Desalinations plants to the rescue for everyone everywhere!People keep saying to me the drought is no big deal, all we need is a desalination plant.
It got me thinking, what if the whole world had desalination plants -- hundreds of thousands of them? (I haven’t thought about nuclear power plants in the same context yet.) I thought maybe too many desalination would not be a good thing and that they could further harm the oceans of our planet.
I asked a few scientist friends. Most didn’t get back to me however, those that did - 2 - gave me some interesting feedback which I just copied from them to you, here is scientist number 1:
What would the net effect on the ocean's salinity be after a year? a decade? a century? etc. Probably negligible for a long enough time that some other catastrophe would overtake us. I ran quick mental guesstimates --- but if desalination is used to such an extent that it's used for ALL our water needs and also to reclaim deserts or arid lands for agricultural production, that would be a different story.
Hmmm. Wonder what that "different story" is? Maybe scientist number 2 hit on it with number 5 below:
I don't know much about the topic but have wondered the same thing. I found one article online that was pretty good (there are others in the same issue of the journal):
Environmental impacts of seawater distillation and
reverse osmosis processes
A.J. Morton, I.K. Callister, and N.M. Wade*(Desalination, 108 (1) 1-10). 1997 (you have to pay for scholarly works so I couldn't look at it but here is what my friend concluded):
As you might expect, the issues are:
1. The source and costs of the energy needed to desalinate.
2. The volumes of water required to desalinate and to cool the system. More water used, more planktonic and other small organisms in this water stream affected. Though there will be a filter at the inlet, the water stream will draw larger organisms to it, causing injury etc, as well
3. Temperature and salinity of the outlet water will have their effects.
4. Chemicals used to pretreat the inflow, and for anti-fouling of the membranes in a reverse osmosis system.
5. In arid parts of the world where desalination is used, the primary environmental impacts are the byproducts of encouraging large concentrations of people to live in a place that normally wouldn't support them.
Aha! The byproduct of desalination plants encourages large concentrations of people to live in a place that normally wouldn’t support them: Like in South Florida.
Getting back to nuclear power plants too, the question becomes are we, with these artificial plants (nuclear, desalination, etc.) playing God?
Hey, all you creationists out there — Isn’t God going to get mad at us when we build all these plants that artificially increase population on HIS/HER planet in places he/she didn't want us? Blasphemy? You decide.
5 comments:
The disposal of excess brine which is left over after desalination can be a problem for local fish.
This is the flip side of problems salt water fish have with all the fresh water we are suddenly dumping into Biscayne Bay after a heavy rain event, to keep the real estate -- in places like Sweetwater -- dry enough to live in.
The other major issue is where will we get the energy to run these desalination plants?
Well, I guess with the eminent melting of the polar ice caps (the shy is falling...the sky is falling), all that former ice turning to fresh water would diloute the slinity of the oceans and raise the sea level.
So wouldn't desalinization plants help reduce that rising sea level?
I guess the salt that is removed from desalinization could be put back into the oceans in order to offset the dilouting effects of melting ice caps.
I hope moderate's post was an attempt at comedy. Sure was the silliest thing I've read in a while.
The biggest issue that desalination has (besides the one pointed out by g.o.d.) is the energy factor. It takes way more energy to make drinking water from saltwater than it does to treat the stuff from the Biscayne (by orders of magnitude).
75% of our energy comes with the lovely side-benefit of global warming (20% with the tiny problem of deadly radiation). So since we're all going to be living in a shallow sea once again and even the Biscayne aquifer will become brackish, we'd better build those desalination plants fast! I love irony.
Excellent new book -
Mirage, Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S,
by Cynthia Barnett,
University of Michigan Press, 2007.
It is so hard for us Americans to think of our cities as ruins, however if you live in europe and you see how many present cities have had to be rebuilt because of war or natural disaster or how many grand cities of the past were left for ruin because of natural disasters then you realize that over the very long term (like 200 years or more) a place like South Florida will most likely look nothing like the substancial city there today if it exists at all. Why plan for tomorrow if most likely there will be nothing here tomorrow?
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