Is Australia screwed?

[BPSCG]

oh come on BPSCG....I bet you you wake up at night in laughing fits at the thought of us two drinking a weak solution of our fellow citizens body wastes...

It certainly would explain the tenor of some of y'all's posts...

Mrs. BPSCG's mother lives near Dallas, Texas and the drinking water in her neighborhood tastes literally like it's had a teaspoon of topsoil added per liter. It makes her coffee almost undrinkable - that plus the fact that her preferred ratio of ground coffee to undrinkable water approaches homeopathic dilutions.

Las Vegas water is worse.

 

[Brian the Snail]

We have been saving all our Families urine production for the last 2 years but we cannot get my states government to come and take it away for reprocessing. South Australia are interested because it tastes better than thier drinking water.

Suddenly, the true origin of Foster's lager becomes horrifyingly clear...

 

[WildCat]

Couldn't you all just move to Tasmania? Seems to get plenty of rain there.

 

[Ed]

What we lack is the rockies...simple as that. If we had a mid continent mountain range we would have the massive fertile belt on each side of it too...... and quite a few more large rivers.

Well, I wouldn't have brought it up but now that you mention it. I happen to have some mountains that I can let go very reasonably.

This little parcel should do you nicely. Price is a mere $25,000,000*. Waddaya say?

* FOB Golden, Colorado.

 

[a_unique_person]

Couldn't you all just move to Tasmania? Seems to get plenty of rain there.

So did Victoria, until the drought. It's supposed to be cold, wet and miserable at this time of the year. Now it's only just getting cold. They will be a few minor showers passing by soon, if we are lucky.

 

[BPSCG]

* FOB Golden, Colorado.

You mess with my skiing and the deepest spider hole in the world won't save you. I will hunt you down like a dog, have you skewered from piehole to cornhole, place you on a spit, and feast on your roasted flesh. Let the Aussies build their own damn mountains.

 

[Zep]

(You can hear the screams for miles, but...)

I think it's surprising that we do not use nuclear power for desalination. We have the largest, or perhaps second-largest, deposits of uranium oxide in the world, and we continue to dig it up and ship it overseas to someone else! (This is the perennial short-sighted view of Australian big-business: selling huge chunks of raw Australia overseas in big ships, then paying fortunes to buy the finished product back - SO short-sighted!). And yet we refuse to use more than a few teaspoons of it ourselves for anything but medical purposes. I'm as green as the next person (ribbit), but this resistance borders on the ridiculous.

At a lower level, some obvious solutions suggest themselves. There is actually rain falling regularly on the Sydney, but not a lot in the water catchment area...because it's in a rain-shadow! However, with every passing shower, tens of millions of litres of fresh pure rainwater goes straight down the drains and into the ocean.

But only now has it been noticed that most Sydney houses have no rainwater tanks - a common sight in country houses not connected to reticulated water systems. A million houses with 1000 litre rainwater tanks would ease the strain significantly...but that means the water companies can't charge so much for their services...

And only now is it realised that we actually have a perfectly good system for funnelling runoff storm-water into holding reservoirs and thence back into the main dams to top them up. Instead, for years we have been funnelling it into the holding reservoirs and then out to sea instead! It's incredible how short-sighted our service-providers have been, really.

 

[WildCat]

[BI think it's surprising that we do not use nuclear power for desalination. We have the largest, or perhaps second-largest, deposits of uranium oxide in the world, and we continue to dig it up and ship it overseas to someone else! (This is the perennial short-sighted view of Australian big-business: selling huge chunks of raw Australia overseas in big ships, then paying fortunes to buy the finished product back - SO short-sighted!). And yet we refuse to use more than a few teaspoons of it ourselves for anything but medical purposes. I'm as green as the next person (ribbit), but this resistance borders on the ridiculous.
[/B]

I bet given the choice between nukes for desalination or recycled sewer water from the tap, all but the most hardcore anti-nuke types will pick nukes.

 

[WildCat]

No water shortage here!

No salt in that water, either.







Although there is sometimes sewage from those backward redneck states Wisconsin and Indiana, who can't seem to figure out how to keep their sewers from overflowing into the lake after a heavy rain.

 

[sackett]

You don't have to tell me about the value of H2O

As I understand it,* Australian weather depends on El Nino and similar long-term changes in the Pacific, hence the extended periods of drought followed by wetter cycles. This suggests that the rains will return, although ten years is a weary long time to wait. (Wyoming has been waiting seven years so far, and it's supposed to have seasons.)

The answer, and it won't be cheap, is to diversify: wind- and nuclear-powered desalination, aggressive rainwater collection and storage (including underground storage -- a horrifically expensive undertaking for which your great-grand children will be very grateful), sewerage recycling (at least for irrigation), and research into more exotic schemes, such as that idea somebody had of sailing Antarctic bergs north and melting them in artificial basins close inshore. ("Exotic" sounds nicer than "harebrained," don't you agree? But who knows, it might be feasible, when water starts costing as much as petrol.) IOW, no one solution should be pursued: you need redundancy.

For god's sake, don't drill more boreholes. If you wreck your water-table, you might as well change your name to Ozymandias.

* If I understand it, which is a non-certainty.

 

[sackett]

The Great Lakes

WildCat, like every Great Lakes dweller, wants to gloat and flaunt and taunt about the world's greatest accumulation of fresh water (except maybe for Lake Baikal) -- and of course, since I live in Detroit, I do the same. Eat yer hearts out, 'Stralians!

There have been proposals to ship G. Lakes water all the way to Australia, just the way New England ice used to be. Trouble is, a) it wouldn't do that much good, and b) the water belongs to too many people, all of whom have their own uses for it. You might as well talk about piping Baikal water down to Oz.

 

[Mycroft]

The problem is definitely getting more fundamental than that. The Australian native flora and fauna is designed to withstand droughts. (And flooding rains, for that matter). It is when mature eucalyptus are dying that you wonder what is going on.

Maybe if we accelerate global warming, it will force a climate change that will bring more water to Australia.

 

[BPSCG]

Re: The Great Lakes

There have been proposals to ship G. Lakes water all the way to Australia, just the way New England ice used to be. Trouble is, a) it wouldn't do that much good, and b) the water belongs to too many people, all of whom have their own uses for it. You might as well talk about piping Baikal water down to Oz.

If you want to ship water, try this:

Since Singapore is the closest site to Australia, you probably want to click there. There's a link on the Singapore page that isn't on the U.S. page - tells you how to detox yourself, which is always important...

 

[jay gw]

I live in the desert in the US, and there's a desalinization plant and another one being built. Water's running out everywhere, Australia should take this as an omen and modernize.

 

[President Bush]

Sydney is talking about water from recycled sewerage.

That's okay for the kitchen sink long as whirly-gigs on the back nine are spitting deep aquifer.

 

[Jaggy Bunnet]

Could you not just get everybody in the country to wash their car and/or organise a picnic for the same day?

That always seems to work for me

 

[RandFan]

It seems to me the place is not as advertised. I would sue the Aboriginies.

 

[davefoc]

California is on the edge of experiencing its wettest rainy season on record (over 30 inches of rain).

Interestingly, it was only a few years ago that we had our dryest season on record (about 4 inches of rain).

 

[a_unique_person]

I live in the desert in the US, and there's a desalinization plant and another one being built. Water's running out everywhere, Australia should take this as an omen and modernize.

As I said before.

A large part of the business of Australia is farming. Desalination won't cater to anything like the scale of water we need for that. Desalination won't help the flora and fauna.

 

[jay gw]

A large part of the business of Australia is farming. Desalination won't cater to anything like the scale of water we need for that. Desalination won't help the flora and fauna.

Economies can live without agriculture. Japan does.