Morocco plans to establish a seawater desalination plant with a capacity of 300 million cubic meters in Casablanca by 2027, according to the country’s national water supply development plan.

The Moroccan government will invest 9.5 billion dirhams in the project, and the plant will be built in partnership between the public and private sector, according to the website of the Russian Trade Mission in the Kingdom of Morocco.

So far, Morocco has built a desalination plant in Al Hoceima (with a capacity of 6 million cubic meters of water per year), while another plant in Agadir is being completed (144 million cubic meters of water per year).

It is also planned in the future to build a new plant in Dakhla and increase the capacity of the existing desalination plants in Laayoune, Tan Tan and Sidi Ifni.

By 2050, Morocco intends to reach a total capacity of 1 billion cubic meters of desalinated seawater and reuse up to 345 million cubic meters of wastewater annually (currently 40 to 50 million cubic meters are reused).

The post Morocco to Build the Largest Desalination Plant in the World appeared first on Morocco Telegraph.

A reactor at a nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan became the first among those damaged by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami to be granted final restart approval on Wednesday, with support from regional authorities.

Reactor number 2 at the Onagawa power plant, located 340 kilometers north of Tokyo, had already been cleared for restart by nuclear safety authorities after complying with new safety standards imposed after the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011. But today it becomes the first reactor affected by the disaster to obtain the decisive green light from the local authorities for its restart, after the approval of the governor of Miyagi province, Yoshihiro Murai.

A real restart in 2023

All of Japan’s nuclear power plants were closed after the Fukushima nuclear accident and most of them are still shut down today. However, the government has been pressing for years to put several of them back into service, especially since the end of October, setting a carbon neutrality target for the country by 2050, which seems difficult to achieve without increasing the part of nuclear.

“Due to the closure of nuclear power plants, Japan depends more and more on thermal energy using fossil fuels,” Yoshihiro Murai told reporters. “There is concern about increasing CO2 emissions” and “we cannot expect to suddenly expand the use of safe and clean renewables” to meet demand, he added.

The very resistant population

However, it will take some time before the Onagawa plant is brought back into service. According to the daily business Nikkei, the plant’s operator, Tohoku Electric Power, is aiming at a restart in March 2023, after taking additional safety measures.

Traumatized by the Fukushima accident, Japanese public opinion also remains very hostile to the revival of nuclear power in the country. According to the public broadcaster NHK, 16 reactors at nine nuclear power plants in the country are currently meeting the new safety standards established after the 2011 disaster. Of these 16 reactors, two were damaged in 2011, including the number 2 of the nuclear power plant Onagawa. On the other hand, the reactors of the two nuclear power plants of Fukushima, Daiichi and Daini, the most affected by the earthquake and the tsunami, must be dismantled after pharaonic work over several decades.

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