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First U.S. Desalination Plant Goes Online
DrEnter writes "According to this AP article on Yahoo!, the first full-time desalination plant has gone online in the U.S. to provide fresh water for the Tampa Bay, Florida area (from Tampa Bay itself). While common in the mideast and other parts of the world, this is the first in the U.S. to be used as a regular source of fresh water (there are a couple others in the U.S. that are only for emergency use). It will also (arguably) be one of the least expensive to operate, producing 1000 gallons selling for about $2. There is some more information at Tampa Bay Water's web site."
if we could only get something to convert salt water into gasoline, we'd be set!
"They'll have enough salt to last forever!"
In regards to the Tampa area project, I didn't see anything on their page about the salinity of the waste water from the desalination process. Could this create problems? That salt has to go somewhere. In the grand scheme of things, that amount of salt isn't very much, but in a local ecosystem it might have an effect.
Are nothing. Just wait until we start seeing wars over water.
The nice thing is that those wars can be prevented with the right technology. Desalination plants might be more useful than we think.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
There's a full-time desal plant on St. Croix, USVI. I guess they meant the 50 states and not the United States and All of its territories.
--Mike
In regards to the Tampa area project, I didn't see anything on their page about the salinity of the waste water from the desalination process. Could this create problems? ...
There is some reference to this in the Yahoo! article. Apparently, they are directing the "brine" into a river or the like. This plant won't cause any problems, but if they build too many more dumping into the same place it might, so they are spending some money on long-term monitoring of the waste effects.
--hey, this is pretty slick! If you had a group of investor/owners/users, you could build an entire planned community based around one of these plants. Think a total alternate energy, live someplace that is now just salty marsh/desert area, have hydroponics farms and industries, etc. I also like that membrane filters can create really CLEAN water, too, and that's the only beef I got with this plant, they are going to use tired old fashioned chlorine tech to "treat" the water. but besides that, pretty spiffy!
Read here for details provided by the California coastal commission. You'll have to page down a bit.
This sig no verb.
I sure hope they've done to cost calculations correctly. The Santa Barbara desalination plant is an example of jumping before thinking. During the drought years of the late 80s and early 90s, Santa Barbara undertook the expensive proposition of building a desalination plant. A few months after it went online, rainfall boosted water reserves to a high enough level that drought conditions were no longer in effect. Because it's darn expensive to run and maintain a plant like this, Santa Barbara shut down its plant indefinitely. All that money spent and the city doesn't even use it. Click for more details.
Bottom line: make sure you really need something before you go building it. I hope the Tampa Bay people have done their math right.
GMD
watch this
Was I the only one to read the title ;-)
as desALIENation plant? (As in desinfection,
but cleaning up aliens and their remains
from crashed UFOs)
Anyway...
Paul B.
I heard about this desalination plant a while ago, that's why I launched google as soon as I read the headline. What is a "RO" plant?
The Santa Catalina desalination plant was built because a condominium project would not get a construction permit unless the developers made the development self-sufficient with regards to their water needs. The developers agreed to build a desalination plant and the excess water not used by the condominiums is sold to the rest of the island.
Think: first plant in the mainland US.
...someone started playing SimCity 2000 with the real world. I remember having to build those when you have a city on the coast.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
That's Tampa, Florida. "Tampa Bay" refers to a body of water.
Lets see:
A total of 44 million gallons of salt water a day is processed and all the salt is rejected to 19 million gallons of brine. Therefore the rejected brine has about 2.3 times as much salt as normal sea water. Since sea water is about 3% salt the brine would be about 7% salt. For reference the dead sea is about 32% salt.
and myself.
I say water is plentiful (70% of the earths surface seems to be covered with it). She says it's a finite resource (I always thought it was recyclable).
I guess the true answer lies in the ability to process said water to an acceptable clean level.
Maybe on the continential US, but I'm sure they have been using these in Hawaii and other small Pacific islands for years.
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
Guess I should explain, an "RO" plant is a Reverse Osmosis facility. A little less expensive on various angles than a still plant (where they distill water rather than filter it), but I wonder if you could run still off of the heat generated at a power plant. San Onofre comes to mind there.
This sig no verb.
....in the US this is correct,for now at least, (I think we will be seeing a readjustment and a common sense averaging of the two environmental extremes soon), but that still leaves most of the rest of the world for such a project. Might be some poor nation someplace that would appreciate it, food and freshwater, and the skilled workers to come in and live there and work it as a co-op with the people already there. One project like this is what? One hour of war in cost? Something like that, probably way off but you know what I am saying. Hmm, maybe even practical in a non coastal but saline/desert area with a salt lake perhaps.
Now some israelis came up with a dandy low tech way to do this, to get freshwater in useful quantities for a useful purpose from salt water. They build deep asphalt pits, waterproof in other words. They are filled with rocks and gravel. They grow veggies at the surface level, using hydroponic methods of a sort. What happens is, they flood the bottom of the pits with normal salt water from the ocean. During the day/night heating and cooling cycle, the salt water starts to evaporate,hits the rocks up above where there's a temp difference, exaxctly where the plant roots are, the water droplets coalesce around the plant roots, feeding them fresh water. Excess water droplets either completely evaporate or drip back down in the pits. The pits are deep enough the plant roots don't make it down there to suck up salty water. They are occassionaly sprayed with a foliant based liquid fertiliser solution. Supposedly works quite well. Been several years since I read about it though, but that is the gist of the technique. I am a big fan of high tech thinking using low tech solutions whenever possible.
Oh well. I did hear one interesting and more-sane international tidbit. While zimbabwe is destroying their farms, and driving away their skilled farmers, mozambique is offering the same guys the red carpet treatment now, very cheap land, etc, to move there and start farms. Funny, too, both nations went through basically the same sort of "revolution", but one appears to have settled down into at least some sort of normalcy, while the other one has de-evolved into chaos. I don't know if that is from them being different past europaen nations influenced, england as opposed to portugal, or why, but it's happening.
There's so much GOOD tech out there now, wish we could make better use of it. Humans just got this "thing" for being predatory and confrotational I guess. I did read that book "the naked ape" by desmond morris a long time ago, guess he nailed a few things correctly.
Dare County (outer banks, NC) has done desal since 1989, some links:
t p://www.membranes-amta.org/media/pdf/reliable.p df
http://darenc.com/Water/papers/desalcmg.htm
ht
The saline effluent from the desalination facility is mixed in with the discharge from a large power plant that is located next to the desalination facility. The power plant takes in hundreds of millions of gallons per day of water from Tampa Bay for cooling. The heated non-contact discharge is put back into the Bay. The relatively small amount of hypersaline (relative to the bay)wastewater from the RO plant is both diluted and well-mixed.
The desalination plant in Tampa Bay is a reverse osmosis plant. There are many RO plants throughout the nation. I believe this is the first large-scale RO plant that uses water from the Ocean (or Gulf of Mexico in this case). The other operating RO plants tend to be pumping groundwater (that is too saline without treatment by far less "salty" then the Bay water).
to see how many delicate ecosystems this desal plant will fuck up. I guess people don't understand the balance that is required in the oceans. Here's a link to the negatives of desal: http://duck2.oc.ntu.edu.tw/iris/apecmrc2/a32.html
this is not a sig.
http://www.edwardwillett.com/Columns/desalination. htm
Now, the plants in Key West may no longer be in use (I don't know if that is true or not), but "the first full-time desalination plant ... in the U.S." is certainly not in Tampa. You might get by with "the only" (and I doubt that is even the case), but "the first" is certainly incorrect.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
There are other commercial plants too, such as in Cape Coral, FL. Google gave me this (I'm sure there are more, this was the first site listed) article which says:
The funny things is that the Tampa people should know better since Cape Coral is only an hour and half drive south of Tampa.
This is absolutely fantastic news.
This should bring down the cost of salt!!! There will be more salt than the US can ever use! Salt for everyone!!!!! They ought to build one of these in costal Africa! More Salt than the third world can ever use!!!
"I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make as they fly past" Douglas N Adams
My city has dozens of those things. It's cheaper than building a ton of waterpumps and my advisors say that I'm a more popular mayor because of it.
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
I can't possibly see how this desalination plant will have an impact on salt levels in the long term. We follow a simple reasoning that only the water contained in the current water cycle will be desalinated. Any used desalinated water will end up back in the bay and dilute any increase in salt concentration back to previous levels. OK so there will be a tiny increase but it will not be noticable and will not be a cumulative effect.
I wonder if its possible to take the salt and sell it to salt companies, like a benefical byproduct?
Or it could just be that whoever reported this doesn't know that the US has possessions in the Caribbean. That sort of geographic ignorance is rampant in the U.S. Ever wonder why New Mexico issues license plates that say, "New Mexico USA"? So New Mexicans can drive outside their state without being asked for their passports! No, I'm not making that up.
..yes it works, it just leaves a more or less permanent toxic residue. There are alternatives to that now. I see no reason to not keep advancing and finding better alternatives for various practices. It's no different a concept than moving on to a faster computer, I mean your old 286 "worked" didn't it? Mine did, I choose to not use it any longer. Same with any discipline, yes?
Some older techniques are so good, that it's cool to keep them, others if viable alternatives exist, making them better/faster/cheaper, etc, and continuing R&D efforts should be adopted. Judgement call there. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Tubular, heh, thanks for the assumption
Last time I went surfing the board was made of wood. It was pretty big and heavy, but it "worked". I am thinking about it now,pretty funny really,it was late winter, and my cob job attempt at keeping warm without a wetsuit, using layers of wool was sort of a failure. heh heh heh shiversurfin. The boards are better now I hear tell.
As many economists already know, salt is one of the strangest goods in the world, in that its price elasticity is almost perfectly inelastic. The demand of salt is always the same, regardless of price. You can never make a profit by selling in bulk.
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