"A Teen Scientist Figured out How to Suck Microplastics from the Ocean" :
Fionn Ferreira
On Monday, Fionn Ferreira, an 18-year-old from Ireland, took home the top prize—which includes, in addition to a lifetime of bragging rights, a $50,000 educational scholarship—at the Google Science Fair for his project on microplastic pollution.
Microplastics are plastic fragments less than 5 millimeters in size and they pose serious environmental and a public health risks. They are ubiquitous, having contaminated the most remote places of the world, including France’s Pyrenees mountains and the bottom of the Mariana Trench; they can be found in tap water and inside marine mammals and fish. While it’s not yet clear how microplastics affect human health, it’s safe to say they are of great concern to scientists.
Enter Ferreira, who speaks three languages, plays the trumpet, and has a dwarf planet named after him. Living near the water in West Cork, he was inspired to study microplastics after becoming “increasingly aware” of plastic ocean pollution. “I was alarmed to find out how many microplastics enter our wastewater system and consequently the oceans,” he writes in his project’s research paper. “This inspired me to try and find out a way to try and remove microplastics from waters before they even reached the sea.”
More than 100 miles from the nearest lab, he conducted all of his research at his home, fueled by hot chocolates from his parents. After running more than 1,000 tests (and starting an accidental fire), he figured out a way to remove about 87 percent of microplastic from water by using a magnetic liquid, or ferrofluid. The challenge now, he says, is to bring the project to scale.
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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/08/a-teen-scientist-figured-out-how-to-suck-microplastics-from-the-ocean-there-may-be-hope-for-humanity/
= new reply since forum marked as read
...it is an oil based high school science project.
Personally I see disaster written all over it.
I applaud this kid doing serious research but this is not a real viable solution to this enormous tragedy. I realize that the kids who win these prizes often go on to great STEM careers and I'm not knocking his effort; there is a certain elegance to what he has done.
In fact, industrialized, this scheme might make make things worse; often things that are over hyped without serious consideration do exactly that.
For example, there's the wind industry, hyped for half a century and industrialized beginning at the dawn of this century.
It sounded great; I plainly confess I was once in favor of these new disasters, wind and solar.
The result of the wind industry, in a purely environmental sense is written in the planetary atmosphere:
The current annualized growth rate of CO2 concentrations in the planetary atmosphere is 2.4/ppm. In the 20th century it averaged less than 1.5 ppm/year.
They were established as a transition point to address one set of problems - mainly pollution and something, that at one time used to be one of the biggest hysterical arguments that was endlessly posted on DU - "peak oil".
However the "solution" to one problem created others - ask any ornithologist who has monitored bird migrations and what some of those turbines have done to those established migration paths (the turbines taking advantage of the natural wind flows where they are positioned, that the birds always used for travel - i.e., "hopping on the flow", including the jetstream, to reduce the frequency of wing flapping to propel forward).
And an issue with solar was recently experienced in South Jersey with a massive 11-alarm fire at a big Dietz & Watson foods warehouse facility that had a huge solar roof that caught fire now 6 years ago (Yikes! Time flies!
) , where the fire fighters had no training on handling an electrified roof like that - https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/2-Alarm-Fire-Rips-Through-Dietz--Watson-Building-222001371.html
But you have to start somewhere and right now, given what happened with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and most recently, Fukushima Daiichi, IMHO, shifts "nuclear" (at least in its current form and technology) to the back burner...
so... 
I mean I think Chernobyl is a case in point (and it is STILL in melt down, where I think they believe the core has burned through the surface and into the bedrock a couple miles deep after 30 years)... They "contained" the immediate site and life has been returning there (I saw pics of the memorial near the site) but the damage was massive and impacted that whole area and every living thing there.
Plus look at Fukushima Daiichi that happened 8 years ago (time flies ) and the fallout from that, with radiation found in fish that traversed the Pacific, along with radioactive debris that washed up along our own west coast. That is scary as hell! Their problems may have generally dropped out of the news but they are going to be dealing with that for decades to come.
And hell, they are STILL working through the issues of Three Mile Island here in PA - literally 40 years ago this year, they are finally shutting the whole thing down now - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/three-mile-island-shut-down.html (this was announced this past May and was big news in PA including here in Philly).
We got a ways to go with what might be used for nuclear fuel and it sure as hell can't be what we are using right now. 
Damn. First thing that came to mind when I first saw the post! 
(Shrub's voice saying that is an earworm! 
)
And you don't want to be nearby when that "split" happens!
Last edited Sat Aug 3, 2019, 01:09 PM - Edit history (1)
is that upon the onset of these disasters, the other factors that impact the environment, which are a steady but growing "noise" now-punctuated by a notable "spike" from a radioactive "signal", has resulted in adding a slew of new problems like clusters of populations contracting various forms of rare cancers or an uptick in major damage to the genetic material in the living organisms in the immediate area of a radiation leak (as well as those downwind/downstream and across the ocean). It gets into the food chain starting at the bottom with microscopic creatures and spreads itself exponentially - particularly iodine (it's radioactive form). This is why those who live within a 10 mile radius of nuclear plants are usually offered KI (potassium iodide) to mitigate the effect.
The people at Fukushima thought their onsite "waste" was "properly packaged" (Japan having been used as the "experiment" for weaponizing a nuke)... until the site got hit with a 9.1 earthquake and subsequent tsunami. We can never be able to "properly package" anything when the threat of a natural disaster can come along and dash it all aside (and certainly an earthquake that size, despite the area being part of the "ring of fire", was not anticipated).
Imagine the plankton around Fukushima and the ocean life that has ingested it, in turn being ingested by others up the chain. 
Radioactive iodine (^131I) has a relatively short half-life of around a week but by then, the damage is done.
You have natural disasters such as volcanoes that spew H2S into the atmosphere (and in the water ) that does its own damage - including plumes of ash that disperse on wind currents, in turn impacting the weather. But the added stress from preventable man-made sources really needs to be looked at and not cavalierly dismissed.
