Water Divining

Far more than the nationalistic glory it yearns for, the Arab world needs water. The Middle East thirsted when Moses "smote the rock twice: and the water came out," and it thirsts now. By and large, its lands have the necessary soils and minerals, lack only irrigation to bloom with fruit and grain. Last week, in his United Nations speech, President Eisenhower took due note that water could end much Middle Eastern misery, and offered U.S. aid in getting it. In Washington other top officials showed how water could be found. Some ways and means: P: Radioactive isotopes. To find underground water, which is plentiful in the Middle East, the U.S. will supply isotopes of the kind used by oilmen to trace pipeline leaks. They could map extraordinary untapped active reservoirs, such as the hidden river below the bed of the Nile, which carries 560 billion cubic meters of water per year, or six times the flow of the mighty Nile itself.

P: Nuclear blasting. Engineers have long considered a connecting tunnel or canal between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. The water would drop 1,800 ft. below sea level from the Mediterranean, creating tremendous hydroelectric power, and the Dead Sea would obligingly evaporate it to keep the current running. While the U.S. is not yet formally prepared to furnish nuclear explosives, the Atomic Energy Commission has already tested them in an underground blast, might well lend help and supplies if asked. P: Desalting water. The U.S. Department of the Interior, eying a 597 billion-gal, daily consumption in the U.S. by 1980 (v. 221 billion in 1955), has gone far in developing cheap desalting methods. Some of its pilot plants are producing desalted water for $1.75 per 1,000 gal. may soon hit $1, using methods that seem useful for the Middle East, where the cheapest desalting costs at least $2 per 1,000 gal. New methods: improved fuel-fired distillation processes, solar evaporation techniques, electrified membranes that draw off salt's sodium and chlorine ions.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.