Harnessing Clean Water from Power Plant Emissions

[NNadir]

7. My feeling is that the membrane condenser technology is more suited to retrofitting coastal...

...reactors of current popular designs.

If I were going to build high temperature reactors designed to capture carbon and fresh water from seawater, I'd do it very differently, basically by exploiting the fact that salts are insoluble in supercritical water.

Supercritical water has remarkable properties that are very, very, very different than liquid water.

It also, depending on how it's used, be a fairly powerful oxidant, which means that it is itself reduced to hydrogen in the redox reaction.

Supercritical water is also a decent heat transfer tool, and of course, a working fluid for Rankine engines.

To the extent that heat must be rejected to the environment, as required by the second law of thermodynamics, membrane condensers can improve the efficiency of the desalination portion so far it is an end goal.

I see a lot of potential products in this kind of scheme - liquid fuels, clean water, electricity, process heat, and material transport all originating from one device.