The best bet in actually desalinating population scale levels of water would be investment into nuclear power. And the desalination could double as a buffer for the nuclear plant so that it could be run at peak power and efficiency nearly full time.
Gas burns and makes CO2 which increases temperature which increases the likelihood of more dehydration events in future. This is the wrong choice. Actually the long term right choice is not to burn gas anymore.
Letting people die is obviously the wrong choice too.
When all choices are wrong we must find another choice that can be right. Somebody wrote solar energy, somebody wrote nuclear energy, somebody argued that both are wrong. I don't suggest a solution but I point out that limiting ourselves to binary choices is the wrong way to think.
I don’t find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_desalination an easy read, but I think it says using PV to get electricity and that electricity to drive reverse osmosis is one of the best solutions.
Certainly, given that solar power is cheaper than nuclear (in the current political climate), nuclear can’t be the better choice for peak loads, which happen when there’s a lot of sunlight.
Nuclear is a great use-case since the problem with nuclear is it needs a constant water source. If you’re desalinating you’ve got that problem covered.
Remember, nuclear power plant is merely a very large heat engine. The main problem is terrorism there.
Are there numbers for this? One one hand solar might provide more energy than nuclear if you're only interested in heat generation, but on the other hand using heat to desalinate (ie. boiling water) is also less efficient than using reverse osmosis.
That statement doesn't make any sense to me. If you need more power, install more panels. Space certainly isn't an issue in like northern Africa. It is cheaper to order a gigawatt or more of solar panels than building a new nuclear reactor, and faster to set up too. Even Germany today has way more solar capacity than it ever had in nuclear, and it is less a great place for solar than Africa.
That's because it never had much nuclear capacity, not because it now has a lot of solar
If we had to desalinate all that water and actively distribute it instead, it'd be a significant fraction of our current global power consumption. The power sources need to be concentrated near the desalination plants and at least half the world lives 100km+ away from a coastline. At 3 kWh per m^3 of water[1] and ~3.5 m^3 per person per day [2], that's an extra ~3800 kWh per year, which would increase per capita energy consumption by 25-30% [3] in the United States just for desalination.
We have enough challenges replacing existing power infrastructure with solar and wind. Placing the burden of desalination on top of that is unrealistic, especially since the NIMBY fight over solar installations of that size would probably be just as fierce as for a nuclear reactor.
[1] https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/energies/energies-12-00463...
[2] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...
I was only answering to the original post which suggested we would build nuclear power plants to desalinate water. There I commented that solar would be cheaper (and more environment friendly) for the same task.
Solar is relatively inefficient, but it can't be used to build a dirty bomb or worse. With large patches of uninhabit{ed,able} desert, many African countries have more than enough space to build large solar farms if they can find a solution to the sand blowing onto the panels.
https://www.sydneydesal.com.au/caring-for-the-environment/10...
I power my water maker with about 1400 watts and can make 35 gallons an hour. The panels, electronics and water maker were ~ $5000. I did the work myself at a slow pace, so not sure what the labor costs would be.
I set my system up in about 2 weeks. The requirements are a bit of time, seawater access and some capital.
For context, according to CEIC data [1], the average salary in Algeria is about $300 per month. That "dirt cheap" project of yours is more than a year's worth of labor.
Locally priced goods may be cheaper, but the US does benefit from a more direct shipping line with China (where most of these products come from, especially cheap solar panels). There's repair costs to be taken into account and if these become a necessity, you'll also have to take into account some kind of protection for when those without the means to buy one of these setups become desperate.
It's true that solar is relatively safe and cheap compared to other power sources, but projects like these are difficult to map to places where they can make a life-or-death difference. If things were that easy, we'd probably cover a patch of Sahara desert with solar panels and power the entire African continent for decades, with power to spare to export to other continents.
[1]: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/algeria/average-monthly-wages
Evaporative is interesting too, but solar isn’t too bad to maintain. Most of the maintenance would probably be keeping the filters, pumps and membranes in working order.
I think in either system, teaching the locals to setup the system and maintain it themselves is important for keeping the costs down.
$1000 would buy a pretty large solar still and you can spend the extra $4000 on a solar phone charger if that's something the locals need. Meanwhile there's little that can go wrong with a solar still and if something does go wrong, they can likely fix it (even if temporarily) with duct tape. Losing their cell phone charger and cooktop to electrical failure sounds like less of a problem than losing their water source.
An inductive burner, cell phone charger, desalinator, etc all sound great on a $200,000 boat where the owner is wealthy enough to keep it maintained and probably keep spares. But putting expensive and complicated electronics in a village so remote that they don't even have reliable water seems like a mistake.
You might be right though, if it’s remote enough and you have room, perhaps a solar still is the cheapest and simplest option. It seems like it would have to be very large to give comparable amounts of water. Do you know someone selling such kits?
In any event, maybe this gives folks some ideas for lowish cost options.
For example: https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...
Achievable, yes, but only for the rich for now. eg Gulf Arab states and Israel are early adopters, the latter with some EU subsidies to defuse water rights as an point of conflict in the Jordan watershed.
Capital and permitting costs presumably dominate.
FWIW on several occasions we came lose to losing the North American Great Lakes to nuclear accidents, the second largest freshwater stores in the world.
People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change. But the sooner we can hit the panic button and get people focused on the magnitude of the issue, the less people that need to die to get the population properly motivated.
https://ieefa.org/france-boosts-renewable-energy-spending-to...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/climate/coronavirus-coal-...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...
China is also, by far, the leading producer and user of electric cars with almost half of the production and sales (more electric cars are sold in china than western europe + US combined). Half of all EV's in the world are driving around in China.
Further, chinese people use a fraction of the electricity that north americans do. Canada: 14,600 kWh/yr, USA: 12,150 kWh/yr, China: 5,300 kWh/yr.
In terms of CO2 emissions, it's the same story: USA: 17.6T/yr, Canada: 15.7T/yr, China: 6.4T/yr, on a per capita basis.
It's hard to remember what with the shiny new tier 1 coastal cities, but try not to forget that, on average, china is still quite poor with only 1/4th to 1/5th the per capita income of the richer advanced economy nations like the US, Sweden, UK, Germany, Japan, etc. China is on par with Mexico, Malaysia, Panama, Russia, or Bulgaria.
In short, the story is not so simple.
China strictly controls how many people are allowed to migrate from the countryside to work in the cities, so it is, in some respects, multiple distinct economies with a centrally controlled standard of living.
Algeria being a former French colony, being close by, and already having a large population of Algerian descent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerians_in_France says there are 10 million people of Algerian origin in France. That’s over 10% of the population), France probably will be a major destination.
What should have been proposed was a unified Europe border force. Where each member state takes its share and also send resources to help manage the southern border.
Leaving the problem to Spain, Italy and Greece is the worst approach. The 1 million migrants in 2015 really was a dry run for what will happen when Africa is too hot.
The EU needs to plan now for receiving these people, because you can't send them back.
[1] https://frontex.europa.eu/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Border_and_Coast_Guar...
[3] https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/27/eu-plans-to-boost-power-...
[4] https://www.euronews.com/2021/01/20/eu-migration-chief-urges...
weather != climate
We make fun of the climate change deniers in this scenario because the cold winter often is evidence of climate change. Record heat waves can also be evidence of climate change.
Or, that will just get the rest of the nations of the world to focus on preventing climate refugees from entering their nation, and perhaps use their militaries to secure remaining resources.
No it wont. If anything it will just start a war and/or a(nother) refugee crisis. Plus dead people. I think hoping for disasters to catalyst change is a sadly naive worldview.
>we can hit the panic button
What panic button? Where?
We seem to be having several "once in a thousand years" heatwaves per decade these days.
- there are no climate change
- climate change is not because of humane activities
- climate change isn't that bad
- climate change might be good overall
- climate change is business as usual: improvise, adapt, survive
You can find more claims and counter claims https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-cold-weather.htm here. I picked up that one following your question about cold winter.
The people who profit from the current state of affairs need to be convinced to modify their plans. Perhaps there are other ways to persuade them, but fear of something worse than not profiting from their current investment plans is the only thing I can think of at this point.
Millions of people die from AIDS, malaria, and the lack of potable water and food each year. But most of those deaths happen other continents, so nothing is done about it.
The transmission of HIV could be virtually ended in the US with drugs like PrEP that have been on the market for a decade, halting a 30+ year AIDS pandemic. That didn't happen, and PrEP's price in the US rose from $1200 to $2400 for a 30-day supply in 2019, despite costing ~$40 retail in other first world countries. Now that one formulation recently became generic, it costs $1400 retail, or $600 with coupons, for a 30-day supply. As of 2020 there is a program for those without insurance, but if you're a working adult with insurance, you aren't eligible.
As long as there is money to be made, people dying will be acceptable to those in power.
The haute bourgeoisie will not, have not done anything to help.
Mike Muir was right. Give it revolution!!
An alternative to desalination is capturing humidity from the air, e.g. by isothermal membrane-based air dehumidification [2] or passively using condensation [3].
I’m involved in building a fund to invest in startups in this and other areas related to biosphere resilience, and would love to get in touch with people taking such technology to the market.
My guess is we will be needing adaptive measures sooner than most people expect.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYodKQP72mg
[2] https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1476418
[3] https://newatlas.com/science/passive-drinking-water-harveste...
https://www.terraformation.com/
Seems crazy now, but vast forests covering most of Algeria may be entirely possible in your lifetime.
Hardly "vast quantities". And it's not cheap, they're currently using "reclaimed" solar panels to provide power. At scale, this not possible and not cheap.
More to the point, their main goal is to plant and grow trees, not provide fresh water.
The thing we don't have enough for in many places is agriculture, industry, watering lawns, bathing, etc.
Although as usual the human problem of doing a suboptimal job of allocating a scarce resource applies...
Some suggested nuclear power, but I think there are better forms of energy production, especially since you don't need base load or capacity, so solar and wind are much better here.
Of couse solar space conflicts with desalination itself. You could just use the sun to evaporate the water in the first place.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
It presents a difficult problem for entrepreneurs to tackle. Definitely the potential to change people's lives for the better, though.
In the end, all fresh water goes back to the ocean so it's not like we would be creating an imbalance, there's just a risk of causing local damage.
Sea-water is about 3.5% salt by weight. Are you saying that the brine water coming out is 3.5 * 1.025% salt, or that it's 5.5% salt? Do you have anything you can cite? What % of the water that goes in the inlet makes it to the "brine" outlet?
The problem is the criminal mispricing of water in most of the world. Anything that interacts with saltwater - especially brine - is in a completely different class of infrastructure that requires constant maintenance, something that most political systems are especially bad at. It's compounded by the artificially low price of water and accompanying lack of funds.
Humans have built over three million kilometers of natural gas and oil pipelines globally. The longest undersea pipeline is over 1,200 km long, which is at least twenty times longer than the longest pipelines we'd need to build for ideal brine dispersion in the worst case geographies. For better or worse, the problems with desalination are economic and political, not technological. We just need to spread out our impact so that it's within the margin of error of ocean currents and evaporation.
For instance, according to a recent research paper[0] from Saudi Arabia, sea-water yields hydrogen, chlorine and lithium all from a single multi-stage process. These are all useful materials for industry. I imagine the process is both energy and capital intensive, but SA would be a good place to begin something like that.
[0] https://phys.org/news/2021-06-electrochemical-cell-harvests-...