this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
177 points (89.7% liked)

News

23376 readers
2493 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

MIT engineers and collaborators developed a solar-powered device that avoids salt-clogging issues of other designs.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You are ignoring that saltwater is available in many, many more places than freshwater. Building a local efficient desalination plant can absolutely be more cost-efficient than transporting freshwater for hundreds of kilometres. Don't simplify so much you lose all perspective.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am not ignoring that, it is also vastly more contaminated than fresh water with microplastics and all the other grabage shipping companies and countries have been dumping into it for the better part of a century now.

I'm not saying it is impossible to do or not a potentially sensible option in certain places, I am saying it is not going to be cheaper than tap water anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

This system uses a variant of distillation to desalination the water. This means that a good part of the filtration and purification process required to make most fresh water potable would no longer be necessary, so it could be cheaper than regular tap water, especially in places where the starting water just isn't that great to begin with. It also is solar powered and looks like it could be pretty scalable, so it may be a viable option.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m not saying it is impossible to do or not a potentially sensible option in certain places, I am saying it is not going to be cheaper than tap water anywhere.

How does this work? If it's a sensible option in certain places (those without access to tap water), how can tap water be cheaper? Why wouldn't everybody just bring tap water to those places as well if it was cheaper?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It might still be more expensive but more resilient to other external factors such as embargoes, wars, whatever might influence delivery of other water sources. Cost isn't the only factor to decide what technology or solution should be implemented.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It is usually the driving factor in our global economy.

I don't see how your point makes sense - transport can easily make tap water more expensive than salt water, but you're acting like it's literally impossible for transportation costs to be higher than desalination costs. Why?