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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

The full title of the OP is: "Beyond the Yuck Factor: Cities Turn to ‘Extreme’ Water Recycling" (emphasis mine).

I can't help but think of "extreme-recycled" water as a socially acceptable version of Soylent Green, produced from liquid instead of solid waste.[a]

More seriously, I think recycling waste-water is a great idea. If we, human beings, continue to change our natural environment as rapidly as in the recent past, many prominent climate models predict that traditional forms of food and water production will likely become untenable due to extreme weather events like heatwaves and fires. If those climate models are right, we'll have no choice but to resort to creative forms of recycling to provide everyone with enough food and water.

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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

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Not really, as far as water is concerned.

One of the less well publicized great advances of the past decade is that we have essentially solved desalinization.

Recent advances in the reverse osmosis process mean that capital costs for desalinization capacity have been driven low enough that they can be economically powered by off-peak intermittent power, essentially using reservoirs of fresh water as a grid battery of sorts. The cost of solar and wind in the places that need fresh water are low enough that this can economically replace natural fresh water even in middle-income countries.

Large-scale buildouts are ongoing. We will not need "extreme water recycling" to provide anyone with sufficient water.

Not that it's a bad idea anyway, because it's good for the environment to recycle the other stuff that you pull out of the wastewater stream.

> can be economically powered by off-peak intermittent power,

The problem with anything designed to run "off peak" is that you have to pay the capital cost the whole time, even while it's not operating.

Do you have some examples you can cite? There's a lot of stuff that can be done but isn't yet at scale.

Question really then becomes how much does it cost to over provision for 100% or 200%. Allowing to run 12h or 8h for the needed daily capacity.

There is certain fixed costs for facility and then adding capacity increases on top of that. But question is really by how much? 10-50% for 200% or 300% capacity might be acceptable if that sum is saved in energy costs.

Normally 200% capacity cost quite close to 200% of the capital investment.

Not necessarily depending on utilization factor and available buffer capacity.

In the end someone has to pay that cost anyway. Overbuild your intermittent sources (and then throttle them when there's oversupply), invest in baseload power (e.g. nuclear), keep using fossil fuels (and pay the environmental/health cost), build storage or curb demand (the case you mention).

Do you have a link so I can read more? I haven't heard anything about the advances in desalinization.

Israel desalination plant profitably offering a fixed price of 1.45 NIS per cubic meter. At current exchange rates that is around 0.40$ per cubic meter (1000L).

https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/desalination_260520

Freshwater withdrawals in the US (which includes all agricultural use including exported crops and animal feed) is around 1550 cubic meters per year.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/water-withdrawals-per-cap...

So, even if we replaced all freshwater use in the US with desalinated water at current prices it would only incur a additional cost of ~600$ per capita per year. If our water use were more similar to peer countrys such as Germany (410 m^3), France (475 m^3), Australia (724 m^3), or Japan (640 m^3) the per capita costs would only be ~150$-250$ per year.

What sorts of advances? Anecdotally, I've developed a bit of an interest in hydroponics (the progress of LED lighting makes growing niche vegetables indoors interesting to me) and I was pricing out RO systems which seemed much cheaper than I remember.

Where I live 'hydroponics' + 'LED' + 'niche vegetables' => Marijuana Plantation...

Admittedly I’ve never heard “niche vegetables” before, though I’m willing to bet that yeah, they ain’t just growing some carrots.

Dwarf Romaine Lettuce and many other leafy greens, Carolina Reapers, Habanadas, and hopefully other capsicum varieties if it goes well. Wasabi would be really interesting but seems pretty tricky.

Wasabi would be quite an achievement, if you manage that you should definitely post it!

The Clarkson's Farm bit on growing wasabi was funny. It did make it sound like a very finicky plant to grow.

> One of the less well publicized great advances of the past decade is that we have essentially solved desalinization.

Can you link to any sources backing your claim?

ocean water mostly

I think that's still very power-hungry and only makes sense in rich, dry countries like Saudi Arabia. My dream is for the weekend to get on board with nuclear desalination (either fixed as part of a land-baded power plant or ship-based).

I come from a country which specializes in water reprocessing, but doing so diligently is an expansive endeavour. Especially where private companies are doing this, the incentive is to keep costs low and just be above barely-legal (and maybe not even that).

There is a myriad of drugs, pesticides and chemicals which are known to be inside the water system in the us. Your neighbour is depressed? Good for you. You might get some anti-depressants yourself (no, the body does not break down drugs completely, they are mostly escaping with the wastewater).

But hey, maybe I am just paranoid.

Good watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FccVv5NsIY

Currently almost all countries sell water earmarked for industrial use at absurdly reduced prices, when compared to consumer prices.

Jack up the rate so both pay the same, and introduce a huge pollution / cleaning penalty for companies that don’t emit virtually fully (talking something like 99.999% here) cleaned wastewater.

It’s slowly happening in Europe, but we’re decades to late with it. Even in The Netherlands and Belgium we’ve allowed companies to dump a continuous stream of PFAS-production polluted water straight into a river. Clown world :)

It gets worse; Microsoft datacenters have been allowed to use up huge amounts of drinking water for cooling; it gets treated to avoid clogging up the lines, heated up, then just dumped back in the river.

It's shameful and wasteful, and our country will run out of fresh water in my lifetime; I even heard one that says the aquifers will be running out within ten years. And they just used it for cooling.

Likewise, there's heavy investments in offshore wind parks, but companies like Microsoft just come in (with government subsidies) and buy up the whole capacity. It was supposed to replace, not supplement, existing power generation options.

> It's shameful and wasteful, and our country will run out of fresh water in my lifetime; I even heard one that says the aquifers will be running out within ten years.

This doesn't seem to track.

They take water out of the river and put the same amount back in as its a closed system in a pipe. How can they be responsible for lower water levels if they are net zero in usage?

Send me a link that backs up your claim that they are depleting the water table so I can fix the holes in my knowledge

> It gets worse; Microsoft datacenters have been allowed to use up huge amounts of drinking water for cooling; it gets treated to avoid clogging up the lines, heated up, then just dumped back in the river.

> It's shameful and wasteful

What you've described does not sound shameful OR wasteful?

It’s not so much fun if you’re a fish.

Not so much fun for a fish, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. Existence itself carries a cost to those around the being that exists; should it be feasible for a datacenter and fish to coexist it ought to be done, but were I to pick one over the other, I'm afraid the fish has to go.

All sorts of things can be tracked through wastewater; cocaine use, COVID prevalence, that kind of thing.

As always "if done correctly" carries a bit of an asterisk.

That's interesting and quite worrying isn't it?

Makes sense that with such a huge global pop and increasing usage of medicines and pesticides the global water supply will eventually turn into a toxic sludge.

Anti depressants have just been found deep underwater in Antarctica so it seems all fish are swimming in a soup of blood thinners and psycho-active medication.

I wonder when the ocean ecosystem will collapse from this and when humans will turn "weird", if they haven't already done that. Imagine constantly being medicated with 1000 medications from the moment you are in the womb.

I hope many of these things are so trace that it's almost homeopathic, ie. doesn't have an effect - can anyone confirm or deny this?

>> I wonder when the ocean ecosystem will collapse from this and when humans will turn "weird", if they haven't already done that

Indeed. At least in the case of fish it turned out that plastic pollution starts to affect the hormonal balance males starting from the 3rd generation.

Makes you think about the ever lowering sperm-count in males across the board.

Tangentially, there have been numerous studies linking trace levels of naturally occurring lithium to lower rates of mental health problems and suicide.

Maybe we'll find out that the reduction in violence we've seen since the 90s is partially due to SSRIs in the water. Might not be helping obesity rates either.

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