Yang Bai, chief researcher of the Rock Creation Laboratory, and others are near the mouth of the Liao River in Panjin City, Liaodong Province.
The desalination plans of last year and this year have initially met the needs of the North China Plain, Guanzhong Plain, and about 46% of the Loess Plateau area.
Starting in September, Yang Bai and engineers from the Desalination Management Company arrived near the mouth of the Liaohe River.
In fact, there are not many water resources in the Northeast. In addition, the Liaohe Plain, Songnen Plain, and Sanjiang Plain in the Northeast also have very serious problems - land salinization, soil erosion, and land desertification.
It seems that the Northeast has good water resources, with a total of about 200 billion cubic meters. However, as a large agricultural region, Northeast China consumes hundreds of billions of cubic meters of water every year.
The total amount of regional water resources does not represent the total amount that can be used. In fact, 30% of the total amount that can be used is almost the maximum.
Where will the remaining water resources come from?
Of course, extracting groundwater and using groundwater to irrigate farmland on a large scale and for a long time will cause land salinization. In addition, excessive use of chemical fertilizers in many farmlands further deepens the degree of land salinization.
Because the mineral salt content of groundwater is relatively high, after irrigating farmland, mineral salts will slowly accumulate in the soil, forming a "salt crust". The salt crust will cause the soil to harden, making it difficult for crops to grow.
Excessive farming will cause the natural fertility of the land to decline rapidly, which will lead to land desertification and soil erosion. This will in turn prompt farmers to increase the use of chemical fertilizers and deepen the degree of land salinization. This is a vicious cycle.
At present, the land salinization area in the Liaohe Plain is about 30%; the Songnen Plain land salinization area is about 75%, and the desertification rate is about 50%; the land salinization area in the Sanjiang Plain is about 10%.
It can be seen that the land conditions in the Northeast are not much better than those in the Northwest, and are even deteriorating faster due to the impact of excessive farming.
How to solve land desertification and land salinization
The simplest and crudest way is to return farmland to forests and farmland to grassland.
However, the possibility and enforceability of this are very low. As an important domestic commodity grain and commercial soybean planting area, it is impossible to convert farmland into forests and grasslands on a large scale.
However, in recent years, the situation in the Northeast has improved greatly, which has been conducive to the promotion and development of rural cooperatives and greenhouse farms.
After all, a lot of land has been directly built with glass greenhouses or agricultural buildings, so that soil erosion can be contained.
In addition, refined chemical fertilizers and drip irrigation technology have further suppressed land salinization.
However, the problem of over-exploitation of groundwater has not been completely solved. Only by solving the problem of using groundwater for irrigation and irrational use of chemical fertilizers can we fundamentally curb land salinization.
Due to the experience of saline-alkali land transformation in the North China Plain, it is currently a common saline-alkali land transformation plan and was developed by the Agricultural Saline-Alkali Land Research Institute of the Academy of Engineering.
The first step is to use fresh water (nearly pure water) to flood the soil 5 times, each time for about a week. This step can dilute and dissolve the mineral salts in the soil, and then take them away with the river.
The second step is to use livestock manure, kitchen waste, and plant dead branches and leaves to make organic fertilizer, and add these organic fertilizers into the farmland soil through deep plowing.
In this way, the soil transformation of the saline-alkali land can be initially completed, and then gradually flooded with fresh water and adjusted with organic fertilizers year by year during the farming process.
In terms of organic fertilizers, Huanong Group regularly collects them from farms, pastures, breeding farms, and rural cooperatives across the country, and then makes them into organic fertilizers.
The only problem now is water resources.
Therefore, the Desalination Management Company and the Rock Creation Laboratory were ordered to come to the Liao River estuary to build a desalination plant.
After a large number of new humans joined, the desalination management company and the rock-making laboratory have become very powerful.
Next to the desalination plant site is a water transmission plant.
However, at this time, this water transmission plant was directly pumping seawater from the Bohai Sea, which was directly used to make water transmission pipelines.
These water pipelines have now extended for more than 30 kilometers to the north, and are advancing very quickly.
After all, pipes are directly generated using rock-forming agents. Only the steel skeleton needs to be bundled in advance and a special movable pipe template is added, so the pipe manufacturing speed is very fast.
Advancing more than ten or twenty kilometers a day is not a problem unless you encounter complex terrain such as mountains.
The excavator dug large pits, and the crane quickly placed the steel frame of the base into the large pits, and then the formwork was closed.
The next step is to arrange the inner formwork of the pipe, the steel frame of the pipe, and the outer formwork on the base, and tie the calculated rock-forming agent to the steel frame.
After laying about ten kilometers, an engineer pressed the water delivery switch.
From the previous gate valve, a large amount of seawater rushed to the pipeline outlet and was poured directly into the formwork. The seawater and rock-forming agent reacted quickly, and the artificial rock began to fill the steel frame. In less than half an hour, the pipeline was formed.
This is the charm of technology, a world-changing weapon in the hands of truth believers.
"Hanchao, how are the arrangements over there?" Yang Bai asked.
Yu Hanchao, who was looking at the adsorption boxes, raised his head and said back: "16 types of adsorption boxes have been arranged, all of which are the latest version of adsorbents."
Yang Bai asked curiously: "I heard that a lot of gold and silver have been refined from seawater recently!"
Yu Hanchao is in charge of the extraction process of trace elements from seawater, while Yang Bai is responsible for the extraction process of large amounts of seawater elements.
"The management company collected 16 tons of gold and 176 tons of silver this month, which is a huge profit." Yu Hanchao said with a smile.
However, Yang Bai shook his head and smiled bitterly: "I'm having a headache right now. Those tens of millions of tons of sodium chloride are almost filling up the warehouse."
"Isn't the management company contacting the chemical factory?"
Yang Bai spread his hands helplessly: "Chemical plants can't handle so much sodium chloride. Don't you look at how much sodium chloride our desalination plants produce every day."
Yu Hanchao thought for a while and suggested: "We can set up a sodium chloride in-depth utilization laboratory to study other applications of sodium chloride, such as combining it with silicate and using it as a house construction material."
"This is a good suggestion."
Anyway, engineers and researchers are almost overrun now, and there are a lot of talented people. Now the country has the most things, research institutes and laboratories.
The scale of many research institutes and laboratories has at least expanded several times, and in many cases has even expanded hundreds of times.
In addition to the desalination plant at the mouth of the Liao River, there are already three desalination plants in operation in the coastal areas around the Bohai Sea, and three more are under construction (including the Liao River desalination plant).
The newly established seawater desalination plant project and water pipelines adopt the seawater rock-forming propulsion method to rapidly advance to inland areas.
For example, the straight-line distance from the mouth of the Liao River to Hulunbuir is just over a thousand kilometers. In addition, the terrain in the northeast is gentle, and the entire main water pipeline is about 1,300 kilometers.
Using the seawater rock-making propulsion method and the planned and designed segmented laying frame templates, the entire line of construction can be completed in one or two months.
This speed can crush all construction companies. It takes two months to build 1,300 kilometers of water pipelines. It is impossible to use reinforced concrete or metal pipes at this speed.
These water pipelines with inner tubes that can run cars are spreading to the Northeast, Northwest, and Mongolian areas at a very rapid rate.