Desalination plants planned
stevem
in Dam Alternatives, Desalination
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January 06, 2008
THE state government will put mobile desalination plants on the Brisbane River to ensure future water supplies, Acting Premier Paul Lucas says.
Mr Lucas said the plans are for two mobile desalination plants on barges on the Brisbane River at a cost of $550 million.
Preliminary works would cost an additional $125 million and include site selection, surveying, water modelling, environmental studies and geotechnical works.
The contingency moves, which would be assessed and approved at the end of the wet season in March or April, could pump an extra 144 megalitres of water a day into the region by the end of next year, even if the worst drought on record worsens.
“That’s enough extra water for more than a million people a day,” Mr Lucas said today.
“Even if our dams receive the same average inflows we’ve had since 1990, which itself is a third of historic average inflows, the Queensland Water Commission advises combined storage levels would be around 28 per cent after the wet season.
“At that level it’s unlikely we would need to proceed with these emergency desalination measures.
“But it’s like having fire insurance - most people never need to use it but it’s important to have there, just in case.”
Mr Lucas said the 2006/07 financial year was the worst for rainfall in south-east Queensland in more than a century of records, with just 4.4 per cent of the historical long-term average, he said.
The Queensland Water Commission estimates the region’s dam storage levels could drop to seven per cent by 2010, based on 2006/07 inflows, daily usage, evaporation, power needs and additions to the $9 billion water grid as they come online.
“If, and I stress if, the current ‘worst drought on record’ rainfalls continue, there will be a gap between predicted supply and demand before the proposed Traveston Crossing Dam starts delivering meaningful flows in 2013,” he said.
“The contingency measures, if required, will address that gap.”
Recent heavy rain from a low pressure system has boosted south-east Queensland’s parched dam levels by up to five per cent.
The average level of the three major dams - Wivenhoe, Somerset and North Pine - was boosted to 22.45 per cent yesterday, with further flows expected in coming days.
stevem
stevem
Craig Isherwood,
National Secretary, Citizens EIectoral Council of Australia
AUSTRALIA must follow India’s lead with mass desalination. On April 19, India’s Minister for Science and Technology, Kapil Sibal, announced the successful start of the world’s first floating desalination plant, now producing one million litres of fresh water per day.
The plant, produced by India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology,sits on a barge about 40 kilo-metres east of Tamil Nadu coast.
The plant brings in saturated hot steam generated in a nuclear power plant for flash heating water in a vacuum chamber located on the barge.
The freshly generated water vapour passes into an adjacent chamber where cold water drawn from 600 metre depth, by pipe, and wrapped around the cooling chamber, converts the water vapour to clean potable water.
The cost of producing such fresh water, including transporting it to shore, is currently six paisa per litre ($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.
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