April 10, 2016
Making salt water drinkable just got 99 percent easier
Gizmodo - Access to steady supplies of clean water is getting more and more difficult in the developing world, especially as demand skyrockets. In response, many countries have turned to the sea for potable fluids but existing reverse osmosis plants rely on complicated processes that are expensive and energy-intensive to operate. Good thing, engineers at Lockheed Martin have just announced a newly-developed salt filter that could reduce desalinization energy costs by 99 percent.
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5 comments:
And what happens to all of the accumulated salt, minerals, and other desalinization by-product? There is an environmental cost associated with manufacturing potable water. As always, these environmental cost will not figure in the economic calculus, instead they'll be disregarded and ignored as 'externalities' beyond the bottom line.
Where does the by-product brine go? Throw it away? Where is that?
I get that dumping it back into the ocean creates a localized dead zone plume similar to the Mississippi emptying into the Gulf, sure smaller and less toxic chemical wise, but still an effect. Or maybe there is already a local waste water discharge that it can be added to that would somewhat mitigate its effects.
Or maybe similar to Maxwell's demon it removes such a small percentage of water that the effect is almost negligible.
I wait to pass judgement until I hear more.
I guess we have to drink more salted margaritas
Package that salt as "Naturally Filtered from Wild Sea Water" and make a mint.
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