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California City Considers Restarting Desalination Plant To Fight Drought
First time accepted submitter SaraLast (3619459) writes in with news about Santa Barbara considering the restart of its desalination plant. "This seaside city thought it had the perfect solution the last time California withered in a severe drought more than two decades ago: Tap the ocean to turn salty seawater to fresh water. The $34 million desalination plant was fired up for only three months and mothballed after a miracle soaking of rain. As the state again grapples with historic dryness, the city nicknamed the "American Riviera" has its eye on restarting the idled facility to hedge against current and future droughts. "We were so close to running out of water during the last drought. It was frightening," said Joshua Haggmark, interim water resources manager. "Desalination wasn't a crazy idea back then." Removing salt from ocean water is not a far-out idea, but it's no quick drought-relief option. It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project. Santa Barbara is uniquely positioned with a desalination plant in storage. But getting it humming again won't be as simple as flipping a switch."
Removing salt from ocean water is a big thing to set up, but don't forget that in addition to getting drinking water, you also get electric power out of the operation as well.
Now I never really looked into it, but it sounds easy. Too bad the people working on this aren't as smart as me.
They're not the first, nor the last.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsbad_desalination_plant
I could always predict when it would rain when I lived in Los Angeles. It was always the day I decided I would go to the beach.
well... it takes energy to boil water and pump it around the system. When you are done, you need to cool that same water so that will take land and cooling equipment.
also, what do you do with the waste product of the seawater with the water removed? there's no place to dump that sort of toxic sludge cheaply.
worst of all, having "unlimited water" will prevent anyone from conserving or reducing development
it's a balance between LA-style sprawl and empty rural unlivable wastelands
You could build floating rafts/barges that would do this passively. As the water condensates on a clear ceiling, it can be collected and filled into the rafts baffles. Fresh water floats on saltwater. So basically this thing could be filled up, then delivered.
California is just a bunch of greedy idiots who control more of the House than any other state. So they put pressure on the other states to capitulate to them.
Why... Why, O worthless Slashdot, the above story when there are much more edifying ones, say, this: http://www.mid.ru/bdomp/ns-dgpch.nsf/03c344d01162d351442579510044415b/38fa8597760acc2144257ccf002beeb8/%24FILE/ATTLUY3T.pdf/White_book.pdf [MID.RU]?
Chelnov is about to pay you a visit, West.
Hot, salty water must be just a liiiiiiittle bit corrosive
The theoretical minimum amount of energy to boil an entire liter of room temp water is about 0.6kw. I pay about $0.12 per cubic yard of water. There are 765 liters in a cubic yard. Assume $0.10 per kw of power. That's at least $77 of electricity costs. To go from $0.12 per cubic yard to $80 per cubic yard is a bit more expensive.
I would say boiling water is out of the question.
Farmers in the desert use about 20 times as much water as California urbanites.
Agriculture in the southwest (i.e. in the desert) is being killed by the lack of rainfall, which seems to have caught everyone by surprise. They're idiots first, farmers second.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I hope you are ready when the population of southern California moves to where the water is. Don't worry, they will bring some "cool" with them. It will have to be an improvement.
It's that little bit about boiling the water. Converting water from liquid to gaseous phase (aka boiling) is energy intensive (read:expensive). To go from room temp water (we'll say 20C) to all of it vaporized and ready for condensation takes about 0.72kWh for each liter of water. So before you run the plant, pump the water, cool the condensate, and prep it for delivery, you've got that much energy going in. Even if you had no other costs, and you paid the lowest (tier 1) residential rates from So Cal Edison, you're looking at $0.36/gal for water. Add processing, markup, delivery...you're north of $1/gal, I'd bet.
Of course, that's why they don't generally use distillation, but even in your scenario the cost of "just boiling the water" adds up very, very quickly.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
worst of all, having "unlimited water" will prevent anyone from conserving or reducing development
I know a lot of environmentalists really believe this bilge.
They honestly see resource shortages as a good thing, because the modern technological lifestyle is inherently evil.
There are a couple processes for desalination. Distillation is just one. The plant in the OP uses reverse osmosis.
Desalination is just always going to be an energy intensive endeavor. There are ways to recoup some of the energy but, end of day, its a lot less expensive to let nature do the work for you (and maybe not try to support millions of people in what amounts to a desert).
*have
They're just throwing the stuff down the drain anyway.
the preservation of pretense is over https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CKpCGjD8wg&list=PL456D453B409DF8D1 hang on to our hemispheres
> Rather, it is all about killing agriculture in the southwest to free up more water for California urbanites.
Agriculture uses about 70%, with industry using 20% and urban populations using 10% of the water. Agriculture, you know, that stuff you eat from those greedy bastards in California.
> Nevada rancher stand off...
Bullshit. It's about some welfare rancher not paying his grazing fee's. Pure and simple. He has no intellectual or legal argument, so he is whipping up the dummies over on Fox News to call out the Tea Party morons to protest his desire to rip off the Tax Payers.
Linux O Muerte!
You could build floating rafts/barges that would do this passively. As the water condensates on a clear ceiling, it can be collected and filled into the rafts baffles. Fresh water floats on saltwater. So basically this thing could be filled up, then delivered.
Do you realize how large a raft like that would have to be to supply an entire city with water?
California is just a bunch of greedy idiots who control more of the House than any other state. So they put pressure on the other states to capitulate to them.
Too bad we're not all as smart and selfless as you, eh?
To me all you need to do is boil water to strip the salt, you sell the salt and the water back.
The difficulty is not the ability to do it, it is that the energy requirements make it economically uncompetitive. Boiling that much water and then collecting the condensation generally takes a LOT of energy which is quite expensive in most cases. Places with a desert like climate and abundant energy resources (like the Middle East) can result in desalinization plants that are economically sensible but in much of the world it's just not competitive. Theoretically you could have a nuclear powered desalinization plant that might be economically competitive but I'm not aware that anyone has done this yet.
you sell the salt and the water back.
Doesn't work when it cost you more to get the salt and water than it costs to truck/pipe it in from elsewhere. Salt in this case is a byproduct but you wouldn't be able to sell it profitably or even on a breakeven basis given current prices in most places. Same with the water if it is being sold to farmers. It makes their crops economically uncompetitive with those from areas not experiencing drought.
Obviously it is more proccessing, and more expensive than getting just ground water or rain water because of that but how much more expensive can it really be?
Consult wikipedia for a quick answer.
could it not be done in a way where we use the salt water in a new type of energy generating plant, that collects the steam and makes it usable?
There are waste heat desalinization plants being experimented with.
Much WISER would be to deny frackers the CLEAN POTABLE WATER they pump deep into oil fields to get their 1 barrel of oil per 10 barrels wasted water.
1) I sincerely doubt the oil companies use the same water that you get from the tap to do that.
2) Southern California is a semi-desert anyway... always has been, always will be (well, within the next few centuries, anyway).
3) If they hadn't been so busy diverting existing water to save some obscure and hyper-local species of fish...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
They might also ask Northern California to perhaps stop shipping a whole bunch of water to China in the form of really cheap Alfalfa..
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Except they'll have to hire engineers from California to actually do that.
The rednecks in Colorado are too busy out hunting drones and building survival shelters to actually build anything on their own now.
How do you deal with everything else that gets on the ceiling, like the salt spray from the air? How do you guide this raft to efficiently use its time, while still keeping management costs below the sale price of the water (including government funding)? How do you build the ceiling in the first place, which must be cooled to support condensation, mechanically conducive to collection, large enough to make the raft practical, and small enough to keep the raft manageable? Once you've filled the raft with several tons of fresh water, will it still be buoyant enough to hold the several tons of engine needed to push that mass?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
People who write "should of" don't get to call others idiots...
....someone's going to figure out that the problem here is " It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project. "
Seriously?
Why?
If the state simultaneously refuses to constrain growth within their water resources, and cannot GTFO of the way of communities *solving* the water resource limitations themselves, does anyone see there's a contradiction there?
-Styopa
*sigh* - time to start building a fence and putting in machine-gun emplacements at the Oregon border...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
bahahahaa....Rednecks in CO seriously? You've obviously never set foot in CO
"I sincerely doubt the oil companies use the same water that you get from the tap to do that." Ignorance is bliss.
I'm soooo looking forward to someone in California realizing that their seawater is connected to the seawater outside of Fukushima Daiichi ...
I live in the UAE. Every power station also produces water. Basically, the whole country lives on recycled power station coolant. Yummm...
The problem is scale.
Yeah but how much does it cost to boil water?
And you're not just talking boiling it, but boiling it away into steam. Get a big stock pot, fill it with water, put it on your stove, see how long it takes to boil away.
Even if we say it's just 10 minutes on the range to boil away 1L of water, how much water do you use in a day?
Even at $0.25 / L you're looking at a very expensive source for water when desalinization happens. Plus you have all sorts of nasty side effects from the increase in fossil fuels you burn. Not just greenhouse emissions (unless maybe you turn the desert into a giant desalinization plant), think of how fuel prices will rocket.
Do you want food? Or do you want a bunch of hipster douchebags running the urban centers? Because if you rely on the hipsters to provide the bulk of GDP, you will have to turn around and spend that on food elsewhere. Nothing is free.
2) Southern California is a semi-desert anyway... always has been, always will be (well, within the next few centuries, anyway).3) If they hadn't been so busy diverting existing water to save some obscure and hyper-local species of fish...
These two arguments contradict one another. If it's a desert then realistically they shouldn't have been diverting the water that said fish depends on in the first place. It only became an issue because water was diverted that shouldn't have been. You don't build stuff or farm in a desert when you don't have to. Las Vegas and Phoenix should not exist in anything close to their current form.
Much WISER would be to deny frackers the CLEAN POTABLE WATER they pump deep into oil fields to get their 1 barrel of oil per 10 barrels wasted water.
Um... The amount of potable water used by frackers is such a low fraction of available water that this is almost laughable. There is many times more water wasted in a day because people won't fix their leaky toilets than the frackers use in a whole year.
If your goal is to save water, I suggest you outlaw watering grass using sprinklers that spray water. Mandate drip irrigation and make sure people are maintaining their plumbing properly. You got to start where the waste is the biggest, or your efforts are a joke.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This should of been done 50 years ago. Various California water districts have been doing it for quite some time: http://www.acwd.org/index.aspx... Just not on large scales.
Turn those barges into giant rain barrels and find a way to use wave action to pump it ashore and the entire Sahara and the interior of Australia will be as fertile as Iowa farmland. Then watch the climate change!
The singular reason that humans suffer from water (or any other natural resource) shortage is that there is a disagreement over the price. It is because it is being treated as just another commodity for Wall Street to profit from instead of a vital resource that all people have a right to.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Much WISER would be to deny frackers the CLEAN POTABLE WATER they pump deep into oil fields to get their 1 barrel of oil per 10 barrels wasted water.
That barrel of oil is worth $100. The ten barrels of water were worth about $1. A better idea would be to get the government out of the business of "picking winners" by micromanaging the allocation of water through idiotic subsidies that result in tens of thousands of acres or rice growing in the desert. California doesn't have a shortage of water, we just have an excess of stupid policies.
They honestly see resource shortages as a good thing, because the modern technological lifestyle is inherently evil.
Nice strawman, but... No.
No one (sane) considers resource shortages a "good" thing. Resource pressure, on the other hand, helps to prevent actual shortages.
When you have a free and unlimited open faucet, you use water for any old thing that comes to mind - Drinking, bathing, slip-n'-slides, washing the car, making rainbows with mist, growing a climate-inappropriate groundcover plant, whatever strikes your fancy.
When you have a $200/month water bill associated with that faucet, you damned well make sure it goes to the necessities, and you find a way to shower in under five minutes.
And when you get a ration of one gallon of water per day - You use it for drinking and cooking, period.
Conservationists "like" situation #2 solely because it prevents us from getting to #3. Unfortunately, we have, historically, artificially created the appearance of situation #1 even in the middle of a frickin' desert thanks to activities like draining the Colorado river dry (and the resulting downstream environmental disaster, as well as not-so-slowly depleting continental aquifers that take millennia to refill (ask Florida what happens when those get too low).
In a universe where you can really make infinite energy and infinite water and infinite food - Waste all you want! But in our universe, TANSTAAFL.
I never looked into it but I always hear how expensive it is to run these things. To me all you need to do is boil water to strip the salt, you sell the salt and the water back. Obviously it is more proccessing, and more expensive than getting just ground water or rain water because of that but how much more expensive can it really be? also, could it not be done in a way where we use the salt water in a new type of energy generating plant, that collects the steam and makes it usable?
Reverse osmosis is a whole lot cheaper, energy wise, than distillation. The original plant was of the Reverse Osmosis type.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Desalination plants don't boil water to filter the salt out. They use reverse osmosis, which typically requires about 3 kWh of electricity per cubic metre of water processed due to the very high pressure pumps required to force the water through the filters.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the evidence of lack (if not outright absence) of freedom. Sure, the government collecting records of our communications is scary. But the real threat is that more and more things are considered a privilege to be granted — or withdrawn — by the Executive, rather than a right, which can only be taken away by the Judiciary.
When even a (smaller) government — with officials fighting red tape during their paid-for work hours — has troubles overcoming red tape (from the bigger governments), what hope do ordinary citizens have?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
but it ain't cheap. What is amazing is one of these heavy duty reverse osmosis systems, I saw one on a small trailer where the hose in harbor water in New Orleans just after Katrina. That water had all kinds of horrible stuff from sewage to industrial chemicals, but the output was nice clean drinking water. On a large scale it can be very expensive and then what to do with the filter units. Also the energy to run these things. So you can get water, it's the cost penalty.
I say for starters don't use water for fracking as others previously commented.
Headline threw me for a loop as California City is in area of long term drought (Mojave desert) and miles from the ocean, http://californiacity.com/
mfwright@batnet.com
The western U.S. is living on borrowed time. Decades of unsustainable development mean that the West is already using more water than it has, leading to depletion of aquifers like the Ogallala, and reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Climate change makes it a pretty good bet that the current decades-long drought is going to become the new normal. The southwest can't sustain its population, or its agricultural economy. Today's southwesterners are going to be the new Anasazi, real soon. Everybody knows it, but nobody is going to do anything about it until it is way past too late.
Some actual energy and costs figures are here:
http://ccows.csumb.edu/wiki/in...
(Concerns a different region in California, but has been put together well.)
In the political battle in Santa Cruz last year, a key contention was that the proposed carbon offsets were not a real benefit to the environment.
They need to use safe drinking water, because if they started pumping sewage into the ground people would get sick even faster.
The hilarious part about the situation is the amount of overlap between conservationists and socialists.
"Water needs to be free (subsidized) because it's a human right!"
"Oh shit, when we artificially lower the price of things people use too much of those things. Since it was our attempt to micromanage resource allocation that caused the problem in the first place, we better double down with even more micromanagement by implementing rationing so that everybody will stop using as much of the resource that we forcefully made too inexpensive."
Maybe the fact that Nuclear Reactors use Helium as their primary fluid to drive turbines and recycle it in a closed loop. Then have a secondary cooling system that cools the helium. The secondary cooling fluid never gets very hot because they maintain a high flow rate. No steam anywhere.
California doesn't have a shortage of water, we just have an excess of stupid policies.
Totally TRUE. Mod parent up.
But totally predictable given the state's propensity to elect politicians from the hard left to both state and federal office...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
As has been pointed out, desalination plants don't typically use distillation, they use reverse osmosis. That is to say that they use very high-pressure pumps to force the water through a membrane which rejects salt. Energy consumption is currently at about 3 kWh per cubic metre, although that's falling over time was membrane technology improves (the less pressure required, the lower the cost).
That works out to about 3 watt-hours per litre. Where I live, industrial power rates put that at $0.0001056 CAD per litre. Or $0.1056 CAD per cubic metre of water (thousand litres) if you prefer.
Obviously, if you live in a place that charges more for power (industrial power is $0.0352 per kWh here), that cost goes up.
With that logic... why don't we drink salt water... there are oceans filled with that stuff...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
I stopped reading after the first two paragraphs.
So you rather see someone's quality of life go down whenever possible? I never get why people want everyone else to live their lives in groaning, miserable slavery with "resource pressure" on every single usable thing, be it Internet bandwidth, power, water, usable land, or food.
Lets be real here. Were it not for the parent poster and people like him, we would have effective, safe, thorium power plants, making very cheap energy, making it possible to desalinate water on a large scale so even though California is in a drought, it is mitigated. Israel has done this, and has turned featureless desert into a place where food gets exported.
However, we have the people who want to hand a family a gallon of water a day, since we have to always have starving poor people. We can't build reactors, so we are stuck polluting the environment with coal and oil, which are far worse ecological disasters over time than nuclear ever will be.
I guess the parent can enjoy "resource pressure" It does give some self smugness, similar to the guy who has the bumper sticker, "I have mine, up ours". However, those are the people who will be most reviled by our descendants because it isn't a matter of "cannot" with regards to clean water, but "will not".
If we had a free and unlimited faucet, coupled with cheap energy, waste from plastics could be "boiled" and made back into crude, ready to be reused, just as we smelt and recycle aluminum cans. There would be no Pacific Gyre.
However, it seems to be that we rather have people limit clean water and energy because it makes others suffer... and I guess suffering is one natural resource others thing is in short supply by their actions.
So let me get this straight...
The Sahara, which has existed for a few thousand years, is a result of the commodities market, and the solution is to just pump water in from the Mediterranean, using the minute amount of usable energy extracted from wave action, with a machine that's big enough to supply water to the whole desert, yet cheap enough that there won't be a "disagreement over the price"?
Sounds simple enough.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
They're just throwing the stuff down the drain anyway.
Not an exact replacement, but I'm sure there would be issues with putting tons of salt water into the environment. I'm sure a fracking fluid spill made with salt water would be a SERIOUS environmental issue, where using fresh water it would not be an issue at all. Then the corrosive nature of salt water is likely to be a problem with the equipment. So, IMHO, your idea seems stupid at first blush.
Not to mention that fracking uses such a small fraction of potable water that it makes such regulations worthless. If you want to make a difference, ban lawn sprinklers in favor of drip irrigation or low water landscapes. Require homeowners to put in low flow shower heads and fix leaking fixtures. Both of these will save thousands of times more water than is used for Fracking.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Agriculture uses about 70%, with industry using 20% and urban populations using 10% of the water. Agriculture, you know, that stuff you eat from those greedy bastards in California.
Much of the Central Valley in California is really a semi-arid desert. Farm in a desert and it should not be shocking to anyone that you'll run into water shortages sooner or later.
Plus a non-trivial amount of water that could be used for farming is diverted to places like Las Vegas that simply should never have been built in the first place. You don't build a major metropolitan area in the middle of a desert unless you have no alternatives. And you certainly don't put swimming pools there. I've ever heard some foolish talk about diverting water from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi to support these desert communities. (which fortunately will not happen)
Well if you have the choice between dying of thirst or paying $80 for a cubic yard, you'd probably pay the $80.
A cubic yard is A LOT of water. You could live for some time off of that.
And, probably at that cost it makes sense for people to bring in water by the tanker truck, pushing prices down.
The key is what you're using it for. If you just want something to drink, $80 per cubic yard is quite all right. If you want to take a desert and turn it lush and green, it's quite expensive.
Seems to me people should look at usage case more than anything else.
I wonder how much energy is spent doing reverse osmosis desalination. Distillation is very expensive, so even pumping at high pressure will be a lot cheaper in terms of energy than boiling large quantities of water to have it condense somewhere else.
As for the barge mentioned, I wonder if coupling a reverse osmosis plant with a reactor (the US Navy has perfected smaller marine reactors for decades) might just be the ticket. However, I don't know how it would scale to the size needed for a thirsty desert region.
It can be done. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel get most of their water from desalination plants.
welfare rancher
Since when does RUNNING A FUNCTIONAL RANCH WITH YOUR OWN HANDS count as "welfare" on this planet? Whatever dictionary you're using, burn it! It will make you look like less of a complete retard to the rest of us.
In the early part of the last century, automation reduced the labor amount for producing food drastically. This reduced it's market value. Probably far below its real value. (when you consider that that value is actually a composite of the food itself, and the water used to produce it, and the soil, and how we burned through the water and soil at a much higher rate than it can be replaced).
So if you want to blame something, don't blame "urban hipster douchebags". Blame the invisible hand for not being able to use basic science to look 100 years into the future and see how growing the population to 7 billion people, while burning through resources at an unsustainable rate, is going to make the concept of money look like a complete fraud, within the next generation.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I never looked into it but I always hear how expensive it is to run these things?
In short, absurdly expensive. So expensive it became economically impractical after running for 3 month as the '92 El Nino made relatively cheap reservoir water available again. With the odds of a strong El Nino climbing this year it looks like we are set for a repeat of that expensive debacle.
Feast and famine of rainfall is a fact of life that politicians seem incapable of grasping. It has always been this way. Average and water-poor years followed by strong El Ninos, which reset the reservoirs and snowpack roughly every 10 years. Budgeting water better between El Ninos should be trivial, yet....
These should answer most of your questions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
State of Colorado should halt the river until California dedicates funds toward this.
Riiight. Shut down the Hoover Dam and destroy the ecosystem of the Colorado river to teach California a lesson.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
"Southern California Cities stealing all the water" is a popular and old conservative meme. Like most conservative ideas, it's not only completely full of shit but probably represents a literal 180 degree shift from actual reality. It's just shit politicians tell their rural republican voters to get them worked up.
Does simply living upstream mean you are entitled to all of the river's water?
And what do you propose? Invisible Hands(TM)?
That's ridiculous. Everybody knows that food comes from grocery stores and electricity comes from outlets.
All California really needs to do is have Diane Feinstein pass a law that makes more food and more water. Problem solved.
There is no link between water pumped into the ground for extraction and drinking supply. None What So Ever.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Saudis are planning to build out a lot of nuclear power stations over the next couple of decades which along with solar thermal power plants will be used to power desalination plants currently fuelled by oil and gas. Other Middle eastern nations are planning similar facilities, some of them combined nuclear power generation and desalination systems utilising the "waste" heat from the reactors.
In 2012, California received 88 cents in federal spending for every dollar paid in federal taxes. If the state were greedy, that number would be over a dollar.
Idiots? Probably. Greedy? Probably not.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
then, only the rich get clean water? How christian.
That would be hoprrid.
That means some rich guy will dictate who gets water. What's that? CA votes dem? well, no water for you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We learned from Hurricane Sandy that salt water on land isn't an environmental disaster in terms of its impact on vegetation. Most areas flooded experienced little effect on local vegetation and I should know, I live in south Queens (not effected by Sandy though, I am north of the Belt Parkway.) A few plants and trees died but that was about it. Everyone still has green lawns and plenty of trees. The bigger issue was with oil and and fuel getting washed out of cars and into the ground along with mold concerns.
Not economically, no. Steam plants typically cool the steam just enough to make it condense before sending it back to the boiler to become steam again. This conserves heat and thus the amount of fuel consumed per pound of steam delivered.
Desalination plants don't boil water to filter the salt out. They use reverse osmosis, which typically requires about 3 kWh of electricity per cubic metre of water processed due to the very high pressure pumps required to force the water through the filters.
And the reason is that boiling off a cubic meter of water requires about 628 kWh of heat energy. Of course you would use some kind of heat exchangers to recover energy as the water condensed, and heat energy is cheaper than electric energy, but it's extremely difficult to beat 3 kWh per cubic meter.
Actually, the Nevada one was about freeing up land so Dinghy Harry Reid could get paid by the Chinese who wanted to build a solar plant there.
It wasn't about water for California.
But you are correct that it had nothing to do with endangered species.
Yes, I have been. The rednecks in CO are trying to compete with the Okies for stupidity.
If you want to find one, try looking in a mirror.
Since when does RUNNING A FUNCTIONAL RANCH WITH YOUR OWN HANDS count as "welfare" on this planet?
When you're doing it on somebody else's land without compensating them?
we better double down with even more micromanagement by implementing rationing so that everybody will stop using as much of the resource that we forcefully made too inexpensive."
Such as low-flow toilets. Don't get me wrong, my *modern* low flow flushes better than the original high-flow from the '70s(estimated), but it took a while to get there and you need to do your research.
I don't read AC A human right
It counts as welfare when you're running that ranch on somebody else's property and not paying them for the use.
To put a partisan twist on this: The urban areas are the heavily democratic areas. The desert farmers tend to be GOP supporters. Who are the real welfare queens? See also: Bundy.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
False, it is False. Completely and utterly False. Neither of you seems to understand what the word 'drught' means. Look it up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Minnesota is nice this time of year. Ice is starting to clear off the 10,000 lakes and the mosquitoes haven't come out in full force yet. Detroit has plenty of water too (comes from Lake Huron).
That would be when you're running it on land that you don't own or maintain.
One of the challenges for renewables like wind/solar is being able to generate power when the grid doesn't need it.
Maybe instead of stopping the windmills they should keep them spinning but use desal plants as a power sink for the "excess" power. It's by and large free energy they wouldn't even generate; you might as well generate it and use it to do useful work.
It's debatable whether the excess energy could desal enough water to make a difference.
There is no link between water pumped into the ground for extraction and drinking supply. None What So Ever.
Except, of course, when you dig a well. That water ends up one way or the other in the surface water supply. Or via springs (fed by underground reservoirs) Or are you one of those that believes the "No Smoking" sign in restaurants creates an impenetrable smoke barrier between the smoking and non-smoking sections? (Water does not have the same properties as oil, so whatever kept the oil locked in may not work with water, forgetting for the moment that we're cracking all that rock that holds the embedded oil/gas.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Desalination plants don't boil water to filter the salt out
Incorrect. Quite a few of them do boil the water. Some through vaccuum distillation which lowers the energy requirements but it still is boiling the water. Reverse osmosis is the principle competitive technology to distillation methods but both exist.
We learned from Hurricane Sandy that salt water on land isn't an environmental disaster in terms of its impact on vegetation. Most areas flooded experienced little effect on local vegetation and I should know, I live in south Queens (not effected by Sandy though, I am north of the Belt Parkway.) A few plants and trees died but that was about it. Everyone still has green lawns and plenty of trees. The bigger issue was with oil and and fuel getting washed out of cars and into the ground along with mold concerns.
Perhaps not, but remember that this is about how the GOVERNMENT defines an environmental disaster, in this case, the state, local and federal government. You and I might understand that the lasting effects of salt water on the local environment might be limited and short lived, but you can bet in California they won't be so forgiving. Given the EPA is obviously involved, I'm sure the frackers are being pretty cautious...
But you are not going to save any water to speak of by banning the use of potable water for fracking. You are fighting a Forrest fire with a single toy squirt gun on a windy day.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Causing suffering and creating shortages are the only reason some people got into government to begin with. See North Korea for reference. Then you have to beg your master for tiny little things. This is what some would like to do to to others more than anything. Environment is just a head fake, like global warming.
Billionaire farmers on welfare
Here is data for those Pink John Deer driving welfare queens in California
And here is more on how California Farmers should have the Fox News assholes in a tizzy if they weren't tools
I don't want food grown in a desert, no. There's plenty of agricultural land elsewhere. In places that get actual rainfall. In places where there are no hipster douchebags or urban centers. Why can't food be grown in the Great Plains instead of the Mojave Desert?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
That is the amount given back to the state government, not California itself. Essentially 88% of all federal taxes paid in California is immediately given back to the state. That number does not include everything else like, oh, interstates, Military, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, farm subsidies, educational grants, IT initiative benefits (which no other state gets a meaningful fraction of); emergency relief for floods, droughts, mudslides, landslides, and wildfires.
The sheer vacuum noise that California makes is only drowned out by the smugness of its citizens.
Shut down the Hoover Dam and destroy the ecosystem of the Colorado river to teach California a lesson.
They've already basically destroyed much of the ecosystem of the Colorado river. Hell, it doesn't even reach the ocean any more. I'm not really sure how much more damage they could really do to the river.
False, it is False. Completely and utterly False. Neither of you seems to understand what the word 'drught' means. Look it up.
What's that quote from a well known political activist? "Never let a crisis go to waste!"
Hey, I live in Texas, I KNOW what drought is, first hand. We have one here too.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"You could live for some time off of that."
No you can't, it's just over 200 gallons.
Unless by some time you mean about a week. You need to drink 1/2 gallon a day alone.
Bath: 40 gallons
Shower: 2.5 gallons per minute
Old showerheads may use 4 gal/min whereas newer low-flow showerheads use about 2.
Teeth brushing: 1 gallon
Depends on if you let the water run while brushing
Hands/face washing: 1 gallon
Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon
Depends on if you let the water run while shaving.
Dishwasher: 20 gallons/load
New energy-efficient models may only use 4 gallons.
Dishwashing by hand: 4 gallons/minute
With a low-flow faucet head, might be 1 gallon.
Clothes washing (machine): : 40 gallons/load (top loading)
Front-loaders may use about 20 gallons/load.
Toilet flush: 3 gallons
Older models may use more, but new energy-efficient toilets might only use 1 gallon/flush.
Glasses of water drunk: 8 oz. per glass (1/16th of a gallon)
Did you drink your "eight glasses of water" today?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why not use the steam to power an electric generator? Perpetual motion!
You should move to a town in a fracking zone and check the water for yourself.
Or, you know, could just blame the environmentalists for trying to save the Delta Smelt. Land of the fruits and nuts, indeed.
Life is not for the lazy.
Nothing is free, but the reality is that producing enough food to feed the US population is not hard and we don't need to dedicate enormous resources to doing it. We produce ridiculous amounts of food with agriculture being a very small part of our GDP, and, as you point out, we can import food as well. We don't need to turn deserts into farmland in order to avoid starvation.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Most areas flooded experienced little effect on local vegetation and I should know, I live in south Queens (not effected by Sandy though, I am north of the Belt Parkway.) A few plants and trees died but that was about it. Everyone still has green lawns and plenty of trees.
Cute how you think there is meaningful amounts of vegetation in NYC.
When you demand the government subsidize you with free grazing land because you don't own enough land to raise your cattle without it? It is similar to the government subsidizing people with kids with food stamps because they don't have the money to feed them. Whats the difference?
The system is inefficient for how much work is put into it versus the water output.
Ok, so that's for a hand-built survival system... perhaps not a good reference for a purpose-built system.
In 1952 the United States military developed a portable solar still ...a large inflatable 24-inch plastic ball that floats on the ocean... on a good day 2.5 US quarts (2.4 l) of fresh water could be produced. On an overcast day, 1.5 US quarts (1.4 l) was produced.
The plant in question produces 7500 acre-feet (2,400,000,000 US gallons) per year. That's the equivalent of 18 million of the spheres. If we assume that the barge would have similar efficiency (which it probably wouldn't, as there would be significant thermal loss to the ocean below, as opposed to the military's encapsulation design), we would require a sunlit area of approximately 8.1 billion square inches, or 2.0 square miles. That's about 360 times the area of a giant cruise ship.
"Inefficient" still seems like the right word, and we still don't have any answers regarding how to propel or maneuver that large a mass.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Will be nice to see Santa Barbara, where my brother and sister and neices and nephews live get some water.
Good point by the Desal power sink post above.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It will keep going for another billion years or more, you just have to collect the radiated energy.
Neat. So you've figured out a way to collect that radiated energy for free then? If so then your Nobel prize await!
shame droughts are getting longer and more frequent.
El Nino doesn't happen 'every 10 years', it happens every year, and the drought isn't related to them.
http://ggweather.com/enso/oni....
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nice troll. The simple fact is that business/politics regulates how much water we have and at what price, not the weather. The tech is just waiting for us to use it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
> Theoretically you could have a nuclear powered desalinization plant that might be economically competitive but I'm not aware that anyone has done this yet.
A group was going to build one in the Central Valley of California, but the fucking idiots in our state government blocked it.
We have a serious problem with selenium contaminating our groundwater, so the plant would boil the water to strip out the selenium, and then sell the purified water and excess power.
But our fucking idiots think that we have too much water and power already.
"while burning through resources at an unsustainable rate, is going to make the concept of money look like a complete fraud, within the next generation.
haha, there has been a douche bag making that claim every generation since the dawn of civilization.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah. Oregon would stand a chance against one of the largest power in the world.
OF course, when every actually knowledgeable people and experts try to do the proper things to ensure the continuation of a regular supply of clean water do something, the loons come out of the wood work and make conspiracy theories up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You may be unaware, but you can get heat from this big ball in the sky (we like to call it 'the Sun"). A few parabolic trough mirrors can concentrate it nicely for things like heating lots of water....
You may be unaware that doing that at industrial scale is hugely expensive and requires more land than is probably feasible. Explain to me how you are going to use a "few parabolic trough mirrors" to heat millions of gallons of water each day such that you evaporate it all. How will this work when the sun isn't shining?
Just because it works in your back yard doesn't mean it works at large scale.
Yeah but how much does it cost to boil water?
Boiling, evaporating = same thing. If your patient and willing to wait it costs nothing.. even ice evaporates... at a glacially slow clip.
And you're not just talking boiling it, but boiling it away into steam. Get a big stock pot, fill it with water, put it on your stove, see how long it takes to boil away.
The massive solar still is getting short changed in my opinion. You could do concentrated solar with cheap reflectors or install into heat exchanger of any power generation plant where steam is used to turn wheels. I mean all we're talking about is large areas of glass/concrete, a few pumps and shiny reflectors.
Desalinization seems a good bet for solar/tidal power. Hot weather is generally a contributor to draught. Hot weather often == more sun. More sun == more power for desalinization.
there's got to me some tiny frog no one's ever heard of that's more important than people.
And not only that, the left eats its own:
> "It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project."
Red tape interferes even with big government projects those who created the red tape ostensibly like.
We really need a popcorn gif for this scene. I leave you with a quote: It's a joke. It's all a joke.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No, they're greedy idiots. I live here. They're so greedy that I've swollowed my pride and voted for the republican. In spite of our sane property taxes, we have, by far, the highest tax burden in the US, and the state pushes our individual tax burdens over most european states, without giving us nearly the appropraite social services.
Oh by the way, a lot of defense spending comes here in spite of companies headquartered elsewhere: Northrop in Falls Church, Boeing in Evverett, Raytheon in Waltham, and Lockheed in Fort Worth.
Does simply living upstream mean you are entitled to all of the river's water?
Yes. When it's on my property, I can do with it as I please. Or at least I should be able to.
Why can't food be grown in the Great Plains instead of the Mojave Desert?
It is grown there. However we're draining a lot of the aquifers in the Great Plains too since we plant crops like corn that use a LOT of water.
The Supreme Court has already ruled the feds cannot drain off feet of water from the Great Lakes to pipe to California without getting the permission of the bordering states, to say nothing of treaty with Canada -- good luck with all of that.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Aquifers in Minnesota aren't doing all that well (no pun intended) either. My family home is on White Bear Lake, which has become something of a cautionary tale for careless groundwater pumping combined with wetland drainage in order to make $millions for developers and then shaft the people who've lived there for generations.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Um, no.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
" The amount of potable water used by frackers is such a low fraction of available water that this is almost laughable." Not in all local areas, sorry you're uninformed.
Not to mention, it damages the water table. Keep studying denialism I guess.
"I suggest you outlaw watering grass using sprinklers that spray water" Again proving your abject mental poverty on the point.
>Farmers in the desert use about 20 times as much water as California urbanites.
Not quite. 80% is ag, 10% residential, 10% industrial.
In exchange, California earns about $17B from farms just in the San Joaquin, and supplies half the fruit in the nation.
Yeah. Oregon would stand a chance against one of the largest power in the world.
You keep forgetting that Northern Cali is in-between. You know, where all the weed is. ;)
(Hell, there's even a town called Weed there if memory serves...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Consumption -> energy use -> global warming -> worse droughts -> desalinization -> energy use ->->-> This is a very poor long term solution
> urban populations using 10% of the water.
Things like limit discs and small-tank toilets were idiotic at the time. By using them, you save maybe 20% of that 10%, i.e. 2% i.e. push off need for increased. supply by about a year or two, assuming an overall 1% annual need for growth.
Just stupid. But it was done, and acknowledged as such, for the purpose of getting a population pliant with this quasi-emergency for further legislation (and, I might add, based on disproven 1970s-era theories of shortage. Disproven via actual predictive experimentation over and over again.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA GROW HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it's gonna be 100 years from now? IT'S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT!
Policy wise it isn't just the California government it is also the federal government as well. Now toss in some water rights that are use them or lose them and you get the mess that they have now.
Time to offend someone
By the end of October (when Sandy happened) much of the vegetation in NY is going dormant (you know, the whole 'fall foliage' thing) and is not taking up much water. Could have had a very different impact if that flooding occurred in Spring.
Neither of you seems to understand what the word 'drught' means.
I'm not sure I know what "drught" means either. Care to elaborate for us? [/teasing]
No you can't, it's just over 200 gallons. Unless by some time you mean about a week. You need to drink 1/2 gallon a day alone.
By my calculations, 1/2 gallon a day means 200 gallons would last 400 days. More than a year. But, as you point out, there are other uses.
To put back some of the context, the person you replied to said: "Well if you have the choice between dying of thirst or paying $80 for a cubic yard, you'd probably pay the $80."
Teeth brushing: 1 gallon
If it takes you more than a cupful of water to brush your teeth, you are wasteful and Darwin says you will not survive. But you don't need to brush your teeth to keep from dying of thirst.
Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon
I'm not sure how this is a requirement to keep from dying of thirst. Personally, I've not shaved my legs ever, and my face has been blade-free for more than 20 years.
The rest of the uses you come up with in your list are hardly survival requirements. The only one is the 1/2 gallon a day for drinking. Even adding a 1/2 gallon for cooking means you could get by for 200 days on that 200 gallons. No, it wouldn't be pleasant, but it would keep you from dying of thirst.
My current city water bill is about $40/month. $80 for water that would last for just six months means I come out ahead on the deal.
Wow, you have a Republican-level understanding of the process. Heating water takes incredible amounts of energy. Just look at how much power your water heater takes just to heat water to a little over half of the boiling point of water. Plus, it takes even more energy for the transition from water to steam. I know several Republicans that either don't believe that, or they are not capable of understanding that. Next, you have the horrific waste of salt. Simply dumping it back in the ocean close to shore can destroy entire ecosystems. These are all reasons that Republicans support desalination plants.
That barrel of oil is worth $100. The ten barrels of water were worth about $1.
All hail the almighty dollar!
When the well dries, you shall drink pennies!
When the food does not grow, you shall eat quarters!
When the air becomes polluted, you shall breathe stocks!
You found the wrong project, dude.
http://www.fresnonewenergy.com...
Historically, the desert southwest has been wetter. 100 years ago they raised cattle in what is now Joshua Tree National Park, and there's still cattle ranches in the Mojave Preserve. I think we're catching up to the fact that things have just gotten drier. Global warming? Coastal uplift due to the action of faults? Who knows, but the rain isn't there anymore.
When you demand the government subsidize you with free grazing land because you don't own enough land to raise your cattle without it? It is similar to the government subsidizing people with kids with food stamps because they don't have the money to feed them. Whats the difference?
Our hamburgers do not contain any government-subsidized kid meat, you insensitive clod!
"Even at $0.25 / L you're looking at a very expensive source for water when desalinization happens."
Yet still much cheaper than the bottled water everyone drinks.
Mandate drip irrigation and make sure people are maintaining their plumbing properly.
That's easy to fix : put water meters at every house and make people pay per-gallon. You'll see people fixing their plumbing the day right after they receive the first bill
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
My apologies. Farmers in the desert use about 8 times as much water as California urbanites. Of course, if you look at per-person usage, it's probably hundreds of times more water, but there's no need to go down that road.
Anyway, California's gross state product is right around $2T, which suggests that those farms in the San Joaquin account for less than one percent of California's economy. It's a rounding error. Any economic argument is bound to fail here, as agriculture is virtually meaningless in this context.
As far as supplying half the fruit in this nation, are you suggesting that without insane subsidies it would still be cheaper to farm in the Californian desert than to simply import fruit from actual arable land? I find that hard to believe, and you haven't offered any convincing evidence.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Ah, that makes sense. There's not enough water in the Great Plains, so we're moving our agriculture to the lush Mojave Desert with its bountiful aquifers?
... wat?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I'm not trolling. I just don't think you understand the scale of the problem.
To give the entire Sahara 28 inches of rainfall (which is the low end of what Iowa gets annually), you need 5.4 billion acre feet of water. By mass, that's 67 times the total amount of oil produced since 1850*. If you think the water business is the problem now, just wait until you see the management for that size of operation.
So where exactly do we get these 15,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of water? We could drain half of Lake Superior, but you specified rain barrels. That makes the math easy. Cherrapunji is often regarded as the wettest place on Earth, recording 1,041.75 inches of rainfall in a calendar year, which is 37 times what Iowa gets. That means we'd only need to cover an area 1/37th the size of the Sahara to get enough water, assuming it all has the same rainfall as Cherrapunji. Our total rain-barrel area is then only about 95,000 square miles, which would cover about half the area of France.
I guess you're right: The problem is politics and business. No government or corporation wants to try to build a rain-barrel raft half the size of France (or larger, since it won't all receive 1000 inches of rainfall per year).
* Wolfram Alpha is great for perspective.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I believe there's an interesting back story to corn and the related subsidy (ethanol)?
Until you die because you have nothing to drink, this makes perfect economic sense you thoughtless twat.
The problem then is the showers; that's 175G/week if you take 10 min showers (a reasonable expectation IMO)
There is no link between water pumped into the ground for extraction and drinking supply. None What So Ever.
It's like you don't even know what fracking is. They shove an assload of water into the ground in the hopes that the increased pressure will squeeze out a bit of oil, or break up some rocks so that oil can flow out freely. They water they pump in then percolates through the ground and ends up in under ground streams, carrying a host of other shit with it. That water, which people do use for drinking, is contaminated out the ass. Go to a state where fracking is done and drink from a well.
My understanding was that most distillation desalination plants used the incoming sea water as a heat sink for the condensation, eliminating the need for cooling equipment and recycling some small amount of heat energy.
That means some rich guy will dictate who gets water.
Under the current system, rich farmers get subsidized water, while poor people in the cities pay high rates to fund those subsidies. It is almost inconceivable that any market based system could be more unfair than the current system designed by politicians.
What's that? CA votes dem? well, no water for you.
California as a whole votes Dem. Most of the Central Valley, which receives the water subsidies, votes Rep.
One of the things that people tend to overlook on these setups is the costly, filters that have to be put into place. Sea water contains a lot of life in it (microscopic all the way up to whale). Obviously, its pretty easy to take care of the stuff on either edge of that spectrum, boil the water and iodine for the microscopic; build an intake smaller than a whale. However, it is the between that is the bane of the plant. Not too long ago, a desalinization plant has to be shutdown for a few days because jelly fish had clogged the whole thing up.
While one could build filters and systems to prevent each kind of creature that tried to get into the plant, it would rise the cost past the breaking point for ROI.
There's not enough water in the Great Plains, so we're moving our agriculture to the lush Mojave Desert with its bountiful aquifers?
I think you have wrapped your head around the absurdity of the situation...
shows that the BS your masters have been feeding you is as contaminated as the water around their fracking sites.
there would be a shortage of water, clean or otherwise, pretty much everywhere.
I realize ~geekoid is usually a colossal douche, but in this case I suspect he was being Sar Cas Tic.
The Central Valley is not a desert. Less than 5% of the farms and dairies are located in the three California deserts.
Unless you can demonstrate that the oil companies are hauling water from Santa Barbara to frack wells in other parts of the country, I don't see how this is relevant.
Besides, I think what you are describing is an oil recovery technique, not fracking. There is a process were water/steam is injected into old wells to try and recover more oil/gas, but it has little relationship to hydraulic fracturing
We learned from Hurricane Sandy that salt water on land isn't an environmental disaster in terms of its impact on vegetation.
Of course not, scrote! The seas got tons of electrolytes, and that's what plants crave!
Erm buddy...?
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Show me the pipeline/canal that can deliver water from northern California to southern.
Red Herring is Red
The majority of water in Santa Barbara is derived from local sources. While there is a lot of local agriculture, it is primarily on coastal planes, not in classic desert areas like Imperial Country. In our current year we've had less than half our typical rainfall, and it has has been going on like this for three years now. Our last drought, when the desal plant was first built, took seven years to set in, we've reached the crisis point in this drought much more quickly. My point is I don't think we're quite as dumb as the rest of the state where they can't ever manage on local sources in normal years, we can. But when things go dry quickly like they have, we get caught out. Of course building a desal plant in an emergency is actually a rain dance. It worked perfectly last time, and given the predictions of an El Nino for next year, it should work this time as well.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
...then you missed the entire point of his post.
So what you are objecting to the the Practice of Water Rights
Water Rights are a legal principle, not Federal Micromanagement. The water belongs to the person with the oldest rights to it first. Need isn't part of the equation.
The person who's water rights were established in 1849 have priority to the person who's water rights were established in 1999.
First come first served. Water Rights are inheritable and sellable. Those farmers have water rights that are older than the residents in the Cities. That is why they get first dibs. Not because they are propped up by the Federal Government. But because the process of water rights was established by Common Law, and supported by California and Federal Courts.
Good, because most of the food grown in Calofornia is not grown in a desert.
This would be called the Central Valley.
By the way, you are a fucking idiot.
So where's the water come from? The same nearby rivers that the local towns pull drinking water from? Or do the frackers have windtraps?
Learn to love Alaska
PLONK. No need to read any further.
what the hell do republicans have to do with my post? go away and let the big boys talk. its a shame too because you make good points, and then make yourself look like an asshole
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The problem with trying to use solar energy to convert salt water into fresh water (or really, any kind of energy) is that it does not scale well enough. It takes too much energy.
This blog post from two years ago specifically address the San Diego plant: https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/10/the-energy-water-nexus/
In a different post, the same author says that to provide enough fresh water for the state of CA using the method you describe, we would need to take a 5 mile wide strip of land down the entire coast of CA and cover that with a transparent cover in order to gather enough solar energy to cover 100% of CA water needs.
The hilarious part is conservatives who don't understand that the eeeeeevil regulations are less expensive to comply with than accepting what the market rate would be with no intervention.
yes, this is true. The Pacific ocean off the coast of California is cold. The water has to be preheated. Using your outgoing warm brine, and pure water, to preheat the incoming water is just good sense.
My water bills tell me I use about 47 cubic meters (approx 61 cubic yards) of water per year, so a cubic yard would last me about 6 days.
Which is cheaper, even at California power rates than bottled water.
Uh, no. Israel exports food from the desert by tapping irreplaceable 'fossil water' deposited during the last ice age. Wells in the Palestinian territories are dropping by as much as a meter a year (and they need permission from the IDF to deepen them), and on the coast salt water is intruding on the wells (the Gaza desalination plant is one of the IDF's first targets every time the bomb). Some urban areas of Israel desalinate water, but no one is doing it with thorium reactors and the very, very small amount of desalinated water used in agriculture is used in greenhouses that (because of the cost) go to great lengths to recapture and recycle as much as possible. No one is irrigating fields with it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
sounds like you got your fill of lamestreet media.
What I've read is.
1. Bundy paid the Nevada STATE the fees, just not the federal government
2. the Federal government did not maintain the land in question in any manner.
3. the supposed tortoise they are wanting to protect they are also proposing to euthanize in another part of the country
and where did he 'demand' the government subsidize anything? He was homesteading. They'd used that land for many years. The government never complained until recently. Question is WHY is it an issue NOW all of a sudden when he stopped paying in the 1990's?
Indeed, so this whole debate is much ado about nothing. Since southern California is a veritable rain forest, there's no shortage of potable water and no concern for irrigation of agricultural land.
Thank you for offering your two cents. Perhaps you can inform the news media and the farmers in that area, as they've been unable to STFU about the dire water shortage throughout the Central Valley.
Also, you may want to correct the numerous articles that refer to parts of the Central Valley as semi-arid desert. Maybe start with Wikipedia, which tells me the Central Valley includes "the Tulare Basin and its semi-arid desert climate at the southernmost end."
Finally, I suggest you take a road trip outside of the area to get some perspective. To many Americans, the Central Valley could be described as a desert, even if only in the colloquial sense. The Central Valley, while sunny, is not naturally arable land. Without extensive irrigation, none of the crops that cover it today would survive.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
California could solve a lot of problems (water, pollution, crowding, traffic) by saying to all the snowbirds/wannabe actors/wannabe silicon valley hipsters:
MOVE BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM! THERE'S TOO MANY PEOPLE HERE!
I know, for many years California was "dreamland" to America. Where people would go to try to make it big, make their dreams come true, start over in life. But simply put, there are too many people doing that and it's made California's population unsustainably large.
Yes, and so many are anti-conservation because they confuse conservation with socialism. If you have to use resources responsibly, then the communists have already won.
Learn to love Alaska
"Strong" El Nino. Qualified statement. Speed reading ain't all it's cracked up to be.
He knows all about recycling salty fluids.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
No, those numbers are total payments. How would Florida get 432% returned if it didn't include the SS?
Learn to love Alaska
The answer is U- Trucks?
Fracking happens miles below fresh water aquifers. The only way either the water pumped in, or oil pumped out could end up in water supply is through leaking pipes near the surface which is a matter of being careful.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Power. If you have everything you want or need, the only way to enslave you is through outright force. But that's hard to give the appearance of righteousness. So, instead those who would be your masters seek to control the resources you need and graciously let you have their table scraps if you obey them. Of course, that system also stays up through force of arms, but this time the violence inherent in it can be disguised as defending the masters's property.
Not that this strategy has any chance of working in the long term - the inherent chaos of the universe grinds any control scheme to dust - but in the short term various artificial shortages can and do pervert the economy into acting against human interests, be their cause intentional behaviour-shaping or unthinking greed.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If I had 200 gallons to live on for a month, I doubt I'd be taking 40 gallon baths or long showers. Having lived places with severe water shortages (a farm with a broken water pump, waiting on a part), you get used to military-style showers. 10-15 seconds of wet, 5 minutes of soaping up/washing. 2-3 minutes of rinsing off. 8 gallons or under.
Dishwashing by hand is most efficiently done with a 3-sink system, not hand washing. Scrape, soap-sink, wash-sink, rinse-sink. 2-5 gallons per sink, 6-15 gallons to wash an unlimited number of dishes. Not as good as the newest dishwashers, but better than running-water washing.
When you don't ever have to conserve, you don't learn how. Extrapolatin wasteful practices in times of crisis doesn't work, and kinda makes you look dumb. Some people live off less water in a year than I use in a day. I don't conserve all the time, but I at least know how. You are arguing from a position of ignorance. Also, I use grey water. It's "easy" these days to get a bathroom sink that feeds the toilet (with a minimum filter to prevent problems if you pour grease into your bathroom sink, or have solid waste in there, such as vomiting chunkies into the bathroom sink). So your toilet is "free" so long as you use your bathroom sink enough. I personally have water recovery from my roof (yes, I don't live in CO, where the rain belongs to the State, and not the property owner). I only use it for grey water, but with some changes to make it potable, I could just about go off-grid for water. Except I use the grey water for the lawn and such.
Learn to love Alaska
If Cliven Bundy was illegally grazing his herd on a neighboring ranch that was privately owned, there wouldn't be a soul on this Earth defending his actions. However, in this case, since he is stealing from the "ferrel gubmint" (which is how people with no teeth say "federal government") his actions are brave and heroic and represent a principled stand against tyranny.
This is, of course, a fantasy. The truth is quite simple: Cliven Bundy is a parasitic freeloader. There is no difference between the actions of Mr. Bundy and those of the "professional urban welfare mothers" that his supporters spend so much time and effort castigating. They are cut from the same cloth.
rich farmers? I have never heard of a rich farmer. Either the farmer makes that season or not. Farming is a lot like the lottery on if your crops grow or not.
That's easy to fix : put water meters at every house and make people pay per-gallon. You'll see people fixing their plumbing the day right after they receive the first bill
WUT?
Apartments and (some) condos likely pay water as part of their rent/HOA, but pretty much everyone else in this country pays a water bill.
Rafts are usually towed. However, it's highly questionable whether a raft would be ideal for this thing - just erect pylons on shallow coastal water and erect it on those. You'll use the water on land, so why produce it far from there?
However, a raft could be a nice anchor point for airborne wind turbine.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So don't take a bath, get a 1.5 gpm showerhead, don't leave the water running while brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, etc. It will also rapidly become worthwhile to get a high efficiency clothes washer and dishwasher. Seriously, I live in a water-rich area, and even I do a lot of these things, so I don't think it will be too difficult for people to manage when they have a serious incentive to do so.
Just checked - that would be at best less than 2 miles deeper, and in some cases less than a mile. So "miles" is an exaggeration.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
They extract the water locally, and add all the other chemicals required (anti-bacterials, lubricants, anti-foaming agents). They extract the water from the nearest underground source since the typical fracking operation requires three to four millions gallons of water. It would defeat the purpose of fracking if they had to burn fuel to transport water to extract fuel.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
When we lived in Peru our water came from a faucet down the street, you become very conscious of every drop you use when you have to carry it in a bucket for two blocks. My wife, myself and our 8 year-old nephew went through an average of 4 gallons/day normal usage, plus about 15 gallons on (hand washed) laundry day. I wouldn't expect USAians to live that way of course, but that's not an unreasonable amount of water to use.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
with a minimum filter to prevent problems if you pour grease into your bathroom sink
Anyone who pours grease down ANY sink, much less a bathroom sink, is a moron who deserves to be thirsty and have sinks filled with standing, greasy water, and no greywater to flush toilets with.
" I sincerely doubt the oil companies use the same water that you get from the tap to do that."
It's the same. It just comes your your tap a bit later, together with some methane.
eehhhhhhh. Sorta.
The western halves of Nebraska, the Dakotas and Kansas are all half-way to being deserts with rolling sand dunes and all. They need irrigation to support crops. Otherwise they're just grazing land. And not great at that either.
The Ogallala aquifer which happens to be right in that area is indeed shrinking and it's a worry. Conservationists are like "OMG WTF!? that took thousands of years to accumulate" and farmers are like "It's been making my family MONEY for decades, we aint' stoppin". It's an issue for a sizable strip of land, but it most certainly doesn't apply to the majority of the "Great Plains".
The eastern half of those states, all the way to the Appalachian mountains, are plenty wet to support crops without the need of irrigation. Iowa has a "thriving" wine industry in the northeast in a strip of land that avoided being glaicered way back when so it's "weird" by our standards. And there are plenty of apple orchards. Johnny Appleseed is still legendary around here. But certain crops simply need a different climate. You're not going to have a... uh... banana industry in Minnesota.
All in all the USA has a fantastic piece of land for agriculture use and we could grow enough food to end world hunger. But getting it from the fields to hungry mouths has some logistical issues and so we grow feed corn to feed our cattle just so it tastes better. If we every really wanted to be super-dicks to the rest of the world. We'd unleash our capabilities, flood the markets with cheap food for a decade or until everyone else's agriculture industries collapsed and then simply stop making shipments. The Arab spring started with food riots.
It is the Republicans that are trying to shove desalination down our throats because it is so bad for the environment. Also, it is very expensive which hits the poor and minorities pretty damn hard so it is a double-bonus for their kind. They don't like this planet and they don't like us so desalination is something they push very hard.
As a Californian, I would like to see the subsidies for farming stop in this state. Did you know we grow rice in California? Freaking rice, which requires copious amounts of water. Why?
Because the state government has subsidized farming irrigation so they only pay 1% of what the rest of us pay for water. If certain types of agriculture are water intensive they should be grown in regions of the country that is geared for that, not a state that is predominantly considered dry. The truth of the matter is that California farming consumes 80% of our water supply. (http://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/workgroups/lcfssustain/hanson.pdf) It's the Pareto principle in full effect, to the detriment of the non-farming portions of the state.
The end result is that we have drought after drought and major calls to conserve. The funny thing is if the same government that was calling us to conserve wouldn't spend taxpayer dollars subsidizing types of agriculture that wouldn't naturally grow here anyway, then we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. Le sigh.
One of the challenges for renewables like wind/solar is being able to generate power when the grid doesn't need it.
With the other challenge for these white elephants being to generate power when the grid does need it.
Maybe instead of stopping the windmills they should keep them spinning but use desal plants as a power sink for the "excess" power.
Or you could use such excess from nuclear plants sized to be able to meet peak demand. This would keep the lights on and have a lower "carbon footprint" than the so called "renewables". Especially once you factored in construction, maintanance and the requirement for some kind of backup.
Alternativly take the wind/solar rubbish of the power grid and have them just run water pumping, desalination, air to fuel or something else where power availability isn't time critical.
thatsracist.jpg
We've tried telling an assorted lot of folks to go back where they came from. Didn't work then, won't work now.
Incorrect.
Farmers in California's San Joaquin depend on government-provided water. The federal government built aqueducts and channels and so it can control water allocation.
How do you create the column of fresh water?
Too bad no one can assault the moral superiority and general douche bagginess of the /. AC
The GP phrased this thread as " the choice between dying of thirst or paying $80 for a cubic yard". If you are buying this very expensive water to not die of thirst, you aren't going to be taking a 10 minute shower every day. Some people clearly don't understand the concept of using resources for survival and not for luxuries.
Depends on the grease. Runny grease that's liquid at tap-water temperature isn't an issue. It won't harm your pipes, or any other pipes getting to the treatment plants. It's the thick grease that you have to use hot water to wash down. That'll congeal in pipes (yours or others) as it cools and not wash away, catching other debris (especailly "flushable wipes" that aren't flushable any more than a cotton towel), and eventually forming a pretty formidable clog.
Learn to love Alaska
Fortunately, California appears to have discover the Pacific Ocean. There is hope.
I don't think you understand. He wasn't talking about moving the water from the Great Lakes to California. He was talking about people from California moving to the Great Lakes.
Is the guy upstream of you able to dam it off and drain all the water before it reaches you?
His speed posting skills are always severely lacking as you've now learned.
Um not to downplay your worship of nuclear fission plants, but you do know that the West is part of the Ring Of Fire (or Godzilla's Revenge), right?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I knew what he meant. You're playing ignorant because he's making fun of your team. Republicans hate any science that will make them less money. It's a fact. Like I always post to your stupid comments:
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man!
good idea and it can even be used without much infrastructure - blast the ocean with some nukes and wait till the rain comes. I like the simplicity of it! I suppose you can even escape all the red tape with this as blasting a nuke may be made a matter of national security and thus an exception from all the rules and regulations!
The difficulty is not the ability to do it, it is that the energy requirements make it economically uncompetitive. Boiling that much water and then collecting the condensation generally takes a LOT of energy which is quite expensive in most cases.
It's worth noting that you can use the energy released by condensation to preheat water before it's boiled as well as use the temperature difference between just condensed water to preheat intake water. If you have high enough efficiency in your heat exchangers, you can significantly lower your energy requirements to boil water.
We all want food. You can grow that food in damned near any other state cheaper, with a higher crop yield, and much less water used yet for some reason, California wants to green the un-greenable. This isn't a choice of "don't do it and starve", but of "use the right tool for the job." California is the wrong tool to use for farming, period.
If we can have rice paddies and alfalfa farms in a desert, you can bet your ass we could grow bananas in Minnesota.
Until you fracked the ground. Then all bets are off, because you have hydraulically fracked the goddamn ground. The structures that kept the wall between these things can no longer be trusted, because you fracked the goddamn earth.
It would probably taste way better if it did.
And you're moving goalposts. A disaster is a disaster.
Los Angeles recently passed a law stating that all open-air reservoirs must be shut down or made to be covered.
We get a beach in Silverlake at least...
The heavily industrialized rice production in the US, is about the same price as traditionally produced (labor-intensive) Chinese rice. Sometimes indentured servitude is cheaper than, and just as effective as, heavy machinery.
Se habla español
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Actually, the opposite side of the coin dominates...
Ad campaigns ask people to use less water. Government programs pay people to rip out their lawns. Then in a couple years, water districts raise their rates, because the lower water consumption means they're getting less money to run the system.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Careful? In an industry that continues to kill and maim its workers at a breakneck pace?
What's left of the colorado river. (ok not northern california, but still.)
For a typical family, that's around 50 gallons a day, more than enough for most backyard irrigation needs. With landscape irrigation needs taken care we can save the clean potable water for more important things like drinking and cooking. Mandate separate plumbing system (that goes into a local collection tank instead of down the sewer) for new home constructions. Provide subsidies as incentives for retrofitting existing homes. Where does the subsidy money come from? A portion from money saved from not having to pay ever rising prices for importing out of state water.
careful, the refugees will wind up in phoenix.
Right, and then once we've solved the water crisis, we can solve electricity shortages by putting some sort of "energy meter" on everyone's home! Once they start seeing how much money they spend on electricity, they'll start turning off their lights after leaving the room!
Grow up you teenage to college age idiots. Just because you are out of high school, or college, TRUST ME, you do not know everything. You only know what your moron teachers have indoctrinated your minds with. You have no real world experience in anything. You believe fracking is bad, because they have told you so, and that you are still under the myth that man can destroy the planet with fossil fuels "greenhouse" gas called Co2 all the while not realizing that if we get rid of Co2, green plants die and so will we because of a lack of oxygen. So, go back to playing your Xbox and leave the running of things to the adults will ya?
More like you get rid of the subsidies so that water costs $20/barrel and suddenly people won't waste so much of it, and the well will never run dry.
I'm not a slave to renwables, it just makes me crazy that we build those windmills and then turn them off when we don't know what to do with the electricity they generate. Desalination is just one use, making hydrogen for methane via electrolysis is another.
I also think that Obama could have done more for the economy when he took office by investing, NASA scale, into nuclear power and building a couple of gigwatts of nuke power in Northwestern Arizona, dedicating the power generation to desalination.
This is what I tell everyone about Indian Reservations!
"You could live for some time off of that."
No you can't, it's just over 200 gallons.
Unless by some time you mean about a week. You need to drink 1/2 gallon a day alone.
Bath: 40 gallons
Shower: 2.5 gallons per minute
Old showerheads may use 4 gal/min whereas newer low-flow showerheads use about 2.
Teeth brushing: 1 gallon
Depends on if you let the water run while brushing
Hands/face washing: 1 gallon
Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon
Depends on if you let the water run while shaving.
Dishwasher: 20 gallons/load
New energy-efficient models may only use 4 gallons.
Dishwashing by hand: 4 gallons/minute
With a low-flow faucet head, might be 1 gallon.
Clothes washing (machine): : 40 gallons/load (top loading)
Front-loaders may use about 20 gallons/load.
Toilet flush: 3 gallons
Older models may use more, but new energy-efficient toilets might only use 1 gallon/flush.
Glasses of water drunk: 8 oz. per glass (1/16th of a gallon)
Did you drink your "eight glasses of water" today?
I know you are using US gallons, but I can't imagine using the amounts of water that you quote for most of the activities that you mention. 4 gallons of water for dishwashing by hand? WTF? You fill up the sink, was everything and let the water out, with the occasional use of the tap to rinse. Trust me that when I do out washing up (5-10 minutes), I don't use 20 - 40 gallons of water. That would be insane.
Sure, you will use loads of water shaving, brushing teeth and showering if you shit it all down the plug hole through stupidity, laziness. And if you have a water shortage, then maybe a bath is a pretty dumb idea.
In a resource constrained world, we are likely to all need to make do with less of everything. This particularly goes for the US where excessive waste (of everything) is the norm because historically everything has been cheap.
It is perfectly possible to live well using fairly minimal amounts of water, it just requires a bit of effort and thought (and don't spend ten minutes in the shower, spend two).
Israel gets 40% of its water from desalination, and will reach 50% next year. It also recycles 80% of its wastewater, highest in the world. They do a very good job of avoiding precisely what you claim is happening.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Really? My parents still have the old ones while I have the new ones. The new ones end up needing to be flushed more often defeating the intentions. At least given my anecdotal use.
Tesla hater.
Well, one of them is the economy failing to meet the employment needs of the individual (a.k.a. the market making sure there is a large pool of unemployed people in order to keep wages down), the other group are hard working businessmen who don't have sufficient resources to do their jobs without losing money, so they're making everyone else pay for it. (Socialize losses, privatize profits.)
California could solve a lot of problems (water, pollution, crowding, traffic) by saying to all the snowbirds/wannabe actors/wannabe silicon valley hipsters:
MOVE BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM! THERE'S TOO MANY PEOPLE HERE!
That would solve almost none of the water problem. The problem is not residential consumption, or even industrial consumption. Agriculture alone consumes more than 85% of the available water, and that is where all the subsidies are, and thus almost all the waste (people tend to not waste things they pay for with their own money).
More like you get rid of the subsidies so that water costs $20/barrel and suddenly people won't waste so much of it, and the well will never run dry.
The price would never go that high. I live in San Jose, California, and as a retail customer I pay about $1/HCF (hundred cubic feet) of potable water. A HCF is 748 gallons. So one gallon costs me $0.0013. A standard barrel is 42 gallons. So clean, drinkable, chlorinated, fluoridated water currently costs about 6 cents per barrel. Farmers receive non-potable water, that is heavily subsidized, so they pay far less than that. So even if the price of a barrel of water went up, for everyone, to a dime, our water problems would be over.
Only if the cost of that burned fuel is more than the value of the fuel extracted.
There are tons of tanker trucks that run on oil-derived fuels that are transporting oil-derived fuels.
The difference is that children are human beings, not a for-profit product, and do not deserve to starve to death. Society as a whole benefits from the subsidy. Your cattle, on the other hand, are property that exist solely to make you money. Only you benefit from the subsidy.
I dont know where you get the idea that the republicans are my team because the truth is them along with the democrats aare 2 sides of the same coin , they both suck for different reasons but dn near equally
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You say it's a hundredth of a cent per liter, but how is CocaCola supposed to maintaint their billion percent margins if the water costs THAT much?!? :-P
See also: Bundy.
Ted or Al?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I can't wait for the apocalypse. What will GROWING YOUR FUCKING FOOD FOR YOU be worth to you then?
also, could it not be done in a way where we use the salt water in a new type of energy generating plant, that collects the steam and makes it usable?
Since when is steam unusable? A good thing to look up is Combined Cycle systems. Any new powerplant will typically use waste heat / steam to run smaller steam generators extracting even higher efficiency. Better still many powerplants are retrofitting heat recovery steam generators for this purpose.
OMG shut up you are making too much sense... We cant just "give" the electricity away!!!
If 200 gallons is all you'll have availble for a long time I would expect some of those items would be rationed more.
If dying of thirst is a realistic thing to happen then I'll be skipping just about all those other things. I don't care if I smell terrible if instead I can say I'm not dying of thirst. And at only $80 per cubic yard the situtation can't be that desperate. I'd pay that every week so long as the $80 source can sustain the extra frivolous use.
You can always scale it up slowly with little barges. It just might be cheaper to let nature do the desalinating for us, and we can deal with collection and transport, which we have to do anyway. It seems you believe I think we should do it all at once. Well, I suppose that's a nice way of making any idea appear absurd. Better to fight wars over the one percent of the planet's water we presently use. That seems to be the cheapest way to do it, so far.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We all want food. You can grow that food in damned near any other state cheaper, with a higher crop yield, and much less water used...
Then fucking do it!
Grow the same crops in other states, undercut CA, and profit!
Since aquifers may extend tens or hundreds of miles, a couple of miles vertically just doesn't seem like that much.
To put a partisan twist on this: The urban areas are the heavily democratic areas. The desert farmers tend to be GOP supporters. Who are the real welfare queens? See also: Bundy.
Bull. Al supported his family by selling shoes.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
That's easy to fix : put water meters at every house and make people pay per-gallon. You'll see people fixing their plumbing the day right after they receive the first bill
WUT?
Apartments and (some) condos likely pay water as part of their rent/HOA, but pretty much everyone else in this country pays a water bill.
And then there are those of us who do not fall into either of those groups, and have a well instead.
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That's the potable water, they're not irrigating open fields with it (that's where most of the wastewater goes if I'm not mistaken.) Ask Palestinians about water and you'll get a different story.
"The West Bank's main resource of natural water is groundwater from the Mountain Aquifer, most of it derived from rainfall and snowmelt on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. Israel abstracts about 80% of it.[8] In Gaza, the only source of natural fresh water is the Coastal Aquifer, which is heavily over-exploited and salinated as the result of seawater intrusion. The development of seawater desalination is hampered by the blockade of the Gaza Strip . . . Israel extracts more water from the West Bank than agreed in the Oslo Accord, while Palestinian abstractions were within the agreed range. Contrary to expectations under Oslo II, the water actually abstracted by Palestinians in the West Bank has dropped between 1999 and 2007. Due to the Israeli over-extraction, aquifer levels are near the point where irreversible damage is done to the aquifer. Israeli wells in the West Bank have dried up local Palestinian wells and springs."
Actually I was originally told about the Palestinian water situation by an Israeli, a "settler", who was quite proud of it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
ER...Isn't the alfalfa dried in situ before shipping? Wouldn't the water go into the local atmosphere?
You aren't following. Cover the Pacific with a tarp. Pump all the water that lands on it to central Australia. It'll have more water than Iowa. Do the same with the freshwater landing on the Atlantic and Indian oceans to Sahara, and tell me how those calculations go.
Learn to love Alaska
That's a lot of little barges. If we make each barge the size of a Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, each would collect 580 acre feet of water per year. To water the Sahara, we'll need just over 9 million of these "little" barges. Producing one per day, we'll be "scaling up" over the next 25,000 years.
Each of these little barges, if it were simply a topless box of 1" steel, will require 12 million pounds of steel, currently coming in at a base price of around $4.3 million, plus labor, and assuming that the price of steel doesn't rise due to demand.
You'd need 13 of those little supercarrier-sized barges to equal the production of the one desalination facility described in TFA, for a production cost of $56 million (again, for just the steel to build a very-poorly-designed hull), whereas this plant cost only $34 million to build. Desalination also delivers water directly to land and does not assume world-record rainfall.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
...this plant cost only $34 million to build...
Not bad. We could build a thousand of these things for less than two weeks of "quantitative easing". So, I'm kind of back where I started. Our water supply remains controlled by the commodities market and the politicians that serves it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let me give you a story to fact-check, once you're done, please return and tell us all what a Big League Chew piece of Shit you've been:
Bundy's ranch was established in 1877. His family purchased it later in the 1880's. When they did, they PAID for the water and forage rights.
After the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, they continued to pay grazing fees and make improvements to the land into the 1990's.
In the 1990's, the BLM tell him he must get rid of +70% of his cattle, and only graze them in the summer/winter/fall in order to protect the desert tortoise (a shoot-on-sight invasive species in the area) He took them to court, after scientifically proving that the cattle do no harm to the tortoise, and when it looked like the BLM were going to lose, they stormed out screaming to the court "YOU HAVE NO JURISDICTION OVER US!"
Meanwhile, he continued paying his grazing fees to the state of Nevada.
Now, the BLM was HIRED by the taxes and fees he was paying under the Taylor Grazing Act to manage the land for ranchers that use "Open Grazing" in order to prevent overgrazing. Considering their department/agency was defined for serving the ranchers, paid for by rancher grazing fees, he told them that they were FIRED for doing a shitty job.
In 1996 BLM tells the State of Nevada to stop allowing grazing rights forever (which, by fiat, should force the BLM off of the land, because if the grazing rights are retired, there's no fucking grazing land for the BLM to maintain!), and Nevada lawmakers get a sweetheart deal for it, so they buy it.
Enter Agenda 21 -- Where the Feds "voluntarily" force all the ranchers off of their property (using your tax money and mine!) in some idiotic power play. They manage to scare off all but 2, one that dies a few years later, (but managed a post-mortem win in court against them), and Cliven Bundy.
Now, where, in this, does Welfare fit in, you fucking idiot? You pathetic propagandist shill? Pull your head out of your ass and do one iota of fucking research before you perpetuate the fucking LIES of your political taskmasters, you BRAINWASHED SHITBAG. Now that you know, don't you fucking DARE call him a welfare farmer if you ever hoped, in your life, to own a shred of integrity to your name. Don't you fucking dare.
Or, you know, could just blame the environmentalists for trying to save the Delta Smelt. Land of the fruits and nuts, indeed.
They Smelt it, they Delta it.
There is I suppose a difference between one off salt water flooding which is followed by melting of snow and rain falling AND a desert like land that is once in a while washed off by salty water from fracking incident. Other than that you are right of course.
All of those items are "luxury" items in terms of survival.
If literally, you have to conserve water to live, while you may find it uncomfortable, you'll find yourself taking a lot less baths, and learning to brush your teeth with only 1/4 L of water.
Additionally, you might rethink using water to flush the toilet (disgusting, I know, but it can be done).
But don't worry, the great thing about the capital market is if you must be a water hog, and you can afford the $80 / cubic yard, you can splurge (although maybe your neighbors will choose to save water and buy a BMW instead)
Except that QE is the purchase of investment vehicles (bonds) that return their cost. You're right, though: You're back to your original point where you don't understand economics.
That does bring up a good question, however: What is the price of the water produced with these rain barrels?
If we want to pay back the production cost of one barge in a single productive year, each gallon of water must be sold for only $0.023. The US average price per gallon of water is $0.002, so to compete with the current US market, you'll need to spread the cost over a decade, at least, and we're still assuming minimal production costs and free labor.
Now would be a good time to account for not having that world-record rainfall. The average in a good southern tropical location is only about 100 inches annually, so your barge probably wouldn't break even for 100 years, if it even survives that long. 100 years is a very long time in salt water, even with corrosion resistance. In comparison, the desalination plant would break even in only 7 years.
I'm left with the same conclusion as I had in my earlier comment: No sane politician or corporate investor will want anything to do with a project this absurd. It's not a matter of how you scale up or where you get the water. A giant rain barrel left open to the sky simply isn't a cost-effective means of water production. Small ones only work because they have a relatively large surface gathering water for them.
American rainfall ranges from about 5 inches to 30 inches per year, which (at 10 inches per year) gives us about 12500 gallons per year for a 2000 square foot collection area. Conveniently and coincidentally, that much water costs about the same ($25) as a cheap plastic rain barrel on Amazon. To equal the production of the one desalination plant (7500 acre feet per year), we'd have to gather rainfall from an area of 9000 acres, or half the size of Manhattan. The easiest way to accomplish that scale of collection would be to dam up a valley, possibly diverting existing rivers and tributaries. In short, build a reservoir, like politicians and corporations already have in many places that can fill them.
I've been mimicking Randall Munroe's style all day, so it's fitting that I'm reminded of a basic test for whether an idea makes sense. Building a reservoir on land where there is already ample rainfall makes sense, and people are already doing it. Building a completely man-made structure to gather rainwater for transport elsewhere doesn't make sense, so people don't do it. You can blame conspiracies all you want, but that won't change the basic fact that such a project is a ridiculously expensive way to get water.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
?Free MLM Software demo is must before finalizing a MLM Software Company?Yes, Sir? Let me have you attention here. Are you planning for a new mlm business? Want to launch a network marketing business? Or Want to switch from your sick programmer
The water to irrigate the Sahara to Iowa's levels falls (assuming typical tropical rates of 10 inches per year) on 6.48 billion acres, which would require a tarp costing $47 trillion (based on the best bulk price I found easily). That's about two thirds the net worth of all US households.
The price for the tarp works out to be $0.02 per gallon gathered, roughly ten times the average price of water in the US. Then we'll have to add on the cost of the pumps, too, and the management and environmental costs associated with putting something that large into the ocean.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I was born in California. About half the population of CA was born elsewhere, 25% somewhere else in the USA, and 25% in another country. That breakdown is a very rough approximation based on 10 year blathering I read ... somewhere. But you get the general idea.
If the rest of you would stop moving here, and the ones that have go back to where they came from, CA would have half the population it has, and maybe only 25% of the weirdo's. Stop sending us your Charles Mansions and Ronald Reagans! Most of the weirdest whacko CA-ians I've met were born elsewhere.
If I had to take my pic and could only pic one, I'd keep the people born in foreign countries and send back the New Yorkers and Floridians.
Seriously, SONGS should be re-opened and used for desalination. In addition, new smaller reactors can be used to do the job, instead of the old ones.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"In Japan, some ten desalination facilities linked to pressurised water reactors operating for electricity production yield some 14,000 m/day of potable water, and over 100 reactor-years of experience have accrued." -- http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Inundating a national park that host "an abundance of uniquely adapted life forms"?
A total of 1,042 plant species, 51 species of native mammals, 346 types of birds, 36 classifications of reptiles, six types of fish and five species of amphibians have all managed to thrive in this extreme climate. http://www.ohranger.com/death-...
Yes, what could be greener?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I was pretty shocked to learn that the Arkansas River now runs dry before it reaches Dodge City.
It does not manage to "get out of Dodge."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You're back to your original point where you don't understand economics.
Yeah, I do. It is you that that doesn't understand human/animal behavior, and economics is just one aspect of it.
And as you argue about costs, you are only confirming my point as to what drives the availability of water, and why people are killing and dying for it.
That QE money can just as easily go towards building the plants and the ROI will go where it belongs. Your economics is a shell game, a con, all very easy to understand as the rest of us suffer what trickles down.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Show me the pipeline/canal that can deliver water from northern California to southern.
Uh, the California Aqueduct was created in the 60's to do exactly that. (Map for the visually inclined.)
On the downside, it normally takes considerable energy, and the only ones to pay for it is the consumers (like everything else). Now if they just solar power the plant (grin)...
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Now, where, in this, does Welfare fit in
Right here:
Now, the BLM was HIRED by the taxes and fees he was paying under the Taylor Grazing Act to manage the land for ranchers that use "Open Grazing" in order to prevent overgrazing. Considering their department/agency was defined for serving the ranchers, paid for by rancher grazing fees, he told them that they were FIRED for doing a shitty job.
See, just because you pay taxes, doesn't mean you can unilaterally fire the government. He isn't the only one who pays taxes and fees. The authority he thinks he has to "fire" the BLM can only come from LEECHING OFF other taxpayers, who may disagree with him. That is very much welfare. And against democratic principles that the US is founded upon.
If Bundy really wants to shut down the BLM, he either goes through the due process (i.e get Congress to pass a bill to shut it down), or he takes the nuclear option and rebel, forming a new government.
Ah, I stand corrected. Thanks for the link.
Still, planning to build a nuclear plant in a state with a "moratorium" on new nuclear plants (since 1976) is a pretty dicey business plan.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
And as you argue about costs, you are only confirming my point as to what drives the availability of water...
You seem to think that some noble goal is enough in itself to overcome the natural scarcity of resources. A few millenia of history stand against you, but don't let that thwart your optimism. Maybe someday, a few thousand miners, steelworkers, and shipwrights, and a few million support personnel, will all decide that drastically changing the Sahara's ecosystem is a good idea, and they'll all volunteer their time and effort to build your giant rain collector.
I won't hold my breath waiting, though, especially since there are far easier ways to get clean water. If there's going to be a mass movement to reclaim the Sahara, it'll probably start with a few local villages planting trees and clearing sand. In fact, that's already happening, and it's fairly successful. In a few areas of West Africa, the edge of the desert has been pushed back several hundred meters, and further away there are noticeable increases in precipitation.
Even that project takes money, though. Coming across free bulldozers is a rare thing. Food is still scarce and people still need to trade with others. You can close your eyes and pretend that we live in a communist world where cost doesn't matter, but that won't change the fact that people usually care for themselves and their families before they'll donate time and energy to an idealist's inefficient construction project
That QE money can just as easily go towards building the plants
No, it can't. The QE money cannot exist without a sufficiently-debt-laden vehicle to support it. The existence of debt is what stabilizes the money supply, preventing the inflation that would result if the Federal Reserve did indeed just start printing money to build things.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Natural resources are NOT scarce in any way. They are made scarce by economics. More money is spent denying access than than producing the product.
No, it can't. The QE money cannot exist without a sufficiently-debt-laden vehicle to support it. The existence of debt is what stabilizes the money supply, preventing the inflation that would result if the Federal Reserve did indeed just start printing money to build things.
I'm sorry. That con simply won't work on me. Try to find another fool that believes that crap.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Natural resources are NOT scarce in any way.
Really? Name any resource that is naturally available in absolute abundance everywhere in the world.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The "Grid" is is built mostly to meet the needs of carbon fueled energy companies, and of course they want it to stay that way. So even if there is huge wind power resource in Nebraska, the coal and oil and natural gas companies, who by the way are the bulk of the contributators to the Conservative and GOP Super PACS aren't going to willingly do something that promotes alternative energy, which is why the U.S. did not have a meaningful energy policy during the Bush years especially. The coming on-line of fracking has improved the natural-gas and oil resource picture, improving their competativeness with alternatives, but of course at a cost that the carbon companies want you to not notice and continue in your old habits of pumping green house gases into the atmosphere, for your convenience. One hopes that the terrible weather in the eastern two thirds of the nation becomes a wake-up call to the connection.
Once electrons go on the grid, they cannot be efficiently saved. It is better to let them go to ground. If batteries were all that efficient, then we could save energy in one part of the grid and transport it to somewhere else. Wind farms in Nebraska could be set up off the grid or on, and if there were efficient batteries or other storage, the energy could be stored and used later, but this does not exist and transforming energy to other forms suffers the same problem, the ways it can be stored are relatively inefficient or they suffer from other bad side effects, like having to create more carbon fuels that get burned in the atmosphere. If and when we decide that our energy should come from less and less breaking of carbon bonds, we will either need to find a much higher energy density fuel than carbon or find a very efficient way to store what energy we make. Nuclear fusion of hydrogen could be a solution to the energy density source, and Thorium fission might be much safer than Uranium fission, so there is possibly a nuclear solution. For alternatives such as solar and wind, it is battery technology that may decide how much they can do. Right now, the carbon fuels industry has a vested interest in obstructing these efforts, one way for them to do that is to ensure that the grid does not go out to places where the alternative energy is available. An answer to them is to bring alternative energy to the grid, either make it possible to bring nuclear energy to the grid or to invent efficient batteries.
But in our universe, TANSTAAFL.
There's A Not-So-Tantalizing Air About Florida?
Nothing posted to
Any desalinization would increase salinity in the waste water. So even if the ocean is an efficient heat sink for the plant, the brine that would result from the process could become a problem by creating density currents in the water column. In cold water, brine does not mix well and significant production of dense brine would pose an environmental problem in the Southern California Boarder Land because the bathemetry of those basins. If enough brine was produced it could cause massive erosion and landslides in the deep ocean. It may be that the size of these brine plumes isn't ever large enough to pose a risk, but one way to deal with the problem is to conceive your desalinization in stages that produces brine waste in sequences that progressively dilute it.
A discussion of alternative techniques of desalinization might relate to this problem. If a combination of solar driven fractionation of brackish water from sea water is used and then reverse osmosis is used for the final stages of purification, the advantages of each can be optimized in a staged process. The energy needed might be greater overall, but if the energy problem could be solved then maybe the costs and waste products could be distributed with reduced impact. The cost of desalination is very sensitive to energy costs, so either a large solar input of some sort, maybe not just solarvoltaic, or a high energy density nuclear source, Fusion, if it proves feasible, or some lower risk fission source, such as Thorium, could be used. I am not saying straight away that Santa Barbra should consider running a Thorium reactor, only that some kind of energy solution needs to be created for the general problem.
All of them, but the problem starts when somebody claims exclusive ownership. That's where the scarcity comes from. Water is the best example so far.
And Nestle corporation would like very much like to make the rules and ration it to "five litres of water we need for our daily hydration and the 25 litres we need for minimum hygiene" so they can bottle and sell at enormous profit the rest.
Scarcity is the life blood of your economic system. And most of its energy is spent keeping it that way through propaganda (the kind you repeat here), lobbying (bribing) government officials and through military action if necessary, much more than is being spent on product and distribution. You should know this. Big agriculture and pharma operate on the same principles. Speculation, it makes the world go 'round, not science or logic. Shortages are not natural, they are created for maximum profit. The number one rule is, "what the market will bear". Turn the screw until it breaks, and then back it off a quarter turn.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This is the internet. Everyone's a special snowflake.
You're officially part of:
..but pretty much everyone else in this country
And the entire concept of water rights is stupid.
Water should be distributed by best use first, not oldest use first.
Eliminate the concept of water rights, and we're halfway to a solution. Farms use wasteful irrigation methods because they can, not because they should.
It's obvious why we don't drink it.
But... What's the long term cost on desalination vs building a secondary water distribution network? There's no reason we can't shower in filtered salt water, no reason we can't flush toilets with it, no reason we can't wash cars with it. No need to maintain residual chlorine in it, either, just disinfect it at the source. Want a swimming pool? Fill it with salt water (salt water pools are becoming more popular anyway, they're apparently cheaper to chlorinate). Hook it up to all the outside faucets, and if anybody tries to water their lawn, it'll either be self-defeating or they can switch to salt-tolerant grasses.
I'm sure plenty of industrial processes could run on salt water too - certainly not all of them, but I'd bet it's a large chunk.
It's not a solution where the runoff and treated sewage end up in freshwater rivers, but for cities that drain into the ocean, it's not a problem.
>Still, planning to build a nuclear plant in a state with a "moratorium" on new nuclear plants (since 1976) is a pretty dicey business plan.
What???
That's crazy talk. The moratorium is on nuclear *power plants*.
They're building a nuclear *desalination plant*.
Selling electricity is just a nice side effect. =)
Sure, in a greenhouse. For twice the cost. And we can grow corn in the scrubland sandhills of western Nebraska... if we irrigate it using unsustainable practices of pumping the aquifer dry.
So you mean like the way they grow alfalfa and rice in the desert. We're on the same page :)
See, just because you pay taxes, doesn't mean you can unilaterally fire the government. He isn't the only one who pays taxes and fees. The authority he thinks he has to "fire" the BLM can only come from LEECHING OFF other taxpayers, who may disagree with him. That is very much welfare. And against democratic principles that the US is founded upon.
You have the most incoherent, inconsistent, fucking retarded definition of welfare out of anyone that's ever lived, ever. According to you, it's welfare to fire a shitty, hostile employee because they're deliberately fucking up your business and you're sick of paying them to deliberately fuck up your business. According to you, it's welfare to work in an office that you don't personally own (because that office is owned by your fucking company, not you! DUHRRR!!!). According to you, because I pay taxes, I'm on welfare, as my taxes and fees support federal government branches that I don't like! According to you, I'm on welfare because I pay my water bill to the utility company instead of the federal government. Your definition of welfare is fucking idiotic and misdirected. You only stand by it because you're hell-bent on being wrong about a guy that you don't like for whatever fucked up, brainwashed reason you can muster. I see that reason and facts cannot convince you of your hostile, willful ignorance.
You seem to describe a system that successfully feeds poor city dwellers. They don't need that much water for domestic use (no front/back yard if they're poor, no pools) and they somehow benefit from other people turning water into food.
I can't speak for mismanagement, waste and so on but the basic premise is sound. 1st world countries need agriculture to be subsidized, else it's not profitable and then we starve.
Riiiiiight, so while you're doing that some shmuck comes along, sees a bit of land next to a river and finds out he can undercut your greenhouse Minnesota bananas, make a buck, and put you out of business. And all he has to do is piss off LA urbanites who would rather he not irrigate his orchard.
And so the world turns.
Another 1 line fart reply from gmhowell!
Do you know where California is and what desalination is? You don't desalinate fresh water. California has well over a thousand miles of ocean coastline.
Free Martian Whores!
Do you know where fracking is done, and what frackers pump down? You don't frack with seawater. Frackers generally use drinking water (I'm counting rivers and streams that would be used as drinking water downstream) as the base for their fracking solutions.
Why are you trying to correct someone when you obviously don't understand the thread?
Learn to love Alaska
Why could you not frack with saltwater? Of course you'll use fresh water in the middle of the continent. Would the salt contaminate aquifers or something?
Free Martian Whores!
Sea water is more corrosive. If you have a "free" source of water (pumping it out of a local stream used for drinking water downstream) why wouldn't you use the "more pure" water as your base? It'll cut your operating cost. And it's possible that seawater wouldn't work as well with the chemical mix you like to add to your freshwater
Learn to love Alaska