Re: What don`t you like about Australia?
Julia said:
Yogi
Could you say some more about your suggestion re the water supply?
One aspect of this problem which infuriates me is that millions of megalitres pour from a constant fresh water source on Fraser Island (Qld coast) into the sea every day. It would be a relatively simple matter to pipe this to the mainland. But oh no, Fraser Island is heritage listed so nothing on it can be touched. So stupid.
Julia
Down here in Tas we've got 8600 megalitres litres flowing out of Meadowbank power station (lowest of 10 significant power stations in the Derwent River catchment) every day. We use about 70 megalitres to supply 60% of Hobart's water and the rest flows straight into the sea.
And another 5300 megalitres per day flowing out of Paloona PS (lowest of the 7 power stations (8 if you count a tiny one) in the Mersey-Forth catchment) which flows straight into Bass Strait.
And another 5300 megalitres per day flowing out of Trevallyn PS (in suburban Launceston). A bit is used to supply industry etc but well over 95% flows down the Tamar into Bass Strait. 1900 of that 5300 megalitres is a diversion into the catchment so quite a bit could be taken out before getting back to "natural" flows.
And another 12250 megalitres flows out of Reece PS every day (lowest of the 4 PS in the Pieman catchment). All of that goes straight into the sea off the West Coast of Tas.
That alone is more than the entire water use in all Australian capital cities combined.
And another 3300 megalitres per day comes out of John Butters PS (King River scheme). All of that ends up in the sea off the West Coast of Tas.
And of course there's always the nearly 9000 megalitres per day from Gordon PS...
Those figures only include flow through the turbines and exclude storage spill (due to floods etc) which in practice is not useful to man (though it is useful to nature).
There's some pretty good reasons not to be pumping huge amounts of water onto agricultural land (salinity etc) but there's plenty to spare for urban use and industry if only we moved it to where it is needed.
One big oil tanker sized load to each mainland capital city each day would basically fix water shortages in those cities. And it would take less than 10% of the water coming out of Trevallyn (or about 1.2% of the total non-flood discharge from all Tasmanian hydro-electric schemes) to do it.
And of course Tas only has 12% of Australia's fresh water anyway so you could probably find it closer to home, especially in Queensland and WA.
Photo: Gordon Dam (Tas). About 140m high and, combined with the adjacent Lake Pedder, stores over 10 TRILLION litres when full (27 times the volume of water in Sydney Harbour and more than all Australian capital city water supply storages combined). Every drop headed straight to the sea... (Yes, there's a safety rail so the tourists on top of the dam are perfectly safe...)