With the recent drought being 4 years in a row in California, more people realize how important water is. What some people are thinking about now is turning the water in our oceans into drinking water.
Currently, as you probably know, seawater is undrinkable. Due to the salt in the seawater, drinking seawater would ironically make you more dehydrated. However, people are now looking into cheap and efficient ways to remove the salt from the water, thereby making the water drinkable.
The process of removing the salt from salty water like seawater is called desalination. The water is drinkable after the process.
There are two major methods to separate salt from water: vacuum distillation and reverse osmosis, but both of these methods currently take up A LOT of energy and are much more expensive than just finding new freshwater supplies.
So what is the future of desalination? The answer may lie in Nuclear Fusion!
The process of nuclear fusion involves smashing two atoms into a single atom, creating a lot of energy in the process. If harness properly, this massive amount of energy can be used to accomplish many feats which are conventionally too energy costly, such as desalination. If the technology is implemented, the cost of desalination can be dramatically dropped.
Submitted by: Hong Guo
