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One of the leading knowledgeable countries on sea water desalination today is Israel. They have a huge problem with getting fresh water because their only supply is the Sea of Galilee which feeds the Jordan River. With the high extraction from the famous Sea, the water in the Jordan has been reduced to a trickle making it more arduous for farmers along the Jordan to irrigate the rich desert regions along its banks. "The more desalination we do, the less we'll need to exhaust these resources and allow them to get back to their natural state," IDE Technology CEO Avshalom Felber said. The Israeli government has invested Billions on five desalination plants alongside the Mediterranean coast stretching from Hadera in the North to Ashdod in the south. The Hadera plant, is the smallest one and also the first one to truly produce fresh water in large quantities. Teddy Golan, vice president of IDE Technologies, a company responsible for the plant says "We found it was cheaper to desalinate water on the shore than transfer it from the Sea of Galilee in the north." President Shimon Perez inaugurated the plant and it has been producing beautiful life sustaning drinking water and irrigation water since then. The much bigger Ashdod plant is scheduled to come online in 2013 The incredible thing about these desalination plants are that they do not call for heat to break up the salt from the water. A process of reverse osmosis technology is used. Reverse osmosis is the most economical method of removing 90% to 99% of all contaminants out of water. Reverse osmosis is extremely successful in removing several impurities from water such as total dissolved solids, turbidity, asbestos, lead and other toxic heavy metals, radium, and a lot of dissolved organics that are contained in sea water. The process will also remove chlorinated pesticides and nearly all heavier-weight VOCs. Reverse osmosis and activated carbon filtration are complementary processes. Combining them results in the most valuable treatment against the broadest range of water impurities and contaminants. Water has been a source of trouble for Israelis, Palestinians and other Arab neighbor states for decades. With the development of these desalination facilities, Israeli officials began to look to the sea for a solution to the region's water problems. The current push to build desalination plants began in 2000 during a lengthy periods of drought that had struck the state. It is said that out of adversity comes opportunity and greatness. The coastal construction boom is not without controversy, however. While cheering the plants' healing impact on natural bodies of fresh water, environmentalists do worry about the effect on ocean life. Environmentally, widespread desalination as in Israel, could take a heavy toll on ocean biodiversity. "Ocean water is filled with living organisms, and most of them are lost in the process of desalination," says Sylvia Earle, one of the world's foremost marine biologists and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. “Most are microbial, but intake pipes to desalination plants also take up the larvae of a cross section of life in the sea, as well as some fairly large organisms…part of the veiled cost of doing business,” she says. Sylvia Earle also points out that the very salty remainder left over from desalination must be disposed of properly, not just dumped back into the sea. The ocean cannot maintain huge amounts of saltwater slush being dumped back in the sea. Perth, Australia desalination engineer Gary Crisp, who works for WA's Water Corporation, said some countries in the Middle East pumped the sludge back out to sea with the brine. "It is pretty harmless, but it doesn't look very good," Mr Crisp said. "It is a red slurry and it smells a bit because it has got organic material (plankton) in it. So if you pump it into the ocean it creates a red plume and would turn your beaches red." "We take it to industrial landfills and into a membrane so it does not trickle into the soil. "The high salt content means it would be harmful to the ecosystem if it entered the soil so a lot of consideration is given to ensuring that this does not happen.
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