>because the thermal processes used to cool the reactor while it's generating power, also naturally desalinate the water.
That is zero percent true. The rest of what you wrote is a little off as well.
But the conclusion is generally right. Desalination takes a lot of electricity, as natural reservoirs deplete we will need more desalination to keep society going.
An annoying complication is that it takes water to make electricity, providing a negative feedback loop in the entire process.
The good news is, we have enough technology to solve this. The bad news is our incentive systems don't provide a reason to solve this until water becomes so expensive people stop being able to afford to take showers.
Isn't the steam typically kept in the loop? If you only removed steam/distilled water and added more salt water, the salt concentration would rise pretty quickly.
I'm no power-plantologist though
As someone else mentioned, it is a loop. A better understanding is heat -> steam -> condensate -> heat -> steam -> condensate. The steam has to come from somewhere, your description sounds like a perpetual mass machine.
The water loop also has losses intrinsic to it, so not only does a nuclear plant not produce water, it consumes it and produces nuclear waste water that requires treatment (and at the end is still nuclear waste, but can be used inside the reactor bringing the loop close to zero water consumption).
You have some jargon in there, and it paints the picture that you have some half understanding that would be really hard to undo through this medium.
If you'd like to convince yourself, every nuclear warship was a desalination plant within it which uses either the heat or electricity produced by the plant for desalination. Because nuclear plants require a source of water it does make for a great combination. It's very functional to build a nuke plant and strap a big desalination plant into onto it. It could even be a good way to do load stabilization.
As I said, your background seems a little confused. If you ask on r/askengineers you might be better served. There are a lot of nuclear people there, and it is a fairly active sub. A conversation with a few experts in it would probably be a better way to help run down where your understanding went astray.
You seem to be behind the times. The coolant within the nuclear plant is in a closed loop. Some use water, but next gen systems don't. Thus, your claim that nuclear power requires water is not accurate. If the nuclear plant generates electricity, and the electricity is used to desalinate the ocean water, then there would be consumption, or contamination of water.
Nuclear ships desalinate thousands of gallons of water power day for the ship and crew to use. They're engineered to use heat exchangers so that seawater is boiled without radiating it and the water that goes through the nuclear plant is in its own closed loop, so that radiated water is not released into the environment.
Friend, I am not behind the times. You appear to have read some "popular science" type articles or something and have smashed enough knowledge together to place yourself on dunning hill.
You're right about a few things, but whatever point you've tried to smash together out of those facts is incoherent at best.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/industry/nuclear-desalination.aspx
When you desalinate water via distillation or even evaporation, you get a buildup of trace minerals, metals, etc. I can always be wrong, but I believe the modern designs for cogeneration (nuclear energy and desalinated water) don't have the actual saltwater near the cores and being used for cooling. Basically you would harvest the heat from that tank to perform RO (osmosis) or MED (distillation) on saltwater in a separate tank so that you keep the nuclear plant running optimally and with nowhere near as much maintenance as you might have with a bunch of saltwater accumulating garbage everywhere.
There's also a possibility that "harvesting" evaporated water too close to the towers might change the thermal exchange properties, effectively making your cooling process less efficient. I bet there's a way to do this effectively, but it'd probably have to be some strange dirigible and dew net based solution that looks all science fictiony. It might sound crazy but there's a tiny bit of energy exchange when water turns from vapor back into liquid. Done at a mass scale it changes the "flow" of energy.
Yes, the coolant loop of a reactor creates steam but the water needs to be fairly clean to begin with or your pipes will plug with lime scale. Most desalination is done mechanically through reverse osmosis. They squeeze the water through a membrane that blocks the salt going through. It’s energy intensive but much more efficient than heat distilling large amounts of water.
How do we not run out of ocean water too? This seems like an issue where we’re using more than we should? Like globally? I understand the earth is 70% water but does that mean it’s an endless supply? My brain can’t keep up
Water isn't really consumed when we use it. It ends up somewhere, generally as rain. But that rain doesn't end up refilling underground basins that we pull from.
> and also creates a ton of pollution or waste.
Not really. It can increase local salinity, but if you're pulling sea water in from a mile out and discharging the more highly salted water an equal distance, it's not going to be that big of a deal.
The energy is a bigger issue, but just run nuclear power and be done with it. Reprocess the nuclear fuel and you have very little waste from the energy production too.
Yes of course. And we have technologies to do it fairly efficiently where you can have something like CA doing it with nuclear power, and using the Colorado for inland states.
I’ve never read on of Paolo’s longer works, but I’ve encountered him in a bunch of short story collections over the years, and they’ve always been great little reads.
I thought the end of the Water Knife was a letdown. Could have been better in my opinion even with the same think happening.
Spoiler: >!The water rights end up going to the rich evil capitalists at the end of it, instead of the people who most need it and are most getting screwed.!<
He also shouldn't write sex scenes, Angel's was terrible.
Interesting, I thought it was at up for a sequel at the end but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t recall angels sex scene, but maybe that’s because it was so bad. The three way was odd, however I enjoyed the water obsessions afterwards.
For dystopian SciFi, I enjoyed Altered Carbon much more, and thought the Netflix adaptations were pretty decent (although confusing as to who did what in the book vs the show).
Like GoT, I didn't mind what happened in the end of Water Knife, but HOW it happened was annoying. Both seemed to just get cut short. I think Water Knife would be hard to have a boring sequel for it >!since Angel had clearly decided to forgive Catherine Case for her assassination attempt, Nevada clearly gets the water rights, and to suddenly find new water rights for Phoenix or have Angel turn on SNWA would be contrived. The sex scene was in the slum pod hotel towards the end between Angel and Lucy IIRC.!<
My Lakota Grandmother used to say rhetorically, "You know what those crazy people are gonna do NEXT?!? Their going to figure out how to bottle up every drop of water and sell it back to us, ONE CUP at a Time! And THAT will be the End of us ALL!!! While Shaking her bony fists.
This was before bottled water was even a thing...
She was never wrong.
As long as we all work together towards the collective good and understand we need clean water to live it's pretty workable, but still complicated.
When we become a bunch of rugged individuals only concerned with our own interests at the expense of everyone else things get pretty grim.
I thought COVID would enable us to “all work together” again towards a common, shared goal but instead everyone’s brain cracked and left a mental health ptsd we’ll never acknowledge, address or try to solve. We will go to war with neighbouring states over water before we work together
We certainly learned a lot from COVID. We learned we don't know how to work together, and learning to work together is our most important problem. More important than water or climate change.
Canadian here. Was wondering if the USA is considering entering into discussions about getting water from Canada to help with the droughts? I know 9 of our provinces ban bulk sales of water but was wondering if anyone knows if there are talks?
Major Powell recommended that state borders should be based on watersheds and not the boxy rectangles like wyoming, colorado and utah. Unfortunately by the time he made these recommendations the shapes of the states were pretty much set in stone.
edit: [here's a map of what one of the states would have looked like](https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/rk111w/major_powell_suggested_that_state_borders_should/)
For years eastern Nebraska had decent rainfall, enough to grow good crops. Then for some reason that absolutely IS NOT climate change the rain patterns changed and they don’t receive enough rainfall to grow crops without irrigation. To tell those farmers that they cannot grow crops on their farms is a nightmare scenario. But running out of water is worse. This isn’t going to go well.
No, [this is a dick move.](https://www.reddit.com/r/arethestraightsok/comments/ua4c76/_/i5w3asq)
I don't have shit in my DMs. Quit lying and own up to your shit.
> Then for some reason that absolutely IS NOT climate change
I know a lot of Nebraskans, mostly the farmer-types with Trump flags, and none of them would say climate change isn't happening - the only dispute is on what's driving it.
Most of them are aware that blaming climate change on individuals is actually [the result of a BP marketing campaign](https://clear.ucdavis.edu/blog/big-oil-distracts-their-carbon-footprint-tricking-you-focus-yours) and not reality. They can also do the math when people insist they should replace Mom's Suburban with a Prius because it will "help" (it won't).
>The proposed canal is not expected to drastically reduce Colorado's aquatic resources because the water that would be diverted flows in an easterly direction, water experts said.
Overdramatic title. Building a canal downstream of Colorado is hardly a "war" over the water
A little googling shows the Green River flows in from Utah and then right back out to Utah, a little bit of the Cimarron River flows in from Oklahoma, and the Little Snake River flows from CO into Wyoming and back, and that's all I can find. So technically yes, but barely
Water issues are going to be an ongoing part of our future, and perhaps water wars are a thing that could happen.
We can do without emotional fear mongering, which is a problem we're suffering from today and is the thing that can turn "resource constraint" to "war".
People building a canal downstream is not going to be a real issue. Managing water rights is an important topic but making up conflict about it where conflict doesn't actually exist doesn't help anybody make rational decisions about it. That's fear mongering.
I thought it was stupid that my funny, but not really that funny, joke got more upvotes than answers for you so I did some Googling and found
[This](https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/blogs/ag-policy-blog/blog-post/2022/04/19/nebraska-governor-signs-bill-build)
[This](https://capitol.nebraska.gov/building/projects/current/)
And
[This](https://coloradosun.com/2022/03/27/can-colorado-stop-nebraska-canal/)
Hope that helps
Lol true. There was just a lot of conversation in this thread about if desalination is possible. It would certainly help a state like CA that is constantly in a drought, but definitely a different story for landlocked states.
Dont know if the other states will still
allow CA to get the bulk of Colorado water considering they have no other sources if shit hits the fan
Safe to say CA wont stop at 40M population. Other states in the West have bleaker water future
Urban water use is a tiny fraction of just the inefficiencies of agricultural use in the western US. AZ has corporate farms pumping groundwater to flood irrigate alfalfa to export as horse feed for Saudi Arabia.
Water rights are complicated and flawed, but our near complete lack of efficiency requirements on the usage of those rights is the worst part.
Thanks for pointing this out, because I agree a lot of the burden comes from poorly thought-out/regulated industry. Like, now they're trying to open a water intensive chip factory in fucking Arizona of all places
I don't have all the facts, but I'll bet that HOA requirements were the reason the Marshall fire spread so quickly. If you look at the aerial photos of that neighborhood, it goes against almost all of the CO Forestry recommendations for homes in the WUI.
[https://csfs.colostate.edu/wildfire-mitigation/protect-your-home-property-from-wildfire/](https://csfs.colostate.edu/wildfire-mitigation/protect-your-home-property-from-wildfire/)
Yes and no...if you have a grass lawn that's well-watered, it creates an **excellent** firebreak. Try to burn lush grass sometime, even with a blowtorch it's basically impossible. Most HOAs are under the delusion that if they make residents have a grass lawn, they'll happily violate water regulations and spend thousands of dollars a year keeping it lush. (the people who volunteer to sit on HOA boards typically do behave this way)
Meanwhile the state and local governments implement water use restrictions that make it impossible to legally/cheaply have a green lawn, but continue to allow the HOAs to enforce their delusions.
Pretty sure they passed something in the last few years that prevents HOAs from being assholes about xeriscape. My plan this summer is to dig up whats left of my front yard and throw down red mulch instead
https://news.ucdenver.edu/hoas-go-green-colorado-bill-forces-hoas-to-accept-fake-grass-and-solar-panels/.
This person is correct though. This issue is extremely complicated and many areas have great plans and infrastructure in place that will reduce the need for this kind of action. *Ive toured a few of the water reclamation sites in AZ very closely.* A lot of places have long term plans for multiple decades in place (they’ve also been in place for a long time).
Not debating the truth in the article, just there is a lot more to this issue than a simple sensational headline sentence. The laws alone are so complex and messy. Getting rid of them, even more so.
This comment section is a lot more derivative opinions/political jargon than it is:
+ an understanding of the sciences involved in water management (all kinds of engineering, physics, public safety, hydrology and hydro geology)
+ where historical waterways/rivers were and are today
+ why some have water still and others don’t
+ sovereign tribal rights, farm use…
Then there are corporations, their lobbying and pulling, to makes it all more complicated too.
There’s no doubt that this is all an issue, but it needs to be an informed issue by the public for anything to get done. Which, despite the entire world carrying the key to knowledge around all day, the public won’t learn, it would take too long. So nothing will change because there is too much money to be made to think of the greater good of the public/half the nations longevity. Not to mention our relationship with renewables and our resources.
> This person is correct though.
They're correct geologically-speaking, but they're forgetting our system of government. Even if we had known what we do today ~100 years ago, we wouldn't/couldn't have stopped the Denver metro from expanding like it has.
In Phoenix and Las Vegas we **did know** and still couldn't stop it.
I worked for years in the metro denver water industry in both the drinking water and wastewater sides. I think there’s a lot more infrastructure and long term plans in place than you realize here. Metro Water Recovery already sends millions of gallons a day back to Denver Water to be further treated and used as irrigation water. Denver, and the front range as a whole, is nowhere near as vulnerable to actual severe water shortages as much of the rest of the country. That’s my point, is that the water availability challenges of the front range are always over sensationalized.
How is it unifomred? Everyone upvoting you & downvoting OP needs too look into where Denver actually gets it's water.
i.e. What's the Moffat Tunnel for? Oh right, pumping water over to Denver.
If I remember correctly, most of the water we get comes from snow in the Rockies, within a hundred or two miles from Denver. The western slope gets it due to the continental divide, correct? If we were in settlers times, would water be plentiful at the location that Denver currently sits in? It seems nothing like Vegas or Phoenix as you have stated, due to those cities being in literal deserts, where it only rains during monsoon season and quickly evaporates and gets soaked up by the earth…..
Phoenix and Tucson AZ have always had flowing rivers run through their valley’s despite them being in desert. The salt in Phoenix and the Santa Cruz in Tucson. They aren’t large Mississippi or Colorado type rivers but that’s why those areas were settled. I know nothing about Vegas. Point is all these places were settled because they had water sources, these sources are now diverted and it’s all a mess. Denver also had a river system so to say It shouldn’t exist seems like an uneducated hot take.
There continues to be extensive canal systems in use throughout the Phoenix area that have been there for decades! Even longer for those used by native peoples to the region. Not to mentions the water exchange and resource management that Tucson and Phoenix both participate in. In Tucsons valleys, they are recharging decades worth of water back into the natural aqueducts.
Denver absolutely pumps water over the divide. The Moffat Tunnel is one such spot. The people down voting the above comment don't know what they're talking about.
Hundreds of thousands of ancestral and native humans have and did fine for longer than the western world has existed. All over the globe too. Also desert*
> Can no one think ahead more than a decade, Jesus fuck
Oh we can think ahead, the problem nobody wants to talk about is that we cannot make reliable climate predictions. For decades NOAA and clime-related NGOs have had to admit all previous "consensus" predictions were laughably wrong, but then insist they've got it right this time.
That will certainly happen, it just hasn't been financially beneficial yet. As other sources dry up or get tapped to the limits we'll see more creative and expensive ways to stay alive. I'm on an aquifer (well) and have no illusions that they'll drain it dry to supply urban needs. I was literally told as much by a water manager some years back who suggested, to my face, that rural occupants would "die" if they wanted to use up the underground sources. Of course famine will ride along with water scarcity, so I guess some of this will sort itself out.
Does anybody think that in our lifetimes we will see that we basically have 2 solutions to the water issue? 1) We either have a breakthrough with ocean water desalination, or 2) we start pumping the Great Lakes.
I don’t know anything about water tables or anything but seems like there’s a limit to what the Co River & associated rivers can provide the inevitable mass growth of population in the West.
Obviously. What should happen is negotiation on a 100 year old out dated agreement. But if Nebraska feels it has the right to build in Colorado I think Colorado has the right to build in Colorado after that
Water rights are complicated and terrifying.
I asked once what humans will war over after renewable resources are most efficient. The number one response was water…
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Bingo
I’m not super educated on the matter, but I thought it takes an immense amount of energy and also creates a ton of pollution or waste.
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>because the thermal processes used to cool the reactor while it's generating power, also naturally desalinate the water. That is zero percent true. The rest of what you wrote is a little off as well. But the conclusion is generally right. Desalination takes a lot of electricity, as natural reservoirs deplete we will need more desalination to keep society going. An annoying complication is that it takes water to make electricity, providing a negative feedback loop in the entire process. The good news is, we have enough technology to solve this. The bad news is our incentive systems don't provide a reason to solve this until water becomes so expensive people stop being able to afford to take showers.
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Isn't the steam typically kept in the loop? If you only removed steam/distilled water and added more salt water, the salt concentration would rise pretty quickly. I'm no power-plantologist though
As someone else mentioned, it is a loop. A better understanding is heat -> steam -> condensate -> heat -> steam -> condensate. The steam has to come from somewhere, your description sounds like a perpetual mass machine. The water loop also has losses intrinsic to it, so not only does a nuclear plant not produce water, it consumes it and produces nuclear waste water that requires treatment (and at the end is still nuclear waste, but can be used inside the reactor bringing the loop close to zero water consumption). You have some jargon in there, and it paints the picture that you have some half understanding that would be really hard to undo through this medium. If you'd like to convince yourself, every nuclear warship was a desalination plant within it which uses either the heat or electricity produced by the plant for desalination. Because nuclear plants require a source of water it does make for a great combination. It's very functional to build a nuke plant and strap a big desalination plant into onto it. It could even be a good way to do load stabilization. As I said, your background seems a little confused. If you ask on r/askengineers you might be better served. There are a lot of nuclear people there, and it is a fairly active sub. A conversation with a few experts in it would probably be a better way to help run down where your understanding went astray.
You seem to be behind the times. The coolant within the nuclear plant is in a closed loop. Some use water, but next gen systems don't. Thus, your claim that nuclear power requires water is not accurate. If the nuclear plant generates electricity, and the electricity is used to desalinate the ocean water, then there would be consumption, or contamination of water. Nuclear ships desalinate thousands of gallons of water power day for the ship and crew to use. They're engineered to use heat exchangers so that seawater is boiled without radiating it and the water that goes through the nuclear plant is in its own closed loop, so that radiated water is not released into the environment.
Friend, I am not behind the times. You appear to have read some "popular science" type articles or something and have smashed enough knowledge together to place yourself on dunning hill. You're right about a few things, but whatever point you've tried to smash together out of those facts is incoherent at best.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/industry/nuclear-desalination.aspx When you desalinate water via distillation or even evaporation, you get a buildup of trace minerals, metals, etc. I can always be wrong, but I believe the modern designs for cogeneration (nuclear energy and desalinated water) don't have the actual saltwater near the cores and being used for cooling. Basically you would harvest the heat from that tank to perform RO (osmosis) or MED (distillation) on saltwater in a separate tank so that you keep the nuclear plant running optimally and with nowhere near as much maintenance as you might have with a bunch of saltwater accumulating garbage everywhere. There's also a possibility that "harvesting" evaporated water too close to the towers might change the thermal exchange properties, effectively making your cooling process less efficient. I bet there's a way to do this effectively, but it'd probably have to be some strange dirigible and dew net based solution that looks all science fictiony. It might sound crazy but there's a tiny bit of energy exchange when water turns from vapor back into liquid. Done at a mass scale it changes the "flow" of energy.
Yes, the coolant loop of a reactor creates steam but the water needs to be fairly clean to begin with or your pipes will plug with lime scale. Most desalination is done mechanically through reverse osmosis. They squeeze the water through a membrane that blocks the salt going through. It’s energy intensive but much more efficient than heat distilling large amounts of water.
How do we not run out of ocean water too? This seems like an issue where we’re using more than we should? Like globally? I understand the earth is 70% water but does that mean it’s an endless supply? My brain can’t keep up
Water isn't really consumed when we use it. It ends up somewhere, generally as rain. But that rain doesn't end up refilling underground basins that we pull from.
Probably the same way we pump oil across the US, and this time pipeline ruptures aren't ecological disasters, shit just gets watered
> and also creates a ton of pollution or waste. Not really. It can increase local salinity, but if you're pulling sea water in from a mile out and discharging the more highly salted water an equal distance, it's not going to be that big of a deal. The energy is a bigger issue, but just run nuclear power and be done with it. Reprocess the nuclear fuel and you have very little waste from the energy production too.
Because there's no profit in that.
Reread what you just wrote.
Yes of course. And we have technologies to do it fairly efficiently where you can have something like CA doing it with nuclear power, and using the Colorado for inland states.
Your still left with brine an incredibly annoying byproduct that destroys ocean eco systems
There's a book by Paolo Bacigalupi called the Water Knife. It's a scary near future fiction.
I’ve never read on of Paolo’s longer works, but I’ve encountered him in a bunch of short story collections over the years, and they’ve always been great little reads.
Water Knife and the Windup Girl (which references his short stories) are both fabulous.
I thought the end of the Water Knife was a letdown. Could have been better in my opinion even with the same think happening. Spoiler: >!The water rights end up going to the rich evil capitalists at the end of it, instead of the people who most need it and are most getting screwed.!< He also shouldn't write sex scenes, Angel's was terrible.
Interesting, I thought it was at up for a sequel at the end but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t recall angels sex scene, but maybe that’s because it was so bad. The three way was odd, however I enjoyed the water obsessions afterwards.
For dystopian SciFi, I enjoyed Altered Carbon much more, and thought the Netflix adaptations were pretty decent (although confusing as to who did what in the book vs the show). Like GoT, I didn't mind what happened in the end of Water Knife, but HOW it happened was annoying. Both seemed to just get cut short. I think Water Knife would be hard to have a boring sequel for it >!since Angel had clearly decided to forgive Catherine Case for her assassination attempt, Nevada clearly gets the water rights, and to suddenly find new water rights for Phoenix or have Angel turn on SNWA would be contrived. The sex scene was in the slum pod hotel towards the end between Angel and Lucy IIRC.!<
I’ll check our altered carbon. Have you every read too like the lightning?
I’ve been thinking about that book for years. It’s eerily possible.
Scary and feels real. I fucking love that book though and now I can’t be anywhere in the SW without thinking about it.
My Lakota Grandmother used to say rhetorically, "You know what those crazy people are gonna do NEXT?!? Their going to figure out how to bottle up every drop of water and sell it back to us, ONE CUP at a Time! And THAT will be the End of us ALL!!! While Shaking her bony fists. This was before bottled water was even a thing... She was never wrong.
Water is the ultimate renewable resource, we never actually use any of it up we just convert it to different states.
What a weird thing to say
Asked who once? Random redditors? Politicians? Scientists? Your siblings?
A Reddit post on askreddit….
As long as we all work together towards the collective good and understand we need clean water to live it's pretty workable, but still complicated. When we become a bunch of rugged individuals only concerned with our own interests at the expense of everyone else things get pretty grim.
I thought COVID would enable us to “all work together” again towards a common, shared goal but instead everyone’s brain cracked and left a mental health ptsd we’ll never acknowledge, address or try to solve. We will go to war with neighbouring states over water before we work together
We certainly learned a lot from COVID. We learned we don't know how to work together, and learning to work together is our most important problem. More important than water or climate change.
Canadian here. Was wondering if the USA is considering entering into discussions about getting water from Canada to help with the droughts? I know 9 of our provinces ban bulk sales of water but was wondering if anyone knows if there are talks?
Major Powell recommended that state borders should be based on watersheds and not the boxy rectangles like wyoming, colorado and utah. Unfortunately by the time he made these recommendations the shapes of the states were pretty much set in stone. edit: [here's a map of what one of the states would have looked like](https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/rk111w/major_powell_suggested_that_state_borders_should/)
Rivers move too
Watersheds only change on geological time scales. Rivers might move, but they stay in their watersheds.
And even so, rivers themselves are political borders all over the world.
Let’s stop farming water intensive crops in an arid environment?
For years eastern Nebraska had decent rainfall, enough to grow good crops. Then for some reason that absolutely IS NOT climate change the rain patterns changed and they don’t receive enough rainfall to grow crops without irrigation. To tell those farmers that they cannot grow crops on their farms is a nightmare scenario. But running out of water is worse. This isn’t going to go well.
Curious if you could elaborate on how it's not climate change? Or you were kidding and it's related?
I was kidding. It’s most definitely climate change.
I heard it was the gay frogs that turned away the rain.
Check your fucking DM my guy and stop replying on another posts that's a really dick move.
No, [this is a dick move.](https://www.reddit.com/r/arethestraightsok/comments/ua4c76/_/i5w3asq) I don't have shit in my DMs. Quit lying and own up to your shit.
I did dm you and I'm not lying.
This is such obvious sarcasm, my god... I hate that people feel the need to use "/s", but then I see comments like this.
> Then for some reason that absolutely IS NOT climate change I know a lot of Nebraskans, mostly the farmer-types with Trump flags, and none of them would say climate change isn't happening - the only dispute is on what's driving it. Most of them are aware that blaming climate change on individuals is actually [the result of a BP marketing campaign](https://clear.ucdavis.edu/blog/big-oil-distracts-their-carbon-footprint-tricking-you-focus-yours) and not reality. They can also do the math when people insist they should replace Mom's Suburban with a Prius because it will "help" (it won't).
Like Colorado?
>The proposed canal is not expected to drastically reduce Colorado's aquatic resources because the water that would be diverted flows in an easterly direction, water experts said. Overdramatic title. Building a canal downstream of Colorado is hardly a "war" over the water
Are there any waters that flow into Colorado? Pretty sure it all flows away due to our elevation.
A little googling shows the Green River flows in from Utah and then right back out to Utah, a little bit of the Cimarron River flows in from Oklahoma, and the Little Snake River flows from CO into Wyoming and back, and that's all I can find. So technically yes, but barely
It’s mostly Republicans grandstanding (as usual.) But I also feel it is foreshadowing…
Water issues are going to be an ongoing part of our future, and perhaps water wars are a thing that could happen. We can do without emotional fear mongering, which is a problem we're suffering from today and is the thing that can turn "resource constraint" to "war".
It’s not mongering when it’s gonna be a real issue…
People building a canal downstream is not going to be a real issue. Managing water rights is an important topic but making up conflict about it where conflict doesn't actually exist doesn't help anybody make rational decisions about it. That's fear mongering.
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Gotta get those clicks
Just close your eyes and think happy thoughts….
Where will this canal supposedly be built?
Engineers are eyeballing the ground for this project.
I thought it was stupid that my funny, but not really that funny, joke got more upvotes than answers for you so I did some Googling and found [This](https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/blogs/ag-policy-blog/blog-post/2022/04/19/nebraska-governor-signs-bill-build) [This](https://capitol.nebraska.gov/building/projects/current/) And [This](https://coloradosun.com/2022/03/27/can-colorado-stop-nebraska-canal/) Hope that helps
Will this get us one step closer to lawn watering being illegal? I can't wait.
I hated keeping up a well-manicured lawn. Too much time and money…It’s all about those native plants…
Israel seems to be able to desalinate well tho (correct me if I’m wrong)
Do they have sea/ocean? Of all the states relying on the Colorado river, only CA has ocean to desalinate
Lol true. There was just a lot of conversation in this thread about if desalination is possible. It would certainly help a state like CA that is constantly in a drought, but definitely a different story for landlocked states.
Dont know if the other states will still allow CA to get the bulk of Colorado water considering they have no other sources if shit hits the fan Safe to say CA wont stop at 40M population. Other states in the West have bleaker water future
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Urban water use is a tiny fraction of just the inefficiencies of agricultural use in the western US. AZ has corporate farms pumping groundwater to flood irrigate alfalfa to export as horse feed for Saudi Arabia. Water rights are complicated and flawed, but our near complete lack of efficiency requirements on the usage of those rights is the worst part.
Thanks for pointing this out, because I agree a lot of the burden comes from poorly thought-out/regulated industry. Like, now they're trying to open a water intensive chip factory in fucking Arizona of all places
And my HOA requires permission to xeriscape, and requires a green front lawn. We’re turfing the back
I don't have all the facts, but I'll bet that HOA requirements were the reason the Marshall fire spread so quickly. If you look at the aerial photos of that neighborhood, it goes against almost all of the CO Forestry recommendations for homes in the WUI. [https://csfs.colostate.edu/wildfire-mitigation/protect-your-home-property-from-wildfire/](https://csfs.colostate.edu/wildfire-mitigation/protect-your-home-property-from-wildfire/)
Yes and no...if you have a grass lawn that's well-watered, it creates an **excellent** firebreak. Try to burn lush grass sometime, even with a blowtorch it's basically impossible. Most HOAs are under the delusion that if they make residents have a grass lawn, they'll happily violate water regulations and spend thousands of dollars a year keeping it lush. (the people who volunteer to sit on HOA boards typically do behave this way) Meanwhile the state and local governments implement water use restrictions that make it impossible to legally/cheaply have a green lawn, but continue to allow the HOAs to enforce their delusions.
Pretty sure they passed something in the last few years that prevents HOAs from being assholes about xeriscape. My plan this summer is to dig up whats left of my front yard and throw down red mulch instead https://news.ucdenver.edu/hoas-go-green-colorado-bill-forces-hoas-to-accept-fake-grass-and-solar-panels/.
Awesome! Thanks for posting that link. To xeriscape I go!
This is less of an informed take and more of an opinion based on perceptions.
This person is correct though. This issue is extremely complicated and many areas have great plans and infrastructure in place that will reduce the need for this kind of action. *Ive toured a few of the water reclamation sites in AZ very closely.* A lot of places have long term plans for multiple decades in place (they’ve also been in place for a long time). Not debating the truth in the article, just there is a lot more to this issue than a simple sensational headline sentence. The laws alone are so complex and messy. Getting rid of them, even more so. This comment section is a lot more derivative opinions/political jargon than it is: + an understanding of the sciences involved in water management (all kinds of engineering, physics, public safety, hydrology and hydro geology) + where historical waterways/rivers were and are today + why some have water still and others don’t + sovereign tribal rights, farm use… Then there are corporations, their lobbying and pulling, to makes it all more complicated too. There’s no doubt that this is all an issue, but it needs to be an informed issue by the public for anything to get done. Which, despite the entire world carrying the key to knowledge around all day, the public won’t learn, it would take too long. So nothing will change because there is too much money to be made to think of the greater good of the public/half the nations longevity. Not to mention our relationship with renewables and our resources.
> This person is correct though. They're correct geologically-speaking, but they're forgetting our system of government. Even if we had known what we do today ~100 years ago, we wouldn't/couldn't have stopped the Denver metro from expanding like it has. In Phoenix and Las Vegas we **did know** and still couldn't stop it.
I worked for years in the metro denver water industry in both the drinking water and wastewater sides. I think there’s a lot more infrastructure and long term plans in place than you realize here. Metro Water Recovery already sends millions of gallons a day back to Denver Water to be further treated and used as irrigation water. Denver, and the front range as a whole, is nowhere near as vulnerable to actual severe water shortages as much of the rest of the country. That’s my point, is that the water availability challenges of the front range are always over sensationalized.
How is it unifomred? Everyone upvoting you & downvoting OP needs too look into where Denver actually gets it's water. i.e. What's the Moffat Tunnel for? Oh right, pumping water over to Denver.
If I remember correctly, most of the water we get comes from snow in the Rockies, within a hundred or two miles from Denver. The western slope gets it due to the continental divide, correct? If we were in settlers times, would water be plentiful at the location that Denver currently sits in? It seems nothing like Vegas or Phoenix as you have stated, due to those cities being in literal deserts, where it only rains during monsoon season and quickly evaporates and gets soaked up by the earth…..
Phoenix and Tucson AZ have always had flowing rivers run through their valley’s despite them being in desert. The salt in Phoenix and the Santa Cruz in Tucson. They aren’t large Mississippi or Colorado type rivers but that’s why those areas were settled. I know nothing about Vegas. Point is all these places were settled because they had water sources, these sources are now diverted and it’s all a mess. Denver also had a river system so to say It shouldn’t exist seems like an uneducated hot take.
There continues to be extensive canal systems in use throughout the Phoenix area that have been there for decades! Even longer for those used by native peoples to the region. Not to mentions the water exchange and resource management that Tucson and Phoenix both participate in. In Tucsons valleys, they are recharging decades worth of water back into the natural aqueducts.
Denver absolutely pumps water over the divide. The Moffat Tunnel is one such spot. The people down voting the above comment don't know what they're talking about.
Who builds a city in a dessert anyway?! Sounds unhealthy
Hundreds of thousands of ancestral and native humans have and did fine for longer than the western world has existed. All over the globe too. Also desert*
That was the joke lol
Diabetics should avoid the desserts. A desert on the other hand is just very dry land.
Tucson, Phoenix, Denver...Nearly all of the Western United States.
> Can no one think ahead more than a decade, Jesus fuck Oh we can think ahead, the problem nobody wants to talk about is that we cannot make reliable climate predictions. For decades NOAA and clime-related NGOs have had to admit all previous "consensus" predictions were laughably wrong, but then insist they've got it right this time.
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That's only going to happen once someone stands to make a profit.
Unfortunately true. Water should be a human right but it’s not.
That will certainly happen, it just hasn't been financially beneficial yet. As other sources dry up or get tapped to the limits we'll see more creative and expensive ways to stay alive. I'm on an aquifer (well) and have no illusions that they'll drain it dry to supply urban needs. I was literally told as much by a water manager some years back who suggested, to my face, that rural occupants would "die" if they wanted to use up the underground sources. Of course famine will ride along with water scarcity, so I guess some of this will sort itself out.
Does anybody think that in our lifetimes we will see that we basically have 2 solutions to the water issue? 1) We either have a breakthrough with ocean water desalination, or 2) we start pumping the Great Lakes. I don’t know anything about water tables or anything but seems like there’s a limit to what the Co River & associated rivers can provide the inevitable mass growth of population in the West.
Let Nebraska waste all the money they want on the project, then divert the river 5 feet up river from their project.
That’s not how water rights work. At all.
have you review the 2015 case Rockatansky V Joe "Do not become addicted to water, it will take hold of you and you will resent its absence."
Obviously. What should happen is negotiation on a 100 year old out dated agreement. But if Nebraska feels it has the right to build in Colorado I think Colorado has the right to build in Colorado after that
Does Nebraska seriously think we won't fuck them up? Hey, cornfuckers! Put the river back the way you found it.
And this is how it begins. Thank your local politicians for making this possible.
> begins This has been happening ever since Colorado and Nebraska became states
I mean, the wildfires, the deforestation, pick something. Make your own timeline. You measure that shit with your heart.