What I don't get about the whole desal plant & poo farm thing is this, why don't they just pipe the already 'clean' water from the poo farm to the desal plant? solves both problems of putting fresh water into the sea, and the putting back of ultra briny water from the desal plant.
its stupid, hey lets pump fresh water into the sea, then 500m up the beach suck in salt water and take the salt out so we can drink it... ?!?!? this is one big waste of energy and money.
and did you know that the amount of waste water pumped out to sea every year in adelaide is approximately equivalent to how much we suck out of the Murray? clean it up, reuse it, and stop our reliance on the Murray.. seems so easy.
the only reason i can see that they dont do this is the 'Yuk' factor. But if they are pumping waste water out to sea right where they are sucking it in to the desal plant, you know that a percentage of the water is going to be from the waste plant
the water that the poo farm pumps out to sea is actually highly treated and already a great deal of it is pumped to aldinga/mclaren vale to water vineyards. I bet when people are enjoying a nice wine from the region they dont think twice about what water went on the vines.
oh and i only refer to the wastewater treatment plant as the 'poo farm' because I have a friend that works there and that is what we refer to it as