Lunatics in charge of the asylum:

Dan

Water alone makes life possible! We're over 50% water, we're born in a flood of water when the waters break and we cannot live more than four days without water!

Several years ago, a new form of vastly less expensive desalination was successfully field trialled in Texas, proved to be cost-effective on broad-scale irrigation.

This new space age desalination, deionisation dialysis desalination, doesn't require any back pressure, therefore, not the horrendous energy bill!

The end result, compared to reverse osmosis, is four times more water volume, that's 95% potable.

Moreover, this new space age desalination removes more than just salt ions!

We must recycle all our water instead of sending millions of litres of perfectly good irrigation water out to sea annually.

Gardens thrive on recycled water and the plant-friendly nutrient load that comes with it. And we just have to stop burning the landscape thus creating more erosion and soil removal, instead, we must use other more sane methods of looking after the country than forever burning her. You don't repeatedly burn your mother!

Where burning as land management is replaced by land friendly options, all of the diminishing rainfall is absorbed instead of running off taking scarce topsoil with it.

Just because your Granddaddy allus did it or is part of a nomadic hunter-gather culture, does not make it, good practice!

Time for something different. I mean doing what you've always done while expecting different outcomes is symptomatic of incurable insanity!

All households should also have rainwater tanks and runoff from the gutters should be fed into wetlands to allow nature to clean it up and top up aquifers as part of the planning, Got any nearby national parks, that might serve?

All that would make the latter economically viable would be much, much lower energy costs! And with it, fewer farmers force to quit and far, far worse!

And you know where I'm going with that and with tried tested and proven technology! Only prevented by asinine politician and their abysmally stupid prohibition on nuclear energy and an income-earning (annual billions)nuclear waste repository
TBC, Alan B.

Cont. In his book, Thorium cheaper than coal Professor and economist, Robert Hargraves demonstrates that thorium as an energy source could bring down the price of power to 2,98 cents PKWH.

Take butchers at Alan Goulding's Facebook page and two shared short interesting and informative videos if only to understand that not only does nuclear energy, i.e., electricity generation but the lowest fatality rate for every gigawatt of power generated.

Consider these two options. A traditional 350 MW light water reactor, which during a thirty-year operational lifetime, will require 2551 tons of enriched uranium fuel and in the process produce around 2550 tons of nuclear waste.

Conversely, a new space age MSR thorium powered option, a 350 MW FUJI will require during the same period, just one ton of much less expensive, far more abundant, thorium! Producing around 1-5%, far less toxic waste that's eminently suitable as long life space batteries that burn up with reentry.

Finally, MSR thorium can apart from making affordable miracle cancer cure, alpha particle bismuth 213, can also be tasked with burning the world's stockpile of nuclear waste and in the process liberating an unused 98% energy quotient. As a service other nations would pay annual billions for. If as part of the bargain we provided a safe repository!

And absolutely safely doable, if we first reprocess this material through MSR thorium, material other nations effectively pay for as annual billions and donate centuries worth of, free to us, fuel!

Can be done in complete unconditionally guaranteed safety!

It's all well and good for the usual suspects to whine endlessly about the energy bill for desalination while absolutely rejecting the energy source that would not only make it very affordable but completely drought-proof the nation. And resuscitate our manufacturing industry, allowed to wither on the vine thanks to, privatized or corporatized, gold plated, price gouged, coal-fired energy! And horrendous, eye-watering energy prices higher than the wages bill!

It's not nuclear conflagration that currently threatens our very existence, just fossil fuels and their exhaust products!
Alan B.

The reason energy is as expensive as it is? Are the high, combined, transmission and distribution losses around in total, 75%.
If most of those losses could be eliminated, the cost of reticulated power and desalination power could be reduced by nearly four times.

Our aging and increasingly transmission towers can be replaced by underground cables with graphene superconductor cores. Graphene apart from being a superconductor that, therefore, eliminates most of the current transmission losses?

Cables could be wrapped in fibreglass to insulate them against unintended electrical leakage and given the combination of material, last for centuries? And give they would be buried, eliminate damage by high winds falling trees, storm and tempest, firestorms and any accompanying outage

Graphene is also the strongest material on the planet and would allow roads bridges and other graphene reinforced, oxidation free, carbon fibre structures to be made so durable and robust, they'd also last for unattended centuries?

And carry far heavier payloads and be transportable by freight helicopters? To allow larger spaces to be more easily spaned as factory-produced assemblies? Thus massively reducing construction costs!
Alan B.

A sensible article with a compelling narrative.

I agree with the author that going down the desalination track for Sydney's water supply was an expensive mistake. The Welcome Reef dam should have been built a long time ago and would have provided much more economical water security.

Part of the historical problem with water supply was that water authorities for decades thought they could obviate the need for new dams by depressing demand through higher water charges. The trouble was that when drought hit, there was less scope for water economies because consumers had already cut back.

Despite the current drought, Canberra (so far) has avoided water restrictions, largely because it has greatly increased the size of its Cotter Dam.

Your correct on Welcome Reef and another alternative dam site in the Sydney basin. Demand Management was a disgraceful "little boys finger in the dyke 'distraction'", that SWC paid "LOADS of Money", funnily enough to the same compliant "expert" who ran the 2005 inquiry and the first Metro Water Plan that 'funnily enough' recommended the desal plant just as Min Frank Sartor NSW Treasury and the global water companies desired starter back in 2002. As Dan Diver commented this morning, the idiots are still in charge of our water demise in Sydney and much of the rest of Oz. One day we might get a good government who will allow sound business, environmental and technically qualified " proper independence that can make Australian cities and towns drought free a with safe drinking water and near zero negative environmental and financial impacts.

Please note that the Shoalhaven Transfers started at the 75% storage level. See the latest Drought Report at;

https://www.waternsw.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/148162/Greater-Sydney-drought-report-04092019.pdf

where it says;

“More than 42 GL has been transferred since reaching the trigger to commence transfers in April 2018. “

The only difference now is that they are allowed to pump down to 3 Metres below the Full Level rather than 1 Metre before.

Note that there is only one small problem with relying on Shoalhaven Transfers like we did during the Millennium Drought. There is very little water to transfer at the moment! This is mainly because the inflows to the Tallowa Dam are very low (& also partly because of some maintenance issues on the pipeline from there) . 42GL in total is not much compared to the 150GL/year that was being transferred during the Millennium Drought. That could change, but so far not so good.

You attention to the "local' Tallowa flows/levels detail is admirable. But, the rate payers of Sydney paid for Tallowa, the rate payers of Nowra at it rich expanding suburbs did not, nor did they thank Sydney rate payers for its expensive, wasteful REMS irrigation in scheme for cow farmers back in 2000. When it comes down to it, allowing politicians/vested interests/partisan bureaucrats to control long-term water (or much else) doesn't have a good track record. Put simply, water supply, distribution, waste collection, treatment and sustainable, safe return to environment is easy... its just the "pollie/people/ activist factor that stuffs it up and make it difficult/insoluble /expensive.

It's good to see people beginning to engage with water issues. I started conducting independent research on an environmental sociology of water about three years ago. I'm doing interdisciplinary research across the humanities (anthropology, history, sociology, archaeology) and the sciences, focusing on what scholars and scientists are saying. Fascinating stuff!

PS To Alan B. I'm more than happy to go nuclear power generation providing they build the power plants in someone else's backyard. How about a solid LNP electorate like ScuMo's seat of Cook or in Barnaby Joyce's neighbourhood? Would anyone like to second that? Do you reckon we could get the thumbs up from ScuMo on that proposition? No, I didn't think so!

Mr Opinion, does sound like fascinating stuff you must be coming across. Human nature is a wonderous thing, but increasingly the essential elements of sceptical and critical thought are drowned by the lazy acceptance of mainstream media and " cultists who now dominant Science. Its not what I signed up for at the start of my first degree in Science back in 1979, when I switched from a career oath in Aeronautical Enrg/Pilot with RAF. The worst is Climate warming cultism and its almost fascists tendencies. You should find amazing data in that minefield BUT watch your back, they can be very nasty from experience, If do comment on this " Scientology-like" sect ( the closest they get to being objective scientists) a gas mask and ex- police stab vest and a chili spray for self protection... "Human nature, ya can't live with-it…" and ya can't live without it . Be happy and remember to smile when they insult your opinion, Mr Opinion!