Disadvantages Of Water Desalination

Water Desalination

Everyone in this planet needs to be able to access water in order to live. 71% of the earth is covered by water, so accessing water from anywhere must be easy. However not all of the water on earth is freshwater. Only 3% of the world’s water is freshwater and ⅔ of the freshwater is tucked in glaciers. Everyone requires freshwater in order to live, as a result about 1.1 million people in this world lack access to freshwater. In India alone, only 18% of the population has access to freshwater. 38 million people in India are affected with waterborne diseases each year. Almost 75% of them are children. This is just in India, which is a developing country right now. Fortunately there are methods of desalination which would eliminate

Desalination provides accessible drinking water, desalination plants can provide drinking water in areas were there is no fresh water. Some Caribbean islands get almost all of their drinking water through desalination plants, and Saudi Arabia gets 70 percent of its fresh water via desalination. This method is actually very helpful as this process goes through a lot of stages and purifies the water. It is very helpful as it purifies the salt water through each evaporation chamber. It distributes the amount of work for all the chambers which allows the chambers to last long and work properly. Water goes through the four stages, and each chamber does it’s job and freshwater is product eventually. Another advantage of desalination plants are that they reduce pressure of freshwater supplies that comes from areas that need protecting. By treating ocean water rather than removing water from sources is also very helpful as that preserves the natural water bodies. However there are also some disadvantages, as it is very costly to build this kind of plants. Depending on the location, building these plants can cost $2.9 million to $300 million. Even after building the plants, once they are operational, they require a lot of energy in order for the plants to be efficient. Whereas that energy costs almost ⅓ or ½ of the total cost of producing freshwater. Therefore not all countries in this world will be able to afford or product desalination plants. Another disadvantage are the environmental impacts the desalination plants make. Removing the salt removed from the water is a big issue. The discharge which is also known as brine, lowers the amount of oxygen in the water at the disposal site, which leads to the killing of animals that are not used to the higher levels of salt. In addition, the desalination process uses numerous chemicals including chlorine, carbon dioxide,