Guerilla Water Purification: Distributed Systems to Reclaim our Freshwater

A well-crafted image is worth more than I could ever write.  Take a look at this before we begin:

click to enlarge

Water is about to become a serious problem.  I say that because I’m a very fortunate human: I live in Vermont, a breakaway republic of the United States of America.  We have marijuana, guns, and swimming holes everywhere.  I have access to clean drinking water all the time.

There are over one billion people on Earth who are not quite so lucky, and because of that they die young from horrible diseases we no longer think of.  For a deeply alarming picture of the future, take a look at UNESCO’s page on the World Water Assessment Project. 

Although the situation is truly grim, we’re not here to berate you with Statistics of Doom, as usual we’re going to be lunatics, and insist that problems have solutions.  Crazier still, we’re gonna operate on the belief that we can figure them out ourselves.

Why leave water purification to someone else?  Is there a cheap, simple way anyone could help make the world a better place?  What tools exist to help us do this?  Let’s analyze some angles.

There are many ways to purify water: perhaps it will come as no shock that here in the United States, we do it the stupid way.

I personally am “allergic” to chlorine.  This is not like being “allergic” to pollen or dust, however.  Pollen and dust are not carcinogenic ("cancer-causing").  Chlorine is, and it’s also known for having a caustic effect on mucus membranes, meaning it damages and even kills cells that happen to be located in your mouth and nose.

Despite this, chlorine is the 2nd most common water additive here in the US, after flouride.  We’re gonna leave the word “flouride” right there --- another time, another post --- and move on:

Begin at the Beginning

It is obvious to anyone who has smelled a glass of tap water then decided to pour it down the drain: our existing system of water purification is not working, so we’re going to wipe the slate clean and take a look at alternatives.

Over in Europe --- you know, land of the free, home of the brave --- they use ozone which is simply 3 molecules of oxygen.  It’s an unstable mixture and when you add that to water (in bubble/gaseous form) ozone will give up it’s 3rd oxygen molecule almost instantly.  This has a powerful cleansing effect --- with no toxic byproducts, no odor, no taste.  This is a system that actually works, just like legalizing drugs, or investing in social welfare programs, or making college-level education free.

Another valuable and non-toxic tool for water purification is UV light, which inactivates cysts and other organic nasties that might be floating around after the ozone treatment.  Although these two technologies are rock solid, and will probably form the basis of our first generation of designs, we’re very much aware that

1) Not everyone has access to ozone gas and a UV light, and not everyone has access to the kind of piping system this setup would require

2) There could easily come a time where buying ozone gas from some factory is no longer an option.

So with that in mind, lets keep digging.

Natural Water Purification

Clearly, our mother Earth has worked out some fairly effective “water purification” systems.  It’s been functioning continuously for billions of years --- not bad.  We should probably take the time to understand it before we destroy it completely. 

We’re currently waiting on some research materials to arrive, but there appears to be great promise in certain species of short-necked clam (I shit you not) which have been observed to purify water in their eco-systems.  I’m still reading through the research, but meanwhile here is the juiciest morsel from the Brainsturbator Library:

Whitepaper from Nature on clam-based water purification

Most of the “natural” water filtration systems on the market use layers of sand to emulate the shallow coastal waterbeds, which are truly purification dynamos.

....and what about ze Germans?

Viktor Shauberger --- yep, we’re dropping another damn obscure scientist on you.  Ol’ Viktor was a quite a sage, descended from no less than 8 generations of forest wardens and loggers and deeply attuned to the forests of Austria.  It was through observation and contemplation of water that he became obsessed with the vortex and it’s applications in industry, transportation and energy sciences. 

Viktor Shauberger is often dismissed as a crank mystic, but it’s worth considering that every single time he applied those theories to actual projects, those projects were a huge success.  It’s funny that a number of his critics want him to be both a backwoods crackpot and a Nazi collaborator, but come on: you don’t attract the attention of the Nazis by failing at what you do. (They’re probably getting the Nazis confused with the Bush administration, which has an unswerving record of rewarding failure and mediocrity.)

The Nazis were initially impressed by Viktor’s first major project: designing at vast system of pipelines to move logs quickly and effectively across large distances and over all manner of terrain.  He designed an intricate vortex system to keep the logs spinning, thus creating a constant cushion of water between the wooden pipelines and the logs themselves.

All of Viktor Shauberger’s works are beautiful.  Look at his windmill design, for instance, and remember the immortal words of one R. Buckminster Fuller:  “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

Viktor used his vortex principles for water purification as well.  Brainsturbator Library carries the original patent and schematics:

Viktor Shauberger’s water purification designs (PDF)

Few people carry his torch today.  I found out about him through the uber-obscure (but insanely meaty) resource of Borderland Sciences.  On the net, Viktor is memorialized at Vortex World, who have done a great many recent experiments with Shauberger’s theorems and designs.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

Deep ocean water is a vast resource --- it makes up 90% of the global ocean mass, and our oceans take up 70% of our planet’s surface.  It is also a very flexible resource.  Former US Naval engineer (and mega-genius) John Pina Craven is suggesting four uses for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC):

First, the water is pumped up from at least 2000 feet below sea level.  (For this precise reason, OTEC won’t be catching on in Vermont anytime soon.  Or Iowa, for that matter.) Everything that happens from the point on is generated by the difference in temperature between the ocean water and the surface air.  Because of the depth and pressure, deep ocean water is “perpetually just above freezing” --- seriously cold, with several unique properties that we’ll perhaps get into later.

Wired magazine did an excellent article on John Pina Craven and his plan --- in fact, it’s where I stole these images from (thanks guys!!).  However, they got a few things dead wrong.  (Not pointing fingers, I do that routinely, with every single brainsturbator post.) Dig:

Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona.

Actually, the first OTEC power plant was built in Cuba back in 1930.  The engineer/designer for that project was Georges Claude, a rather obscure inventor who also gave mankind the neon light (yeah, thanks a bundle). Claude was a student of one of Nikola Tesla’s contemporaries, Jacques d’Arsonval, who drafted working plans for such a power plant but sadly, didn’t live to see it become a reality.  Regardless, the plant was a success for at least a few years, producing 22 kilowatts of electricity from a single mega-turbine.  If anyone knows what has happened since, or where the plant was actually located, I’d love to hear from you.

Getting the pipe down 2000 feet is the hardest part.  Once you start pumping, of course, you’re surfing along in the siphon zone --- familiar to our readers who have enacted revenge on teachers, police or federal judges by visiting their parking lots.  The siphon maintains it’s own suction pressure and basically runs itself --- leading to either an empty gas tank or, in this case, a vast supply of energy and water.  From the Wired article:

“Already, 39-degree-Fahrenheit water courses through the Natural Energy Lab’s newest pipe - a 55-inch-diameter, 9,000-foot-long polyethylene behemoth - at the rate of 27,000 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day.”

Not too shabby, huh?  This tips the scales in a very advantageous way --- this is really one of the more amazing shortcuts humans have found in the past century.  As Craven states repeatedly in his work and his interviews: “What the world doesn’t understand is that what we don’t have enough of is cold, not heat.”

To me, the most fascinating aspect of Craven’s research is the applications in agriculture.  Craven claims that by running the ocean water along the roots of the plants, it vigorously stimulates their growth.  I know from personal experience that when I’m feeling ill, the best thing to do is take a cold shower, which only sounds insane if you never thought about it.

More interesting still: Craven claims that by turning the water on and off, he can essentially trick the plants into speeding up their metabolism, and thus growing three to four times faster.  Worth noting again that this is neither pseudo-science, nor theoretical claims.  John Pina Craven runs a corporation --- the Common Heritage Corp --- which is already operating these plants.  He has vineyards on volcanic rock in Kona, Hawaii ---- vineyards which are not only on volcanic rock, but get 3 growing seasons every year, thanks to his cold-water wizardry.

How is this relevant to water purification?

Ever seen pipes sweat?  Exactly.

According to Craven’s numbers --- which are, remember, operational reality, not theoretical fantasy --- an OTEC plant that’s generating 2 megawatts of power would also produce 1.1 million gallons of de-salinated, fresh water.  That’s every day.  All you gotta do is make a tank big enough to collect it. 

For deeper diggins, wiki has an unusually thorough and excellent page on OTEC you should check out.