Do folks here understand the expense and energy use associated with desalination plants?

[MarshallS]

122. Yes, you are obviously not a scientist, or an engineer, which is more germain to

no matter how much the the subject. So let me try.

Desalinization is expensive. One of the things that makes water so wonderful is that it is such a polar molecule that it "sticks" so well to other stuff. That makes separating water from anything "soluble" is expensive. BTW tap water in the US is tremendously under priced. If you go to, say Holland, and suggest that they water the garden with tap (aka "drinking&quot water, they would laugh at the waste of money. (As an aside, research facilities take municipal water and de-ionize it to pipe slightly cleaner water into individual labs. It ain't cheap. Standard reagent grade water comes in a bottle under a teflon seal, it's price would make you faint.)

Water is heavy. Not "heavy water" I mean the stuff weighs a lot. "A pint's a pound, the world round" isn't just a cute saying, it's (close enough) to being true. Pick a high value crop like, say almonds. Ten percent of CA H2O goes to almonds, which we produce and export for big bucks. Moving that much water from the hypothetical desalinization plants to the Central Valley growers would cost...hang on...A LOT OF FUCKING MONEY! No matter how much the Japanese love almonds, or the Germans depend on California for marzipan at X-mas, or how skimpy Hershey's skimps in their chocolate bars, two hundred dollars a pound almonds aren't going to cut it.

And that's a high value crop. Most of our acreage is in lower value vegetables/fruits/forage crops. Broccoli, lettuce, spinach, hay. Cattle, pigs, chickens gotta eat somethin'. When Foster Farms has to pay quintuple prices for chicken feed, even though a lot of it is chicken guts and feathers, guess what happens.

Add to that the two things that no one wants to talk about. We have been pumping our aquifers dry for decades. There are places in CA where the land has sunk by multiple meters because we have been taking water out of underground "natural storage" for about a hundred years. That aquifer "freebie" will never come back.

The second thing is that that "free" water doesn't have salt (NaCl) enough to kill crops, but it's not really that pure either. Aquifer irrigation water isn't "pure" whatever that means. Trace minerals contaminants, which aren't absorbed by plants, stay in the soil. As it is now, we need more hardy, tough crops to be planted in more and more acreage. As it is, for many parts of California, what's needed is about a millennium of clean rain to rinse the topsoil clean and replenish the aquifers if they can be refilled at all.

Or, remember above, when I spoke of DI (deionized) water? Desalinization isn't enough, DI water isn't really that clean, but if you're willing to pay for $40 romaine, go for it. But the idea that desalinization plants and pumping stations to transport sort-of-clean water to the central valley of CA and still produce a salable crop is nuts.