海水から塩づくり！／Making Salt from Seawater!

DENJIRO: Take a look at this. GIRL: They’re cute ornaments! DENJIRO: These are ornaments made from salt crystals. I created the shape with a wire, wrapped string around it, and submerged it in highly concentrated saltwater. After a few days, it forms salt crystals like this. In Japan, the salt we use every day has been made from seawater. Seawater has a salt concentration of about 3.4%. Sodium chloride, or the salt we eat, makes up about 78% of that amount. The rest is called “bittern,” which comprises a variety of components such as magnesium chloride and calcium sulfate. Let’s try making salt from this cleaned seawater. I’m going to boil it down. Something white is starting to appear at the bottom. GIRL: Is this salt? DENJIRO: This isn’t salt, it’s calcium sulfate. Since it doesn’t dissolve in water as much as salt does, it appears before salt if you evaporate seawater. Once the calcium sulfate appears, we take it off the heat and filter it once. We’re going to boil the filtered seawater even further. A white substance has appeared again. Let’s filter this. The white substance that is left in the filter is salt. Once we dry it, we’re done. The liquid that passed through the last time we filtered it was bittern, which contains a lot of magnesium chloride. If you add this to soymilk, you get tofu. The magnesium in the bittern hardens the protein in soymilk. As you can see, you can make lots of things from seawater. The next time you go to the beach, try taking back some seawater to experiment at home. Let me see how our salt tastes. It’s so good! Salt tastes so much better when you make it yourself! Try making it at home! I hope energy will bring you all happiness. Our magic word is "Happy Energy!”