Electricity From Salty Water

BuzzSkyline writes "It's possible to produce energy by simply mixing fresh and salty water. Although chemists and physicists have long known about the untapped energy available where fresh water rivers pour into salty oceans — it's equivalent to 'each river in the world ending at its mouth in a waterfall 225 meters [739 feet] high' — the technology for exploiting the effect has been lacking. An Italian physicist seems to have solved the problem with the experimental demonstration of a 'salination cell' that creates power given nothing more than input sources of salty and fresh water. The researcher believes that this renewable, environmentally friendly energy source could be deployed in coastal areas and could provide another addition to the green-tech roster. A paper describing the technology is due to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters."

Comments

Re:Double Duty?

[localman57]

Only if the waterfall is on the edge of the ocean...

Not so new..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the technology was already available, and is to be used to power most the majority of homes in the Netherlands, including mine, if the proposal is approved:

http://ecoworldly.com/2009/03/08/saltwater-power-could-supply-energy-for-most-dutch-homes/

Or the original publication:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es9004224?cookieSet=1

Inaccurate story

[Otto]

There have been other ways to extract salinization energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_electrodialysis

These methods are even being used in test sites to generate power. Main problems are that there's a lot of crap in rivers that you need to filter out to get high efficiencies.