748 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. This is roughly one in ten of the world 's population. Every year, around 60 million children are born into homes without access to sanitation. Every year, around 60 million children are born into homes without access to sanitation. People -- especially those in water-starved parts of the world -- have been searching for fresh water solutions for centuries. Even in modern times, entire populations struggle with a cruel irony; they are surrounded by salt water, but lack drinking water. Desalination, desalinization, and desalinisation refer to any of several processes that remove some amount of salt and other minerals from saline water. Desalination/distillation is one of …show more content…
Distillation is perhaps the one water treatment technology that most completely reduces the widest range of drinking water contaminants. Without safe water or sanitation, people are trapped in a cycle of poverty and disease. Across the developing world, millions of women are wasting precious time collecting dirty water, children are dying from preventable diarrheal diseases, and communities have open sewers running through them. Salt water is desalinated to produce fresh water suitable for human consumption or irrigation. Salt water makes a person thirstier and eventually would make you suffer from dehydration. 2.5 billion People in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, one in three of the world’s population. Using desalination can help lower this number by a ton because it can open these people to a cleaner and more sanitized life. There are varying degrees of salinity in water, which affects the difficulty and expense of treatment, and the level of saline is typically measured in parts per million (ppm). The U.S. Geological Survey provides an outline of what constitutes saline water: 1,000 ppm – 3,000 ppm is low salinity, 3,000 ppm – 10,000 ppm is moderate salinity, and 10,000 ppm – 35,000 ppm is high salinity. Water that contains saline levels less than 1,000 ppm is generally considered fresh water, and is safe to drink and use for household and agricultural purposes. For a reference point, typical ocean water contains about 35,000
Desalination is a great way to help people. Many areas do not have fresh water resources such as rivers and lakes. Taking out the salt from seawater will provide lots of people. This is needed where there is not a lot of natural drinking water. “People are building the Carlsbad desalination project. When it is completed, the huge plant will turn as many as 56 million gallons of seawater each day into drinking
However, due to the long lasting drought in California we should heavily consider this method of producing clean water. In other parts of the world such as China, India, Australia, Spain and more they have been able to produce nearly fourteen billion gallons of drinking water through this process. The largest desalination plant in the world is located in Saudi Arabia and produces two hundred and seventy three million gallons of drinking water per day. If the United States is able to perfect this, it could fix the situation. Amanda Little does an excellent job of sharing a wide array of perspectives of desalination in her article “Can Desalination Counter The Drought”. For instance she describes the discusses the standpoint of the executive director of the California Coast keeper Alliance, Sara Aminzadeh, as she argues, “It’s just not a good option from a cost and energy standpoint.” She goes on to say, “Desalination may seem like a panacea, but it’s the worst deal out there.” Although this method may not be cost or energy efficient, this may be the only plausible method of producing clean water. As seen in Saudi Arabia this is an efficient form of creating clean water and due to the lack of resources, this may be California’s last
There is a water crisis which faces many parts of the world and it is a threat to survival of human beings since humans are primarily dependent on water. Shortage in drinking water is beginning to show its effects in first world countries, but is a current major problem facing lesser developed countries which have not taken drastic steps to harvest water and purify it to make it safe for human consumption. In developed countries the population growth has strained available water resources and stretched the ability of governments and private firms to provide safe drinking water to the vast majority of the population. Seventy one percent of
Desalination is basically the procedure of separating excess sodium chloride, minerals and impurities from sea and ocean water to make it usable for irrigation and human consumption. It has been touted to rid the world of its current water problems for nearly 5 decades now, during this period huge strides have been made in the desalination technology. These advances have made it possible to venture into desalination as the long term option to the water problem in many parts of the world. It is seen as long term since the ocean is not going anywhere anytime soon as compared to lakes and rivers that have been going dry seasonally. The state of California is not new to the water shortage problem; as stated above tit has been a witness to previous droughts. It is therefore time to consider a long term solution to this problem.
With the water crisis being seen around the world, even right here in the United States, we need to explore other options to supply fresh water to the residents. One State, in particular, that raises concern is the state of California. An alternative method to supply water to residents could be the process of desalination. Desalination is when fresh water is made by using either seawater or brackish and eliminating the minerals and salts as a way to make the water safe for human and agriculture uses ( Kesieme et al., 2013). In recent years, we have seen an increase the in the number of desalination plants around the United States (fig 1). However, is the process of desalination the answer for the water crisis going on in California? As a
If residents and corporations throughout the United States continue to frivolously waste water and refuse to make painless changes and upgrades around their homes, it will continue to increase in cost to people across the United States. For example, as a result of the water shortage crisis currently afflicting the southwestern United States, the city of San Diego, California, is currently constructing a desalination plant, located in Carlsbad, California. The idea of a desalination plant is to collect undrinkable saltwater from the ocean and, using reverse osmosis and other filtering techniques, remove the salt to produce clean, potable water (Barnett). However, there are many downsides to relying on desalination practices to provide for a city the size of San Diego. First and foremost, it is considerably more expensive to produce clean drinking water from saltwater as opposed to using regular surface water or groundwater. The act of filtering the water alone can be twice as expensive as traditional filtration methods. In addition, desalination plants consume much more energy than traditional treatment plants, mostly due to the fact that the filtration methods are much more involved. Desalination consumes twice as much power as recycled plants, and four times as much as pumping groundwater (Newell, Roohk and Reardon). For example, the Carlsbad plant alone will require the same amount of electricity as is used to power 125,000 homes in California. However, the biggest
Today, desalination is a common process that's used in seaside cities and towns worldwide. There are more than 15,000 desalination plants around the world providing freshwater from salt and brackish water alike (Planet Green 2011). This number continues to grow as researchers work to improve the process, both in terms of cost effectiveness and energy efficiency (DSE 2011). But countries such as Australia, Israel and even the United States are continually adding desalination plants of various sorts into their water-management portfolios. The facilities are common in North Africa and the Mideast, where freshwater is scarce (Chandler 2008).
The advantages of desalination represents an opportunity to use oceanic water resources. If the appropriate conditions are present, a desalination plant could potentially be used to replace an existing or future dam. As existing sources of useable water run dry, desalination is a very effective, alternative source of water. On top of that the distillation process produces one of the highest quality water, with a range of 1 to 50 ppm tds, tds is also known as total dissolved solids. With the recommended California standard being 500 ppm, this quality of water is far beyond any other water quality seen before.
Desalination is one of the more popular options being considered to attempt to terminate the drought. Desalination is a process through which salt water is pumped from the ocean in to a treatment facility, and then the salt is extracted to make it possible to be used domestically. This is a long drawn out process, which involves seven different steps. The steps of desalination include the
Ocean water desalination is the process of making ocean water drinkable. Seventy-one percent of the world is covered in ocean water, and a significant number of people in the world live within thirty miles of an ocean. Despite the abundance of resources, a large portion of the energy and materials found in the ocean remains largely untouched. Desalination of ocean water is the only solution for countries with a limited availability of existing sources of drinking. Areas such as parts of the Middle East and Africa, where water is scarce, may use outside shipments of fresh water and techniques to purify the abundant ocean water in order to survive. Some areas in South America where water may be abundant, could be unsafe to drink due to the biological
1. There are two main sources of fresh drinking water, ground water and surface water. Ground water originates from precipitations that usually fall in the form of snow or rain. While, the surface water is also originates from precipitate that reaches the land surface and is then recharged into rivers, wetlands and lakes. Although these systems are usually reliable, in desperate time of need, a more reliable source of water is needed. The desalination plant is extremely valuable and flexible because it does not depend on rainfall. Instead, the desalination plant is the only source that relies on seawater. Using seawater in the desalination plant helps meet the community’s water needs and secures the water needs in the future. While other sources of water, such as rainwater or water from dames are not reliable enough to strictly rely
Desalination allows the removal of all impurities from water, through the use of chemical engineering, at a reasonable cost that is affordable to low-income areas (Lopez-Gunn and Llamas). Desalination being used in Flint could help prevent the abundance of lead in the water and allow the Flint River to still be used for the source of water. Instead of spending $12 million to reconnect to Lake Huron, this type of water system could save the city money and end this crisis (Robenznieks). Another way desalination can help is in Africa. Earlier it is mentioned that students created their own filtering system to help communities in Africa. This connected the students with the people in the villages along with the country through this change that was being made because of the water. However, with this new desalination system, instead of allowing a filtering system, it allows for a public water supply in African communities. Currently, global desalination is taking place in North America (16%), Europe (13%), Asia (11%), Africa (5%), as well as several other countries (Lopez-Gunn and Llamas). Lopez-Gunn and Llamas go on to explain how even though the number of this type of system isn’t very high in some areas, the breakthroughs in recent technology allows it to be more affordable and become an option being considered. No matter where in the world the water issue is, it can be fixed by
Desalination is the removal of salt and impurities from groundwater or seawater to produce fresh drinking water. Desalination is a secure water source that doesn’t depend on rainfall and has become a significant water source that has been strengthened through its decrease in production costs and related technological improvements. The process of Desalination is another means of securing Western Australia’s future water supply. Western Australia has two main plants, Perth Seawater Desalination Plant and Southern Seawater Desalination Plant, both of these plants deliver water to the Integrated Water Supply Scheme which supplies water to over 2 million people in Perth, parts of the South West, parts of the Agricultural region and the Kalgoorlie-Boulder
Desalination is the process of removing dissolved salts from water which makes it more useful and it makes it so if you drink the water you will not dehydrate faster and die.The water after the desalination process is utilised for drinking water , crops like corn and wheat , showers , washers , municipal / potable use and for agricultural irrigation but is also used extensively in many other applications where high quality water is required .
Desalination has been used for hundreds of decades, Greek sailors heated water to evaporate fresh water away from the salt and other minerals, and the Romans used some clay filters to trap salt. Today's urbane methods still mostly use the concepts of distillation or filtration. The procedure of desalinating sea water to produce drinkable fluid has a long and gorgeous history. Nevertheless, the first significant modern desalination process to perform was multi-stage flash distillation type (MSF) it is a process that originally started during the mid-20th century in the USA (1955). Moreover, even though multi-effect distillation had been revealed and had the potential to be more effective than multi-stage flash desalination (MSF), it took a