Craig Isherwood,

AUSTRALIA must follow India’s lead with mass de­salination. On April 19, India’s Minister for Science and Technology, Kapil Sibal, announced the success­ful start of the world’s first floating desalination plant, now producing one million litres of fresh water per day.

The plant, produced by India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology, sits on a barge about 40 kilo-metres east of Tamil Nadu coast.

The plant brings in saturated hot steam generated in a nuclear power plant for flash heating water in a vacuum chamber located on the barge.

The freshly generated water vapour passes into an adjacent chamber where cold water drawn from 600 metre depth, by pipe, and wrapped around the cool­ing chamber, converts the water vapour to clean pot­able water.

The cost of producing such fresh water, including transporting it to shore, is currently six paisa per litre ($A1.72 per kiloijtre), and once up-scaling to 10 million litre per day systems occurs, the cost is ex­pected to halve, at three paisa per litre ($A0.86c per kilolitre).

This is only slightly higher than what most city dwellers now pay for water in Australia.

We have oceans of water all around Australia!. All we have to do is desalinate it, instead of wasting $10 billion on Howard’s National Plan for Water Security, which will not solve our water crisis anyway.

The Government’s just-released Murray-Darling Contingency Plan, announcing that irrigators will lose their water allocation on July 1 unless there is significant rain, highlights the necessity to move to producing reliable sources of water in as much quan­tity as we desire.

And, if John Howard were serious about going nu­clear, then we would start building such desalination plants immediately, both for ourselves and for export.

Instead, we cannot even produce our own reactor for medical isotopes, but had to buy one from Argen­tina, a developing sector nation.