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Part 1 of 2 Parts
There is a shortage of potable water around the globe. Hundreds of million people are at risk. Only about two and a half percent of the water on Earth is fresh. Demand for drinking water is estimated to exceed supply by trillions of cubic yards by 2030. Desalinization plants which remove the salt from seawater could help supply the fresh water that is desperately needed.
However, desalinization plants are among the most expensive ways of creating drinking water. They pump huge volumes of water across membranes at high pressure which is extremely energy intensive.
One radical solution could be the use of barges containing desalination systems. Powered by nuclear reactors, these barges could travel to islands or coastlines struck by drought or natural disasters to supply them with drinking water and energy. Mikal Bøe is the chief executive of Core Power. He said, “You could have them moving around on an intermittent basis, filling up tanks.”
This may sound like a fantasy, but the U.S. Navy has supplied desalination services in the past with the help of its nuclear-powered ships. Russia already has a floating nuclear power station that was designed to power desalination facilities.
There are about twenty thousand desalination plants around the world. Almost all of them are onshore. The majority are located in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Desalination plants are located in the U.K., China, the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, Australia, and other countries. Some engineers claim that it might be cheaper to position desalination technology offshore because the seawater can be more easily pumped aboard.
For decades, engineers have imagined floating nuclear powered desalination systems. Core Power intends to use vessels like small container ships, but stack containers on board filled with desalination technology. A nuclear reactor onboard the vessels would supply the huge amount of power required.
Core Power’s floating nuclear desalination vessels could have power level outputs from five to seventy megawatts. A vessel with five megawatts of nuclear power could pump out thirty-five thousand cubic yards of fresh water every day.
In order to remove the salt from seawater, desalination systems pump treated seawater across a semi-permeable membrane at pressure. Osmosis is the movement of molecules in liquid across such membranes. Minerals are removed from water and a separate stream of very salty water called brine is generated. There are a variety of versions of this technology which have become ever more efficient. However, floating desalination systems are relatively rare. Saudi Arabia has just taken delivery of the first of three desalination barges which are the largest ever built.
Oisann Engineering has developed a desalination system called Waterfountain which they hope to sell to the expanding market for desalination. The company has various designs ranging from large ships to small buoys which all operate on the same principle. However, instead of using nuclear power, the OE desalination system utilize what is called subsea desalination which has been in use for decades.
Kyle Hopkins is the Chief Administrative Officer of Oisann Engineering. He said, “[The technology] was never commercialized because you still need subsea pumps to facilitate taking the water to the surface. We removed the pump.” He has declined to elaborate how the OE system works except for saying that their system takes advantage of the higher pressures on the seafloor to move water around which requires much less energy. He also mentioned that the pipeline from the vessel to shore could be raised so that gravity can assist the flow of water saving even more energy. Mr. Hopkins estimates that the technology could be roughly thirty percent more energy efficient than a conventional onshore desalination facility. OE is currently building a small prototype and hopes to install a commercial version in the Philippines in 2023.
Please read Part 2 next