Yeah, well, you try refilling a canadair in a swimming pool when it's windy.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Salt the earth
Can't have wildfires if nothing grows!
Mudslides for everyone!
Salt can stress and kill plants?
You know what else can stress and kill plants? Being on fucking fire.
🤷🏻♂️
Ocean water has electrolytes, and that's what plants crave
No, plants in California are adapted to fire season weather. They're not adapted to salt.
Except the fire goes out once the plant is burnt and a new one can grow. The salt stays for a long time.
I mean, as long as we:
-
Produce it in advance and store it then.
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Are willing to pay what it would cost.
We can come up with all the freshwater we want in LA, desalinate ocean water. San Diego built a large desalination plant down the coast, finished it a decade back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant
Can't do that at the last minute, though.
The problem with desalination is that there's a super-concentrated salt sludge that needs to be discarded after the process. Dumping that back into the ocean creates excess salinity which fucks up the ecosystem in the immediate area.
Not saying that desalination isn't a good idea, just that there's more to think about than "put seawater in, get tap water out".
Sell that shit to the north east! BAM.
We got around that in San Diego by already having several acres of evaporative pools to process sea water into salt at the south end of the bay. The desalinization plant is just helping our ability to create sea salt by dumping the waste salt product into an absolutely huge first stage evaporative "pond."
If you wanted I can literally take pictures of the south end of the bay, and all the "salt ponds," that we've, apparently, built, and are expanding.
Why cant it be turned into sea salt (the "spice")?
It is. But there's way more salt produced that way than the market wants to buy.
There is work to combine lithium extraction with desalination plants. We would also have more lithium than we would ever need for batteries.
But there's way more salt produced that way than the market wants to buy
Artificial scarcity from Capitalism yet again!
We want to desalinate water so that we have fresh water.
Doing so generates salt as waste and requires safe/responsible disposal.
We can sell some of the salt, as a product.
But the market won't buy all of the salt.
So the salt just goes back to the "waste" category, and we need to find disposal methods.
I don't see where scarcity (whether artificial or natural) comes into play. The world has lots and lots of salt, and anyone who wants it can get it very cheap.
Constitute it into bricks and dump them into old salt mines. Itll at least slow down mine erosian.
Is there lithium in seawater?
In small amounts. It's not economical at all to extract on it's own, maybe as part of desalinization, but even then it's probably marginal.
Yes, lots. More than we could use.
I don't know, but if I had to guess like everything else it comes down to money. It's energy intensive to desalinate seawater to the degree it's drinkable, and now we're talking about adding even more energy to refine it even further to make it suitable for human consumption. That makes any recovered salt expensive compared to natural salt deposits. Much easier (read: cheaper) to just scrape salt deposits that have already evaporated.
I would imagine the thousands of cubic kilometers of freshwater currently entering the ocean from global warming far outbalances the little water we take from desalinization, and the net effect even if we put that salt back is quite a bit lower salinity.
For sure. All the freshwater needs in the world is soo tiny in comparison to the oceans that it would be completely impossible to even measure a rise of salinity in the oceans if we were to desalinate all our freshwater and dump the brine in the oceans. However, we can't feasibly distribute the brine all over the oceans, so it would increase salinity locally and kill everything there.
Current regulations have outfall systems that dilute it below harmful levels as it's dumped, plus there's usage of the salt waste for chemical production, including chemicals used in the desalinization process.
Yes. But at the same time, we're litteraly mining for salt, because it's cheaper.
Actually, we're also desalinating for salt. Here's some evap ponds in San Diego.
There's a bike trail that goes along side and cuts straight through those ponds I used to ride out to the Silver Strand when I lived in North Park.
Was super cool to see the ponds change week over week. But holy hell do they stink. Not as bad as some of the brackish mud flats around the Puget Sound, but they definitely have an aroma.
Did you read all of that?
The cost of water from the plant will be $100 to $200 more per acre-foot than recycled water (approximately 0.045 cents per gallon), $1,000 to $1,100 more than reservoir water (approx. 0.32 cents per gallon), but $100 to $200 less than importing water from outside the county.[42] As of April 2015, San Diego County imported 90% of its water.[13] A conglomerate of California-based environmentalist groups, the Desal Response Group, claimed that the plant will cost San Diego County $108 million a year.[16]
So yes, "we" can come up with all the fresh water "we" want, provided "we" can afford to pay for it. There are a hell of a lot more poor Angelinos (some of whom have just gotten even poorer) than there are poor people in SD and L.A. county does not import 90% of its water.
What the fuck is an acre-foot?
It's 1 chain by 1 furlong by 1 foot
I thought you were taking the piss, but no, an acre really is one chain (66ft) by one furlong (660ft). TIL.
It's the amount of water to fill an acre sized area with 1 foot of water.
Acre inches and acre feet are used in a lot of land use and water use analyses. If a crop needs a certain number of inches per year of rain, or calculating the depth of flooding a certain amount of rain will cause, or how much water can be diverted from a river while fulfilling obligations to downstream rights owners, etc.
It's like watt hours or calories or light years or electron volts: not exactly an SI base unit but sometimes an easier unit for certain types of conversions and formulas.
Most likely the amount of water that covers one acre to a depth of one foot.
The volume to cover one acre with one foot (ie: of water). Cubic volume measurements are for metric.
I'm guessing it's the volume of water that is the area of an acre times a foot deep.
Freedom units. Equal to 3.2 million big gulps ;)
1 acre of area by 1 foot high volume of water
That is absurd.
If I remember correctly, it comes from measuring volume coming to/from large bodies of water where surface area (acres) and depth changes (feet) are easier to measure and there is little reason to do unnecessary conversion to other, more common, units of volume for industry-specific purposes, especially if others outside the industry rarely see or care about such values.
It's also very common in agriculture, especially older areas that use flood irrigation, where A. Larger volumes are hard to use in any other unit, and B. you want to know water application rates per-acre on your crops, something that is very easy to find when you are applying acre feet of water over X acres.
Yes it's a "stupid" unit but it has it's place.
Ok, but what about cubic metres?
Even if you're using metric units, area of land times height of water is a common calculation. If you have a 200 hectare plot of land that you want to plant wheat on, and know that wheat needs about 35cm of rain to thrive, but a drought comes in where you only get 10cm, then you'll want to irrigate with 25 cm times 200 hectares = 5000 hectare cm of water. If you irrigate that volume from a 5000 hectare lake you can expect to deplete it by 1 cm, which would replenish with 0.1cm of rain if the watershed feeding that lake happens to be 50000 hectares itself. Or you could do it with square kilometers. Or square meters. The conversion itself just happens to want to stick with the area for ease of analysis, whenever talking about water use from rain or rivers or lakes.
See also the calorie (non-SI unit of energy that is still convenient for certain calculations), electron volt (non-SI unit of energy useful in quantum physics), or the watt hour (non-SI unit of energy useful for electricity use or battery capacity). These are all metric derived, but different units of the same thing (energy) based on ease of conversion in different calculations.
An acre foot is 1233 cubic meters
Because the equation needs three numbers, and because one of them is 1, it won't give a clear picture of the volume.
You mean that?
This is a shortsighted, unintelligent comment.
Please explain.
The only reason that most of the southwest is short on water is that the water rights in California were decided in the late 1800s allowing farmers in the central valley to use most of the water that we have available to us in the southern part of the state. They have decided to plant water hungry crops, such as alfalfa, in a desert so that they use their allotment every year and don't lose access to "their" water. Some of the cities have decided to sell "excess" water to Nestlé to be bottled at a rate of cents per 1000 gallons of water.
The US is literally starving, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico of water because of all these bullshit imaginary contracts that haven't been revisited since the 1800s
Cogently put. Thank you!
He was talking about his own post
Forget it Jake, it's Pacific Palisades