Monday, November 23, 2009

Ashkelon makes "Dry Bones"!

Ashkelon's desalination plant features in today's Dry Bones Cartoon !!
The Jerusalem Post has been running Yaakov Kirschen's Dry Bones political cartoons for 30 years.
"The world's largest reverse osmosis desalination plant (and a target of Gazan missiles) is in the Ashkelon area. The desalination plant provides fresh water to Israel and supplies Gaza with its drinking water. The Israeli government plans to build four more plants which will make the country water independent.
The Ashkelon plant has been targeted by Gazan missiles. A Gazan missile hit would hurt Israel but would also stop all the fresh water flow to Gaza. Which, of course, gave me the idea for today's cartoon"
The Ashkelon Desalination Plant, which opened in 2005, converts more than 26 billion gallons of Mediterranean Sea water into fresh water for the State of Israel each year—5 to 6 percent of total demand. Ashkelon is not only the largest reverse-osmosis desalination plant in the world, it's also one of the few public plants to recover waste heat to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The process does require heat, though not as much as distillation. Reverse osmosis works best when the water is around 95 to 100 F. And while the Ashkelon plant operates at the low end of the desalination cost spectrum (52 cents per cubic meter of water) it's still not cheap, at more than $51 million a year.
nicole

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