“energy recovery is performed with a solid state circuit ”

Really! The problem with all of these highly efficient methods is that they are not scalable and very expensive.

Currently we have the ability to produce limitless amounts of power and desalinate limitless of water. However, we only need to produce the amount we need. The reason we do not turn deserts into farms is the productivity of American farmers.

"Currently we have the ability to produce limitless amounts of power and desalinate limitless of water. However, we only need to produce the amount we need. The reason we do not turn deserts into farms is the productivity of American farmers."

Kip P, you apparently haven't been anywhere near a Midwest American farm this summer and there ain't no "currently..limitless water."

Kelly I grew up in the Midwest and visited there this summer. There is always someplace that has a flood and someplace that has a drought. We do not build desalination plants for infrequent events.

Furthermore we do not grow grow crops with seawater. As Alain points out it takes energy to pump water. I know of semi-arid places that have limitless supplies of fresh water for irrigation. A for a few miles from the river, there is a wide variety of crops then all you see is dryland wheat.

There is not a shortage of electricity either. It is just a case of supply and demand. Farmers have to pay their power bill and buy diesel fuel to get the crops to the river where they are barged to the world market. The reason deserts are not turned into farm land is food is cheap when not grown in the desert.

So Kelly what is the root cause of starvation and power shortages? It is not the ability of engineers to produce power or farmers to grow food.

nuclear powerplants are always located near abundant fresh water.
I would be surprised if at that location, there would be water shortages.
If they let the water go, it must be because the value of that water is lower than its local comercial value. Any additional 'thing' you do with the water (and it is a lot of water) will cost energy.
I wonder if it is smart to waste energy to produce fresh water at a location where you already have plenty of water.

(if the heat in the steam however could be used in any productive way, that may be beneficial, but I wouldn't care too much about the water)

"So Kelly what is the root cause of starvation and power shortages? It is not the ability of engineers to produce power or farmers to grow food."

Engineers and farmers have made progress everyone can obviously see.

Wizards who state we already have limitless power and water are the problem.

The water is treated before using it for cooling. This is enough water for 1000 square miles of land growing miscanthus for fuel.

No sense growing 30 million acres of corn for ethanol when you can make 20% of our gasoline from tall grasses using gasification.

This is water that is just going out the cooling stacks and adding to the humidity, might as well condense it, irrigate land and grow some fuel.

Condensing it means extracting the latent heat and putting it somewhere; this is energetically "uphill" because otherwise it would occur spontaneously.  Do you have a recipe for this, SJC?

" We can produce a limitless supply of power and water with nukes" - nuts.

The world, esp. Japanese, can't afford the nuke costs or radiation already spilled.

If earth has limitless power and water, there is no drought or hunger(false). Drop the wild illogical(mechanical?) statements, or is reality to slow..

If the Japanese governments were to restart now all of the nuclear power plants that did not fail during the Tsunami, and then offer the use of the homes in the so called radio-active exclusion contaminated area to the original owners or to other displaced persons and families with their electricity at half price and a warning that the area had higher than its usual radioactivity but less than the natural radioactivity of other inhabited parts of the world, the houses would be filled in a week. The contamination is no longer immediately life threatening, and in some of the restricted area never was. A further warning that cancer development theoretically attributable to increased radiation levels, but unprovable, would be less than a tenth of all other cancers of the populations and much less than the cancers caused by smoking or deaths cause by driving automobiles.

The Japanese reactors should not have been turned off until all use of cigarettes was banned in Japan to prevent far more life shortening illnesses.

Some one could begin to assess how many man-hours, therefore lives, were lost due to the lack of electricity from the operating power plants that were shut down.

China now could build many CANDU power plants along the coast(at high elevations or submersible) within the next four or five years and sell the power produced to Japan. The present "waste" fuel from China's and the US light water reactors could power them for centuries or millenia if some thorium were added.

Reactors for making pure water out of seawater can use far lower pressures and less costly equipment and can have far larger cheaper tanks of cooling water so that the melting of the fuel cladding (meltdown) is impossible with or without electricity. Such reactor tanks could even be built below sea level with flooding valves to let in sea water with gravity when fresh water from all other reserves ran out. One pound (kilogram) of uranium or thorium or plutonium can supply energy equivalent to three millions pounds (kilograms) of coal or crude oil. The cost of uranium for of making a thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water is less than zero if modified CANDU reactors are used, and a group of many such reactors can be combined with a fuel processing facility that makes the fuel whilst the reactors eliminate all long lived transuranic wastes including all of the several explosive and more nonexplosive isotopes of the inseparable non explosive plutonium isotope mix found in the fuel rods removed from light water reactors as waste during refueling of the reactor.

Special reactors can be built to extract at least 50 percent more energy from these unmodified fuel rod assemblies for water desalinization before they are processed to remove the fission products that first slow then stop the chain reaction until removed.

Except for the slight additional cost, there is no reason to not build nuclear reactors a hundred or more feet underground. The heat can be sent up as steam and the steam returned as water. Even a Chernobyl type failure would have not disturbed the people on the surface.

Until a perfect automobile is built and required, there does not need to be a perfect nuclear power reactor.

I will suggest that hundreds of people are dead that would not have been, because working Japanese power reactors were shut off and heat and light were not available at times. Only about 50 workers and no non worker residents of the Chernobyl area were killed by radiation.

Every human body, that ever existed, has given off nuclear radiation to other humans that is an easily measurable fraction of that received from space and the earth. You are not nuclear virgins and never were. The bodies of all types of animals know how to repair themselves from nuclear rays as well as they know how to repair the damage caused by oxygen from the air getting into cells or sunlight on the skin. This very second, potassium atoms are exploding in your body cells right next to your DNA or nerve fibre. ..HG..

Kelly:

The world, esp. Japanese, can't afford the nuke costs or radiation already spilled.

Most of the Fukushima evacuation area is habitable now, under exposure limits from our best understanding of radiation effects (as opposed to the LNT hypothesis, which is known to be false).  Japan can afford another Dai'ichi meltdown, though it's almost certain never to have one (neither Dai'ini nor Onagawa had radiation releases); what Japan cannot afford is another $1 trillion for fossil fuels over the next 20 years.

Engineer-Poet, "The tsunami killed tens of thousands; the radiation from Fukushima Dai'ichi killed NOBODY, and is likely to never kill anyone."

Hogwash. Up to 5% of a small country is irradiated for decades. Don't for a minute pretend lives haven't been shortened in Japan and insurance rates won't gouge this.

Corrupt US medical insurance lumps simple type 2 diabetes with the extreme, often unaffordable, premiums charged AIDs patients - so don't pretend radiation isn't costly, lethal, or in the insurance tables and premiums.

My initial comment on this, yet another 'many fold better' article(now desalination) is that it should be monitored. Every week, there's some breakthrough that, years later, has gone nowhere.

Frankly an app to automatically monitor these 'breakthroughs' would be useful.

Perhaps I'm like JFK, asking '..why not?' A fraction the cost desalination could green parts of the Sahara - and Africans don't have limitless power, water, or food.

I lived through Enron brownouts of Silicon Valley. Why, for God's sake, wasn't just a tenth of a percent of solar electricity distributed at traffic lights to stop HOURS of DAILY 'signals out/traffic jams'?

I mentioned JFK. After a dozen years of S. Vietnam US troop hikes(to 17,000) in Sept. 1963, JFK pulled a 1,000 troops out in Oct.

In Nov, he was then murdered thirty miles from a Texas helicopter factory that suddenly made $BILLIONS during Nam under the new Texan President.

Now, we've endured one truly despicable track record of decades of Texan President's, yet, like oil, they're seemingly always in the wings.

Others may ask why nuke engineers ALWAYS put redundant water cooling pumps IN the reactor facility, instead of miles away, where they could survive a CATASTROPHE AND ACTUALLY COOL a stricken reactor http://video.pbs.org/video/2202847024?starttime=876001

etc, etc..