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."

Comments

USVIs

[mjpaci]

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

This is not the first operational US desal plant

[dacarr]

There is a small desalination plant on Santa Catalina Island, which provides a significant amount of the island's water requirements without having to have it tanked in from Long Beach. (More of it is from inland reservoirs scattered about the island.) Granted it's an RO plant, but let's get the facts right, shall we?

Read here for details provided by the California coastal commission. You'll have to page down a bit.

Cost analysis is important

[GuyMannDude]

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A few months after it went online, rainfall boosted water reserves to a high enough level that drought conditions were no longer in effect.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

Guess this solves the arguement between my wife

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Re:This is not the first operational US desal plan

[dacarr]

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.

Uh, there are some in the US already.

[Above]

Dare County (outer banks, NC) has done desal since 1989, some links:

http://darenc.com/Water/papers/desalcmg.htm
htt p://www.membranes-amta.org/media/pdf/reliable.p df

brilliant news!!!!!

[WickerChap]

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!!!

Re:cool!

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh, boring old chlorine. Too bad it "works", as those boring old engineers like to say. They should invest in an unproven, tricky technique to treat the water. That way, you could have "total" alternate energy, instead of just "partial". Totally tubular, dude!