Ultra Pure Water (UPW)? What Gives?

You'd think that clean water is a good thing, and moreover, when it's for drinking, water couldn't be too clean. But you'd be wrong. In certain manufacturing worlds water has to be VERY clean. Not even pure makes the grade, it has to be ultra pure - nothing but two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen pure. And this kind of water is NOT good for a body. In fact, rather than giving things that your body needs, it starts to take all kinds of minerals from your body that it needs. Besides, it tastes pretty awful, too. This water is so clean it doesn't even conduct electricity worth a hoot.

UPW is particularly useful in the semiconductor and microchip industry, but is used in pharmaceutical manufacturing as well. In the computer world it's used to wash the semiconductors which are becomming very small and very condensed. In fact the electronic pathways on microchips are so small these days they're narrower than the wavelengths of visible light and can only be seen with an electron microscope. Can you imagine the havoc a salt crystal would wreak on one of these chips? Kind of like finding Pike's Peak in your garden.

If you think reverse osmosis filtering would be involved you'd be right, but, it's just the first step with about 12 filtering processes afterwards - all the way down to the final filter of somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 nanometer wide pores. This is water that the typical municipal water plant does not provide, so where do they get this stuff? Fact is, most semiconductor plants make their own with a water treatment plant within the chip production plant - can't rely on anybody else's water!

Given all this information, I'd say that while you can't drink it, UPW would probably make some pretty darn good bath water, maybe - especially for those who like to listen to the radio sitting on the edge of the tub! But the best news of all is that it has to weigh less than regular or heavy water - great for transporting it!  As long as you can afford the stainless steel pipes, that is.