About Bloody Time

They've finally announced the winner of the bid to build a desalination plant in SA.

(see title)

This is something that should have been done ages ago, I understand some of the issues involved included things like what will happen to the salt and other stuff they remove from the water which I'm assuming will be just dumped back into the gulf instead of using it for something, but we really need to lower our dependence on Murray water.

I'm assuming that our friends further upstream will probably use whatever we won't be using later on to grow rice or whatever water intensive crops that people in places like Deniliquin grow now.

But if I remember correctly when the government started taking tenders there was a big uproar of some sort (it's Adelaide, what do you expect we've become far more conservative now then we were in earlier times) over the standard "environmental issues" beyond "what happens if we dump the concentrated salt in the gulf" cries of "white elephant" (again, everything here is a white elephant. New hospital? White elephant. Stadium that would allow us to, if Australia gets is, host World Cup games? White elephant. I'd assume an elephant enclosure in the zoo would probably be a white elephant as well) and a bunch of people who thought that Mobil, who owned the area that they will be building this plant, would want to come back and would need a refinery again.

The latter is an absolute joke because I'm sure that the oil refineries prefer to ship our oil in from Singapore.

But we need this thing. The countries along the Persian Gulf have desalination plants and I haven't seen their societies crumble or whatever calamity was supposed to befall us, and they are doing quite fine.

But at least we are now one step closer to lowering our dependence on Murray water.