A Clever New Approach To Desalination

jbeaupre writes "The Economist reports on progress by a company called Saltworks on using saline gradients to do the heavy lifting of desalination. In essence, Saltworks uses solar energy or waste heat to concentrate sea water. They then use the ionic gradient between the concentrated brine and two sea-water streams to pull ions from from a 3rd sea-water stream. It appears to work with entropy by trading the reduced entropy of the desalinated water against the increased entropy of 'mixing' the brine and the other sea-water streams. The article only discusses Na and Cl, but even just removing these ions is a step in the right direction."

Comments

Re:ion bridges cost? Consumable?

[nutshell42]

Not everyone reading Slashdot has a degree in chemistry or chemical engineering. I appreciated OP's questions since I had the same ones. I appreciate your answers but not the attitude that I had to endure when reading your post.

The attitude of the GP was the problem. "These are the questions we need to ask", as if they were non-obvious and revolutionary. Whenever there is a post about an invention on /. the easiest way to get "+5 (Group-Wank)" is to write that it will never work because the inventors overlooked an issue a drunk chimpanzee could come up with. Then a thread ensues where everyone congratulates themselves on saving the world yet again.

You are right, the GP's questions were interesting and should have been answered in the article (which is for laypersons) and because they weren't it's good that someone answered them here on /.

The problem is that the GP posed the question in a way that implied he knew what he was talking about and was making a statement about the invention, instead of admitting that he had no idea and was asking for clarification. jm2c