Gov Jerry Brown “We take pride in drinking Brown water!”
Gov Moonbeam, during his first term when there was also a long drought, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow.....if it’s brown, flush it down!”
I had thought that the people of California were ALREADY drinking the Brown water.
Makes great Kool-Aid, I understand.
There is a way to get plenty of drinking water, irrigation water, bathing water, just water sparkling in a pool. Suck it up out of the ocean, desalinate it, and pump it inland.
And how is the water desalinated? Same way it is on a US Naval ship powered by an atomic reactor - distill it from sea water using the excess heat from the atomic reactor. The heat was going to waste anyway, put it to good use.
Setting up a series of Thorium-fueled Molten-Salt reactors all along the Pacific coast, and using them to generate a base supply of electrical energy, then using the escaping heat energy to drive distillation towers, results in the generation of pure water from the condensed water vapor driven off from the heated brine, and a supply of sea salt from the brine. Now, there are a number of valuable components in the brine, minerals of nearly every sort. These may be refined out of the brine, by differential crystallization. One of the lesser constituents of “sea salt”, is potassium chloride, a valuable fertilizer, which crystallizes out at a different rate than sodium chloride, the main constituent of “sea salt”. Almost every other metallic element is also dissolved in sea water, to a much lesser degree, but still recoverable by selective crystallization, in steadily smaller and smaller amounts. There is even a theoretical quantity of the noble metals, gold, silver and platinum, that could be recovered as salts (mostly chlorides) and refined. As an industry, the processing of the dried “sea salt” could be on a paying basis relatively quickly, as mining the sea is probably not significantly more complex than hard-rock mining, and environmentally much easier to manage.
We have not yet even begun to tap the potential wealth that surrounds us in our seas. All we have to do is apply techniques we already know about, but have never sufficiently developed the engineering to make them a reality.