“As an aside, as a resident of the once great state of California, this news has made me wonder whether we could not use a few of these plants along the coast more than we will ever use our budding nearly one billion dollar “high” speed rail line from nowhere to who knows where.”
You can put 3-4 along the coast, run pipelines inland and grow vegetables, fruit as well as expand forests and other vegetation. All of which contributes to scrubbing Co2 and producing oxygen.
Basically, if California did this, they would be the biggest contributors to “fixing” global warming. So, if some enterprising young Conservatives promoted this, and went balls to the walls with videos and stories, it would put the environmentalists into a bind.
I smell a crowd sourcing opportunity.
Lockheed Martin developed a nano-tech membrane in the past year or two that is much thinner but does as well as conventional desalinization via membrane.
The benefit is using a few percent of the current power requirements for desalinization via membrane filtering.
We should be building desalinization plants like this in Texas, California and Florida to meet freshwater demands, in addition to the wastewater recycling efforts.
I wish we could sell it to environmentalists as saving the smelt AND migrant farm workers, while making the defense contractor into a peaceful infrastructure developer. Build desalinization instead of jets!
But they’ll oppose anything new but artwork.
Great idea. Throw in thorium power reactors funded by Bill Gates and you might have a winner. I’m in Nevada, we might pay to build to offset for Colorado River water.
Let the Central State reservoirs be used for flood control, agriculture and environmental uses (fish and waterfowl) not pumped to the cities. Dismantle Hetch Hetchy and the Owens Valley water projects; fill the coastal reservoirs with desal. Governor Choo-Choo could leave a better legacy for this state than a train to nowhere.
Plus, pumping all that water will keep the seas from rising. It's a two-fer!