Salt extraction in Israel

Title

Identifier

They shall not want

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XII (No. 2) February 1960

Year

1960

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

They shall not want Salt Extraction in Israel Israel will soon make public an invention designed to transform the oceans into li mitless cheap reservoirs of water fit for human consumption and agriculture. The Government is completing a pilot plant that utilizes a new process—freezing sea water and then melting it—that was invent ed in Leningrad and perfected in Tel Aviv by a refugee engineer from the Soviet Union. It is based on the fact that ice formed by freezing sea water is free of minerals. Actually, the process is older than the 63-year-old inventor, Alexander Zarchin. On the Sibe rian coast, the Russians have long been cutting blocks of ice from the frozen Sea of Japan and cart ing them to a reservoir on a mountain top. In the summer, the molten ice has been flowing down to the city of Vladivostok to sup ply the populace and the ships in the harbor with clear water. Mr. Zarchin’s invention is de signed to achieve artificially on the semi-tropical shores of the Mediterranean what nature has been doing on the frigid coast of the Sea of Japan. By conventional means, it requires thirty-five kilo watt-hours of energy to freeze one ton of water. Mr. Zarchin says that the de salination of a ton of water by. his method will require only three or three and a half kilowatt-hours of energy. However, even if it takes as many as six kilowatt-hours it will still be worthwhile for a country like Israel, which pays heavily for her water supply. The inventor hit upon his idea in 1933 when he was assigned by the Red Army to study the prob lem of water supply for troops in the Turkmenistan area, where the water is brackish. He designed machines in which water was frozen by evaporation and then melted. His Israeli invention is a great improvement, for it provides for a continuous process of freez ing and melting. As explained by the inventor, it works in this manner: VUater is pumped from the sea ■ • and sprayed at almost no pressure into a vacuum tank. Be22 Panorama cause there is no air pressure in the tank to hold the water’s mole cules together, the water begins to evaporate. This causes the tem perature to drop below the freez ing point, and part of the water freezes as it drops. Thus the sea water spraying into the tank is divided partly into vapor, which floats to the top, and into ice crystals and brine, which fall to the bottom. The mixture of ice and brine is pumped from the tank to a con veyor belt. The brine, in which all the salt is concentrated, seeps through the belt and is drained back into the sea. The ice crys tals are conveyed by the belt to another vessel. Meanwhile, the vapor at the top of the tank is constantly siphoned out to maintain the state of va cuum. It is piped to the second vessel, where it meets the ice crys tals again. The vapor restores tne latent heat to the ice and causes it to inelt. Mr. Zarchin is unable to recall how he happened to think of the freezing method in the first place. He assumes that the thought grew out of widespread discussions about polar exploration in 1933, when the Red Army gave him the problem. Newspapers reported at that time that explorers would supply themselves with clear wa ter by melting polar ice. Mr. Zarchin had been a re search assistant at the Leningrad ¥ Technical Institute. He was as signed to examine an Austrian machine for the distillation of wa ter by electro-osmosis and to re port on the practicability of adopt ing it for desalting brackish water. He reported that the method was too expensive, and he recommend ed freezing. After a year’s work he developed a machine, which was mounted on a truck and put into operation as a mobile desalinator. The Soviet Government awarded a prize to the inventor. Shortly afterward, he was arrested for “Zionism,” which is a criminal of fense in the Soviet Union. He was sentenced to the asphalt mines west of the Ural Mountains for five years. In prison, he invented a method for the extraction of lacquer from bitumin. After his release in 1939, he lived in Moscow illegally because the terms of his release barred him from forty-eight cities. When the Soviet Union entered the war against Germany in 1941, he served in a labor battalion near Leningrad. He became ill and was evacuat ed to Tashkent. There he bought the passport of a dead Polish re fugee. With that document he left the Soviet Union after World War II and reached the displacedpersons camps in Germany. He arrived in Israel in 1947. ¥ ¥ February 1960 23

pages

22+

Media