James ConcaContributor
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ENERGY 21,633 views
California's Mega-Drought: Nuclear Power To The Rescue
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The only power facility in California that does not use any of the state’s precious fresh water is the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County. And it can even produce additional freshwater for the nearby community.
The nuclear plant desalinates ocean water using reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration. The nuclear plant depends on the desalination plant as its sole source of fresh water, used for the plant’s two nuclear reactors as well as all other water needs such as drinking water for its employees and irrigation of its grounds.
Although a relatively small plant, Diablo Canyon’s seawater desalination plant is presently the largest operating desal facility on the West Coast, producing about 675,000 gallons of freshwater a day.
But the desal facility is not running at maximum capacity. It can actually produce a million and a half gallons of fresh water a day, and can ramp up right now, with very little upgrade and additional costs.
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County, California has had a seawater desalination plant for its entire existence, producing all of its fresh water needs from operations to cooling to irrigation to supplying drinking water to its employees. But it only uses about 40% of its capacity and is willing to use all of it to produce fresh water for the nearby community to help with the effects of the megadrought. Source: Pacific Gas and Electric
After four consecutive years of drought, San Luis Obispo County sees the additional 825,000 gallons per day of freshwater production as key to helping it cope with the drought.
Diablo Canyon’s desal facility will fall to second place in California when the commercial desalination plant in Carlsbad begins producing about 50-million-gallon-per-day in November. In addition, Santa Barbara is evaluating whether to restart its mothballed desalination plant. And the city of Marina Coast in Monterey Bay is planning to develop large desal capabilities. These would increase the state’s capacity to almost 100 million gallons per day.
Desalination is not a new idea. Most of Abu Dhabi’s gas-fired power plants provide electricity to their huge desalination plants that deliver over a billion gallons of drinking water a day. Desalination is the country’s only source of drinking water.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, who owns the Diablo Canyon plant, is happy to maximize production at the desal plant. The main requirement is additional reverse osmosis filters and storage tanks, fairly easy considering that the system is highly modular and they have plenty of space. In addition, a water pipeline is needed to connect the plant to the water users in town.
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Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Opponents to desalination complain that there are significant environmental issues. I’m not sure I’d call them significant, since these issues are nowhere near as bad as continued depletion of groundwater and the effects of the drought itself. Also, they can easily be addressed.
The seawater intake pipes can drag in and kill small ocean organisms, but proper filters can fix that. Even better, the intake pipes can be placed under the ocean floor to use the sediment as a natural filter. And the volume of water is comparatively small compared to the local area around the intake.
About half of the seawater that is treated in a desalination plant becomes fresh water. The salt removed stays in the other half, doubling the saltiness of the wastewater and making it a brine. The brine is generally returned to the ocean, as Diablo Canyon does, where it is quickly diluted back to normal.
The claims that the cost of desalination is huge and energy-intensive are also a bit overblown. The cost is certainly higher relative to river and groundwater that just need to be pumped to users. But relative to the effects of the drought, a fraction of a cent per gallon just isn’t that much. Buying RO water from the supermarket costs about 40¢/gallon, so the public should not be too upset at a fraction of a cent per gallon to address something as grave as a megadrought.
The amount of electricity needed to desalinate seawater is also pretty low, only about 1 kWh per 100 gallons of drinking water produced (WRA). A kWh costs an average of 12¢ in America, so this is a tenth of a cent per gallon. But the Canyon Diablo nuclear plant produces this electricity at only 4¢/kWh, cheaper than most other energy sources in California, so the cost is even less.
If desalination were to increase significantly in the state, monthly water bills might rise $10 or so. This is not much of a price to pay to ward off the worst effects of a megadrought. And new desal plants can be kept in reserve for when they are needed most, as was the case with Santa Barbara’s mothballed plant.
Of course, we should exhaust all other options at the same time, particularly reusing wastewater, and capturing and treating stormwater runoff. California only reuses 9 percent of its wastewater. While this is far ahead of other states, it’s only scratching the potential surface. Significant increase of wastewater treatment across California could provide over a hundred million gallons a day to the drought-stricken state.
But right now, this nuclear power plant can contribute to helping with this drought.
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BUSINESS 19,920 views
Beyond California: The Worst Droughts In American History
A senior hydrologist for California says the state’s ongoing drought will become more severe—at least in the San Joaquin River Valley—than any similar-length drought of the past century.
“With the forecast just made, this year is going to be the worst four-year sequence on the San Joaquin River group,” says Maury Roos, senior hydrologist for the Department of Water Resources, who retired as the state’s chief hydrologist but still works part time. Despite the dire declaration, California’s drought is far from the worst the U.S. has ever seen.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s beats California’s current plight by a long shot, in terms of area covered and years of length. Spanning eight years in certain parts of the Great Plains, it was the worst American drought of the 20th century, causing mass migration westward. But even the Dust Bowl pales when compared to centuries past. Californians today are facing water rationing. Early European settlers and Native Americans disappeared entirely in certain regions in the face of devastating drought.
To identify the Worst Droughts In U.S. History—a task that is harder than it might sound–Forbes consulted America’s top climate scientists. We discovered that comparing droughts is tricky. For one, there is no clear consensus on the exact definition of the word “drought.” Nor is there an agreed-upon way to calculate a drought’s duration. Drought can be measured in a myriad of ways, by “rainfall amounts, vegetation conditions, agricultural productivity, soil moisture, levels in reservoirs and stream flow, or economic impacts,” scientists at NOAA point out. Comparing regions is also fraught, since a New Jersey drought would make for an Arizona wet streak.
“Everybody’s drought is going to be the worst one in their region,” says Daniel Cayan, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s kind of like a drought beauty contest.”
Fortunately, scientists have been measuring rainfall, temperature, and soil moisture across North America since the beginning of the 20th century, providing a century’s worth of hard data. Those measurements confirm that the drought that turned vast swathes of the U.S. into the Dust Bowl, named for the massive clouds of dry soil and sand the wind whisked into “black blizzards” that blocked the sun for days at a time, is indeed the worst in recent memory. At its peak in 1934, the Dust Bowl covered 77% of the United States; drought conditions lasted for some seven to eight years in the hardest-hit region, the Great Plains, though some researchers say the drought lasted as long as 12 years. The Dust Bowl, which peaked in 1934, came amid the Great Depression. Farmers couldn’t grow the crops needed to pay loans, or even to feed themselves. Many were forced off their land. Millions moved from the Great Plains to the Western U.S., as commemorated in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. In fact, scientists believe that the Dust Bowl was the worst drought of the last 300 years.
Not far behind the Dust Bowl in terms of severity is the Great Plains/Southwest drought in the middle of the last century. First felt in the Southwestern U.S. in 1950, it spread to Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. By 1954, it had enveloped 10 states from the Midwest to the Great Plains and south into New Mexico. At its peak in 1954, it covered 62% of the country. Researchers say it lasted from 8 to 14 years. Texas rainfall dropped 40% from 1949 to 1951; Dallas temperatures soared higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 52 days during the summer of 1953. Nearly as severe as the Dust Bowl, the Great Plains drought peaked in 1956 and finally subsided with the spring rains of 1957, according to researchers who take the shorter view on duration.
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