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Non-Tech : Alternative energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (8638)	7/27/2010 9:13:38 AM
From: Eric	Respond to of 16955

Sam Good comments. I agree with them. Dealing with brackish, salt concentrated water is something that has to be delt with when you make a lot of fresh water out of seawater. You can't just "point source" the exhaust of that stuff, it has to be diluted over a large body of water to keep the salt concentration down. It's one thing to have an RO machine in my boat and another to be making millions of gallons per day for a city!

To: Sam who wrote (8638)	7/27/2010 2:04:12 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16955

re desalinization: That's a good read you posted: books.google.com He says (page XV) "we now know there are limits to our water resources, and that we will have to make do with less." With a very broad brush, he disparages all "hard solutions" (= more supply), and praises "soft solutions". <A New Water Paradigm: The Soft Path For Water> As an ideological Belief, he only looks at "soft solutions", which means accepting permanent water poverty. He makes a good analysis of those soft solutions, but he's only seeing half the picture. Voluntary poverty is a solution Americans, Chinese, and everyone else rejects. You can't convince everyone to become a vegetarian and bicycle to work. The only acceptable solution, is to maintain and improve our current lifestyles, but figure out how to do it sustainably. That means a huge increase in water use. And that means his "soft" answers, are only half the answer. Yes, available fresh water from dams and aquifers is mostly already being used, and is in many cases not sustainable. That's exactly why large-scale desalination (and cheap energy to make it possible) are needed. You point out the increasing international tensions, between upstream and downstream nations. There are other examples, like Turkey and Iraq, Mexico and U.S. This, along with disappearing glaciers, are arguments for, not against, desalination. The problems in the Arabian Sea, are not typical. That Sea is shallow, with a very small outlet to the Indian Ocean. More of a big lake, like the Caspian. Other places that are going to meet future water needs by large-scale desalination, like California and Australia, can easily dilute the extra salinity to insignificance. <Like nuclear, desalinization has a waste problem> The desalinated water, once it is used, eventually goes back into the ocean, so the net salinity of the ocean doesn't change. Salt is not radioactive, presents no long-term storage problems, and doesn't build up in the environment. Any issues are local and temporary. Issues like the toxicity of descalers are amenable to technical fixes (R&D for nontoxic alternatives). OTOH, the problems of nuclear waste have proven unsolvable, despite decades of effort, with tens of billions spent. Transporting water, like desalinating it, is only expensive because energy is expensive. Pipes and pumps are a mature technology. re Tampa's problems with desalination: that's the kind of "teething problem" any growing industry has. Much of China's wind capacity is being wasted, because the grid is inadequate, and this is used by windpower detractors as evidence the technology is a dead end. Not so. Just as with the Arabian Sea, that example cannot be generalized.