Water scarcity because of freshwater waste & freshwater pollution are a big topic because of how water essential to human life. People can live for up to 40 days without food, but after 3 days without water a person becomes dangerously dehydrated.
It's not easy or cheap to use tugboats to drag icebergs to Australia. It's actually so hard no one has ever done so; scientists have only talked about it & studied it at great lengths. Not even billionaires in arid regions have succeeded at dragging icebergs to their home countries.
Bagging the icebergs in giant polymer bags then pulling the floating bag along the sea to the destination seems like a more practical approach to fresh water harvesting of the ice sheets breaking off Antartica.
I personally like nuclear sea desalination technology to make domestic water, since there are oceans covering seventy percent of the world!
I am a big fan of nuclear fission, especially fuel breeding that can make virtually endless nuclear fuels for fission reactors. Nuclear fission heat can make green hydrogen for transportation energy in fuel cells or even as a cryogenic H2 for hydrogen fueled engines like that Toyota GR Yaris 3-cylinder turbo running on hydrogen gas combustion.
Flush the toilet, take a shower, wash your hands or the dishes, clothing washing machines, wash your car, cook with boiling water, coffee, espresso, tea, soda, beer, wine, water makes agricultural irrigation possible so we can make food for billions of people to fuel human brain & muscle activities responsible through fossil fuel energy multiplied machines to modify the biosphere with air & water pollution & thoughtless inconsiderate scarcity mindset development by greedy people who seek political power over others with deranged satanic thinking.
Water can be harvested out of humid air directly using electricity in air-conditioning technologies that dehumidify air while cooling it. A typical domestic dehumidifier uses a pressurized refrigerant gas like R134A inside a system with a sealed electric pump that pressurizes that gas to liquid vaporize phase change cool your fridge for example or to make a cold surface to pass humid air over so the water in the air condenses onto the cold surface the way that dew forms on the side of a glass of ice water.
This means HVAC using electricity can be used as a heat pump to move heat around in such amazing things as an air-source mini-split heat-pump with SEER rating of 38 & COP of 4.1-7.4 :) Heat or cool indoor spaces with less electricity with Mini-Split Air-Source Heat-Pumps, Mitsubishi Electronics makes the highest quality & most efficient models.
The water produced by condensation of humidity contains no ions, so you have to add mineral salts to it to make it healthy to consume. You might also have to boil vapor condenser capture water or run it through an activated carbon filter to clean up the water for drinking or cooking with it.
Water, Water, Water
Ultra-high purity water used in Chip Fabs like those of TSMC with chip gear made by ASML
Intel uses a lot of high purity water at its chip fabs around the world.
In farming & agriculture irrigation water priceless!
Drinking water required for people to live, where there is water there is life!
Larger wind power turbines with a cubic relationship between rotor size & power output, but the generator has to cut out power if the blades spin too fast during storms for example to protect the tower. 3 blade configuration in vertical setups are the most common because it can be turned away from the wind to modulate power output. Offshore wind leverages technology developed by oil drilling platforms in the worlds oceans.
Monopiles work, or a heavy concrete dingy gravity-based approach, or you can setup a hollow frame of steel tubs in a jacket configuration. Consider Danish wind farms off the northwest coast of the low land, 3 to 5 meters deep or shallow. Later during construction, it was discovered that the see water was too shallow for large ships. 700k to 1000K tons of concrete with a jack up setup to lift the turbines, just like the offshore oil platforms.
Hammered into the ground like a jack hammer the mono-pile create a lot of noise during construction. Everything has to be connected with cables, undersea cables, while the installation only costs about 6% of the wind farms lifetime cost. Calm weather conditions idea for construction, but violent squalls & corrosive sea water spray makes it hard to service the Offshore wind turbines, so maintenance costs for offshore wind turbines 2-3X higher than onshore Wind Power. The gearbox the least reliable part & complicated & expensive to fix.
Offshore wind popular because many nations have windy coastal areas with water shallow enough to make developing offshore wind power feasible, especially as the larger turbines achieve economical economies of scale power output as cheap as $0.04/kWh making it even cheaper than coal power when the wind is blowing // that's the rub with renewables with intermittent output, the sun shines and wind blows but not exactly in synchronization with grid power loads varying in what is known as load following in the commercial power industry.
Natural gas peak-R plants have excellent fast throttle load following. Nuclear fission power creates firm stable baseload power, as do hydro-damns which can also act as pumped storage for energy storage & irrigation. This means that energy storage technology will become very popular, especially bidirectional charging electric vehicles.
Nuclear Fission reactors have to have water for cooling, though they can use domestic waste sewage liquids too like that Palo Verde reactor complex in Arizona. This is also why I like gas cooled high temp reactors that can produce green hydrogen :) Think fuel breeding IFR & Fast Neutron reactors with integrated onsite fuel reprocessing of spent fuel rod elements :)
Water removal in our Harvest Right Freeze Dryer, first the food prepared onto metal trays & deep frozen, then inside the resistive heaters in rack shelves heats them gently while under strong vacuum so the water sublimes away as a gas that condenses to form ice on the cold chamber walls, thus removing most of the water from the food in the treys. I particularly enjoyed gummy bears & ice-cream sandwiches that were freeze-dried. I have learned online the doing so to coffee beans & then grinding them makes a nice instant coffee :)
Food Dehydrators are another popular way to remove water from food to extend its shelf life without weird chemicals like food processing companies tend to do :) Without sugar or salt, drying the food makes it last longer :) This is why meat, fish, produce, berries, vegetables and other stuff around the outside of the grocery store are highly perishable, they are hydrated and bacteria & mold & fungi like to eat hydrated foods, especially if they are warm & wet at the same time. Your learn about keeping food hot or cold but never warm because warm propagates bacteria, just like the microbes in our gut require. In and on food produced bacteria can cause food born illness, vomiting & diarrhea. You can eat probiotic rich foods, drink probiotic beverages, you can even take probiotic supplements to restore beneficial microbes to your gut, to improve digestion or help make your tummy less upset.
This is why fridges keep stuff cold, and why freezing makes food last longer. Dry, cool or very cold makes fresh foods last longer by limiting pathogen growth. Say "Thank God I have an Immune System & Gut Microbes :)" because we eat pathogen unwittingly all the time, in small doses that normally does not cause gastroenteritis thankfully.
There are microbes on our skin, in our hair, in our eyes, in our nasal system, throat, gastrointestinal tract, inside & outside an ecosystem of biota or flora from nature, without which we would not have proper immunity or immune system function. While mushrooms break down forest litter into soil, some fungi are pathogenic to humans & cause yeast infections, jock itch or athletes foot. Think about how wine was made in antiquity when people stomped the grapes barefoot.
There is an interesting U gap with hygiene where people overly hygienic can actually harm your immune system. The words "Dirty and Clean" are relative. If you have ever tried to vacuum sputter deposit metals onto glass that was not perfectly cleaned way beyond normal human standards for the world clean, then you get poor results. This is also why ultra purity water required at a chip fab, as anything in the water can cause defects in the produced integrated circuits. Anything that reduces yield on the wafers is minimized to maximize profits.
The ASML machines are the most expensive machines in the world. We are talking about millions of parts that take years to develop into a functioning system that has to shoot a laser pulse at a droplet of liquified tin metal moving at 1000 mile per hour several hundred times per second without getting any tin vapor on the exceedingly costly mirrors that move the deep UV light produced into the aperture refractor system to copy etched nickel metal mask patterns onto 50-250 layers of IC light machined into photo-resist photopolymers applied to the wafer.
Even making the large silicon boules to cut into IC wafers a modern marvel symphony of applied technology, energy, human time, thought & activity. Computers & information technology is the composite outcomes of millions of people working together across time & place throughout history, such that most of what we have today in electronics literally built on the shoulders of giants who came with precursor technologies long before smartphones existed.
Thus without clean water, Google or Alphabet Inc would not exist. Without water humanity would die off entirely. Without water nature cannot function. The water cycle in the world is paramount to modulating solar incoming energy to keep climate & weather in a carefully balanced state otherwise runaway warming would render all life on Earth cooked off by forest fires & temperatures so high your AC system could never keep up.
We live in Amazing times where we are bumping up against tipping points in Earth's energy balance with CO2 emissions for example, where storm systems are becoming more powerful, droughts & forest fires more intense & longer lasting, where air & water pollution problems are getting worse because coal power still around on a grander scale now as billions of people embrace the American Dream style 6kW materialistic lifestyle of mansions for everyone, 3 car households, microwaves, ovens, fridges, internet, computers & more, more clothing, so much more that people even rent spaces for stuff they are not using.
If we are talking about real wealth and prosperity for everyone, it's about making clean healthy foods & clean water & air for everyone. It's about phasing out dirty combustion & broadly decarbonizing all human activity on the Earth. Thats a hard target, much harder than dragging icebergs around the world using diesel fueled tugboats or nuclear icebreakers.
We need all governments to focus on electrification of transportation, renewables + energy storage, new nuclear, battery electric vehicles, biofuels using crop waste, sustainable farming practices that protect soil & bee's. We need to work smarter in all domains to make life thrive in the future, especially making lots of clean electricity for everyone's benefit. More energy to energize & empower future generation without burning fossil fuels.
Made with nuclear fuel breeding reactors, new Solar PV and New Wind Power and New Geothermal, New Energy Storage, New trending & emerging solutions that solve climate change & enable people to thrive more :) Especially Technolgies made with earth abundant minerals, ways figured out how to stop using rare earths in all the electronics & still get amazing data throughput in quantum computers used for CFD to optimize blended wing aircraft at Boeing & Airbus that use 90% less Jet Fuel to move the same number of people & mass of cargo long distances around the world. Hydrogen hybrid electric passenger blended wing aircraft that silently land & have silent take off, only using fuel to cruise once up to higher altitudes.
We can use electric spin launch to move big mass into space to build massive space stations on the Moon, orbiting the Earth and to send to Mars for support of Mars colonization after terraforming Mars to make it more habitable. Spin launches of concrete & steel & solar PV CIGS + wiring to build a Dyson Sphere around Earth's Sun so we can control the solar output that hits the Earth and so we can energize mankind to infinity & beyond with proton drive technology to give relativistic velocity performance. I am talking about super advanced nuclear fusion propulsion spacecraft that moves big heavily shielded spacecraft fast to ferry human people around the universe in time frames relevant to their lifespan.
I am talking about using nuclear (fission & fusion) heat to desalinate Sea Water on a grand scale (tens of thousands of new reactors) to end all water scarcity problems & to stop sea levels from rising. These same reactors can make green hydrogen to energize the decarbonization of transportation even with engines that combust hydrogen gas as a fuel source! Vastly more energetically broad that battery powered vehicles. Hydrogen offers way higher energy density than any new or near-term batteries. This means more performance or longer range in hydrogen fuel cell aircraft for example.
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