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Dubai Is Building a Refrigerated Beach

Posted by samzenpus on from the building-ice-castles dept.

dataxtream writes "The world's first refrigerated beach is to be built at a luxury hotel in Dubai, located along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. The beach will include heat-absorbing pipes under the sand along with large wind blowers, which will keep tourists cool and guard their feet against the hot sand. Half of me says these guys need a reality check, the other half wants to go there." I believe I've just thought of a way we could solve this whole global warming thing I've been hearing about.

4 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. beach erosion/movement by trybywrench · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I lived in Daytona until i was 12 and remember the beach landscape constantly changing. Wouldn't they have to keep moving the pipes? Like bury them deeper at times and shallower at others based on what the beach is doing that day.

    --
    I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
    1. Re:beach erosion/movement by Kagura · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I don't care what the media says, I doubt we'll ever know the true motivations of the scumbags who committed mass murder in India recently

      What? Do people just decide to organize a dozen people for months or years with detailed plans just for no reason, on a whim?

  2. Re:Patent Pending by donscarletti · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The world is in a global economic depression and they are rigging up their beach with AC. Give me a break.

    The world is in a global economic depression because everyone's too worried about the global economic depression to spend enough money to pick the economy back up. If you've got the money to spend on something that takes an enormous amount of labour it will be a great thing for the economy as the extra cash circulating will boost everyone's confidence to spend their own. Plus, if you ever wanted to have something like this built, now is the time.

    --
    When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
  3. Every little bit of solar helps... by maxfresh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What they are proposing is just to extract the solar thermal energy from the beach sand. The solar energy doesn't have to be wasted. If they were to take the solar heat laden coolant, and pass it through a heat exchanger, and into a Stirling engine, they could use it to generate electricity to power desalination equipment, for example. Using the cooler ocean water as the heat sink wouldn't produce very high efficiency, but it would still be a net gain. It wouldn't cost very much more than just throwing the heat away. They could get coolor sand, and generate solar power at the same time. Just a thought...