From Areo Magazine, September 5:
In 1964, US President Lyndon B. Johnson made a historic request: he wanted a large-scale, nuclear-powered desalination programme to address the growing need for potable water in the American Southwest. Members of the federal government were dispatched to Israel for conversations with the world’s leading experts on desalination technology. Four years later, the Secretary of the Interior and the Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission submitted a report endorsing nuclear-powered desalination as a “solution to the Southwest region water supply” and outlining locations for the relevant facilities.
These plans never came to fruition. Disputes over the salinity of the Colorado River soured America’s diplomatic relations with Mexico, especially on water issues. Negotiations ultimately resulted in the construction of just one desert-bound desalination facility: the Yuma Desalting Plant (YDP), designed to reduce the brackishness of the Colorado River as it left the United States. But for a number of reasons the $250 million YDP has been idling for more than three decades. In particular, the brackish water that was initially diverted during construction of the YDP transformed thousands of acres of desert into an unintended wetland, which the Mexican government then declared a biosphere reserve. The current consensus is that operating the YDP would adversely impact this ecosystem, and so the facility remains mothballed.
While the deserts of North America are not the most expansive in the world, proximity to Hollywood renders them larger than life in the popular imagination. From California’s Death Valley to the sagebrush of Santa Fe, from Utah’s Salt Flats to the mighty saguaro cacti of the Sonoran Desert, icons of American aridity abound. Nevada is not the Sahara, but Las Vegas is seen as a paradigmatic oasis. Defying the legendary heat of central Arizona is viewed as the definition of hubris. The problem is well understood. In times of turmoil, academics, advocates, politicians and pundits are quick to resort to panic and blame—only to abandon the issue at the first hint of rain.
The most recent round of recriminations involved an Arizona suburb that made international headlines when its water deliveries were cut off to protect a neighbouring community’s dwindling supply. The City of Phoenix ultimately adopted construction restrictions in response to the ongoing drought. Further north, the Navajo Nation sought, and was denied, assurances from the federal government concerning its share of the Colorado River. In Nevada, federal officials contemplated modifications to the Hoover Dam to prevent a “dead pool,” a situation in which dwindling liquid reserves could strip the grid of 1.3 million households’ worth of hydroelectric power. In Utah, the possible disappearance of the Great Salt Lake was not only a threat to the local environment and economy, but threatened to scatter arsenic dust into the state’s already polluted air. This was regarded as especially bad news given Utah’s ongoing population boom, which has proven so challenging to local governments that Governor Spencer Cox implored would-be Californian migrants to stay away. The tens of thousands of Californians who do relocate to Utah, Arizona and Nevada every year are not bringing water with them. While recent precipitation has substantially eased drought conditions in the Golden State, California still hasn’t much water to spare.
Or rather, California hasn’t much potable water to spare. With over 800 miles of Pacific coastline, there is no plausible risk of California actually running dry in the foreseeable future. The ocean would not be measurably diminished were it tapped to refill every lake, river, stream and aquifer in the Intermountain West. So it is unsurprising that government officials in Arizona, Utah and Nevada, who have for decades been embroiled in legal disputes over distribution of water from the Colorado River, have expressed renewed interest in pipeline projects connecting the ocean to their own landlocked infrastructure....
....MUCH MORE
Their headlines are boring, their articles are not. Also at Areo:
Why Do We Get Sick? The New Science of Evolutionary Medicine
