That fact in no way makes it *not *a political jab.
Would the current plans I linked earlier make much of a dent in the water shortage? 3 Desalination plants are already working. The one finished in 2016, will be able to provide 50 million gallons daily. They’re purposing 15 more plants to be built.
Sure seems like that’s a substantial amount of water. Add in what they can still obtain from traditional sources, then would California’s water problems be solved?
A decision would need to be made where to use the more expensive treated seawater. Would it be better to use it for household drinking water or agriculture? Which tastes better?
Because you leave the Central Valley’s water alone, and use the desal water to supply the LA Basin and other SoCal desert residential areas. If you don’t suck the Central Valley’s water over the grapevine in the first place, then they are better prepared to use their own water for their own needs.
And make the damned green craptastic monoculture lawns illegal anywhere there is not enough natural rainfall to support them. The only things that should be irrigated is food crops.
[URL=“http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
They could get lots of “new” water just by hunting down leaking mains and fixing them. Or doing it a lot more than they currently do. Not only would they save water, but they’d also avoid costly main breaks like the one they just had in LA. But of course, it costs money to do that, and that’s the kind of spending that gets cut first when budgets are tight.
I think that a great deal of the underground infrastructure in LA was installed in the first quarter of the 20th century, making it nearly 100 years old.
In the UK, a lot of ours was installed by the Victorians, who, fortunately, tended to over engineer everything. Much of this is well past its sell-by date and modern traffic volumes and weights don’t help. £Billions are being spent of replacements, but there is a hell of a lot of it. I guess LA has the same problem.
Yes, but you’ll need to have troops stationed every few feet, all the way to California, to prevent the pripe from being sabotaged, filled with concrete, or something along those lines. The manpower expenses will be prohibitive.
Seriously, this is not an issue the Great Lakes states take lightly. If the federal government tried to force such a project, open rebellion would be a real possability.
“There is no shortage of water, only shortages of cheap water” – A San Diego resident
NOAA has backed off their El Nino prediction, they think it will be mild to moderate now. From this we can expect at least normal rainfall, maybe enough to fill the reservoirs. But this doesn’t fix the problem permanently.
Governor Moonbeam is advancing the idea of plumbing Sacramento River water around the Delta region again which will only enflame the North/South political split in the State. I voted against this back in the '70’s, but maybe it’s time again to study and put it on the ballot again.
As I sit here*, I’m watching an amazing amount of mountain fresh sweet spring water flow into the Pacific. We’re talking the same amount of water as the Ohio River where it enters the Mississippi, 7,500 cubic meters per second. It’s no small project to build an aqueduct from the Columbia River up and over the Basin country and dump into the Sacramento River drainage, but pumping it would be dirt cheap (and carbon-neutral).
The entire United States is wired together, an electrical outlet in California has a continuous wire to the outlet in New York. Coaxial cable crisscrosses the nation and so did phone wires (these maybe in a state of decay now). Every place you go there is a natural gas pipeline connecting everybody. What we don’t have is a network of aqueducts. Inevitably, when there’s drought in one part of the country, there is flooding in another. Whenever the people get sick of this flood/drought cycle, we will build this network, and pump flood waters to the drought stricken areas.
- = This is a figurative statement, I don’t actually live near the mouth of the Columbia River, but about 150 miles upstream on a tributary. Put your face right in the water and drink it on down, never get sick at all.
This analogy betrays a lack of understanding about how the infrastructure of any of these services work. It is relatively easy to create a nearly lossless long distance communication and data system (and virtually all land communication networks use fiber optic transmission for long distances now) with essentially zero latency. The same is not true for electricity; an electrical outlet does not in any sense have “a continuous wire to the outlet in New York.” In fact, North America has three interconnected grids (Easter Interconnection, Western Interconnection, the ERCOT Interconnection that manages most of Texas) which are managed by eight different entities which are often in conflict with one another regarding electrical demand and pricing. It isn’t a simple matter of just “putting energy where it needs to go”, nor if that Florida starts having blackouts that Nevada just turns down their air conditioning. There are considerable losses in this grid own to the fact that much if it is still running on circa 1970s technology that was in no way designed to handle the existing load or complexity of the system. Although there is low latency, in general little effort is made to “store” electrical energy which has been produced; instead, gas plants are brought on line or hydroelectric plants are given higher flow rates to cope with fluctuations.
As for “a network of aqueducts” to distribute water across the continental United States even a cursory look at the attempt to move water across an entire nation, to wit the Libyan Man-Made River project, will demonstrate the costs and complexity of this even for a relatively point-to-point solution. Water, of course, has a high latency owning to the physical inertia and incompressible flow volume; hence, if you want to deliver flood water from Duluth to drought-stricken Southern Arizona (where someone has decided to grow citrus in the desert for some fool reason) the aqueduct would have to be enormously oversized (by orders of magnitude) compared to the standard flow rate. This would be like trying to build an East-West canal with the flow volume of the Mississippi River with tributaries the size and length of the Ohio and the Missouri. And of course, during dry years the downstream users will be vying with upstream users for who gets what quantity of water even provided you can get the water there without it leaking or evaporating, and again, the issues with crossing the US Continental Divide, which will either require pumping water over a mile uphill and over, or routing all the way down to New Mexico (and still having to pump water up to over 4000 ft ASML).
In short, you just can’t flip a few levers and command water to go where you want it to go. Indeed, we can’t even get water to go where it seemingly should want to go consistently. Rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars and gigajules of energy trying to send water to places where it doesn’t normally appear, it would be more sensible to build systems which put local sustainable resources of water to their best use. Which means not growing citrus in a desert, or placing housing developments in a flood plain.
Stranger
So, your solution is to not farm anywhere that droughts can occur? Would it be cheaper to move everyone from Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas to Duluth and have them grow citrus there? We’ve been piping crude oil (of all things) across the entire state of Alaska for 40 years now, across two mountain ranges. We’re building a pipeline from the Canadian Arctic to coastal Texas as I type. It’s a very simple matter building an aqueduct from Louisiana to Georgia or West Texas. The cost/benefit ratio depends on what value we put on human suffering.
Er, why? We must have enough industrial uses for salt to make it worth processing, no? Or we could just truck it to Nevada and dump it.
Check the flow rate on any proposed pipelines or aqueducts and compare that to oil. We use more water than we use oil on a daily basis.
Worse, simple aqueducts wouldn’t work. Louisiana is on the coast. Both Georgia and West Texas have higher elevations. The principle of an aqueduct is fine - take available water from a higher elevation to a lower elevation where it is not as available. To get that water from Louisiana to West Texas or Georgia would require pumping stations, i.e. big energy input. That’s fine for oil, since we don’t pump that much and the transport cost is made part of the cost of production. Not so water. We need much more of it, i.e. tons of new electric plants, but we don’t want to charge $100 a gallon for it, either.
And that’s another piece of that problem. For the relatively low amount we use compared to water, using a pipeline to transport oil is fine. The market value is around $100 a gallon. We’d run into some big problems if water cost anywhere near that much to produce.
There would be much more water if only people would be willing to allow purified discharge. Yes, it is full of shit, but do you think fish and other creatures living in 'fresh" water don’t defecate? The problem is the yuk factor. Well, get over it people.
Can desalinization really produce enough salt to change the ocean, even locally?
And, just for the record Stranger, the Quebec grid is separate from any North American grid.
Was this supposed to be $100 per barrel? Or are you posting from 2053? 
Oops. Yeah, that should be $100 a barrel or about $2.50 a gallon.
Producing water at $2 a gallon is still a big problem, of course, not that I’m entirely sure we could keep the price that low.
Not technically true but it’s almost true.
The very statement that you believe building a massive pipeline or aquaduct to be “a very simple matter” demonstates that you have no understanding of the difficulties involved.
And yes, the ultimate solution should be using locally sourced water in a sustainable fashion rather than creating complex, maintenance- and energy-intensive system that is prone to cascading failures and will inevitably outgrow the design capability. The notion that we can beat nature at her own game by applying technology is a losing proposition. It is much wiser to use resources in a fashion within their natural replenishment rates.
Regardless of the use for salt (which we have plenty of readily accessible reserves of) clearing osmotic filters or other systems which desalinate water requires backflushing in order to dissolve the deposited salts. This high salinity water (up to 9 to 10 percent chlorate salts) is not suitable for any industrial use and would quickly clog or corrode any system it would be used in.
Stranger
If water cost as much as gasoline, society would be in some serious trouble. I pay around $100 every 3 months for water. I’ve never bothered to check how many gallons I use, but I’m sure it works out to a fraction of a penny per gallon.
If people had to pay 3 or 4 bucks a gallon for water, the societal impacy would be pretty severe. Forget about lawns; we’d go back to the days when people bathed maybe a few times a year, at most. Some thing for washing clothes.
Let’s look at the aqueducts that are already in use in California. The Delta Mendota canal starts at the Delta, which is at sea-level. It’s uphill all the way to the Grapevine and then up and over into the Los Angeles area. This is in continuous operation. You’re claiming that this is costing the average user $100 a gallon, that’s $50 per flush of each and every toilet for the 20 million or so people who live there. Perhaps a citation is in order for this claim. Current market for crude oil is about $4 a gallon.
However, an aqueduct between Louisiana and Georgia would cost almost nothing if it’s raining in Georgia. It’s only used when the rains stop. So, when we look at the cost of shipping water to Georgia to save the crops on occasion, we have to consider the cost of crop failure in Georgia. Right now we use a system of drought insurance, so we also have to consider the insurance company operational overhead and profits. I don’t know this number is for this insurance pool, but it’s widely published that the medical pool takes 40% of your premiums.
We’re running out of cheap water, that only leaves expensive water. Desalinization or aqueducts, this is going to cost the tax-payers a bundle of money.
No, it can’t. The Great Lake’s states and Canada would have to agree. State’s Rights and a treaty can’t be repealed by the stroke of a single pen.
Southern California is, and has always been, an arid region. California wouldn’t be able to maintain it’s population and agriculture if it didn’t import water from other states.
Desalinization will help provide California with more water. And Californians should be willing to pay higher taxes for it and/or hire more water cops to curtail use.
How about a big-ass tunnel? Obviously stupid expensive to build, but the energy savings long-term might make it worthwhile (assuming that idea is actually feasible, which is isn’t).