Free Republic

In politics, they say you want your people all peeing out of the tent rather than into it. In this context, there is a case to be made for assigning Elon Musk a new task to keep his mind off the budget and keep him focused and on point. Here is the assignment. Give him a contract to develop the desalination technology that will increase the habitable size of the USA by one-third and double the habitable size of the Earth. This can be achieved by collapsing the cost of desalinating seawater to roughly $ 200 per acre-foot. (That would...

Sacyr Vallehermoso, a Madrid based Spanish construction firm, has expressed interest to lead the construction of the Agua Negra tunnel, a project that aims to build a highway that crosses over the Chile-Argentina border, connecting the San Juan province in Argentina to Coquimbo in Chile. The project’s high profile comes from its ambitiousness. The tunnel in question is planned to go for nearly 8.6 miles and will be built in complicated conditions under the Andean mountains. It comes as part of a Mercosur integration process, and will be part of the highway that traverses the continent, from Coquimbo in Chile...

Desalination won’t end water shortage Re “Scrap high-speed rail” (Letters, Dec. 28): Don Anderson’s letter advocates scraping the bullet train and using the money for desalination plants in Southern California. Our water problems have been caused by drought, which is a symptom of global warming. One of the causes of global warming is our dependence on burning fuel for transportation. Desalination would exacerbate the problem. It takes 1,500 kilowatt-hours to produce a million gallons of desalinated water. That’s a lot of carbon being put into the atmosphere. The solution to global warming isn’t to make more air conditioners, and the...

Is desalination the future of drought relief in California? Oct 31, 2015 San Diego is set to soon start supplying itself with millions of gallons a day of fresh, drinkable water, using saltwater from the Pacific Ocean, converted by a brand new desalination plant. As California's historic drought continues, the plant will likely intensify the debate over the role of desalination may play in the state's water supply. Special Correspondent Mike Taibbi reports.

Seems it's not enough to try to coax us into eating bugs ... For a movement that claims to be all about saving the Earth, the green environmentalist globalists sure do come up with repulsive ideas. Here's their latest, according to the Washington Free Beacon: A beer brewed from recycled toilet water has become a hit among attendees at the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference. "At first their eyes widen," Samantha Thian, a leader of Singapore's youth delegation at the U.N. climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, told the New York Times. "Then we reassure them. They're usually coming back...

The team's new system improves on their previous design — a similar concept of multiple layers, called stages. Each stage contained an evaporator and a condenser that used heat from the sun to passively separate salt from incoming water. That design, which the team tested on the roof of an MIT building, efficiently converted the sun's energy to evaporate water, which was then condensed into drinkable water. But the salt that was left over quickly accumulated as crystals that clogged the system after a few days. In a real-world setting, a user would have to place stages on a frequent...

A representation of the team’s bipolar membrane system that converts seawater into hydrogen gas. Credit: Nina Fujikawa/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory The cocktail of elements in seawater, including hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and others, is essential for life on Earth. However, this intricate chemical makeup poses a challenge when attempting to separate hydrogen gas for sustainable energy applications. Recently, a team of scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, University of Oregon, and Manchester Metropolitan University has discovered a method to extract hydrogen from the ocean. They accomplish this by funneling seawater through a double-membrane system and...

Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1pogU_5TYYSTORY: Israel is saving its main freshwater reservoir from the effects of climate change. The Sea of Galilee was being lost to droughts. So Israel built a chain of desalination plants along its Meditteranean coast. They turn seawater into freshwater, to refill the lake when water levels get low. “With this environment of climate changes, you don’t know what to expect next year and the year afterward. We are standing now in the late January and with very little rainfalls during this winter in Israel, arid winter basically with no rainfall. And we are no longer depending on...

Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water. All it does is cause flooding and massive tax expenditures to repair and strengthen dikes. The best solution would be for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build an aqueduct from the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi to Lake Powell, fill it, and then send more water from there down the Colorado to fill lake Mead. About 4.5 million/gals a second flow past that structure on the Mississippi. As mentioned, New Orleans has a problem with that much water anyway,...

California residents were slapped with tighter water restrictions Tuesday two weeks after state officials spiked plans for a $1.4 billion saltwater desalination plant in Orange County amid a season of historic drought.The State Water Resources Control Board unanimously voted to implement a statewide watering ban for ornamental lawns at businesses and commercial properties as residents brace for a prolonged drought, the driest drought of its length in 1,200 years. Local government will also be required to reduce water use by up to 20 percent. “California is facing a drought crisis and every local water agency and Californian needs to step...

The proposed plant would operate like Poseidon Water’s site in Carlsbad, where ocean water is put through a process that includes using thousands of pressure vessels and reverse osmosis to remove the salt. Poseidon officials say that from the time the water comes in from the ocean, it takes just about two hours to get it to the point where people can drink it. In California, where water sources are shrinking, proponents of the project say the plant will provide a great drought-proof source of water. In Huntington Beach, about 107 million gallons of seawater a day would be used...

A proposed California desalination plant that would produce 50 million gallons of drinking water per day failed a crucial regulatory hurdle on Monday, possibly dooming a project that had been promoted as a partial solution for sustained drought. The staff of the California Coastal Commission recommended denying approval of the Huntington Beach plant proposed by Poseidon Water, controlled by the infrastructure arm of Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management. The commission’s staff said the project was more susceptible to sea-level rise than was understood when it was first proposed more than two decades ago. The plant is expected to produce 50 million...

Already remarkable for being the world’s second Westinghouse AP1000 reactor to be brought online, Shandong Nuclear Power Co.’s Haiyang nuclear power plant is pioneering two significant aspects of nuclear diversification in China: district heating and desalination. In 2009, China only had 11 operational nuclear power reactors—three that used domestic technologies, two were Russian technology, four were French technologies, and the remainder are Canadian-designed. It now operates 50 units—a combined 50 GW. The heating project alone could translate to an “annual savings of about 6.62 million tons of standard coal,” it said. The company projects that by 2030, Haiyang and other...

NEWARK, Calif. (KGO) -- As more communities impose water use restrictions because of the drought, the California Coastal Commission is likely to vote on a controversial proposal later this year that could ease water worries for millions of Orange County residents. After decades of debate, Poseidon Water just needs approval from the commission to begin the construction of a desalination facility in Huntington Beach that would produce 50 million gallons of drinking water per day. Poseidon Water already runs a desalination facility in Carlsbad which is the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The facility was built in 2015 and provides...

Years back I believe the discussion of building desalination plants along the coast of California was met with quite the blowback from elitists and Hollywoodites. Do you think the same exists now?

Seawater makes up about 96% of all water on earth, making it a tempting resource to meet the world’s growing need for clean drinking water and carbon-free energy. And scientists already have the technical ability to both desalinate seawater and split it to produce hydrogen, which is in demand as a source of clean energy. But existing methods require multiple steps performed at high temperatures over a lengthy period of time in order to produce a catalyst with the needed efficiency. That requires substantial amounts of energy and drives up the cost. Researchers from the University of Houston have reported...

..... To look for self-defeating behaviour at work we don’t have to go back to ages past. And there is nothing like trouble over public access to water to bring out behaviour of the worst kind. In 2019, touring the Eastern Cape I encountered towns and trendy resorts with this trouble. The government blamed drought. Residents who knew better blamed comrades out of their depth who’d got winks and nods from higher comrades to run town councils. Israel stepped up to the plate. The ambassador put Israeli know-how for desalination and other fresh water solutions at the disposal of dry...

Interfacial evaporators are made of thin materials that float on saline water. Absorbing solar heat on top, the evaporators continuously pull up the saline water from below and convert it to steam on their top surface, leaving behind the salt, explains Hu... However, over time salt can build up on this evaporative surface, gradually degrading performance until it is removed... Hu and his colleagues minimized the need for this maintenance with a device made out of basswood that exploits the wood's natural structure of the micron-wide channels that carry water and nutrients up the tree. The researchers supplement these natural...

“What should the U.S. do about The Wall?” is a question that’s destined to divide many Americans. But there’s one proposal for the U.S.-Mexico border that, at least in theory, seems agreeable to everyone. A consortium of 28 engineers and scientists has proposed that — instead of building a simple barrier along the approximately 2,000-mile border — the U.S. and Mexico could work together to build an industrial park along the divide that would include desalination facilities, solar energy panels, wind turbines and natural gas pipelines. The plan would not only provide the region with border security — considering it’d...

The EU has completed the biggest photovoltaic solar field in Gaza, the European Commission announced on Thursday. The field will provide 0.5 Megawatts of electricity per day to fuel the Southern Gaza Desalination Plant. The EU-funded Southern Gaza Desalination Plant currently provides drinking water to 75,000 inhabitants in the Khan Younis and Rafah governorates. With the new energy field and new investments foreseen it will eventually reach 250,000 people in Southern Gaza by 2020. Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, commented, “Limited energy supplies in Gaza are one of the main challenges when improving access...