Yeah my video auto-played and the minute I heard her smarmy tone I yanked the headphones off and went looking for the tab. New computer, forgot to set it up so I don’t get surprised by videos like that.
Thank you!
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Is there any way to reset the widgetId inside Sarah Palin’s brain?
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Sarah Palin’s what?
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It may be too subtle, but it is right in the headline : Sarah Palin.
Also anything with Michele Bachmann…
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Fraud metrics aren’t fun housepets. Blame for prevailing Pacific wind isn’t more on ragepols (hm, though I should check out the takedown in Seveneves…) than on Baja Witch density. Desalination projects over a billion can capture the necessity for salt applications and better-rating LEED facilities.
I suppose it’s easy to look at flood prevention, tilting to cisternage, in the rest of the country and think that would work as soon as a small tilt feeds the Wild Colorado from areas served by rain. Of course we have to plan to skip that tilt step. I think Sarah’s converging less dramatically far into ‘nope’ and may be accidentally constructive in 15-30 subjective years.
I am not about to ruin it by listening to this bit of hers…
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While I love to make fun of the stupid train, I think that has effectively been done. So now the question becomes, how much water do we need and what are the repercussions for getting it.
Criteria for this model:
- 100 gallons per day per household (surprisingly this is a lowball estimate, http://water.usgs.gov/edu/qa-home-percapita.html )
- can’t harvest rain water
- unlimited access to salt water
- can’t add the salt back to the ocean
It takes ~2400 watts to boil off a gallon of water in an uninsulated still. So you could probably get away with 8000 watts, running continuously 24/7 with a heat exchanger, and pumping the high salt water into a holding pond.
Each household will need at least a 100,000 gallon salt water storage pond that is quite shallow. Salt would have to be harvested daily and stored in granite or limestone caves that don’t connect to an aquifer.
Even for a nerd like me this sounds insane.
So the answer is to use less water. Or figure out how to use brackish water for toilets, showers and baths, and disposing of it correctly.
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Several times more than that if we’re planning to grow food in California - and the repercussions will include a basin by basin integrated assessment and coordination of water rights. What works in the American River, will not apply to the Colorado Basin, and certainly will not work for the Eel.
Yeah, for the life of me I can’t make the math work. The numbers trend towards quadrillions.
Can I make a teensy, weensy modest proposal? Start guiding comets to gently collide with the Pacific ocean? Or perhaps a mild (mild!) Nuclear winter?
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California uses 2 trillion gallons of water for irrigation per year. For you or me it takes 2400 watts to desalinate a gallon. For the sake of this model lets say the geniuses have gotten that down to 1000 watts.
That means 2 quadrillion watts, or what about 2 TeraWatts (did I convert correctly?) Per year.
The US generated 4.01 TeraWatts last year Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
So even if I’m off by an order of magnitude either way, we can’t desalinate our way out of this.
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Reminds me of Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.
Edit: Ah, so you said. Never mind!
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No, it doesn’t. Units, my friend, units. A watt is a unit of power. A unit of energy would be a watt-second or a watt-hour. Or a joule. To boil water requires energy.
But modern desal plants don’t boil the water, they force it through a semi-permeable membrane. The process is known as reverse osmosis.
Even so, an RO plant is one of the least efficient ways to obtain drinking water. Better than an electric still, but requires a lot of energy and fancy technology. It is much cheaper to use water which has already been distilled by the Sun. Lakes, rivers, fresh water. Heck, it may even be cheaper to recycle sewage than to desalinate seawater.
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Yes, I know, I am lazy with electricity. 2400 watts at 115 amps over 1 hour will evaporate 1 gallon of water. Additional assumptions: 85% efficiency of heat transfer and no insulation.
So three phase boilers are way more efficient, and reverse osmosis membranes… I don’t even know how to calculate that. How much energy goes into the manufacture and cleaning of these high tech filtration devices?
I stand by my total back of the envelope guess of 1000 watts at 115 amps per hour per gallon as a best case. Regardless of technology. If there are papers I haven’t read or found (since this interests me) let me know, there is nothing better than being shown you are wrong 
ETA
Alcohol is a powerful drug, kids. Ease reace amps with volts on anything I say if it involves a number above, say, 20.
head explodes
Remind me not to be in your study group for science class. That’s all.
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Heh… Drinking a beer and talking science is a great way to cause massive explosions
Yes, never, ever do that. You’d need what, copper four feet thick?
Volts japhroaig, volts.
Why is it ohms law vexxes me so?
Edit
Or would my study group be totally awesome!?
I don’t think the copper needs to be four feet thick. The NxNW brewpub has copper tanks, and I think they are less than 1/4 inch thick. The beer’s good, though.
I do apologize about being a unit idiot. At this point with electricity it is almost a nervous tick. I get ac and three phase (I worked with waves, standing waves, nodes, antinodes, reflections, etc for years as an instrument maker/repairman) but I always mess up basic electrical terminology.
Yeah, don’t worry about it. I’m having a beer or three myself.
When there’s a deadline looming, I always like to see if someone else has done the homework already. And sure enough … a web search for “Energy requirements for seawater desalination” turned up this paper:
The National Research Council (2008) reports that energy accounts for 36% of the typical water costs of a reverse osmosis plant, with the remainder from other operation and maintenance expenses and fixed charges. 4
Energy requirements for thermal plants are even higher, accounting for nearly 60% of the typical cost of produced water for large thermal seawater desalination plant (Wangnick 2002). At these percentages, a 25% increase in energy cost would increase the cost of produced water by 9% and 15% for reverse osmosis and thermal plants, respectively.
There’s a table toward the bottom that lists MWh per day of power consumed, and MGD for a couple dozen desal plants along the west coast. I guess you could divide the MWh by the MGD column, and have an efficiency figure for each one, but I’m lazy. And drunk.
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It’s a flippan mess. Cali needs snowpack, that’s it. So it needs to keep sea temps stable, lower the ambient atmospheric temp, and encourage low cool clouds that travel east.
How to do that? Who knows!!
