ABSTRACT
Various renewable energy sources are available to provide for energy needs in desalination processes. These include solar energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, wave energy and nuclear energy. Considering the energy requirements for desalination processes, renewable energy sources present exciting opportunities to produce freshwater in an environmentally friendly manner. Depending on the source temperature, various desalination technologies can be integrated with the geothermal sources. The energy efficiency is calculated as the ratio of the amount of distillate produced to the amount of solar energy received by the solar still unit. Solar energy is harvested in devices called solar collectors which are essentially heat exchangers that extract and transfer the heat to the load. Small- and medium-sized nuclear reactors are identified to be suitable for desalination, often with cogeneration of electricity using low-pressure steam from the turbine and hot seawater feed from the final cooling system. Large-scale deployment of nuclear desalination on a commercial basis will depend primarily on economic factors.
