Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water::A new solar desalination system takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight. The system flushes out accumulated salt, so replacement parts aren’t needed often, meaning the system could potentially produce drinking water that is cheaper than tap water.
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We get one of these reports every few years, and I’ll believe it when I see it. The problem with desalination is it just creates yet another ecological disaster scenario. The waste byproducts are toxic, and as Israel has already proven multiple times, prone to cause issues with the balance of ecosystems surrounding intake ports.
Desalination won’t touch a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of the brine produced by the sun simply by evaporation.
Our problem isn’t the byproduct, it’s how to return it to the sea in a distributed way rather than out a single pipe. That’s an engineering problem, not an ethical or environmental one.
Dress it up or call it whatever you want, but there have been horrible problems with it in the past, and nothing has been done to prevent them happening in the future. A problem is a problem regardless of what type of problem you want to categorize it is.
Let me put it in a way you might understand:
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Ethical problem - Potentially no correct solution, tradeoffs likely.
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Engineering problem - Smart people do maths until problem is solved.
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We care but guess who doesn’t? Corporate Amer$ca
Don’t tell Nestle this, they would store all the ocean water and resell it at a premium.
Nothing about this is “new”.
Evaporating water and catching it has been the way to produce fresh water since, like ever. But it’s slow, and prone to bacteria.
The “new” is the way they’re doing it
Apparently they solved the issue of how to keep the waste salt from clogging up the system.
No they didn’t. It’s never been an issue. Just don’t evaporate all water and use a new batch of salt water before the previous one gets saturated. Availability of salt water usually isn’t the issue.
The question with desalination is always the same what will you do with the salt ?
If it was just salt it wouldn’t be a problem. Salt is an essential nutrient and industrial product and we actually run seawater evaporators today specifically to farm the salt. We mine salt out of mountains and ship it around the world. Salt is our friend.
The actual question is what to do with the concentrated salty sludge by products.
Pipe it to mcdonalds.
French fries are already too salty. And then, people gonna need freshwater. Infinity loop.
Second moon
What about stopping shitting in fresh water ?
I tested a dry system with sand, sawdust and straw, but none of the other users was a fan :(
I imagine actually applying your solution would cause quite some friction.
I can’t see why, we also had the three seashells system https://screenrant.com/three-seashells-demolition-man-function/ :)
Ofcourse. But that is because the seashells are the obviously superior method. The friction is with the sand and sawdust method.
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Evaporating water and condensing it has been done. We don’t use this method for desalination since it is more energy intensive (read expensive) than reverse osmosis, which itself is also quite energy intensive.
Their solution uses the sun, so…
To produce systems energy would be needed too, and all “green” solutions have terrible EROI sometimes even negative, so… this solution have economically better alternatives that already in use
