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Southern California is beginning to see more water restrictions - each and every desalination tech advancement is a very hopeful development for the region, and

Southern California is beginning to see more water restrictions - each and every desalination tech advancement is a very hopeful development for the region, and many others in the world that can't get enough freshwater. I hope they can generally work this up to factory scale and put it behind a solar farm and see if that can supply a lot of homes.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
The problem is that southern California is trying to grow a shit-ton of crops that aren't suitable for the environment there. The almond industry is particularly guilty in this regard. Desalination will never scale to a level suitable to supply that industry. If anything they'll take that water and just grow even more crops, while still sucking the aquifer dry. Thing is, aquifers compact when you draw water from them too much. That compaction can never be undone. They are slowly rendering that land permanently uninhabitable.
- qayxc 5y ago
  > Desalination will never scale to a level suitable to supply that industry. Are you sure about that? It's simply a question of economics. As long fresh water from other sources is significantly cheaper, no one's going to invest in large scale desalination. Once this changes it becomes a question of which is more expensive - shutting down the agribusiness or running large scale desalination (which has options, from nuclear to solar to the use of metamaterials).
  - sp332 5y ago
    It is true in California, because you need to dump the concentrated brine somewhere, and doing that at industrial scale will run up against environmental protections.
    - jillesvangurp 5y ago
      There's a big bucket right next to California called the Pacific. Perfect place for sourcing water to desalinate and dumping brine back into without doing anything measurably harmful to salt concentrations in the Pacific. It's like a literal drop in the ocean. Most big Californian metropolitan areas are right next to it. There is no water shortage; just a reluctance to pay a fair price for it. The challenges in California are not technological but political and policy related. Local consumers of water seem to assume that water is like manna from heaven that has to be perpetually subsidized by the government. They feel entitled to it but are not really willing to pay for it; or even invest in common sense ways to reduce their consumption of it because it doesn't really cost them anything.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

The problem is that southern California is trying to grow a shit-ton of crops that aren't suitable for the environment there. The almond industry is particularly guilty in this regard. Desalination will never scale to a level suitable to supply that industry. If anything they'll take that water and just grow even more crops, while still sucking the aquifer dry. Thing is, aquifers compact when you draw water from them too much. That compaction can never be undone. They are slowly rendering that land permanently uninhabitable.

qayxc 5y ago
> Desalination will never scale to a level suitable to supply that industry. Are you sure about that? It's simply a question of economics. As long fresh water from other sources is significantly cheaper, no one's going to invest in large scale desalination. Once this changes it becomes a question of which is more expensive - shutting down the agribusiness or running large scale desalination (which has options, from nuclear to solar to the use of metamaterials).
- sp332 5y ago
  It is true in California, because you need to dump the concentrated brine somewhere, and doing that at industrial scale will run up against environmental protections.
  - jillesvangurp 5y ago
    There's a big bucket right next to California called the Pacific. Perfect place for sourcing water to desalinate and dumping brine back into without doing anything measurably harmful to salt concentrations in the Pacific. It's like a literal drop in the ocean. Most big Californian metropolitan areas are right next to it. There is no water shortage; just a reluctance to pay a fair price for it. The challenges in California are not technological but political and policy related. Local consumers of water seem to assume that water is like manna from heaven that has to be perpetually subsidized by the government. They feel entitled to it but are not really willing to pay for it; or even invest in common sense ways to reduce their consumption of it because it doesn't really cost them anything.