Water has always been a volatile topic in Australia, the world's driest inhabited continent, but the political row that broke out last week was perhaps surprising. Protesters are complaining that a planned desalination facility outside Melbourne, Victoria, will generate too much freshwater.
As Neil Rankine ( a spokesman for protest group Your Water Your Say) and his supporters gear up for a new round of protests, Melbourne could do worse than look west to the city of Perth. Its US$329-million desalination plant, which opened in 2006, has won grudging approval. In fact, a second, US$811-million plant is now planned. The secret: renewable energy — the power comes mainly from a wind farm, and up to 90% of it can be recycled by energy-recovery devices.
From Nature News, 19th March: 'Water: Purification with a pinch of salt'
Hhhmmn, so now Melbourne is building a desalination plant, to join Perth, Sydney and Gold Coast City. And all this time the one city that should have been first in line, Adelaide, persists with it's parasitic extractions from the Murray-Darling.
The major energy cost in desalination is heating up the water to boiling point. This can be done by first pumping the sea water into shallow black lined warming pools before feeding into the desalinator. Or it can be done by way of heat exchange from hot rock resources.
South Australia is particularly well endowed with both hot rock resources and/or vast areas of flat land suitable for warming pools. But no, this city of water parasites demands increasing volumes of MDB water as if it was their divine right to deprive another hundred farmers of their water allocation every time they build a new suburb.
It is a question of social responsibility. They must be made to take all reasonable and practical steps to help themselves before they go holding their hand out for someone else's property.
Correction:Most reactors built these day
Should be most *research* reactors built these days ...
Sub critical reactors are also low output reactors.
Gavin: bet we could have this nuclear industry up and running like our national health programs any day hey
Heaven forbid that the government actually runs the system.