Conserving NE FLorida's Water Is Better Than Building A "Technological Turkey"

Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Desalination plant under construction in Perth, Australia







A desalination plant outside desert areas is like a Rube Goldberg device we don't need -- an affectation, an energy-wasting device, a means of continuing the promiscuous, polluting waste of our water.

Preident Jimmy Carter said, "our energy problems have the same causes as our environmental prolems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation solves both problems at once."

It is now being hamhandedly bruited about (see below) that our area will have foisted upon it like an alien implant a brand-new desalination plant. Unless it were powered by solar or wind energy, it would require a powerplant burning fossil or nuclear energy.

Not so fast, St. Johns River Water Management District. Not so fast, "Water Authority of Volusia; Flagler, Marion and St. Johns counties; Dunes Community Development District; plus the cities of Palm Coast, DeLand, Mount Dora, Leesburg, Bunnell and Flagler Beach."

S. David Freeman, Jimmy Carter's Chairman of the U.S. Tennessee Valley AUthority, is an energy intellectual and a lawyer and was always quotable when I covered TVA meetings for the Appalachian Observer. I once asked him a question and he responded, "Ed, that's one of those have you stopped beating your wife yet" questions."

Freeman was dead-set against the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which he called a "technological turkey." Congress killed the CRBRP. Freeman helped shut down several nuclear powerplants (at TVA and Sacramento and elsewhere) on the basis that conservation saves energy (and water) and is superior to capital-intensive projects that waste energy.

In my opinion, this desalination plant is a terribly dangerous idea. THere should be a referendum and public debate before the St. Johns River Water Management District, a few cities or any of the other special interests spend any more of our money on this pipedream.

It would mar our coastline with ugliness, either a giant plant at Marineland, or else a giant ship located just offshore. Not exactly what we need to make our area attractive to tourists. Not exactly what we need in the middle of a St. Augustine National Historical Park, National Seashore and Scenic Coastal Parfkway.

See the St. Augustine Record article by Peter Guinta below, "Desalination plant moves ahead == January report to say if $1.2B complex will be on land or offshore" and the articles appearing below it. Do your own research on desalination. Activate, energize and ask questions -- the coast we save is ours, and as Woody Guthrie sang, "this land is our land."