Nick Palmer wrote:
The one thing Australia has is gigantic quantities of sun and vast spaces of "outback"
I think it would be uneconomical to use this for a massive desalination project. It would be good for ordinary levels of electricity. If the solar array can be constructed near the ocean perhaps direct use of solar heat can be used in the first stages of desalination, with more sophisticated techniques in the last stages. There are various low-tech solar distillation schemes but they leave a great deal of salt in the water. As I said, desalinated water used for agriculture has to have the lowest levels of salt you can manage, to avoid salt build-up. I think I read that the levels of salt allowed for potable water are higher than the levels the Israelis use for agriculture.
I think the world's largest desalination plant is still the Ashkelon plant, Seawater Reverse Osmosis (SWRO):
<http://www.water-technology.net/projects/israel/>http://www.water-technology.net/projects/israel/
They say "seawater" because other plants these days start with brackish freshwater or polluted freshwater. The technology is branching out and making progress, especially in places such as Los Angeles.
Until we can realise CF/LENR technology which doesn't destroy the (expensive) lattice/matrix that supports it, I don't think we can expect energy "too cheap to meter" too soon.
The lattice itself is not expensive. That is to say, the act of forming the metal into a lattice will not be expensive with mass production. (It is incredibly expensive with today's manual techniques.) Disregarding the cost of materials, a mass-produced cell should cost roughly as much per kilogram as a NiCad battery or an automobile engine. That is not cheap, but the lasts for years so the overall cost per kWh will be very cheap.
If the active material in the cell is palladium, that is expensive. However, unless the palladium transmutes into some other element it can be recycled and remanufactured. This is like recycling the palladium from automobile catalytic converters. Except that some of the palladium from the catalytic converter is blown out into the environment by the exhaust gasses, whereas a cold fusion cell is tightly sealed so no starting material is lost.
If the metal is nickel obviously the cost of both the material and fabrication will be trivial. I think there is good reason to hope that Ni or Ti can be used for cold fusion.
- Jed
