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For sure! But cheap energy is hard :( I'm cheering for Solar, renewables and Nuclear Fission to become cheaper and more widespread. Fusion... well it would be n

by entee 8y ago

For sure! But cheap energy is hard :( I'm cheering for Solar, renewables and Nuclear Fission to become cheaper and more widespread. Fusion... well it would be nice, but given that it's never been demonstrated in a form suitable for commercialization, it's hard to hold out for that.

est31 8y ago
With renewables due to changing weather and demand, prices for electricity at international markets are falling regularly, sometimes even becoming negative (keeping the frequency is must), only to rise again when there is more demand than supply. Desalination plants have the advantage that, as long as you have overcapacities compared to the average needs around, they can be turned on when energy is cheap and off when it's expensive. While they are operating, they would fill reservoirs that would provide a continuous supply of water. There might be a thermodynamic limit onto how much energy you need to desalinate water, but the limits of harvesting renewable energy are far from being reached. We might make the sahara green, in this very century.
bduerst 8y ago
Anyone know why we don't just use nuclear fission as the heat source in desalination? I mean, other than the implications of your nuclear purified drinking water.
- gotocake 8y ago
  For the same reason we don’t utilize fission in other areas, people are ignorant and terrified of it, politicians are trying to be re-elected, and as a result real problems such as distributed rather than centralized storage of waste emerge. There are also real issues with processing vast quantities of seawater in a way that doesn’t destroy littoral ecosystems. Then there’s disposal whatever heavy metals and pollutants are concentrated as a byproduct of the process, regardless of your power source. Still, it’s feasible to overcome the last two issues, but I’m pretty sure that ignorance is going to kill us.
- dmfdmf 8y ago
  I used to work in the nuclear power industry. When I came on board out of college in my first month or so I was given a bunch of books to read and free time to read the history of the company and industry in the company library. I came across a 1980's feasibility study to use nuclear power for desalinization in a boiling water reactor. The tldr of the report was "not economic" so the project died. I asked my boss about it since he was around at the time and he hadn't work on the project but did hear about it. He said the study was paid for by Saudi Arabia and that the deal killer wasn't the cost of nuclear heat but fouling of the pipes from mineral deposits in the heat ex-changer and desalination chamber. The coatings killed the thermodynamic efficiencies of the system so there would be really high maintenance costs for continually cleaning and/or replacing the pipes. Like a lot of engineering projects it was a material science problem but nobody wanted to pay for the research to solve.

by entee 8y ago

est31 8y ago

With renewables due to changing weather and demand, prices for electricity at international markets are falling regularly, sometimes even becoming negative (keeping the frequency is must), only to rise again when there is more demand than supply. Desalination plants have the advantage that, as long as you have overcapacities compared to the average needs around, they can be turned on when energy is cheap and off when it's expensive. While they are operating, they would fill reservoirs that would provide a continuous supply of water. There might be a thermodynamic limit onto how much energy you need to desalinate water, but the limits of harvesting renewable energy are far from being reached. We might make the sahara green, in this very century.

bduerst 8y ago

Anyone know why we don't just use nuclear fission as the heat source in desalination? I mean, other than the implications of your nuclear purified drinking water.

gotocake 8y ago
For the same reason we don’t utilize fission in other areas, people are ignorant and terrified of it, politicians are trying to be re-elected, and as a result real problems such as distributed rather than centralized storage of waste emerge. There are also real issues with processing vast quantities of seawater in a way that doesn’t destroy littoral ecosystems. Then there’s disposal whatever heavy metals and pollutants are concentrated as a byproduct of the process, regardless of your power source. Still, it’s feasible to overcome the last two issues, but I’m pretty sure that ignorance is going to kill us.
dmfdmf 8y ago
I used to work in the nuclear power industry. When I came on board out of college in my first month or so I was given a bunch of books to read and free time to read the history of the company and industry in the company library. I came across a 1980's feasibility study to use nuclear power for desalinization in a boiling water reactor. The tldr of the report was "not economic" so the project died. I asked my boss about it since he was around at the time and he hadn't work on the project but did hear about it. He said the study was paid for by Saudi Arabia and that the deal killer wasn't the cost of nuclear heat but fouling of the pipes from mineral deposits in the heat ex-changer and desalination chamber. The coatings killed the thermodynamic efficiencies of the system so there would be really high maintenance costs for continually cleaning and/or replacing the pipes. Like a lot of engineering projects it was a material science problem but nobody wanted to pay for the research to solve.