Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

thehill.com

131 pointssantaz01168 comments

There may be good news on this front.

Most of this water is being used to farm, specifically to grow feed crops for cattle. Anyone that can hearken back to elementary school will remember that you lose a lot of energy in the food chain. It takes an absolute shitton of water to get to a steak, 1800 gallons for one 16oz cut (https://www.denverwater.org/tap/whats-beef-water). But a demographic crises is coming. I was just at the stock show here in Denver and yes, ranchers are very much framing this as a crises. 12% of the population is eating half the beef, males 50-65 (https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795). This group is dying off quickly, quicker even than their peers, as increased beef consumption is a big predictor of early mortality. Younger populations are curbing beef consumption for chicken and it's far more water efficient.

But where does the water go? It can't simply just vanish. It's a capacity problem, right?

Also who cares who eats the beef? If you price in the water usage then these people eating all the beef will either keep eating and pay for their use or stop.

Don't blame people for enjoying their life. It's akin to blaming people for using electricity when it is powered by coal...

The remark about who eats the beer is about the fact baby boomer generation is in full swing retirement wave. As they retire they switch to fixed income and as they age, they will consume less beef, because their bodies won't keep up.

Basically if demographics hold, then the US will see a drop in beef consumption in 5 years and in part, more water conservation lol

What does that have to do with water conservation? It's not water conservation it's water usage that's going down.

If you fill your car tank and don't drive, you're not conserving it because it's still going to drain just as fast when you do drive. The car has already got the water in there. You won't take it back out.

>But where does the water go

Not back into aquifers, that takes hundreds if not thousands of years.

>Also who cares who eats the beef? If you price in the water usage

Ya, that's kinda the point, we don't. If we removed the massive subsidies propping up ranching very few people would be consuming beef.

>Don't blame people for enjoying their life

I don't think I did, but as you brought it up. I'll absolutely shame people for having disproportionate impacts on conservation of our natural resources. Boomers especially are leaving the planet a worse place than they inherited and I for one hope younger generations can reverse that trend.

> that takes hundreds if not thousands of years.

Wut. Where are you getting this from? It takes few decades max.

Yeah so they're not back into aquifers, but so what. Where is it going if we aren't reusing it? Into the ocean? That is the only reasonable explanation. Unless it's physically leaving Earth which I doubt but also it could be true, who knows.

So remove them. Stop crying about cows or the medium, they aren't related to it. It's purely a regulated movement problem.

You are talking about who is eating the meat. It is totally irrelevant unless you are there to single them out and blame them.

So you're blaming who, the people eating or the "boomers" regulating it so they can eat? Right now it sounds like the people eating. Consumers aren't the problem. If you give people things they enjoy they will consume them, that isn't new science, and so they should.

The main point they are trying to make is the people eating most of the beef are dying off. If the trend holds and younger generations don't drastically increase beef consumption, there just won't be anyone to eat the same amount of beef they are producing currently. Therefore, they will have to reduce beef production which may reduce water used when growing food to feed the cattle as fewer cattle eat less food.

So they are pointing out this problem may resolve itself somewhat as the people that industry relies on die out or retire to an income less able to buy steak for every meal.

But what does all that have to do with anything? It won't resolve itself. Natural products have ebbs and flows. Meat isn't exactly a luxury product.

The way we produce meat is anything but natural these days. That takes its toll on our resources. Far more than growing food directly for humans does.

The way we produce anything natural is not natural. You're right. That doesn't make it not natural.

You seem to be simultaneously unable to read or comprehend and quite upset at something. I will not waste me time trying to explain it a third time.

I'm neither. I'm not sure why you are upset now though. Did you not want me to point out how useless tracking consumers is on something like food?

The NYTimes had an article recently that indicated the volume of chicken consumption has increased to a point where it is also a drain on aquifers.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/24/climate/groun...

That is a positive trend, but a few good marketing campaigns can increase eating beef again.

> That is a positive trend, but a few good marketing campaigns can increase eating beef again.

It's not that simple.

Millennials don't eat meat in the same quantities as their parents did and that's not going to change any time soon. Also, this generation is basically allergic to typical marketing campaigns. They also get how eating meat is detrimental to the environment, something they care a lot about.

"Notable Millennial Food Trends: What Do They Like To Eat?" — https://dfaingredients.com/trends/millennial-food-trends/

>According to other research sources, a total of 96 percent of millennials say they replace a meal with a snack once a week, and 58 percent say they snack 4-5 times a day!

"I don't think he knows about second breakfast, Pip"

>Also, this generation is basically allergic to typical marketing campaigns.

Huh?

The newest generation is the easiest that's ever been to advertise to. The medium has just changed...

According to who? I'll admit I'm not a marketer, but I'm in meetings with and work alongside our chief sales officer a lot and the sentiment is always that millenials are very hard to sell to and gen-z is damn near impossible. Advertising turns them off.

According to anyone who's been around these people and their marketing tools like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc.

Scene 2: Enter Paleo.

> To an outsized extent, the problems identified in the Nature study are — for Americans at least — problems of California, and of the national food systems’ reliance on the fertile Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and the groundwater beneath.

This makes it sound like the only sane option is for the rest of the USA to stop being so dependent on California.

One change which would have to be made is here in the Midwest, we grow a lot of soybeans and corn. We feed most of it to animals. There are likely better uses for that land, especially when talking about modern corn as it is so nitrogen hungry that nearly all farmers apply high nitrogen fertilizer...which runs off into the rivers and causes the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

So, so many things could be better if we reduced meat consumption and transitioned to growing food humans actually eat. But...it's unlikely to happen for an equally large number of reasons.

Plants are already pretty inefficient (~1-3%) at converting solar energy to stored chemical energy (glucose -> fats/carbs)

https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2012...

However ignore the solar conversion, we put in a ratio of 3:1 i.e 3 calories of energy in for 1 calorie of energy out in plant energy (30%).

https://sustainability.emory.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/...

Add the mix of energy required for irrigation, producing industrial fertilizers, harvesting and then feeding to another inefficient organism (cows, pigs, chicken).

https://cbey.yale.edu/our-stories/disrupting-meat

Cows are 25:1 ratio (4%) calories of feed in to calories of meat out. Pigs are 1:15 (6%), and Chicken is 1:9 (11%).

So if you take the total amount of energy received from sun being converted to chemical energy in cows that is only 0.012% of solar energy output into beef.

---

The biggest breakthrough we can make as humans is to efficiently convert solar energy into chemical energy. chemical energy we can eat as food for humans that tastes great, and chemical energy we can use for homes, transport and industrial processes.

And the thing about converting solar -> chemical energy is that it is carbon negative. Plants and phytoplankton are 1% efficient, yet they convert billions of tons of C02 + solar energy into chemical energy.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Phytoplankton

---

I'm hoping in our lifetimes we can crack artificial high efficiency photosynthesis at scale with engineered algae.

Oil is only cheap because of 10s of 1000s of years it has been compacted underground, but at our rate, we may deplete it in 100-200 years.

Engineered algae would be way cheaper and distributed than oil. Most humans live where there is sunshine and water.

Our future depends on how efficiently and cheaply we can convert solar -> chemical energy.

I think you're optimizing the wrong thing here. We don't need to be hyper efficient in terms of Sun's energy, as it's one of the most abundant sources of energy available and will not run out any time soon.

First one should optimize over land and resource use, as well as sustainability (CO2, fertilizer run-off etc.). Not to mention cost (including subsidies).

The hyper-efficient algae you describe sounds a bit like ice-9…

A lot of that corn goes into ethanol instead.

Roughly 1/3rd of the US corn production is for ethanol[1], 1/3rd for animal feed, and 1/3rd for human food products. Ethanol kind of sucks as a fuel though, because it can't be piped for various reasons[2] including water-induced separation in gasoline-ethanol blends and oxygen induced steel corrosion requiring specialized pipeline construction to mitigate. This means ethanol is usually shipped via train and worse, trucked, increasing diesel usage/emissions on top of the farm equipment emissions to grow and harvest the corn in the first place.

So in the end it isn't much better than pure gasoline at best, and is actually overall higher total emissions at worst.

Edit: ethanol also doesn't have the same range as gasoline per tank, so vehicles may need to fuel up more often, making the problem worse.

1. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar...

2. https://www.ogj.com/refining-processing/article/17217746/eth...

I think the future is going to find the past 100 years or so an insane time in history as we used all the fossil fuels and water up in the blink of an eye on the historical time scale.

> an insane time in history as we used all the fossil fuels and water up in the blink of an eye on the historical time scale.

I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know, but this is what exponential growth does. Even when the exponent is tiny.

If I had a solution to the impending energy / water crunch, somebody would've thought of it already. :-(

IF we didn't find fossil fuels, in all likely hood we would still be living in the 18th century.

Electricity came up around the same time and never stopped - the tech involved with electronics and electric everything has far surpassed that of oil and gas. There were electric cars at the same time ICEs were being invented. Oil and gas won for selfish reasons.

O&G won because the energy density is so extremely high.

Gasoline may be a lot more energy dense, but ICE are about 20% to 40% efficiency while electric motors are about 60% - 80% efficient. So the differences aren't as great as you might think.

If we hadn't just jumped at gasoline and money hadn't flowed so readily towards that tech, there's no telling how far battery tech would be today. A lot further than it is now, I have no doubt.

The fact is that big oil has killed off again and again any threat it perceives against its absolute stranglehold on us. We've been stuck with gas engines because of greed, and only now in the 2000s are we considering alternatives because of the damage that's been done by big oil.

In response to the now deleted response questioning "how can we mine lithium without fossil fuels" ...

Rio Tinto (mining since the pre Roman gold mines at Rio Tinto in Spain ... (alledgedly)) are already transitioning to hydrogen and renewables on their iron ore (and other) mines that move ~ 800 million tonne per annum from Western Australia (that's something like 4x greater than peak mining for steel in the US ever reached in a year).

Rio Tinto and Komatsu partnering for zero-emission mining

https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/2021/rio-tinto-and...

See other headlines on electric trains, automation, green hydrogen (from solar) for aluminium calcination, Fortescue Futures, etc.

> Gasoline may be a lot more energy dense, but ICE are about 20% to 40% efficiency while electric motors are about 60% - 80% efficient.

You are correct about energy efficiency of ICE vs electric motor efficiency.

> So the differences aren't as great as you might think.

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

  +-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+-------------------+
  |              *              |  Gasoline   | Li-ion Batteries | Gasoline Multiple |
  +-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+-------------------+
  | Gravimetric Density (MJ/kg) | 0.59 – 1.06 |             46.4 | 56.5x             |
  | Volumetric Density (MJ/L)   | 1.74 – 2.83 |             34.2 | 15.5x             |
  +-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+-------------------+

Gasoline weighs ~50x less and takes 15x less volume for the same energy in a battery.

There is only so much electrical energy that can be jammed in metals that form batteries. Chemical energy in C-C or C-H bonds is so much more dense.

https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoret...

In a similar paradigm, fusion energy is 20-100 million times more dense than gasoline.

https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fusion-energy

---

We have so much science and engineering to do to truly be masters of energy and intelligence.

We haven’t switched because electricity (37 qBTU) is only a third (100 qBTU) of our energy production, and we don’t know how to triple the electricity grid.

Of our electricity production, 60% is fossil fuels (coal, gas, or petroleum).

We have zero clue how to replace our total energy consumption (100 qBTU) with our renewable production (15 qBTU).

This is all using official EIA numbers:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

Also, gasoline is 13 MJ/kg; normal batteries are < 1 MJ/kg. That’s a lot of density difference.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Refe...

>We haven’t switched because electricity (37 qBTU) is only a third (100 qBTU) of our energy production, and we don’t know how to triple the electricity grid.

Sure, because plenty of money went into oil refineries and not electric infrastructure over the last 100 years.

>Of our electricity production, 60% is fossil fuels (coal, gas, or petroleum).

There's plenty of alternatives that big oil has put its foot on. Nuclear and solar are absolutely great alternatives, but we've wasted the last 100 years spending on big oil infrastructure and jobs.

>We have zero clue how to replace our total energy consumption (100 qBTU) with our renewable production (15 qBTU).

We should have a clue. It's like spending all your time playing video games and then suddenly when your 50 looking back at the wasted time when you're getting kicked out of your parents basement.

My point is that it didn't have to be this way.

Electrical generators were powered by fossil fuels (excluding hydro) until nuclear/solar/wind became economical. There would be no electricity without fossil fuels, full stop.

From WP:

"In 1878, the world's first hydroelectric power scheme was developed at Cragside in Northumberland, England, by William Armstrong. It was used to power a single arc lamp in his art gallery.[13] The old Schoelkopf Power Station No. 1, US, near Niagara Falls, began to produce electricity in 1881. The first Edison hydroelectric power station, the Vulcan Street Plant, began operating September 30, 1882, in Appleton, Wisconsin, with an output of about 12.5 kilowatts.[14] By 1886 there were 45 hydroelectric power stations in the United States and Canada; and by 1889 there were 200 in the United States alone.[1]"

That is the least of it. We also radically changed the climate without really seriously trying to change our lives and our methods of growing food to reflect the new climate.

With solar energy prices plummeting, it may make sense during peak production hours to use it to do desalination and/or extract water from the air, depending on where you are.

It's like trying to use a hammer to screw some bolts. The priority should be sustainable development. We have enough water, just not great usage. The water infrastructure we have today is aged and needs to expand to allow for the population growth the country has seen. On top of that, we are expanding cities in parts of the country where water is scarce. We are growing water intensive crops in parts of the country that does not have water for it. We are also mismanaging the largest watershed in the country: the Missisippi. Just focus on these problems than creating other problems with desalination.

> The priority should be sustainable development. We have enough water, just not great usage.

We may have enough water for now but we're using it faster than it can be replenished; our reserves in aquifers is starting to run out.

I watched the documentary Day Zero [1] last year about the global water crisis. I highly recommend anyone interested in what's going on with water to watch it. It was one of those oh shit movies where on one hand, you're glad you learned something important and on the other hand, you kinda wish you could have stayed blissfully ignorant because of how scary the situation actually is.

For example, the Ogallala Aquifer [2] covers approximately 174,000 square miles across 8 states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. It's one of the largest aquifers in the world.

Of all the water that's extracted from it, only 10% gets replenished. That's obviously not sustainable, especially with climate change, increasing municipal and farming use.

We're not going to desalinate our way out of this all over the world.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13323462

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

> The priority should be sustainable development.

What does sustainable mean? It sounds like the implication is that if we go backwards technologically that would somehow be sustainable.

If we doubled down on renewable energy or even nuclear energy and desalination maybe we could increase water consumption and reduce our impact on the environment without any compromises. It’s easy to be a cynic and say we should reduce agricultural output or tell people to have a worse quality of life while giving up on finding solutions, because that viewpoint requires no problem solving or innovation. That isn’t sustainability, it’s the exact opposite.

It's also easy to wave a magical wand technological solution like desalination instead of looking into the issue more holistically: what is currently wasteful that we could make more efficient?

Desalination is just more waste of energy, it can be part of a solution but shouldn't be the solution. We really need to look into the natural systems we modified/interfered and figure out ways to be much more efficient with them. And that is what usually gets called "sustainable".

It's not being a mennonite, much rather the opposite: be smarter about what we use, extract more from less.

Desalination increases your environmental footprint because it is ecologically very damaging. It won’t allow you to reduce your impact on the environment.

93 billion gallons of fresh water falls on Los Angeles every year. (12 inches / y over the whole surface area[1])

They have ~2 million households[2], and a household uses an average of 3,000 g/m or 36,000 g/y/h or about 80 billion gallons / y for all households.

Huge coincidence, that's pretty close to balanced out.

And yet, we shuffle the rainfall to the ocean and pray for snowpack in the mountains and protest Nestle and Almond farmers.

1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%2812+inches+*+los+a...

2. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=households+in+los+angel...

Only a fraction of that can be captured

I’d agree for a lot of places heavy on greenery… but LA? The city itself seems to have a very small percentage of greenery.

I’m assuming the rest is mostly captured via sewers just to prevent flooding.

This is true.

A better designed city could capture more.

Why is that? If it is slowed down and sunk into the earth it would add to the aquifers, no?

Going off the great book “Rainwater Harvesting in Drylands & Beyond”

Cool, out of everything in Star Wars it turns out moisture farming was the thing that would make it to real life.

they're testing some new tech that directly uses the sun to desalinate.

Really, what's required for the electric grid is ways to store the energy, and not use it.

For places like Arizona, they may need a whole different type of infrastructure of grey water use. Just piping in water ain't gonna be sustainable.

> they're testing some new tech that directly uses the sun to desalinate.

We should be implementing technologies we have now today rather than banking on something that might or might not pan out.

I don't hate the idea of piping water throughout areas or creating artificial enclosed canals of sorts.

But then I'm on the side of thinking that we should advance and terraform the planet rather than try to be more one with nature and cut back.

So a nuclear power plant adjacent to the ocean and a desal plant?

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

We can have safe nuclear power, right after we invent safe people. Till you solve the human problem nukes are bad mmmkay.

Nobody died in Fukushima, except in a bungled evacuation of the surrounding area. Maybe one person in the fullness of time. Nuclear power is literally the safest power source in deaths per TWh - right between wind and solar. [1]

We have safe nuclear power, so I'm pleased to inform you that your concern was mitigated, about 50 years ago.

[edit] Also, I would point out the worst nuclear accident in history killed 4000 people according to USCEAR. The next-worst killed 1. The worst hydro accident in history (Bangqiao Dam) killed 240,000, damaged 5 million homes, displaced 10.5 million people and wiped several cities off the face of the earth - yet for some reason it doesn't share the same perception of intense danger. Interesting. [2]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Great, we're looking at deaths till the point of generation.

4.5 billion years, is the half life of uranium. Come back to me with stats then....

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

We're going to be pouring money into that shit show for probably a 1000 years, and an exclusion zone for 20,000.

So if you want to move next to Fukushima or Chernobyl you can preach safe nuclear from there, other wise stop the nonsene. The same companies that kill people with coal, and gas lines, and Power lines (lookin at you PGE) dont need to run nuclear plants. They are untrustworthy.

The amount of spent uranium that will need to stored is infinitesimally small compared to the amount of energy that is produced in contrast to the waste that is produced by any other non-renewable source. It will typically get buried deep in the earths crust - deeper than anything save for mining, encased in concrete, and buried over where it would be most unlikely that anything will touch it ever again.

>>> It will typically get buried deep in the earths crust

IN the us, above ground, on site, in dry casks (Fukushima had this same issue too) There is no plan for where to put it. Yuca mountain is stalled and no way to finish (and problems with the site)

https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us

Sweden got their shit together, but they dont have much in the way of power and their site has massive cost over runs.

https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-approve-nuclear-waste...

But, even underground, on the time scale were talking about, its complicated: https://longnow.org/ideas/the-other-10000-year-project-long-...

> IN the us, above ground, on site, in dry casks (Fukushima had this same issue too) There is no plan for where to put it. Yuca mountain is stalled and no way to finish (and problems with the site)

It wasn't an issue at Fukushima, it's not currently an issue in the US, and the reason Yucca Mountain isn't being developed is FUD and politics, not technical. Note that the vast majority of nuclear waste isn't high-level waste, but rather low-level - tools, clothes, etc.

Sorry - it wouldn't let me reply to your last comment...

>> Nuclear, all nuclear, has the down side of needing local power. If you have to shut down in an emergency you need to keep shit running (this is what killed Fukushima in part)...

Wouldn't that be true of any power source? If you do a full shutdown, the power to run everything has to come from somewhere? (Palo Verde handle maintenance shutdowns by having 3 reactors, 2 running and 1 down for refuel/maintenance).

Also, given the death tolls from any major hydro dam failing, I'd guess the numbers would be a wash (pun intended). More specifically, why would we assume things won't get safer over time? As for solar - how much space we can dedicate to it near cities could become a problem? and some places aren't really well suited to it (nor are some places suited to nuclear or hydro). According to other comments it also seems to be getting more expensive, and installs are slowing down.

I don't have a problem with solar, hydro OR nuclear ... Hell, I used to live near one of those methane producing garbage dumps, IIRC. I think the future is gonna require a balance. I

iirc, I live near the largest nuke plant in the US. No complaints. Perhaps the issue is more with the people running the plants, then the plants themselves. Also, recycling nuke waste like many countries do cuts the amount of waste down dramatically.

P.S. - we also use grey water for cooling the plant, limiting the amount of fresh water needed.

Edit: According to 1, "All of the nuclear waste collected at Palo Verde over the past 30 years is stored on-site. The waste is currently stored in cement-and-steel containers that take up a space the size of a football field." - seems pretty small for a 30 year life time, maybe a couple of tons / year ?

1) https://chamberbusinessnews.com/2019/10/25/inside-palo-verde...

Lets round up its generate to 4gw

Solar last year: 228gw was ADDED globally.

SO about 57 plants of the size of the one near your house every year.

400 nuclear plants will give us about 2 major accidents every 50 years at current rate. We can assume this is pretty close to a constant as plants age, natural disasters happen and everything gets more complicated.

Meanwhile solar is not responsive and doesn't work after dar, so needs storage. In a pure nuclear set up, you still need storage, because it isnt responsive (you can't just crank them up and down like a dimmer) ... Nuclear, all nuclear, has the down side of needing local power. If you have to shut down in an emergency you need to keep shit running (this is what killed Fukushima in part)... so we either need on site generation or a more complex grid, and probably because of safety, both.

It's not a question of IF we have an accident but when, and more plants doesn't make them safer it just lowers the time between accidents...

We aren't building more nuclear for a good reason. I does not make ANY sense to do so, the cost and complexity is too high for too little power.

With the disclaimer that I'm pro solar your accident based argument is weak as it ignores all accidents in resource mining for renewable infrastructure .. which will only increase as to date renewables make up only a fraction of the energy still generated by coal which is due to be replaced.

Make no mistake, accidents (death and injury) in resource mining (non nuclear) greatly outweigh the total deaths and injuries due to just uranium mining | processing and nuclear power accidents.

Lithium for batteries has barely started compared to where it is headed and we already see waste storage issues (Lynas, Malaysia) for large volumes of acids and associated low level radioactive waste.

Again, I'm pro renewables, but as an exploration geophysict who has worked on global mining databases I can state as fact that these (as do all things) come at a cost - and accident free is not a reality.

You're making a purely emotive argument based on feels sans actual real world data.

At the point my solar panel is installed all the death is built in. At the point my coal plant explodes, all the death is built in (no more outgassing, health increases going forward in fact).

The problem with the death toll of nuclear is that it's deferred.... So no one can agree what the impact of Chernobyl is. For instance, the UN cites a report and claims 4000 dead post accident. The report itself says 9000. Greenpeace says 90,000. IF we grew nuclear to 2000 plants (and that's just to replace coal) the accident rate is going to go UP. More humans more human factors (greed, angry about stuff at home and makes a mistake) and more "acts of god"...

The other side of the coin is your either going to have to increase mining nuclear materials... OR your going to need to start a breeder reactor program up again (turn that "used" uranium back into fuel)...

and all that uranium, the stuff that's contaminated. It has to go somewhere, for a long time. A timescale that no one can comprehend. https://longnow.org/ideas/the-other-10000-year-project-long-... ....

billions of years for the fuel (uranium) 20k years to move the elephants foot out of chrernoble. No one knows what to do with the fuel melted into the ground at Fukushima. Were closer to the pyramids being built than we are to the impacts of these disasters being cleaned up... at that scale there is the potential for "More harm" to happen past the horizon of every nation on earth today (20k years is older than the oldest human construction, but not artifact).

As a pro solar pragmatic engineer response:

> At the point my solar panel is installed all the death is built in.

No. The toxic waste ponds left after creating your solar panels remain with all the carcinogenic after effects. The large volume of low level radiactive waste from lithium processing for batery banks remains in ponds (again, see Lynas, Malaysia) awaiting possible pond leakages.

> no one can agree what the impact of Chernobyl is. For instance, the UN cites a report and claims 4000 dead post accident. The report itself says 9000. Greenpeace says 90,000.

So .. how many actual body bags definitive linked then?

Once a waste problem hits ANOVA analysis to tease out deaths from other background deaths it's an acedemic exercise not dissimilar to estimating cancer deaths from eWaste (like solar panel production waste bybroducts).

> billions of years for the fuel (uranium)

So .. hardly breaks down at all, barely radioactive is what you're saying here?

Lead has a half life in the billions of years also - anywhere there's granite has uranium .. and it's the daughter products like Radon gas that fill granite valleys and basements that kill (like a packet a day smoking habit).

> 20k years to move the elephants foot out of chrernoble.

Why move it when it's sufficient to glass it over and stay a few hundred feet back ?

> IF we grew nuclear to 2000 plants the accident rate is going to go UP.

By how much though? Designs have changed since Chernobyl, lessons were learned from Fukishima (which had fewer deaths than the earthquake events and fewer deaths than serious mining accidents).

There are risks everywhere - it's difficult for many to pragmatic assess and compare risk.

You appear myopic WRT risk in the sense that some risk appears much larger and other risk isn't seen at all.

> So .. how many actual body bags definitive linked then?

Several hundred, most of them in the days and months immediately following the incident.

The remainder are based on the UNSCEAR estimates over the fullness of time including people who commited suicide because they fear they're somehow contaminated. The majority of the deaths are derived the statistical projections of death. They estimate the impact of the fallout using the linear no threshold dose-response model (itself, contested for being too conservative).

Suffice it to say Greenpeace is out to lunch with their projections.

> Several hundred.

Okay, for Part Two .. is that a high number or a low number when compared to a dam burst or a Bhopal type chemical plant accident?

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

Point being, are we globally casual about all manner of destructive events and relatively over sensitive to OMG! nuclear!! accidents?

Sorry, I'm not the person you were replying to, I suspected they wouldn't so I wanted to share the research I did earlier on. I agree with you, and to me these numbers seem rather low relative to the known harms associated with other generation methods. To steelman, it could certainly have been a lot worse, but also, it wasn't, and much was learned that has been incorporated into modern designs.

My apologies if I seemed combative :)

I noted at the time that you were another commenter and that you seemed in general agreement, I added further framing to point out that while a large number and that all death is tragic it's not been the case that nuclear power accidents have been worse than other industrial | power accidents in world history.

Not at all, I would have replied the same way to OP, heh. I agree with you. All death is bad, less death is better, and the scale of nuclear accidents doesn't seem out of line with other industrial accidents. People get spooked by the spicy rocks.

Wow..Thats a name I haven't seen in ages! I remember when that happened..Horrible and last time I looked (10-15 years ago??) the wells were still contaminated, and people still had to drink the water :-/

> The toxic waste ponds left after creating your solar panels remain

Yes we're bad at cleaning things up AT SCALE. We do stupid and shitty things to make a buck AT SCALE. People are terrible...

>> Chernobyl, lessons were learned from Fukishima (which had fewer deaths than the earthquake events and fewer deaths than serious mining accidents).

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2017/11/...

Disasters at power plants are dangerous. There is a coal plant whose explosion killed about the same number of people who died on site at chernoble.

That toxic pond left over from solar. No one looks at it, no one gives a fuck about it, and though we know how to clean it up we dont. The clean up from Fukushima, from Chernobyl is at present close to 100 billon, and will continue for 1000's of years. The the melted down fuel on both sites will remain in place for a long time to come. ( https://apnews.com/article/japan-nuclear-fukushima-plant-dec... )

Thats 860 tons of nuclear waste at Fukushima that we dont know what to do with.

There is also the off site storage, that cotiains rubble removed from site, and the spent fuel from ponds on site.

All of this material remains a threat, it will have to remain tagged, tracked and under guard for the rest of its life. OR get dug up, buried and hidden away in so deep that we hope no one finds it.

> By how much though? Designs have changed since Chernobyl, lessons were learned from Fukishima ... There are risks everywhere - it's difficult for many to pragmatic assess and compare risk.

The risks from nuclear are so high that everything gets tagged, tracked, checked on by national and international agencies, and remains under guard. Nulcears toxic pond is going to last for 1000's of years, longer than any human civilization has. It's going to need to be tracked, tagged and guarded for that time or it will become an existential threat all over again (dirty bomb any one). All the toxic ponds are over and forgotten and nuclear is rearing its ugly head, is costing us still.

We know the risks for solar, we know the risks for nuclear. There is a reason no one is building more at scale. There is a reason we only built one (comerical) reactor in 40 years in the us. The economics of them dont make sense (no one wants 1000 years of liablity) . The one we did just build (new site, not adding to an existing one) is a whole story in and of itself, money the DOE and the DOD are all involved in that (and the potential for producing tritium in the us again).

not who you responded to but...

Do we even have enough lithium etc. to produce all the solar panels (and batteries for ev's ??) we're gonna need ?

P.S. - good point on the dangers of mining!

It's highly probable we will have enough economically viable lithium from ground mining, we have "known measured reserves" that are less than we need (but have been explored, drilled, and modelled) and an excess of indicated resources (which are places trace tested that look a lot like other places with good reserves, but have not yet been drilled).

Then there's seawater (which always gets bought up but isn't really a thing yet).

More to the bigger picture, it's not just lithium - Vanadium redox batteries are better for grid storage where light nimble weight for a mobile vehicle doesn't matter so much.

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

Not to mention other ongoing battery research and forms of energy storage (thermal mass, hydrogen, ammonia, etc) that make sense in an abundance of renewable energy that may soon arrive.

oh - the Vanadium thing is interesting... I guess the poor round trip efficiency and poor energy-to-volume ratio are what we're waiting for before they become more common?

speaking of ammonia - what do you think of ammonia engines? I just recently heard of them...

The battery and the panels we can do.

ITs the upgrades to the grid that we aren't close on and aren't making progress on.

If you have an all electric house, a 3 day battery, all electric appliances and cars to charge... works great.

Now how about a week of rain. Suddenly your either powerless or your utility has to import enough power to keep that all electric everything running. It's more lines, and transformers. We can't maintain global transformer demand today. A large disaster would be crippling (think solar flair, terrorism). It has been a major issue for Ukraine to replace this damaged infrastructure (due to production constraints).

I'd assume even if you have all that, you'd still be tied to the city grid, so it wouldn't require any 'extra' over your current connection? (At least, thats how it works here - you might have roof top solar, but you keep your existing grid connection...)

P.S. - I'm curious what (if any) solar flares/storms will have in the near future as we're approaching the 'bad' part of the solar cycle...Doubtful anything will happen since the strongest recorded sun flare was in 2001 and I dont recall any disruptions. We've added a lot more stuff in orbit, and made transistors a lot smaller since then though, so it will be interesting.

Dam - now it let me reply - sorry, I responded above

This really smacks of Brandolini's law, or the "bullshit asymmetry principle" where debunking claims takes much more effort than making them. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

We can have safe nuclear, full stop. Your FUD notwithstanding.

we can barely get a mentally fit president.

good luck with that.

We, as a society can't tighten the bolts on plane doors.

Its not a question of IF we have an accident its how many, how often and how bad. It's gonna be greed, trying to get more out of the plant, or cutting corners on keeping it safe, its two people who had fights with their partners and dont cross check, Its a tidal wave and a sequence of events that no one thought of.

And we know the scope of those things: Chernobyl, 20k years 1000 mile exclusion zone. It will take them 100 years to clean up the buildings that are there, we will likely need to build ANOTHER rolling roof to continue that work. Fukushima is a cluster fuck still. They just recently started removing spent uranium fuel rods that were on site. Most nuclear sites have cooling pools filled with radioactive material, that needs to be stored for a scale that is beyond human comprehension. Meanwhile no one has a good or straight answer on how to deal with the meltdown, the fuel IN the ground, still hot.

All that fuel is waiting for someone to turn it into a dirty bomb. Or we can start recycling it and running breeder reactors (and they are dangerous and have the down sides, typically they dont generate much power).

Right now we have about 379.79GW of nuclear generation globally from 400 odd rectors. At the ongoing cost of the two meltdowns. Right now solar is growing by 228 GW a year.

TO keep pace with solar, you're going to have to build 200 reactors a year, every year, for the next 20 years. The solar has its "death toll" built in at install time. The reactor's death toll is one of human factors, it's not an IF it's a when. And that cost could be 3 mile island, or a Chernobyl. That cost could be some wack job breaking in and stealing waste for a dirty bomb, or an accident moving it to the long term storage that we DONT have right now, and dont know how to secure for the time scale that it will be deadly on.

> We, as a society can't tighten the bolts on plane doors.

And yet planes are the single safest places you can be at any given time. Even on a 737-NG you're far more likely to die driving to/from the airport than during the flight.

I would strongly suggest rethinking how you evaluate and manage tail risk.

> Or we can start recycling it and running breeder reactors (and they are dangerous and have the down sides, typically they dont generate much power).

I'm not going to get into it with you because this is just gish gallop, but no, they do not generate less power than conventional reactors. They require dramatically less fuel, several orders of magnitude. Some of them even produce more fuel than they consume. They're not really used only because the cost of Uranium is about $0.005/kWh and there's plenty of it, so there's no need for breeder reactors.

I refer you once again to Brandolini's law. Pretty much everything you claim is wrong and easily disproven with a quick Google search.

Don't facts get in the way of a good narrative, I guess.

Water is a lot easier to store than electricity. Desalinate while the sun is shining to fill a reservoir that you can pull from 24/7.

> Water is a lot easier to store than electricity. Desalinate while the sun is shining to fill a reservoir that you can pull from 24/7.

Cheap to store, expensive to transport. Desalinisation only makes sense if you are near the coast and short of water. Further inland it becomes uneconomical.

The Earth is not short on fresh water, the problem is getting fresh water where it is needed.

True, but it isn't energy, and desal requires firm generation, so you're not using renewables that would've been curtailed but instead competing with load that needs consistent power. Still hopeful considering the cost decline curve of utility scale storage, but it isn't a silver bullet based on solar being free at noon.

>desal requires firm generation

Most existing plants are designed for this, but it is by no means necessary.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001191642...

>This work analyses the long-term performance of a full-scale brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) desalination plant that has been working under intermittent operating conditions for 14 years (~9 h d−1).

TIL. Appreciate the correction.

You combine the desalination with pumped hydro storage. Or you just deploy it with intermittent power, as the other poster pointed out. https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/pumped-storage-hydropower-2666...

But water in a reservoir is one of the oldest ways of storing energy.

Why do you need to desalinate it to use it for energy storage? Seems like an unnecessary step that would not increase the gravitational potential energy at all.

You really don't want to mix salty water with machines unless you have to.

It's done routinely in ships and such. It's certainly much easier than the energy and machinery it would take for desalination.

No, it isn't easier, it's done on ships for lack of choice.

Pumped storage hydro is a way to store energy, but also can dispense water.

> they're testing some new tech that directly uses the sun to desalinate.

I'm intrigued. Link?

Desalination means killing some ecosystem, wherever you choose to dump the brine, with waste salt.

And cover existing canals with solar to reduce evaporation!

> solar energy prices plummeting

Shopping for solar in California, prices aren't plummeting. With high interest rates, solar no longer makes economic sense. Its more expensive than ever. Many solar installers are facing bankruptcy because the market has collapsed.

People are downvoting this, but from Tesla earnings today

"Solar deployments declined on a sequential and YoY basis to 41 MW. Downward pressure on solar demand continued into Q4 as interest rates have remained high."

This isn't an opinion, this is a fact. You could also compare the cost of capital between 3% and 10% and derive a cost per kwh.

The failures of a tiny player like Tesla Solar are totally unrelated to US solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity.

From 2021 to 2022 solar PV went from ~161,499 GWh to ~202,080 GWh of net generation (~25.1% increase) [1]. Utility scale went from 112,335 GWh to 140,798 GWh (~25.3% increase) [2] and personal/small scale solar PV went from ~49,164 GWh to ~61,282 GWh (~24.6% increase). New solar PV accounts for 11,058 MW of the total 31,692 MW (~34.8%) capacity additions for 2022 [3] and 24,545 MW of the total 51,490 MW (~47.6%) capacity additions that were planned for 2023 [4].

Tesla Solar accounts for ~1/5 of 1% of solar installation capacity, so it is hardly relevant compared to actual solar energy companies.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_a.html

[2] Utility Scale Solar includes non-PV, Utility Scale PV numbers derived by subtracting Small Scale Solar Photovoltaic from Estimated Total Solar Photovoltaic

[3] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_06.html

[4] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_05.html

What is the cost of a $50,000 at 10% interest vs the cost of $50,000 at 2.5% interest over 10 years?

Money is not free. Solar is now expensive:

[1] https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/high-interest...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-11-03/invest...

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/solar-stocks-get-hit-as-risin...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/climate/renewable-energy-...

[5] https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/high-interest-rates-imp...

[6] https://www.ft.com/content/07443afb-b935-492d-8711-8c47e4353...

[7] https://time.com/6281021/renewable-energy-interest-rates/

[8] https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/01/13/why-solar-energy-s...

[9] https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2024/01/high-interest-...

[10] https://www.newsweek.com/high-interest-rates-impact-solar-en...

Utility-scale solar is what is both cheap and plummeting in price, relative to other sources, and has even gone negative during peak production hours.

Toilets haven't been fundamentally changed in 100 years. We flush unfathomable gallons literally down the toilet because we can't think of a better way to move poop around.

We mandate half-flush systems in Australia. A half flush is 0.8 gallons and a US system uses 1.6 gallons per flush. Easy to retrofit your home if you care about water usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_flush_toilet https://www.epa.gov/watersense/residential-toilets

I have a toilet that uses probably 5 times less water than one used 30 years ago, and it even flushes better (feels like a power-flush without being one).

Meanwhile Nestle is pumping thousands of gallons per minute out of aquifers to put into plastic bottles.

Thousands of gallons per minute is not much on the scale of the US.

The Mississippi alone has a flow rate of almost ~6M gallons per minute.

The US uses almost ~500M gallons of water per minute.

Nestle is a pretty large user of water and if it's even 5k gallons per minute that's 1 in 100,000 gallons.

That's about how much 24,000 houses use. On the scale of the US, that's not really a lot.

Yes, bottled water is dumb. No, it is not the reason the Colorado basin is going bone dry. And if you were building a list of reasons, Nestle wouldn't even be worth mentioning.

1) You're taking it too literally

2) It doesn't matter if it's small on the scale of the US if it's big on the scale of individual aquifers

> taking it too literally

They’re straw men. The problem is almost entirely inefficient farming. Bottled water and golf courses don’t move the needle, but they do absorb activist resources. It’s an incredibly effective rhetorical technique in a public sphere that chases shiny range-inducing factoids.

Nestle gets its water from all sorts of places, so in theory, the size of their global draw vs the size of individual aquifers shouldn't matter.

In practice, it does for some of their processing plants.

For instance, in Ontario, they pull water from aquifers that would otherwise go to tribes that have run out of water:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/oct/04/ontario-six-n...

Not taking it too literally at all. GP obviously wanted to get on their soapbox about The Corporations and they were corrected / called out re the relevance of that particular rant. At a point it’s breaking HN’s rules

Does whether the tap water I drink comes from a plastic bottle or a reusable container affect aquifers?

If a private company is doing it - and presumably not paying what the water is worth - that takes away the public's ability to decide how to prioritize the limited remaining water.

Also, according to these people - https://foodprint.org/blog/plastic-water-bottle/ - it takes over 5 liters of water to make one bottle.

Literally 0 impact as compared to farming.

And the amount of water for farming that is used to grow crops for animals rather than humans, with beef needing an absurd amount[0] yet is has always argued on for different research methods and money from sources that want to confused us[1].

To quote another study [2] on the issue.

>Agriculture accounts for 92% of the freshwater footprint of humanity; almost one third relates to animal products. ... >In the western countries, the WF of meat can be reduced by changing consumption, requiring a transition in the present nutrition pattern and a reduction of food wastes. Obviously, the WF of the livestock sector is only one of the concerns to be taken into account. Other factors include animal welfare, food security, public health concerns and environmental issues other than water, like contribution to emission of greenhouse gases.

It took a while for me to come to grips that I needed to change food comsumption to only non-animal products. Way to many reasons. Maybe comments on threads like this can slowly change other people as well. We need compounding changes to really make a difference.

[0] https://www.watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120001666638282817 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221237171...

It all comes down to where crops for animals are produced. If ground water is needed it is probably wrong place. In places where rain covers the water need, we are entirely fine as that water will mostly end up back to cycles or even rivers. Which then if needed can be processed.

At least farming feeds people rather than taking water from communities purely for profit

In a way - it mostly provides for dairy, which is an incredibly lossy operation.

The "alfalfa in the desert" stuff you hear about isn't for salads. It's feed for cattle.

A gallon of milk requires [edit](4-5 gallons excluding consumption for growing feed, ~800 gallons, contested, fully realized)[1, 2] and a pound of beef requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 gallons. [3]

Beef is where the water goes, not Nestle water bottles, which are silly too. You drink about 185 gallons of water per year, meaning 1 pound of beef consumes 10 years worth of your personal drinking budget. Assuming you drank every single drop out of a Nestle water bottle, it really does round to zero compared to agriculture.

[1] https://www.watereducation.org/post/food-facts-how-much-wate...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092652/volume-of-water-...

[3] https://www.watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-...

> It's feed for cattle.

Saudi Dairy. All that alfalfa grown with groundwater in the desert is shipped to a country that banned growing alfalfa with groundwater in the desert.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90963878/arizona-is-evicting-a-s...

> The "alfalfa in the desert" stuff you hear about isn't for salads. It's feed for cattle.

Worse. It's feed for Chinese cattle in China. Alfalfa is shippable, and it gets shipped to the Chinese mainland. Economically speaking, alfalfa and water are pretty fungible, one's as good as the other, and they're buying it up subsidized by the US government to the detriment of American taxpayers. If we taxed alfalfa sold abroad to make the price reasonable, that nonsense would stop immediately.

now do almonds..... Which alot of people want to use as a replacement for things like Milk, or Flour....

Yes, almonds require a lot of water to grow also. Oat, soy and coconut require orders of magnitude less.

"It takes a bonkers 1,611 US gallons (6,098 litres) to produce 1 litre of almond milk,” says the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Pete Hemingway." [1]

So that would be 6,000 gallons of water to make 1 Gallon of Almond Milk... that seems to be more than your 800 Gallon figure for cow milk....

Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/05/ditch-the-almon...

Where did you get the idea I supported almond production for milk substitutes. I specifically cited other much lower water usage milk substitutes like oat and soy.

> Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner.

Also not relevant, but ok. I'll make a note of it.

Personally, I think meat should just be much more expensive, representing the actual consumption of resources in its production. That way we could just let the market sort it out.

Regardless, as I understand it, it's well-established that almond milk uses less water per gallon than dairy milk.

However, we grow almonds in areas that don't have enough water, and milk is often produced in areas with surplus water.

Either way, I prefer soy milk.

> Either way, I prefer soy milk.

Are you at all concerned about hormone imbalances?

The estrogenic substances are not present in physiological relevant concentrations, its not anything to worry about

> Personally, I think meat should just be much more expensive, representing the actual consumption of resources in its production. That way we could just let the market sort it out.

When the govt. starts subsidizing, the market cannot sort it out, or at least that is how I’ve seen things play out. I’m not a market expert by any means.

1) The link to their source doesn't go anywhere. Other sources have very different numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092652/volume-of-water-...

2) If you truly cared about this and weren't just using it to justify your milk consumption, why wouldn't you switch to a far less water intensive milk like soy milk?

Do you realize that the US native buffalo population used to be as high as 30 to 60 million before we decimated them?

30 to 60. million. grazers. Roaming the countryside, eating and pooping and fertilizing our soil. Remember when the US had some of the most fertile, nutrient-rich soil in the entire world? Remember how perfectly balanced our ecosystem was before we ruined it?

The issue is not ruminants. It's everything else we've done to this planet throwing everything life carefully manicured into disarray.

We eat about 40 million cows and 125 million pigs every year, and more than 8 Billion chicken. These are just the ones that are killed each year, the actual livestock inventory is much higher for cows, around 90 million cows. We absolutely will have to cut back production if we want to "sustainably" farm cattle.

On the plus side there are a lot more people who get to be alive now.

there are ~90M cattle in the US, so more than before ?

Wonder much the average buffalo consumes vs the average cow?

It's probably relevant in order to provide some kind of scaling factor. :)

Probably more, considering they're likely similar mass but migrate more than cows do who are usually relatively confined

People do drink the water, presumably.

They could have drank it for free or for minimal tax investment but now they have to give money to Nestle to do so while also polluting the planet with plastic bottles

What argument are we having? If people would drink the water out of the tap, or drink it out of a Nestle bottle, they're drinking the same amount of water. Bottled water may be inefficient of other resources, may cause pollution, but it doesn't waste water.

According to this: https://foodprint.org/blog/plastic-water-bottle/ it costs about 5 liters of water to make one plastic bottle, so based on that, yes, it wastes a massive amount of water.

> now they have to give money to Nestle to do so while also polluting the planet with plastic bottles

Very few people have to drink Nestle’s products.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/oct/04/ontario-six-n...

They do if they want to drink their water, which was taken.

Just because two things "feed people" doesn't mean they are equally efficient and have equal justification, especially in the face of resource scarcity or shared finite resources.

In the same way that taking a private jet and walking somewhere both "move people".

You would better blame the people who buy it. It's an insanely expensive way to drink water, when out of the tap it costs what, 3 cents a gallon?

As for why people are in business, they are in it for profit. The only way they make a profit is if people want to buy their stuff. There's nothing shameful about it.

Farming is not done for profit?

> At least farming feeds people

And Nestle’s water quenches folks’ thirst. They’re both wasteful. Only one is significant.

Article mentions California a lot.

There is absolutely zero reason that California's cities cannot be fed with nuclear heated desalinated seawater or heck, traditionally desalinated sea water.

The only thing holding back this engineering solution are NIMBYs, naive greenies, and mountains of legal paperwork.

Water doesn't go away and we have the solutions to make freshwater. The problems are political, not technical.

Tha solves the city consumption problem which can then allow water run off from the mountains back into the valley where it used to be. That will help restore the aquafiers.

Read up on what the California valleys used to look like before the water was siphoned away to the coastal cities.

Edit: the replies and downd00ts to this post are precisely why California is in its current state. All whiners and no solutions. Enjoy your mess and desertification!

The great majority of water usage in California is for agriculture, not "coastal cities." Things like drip irrigation and not growing alfalfa in the desert are far more realistic (and cheaper) than what you are proposing. This is a solvable problem, even with climate change, but there aren't going to be any silver bullets.

You're both right. The Owens River Valley was desiccated to ship the water to the Los Angeles region, back when the latter was primarily agricultural in the 1920s.

> before the water was siphoned away to the coastal cities.

Hell, a lot of that wasn't even for cities. Significant and massive lakes, including Lake Tulare, were siphoned away simply to create farmland.

Lake Tulare and the Aral sea are both super sad

Pinning water usage on city elites, lol, now that's some mental gymnastics. Ya, I'm not sure "NIMBYs" are going to be super into a nuclear power plant driving a desalination plant with a water pipeline that stretches out into the desert to farms.

"nuclear power plant"

We dont build these because people fuck them up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018)

Is this the company you want having a nuclear plant in CA?

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