Much more powerful in 3.5, where salt was worth as much as silver for some reason. And it was a trade good, meaning it's worth the same right next to the ocean where salt is plentiful as it is far away from it when there's no trading route available.
If you really want to make this powerful, presumably if there's more water there you just destroy some of it, so destroy only the hydroxide ions and make a Coulomb explosion with the power of an antimatter bomb.