[negative nitpick]
“Kibbutzim” is correct.
[/negative nitpick]
Would an expanded Dead sea increase local rainfall? I would think the larger area would increase evaporation, and hence rain. It sounds like a good idea-would there not be a nete energy gain as well (all that water dropping a mile)? Seems like a pretty fair amount of power could be extracted.
French military engineers had discussed digging a canal from the Mediterranean into low-lying areas in northern Africa to create a “Saharan Sea”. Jules Verne even wrote a novel based on this, the last one published in his lifetime (L’Invasion de la mer, the last novel of his published during his lifetime, in 1905. It wasn’t completely translated into English until over a decade ago, as “Invasion of the Sea”). The goal was to create commercial and military opportunities, and improve the climate.
Would it be possible to use a siphon to to pull the water from the Red Sea? I presume not because of the difficulties of building an air-tight conduit that could withstand the pressures, but then I wouldn’t think a 1km-tall building would be possible, either.
Even if you can’t use a siphon, you could simply pump the water (not sure with specifically what technology) and then recover the electricity at the other end when the water comes back down. Since pumping water up and then down is relatively efficient in terms of losses, it could be break-even or better since the water would be travelling downward farther than it is travelling upward.
There have been attempts to use “classic” siphons to transfer large quatities of water. The problem is that dissolved gases tend to come out and form air bubbles that “kill” the siphon effect. See here:
http://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/tr2000066/tr2000066.html
“Inverted” siphons, in which a closed pipe is used to carry water down a valley and back up again, don’t suffer from this problem. The Romans used them sometimes instead of aqueducts to get water across valleys. The LA Aqueduct used an inverted siphon that got as large as 10 feet in diameter at Jawbone Canyon.
http://wsoweb.ladwp.com/Aqueduct/historyoflaa/worldrecords.htm
I don’t see ant cases of people using a “non-inverted” siphon to move large quantities of water from one body to another, probably because of the bubble problem. Pumps are probably more reliable.
As a side note, if the Atlantic Ocean had not breached the land bridge at Gibraltar the entire Mediterranean might be a dead sea. Evaporation far exceeds the fresh water sources it has.
I would have thought the problem with siphoning is that there is no way to raise water more than 33 feet with a siphon - after all, at that height the pressure inside the siphon would be zero PSI and the water would “boil”. (33 ft of water = 1 atm.) Siphons rely on pressure at one end being higher than the other, so a situation of zero pressure means the siphone stops working.
The water would need to be pumped.
Pumping systems are designed to take as much advantage of siphoning as possible. Most waste sewer systems rely on this, but are still dependent on pumps.
Archimedes screw(s)? Perhaps partially wind-powered?
You can get a siphon higher then 33 feet, but can’t ‘suck’ it any higher. The water adheres to itself, and can be at negative pressure. One little air bubble or if you try to siphon it too much and yes it will cavitate and the siphon will be lost.
But the principal is still valid, one should be able to extract energy from water running down hill, so the water you have to pump up hill you should be able to get energy back out as it flows down the other side. Practically there are losses, however power companies do use this method as a efficient way to store power for high demand times. So a siphon is not needed.
Just hire the Romans to build an aqueduct linking the DS to some distant highland water source.