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The Chinese built one of the largest desalination plants
View of the Bohai Bay i>
Chinese рассказали about his plans for the construction of in the Bohai Bay near the town of Tangshan largest desalination plant. Four years later, the station will start working and will remove the salt from the 120,000 tons of sea water daily. The resulting 50,000 tons of drinking water through a pipeline length of 270 km will be delivered in Beijing.
The rapid development of China in recent decades allows him to set records in terms of population and its density. Urbanization leads to an increasing number of megacities and the gradual formation of not having analogues urban conglomerates with a population of about 100 million people. The downside of this growth - a lack of basic natural resources. Fresh air has long been in short supply in the centers of large cities. In addition, China needs to solve the problem of fresh water.
The supply of fresh water needed for human spread across the globe very unevenly. In Eurasia, where he lives about 70% of the world's population is only 39% of the world's river water. In China, the lives of 20% of all people with the fresh water on its territory only 7% of world reserves. About 87% of all terrestrial fresh water is contained in lakes. The famous Russian Baikal contains about 20% of the lake water world.
Of course, because of all the water on Earth 97% is contained in the seas and oceans. The only problem is that the water is very salty and not suitable for drinking. Countries that have access to the sea, are investing in desalination plant.
By 2020, the Chinese government has approved a plan for the daily production of 3 million tons of fresh water from sea water - about 4 times greater than the current volumes. In 400 of the 668 largest cities in the country anyway already a shortage of water.
Industrial desalination process, developed in the 1950s, until recently used only enough rich countries - for example, in the first place by the volume of desalination has always been Saudi Arabia. But in recent years the interest in the conversion of seawater into drinking show China, Israel, Spain, Australia and the United States. Drought in California last year led by the need to enter the water supply restrictions. This is spurring the construction of a major new desalination plant in San Diego , which should start operating next year. The station will have to issue approximately 190,000 tons of fresh water per day.
Desalting is carried out on an industrial scale by two methods - reverse osmosis (pushing water through the membrane, retarding salt particles) or distillation (boiling followed by collecting and cooling steam). Amount of energy required for this process, account for nearly half the cost of servicing the desalination plant.
Unfortunately, the energy for the desalination plant in China will be produced from fossil coal burned, which, according to the World Resources Institute study, will lead to additional emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and to the further deterioration of air in China and its surroundings.
Source: geektimes.ru/post/248966/
