
One Way to Fight California's Drought: Desalt the Ocean - prostoalex
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/one-way-fight-californias-drought-desalting-ocean/
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bradleyjg
As I said the last time this came up:

It makes no sense at all to pay $2k an acre-foot for desalinated water in a
state where millions of acre-feet are being used to grow alfalfa that sells
for less than $400 per acre-foot of water consumed.

This isn't a lack of water problem, it is an poor governance problem.

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maratd
> it is an poor governance problem

No, it's a poor pricing problem.

The price of water should be directly related to the cost of delivery and
supply. Unfortunately, virtually everywhere, you are merely charged for the
cost of delivery. If we tie the price of water to something like rainfall,
we'll all be much better off. Inefficient use of water will disappear very
quickly.

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jakob223
Why isn't the price of water tied to the price of supply?

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mangecoeur
because water is a public utility and heavily regulated, and for good reason -
you want to guarantee that everyone who needs water gets it, even if you are
poor and unpopular. Of course that's vulnerable to pressure groups, in this
case the agricultural sector who want lots of cheap water. Then again if it
was all run privately with no regulation, all the water would probably be put
in bottles and sold at 1000x the price.

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ancap
Your comment shows an ignorance of how prices work. Companies cannot
arbitrarily set whatever price they want.

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mangecoeur
No, but they will set the highest price the market can bear. It appears people
are willing to buy bottled water at around 1000x the price per unit volume
compare to tap water, so given a free reign companies would sell as much water
as bottled water at that price as they could.

This is actually happening in California with Nestle's bottling operation
where the oversight of their water use has been very lax.

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bradleyjg
You are being manipulated by a PR campaign. Nestle draws ~2000 acre-feet a
year. It's a rounding error. Same thing with shutting off the water while you
brush your teeth, restaurants not serving water until you ask for it, and so
on.

The uses that matter are agriculture, agriculture, agriculture, industrial
(e.g. power plant cooling towers), and far off in the distance outdoor
domestic / commercial use (pools and lawns). (Also, if you consider it a 'use'
\- not draining every river in the state, but rather allowing some of them to
continue to be rivers. This is the so-called environmental use.)

When you bring up red herrings about poor people dying of thirst because rich
techies are buying bottled water from nefarious companies stealing public
water, you are being a patsy of BigAg.

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pbreit
Can't we find something a little more natural like capturing more rain water
before it goes into the ocean?

Edit: there's plenty of rain water.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2015/04/15/why-does-
calif...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2015/04/15/why-does-california-
let-billions-of-gallons-of-fresh-water-flow-straight-into-the-ocean/)

~~~
chc
There's lots of rainwater in aggregate if you look at very large areas, but
I'm not sure if collecting rainwater over a huge area is necessarily more
practical than desalination. I honestly haven't studied the matter, but
judging from the fact that this guy's credentials seem to amount to "Has
planted a bunch of trees," I'm unsure how much of an expert he is either. He
says it isn't being pushed because there isn't any industry behind it, but
that seems to be begging the question. Why is no one taking this field by
storm if it's actually a more practical solution? Why isn't _he_ making money
hand over fist doing this? The disconnect between the reality he suggests and
the reality we observe makes me doubtful about whether this is actually a more
realistic approach than desal.

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mturmon
Wow, you opened a lot of boxes. Lipkis is actually much more than a guy that
planted a bunch of trees. His organization, and a couple of others like FOLAR
([https://folar.org](https://folar.org)), have been changing the way the city
of LA approaches storm water.

As a nearby comment mentions, building regulations had been designed to convey
rain water to the sea as fast as possible, due to a justified fear of floods.
At the micro level, this means diverting rain water to concrete channels
(e.g., streets or drainage channels). For instance, when I put in a building
in my back yard, I had to install a pump to pump the water from a tank filled
by the rooftop gutter into the street, rather than letting it soak in to my
yard.

Now, multiply that by millions, and you can see we're wasting a lot of water.

Changing the whole conception of storm water ("collect and dispose of" ->
"disperse and soak in") involves changing building codes and city/county/state
infrastructure practices.

Because ground water is all externalities, there is no ready market solution.

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clumsysmurf
I recently read about a project in the Hudson Valley, where United Water would
use desalination to draw water from the Hudson river.

Most of the negatives / cons I have heard before (impact on wildlife, where to
discharge brine, energy, etc) ... but one thing stood out:

"Haverstraw Bay is polluted with contaminated sediments, sewage and urban
runoff, and the plant’s intakes would be approximately 3.5-miles from
Entergy’s Indian Point nuclear power plant, which releases radionuclides to
the Hudson."

I guess many people are concerned that (1) the technology to remove these
pollutants either does not exist, or is very expensive and (2) being a
privatized water company, it may put profits over water quality.

My question then, is what kinds of things are in sea water that should ideally
be removed beside salt? What is more contaminated source.. sea water, or water
from land based sources?

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vilhelm_s
I was curious how much radionuclides are in the water. Apparently, "nuclear
plants typically release between a few curies and one thousand curies per year
of tritium in liquid effluents; releases of mixed fission and activation
products are much smaller (in the range from 0.001 to 0.01 curies per
year)."[1] For comparison, it seems a glowing tritium keyring contains 0.4
curies.[2] One thousand curies would be 0.104 grams of tritium.

Also, there is an online database for this! [3] E.g., if I read it correctly,
in 2008, Indian Point 1,2 released 0.09 Ci of liquid effluvents. (No tritium
in the table?)

[1]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201991/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201991/)
[2] [http://depletedcranium.com/my-attempt-to-import-tritium-
key-...](http://depletedcranium.com/my-attempt-to-import-tritium-key-chains/)
[3]
[http://www.reirs.com/effluent/EDB_Main.asp?l=n](http://www.reirs.com/effluent/EDB_Main.asp?l=n)

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timdierks
I've always wondered why desalination is so hard. From a thermodynamics
perspective, dissolving salt into water isn't particularly enthalpic (the
water doesn't get warmer when you do it), so it's never been clear what the
fundamental challenges to reversing that dissolution are.

It's surprising there isn't some chemical reaction to precipitate out the
sodium and chloride atoms bonded to something else, or whatever.

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aqme28
From a thermodynamic perspective, un-mixing two mixed things always requires
energy.

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timdierks
From a first-law standpoint, how can it fundamentally require more energy than
is released by mixing them?

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mc32
Whatever happened to the idea of tugging broken off icebergs as source of
freshwater. It could lessen the impact on rising seas, to some extent.
Desalting of course would lessen it too. perhaps neither would be enough to
counteract the overall melting. But both can address droughts.

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j-pb
> It could lessen the impact on rising seas, to some extent

And where do you think that water goes, after it has been put on the fields?

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kaybe
Ice bergs are nearly neutral as far as water level goes, since they displace
about the volume of water they contain (if melted). If all the sea ice melts,
the sea will rise on the order of mm. (I have the calculations around
somewhere if you want details.) The problem is the ice currently located on
land.

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j-pb
Even in it has an almost neutral effect, it still doesn't lessen the effect of
rising seas.

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bozoUser
When did desalination become cheaper? Saudi Arabia can be afford it because of
the petro money but how about United States and reading the env. impacts not
sure which way to look for water.

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oehokie
(It's called desalination)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination)

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Havoc
This is one of the reasons I'm hoping fusion gets off the ground fast. Oceans
+ Lots of power is a decent recipe for fixing humanities fresh water problem.

