Forget droughts, crop failures and geoengineering. We can drink the sea

Found this while researching water desalination. We are pumping sea water in to London for the first time ever to prevent the Olympics from spontaneous combustion. Water distilling is expensive especially if you don't have direct sunlight to help.

INTRODUCTION Rapid Spray Desalination (RSD) is a newly developed technology that makes effective use of waste heat generated from gas-fired electrical generating plants, wastewater treatment plants, landfills, marine engines, and other sources, for desalination or for the recovery of dissolved substances. RSD, is a recently patented process, whereby water under pressure is nebulized into a moving hot air stream. Because of the extremely high surface area of the water droplets, the water vaporizes instantly and efficiently. By careful control of the system, salt that remains behind is concentrated into a brine for material handling purposes.

The technology described is simple and scalable.
They conclude that one system produced a substantial impurity reduction in a single pass.

RESULTS In the demonstration trial using real wastewater from a power plant evaporation pond, a single pass though the RSD bench unit dropped the total dissolved solid concentration from 130,000 milligrams per liter to 440 milligrams per liter

To turn sewage into drinking water, further stages of RSD could be used.

The article is here:

I've often wondered why this isn't on a mass scale.

We can go to Mars. We can go to the moon. We have the tech to recycle our urine to drink safely.

So why with all the technology we have at our hands and the advances in science, can't we have sea water used around the World?

I guess then there would be enough water and food for everyone and TPTB won't have it that way...?IMO

Peace

reply to post by lostjohnny


www.sportsmansguide.com...

70 bucks!

reply to post by jude11


Because the technology was/is new and expensive. Two things to consider. First when I say expensive, that's a relative term. Expensive compared to what?

Expensive compared to the fresh water source sitting right next to it. One requires you to dig a hole and stick a bucket in it, done! The other requires you to build a giant processing plant, pump it through a giant processing plant, turn it into fresh water, pump it back out of the giant processing plant, then stick a bucket in it.

No matter how cheap that process becomes, it will always be more expensive than just starting with fresh water in the first place. So that's what people look to use up first of course, all the fresh water.

Now, the other thing to consider is the people that have enough money to buy the processed water, and the people that need the processed water the most, are two different people!

The technology to make fresh water is getting cheaper all the time. Awesome! But, what we think of as cheap, is still insanely too expensive for countries that have no money or economy. Cheap is still expensive if you're broke!

Worse, companies like Coke have been known to go to poor countries where fresh water is just about the only resource they have and buy it all up. Because like I said, it's cheap and easy to just use what's already there instead of making more.

I'm pretty sure nuclear submarines can do desalination for both drinking water and oxygen to breath. I'm also interested in machines that can use cold temperature to collect water vapor.

When I was growing up I was on well water, and had no idea what water treatment plants were. When I got in my teen years and found out that city water is just recycled waste water...it made me think much less of human intelligence; I figured we would be much smarter than constantly crapping and disposing other waste in our own water supply. If you've never been to a water treatment plant; you will walk away from the experience re-evaluating where your water comes from, especially after seeing the holding tank with millions of floating tampons.