Water desalination

Conventional water desalination uses low-temperature heat to purify seawater. Three types of desalination are considered: multi-stage flash distillation, multiple effect distillation, and reverse osmosis. The multi-stage flash distillation is a process where incoming seawater is pumped to a higher pressure and heated to near boiling. Through a series of stages, the seawater pressure is decreased to generate vapor that is condensed by the incoming seawater. The multiple effect distillation process uses a steam heat source and a series of evaporators at successively lower pressures to create water. The reverse osmosis process uses membranes to separate the pure water from the brine. The conventional case would use steam from the bottoming cycle of a natural gas combined power cycle as the steam source. For the nuclear-integrated cases, the steam would come from the low-pressure turbine. As stated previously, the temperatures needed for water desalination are higher than the conventional heat rejection temperature of the power cycle. Therefore, power generation would need to be decreased to compensate, but the steam extracted from this point in the cycle would be used for the desalination process. These combined trends would result in an overall increase in the efficiency of the combined system [4].