We could fill Lake Powell in less than a year with an aqueduct from Mississippi River

Desert Sun ^ | 6.30.2022 | Don Siefkes

[libh8er]

Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water. All it does is cause flooding and massive tax expenditures to repair and strengthen dikes.

The best solution would be for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build an aqueduct from the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi to Lake Powell, fill it, and then send more water from there down the Colorado to fill lake Mead.

About 4.5 million/gals a second flow past that structure on the Mississippi. As mentioned, New Orleans has a problem with that much water anyway, so let’s divert 250,000 gallons/sec to Lake Powell, which currently has a shortage of 5.5 trillion gallons.

This would take 254 days to fill.

Lake Mead has a somewhat larger shortage, about 8 trillion gallons, but it could be filled in about 370 days at 250,000 gallons/sec.

Within a year and eight months of the aqueduct’s finish, both reservoirs would be filled and most of the Southwest’s water problems would be gone. We built a California aqueduct that saved Southern California and a crude oil pipeline across Alaska that were far more difficult than this proposal.

[Vermont Lt]

Aren’t the Rocky Mountains between the Mississippi and Lake Mead?

I am not sure that would make sense.

Desalinization using Nuclear plants seems like a much easier solution.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

My thoughts exactly...per my post #13.

[Quentin Quarantino]

Tapping the Columbia is more logical. Most of its water flows into the Pacific, a little siphon Southward will hardly be noticed.

[Reily]

The biggest problem for these places is - THEY ARE DESERTS!!!
The people who live there in this country don’t want to accept that. They insist on making it like “back east” or “the coast” that is someplace where its temperate. If you want to live in a desert, you have to adapt to its conditions. Making it into something else will fail in the long run, perhaps catastrophically. It’s like people who build on a flood plain and think it will never flood!

[gloryblaze]

Sure. Just hook up a big garden hose.

SMH

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

I think the idea could save maybe 1000 miles of aqueduct and avoid leaping the the Rocky mountains if the source was instead the Pacific Northwest. Wouldn’t fix the lower Mississippi issue, for sure.

[blam]

"Why would you do that? From New Orleans, follow I-10 west to Phoenix"

Travelling west on I-10 from Louisiana to Texas, at the Texas border is a sign that says El Paso 857 miles.
(And, when you get to El Paso, you're still in Texas)

[DoodleDawg]

Just the will of the politicians!

And hundreds of billions of dollars and years of work. Your open channels have to go through land that has to be bought. It has to go from roughly sea level to several thousand feet above sea level and through some of the more arid parts of the country. It's a trillion boondoggle that may or may not solve your problem.

[P.O.E.]

There is a little problem with this approach. It is known as the Rocky Mountains.

Bucket brigades.

[no-s]

> There is a little problem with this approach. It is known as the Rocky Mountains.

It would probably be easier build tunnels and nukes to pump desalinated water uphill from the Sea of Cortez to the head of Lake Havasu. Then we could take advantage of CAP to distribute to Arizona and Southern California Water district.

Of course this is also dubious but hey, if pie-in-the-sky is on the table, why not?

[Vermont Lt]

But the highest elevation is 7,000 feet.

https://www.flattestroute.com/Laurel-MS-to-Las-Vegas

I know the start point is not where the plan says it should be, but that part is irrelevant. There are mountains between the two places. And that is a lot of feet to move water.

[Jane Long]

Wouldn’t a desalinization system, on/from the PNW, make more sense than trying to pipe water across this vast distance?

[AZJeep]

An aqueduct running from the lower Mississippi to the Colorado River (via the San Juan River tributary, at Farmington, New Mexico), with the same capacity as the California Aqueduct, would roughly double the flow of the latter while taking merely 1-3% of the former’s flow.

[NorthMountain]

Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water.

How about 'FXXK YOU!!!'

Desert dwellers need to figure out how to live in the desert, not screw up someone else's environment.

[NorthMountain]

You can turn on the pumps

And the desert dwellers would then have a conniption fit when you decide to turn them off.

[TomGuy]

There is a little problem with this approach. It is known as the Rocky Mountains.

The author has no clue about the engineering involved.

Up hill all the way.

[G Larry]

I have friends who were Biology Majors and their "field work" (for credit) was to go to assigned areas and identify "species" to be declared "endangered".

Once added to the list, it is declared to be "scientifically true" without any further investigation.

Once on the list, its almost impossible to disprove, and is certainly costly.

[ShadowAce]

Flooding--especially Mississippi flooding increases farmland viability. It enriches the quality of the soil.

You take that away by removing flooding, and you remove a good portion of the Midwest farmland.

[HamiltonJay]

hahaha yes, let’s redirect the eastern North American watershed over the continental divide, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Here’s an idea... when you move to an ARID environment, accept that fact?

[verum ago]

Um, isn’t the elevation of Lake Powell higher than the Mississippi? That is a lot of pumping for 250,000 gallons a minute.

Lake Powell's full pool elevation is 3700' AMSL. The river elevation at the Old River Control Structure is listed as 24' AMSL. Heck, the Mississippi's source (Lake Itasca in Minnesota) is listed as being at 1475' AMSL. Insofar as I can tell, none of the MIssouri River branches / tributaries get anywhere near that elevation while still having enough flow that such a massive withdrawal wouldn't be devastating. Heck, the Mississippi River at its confluence with the Ohio (Cairo, IL) is still only at 730' AMSL.

Doing some quick back of the envelope calculations, in order to lift water at the rate listed in the article (which is 250k gallons per second, not per minute), I get a power expenditure of ~10.4 gigawatts. That assumes 100% efficiency (lol), and ignores the friction loss from 1157 miles of pipeline (great circle distance from ORCS to nearest part of Lake Mead), which would probably be in the GW range itself. (You'd definitely want to use a pipeline, or else your evaporation losses would be horrible given the climate of the lands said pipeline is crossing).

And, as other posters have pointed out, the Rocky Mountains are in the way- just spending a quick moment skimming the Santa Fe area (which aforementioned Great Circle route passes through) I can't find a route that crests at anything lower than the elevation of Santa Fe itself ~7200' AMSL. And you have to take this into account, as you can't just siphon water over the mountain range to the lower elevation of Lake Mead- since siphons work partly by atmospheric pressure, they stop working beyond the equivalent weight in a water column of the atmosphere- around 33 ft.

So to make this idea work, we're probably looking at an enormous steel pipeline well over a thousand miles long, through some very rugged country, and taking the Rocky Mountain Crest into account, requiring I would guess around 25-30 GW of power for pumping.

Simple, right?

*Sigh* but the proponents of these "Take Mississippi River water and send it to the West" projects never seem to get beyond the point of going 'Well, there's too much water over here, and not enough over here, and if I squint they're not that far apart on a map so we'll just dig a ditch. Problem solved!"