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Electricity From Salty Water

Posted by kdawson on from the foaming-brine dept.

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."

8 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Quick! Grab all your salt shakers and run to th by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

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  2. Re:Where does the fresh water come from? by ivan256 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    He's thinking in terms of the southwestern United States. There are plenty of other areas in the US that have more than enough fresh water. People from the southwest tend to be pretty self-centered when it comes to regional issues, and assume everybody has the same problems. The rest of us tend to ignore them.

  3. Re:Brilliant, Holmes, brilliant! by Un+pobre+guey · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I guess you don't know about estuaries and their intimate relation with water use, wildlife habitat, etc. I would speculate that you are precisely 17 years old, the age at which a person knows and understands absolutely everything in the world.

  4. Re:If only the professor knew. by Bandman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

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    --
    Check out my sysadmin blog!
  5. Re:neat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Hi everyone, I'm BitZtream. I'm a walking cuntknuckle and feel a desperate need to sound nerd-cool by calling that big yellow ball in the sky "Sol" rather than...you know...the Sun, like everyfuckingbody else.

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  6. Re:Quick! Grab all your salt shakers and run to th by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

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  7. Re:Quick! Grab all your salt shakers and run to th by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    http://firefoxhtml5test.webs.com/

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  8. Re:Economy is a Subset of Ecology by AlamedaStone · · Score: 0, Offtopic

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    --
    "All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."