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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."
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.
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.
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?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
This should of been done 50 years ago. State of Colorado should halt the river until California dedicates funds toward this. They're the only southwestern state with this option. And they destroy the other states and cause immense environmental damage by their water greediness.
Both Central Valley region and Nevada rancher stand off, have nothing to do with protecting endangered species. Rather, it is all about killing agriculture in the southwest to free up more water for California urbanites.
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.
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.
the official GAY that supports its readers and come Here 3ut now code sharing
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?
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
....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
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...
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.
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.
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.
With that logic... why don't we drink salt water... there are oceans filled with that stuff...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
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)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Consumption -> energy use -> global warming -> worse droughts -> desalinization -> energy use ->->-> This is a very poor long term solution
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.
"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.
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.
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!
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
He knows all about recycling salty fluids.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
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.
How do you create the column of fresh water?
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! --
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...
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.
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?
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.
OMG shut up you are making too much sense... We cant just "give" the electricity away!!!
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.
?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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.