Watering Rocket Bases

In a shower-taking, lawn-dousing, pool-splashing nation that casually consumes about 300 billion gallons of water a day, it seems curious that water should be a national defense problem.

But it is--particularly to the U.S. Air Force, which is building a network of underground Atlas and Titan rocket-launching sites in the arid inland wastes of New Mexico, South Dakota and Oklahoma. In these areas available water is apt to be brackish, highly contaminated with minerals and salts that make it unpleasant and harmful for men and missiles alike. In addition to satisfying the need of parched humans, the bases must also slake the huge thirst of the rocket complex: thousands of gallons of water are needed to cool intricate machinery and to air-condition control rooms 25 to 35 ft. below the surface.

Tapped Off. To help solve its water problem, the Air Force has signed up Ionics, Inc., a twelve-year-old Cambridge, Mass, company staffed largely by professorial veterans of M.I.T. and Harvard. Less than two years ago, Ionics unveiled the nation's first municipal water-desalting plant at Coalinga, Calif.; since last June, Ionics has been transforming 250,000 gallons a day of unpotable water into good water for the town of Oxnard. Calif, at a cost of 20-c- per thousand gallons--half the amount that most U.S. cities pay for their water. About 50 more company plants are in operation or projected from Alaska to the Persian Gulf.

Ionics' specialty is purifying brackish water, which has a maximum of only 10,000 parts of dissolved contaminants per million parts of water. The Ionics system is much more costly in converting sea water, where the contamination rate is 35,000 parts per million.

Under traditional purification methods, salt or brackish water is either heated to a vapor and then condensed, leaving foreign matter behind, or else it is frozen into ice, thereby separating out the brine, and then remelted to obtain a pure product. The Ionics system, developed by Executive Vice President Walter Juda, does neither. It is an electrical process that exploits the natural attraction of opposite charges. Ionics uses a 4-ft. stack of 18-by-20-in. plastic membranes, 1/32-in. thick and 1/25-in. apart, between which the brackish water circulates. When voltage is applied across the stack, positively charged ions of impurities are drawn through one set of membranes, while negatively charged ions go through the other set of membranes. The concentrated brine is tapped off, leaving a continuous stream of fresh water.

Enough Water? Ionics' specialization in brackish water makes its purification system particularly suitable for the missile bases. From local deep wells, highly mineralized water will soon be pumped into a dozen desalting units with a daily capacity of 500,000 gallons, enough to supply a town of 5,000. That amount of water is only a drop in the bucket to the U.S. as a whole. But the significance of desalinization research goes beyond its immediate importance to national defense, looks ahead a scant 20 years, when Americans will be using 600 billion gallons of water a day--more than today's readily available supply.

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