Hacker News Reader

Comment by doug_durham | Hacker News Reader

At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995".

There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.

Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?

View on HN

Hate to be glib, but this "if it were possible, someone would've done it" thinking is exactly why we're stuck. Your reasons sound smart. Well-reasoned. Totally rational. And they're missing something fundamental.

Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway.

You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard.

Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway.

Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.

I think you underestimate how much larger of a task terraforming the USA west is then say building a rail network through the US (which was an impressive feat) or building hoover dam(also impressive). Not only that the issue with terraforming the West is you are pulling sooo many resources away from productive uses into low value uses.

The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity.

Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas.

Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them.

Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.

This can be summed up with “physics isn’t real, we just need some American ingenuity.” Very similar to the argument given by the guy who ignored all engineers and made his own submersible out of carbon fiber.

Why don't you apply that "can do" spirit to describin how we limit climate change within this decade? That would be more helpful for everyone.

The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb were published in the early 1970s. These books convinced many developed world politicians to put a break on almost all large scale infrastructure projects. Slowly the ideas of degrowth and depopulation have been pushed through many areas of society and culture.

One small exception, the sudden U-turn on nuclear power last month after 40 years of not building a nuke plant was only made possible by the dire need to beat China in the AI military race. Little of that power will go to civilian use and will be used to power massive data centers.

The failure to build hi-speed rail in the United States is a huge contrast to the non-stop obsession with climate change legislation, administrative agency activities and diplomacy that go on. It's so boring that nobody reports on it, but since I follow the energy sector I get the news alerts and there are non-stop climate negotiations, policy making and legislative pushes and so forth to do everything possible to implement the Limits to Growth and Net Zero 2050 agenda. Voters rank it fairly low on their list of issues they are concerned about though.

If you want to get really dark, there's this guy who's been popular in left of center intellectual publications pushing "Degrowth Communism" which is like communism but there is no prosperity for workers, just endless lowered standards of living to save the planet.

I feel your sentiment for sure but this is unfair criticism of the top post. Bold claims need proof.

To me it harkens back to the whole hyperloop thing which was such a disappointment that I am very skeptical of details. Doesn’t mean it’s not possible of course!

> 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today.

Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.

It is true that end-use heating takes a lions share of the energy from the water-energy nexus in California.

That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps.

OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive.

Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."

It doesn't matter how inefficient this is because as it stands we are "curtailing" — which means throwing away — an insane amount of energy in the spring just because we can't figure out what to do with it. The amount of solar power curtailed so far in 2024 was more than enough to desalinate one million acre-feet of seawater and pump it to 1000' above sea level.

Residential solar was a terrible idea. It only works during the day, it is hard to store, and you can't efficiently transport it to where there is demand without a major overhaul of the grid.

I guess you could pump seawater to affluent neighborhoods for processing, but then you need to rethink drinking water distribution.

It would have made so much more sense to just build nuclear plants along side desalination plants, but the oil industry convinced everyone that nuclear is a scary boogie monster.

Naive question: if we expanded a lot of residential and light commercial solar heavily enough, could the excess capacity no longer needed from the grid in the daytime be efficiently transmitted to where it’s needed?

Somewhere I saw someones study that said it's better to build solar and batteries than solar and transmission lines. I think wind is maybe more of an issue since wind and people don't line up geographically as much as solar and people.

I saw somewhere the opposite: that it’s better to build solar and transmission lines. So idk what the truth is.

> If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale.

It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.

Sounds like a great way to destroy one of the most diverse and unique marine ecosystems on the planet, thanks to the brine waste.

It's a funny problem. Too expensive to pump it WAY out to sea, but too salty to be of any use?

Couldn’t you pump the brine waste into evaporation ponds and extract lithium and other materials from it?

Could we convert the brine waste to building materials? Truck it out to the desert and build a giant salt pyramid.

I'd have to see some real math to be convinced extracting fresh water from the ocean could raise salt levels enough to destroy the Sea of Cortez ecosystems.

Reasonable summary… https://www.wired.com/story/desalination-is-booming-but-what...

Hard numbers aren’t readily available because we don’t track discharge consistently (or at least didn’t).

And it’s not just the salt in the brine, but remnants of the chemicals used to defoul the RO systems.

The brine waste is nasty stuff and absolutely deadly to the local environment where it’s discharged.

No no no, you don't understand. We'll remove it from the environment. So the environment will be safe -- the byproducts will be disposed of outside of the environment!

Well what's out there?

Nothing’s out there. All there is out there is sea, and birds and fish. And 20,000 tons of waste brine.

Downvoters clearly haven't seen the legendary "the front fell off" video: https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM?feature=shared

I heard this concern many times. But with so many desalination plants already built, there must have been some environmental impact studies. I googled around and found one for the Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego [1]. On page 66 you find this:

  > Concerns over marine life are also associated with increased salinity levels and exposure to high-saline water (brine). The proposed CDP modifications have been designed through an extensive process to minimize the impacts of mortality of fish species and larvae as part of the submittal to and requirements of the RWQCB.

On page 85 you find that the average salinity prior to dilution is between 64 and 67 ppt (parts per thousand). Once it's diluted, it becomes 42 ppt and discharged in the sea. The average salinity of the sea in that region is 33.5 ppt with a natural variability of 4 ppt.

On page 150 you find out that the salinity of the discharge drops from the 42 ppt to withint 2ppt of the ambient within a circle of 200 meters radius from the discharge point. That zone is called the Brine Mixing Zone, and it has area of 15.5 acres.

[1] https://www.sdcwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Final-SEIR-...

According to the article, intermittent operation is assuming new desalinization technology that needs to be invented:

> Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.

And that’s largely the point of the article. It’s not being done yet, but he thinks it’s technically feasible and could be a game-changer. Big if true.

It’s not something we should plan on until the technology is further developed, but seems like worthwhile R&D to fund.

This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot.

I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.

> Could we actually do all of this? Probably not.

It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should.

Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.

100%. Also the author citing California and Florida as "successful" terraforming projects is a bit ironic in 2024. Nature seems to be taking them both back... The world is already super fragile, especially in regards to climate change. I'm not convinced doubling down on a country which struggles to maintain it's existing infrastructure and is hyper divided (to my chagrin) is a wise strategy.

That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible

When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality

Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy

Go read Cadillac Desert: It's precisely about all the efforts, right between fantasy and reality, that have put is in the hole we are today. From straight out wishful thinking to really expensive investments that haven't ever come remotely close to paying for themselves. There's entire sections covering how we have spend very large amounts of money doing water works that just go to feed very low productivity farms. We dreamed, built, and just wasted money.

It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix?

But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon billions to make the property of people living in a desert more valuable.

Doubling up on the CD recommendation; I saw it mentioned on HN years ago and read it and it completely changed the way I see water issues in the US, in particular the insight about how “wasted” water has a completely different meaning on the east coast vs the west.

To someone who has lived most of my life in Ontario, it’s an eye opener recognizing that drinkable water is insanely plentiful here relative to most of the rest of the world.

> property value of people living in a desert more valuable

People living in the desert (outside of phoenix and Vegas anyway) are probably thinking there is much more value in not being in the suburbs honestly, and I seriously doubt they want to trade this for more neighbors.

They still want infrastructure investment though, because there is little appeal in their taxes funding more development in urban centers that are already rich or repairing coastal areas after the next hurricane, etc. Forward looking investments in rural areas is a great way to boost the economy generally, to curb the scary rise of populist madness, and start to fix one of the major sources of division and angst in the USA and other places. If desalination makes no sense, how about a space elevator, hyper tunnel, or you know, decent cheap old school passenger rail options?

> We dreamed, built, and just wasted money.

A bit more nuance than that. First, there are reasonable arguments that desert living is/can be more energy efficient than heating the great frozen north, even prior to cheap solar. Whether things happen or we give up comes down to who is politically important more often than what is physically or economically easy. And one thing that is often forgotten about such efforts is that even projects that fail can be a net positive.. that is why we don’t cancel the space program after the first rocket crashes.

Why do you think your arguments/assertions/beliefs/opinions ought to carry greater weight than the parent’s?

Is there some compelling analysis, theoretical proof, etc…?

You’re confused about the direction for the burden of proof here. I want infrastructure investment, and already mentioned that it really doesn’t matter if it’s desalination specifically. This creates jobs and general prosperity while it increases possibilities and capabilities historically, and has essentially already created everything you know and love about modern life.

If your position is that it’s better to do absolutely nothing, then it’s on you to show that railroads, dams, and interstates are useless and that the New Deal, the Hoover dam, the Ccc, etc were a net negative for society. Maybe you know of countries that were destroyed by good employment numbers or infrastructure investment?

Eagerly awaiting your own proofs and analysis.

You responded to the parent initially… I am not that user, so I didn’t make any such claims?

Are you confusing me with the other user?

Several no longer existing civilizations built out infrastructure that proved too complicated to maintain. So they had, for some time, "good employment numbers or infrastructure investment". Then they "were destroyed", or more often faded away as folks adapted, migrated, or died. Details can be scarce, as your stone carving artisans might simply stop making records. If there are any records. Some of these fallen civilizations had water-works that gave short term benefits, but eventually failed: the system became too complicated or too expensive to maintain, soil salinity grew, earthquakes cut the qanats, maybe there was a run of corrupt or incompetent leaders, wars and political unrest can complicate maintenance, or economic and trade changes can make a once profitable area irrelevant, and it's a pity about those changing rainfall patterns.

"Strong Towns" does exist as something of an antidote to mindless "it doesn't matter" infrastructure spending, and has pointed out various problems of popping up yet more suburbs that lack the tax revenue for maintenance. Or perhaps civilizations, like flowers, are all about short term gain before they fade away?

Cadillac Dessert - 1997 TV series based on the book (4hr)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU

For those who are interested in the concept of dreaming as a mechanism for preventing overfitting (insofar as such a term may be applied to biological processes), I myself first encountered the concept in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560

>If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale

An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.

It’s possible to treat high purity water other ways. Essentially just adding in some minerals.

Our of curiosity, is there any way to line the pipes with PVC or similar? Like a large scale version of those "pipe fixers" they pump up with air/water that lines existing pipes and hardens in place?

I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this

RO water can strip chemicals from PVC, so it would be substituting one poison for another. Treating the water with minerals seems a much more practical way to go.

I am finding numbers that US tap water has on the order of ~10mgs minerals/L water. Doping water with some combination of calcium/potassium/magnesium/whatever certainly sounds easier than alternatives.

There are many solutions to this, and I would not consider it to be one of the foremost complications in a de salinization project.

Very large format, plastic water, main pipes exist… As do concrete pipes, etc.

A sacrificial metal bed could work as a solution.

Just have some of the seawater bypass the desalination and mix it in.

Oh no, how could we ever manage the impossible technique of dissolving minerals back into water?? Truly, this technology is doomed.

The entire body of technological progress stands as a counter-argument to “if it was possible someone would be doing it”. Things are only impossible until they aren’t.

And the "until the aren't" part importantly involves a feasible plan to actually get there.

This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.

You're responding to an argument I didn't make. The lack of an economically feasible implementation today does not prove that one will never exist.

>> involves a feasible plan to actually get there.

Most plans never realize exactly--they have budget and time overruns--, and that happens in both infrastructure and software development. So, they are not feasible to start with. On that principle, you can shoot down any and all plans, and never should anybody do anything.

> It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics

We pillage our natural water sheds so the Central Valley can grow almonds. The underpricing of water is absolutely a regulatory issue.

The bigger water waste problem now isn't almonds but alfalfa grown for export to places like Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately this isn't just a regulatory issue; we can't fix it with improved regulations. At the core it's primarily a property rights issue. Many property owners are legally entitled to a certain quantity of water by titles that in some cases go back over a century. The government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation, which would be tremendously expensive.

> government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation

No, but it can tax them.

Israel gets most of its water from desalination.

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

California is discussing rationing water.

Nevada is a dry empty expanse, Arizona is pulling the dregs out of their aquifer.

Cheap energy + desalination is the answer, but we need more energy. Nuclear and other renewables are the obvious answer.

The answer? Another answer is that the desert population collapses, possibly due to the breakdown of too complicated infrastructure and troublesome hand-offs of political power, factors one may observe in the decline of various other past civilizations. But one must not get too salty when talking about such places as the fertile crescent.

> What was this even posted to hacker news?

This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.

> It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics.

I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed in Huntington Beach. [1]

> In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with the staff report that recommended denying approval of the project.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...

The Middle East has been doing it for atleast 4 decades. Kuwait has run exclusively on desalinated water for 50+ years. The reason we don’t have a lot of of them in places like California is the same reason we don’t have a lot of big new bridges or new high-speed rail lines or new underground tunnels. Building big things in America is just hard now there’s a lot of regulation, labor is expensive and we just don’t do it as much.

The article does make an interesting point on our energy usage. As an industrial society - we hit the limits of scaling energy output sometime in the 70s. With the majority of gains coming from improved efficiency as well as incremental expansion since then.

Conceivably, if solar continues its price trajectory - we could see a world where new large scale projects are started.

It is posted for the same reason people sometimes post about Atlantropa:https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlantropa

It is quite literally a regulatory issue. Orange County just recently shut down a permit for a significant desal plant with a ton of planning. Very frustrating.

I don’t know what else to expect from a scientist who previously worked at can’t-possibly-work-and-didn’t HyperLoop.

At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995."

There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.

Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com