Technology

From some digging the "amazing" part is that it's floating. I'm not sure how they do distribution and collection, but from the UMA page it's a vapor distillation process - same as the old survival distillation process but on a floating platform. Solar energy heats the water, evaporating some, and it is passed over a cooler to condense the water. The "no brine" claim comes from the fact that they so inefficient that the localize increase in brine concentration due to the extraction of desalinated water is within the limits for not requiring treatment - they're just lifting evaporate from the surface and (I'm guessing) using a low power circulation loop to draw water from below the surface as their condensation cooling loop. I suppose it's possible that the cooling may even be a convectively driven vs a photoelectric conversion and standard pump, which would be useful for low maintenance. It's a cool project, no doubt. I'm still not sure how they're doing bulk collection and distribution of 1000kg of water a day. Maybe that's the 17% energy figure. Maybe it's someone else's problem to solve.

I know you're just trying to get me to read the article instead of commenting on the headline like I know what it's all about, but that's not going to happen!

The article says the desalination plant designed by this student uses 17% of the power a normal desalination plant, meaning a 5+x reduction in energy consumption.

"With nine square meters, it consumes only 17% of energy compared to traditional desalination plants."

Comparing based on size doesn't seem too useful. How many square meters is a "traditional desalination plant"? How much salty water can it purify into drinkable water given a certain amount of energy compared to the student's design?

I hope it's an improvement over existing designs, but unfortunately this article doesn't have any actual content. It's clickbait that hopes people will jump to conclusions like "it's a 5x reduction in energy compared to the traditional approach" because that drives traffic.

For some things hydrogen doesn't really make sense, but for everything else it's basically a form of a battery. The one big advantage it has over batteries is its weight.

To be fair, it wasn't designed for hydrogen, but helium.

It's like putting diesel into a petrol engine (or vice versa), and saying petrol is bad when the engine inevitably explodes.

Yeah, it seems to me that you only have three options when it comes to the brine, and none of them are good- bury it and hope it doesn't get into the water table, leave it where it is and hope it doesn't leak, or dump it back in the ocean and increase ocean salinity. I don't see another option.

Fine. What do you do about the salt?

It's bad. Very bad.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/salt-scourge-the-dual-threat-of-warming-and-rising-salinity

I said this in another comment- I'd be very worried it would get into the water table. That brine is not just salt. It's also full of toxins. But maybe there are good solutions that I don't know about.