Beijing to melt snow to address water shortage

[phantom power]

Beijing will collect and melt snow this winter in a bid to quench the water shortage that has plagued the Chinese capital for years, state media reported Friday.

Two vehicles with high-powered heaters capable of processing around 100 cubic metres (3,500 cubic feet) of snow and ice an hour will be sent to locations around Tiananmen Square, the Global Times said.

Clean snow will also be dumped into dammed sections in three rivers that drift through the city to be used for road cleaning, irrigation and to supplement the rivers' water levels, it said.

Additional snow-melting areas have been assigned citywide, it added.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-beijing-shortage.html

[ananda]

1. Over population plus AGW = Total FUBAR disaster!

nt

[GliderGuider]

2. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Talk about grasping at straws! nt

[XemaSab]

3. I shudder to think

what pollutants are in that snow. :o

[Iterate]

4. Oh no. That's about one rail tanker per hour,

but the shortfall was 1.37 billion cubic meters...you're going to need more snow.

By comparison, the new desalinization plant on the Thames is 140,000 cubic meters per day.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. That's insane. If they want to address the water shortage they should be

looking at how to INCREASE the snow pack, not melt it. We have a crisis from global warming melting all the glaciers, so the answer is to MELT THE FUCKING GLACIERS?

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. No, they're melting the snow in the city, not the glaciers

It would temporarily give them a bit more water at a time when the flow from glacier-fed rivers may be down, because nothing's melting further upriver.

Having said that, the energy needed to melt snow is horrendously large - the equivalent of heating water by 80C, while the energy needed for desalination is just heating by 7C. The idea of shovelling snow into some running water to get it to melt and have a little more liquid water overall may be OK, but I shudder to think of the greenhouse gases emitted by melting it with heaters.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. Well, that's what I get for typing faster than I read.

I don't see how that's going to make any real difference, unless they're talking about Buffalo in January type levels of snow.

A sign of just how bad the shortage really is, I reckon.

[pscot]

8. The part of China where it snows

is a rather dry place.