| ▲ | windowpains 5 hours ago |
| If only we built reservoirs to keep the water for the drought years it would be great news. |
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| ▲ | oatmeal1 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The problem isn't storage capacity. It's wasteful consumption growing water-intensive crops in the desert. |
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| ▲ | bibimsz 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | crops are kind of important though | | |
| ▲ | cowsandmilk 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They don’t have to be grown in the desert | | |
| ▲ | dcrazy 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Almonds aren’t grown in the desert, they’re grown in the Central Valley. And they’re grown there because before it’s incredibly fertile soil. | | |
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| ▲ | Izikiel43 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can grow almonds elsewhere, they are not needed for daily life | | |
| ▲ | michaeldh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | CA, apparently, grows almonds for the entire United States, and 80% of the world's almonds, too. | | |
| ▲ | Izikiel43 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, I'm not saying they don't, but it isn't a critical crop for day to day life, biologically speaking. No one is going to die for not eating almonds. Is it economically important? For sure. Is it critical for living? No. | | |
| ▲ | dcrazy 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | We don’t decide what to grow based on what someone decides is “critical for living.” We decide what to grow based on what sells for a decent margin above cost. Some countries in the Eastern Hemisphere tried the first way and it didn’t work out very well. |
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| ▲ | bdamm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| California has already invested a lot into reservoirs. In fact, as a pilot, I recall noticing that nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs. I doubt there is much room left for economically building more; all the easy ones have been taken, and more. Surely the cost benefit of just investing a lot into desalination must be getting close. |
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| ▲ | kyboren 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, the California Coastal Commission put the kibosh a few years ago on a decades-long desalination project: https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desali... I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination. | | |
| ▲ | kriskrunch 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Doheny was approved shortly after the Huntington Beach desal plant was killed. Update from last month: https://www.ocregister.com/2025/11/26/landfill-trash-could-h... Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California. There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years. If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand. |
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| ▲ | al_borland 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Desalination must be insanely expensive; I’m always shocked it wasn’t done decades ago. Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Desalination must be insanely expensive It isn't. Mostly there are environmental concerns. |
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| ▲ | devilbunny 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp. |
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| ▲ | mikestorrent 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Could use some large scale geo-engineering. Pity that we don't have a radiation-free way of blowing a gigantic hole into the ground that can store a few trillion litres. |
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| ▲ | to11mtm 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Probably bad idea, and definitely 'Need to bid it to responsible parties' question but would there be a way to safely use even separated 'landfill refuse' to build significant parts of the enclosing structure? |
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