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Title: An Engineered Drought
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Published: Apr 6, 2015
Author: Victor Davis Hanson
Post Date: 2015-04-06 19:21:17 by tpaine
Keywords: None
Views: 12984
Comments: 27
www.city-journal.org An Engineered Drought California governor Jerry Brown had little choice but to issue a belated, state- wide mandate to reduce water usage by 25 percent. How such restrictions will affect Californians remains to be seen, given the Golden State’s wide diversity in geography, climate, water supply, and demography. We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems. Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert to the Pacific Ocean, the exasperated Left is damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But the truth is that corporate giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. Our California ancestors understood this; they saw, after the 1906 earthquake, that the dry hills of San Francisco and the adjoining peninsula could never rebuild without grabbing all the water possible from the distant Hetch Hetchy watershed. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project. The Bay Area remains almost completely reliant on ancient Hetch Hetchy water supplies from the distant Sierra Nevada, given the inability of groundwater pumping to service the Bay Area’s huge industrial and consumer demand for water. But after four years of drought, even Hetch Hetchy’s huge Sierra supplies have only about a year left, at best. Again, the California paradox: those who did the most to cancel water projects and divert reservoir water to pursue their reactionary nineteenth-century dreams of a scenic, depopulated, and fish-friendly environment enjoy lifestyles predicated entirely on the fragile early twentieth- century water projects of the sort they now condemn. It’s now popular to deride California agriculture in cost-benefit terms, given that its share of state GNP (anywhere from 4 percent to 8 percent, depending on how one counts related industries) supposedly does not justify its huge allotted consumption of state water (anywhere from 65 percent to 80 percent). But note the irony: California supplies a staggering percentage of the nation’s fresh vegetables and fruits; it’s among the most efficient producers in the world of beef, dairy, and staple crops. One can purchase an iPhone 6 or a neat new Apple watch, but he still must eat old-fashioned, pre-tech food. There are no calories in Facebook, and even Google can’t supply protein. On the other hand, I can live without an iPad. Who is to say which industry is essential and which isn’t? Insulin and antibiotic production constitute a micro-percentage of GDP, but is their water usage less important than Twitter’s? Is a biologist who studies bait- fish populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta really more important than a master tractor driver whose skill gives broccoli to thousands? We’re suffering the ramifications of the “small is beautiful,” “spaceship earth” ideology of our cocooned elites. Californians have adopted the ancient peasant mentality of a limited good, in which various interests must fight it out for the always scarce scraps. Long ago we jettisoned the can-do visions of our agrarian forebears, who knew California far better than we do and trusted nature far less. Now, like good peasants, we are at one another’s throats for the last drops of a finite supply. Victor Davis Hanson is a City Journal contributing editor.
Poster Comment: Gotta love Hanson for his ability to see clearly through the progressive bullshit put forth by the greenies of this world..
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#1. To: tpaine (#0)
Southern California has had no appreciable rain in the last year. Some light rain appears on the weather map radars periodically but evaporates before it gets to the ground. I can remeber in about '95 when my brother was complaining that they were getting about six or more inches per day. Some of the drouth problems are probably due to Humbolt or other ocean currents that reverse themselves periodically for unknown reasons.
Most Southern California rain ends up in the ocean. -- Snow in the Sierra's--- Is the key to having water in the valley and the coast. -- And the greenies oppose more reservoirs and distribution systems. We'll soon see how they like living with scarce water.
And there they sit, with unlimited sunshine and long, arid, unpopulated coasts in some areas. Solar power and desalination can provide immense amounts of water. Or, if the Mexicans are enterprising, they can build desalination plants all along that dry dusty and most empty Baja California coast, both sides, and then sell the water to the thirsty Californians.
Only at 'immense' costs. --- Desalination is not yet viable for the amount of water needed.
From what I can see, he's just another whiney, finger-pointing blowhard who lacks any constructive proposal or alternatives... Lacking a true marketplace that would allocate the limited supply of water based on price, we're pretty much stuck with developing our water supply based on what's politically (if not economically) viable.
They said that about extracting oil from shale too. It's false. On the Baja Coast, there is sun every day. It's hot and dry, and has very long, very empty seashores. It's the perfect place for dedicated solar power that doesn't have to be stored or transmitted any distance. Solar power requires batteries to maintain a grid, but there's no grid to maintain with on site generation. Hell, you don't even need to go through the intermediate step of making electricity: light collectors can put solar heat directly to the task of boiling the water. You don't have to make enough water to solve all of California's drought problems. Every bit you make reduces the problem somewhat. What is more, once the industry starts to go, technology improves. Consider: there are 5000 people on cruise ships and aircraft carriers, and they make their own water, and do it at a price that is no so prohibitive that cruise lines can still make money on ticket packages that are affordable to middle class people. Turning sunlight into fresh water from seawater is 19th Century technology. It does not have to be super efficient. You don't even have to use computers. Coal gasification is also said to be impossibly expensive. That isn't true either. Germany powered their war machine for two years on it, and that was in the 1940s. The Chinese provide a huge portion of their fuel needs through gasification. The technology is dirty, but it is not backbreakingly expensive. Neither are simple on-site solar collectors. Obviously such an infrastructure has large up front costs that will have to be borne by the government. That was true of the railroads too. They were also all financed by the government in their set-up phases. Only later was it possible for them to operate as for-profit businesses. So, desalination would have to be a massive government program.
Estimates vary widely between 15,000–20,000 desalination plants around the world producing more than 20,000 m3/day. Australia: The Millenium Drought (1997–2009) led to a water supply crisis across much of the country. A combination of increased water usage and lower rainfall/drought in Australia caused state governments to turn to desalination. As a result several large-scale desalination plants were constructed -see list- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_desalination_in_Australia Israel Desalination Enterprises' Sorek Desalination Plant in Palmachim provides up to 26,000 m³ of potable water per hour (2.300 m³ p.a.). At full capacity, it is the largest desalination plant of its kind in the world. Once unthinkable, given Israel's history of drought and lack of available fresh water resource, with desalination, Israel can now actually produce a surplus of fresh water The Saline Water Conversion Corporation of Saudi Arabia provides 50% of the municipal water in the Kingdom, operates a number of desalination plants, and has contracted $1.892 billion to a Japanese-South Korean consortium to build a new facility capable of producing a billion liters per day, opening at the end of 2013. They currently operate 32 plants in the Kingdom; one example at Shoaiba cost $1.06 billion and produces 450 million liters per day Many more examples at link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Existing_facilities_and_facilities_under_construction Americans are an interesting people. A dry spell pops up and most act like it's never happened anywhere else, and no other countries have done anything about it. When it comes to desalination, even OMAN is farther ahead than the US. For shame. California FINALLY has taken steps to do SOMETHING. Expensive? What is spending almost $20 MILLION DOLLARS PER HOUR ON THE WARS and "Homeland Security"? The "Homeland Security" spending figure is here: http://costofwar.com
Americans can't even do that. Because the US has spent the treasury on wars. It's disgusting. Here's a country that Can Do: It's not a desal plant but it could be
But the failures of the huge new solar plants in CA is not encouraging. Even in a best case outcome where they manage to resolve or mitigate some of the current problems, they will still fall well short of their planned power output. But it isn't. San Diego County has the biggest new plant. They're using the latest Israeli desalination tech. CBS: California hopes to ease drought woes with ocean water The company currently imports a majority of its water from drought-ravaged parts of California and the Colorado River Basin. San Diego will buy all of the water the Carlsbad plant will produce starting next year. Water bills will increase about $5 to $7 per month to cover the cost. "It will represent 7 percent of our total water supply," Kerl said. "It's a significant chunk of water that, in the event of a drought, will be 100 percent reliable for this region." I know you love da Big Gov but obviously cities and counties can address their own problems.
Get over yourself. America has a lot more water to begin with and continental needs, not remotely comparable to supplying 3 million people in some dinky non-country of oil sheikhs like Oman where half the country lives in the ten biggest cities out in a desert. That you even consider these two things to be remotely comparable indicates how flawed your argument is. I guess if all you have is a dead horse, you may as well beat it.
Cities and counties ARE government. They are not for-profit enterprises.
Desalination is not yet viable for the amount of water needed. You 'forget' that massive amounts of water would have to be transmitted north to California. -- Nope, it's obviously more economical, and rational, to capture more of the existing water in California, and distribute it within the state. -- You greenies have been fighting against this engineered solution for years. Now you can reap what you've sowed.
Blah, blah, blah. "YOU" greenies? I'm not a greenie. I'm a "dominion over the land"-ie. Earth is ours. I also look and see an ocean of water right there, and a crying need for it, and the ability to get it. And I see a power source to do it: the sun. I note, at the store, that bottled water is more expensive than gasoline. I note that oil is pumped down pipelines from across the country. Water can be pumped more easily than oil, because it doesn't explode. And there's already a California aqueduct system, so all you need to do (if you make water in the Baja) is pump it to the aqueduct and dump it in. This is not rocket science. Put a big desalination plant on the San Diego strand down at Imperial Beach and pump the water up into Sweetwater reservoir. Or if you can't stomach that, then put it in Tijuana - stimulate the local economy...and pump the water into the Sweetwater reservoir. Supply San Diego with water and you've done a lot. Agriculture uses a lot of California's water. So put a desalination plant at the foot of the Imperial Valley on the Baja Coast at the Gulf of California, and pump the water right up the river to the fields. Use it for agriculture and divert the water that would go to the Imperial Valley over to other uses. The oceans are limitless, and so is the Sun. This is just a big engineering program, not NASA. Making water out of the sea just requires energy. Solar electricity plants are hard, because you have to make huge amounts and store it and ship it. But having dedicated solar on site to run a plant is easy. Storage for one fixed use. You could run the plants off the grid, but why?
Well, you sounded like you were pining for FDR or something.
FDR did a lot right. Social Security. Unemployment insurance. The WPA. The TVA. The military buildup. The grand strategy in World War II. I think he was the greatest President of the 20th Century. Didn't mean that everything he did worked, and doesn't mean that I agree with everything. But then, I don't agree with everything anybody does, including myself. I do not hold men to standards of perfection. I'm not God.
It's obviously more economical, and rational, to capture more of the existing water in California, and distribute it within the state. -- You greenies have been fighting against this engineered solution for years. Now you can reap what you've sowed. Yet here you are, posting in opposition to Hanson's article, and from a big govt greenie type position. -- Consistency anyone?
Government's role is to provide rational infrastructure. When you have unlimited water and energy - sea and sun - at your doorstep, you use it to get water right there. Of course government has to do it, because there's no profit in it. The profit lies in what plentiful water in California does for everything and everybody else. Government builds necessary infrastructure, which supports profitable economic activity. With mountain waters there is always drought, but with the ocean there is unlimited water until the end of time.
California’s ‘man-made’ environmental disaster Hotair ^ | 04/07/2015 | Noah Rothman The United States, a vast nation of near unparalleled natural beauty, might have no more stunning an environment than that which characterizes the state of California. Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a brief trip to the Bay Area where I sampled some of this landscape’s agricultural pleasures, many of which came in fermented form. The people were lovely and accommodating. The weather was near perfection. The scenery was positively inspiring. But the topic not far from every local’s lips was a worrying one. A debilitating drought that has forced Gov. Jerry Brown to impose draconian water usage restrictions on the public has many in that state genuinely fearing for the future of their erstwhile paradise. During an Easter morning brunch, I sat across from a pair of middle-aged women who, despite their contentedness, fretted mightily over the perilous environmental challenges facing their state. While staring wistfully over the San Francisco Bay, one of these conversationalists bragged with mock humility about her involvement in The Cause. She noted that she eagerly devotes her time to virtually any organization with an ostensible environmental mission; Sierra Club, Green Peace, Earth First!, and what she claimed was the laudably litigious Earth Justice. Turning again to the bay, this individual scolded the ill-defined villains whom she has devoted her life to combatting. Corporations, she said, which “only care about profit,” have devoted their time to dredging the bay from Oakland to Sausalito in order to capture every smelt in the ocean. This, she claimed, has driven the native seal population into decline and has forced seal mothers to abandon their seal children in search of the disappearing schools. It was a tragic premise upon which you might base a Disney film. But for all her environmental education, this individual lacked an understanding of public policy, the federal regulations governing smelt, or how this corresponds to her state’s water crisis. There was a period when the various species of smelt native to California were over-fished, but that was a time largely prior to this fish’s protection by the Endangered Species Act in 1994. And while it would be overly simplistic to lay the entirety of the state’s water crisis at the feet of environmental regulations (In 2013, the state had its driest year on record followed by its third driest year in 2014), the plight of the smelt has led Sacramento and Washington D.C. to tragically mismanage one of the few natural resources in California that is not present in abundance: Water. In 2014, National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke filed a dispatch from California’s Central Valley, an area that was once an agricultural hub and has now been reduced to a virtual dust bowl as a result of drought combined with severe and unnecessary resource mismanagement. That misallocation of resources is not the result of a frustrating tradeoff between the needs of Central Valley farmers and the desert-dwelling populations of Los Angeles and San Diego, but the eternally threatened smelt. “In 2007, the pumps were turned down; the Delta’s water output was lowered dramatically, contingent now upon the interests of a fish; and the farms that rely on the system in order to grow their crops were thrown into veritable chaos,” Cooke wrote of the smelt-favoring anthropogenic water crisis. “Predictably, a man-made drought began.” This is a classic tale of activist government run amok — and, too, of the peculiarly suicidal instincts that rich and educated societies exhibit when they reach maturity. Were its consequences not so hideously injurious, the details would be almost comical. As a direct result of the overwrought concern that a few well-connected interest groups and their political allies have displayed for a fish — and of a federal Endangered Species Act that is in need of serious revision — hundreds of billions of gallons of water that would in other areas have been sent to parched farmland have been diverted away from the Central Valley and deliberately pushed out under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific Ocean, wasted forever, to the raucous applause of Luddites, misanthropes, and their powerful enablers. The later chapters of “The Decline and Fall of the United States” will make interesting reading. Make no mistake: The rare, hard-done-by, and rightly protected manatee the Delta smelt is not. According to some estimates, there are no more than 3,000 manatees left in the United States, and, when left unchecked, human beings have had a nasty tendency to maim and kill them in the service of nothing more exalted than speedboating. By contrast, when the Great Smelt Freakout of 2007 began, there were 35,000 to well over 100,000 of the little buggers, depending on whom you ask. And yet the powers that be have seen fit to decree that no more than 305 of them may be killed in a given year. As an exasperated Harry Cline, of the Western Farm Press, put it in February 2012, last year “800,000 acre-feet of water went to waste based on the science of four buckets of minnows. That is enough water to produce crops on 200,000 acres or 10 million tons of tomatoes; 200 million boxes of lettuce; 20 million tons of grapes. You get the picture?” The present crisis is not entirely California-based; Washington also plays a role. In December, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would have pumped water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into Central and Southern California, but it died an unceremonious death in the Democrat-dominated Senate. If the measure had passed both chambers of Congress, President Barack Obama pledged to veto it. Why? Environmental groups feared the threat it posed to the smelt. “That’s the tragedy of California, because of liberal environmentalists’ insistence — despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled,” said former CEO and U.S. Senate candidate from the Golden State Carly Fiorina. “There is a man-made lack of water in California — and Washington manages the water for the farmers.” “President Obama goes out to California a little over a year ago, calls it a tragedy of global warming and hands out money to a food bank,” she continued. “This is all about politics and policy, and it is liberal environmentalists who have brought us this tragedy.” When asked on Monday if the White House had a plan to address the crippling drought facing California, the administration said it did not. And save for blocking any resolution to this crisis that would inevitably endanger his support from the environmental lobby, the administration doesn’t have a plan. And, yet, the Democratic Party is forever given the benefit of the doubt because their intentions, we are sanctimoniously informed, are noble. Fiorina is right. There is a man-made component to California’s resource crisis, and it is one that has the full support of many of the state’s environmentalist residents. Our well-meaning conservationist, who bemoaned the present state of affairs over brunch while comfortably overlooking one of the planet’s most endowed natural landscapes, cannot see that reality. For her, the perennially victimized smelt are a more pressing concern than the millions driven out of a man-made paradise by man’s folly You claim that: --- The article above shows us that govt instead provides IRRATIONAL infrastructure, and encourages the greenie viewpoint.
Then they need to bring in some Kuwaitis to do it.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live." (John 11:25)
You must be thinking someone else, dude. If them nitwit Kalifornicators had listened to me THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, then they wouldn't be having the water shortages that they're having today.
Good for you Willie! Now go to Moonbeam's office and tell it to him again.
Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:13-14)
Nuclear as the basis for desalination is reasonable, but given the vampire- and-garlic reaction of California-type folks to nuclear power, and their love for solar, there's no good reason not to power the plants with solar. "It never rains in Southern California..."
Nuclear as the basis for desalination is reasonable, but given the vampire- and-garlic reaction of California-type folks to nuclear power, and their love for solar, there's no good reason not to power the plants with solar. --- Vicomte13 Well, there you have it Willy, proof positive that some of your fellow greenies agree that nuclear power for desalination will be rejected, for pie in the sky solar 'solutions'... Exactly the kind of silly thinking that lead to this mess.
Well you might as well stop whining about it... our water supply is a government service because the private sector is incapable of providing a competitive marketplace.
Nuclear anything is expensive and unsafe. One Chernobyl or Fukushima near a densely populated U.S. metropolitan area would be a disaster. Building large quantities of nuclear power plants requires lots of qualified people to run them less unsafe. California is known as an active earthquake area. With any nuclear project, there is the problem of what to do with the garbage. If it is California state (not federal) garbage, where in California does the state propose to put the garbage? Or does California propose that some other state take their nuclear garbage? Ground has not been broken on a new U.S. nuclear power reactor since 1977. The cost for commercial application is prohibitive. Desalinated water is expensive to produce. After pouring billions into plant production, when the rains/snow come back to California, the desalination plants would become inactive money pits, unable to compete. Desalination is a proven source only where a natural system will not become available to compete, e.g. Gibraltar. - - - http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-largest-ocean-desalination-plant-goes-up-near By Paul Rogers HIGH COST Almost every discussion about desalination begins and ends with cost. Desalinated water typically costs about $2,000 an acre foot -- roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year. The cost is about double that of water obtained from building a new reservoir or recycling wastewater, according to a 2013 study from the state Department of Water Resources. And its price tag is at least four times the cost of obtaining "new water" from conservation methods -- such as paying farmers to install drip irrigation, or providing rebates for homeowners to rip out lawns or buy water-efficient toilets. "We look out and see a vast ocean. It seems obvious," said Heather Cooley, water director for the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland. "But it's cost prohibitive for most places in California." In Carlsbad, two gallons of seawater will be needed to produce each gallon of drinking water. And to remove the salt, the plant will use an enormous amount of energy -- about 38 megawatts, enough to power 28,500 homes -- to force 100 million gallons of seawater a day through a series of filters. The process, known as reverse osmosis, removes salt and other impurities by blasting the water at six times the pressure of a fire hose through membranes with microscopic holes. San Diego County is better suited than any large California community for desalination. It receives only 10 inches of rain a year, one-third less than Los Angeles, Fresno or San Jose. It has very little groundwater. And it has a large customer base to spread out the cost of the Carlsbad plant, which will provide about 7 percent of the total water needs of the county. The high price is worth it to help San Diego and other regions rely less on water from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, both of which are overdrawn and increasingly unreliable, said Bob Yamada, water resources manager for the San Diego County Water Authority. "You can't conserve or recycle what you don't have," Yamada said. "Desal offers us local control." The authority will pay from $2,014 to $2,257 an acre foot for the water, depending on how much it buys. The agency, which provides water to 3.1 million people in San Diego County, signed a 30-year contract agreeing to buy at least 48,000 acre feet a year. With that guarantee, Poseidon and its investors were able to sell bonds to finance the project. The company will be guaranteed a rate of return between 9 and 13 percent, depending on operating costs. Critics say the agency is getting a raw deal. "It's not a public-private partnership," Gonzalez said. "It's corporate welfare." Nobody disputes that the cost of water will go up. According to Yamada, the average customer's bill, now $71 a month, will rise $5 to $7 to pay for desalination. SANTA BARBARA REDUX? Sometimes the high costs can turn off the spigot. After enduring severe water shortages during a drought in the late 1980s, Santa Barbara voters agreed to spend $34 million to build a desalination plant. It opened in 1991 and provided water for four months. When the drought ended, the city shut it down. Water from reservoirs and other sources was significantly cheaper. Similarly, Australia spent more than $10 billion building six huge seawater desalination plants during a severe drought from 1997 to 2009. Today, Cooley noted, four are shut down because when rains finally came, the cost of the water became noncompetitive. "We run the risk of building facilities that we don't use," Cooley said. "And that's a waste of money." Earlier this month, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to spend $935,000 to hire an engineering firm, law firm and lobbyist to try to restart the city's shuttered plant by 2016. "None of us wants to do it, but I was there 25 years ago, and it's really ugly when you run out of water," said Santa Barbara City Councilman Harwood "Bendy" White. "This is one option for stretching out our supplies." MONTEREY COUNTY Similarly, the California American Water Company in Monterey County is studying three locations to build a desal plant to make up for water lost when state regulators ruled the company didn't have valid permits for the Carmel River. In Los Angeles, leaders of the West Basin Municipal Water District, which serves about 100,000 people, built a pilot plant in Redondo Beach and are studying plans for a $300 million desalination plant by 2020. Desal technology continues to improve. It now takes only a quarter of the electricity to generate drinking water as it did in the 1980s because of more efficient pumps, membranes and energy-recovery devices, said Tom Pankratz, editor of the Water Desalination Report, a newsletter based in Houston. But some places are balking. Santa Cruz city officials in August shelved plans for a desal plant after environmental activists raised fears that the new water might trigger more growth. Marin County studied a desal project, then dropped it when water use declined. Long-running plans to build a desal plant in San Francisco Bay near Concord were shelved this year when the region's largest water districts decided they could obtain water more cheaply through recycling and other means. Another key issue looming large is how to get the seawater without hurting the marine environment. The Coastal Commission approved the Carlsbad plant and its open-ocean intake system. But new scientific studies and changing laws mean that most future plants probably will be required to bury intake pipes and pump water at a lower rate to reduce impacts on fish and the millions of larvae, eggs and other sea life that can be killed. "These organisms become things -- like fish -- and we always have to be careful of the perspective that 'Oh, this is just one little piece,'" said Charles Lester, executive director of the Coastal Commission. "It all adds up." Plans by Poseidon to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach slowed last year when the Coastal Commission said it wanted the company to investigate whether its pipes could be buried, a prospect that will increase costs. For the Carlsbad plant Poseidon was required to build 66 acres of wetlands in San Diego Bay to offset the plant's environmental harm. It also must blend its brine at a 5:1 ratio with other seawater before flushing it back into the ocean so it won't harm marine life. Other projects will have to do all those things to get state permits. But some experts say the plants are coming anyway. "In the next 10 years you are probably going to have three big plants built in Southern California and another plant or two in Northern California," Pankratz said. "The trend is toward more desal. They are the most reasonable insurance policy against a long, protracted drought." - - - http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/wilderness/convert-salt-water2.htm Gerbis, Nicholas. "Why can't we convert salt water into drinking water?" 16 February 2010. HowStuffWorks.com. by Nicholas Gerbis - - - http://australianwaterresources.com/desalination.htm
Of course we can do it, and we should do it, as part of integrated, permanent infrastructure. Using local solar power to do it is a big part of the key to bringing the cost down. Energy is expensive, but it can be considerably less expensive. If you've got tides and wind you can do that too. The purpose is not simply to make water. It is to improve a whole nexus of oceanic environment based technologies to make better use of the readily exploitable energy that's just sitting there. Of course the government will have to build the infrastructure and run the stuff, just like it had to build the railroads, the interstate highways, and NASA, and just like it has to provide tax breaks to keep the universities open. There are needful things which cannot produce a profit in any reasonable time, but by whose existence the overall level of operation of the economy is increased.
#2. To: rlk (#1)
Southern California has had no appreciable rain in the last year.
#3. To: tpaine (#0)
#4. To: Vicomte13 (#3)
Solar power and desalination can provide immense amounts of water.
#5. To: tpaine (#4)
Gotta love Hanson for his ability to see clearly through the progressive bullshit put forth by the greenies of this world..
Only at 'immense' costs. --- Desalination is not yet viable for the amount of water needed.
There is no way to evaluate whether or not desalination is economically viable when there is no marketplace to determine the price charged to consumers. That isn't because of "progressive bullshit" or the "greenies of this world"... it merely reflects the byzantine evolution of municipal water service since they were first conceived as public utilities with no real competition.
#6. To: tpaine (#4)
Only at 'immense' costs. --- Desalination is not yet viable for the amount of water needed.
#7. To: Willie Green (#5)
There is no way to evaluate whether or not desalination is economically viable when there is no marketplace to determine the price charged to consumers.
#8. To: Vicomte13 (#6)
Turning sunlight into fresh water from seawater is 19th Century technology.
#9. To: Vicomte13 (#6)
On the Baja Coast, there is sun every day. It's hot and dry, and has very long, very empty seashores.
So, desalination would have to be a massive government program.
"There is no more cheap water available," said Sandy Kerl, who currently runs the San Diego Water Authority.
#10. To: Operation 40 (#7)
When it comes to desalination, even OMAN is farther ahead than the US. For shame.
#11. To: TooConservative (#9)
I know you love da Big Gov but obviously cities and counties can address their own problems.
#12. To: Vicomte13, Willie green, Y'ALL (#6)
On the Baja Coast, there is sun every day. It's hot and dry, and has very long, very empty seashores. It's the perfect place for dedicated solar power that doesn't have to be stored or transmitted any distance.
#13. To: tpaine (#12)
You greenies
#14. To: Vicomte13 (#11)
Cities and counties ARE government. They are not for-profit enterprises.
#15. To: TooConservative (#14)
(Edited)
Well, you sounded like you were pining for FDR or something.
#16. To: Vicomte13 (#13)
I'm not a greenie. I'm a "dominion over the land"-ie. Earth is ours.
#17. To: tpaine (#16)
#18. To: Vicomte13, Willie green, Y'ALL (#17)
" Government's role is to provide rational infrastructure."
#19. To: tpaine, Vicomte13 (#4)
Desalination is not yet viable for the amount of water needed.
#20. To: tpaine, Vicomte13 (#12)
You greenies have been fighting against this engineered solution for years.
Nuclear Desalination
Posted as a reminder to Californians faced with water
and power shortages: the technology is available and PROVEN!
1 posted on 4/5/2002, 11:52:14 AM by Willie Green
#21. To: Willie Green, tpaine, Vicomte13, liberator (#20)
If them nitwit Kalifornicators had listened to me THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, then they wouldn't be having the water shortages that they're having today.
#22. To: (#20)
#23. To: Willie Green (#20)
#24. To: Vicomte13, Willie green, (#23)
To: Willie Green (#20)
#25. To: tpaine (#24)
Exactly the kind of silly thinking that lead to this mess.
#26. To: Willie Green, tpaine, Vicomte13 (#20)
Nuclear Desalination
Posted as a reminder to Californians faced with water
and power shortages: the technology is available and PROVEN! Nation's largest ocean desalination plant goes up near San Diego; Future of the California coast?
Posted: 05/29/2014 02:18:19 PM PDT
Updated: 8 months ago
San Jose Mercury News
07 April 2015. Why can't we convert salt water into drinking water?
How Stuff Works SEAWATER DESALINATION FOR PERTH
…Is not the answer…
#27. To: nolu chan (#26)
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