Let's say you're an American citizen, and your source of tap water is ultimately groundwater.  Chances are,
your groundwater contains at least a few parts per million of chlorinated hydrocarbon chemicals which were
not there 50 years ago, rendering it carcinogenic and non-potable.  How did it get there?  Well, it mostly
comes from the many commercial, military and industrial operations carried out on the Earth's surface just
above these huge underground bodies of water (called aquifers).  Over the last 50 years or so, many of the
chlorinated, oxygenated, and nitrogenated hydrocarbon chemicals which the military, the government, and
private industry have used for solvents, cleaners, degreasers, explosives, fuels, fuel additives, paint
strippers, plating and electrochemical agents, etc. have simply seeped down through the earth into our water
supplies.  The phenomenon is fairly simple of course:  Carcinogenic chemicals tend to seep downwards into
the ground and spread out  the same way any other liquid tends to seep into the ground if poured (or
leaked) onto (or into) it:  Between the forces of gravity (which do not stop at the earth's surface, but are
active to it's center) and the second law of thermodynamics (which states that chemicals tend to spread out
to achieve homogeneous distributions), the effect has been that our earth's crust has been largely polluted
by these nasty chemicals, and as a corollary, some of these chemicals' molecules have found their way into
our water supplies.   Now, for ~25 years, some of our best minds have been trying to figure out ways of
removing these nasty chemicals from our earth, and its underground waters.  Vast sums of money and huge
resources have been devoted to this effort, called remediation, but in the end, the logistic problems with
separating a host of hundreds of different poisonous chemicals from the Earth's crust are so overwhelming
as to be a farce:  imagine you had to 'clean' say one wheelbarrel full of soil and rock underneath your
backyard lawn so that it went from 1ppm of say, 4 different poisons, to say, less than 0.1 ppb of these
poisons.  Well, first, you dig it up.  OK, then you take it to a magic place where there is a magic machine ,
into which you shovel this dirt and rock, and it is magically processed, such that 99.99% of these
very-hard-to-remove (recalcitrant) chemicals are magically separated from the dirt into, say a large drum of
water, or a big balloon of steam or air.  So with all this magic, you've really just MOVED the pollutants from
your dirt to some water and/or some air.  What do you now do with that water and/or air?  If you drink or
breathe it you will get cancer.  If you throw it away', then you'll be polluting again, and if everyone polluted
(and we all do) then it will eventually get back to  ... you guessed it - your back yard, and thence into your
well, where it will pollute your water, which is the very problem we started out trying to solve! So throwing it
away does not good.  What if you 'bag it up' so that the poisons cannot 'get out'?  Well there's an idea,
except that it doesn't tend to work very well on a large scale, and the many 'impermeable' barriers
underneath landfills are teaching us that it is futile to try to 'contain' poisons for a variety of reasons.

So you're at an impasse, really, and having gotten the nasty chemicals out of your dirt, the only real solution
would be to now get them out of the air or water you've put them into, purify them so much that they can
actually be used again, and prevent the NEED for making any more of them!  

Welcome to the nightmarishly daunting world of chemical engineering and environmental engineering.  But
just for kicks, let;'s say you get REALLY lucky and can purify these poisons you brought to the magic place,
and then put them into their original containers (which have magically not corroded).  Now you bring the dirt
back to your yard, having polluted the air with your truck exhaust to get it there and back, and you want to
put it back.  But the wheelbarrel-full of dirt and rock which lay beneath the one you just processes is polluted
too ... all the way down for thousands of feet, actually, and come to think of it, so is the soil right next to it.  In
fact, come to think of it, so is much of the first thousand feet or so covering the occupied (and
non-occuipied) portions of our Earths land masses.  So no big deal, we only have to SOMEHOW
MAGICALLY CLEAN THE DIRT UNDER OUR FEET,OVER MUCH OF THE PLANET!  No problem, boss -I'll
get right on it!

Sound Funny?  Well don't laugh - that's what the DoD said to Reagan in the early 80's, and for 25 years,
we've as a nation, been pretending that we're doing just that!

But of course, we are not.  What we're doping is spending billions and billions of tax dollars trying to develop
little schemes that can make it SEEM like th\e earth is somehow getting cleaner.  It is possibly the largest
ecological nightmare ever faced, and Uncle Sam has you thinking it's no big deal.  No big deal?  If you took
One thimble full of Dioxane and poured it into a big tanks of clean drinkable water which contained exactly
800 thousand ounces (100 thousand glasses of water), and gave each of 100 thousand people one glass of
that water, each person would die, yet I have read that the chemical is SO ubiquitous that it has been years
since any fish, fresh or saltwater, has actually tested negative for the compound.  Any fish, anywhere on the
planet!  Many scientists theorise that there is no living aquatic carnivore or omnivore without some dioxin, let
alone the ones at the top of the food chain....

Now, sure, you can pay ~$2 to ~$16 per gallon for bottled water and hope the manufacturer actually
removes these recalcitrant (hard-to-remove) pollutants with their reverse osmosis / nanofiltration processes
prior to bottling it, but research data suggest that, not only are these chemicals not fully removed by RO/NF
type filtration systems (which produce your bottled water, regardless of what the label says about mountain
streams and so on), but that they actually degrade the very membranes to which they are exposed, rendering
them useless!!

But back to the ground.  We now see how futile it is to think of 'remediating the soil' on any comprehensive
scale (though there are many places where the concentration o pollutants is so great that remediating the
soil does actually make sense for those specific areas), and let's just consider ourselves lucky that the plants
that grow in it have a natural tendency to chelate and otherwise limit the amount of poisons that end up in
them (when we go to eat them - again, the Earth's ecological resiliency is astounding, and yet it can no
longer keep pace with mankind's capability to disregard it!) and think about the water.  Oh boy we all need
that water.  How much do we need?  Well, each person needs about a half gallon a day to survive, but of
course, we're not just 'people', we're Americans!!  When you include the water used to make all our food,
clothing, shelter, and creature comforts, heck we need approximately 15 thousand gallons per day each, and
that does NOT include anything for power generation, which by the way, does pollute, just not as directly or
quickly as fossil fuel methods).  Now, I've got other things to do getting HENCI out there and precious little
time to glean better numbers, but just to make ONE t-bone steak, the average factory farm consumes over 9
thousand gallons of fresh groundwater and turns it into very polluted runnoff.  So water is not scarce, but
naturally clean water is, statistically speaking, all but gone.

And cleaning that water WHILE IT IS UNDERGROUND is about as wise as cleaning all our dirt - even if it were
possible, we would be subject to the 2nd law of thermo, and the world would be a MUCH more polluted place
after we finished.  But the DoD and big business continue to try to remediate groundwater in-place.  Now
however, chemists and othe scientists have catalysts which can actually DO that magic we spoke of, (but
only with water, not generally with 20,000 ingredient soil):  If we expose polluted water to the right
nanocatalysts, even for a relatively short time, it is purified.  But not because the pollutants have been
removed - because the pollutants have been chemically broken down into their (small) constituent molecules
(and radials, ions, and atoms) most of which are not carcinogenic, even at thousands of times the
concentrations at which the original poisons are carcinogenic.

So great - better living through chemistry! Let's use these nanocatalysts to clean the groundwater!  But
how?  If we inject them into the aquifer, they will break down some of the pollutant therein.  But there is no
way to 'mix them up' in that water like there is in a lab, so that they actually come into contact with all the
water, and even if there were it would only pollute the water with the surrounding earth (which remember, is
no longer just organic, but is also polluted) the same way you turn clear water to cloudy when you walk in a
muddy-bottom pond.  So we have tried this , and if you sample at just the right place and just the right way,
you can deduce that those little nanocatalysts do indeed break down the nasties into benign species, like
CO2, Chlorides, Chlorine, ethane and lower alkanes, and other naturally-occuring species.  But remember
that 2nd law of thermo and it's little statement about how all chemical species (meaning all matter) seeks to
spread itself out into homogeneous (evenly spread) distributions?  Of course, liquids and gases have a
much easier time of it than solids, but go ahead and make a sand pile - measure it's dimensions and take a
picture of it.  Put it in the calmest quitest place you can find, and come back in a month.  I guarantee you that
he sand pile is no taller than it was before - if anything it has spread out to cover a larger surface area and is
less ordered (higher entropy) than it was before.

And this is what happens with the pollutants, though MUCH faster.  As son as the concentration of pollutant
inn the groundwater 'lake' or aquifer is decreased by, say, in-situ  nanocatalysis, more of that same pollutant
will spontaneously seep from the surrounding earth into that same water (until equilibrium is reached), and
the thing is, there is just sooooo much dirt and earth and sandstone surrounding these water bodies, that,
for all intensive purposes, there is simple an endless supply of poison surrounding each polluted aquifer,
and trying to clean that water while it is still in the ground (in-situ) is kind of like washing out the toilet in your
favorite restaurant and expecting to be able to drink from that toilet in a week.

The time has come to wake up.  The only answer is to use nanocatalysis to
remediate-by-destruction this groundwater after we pump it to the surface
(eg. a well) and before we store or use it (e.g. a water tank).  Now that
nanocatalysis can remediate more and more pollutants every week (research
is ongoing and fruitful), the only thing preventing us from using them is to find
a way to flow the polluted water through them without entraining them in that
very water (such that they become the pollutants).

HENCI is the only way top do this: The time to abandon ridiculous in-situ
remediation schemes in favor of On-demand, surface stored remediation is
here.  A HENCI unit the size of a small truck could remediate tens of
thousands of gallons of water polluted with, say, trichloroethylene, and
provide potable water to an entire community at near zero operating cost