The True Cost of Water

[bleeb]

Which brings me back to Bermuda - upgrade your damn desalination plant, you're surrounded by water! They even built the plant to operate at double it's current capacity and aren't utilizing it.

Maybe someone more familiar with the situation in Bermuda can explain things, but I would imagine that almost all the energy in Bermuda still comes from imports of fossil fuels. Isn't most of the operating cost of salt water desalination the cost of that energy? I don't think anyone believes fossil fuel prices are going anywhere but up in the long term, and I haven't gotten the impression that desalination efficiency is radically improving by massive amounts. So is the Bermuda situation almost a classic case of supply and demand, where consumption is limited not by availability (larger desalination plants) but by the cost of production?

 

[AfterDark]

Bemuda needs nuke plants to power desaltnation plants and produce all the fresh water they need for years to come.
They don't need big plants smaller plants are safer anyway. A submarine size reactor a matchbox size compared to 3 mile island for example will power most of the big island HI. As Mike posted technology holds the answers

 

[Tigerman]

Solar?

 

[Mark Derail]

Drinking water should be harvested from the air, using ground water as the coolant, in places like the Caribbeans.

Pump could be solar driven. At 90$ per 1000 liters, I imagine / postulate that such a system would probably pay for itself within five years.

Desalination is quite costly...Mother Nature has already done the hard work for us, putting it in the air as humidity.
Sometimes it even falls from the sky on it's own...

Kidding aside, air extraction & rain water systems with storage. Treating that water for human consumption is less work, energy wise, than desalination.

 

[Peter_C]

Back to water - the earth is a closed system, matter is neither created nor destroyed.

I will agree with everything except the "nor destroyed" part.

If you drink a glass or water those molecules do not disappear from this planet. If you spill a glass of water on the ground, those molecules do not disappear, they make their way down to the aquifer below or evaporate back to the atmosphere above.

Since you like graphics I will attach a more accurate one. Remember what happens in China doesn't stay in China, it is eventually shipped to the USA.



























I would offer to take you diving but currently the largest body of water around, the Pacific Ocean, has this sign on it.





























Instead lets meet in Hawaii at the beach.

























Point being, water issues are not always one of just supply meeting demand. The way we are using the current resources is one that is not sustainable, and water just happens to be something humans are quickly noticing is becoming scarce.

In the mean time instead of using say...all you want of gasoline because you can afford it, doesn't mean it is the right thing to do. Someday we may have a power source we can hold in our hands, but today that is not available and we need to conserve what we have. I do my part, and have made many efforts to improve the planet I will shortly leave behind.