Posted on 05/11/2022 6:40:29 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The proposed plant would operate like Poseidon Water’s site in Carlsbad, where ocean water is put through a process that includes using thousands of pressure vessels and reverse osmosis to remove the salt.
Poseidon officials say that from the time the water comes in from the ocean, it takes just about two hours to get it to the point where people can drink it.
In California, where water sources are shrinking, proponents of the project say the plant will provide a great drought-proof source of water.
In Huntington Beach, about 107 million gallons of seawater a day would be used to produce about 50 million gallons of drinking water.
Critics argue that the costs to rate payers — and the environment — are too high.
The report also claims that Poseidon’s proposals to mitigate those losses, which include plans to restore wetland areas, wouldn’t do enough to offset the damage.
There’s also the question of whether desalinated water is even needed.
Unlike other parts of Southern California that import most of their water from hundreds of miles away, the central and northern parts of Orange County have an underground aquifer that provides about 77% of the water used in the region.
Newsom supports building the desalination plant, arguing that having more water options is something that the state needs.
The Orange County Water District also joined Newsom in calling on the California Coastal Commission to approve the desalination project.
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
What exactly is the "cost" to the environment?
This would make more sense than a boondoggle project like a high speed train with 30 stops (exaggerated) that the whole country has to pay for (mostly federal funding).
Exactly. Especially compared to the environmental cost of bringing it in from hundreds of miles away, and taking it from the farmers?
Partly this, it seems:
“In Huntington Beach, about 107 million gallons of seawater a day would be used to produce about 50 million gallons of drinking water.
“However, this would leave behind about 57 million gallons of brine — highly concentrated saltwater — that would be diffused while being sent back into the ocean.
...
“The facility, in total, would kill marine life in about 100 billion gallons of seawater per year,” a report by the staff of the California Coastal Commission states.”
Huntington Beach is already completely built out, so I can’t see any damage to be done at all. It isn’t like they are putting it in Big Sur.
Only in California does it make sense to divert rainwater to the ocean, then build a plant to desalinize it.
“Newsom supports building the desalination plant, arguing that having more water options is something that the state needs.”
When Newsom starts making sense...it must be because he was bribed!
I'd want to know more, like what have been the implications of other similar plants that operate around the globe. This stat has nothing to compare with it.
It would make a lot of sense to build desalination plants and diversify the water supply of a drought stricken region that has enough natural water to support maybe 10,000 people and has a population of about 25 million or more.
but don’t expect the envirosocialist watermelons to allow it. This is California after all.
Thank God we have 3 wells that are tapped into a dependable aquifer. But we’re being threatened by a corporate water company that wants to buy us out. As long as I’m the president it ain’t gonna happen. Whiskey is for drinkin and water is for fighting over.
There is the solution. Call the desalination project a high speed train project. The money will flow.
You realize it doesn’t rain much in Southern California, right?
Don’t forget California has steadfastly refused to build more reservoirs to capture more of the snowmelt. The California infrastructure was built in the 60s and 70s when the state had half the population it now has.
Nah. That would mess with the salinity of the oceans, so NO. :>}
And CA has more than enough surplus energy to do the process. /s
Wait...Huntington Beach would have to consider the use of the water by the metrics of DEI. They may have to send most of the water to East LA.
Doesn’t northern California have a lot of snowmelt? I get that California is geographically large, but at least Southern California getting water from Northern California wouldn’t involve all the cross-state bickering that other states do for water access (i.e. Tennessee and Georgia disputing over water).
You want massive amounts of desalinated water from the ocean? Set up a heat exchange system powered by nuclear energy, essentially a huge distillation tower, to first boil the sea water, then collecting the condensate and piping it out as “fresh” water. Of course, this means a huge pile of the solids in the sea water, the sea salt, builds up around the distillation tower, which could be used as an enormous resource of all the minerals dissolved in sea water, in the resulting brine or dried residue. Most of the content would be sodium chloride, of course, but there is just about every other water-soluble substance as well, including potassium chloride, an excellent fertilizer, considerable amounts of phosphorus, and all the other lesser minerals like calcium, magnesium, zinc, and all the trace minerals that have been incorporated into living tissue. There is even some amount of gold and other precious metals present in the form of ions, which would make the sea salt one of the more valuable ores to extract all these metallic elements.
This would actually work. CA doesn't pay attention and is already corrupt. They funnel money all over the place after budget votes and federal moneys are legislatively allocated. CA government is the worlds 2nd largest money laundering operation, only beat by the US Federal Government.
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