Massachusetts Considering Desalination Plants

Iphtashu Fitz writes "Despite a reservoir system containing some 412 billion gallons of water for Boston and surrounding communities, some eastern Massachusetts towns are facing water shortages and are now considering water desalination plants as a new source of fresh drinking water. The city of Brockton, 20 miles south of Boston, has plans in the works to build a $40 million plant and could begin construction as soon as this September. Currently there are fewer than 100 desalination plants in the US and most of them are in smaller communities, but that seems to be changing. The largest desalination plant in the country is located in Tampa, FL, which expects it to provide 10% of the citys drinking water by 2008. California also has at least 10 large scale plants on the drawing board. Some environmental organizations like the Conservation Law Foundation dispute the need for desalination plants however. They argue that many water shortages could simply be solved by better conservation of existing supplies."

Comments

Re:Enviromental issue anyone?

[Cyno01]

You misunderstand... Desalination does 'clean' water, but specifically it removes the salt from seawater to provide fresh water for costal communities. This is a good thing because only about 1% of the worlds water is fresh water easily avalible for our use. The only environmental issue is that desalination requires huge amaounts of energy. This is not so much of a problem if the plant has its own small nuclear reactor or solar power setup.