Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Media Release 23rd April 2007
Craig Isherwood, National Secretary
PO Box 376, COBURG, VIC,
3058
Phone: 03 9354 0544 Fax: 03 9354 0166
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: /
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 1 million litres of fresh water per day. The plant,
produced by India's National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), sits on a
barge about 40km 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. (Click
here for further detail.)
The cost of producing such fresh water, including transporting it to shore,
is currently six paise per litre ($1.72 AUD per kilolitre), and once up-scaling
to 10 million litre per day systems occurs, the cost is expected to halve, at
three paise per litre ($0.86 AUD 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 1st 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 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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