Water desalination

 Santa Barbara is about to go online with a water desalination plant that will provide 30% of the city’s needs. This prompted the recollection that my dad worked for years on water desalination, even consulting after retirement. According to my brother Mike, he foresaw that the approach he was researching—boiling and condensation—would be overtaken by reverse osmosis, which is indeed what the Santa Barbara plant uses. Mike also sent me a link to a 1991 LA Times article that quotes our dad:

“The research was funded primarily by the Atomic Energy Commission, which was looking for uses for what it expected to be cheap energy produced by nuclear power plants, and by the Department of Interior, which foresaw water shortages in the West.
“Somewhere along the way, the Department of Interior lost interest, partly because the California Water Project (which brings water to Southern California from the North) was under way and it was thought that it would relieve the water shortage,” said chemical engineer David Eissenberg of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Cheap atomic energy also proved to be an illusion. “The funds dried up and nothing much has happened since then,” Eissenberg said.”
*snip*
“The so-called multistage flash distillation plants in the Middle East use a variety of tricks developed in U.S. laboratories--including recapturing the heat given off when steam condenses and carrying out part of the evaporation at lowered pressures--to produce about eight or nine pounds of water per 1,000 BTUs.
The efficiency of such plants can be boosted to as much as 13 pounds of water per 1,000 BTUs, but the Saudis and other nations rich in natural gas have not seen the need to pursue high efficiencies.
“The Saudis are very conservative in design and operation,” said Oak Ridge’s Eissenberg. “They’re not interested in improving the design, but in replicating a proven design.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-02-18-mn-1197-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1PGYb3jdE4PaUmo8DuFexcJXpfIg-HV4A-zFzTZuinywykYXHZPZuN_NI

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