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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 wat

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.

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.