California City Considers Restarting Desalination Plant To Fight Drought 420
First time accepted submitter SaraLast (3619459) writes in with news about Santa Barbara considering the restart of its desalination plant. "This seaside city thought it had the perfect solution the last time California withered in a severe drought more than two decades ago: Tap the ocean to turn salty seawater to fresh water. The $34 million desalination plant was fired up for only three months and mothballed after a miracle soaking of rain. As the state again grapples with historic dryness, the city nicknamed the "American Riviera" has its eye on restarting the idled facility to hedge against current and future droughts. "We were so close to running out of water during the last drought. It was frightening," said Joshua Haggmark, interim water resources manager. "Desalination wasn't a crazy idea back then." Removing salt from ocean water is not a far-out idea, but it's no quick drought-relief option. It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project. Santa Barbara is uniquely positioned with a desalination plant in storage. But getting it humming again won't be as simple as flipping a switch."
Re:California = 1D10T Errors (Score:5, Insightful)
> Rather, it is all about killing agriculture in the southwest to free up more water for California urbanites.
Agriculture uses about 70%, with industry using 20% and urban populations using 10% of the water. Agriculture, you know, that stuff you eat from those greedy bastards in California.
> Nevada rancher stand off...
Bullshit. It's about some welfare rancher not paying his grazing fee's. Pure and simple. He has no intellectual or legal argument, so he is whipping up the dummies over on Fox News to call out the Tea Party morons to protest his desire to rip off the Tax Payers.
Re:A drop in the bucket. (Score:0, Insightful)
"I sincerely doubt the oil companies use the same water that you get from the tap to do that." Ignorance is bliss.
Re:A drop in the bucket. (Score:3, Insightful)
Much WISER would be to deny frackers the CLEAN POTABLE WATER they pump deep into oil fields to get their 1 barrel of oil per 10 barrels wasted water.
Um... The amount of potable water used by frackers is such a low fraction of available water that this is almost laughable. There is many times more water wasted in a day because people won't fix their leaky toilets than the frackers use in a whole year.
If your goal is to save water, I suggest you outlaw watering grass using sprinklers that spray water. Mandate drip irrigation and make sure people are maintaining their plumbing properly. You got to start where the waste is the biggest, or your efforts are a joke.
Re:A drop in the bucket. (Score:5, Insightful)
Much WISER would be to deny frackers the CLEAN POTABLE WATER they pump deep into oil fields to get their 1 barrel of oil per 10 barrels wasted water.
That barrel of oil is worth $100. The ten barrels of water were worth about $1. A better idea would be to get the government out of the business of "picking winners" by micromanaging the allocation of water through idiotic subsidies that result in tens of thousands of acres or rice growing in the desert. California doesn't have a shortage of water, we just have an excess of stupid policies.
Re:now I never looked into it (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice strawman, but... No.
No one (sane) considers resource shortages a "good" thing. Resource pressure, on the other hand, helps to prevent actual shortages.
When you have a free and unlimited open faucet, you use water for any old thing that comes to mind - Drinking, bathing, slip-n'-slides, washing the car, making rainbows with mist, growing a climate-inappropriate groundcover plant, whatever strikes your fancy.
When you have a $200/month water bill associated with that faucet, you damned well make sure it goes to the necessities, and you find a way to shower in under five minutes.
And when you get a ration of one gallon of water per day - You use it for drinking and cooking, period.
Conservationists "like" situation #2 solely because it prevents us from getting to #3. Unfortunately, we have, historically, artificially created the appearance of situation #1 even in the middle of a frickin' desert thanks to activities like draining the Colorado river dry (and the resulting downstream environmental disaster, as well as not-so-slowly depleting continental aquifers that take millennia to refill (ask Florida what happens when those get too low).
In a universe where you can really make infinite energy and infinite water and infinite food - Waste all you want! But in our universe, TANSTAAFL.
Re:now I never looked into it (Score:2, Insightful)
The hilarious part about the situation is the amount of overlap between conservationists and socialists.
"Water needs to be free (subsidized) because it's a human right!"
"Oh shit, when we artificially lower the price of things people use too much of those things. Since it was our attempt to micromanage resource allocation that caused the problem in the first place, we better double down with even more micromanagement by implementing rationing so that everybody will stop using as much of the resource that we forcefully made too inexpensive."
Re:now I never looked into it (Score:1, Insightful)
I stopped reading after the first two paragraphs.
So you rather see someone's quality of life go down whenever possible? I never get why people want everyone else to live their lives in groaning, miserable slavery with "resource pressure" on every single usable thing, be it Internet bandwidth, power, water, usable land, or food.
Lets be real here. Were it not for the parent poster and people like him, we would have effective, safe, thorium power plants, making very cheap energy, making it possible to desalinate water on a large scale so even though California is in a drought, it is mitigated. Israel has done this, and has turned featureless desert into a place where food gets exported.
However, we have the people who want to hand a family a gallon of water a day, since we have to always have starving poor people. We can't build reactors, so we are stuck polluting the environment with coal and oil, which are far worse ecological disasters over time than nuclear ever will be.
I guess the parent can enjoy "resource pressure" It does give some self smugness, similar to the guy who has the bumper sticker, "I have mine, up ours". However, those are the people who will be most reviled by our descendants because it isn't a matter of "cannot" with regards to clean water, but "will not".
If we had a free and unlimited faucet, coupled with cheap energy, waste from plastics could be "boiled" and made back into crude, ready to be reused, just as we smelt and recycle aluminum cans. There would be no Pacific Gyre.
However, it seems to be that we rather have people limit clean water and energy because it makes others suffer... and I guess suffering is one natural resource others thing is in short supply by their actions.
Re:now I never looked into it (Score:4, Insightful)
Well if you have the choice between dying of thirst or paying $80 for a cubic yard, you'd probably pay the $80.
A cubic yard is A LOT of water. You could live for some time off of that.
And, probably at that cost it makes sense for people to bring in water by the tanker truck, pushing prices down.
The key is what you're using it for. If you just want something to drink, $80 per cubic yard is quite all right. If you want to take a desert and turn it lush and green, it's quite expensive.
Seems to me people should look at usage case more than anything else.
Re:Radiation! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm soooo looking forward to someone in California realizing that their seawater is connected to the seawater outside of Fukushima Daiichi ...
LOL, Yea, I love this kind of thing. Just because we can MEASURE the radiation in something means that it is a deadly poison.. Never mind that the yearly exposure is an order of magnitude or two less than what you'd get say in one airplane trip... You are right though, there will be protests the day before they turn on the switch (after the money is spent) claiming it's "not too late!" .
You say RADIATION and the poor uninformed public run like scared sheep to put a stop to that deadly menace to society, science and medical experts aside.
Re:California = 1D10T Errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when does RUNNING A FUNCTIONAL RANCH WITH YOUR OWN HANDS count as "welfare" on this planet?
When you're doing it on somebody else's land without compensating them?
Re:A drop in the bucket. (Score:3, Insightful)
That barrel of oil is worth $100. The ten barrels of water were worth about $1.
All hail the almighty dollar!
When the well dries, you shall drink pennies!
When the food does not grow, you shall eat quarters!
When the air becomes polluted, you shall breathe stocks!
Re:now I never looked into it (Score:4, Insightful)