1y ago

Engineers at MIT and in China develop desalination system which could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water

Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water

It looks like the paper is paywalled and not yet on scihub but i did find 38 pages of supplemental information with more details than the article.

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thanks for posting the supplement, which goes into considerable detail. There is also this diagram which shows how it works:
But doesn't that produce salty brine that fucks up our ocean?
- The brine is a thing that needs handled, but there are ways to handle it.
  Unfortunately it is the kind of thing where the best solutions, like drying it and storing the salts, or pumping it underground, are expensive (and therefore hard to convince anyone to use), and the cheap solutions, like just dumping it back in the ocean, can have severe negative effects, like killing everything in the water around where it is dumped.
  Edit to add: although looking at this, depending on how they actually build it, it might sort of just turn ocean water into brine on the spot as it removes water. That would be basically like dumping it bqck in the ocean as far as effects, and doesn't seem ideal
- Nah we can use it to sell "sea salt"
- Isn’t that why good god gave us deserts? To build Salt Hill 8210 within the next two decades?
- Could we take enough water out of the ocean for the salt balance to be affected?
  
  Seriously doubt that. All water ends up in the ocean anyway, one way or another.
  But dumping brine in could wipe the life in that spot.

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