/sci/, is it really that hard to remove the salt from salt water?
>>7986895
As far as I understand it's not so much a problem of how to do it, it's that boiling/ filtering the water is so energy intensive that it costs a fuck load of money to do so.
>>7986895
Not hard, just expensive
>>7986895
Yes. Phase changes are very energy intensive, presuming you want to boil it out. I don't know about the energy or infrastructure costs of other filtering methods. Something using osmosis probably works better.
>>7986957
reverse osmosis works pretty well, its just that the filters use end up getting biofouled pretty quickly so they have to be replaced. lots of work is currently being done on biofouling resistant membranes.
>>7986919
why is filtering energy intensive, why not just dig a canal, put a filter along its cross section then release sea water into the canal
>>7986895
No, but it is hard to do so on an industrial scale without using a lot of expensive resources.
>>7986895
no, its quite simple really.
>stick hot thing in seawater
>collect steam
we need better ways of making the hot thing hot.
>>7986895
Small scale no, large scale yes.
>>7986967
You have to force the water through a filter.
>>7986986
>we need better ways of making the hot thing hot.
just use seawater to cool nuclear power plants
you get potable water and electricity all in one
>>7986895
This is the wrong question. People use a lot of water - like, an absolutely gigantic, mindbogglingly enormous fuckton of water. Lets imagine that we're desalinating the ocean to meet the demand; we're now left with an excess of salt. If we dump it back in the sea, we create a lifeless briney oceanic hellscape. Put it on land, and nothing will grow there, and you best hope it doesn't get into the groundwater. Solve the waste salt problem and you can start thinking about the rest of industrial scale desalinization.
>>7987191
Build a moon out of it.
>>7987203
But what of the moonmen?
>>7987205
We say goodbye, Moonmen.
>>7987184
>potable
also radioactive
also your and idiot
>>7987220
Truly, it was we humans who were the real monsters all along.
>>7987184
Salt gets stuck in the machines.
>>7987223
Not very radioactive. There's always two separate coolant loops. People wouldn't buy it though. Typically waste water goes through the cooling tower and then into a nearby river or lake. The fish hang out around there because it's warm.
>>7987228
what if we created a nuclear powered machine that gets the salt out?
>>7987246
You'd be wasting energy destined for whatever the power plant is for. Also, I'm clearly no nuclear engineer but wouldn't the radiation ionize the water? Creating free radicals and shit?
>>7987255
well then you unionize the water by creating yet another machine that runs off of nuclear power. It's essentially a giant system that does nothing in the long run as we continue to add more onto it, however; will definately provide many Nobel Prizes!
>>7987181
Can gravity do that? You will be pumping the freshwater somewhere anyway so the water level will be lower on the freshwater side.
>>7987261
Are you pic related?
The nuclear water goes into a lake or river?
Dont animals and people drink from those?
Estimate how expensive?
Are lives not being lost over this issue?
>>7986895
It's not, that's why large-scale desalinisation plants exist all over the world and some provide the bulk of a place's water supply. Protip: they don't boil the water.
>>7986895
>put salt water in bowl
>wait
>wait
>wait
>$$$
>>7986895
No.
http://www.watercone.com/mage.html
If the people in Yemen had more of these, they wouldn't have a war down there.
>>7986895
>is it really that hard to remove the salt from salt water?
Yes. It's easier to remove the water from the salt.
>>7987191
Then you put the salt water in molten salt reactors. walla
>>7987711
*salt FROM the water, I should say
>>7987300
It's not "nuclear" water. Just warm water. The water never comes into direct contact with radioactive material but just gets the heat.
>>7986967
It is literally a physical impossibility to filter salt out of water. The say l salt splits into sodium and chlorine in water and these atoms are smaller than water molecules.
>>7987275
The RO filters are very thick with multiple layers. Gravity is not strong enough, the water must be forced through via pumps which is very energy intensive. Even then it's not 100% efficient, you're lucky to get a small fraction out of what you put in.
You still end up with a fuck-ton of highly salty water, which is a problem.
>>7987306
It depends on the scale. Do you want to do this for a small community, city, the entire state of California? It becomes really expensive, really fast, and that's not even considering environmental effects.
Most likely yes, water security causes all kinds of destabilization, probably moreso in African countries. This problem will only increase in severity over time unless we find a solution.
>>7987812
forgot pic
Can we remove water from the air. Or make water from air?
>>7987857
Yes, you can pull vapor from the air using strongly hydrophilic materials.
>>7987300
>Based on a true story.
>Nuclear construction
>Fishermen going REEEEE NIMBY!
>Nuclear built anyway
>Comfy warm coolant water causes shrimps to proliferate... within the plant operation spillwater area
>Fishermen going REEEEE IT'S NOT YOUR WATER LET US SHRIMPS!
Fucking envirocucks, I hope the plant operators ate all the fucking shrimps.
>>7987857
Dehumidifiers and air conditioners do this.
>>7987772
ur dumb
RO filters obviously work
the ions are charged too. so you could do something with that
>>7987242
>>7987223
I am having trouble figuring out exactly how dual purpose nuclear-power and desalination plants work. Surely they do not output the same (former) seawater they used to cool the reactor as their "clean drinking water"? Wouldn't the water be highly radioactive?
And yet I am reading about many of these plants currenty in operation, providing tens of millions of gallons of potable water in places like Japan and the middle east. There is one in Saudi Arabia called "Al-Jubail 2" that produces almost a million cubic meters of fresh water per day (using "MED-TVC"), and 2745 MWe power output
>>7987696
this looks like a very useful thing to have on a lifeboat
>>7987711
Wrong kind of salt; fluoride salts are preferred for their stability in a radioactive environment. Also, it's voila.
>>7988743
absorbing radiation doesn't cause a material to become radioactive itself, if it had dissolved radioactive materials in teh water, it would be a problem though
>>7989054
Yes and no. There are several designs without fluorine, such as sodium berylium of ThorCon. Fluoride salts would be great, but we're not yet entirely sure if there's a cheap, environmentally acceptable way to enrich fluorine to the isotopic purity needed. The way we did it before released a metric shitfuck of mercury into the environment.
>>7986895
I've seen a video of some indian professor using a bucket of salt water, a sheet of graphene and a sheet of wolfram or some other metal to desaline it, special thing was it would work on any scale and without additional energy required.
maybe someone knows it because of all desalination techniques I've seen so far, this seemed like the most efficient.
>>7990562
So why aren't we doing that?
>>7990975
Because we can't mass produce graphene yet.
>>7986895
No, nature does it all day long at 0 cost.
kek filename. oops
