Believe me, SA has all the water we want

Winter is approaching and, for us folks in the highland areas of South Africa, such as Gauteng, Limpopo, the North West, the Free State and other provinces, this means that nights become cold. We are blessed in this country because the winter days in these areas have no clouds.

This means that our winter days are mostly sunny and cloudless. This, in turn, means that the daytime warms up considerably, compared with night-time temperatures.

Many people know, by folklore, that, if it is cloudy at night in winter, then it will be warm during the night and that frost and ice will not form before dawn. This is because the infrared, which is the heat portion of the light spectrum, is reflected by the clouds and returns to earth during the night to keep the ground warm.

This cloud effect is a major influence in the climate change and global warming theatrical saga, but the people who do the howling, baying at the moon, and the gnashing of teeth prefer man-made carbon dioxide to be the guilty party because then they can fine and tax people.

However, another result of a no-cloud winter is a generally no-rain winter. This is great if you live here. When I tell people in Europe that, from time to time, we see a newspaper item that says “it rained today” in our winter, they think that I am crazy. There it rains on many or most days during winter.

Another result of a no-rain winter is a no-rain-in-our-dams effect.

A few months ago, South Africa was becoming desperate because of the drought. In many places, water restrictions were introduced. In some places, the drought was so bad that the trees were chasing the dogs. People were putting postage stamps on letters using paper clips.

Then we had a bit of good rain in some places. At that point, of all the nation’s dams, there were 16 that were less than 10% full. We build really large dams.

After the late rain, the Vaal river system, which fills 14 dams, increased to 58.5% full. That was great, but it is a long way from 100%. On November 7 and December 22, water was released from the Sterkfontein dam to feed to the Vaal dam. Pretoria receives 85% of its water from the Vaal dam. So, I probably drank some KwaZulu-Natal water here in Pretoria. Remember that the Sterkfontein dam is actually an ‘electrical battery’. It is the energy storage for the Drakensberg pumped-storage scheme. It pumps water up from KwaZulu-Natal to hold it at the higher height in the Free State.

During all this no-water drama, we repeatedly heard that South Africa is a water-scarce country. That is wrong. South Africa is not a water-scarce country; we have all the water we want. It is mostly found along our longest borders, namely the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean borders. You can take all the water you like out of the two oceans. They will not run dry.

Of course, a snag is that our ‘border water’ is salty. So, to use it effectively, we need to take the salt out. South Africa has been doing this for years. Robben Island runs on desalinated water. We have large-scale desalination plants near places like Mossel Bay. But they are still small when you want to fill the Vaal dam.

The answer is to implement desalination on a large scale, using nuclear reactors. Then we can pump that water inland. We already pump petrol from Durban to Johannesburg, so doing this with water is technologically easy.

We are about to build large nuclear power reactors to produce electricity. Why not consider using them for desalination as well?
During the drought, a Department of Water Affairs person said that the water supply situation would remain gloomy, “unless there is a rapid and significant change to rainfall patterns”. That is not going to happen over timescales that count. That is why we build large dams in South Africa.

For economic growth, we need to double the water consumption of the country. The rain will not do that, but nuclear desalination can.