Editing 2982: Water Filtration

{{comic
| number    = 2982
| date      = September 6, 2024
| title     = Water Filtration
| image     = water_filtration_2x.png
| imagesize = 593x467px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = You'd think the most expensive part would be the quark-gluon plasma chamber, but it's actually usually the tube to the top of the atmosphere to carry the cosmic rays down.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by WATER. JUST PLAIN WATER. NOTHING DONE TO IT, JUST PLAIN WATER. POSSIBLY DRINKABLE. - Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic seems to be a diagram of how well water is purified, a common procedure done to make said water safe to drink. However, this well water is "purified" through a series of increasingly unnecessary, expensive, and possibly hazardous steps. 

{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Step
!Real?
!Explanation
|-
|Water softener
|{{Yes|Real}}
|{{w|Water softening}} is the removal of calcium, magnesium, and certain other metal cations in hard water. The resulting soft water requires less soap for the same cleaning effort, as soap is not wasted bonding with calcium ions. Soft water also extends the lifetime of plumbing by reducing or eliminating scale build-up in pipes and fittings. The comic shows the water being passed through some granulated material; presumably, {{w|ion-exchange resins}} are being used to treat the water.
|-
|Reverse osmosis
|{{Yes|Real}}
|{{w|Reverse osmosis}} is one of the main steps used in modern water-purification systems. It relies on using osmotic membranes and high pressures to separate water molecules from dissolved solutes and biological substances. 
|-
|Ultraviolet Sterilization
|{{Yes|Real}}
|{{w|Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation|Ultraviolet sterilization}} uses UV lamps at short wavelengths to kill micro-organisms in the water.
|-
|Autoclave
|{{No|Fake}}
|{{w|Autoclaves}} are devices that sterilize items with high temperatures and pressures. While they are commonly used in hospital and laboratory settings to sterilize equipment, it is not normally used to purify water, as it would generate steam by the end of it. Furthermore, it would be extremely energy-intensive to convert the large volumes of water required for human consumption to steam. However, by the rest of this water purification setup, this much energy is barely anything in comparison.
|-
|Condenser
|{{No|Fake}}
|This isn't a purification step, but rather condenses the steam generated by the autoclave back into water.
|-
|Regular osmosis
|{{No|Fake}}
|Regular osmosis is the reverse of the previous Reverse Osmosis step. Oddly enough, this wouldn't directly contaminate the water, since the water is extremely pure as of this moment. Instead this step would simply remove water from the main stream, leaving the filtrate unchanged.
|-
|X-Ray Sterilization
|{{No|Fake}}
|While {{w|Sterilization_(microbiology)#Non-ionizing_radiation_sterilization|X-ray Sterilization}} is used to sterilize equipment, it is not normally used for water.
|-
|Carbon Filter
|{{No|Fake}}
|The water is passed through some volume of carbon. A riff on activated carbon filters, which are used in water filtration (seen later in the process).
|-
|Neutron Source
|{{No|Fake}}
|A {{w|neutron source}} generates high-energy neutrons. High-energy neutrons are highly penetrating and will cause ionization events to occur due to collision with atoms in the water. This can potentially make the water more radioactive due to the generation of radioactive isotopes.
|-
|Activated Carbon Filter
|{{Yes|Real}}
|{{w|Activated carbon}} is a form of carbon commonly used to filter contaminants from water and air, as it has a large surface area available to adsorb impurities on its surface. While this isn't a strange step to see in a water purification process, Randall makes a pun here with its proximity to the neutron source - the carbon has been '{{w|Neutron activation|activated}}' by the neutron source, and is currently radioactive. Water filtered through this may pick up radioactive isotopes from the filter.
|-
|Gamma Ray Sterilization
|{{No|Fake}}
|Similar to x-ray sterilization, this step uses {{w|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_(microbiology)#Ionizing_radiation_sterilization|gamma rays}} to sterilize the water. Gamma rays can potentially irradiate the water through photodisintegration if their energy is higher than the binding energy of oxygen.
|-
|Cosmic Ray Sterilization
|{{No|Fake}}
|Similar to the previous step, but this time using high energy {{w|cosmic rays}} to do so. This would be incredibly impractical, as cosmic rays are generally blocked by the atmosphere at high altitudes (as stated in the title text). Furthermore, their extremely high energy (shown to be in the exa-electron volt (10^18 eV) range) would cause multiple high-energy particles to be created on impact with the water molecules, irradiating the water significantly.
|-
|Electrolysis
|{{No|Fake}}
|The water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen gas using an electric current. Assuming the gas outputs of this process are pure hydrogen and oxygen gas, this *would* be an extremely effective sterilization tactic, seeing as no known organism or water pollutant is entirely composed out of hydrogen or oxygen gas. Along with the next step, this step may be a misguided attempt to "take the water apart and clean each part individually.". The hydrogen is sent to the ionizer, while the oxygen is sent to the oxygen spallation step.
|-
|Oxygen Spallation
|{{No|Fake}}
|The oxygen is apparently broken down back into hydrogen via a fictional form of {{w|Cosmic_ray_spallation|spallation}}. While spallation can form lighter nuclei from heavier ones, there is no known process to convert oxygen back down to hydrogen. It is unclear what happens to the neutrons present in the oxygen nuclei - whether they are removed, used to create hydrogen isotopes or allowed to decay into protons and electrons. The hydrogen formed here is merged with the rest of the hydrogen before being sent to the ionizer.
|-
|Ionizer
|{{No|Fake}}
|The hydrogen outputted by the previous step is made into a plasma with free electrons and protons.
|-
|Quark-Gluon Plasma Chamber
|{{No|Fake}}
|The plasma outputted from the previous step is further energized into a {{w|Quark–gluon plasma}}, such as the one found just after the Big Bang. This follows the theme of the previous steps, which all serve to break the water down into their elementary components. The incredible energies involved in doing so are unachievable by current technologies (current particle accelerators can form such a plasma for very short periods of time and involve a very small amount of matter), and serve to highlight the impracticality of this setup (alluded to in the title text). The energies would also result in formation of lepton pairs from energy, which is presumably where the electrons from the previous step ended up.
|-
|Hydrogenation
|{{No|Fake}}
|This process converts the quark-gluon plasma outputted in the previous step into elemental hydrogen, reversing the previous two steps. Presumably, this is done via {{w|hadronization}} and {{w|recombination}}, however it is unclear how the {{w|baryon asymmetry}} needed to generate matter and not anti-matter is developed. In real life, {{w|hydrogenation}} is the process of adding hydrogen to unsaturated hydrocarbons. The resulting hydrogen is split into 2 streams leading into the Nucleosynthesis and Reverse Electrolysis steps.
|-
|Nucleosynthesis
|{{No|Fake}}
|Part of the hydrogen produced in the previous step is converted into oxygen via 2 sub-processes. The hydrogen is first converted into helium, through a combination of the {{w|proton-proton chain}} and the {{w|CNO cycle}} as per the labels on the step. This helium is then converted into oxygen through the {{w|alpha process}}. This step may also involve the {{w|triple-alpha process}}, seeing that the alpha process is typically only applicable to converting carbon into heavier elements, owning to the lack of a stable element with eight nucleons. These steps normally occur in the cores of massive stars. It is not known how the oxygen is filtered from the extremely hot plasma of fusion products.
|-
|Reverse Electrolysis
|{{No|Fake}}
|This step is essentially a fuel cell, utilizing an electrochemical reaction to convert hydrogen and oxygen back into water and electricity.
|-
|Adding Well Water
|{{No|Fake}}
|A second pipe is linked to the first that simply feeds untreated well water into the pipes, undoing the entire process. Even if the well water is only a small portion of the faucet water, its presence has now contaminated the now incredibly pure water, making it potentially unsafe to drink if the original well water was contaminated with toxins or pathogens. This act of putting well water into the faucet after treating it may be a riff on the cultural interest in "spring water" or "pure glacial water" that is said to have additional minerals or beneficial properties but is oftentimes not meaningfully distinct from properly treated tap water.

Alternatively, it may be that the level of purity achieved by this setup is so overkill, and the cost per liter processed so high, that it's simply more efficient to treat just enough of the water to dilute the rest of the water to acceptable levels of contaminants. For example, it's common to use a partial bypass to supply water to the shower, since shower water does not need to be potable.
|}

The title text briefly covers the cost implications of the components. Various 'real' filter elements will either have material or energy costs (if not both), in operation or to replenish their effectiveness, and the high energy input needed to disassociate hadrons into raw quark–gluon plasma (at bulk levels) would seem to require the most in terms of running the equipment. But it is pointed out that to ''ensure'' enough cosmic rays reach that particular phase of sterilization, there would have to be a pipe (not shown) leading out to the edge of the atmosphere to optimistically carry down such particles (due to also containing ''no'' air, i.e. keeping it out to negate the normal {{w|Air shower (physics)|shielding and dissipating effect}} of the atmosphere).

Whether a one-off-cost or needing regular replacement, the setting up of such a tubular structure (a vertical air-proof pipe perhaps somewhere between 100 and 10,000 kilometres high) would be technically challenging and has not ever been actually accomplished. The conditions for a quark–gluon plasma, albeit in limited quantities, at least have been fulfilled at {{w|CERN}} (with its 27 kilometer airless pipe that goes round within a vast circular tunnel).

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

{{comic discussion}}