California's MegaDrought - Nuclear Power To The Rescue

[Marlin]

California's MegaDrought - Nuclear Power To The Rescue


http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/06/09/californias-megadrought-nuclear-power-to-the-rescue/?ss=energy

[Rerun]

Or put in a similarly sized UP tangentially fired boiler with a FGD system. Get more power , more economically , reject less heat to the environment therefore using less cooling water and run that same desal plant. You would make more money at a lower cost with less environmental impact and sell the gypsum from the FGD to boot.

[GLW]

Or put in a similarly sized UP tangentially fired boiler with a FGD system. Get more power , more economically , reject less heat to the environment therefore using less cooling water and run that same desal plant. You would make more money at a lower cost with less environmental impact and sell the gypsum from the FGD to boot.

That's a lot of long trains pulling a lot of lignite,...

And then there's the fly ash,...

And this is California,...

[Marlin]

Or put in a similarly sized UP tangentially fired boiler with a FGD system. Get more power , more economically , reject less heat to the environment therefore using less cooling water and run that same desal plant. You would make more money at a lower cost with less environmental impact and sell the gypsum from the FGD to boot.

  Diablo Canyon was not built to supply desalination capability to the public it is just a lucky happenstance that it is currently the largest in California with enough excess capacity to help alleviate some of the drought conditions. A much larger one is coming on line in Carlsbad and they may restart the mothballed plant at Santa Barbara. I found the article interesting and was surprised how cheap the cost was. Only raising water bills by $10 a month does not seem bad when in an extended drought.

[Content1]

Our state is run by liberals who can't see the big picture.  Will protesters line up to desalination  plants and protest like they did for nukes?  Coastal cities are lucky they have a backup source of water.  Throw solar cells in to power most of it, and it has everything the green people should love.  Think of all the jobs if  we could expand farming.

[nukewood]

We lived in Israel in 91-92. water shortage was critical. Today Israel exports water because of their modern desalination plants.

[Content1]

We lived in Israel in 91-92. water shortage was critical. Today Israel exports water because of their modern desalination plants.

We need our Governor to read Nukeworker.  We could learn from Israel, just like cell phone are most created by their scientists. 

[Rerun]

Hey GW I know. I was pointing out how stupid the idea is!

[HydroDave63]

Or put in a similarly sized UP tangentially fired boiler with a FGD system. Get more power , more economically , reject less heat to the environment therefore using less cooling water and run that same desal plant. You would make more money at a lower cost with less environmental impact and sell the gypsum from the FGD to boot.

Hey GW I know. I was pointing out how stupid the idea is!

Sounds more like "He was for it, until he was against it"...

[GLW]

Well, let me get a bit PC sounding but bear with me,....

Not a stupid idea, more likely inappropriate,...

Being a steward is not the same as being a "Forever Wild" cheerleader,...

Being a steward requires decisions where pros and cons are balanced against needs and wants,...

California's human population is sucking the Colorado River Basin (CRB) dry,...

This was a need met by the CRB for many decades, but is tilting into unsustainable,...

So, are new construction nuclear desalination plants a good solution for California?

I'm not convinced it's a financially plausible solution,...

That's before the technical stuff kicks in,...

Is using Diablo Canyon's unused capacity a reasonable, albeit small, addition to the plus column in a dry state?

Yup, that's a no-brainer,...

Except for those with turkey brains,...



HAPPY FLAG DAY!!!!!!

[HydroDave63]

HAPPY FLAG DAY!!!!!!

For California?

[hamsamich]

Using a quick calculation based on two articles I read it looks like California could of used San Onofre's lost 2 GW to make about 4 billion gallons or so of fresh water a day if they built the desal plants to make it, which would be about 10% of the 38b gallons the whole state uses daily.  This could have been a nice stop gap measure to deal with drought situations that crop up so often there.  How much lost revenue from loss of food production could have been saved?  Plus the damage to hard to replace fruit and nut producing trees that may die soon with the water rights revocations going on there now.  Nuclear power could have been a low carbon answer to water issues in CA but not now.

[Rerun]

You know except the safety thing

[HydroDave63]

Using a quick calculation based on two articles I read it looks like California could of used San Onofre's lost 2 GW to make about 4 billion gallons or so of fresh water a day if they built the desal plants to make it, which would be about 10% of the 38b gallons the whole state uses daily.  This could have been a nice stop gap measure to deal with drought situations that crop up so often there.  How much lost revenue from loss of food production could have been saved?  Plus the damage to hard to replace fruit and nut producing trees that may die soon with the water rights revocations going on there now.  Nuclear power could have been a low carbon answer to water issues in CA but not now.

One rarely mentioned drawback to the desalination "solution" is disposing of the leftover brines. Domestic water has a definite chlorine taste and odor to it above 2 ppm free chlorides. Yet ocean water has about 17K ppm NaCl and roughly the same content of KCl. To get those 4e9 gallons of domestic water, one would be discharging the equivalent of 150 millions gallons of salt back out. Problem with that being that the ceiling on chlorination to reduce biofouling for some NPDES permits runs at about 100K ppm Cl, so a great deal of the energy used in the desalination process is the pumping of dilution water from the ocean to mix with the brines, and then back out to sea. Too much of the ocean's own salt going back, and there is a potential dead zone at the discharge pipe.

Not saying that desalination at that particular facility wouldn't be a great thing (although it is constrained by the limited site footprint west of I-5, not to mention the political issues),  but at this point, it is water under the bridge. Pun intended. The state could easily save huge amounts of water by building a ~1 mile dike and lock at the mouth of the San Joaquin west of Pittsburg. But that idea has also been kicked around for 40+ years...

[hamsamich]

Great post hydro!  I've read a lot about the brine discharge.  Most comprehensive articles mention it as the biggest drawback along with the obvious power consumption and sea life deaths overall depending on point of view..  I recently read an article on how Israel is helping Cali design Desal. plants and how they figured Desal should be considered one of the last options - they should know.  Texas has aquifer management/pumping going on to better use excess rainwater to fill aquifers "fuller" and faster.  More reservoir building also helps.  Wastewater reclamation was mentioned as a biggie.  Charging for excessive use of water made people more aware and they would use a lot less also.  Basically less Desal needed and less MW needed.  California water resources seem to be extremely poorly managed and although Desal is a good option probably shouldn't be looked at as a first option to fill a huge void.  Getting a large scale Desal plant up now to get experience and fill a small percentage of yer void looks like a no brainer.  However you slice it though, California has 2 big problems:  power consumption and water consumption.  Those 2 GW could have went a long way for both.

[Chimera]

Sam Kinison used to joke about people who live in the desert . . . claiming that we don't do that here in the good old USA.  Water has long been an issue in the southwest.  Enough so that water has been re-appropriated from all over the west just so people could live in the great American desert in southern Arizona and California.

[GLW]

UAE, Qatar, et al on the Arabian gulf use three and four and five and six different desalination techniques/technologies,....

They deal with brine discharge, et al,...

The answers exist, technology will advance, but the answers to the acute needs are already on the table,...

The 2 GW at SONGS would have been throwing good money after bad,...

It keeps coming back to this is California,...

Possibly the penultimate example on Earth of an educated beyond their intelligence society, almost completely disassociated from the reality of living and breathing on planet Earth,...

Californians seriously refer to the Khardasians as an "industry",...

The Edwardian vanguard of American Society,...

May we be spared,...

[HydroDave63]

May we be spared,...

I hear that once the water runs out, millions of them will move to New York, for the scenery and abundant water of Niagara Falls... 

[GLW]

I hear that once the water runs out, millions of them will move to New York, for the scenery and abundant water of Niagara Falls... 

Just so long as they have to pay a poll tax to relocate,...