Salt (sodium chloride) is an indispensable and versatile mineral with a vast array of historical, biological, industrial, and practical applications, essential for life and numerous human endeavors.
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it is the multi-purpose jeel and hide of
the mineral World it can save you and it
can kill you it can also conduct
electricity whiten your whites and ward
off the devil it tastes like no other
Rock and just try cooking a decent meal
without it not going to happen we
literally can't live without it the
ceiling's salt the floor is salt the
walls are salt I'm home stand aside
solar and wind could salt be the amazing
energy source of the future now salt on
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works geologists call it halight
chemists call it sodium chloride the
rest of us just call it salt it's in
nearly everything from our blood to this
Stone and it has 14,000 known uses some
refer to salt as The Fifth Element as
essential to our world as earth air fire and
and
water but what is salt while there is a
technical chemical definition of salt
what we'll be talking about is the
everpresent compound sodium
chloride the sodium is a metal the
chloride a hallogen and the ratio is
about 40% sodium and 60% chloride they
come together and form an ionic bond
when multiple sodiums and chlorides come together
together
they form a
cube when multiple cubes come together
they form a crystal as we're accustomed
to seeing in nature so what talents does
this little Crystal have salt is
hygroscopic a fancy word that means it
attracts water salt dissolves pretty
easily in water once dissolved it breaks
up into its positively charged sodium
ions and it's negatively charged
that makes it infinitely useful in chemical
chemical
applications salt lowers the freezing
temperature of water making it great for
deicing winter roads but it also rusts
vehicles and bridges in the
process the most obvious use of salt is
in our food where it's both a luxury
because it tastes good and a necessity
because it's an amazing
preservative what sets salt apart from
some other resources is that it's
naturally recyclable
so we're never going to run
out if you think about it the salt on
your eggs or on the sidewalk could be
millions of years old so where does salt come
come [Music]
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from Salt covers the earth it's
everywhere it's mixed in with all the
ocean water that covers the
planet salt crystals develop from
evaporating Salt Water ocean water uh
from dried ocean beds this looks like a
dried ocean bed doesn't
it many millions of years ago after the
Earth's surface cooled centuries of
rainfall turned puddles into oceans the
Ocean Floors were littered with
sedimentary rock which is full of
sodium meanwhile chloride spewed from
vents still the amount of salt content
in these early oceans was likely pretty
low it took billions of years of water
runoff eroding Rock dissolving the salt
and carrying it into the oceans to
create the saltiness we know
today though it varies by location
seawater is roughly 3.5% salt that
translates to about a/4 pound of salt
per gallon of seawater or a total of
nearly 50 quadrillion tons of salt in
all the Earth's
oceans okay so how do we get all that
seawater harvesting sea salt on a grand
scale requires some serious
patience the other key to this process
location location
location you're located on gr Naga
Island the most suddenly island in the
Bahama chain gr Naga is approximately
500 Mi southeast of Miami Florida
at modern Bahamas limited we have a
unique partnership with
nature aside from having access to a
limitless supply of salty seawater this
location is ideal for other
reasons the requirements are high
incidents of uh solar energy as you can
see we out here in the Sun a steady but
not strong wind low rainfall uh High
evaporation large land area that is
suited for solar salt uh production
30,000 Acres of inaga is devoted to the
solar salt
operation each year hundreds of millions
of gallons of seawater are pumped into
these primary
reservoirs shallow basins where the
water will sit exposed to wind and the sun's
sun's
Rays as the water slowly evaporates the
result is a concentrated brine that's
drawn into secondary reservoirs and
eventually into the final concentration pond
pond [Music]
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each stage becomes a mini ecosystem
based on the increasing level of
salt in our primary reservoirs millions
of microorganisms flow in with the ocean
water also coming in is millions of fish
egg and other marine animal eggs these
ponds are just teaming with wildlife and
a biodiversity of
Life the secondary reservoirs are too
salty to support most life
with the exception of algae and brine
shrimp and only salt loving AKA
halophilic Red bacteria can survive
after prolonged
evaporation the real magic happens in
crystallization I guess to a point where
the sodium chloride in that solution
cannot be held in solution any longer so
it crystallize into a solid once the
salt layer is about 4 in thick the
Harvesters mechanically scarify or break
up the surface and truck it out to the wash
wash
Plant at the wash Plant the salt is
dumped into a hopper and it is conveyed
on a conveyor belt into spiral
classifiers these are washing tubs where
the sediments from the crystallizers
like dirt or sand is washed out of the
product the 1 million tons of salt
harvested here each year mainly goes
toward Road deicing and water
softening all this salt produced with
little human
intervention in some parts of the world
Salt Lakes or oceans evaporated with
zero help from us resulting in Salt
Flats big exposed beds of salt Utah's
Great Salt Lake is a Salt Flat in the
making as is the Dead Sea in the Middle
East you can find Salt and crusted
seabeds in California's death valley and
at the Bonville salt flats in Utah [Music]
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here in a Salt Flat in Bolivia salt is
collected right off the surface just as
people have been doing for thousands of
years today salt has many uses but in
the beginning it was all about food and
survival we've known about salt
preservative properties ever since uh
the cavemen and so men have been
locating their settlements near Salt
Works salt has been used since antiquity
as a preservative so before there was
Refrigeration people salted meat and
they salted fish prior to Modern geology
and industrialization if you didn't live
near the ocean procuring salt was an arduous
arduous
proposition this made salt precious
trade routes were set up to holl it from
regions salt was valuable in ancient
Rome because it was used to preserve
rations on Long Journeys
the paycheck of the Roman soldiers was
in salt it was called salario from this
salary we be good if we can convince my
people over here to be paying
salt salt spawn countless superstitions
like warning off bad luck by throwing
spelled salt over your left shoulder
into the eyes of the
devil and Proverbs if you read the
gospel of St Matthew S Matthew Matthew
says quoted
Jesus telling his disciples you are the
salt of the
earth with a double meaning basically
having a life with salt with with
interest and also being the
savior of the people of the humanity
it's impossible to imagine that we could
live without salt and that's why our
watch word is salt the essence of
life evaporating seawater is just one of
the ways we get our salt [Music]
fix a dash here a pinch there the salt
we eat comprises less than 15% of all
the salt produced
worldwide but it's the salt with which
we're most
familiar thanks to that unmistaken able
taste but why do we eat salt at
all it's an essential nutrient an
essential nutrient is defined as one
that our body doesn't make itself so if
we don't take salt in we compromise our
health the body contains about 0.15%
Salt by mass so for a 50 kg human about
110 lb that works out to 75 G of salt or 7
7
tablespoons salt is an electrolyte that
keeps our cells muscles and nervous
system working because when you come
right down to it we run on
electricity electrolytes act as the
electrical conductor that allows our
nerve endings to fire our muscles to
move and our thoughts to form well the
human body is actually a machine it's an
electrical machine and electrical
impulses move into and out of the cells
over the cell membranes and that
transmission is facilitated by the
sodium if that's true salt water act as
a conductor connecting two electrodes
lighting this light
bulb pure water doesn't complete the electrical
electrical
circuit I'm going to add a small amount
of household [Music]
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salt there goes the stir bar and there
is the light as it goes into solution
the water separates the sodium and the
chloride ions and they allow the
electrons to flow from one side to the
other completing the circuit lighting
our light bulb all our bodily fluids are
salty because salt and water are
inherently attracted to each other but
salt where salt goes water will follow
and so if you have too much salt in your
body that can increase your blood
pressure to regulate your blood pressure
if you get rid of salt you'll also get
rid of water in other words too much
salt in your body in your blood attracts
more water than your arteries and veins
are used
to lose the salt and you lower the
pressure how much salt is too much
depends on your size age and
genetics but Health agencies recommend a
daily intake of no more than 2,400 mg of
sodium or about a teaspoon full with
prepackaged and fast foods flavored with
large doses of salt the average American
day but why what makes salt taste so
well salty salt has that unique flavor
because of the sodium ions it contains
picture a tongue if you zoom in very
closely into the tongue you'll find the
taste buds the taste buds are made up of
individual cells and at the tip of each
of those cells are receptors to each of
the different flavors for salt there's a
particular channel that only allows
sodium through so when you eat salt the
sodium from the salt goes through the
channel causes a change in the cell and
that change is telegraphed to the brain
your brain can then detect oh I've eaten
salt according to the fame tongue map
salt is best detected on the tip of the
tongue or so we thought in practice we
now know that isn't true and that you
can detect salt all over the
tongue salt doesn't just add flavored to
it it even preserves something as
potentially dangerous as uncooked pork
which can be full of harmful pathogens
the recipe for making an Italian cured
ham known as Pudo hasn't changed in
years it still depends on salt and just
two other
ingredients the pork salt and Thyme and
us that's t m e time people that work
here they know the meat they know the
salt and they know the time that it
takes to make a
p we consider them P [Music]
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J if these are the pruto Jedi then this
is their Master pruto actually is the
past tense of the verb
prugar which in Italian means to dry it out
out
and that's just how salt makes raw pork
safe to eat by dehydrating and killing dangerous
dangerous
bacteria we apply the wet salt on the
skin of the
product just to eliminate some eventual
bacteria can can grow at the skin level
but the important salt is the dry salt
which penetrates the ham once salted the
hams will age for about a a year in
different chambers giving the salt a
chance to work its bacteria killing
magic each chamber simulates the
environmental conditions of a particular
season in
Italy that first stage is if you will a
replica of what is the winter season so
winter being cold being humid at least
of course in the Mediterranean countries
the salt Works its way into the ham as
it draws out moisture and inhibits
bacteria activity uh the pruto is safe
to eat because there is no more active
bacteria anywhere within the ham but
theut being safe isn't good enough but
also has to be something pleasant hence
you have the summer and the fall and
that's really where flavor is further
brought out by the
salt as you Traverse this vegetarian
nightmare a 100,000 legs of salted hams
at various stages of completion hang
triumphantly as a testament to time old tradition
but vegetarians don't despair salt can
also render vegetables virtually [Music]
unspoil this salt loving bacteria AIDS
in the fermentation and pickling process
in the process of going from a cucumber
to a pickle the salt is added to the
fermentation bright it suppresses most microorganisms
microorganisms
but through a selective process allows
the lactobacillus organism to grow and
flourish throughout the fermentation the
lactobacillus will take the sugars in
the cucumber and it will convert it to
lactic acid and thus further preserve the
the
pickle once the fermentation begins its
active State we'll start incrementally
increasing salt a little at time with
these shovels this carefully controlled
salinity in the brine lends the pickles
their ultimate flavor texture and [Music]
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immortality so where do we get the table
salt that goes in our
food at Morton salt in Hutchinson Kansas
salt is mined from underground using
water it's called solution
mining this salt derivation technique
exploits salt deposits left over from
ancient bodies of water that were cut
off from the oceans millions of years
ago these prehistoric Salt Lakes
evaporated and the residual salt was
left on the Earth's surface surface ages
of subsequent sediments covered the salt
deposits the weight and pressure of
these accumulating sediments compacted
the minerals into Solid Rock layers
hundreds of feet below today's ground
surface solution mining followed by pan
evaporation primarily yields food grade
salt a very pure form of salt the one we
eat fresh water is injected into deep
Wells the water dissolves the dry salt
deposits into a SAT saturated brine more
water pushes the brine to the
surface brine is brought into a covered
evaporator it's a big teardrop shaped
evaporator that's up to three stories
tall and the water in the evaporator is
being boiled and as it's boiled the
steam is rising off the water and it's
evaporating and that's causing the salt
brine to condense and form salt crystals
and the salt crystals fall to the bottom
of the evaporator and as they're falling
they're being
clean a heat dryer removes any excess
moist moisture but this is easier said
than done with salt because it's
hygroscopic it attracts moisture from the
the
air so how do they keep the crystals
from clumping we put free flowing
additives or anti-caking agents in the
salt and those were kind of like a
sponge they absorb the moisture in the
salt to help keep it dry and to help
keep it from caking that additive paves
slogan now the salt would flow freely
even in humid weather so when it rained it
it [Music]
bored salt has a virtually infinite
shelf life both on the shelf and
underground after all it's just a rock a
really old rock geologists tell us um
that this salt deposit was formed about
250 million years ago it was during a
time where what is now Kansas actually
lay close to the equator and all of the
continents were pushed together into a
large supercontinent which the
geologists call
Pangia today there are several large
ancient salt deposits throughout North
America some geologists estimate that
the one under Kansas alone could satisfy
America's salt needs for the next
250,000 years so how do they get the
miners have been chipping away at rock
boom and some heavy
machinery okay maybe it's a bit more
complicated than that we're going 650 ft
underground and it'll take us
approximately a minute and a
half we're going out to the face uh to
where the mining is actually being done
and that'll take us uh about 20 minutes
down here salt is a way of life
obviously the environment down here is
all salt the the ceiling's salt the
floor is salt the walls are salt and to
an extent the air is salt and you
breathe that in and you can constantly
taste the salt and a lot of the miners
they get to a point where either they go
one of two ways they don't put any salt
on their food or they put way too much
salt on their food in order to taste
it this mine is approximately 2 and a
half half miles north to south and a
mile and a half east to west and growing every
every
day the mining method they use here is
called room and pillar this is because
large Caverns are carved out leading
behind 40x40 ft loadbearing salt
pillars the first order of business
undercutting and drilling 12T deep
holes the reason to undercutter is to
relieve the pressure from if you shoot
it without cutting it to just stand
there it wouldn't blow out it just be
one big
glob what we're doing here we're going
to fill these in 29 holes that they just
drilled with ammonia nitrate and a
diesel fuel
mix it's just a
fertilizer you just take your booster
and your primed de and stick it the end
the hose then you try to hit that hole up
the blast dislodges 300 tons of rock
salt the uh salt that we mine today will
be used on roads this winter all over
the Midwest we're on a two shift day we
take out about 2,000 tons uh in a year
we aim at about 500,000 tons or uh up up
to 700,000 tons we are very dependent on
the weather if there's a lot of I though
like last year we can hardly keep
up and that about $20 a ton it takes a
lot of salt to pay their
salaries after Decades of Underground
Salt mining there must be something that
can be done with all these room and pillar
pillar
what deep below the plains of Central
Kansas lies a company called underground
vaults and storage encased in these
prehistoric rock salt walls hidden away
from anyone who doesn't know this place
exists if you're searching for a place
to store important stuff look around
space is No
Object the available space that's
already mined out is over 980 Acres so
we will never run out of space at least
in your lifetime or my
lifetime the current facility uses 1.7
million square ft of storage space and
over 6 million boxes stacked on many
miles of shelving and your Stu would be
in fine company there's just tons of
movie film that we store from various
film companies throughout the world we
have a complete series of friends we see
the Dr shago that was a favorite Oceans
11 and what do you know here's one of my
favorites The Shining with Jack
Nicholson right back here in the salt mine
so why is this environment such a good
place to store things because salt
lowers and stabilizes the humidity to a constant
constant
45% back up at the surface Kansas
suffers through hot humid weather for
several months of the
year large fans bring that warm humid
air down from above through the elevator
shafts the warm air mixes with the cool
underground air dropping and stabilizing
its temperature the salt ceilings
pillars walls and Floors suck up the
moisture lowering the humidity
level the now cooler drier air
circulates around the storage facility
to the adjacent Underground Salt Museum
through the salt mine and ultimately
back out to the
surface we do not have to air condition
the facility we do not have to heat the
facility which saves on utility costs
one of the concerns that we do have
underground of course is fire with all
the paper and the the boxes and the
documents we have here but it's very
unlikely because salt will not
burn something the Nazis knew when they
squired away stolen valuables in German
salt mines during World War
II the Hutchinson facility was
established in 1959 during the Cold War
to protect sensitive information and
assets we have lots and lots of things
that we can talk about and other things
that we cannot talk about because of the
security that we have a remarkable
example example of human Ingenuity
partnering with salt to solve the very
modern problem of storage space salt
properties harness properly can solve
many Modern [Music]
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Problems the relationship between salt
and water is a complicated one in the
ocean a delicately balanced life
sustaining coexistence in the body it's
more of a
codependence spreading salt on icy roads
becomes a real LoveHate situation we
know that if we salt the roads we cut
accidents by 88% in the first couple
hours after we do that water freezes at
32° fight however if you add salt you
can depress the freezing point and this
is exceedingly useful because if you
live in a cold climate where you have
ice and snow you'll often want to put
salt on the ice to keep the streets from
slippery the transition of water from
liquid to solid is a kind of chemical
reaction when you throw salt into the
equation the sodium and chloride ions
interfere with water's ability to assume
the structure of [Music]
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ice this property of salt combined with
its abundance and low cost makes it an
ideal Winter Road deicer over 15 million
tons of salt get dumped on roads in the
US each year but another characteristic
of salt comes into play and this one's
not so beneficial this is the hate part
water when applied to wet roads deicing
salt breaks up into its components
sodium and chloride ions
the water layer becomes conducting
oxygen from the air transports through
the conducting water layer to the iron
in your car or on a
bridge oxygen atoms contain six
outermost shell electrons a highly
unstable configuration while 8 is
stable as a result oxygen is always
swiping electrons from other atoms a
process known as
oxidation this could spell Doom for the
infrastructure we are here in Northeast
under a bridge that is exibiting signs of
of
corrosion the deicing salt penetrates
the concrete until it makes contact with
the rebar structural
supports the salt goes to work
metal the rebar erods until its
loadbearing cap capability becomes so
diminished that the structure is at risk of
collapse we are going to inspect one of
these poles that have been exposed to
the icing salts we have around 7 and2 in
of material that
90% of it has been corroded
perforated and there is evidence of
corrosion products that I'm going to
collect for lab
analysis all you need is a bit of force
or wind to cause it to have a catastrophic
catastrophic
failure back at the Matco Lab Dr Z and
his team do a cause and effect
analysis but just as importantly they
test different materials and Coatings in
an attempt to curb future salt
corrosion what we do here in this lab is
we test on different metals to see their
corrosion resistance
we're going to be putting these into our
chamber this is what carbon steel looks
like after prolonged exposure in our
salt spray
cabinets the salt spray test helps
determine how these materials and
Coatings hold up against a water and
salt Laden
environment but it isn't just the snow
belt that should be shaking in its winter
winter
boots Midwest and Northeast and Colorado
are areas that they are affected by the
icing salt East Coast and West Coast
both are affected by the salt from the
ocean now if you have a situation that
you have both the icing salts and also
salt from the ocean obviously you will
have the maximum damage from
corrosion still studies show that the
benefits of Di in salt outweigh the
dangers we cannot avoid salt because
salt is very positive salt is very low
cost and they are abundant so in my
opinion they are going to be used for
long term we just have to control the
corrosion process we can never prevent
it completely but we can detect it and
slow it down through coating selection
and material
selection with about 70% of us residents
digging their way out of snow each
winter when it comes to Road Sals we'll
take the bad with the [Music]
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good Americans use up about 16 tons of
salt over their lifetimes per person
that's over 400 lb a
year but don't reach for the blood
pressure meds just yet sometimes salt is
lurking where you least expect it the
most common use of salt is generally
Unknown by the public and that is about
40% of the total salt is used to make
chemicals like petroleum is the feed
stock for the petrochemical industry
salt is a feed stock for the Chlor Alkali
Alkali
industry salt is comprised of sodium
which is an Alkali and chloride which is
chlorine so really the industry gets its
name Chlor Alkali from Salt
itself most people think of salt as
common table salt but when mixed with
water and electricity has passed through
that saltwater solution you get
compounds like chlorine costic soda and
hydrogen which are essential building
blocks and everything from food to clean
drinking water to
Pharmaceuticals a major manufacturer of
these building blocks is this Olan Chlor
Alkali plant land strategically located
near the sources of its main
ingredients we actually located here in
Upstate New York not only due to the
abundance of salt but also because we
are near historic Niagara Falls which
makes it a ready resource for lowcost
hydropower electricity we actually reive
the salt as a solution uh from a company
about 60 Mi away from here we're really
taking advantage of the properties of
salt which is that it's highly soluble
in water miles of pipes and wires carry
the saltwater and electricity to the
cell membrane
room here electrolysis breaks down the
brine into chlorine sodium hydroxide and
hydrogen separated by a
membrane this membrane just looks like a
a sheet of paper it's much more than
that it's really a very ion selective
high-tech polymer technology that allows
the sodium ions to pass through the
membrane while leaving the chlorine ions
on the other side
now what to do with these separated ions
every year in the US we produce about
12.7 million tons of chlorine chlorine
molecular outer shell is missing one
electron giving it a unique ability to
bind with other elements and compounds
this makes it extremely useful in all
kinds of industrial
applications Florine specifically is
really known due to its disinfectant
properties it's been used for well over
years in the US for providing purified
drinking water to millions of people
well over 85% of agricultural crop
protection products use chlorine in
their manufacturing process but it
actually has hundreds of other uses and
winds up in many other products you name
it there's likely some form of chlorine
chemistry used to make it on the other
side of the membrane is the costic soda
as the name implies it's probably not
wise to touch this stuff in its raw
State because it can burn
cic soda is another name for sodium
hydroxide it has a number of important
uses it's used as a raw material and
soaps and detergents it's also used in
the uh PP and paper industry to break
down the pp to make paper the US
industry produces about 13.3 million
tons of costic soda every year and that
equates to about 21 million tons of salt
consumed to make those products after
all that effort went into splitting salt
apart there's something else made of
this plant that involves a reunion of
sorts Just Add Water bleach is produced
by combining chlorine CTIC back together
and it's important as a disinfectant in
keeping our food safe in that it
disinfects the surfaces that come in
contact with our food um not only in our
house but also in restaurants and also
in in healthcare
facilities chlorine bleach kills those
nasty microorganisms by attacking them
at the cellular
level and it gets those stains out of
your whites but not how you
think let's say you spilled some
spaghetti sauce on your white shirt now
the spaghetti sauce is red due to the
color in the Tomato the chromophores and
so bleach won't actually clean the
clothes all it simply does is it
denatures the chromophor removing the
color and therefore returning your shirt to
to
White the byproduct of electrolyzing
salt waterer hydrogen doesn't go to
waste either hydrogen is is able to
displace natural gas in our boilers and
we're not only uh saving uh money for
the operation of the plant but we're
also helping uh reduce our carbon
footprint and our impact on the
environment salt molecular structure can
be harnessed separated and altered
proving that it's more than just the sum
of its
parts salt is edible it makes food safe
and our bodies are full of it
this it may be the most ironic way to go
dying of thirst in the middle of the
ocean but the reality is drinking too
much seawater will kill you and that's
because of the salt drinking salt water
is a bad idea because your body will try
to expel the extra salt by urinating and
it will actually urinate more water than
you drank it has to get that water from
somewhere so it gets it from the rest of
your body it gets it from your
circulatory system and from your cells
so drinking salt water actually dehydrates
dehydrates
you 97% of the planet's 326 million
trillion gallons of water is in the
salty oceans rendering it
undrinkable more than half of the
remaining 3% is tied up elsewhere so
that doesn't leave us with
much some areas like Tampa Bay are
looking to Des salination as a solution
through this complex filtration process
you can actually Force the salt out of
the salt waterer ironically the first
part of the salination involves a
product made from Salt this is where the
raw sea water comes into our plant this
is the first stage of our pre-treatment
process and what we do here is we add
some chemicals sodium hypochloride and
feric chloride the sodium hypochlor is
common bleach we're trying to get the
particles to settle and collect together
get heavy and settle to the
bottom next the water is stripped of its
minerals and particulates and subjected
to reverse osmosis which removes the
salt in this case osmosis is the passage
of water through a semi-permeable
membrane from an area of high salt
concentration to an area of low salt
concentration reverse osmosis uses
pressure to push water through the
membrane leaving highly concentrated
salt on one side and pure water on the other
other
other it takes about an hour to get from
seawater to drinking water the leftover
concentrated brine now contains 6% salt
too salty to discharge back into the bay
so they first dilute it with
seawater of course environmental
Watchdogs Patrol any impact on local marine
marine
life we have an extensive monitoring
program we spend over a million dollars
a year here at Tampa Bay Water checking
for change in the bay to date we've not
seen any changes at all the desalination
process can be pricey reverse osmosis
requires a lot of energy and there's
another cost to consider when working
with salt in a wet
environment as you know salt water is
very corrosive at this treatment plant
we had to build the plant with special
materials high quality stainless steel
that is very expensive but it will not
corrode stainless steel is corrosion
resist istent because it has a super
thin chromium oxide barrier worth the extra
extra
cash maybe seawater desalination would
be less cost prohibitive if there was a
way to produce say hydrogen energy in the
process sound a bit far-fetched not to
this Eerie Pennsylvania inventor while
researching a way to kill cancer cells
using a radio frequency transmitter he
stumbled upon a way to make salt water
burn and release hydrogen the salt
waterer is just regular sea salt water
this salt water was actually taken from
the Gulf of Mexico so it hasn't been
altered in any particular way we have
taken saltwater and put Morton salt in
it and it burns the same way when a
saltwater solution is placed in a
specific radio frequency field the
signal breaks the hydrogen oxygen bond
in water molecules releasing hydrogen
and oxygen upon recombination through
combustion the hydrogen and oxygen
produces the flame and the byproduct distilled
distilled
water could saltwater end the quests for
fresh water and Alternative Energy
there's no reason why it could not run
an engine just the way oil runs an
engine the implications are are
huge the purpose of this test was to
show that there's energy released inside
the test tube and it expands like
gasoline does in a piston inside a
vehicle the gas gets sprayed in it
ignites and it pushes the Piston back in
this particular case our cork is our
piston the real world viability of this
is still debated because it takes more
energy to generate the radio frequency
than releasing hydrogen produces and the
role of the salt is not yet fully
understood but scientists do know that
this doesn't work with plain
water they're also testing this process
on other
substances though probably none as
plentiful as
saltwater if this works then I think
it's a great gift to the world yeah
prices while many of our most precious
resources are endangered we can rest
assured we're not running out of salt
anytime soon we naturally recycle most
of the salt that we use we for example
put salt on the roads to keep Winter
Road safe and that will run off into the
streams into the rivers and back to the ocean
ocean
my doctor said that salt is bad for
me but I don't trust too much my
doctor this dinner table staple seasons
and preserves not only our food but our very
very
existence and who knows maybe this
humble chemical compound found all over
the world with its 14,000 known uses
from seasoning our Foods keeping them
safe from bacteria regulating our water
content deicing our roads and even
saving our beloved movies actually has 14,000
And1 it is the multi-purpose Jaelin hide
of the mineral World it can save you and
it can kill you it can also conduct
electricity whiten your whites and ward
off the devil it tastes like no other
Rock and just try cooking a decent meal
without it not going to happen we
literally can't live without it the
ceiling salt the floor salt walls are salt
salt
I'm stand aside solar and wind could
salt be the amazing energy source of the
[Music]
works geologists call it halight
chemists call it sodium chloride the
rest of us just call it salt it's in
nearly everything from our blood blood
to this Stone and it has 14,000 known
uses some refer to salt as The Fifth
Element as essential to our world as
earth air fire and
water but what is salt while there is a
technical chemical definition of salt
what we'll be talking about is the
everpresent compound sodium
chloride the sodium is a metal the
chloride a hallogen and the ratio is
about 40% sod sodium and 60% chloride
they come together and form an ionic
bond when multiple sodiums and chlorides
come together they form a
cube when multiple cubes come together
they form a crystal as we're accustomed
to seeing in nature so what talents does
this little Crystal have salt is
hygroscopic a fancy word that means it
attracts water salt dissolves pretty
easily in water
once dissolved it breaks up into its
positively charged sodium ions and its
ions that makes it infinitely useful in chemical
chemical
applications salt lowers the freezing
temperature of water making it great for
deicing winter roads but it also rusts
vehicles and bridges in the
process the most obvious use of salt is
in our food where it's both a luxury
because it tastes tastes good and a
necessity because it's an amazing
preservative what sets salt apart from
some other resources is that it's
naturally recyclable so we're never
going to run
out if you think about it the salt on
your eggs or on the sidewalk could be
millions of years old so where does salt come
come [Music]
[Music]
from Salt covers the earth it's
everywhere it's mixed in with all the
ocean water that covers the
planet salt crystals develop from
evaporating saltwater ocean water uh
from dried ocean beds this looks like a
dried ocean bed doesn't
it many millions of years ago after the
Earth's surface cooled centuries of
rainfall turned puddles into oceans the
Ocean Floors were littered with
sedimentary rock which is full of
sodium meanwhile chloride spewed from
vents still the amount of salt content
in these early oceans was likely pretty
low it took billions of years of water
runoff eroding Rock dissolving the salt
and carrying it into the oceans to
create the saltiness we know
today though it varies by location
seawater is roughly 3.5% salt that
translates to about a/4 pound of salt
per gas gallon of seawater or a total of
nearly 50 quadrillion tons of salt in
all the Earth's [Music]
[Music]
oceans okay so how do we get all that
seawater harvesting sea salt on a grand
scale requires some serious
patience the other key to this process
location location
location you're located on gry Naga
Island the most suddenly island in the
Bahama chain R inaga is approximately
500 Mi southeast of Miami
Florida at modern Bahamas limited we
have a unique partnership with
nature aside from having access to a
limitless supply of salty seawater this
location is ideal for other
reasons the requirements are high
incidents of uh solar energy as you can
see we out here in the Sun a steady but
not strong wind low rainfall uh High
evaporation large land area that is
suited for solar salt uh production
30,000 Acres of inaga is devoted to the
solar salt
operation each year hundreds of millions
of gallons of seawater are pumped into
these primary
reservoirs shallow basins where the
water will sit exposed to wind and the
sun's rays
as the water slowly evaporates the
result is a concentrated brine that's
drawn into secondary reservoirs and
eventually into the final concentration
ponds each stage becomes a mini
ecosystem based on the increasing level of
of
salt in our primary reservoirs millions
of microorganisms flow in with the ocean
water also coming in is millions of fish
eggs and other marine animal eggs these
ponds are just teing with wildli and a
biodiversity of
Life the secondary reservoirs are too
salty to support most life with the
exception of algae and brine
shrimp and only salt loving AKA
halophilic Red bacteria can survive
after prolonged
evaporation the real magic happens in
crystallization I guess to a point where
the sodium chloride in that solution
cannot be held in solution any longer so
it crystallize into a solid once the
salt layer is about 4 in thick the
Harvesters mechanically scarify or break
up the surface and truck it out to the wash
wash
Plant at the wash Plant the salt is
dumped into a hopper and it is conveyed
on a conveyor belt into spiral
classifiers these are washing tubs got
are sediments from the crystallizers
like dirt or sand is washed out of the
product the 1 million tons of salt
harvested here each year mainly goes
toward Road deicing and water
softening all this salt produced with
little human
intervention in some parts of the world
Salt Lakes or oceans evaporated with
zero help from us resulting in Salt
Flats big exposed beds of salt Utah's
Great Salt Lake is a Salt Flat in the
making as is the Dead Sea in the Middle
East you can find Salt and crusted
seabeds in California's death valley and
at the bonnaville salt flats in
Utah here in a Salt Flat in Bolivia salt
is collected right off the surface just
as people have been doing for thousands of
of
years today salt has many uses but in
the beginning it was all about food and
survival we've known about salt
preservative properties ever since uh
the cavemen and so men have been
locating their settlements near Salt
Works salt has been used since Antiquity
as a preservative so before there was
Refrigeration people salted meat and
they salted fish prior to Modern geology
and industrialization if you didn't live
near the ocean procuring salt was an
arduous proposition this made salt
precious trade routes were set up to
salt was valuable in ancient Rome
because it was used to preserve rations
on Long
Journeys the paycheck of the Roman
soldiers was in salt it was called
salario from this salary would be good
if we can convince my people over here
to be paying
salt salt spawn countless superstitions
like warning off bad luck by throwing
spelled salt over your left shoulder
into the eyes of the
devil and Proverbs if you read the
gospel of s Matthew St Matthew says quoted
quoted
Jesus telling his disciples you are the
salt of the
earth with a double meaning basically
having a life with salt with with
interest and also being the
savior of the people of the humanity
it's impossible to imagine that we could
live without salt and that's why our
watch word is salt the essence of
life evaporating seawater is just one of
the ways we get our salt [Music]
fix a dash here a pinch there the salt
we eat compris Rises less than 15% of
all the salt produced worldwide but it's
the salt with which we're most
familiar thanks to that unmistakable
taste but why do we eat salt at
all it's an essential nutrient an
essential nutrient is defined as one
that our body doesn't make itself so if
we don't take salt in we compromise our
health the body contains about 0.15%
Salt by mass so for a 50 kg human about
110 lb that works out to 75 G of salt or 7
7
tablespoons salt is an electroly that
keeps our cells muscles and nervous
system working because when you come
right down to it we run on
electricity electrolytes act as the
electrical conductor that allows our
nerve endings to fire our muscles to
move and our thoughts to form well the
human body is actually a machine it's an
electrical machine and electrical
impulses move into and out of the cells
over the cell membranes and that
transmission is facilitated by the
sodium if that's true could saltwater
act as a conductor connecting two
electrodes lighting this light
bulb pure water doesn't complete the electrical
electrical
circuit I'm going to add a small amount
of household [Music]
[Music]
salt there goes the stir bar and there
is the light as it goes into solution
the water separates the sodium and the
chloride ions and they allow the
electrons to flow from one side to the
other completing the circuit lighting
our light bulb all our bodily fluids are
salty because salt and water are
inherently attracted to each other but
salt where salt goes water will follow
and so if you have too much salt in your
body that can increase your blood
pressure to regulate your blood pressure
if you get rid of salt you'll also get
rid of water in other words too much
salt in your body in your blood attracts
more water than your arteries and veins
are used
to lose the salt and you lower the
pressure how much salt is too much
depends on your size age and
genetics but Health agencies recommend a
daily intake of no more than 2,400 mg of sodium
sodium
or about a
teaspoonful with prepackaged and fast
foods flavored with large doses of salt
the average American consumes over 3,300
day but why what makes salt tastes so
well salty salt has that unique flavor
because of the sodium ions it contains
picture a tongue if you zoom in very
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