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Desalting Plants: This is cheap enough to use the water for irrigation near the desalting plant, but not if the water must be transported long distances. There are, however, many areas of the world where inland water supplies are brackish, somewhat salty, and not fresh enough to use for drinking or for growing crops. New techniques using membranes under pressure to separate the salts from the water are being developed rapidly. Electricity generated as a by-product of nuclear desalting plants on a seacoast could be transported inland to areas where brackish water is a problem and used to run these "membrane-under-pressure" plants.
Desalting Seawater.—Supplementing defi cient supplies of freshwater by using desalted seawater has received increasing study and research. Its use has been considered by such seaside metropolises as New York and Los Angeles, in view of the successful desalting to supply thousands of persons on South Pacific islands in World War II.
Perhaps the most dramatic new advance in nuclear-reactor technology is the development of the atom-powered desalting plant to distill fresh water from the oceans. A number of desalting plants are already located along many arid coastlines of the world and on many arid islands, but they are expensive to operate and their yield of fresh water is generally limited. In the United States desalinization plants using fossil fuels produce fresh water at a cost of about $1 per 1,000 gal (3,800 I). With the enormous quantities of inexpensive heat that can be produced by nuclear reactors, however, the cost can probably be reduced considerably to make the process cheap enough for most urban uses. |
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