Nuclear-Powered Drinking Water
Many people don't take a shortage of drinking water seriously. After all, everybody knows that 70% of the Earth's surface is covered in the stuff (except Mel Gibson-hunting aliens, for some reason). We just pull the salt out of that and we're fine, right? The problem is that desalination of seawater is an energy-consuming process, and if you want to watch somebody's head explode just go up to an economist and say "What if the price of water was linked to the price of oil?"
The simple math is that fossil fuel supplies are going down while the population is going up, if those two trends cross "It would be bad" (as stated by famed expert in Crossing-things-bad-ology, Dr Egon Spengler). The fact that it might also leave many dying of thirst as civilization collapses is just the dehydration icing on the Mad Max dystopian future cake. The usual raft of renewable energy suspects have been suggested, but until now the water problem seemed to be entry #232 on the big "We should really get this working" list.
Recently Dr Verma of the SLIET Department of Physics put forward a solution - floating nuclear reactors which, in addition to generating electricity for nearby heavily populated areas, can use their waste heat to desalinify seawater and render it drinkable. To summarize: that's a heavily populated city depending for both power and water on a nuclear reactor floating just off the coast, and that couldn't sound more like the plot of an action movie if Bruce Willis was explaining it to a sassy female reporter. No one has yet confirmed if Dr Verma is associated with COBRA or the SPECTRE, but James Bond has apparently been sent to investigate.
It's a novel solution and one that shows the absolute schism that exists in many scientist brains between the "Science" lobe and the "What people will say" center. We live in a world where a career can be ended by being misquoted as having the words "race" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, so if you're going to put together a plan with "nuclear waste heat" and "drinking water" next to each other you've got an uphill battle ahead. Let alone the whole "floating nuclear power plant" angle.
Luckily not all funding agencies are swayed by FOX news and "big scary words", and BARC (the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) have already commissioned a small-scale plant capable of refining 50 tons of water per day. They are apparently in talks with Jean Claude Van Damme to act as the facility's chef, Chief splits-performer and Executive Director of Terrorist Removal.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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