
Electricity generated with water, salt and a three-atoms-thick membrane - EugeneOZ
http://phys.org/news/2016-07-electricity-salt-three-atoms-thick-membrane.html
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voiceofdead
Looks like there is something wrong with numbers. Article says 1 square meter
will be enough to produce 1MW of energy. But, 1MW of energy will be surely
enough to desalinate water for covering 1 sq. m., isn't it?

So, place it at sea-side and get "infinite" amount of energy.

But, more probable, author of the article confused 1MW and 1mW.

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nucleardog
The paper seems to be here, although all I'm getting back right now is long
load times and a generic error page:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18593.html)

I found a copy elsewhere (won't link, piracy, etc) and it does indeed claim an
estimated density of 1 _megawatt_ per square metre.

There definitely seems to be _something_ missing here, because another paper I
found
([http://www.ijesd.org/papers/243-B20001.pdf](http://www.ijesd.org/papers/243-B20001.pdf))
claims a typical reverse osmosis plant processing seawater uses 3-10kWh to
desalinate a cubic metre of seawater.

They don't have any information on water consumption (which I'm really curious
about), but the break-even point on energy consumption is ~333m^3/hr and, as a
layman, that seems like a pretty high flow rate for how they describe this
working.

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SeanDav
Other potential problems are the life span of the membrane, and how to keep it
clean. I would imagine that seawater is full of impurities that would cause
havoc with a membrane in real world use.

