In the bay area, I'm paying ~$2.80 per cubic meter.
I don't see why it's not feasible.
Yes, there are transmission/pumping costs. Assuming the water we're getting now is free, that's still only ~50-75% increase in cost over current costs.
My hope is that one day, small scale nuclear power (sometimes called "modular nuclear power") will make this a reality.
Maintenance is basically pulling the pipe up every couple of years and replacing the membrane which will become fouled over time, but generally it would be deep enough that it would not get barnacles and other mollusks on it.
You pump out the top x feet of water from the pipe. The equalizing levels of inside and outside the pipe is what drives the upward flow through the membrane.
Perhaps the advantage is that you can lift in multiple stages, so each pump doesn't bear the full column pressure. Also the pumps aren't exposed to salt.
It is incontrovertible that this system would have to push the water up from below.
Air pressure increases slightly as you descend a well, but not enough to change the outcome.
What you’re saying would imply that the Titan submersible would be at the same pressure whether under an ocean of water, or in a well the same depth. No. The former is 375atm, the latter is a bit more than 1atm.
You only need to lift the top layer of water a little bit. The rest of the water column would come up after it. Of course, you cannot lift the top of the siphon more than 10m above sea level.
While operating, it's basically a deep open well with a bit of water at the bottom. You need to pump that water out to keep the process going.
I don't think the math works out all that spectacularly though. The pressure difference would be a about 1.1 MPa, and desalination of seawater takes ~6MPa, so by running a pipe down to the bottom of Monterey Canyon you could... save almost 20% of the energy costs.
Which makes sense. You can't build a perpetual motion machine by sticking a pipe with a membrane at the bottom and a turbine at the top into the ocean. Even if it's a very long pipe.
Am I missing something here?
The pressure at the membrane will only ever be the difference. It has nothing to do with the depth the membrane is actually under the water.
If we can run those for hundreds of miles through water, pumping thick sludge that is crude oil....
Have we ever built a working prototype/plant that does this?
The problem is, your fresh water is now several hundred feet below the surface. To raise it up to where you are, you need pumps to push up the same exact pressure differential that you got by putting the membrane so deep. And if you need to do that anyway, just use surface level water and pumps for ease of maintenance and access.
There absolutely is.
All you need is a bunch of mirrors to direct the sun at a chamber filled with water. The water will evaporate, the expansion into steam creates significant pressure so you can run it through a turbine, and then once the steam cools down and liquifies again, it won't have any salt in it.
It's not even remotely expensive. Mirrors are cheap. The turbines/etc are basically the same as a coal or gas power plant and mirrors are a hell of a lot cheaper than mining coal or gas. Also if you're boiling a usable quantity of water you'll be generating a lot of power, which is a handy byproduct (more valuable than the water to be honest).
"Not in our back yard" is the real issue. The chamber is generally at the top of a tower, and even painted black all that sunlight focused onto it is very bright. People generally don't want a really bright object on top of a tower anywhere near them. I guess you could build a wall around it or something, but you'll still get complaints from aircraft/etc.
Driving into the sunset or sunrise is annoying. Imagine if that was all day every day instead of just for 20 minutes or so.
Having said that, if you're in a remote area to counter the NIMBY issue, and clean water is hard to find, then the system I've described is very effective and they are being used for cost competitive farming of cheap crops.
Anyone who actually wants to desalinate seawater can do it. It's just that almost nobody wants to right now.
Why use so many words when there is literally a very old term well established in use?
They have their own issues and they require quite a bit of real estate. Not something that was easily obtained in Sunnyvale but I'm sure that there are places where they would work.
How big a tower are we talking about for the steam volume necessary to turn a reasonably sized turbine?
> People generally don't want a really bright object on top of a tower anywhere near them.
There is a stretch of road near the tower that is uncomfortable to drive on during the day, the tower is so bright. I honestly can imagine that many a child has hurt themselves staring at it, it is extremely eye catching and there's really nothing else to look at in that desert.
I'm all for green power (I have an electric car that I feed from roof-mounted solar) but these towers should be very far from population centers.
Using the above methodology, I ran numbers for a desalination factobattery and it's really bad, like two orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying a Li battery to buffer the unreliable energy and running desal 24/7.
Thanks for educating me!
Also, the concentrated brine is a real problem in any area that has regular sealife. Maybe not a big problem in the salt ponds already, but it will kill off anything normal.
Amortized capital costs for desalination runs about 40%,[0] so if you "charge" for 12 hours and "discharge" for 12 hours then your facility doubles in size, so your desalination cost increase by (at least) 40%. This doesn't even account for added maintenance btw.
If you charge for 6 hours (ie the solar peak) and discharge for 18 hours, you need a facility 4x as large, and your desalination costs increase by at least 160%.
Desalination isn't 'free' energy storage.
[0] https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-...
I studied in a tangent area and either I'm dumb or DOE had a lapse of reason that day.
Having five reactors per site is going to be worse than two of equal installed power in almost every respect. USA is the fourth largest country in the world, how is reduced footprint even a consideration?
If you're still interested you can start at the DOE site and follow those links, NuScale (https://www.nuscalepower.com/en) has a bunch of stuff to, they will send you white papers). Anyway, I doubt they are going to go anywhere before the first round of the climate apocalypse gives people the "You can either put in a nuclear power plant or you can all die, which do you want to do?" choice.
I know I’m already at that point. Just experiencing the southwest heat and lack of water for my life has been enough. It strikes me that the US could absolutely resolve so many of its problems with known tech today, but refuses. And definitely it takes some shattering moment to wake people up. We recently had the hugest wildfires known and I don’t quite see much difference locally. But these things take time.
1) Get a library card for university (this will more reliably get you papers than sci-hub). Sometimes you can just pay them for one, sometimes you have to register for a course (1 unit courses in the US can be inexpensive and even if they are in basket weaving as a "student" you get to get a library card :-)
2) With the assistance of the reference librarian find the journals that cover the topic you're trying to master and go through the papers. There will be some "highly cited" papers that everyone refers to, some "medium levels of citations" and then typically you'll see papers that take the research in one of a few directions. You can choose to either stay in "survey" mode at this point or dive down one of those directions.
3) Read the papers and learn from the results, you may find subjects that you didn't learn as much as you needed to in order to read the paper (math, chemistry, physics, etc) for each of those, you find text books or things like the Chaum's notes for the subject to bring you up to the level you need in order to understand the paper.
If you keep at this for a while you will start finding that when you read a paper you both understand what they are doing and may instantly develop an opinion on whether or not you think it is "good" and will be able to explain why it is or isn't good.
At that point you are now the "master" of that topic. You don't have the degree but you didn't have to write a thesis either so there is that :-). If the university you chose in step 1 has professors doing stuff in the area you could probably co-write papers with them.
A power plant is only ever "done" when it finds itself on a far more valuable land than when it was built or when your politicians decide to go back to fossil fuels, something that should pretty much never happen.
That said, if it does need to happen, traditional 500MW PWR sites have been restored to green field condition.
SMRs are expected to by 1.5-2x as expensive as traditional nukes, it's borderline fraud at this point.
Even the RBMK reactors, which had lecturers in the 1960s pointing out safety flaws, needed human intervention (and quite a lot of materials fraud) to actually go boom. TMI similarly needed some humans to fix it until it was broken (also why there is a genuine good-faith lobbying argument to mandate less maintenance sometimes, especially as higher-quality equipment wears slower).
You'd still need security, and frankly security for the security, though.
I think you confused it for The Hague, which is in The Netherlands.
The sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and batteries often are astronomically expensive and impractical at large scales. Solar and wind vary greatly, both over an individual 24-hour period, and seasonally throughout the year. A nuclear plant is producing its maximum capacity 93% of the time, as opposed to wind (34%) and solar (24%). To get 1 GW of reliable energy at any given time, you need 3-4 GW of wind and solar in the hope it will be enough, as opposed to 1.1 GW of nuclear. (Worth noting that coal is only 48% reliable).[1][3]
In order to build a grid that is able to meet demand consistently and reliably, you would have to massively overbuild renewables so they were able to meet peek demand, and deal with the issue of huge load shedding during times of overproduction. See section 5 and 6 of [1] for a study of what it would take to reach 80% and 100% renewables for California. To reach 0% fossil fuels, a total of about 7GW of nuclear power (the equivalent of 4 Diablo Canyon plants) would reduce needed wind by 11.5GW (the equivalent of over 5 million wind turbines) and solar by 5.7GW (the equivalent of 1.8 million rooftop systems). When you only need 40% the capacity, even double the cost is cheaper. Nuclear is only expensive when you compare it to coal and natural gas, which are baseload generating power sources. Again, with intermittent renewables, it is cheaper to build nuclear than to massively overbuild solar, wind, and grid level batteries.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
[3] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
No nuclear power plant ever created has stopped costing money yet, even ones that have been closed for 30+ years. They are costing taxpayers millions per year, each, for the foreseeable future. How can anyone know for sure what the actual cost will end up being?
Meanwhile, the cost per Mwh of batteries is very likely to fall, considering that almost every major economic centre started building battery gigafactories during the pandemic and new chemistries are already viable for cars.
I suspect that energy storage will soon be so obviously the right choice that even if someone decides to make a nuclear plant today, they won't finish it because it won't make financial sense.
Nuclear power is prohibitively expensive even in a best-case scenario. All estimates that have indicated otherwise simply ignore most of the costs. Political decisions socialize the costs to the state and future generations. Even in the US.
Read up on the current costs of closed plants like Rancho Seco in the US, recent developments around EDF in France, and the statements from Sweden's riksgalden for more info about this. TLDR, you are paying for closed nuclear plants already, and so will your great great great grandchildren. They will pay all their lives for plants that won't give them a single watthour of power. This is a monumentally bad idea IMO.
How about we instead make a nationwide push on things like hydrogen gas from seawater and solar?
When the hydrogen gas is burnt, it creates salt-free H2O as a byproduct, and in the meantime it's a good energy storage solution to solve the intermittence of renewables.
Your grandchildren will praise you instead of curse you.
I haven't seen a detailed analysis, but this could look good for California, notwithstanding the other problems with desalination (ecological).
Also desalinated water does not to be used the moment it is produced. One can run desalination facility at full blast during the day using renewable energy and at a lower or even trickling speed during the night using cheaper, often wasted otherwise energy from the grid.
The advantage is that you need a smaller desalination facility, as it can run at 100% duty cycle. Pumped hydroelectricity could do something similar, but why not have a go at removing the losses of converting back to electricity. (Then again, if you have an electric pump you already have most of the equipment required to produce hydroelectricity by running it in reverse, so pumped hydro might be better because it is more versatile?)
The drinkable water can be viewed by itself as "salty water + stored energy". If you produce it at any time where electricity demand is low/or production exceeds demand you store energy already produced, be it by nuclear or renewable power plants.
And then you can build the pumped-hydroelectric power station where it makes sense, not being limited to the coast line/big city being close.
Even if one lives on a desert coast there may be times where it makes more sense to purify and store water from say flash floods than desalinate it from the sea.
IMHO your idea may work if we think about some isolated location not attached to the grid and without some power plant running 24/7. No idea at which scale pumped hydroelectric starts to be viable.
But anyway, arguments about cost of making drinking water are moot. We need it, so eventually all options will be explored as needs increase.
Which to me sounds completely negligible in real world terms.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/five-things-know...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190114220150/https://www.reute...
I have no idea how much of an impact that would have though.
Of course building infrastructure affects nature, on land and in the oceans.
I see you didn't click my second link, and/or research it yourself. ;)
But even if the magnitude of harm were unknown, that doesn't mean we can just default to "ignore it."
Additional sources:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.8451...
Realistically speaking, because buying water rights from existing farmers is probably even cheaper.
0. https://sfpuc.org/sites/default/files/accounts-and-services/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nlkW16t5lM
It's probable the reason water costs that much for you is because people are still willing to pay that price for it.
Capitalism truly sucks.
Except the core premise is not true, so far as I can tell. To confirm this I went on Uber Eats, looked for chain restaurants near Salesforce Tower, and surveyed their beverage menus. At initial glance, most restaurants charged more for "water" than for soda. However, on further inspection this is because in those cases, the soda was dispensed from a fountain and the water was bottled. The latter obviously would cost more than the former, because of the cost of having to transport individual bottles. This can hardly be attributed to "Capitalism truly sucks". Furthermore, in cases where a soda fountain is available, the restaurant is legally mandated to provide the water to you for free[1], which makes the cost of water in those places $0. Of the places that only sell bottled beverages (there's surprisingly few):
* California Pizza Kitchen charges the same for water as for canned soda, and gives you more water[2]
* Chipotle Mexican Grill's cheapest beverage is bottled water[3]. The second cheapest option? San Pellegrino sparkling water, shipped all the way to California from Italy.
That said, the economic principle of "thing x costs more because people are willing to pay for it" is probably true (see for instance, airfare that's bought late), but this isn't one of those cases.
[1] All restaurants are technically supposed to, but having a soda fountain virtually guarantees that they can't weasel out of it by saying that they only serve bottled beverages and don't have cups for serving tap water
[2] https://www.ubereats.com/store/california-pizza-kitchen-53-t...
[3] https://www.ubereats.com/store/chipotle-mexican-grill-211-su...
What do you mean? I'm not arguing that cheaper water options don't exist- just that the fact that you seem to be surrounded by said options doesn't mean that everyone is.
The video may very well be true for certain regions, it's absolutely not a universal fact or rule of any kind, but I proposed it as a possible explanation, in an attempt to be helpful.
Actually, the exact wording used by the video is a "service station". Luckily uber eats also delivers from those, and after sampling some in my area I can say that the statement is also false for them.
Of course, you can't prove a negative. However, considering that the video just asserts the fact without evidence, and I actually have hard numbers, I think it's fair to say that we can tentatively conclude that the statement is false. I suppose you could make the argument that the actual claim isn't that the phenomena is widespread or common, but that it merely exists. However, that wouldn't make sense in the context of the original comment, which uses that video to conclude "Capitalism truly sucks". If most establishments are pricing water and soda "correctly", and there's a few outliers that don't, it doesn't make much sense to cite that and conclude "Capitalism truly sucks".
I think capitalism sucks, not because there is not a single place on earth where it is detrimental, but because there are plenty of places where it is. There are obviously the big offenders - the faceless megacorporations in the US and stuff like that. It's not like I'm saying it's impossible to get capitalism to work. I'm just saying that it sucks that it incentivizes stuff like this to happen, even if it doesn't happen everywhere.
and remember... "most establishments" in your area. Some people, live in different areas than you, and the relative price difference is not necessarily the same worldwide.
I don't want to repeat it again, so I hope this explanation is good enough. Just because the video isn't true for you doesn't mean it can't possibly be useful to anyone, if they happen to be in an area where water is more expensive and they're trying to figure out why.
But really, your argument just doesn't make sense to me. It feels sort of like "works on my machine", except it's "water isn't more expensive in my area". Mh.
Olive oil from California is also much cheaper than Olive Oil from Italy.
In both cases, it's up to you to decide if you think there is any actual quality difference, and if such a thing is worth money to you.
Alternatively, the soviets usually only had one (maybe two-three if it was military equipment) brands or models for any one thing. So there is that alternative.
Where do you buy cheap Californian olive oil? Whenever I’ve seen it for sale (rarely) it’s always a more premium product available only in medium sized glass bottles while Italian olive oil is available in large plastic containers.
If you go to Safeway.com, there are clearly a couple different ‘markets’ or sub-verticals in olive oil. Glass bottle ‘fancy’, plastic jug ‘bulk’, and large metal jug/tin ‘medium fancy bulk’.
Looking at the sub-categories, it it seems like Italian extra virgin is typically about 2x in price of Californian equivalents within a given sub-category, but there are some Californian brands coming close to equivalent.
Like Californian wines vs French.
Each sub-category for oil has its equivalent of 2 buck chuck of course.
There was a period of time where I did switch to water, when I first started my ADHD medication. And you're right, even though I didn't find the water "tasty", I was perfectly fine drinking it and just using the feeling of it instead of the taste.
It did take a while even after the meds stopped working for me to switch back to soda. I think it actually happened just because we ran out of water bottles and I was still thirsty. Which I guess proves that I still have thirst at least.
How many different places have you had tap water? The tap water in SoCal, west Texas, Seattle, and Hawaii all have distinctive tastes. Or have you tried distilled or R/O water?