The site in Fukuoka is only the second power plant of its type in the world, harnessing the power of osmosis to run a desalination plant in the city
The things a guy has to do to get some electricity around here.
Seems like a good pair for desalination plants, great to see the technology develop.
I did not quite get how it’s a good idea tbh. They need freshwater to dilute the saltwater/brine. And they use it to separate the brine from saltwater to make freshwater? That’s definitely an energy negative cycle. So what’s the benefit? Is this more energy efficient then cleaning waste water into freshwater?
It’s easier to understand with a picture of the process:
It’s not energy negative. Osmosis doesn’t require any energy input. You only need to pump water to the plant,but the harvested power from the pressurized water exceeds the required pumping power. Freshwater and saltwater are freely available. Using the concentrated brine from a desalination plant only increases the efficiency.
I mean the part in the picture is clear to me. But if we assume freshwater is freely available, why would they want to power a desalination plant with the generated power? Basically you can trade freshwater (or salinity gradient generally) for power or power for freshwater. But in a simple loop you’d only lose both over time due to inefficiency.
From the article:
fresh water – or treated wastewater
I understood it as using water not suited for household use (+ sea water) to power a plant that can create fresh water for the community?
doesn’t completely answer your question, but:
Kentish said a lot of energy is lost through the action of pumping water into the power plant and when it travels through the membranes.
“While energy is released when the salt water is mixed with fresh water, a lot of energy is lost in pumping the two streams into the power plant and from the frictional loss across the membranes. This means that the net energy that can be gained is small,” she said.
But advances in membrane and pump technology are reducing these problems, Kentish said.
so it would seem it happens to be a net positive due to the energy “stored” in the brine
Hm from reading more on it, I think it has more to do with droughts in the area. That is why they build the desalination plant in the first place. I assume using the residual energy of the saline gradient (+ the boost from the brine) to generate new freshwater is better than further draining the naturally occuring freshwater. But still just a guess.
There would be an option run desalination on solar, and osmosis generator is a base load source. So I would imagine that energy storage made out of waste product could be a potential good investment.
Right now those are pilot programmes that discover viability of those new technologies.
Even if solar/nuclear is better it’s good thing to investigate those things as in right circumstances even ski gondola can be good public transport system (La Paz)
Definitely not shitting on the tech, it’s a really cool concept and definitely useful. I just wish news outlets would have asked how the cycle is beneficial. I don’t doubt that it is, but I don’t get it.
I don’t know, so I can only guess.
The desalination plant could have been there already, because for whatever reason it was more practical (or even required) than taking the water from the river.
Or maybe the desalination plant requires very little power, maybe less than what the osmotic plant produces.
Or the whole thing is indeed energy negative, but not as energy negative as having just the desalination plant. So at least they get to use the brine from the desalination to recoup some of the energy. Because the osmotic plant is power positive.
Something stinks here and it’s not the treated sewage.
I think the idea is that if you have an unlimited supply of treated waste water, and a limited supply of fresh water and an unlimited supply of pumps and osmotic membrane and turbines you can harvest energy from the process you already need?
IDK… calling it a power plant seems like the stretch. But I’m not a languager.
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Fuk u oka(y)?
i recognize you probably have no racist intention.
non-English speakers and bilingual English speakers, including those who speak Asian languages, often experience that type of mocking of their language. if it happened once to one person in the history of earth, it’s not racist. but the collective effect over generations and across thousands of experiences creates accumulative pressure on specific identity groups of people. the pressure and related coping/denial behaviors can manifest in unpredictable and inconsistent ways which may be why not everyone understands that racial mocking causes measurable harm.
tl;dr
it really helps if you would not do that. even more so if you could help stop others who you observe doing the same.
Wasn’t a racist comment. Words that sound different in different languages can be some of the fun of learning languages and all cultures do this. When I lived in Germany, there is the classic example of “gift” sounding like poison. In Japan good luck introducing yourself if your name is Gary - It sounds like diarrhea.
Since you are passing judgment, id say it would really help if you didn’t see everything through a racist lens. It implies a degree of projection. Its ok to take some innocent pleasure out of things like language - it works in all directions and does not involve othering unless it’s done with some malicious intent.
if you would reread my comment, you would see i said twice that i don’t think you are trying to be racist.
however, the impact of harmlessly-intentioned statements is completely determined in the mind of the listener.
if you feel i judged you, that’s an example of how my intentions are out of sync with the consequence on your feelings. i apologize. it’s also reinforces my point.
to clarify, you might originate a statement, make a comment, then it leaves your mind and your body. the affect on you is done and any meaning in the words is frozen. people, myself included, tend to think our intended meaning is more explicit (denotation vs connotation) in our words than it actually is.
like a pebble in the air, that comment can land in the ground and not touch anyone, not trigger anyone’s feelings.
for comments about a person or about culture that’s tied to people, it’s hard to argue that no one could ever have any feelings about it.
i understand you’re implying that comments about funny sounds in languages are abstract and/or unavoidable, and that it’s harmless to enjoy. I’ve also made such jokes, and I’m not immune to my own criticism. and just because this type of joke has happened for generations, that doesn’t mean it’s an unalterable process of the physical universe. if a human does it, that human can stop it, make it better, make it worse, etc.
just imagine your native language being mocked everyday, by the majority group surrounding you, it started before you were born, over time you can sense that it affects your family members, reduced their confidence, maybe they’re highly educated but for some reason they don’t achieve “success”, whatever that means for your culture. maybe they were bullied in school or at work.
you might think I’m suddenly bringing up fiction and distorting the issues. scientific research has proven that culturally related mocking is linked with bullying and has racialized effects on the targeted people. racialized effects meaning, among other things, giving them the sense that if they try to participate in certain areas of life, like employment, applying for home loans, dating, politics, showbusiness, they might be rejected. that sense has also proven to be accurate in the sense that (in USA) people who have been mocked in relation to their race definitively do get rejected in all fields and endeavors more than non-mocked (majority) people. that’s after adjusting for income level, education level, skill gaps, language barriers, etc.
again, to repeat, i know you probably didn’t make the comment thinking “hey what’s something racist i can do”
wha
