a faster way for cleaning the river??

Question

im just wondering if i could do this


http://answers.yahoo.com/question/;_ylt=Ai.qpEnbxVNyHu7Ih7EKJcwjzKIX?qid=20060910212258AAIWQcm


i will place it under the river and i will make sure it hits the sun light isnt that brilliant?.... thank you japanese scientists!!! i wish i was japanese though.....

do you think people will do the same thing?

and btw... how much is titanium oxide(deoxide)?????

Answer 1

You'd have to do a bit more than that.

For one thing, titanium dioxide is largely insoluble. If you dumped a bunch of it in the bottom of a river, it would probably just stay there as the water washed over it and most of the water would fail to come in contact with it at all.

Secondly, it generally seems to require light. And water is pretty good at absorbing and refracting most light. In fact, almost all plants in the ocean live or reach up to within a few meters of the surface because light just doesn't get much further down that that.

So titanium dioxide on the bottom and sunlight on the top means nothing much will happen. You'd need large, shallow pans of water that isn't going anywhere... that's what they used in successful tests.

Your last problem is that even if it works to sterilize the water, it's going to sterilize the water! Titanium dioxide isn't going to distinguish between all the GOOD things that you WANT to have in the river (like fish and the rest of the ecosystem that's supposed to be there) and the BAD things you don't want there (like pollution and infection microorganisms). Which leaves you with a probably insoluble problem: how to you filter the good stuff from the bad stuff. If you could do that, you wouldn't need the chemicals in the first place! Just filter it out and put it somewhere else!

All of which doesn't mean it's not a useful process... just that you can't dump a bunch of it in a river. Sorry.