William Shatner was in the news recently, advocating piping Columbia River water to California via a submarine pipeline. The pipeline would start somewhere near Bonneville Dam, go down the Columbia (underwater) to the ocean, along the coast (also underwater) to somewhere along the California coast where it goes inland to some lake or other. I don’t know if the plan has a specific name or not, so Googling about it is not the easiest.
How feasible would such a pipeline be? Wouldn’t there be a lot of salt infiltrating the pipe along the undersea section? That section would be several hundred miles long. Any other potential problems with it?
Oops, I meant to title it “Submarine pipeline from the Columbia to California”
If the pipe is leaky enough to allow seawater in, why not just pump in seawater directly? In other words, if the undersea pipe isn’t sealed, it’s useless.
Think of the whales/porpoises/seals/otters/salmon!
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I suppose that it might be worthwhile to consider if the collection point was a mile or so upstream of Welsh Island, (the estuary border of salt/brackish water). However, anyone wishing to tap the Columbia is going to want to draw water above the Hanford reactor poisons and that will put them in conflict with the current users of the river, (Portland, Willamette Valley, Astoria, etc.)–particularly if the California drought moves northward.
When you take into account the manner California screwed the Pacific Northwest on electricity prices a few years back, don’t count on any water for California anytime soon, if ever.
Of course it’s going to be sealed at first, but isn’t it going to corrode after a while? It seems to me that keeping several hundred miles of submarine pipeline sealed will not be a trivial task.
Which incident are you thinking of? The 2000-1 energy crisis or something else?
Shatner had his head up his ass. There is also a drought in Eastern Washington, all the water in the Columbia River is not going to fix that. The snow pack in the Cascades is at record lows for this time of year. We had one of the warmest winters ever. Do Californians want to suck all the water out of the Columbia like that already do to the Colorado River?
I’ll grant you it’s more feasible than the pipe dream (heh heh) of stealing water from the Great Lakes. But I’m pretty sure the good people of Washington State & Oregon will manage to cobble together some depth charges to keep the repair crews on their toes
Seriously, California needs to come to grips with the fact that nobody, but nobody, is interested in giving up their water so people can grow almonds in the desert.
Or just haul an already-cohesive iceberg down to Los Angeles. As an added bonus, the coolth in the 'berg is probably also a valuable product in southern California.
It would probably be more technologically feasible and faster to drain Lake Tahoe since there are only a couple miles of rock to dig through to get to the other side of the watershed. Plus, you’d get the several thousand feet of drop to generate electricity from. Sure, it will only solve California’s problems for a decade or two, but in the long run we’re all dead
Uhm… what’s to prevent seawater from getting into oil pipelines? Whatever technology and materials they use for the oil pipes lines they’ll surely use for the freshwater. Also, as the freshwater is pumped it’ll be under pressure so any pinhole leaks will purge the saltwater.
It’s a dilemma, they could build desalinization plants, but those require energy and chlorine salts I’d imagine. Or, a massive pipeline that will just drain away a resource from somewhere else. Or, move out of the desert, at the very least, stop growing plants that need a lot of water out there. Grow like figs or dates or something.
Because when California runs out of water, the people will move to where the water is … maybe better to send them the water so they stay there.
Just pumping the water up to the High Desert and then down along the east side of the Cascades would be cheaper. Dump it as soon as you reach the Sacramento watershed. I don’t think the water is used much downstream of Bonneville Dam, all the irrigation usage is upstream.
That being said it ain’t going to happen, not until California builds a pipeline around the Delta to ship Sacramento River water to SoCal.
