Which is exactly why I was surprised to hear that resorts were much of a problem. There are plenty of resorts on the Australian coast but they tend to have enough water. There are a tiny handful in the drier areas. Compared to many thousands of cattle properties, and the (at a guess) hundreds of thousands of bores into the Great Artesian Basin used to water cattle, I would be very surprised if mere resorts are a blip on the radar.
I did not mean to imply that desert resorts were the only problem. I know very little about Australia and its water problem. Within the last year, I read a lengthy article in the Scientific America that described a battle between one or two resorts that were consuming an ice age aquifer at an alarming rate.
I suppose it would have been better if I did not mention it at all.
Jim
“We”? Do you have Cecil in your pocket? :dubious:
I wonder if cheap desalinization (sp?) will evolve as an effective and sufficient technological fix to the problem of aquifer depletion. Plenty of water in the oceans, after all, and if we could just get the salt out of it on a large-scale basis, we’d be in much better shape (particularly if the volume of human use for drinking and agriculture offset the global-climate-change-related rising of sea levels). But IANAscientist.
Sure, once we have fusion licked, desalinization should be simple. The Navy does a great job of it with Flash Evaporators; the problem is they take a lot of power (heat). If we ever get large-scale commercial fusion, desalination should become simple. Of course then we would need giant pipelines heading inland. This will be another fun engineering feat. At least a leak in this case will only mean flooding. NYC could advise the rest of the country on moving vast amount of water, as could LA of course.
Now all we need is the fusion. It is only 20 years away, or maybe we are 20 years away from it being 20 years away. 
Jim
Why fusion? Israel gets a fairly substantial amount of water from desalination, as do other countries in the Middle East. Fusion isn’t needed for anything, except hopefully cheap energy.
The bar to desalination in the US remains our ability to obtain all the water we need through cheaper methods. This will continue until Las Vegas grows too big for the available water in the state of Nevada, which, at present rates, isn’t that far away. Then, you’ll see a desalination plant, coupled with a pipeline to Vegas, an engineering feat no greater than that of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which was completed back in the 1920’s. :dubious:
Osmotic desalination is far less energy intensive, produces significantly less waste heat, and is generally more feasible on such a massive scale. However, that technology is in early stages of production capability.
We would need fusion (or some other method of large scale energy production) because desalination requirements are going to place an additional load on the already overtaxed electrical generation facilities and additional accompanying pollution.
Regarding a pipeline to Las Vegas (as an example, though the same point applies to any inland city) the engineering and energy requirements are far more complicated and demanding that the Los Angeles and California Aqueduct systems (not to mention the legal complications regarding right of eminent challenges in modern law); the existing aquaducts are mostly downhill operations, with energy lost in pumping being partially regenerated by hydroelectric dams. An inland directed aqueduct, however, would require substantially more energy, and crossing the desert into Los Vegas or places further inland (Phoenix, for instance) will also have to account for significant evaporative loss and resultant impact upon the local and possibly regional ecosystem and weather patterns. It’s not undoable, and in fact, it’ll probably need to be done to sustain future predicted population levels, but it’s signifcantly more complicated than just digging a trench and putting in a few pumping stations.
In the interim, demand can be met by more efficient use of water (including code/regulartory requirements for greywater processing systems in new commercial and possibly residential construction), greater taxation and penalty for wanton wastage and ostentatious use of water, and enhanced natural rainwater and dew-water collection systems. These are all stopgaps, though; the need for water is essential to life and industry, and we need to start treating it like the renewable-but-limited resource that it is.
Stranger
One more note: The California Water Wars were a result of the profiteering prescience of Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland, entertainingly fictionalized in the haunting masterpiece Chinatown (though as far as I know, Eaton didn’t rape his daughter and marry her off to Mulholland). There was a very deliberate, and in hindsight, very obvious profit motive for doing so, and in a time when California was still a frontier and both the state and federal courts more flexible to corporate interests.
The environmental and agricultural impacts of the water theft to nominal and downstream users of the water from the Sierra Nevada runoff and Colorado River Basin is manifest and detrimental, and will dramatically influence and overshadow any future water redirection efforts, most likely even those ostensibly for the mitigation of said demands. The failure of the Colorado River Compact, the Owens Valley Memorandum of Understanding, and the California Water Quality Act of 1970 to protect the interests of people and areas which stood in competition to the water requirements of Los Angeles will remain in the forefront and feed the skepticism of anyone offering plans to “take care of” other interests. One only need drive through the Owens Valley (once described as “Switzerland of California”, now almost a desert with irregular overflow-fed marse) to understand the cynicism displayed by those who would reflexively contest any plan involving moving water around through the Southwest.
Stranger
I grew up in the valley just south of the Owens Valley, and I have an extensive interest in its history. Contrary to the popular perception, the valley’s basic look hasn’t changed hardly at all. Yes, Owens Lake is now dry, which is a really bad result (it used to be deep enough to float a paddle-wheel steamer), but the Owens River was never a very robust waterway, and the valley floor, until it was irrigated by settlers (who set up orchards, for the most part) looked much as it does today, because most of the water in the Owens River comes from north of the valley; the valley itself gets only a relatively small input from the East side of the Sierra Nevada. The concept of a “lush” valley floor is the romanticization of people opposed to the Los Angeles Aqueduct. So, except for a dry lake bed, and the addition of some reservoirs (Crowley Lake, Tinemaha Reservoir, Haiwee Reservoir), and a somewhat reduced riparian ecosystem along the lower Owens River (after the main diversion intake), the valley really isn’t that changed.
As for the water issue, power is nothing but money. As I have pointed out, the main resistance to desalination is the cost, not the lack of ability to engineer it. In societies where water is expensive as a necessity, the issue is mooted. In our society, we have yet to reach a point where cheap water is no longer available. And while we certainly can be more efficient in its use, there will quickly come a point (and Las Vegas is fast reaching it) where it simply will pay to undertake the engineering and cost involved.
As for eminent domain issues, nonsense. They still build new pipelines in the East and Midwest, and, while it isn’t like the salad days where you just trampled the rights of landowners, it isn’t particularly hard to accomplish, just time-consuming. After all, eminent domain is a right of the government in our land, and one government has never been shy about employing when needed.
I make the following claim, and will be happy to be proven wrong if it turns out not to be true: we will be involved in large-scale desalination in the US WELL before we are involved in significant fusion power production. 