Is sending Mississippi water to West feasible?
desertsun.com
desertsun.com
At that point, calling the fluid in the Mississippi River "water" is stretching the definition. It is rich and chunky with the flavor of all the land it fell on as rain. It'll put hair on your chest and crayfish in your pockets. Drink enough of it and you'll start to call them crawdaddies.
Sure its not hard to filter, but what will you do with all the silt? Look at how much effort we spend now dealing with all the silt right there. Without trying to handle it as part of water extraction.
I think there's gonna be better luck looking elsewhere, desalinization looks like about as much effort and less distance to move the results.
https://www.corrosionpedia.com/internal-corrosion-of-pipelin...
All hail the Army Corps of Engineers guys who actually design and are responsible for understanding our efforts to modulate that river. I've just helped scratch at the dirt in accordance with their directions a couple times.
If you want Mississippi water, pick up your ass and relocate it to one of the 32 states in the Mississippi watershed.
In all seriousness, the way the west (and California in particular) price water defies logic. All this talk about senior and junior water rights doesn't make any sense: it only benefits the entrenched incumbents. A properly setup market would simply price out water uses whose utility was materially less than demand of the produced product.
It's a quotation used by the socialist trio of Cabet-Blanc-Marx, and itself has origins in scripture, just with a materialist reframing, instead of a spiritual one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_a...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Farmers in California are literally pumping the aquifers dry. There are already people who have had to abandon their homes because you can't just dig the wells deeper to hit water anymore.
>A frenzy of well drilling by California farmers leaves taps running dry
https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-farms-water-well...
Ground water is a limited public resource. Farmers do not have the right to pump the aquifers dry and render the area uninhabitable.
I would imagine that you could require a license to pump ground water in areas where the ground water level has already dropped dangerously low.
>Water rights east of the Mississippi work differently than water rights to the west. In the west, they are based on seniority.
That applies to water on top of the ground (lakes, rivers, streams), not the water under the ground.
Farmers in California were running out of water 100 years ago too, and people responded with massive engineering projects to regulate water throughout the year and move it from places that were at the time water-rich to places where more water would allow using the extremely fertile land with favorable weather for agriculture.
It’s not insane to consider doing the same again.
The idea that californias water projects only direct water downhill is invalid anyway - the California aqueduct flows uphill quite a lot, and over mountains.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant is one of at least 5 pumping plants along the aqueduct.
sun
good soil, almost all capability class 1
ideal mediterranean climate
Not such an ideal climate evidently, since they're so desperate to import water.
Irrigation agriculture, rather than depending on natural water for growing, was an innovation humanity developed 6000+ years ago.
It used to be a great climate for growing things, a century ago. But that was during an abnormally wet period in Californian history. California is usually much dryer than it was a century ago, and is drying out once again. In California, people think one or two centuries of experience with the land is a long time. In most of the world, that's a joke. Try farming the land for a thousand years before you form such expectations.
I assume your opinion is probably that the water projects in California were all mistakes, but it’s not accurate to say that at some point the Central Valley was naturally ideal for growing things without artificial irrigation from far away.
but “does not require artificial irrigation” was not what I meant by “ideal climate.”
in good part because California doesn't charge people a fair price for the limited resources.
The Mississippi River basin is hardly an agricultural desert.
The western states are right next to an ocean (the largest one in fact) with sea levels and the amount of water rising faster than they could ever use it. There's basically unlimited (salt) water there. Desalinization is an extremely energy hungry process, but we also have a TON of sun and heat energy in these states as well that can be utilized.
https://santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/public-wor...
Traditional (distillation) desalination uses too much energy (10+ kWh per m3). Reverse osmosis plants drastically reduce that, to the 3kWh range[2]. From what I remember from my now-outdated university studies, the capital cost of the membrane was more the limiting factor, as they get fouled pretty quickly. Disposal of very-high-salinity brine is also an issue.
[1] https://sfpuc.org/sites/default/files/accounts-and-services/... says ~$10.71/unit, with each unit being 768 gallons, or 2907 litres. (there's a lower rate for the first 4 unit, which I would guess is subsidized). 10.71/2.907=$3.68
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis#Desalination
After the Northridge Quake in LA, the Santa Monica Freeway was repaired in less than three months. Given the political will, the procedural roadblocks can be dealt with.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-...
But, I imagine it’s much easier to fast track an infrastructure repair or replacement project than it is for a brand new infrastructure project.
you've got immense coastal regions and those big blue oceans on both sides. invest in your future for once.
(Yes I realize this taken with a heaping spoonful of "what if", there are far better things to spend this money on, unknowable environmental impacts, there is a personality cult around that company, etc.)
"nuclear explosions"!! Sounds legit.
Has anybody here read it?