It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
Scale is not about money alone. Building one of them: entirely doable. And can be started on today, let's go!
But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know what would be insanely stupid? Creating just enough fresh water for a single state to cope, but at the cost of destroying the entire western sea board ecosystem, affecting all pacific states, Canada, Mexico, and a good part of Central and South America, too.
Ten is a tiny number and you can do an analysis of similar quality to a smaller setup. I really don't understand your argument here.
If you put the pipes far out then that's so so so much ocean involved to get a river's worth of water. The right design could even reduce the salinity near shore as runoff increases (or trivially counteract that, of course).
Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you.
Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water, and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with.
Were you asleep for the last 40 years while this was all being discussed?
> Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you.
Point me to whatever source you think supports your argument that it can't be done.
> Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water,
We're going to need water forever. It's never too late.
> and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with.
So build power plants that don't release carbon. If you want to get really particular, sell the water at a price that lets you build 2x as many power plants as you need, so even after considering construction costs you're reducing the net CO2 output.
But also, what are you talking about when you say it's not solvable or buildable? Adding 50% more water to the residential supply would be 3 million acre-feet, which would take 15-30 terawatt hours of power each year. California already uses 260TWh. That's very obviously feasible.
It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.