California is sucking millions of gallons of water from the ocean. The purpose of this is a process known as desalination. The basis of the desalination process is to obtain clean drinking 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 the world's lack of clean drinking water, but the desalination process has its own problems. These problems must be resolved before the desalination process can be used for the better. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Desalination is the process of turning salt water into drinkable water. It is very useful in parts of the world with larger populations and little water. That's because desalination plants can siphon 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 to millions of gallons of clean drinking water. The type of desalination plant is important based on how the water is used and how much water will exit the plant at the end of the desalination process. Desalination plants are becoming a new technology and humans like new technology. Humans are slowly entering the era of water scarcity, and if they continue to use water at current rates, the water supply will disappear 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 in places like Saudi Arabia, Spain, Australia, California and Texas. That's because the populations are dense and therefore absorb more water than, say, Nebraska or Yugoslavia. If the desalination process does not change, we will face another crisis. (Li, Yang, Shi and Hu 6) What if the very solution of turning salt water into drinking water, which saves lives, also destroys human 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 final consequence will be that all plants and animals will die and humans will no longer be able to survive on the planet. This is an extreme consequence, and it will never have to go that far until someone steps up and takes action to stop the damage to the environment. The question is how humans stop harming the environment. It's a simple question, but the answer is one step at a time. The first step could very well be desalination plants because desalination plants are simply converting seawater into drinkable water that will not kill the people who drink it. It makes sense to solve what can ultimately save thousands of lives in places like Saudi Arabia, Africa and the United States. All the desalination plants they need are simple fixes, but if they aren't fixed, the plants aren't useful enough for the price it costs to build them. (Handman par 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 people want to help save it? This topic of desalination has been controversial for several reasons. The first is because some people in California started a desalination project to fix where they got their water from, so thatdo not harm marine life. The second is because people love the environment and want to help it by protesting against water desalination plants because of the damage they cause, and the last and most important reason is because the owners of desalination plants do not want to spend money on 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 recovered, the amount of energy used and the amount of oil used to operate the plants desalination, but there are solutions such as desalination plants powered by solar and wind energy, recovery of water under the seabed, and the coreless microbial desalination process. For starters, the first problem isn't as bad as some of the others. Brine is sodium chloride in water. (Katz 609) This water basically contains a lot of salt. The problem of where to put it is because it can be lethal to humans and animals. If humans or animals come into contact with it, that's fine, but it's only lethal when a human or animal gets it by eating or drinking it. Humans know not to eat or drink anything they find in a landfill, but animals don't. The importance of removing brine safely is because humans need animals to survive in this world and they are starting to get killed because they get into brine that is not being removed properly, so in other words, there remains the problem of where download it. brine. They can't throw it into the ocean because it would kill marine life, but they also can't put it where humans and other animals can easily get to it. This forces the owners of these desalination plants to usually leave the brine resulting from reverse osmosis in landfills or random places where humans and animals can obtain it. This is a big problem. Another problem with reverse osmosis is not only the removal of salt molecules from the water, but also the removal of bacteria. Some of those bacteria humans actually need. Some bacteria are bad. This is the type that makes humans sick, but there are also good bacteria that help the human immune system. By removing virtually all bacteria from the water, humans are not getting the amount of bacteria needed to build the immune system and fight off bad bacteria. (Katz 609) This can be very dangerous for humans in the long and short term. The crisis mentioned before is due to the fact that desalination plants and the desalination process are harmful to the environment. The desalination process at various desalination plants varies, but most of them use the process known as reverse osmosis mentioned earlier. This process requires a lot of energy. Reverse osmosis is a form of technology that uses a semi-permeable membrane. This membrane will help remove larger particles in the water to make it safe to drink. “In reverse osmosis, applied pressure is used to overcome osmotic pressure, a colligative property driven by chemical potential, a thermodynamic parameter.” (Jones 1031) This applied pressure simply uses more water to push out more water. This process requires a lot of energy and causes major problems such as brine production. The production of brine then poses the problem of where to place it. Fighting water with water seems like a strange thing to do, but using so much energy to fight water with water is ridiculous. It needs to be addressed because humans cannot afford to use so much energy. The world isbecoming green and the only way to become green is to stop doing the things that make the world black and turn it into a giant landfill. If there was another way to do the desalination process, that would improve the situation. There are 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 at 30-40%. (Pernia and Diaz 2) If a distillate membrane system is connected to the diesel generator, the generator can fully operate 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 more oil than reverse osmosis plants. The oil is not only used for the plant, but is also used for the generators that are part of its desalination. This process also creates twice as much brine as reverse osmosis, but low-temperature thermal desalination uses the same energy as heat-powered desalination and creates twice as much brine as heat-powered desalination. This process uses a cooling vacuum to lower the temperature of seawater, but before cooling the water, they boil it. After the water has cooled, it is pumped through the coils to condense the water. After doing all this, the product is clean drinking water. This process is also very useless because if a desalination plant were to extract a million liters of water from the ocean, it would only receive a third of it through clean drinking water because during the boiling and cooling phases, a lot of the water ends up evaporating and disappearing . (Pernia and Diaz 4) Desalination plants not only have the problem of brine and how much energy is used by the different desalination processes. They also have problems with water recovery. Some use a large vacuum tube in the ocean, but this can kill marine life. Marine life can become trapped in the tube and essentially 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 mesh net over the pipe. People in California still weren't convinced that this wouldn't help marine life. People thought that marine life would still find a way to get sucked into the big vacuum tube. Project Poseidon realized that it was not harmful to marine life because the holes in the net were so small that no marine life could pass through them, but it was harmful to the desalination plant because starfish and the like would block the holes by attaching themselves to the net . This made it more difficult to recover the water needed to keep the plant running. (Nazar) Other desalination plants use various ways to recover water, such as using a pipe located in the ocean that does not have the capacity to suck up the water. This process of reclaiming water is still killing marine life because marine life can simply swim straight into the pipe and become trapped. This process does not use as much energy as the Project Poseidon process because there is no vacuum suction. This process simply lets natural ocean waves wash into the tube. This is also counterproductive for the desalination plant because it does not get all the water it needs in a shorter period of time. The Poseidon Project gets twice as much water as desalination plants with this type of water recovery in a couple of hours (Nazar) The next problem thathave desalination plants is that desalination plants use too much oil. Oil is used for a number of things in desalination plants. The desalination process is one of those things, but it is not the main reason for using this oil. The oil is used for the plant itself. It is used to run pumps and to keep the building up and running. Oil is not something that humans can simply make more of, and the more desalination plants use, the less humans will 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 everything in the building. (Gupta, Mehta, and Dhingra 9) This is a false statement because new technologies have been developed that are better for the environment than using oil. The first technology and solution to one of the many problems with desalination plants is wind energy. Wind turbines will be located outside the desalination plants and the wind will generate energy for the desalination plants. This would work very well in places like Saudi Arabia because there are always dust storms, which are essentially desert sand carried by very strong winds. The other technology is solar energy. Solar panels are installed on the building and generate energy to carry out the desalination process. This process can be used practically anywhere because the sun comes out every day. The current problem with solar and wind energy is that it can be expensive. There is a solution to this too because, as solar and wind energy are becoming more common, prices are coming 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 against Project Poseidon. They wanted to improve the environment and not hurt the innocent ocean animals who have no idea what is happening, except that their home is now gone. Looking at the situation from another perspective, however, it is very expensive to correct what has already been done. Desalination plant owners who already have pipes that harm marine life don't have the money to stop collecting water this way and fundamentally change most of their desalination process. Desalination plant owners want to help the environment as much as anyone else, but they are completely against helping the environment in this way because they can't afford to abandon what they already have and pay for something new. Not just because they would have to come up with a new way to recover the water, but because they would have to use wind turbines or solar panels to create energy so they wouldn't use so much oil. Solar panels are very expensive. Not only would they have to pay the high prices for the panels, they would also have to pay for other people to put those panels on buildings. That's a lot of money. Some would say just build wind turbines, but they don't know that wind turbines cost twice as much money as putting solar panels on a desalination plant and a half. (Barringer par 5) Wind turbines also do not perform well because unless the desalination plant is somewhere like the Middle East or the Windy City, Chicago, there is no way to estimate how much wind they will receive. This is an extreme amount of money. Desalination plant owners are key to better understanding how desalination is performed and how to resolve the issues involved. There.