Solving the World Water Problems: What McKinsey & Company does not say

McKinsey & Company, the management consultant company whose advice was so helpful toENRON, Swiss-air, Kmart, and Global Crossing, has now published a 185 page report on current and future world water shortages. McKinsey & Company is of course a darling of the Greens because of a previous report that suggested that huge amounts of carbon savings were possible with energy efficiency. Form this the anti-nuclear Greens concluded that energy efficiency would make the construction of new nuclear plants unnecessary. This is of course preposterous nonsense, but McKinsey & Company has done nothing to disabuse the anti-nuclear fanatics. Now McKinsey & Company has come up with a new report on global water issues.

There is no question that world water issues constitute serious problems and water shortages create multiple problems for many nations including many areas in the United States. There are, however, a good solution to the world wide shortage of good quality water that the McKinsey and Company report completely ignored, the use of nuclear desalinization. This is not a new idea. In 1963 Phillip Hammond, a nuclear pioneer who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, suggested that waste heat from nuclear power plants could be used to distill large amounts of sea water. ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg, ever a visionary, quickly realized the implications of Hammond's idea. Nuclear power can cause the deserts to bloom Weinberg told the Kennedy Administration. The Idea was presented to the 1964 United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, and was endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and by the Johnson Administration. Research began at Oak Ridge, and quickly yielded improvements in both distillation technology, and reverse osmosis (RO) technology. Despite the rapid progress, the Johnson Administration, faced with mounting costs for the Vietnam War, cut funding to the ORNL Nuclear desalinization project, and prematurely ending this very promising project.

The termination of nuclear desalinization research at ORNL was hardly the end of exploration of the use of nuclear power for nuclear desalinization. In the Soviet Union, the concept was connected with the fast reactor research. The Soviet experimental BN-350 demonstrated that large scale nuclear desalinization of the brackish water from the Caspian Sea was possible. Most of the heat produced by by the BN-350 was used in the desalinization process, and up to 120,000 cubic meters (or about 100 acre feet) of fresh water per day were produced.

Currently, dedicated desalinization plants are almost without exception operated with fossil fuel heat sources. or utilized reverse osmosis, a desalinization method that forces water through a membrane under pressure.Osmosis does not require heat, but electricity is normally use to provide the energy needed to force the water. However waste heat from nuclear plants can be substituted from the heat created by burning fossil fuels. In addition electricity generated by nuclear facilities can be used to drive reverse osmosis desalinization. This opens some interesting does for conventional nuclear technology, as well as for advanced generation IV reactors.

One of the problems of the post carbon grid is the generation of part time power. Base load power is generated twenty four hours a day seven days a week. But electrical demand goes up in the day time. But excess nuclear capacity available at night need not go to waste. It can be put to work generating electricity to drive reverse osmoses. Dual purpose nuclear generators, for example, a reactor can be used to produce water most of the time, but switch from producing water to feeding the grid during periods of peak demand. Load following would be possible while operating a reverse osmosis facility. As load demand increases, electricity can be switched from the osmosis plant to the grid, and as electrical demand drops, electricity can be switched back the osmosis process.

The co-generation of electricity and water will greatly increase the thermal efficiency of nuclear power facilities, and the sale of water will add to the facility's revenue stream. Of course, electricity/water cogeneration will not be possible everywhere. Co-generation requires a source of salty, or brackish water, and a need for fresh water. Most co-generation facilities can be located close to the sea. But over half of the population of the United States lives near the sea, many in areas that have or will face acute water shortages. The American Southwest faces a grim future of long term drought, and the California water shortage of continues to grow. The long term prospects for the Colorado River are particularly grim, and researchers are now predicting that Lake Mead and Lake Powell could both run dry in little over a decade. Thus in the Southwest, particularly in California, nuclear co-generatrion of water and electricity offers the only plausible plan for alleviating the growing water shortage.

Finally it should be noted that reactor heat that is rejected during the electrical generation process can not only be used for desalinization, but it could also be used for district heating. The brine, leftover from the desalinization still has useful heat that can be captured and piped to area homes, business and factories. Not only can the heat be used to for winter heating, but it can also heat water, and can also power summer air conditioning. Such a system would have the double benefit of increasing reactor thermal efficiency while lowering electrical demand.

Finally it should be noted that the brine produced by the nuclear desalinization process contains many valuable minerals, that have been sufficiently concentrated by the desalinization process that their recovery is possible. The recovery of minerals from the nuclear desalinization process would thus provide a further revenue stream for a reactor owner.

It thus should be noted that reactors are a very promising source of desperately needed fresh water, and that nuclear desalinization has the potential to add new revenue sources to reactor owners. This is the story that the McKinsay & Company report on world water resources failed to tell.