Submitted by MiloFrank76 t3_10paoln in explainlikeimfive
Every few years, you hear about some new revolution in the process, but nothing much after. Why is that? Is it very hard to scale up or...?
Also, is it going to become more viable as fresh water is becoming more scarce?
Thank you in advance.
Thank you all. So it was basically what I thought. It's not hard to do, but it is not really feasible due to many factors.
dkf295 t1_j6ja1cf wrote
Desalination itself is super easy. Take salt water, evaporate and recondense it to separate the salt and other minerals/etc from the water. You can do it yourself on a stovetop or a campfire.
The problem is that there's no way to scale it easy for the massive demands of human use (personal, industrial, and agriculture). It takes a decent amount of energy to heat up water, and you need to do something with all of the salt you've got left over - no matter where you dump it, you're going to cause environmental problems. Salt is also corrosive so there's longevity problems with equipment/piping/etc but those are relatively minor problems with partial solutions. You can't ignore physics, or just make giant piles of salt disappear.