Ludwig
From your comments I assume you don’t reside in QLD. Don’t be fooled, most residents here are livered at the fact that our welcome mat has been put out by ‘back flip beaty’ without giving consideration to the consequences. It’s a joke and we are all paying the price. We have all paid our ever-increasing rates and watched these morons piss our money up against the wall. Still wouldn’t live anywhere else though!

Sylvia
I must admit I know little about the conversion from salt to fresh water so I will take your point.

On the other hand I don’t think the water that is supplied to our homes should be of drinking standard in the first place. It’s like spending $20,000 on an ice machine which will make 2,000 kilos per hour when all you want is enough ice for one rum and coke per night then you throw the rest of the ice out until you make some more tomorrow. And don’t forget, we currently bath, shower, swim, wash our cloths, cars and pets in drinking water. What a waste!

A pretty corny analogy but in essence that is exactly what is happening as very few people consume 2 Lt + per day drawn directly from the tap. In any case one can buy bottled water for less than 60c per litre. I for one would rather spend $1.20 per day on drinking water and have a decent shower!

My suggestion would be to treat water to a point where it is safe to drink if desperate but should be either filtered of boiled when consumed.

Furthermore, the water that is returned back to the dam would not be fully treated, it would be treated to the level that exists today. Surely if it is safe to dump into our streams it would be safe to re-direct back to the dams.

Continued
Finally, with regards to the ground water.
My theory is that due to the catchment of rain from the thousands of rooves which is then channelled out to sea and whereby this water, that once fell onto open ground in most areas is no longer falling the water table has been effected.

Possible solution, stop directing rain water into the sea and let our downpipes flow on to the ground.

Lets go back to soggy lawns etc.

Sylvia - regardless of how "valuable" water is per tonne, just where do you think we're going to get the energy to produce all this desal sustainably?

rehctub

You might be happy to spend $1.20 per day on bottled water, but the reality is that that's already more than it would cost to supply your entire daily water usage by desalination.

CJ Morgan

The energy requirements for desalinating the water are not great in the scheme of things (it's about 6kWh per tonne with current technology). A household would use much more energy to heat water for showers than would be used to desalinate its water.

Either we have an economic way of producing energy sustainably, or we don't. If we do, then no problem. If we don't then using energy for desalination makes little difference.

Sylvia
Desal is not a normally occurring process nor is the deumping of millions of litres of treated waste water per day into our waterways.

My suggestion is, that if we must dump it then pay the extra costs and dump it back into the dams where it came from in the first place.

I would be much happier to pay $1.20 per day ($438 per year) for drinking water than to see desal units pop up everywhere along our foreshores!

In further consideration of your previous comment I can't see how desal can produce 1,000 litres of water for just $1 or $2. Does this take into account the running costs, labour costs, maininance costs and depreciation of equipment?

Rehctub, I live in Townsville. We’ve got permanent water restrictions, which recently became permanently more restrictive. This has happened despite the last wet season being very good and filling the Ross River Dam. We are also constantly connected to the Paluma Dam and have a backup capacity to draw on the mighty Burdekin Dam in very dry times.

Townsville has a faster population growth rate than ever before! This is due in no small part to many people who would have moved into SEQ choosing to move somewhere where there is better water security and less harsh restrictions.

So here we are, in the largest city in tropical Australia, with water restrictions that we don’t need to have, but with a rapidly increasing demand on an unchanging water supply capability….which will cement those restrictions.

Oh sorry, they’re already set in concrete. Spose the reason is that our illustrious council has thought ahead a bit and wants everyone to be used to the restrictions that we WILL have to have in the near future with ever-more people moving here.

Quite frankly, the restrictions we now have are serving one purpose only; to lower the per-capita usage rate a bit so that our town planners can justify squeezing in a whole lot more people than they would otherwise have been able to.

It's the same in SEQ.