-pack of carbon atoms. The six-pack is held together. It's stable. It's strong. It takes some effort to pull one of the atoms off. There are a couple different kinds. If you put two six-packs together, you have a twelve-pack. THe six-packs are phenyls, a twelve-pack is a biphenyl. If the six-packs are benzenes, it's a dibenzodioxin, because the connection between the six-packs is made by using a couple of oxygen atoms. But the toxic part of polychlorinated dibenzodioxin (PCDDs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) is the chlorine.
The biphenyl or dibenzodioxin structure dissolves easily in fat. Once it gets into your body fat, it never leaves.
The second bad thing is, the chlorine there is in covalent form; it's got the normal number of electrons, whereas the chlorine in (safe) table salt is in ionic form. It's got an extra electron. The difference is that covalent chlorine is more reactive; it has these big electron clouds that can f*** up your chromosomes. And it slips right through your cell membranes. Ionic chlorine ddoesn't - the cell membranes are made to stop it.
In Stephenson's book, this guy Sangamon Taylor runs around trying to take down corporations that electrocute seawater to create PCBs, use the PCBs as coolant, then dump them into Boston harbor. Stephenson makes it seem like the root of all evil is zapping salt water, because it produces organic chlorine. So I would be very, very careful about intentionally electrocuting salt water and then swimming in it.
It seems like there must be something more to this if, as you said, "This Old House" recommended the process. Maybe it works differently with plain salt water as opposed to sea water. Or something. Scares the crap out of me, though. Maybe someone smarter can tell me what I'm talking about?
Re:It's plain simple ... (Score:1, Interesting)
This story should be listed under the slashdot toilet icon in my anonymous opinion.