Desalination Plant in Australia: Measure to Confront Droughts

The water desalination plant is a process by which sea water is converted into drinking water, which due to a physical-chemical process removes minerals and all those impurities that water has and can be used by human beings. plants, and animals. This plant was used in Australia, due to the natural phenomena that left that country with a great shortage of fresh water. The desalination methods that were carried out for this project were: distillation, reverse osmosis, freezing. The most used was reverse osmosis due to the low cost of energy. In the world there are many industries that only care about their economic benefit regardless of the damage they cause to the environment. As Bunge states, quoting Ortega y Gasset (1985: 116) "I am myself and my circumstance".

The desalination of sea water is one of the possible solutions to the shortage of drinking water, because fresh water is obtained that is used for the supply and irrigation, since salt and pollutants come out that are the cause of destroying the flora and Wildlife is also a high cost of electricity, for this reason should be built more sophisticated desalination plants, which use renewable energy sources and in turn are less polluting.

This desalination process of seawater consumes a lot of energy, therefore, inventions have been made that reduce the amount of energy required, one of which was to implement a reverse osmosis system that requires significantly less energy than thermal distillation. According to Sedlak (2014: s / p): "It is much more practical and sustainable to desalinate salty brackish water and use technology to recycle wastewater. Thus, companies around the world work on new technologies to reduce the costs of desalination, environmental impacts and in turn increase their profits. "

It is called reverse osmosis because it is a process that involves purifying water using pressure and a set of specialized membranes. Through this process it is possible to eliminate 99% of unwanted substances. The cycle inside the filter starts with water running through several layers of spiral-shaped waterproof membranes, which is responsible for absorbing pollutants or substances such as salt, and when exiting at the opposite end, this water can already be used as drinking water. This method is the most effective in terms of filtering processes.

When planning the creation of desalination plants, the reduction of energy consumption is one of the most influential factors, since this project is beneficial in terms of the production of drinking water; On the other hand, it has the disadvantage of being expensive, because although the plants contain energy recovery devices, the amount they need to function properly is enormous. As Díaz (1994: 120) states: "Running after greater achievements at the lowest possible cost is a sign of our time". Decreasing energy consumption and at the same time reducing the economic cost is the main achievement that would be sought by improving the desalination processes.

The water desalination plant is a sustainable future solution since it will avoid drinking water droughts, on the other hand it can be said that this project of the water desalination plant is built with a vision towards the future to increase the percentage of fresh water with respect to to salt water on planet earth, and thus have a high percentage of prolonging life on our planet, because water is an important factor in living beings.

Desalination is the promising future for future generations as the methods to obtain drinking water will continue to be improved over the years, with the purpose of satisfying the population's demand for water, and it could also be said as a preventive measure in the future in the face of droughts. According to Downie (2015: s / p): "The people in the cities believe that because they open the key, the water reaches them. But for that there is a complex world of infrastructure, resources, connections, planning, interests, conflicts and politics. " Behind what we observe at first glance or the knowledge we have about how we obtain water daily in our homes, there is a complex process of distribution of drinking water from reservoirs to cities. In this case, desalination involves a more complex process, not only depending on the distribution of the water but also on its transformation. Therefore there would be a change between the economic, political and infrastructural.