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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-thirsty dept.

Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water.

Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March. The crisis has been caused by three years of very low rainfall, coupled with increasing consumption by a growing population.

The local government is racing to address the situation, with desalination plants to make sea water drinkable, groundwater collection projects, and water recycling programmes.

Meanwhile Cape Town's four million residents are being urged to conserve water and use no more than 87 litres (19 gallons) a day. Car washing and filling up swimming pools has been banned. And the visiting Indian cricket team were told to limit their post-match showers to two minutes.

Such water-related problems are not confined to Cape Town, of course.

Nearly 850 million people globally lack access to safe drinking water, says the World Health Organisation, and droughts are increasing.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:51PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:51PM (#621810)

    I don't know the local geography of Cape Town, but one of the few things that will be saving the people of Florida during their coming water crises is that an absurd amount of water is currently used by agriculture. They cry "water shortage" in the city, meanwhile the nearby tomato farmers use more water than the entire city. Sooner or later, the tomatoes are going to lose out, and then people will really have to start taking conservation and alternative sourcing seriously - or just leave the state because they don't like paying for bottled water to bathe in.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:47PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:47PM (#621949) Journal

    You're going with Tomatoes as the problem? Seriously?

    Water all around you.
    Solar and wind everywhere you look.
    Three Nuclear Power plants.

    Seems to me desalination or RO water would be an obvious choice in Florida and South Africa.

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 13 2018, @10:17PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday January 13 2018, @10:17PM (#621957)

      Inland tomatoes seriously consume more water from the local aquifer (the same one that supplies household drinking water) than the entire coastal city of Sarasota, in Sarasota County alone. Similar situations exist for ag-use everywhere in the state. When a cold-snap comes, 1000hp engines pump water up out of 12" boreholes to keep the citrus wet, makes the aquifer drop by 10 feet overnight. Meanwhile, suburbanites are told to only water their lawns between the hours of 6 and 7am on alternate days of the week depending whether or not they have even or odd house numbers, building codes call for 1/8" flow restrictors in shower heads, and similar nonsense.

      I'd like to see Crystal River and Turkey Point get 5 or 6 new nuclear friends in the state, especially if it could mean an end to the burning of coal and other fossil fuels here, and with the surplus power we could run desalination plants, but, no... new Nuclear will be lucky to open the first plant in 30 years in the US sometime soon. With the cost of electricity in Florida running ~$0.11/kWh, going with a RO desalination efficiency of 3.6 kWh/m^3, that's ~$0.002 per gallon, or roughly $6 per person per month typical (100gallons/day) usage - not a terrible deal on the economic side, but the cheap RO water I've tasted in the Bahamas is, frankly, nasty, and probably not suitable for crop irrigation due to residual salt accumulation in the farmland. If we wanted to convert the Sarasota municipal water region over to RO water, first they'd revolt due to the taste, (there's no current plans [usf.edu] to use RO), they're projecting a need of 30 million gallons per day, which would require roughly 10MW to run the RO plant alone, that's about 7.5 tons of coal per hour [quora.com], or a bit over one rail-car full of coal per day, with the attendant fly-ash disposal problems, sulfur, mercury and other toxic emissions, cost of scrubbing to reduce those problems, etc. And, this is just one of dozens of Florida counties with similar fresh water needs.

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