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> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the e

> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater. You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical. For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation. A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else. Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down. Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.

cornstalks 1y ago
> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.
dpc050505 1y ago
Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.
- FredPret 1y ago
  If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again. We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars. I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
  - Manuel_D 1y ago
    That's like saying fossil fuels don't actually pollute or emit greenhouse cases, because we're just X joules away from sequestering it back from the atmosphere. Desalination, and pumping water over thousands of miles is extremely expensive. Sure, you're not wrong, but the values of X and Y are uneconomical.
    - FredPret 1y ago
      I don't think they're uneconomical. Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap; of course people are using it to grow almonds and alfalfa in the desert. Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity. You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but: a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology b) we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
      - Manuel_D 1y ago
        While I do agree the hysteria around water use is unfounded, it's just patently false to say that fresh water cannot be wasted, pointing out that the molecule is just in a harder to access state is pedantry.
        FredPret 1y ago
        But the reason I hammer on about this point is precisely due to the hysteria. In the popular imagination, we spray x million gallons of water onto a golf course, and it just evaporates, never to be seen again. It is the alarmism that alarms me.
      - close04 1y ago
        > Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usable, or all of the above. What's cheaper and easier for you, to condense a cup of water from the air or to just turn on the faucet? > we should be using solar and nuclear for everything Why solar? Energy is not lost/consumed in the universe, so why not collect it from anywhere else. Energy is astonishingly cheap, that's why we use so much of it. If you know what I mean...
guhidalg 1y ago
You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong. The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management. Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.
- hinkley 1y ago
  And we couldn’t anyway because we’d bake the surface of the planet with all the waste heat from that free energy.
  - FredPret 1y ago
    Doesn't pass the sniff test: From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount). Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers. And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers. I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.
    - hinkley 1y ago
      Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it. Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap. What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
      - coredog64 1y ago
        Degree C/K or F/R?
    - deleted 1y ago
wombatpm 1y ago
Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes. During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity. And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
- kortilla 1y ago
  That’s a fake constraint though. If there was any actual shortage people would use it immediately. Temperature controls gate returning to env.
sydbarrett74 1y ago
True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.

cornstalks 1y ago

> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.

dpc050505 1y ago

Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.

FredPret 1y ago
If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again. We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars. I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
- Manuel_D 1y ago
  That's like saying fossil fuels don't actually pollute or emit greenhouse cases, because we're just X joules away from sequestering it back from the atmosphere. Desalination, and pumping water over thousands of miles is extremely expensive. Sure, you're not wrong, but the values of X and Y are uneconomical.
  - FredPret 1y ago
    I don't think they're uneconomical. Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap; of course people are using it to grow almonds and alfalfa in the desert. Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity. You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but: a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology b) we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
    - Manuel_D 1y ago
      While I do agree the hysteria around water use is unfounded, it's just patently false to say that fresh water cannot be wasted, pointing out that the molecule is just in a harder to access state is pedantry.
      - FredPret 1y ago
        But the reason I hammer on about this point is precisely due to the hysteria. In the popular imagination, we spray x million gallons of water onto a golf course, and it just evaporates, never to be seen again. It is the alarmism that alarms me.
    - close04 1y ago
      > Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usable, or all of the above. What's cheaper and easier for you, to condense a cup of water from the air or to just turn on the faucet? > we should be using solar and nuclear for everything Why solar? Energy is not lost/consumed in the universe, so why not collect it from anywhere else. Energy is astonishingly cheap, that's why we use so much of it. If you know what I mean...

guhidalg 1y ago

You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong. The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management. Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.

hinkley 1y ago
And we couldn’t anyway because we’d bake the surface of the planet with all the waste heat from that free energy.
- FredPret 1y ago
  Doesn't pass the sniff test: From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount). Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers. And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers. I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it. Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap. What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
    - coredog64 1y ago
      Degree C/K or F/R?
  - deleted 1y ago

wombatpm 1y ago

Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes. During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity. And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.

kortilla 1y ago
That’s a fake constraint though. If there was any actual shortage people would use it immediately. Temperature controls gate returning to env.

sydbarrett74 1y ago

True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.