EIR Says "Go Nuclear!", in Order to Green Peru's Desert Coasts through Desalination

Lima, May 14 (EIRNS)-- EIR 's Luis Vasquez Medina raised the urgency of using nuclear energy to power the desalination plants which Peru must build to green its desert coastal regions, during an international conference on "Water for Cities: Desalinization. A New Technology, Looking to the Sea," held at Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola in Lima on May 10.

Water scarcity is limiting agro-industrial development in cities across the planet. An expert from Lima's public water company, SEDAPAL, told the conference that the scarcity of potable water along the whole of Peru's coast will become a crisis of the first order within 10 years, at the latest, if action is not taken now. He reported that the Peruvian government is studying the possibility of building desalinization plants in three places: the port of Paita in the north, two plants in Lima for the central coastal region, and the port of Ilo in the south.

All the panelists, who included speakers from the Spanish desalination and water treatment company, INIMA, which co-sponsored the conference, a Chilean expert, and a Peruvian who has worked closely with the South American Regional Integration Initiative (IIRSA), agreed that powering desalination plants represents more than half their cost, but they limited Peru's options to using natural gas, which Peru produces.

Nuclear power would be far more economical, Vasquez Medina pointed out, because nuclear can serve as dual-use plants, generating electricity as well as desalinating. Such plants could also power the pumping of the Amazon River tributaries and the waters of Lake Titicaca to Peru's arid regions.

The LaRouche movement in Peru has campaigned for just such an integrated approach around nuclear energy for years, publishing an ambitious program in 1990 for the development of Peru as part of opening the whole interior of South America, by crisscrossing it with transcontinental development corridors. The movement's " Mercantilist Manifesto for an Industrial Peru " is still valid today. That program specifically identified the ports of Paita, Lima and Ilo as starting points for the needed Atlantic-to-the-Pacific development corridors, and proposed powering those projects by combining two agro-industrial nuclear complexes ("nuplexes"), NEOLMAR in the north and the Nucleoelectrica del TITICACA in the south, with the transfer of the hydroelectric bounties of the Amazon Basin and the Lake Titicaca basin.