The Central Valley in California is getting dry. They need the water even if environmentalists would throw a fit about nuclear reactors.
This is what the Russians wanted to offer after the fall of the Soviet Union. They would park a nuclear powered old warship off shore and use the reactor to provide cheap electricity to places without reliable electricity. I don’t know if anyone took them up on the offer.
The Russians went one better they have two floating nuclear plants and orders for 70 more. The active plants are based on ice breaker and submarine reactors. Samsung heavy and Seaborg are building floating plants that will be molten salt fueled with a meltdown proof core since the whole core is already melted if it spills it goes subcritical and hardens into solid rocksalt that is not all that water soluble. They intend to use fluoride salts and a sodium hydroxide moderator in an epithermal spectrum with those salts they could also go fast spectrum and go to breed and burn fuel cycles. As of right now Samsung intends to have a 12 year fuel cycle using HALEU with the option of using LWR spent fuel actinides as the fissile materials going fully closed cycle breeding with fast spectrum or just break even with epithermal spectrum. Neither requires a breed blanket, the fluoride salts already are the right form to do online fuel processing or batch centralized processing.
You bring up a good point. The central Valley and imperial Valley are two of the largest water users in California they dwarf L.A. And San Diego. Urban use is only 10% of water use in California. Agricultural is 40% nuclear desal is the only thermal power source cheap enough be used for bulk irrigation. The Israelis have desal on drip, hydroponic, and flim strip irrigation but they recycle urban waste water into irrigation not direct use as it’s still to costly for direct use. Nuclear heat on a btu for btu basis is equal to 50 cents per bbl oil or coal under $10 a tonne delivered not at the mine gate.