Water, Water Everywhere

…and the boards did shrink. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” (Samuel Coleridge)

Water covers 71-percent of the entire earth. But of all that water only about 3 percent is fresh and drinkable (also called “potable’).

Water is available almost everywhere. The main question is the methods used to obtain it. Sources like ground water, aquifers, rain collection, surface water such as rivers, streams, even glaciers – all have to be tested to be certain of its safety for drinking, washing and hygienic uses.
The most common contamination of water sources from the ground and surface flow is human sewage and especially human fecal and parasitic waste.

The availability of clean, “potable” water is found in direct proportion to the wealth, or economy, of the country or area studied. In the poorer countries lack of clean water has reached endemic proportions; 2 million deaths a year of which 90 percent are children under the age of five.

There are processes at work and others being studied to “desalinate” sea water for human consumption and there are some experts that say we should be working more seriously on this problem than we have to date. One of the problems involved in obtaining consumable water from the ocean is that the process is very expensive, space and time consuming.

The Lorson Group has for years expounded the theory that water power generated electricity is one of the ultimate answers to the cleaning the environment. We suggest now that the process of generation can be coupled with that of desalinization of brackish water to the even greater benefit to humanity at costs considerably lower than those encountered in the past.

We have found the economics of hydropower and its clean and very cheap product. We have also found the means of increasing the efficiency of fossil fuel generation of electricity from 35% to 75-80% through waste heat recovery.

In our succeeding issues we will present the combined advantages of hydropower and the total energy generation concept to work on cleaning up both air and water.

We close this one by quoting Jacques Cousteau, that eminent explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, humanitarian, photographer, author and sea study researcher who said “Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”