Nuclear Desalination: An Alternative Solution to the Water Shortage

Abstract

Global water shortage is one of the rising problems that, nowadays and worldwide, Countries and governments have to face. People from many countries have to deal with scarcity of water supply and aquifer pollution that could jeopardize their health and agriculture. Desalination process could be one of the most promising method to hinder such phenomenon. During this work we analyzed different desalination processes and the state of art of the technology. In this paper we carried on a deep evaluation of the state of art of desalination processes. Obviously all these methods need a driving force in terms of energy. With the aim of a more environmental friendly scenario, nuclear energy has been chosen as energy source for different desalination processes, implementing the so called nuclear desalination. Moreover a nuclear scenario analysis has been studied for the UAE (United Arab Emirates), one of the countries that have to deal with water shortage and that presents today an ambitious nuclear program.

Economic Feasibility of Energy Supply by Small Modular Nuclear Reactors on Small Islands: Case Studies of Jeju, Tasmania and Tenerife

“…A smaller-sized, factory-based manufacturing process using standardized components, coupled with the clustering of multiple units of SMRs within 'energy parks', can potentially reduce the long-run construction cost and shorten the delivery period [31,32]. Moreover heat production from SMRs (an inevitable by-product of the Carnot cycle of heat engines that is exploited today in fossil-fuel-powered combined heat-and-power units in Europe), if aligned with district heating systems (>100 • C) in cold climates, or else the provision of evaporative or reverse osmosis desalination services in tropical islands, could generate other economically attractive revenue streams [32,[35][36][37][38]. High-temperature thermal output of advanced reactor technologies can be used for other industrial purposes, such as petroleum refining (>300 • C), hydrogen production (>400~600 • C) [39,40], coal gasification (>800 • C) and blast furnace steel making (>900 • C) processes [7].…”