Article doesn't mention what the unit does with the salt waste.
I support this 100%, but desalination presents a unique problem: what do we do with all the salt? Maybe the unit uses it for something, but otherwise it just miniaturizes a problem that we're already working on.
If this works, it's better than anything we have , which costs grid energy and dumps brine all the same. If anything, the smaller scale makes it easier to distribute and dilute the output brine.
If sea levels rise as much as they're supposed to, this will be an invaluable tool for an enormous proportion of the country. My concern comes from capitalism getting its hooks into this.
Wait what country?
Capitalism bad, sure, but you can’t deny it has a way of making things scalable and affordable. If some venture co started the infrastructure to mass produce this stuff and make it possible for everybody to afford it would it be that bad?
What? No, my friend you misunderstand. Mass-production makes stuff affordable and scalable. Capitalism makes it so wealth is horded and only the rich get to decide what gets made. You vote with your dollar while a billionaire votes with theirs, guess who wins.
Mass-production is not a capitalism-exclusive unlock, it's a dlc that can be redeemed in any economic system.
Evaporate it to solid, store it if need be, or distribute it back into the sea in absorbable chunks. The water's ending up back in the sea eventually anyway, see water cycle, so it should be zero sum, just need to avoid local overloads. Seems eminently solvable.
Depending on the desalination method, you can also harvest lithium while your at it.
Sounds so easy for you but what to do with the excess salt is the only real problem with desalination that we have for decades now. It's not easy to solve.
This sounds fantastic on its face, but I seem to keep on hearing about how desalination will solve all kinds of problems and we still have this particular problem.
The missing piece, it seems, is the will for it to be used as infra at scale. Meanwhile selling bottled water taken for free from public lands for several dollars a liter in single-use bottles remains a multi-billion dollar industry. (an industry, I might add, that is aggressive about lobbying to protect its interests)
Devices like this are a lifeline for communities in developing nations. Who are the first and worst affected by water shortages and salt water intrusions into their fresh water sources.
Also the poorest and least likely to get the help from the people with the resources to help.
Not to mention if we do this at enough scale it will raise the salinity of the ocean and, you know, kill everything.
That's pretty unlikely, given that the water systems are more of less closed, and the volume of water in the oceans is so massive that it wouldn't make an appreciable difference at any reasonable scale.
Keep in mind that this isn't the creation of desalination, just making it cheaper. There are already plants that do this at a scale of 50 million gallons a day, or under 1 trillionth of the oceans.
Localized salinity changes are more likely to be an issue, but for that I think they just mix that salt back in with processed waste water, making it roughly neutral.
will raise the salinity of the ocean
If care isn't taken to avoid concentrating brine going back in just one spot, sure that could create localized problems. Buuut, you realize that the oceans constantly lose water to evaporation and their salinity is more or less stable, right? Every bit of rain or snow that falls on land (most of which returns to the ocean eventually) is water the ocean can be without and still not too salty for life.
Speaking of salinity, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (which in normal conditions, is the deep/cold return current from the gulf stream -> North Atlantic) is running into a big damned problem because Greenland is melting and all that fresh water pouring off of it is disrupting the return flow of cold water to the tropics. That's why the Gulf Stream has been so hot- it's not getting return feed from its radiator in the North Atlantic, and meanwhile the North Atlantic is getting colder because it's not cycling water back south, and that prevents hot Gulf Stream water from getting there.
Edit: I recently learned that concentrated brine regions in the oceans (called brine pools) are a thing. There are massive salt deposits (as much as 8km thick) under the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico today, the legacy of a time when the gulf was closed off from the oceans- when it refilled, the salt layer was covered over. Today, the deposition on top of it is heavy enough that subsidence within it squeezes the softer salt around, occasionally exposing that salt to the ocean water.
cool, but the real cost of desalination is transporting the desalinated water upstream, which presumably would also need to be done here
Considering how many people live near the coast it would still be a huge step forward. Right now even for most coastal cities desalination isn't cost effective and they have to import water from inland.
And by not having to deliver as much water from inland to the coast that water can be distributed more for people living inland.
Yes, it's not going to make inhospitable areas liveable but it's not just "cool".
the issue with water networks is they work great when you have the source (usually dams) upstream, water essentially is gravity fed throughout the network with only some localised pumping for certain elevated locations. wastewater again gravity fed towards treatment plants at the lowest point (usually the ocean), so usually, its fairly efficient, despite still requiring enormous amounts of energy.
this doesnt solve that. it has the source where the end point is. the desalinated water needs to be pumped up, to then be gravity fed through the network. In some places, it is worth the cost and energy due to water scarcity, and im not knocking the technology. but claiming its cheaper than tap water is patently false because the distribution cost is far higher
True...otherwise it's reverse hydro, which could be done with surplus renewables at peak times, but not at more than 10km.. This is mostly aimed at coastal communities (and sustainable floating villages 😁)
...or you could say fuck it, go full Dutch and build wind turbines and reservoirs everywhere to get water to all crops and green deserts 😊.
Since this produces distilled water, I imagine you could use it to filter any water, not just saltwater. You'd still need to boil it to make sure it was free of pathogens, in either case, and add an appropriate amount of salts and minerals back in to make it potable for the long term.
SONOFABIT*H, I've been working on a project exactly like this with my friend for a couple years. Hella congrats they got it done and working first but damn :'( I was too slow.
Imma go sadly crush some bugles with my face stones now
Keep doing it anyway. They still haven't gotten to market, and I want choices when it comes to my post apocalyptic water suitcases.
Zero reason to stop. Until this is put into practice it's just another article promising a future that isn't here.
I feel like every week we hear about some huge breakthrough that is supposed to revolutionize clean drinking water technology and save the world, but nothing ever comes of it.
I know this stuff takes time to develop, and not every idea is going to work, but it would be nice if one of these things actually did pan out and start being useful to solve our drinking water issues.
Where's the cheaper part?
It's just a giant plastic bag. They catch the runoff with a giant cup.
“Could”. What kind of fucking title is this?
Either it does or it doesn’t.
It's a good title. They don't know if it will be cheaper or not until they go and actually scale it up. Based on the prototype their projections say it should but it's very likely they would run into issues that drive up the cost.
They do say in the article that they haven't scaled it up yet. If a large version works same as the small version it would do it. Hence "could".
Delete this before Nestle sees it.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
