The world’s greatest resource of water is the ocean, but energy is required to remove the salt from it and make it potable or even useful for agriculture and industry. The energy produced by nuclear reactors is considered economical in the large quantities that soon will be required.
The AEC and the Office of Saline Water of the Department of the Interior, after a preliminary study, have joined with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the electric utility firms serving the area, to begin construction of a very large nuclear-power desalting plant on a man-made island off the California coast. The plant, when completed in the 1970s, will have an initial water capacity of 50 million gallons per day and also will generate about 1,800,000 kilowatts of electricity. Additional desalting capacity is planned for addition later to achieve a total water capacity of 150 million gallons per day.
Plans to construct a nuclear desalting plant in California were announced in August 1966 by (from left) AEC Commissioner James T. Ramey, Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, Mayor Samuel Yorty of Los Angeles, and Joseph Jensen, Board Chairman of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
Plans for other nuclear-powered desalting projects around the world are being discussed by the United States government, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the governments of many other nations. Some of these also may be in operation during the early 1970s.[17]
Model of the nuclear power desalting plant to be built on the coast of Southern California.
These projects followed extended detailed studies, including one “milestone” investigation at the AEC’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in which the economic feasibility of using very large nuclear reactors coupled to very large desalting equipment to produce power and water was determined.
The significance of these studies was recognized by President Johnson in 1964, when he told the Third International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy: “The time is coming when a single desalting plant powered by nuclear energy will produce hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh water—and large amounts of electricity—every day.”
It is obvious that today realization of that goal is much nearer.