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several better ways, multi stage stills and reverse osmosis are leaders of the pack, https://www.veoliawatertechnologies.com/en/technologies/mult... . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis
The author specifically mentions reverse osmosis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Separating two things isn't necessarily expensive. Think of coin sorters that just use gravity and different sized holes.
You need to bring the coins uphill in the first place.
What's really interesting and relevant to the topic is that the oyster farm serves as a pre-filter to the desalination plant and there's an symbiotic relationship between the plant and the oyster farm.
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?
I remember reading that it causes some problems related to fishing because the fish all migrate further out.
The biggest issue is cost for these plants and it isn't worth spending the political capital to build them yet.
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?
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?
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 evaporates from its surface all the time. Humans aren't going to make an evaporation zone larger than the ocean.
Also: Water does not (mainly) evaporate because of heat, but rather because of wind. There's lots of heat in the desert, but not much wind. The ocean has a ton of wind.
It's not difficult. It's just energetically uphill. Undoing entropy costs energy. Second Law of Thermodynamics.
A thousand liters takes about 3kwh. It's not really that expensive. If you run a very inefficient house in the US, that's actually what you'd need per day. You might consider some cost/water saving solutions if that worries you. But, either way, we're talking cents per day per household basically.
Not nothing. But cheap enough that it is a common solution to get water in places that have average incomes far below those common in places like the US where desalination is mostly science fiction.