Stuff You Should Know - How Desalination Works

Episode Date: March 26, 2015

Why would people want to remove salt from water? To solve the world's water problem, that's why. Learn all about the efforts to desalinate H2O in cheaper and more efficient ways. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough.

Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and

guest producer Noel. So this is Stuff You Should Know. Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. Noel's been waiting for that one for months. That's right. Well, you got it, Noel, finally. How do you feel?

Ooh, he talks. He does great. He just woke me up. You doing okay? I'm doing fine, sir. I think we need more air circulation in this place. In our new little... It makes you logy.

It makes me logy. What's logy? Josh just mimicked being tired. Yes. Okay. I've never heard that. Is that a real word? Loggy?

Or is it some internet short for something? No, it's much older than that. Okay. Lo, keep going. I don't know. Lo on what? I don't know. Something GI.

That's first of all, what you're thinking of. Yeah, I don't know what any of the little internet shorthand is. I always have to look that stuff up when someone leaves a comment. Have you heard of first of alls? No. Instead of first of all, it's now first of bulls. What just by leading a sentence like first of all, blah, blah, blah? Right.

First of bulls. What? Yeah. That's just stupid. I'm with you, man. Now, I'm at more of the acronyms like FOMO and... Oh, yeah. I have to look a lot of those up, too.

I never know what those are. We're getting aged. Yes. Right. We think first of alls is stupid. We have to look up acronyms. Got to look up FOMO. Yeah.

If you're missing out, by the way. Oh, is that what that is? Yeah. Okay. I had to look up that when I was watching Broad City, one of them said that and I was like, what's FOMO? Mm-hmm. I got to keep the old internet handy when I watched those young kid shows.

Mm-hmm. That show is pretty funny. Yeah. It's my favorite comedy out right now, I think. I really, really enjoy it. I just posted today, in fact, on our Facebook page, a great New Yorker article on Abby and Alana. Nice.

Because you know how the New Yorker does it. They do it great. In depth. Yeah. You know. You feel like, I never have to read another article again about the ladies of Broad City. When the New Yorker does it, it stays dulling. That's, I think, their masthead.

Is it? Yeah. The New Yorker. When we do it, it stays done. I've read a New Yorker article from 1999 that was still awesome about this band called The Shags. It was a Susan Orlean article, she wrote The Orchid Thief, but it was about this family band, a girl band called The Shags from the 60s.

I've heard of them. Who, like, didn't really learn to play their instruments, even though they practiced all the time. Oh, yeah. The dad was the master on it. The father was like, yep, you're going to be a band. He tried to take them to the top as much as he could. He cut a record even, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading it. That might have been the same article, but super interesting. Our friend, Van Nostrand, sent us the record. Oh, okay. Maybe that's what got me looking into it. The only problem is, is he burned it on CD and like, like our computers don't have CD

players. Mine does at home. Oh, good. Yeah. Well, I need you to put it on the cloud. Yeah. Or you can just come over. We'll listen to The Shags.

We'll have a Shags party. Oh, wait. Okay. We need to buy The Shag album. I don't think it's still in print. Okay. Chuck. Yes.

Are you familiar with seawater? Yes. You know, there's tons of it out there in the world. That's right. As a matter of fact, Chuckers, 97.5% of all the water on Earth, and that's 70% of the Earth's surface area is water, right? Yeah. 97.5% of that is salt water, seawater.

That's right. Which is great. It's good for sailing on. It's good for swimming in. It's good for catching porpoises in. Uh-huh. Doing all sorts of cool stuff, right? Porpoise fishing.

Expedition. Right. Yeah. The problem is it is terrible, horrible, unbearable for drinking. That's right. The reason why is because when you drink salt water, it messes with your body's homeostasis. Yeah. It messes with your body's homeostasis because salt is an electrolyte.

Yeah. Just like they talk about in, um, what's that Mike Judge movie that I love that you don't like? Oh, uh, Idiocracy. Idiocracy. Yeah. Remember, they water the crops with Gatorade because it has electrolytes? Yeah.

I did not like it. I love that movie. Yeah. It's a medium for me. Okay. Um, when you have too many electrolytes or salts, for example, in your body, you're your body says, hey cells, you've got a bunch of water, we've got too much salt outside of you.

Yeah. So we need you to release some of your water to return the body to homeostasis. That's right. Well, if you have too much salt, your cells purge themselves with too much water in order to excrete the salt out of your body through urine. Yeah. Right. Um, and once you do that, you dehydrate your kidneys malfunction, your brain starts to

go downhill, you get brain damage and you ultimately die a terrible, horrible death from electrolyte imbalance. Yeah. And that's why when, um, if you were ever lost at sea, let's hope that never happens to anyone, but, um, they, you do not drink the salt water. It would be very tempting because it's right there. Yeah. Um, but they're not kidding when they say water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

Yeah. I mean, you will, you will die a quicker death if you start drinking that salt water fact. This has been like a, a problem for a very long time. Um, humans have lived in coastal areas for long, long, long time, even before civilization. Long, long, long time. Yeah. So as far back as I believe the Greeks in the second century BC wrote down ways of getting fresh water from salt water because it's still water.

Sure. You just have to figure out how to get the salt out of the water. And one of the best ways, one of the earliest ways, and one of the ways it's still in use, although in much more high tech use is called the solar still. Yeah. Uh, I guess a little bit more on the, the history, um, Aristotle, uh, in 320 BC was like, Hey, we should desalinate water. So wait, that's the zero to 100, 100, 200, 200, so that'd be the fourth century BC.

Okay. I was wrong. Uh, Pliny the Elder, uh, which we, by the way, is there a younger, we just got some beer, some Pliny the Elder. Yeah. Thank you. Dan. It was Dan.

Dan? Yeah. Dude. Very much appreciated. Yeah. She can't get that stuff here. No. It's an extraordinarily rare beer.

Uh, Dan sent us some Pliny the Elder. So thanks for that. Uh, but Pliny the Elder in Rome, um, also described sea water distillation and in 70 AD, Alexander of Aphrodisius, uh, also did so about 130 years later. And then there was a French explorer named Jean Delery, who, um, did you like that? Who, um, in 1565, uh, talked about desalination, James Cook as well. So it's not a new thing. For many years, humans have been able to look around and say, you want water?

There's plenty of it. Let's just figure out a way to, to make it not salty. Water water everywhere and let's all have a drink. Yeah. Uh, which got me, um, thinking sort of later in the research, like why is the ocean salty to begin with? And I didn't really know until I looked it up. That's a good question.

Yeah. Uh, it turns out that salt from the ocean comes from rocks here on earth. Okay. It's not just, uh, out there in the ocean. It, um, what happens is it rains and then, uh, it falls on the land and it contains carbon dioxide from the air and that makes the rain slightly acidic. So when it hits the rocks, it's going to break down that rock some creating, uh, ions, which we've talked about chemical particles that are charged.

Yeah. Because they're missing an electron. That's right. Uh, and these ions are basically just carried into streams, which eventually into rivers and eventually into oceans. Okay. And along the way, a lot of them are used up by organisms, um, but the ones that are not used up or leftover and 90% of all these ions are sodium and chloride.

So boom, there you have it. Put those two together. You got salt. Yep. And all that stuff flows in the ocean. And that's why you have, uh, I got a couple of stats, uh, 3.5% of the weight of seawater comes from dissolved salts. Wow.

And they say, some say that if you took all the salt from the ocean and spread it evenly over the earth's land, okay, just the land, it would be about a 40 stories high, 500 feet thick. Wow. There's a lot of salt to get rid of if you want to desalinate and it's all from broken down rocks. Huh? Yeah.

And why is desalination a big deal? Because, uh, clean potable drinking water is a problem in a lot of parts of the world. Dude, it is getting to be a problem faster and faster. Yeah. And people say that the future wars will be fought over water, which is really scary to think about. Yes. You know?

Um, and for drought too. Like, uh, it's not just, you know, I'm in a developing country and we don't have access to clean drinking water. Right. Big problem. But places like California suffer a drought, you know, like maybe we should think about building desalination plants. Right.

And they have as a result. Yeah. Which we'll get to. So, so first of all, we should say happy world water day to everybody. It's March 22nd is world water day. Oh yeah. So just think about that while you're, you know, while it's March 22nd. Sure.

Um, and yeah, so there's a, there's a great need for water. That's the whole reason for world water day is to point that out. Supposedly right now, 700 million people, um, lack access to water. They don't have, there's a water scarcity. Clean drinking water. Yes. Yes. And they think that that's going to rise to 1.8 billion by 2025 in 10 years.

It's going to add another 1.1 billion people to those who face water shortages. Yeah. We talked about that a little bit in our life straw podcast from quite a few years ago, but the life straw is a, um, it's about to say single use, not single use, but, uh, single serving single, well, not single serving. But, uh, what do you call it if like, uh, it's just for one person or a family, uh, single person, personal heirloom. It's a personal, uh, device that you can use to literally, uh, drink water like out of

a river through this straw. Yeah. You just put it in the river and it's got filters in it. So it filters out. That's right. I don't, it doesn't filter out salt. No. It has to be used for fresh water, but it filters out like bacteria, things that, you know,

disease causing stuff. Correct. So yeah, we did talk about water scarcity. I think we've talked about it in other ones too, like, why can't we manufacture water and things like that. Yeah. It's part of our water suite. It is.

And it's ongoing because the problem is not getting better. It's getting worse. And one of, one of the responses to water shortages around the world is what's called virtual water exporting, which is where you and I have a bunch of fresh water and we use it to grow grain and then we send that grain to a place that doesn't have much water. Yeah. So they get to use their water for drinking. Right.

They don't have to use it for grain. That makes sense. So, and there's a lot of different things that we use water for that can be exported. It's hard to export water, but you can use it for stuff and save other people from having to use it. Right. Um, because we use a lot of water. We do use a lot of water.

Americans especially. Yeah. And there's stats like, oh, this desalination plant can pump out like 15 billion gallons of fresh water. You think, man, 15 billion gallons is so much. It's not very much at all. No, it's not. And that's a grand scheme.

I think 15 billion gallons of water is two thirds of a percent, two thirds of 1% of the amount of water used by humans every day. Yeah. And, um, I think all of the desalination plants online, there's 17,000 of them. Yeah. Right now. And that accounts. I think that's all of them from the, from the very small ones to the ones that are also

used in like, uh, as part of the, uh, fracking process. Right. So it's not necessarily all of those are to deliver water to humans, but yeah, there are that many. So the 17,000 desalination plants online in the world, they think that could double by 2020, which is pretty good. It's those 17,000 are producing 21 billion gallons a day. And remember 15 billion is two thirds of 1% of all of the fresh water used every day.

That's right. Around the world. So it's still sorry for the pun, but a drop in the bucket. Yeah. Uh, but things are changing fast. They are. This new one in California, which, uh, we're going to talk about later, um, is the largest in the Western hemisphere will produce 50 million gallons per day on its own.

That's pretty substantial, pretty substantial. Um, so we'll talk about the technology used in this. It's actually kind of old, it needs a little updating right for this. Attention, bachelor nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison.

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In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Patrick Curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Visit Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, there's basically two ways that humans desalinate seawater.

And they've both been around for many, many decades. They're in theory, they're pretty good at removing salt from seawater to create freshwater. But there's, over the course of these decades, we've found this could be improved, this could be improved, that can be improved. And we'll talk about that later. But this technology, it's been around for a little while is what I'm trying to say. And the two different, the main competitors are multi-stage flash, desalination. Sometimes I talk like Barack Obama.

Well, yeah. Well, that's a good thing. And I'm not getting political, I just mean he's known as a great orator. Was, Chuck, was. And the other one is reverse osmosis. Do you remember that poster in elementary school, it was like Garfield laying down on a pile of books, taking a nap, and it said, I'm learning through osmosis? I think I do remember that.

I was at the Garfield fan. I think that every time I see the word osmosis, I didn't get the joke when I was a kid. And now that I do get it, it's not that funny, but I'm reminded of it every time. Yeah. He didn't understand why I ate lasagna. Oh, to catch favor food for the lasagna, right? Yeah, it's kind of weird to think about now. And so the reverse osmosis one is the state of the art.

It's the one that's used most widely. Yes. And I think that term was coined in the 1950s by the U.S. military, I think, were the first ones to start using that process after World War II. It makes sense. It was an Eisenhower creation, probably. Yeah, like we're out on this island, the Pacific. Our soldiers need some stuff.

So let's start a process by stuff, I mean water. We'll start a process where we can take the salt out of the water all around us. And so they did. Reverse osmosis. Yeah. And again, I mean, we talked about solar stills, right? Yeah. I don't think we described, like you can do this experiment yourself at your house.

Well, and also if you're ever caught without water, you're stranded at sea. And you have a bowl. Yeah. All you need is a bowl and a glass, some saran wrap, and you're fine. Yeah. You could use other things like if you were Tom Hanks and Castaway, you could just try and use the things around you to create the same effect. But yes, go ahead and describe it.

Well, you take some sea water, you put it in a bowl, you put an empty glass in the middle of that water. I guess you want to make sure it doesn't float other than that, you're fine. Yeah. Put some saran wrap over it. Poke a hole in the middle of the saran wrap so that it's over the center of the empty glass and just set it out in the sun. Boom, solar still.

Yeah, because the sun will cause the water to evaporate, which means it will go up to the underside of the saran wrap, cling to it, and condensate into the glass. Condense? Oh yeah. Into the glass. Uh-huh. Right? And what goes into the glass will be fresh water, the salt will be left behind because

the evaporation will have separated the two. Yeah. And we're basically describing rain. Right. Right, the rain cycle. Yeah. But in a glass with saran wrap. Exactly.

And by saran wrap we mean like cellophane wrap, plastic wrap. Cellar wrap. But that's a solar still. That's pretty basic. You can do it on a rowboat. Again, if you have a glass with a bowl in some saran wrap. Reverse osmosis is something different. That's right.

It's actually the opposite of natural. Quite literally. Yes. Because osmosis is natural. Reverse osmosis ain't natural. It ain't natural. So when you put salt water on one side of a membrane, semipermium membrane, and you use pressure to the tune of, I think this one in California is like, they said six times

as powerful as a fire hose. Whoa. So serious pressure to move the water molecules through that membrane basically. And it's like a big filter. It filters out the salt. Yeah. It's calling it anything else but a filter is kind of fancy. Yeah, because I think they said the pores on these membranes are smaller than a human

hair. Yeah. So it's not like you're average filtering. You know what I mean? No, it's not. The point is what you're doing is you're pushing water through a membrane that the water can make it through, but the solute, the salt inside of it, can't. So the salt is left behind.

That's right. And in a reverse osmosis system, and they call it reverse osmosis because under normal osmosis, what you have is something with a low concentration of a solute. So fresh water on one side of a membrane, and salt water on the other side of the membrane, that water is going to, the fresh water is going to move from the area of low concentration to the fresh water, is going to move to an area of higher concentration, the salt water, in order to achieve one of our favorite things, homeostasis. It wants to achieve a balance so that the stuff on either side of the membrane will

be equally salty, right? Yeah. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Okay. Reverse osmosis is the opposite. So if water naturally wants to go from low concentration to high, with reverse osmosis, you're going from high concentration to low.

Yes. And that's just, again, another way of putting it, of saying you're filtering the salt from the water by pushing the water through a membrane. With a lot of pressure via a lot of pumps. Yeah. And you're running it through a lot more than just one membrane. Oh, sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Great. So that's reverse osmosis, number one. And not number one in ranking. Just... It's number one in my book. Oh, is it? Sure.

See, I'm a multi-stage flash guy. Are you? Sure. Why not? All right. That uses heat. If you've heard of flashing, like flashfiring or something, basically means to do something cooking-wise very quickly, so flashing, in this case, is bringing water to a boil really

quickly. And multi-stage means you're going to do it in different stages multiple times. So the name makes sense. Yeah. So basically what you're doing is you're going to boil this water super fast, many times, and each time this happens, water vapor is going to form, and you're going to have fresh water there, and then the salty brine is left over to be disposed of. It's like making a solar still, like a flash-poiled solar still over and over again.

That's right. So yeah, a multi-stage flash is like a super hot solar still over and over again. That's right. And each time you collect that evaporated fresh water, leaving the salt water behind. Sure. There's some real issues with both of these, as simple as they are. And one of the chief ones is that if you take a bunch of salt water, and you either filter the fresh water out of it, or you boil the fresh water out of it, there's still something

left, and that is salt. And you're probably not going to get all the water, so what you have is called brine. Yeah. And if you compare brine to seawater, brine is even saltier than seawater. The reason why is there's not more salt than there is in seawater. There's just less water, so it's like an ultra-concentrated form of seawater. Well, you're not going to do anything with this, except try to put it back in the ocean. Right.

And once you do that, you have a big, big problem, because you kill a lot of the sea life. Yeah. Basically, it's heavier, so it settles down on the bottom. And so the things that they're trying now to combat that is one, diluting it with a bunch of other water. Yeah. I think a 5 to 1 ratio is what they are suggesting at this point.

And they're not saying, oh, we'll just use some of the fresh water, we just distilled out. They wouldn't make any sense. They're using things like industrial or agricultural wastewater that they were just going to pump into the ocean anyway. Exactly. So mix it with that brine, dilute it out, and it's not going to be as bad for the environment. They're also doing it gradually now, much, much slower, which also helps.

They are strategically placing it in the ocean in places where it is more apt to disperse very quickly. It's a very strategic placement. I think in Australia, they try to re-release it to the tune of 160 to 250 feet away. You won't tell any difference in the water salt concentrations. And then the last thing that they're trying to enforce whenever we build these new plants is to bury these pipes and actually do it under the sea floor. Out of sight.

Yeah. I mean, outside, in other words, it's not being released directly into the water. Right. It's being released into the sand under the water. And then I think the sand actually acts as a filter as it disperses. But that's a lot more expensive as well to bury these pipes. So Chuck, dealing with brine is just one challenge that desalination engineers have to deal with. Plenty of other ones have popped up over time and come up with some pretty cool solutions

or ideas for solving some of these problems. We're going to get into that right after this. So Chuck, when you put sea water through reverse osmosis or multisage flash, you end up with brine and you have to figure out what to do with that brine. There's some other problems too with desalination. For one, it's expensive. It is. Apparently, they measure water on the scale of things like desalination plants in something

called what is it? Foot acres. Foot acre. It's like 325,000 gallons and a foot acre is about the amount of water two American households of five people use in a year to deliver desalinated water, at least for the major plant that they're building at Carlsbad, California. It's going to be about $2,000 per foot acre. We've seen ranges and other articles from other plants averaging 800 to 1,400.

This one's a little bit on the high side. But what they're doing is selling it back to the city at a rate of $2,014 to $2,257 per foot acre, depending on how much they're buying at a time. So basically, that's how they paid for this thing in California because they're super expensive to build these plants. They got a 30-year contract agreeing to buy at least 48,000 acre feet per year, sell bonds on that, and now they can open their plant. But the problem is, and the reason a lot of people are upset about this, is they're like,

it's going to start costing more and more and what happens then? I don't know. I guess people pay more for water. Well, people are definitely going to be paying more for water. That's been a criticism for a very long time of water in America is that it's artificially cheap. It should be way more expensive than it is because there's plenty of places that have lots of water, but there's also plenty of places that are facing drought, and the fact

that it's so cheap, people tend to abuse it, don't conserve it as much in places where it's very cheap and inexpensive. So just by increasing the price, there's a school of thought that conservation will kick in just because economics kicks in a little more. Yeah, there's some price comparisons here with this new one in California. The 2,000-a-foot acre, or an acre-foot, I think we had that backwards, is double that of... No, we had acre-foot.

Oh, did we? It's double that of water obtained if you built a new reservoir to recycle wastewater. And it is four times as much as obtaining what they call new water from conservation methods. Water-efficient toilets, rebates, paying for farmers to install drip irrigation. And that's conservation four times. Four times is expensive. It's four times more expensive than the conservation efforts they want to try and push through.

One of the reasons it's so expensive is because, especially with reverse osmosis, you said that they were using pressure that exceeded fire hose pressures, right? That's six times, yeah. That takes a lot of energy because you start out with intake pipes, which again present their own problems because they suck in lots of sea life. So there's an immediate and deleterious effect on the sea life by sucking in seawater, right? So you're sucking in the seawater under high pressure. You're pumping it through sand and charcoal, pre-treatment.

You're pumping it through these membranes, usually more than a thousand membranes over a very long distance into this treatment plant where it's further treated. All this requires a tremendous amount of energy, right? And when you're desalinating seawater in particular, films tend to build up on these membranes, which means your pumps have to work harder, which means more energy is required to pump that water through, which means the costs rise. The environmental impact rises because it's getting energy probably from a coal-fired power plant.

So you have this new huge desalination plant that wasn't there before that's increasing your carbon dioxide emissions. So there's an economic cost, and there's also an environmental cost with reverse osmosis plants as they exist right now. Yeah, I've got a stat on the energy required. This one in Carlsbad, California, which is just north of San Diego. It uses 38 megawatts of energy per day, and that is enough to power 28,500 homes a day. That wasn't there before.

Yeah. It hasn't gone online yet. When it does in 2016, it'll be like adding how many? 28,500 homes worth of energy per day. That's a lot. Yeah, and that's, I mean, it's great to try and provide because California is doing it specifically for their drought issues. But as we said, even at 50 million gallons a day, it's just a fraction of the problem,

and there's a lot of people critic saying, we don't need to be putting our money in these things. They have examples of ones that were built. There was one in Santa Barbara that was built in 1991 that cost $34 million to build and then after it started raining again, basically they shut it down. Australia had spent 10 billion on six of these because of their drought in the 90s and 2000s, and four of those are shut down now because it started raining again, and basically they're like, it's costing way too much money to make this water now.

We don't need it. Right. Well, it's the same thing as solar power or wind power. When oil gets really expensive, then the investment in that seems smarter because comparatively speaking, that output of solar power or wind power isn't as expensive as that expensive oil, right? Yeah. When the price of oil drops, that solar power output seems really, really expensive by comparison,

and so investment goes away from it. But what you don't want to have happen and what they're worried about in California is they're going to build several of these at the cost of like a billion a piece, and then they get a lot of rain in five years, and then all of a sudden these things are just sitting there. Yeah. So I get the impression, I think it actually says in this San Jose Mercury article you sent that this Carlsbad desalination plant outside of San Diego is going to basically

be the litmus test for the rest of the state. Yeah. It's a really big deal. Right. So like it does well. We'll say, yes, desalination works, and let's start investing in this, or you're going to say, no, this doesn't work. It has too much of an environmental cost.

The water's too expensive. Yeah. It just isn't what we need to do. We have to figure out some other stuff, and it's all coming down to this one plant in 2016. Yeah. Pretty much. But there's been other success stories throughout the world.

Like... The Middle East has a lot of them. Yeah. It has a leader in desalination, so too is Israel. Yeah. Australia knows what they're doing. Aruba had, at the time, opened the largest productive desalination plant in the world. So there's a lot of desalination going on.

So even if California decides to abandon it, there still needs to be an investment in making these things more energy efficient or environmentally friendly, or coming up with new kinds of desalination technology altogether. Like, whether or not California goes forward with it. That's right. That all hinges on the Poseidon, I think, is what they're calling it. What? The plant.

Right. For California, by saying even if that doesn't happen, other plants around the world demand that we need to make this better. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Because people need water. Yeah.

So let's figure out a way to get it cheaply and with a small environmental impact. Okay. So isn't there, I think a lot of efforts are being made too, to invest in ones like, sort of like the LifeStrawl, but not like a gravity-fed family-sized desalinator, instead of these really expensive ones that require tons of energy. Yeah. Do you need a huge desalination plant, or do you need a bunch of smaller portable desalination units?

Yeah. Like a unit that will take care of a village, let's say, in a developing country. Why not? It's pretty interesting. It is. For some reason, water has always struck me as very interesting. Every time we do an episode like this, I'm like, man, this stuff gets me. It's a commodity that is becoming more scarce, which is scary to think about.

Yeah. Because it's such a basic thing that every human needs. Yeah. It's not like, well, I mean, things would go bad if we ran out of oil too, but it's not like water. Yeah. I mean, society would collapse and civilization would suck if we ran out of oil, but not everyone's going to die directly, yeah, from a lack of oil.

We'll die from murder. Right. Over the lack of oil. If you want to know more about water, just type that magic word into the search bar how stuff works, and it'll bring up just a plethora of really interesting articles. And I said search bar in there, so it's time for Listener Man. Yeah, I'm going to call this a brave, brave email from a young person about depression. It was really neat.

Hey guys, my name is Brooke, and I am from Beria, Kentucky. Absolutely love your show. I think you're both extremely intelligent and inspiring. I don't know about that. I've learned a lot about various topics while listening to your show and can't get enough. I wanted to email you guys because I wanted to get a message out to as many people as I can. I am 15 years old, I've been hospitalized three times for depression.

The last time was because I attempted suicide by overdosing on Trasadone. I was aware, but hyperventilating when my mother found me on the bathroom floor called 9-1-1, and an ambulance took me to the local hospital, and then I was sent to a facility after recuperation for depression for a little over a week and did not get discharged until Christmas Eve. The day I attempted suicide was the day I turned my life around, though, since then I've been doing amazing and have come to the realization that harming myself was not the way to go. So I wanted to tell anyone and everyone that suffers from this kind of depression to know

that there is hope, and I wanted to start publicly speaking about my experiences to hopefully try and motivate others to have the same epiphany I did. I would really appreciate it if you guys read this on the air during the podcast. Thank you from Brooke. So, Brooke, that is a very brave thing to do. Yeah, thanks, Brooke. As a 15-year-old, and really for any age, to be so forthcoming about your struggle and try and help people out.

So thanks for that. Yeah. Thank you. If you want to send us a letter, an email, you want to say hi, you want to share your story, anything like that, especially if you think it will help other people, you can tweet to us if it's a really short story at SYSK Podcast. You can post it on Facebook.com slash StuffYouShouldKnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the

web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Shatikular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed.

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