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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

> We can also deal with water shortages through desalination.

I mean we can't. Shipping water is _hugely_ expensive. Assuming that we make electricity for free, the amount of water needed to irrigate the bit between the Rockies and Appalachians is huge. Literally millions of tons of water a minute.

All of that energy could be used to do something more useful.

Especially as we can do a few things to keep water about longer that helps stops flooding and keep ground water higher.

Yes, we need more power. Yes nuclear is the answer. However the reason that we didn't build them is because it was expensive, and without government incentives they don't get built.

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Shipping water isn’t expensive. Southern California has been doing it for decades. It’s a steep initial investment but not a prohibitively expensive system to maintain.

We didn't build them because of a smear campaign by fossil fuel industries.

I don't understand how people can look at big tobacco, big sugar, big oil all paying for fake science between the 1940s to today and then think "Yes, but coal barons are the one group of people ethical enough to not spread fud about their main competitor".

Anti-nuclear sentiment was a broad grassroots movement. While companies smearing competitors isn't something unheard of, it just doesn't happen between industries with any degree of success and scale. It's just easier for Big Money to diversify and re-invest: you can watch it in real time with oil companies spawning solar and wind power departments.

tl;dr blame your hippie parents

May be water stressed populations can move closer to the coast in absence of any practical alternatives

Coasts are already the most inhabited places on earth and making drinking water from sea water at scale requires lots of energy

Drinking water is the tiny part of overall consumption. Almost all water humankind is using, is used in agriculture, so the need is very, very distributed just as the farmland where stuff grows, is.

Shipping water is _hugely_ expensive.

Nonsense! All we need to do, is use huge lasers to evaporate gigatonnes of ocean water. It will blow inland, and rain will take care of the rest!

Easy peasy.

> However the reason that we didn't build them is because it was expensive,

No, because there's been a concerted move against nuclear from several actors (petroleum industry, greenpeace and related organizations) which made us not invest in Nuclear for 50 years. It's not for the lack of means to build to it. China is building hundreds of reactors in the past few years while the US enjoys power cuts.

China built around 50 reactors to date - they still have less generating capacity than France and wind power has been producing more energy (in terms of TWh delivered) than nuclear in China since at least 2013.

TWh used should be the standard, nobody cares for produced energy that isn't used.

There's also a physical limitation in the amount of coastline available for building desal plants.

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