Section E. Water Supply, Sewage System, Waste Disposal and Environmental Remediation Measures

Continuation of Table 1 

* Electro-plasma technologies for water collection, treatment and distribution:

a) Create urban water treatment systems

Electro-plasma technologies can be used for creating water treatment systems in any city. At the same time, they also have many important advantages. The first extremely important advantage is that they produce high-quality drinking water and guarantee the absence of dangerous micro flora. The second, no less important, advantage is their low level of operating costs. No more than 1 kWh of electricity is required on average to prepare 1 m³ of water, which is less than the cost of chlorination, not to mention ozonation. The number of maintenance personnel is 5-6 times less than for traditional methods. The installation is small in size, therefore it takes up much less space than conventional cleaning methods.
In this case, there is no need to build a citywide wastewater treatment plant. It is more convenient and profitable to create water treatment plants for a district, micro district, or an individual housing complex. At the same time, the water does not have to come from cleaner or better sources, but is selected keeping in mind the length and cost of the water supply system. This introduces radical and positive changes into the water supply system, as well as repair and maintenance of the city water supply system. Safety and hygiene are improved. This is particularly important in the event of epidemics, terrorist attacks, man-made and natural disasters.

b) Seawater desalination

Electro-plasma technologies can be widely used in seawater desalination. As a result, relatively cheap, clean drinking water can be obtained.
The ultra-low power (1 kWh per 1 m³) and operational costs, as well as relatively low cost of the equipment and small size of the desalination complexes essentially solve the problem of using sea water for domestic needs. This also helps to solve the global problem of sufficient fresh water supplies on the planet.

** Electro-plasma technologies for waste treatment and disposal:

a) the treatment of different types of wastewater is a vital environmental task.
Electro-plasma technologies used in wastewater treatment have every advantage over the existing methods and help to cardinally solve the problem. They are suitable for treating any type of wastewater, with any level of microbiological contamination and salinity, as well as a high concentration of surface active substances. Contaminated water is immediately recycled, so it  does not build up or is retained anywhere, which means there is virtually no chance of contaminated water getting into clean water, or at least the chance of this is reduced to the minimum. If a pipe carrying dirty water bursts, an alarm and blocking system are activated.
This purification method produces pure disinfected water that does not require further treatment. It also produces solid utility-type residue that can be used as a raw material for fertilizers, building materials, etc.

In addition to being environmentally friendly, electro-plasma technologies also have significant economic advantages. They do not require the construction of special treatment facilities or large premises, since the hardware complex is compact and has low specific energy consumption (0.4-1 kWh per 1 m³). It also requires a much smaller number (5-6 times) of service personnel to operate in comparison with traditional technologies.

b) Domestic wastewater treatment*

The use of this technology for treating municipal wastewater during the reconstruction of existing treatment facilities significantly increases the efficiency of treatment facilities and the degree of wastewater treatment. This allows for the repeated use of treated water for household needs, including in public utilities. After separating potable water from service water, the latter can be used repeatedly, returning after treatment to the same system. This, firstly, will reduce water supply costs, and, secondly, will significantly reduce the consumption of fresh water in the public utilities system.

When constructing new treatment facilities, the use of this technology will ensure that such facilities are compact and occupy hundreds of times less space than the old technology. In particular, it is particularly beneficial in the construction and expansion of treatment facilities in resort areas.

c) Wastewater treatment of industrial enterprises*

Electro-plasma technologies make it possible to treat practically any effluents from industrial enterprises, including such pollutants as petroleum products, fats, dyes, iron, hexavalent chromium, fluorine, radionuclides, salts of heavy metals, and other compounds of organic and inorganic origin. The purification complex is very compact, low energy-intensive and can be installed directly in production shops. Therefore, this technology can be used to build high-performance local treatment facilities at enterprises that quickly return the treated water back into production. Such units can be installed in separate production cycles. Wastes generated after cleaning can also be returned to production. This is particularly important for companies using valuable metals and materials (galvanic production).
Similarly, electro-plasma technologies can be used for:

• removing radionuclides and transuranic elements from water at nuclear power plants and uranium ore mining sites;
• treating waste water at processing, light and food industry enterprises;
• treating the ballast water of tankers, submarines and other vessels;
• purifying water for carwashes and washing other hardware.

d) Treating effluents in municipal waste bins

Effluents from solid domestic and industrial wastes contain a very complex assortment of pollutants that are difficult to treat and disinfect using traditional technologies, heavily pollute groundwater and underground water, and pose an extremely high environmental threat. During the construction of new garbage dumps with waterproof bottoms, effluents are collected and accumulated in separate tanks.

Electro-plasma technologies not only purify complex drains, but also disinfect them, which greatly simplifies the task of using the obtained sludge; they perform high-quality treatment of effluents, resulting in clean water that can be used for household needs.

e) Wastewater treatment of animal breeding complexes*

Wastewater treatment at livestock breeding complexes does not differ in principle from wastewater treatment at other enterprises. The clean water obtained can be reused for ploughing and irrigating the surrounding agricultural land. The waste can be used as a high-quality fertilizer.

f) Building treatment facilities for special (infection) medical institutions, microbiological and pharmacological enterprises

The waste water from these enterprises is distinguished by a particularly high concentration of hazardous micro flora. Electro-plasma technologies almost completely destroy it.
The level of residual micro flora is 1,000 times less than in other disinfection methods.

g) Mine and quarry water treatment*

Mine and quarry water occupies a large area, creating artificial reservoirs, which, due to their high mineralization level, cannot be used by humans.

At the same time, they contain many substances from which valuable, rare-earth and other elements can be extracted.

Electro-plasma technologies are effective in treating water that is pumped out of mines and quarries, whereby it can be used as drinking water or as industrial water for irrigating fields and gardens, or can be accumulated in reservoirs for fish farming, etc., while the solid waste can be used as raw material for the extraction of rare-earth and other chemical elements.

h) Building stationary and mobile complexes for neutralizing and destroying highly toxic waste, toxic substances and toxic chemicals*

The absence of effective universal technologies for neutralizing and processing toxic substances creates a major ecological problem. Attempts to bury non-neutralized toxic substances complicate the problem, as this does not prevent them having an impact on groundwater in the future, and their neutralization after burial is impossible.

Electro-plasma technologies destroy complex molecules of toxic substances, turning them into simpler non-toxic ones which are removed from the solution in the form of solid insoluble substances. This turns liquid toxic substances of any origin into pure water and safe solid insoluble substances that can be used in the economy or buried.

Installation for extracting platinum group metals from spent catalysts on the basis of electrochlorination

Installations for extracting platinum group metals from spent automobile catalysts make it possible to implement processing technology with the following technical parameters:

• worldwide use of palladium in automobile catalysts in 2018 amounted to 229.6 tonnes; platinum - 28.35 tonnes in 2017, rhodium - 24.4 tonnes in 2018.
• extraction of platinum and palladium of no less than 98%, rhodium of no less than 90%;
• raw material capacity of at least 100 kg/day;
• electrolyte turnover amounts to at least 90%;
• the installation has a catalyst loading weight range from 100 to 250 kg.

The overall dimensions of the installation are adapted for use as a technical module for a tall container of 12x2.4x2.8 m in size. The design of the installation makes it possible to increase the productivity of the complex by installing additional electrochemical modules with the same site infrastructure.

Gravitation and Magnetic Separation Method

A multi-purpose laboratory unit based on the gravitation principle for separating solid powders of minerals in heterogeneous media with the imposition of a magnetic field allows for the most efficient separation of the initial concentrate into waste rock, collective rare metal (RM) and rare earth metal (REM) concentrate, and magnetic concentrate.

These minerals contain every beneficial component, while their specific weight significantly exceeds the bulk weight of the rock, equal to 1.4 g/cm³.

This allows them to be separated into a collective concentrate which is 100-fold and more concentrated. In this case, their estimated yield does not exceed 5% of the total volume of red mud and makes it possible to process them using hydrometallurgical technology.
One thousand tons of red mud per day can produce an iron concentrate of 70%, while the output of waste rock comprises a 20% compound of silicon, aluminum, calcium and magnesium oxides. The actual mud yield currently amounts to as much as 4.0 thousand tonnes per day.
Therefore, processing up to 1,000 tons of red mud per day could yield the following amounts of beneficial and valuable components:

• inert material ~250 t/day or 5 thousand t/year;
• iron concentrate ~700 t/day or 238 thousand t/year;
• collective concentrate ~50 t/day or 17 thousand t/year.

The collective concentrate will include:

• gold with 90% recovery at 2800 g/t ~28 kg/day or 9.5 t/year;
• zircon ~350 t/year;
• REM concentrate ~1.5 t/day or 510 t/year, including up to 100 t/year of the light group;
• scandium - up to 10 t/year in concentrate;
• vanadium - 1.5 t/day or 510 t/year;
• gallium, germanium

We consider this technology extremely promising and invite interested parties to participate in its implementation.