Cascade Magazine article, “Chemical Twofer,” covers a new filter created in the Darren Johnson lab that will extract valuable metals and create clean water.
One gram of a material being used by chemist Darren Johnson for water filtration has the same surface area as the football field in Autzen Stadium.
Darren Johnson doesn’t want to “get the lead out.” But he does want to get the neodymium and ytterbium out.
Yes, those are real things. They’re among the so-called rare earth elements, metals that often get leached from underground minerals and brought to the surface in briny, hot, underground water that’s increasingly being tapped to generate electricity in geothermal energy plants. Often toxic, the metals need to be removed before the water can be used and then discharged into a river.
