151–160 of 644 posts
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Not sure that largish, easily targetable, nuclear facility on a tiny spot of land is a good idea.
They already have one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_Negev_Nuclear_Res...
on a serious note, it's a smallish research/etc facility. probably most of things are as deep underground as possible. it's not same thing as full blown nuclear power plant
Probably very dumb idea, but would it be feasible to just pump and sprinkle sea-water on hot, dry desert and let it naturally evaporate, and then collect it as fresh rainwater back? i.e. how much water would you need to evaporate to have a noticeable increase in rainfall?
Israel does this for a different reason: To collect minerals from the dead sea. It doesn't increase rainfall. Israel is actually desalinating water and rejuvenating a river, which eventually will reach the dead sea (although that's not why they are doing it, but it makes the point that evaporating water isn't doing much). Maybe you mean on a far larger scale? Well - the ocean itself is much larger, and water evaporat…
That said, none of this contradicts the overall point you were making.
Stupid question time, why not expose the sea water over a larger area and expose to sunshine? There's plenty of room in the UAE for this, somebody is even building a wall that could hold the water which could be dual purpose and act as cooling via evaporation...
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You've pretty much nailed it except for one minor nit: > It takes less energy but produces a concentrated liquid waste stream that must be disposed of. This implies that creating a concentrated waste stream is a problem unique to reverse osmosis. It isn't. No matter what you do you're going to end up with a bunch of salt that you have to get rid of somehow.
Its always been my understanding that any treatment to remove stuff from water is going to produce waste which needs disposing, just look at the Brita water jug filters, they need disposing. I've often wondered why dont we have more pure water pumped through the water mains in various countries, and I think after reading about Super K the Japanese Neutrino detector [1] and how the water in the tank was so pure it had…
"Apparently somebody had left a wrench there when they filled it in 1995," he said. "When they drained it in 2000 the wrench had dissolved."
I dunno, I think if you left a wrench soaking in regular water for five years there wouldn't be much left of it after that either.
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I believe I had read just dilute it until concentration is ok then release. But might be more tricky than that ^^ : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
dilute it with what? the clean water you just removed the salt from?
Have a pump that draws in 10L of ocean water for every 1L of brine you need to dispose of, mix 'em up, and discharge the 11L of only-slightly-saltier water back into the sea.
Not sure when it makes more sense to do that vs. having a leach-field type of brine discharge. They both ultimately do the same thing, but one requires more mechanicals, the other requires more piping and "passive" infrastructure.
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>Why must drinking water be a for-profit enterprise? It's about sustainability, not profit. Of course wealthy nations can (literally) burn enough money turning fossil fuels into water to make their population comfortable and happy. But most can't, and the externalized cost is unimaginable at a global scale.
Clean energy exists, it would require more subsidies but so what?
It's not difficult. It's just energetically uphill. Undoing entropy costs energy. Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The thing is, it doesn't have to be. The energy released by mixing salt into water is small, around 3.9kJ/mol. Molar mass of salt is 58g/mol, and the average sea water salinity is around 3.6% So a cubic meter of sea water will have 1000*0.036/0.058=620 moles of salt, and it'll require 2.4MJ of energy to remove the salt in a perfect desalinator. In more common units, 2.4MJ is about 0.75 kWh. Around here electricity is…
"Turning sea water into clean, drinkable water costs $2 to $5 for 1000 gallons. Less than half a penny per gallon is obviously absurdly cheap." - Elon Musk, 2023-05-07 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1655262008898383872?ref_...
I'm looking at this and unclear what he's talking about. Essentially, citation needed Elon?
"Turning sea water into clean, drinkable water costs $2 to $5 for 1000 gallons. Less than half a penny per gallon is obviously absurdly cheap." - Elon Musk, 2023-05-07 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1655262008898383872?ref_...
It's very easy to forget that we use orders of magnitude more water than comes out of our tap. A pound of beef is about 2,000 gallons, so that would be a nontrivial price increase.
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good thing people need salt!
If people needed as much salt as was contained in the water to begin with, we wouldn’t need to remove it in the first place.