Why Is Desalination So Difficult?

Comments · 6.5K

• PR

  @PracticalEngineeringChannel · 3 years ago · pinned

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• DU

  @dundonrl · 3 years ago

  I&apos;ve drank literally thousands of gallons of desalinated water over 20 years while I was in the US Navy. First ship used 7 stage evaporators and the last two used reverse osmosis. You couldn&apos;t tell the difference between them since it was pure water that came out of them and the engineers added minerals back into them to make them drinkable.

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• MO

  @morganmedrano920 · 3 years ago

  I&apos;m a Navy veteran and I served on a Nuclear Aircraft Carrier. We had a desalination system built into the Reactor system using the excess heat from the steam powerd turbines. It was actually very efficient.

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• WK

  @WKfpv · 3 years ago

  Here in Uruguay we are facing a drought right now, and the government decided to mix treated salt water in the normal fresh water supply, so now we are getting water on our taps with a salt concentration about 10x of what it used to be. This video turned out to be very well timed for us.

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• AT

  @atrumluminarium · 1 year ago (edited)

  I think we shouldn&apos;t snub solar stills as &quot;just reinventing the watercycle&quot;. I live on Malta, a tiny island nation in the Mediterranean. The relatively hot climate and small size for us means that the natural water cycle actively works against us in summer. This is because anything that evaporates rarely rains back on the island especially since most days the wind comes from the Sahara. &quot;Reinventing the water cycle&quot; for such a small island that has mostly marine territory is a way of controlling where the water that evaporates ends up.

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• CR

  @craigbabuchanan · 3 years ago

  Spoken like a true engineer... &nbsp;&quot;The instructions didn&apos;t say to not run salt water through the pump&quot;

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• N1

  @n16161 · 3 years ago

  It is SO extremely important how you put things in perspective in these videos. “It took X kilowatt-hours to do this process.” You could end there and compare numbers at the end, but then people wouldn’t understand what that actually means. It’s great.

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• TH

  @TheDd2402 · 3 years ago

  Lived in Saudi Arabia for a while and dad worked at the desalination plant there. Interesting bit was steam generated by the boilers were split into two pressure points. High pressure steam was used to turn the turbines to produce electricity while low pressure steam was used to make fresh water. Interesting when I heard about it the first time.

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• JM

  @jmiki89 · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxqOPdEUNTs&amp;t=71">1:11</a> &quot;Dumping that salt into a bucket of water may seem like no big deal, but reversing the process is a lot more complicated than you might think.&quot; Desalinating the water is complicated exactly because solving salt in water is so simple. The energeticaly favourable state of the two ingredient is their mixed state, by a far margin. It makes mixing them super easy but separating them quite literally an uphill battle.

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• ST

  @Stroheim333 · 3 years ago

  Nuclear powerplants are basically just &quot;big waterboilers.&quot; Many of them are of obvious reasons situated near oceans. In them you get a lot of desalinated water steam in them, which easily can be collected and used as drinking water, and many nuclear power plants has that dual function: generate electricity and desalinate water. THIS is the easiest and cheapest way.

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• TW

  @TwinSteel · 3 years ago

  I think one reason people may have a hard time wrapping their head around how difficult it is to get the salt out of the water is that they can’t see what it does - it’s not just swirling around in there, it’s dissolved - it’s harder than getting the cream back out of your coffee

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• IM

  @ImpendingJoker · 3 years ago

  Here in Tampa they tried to build a RO desal plant near the Apollo Beach Power Plant. The biggest issue was not any of what you outlined here. The problem was zebra mussels. They are a non native invasive species that would collect on the intake pipes for the desal plant and they were spending 100&apos;s of thousands of dollars each month just to keep the pipes clean, and that is what killed the project in the long run.

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