California is sinking as it sucks remaining water out of underground aquifers

We have some experience with desal plants here. I don’t think the current tech can be ramped up fast enough to make a tangible difference. You may be able to save a few towns, but from where I’m sitting, agriculture is doomed.

Unless, that is, you start seeing massive precipitation events for the next ten years or so. Even then, the ground water table’s not going to go back to where it was…

I really can’t face-palm these responses enough.

What’s that saying about rolling in the mud with engineers?

“Well, if I completely ignore the point of what your saying and instead focus on technical hurdles inherent to your suggestion, I think you’ll find I have no sense of proportion or humour.”

Really someone soon is going to get it and fall back on, ‘snyerk, jus’ trollin bro!’

“Uh, yeah, uh but I think you’ll, uh, find that engineers aren’t technically required to, uh, roll in mud, in order to perform their duties.”

I get what you’re saying. What I’m saying is that it’s not enough. It’s not a question of throwing money into it. I don’t think there exists enough money to make desalination work at the scales you need in the timeframe you need. There’s no Yankee-ingenuity-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-elbow-grease-sweat-of-the-brow solution for this.

“Well, actually it’s been proven that the sweat-wicking and skin-conditioning properties of, uh, many forms of mud, had been proven to be effective in creating an atmosphere of comfort conducive to the completion of engineering goals. Uh.”

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You understand that even the current state of the technology and the implementation of such, as expensive as that would be, would still be preferable to the destructive implications of continuing with the current program of water usage buuuut you’d still like to focus on issues with developing desalination technology?

Underlining my hyperbole is the suggestion that the implementation of more expensive options, even really fucking expensive, impractical options, is preferable to the short-sighted and ultimately destructive continuation of current practices.

Are you commonly to be found beating dead horses into dust, or is this just a new hobby for you?


I’m self-bingo’ing here.

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It’s not merely the expense. It’s the time. Assume it takes a couple of years to get a 250 million litre/day plant built on about 10.5 acres of land (numbers based off a recent plant built near where I live). That feeds a mid-sized city (say population in the 100000s).

Those membranes and equipment aren’t exactly off-the-shelf, you know. They have to be designed for the location. Then there are clearances, land acquisition,… Final hiccups included, you’re looking at 3 years minimum before it becomes operational.

Even if you were willing to bankrupt the entire California and US Governments to do this, do you really have three years?

Basically, you’d just be pissing lots of money down the drain without a plan.

Even if I wanted to get into a technical discussion with you, which I do not, I have to say that the rather unimaginative limitations with which you are encumbering your argument seems like a mis-step.

In fact, there probably is an interesting, technical discussion concerning the strategies that could be employed as emergency relief in the build up to the shift to a major implementation of a new technology…

Look, I’m not saying the discussions about potential engineering solutions can’t be fun, but you have got to work on the skills you employ to take the conversation into that arena.

Also, self-excusing from potentially very interesting discussions pertaining to imaginative solutions that could be employed aside, I’m going to watch Game of thrones and Silicon Valley. Perhaps my appetite for pontificating about mega-engineering will be whetted in the time away.

In other words, you can’t find anything technically wrong with what I’ve said, so instead you try to find something wrong with my imagination and conversational skills?

Sorry I punctured your fantasy bubble…

Look, I’m not saying that your idea was completely invalid. Just that it’s not going to work well enough under these conditions to make enough of a difference. Of course, California needs to build some desalination, inefficient as that may be, to just feed its population centres. But that’s not going to help agriculture in any measurable way.

No, no, maybe… I think the conversation really does have some merit.

But I’m just about to watch mah stories.

Perhaps you could work on counter-arguments to your suggestions of precipicial limitations and then counter arguments to those so that when I come back you’re already one step ahead of me?

You see, I too have been known to enjoy wrastlin’ in the mud over engineering potentialities.

This is happening in large areas of Arizona, too. Some areas are more than 20 feet lower than where they were in 1950.

In an ideal world, we would be willing to endure the political heat and modify the rules on water extraction now, so that we at least keep the aquifers if not the agriculture, rather than letting the agriculture crater those and then die anyway.

Unfortunately, based on observing attempts at keeping fishing within sustainable levels, I’m not optimistic.

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The dispersal is precisely the point! Regardless how hard you run the desalination plants, the amount of concentrated brine will never be more than a miniature drop in the olympic-sized swimming pool of the ocean. The plume of brine has only a local impact, and only until it sufficiently mixes with the rest of the ocean. Avoid the local effects and the global ones will take care of neglecting themselves.

So the three to five gallons of waste stream have correspondingly lower concentration.

Which on one side worsens the issue with extraction of dissolved metals and with the waste stream volume, but on the other side reduces the issues with plume mixing when disposing of the stream back into the ocean.

We need more R&D on the membranes. I keep reiterating that.

The Manhattan Project started with a tentative hypothesis and ended with a functional prototype in a matter of few years. Fewer years, including actual building and running of all the plants, than it takes today to even write the environmental impact statement paperwork.

We are crippling ourselves and then wondering why nothing gets done…

Death by a thousand budget cuts!

Sometimes the more expensive choice is the less expensive choice.

How long did it take to develop the membranes for uranium diffusion separation, pretty much from scratch? How long did it take to build the plants?

It can be done, it was done. It was proven it can be done. It was proven it can be done with 40’s technology.

Also, consider that only the scale is the difference between one-of-a-kind and off-the-shelf. The cost per unit production scales nonlinearly; making a thousand membrane units costs less than a thousand times one, and making a million costs less than thousand times of the thousand.

And think about the possibilities of nanotech self-assembly for creating layers with controlled porosity.

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great! then we should switch to this “geologic time” you speak of.

Sorry, I didn’t… Got into a wrestlin’ match with a set of Fourier transforms! :wink:

Anyway, why I’m into all this at all is, much of my state’s facing an adverse groundwater situation too - nowhere near as bad (we still get rains, just not enough). We’ve been trying all kinds of things, including desalination, and just reduced water usage in agriculture. What we’ve found is that desal is OK for urban supplies, even for some industry with a captive plant, but it’s just not enough to feed agriculture.

They have a higher concentration than the input; whether that’s good or bad depends on the actual ecosystem into which they’re discharged…

The issue is not the ocean - it’s local ecosystems. Most marine organisms breed in shallow coastal waters. Desalination rejects can quite badly affect these populations. Which has bearing on both fishing and on larger ocean fauna.

There are reports here that the desal plants we have are affecting the fish population, but that’s kind of inconclusive right now - there are other issues like fly ash and high temperature water discharge from powerplants close by, and no specific study has been reported that I know of.

Well, for one thing, they just didn’t have to deal with a few million stakeholders all pulling in different directions - land rights, water rights, agriculture vs industry vs urban supply, various laws,…

And for another, there was a clear and simple goal at the end - same with the moon landing. “Solve the crisis however you can” may not be specific enough for such a thing to work.

Not saying that it can’t… Just looking at potential issues.

Someone once remarked to me that “if it’s a question of your civilization’s survival, what appeared expensive suddenly looks cheap”…

Roughly a year and a half:

Apparently, the Carlsbad plant has taken about three or four years to become operational (it’s scheduled for next year, but they seem to be trying to move it up. That sounds similar to the one I was talking about earlier - started in 2005 and commissioned in 2010 (they had issues with a cyclone setting them back about a year or two).

Yeah, we have a tiny RO unit at home - that’s literally off the shelf. It produces something like ten litres a day. Assume a 250 MLD plant, and say, a unit with ten times that capacity. You’d need about 2.5 million of those membranes in the plant. They’ll wear out in about a couple of years, and so you’d need 2.5 million every two years. It’d be kind of uneconomical…

But those are different from the ones they use in large plants. Those have longer lifespans, and they are also much more heavy-duty - our little unit is meant to handle slightly brackish water, not full-on seawater.

Hmm, I wonder what the economic impact of losing California’s agriculture would be… I don’t mean just financial - what does it mean for the food system in the US and in the rest of the world? Even half-way around the world, we get Californian stuff - sun-dried raisins and the like. Not to mention the wine. I don’t want to lose Californian wines, goddamnit! :smiley:

Anyway, the impact on the system could be pretty bad either way. I don’t think there’s a real way to go back to things as they were…

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Who won?

That’s why I specified discharging to depth, earlier in the discussion. If we can pull oil a hundred of miles off shore mile deep and then more miles through rock, we can discharge saltier saltwater two miles away in a half mile depth.

Makes one long for a nice, peaceful wartime…

Good start, I’d say. Even the Moon program started more as “show the Russkies who’s the king however you can”.

It was a rhetorical question but the answer is appreciated anyway :smiley:

Make them reel-to-reel, in a continuous process. Reel-to-reel is a holy grail of mass production of flat goods; makes everything way cheaper.

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Except it doesn’t actually solve the problem so much as just create a worse problem that makes it irrelevant.

Yeah, the water rights issue is, insanely, not being addressed even though currently the amount of water promised in water rights exceeds the total amount of water in the state something like five times over. I don’t think property taxes are going to do it. Farmers with water rights can sell on whatever they don’t use, so they can pass on costs while still using as much water as they want until there’s no water left in (former) waterways. Aquifer pumping also seems to be another issue; it’s basically entirely unregulated and amounts to a free-for-all: whoever can pump the water out from underneath their property can do so. What’s going to be required is a total overhaul of how water is used and distributed and with it, an overhaul of California agriculture and the established system of water rights.

What I meant was that it wouldn’t happen on its own. But honestly it’s not going to happen artificially, either. It’s not remotely economically viable without a large amount of free water - which just ain’t going to happen in the Central Valley.