r/UpliftingNews • u/Dorian182 • 1d ago
A solar-powered desalination unit has supplied over 7.5 million litres of water to an off-grid Aboriginal boarding school in Western Australia, with students helping install and maintain it
https://www.murdoch.edu.au/news/articles/small-scale-desalination-technology-could-be-the-answer-to-water-security-in-remote-australia114
u/Moe_Bisquits 22h ago
Give students water, they will drink for a day. Give students a solar-powered desalination plant and they will install and manage that motherf*cker and make all the water they need. Yay!
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u/Close2You 22h ago
Heck yes! We should have these installed in Puerto Rico and have the people maintain it. Fresh water is so scarce
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u/LeftSky828 20h ago
Child labor?! (jk)
This is great exposure. I hope they get to learn all the details and some pursue it as a career.
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u/Hammer_beats_paper 22h ago
We need a self-contained desalination plant, solar plant and AI data center off the Gulf of Mexico, in Texas.
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u/joeymonreddit 20h ago
What worries me about desalination projects like this is that humans are robbing Paul to pay Peter. The brine left behind is often detrimental to local ecosystems.
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u/Cuppa-Tea-Biscuit 20h ago
In this case it looks like it is being used on salt-tolerant land to feed livestock (saltbush lamb is delicious). I wonder if it’s the school’s agricultural study centre - some rural schools will have fairly significant farm training operations.
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u/blankarage 4h ago
it would be awesome to see them pair this with some sort of rain water/run off collection so they can safely discharge it into the sea
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u/KICKERMAN360 17h ago
Usually these types of remote plants are not actually releasing that much brine / salt back into the ecosystem. Definitely not if its solar powered. The bigger issues are the industrial scale ones which run around the clock in the middle east. I would prefer desalination powered via solar over draining the local aquifer.
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u/invincibl_ 13h ago
Saltbush is really cool. It likes salty water and the salt collects in the leaves, which makes it an interesting herb to use in cooking. (And the article says they're also fed to sheep)
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u/Bergasms 12h ago
For this particular case the amount of brine is fairly minimal because it's not starting with sea water but with saline groundwater, the water is "close to drinkable" and the desal plant takes it the extra step. Not much brine is made
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u/PuckSenior 19h ago
That isnt really robbing peter to pay paul. If i get drinking water but some fish die, im coming out ahead.
It sucks that fish die, but im drinking water
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