Posted on 01/09/2025 3:54:40 PM PST by grundle
A plan to build the largest reservoir in California in decades, Sites Reservoir about 70 miles north of Sacramento, is being challenged as ecologically destructive and not worth the cost in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups Wednesday.
The $4.5 billion project, which seeks to boost water supplies for drought-plagued cities and farms, was recently put on the fast track by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The suit, though, alleges the reservoir’s environmental impact report was insufficient, failing to address harm to fish and greenhouse gas emissions — problems opponents say make the additional water hard to justify.
“It’s not a negligible amount of (water) storage that is provided, but it comes with a big cost,” said John Buse, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations behind the suit. “There are other alternatives that were really not considered that might achieve some of the same benefits.” While the legal challenge is a potential setback for the reservoir, Newsom’s streamlining of the proposal, under recently passed Senate Bill 149, was done to expedite legal challenges. The new law calls for the courts to resolve disputes under the California Environmental Quality Act within 270 days. The law was among several efforts by the governor to reduce red tape for infrastructure projects.
Sites Reservoir, planned in rural Colusa and Glenn counties, would be the state’s eighth biggest reservoir. Its water would be piped across the state, including to the Bay Area.
The facility is designed to capture water from the Sacramento River during wet years and store up to 1.5 million acre-feet for dry years, enough to meet the annual needs of more than 3 million households.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfchronicle.com ...
There is no reality that interferes with the leftist agenda.
If Kamala had been elected things would be quite different for California. I’m sure Kamala would have the US taxpayers pay the entire cost.
Recently Biden said —
“President Biden pledged Thursday that the federal government will cover 100% of disaster assistance costs to California for the next 180 days and emphatically tied the devastating wildfires to human-caused climate change.”
Nuclear power and desalinization make sense . . . especially in light of the cost v benefits of the so-called California high-speed rail train.
The “Court” should require the Environmental Whacko groups that are the plaintiffs, to POST A BOND Equal to 5 times the amount of the APPROVED PROJECT, to cover any damages as a result of the delay.
Nice find.
I think that the 180 days of payin g ofr disaster response is typical FEMA? Trying to remember from the Camp Fire here in Butte County
No reservoirs no federal for wildfires. Sleep in the bed you crap in.
So I guess the greenhouse gases is water vapor from water doing what it does.....Evaporate.
every enviromentalist against this needs to have their water turned off ASAP
Don’t fret, when Newscum sells out to the Chinese, they will complete the reservoir in record time.
The Chinese are using our own technology to do not only district heating but also desalination.
“As envisioned, the phased “Shandong Haiyang Nuclear Energy Heating Project” could provide 300–400 terajoules of heat per year and produce 30 million tonnes of fresh water. In addition to steam extraction for heating and desalination, SDNPC is also exploring a more “comprehensive utilization” of Haiyang that could include a large-scale 500-MWh heat storage system (via heating storage tanks) and hydrogen production by electrolysis. “
“The heating project alone could translate to an “annual savings of about 6.62 million tons of standard coal,”
That’s a lot of coal you don’t have to mine or shop in by rail or ship. Nuclear heat is essentially free below 40C you are using condenser level heat and it’s 60% of the rated thermal output. A 1000MW reactor dumps around 3000MW of condenser heat. Every Joule of that can be used to evaporate seawater or heat up a house or hot water. 50C heat takes only a fraction of a percentage off the electrical output of the low pressure turbine and now you can do adsorption cooling too or better yet seawater ice storage for district cooling which by default when that ice melts is fresh water, two birds one stone and the latent heat of freezing is a fraction of that of boiling or vaccine evaporation.
*vacuum evaporation.
Condenser heat also can be used directly for rapid spray desal.
You get solid salt and fresh water so the greens don’t have a fit with brine discharge on the coasts plus you can use subsurface brackish and brines far from the coasts and not worry about SWD disposal wells or injecting brine waste from the desal operations.
This is the way...rapid spray desal using nuclear waste heat and ground water brine..The areas with saline aquifers is massive in the USA as is the amounts of brine in place. Most of the USA was under the ocean at some point in the geological past those sediments are still full saturated with seawater in it’s pore space.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs075-03/
They’ll get on that reservoir job just as soon as they get that high speed railroad finished...and that means “NEVER!”
If Kamala had been elected things would be quite different for California.
Kamala would have raised her wand, and decreed that ‘things will be better.’
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