The fear of any change in our environment has reached ridiculous levels. Rodney Mazinter’s letter did a great job of illustrating this (Adopt brineless process, November 14). He notes that Cape Town intends to introduce desalination, and that means generating a brine waste. How does Cape Town plan to overcome the problem? What problem? Cape Town hopes to desalinate 250-million litres per day. Sea water contains about 35g of salts per litre, so desalination will produce 8,750 tonnes of salt a day. If it all goes into Table Bay (Green Point to Robben Island to Blaauwberg to the docks, an area of 7,000ha) and the average depth is 15m, the saltiness of the sea will increase to 35.008g of salts per litre. Every day, the currents that run through Table Bay will remove it and bring in new sea water to be "polluted". The environmental effect of desalination is no problem at all; the same cannot be said of Cape Town’s lack of water.
Prof Philip Lloyd Energy Institute, Cape Peninsula Un...
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