Read EG03 - The Water Lily Cross for Free Online

she said. “And the stapler?”
    “It’s an anagram.”
    “An anagram?”
    “Yes. ‘Stapler’ is an anagram of ‘plaster’ As part of a cryptic crossword clue, ‘fix plaster’ would be a dead giveaway. Stewart would know damned well I would figure it out. At one time we used to compare notes every week on the crossword puzzles, remember?”
    Becky shook her head. “I don’t know about you two,” she said, as Kingston hugged her briefly and then strode off up the path.
    For the second time in as many days, Kingston waved farewell from the TR4 and headed back to London.

FOUR
    A ndrew’s birthday party was a drawn out and boozy affair. Starting with drinks in the lounge at Benihana in the King’s Road, their party of ten was ushered into a private dining room. Seated on three sides of a large wooden table, with a teppan —a flat stainless-steel grille—occupying the fourth side, they marveled at a dazzling knife-skill performance by their good-humored Japanese chef, Toshiro, who orchestrated a teppanyaki banquet that stretched over nearly three hours. By the end of the first hour, Kingston had lost track of the number of sake bottles that had come and gone.
    The following morning, nursing a milder headache than deserved, all things considered, he phoned the Bristol Chamber of Commerce, inquiring about the June 9 conference. He was told that it was held at the At-Bristol Complex and was given the appropriate phone number to call. In the following minutes, talking with the Complex’s press officer, he learned that the event that took place on the three days in question was the tenth annual conference of the World Desalination Institute. The lecture given on Friday, June 9, was titled “New developments in the biological treatment and desalination of effluents and other marginal waters.”
    Kingston put the phone down and thought about the implications. This new information left little doubt that Stewart had indeed been dabbling, in one form or another, with a biological method of desalination, using water lilies. Turning to his iMac, he logged on to the Internet and, after a Google search, bookmarked a half dozen sites with information on desalination. After an hour of scrolling through pages that described the background, different technologies, technical drawings, charts, diagrams, energy usage, waste discharges, and costs, he was much enlightened on the subject. Along the way he had compiled three foolscap pages of notes.
    With a cup of tea, he sat back and read over his notes.
    Seawater in the world’s oceans has a salinity of ~3.5 percent. Every liter of seawater has 35 grams of salts dissolved in it—mostly, but not entirely, sodium chloride. Other elements can include magnesium, sulfur, and potassium.
    The two principal technologies for extracting salt from seawater are reverse osmosis and distillation. With reverse osmosis, high pressure is applied to the intake seawater forcing the water molecules through a semipermeable membrane. The salt molecules will not pass through the membrane but the water does, and becomes potable product water. In distillation, the intake water is slowly heated to produce steam. The steam is then condensed to produce product water with low salt concentration.
    Of the two, reverse osmosis is more energy efficient but distillation plants offer a greater potential for economies of scale. Unlike RO plants, they are not required to shut down a portion of their operations for cleaning and replacing equipment as frequently as RO plants and generate no waste from backwash or treatment filters. The principal operational costs of desalination plants are from energy usage and disposal of waste discharges.
    In all cases, pure product water recovery ranges from 15 to 50 percent For every 100 gallons of seawater, 15 to 50 gallons of pure water is produced. Based on 1992 figures most seawater desalination plants produce pure water at costs ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 per acre-foot