This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Article doesn't mention what the unit does with the salt waste.
I support this 100%, but desalination presents a unique problem: what do we do with all the salt? Maybe the unit uses it for something, but otherwise it just miniaturizes a problem that we're already working on.
If this works, it's better than anything we have , which costs grid energy and dumps brine all the same. If anything, the smaller scale makes it easier to distribute and dilute the output brine.
If sea levels rise as much as they're supposed to, this will be an invaluable tool for an enormous proportion of the country. My concern comes from capitalism getting its hooks into this.
Wait what country?
Evaporate it to solid, store it if need be, or distribute it back into the sea in absorbable chunks. The water's ending up back in the sea eventually anyway, see water cycle, so it should be zero sum, just need to avoid local overloads. Seems eminently solvable.
Depending on the desalination method, you can also harvest lithium while your at it.
Sounds so easy for you but what to do with the excess salt is the only real problem with desalination that we have for decades now. It's not easy to solve.
Eventually is an important word here. With the raise of temperature, the amount of vapor in the air raises too.
Don’t you just dump it back in the sea? Diluting should make this a minor issue right?
That's what I always thought, but the local effects of hypersalinated water can be terrible for any nearby life
This sounds fantastic on its face, but I seem to keep on hearing about how desalination will solve all kinds of problems and we still have this particular problem.
The missing piece, it seems, is the will for it to be used as infra at scale. Meanwhile selling bottled water taken for free from public lands for several dollars a liter in single-use bottles remains a multi-billion dollar industry. (an industry, I might add, that is aggressive about lobbying to protect its interests)
SONOFABIT*H, I've been working on a project exactly like this with my friend for a couple years. Hella congrats they got it done and working first but damn :'( I was too slow.
Imma go sadly crush some bugles with my face stones now
Keep doing it anyway. They still haven't gotten to market, and I want choices when it comes to my post apocalyptic water suitcases.
Zero reason to stop. Until this is put into practice it's just another article promising a future that isn't here.
Sounds like a great thing to include in your resume if you want them to hire you to keep working on it. Assuming theirs is better and succeeds.
I feel like every week we hear about some huge breakthrough that is supposed to revolutionize clean drinking water technology and save the world, but nothing ever comes of it.
I know this stuff takes time to develop, and not every idea is going to work, but it would be nice if one of these things actually did pan out and start being useful to solve our drinking water issues.
Where's the cheaper part?
It's just a giant plastic bag. They catch the runoff with a giant cup.
All this stuff is like planning to colonize mars before we stop destroying earth. There is plenty of water if we just stop fucking pumping it all out and wasting it.
All farmers growing cotton in the middle of the fucking desert along the colorado river basin disagree with you
Clean freshwater isn’t evenly distributed across the world and it’s not easy or cheap to transport. This kind of tech can help the people that will be most impacted by climate change to survive.
Can you believe some people actually drink that stuff straight from the tap? It's like they don't even care about the golf courses at all!
Delete this before Nestle sees it.
“Could”. What kind of fucking title is this?
Either it does or it doesn’t.
It's a good title. They don't know if it will be cheaper or not until they go and actually scale it up. Based on the prototype their projections say it should but it's very likely they would run into issues that drive up the cost.
They do say in the article that they haven't scaled it up yet. If a large version works same as the small version it would do it. Hence "could".
