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Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water
- chrisbolt 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675831
- bsima 3y agoWhy is a new and cheaper desalination invention in the news every 3-4 years?
- maxerickson 3y agoWater is important.
- unstatusthequo 3y agoI feel like we see these in that cadence, but do we see them becoming commercially viable or actually in use at scale at all?
- LogicWolfe 3y agoI don’t know about elsewhere but I live in Perth and we have a desalination plant that supplies 15% of our drinking water. https://www.watercorporation.com.au/Our-water/Desalination/Perth-Seawater-Desalination-Plant https://www.watercorporation.com.au/Our-water/Desalination/P...
- iamthemonster 3y agoI think we've got another one at Alkimos that supplies another 15% or so right? I think we are projected to have the majority of our drinking water come from desal over the next few decades. Desal is cheap as chips compared to Water Corp's supply charge!
- dbetteridge 3y agoYeah Alkimos just past the private school.
- techdragon 3y agoAnd it’s a pretty recent thing too since we realised we couldn’t just blindly drain the underground water and the rain had become insufficient for our long term population growth predictions.
- pests 3y agoThe world leader in desalination is Saudi Arabia with it producingover 37% of their water supply > Water desalination in Saudi Arabia has doubled over the past decade to reach 2.2 billion cubic meters in 2021 [0] Then United States is right behind at #2. It does seem like a lot is happening it just has to be the perfect storm of correct conditions. [0] https://www.arabnews.com/node/2160116 https://www.arabnews.com/node/2160116
- langsoul-com 3y agoWater and food are the absolute essentials to life. If meta came up with a new product, you can ignore it, but you cannot ignore water scarcity. Most nations are beginning to deal with intense water pressure issues. Especially as seasons don't follow the patterns so perfectly. A flash drought could cripple almost all water and excessive underground water pumping sinks the land. See china's issue with random potholes due since the land is sinking. Modern water desalination is quite new, so technology has much room to grow. Not only does that make it attractive in terms of patents for better systems, but also there's always a market.
- TheCapeGreek 3y agoIt's important news for dry countries and regions.
- davideg 3y ago> In the meantime, the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device, rather than accumulating and clogging the system. I don't want to detract from the innovation of this, however my understanding is that one of the largest unsolved problems with desalination is what to do with the waste product: usually incredibly salty brackish water. Dumping it back into the ocean can be disruptive to the local ecosystem. A quick search turned up this Scientific American article about the issue: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-worlds-thirst-with-seawater-dumps-toxic-brine-in-oceans https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world... "The excess salt decreases dissolved oxygen in the water, suffocating animals on the seafloor" "In addition to harming sea life, extreme salinity also makes desalinating the water more difficult and expensive."
- BurningFrog 3y agoMy controversial take is that the best solution will be to accept that solving the drinking water problem for people is worth worsening the environment for some local sea life.
- SonicScrub 3y agoThat local sea life also provides humans with food. So even with the human-centric viewpoint, we have a strong incentive to solve this problem.
- missedthecue 3y agoA poorly implemented runoff would nuke a square km or five of ocean floor with high salinity waste. It would not impact food supply in any discernable way. The ocean is simply too big.
- mikeymz 3y agoWhich ocean? People used to think this about raw sewage discharge. Check the state of UK beaches
- api_or_ipa 3y agoConfused by the "... that is cheaper than tap water". Growing up on an island with desalination, that was our tap water!
- fooker 3y agoI assume you understand that the vast majority of the tap water is not in that category?
- mint2 3y agoWell I’d hazard a guess that this new desal method isn’t cheaper than well water for rural areas where that’s an option. Or surface water for areas with plentiful rain. And I’d further hazard a guess that their cost analysis hasn’t scaled up or thought about distribution. And their invention is pretty useless for people inland since then it requires the distribution that makes many of the other systems costly. Basically the title is PR bunk is what I’m saying.
- api_or_ipa 3y agoTap water has to come from somewhere. Dig a well, dam a river or desal the ocean, they all have significant costs to produce, treat, and distribute the water. Even if you did build one of these devices outside your house, you'd still need to pressurize and plumb it into your house's water supply. Simply producing water is but one step among many to make that water usable.
- fritzo 3y agoYeah seems like a category error: desalination is a mode of production, tap is a mode of delivery
- 6510 3y agoI think it is time for internets to adopt a second heading/headline. It can explain what the article is about like in the good old days, the first one can bait the clicks. We all want better click bait but also to know wtf is going on. "It produces unlimited FREE drinking water!" => "remove salt residue from solar distillation apparatus"
- cat_plus_plus 3y agoOnly if desalinated water is banned from being delivered to taps, else the two would be the same price?
- gpm 3y agoIt's a weird comparison, but no if desalinated water is being delivered to taps you'd expect deslinated water to be cheaper than tap-water, if you take the price at the source instead of the price after a (not free) delivery process.
- hooo 3y agoI think OP is saying that if desalinated water is being delivered to taps, then it is tap water.
- gpm 3y agoI agree that's what OP is saying, I'm saying that's not true. The "is" operator here isn't commutative, "tap water is desalinated water" is true, but "desalinated water is tap water" is not. Let's put some numbers to it. Assume tap water is desalinated, it costs $1 to desalinate a unit of water, and $1 to deliver a unit of water to taps. Then tap water is going to cost $2 while desalinated water only costs $1. Delivery to taps isn't free, so if you just want to buy bulk desalinated water it's cheaper.
- SamBam 3y agoI assume the implication was "cheaper than the current typical cost of non-desalinated tap water."
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoFlushes out the accumulated salt? Sea salt sells for about $3/lb
- 13of40 3y agoI think if you did it at that scale it might flood the market and push the price down. You might be able to trade it to areas with a legitimate need, but you'd be competing against the people who just scoop it from ancient seabeds with a bulldozer.
- jerrysievert 3y agoconsidering that 6 months ago, 3 lbs of salt was sold for $2.29 (pnw, Oregon) and now sells for that for a single lb, that might be ok to flood the market and lower the price. if it can be disposed of for that price. shrinkflation sucks, it doesn't mean we need to be beholden to it.
- CydeWeys 3y agoThe price is already just about as low as it's reasonably going to go, with the price being dominated by factors unrelated to the actual production of the salt. Your average person consumes under ten grams of salt per day. The market simply isn't that large, and it's easy to make it in bulk at those scales.
- jerrysievert 3y agoso then a 3x price increase is justified by ... * labor (no, price for labor hasn't increased 3 fold) * transport (no, the price for transport hasn't increased 3 fold) ... still looking for an explanation why prices would increase 3x, and allow the packaging to be redesigned to be 1/3 of the size but with new plastic (as opposed to cardboard/recycled) and be sold at the same price. if you can lower the cost of the original product, shouldn't you also be able to avoid some shrinkflation/redesign/platicification?
- gcanyon 3y ago[flagged]
- andreygrehov 3y agoI know the HN community will hate my comment, but Musk has been talking about desalination since at least 2018, claiming it's the solution.
- jackmoore 3y agoAnd?
- ranguna 3y agoA lot of people have.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoAnd people were actually doing large scale desalinated water at least 20 years before that, because it’s a pretty well known solution - why do you need to bring up Musk?
- KaiserPro 3y agoI have a mate down the pub who claims to have solved world hunger. He also claimed to have stopped WWIII. Doesn't make him credible.
- VeejayRampay 3y agoMusk has been talking for five years about a topic that's been discussed in depth everywhere for the past twenty years and your conclusion is what exactly?
- bobse 3y ago>could >maybe >not really
- reacharavindh 3y agoEven if the water produced by this process is like distilled water(without the minerals needed for drinking water), if it is cheap enough, and scalable enough, countries like India, Arab countries and northern African countries could theoretically pump in such clean water into the ground and mix it with the little fresh water they have in their land… Setup the system to produce a 100 million liters per day, and pumping into ground inland should still replenish the ground water levels enough while earth does its thing to add the needed minerals… Heck use such water to plant trees where it would not have been possible otherwise…
- crishoj 3y agoThis. It may seem like wishful thinking, but the problem of desertification is so immense that we ought to approach any potential remedy with first principles and determine feasibility. Could passive desalination be a way to bootstrap local ecosystems in arid environments to a degree where it would be self-sustaining?
- wanderingmind 3y agoI would look and see if they have tried to patent the system. I'm unable to search anything immediately, but patents and followed by licensing to the associated startups are bare minimum steps that needs to happen to have any confidence that the system can pan out in real life.
- mrpopo 3y agoOnly innovating on price, not on dealing with the toxic brine dumped into the shores (ocean shores are a bio-diverse eco-system in itself, that you can't find in the rest of the ocean).
- raducu 3y agoWhat if you dump the brine 10 miles into the ocean via pipes? The desalinated water has to make its way back to the ocean somehow, I would not be worried about us making an impact on the Earths ocean salt levels, and if we dump the brine far enough into the oceam, there must be cubic power laws about salt dissipation.
- mrpopo 3y agoYes, that would be trivial. I wonder if this is not done because it's expensive (maybe brine corrosion requires expensive pipes), or because governments will simply do nothing until there is public outcry (unlikely to happen in Saudi Arabia, they would need international pressure).
- Fatnino 3y agoOr just dump the brine on the ground in a dump site. Let the water seep away underground and the salt pile up to eventually be bulldozed away from the pipe outlet when it gets too high. I'm picturing something that looks like mine tailings. Possibly the stuff could be sold as pavement salt for cold climate markets. Depends on how dirty it is I suppose.
- flarg 3y agoPrice is the only barrier to desalination. Environmental impact is a problem to be solved, but we never try to solve it for other things, so why for this?
- ksec 3y agoIt doesn't list the cost of Tap Water. Which I assume would be different in most part of the world. And then 25% of it are wasted in pipe leakage.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoIf everyone uses this suitcase, how is access to the coastline regulated? Does the water come to the house with a pump? Or by bucket?
- 3seashells 3y agoNestle Strawman Inc. Just bought the patent.. Wish there were more ip violating nations out there, allowing tech progress to flourish.
- tim333 3y agoChina tends to do well there.
- 3seashells 3y agoYeah, but they would do much better if they had a legal system protecting there internal inventors and geniuses from party corruption and harmony idiocy. Nothing new can be introduced harmonious
- snapcaster 3y agoIt seems like the constant stream of innovations coming out of China directly refute "Nothing new can be introduced harmonious"
- rpwverheij 3y agooh gosh really? there goes my optimism :|
- RobotToaster 3y agoDoes anyone know where I can find the original paper with the design or something?
- subtlepseudonym 3y agoIt's frustrating how often science news articles like this one don't include a DOI or a link to the journal. Looks like this is the paper https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00360-4 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00360-4
- aurizon 3y agoLooking at this as a 'black box', You have the heat resource of the sun that will heat all the water. Let us say 10% evaporates and condenses into the storage area, the remainder is now 3.5% salt plus .35% saltier and it maintains it's heat. If you allow 10% to exit and be replaced with cold 3.5% salt water, AND it exits via a counter current heat exchanger = heat stored is kept, the added .35% salt is a minor effluent and will disperse. The greatest problem is the propagation of algae and suspended sea life that will soon proliferate to clog all surfaces, with free floaters exiting as well. Any salt/fresh water aquarist will know that this will be a problem. The system will work until the algae problem(not to speak of clam/mussel/barnacle etc larvae that are ubiquitous in sea water.
- lakomen 3y agoIt's not about cost, it's about quality