At 11:57 PM 11/27/03 +0900, you wrote:
>But I was wondering about the electrolysis part of this process.
>Salt, water and electricity produces, what, hydrogen and chlorine -
>what happens to the sodium?
NaCl electrolyses into Na and Cl
The Na reacts with water to form H2 and NaOH, which in turn reacts with
the Cl to produce sodium hypochlorite, better known as chlorine bleach.
What the chemistry described in the article is doing is making bleach,
not
free chlorine.
>And to the hydrogen? It off-gasses.
>It's really this
>simple? If so there really is application for it, this is a serious
>problem, as you know, it affects billions of people and kills lots of
>them, especially the children.
Most everyone I know uses chlorine bleach to sanitize. We use a dilute
solution in our dining hall for a sterilizing rise in our dish washing room.
None of this is to say that the fellow hasn't worked out an ingenious
method for delivering minute quantities of chemically active chlorine into
the water supply, which in certain cases may be very good. In other cases,
it might not in that any chlorine not consumed in the water will be active
in the digestive tract of a someone who drinks that water.
Humans have a very active set of critters living in their digestive
tracts, and anything that kills them off can put the person at risk. For
example, most of the deaths by salmonella come after someone has taken oral
antibiotics that killed off their resident (benevolent) bacteria.
People consume malevolent bacteria all the time, but because beneficial
bacteria are already in residence, the bad bugs can't get a foothold. It's
when the good bugs are gone, and the bad bugs can get established that
people get sick and die.
Bacteria are able to determine when they're out numbered, and when
they're
in the majority. It's only when they reach a critical mass that they start
producing the toxins which kill people.
I make my living providing coinage services at living history events,
so I
spend all day handling money. In order to protect myself, I consume
substantial quantities of live culture yogurt. I used to get a "stomach
flu" after most every event, but since I started "dosing" myself with
yogurt, I've never had another bought.
The point of all this is to stress the reality that we're talking about
dynamic, interactive processes, and that every change you make triggers
other changes, and while those consequences may well be unintended, they're
none the less real.
If my options were (1) drinking from a polluted river or (2) drinking
water containing active chlorine, I'd choose Door Number Two. That would
keep me well long enough to build a cistern so that I could collect rain
water and drink that instead.
Walt
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