Water Desalination Essay

384 Words2 Pages
Is the desalination of water a sustainable answer ? The availability of fresh water is decreasing in many parts of the world, a problem that is expected to grow with populations. One promising source of potable water is the world’s limitless supply of seawater, but so far desalination technology has been too expensive for widespread use. Water desalination is the removal of salt from sea water to make it drinkable. Desalination is produce in Ships, Submarines and Dessert regions of the world. The top five markets are Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emeritus, USA, China and Israel, other countries are England and Australia. There are two ways of how water desalination is done, 84% of desalination is done by multi stage flash distillation which consist in heating the water to evaporate it, only leaving salt behind. The second is (RO) Reverse Osmosis, which is done by filtering the water trough a membrane. It can easily be used if the countries that are close to the sea or where good energy supplies are abundant. Many believe water desalination is the answer to the world’s water problem, but they don’t see that this brings a lot of other big problems. For desalination to be successful, a large amount of energy is consumed. It uses a lot of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, to generate the electricity needed. Also the desalination machine is very expensive to build, some countries have the capacity of having this process, but the poor countries does not have this option because they don’t have enough money to create the plants needed. Moreover the waste brain from the desalination plant is rich in salt and often contains chemicals, discharging this brine directly back into the ocean can cause a lot environmental problems. Water desalination can help us to solve the world’s water problem, but can also bring a more problems that we would have to deal with
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