Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU), together with colleagues from the Technical University of Milan, have developed a program that allows you to quickly and accurately assess the economic efficiency of any technology for producing drinking water using nuclear fuel. The scientists’ work was published in the journal Desalination.
The most common energy source for desalination plants is now fossil fuels – mainly oil. However, its combustion in large quantities leads to environmental degradation. Nuclear power is an environmentally friendly alternative, but investors are skeptical about the cost-effectiveness of this method.
The program developed by scientists takes into account more than 200 factors: various properties of water, the environment, the parameters of the desalination plant and the nuclear reactor itself. According to one of its developers, Sadega Khashayar, Senior Lecturer at the SPbPU Energy Institute Atomic and Thermal Energy College, many formulas and algorithms are “stitched” into the program, thanks to which you can achieve the coveted. The figure in 10 seconds – the cost of one cubic meter of fresh water.
The program can be used to calculate nuclear desalination with the VVER-1000, one of the most common reactors in the world.
According to the calculations, the cost of desalination for Saudi Arabia will be 0.5159 $/m3, for UAE – 0.4276 $/m3, for Egypt – 1.4402 $/m3, for Morocco – 0.5232 $/m3. According to Ekaterina Sokolova, another co-author of the publication, these figures are quite comparable to tap water prices.
Source: Ferra
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
