Critics of desalination agree, adding that such high costs are preventing those U.S. cities that are actually transforming seawater into potable water from fully utilizing their existing facilities.
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The salt of the seawater draws the fresh water across the membrane, leading to a build-up of pressure which forces water through the turbine, generating electricity.
We also spotlighted the Networking Nature exhibit at the Venice Biennale -- a small ecosystem that lives off of seawater and produces fresh drinking water.
Sadly, due to the nature of the seawater, even when the water has dried, what is left of his split-level ranch-style home will still smell like the bay.
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Estuary: mouth of a river, where fresh river water mixes with the seawater.
Cost, it adds, has been the biggest obstacle to development, noting that it is much more expensive to purify seawater than it is to treat fresh water.
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Its patented reduced-pressure distillation system can reportedly convert 10 liters of seawater into 3.7 liters of fresh water.
Meanwhile, engineers are continuing to pump some 11, 500 tonnes of low-level radioactive seawater into the sea so the more highly contaminated water from reactor No 2 can be stored in waste buildings.
The 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide deposited in our oceans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution are making seawater more acidic, already affecting life in cold-water areas such the Pacific Northwest.
With few sources of fresh water in the region, the country has relied on desalinating seawater for domestic use -- a technology that has been essential to the country's growth, according to advocates.
In federal water desalination policy, why the politically preferred brackish groundwater desalination instead of seawater?
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The seawater down there is so cold that when natural gas bubbles out of the well into the water it forms methane hydrates, which clog the uptake pipe.
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Organisms that make shells or have skeletons that are exposed to seawater, such as clams, snails and sea butterflies, could see their shells dissolve in water that is too acidic.
It is equivalent to the quantity of fresh water proposed to be imported from Turkey and the total annual production capacity of a major seawater desalination plant.
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