3 ms·
Desalination, yes. But we don't need nuclear to power it. A bunch of the energy can be pulled from the ocean through either tidal stream turbines or wave power.
by starwind 4y ago
Desalination, yes. But we don't need nuclear to power it. A bunch of the energy can be pulled from the ocean through either tidal stream turbines or wave power. Renewables work well here because you don't need to store the energy you can just generate the power and immediately use it. No long-term storage. No long-distance transit. And (I assume) water use roughly tracks energy use.
The new generation geothermal is also something that we should be exploring in areas that aren't earthquake prone (which is basically everything from Denver to Las Vegas)
- acidburnNSA 4y agoDesalination plants are capital intensive, and no one who builds them wants to run them only occasionally. They want to run them nearly all the time. Thus, nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are the best suited zero-carbon energy sources to work for it. Wave and tidal energy has not been deployed at any meaningful scale, but once they're in full production at scale then sure they could be used too.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoyes, but nuclear plants are also really capital intensive. Also, according to https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-desalination https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-..., the thermal and electrical energy costs of desalination are greater than amortized capital cost. Running primarily off of renewables will probably reduce the uptime to 70% or so, but will dramatically reduce cost to run.
- starwind 4y ago70% would be fine because you don't need to run desalination all the time. We can store water in watertowers and draw down when we need it