Peter H. Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit environmental and water policy think tank based in Oakland, Calif., distills an answer:

The desalination of water requires a lot of energy and, hence, money. The price varies widely from place to place, ranging from just under a dollar up to several dollars to produce a cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water, and efforts to reduce the energy requirements have not kept pace with rising energy costs. The cost of drawing freshwater from a river or aquifer is much lower— about 10 to 20 cents per cubic meter—and farmers often pay even less. As a result, desalination currently satisfies less than half a percent of human water needs. Desalination carries environmental costs as well: seawater intakes can suck up small ocean creatures, upsetting the food chain, and the process’s leftover brine is so strong that its return to the ocean can prove harmful to coastal ecosystems. Nevertheless, desalination’s appeal is growing as other sources of water disappear and the price gap closes. Finding a new source of freshwater or building a dam in a place such as California, for instance, can drive costs up to 60 cents per cubic meter. Far more must be done to use water more efficiently, but with the world’s population swelling and the water supply dwindling, the economic tide may soon turn in favor of desalination. ■

Saudi Arabia Shoaiba Unit 1 - An oil powered combined electricity power and flash desalination water plant.

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- Using Nuclear Energy to Repair Our Water Supplies -

INTEGRATION OF NUSCALE SMR WITH DESALINATION TECHNOLOGIES     https://www.nuscalepower.com/     https://www.ltbridge.com/  (Next generation nuclear fuel rods.)

There is a staggering amount of much-cheaper-than-coal nuclear heat available for desalinating the oceans to obtain fresh water.

7 year membrane life.

Comparing "Multi-Stage Flash Desalinators" and "Reverse-Osmosis Desalinators".

Your website author is using Reverse-Osmosis desalinated water from the largest desalinator facility in the Western Hemisphere,
located just South of Tampa, Florida.

There are over 16,000 flash water desalinator stages producing 75 million cubic meters of fresh water per day.
60% is seawater, but 35% is desalination of brackish ground and surface water. Concentrated seawater gives you a head start for extracting it's dissolved uranium using water softener ion-exchange technology.
Japan holds all the key primary international patents for this process.

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Nuclear Fission Water Desalination + Electricity Generation

Control stations for 12 NuScale Reactor Units. - Not completely unlike Henry Ford's Model T engine, the very simple NuScale Reactor units need relatively little in the way of controls.

Your web site author worked 1959 & 1960 as an electrical engineering intern making control room instrumentation installation diagrams for the Monroe, Michigan, Fermi I 69 megawatt (electrical) sodium fast fission reactor.

Integration of NuScale Small Modular Reactor (SMR) With Desalination Technologies

Note: The first operational ultra-safe, inexpensive NuScale SMR has been under construction at Idaho National Labs for about a year. It's power will go to the U.S. Pacific Northwest Grid.
A NuScale reactor power plant can have as many as 12 reactor modules, starting modestly but, over time, enabling a rather large city to have all the electricity and desalinated water it needs.

Desalination is extremely energy-intensive but both the energy reserves - ocean's uranium - and ocean's saline water reserves - are vast.

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Electricity Demand varies widely over both the day and the year.
This means you can run the nuclear reactor flat-out all the time, shifting between mostly electricity and mostly water desalination every 24 hours, and just pump your extra water into a water reservoir until needed.

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Nuclear power plants installed on barges can easily bring clean electricity to the world's massive coastal populations, then return to shipyards for repair, refueling.
Several countries already have nuclear power plant barges in the works. China has an excellent model under development.

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