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Comment by wildmanx | Hacker News Reader

Oh the typical techie solution to environmental problems. We can solve this with tech!

Wait until the aquifers under North America run dry. That's where most irrigation pump up their ground water from. A few dry rivers and smaller lakes are nothing compared to what's going to happen. Forget your desalination plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aquifers_in_the_United...

And it's entirely predictable. In fact, for decades already. But (almost) nobody is doing anything. Cause freedom, I guess. What's a golf course here and there in the desert, for the better off, right? Or what about an artificial lagoon? Freedom!

Edit: Oh, there is a recent John Oliver episode about this one too. Maybe finally somebody will notice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtxew5XUVbQ

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> Oh the typical techie solution to environmental problems. We can solve this with tech!

In this case, yes, we literally can solve this with tech. We don't have to wait for the aquifers to dry up, because California has a ludicrously long coastline just begging for desalination plants up the wazoo.

You may need to check the orders of magnitude we are talking about here and then re-evaluate your statement. This is not about a few stretches of CA coastline. This is about all of the continental US. A few desal plants won't cut it.

No desal water will be enough for agriculture.

Only multigigawatt nuclear desal can privide so much fresh water economically.

> A few desal plants won't cut it.

Then we build more than "a few".

Hope their byproducts are environmentally safe. Northern Mexico also has water scarcity, and it's been shocking to see the studies about how water is used in my state:

- Residential: ~10%

- Industrial: ~20%

- Agriculture and farms: ~70%

Residential water is being rationed, but it won't make a dent unless we address that 70%, which to make it worse, loses half of that to evaporation and inadequate distribution networks. Solve the most glaring wasters and you don't need massive desalination anymore.

> Hope their byproducts are environmentally safe.

The byproducts are sea salt. You might pay less for it at the store.

The environmental impacts come from having so much extra salt that there's nothing worth doing with it other than dumping it. Considering how tiny of a fraction Earth's freshwater (let alone that actually used by humans) represents of the total global water supply, the environmental concerns are arguably way overblown even in that worst-case scenario of "we literally can't find any better use of this salt other than dumping it back into the ocean whence it came".

> The byproducts are sea salt. You might pay less for it at the store.

1. It's not some food-grade "sea salt" that you get. It's brine, which, dumped into the ocean, wreaks havoc in the local ecosystem. It's heavier than sea water, sinks to the ground, etc. Not something you want in your backyard.

2. Energy is not free. No, nuclear isn't either. Want a uranium mine in your backyard? Or a coal mine?

Wasting less water could be the easier solution here.

> It's brine, which, dumped into the ocean, wreaks havoc in the local ecosystem

Only if dumped such that it's concentrated. Either don't dump it or do so in a more dispersed manner.

> Energy is not free. No, nuclear isn't either.

You don't need free energy for desal to be more than worthwhile.

> Want a uranium mine in your backyard?

If I had a backyard, then sure, why not?

> > Energy is not free. No, nuclear isn't either.

> You don't need free energy for desal to be more than worthwhile.

It was a response to that the only byproduct of desalination is sea salt. It's not (or it's a bad-faith misleading statement). You need to account for the energy you put in which has its own byproducts.

> > Want a uranium mine in your backyard?

> If I had a backyard, then sure, why not?

You may want to check out the health implications before you commit.

> It was a response to that the only byproduct of desalination is sea salt.

Because it is. Energy requirements are inputs, not products ("by" or otherwise). They may have their own byproducts, but those happen anyway (and in the case of nuclear, are so tiny in quantity compared to those of desalination to be not really worth discussing).

> You may want to check out the health implications before you commit.

The health implications of drought and famine are arguably far more pressing.

What are you even arguing? People posting here need to made less ambiguous, seething comments and stop assuming that people reading already know what they’re arguing.

- The poster above mentions desalination and says tech provides a solution.

- You make some vague point about tech people depending too much on tech, but without actually discussing the point and why.

- Then you go on to talk about the current problem, which the commenter above proposed a solution to, but making it sound as though you’re disagreeing with them.

So what are you even saying??

We humans have a terrible track record when it comes to using tech to try to counter environmental issues that we caused. It has essentially never worked.

What _can_ work is to use tech to address the root cause, which in many cases resource overuse, just like this one. That is, using tech to reduce the use of that resource. Trying to replenish the resource while not curbing its use is doomed to failure.

> We humans have a terrible track record when it comes to using tech to try to counter environmental issues that we caused.

That’s a potentially valid criticism but it’s also a heuristic that, even if a valid one, draws on a very short history of generating solutions to man made environmental disasters. Things generally don’t work until they do, and there’s no inherent reason that humans can’t do well here.

> It has essentially never worked.

A large part of the reason for those failures was that up until recently, science was very dismissive of nuance in environmental systems, but now there’s certainly an abundance of caution, to the point where environmental engineering as a solution to climate change is heavily frowned upon, which is good.

I think desalination has more potential than just as to replace current water consumption, it even has the potential to make water an abundant resource, which is a very exciting prospect.

All of this should be approached with highly cautious and critical optimism however, since there isn’t a miracle solution to anything and it’s improbable that we’d stamp out all the possible consequences right off the bat.

Look, I think I agree with you that aquifers running dry is a very serious problem. However, I don’t understand why you believe desalination would not alleviate California’s problems with water. If California could be convinced to build enough nuclear desalination capacity for all present and future water needs then the problem is solved, no? There are trade offs such as environmental impact and cost. There are obstacles to implementation such as fear of nuclear power. If that’s your concern then please clarify.

(I haven’t watched that episode of the show. Does he go over this?)

Well, what are the alternatives?

In reality, we will need a plurality of solutions, coming from tech and policy. Also, this is a website that has a glut of techies, so expect tech-based solutions to be suggested!

> Well, what are the alternatives?

The same as with any resource that you are overusing: Use less.

You don't need golf courses in the middle of the desert. You don't need broken water access rights regulation that encourages wasting water. You can reduce water use in agriculture to a tiny fraction if you'd start viewing water as a precious resource and do this smarter. There is a lot you can do that's different from "let's keep wasting this resource, we can throw tech at it, ignore the consequences!"

Desalination isn’t going to help agriculture anyways. I think it’s worth a few billion dollars to avoid an explosive potentially destabilizing political wedge issue.

Do you know of any evidence that North America, as a whole, is using more water than is falling on it? Because that's not something I've heard about thus far.

Just because we have a significant drought (or possibly "climatic shift to a drier climate") in the Southwest doesn't mean that we have the same problem everywhere in the US.

I would suggest you take a look at history, you would see that humanity’s story is one of exploiting resources till collapse

Which is exactly my point.

Why exactly would we not leverage established desalination tech, already deployed at scale in Israel and other nations, to alleviate this problem? Reducing the stress on aquifers would bring us much closer in line to equilibrium yield, especially in areas where rainfall surplus is infrequent.

Once the Ogallala starts drying up I guess everyone will just leave Nebraska. /s

It’s not a solution everything buts it’s a solution for domestic water. California ag interests are digging their own graves and I’m not sure what we can do about it.

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