Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Can Sea Water Desalination Save The World?" video.

  1. There is no such thing as a thorium reactor. Its proper name would be a uranium 233 breeding reactor. Thorium is fertile NOT fissile. Forty-years ago the US and USSR dropped any effort along the lines you think are so promising. Molten salt, so-called, thorium reactors can NEVER work. They destroy their containments so rapidly that they can't stay running for more than about 60-days. The ENTIRE list of materials -- over a twenty-five-year period -- had been tested for containment properties. It's been five-years now, and the Red Chinese are running into the exact same road blocks. So just stop babbling about thorium. It's a scheme that only works on the drawing board -- never in reality. BTW, U-233 is the WORST single threat to humanity, for it makes possible a back-pack atomic bomb. It takes less U-233 than U-235 or Pu-239 to craft a detonation -- quite a bit less. You don't WANT a thorium cycle. For if solved, there can be no way to stop the creation of U-233 on a grand scale. Ugh. U-233 is easily separated from thorium... chemically. So you have the purity of plutonium with a drastically simpler detonation mechanism. Again, you don't WANT a thorium cycle. Politically, Planet Earth is not ready for it.
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  2. I do my part, I feed my plants second hand water.
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  3. The biggest players are right along the Gulf. What they face is that the Gulf's water is not the same as ours -- it's saltier, yet. The Israeli technology is not so effective with their feed water. It's too shallow, too hot and too salty for it to go through the membranes that the Israelis have developed. For such plants to be efficient, they want pretty deep, cool, uncontaminated (think sterile) sea water. BTW, along the Gulf the humidity is so high that a gusher of fresh water pours off of their air conditioning evaporators. It is caught and used.
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  4.  @DrJohnnyJ  The Gulf has ALWAYS been more salty than the Indian Ocean. What you've experienced is due to strictly local conditions -- that is -- you've been near a desalinating plant. Not so far away, the ocean is going to overwhelm the powers of man. BTW, other pollutants than salt are usually the source of any ecological nightmare.
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  5. You're living in Siberia?
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  6.  @richardcranium3417  Around here, it's called grey water. Get your mind out of the gutter.
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  7.  @c.j.3404  Then the Soviets and Americans didn't know what they were doing when they abandoned a field of techno research after twenty-five years and billions of dollars -- but YOU do. Solid! The Red Chinese have run into the same wall -- or -- ironically -- the lack of a wall. When you state that U-233 makes a bad atomic bomb -- well the science on that is settled. The technology is hugely destabilizing. U-233 makes for the smallest bomb possible -- by quite a margin. Pu-239 needs all kinds of trick engineering for it needs super-density to fire off, etc. U-233 can get away with the Little Boy solution. But if it's treated like Pu-239 then the size of the weapon-pit really drops. Nice dis-information, you spew, here. The players in the atomic bomb space are not going to be influenced by your rant.
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  8.  @lechefski  I've posted this elsewhere, but there IS a viable route to virtually endless energy -- from the SUN. You see nature has crafted the world's largest solar collectors around our planet's equator. For our purposes, the Amazon rainforest solves everything. For the water vapor it releases flows westward to fall upon the Andes as rain and snow -- in STAGGERING amounts -- far exceeding your imagination. It's so rainy there that humanity can't tolerate it. (!) The hydro-potential there is enough to power the entire Western Hemisphere -- ALL energy needs -- not just electricity. We need to mass-produce Swiss type high-head, low-volume, high-pressure jest [Pelton Wheel] hydro-electric generators. They'd be best if they were Mono-Pole Generators which crank out staggering amps at low voltages. Mega-low-voltage-amps is exactly what you'd want to electrolyze mind-boggling amounts of water into HYDROGEN and Oxygen right at the foot of the Andes. Each generator would operate independently -- just venting well pressurized hydrogen gas into a network of pipes -- very much like today's natural gas fields. The hydrogen would then be sent off to reduce iron ore to iron and steel -- at the world's largest mine in Northern Brazil.... It would be sent off to a slew of alumina reduction plants located way downriver where ocean going ships can navigate the Amazon River. It would be sent over the Andes to Chile and Peru's Western Coasts -- where the dry climate would be IDEAL for hydro-reduction of toxic poisons and every other manner of industrial chemicals -- to be shipped across the Pacific to the USA, Red China, Japan, Korea, Australia -- even Canada. It would be PIPED under the ocean to those same markets. The cash flow from this bounty would make Peru one of the wealthiest nations (per capita) on Earth. And everything I've detailed here could begin tomorrow. It's all TOTALLY conventional engineering. Thorium reactors, fusion reactors will ALWAYS be totally uneconomic. My scheme will die when the Sun winks out. So, nothing is forever.
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  9.  @lechefski  Elon Musk is not promoting it. Yeah, it needs a seller of dreams to gain attention. Andean hydro-potential is FAR more viable than Musk's other dreams. We already know that the individual sub-systems work. Pelton wheels have been spinning for more than a century. A run-of-the-river hydro-dam is just as ancient. [ To keep costs down, one does not build a substantial containment dam. Such modular dams could be built small enough, light enough to be transported globally by ship and dirigible -- the latter for the final miles across the jungle. They could easily be remotely controlled as they would not need any synchronous bus -- like our modern power grid. They'd spin or not -- same as a windmill. But they would not really need co-ordinate any more than a natural gas well does with its neighbors in the grid.] How easy can you get? BTW, Peru is king of the mountain, but Columbia has staggering hydro-potential, too. The key is to NOT build big containment dams -- to NOT build near habitation -- and to settle for intermittent operation. Hydrogen, as a pressurized gas, will function as energy storage. BTW, when iron ore is reduced by hydrogen gas instead of coke you reduce slag production rather tremendously. Mexico has been using this method for decades, now. A 'steel town' no longer looks like a steel town. Indeed, hydrogen can reduce to metal most of the ores in use today. That reduction would not happen in the Amazonian jungle. You'd always pipe the gas to where it's a snap to locate a chemical// metals facility. Western Peru and Chile are DREAM locations for said global scale plants. It's my contention that it's cheaper to ship electricity as hydrogen gas versus high voltage DC power lines. The latter pretty much have to be in the sky. Hydrogen pretty much has to travel in pipes underground and UNDER THE SEA. Under the sea, the pipes would be PLASTIC -- titanic garden hoses, they'd be. You lay them from a continuous casting vessel, itself fed from a suite of supply ships even while still at sea, USN style. As for depth, think of them laying on the sea floor about 300m-1000m down. The gas pressure inside would be very close to the local water pressure, so the pipe would be under trivial strain. Biologically, at such a depth, the oceans are virtually a desert -- no sunlight.
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  10.  @lechefski  Actually, hydrogen gas has been handled for decades in this way. If there IS a leak, hydrogen gas shoots straight skyward -- being so light -- the exact opposite of propane -- the latter being a REAL worry within the industry. In all other aspects, hydrogen mimics methane/natural gas. The pipes do need special treatment because hydrogen will embrittle common steels. But this tic has been solved. Any free hydrogen gas in the atmosphere will be burned by sunlight into water vapor. It has absolutely no stability in the presence of oxygen. The kicker in my concept is that it needs a high profile patron -- kind of like FDR -- to kick start it. The numbers are vastly favorable because it's easy to scale up and it's wildly economic even now. Every item I've detailed is OLD NEWS to engineers -- even if they are novel to civilians. Check out Pelton wheels -- Monopole generators -- electrolysis -- BTW you can use high pressure water to generate high pressure gas in a single step by upping the voltage. So there's no need for gas compressors. This is significant because hydrogen gas (and helium) resist compression. These two gases don't behave like any other gas -- period. High pressure water will be right to hand at the bottom of a dam's feed stock pipe. How easy can it get?
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