Can we destroy deadly "forever chemicals"?

[@RaglansElectricBaboon]

Interesting. I'd be really keen to know what's in the exhaust gasses & if exhaust scrubbers can capture most of it. Either way until the exhaust products are either safe or can be made safe we're just moving the problem around.

[@Kaleb-f5g]

That's a part of the research, too. The goal is to achieve full mineralization, which is destruction of all PFAS into hydrofluoric acid, HF, which can be captured with the air pollution control system. Measuring HF in the exhaust is hard because it reacts with everything, including the walls of the furnace, so you'll always measure less than you should. Any PFAS that aren't reduced to HF are made into other PFASs as a product of incomplete combustion (PIC), and there are potentially thousands of different PICs, so testing for all of them is difficult. PFAS are very different from many other pollutants because they aren't broken down in the same way, and they require different conditions for complete destruction, so the research about how to destroy them is very important.

[@davidwilkes2472]

My son, Kaleb Wilkes, is working on this project.

[@fluoxethine]

I don't know but for safety reasons I'd separate "office" space from that incinerator. I hope that they at least have good ventilation and realtime PFAS level alarms.

[@Kaleb-f5g]

The lab space is very separated from the office space, it's in a different building. The incinerators are also run under negative pressure, so there shouldn't be any emissions leaking out, and they feed into an air pollution control system