Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?
Fair enough, sorry. It’s just that your question (and some of your answers) don’t seem to be accounting for dealing with the volume change of steam, and how that would be managed.
Also the fact that if you’re evaporating the water off anyway, why not just let it escape and concentrate the chemicals, and then deal with them that way? I’d guess most of them would not be in the vapour anyway? (unless they’re volatile, in which case they’d probably boil off even earlier)
Re: Lava contact. I don’t think the resulting water vapour is much more than 100°C? The phase change takes a lot of energy to phase change, and is still at about 100°C after that, and then the steam would escape very quickly, and be displaced by more water, so it would not have much chance to heat up more. The lava-water interface would always be at about 100°C, give or take a few tens of degrees for the Leidenfrost effect, maybe? I might be wrong here, but I can’t see how it would get MUCH hotter than 100°C (assuming normal surface pressure).