Latest news with #seawater
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Britain's largest seawater lido marks 90 years
Swimmers have dived in to mark the 90th anniversary of a "special" Cornish seaside lido. A celebration event was held on Saturday at Penzance's Jubilee Pool, which first opened its gates in May 1935 as part of King George V's Silver Jubilee. During the event, people were encouraged to wear vintage swimwear at the pool - which is Britain's largest seawater lido - and a group of 90 partygoers jumped into the water all at once to mark the occasion. Nicola Murdoch, the pool's chief executive, said it was an honour to be able to celebrate the milestone at the site on Battery Road. Ms Murdoch said it was a special day at the pool, with other activities at the party including surfing and water polo demonstrations and live music. She added she was glad the early morning rain had disappeared in time for the main event, but felt even a bit of wet weather would not have dampened the atmosphere. "It's just an honour to be here on a big day in the pool's history," Ms Murdoch said. Ms Murdoch said the pool had had to evolve throughout its existence in order to stay open and had been "extremely hard hit" by the weather and elements at various points. More news stories for Cornwall Listen to the latest news for Cornwall She said the team which runs the pool had always looked for new things to add to the site, including becoming a licensed wedding venue, but the lido was still a special place for many people. "It's got so much history and so many stories woven into here," Ms Murdoch said. "It's beautiful and stunning." Two of the swimmers who took part in the festivities were mother and daughter duo Lesley and Tamsyn Nowman, who regularly use the lido. They said the pool was a significant place for their family as Lesley's mother had visited the site the day after it opened in 1935. Tamsyn added: "It's such a lovely event to bring all the community together and to celebrate such a special place that we're really lucky to have on our doorstep." Follow BBC Cornwall on X, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to spotlight@ Sunshine brings in the bookings at open-air pool UK's 'first geothermal lido' opens in Cornwall Rising costs forces winter closure of heated lido Jubilee Pool
Mail & Guardian
11-05-2025
- Health
- Mail & Guardian
SA's loos not flushed with success
Lost opportunity: Researcher Teboho Mofokeng says using drinking water to flush toilets is irrational. Every day, South Africa's coastal cities discharge roughly 300 million litres of For She said that amount of water is enough to provide about 1.5 million to two million people with drinking water every day 'and that is just from us flushing our toilets into the sea. Surely we can rethink what we are doing.' Mofokeng is the co-author of a new The research, commissioned by the Water Research Commission, found that Capetonians were willing to pay up to 10% more on their water bills to use seawater to flush their toilets — as long as it doesn't smell or stain the bowls. Mofokeng said water could also be treated to remove harmful bacteria and reused to flush toilets. But this would require a closed water system. In Cape Town alone, 20% to 30% of the city's drinkable water provided to households is used to flush toilets. As the demand for housing grows, so does the need for water and sanitation. When new housing developments are connected to the water supply network, alternatives such as seawater and recycled water for toilets should be considered, rather than using potable water. For their study, the researchers asked 239 people whether they would be willing to flush with seawater or recycled water — or continue to flush with drinking water but pay more to do so. They were also asked how they felt about toilet wastewater being discharged into the sea. The respondents had mixed findings. 'Overall, 90% of people were willing to move away from using drinking water for toilet flushing, but only if the new water source did not stain the toilet bowl, was clear and had no smell.' Nearly 60% of the respondents preferred using seawater to recycled water to flush toilets. But there were differences in preference according to income, gender and household size. About 45% of the people interviewed earned more than R12 800 a month and they preferred to use potable water to flush toilets. But women with a higher education qualification were more likely to pay extra for both seawater and recycled water options. Furthermore, homes in which more than three people lived were more likely to pay for recycled water than seawater. 'My interest was in understanding whether the choices we make around using alternative water sources are embedded from a pro-environmental influence; [in other words] if I use alternative water sources, then it's better for the environment,' said Mofokeng. 'From a research perspective, women tend to make those [environmental] choices more than men and people with a higher level of education also tend to make those kinds of decisions and also older people,' she said. On average, 10% to 15% of Capetonians' municipal bills went towards paying for water. The study looked at the preferences of households that pay R350 to R900 a month for water and found they were willing to pay 5% to 10% more to use alternative water. 'In the way that we set up this experiment and the models that we are using, it allows us to understand what qualities are important for people and under what circumstances would they But the study found that people were not willing to foot the bill for treating wastewater that would be discharged into the sea. They were also in favour of the city treating wastewater, but only if it reduced their water bill by up to 7%. Mofokeng said flushing toilets with seawater has its downsides. 'It would need a duplicate network to be set up, with one network of water pipes for the drinking water supply and another for the toilet flushing water supply. This would mean that both new and ageing water systems would be set up or replaced by systems with a duplicate pipe network. 'Usually water supply networks use concrete, steel or plastic pipes. But because seawater corrodes, plastic pipes will be needed for the seawater flushing pipe network. Plastic manufacturing and the raw materials needed have a significant impact on the environment,' Mofokeng explained. But steel or concrete pipes would need to be replaced more frequently than plastic pipes. Storage facilities, such as reservoirs, would also need to be built and a new system set up to treat seawater before it is piped to people's homes. The chemicals and electricity required to clean the water, supply water to consumers and eventually dispose of the wastewater would bump up the costs. And because the country's electricity is predominantly produced through burning coal, using up more energy in a duplicate water system would increase global warming significantly. This means a renewable energy system would need to be set up. Mofokeng added that climate change will result in a drier south-western Africa. Unpredictable rainfall and frequent droughts will mean less freshwater available for people to drink. She said it was crucial that coastal cities such as Cape Town, whose populations are growing, invest in water supplies from 'unconventional' sources. She said people have to become more aware that not all household activities need to use potable water. 'Increasing public awareness and education about the benefits of using alternative water can help people to accept that they won't be able to flush their toilets with clean, drinkable water for much longer.' The need to recycle water is a 'no-brainer' around the world but the problem is public perception and public acceptance of it, Mofokeng added. She pointed out that Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, has been producing purified drinking water from its wastewater for more than 50 years, while Singapore recycles its wastewater, turning it into safe, clean potable water. 'Until we start building new developments that have two-pipe systems, where the one is dedicated just for flushing toilets [using recycled or seawater], once people have that level of experience, then maybe it will become the new normal.'
BBC News
11-05-2025
- Climate
- BBC News
Seawater sampling to test water quality in Jersey
Tests to determine the quality of Jersey's seawater will begin on Government of Jersey said sampling would take place weekly at 16 bays on Mondays and Tuesdays until 23 September, as required by the EU Bathing Water government said the results would be updated automatically on the interactive map on its said signs would also be placed at each sampling point showing a QR code linking to the latest results. Results 'only a snapshot' The government said monitoring seawater quality enabled it to keep the public informed and to identify episodes of it warned the results were "only a snapshot of the water quality at the time of sampling" and reminded bathers that they entered coastal waters "at their own risk".The government advised people to avoid swimming for 48 hours after heavy rainfall and also when sea foam was present, as it might contain substances that could be harmful.
CNN
07-05-2025
- Science
- CNN
A nuclear fusion power plant prototype is already being built outside Boston. How long until unlimited clean energy is real?
In an unassuming industrial park 30 miles outside Boston, engineers are building a futuristic machine to replicate the energy of the stars. If all goes to plan, it could be the key to producing virtually unlimited, clean electricity in the United States in about a decade. The donut-shaped machine Commonwealth Fusion Systems is assembling to generate this energy is simultaneously the hottest and coldest place in the entire solar system, according to the scientists who are building it. It is inside that extreme environment in the so-called tokamak that they smash atoms together in 100-million-degree plasma. The nuclear fusion reaction is surrounded by a magnetic field more than 400,000 times more powerful than the Earth's and chilled with cryogenic gases close to absolute zero. The fusion reaction — forcing two atoms to merge — is what creates the energy of the sun. It is the exact opposite of what the world knows now as 'nuclear power' — a fission reaction that splits atoms. Nuclear fusion has far greater energy potential, with none of the safety concerns around radioactive waste. SPARC is the tokamak Commonwealth says could forever change how the world gets its energy, generating 10 million times more than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from deuterium, found in seawater, and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no atomic waste involved. The biggest hurdle is building a machine powerful and precise enough to harness the molten, hard-to-tame plasma, while also overcoming the net-energy issue – getting more energy out than you put into it. 'Basically, what everybody expects is when we build the next machine, we expect it to be a net-energy machine,' said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, a trade group representing fusion companies around the globe. 'The question is, how fast can you build that machine?' Commonwealth's timeline is audacious: With over $2 billion raised in private capital, its goal is to build the world's first fusion-fueled power plant by the early 2030s in Virginia. 'It's like a race with the planet,' said Brandon Sorbom, Commonwealth's chief science officer. Commonwealth is racing to find a solution for global warming, Sorbom said, but it's also trying to keep up with new power-hungry technologies like artificial intelligence. 'This factory here is a 24/7 factory,' he said. 'We're acutely aware of it every minute of every hour of every day.' Perhaps most urgently, Commonwealth and other western companies are also racing to beat Chinese scientists at achieving net energy amid a rapid fusion buildout in China, where one enormous facility has emerged in satellite images. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin nodded to that while speaking alongside Commonwealth's CEO, Bob Mumgaard, at a March energy conference. 'China is building fusion plants, and therefore we've got to get moving,' Youngkin said. 'There's a race to lead the world in power generation.' Why fusion is so safe Fusion science is mostly settled. The hard part is maintaining a reaction long enough to generate electricity out of it. For tokamaks, like the one being built at Commonwealth, the name of the game is building powerful magnets strong enough to contain plasma – a superheated cloud of charged gas in which fusion reactions happen. Plasma is very hot and very light; it's a million times less dense than the air we breathe. 'I won't call the plasma clever, there's no intelligence there, but the plasma has many, many ways in which it can thwart your abilities to confine it,' Jerry Navratil, a professor of fusion energy and plasma physics at Columbia University, told CNN. That is where the wall of magnets comes in, which restrains the unruly plasma. Plasma is delicate and ephemeral — it can't even be seen until it's cooled. And that's what makes it so safe; it can be turned off, so to speak, as easily as blowing a candle. 'If you were to blow a breath of air onto the plasma, you would kill it,' Sorbom said. '(If) a meteor hits the plant and ruptures the vacuum vessel, everything just shuts down. It's not like you have something like Fukushima or Chernobyl where there's this runaway chain reaction.' Small but mighty Even though it will tower 30 feet, about three stories, when built, the SPARC tokamak is much smaller than conventional power plants running on coal, gas or nuclear energy, a key advantage that will allow it to fit into power plants in the future. It is petite compared to ITER, the monster French research tokamak that is as tall as a 22-story building. 'ITER is so big that it requires things like the world's largest cranes just to move some of the pieces around,' Sorbom said. 'This is now small enough that we have standard equipment to move things around – something that you'd find in any auto manufacturing facility. You don't have to invent a totally new industrial supply chain for everything.' Thus far, the scientific conventional wisdom has been the bigger the tokamak, the more powerful its performance. Sorbom and his team have disrupted that idea with new magnet technology. The magnets are big, but their secret weapon is an unassuming piece of thin, highly-conductive metal tape layered into each one – maximizing its power in a relatively small space. This tape can carry 200 amps of electrical current – as much as a house's electrical breaker. Navratil said SPARC is using the most tested form of technology with their magnetic tokamak. However, a lot of questions remain on how well it will work. 'They're pushing the technology to places we've never been before, which obviously entails risk,' Navratil said. 'Once the thing is going then the question is, can the surrounding structures withstand any kind of energy bombardment that comes from the plasma?' A person works on the cryostat base inside the tokamak hall at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. For instance, Navratil noted if the electrical current running through the magnet does something unexpected, it could sustain damage. But, he said, if the first runs of SPARC prove the magnet technology works, it would be a major advancement for the field. 'If those magnets function as expected properly, that'll be a major step forward,' Navratil said. 'If that's all they do, they will have actually contributed quite a bit to the development of fusion energy.' Beyond technology breakthroughs, the US also needs to think about the kind of supply chains needed to breed more tritium fuel for fusion, which require access to lithium reserves, Jean Paul Allain, who leads the US Energy Department's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, told CNN in an interview last year. The Chinese have been particularly adept at securing those supply chains, Allain noted. 'Access to lithium deposits around the world are in high demand,' Allain said. 'The Chinese have been establishing themselves in Latin America for a long time, precisely because they're looking at some of these raw materials.' Powering 'the next age of civilization' Inside a sprawling Houston ballroom in March, Mumgaard, Commonwealth's CEO, spoke to hundreds of fossil fuel CEOs and lobbyists about the future of an energy that could eventually replace oil and gas. At that CERAWeek conference, Virginia's Youngkin also noted he is keenly interested in getting energy wherever he can find it to support the state's growing data center industry, advanced manufacturing and population growth. 'We need a lot more power,' Youngkin said. 'Whoever wins this power race is going to unleash the economic opportunity that comes quickly.' Oil and gas companies are among the investors in Commonwealth Fusion and other fusion startups, Holland, the CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, said. 'I think that other energy companies, companies that want to be not oil companies, or not renewable companies, are looking at fusion,' Holland said. 'Physically, fusion is decoupling energy from resources, from something that you have to pull out of the ground or rely on weather. It makes energy something that you can manufacture.' Sorbom said that although he thinks fusion could eventually 'replace' a 'whole bunch of things,' he also sees it as a way to provide 'way more energy for everybody.' 'One of the things that's always excited me about fusion is that if you look at quality of life metrics, they all get better when you add energy to the system,' he said. Holland emphasized fusion will be 'the next part of the energy industry.' 'And ultimately, it will be the thing that powers humanity into kind of the next age of civilization.'
