Posted on 01/24/2025 4:44:48 PM PST by Libloather
It would make water more costly?
As opposed to $275 BILLION in damage from a series of fires?
Or get busy and build some small nuclear reactors to power the AI data sites and the desalinization plants. This will not produce more CO2, even though it is not going to change what happens to the climate. That is out of our control.
Yeah although they better build them far away from the fault lines.
“Desalination would exacerbate the problem. It takes 1,500 kilowatt-hours to produce a million gallons of desalinated water. That’s a lot of carbon being put into the atmosphere.”
Just a thought - no carbon would be put into the air if the 1,500 KwH were generated by a nuke. Think about it. It’s a two-fer ... clean water and clean air.
You’re welcome.
“A cubic meter is 256 gallons”
If you spill 8.172 gallons it is :)
They need to move people to where the wster is by shutting down water access to areas.
Close enough! The way I remember is that a gallon is just about 6x6x6 inches, so 8 gallons per cubic foot and 216 gallons per cubic yard (really 201 gallons, but reasonably close). I cubic meter is a bit bigger than a cubic yard, so 250 gallons.
Just for clarity It is 264.172 gal/cu meter, I meant 256 +8 and change , not minus. I like your mnemonics though. It’s 6.1358 inches btw :) I have to get a sense of an approximation’s accuracy before putting it in mind for future use.
The largest seawater desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, producing 50 million gallons of water per day, has been in operation here in North San Diego County, California, since late 2015. Connecting the output into the existing potable water distribution system was a major project, the amortization of which increased our water cost slightly, but we voted that the security is worth it.
Viva San Diego! Please secede from California and join Texas. We could use some desalination plants here btw.
I don’t get why the letter writer assumed powering dasalination plants will generate CO2, but nuclear power is fine and dandy for AI data centers. Not that I buy AGW.
Park a nuke plant next to the ocean waste heat from cooling the reactors distills pure water.
Build with earthquake strong engineering too.
Yes this is the way...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011916424000365
A nuke puts out 2 units of heat into it’s cooling heat sink for every one unit of electricity. Using waste heat you can make a medium sized river worth of fresh water with rapid spray desal, or low temp vacuum desal or go triple win and do adsorption cooling to sea ice, melt that now fresh water ice with loops of propylene glycol to melt it at 32F and take all that cold glycol and send it to a district cooling system. You get cheap electricity, loads of fresh melt water, and tons of cooling which is 75% of your electric load in hot climates so you just multiplied the number of buildings that nuke can power by not running HVAC units and district cooling them instead. It’s win win win. Ask GE Hitachi for the ESBWR in 1600 MW form. They built the more complex older brother the ABWR in 39 months from first concrete to first fueling twice in Japan. The ESBWR has 50% LESS concrete and no active cooling systems it’s all passive cooling and natural convention driven no pumps in the reactor vessel, no large pipes and it cannot melt down it’s under the gravity driven flood tanks that open as soon as it scrams and vents to the suppression pool. You only need to add water to the top pool after 7 days and you can do that with a probable hand carried 3 inch gas driven pump. That’s assuming your triple redundant feed water systems, double redundant fire suppression systems, and on site gravity driven water tower pressure system are all compromised. There is hose hook ups for fire truck water and you could use a hand carried pump to fire hose water from your cooling tower basins or cooling pond directly to the triple diverse external hose points that lead to the top gravity pool, from there it flows down to the core, fuel storage pool, and containment cooling condensers all by physics humans don’t even need to be there just get the water to the top pools one of three and physics does the rest. It’s the safest reactor humans have ever designed by core damage frequency. I would gladly live inside the plant gates sleeping the sleep of babes knowing my air is clean , my water is pure and my house is 65F all while the wonderful machine hums away a few hundreds of feet from my bedroom.
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