Is Chlorine a Good Water Purifying Agent?

For over 100 years in America, chlorine has been used as the prime disinfectant of drinking water because scientists haven’t been able to find anything that does a better job of killing bacteria while carrying an acceptable residual that people can drink. It is relatively cheap and very effective for the deactivation of pathogenic organisms.

One definition* of chlorine says that "chlorine is a natural element, a yellow green gas at room temperature. It is heavier than air, but under the correct pressure and temperature it can be converted into liquid. Chlorine is found in the earth and can also be found in the sea. It is essential to the life of animals and plants."

As a disinfectant in water chlorine attacks the bacteria in water by combining with it. In the process it breaks the bacteria cell walls and kills them. There are literally thousands of types of bacteria and chlorine works well on almost all of them, which is why it has been used for so long as a disinfectant. There are some bacteria, however, that have a kind of shell around their cell walls that prevent the chlorine from destroying them. Luckily, they are large enough to be filtered out in the purification process.

Some environmentalists, however, claim that chlorine is harmful to the body and needs to be banned. In reality, 1 part per million of chlorine is really a small amount. Furthermore, to date there is nothing that does a better job of disinfecting water while maintaining a residual, which is the amount of chlorine left in the pipe that continues to disinfect while water flows through it.

One promising development is using ultra violet light to kill bacteria, which is currently under development. It is a great way to get the job done without adding chemicals. At a water treatment facility, for example, the water passes through rays of ultra violet light, which kills bacteria. Then it must go into the pipes where there is no light at all. So some chlorine must still be used in the disinfection process so that the water has a residual defense of bacteria after it passes through the ultraviolet light process.

* from http://www.wiki.answers.com

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