Researchers use electron beams to eradicate forever chemicals in water

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-electron-eradicate-chemicals.html

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

138 89 2 years ago

navi0• 2 years ago

“ Fermilab irradiated these samples with the electron beam and shipped them back to 3M.

3M sampled both the headspace—the air at the top of the container—and the liquid to verify that the PFAS of concern had been destroyed without releasing hazardous products to the air.”

I think this is what we call fox guarding the henhouse. 3M has EVERY incentive to declare this whiz bang treatment effective because of the legal liability and financial incentives involved.

I’d want independent test results and a full accounting of the byproducts of this treatment before putting any faith in it.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years ago

Yeah.

"The fact that we were working with 3M, a world expert in PFAS"

Lol, lmao even. Wonder how they became an expert.

LoganDark2• 2 years ago

World expert in creating pollution

thfuran3• 2 years ago

3M has EVERY incentive to declare this whiz bang treatment effective because of the legal liability and financial incentives involved.

That sounds entirely incorrect. It seems to me that they'd want to avoid a second round of public flogging and lawsuits when it's later discovered that they falsified efforts to remediate their original catastrophe.

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 2 years ago

I'm not too sure about that. When profit is the main goal, guaranteed savings(not doing the necessary spending to actually clean up) in the short term often take priority over possible long term avoidance of fines and lawsuits.

In the short term, actually cleaning up and only appearing to clean up probably give the same return in terms of PR and so on, but the former is cheaper.

Not to say I condone them misleading the public, not at all.

7thaccount2• 2 years ago

Why? As long as the fine is a fraction of the profits, it's just the cost of doing business.

andrewflnr5• 2 years ago

The next round of flogging and lawsuits will come long after most of the people involved are gone, having already received their accolades and bonuses for "solving" the problem.

Incentives for a corporation are not the same as the incentives for the people, and the corporation's decisions are made by people who follow their own incentives.

jeroenhd• 2 years ago

3M has misled and twisted the truth regarding PFAS before. I trust their word as much as I trust BP's when they come up with excuses for oil spills.

KennyBlanken2• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter either way. There are multiple problems with PFAS - one of which is how toxic it is to the body, and how long it stays in the body.

"We can destroy it with electron beams" doesn't mean shit when kids are getting a huge dose of PFAS from their happy meal french fries.

LoganDark2• 2 years ago

Those very same french fries may stop containing PFAS sometime in the future. However, the kids who loaded up on PFAS early in life may never be able to get the stuff out of their bodies. :(

logtempo• 2 years ago

Maybe we can send kids under electron beam.

dham• 2 years ago

3M, an entire company built because people couldn't figure out how to cook with butter anymore.

blibble• 2 years ago

the F in PFAS is for fluorine

if it wasn't in the liquid and wasn't in the air... where did it go?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years ago

No numbers in the summary. How many watt-hours of electricity per hundred gallons of water?

Using nonstick cookware to fry your bacon and eggs can make your life easier at that moment, but scientists believe there may be long-term consequences because the chemicals used to make it nonstick are so difficult to destroy.

I have finally committed to buying cast iron for my new cookware. It was difficult because of a stereotype in my brain that cast iron == gas stoves == meat. I'm telling myself that cast iron and induction stove just means I have lots of money and don't want to eat PFAS.

throwanem2• 2 years ago

I've had far better results with modern ceramic pans than I ever did with either Teflon (thin pans = no heat capacity) or cast iron whose maintenance is a cast-iron bastard.

amelius• 2 years ago

Can confirm.

worik3• 2 years ago

cast iron whose maintenance is a cast-iron bastard.

I have had my cast iron fry pan for thirty years

Very easy to maintain

Very tolerant to abuse

As good as the day I bought it

I have heated it to heroic temperatures for cooking meat, on the stove top and in the oven. All good, just be *very* careful picking it up!

biomcgary• 2 years ago

I use cast iron almost exclusively (the exception being enameled cast iron). Linseed oil (not boiled linseed oil, which has toxic additives!) makes for a great low stick surface if you are willing to put in the time. Add a thin layer, bake it to the smoke point and repeat. Lasts a long time and makes cleanup and frying eggs much easier.

amluto• 2 years ago

I very consistently get a pretty amber colored sticky surface from flaxseed oil. Olive oil doesn’t build a film as impressively quickly, but the result is less sticky and more durable.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

cast iron == gas stoves == meat

See, you're equation here is slightly wrong.

cast iron == open fire == food

city folk consider gas stove as open flame, and it cracks us rednecks up. sure, you can cook meat in a cast iron, but it's much better cooked directly on the grill over the coals that were once the open flame cooking all of the sides in the cast iron

alejohausner• 2 years ago

I’d be worried about excessive iron intake from a cast iron pan. Too much dietary iron can cause all sorts of problems. How about enameled (glass coated) pans instead?

shagie3• 2 years ago

I'll note the parent comment:

It was difficult because of a stereotype in my brain that cast iron == gas stoves == meat.

This suggests a diet that is more on the vegetarian side... and in that case, cast iron can be helpful as a supplement if you don't have any iron intake from meat.

Food prepared in iron cooking pots as an intervention for reducing iron deficiency anaemia in developing countries: a systematic review - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12859709/

While I'm having trouble finding it (and thus it may only be folklore) - the cast iron skillets used by early American pioneers where helpful in supplementing their diet that was otherwise low in meats.

https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/an-introduction-to-nu... is one such mention of it:

Unbeknownst to the American pioneers, the cookware also leaches iron, an essential mineral, into foods as they are cooked in cast-iron hardware.
...
Dietary sources of iron include red meats, poultry, leafy green vegetables, prunes, raisins, egg yolks, lentils, oysters, clams, artichokes, and enriched cereal grains. While there are many food sources of iron, only a small fraction of dietary iron is absorbed. One method of increasing dietary intake of iron is cooking foods in an iron skillet. Acidic foods high in moisture content, such as tomatoes, absorb more iron during cooking than nonacidic foods. For example, cooking spaghetti sauce in iron cookware can increase the iron content ten-fold. How much iron leaches into food is also dependent on cooking times; the longer food is in the pan the more iron is absorbed into the food. Stirring food more often increases contact time and thus more iron is absorbed from the cookware. The utility of iron cookware in increasing dietary intake of iron has prompted some international public health organizations to distribute iron cookware to high-risk populations in developing countries as a strategy to reduce the prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia worldwide.

---

So yes, too much dietary iron is a problem. Iron deficiency is also problem and for people with a vegetarian, vegan, and women of childbearing age, additional iron may be a good thing.

myself248• 2 years ago

If you weigh the pan and figure out how much iron it loses over a year, you could compare that to your dietary iron intake needs. If it's not over, don't worry about it. If it's over, then you have to estimate how much of that iron is going down the drain during scrubbing vs how much is going into your food.

My gut feeling is that, since cast iron pans seem to last quite a long time, they're probably not shedding much iron into your food, and the amount of iron the body can handle is pretty significant, on the order of tens of milligrams per day.

Throw some Wheaties in a blender until they're dust, then take a magnet to the resulting pile. If we're not hearing about iron toxicity from breakfast cereals, I'm not inclined to worry about the pans.

SrslyJosh4• 2 years ago

Unless you are doing something truly stupid to your cast iron cookware, the amount of additional iron in your diet should be zero. Please learn about cast iron and the seasoning process before spreading FUD.

dennis_jeeves22• 2 years ago

I’d be worried about excessive iron intake from a cast iron pan

This is really underappreciated, iron overload is very common.

artimaeis• 2 years ago

If you don't want to consume PFAS, you'd be better served trying to limit them from food packaging. There's limited evidence that cooking with traditional nonstick cookware exposes people to PFAS. The evidence shows that discarded nonstick cookware exposes the environment to those PFAS. Which is awful! But probably not affecting you directly.

Meanwhile, food packaging is unregulated and has been shown to be a major source of PFAS. Water bottles are particularly guilty.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/dan...

vkou• 2 years ago

What exactly is 'traditional' nonstick cookware? Teflon?

I avoid it, because I know I'm too stupid to never make a mistake with either a bad scratch, or bad temperature control.

ars2• 2 years ago

There is zero PFAS in cookware. It used in the manufacturing, but none is left in the final product. And note that Teflon itself is not actually a PFAS, but if you google the subject many authors pretend that it is.

Food packaging on the other hand...... Especially paper straws are really really bad. You should make sure to only use plastic straws.

SrslyJosh4• 2 years ago

You might want to look at carbon steel instead. It has many of the desirable properties of cast iron, but it's less brittle which allows manufacturers to make pans as thin as ~2mm, which makes them much lighter. (They also heat much faster.)

ruraljuror• 2 years ago

Yeah it is a great alternative/addition to cast iron, and can be similarly seasoned.

CastIrony• 2 years ago

forever chemicals had one job

dylan6042• 2 years ago

to kill everything? all of the other things were just happy accidents

RIMMRAMMBUS2• 2 years ago

AI and non-living tissue will make the problem "supposedly" go away... :D

shagie3• 2 years ago

To be non-interacting with anything... and that makes them rather foreverish.

The problem is that the structure of the PFAS (a fluorocarbon chain with an OH at the end) looks a LOT like a hydrocarbon chain with an OH on the end... that's a saturated fatty acid which is crucial for body metabolism.

Compare the structure of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myristic_acid and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...

This allows the body to accidentally substitute a PFAS (which does nothing) for a fatty acid (which does something - and often important things).

https://www.vox.com/2022/8/25/23318667/pfas-forever-chemical...

So yes, it had one job - and it did that job well. It also looks like something that has another job... and does that job really poorly when substituted.

philipkglass• 2 years ago

There are actually a lot of ways to destroy per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, colloquially called "forever chemicals") before they are released into the environment. Incineration, supercritical water oxidation, Fenton chemistry variants, even aggressive reducing agents can break these chemicals down into low-hazard "mineralized" residue.

The reason they're called "forever" chemicals is because natural processes that break these chemicals down are very slow acting once the chemicals have escaped into the wider environment. Even then, "forever" is a bit of misnomer. Various PFAS have environmental half lives on the order of decades, comparable to the medium lived fission products in spent nuclear fuel. That's not good, but it's not forever; the real "forever" pollutants are stable elements like mercury and arsenic.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

I think of this idea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

where the idea is you throw in all your municipal waste and the organic material is converted to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas

which can be burnt to make (much) more electricity than it takes to run the torch and heavy metals get immobilized in glassy slag that can then be broken down and incorporated into building materials such as concrete and roads.

I have this vision though of a civilization that does this for 100,000 years and gradually poisons itself the way we did with leaded gas.

nanomonkey• 2 years ago

I used to work in gasification, and my understanding is that Plasma gasification has not reached net positive. You use up about as much electricity producing the plasma as you gain from burning the syngas in a generator. Normal gasification on the other hand, which uses oxygen to do the pyrolysis is very much net positive. It's sad to me that this technology hasn't taken off, as you can produce a tremendous amount of electricity and hot water from waste streams such as agricultural waste, woody biomass and trash. Not to mention if you bury the biochar it is carbon negative.

chongli• 2 years ago

Don’t put heavy metals in roads. Roads are continuously broken down by traffic and freeze/thaw cycles. The dust from this process then gets carried into rivers and streams by rain as stormwater runoff.

People previously had the idea of using ground up post-consumer plastic pellets as filler in roads. Now that stuff is finding its way into the waterways by the above process.

ugh123• 2 years ago

So.. "fight fire with fire".

KennyBlanken2• 2 years ago

"It's technically possible to destroy this stuff"

...that doesn't mean it's relevant to how people are exposed to them, that it is economically feasible or practical to do the destruction, etc.

It does nothing to address exposure from things like cookie wrappers, french fry bags, disposable food trays, bottled water (ironically, which some people have to drink because their water is contaminated with PFAS.)

The whole point behind fighting against disposable plastics, for example, is that despite it being possible to recycle it, almost none of it is.

"It has a half-life of up to decades but that's better than mercury and arsenic"

Whataboutism? And PFAS have nothing to do with mercury and arsenic?

graphe• 2 years ago

https://www.space.com/air-pollution-reentering-space-junk-de... immediately made me think of where all burn up space ‘junk’ goes.

Sensitive sensors in the nosecones of the planes analyzed the chemical compounds diluted in the thin, pristine stratospheric air, which is out of reach of Earth-based air pollution sources. The researchers found traces of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead in the sampled air. The detected concentrations of these compounds were much higher than what could be caused by natural sources, such as the evaporation of cosmic dust and meteorites upon their encounter with the atmosphere. In fact, the concentrations of these pollutants reflected the ratio of chemical compounds present in alloys used in satellite manufacturing, the researchers said in a statement.

sandworm101• 2 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1217/

Lots of things destroy lots of other things. That doesn't mean they are also a reasonable treatment.

> used an electron beam accelerator at the laboratory for their testing.

Yup. I'm sure that most any organic chemical won't last long when put in front of an accelerator. Crank the voltage up enough and even the water molecules might have issues.

kokanee• 2 years ago

I was thinking this too. My favorite fishing lake was recently found to have unsafe levels of PFAs. I suspect that if we pumped the lake through an electron beam purifier, it wouldn't be my favorite fishing lake anymore.

RIMMRAMMBUS2• 2 years ago

You could start fishing for inorganic items afterwards. All it takes is for you to adjust your expectations of what is to be your favorite! :D

delecti• 2 years ago

That comic really doesn't apply. The "medium" of PFAS (drinking water) is a lot less likely to be bothered by hostile treatment than the "medium" of cancer cells (our bodies). We're mostly not concerned about the water itself, unlike the patient with cancer cells in their body.

amarant• 2 years ago

"The electron beam is a promising technology to break down PFAS in large volumes of water that contain high concentrations of PFAS,"

I wonder how well this works with water that has low concentrations of PFAS, because I guess that's what we've really got.

Also, would be nice to have some numbers on power consumption per cubic meter of water treated: is it feasible to deploy this method in waste water treatment plants for example?

aj72• 2 years ago

Electron beams are not cost efficient in photolithography. And it is proposed to use electron beams to treat water or garbage?

nomel• 2 years ago

This is like comparing the price of a sewing needle to a needle in an atomic force microscope. The beam is not what's expensive. It's the requirements set by what you're using the beam for.

For photolithography you're steering the beams with such precision that it results in one of the most accurate manufacturing processes known to man, in vacuum chambers, performed in cleanrooms, involving purities in the tens of part per billion for the materials involved.

That sort of accuracy isn't required when blasting garbage. Electron beams are how old CRT TV's worked, which were in nearly every home. If you have access to a vacuum chamber, you could order the parts off Amazon, if you want to DIY. You can also just go buy an electron beam welder and be done with it.

aj72• 2 years ago

Ok, big vacuum systems, (you need about 1E-4 torr for an e-beam) are not efficient for garbage treatment. Your comment is a good one; although I thought it was the low throughput that made e-beam photolithography impractical. Ok, so we don’t need nm precision. Still an order of magnitude or more too expensive, I’m guessing. And water treatment…

khaki54• 2 years ago

Ok phys.org let's not pretend that most of the PFAS contamination came from firefighting efforts rather than just dumping it into the ground or water.

Animats• 2 years ago

As sewerage treatment, this would require way too much power.

Look for it in expensive water purifiers for the lifestyle market. Gadget sellers won't have a powerful enough electron beam to do much, because that's both expensive and requires safety systems. But that won't stop them.

Researchers use electron beams to eradicate forever chemicals in water

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