California has many more people than the water supplies will naturally support. There is strong historical evidence from tree rings and other sources that California has a drought cycle that occurs repeatedly over the centuries and millennia. The state population has boomed in a very wet part of that cycle over the last 100 years. Same for Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. It's very bad timing with global warming also in play and it will break the population boom in the American West over time. This is nothing that has not occurred before. Native American populations boomed and busted long before we showed up. The difference is that there are close to 60 million people, or a fifth of the US population, in the path of the drying West this time around.
Saudi Arabia has desalinization plants operating as does quite a few other gulf states. I don't know why such a solution couldn't be implemented in California too. Maybe the fear is the fault lines that run along the coast?
We are too busy spending billions on high speed rails that travel from Bakersfield to Sacramento that was sold to the bright citizens under the guise that it would reduce traffic congestion. Because the daily commute for people traveling from Bakersfield to Sacramento is horrible. Like I said, the drought isn't of concern to the government because it has helped accomplish the state's goals -- raise water costs to the users even though the actual amount of water use by residents is so minimal it doesn't impact the drought. Hardly the actions of a government that is concerned about actually "solving" the drought.
They have some now and others in the works but besides the high cost, 4 times higher than spending to conserve, you also deal with environmental issues. The discharge can cause fish kills, it can kill sea grass and other underwater vegetation, etc. There are actually some plants built during previous shortages that only ran for a short while but were then shut down once the rains came. You also have the high energy costs, the plant in San Diego which may be open by now (haven't kept up on it's progress) that will use the energy of 28,500 homes just to remove the salt from the water.
They built one recently near San Diego. It cost a billion dollars to built the thing and around $50 million a year to operate it. All that and the LA Times reports that it will only satisfy the water needs of 7% of the San Diego population. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-carlsbad-desalination-20150604-story.html#page=1 hardly seems worth it to me
I think (memory is foggy) the cost in these things is dealing with the waste. Isreal has been successfully using one for years at a decent cost because they just dump the waste into the ocean and let mother nature figure it out.
The United Colors of Ben 'n Tom. Wha'? ....are you're now claiming to speak for me? .....maybe replace e pluribus unum with "you people" on this one-sided wooden nickel while we're at it ? (to help assuage the anger...if not the sweeping generalizations):
The waste products of desalinization are horrific. It sounds like a great idea until you realize that what you are pulling out of the seawater is about as bad for human beings as U238 and just about as hard to store long term. Saudi Arabia gets away with it because they have a small population to water relatively speaking. Doing it on a 60 million person basis would be just pushing problems down the road and we'd still have the water issues and we'd also have the brine problem on the surrounding coastlines. The better idea for a long time was mining iceberg's for fresh water, however the ice is vanishing worldwide at a rate unimaginable a generation ago. The other side of the water issue for the American West is that it is a pernicious fact that if you fix the water problem the population will continue to expand and the problem will reassert itself over and over again. We'd be in much better shape if people didn't think that moving to the desert was a good idea.
If you keep taking brine out of water and dumping it back in the ocean what do you get on your local coastlines and seafloor? If you pump it underground what do you get in your local watershed? If you make huge storage tanks for it and put it there what do you get from the costs of maintaining that over generations? There are no good answers and Israel is robbing tomorrow because they have to pay today. The country is a giant desert with a few areas that support high yield agriculture.
I don't know. The oceans have a decent amount of water in them and a lot of currents to stir them up. I imagine it would eventually work itself out after causing short term (in geological terms) issues.
I wasn't going to comment much on the issue but I can't let this go. It is clear you don't have the faintest idea what desalinization and reverse osmosis is. What is pulled out of the sea water is mainly salt, algae and some other organic matter, saying it is as bad as U238 shows you just don't know. Of course just sending the highly concentrated brine mixture back out is bad if not done correctly but there are ways to do it so that the impact is minimal. Not exactly sure what you think is being stored so I can't address that. Using existing storm water piping that sometimes goes out up to a mile into the ocean, with outlets every few feet, thereby just putting small amounts to mix in with the sea is one way. Another is to have it go out with the cooling water from power plants which helps to dilute it as soon as it hits the ocean. Minimal impact. Yes there are environmental issues but the major problems are the cost and energy consumption to produce the water. There is nothing even close to resembling U238 in sea water. I used to build small desalinization plants in cargo containers which we shipped down to the Caribbean so I know a bit about them. My previous post did touch on environmental concerns but curious what level of expertise you have on the subject to proclaim such dire concerns.
