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California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water
HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that as drought strikes California, residents can't help noticing the substantial reservoir of untapped water lapping at their shores — 187 quintillion gallons of it, more or less, shimmering invitingly in the sun. Once dismissed as too expensive and harmful to the environment desalination is getting a second look. A $1 billion desalination plant to supply booming San Diego County is under construction and due to open as early as November, providing a major test of whether California cities will be able to resort to the ocean to solve their water woes. "It was not an easy decision to build this plant," says Mark Weston, chairman of the agency that supplies water to towns in San Diego County. "But it is turning out to be a spectacular choice. What we thought was on the expensive side 10 years ago is now affordable."
Carlsbad's product will sell for around $2,000 per acre-foot (the amount used by two five-person U.S. households per year), which is 80 percent more than the county pays for treated water from outside the area. Water bills already average about $75 a month and the new plant will drive them up by $5 or so to secure a new supply equal to about 7 or 8 percent of the county's water consumption. Critics say the plant will use a huge amount of electricity, increasing the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, which further strains water supplies. And local environmental groups, which fought the plant, fear a substantial impact on sea life. "There is just a lot more that can be done on both the conservation side and the water-recycling side before you get to [desalination]," says Rick Wilson, coastal management coordinator with the environmental group Surfrider Foundation. "We feel, in a lot of cases, that we haven't really explored all of those options."
Carlsbad's product will sell for around $2,000 per acre-foot (the amount used by two five-person U.S. households per year), which is 80 percent more than the county pays for treated water from outside the area. Water bills already average about $75 a month and the new plant will drive them up by $5 or so to secure a new supply equal to about 7 or 8 percent of the county's water consumption. Critics say the plant will use a huge amount of electricity, increasing the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, which further strains water supplies. And local environmental groups, which fought the plant, fear a substantial impact on sea life. "There is just a lot more that can be done on both the conservation side and the water-recycling side before you get to [desalination]," says Rick Wilson, coastal management coordinator with the environmental group Surfrider Foundation. "We feel, in a lot of cases, that we haven't really explored all of those options."
The environmental groups are right. American families use a lot more water than those in other countries with a similar quality of life. It's always cheaper to save water or save energy, the problem is that people are unwilling and take it as some kind of assault on their way of life and freedom to waste. It's dumb because it just costs them more money.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Let's be honest here. The rate and methods by which we are consuming resources from environment is akin to a clueless child playing around the stove. Sometimes we need to get burned by the stove to learn not to touch it again. And the drought in California is natures way of telling us our hand is currently roasting on said stove.
Start whacking industries who use the most water with a levy to pay for the plants. e.g. almond growers. If they are suddenly motivated to develop ways to save water then fine, if then don't then it's still a new plant.
Not helping.
What they nee to do is stop selling subsidized water to farms. Especially almond and alfalfa. Let them pay market rates.
I want that, mine was $141 last month. We had an increase this year by $5 a month because the lake is dry and they had to drill a bunch of water wells. A local private water coop regularly charges $200 a month. Suck it up Calif. If we can afford it in west Texas, you can in calif.
Solar isn't nearly efficient enough to do that without pretty much paving over the entire southwest with solar facilities
Bullshit. The Ivanpah Solar Power facility is only 1% of the Mojave desert area, and can produce enough energy for several of those desalination plants.
The acre-foot may seem an odd unit, but it makes calculations much simpler when you have to work with either catchment or agriculture.
It is simpler only to Americans. The rest of the civilized world use litres (L), which easily converts to cubic metres (=1000L) for large volumes, and trivially works with land distances (km) and rainfall (mm) measurements.
Unless you pump the excise brine directly back into the ocean and kill all the life around the pump outlet. Similar thing happens with CO2. I've head the specious argument we don't have to worry because we're just recycling CO2 by burning coal, oil, and gas. Yes, that's true. However, it is important to note that all the sequestered CO2 put into the atmosphere isn't mere recycling.
As in everything, it is important to have a sense of proportion. Math is your friend.
They had a nuclear power plant in San Diego. San Onofre.
They're shutting it down instead of refitting/repairing it because the operators figured there would be too much trouble jumping regulatory hurdles and endless delays from the government and environmental groups that had little interest in, or were openly hostile to letting the plant operate.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Desalination on the level being talked about here would produce huge amounts of salt and other minerals. Getting rid of that salt in a way that wouldn't cause catastrophic harm would be no mean feat. So while some objections may be hyperbolic, the underlying concern of serious environmental harm is justified. Getting rid of that salt has to be part of the plan, and not just a "oh well, we'll figure something out".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And the whole idea that desalination destroys the environment somehow is an example of why I have zero respect for environmentalists
The environmental problem with desalination is not that it "uses up" water, but that it is a voracious consumer of energy. It is idiotic for San Diego to produce expensive and energy intensive desalinated water, when a short distance away in the Imperial Valley, farmers are receiving water for a hundredth the cost. Central planning has been a failure everywhere, and it is failing in California. The government should not be picking winners and losers, or segmenting the market into favored certain sectors. Instead they should just let the market set the price for water. The alfalfa and rice farms will disappear from the desert, and the desalination plants will not be necessary. We don't have a shortage of water, we have a surplus of stupidity.
I can see another aspect besides the waste in electricity... The microscopic life in the ocean that is the foundation of the food chain that will eventually lead to us is not considered in the environmental assessments. They are only worried about the higher multi-cellular life. The ocean is one of the most diverse places on Earth. I can see us fucking up that diversity much like we fucked up everything else we touched in nature.
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Maybe the entire country could stop massive subsidies for farmers to grow crops in what amounts to coastal steppe/desert? Oh, and the massive subsidies allowing millions and millions of people to live in deserts (and yes, I'm not just looking at California).
It was a stupid policy in the early 20th century, but at least then there was the incentive to populate the (south) west coast for geopolitical/security reasons. Now, simply start charging people (farmers, corporations, individuals) the ACTUAL costs of the water they use and let the market cull the system. /solved.
-Styopa
I generally support Nuclear power, but in reference to old plants shutting down? Good. Old reactor designs need to be retired, because quite frankly they're not safe enough compared to what's available now.
No, the problem isn't that older plants which have seen significant wear and tear face too many regulatory hurdles to continue operating - it's that NEW plants, using more advanced, safer technology, are facing too many legal hurdles in most cases to get built. We're talking about Passively Safe fourth-gen reactors, the sort that would be able to survive even something like Fukushima without a meltdown. We can't get these old plants replaced with new ones, so the old ones keep running with increasingly creaky equipment? That strikes me as downright crazy.
I think Robert Heinlein wrote a book about that, but he called it the Moon instead of California and they were exporting to India instead of China.
Sure, get some water now, and create waste that lasts for 100,000 years
Or not, if you use technology that isn't 50 years old. What's your agenda, that you're objecting based on completely out-dated information? You can't be ignorant of current options, so that means you're hoping that other people are when you spout deliberate misinformation like that. Really - who are you hoping to fool? What's your purpose?
Nuclear being safe power is a myth.
See above.
I really think that conservatives think ... there is no hope for the future, so who cares about the lives of future generations ... write people off as "sinners" and dismiss them as real people
Wow, you've really got some hang-ups, don't you?
It is a pessimistic, myopic viewpoint driven by a false glorification of the past
This, from someone who appears to be reliving a "No Nukes" rally from the 1970's? Did you get some bad mushrooms or something at one of those events, and haven't been able to shake it off since?
a true hatred of the now that they're afraid that they are not a part of
Again, this from someone who is clearly stuck (or wants to be) in a decades old complaint, and who's using a cartoon villain fantasy version of "conservatives" as his main take on those who think contemporary nuclear technology, including reprocessing and new fail-to-safe designs, is a useful tool? The person with the fixation on the past and delusions about the "now" and the future, here, is you. Hyping those delusions here is fairly harmless, since people here understand that what you're complaining about is just nonsense. But please don't do things like vote, OK? The future thanks you.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I live in Portland Oregon and pay an average of $150 a month for a 1500 sq ft house. Maybe we should start buying water from California since it is apparently cheap there.
Who cares? They are birds.
I'm not trying to troll; I really cannot understand why people are upset over a few dead birds. Nuclear kills fish. Coal kills everything. Nothing has a zero environmental impact. Is the benefit worth the cost? It seems like it is. Glass windows kill birds too. I'm not losing any sleep over it, except when they wake me up by flying into my windows.
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