California sucks millions of gallons of water from the ocean. The goal is a process known as desalination. The basis of the desalination process is to obtain potable water in places where there are many more people than in other parts of the world. The desalination process is a great solution to the problem of lack of clean water in the world, but the desalination process has its own problems. These issues need to be resolved before the desalination process can be used to its best advantage. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayDesalination is the process of turning salt water into drinkable water. It is very useful in more populated and water-scarce regions of the world. This is because desalination plants can suck up millions of gallons of salt water from the ocean and use different processes, depending on the type of desalination plant, to create hundreds of thousands or even millions of gallons of water. drinkable. The type of desalination plant is important to how the water is used and how much water will ultimately leave the plant at the end of the desalination process. Desalination plants are becoming a new technology and humans love new technology. Humans are slowly entering the era of water scarcity, and if humans continue to use water at the rate they do, the water supply will be gone by 2090 (Li, Yang, Shi and Hu 6). Desalination is definitely a solution to this problem. because it takes water that is undrinkable for humans and makes it non-toxic and perfectly clean for them. Desalination plants are being built around the world, including in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Australia, California and Texas. Indeed, the populations are dense and therefore absorb more water than Nebraska or Yugoslavia, for example. If the desalination process does not change, we will face another crisis. (Li, Yang, Shi, and Hu 6) What would happen if this life-saving solution of turning salt water into drinking water also destroyed lives? People need the environment to live, so it is wise not to harm the environment. as they did and still do without consequences. The ultimate consequence will be when all plants and animals will have died and humans will no longer be able to survive on the planet. This is an extreme consequence, and it will never go that far as long as someone steps up and takes action to stop harming the environment. The question is how humans will stop harming the environment. It's a simple question, but the answer is step by step. The first step could very well be desalination plants, because desalination plants simply convert seawater into drinking water that will not kill the people who drink it. It makes sense to fix what could potentially save thousands of lives in countries like Saudi Arabia, Africa and the United States. All desalination plants need simple repairs, but if they are not repaired, then the plants are not useful enough for the price it costs to build them. (Handman by 4) Why not solve these simple solutions and move on to the next problem to help the environment? The people of this world need an environment to live in, so why wouldn't they want to help save it? This topic of desalination has been controversial for several reasons. The first is that some people in California have started a desalination project to determine where the water is coming from, sonot to harm any marine life. The second reason is that people love the environment and want to help it by protesting water desalination plants because of the damage they cause. The last and most important reason is that desalination plant owners do not want to spend money to solve these small problems. The desalination process is also very harmful to the environment due to the production of brine, the distribution of the brine, the way the water is collected, the amount of energy used, and the amount of oil used to operate desalination plants, but there are solutions such as desalination plants powered by solar and wind energy, harvesting water from beneath the seabed, and the non-nuclear microbial process of desalination. For starters, the first problem isn't as major as some of the others. Brine is sodium chloride in water. (Katz 609) This water essentially contains a lot of salt. The problem of where to put it is because it can be deadly to humans and animals. If humans or animals come into contact with this product, it is not serious, but it is only fatal when a human or animal ingests it by eating or drinking it. Humans know not to eat or drink something they find in a landfill, but animals don't. The importance of safely disposing of brine is because humans need animals to survive in this world and they start being killed because they end up in brine that is not properly disposed of. In other words, the problem remains where to dispose of this brine. brine. They can't dump it in the ocean because that would kill marine life, but they also can't put it where humans and other animals can easily access it. This forces the owners of these desalination plants to typically leave the reverse osmosis brine in landfills or random places where humans and animals can obtain it. It's a big problem. Another problem with reverse osmosis is not only removing salt molecules from water, but also removing bacteria. Some of these bacteria humans actually need. Some bacteria are bad. These are the kinds of bacteria that make humans sick, but there are also good bacteria that help the human immune system. By eliminating virtually all bacteria from the water, humans do not receive as many bacteria needed to develop the immune system and fight off bad bacteria. (Katz 609) This can be very dangerous to humans in the long and short term. This crisis mentioned earlier is because desalination plants and the desalination process are harmful to the environment. The desalination process in different desalination plants varies, but the majority of them use the process known as reverse osmosis mentioned earlier. This process is very energy intensive. Reverse osmosis is a form of technology using a semi-permeable membrane. This membrane will help remove large particles present in the water to make it drinkable. “In reverse osmosis, applied pressure is used to overcome osmotic pressure, a colligative property that depends on chemical potential, a thermodynamic parameter.” (Jones 1031) This applied pressure simply uses more water to remove the other water. This is very energy intensive, which poses very big problems such as brine production. The production of brine then poses the problem of knowing where to put this brine. Fighting water with water seems like a strange thing todo, but using so much energy to fight water with water is ridiculous. This needs to be addressed because humans cannot afford to use so much energy. The world is going green and the only way to go green is to stop doing the things that turn the world black and turn it into a giant dump. If there was another way to do the desalination process, it would improve the situation. There is more than one desalination process in this world, and another desalination process is powered by heat. Basically, diesel generators are used to provide heat, but they tend to burn out between 30 and 40 percent. (Pernia and Diaz 2) If a distilled membrane system is connected to the diesel generator, the generator can work fully to use a lot of energy, heat and oil to complete the desalination process. This process uses twice as much energy as reverse osmosis, and this type of desalination plant uses five times as much oil as reverse osmosis plants. The oil is not only used for the plant, but also for the generators that carry out the desalination process. This process also creates twice as much brine as reverse osmosis, but low-temperature thermal desalination uses as much energy as heat and creates twice as much brine as thermal desalination. This process uses a cooling vacuum to lower the temperature of the seawater, but before cooling the water, it is boiled. Once cooled, the water is pumped through coils to condense the water. Once all this is done, the product is potable water. This process is also very wasteful, because if a desalination plant extracted a million gallons of water from the ocean, it would only receive a third of it as drinking water, because during the boiling stages and cooling, a large part of the water ends up evaporating. and disappear. (Pernia and Diaz 4) Desalination plants not only have a problem with the brine and the amount of energy used by the different desalination processes. They also have problems collecting water. Some use a large vacuum hose in the ocean, but this can kill marine life. Marine life can be caught in the pipe and basically the life is sucked out of the animal. (Hui, Liu and Song 2) A desalination plant in California called Poseidon found a solution to this problem by placing a net over the pipe. Californians still weren't convinced it wouldn't help marine life. People thought that marine life would always find a way to get sucked into the big suction pipe. The Poseidon Project figured out that it wasn't harmful to marine life because the holes in the net were so small that no marine life could fit through them, but it was harmful to the desalination plant because the Starfish and others would obstruct the holes in the net. This made it more difficult to collect the water needed to operate the plant. (Nazar)Other desalination plants use various methods to collect water, such as using a pipe laid in the ocean that does not have the capacity to suck up the water. This water harvesting process continues to kill marine life, as marine life can simply swim straight into the pipe and get caught. This process does not consume as much energy as the Poseidon Project because there is no vacuum suction. This process simply allows natural ocean waves to progress through the pipe. This is also counterproductive for the desalination plant, as it fails to obtain as much water as needed in less time. The Poseidon project obtains twice as much water as desalination plants with thistype of water recovery in a few hours (Nazar). The next problem with desalination plants is that they use too much oil. Oil is used for a number of things in desalination plants. The desalination process is part of it, but it is not the main reason for using this oil. The oil is used for the plant itself. It is used to power the pumps and keep the building in working order. Oil isn't something humans can just exploit more of, and the more of it desalination plants use, the less humans have to use for important things like homes and cars. Desalination plant owners will say that without this oil, there is no way to power the entire building. (Gupta, Mehta and Dhingra 9) This is a false statement because new technologies have been developed which are better for the environment than the use of oil. The first technology and solution to one of the many problems of desalination plants is wind power. The wind turbines will be installed outside the desalination plants and the wind will generate electricity for the desalination plants. This would work very well in places like Saudi Arabia, because they always face dust storms, made up mostly of desert sand blown by very strong winds. The other technology is solar energy. Solar panels are placed on the building and generate energy to carry out the desalination process. This process can be used almost anywhere because the sun comes out every day. The current problem with solar and wind power is that they can be expensive. There's even a solution to this, because as solar and wind become more common, prices come down. (Young, Jong, and Yu 391) If desalination plants took the slightly more expensive route, they could eliminate many of their problems with the desalination process. People protested the Poseidon Project. They wanted to improve the environment and not harm the innocent animals in the ocean who have no idea what is happening except that their home is now gone. However, if we look at the situation from another angle, it is very expensive to fix what has already been done. Desalination plant owners who already have pipes that harm marine life don't have the money to stop collecting their water this way and fundamentally change much of their desalination process. Desalination plant owners want to help the environment as much as anyone else, but they are totally opposed to this help because they cannot afford to give up what they already have and pay for something new. Not only because they would have to find a new way to harvest water, but also because they would have to use wind turbines or solar panels to produce energy so they don't use so much oil. Solar panels are very expensive. Not only would they have to pay the high prices for the panels themselves, but they would also have to pay for other people to install these panels on buildings. That's a lot of money. Some would say just build a wind turbine, but they don't know that wind turbines cost twice as much as installing solar panels on one and a half desalination plants. (Barringer by 5) Wind turbines are also not very profitable because unless the desalination plant is in a location like the Middle East or Windy City, Chicago, there is no way to estimate the amount of wind.