Reservoirs are drying up in the Western U.S.

Yeah. Not a lot of sympathy, there's plenty of water to go around, stop trying to grow corn in a desert.

Deserts are excellent places for agriculture for the same reason they are good for solar power. There is an abundant amount of solar energy, the growing season is long and consistent, there are few pests, and reversing desertification has numerous environmental benefits.

The problem is an engineering problem: We need to build more reservoirs, encourage rainwater harvesting, convert agriculture to more efficient irrigation, and build out desalination. The Earth has no shortage of H2O, in fact it’s one of the most abundant things on the planet.

Good luck: https://youtu.be/rWpui1P9cAY

It may already be too late. The rate of subsidence in the growing regions of California is astonishing[1]--nearly a foot per year in some places. Some aquifers can take a long, long time to recharge (the rate differs per aquifer) and some aquifers can be damaged by compaction and never recharge[2].

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/ca-water-ls

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/aquifer-compaction

How would that work? I’d imagine salt and mineral buildup would impede heat transfer and wind up melting the reactor down.

There's little need for nuclear for this when there's surplus solar power in the West these days during the middle of the day. Desalination is the perfect kind of load for this suprlus power: flexible, its output can be stored, water demand is highest during the day when there's sunlight, irrigation demand is highest during the summer when there's more sunlight, etc. (In the coming decade there's going to be too much solar power production but only during the day, and not enough renewable generation in the evening.)

A safer way of doing this is just using the electricity to run a desalination plant.

Which is probably something we should be looking into. What's a drought except a lack of fresh water? It's just another problem so solve and a great way to create jobs.

There are three factors at play: population size, population lifestyle, and efficiency of resource use.

It is customary to completely ignore population size as a factor, as long as lifestyles or resource use could be more eco-friendly (commute with bicycles, rebuild infrastructure to make that possible, re-zone cities, change diets, make industries and farming greener, etc..)

This is the case even though those large, society-wide transformations would take decades, and even while the population is actively being increased by immigration (most of the developed world has had below-replacement fertility for decades, so birthrates are not a factor).

Humans in those regions are far beyond the carrying capacity of the local environment, and have been for decades.

American population is driven solely by immigration, given that the average fertility is far below replacement.

If you don't want one billion Americans, then you need to propose and support:

- Ending refugee programs and withdrawing from the UN convention on refugees

- Sending refugees back to safe countries

- Building walls along the southern border

- Ending the H1B visa

- deporting illegal immigrants already in the country

- Disallowing citizenship by birth

- Ending chain family migration

The bigger issue here is that Americans are moving out of States with huge pension bills, into 'younger' states with lower taxes and fewer legacy costs. Its basically a death loop playing out at an inter-state migration level.