Evaluating the Potential of a Nuclear Desalination Plant
May 5th, 2009
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Fresh water is one of the most overlooked resources on earth, especially given that supplies of fresh water are increasingly strained by development in areas where adequate water reserves do not exist. As development of urban areas and agriculture expands, water is becoming more of a limiting factor. Wells are being pumped to the point of endangering the sustainability of aquifers and entire rivers are now diverted to provide for both irrigation and water for cities.
One solution to this problem is desalination. Currently, it is used primarily in areas where water is simply not avaliable by other means. It is expensive due to the large amounts of energy needed to extract fresh water from sea water, however, it also offers the only source of water that is effectively unlimited and avaliable anywhere within reasonable distance of the coastline.
There is, thus far, only one example of a reactor which was operated primarily for the purpose of fresh water production:
The BN350 Reactor in Kazakhstan produced about 1000 MW of thermal power. The reactor was used to generate 150 megawatts of electricity, but most of the thermal energy was used for process heat at a desalination plant, resulting in the production of 120,000 cubic meters of fresh water per day.
Larger generation III+ reactors produce about four times as much thermal power, with the USAPWR producing about 4,451 MWt and the European Pressurized Reactor producing about 4,500 MWt. A common nuclear power plant layout has two such reactors operating in tandem, thus having a total thermal output of about eight to nine gigawatts.
Assuming that the same effeciency as the BN350 setup were achieved in a conventional regenerative steam distillation plant, such a two-reactor driven desalination plant could therefore deliver about one million cubic meters of water per day (over one quarter of a billion US gallons), as well as more than half a gigawatt of electricity – more than enough for all plant operations as well as activities like pumping water, operating equipment and other internal activities.
To put this another way, since one acre-foot is equal to 1234 cubic meters, such a desalination plant could produce 810 acre-feet of water per day or about 283,500 acre-feet per year.
What that equates to:
Slightly less than half the water consumed by the entire city of Los Angles. Los Angles California has one of the highest per-capita water consumption rates in the US, at 122 gallons per day, versus 75 gallons per day for the average New Yorker.
Of course, this is based on the one good real-world example of a nuclear powered desalination plant, the BN-350 reactor complex in Kazakhstan. The BN-350 used a multistage flash evaporation system which fairly standard for Soviet desalination systems of the time and considered nominally effecient when it came on line in 1973. Since then there has been additional refinement of evaporation-based desalination along with the increased proliferation of reverse-osmosis systems, which can be more energy effecient but are more technically complex and may require greater maintenance. Reverse osmosis systems do not require heating but do require a large amount of energy to force water through a membrane system at extremely high pressure.
Also, here the hypothetical system is composed of reactors currently avaliable. A future system could use reactors of a higher output or designed especially for water desalination. A system could also use solar heating to pre-heat water before evaporation or might use waste water, brackish water or water that is fresh but in need of treatment and sterilization. In such cases, the yield would be increased dramatically.
Thus, in a modern system, the water output could be considerably higher. These numbers should be used as a lower limit for what could be expected from a nominally sized plant using existing technology and conventional flash distillation methods.
More info on the BN-350 and other Soviet fast reactors
Info and Images of the BN-350 plant
Additional Info on Nuclear Water Desalination
Even more info on nuclear desalination, including applying reverse-osmosis and other technologies
Sadly, the BN-350 was shut down in the mid 1990’s due to lack of funds for refueling and necessary updates and overhauls of the systems, which had reached the end of their planned design lifespan. Other examples have shown that such plants can be extended to operate far longer by replacing and updating critical systems, but this was not possible for the government of Kazakhstan.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Enviornment, Good Science, History, Nuclear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 5th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Roger Humphries and Keith Davies have been leading advocates of nuclear desalination and active in developing the technical basis for coupling nuclear power plants and desalination plants. CANDESAL is their coupling of CANDU power reactors and desalination plants.
An applications study encompassing a technical and economic evaluation has been carried out for a CANDESAL nuclear desalination/cogeneration system located at the El Dabaa site in Egypt. This site was selected for the applications study because it has been qualified as a nuclear site and is under consideration as a potential site for a CANDU 6 reactor. The economic evaluation was carried out in accordance with the assumptions and methods used by IAEA in their evaluation of the technical and economic viability of nuclear desalination.
The results of the study indicated that for a design capacity of 240,000 m3/d the levelized cost of potable water is about $0.70US/m3. For a potable water production capacity of 1,100,000 m3/d, corresponding to the full condenser cooling water flow, the cost is essentially the same, dropping slightly to $0.69US/m3. These figures represent a cost reduction of approximately 13% relative to the cost of water produced by a reference plant without preheat or design optimization. The similarity in water price over the wide production range is expected, since in both cases the full benefit of preheat and design optimization is realized.
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May 5th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the USSR was its waste of engineering talent. Everything was that the whim of the central planners and the Politburo with no rhyme or reason. Without the economic incentive or the economy to keep it going stuff like this just becomes yet another ex Soviet rusting ruin.
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May 6th, 2009 at 12:10 am
One problem with any coastal desalination scenario is what you do with the brine. The brine could increase the salinity of local coastal marine environments to deleterious levels.
One solution would be to recycle the waste water produced by consumers after the fresh water produced from nuclear power plants has been utilized and use it to dilute the brine before pumping it back into the sea. However, only about 80% of of waste water can usually be recovered. So you would still have to deal with the other 20% of brine not diluted.
Alternatively, desalinated water could supplement existing water systems, increasing fresh water resources up to 400%. This would allow recycled water to completely dilute the waste brine from desalination plants to the normal salinity of sea water with no harm to the local environment.
http://www.newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/
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May 6th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Marcel F. Williams said:
There are numerous ways of dealing with the brine. I believe the most common is just to dilute it with more sea water such that the salinity is reduced to near seawater levels. You could also have a multipoint dispersal system that does not discharge it all at one point, so it gets diluted pretty fast.
Of course you could also use wastewater, although that begs another question: Why not recycle the waste water. Unpleasent though it may sound, it is entirely possible to recycle waste water 100% back to potable water. Of course, it’s easier to recycle it back to use for irrigation or some other use that is not as touchy as drinking it.
Of course there’s something else you could do with it too: You could use the concentrated brine for producing useful end products. Sodium, chlorine, magnesium, potassium and a few other chemicals are derived from their salt form which occurs in large enough quantities in sea water to make them a potential source for extraction.
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May 6th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
The easiest, cheapest, most environmentally friendly and most energy efficient way to increase supplies of Potable Water, is by stopping most Biofuel production. 81% of USA freshwater consumption is for Irrigation. According to Sandia Lab study, Biodiesel uses a staggering 6500 gals of water for every gal of biodiesel and Corn Ethanol uses 985 gals for each gal of Ethanol. Curious how the anti-Nuclear Greens in Germany are big fans of biodiesel, in spite of it also requiring more energy to grow & process than it yields as a fuel. Also, according to a confidential, leaked World Bank report, Biofuels have pushed World Food Prices up 75%. Amazing that the European Union is also pushing Biofuels, while it takes a generally negative view to Nuclear Power. So how many children are the German Greens willing to sacrifice by way of starvation, in order to promote their anti-Nuclear, Renewable Energy Dogma?
They’ve already pushed up the price of Solar PV, by creating excessive demand, with half the World’s Solar PV installed in high tech Germany, even though Germany has about half the Solar Insolation of typical developing nations. The low tech developing nations could actually use the Solar PV, to supply a minimum of basic power for medical clinics, schools and rural villages – whereas Germany could give them their Solar PV, expand Nuclear Power by the same amount, and still come ahead money wise. Now that is a Win, Win Environmental & Humanitarian Bargain.
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May 6th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Warren Heath said:
Very true. All subsidies for biofuel need to be stopped immediately for the good of the enviornment and world economy. Of course, that will only help the water situation in places like the US. Places like the Marshall Islands, parts of northern Australia, much of the middle east etc still are dependent on very limited and expensive desalination and would benefit from plentiful water from nuclear desalination.
Warren Heath said:
Again, an excellent point. Solar energy is useless as a method of providing for grid energy for either base load or peaking. I’ve made the point before that solar energy is excellent for remote areas where it is generally impossible to deliver fuel and where power needs are not very high. It is therefore the natural choice for things like remote seismometers, weather stations, communications relays and so on.
In Africa or someplace similar, a few solar panels would certainly not be enough to bring an area up to first world living standards, however they could run a well pump or provide enough power to village center to power a radio or satellite telephone system or something like that. A backwater rural medical center might not have access to reliable power of any amount, but if what they critically need is to keep a small refrigerator running to store antibiotics and also to run a low power ekg machine etc, they could get by with a few solar panels.
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May 6th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Warren Heath said:
It’s not just solar PV – now solar thermal is admitting that they are going to need water cooling to raise the efficiency of their plants, using guess what? Cooling towers.
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May 6th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Another suggested application of nuclear power for potable water was studied to death in the 1960s.
Build a couple of large tugs, and push or tow Antarctic icebergs to places where water as needed. The tugs would have about half the powerplant of a CVN, and could tow a moderate size [say 1 mile, by 0.25 mile by 300 feet] berg at 10 knots or so.
Two stories using them as a plot element were “Power to the People” [Jerry Pournelle as "Wade Curtis", in the Baen webscription site as a free sample] and _Oath of Fealty_ by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven
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May 6th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Current practice in large-scale coastal desalination plants is to reject brine back to the sea. As Marcel pointed out this practice may lead to a degradation of local fauna and flora unless the concentrated brine is rejected far out at sea, which would unnecessarily increase overall costs. However, some of the elements present in the brine are very scarce on land and/or are very expensive. There is thus a strong motivation for extracting these materials.
Not all the materials contained in seawater are worth extracting of course but obviously uranium, along with rubidium, indium, cesium and germanium are both expensive enough and concentrated enough in seawater to be worth extracting. The fact that the separation plant would be working with a brine would only increase the efficiency of the process. In some places the NaCl is of commercial value as well.
Extraction of materials and subsequent brine evaporation for surface storage of the solids would therefore be another advantage for these integrated desalination plants, making them more environmentally friendly, and mineral extraction will reduce overall costs of cogeneration nuclear desalination systems since the benefits of a third product would be added.
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May 6th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
DV82XL said:
Define “Unnecessary” I don’t consider it to necessarily be unjustified or inappropriate to expect an industrial facility to take certain steps in order to reduce undesired enviornmental effects, even if doing so would increase the cost of the project by a given amount – as long as this is all within reason.
If there is a demonstratable impact on local ecosystems by discharging undiluted brine then having a mechanism to dilute it and pipe it out to be dispersed is not unnecessary, even if it adds a few million dollars to the cost of the project.
DV82XL said:
NaCl is the primary source of both sodium and chlorine for use in industrial processes and chemical manufacture. Chlorine is by far the more important of the two materials recovered from NaCl (common salt).
Industrial chlorine is normally produced from brine solutions that are electrolyzed to produce chlorine gas and sodium hydroxide (along with potassium hydroxide if the salt source has signifficant amounts of potassium chloride in it). The sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide may be used as the final product for market or may be further processed to produce other sodium and/or potassium products.
The facilities that produce chlorine gas and sodium compounds produce high purity hydrogen as a byproduct. Occasionally it’s just burned to recover energy, but in situations where the facility has other chemical production operations, it can be used for additional end products. Many chlorine production facilities also produce large volumes of sodium hypochloride (bleach).
The anual demand for chlorine for industrial and chemical processes is equal to hundreds of thousands of tons, which are used for water disinfection, production of PVC and other chlorinated compounds, bleach, sanitizing solutions, hydrochloric acid etc etc. Demand for sodium hydroxide is also quite high as well as other sodium compounds.
As is, the chemical industry accounts for the largest end user of sodium chloride.
These products are produced in areas which have two things: Plentiful and reasonably priced electricity and a local source of rich brine (usually through hydraulic mining of a salt dome).
If you have some big nuclear reactors and some high salt brine in the same place, and you also happen to be making distilled water, it seems like a no brainier for a location for a chlorinated chemical plant. As a bonus, if the brine comes from sea water and not a salt dome, it will have other compounds which can be worth extracting.
The market is enormous.
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May 6th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
If you’re producing hydrogen, mightn’t you want to attach an ammonia factory to your complex? That’s one of the most important chemicals produced due to its role in fertilizer manufacture…
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May 6th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
drbuzz0 said:
My poor grasp of English idiom rears its head once again. The “unnecessary” was meant to refer to the alternative to the proposed solution of extracting the mineral content. In other words discharging the effluent out to sea such that it will not harm the local environment is an unnecessary cost, against the recovery of useful material which is a potential source of profit.
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May 6th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
George Carty said:
Hmm. Good point. You’d already have a descent source of potassium and if you have hydrogen then you’d certainly be able to produce ammonia, so you have two of the three most important fertilizers right there.
Nuclear + sea brine + distilled water in the same place might be a good formula for a general purpose bulk production facility for fertalizers, chlorinated produces, sodium hydroxide and all manner of other things. If you had a descent source of phosphorus then you’d have the makings of a great agricultural product plant. You can always recover phosphorus from sewage pretty easily. Sewage is very rich in phosphorus…
actually that would be a very neat system if you incorporated sewage treatment as well. You’d have plenty of chlorine on hand to disinfect it and if the facility is already producing water for irrigation, you could use reclaimed waste water to add to the irrigation water.
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May 6th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
TheOldBear said:
Interesting idea, I wonder how the costs compare with Nuclear Desalination.
Another idea would be to use Giant Nuclear Powered Tankers to extract fresh water from the many areas of the World where fresh water is flowing into the sea. West coast of B.C., Hudson’s Bay, coast of Greenland are examples.
There was also a plan to dam James Bay, turning it into a Huge Fresh Water Lake and pumping the water down various rivers into Lake Superior, and then into the Grain Belt of the USA.
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May 6th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Warren Heath said:
Another idea would be to use Giant Nuclear Powered Tankers to extract fresh water from the many areas of the World where fresh water is flowing into the sea. West coast of B.C., Hudson’s Bay, coast of Greenland are examples.
There was also a plan to dam James Bay, turning it into a Huge Fresh Water Lake and pumping the water down various rivers into Lake Superior, and then into the Grain Belt of the USA.
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May 6th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
For some reason the quote decided to enter by itself, anyway,
The issue with those plans is that they would have to be approved by Canada which strangely enough doesn’t want to see the Hudson Bay basin, which makes up about a third of the country, changed into a lake, or have the estuaries of our West Coast rivers damed to make reservoirs. We’re funny like that here.
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May 6th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
DV82XL said:
I don’t think you would need any estuaries dammed, just build a Tanker Terminal in deep water with a storage Tank large enough to hold one tanker’s worth of water. After emptying the Tank into the Tanker, use an underwater pipeline that extracts a fraction of the river’s outflow into the Tanker. If the pipe intake is sufficiently uphill, no pumping would be required, and the flow would only need to meet economic requirements.
The plan was to only dam James Bay, not Hudson Bay. See:
The Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal of North America or GCNA
Ultimately, with any of these schemes you would have to work the numbers to figure out whether they would be worth pursuing and then deal with all the environmental, social & political issues, afterwards.
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May 6th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Warren Heath said:
I am very familiar with these ideas, in all of their manifestations, and evolutions, and I can tell you right now that unless the USA invades Canada and subjugates us, none of these will ever come to pass. Even shipping water by tanker in the mater you suggested was rejected outright after one trial and the company’s permits revoked. This is a real hot-button item up here driven mostly by fears that should the US become dependent on our water, our sovereignty would be in real danger.
I am far from being anti American, nether are the overwhelming bulk of my countrymen, but at the same time we all know that Canada already is the mouse lying down with the elephant in our relationship with the US. We all are acutely aware that we are the Junior Partener and our own internal policies all have to be made with one eye to the South, and see no need to garner anymore interest from that quarter.
Feeling run very high in this matter, rightly or wrongly but they are not likely to go away.
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May 6th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
DV82XL said:
I thought British Columbia was already exporting River Water to the United States by Tanker, used for bottled water. The Water issue will become a serious one, if the Global Warming models prove correct. They are predicting the American Grain Belt will turn into semi-arid desert, and Agricultural Production will move into Northern Canada.
Right now, the issue is much more about minerals, especially Oil, which we happily sell to the United States, because we make money at it. Why the sensitivity to RECYCLING Fresh Water that is being dumped into the Ocean anyway is beyond my understanding. If we can make a decent income from it, why not. Canadians should be a lot more sensitive to the use of OUR PRECIOUS RIVER WATER in the Tar Sands, and the stupid waste of OUR PRECIOUS IRRIGATION WATER for Energy Negative Biofuel production, heavily subsidized by the Federal & Provincial governments.
I’m alot more concerned about how most of our Natural Gas is going to be used to produce Tar Sands Oil, for export to the United States. Under the Proportionality Clause of the N.A. Free Trade agreement, that NG comes out of Canada’s Quota, even though it is actually being exported to the USA, in a converted form (clean NG converted to dirty Crude Oil – a brilliant idea that is).
In any case, if British Columbia ain’t interested, there is a lot of spring runoff water in Greenland, Baffin Island and Antartica from the rapidly melting Glaciers.
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May 6th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Warren you know as well as I do that sovereignty issues up here are not decided on economic values alone, these plans will never fly because they will be opposed for the reason I noted. Let them go to Greenland then, or the Antarctic, it’s just not worth the political upheaval.
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May 6th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
DV82XL said:
When you want to build a Hydro Power Facility, or a Nuclear Power Plant or a Uranium Mine or any similar installation, the Environmental Wahhabi’s, Paid-by-Fossil-Fuel Pseudo Environmentalists, Whiners and Whack-Jobs will come out of the Woodwork in Droves. My View is, just announce a Referendum in the affected area, and let the fanatics try to convince the public of their view, if not, too f–in bad
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May 6th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
TheOldBear said:
That idea has been around for some time (towing ice bergs to areas which lack fresh water.) Of course, it does not need to be nuclear-based. If it is a small enough iceberg you could use standard sized ships. If it is larger you would need larger high power tugs to move it before it melts signifficantly.
The nuclear issue is seperate. Of course, nuclear energy is a great way to power big fast powerful watercraft, but it’s not necessary.
Warren Heath said:
What on earth would be the point of a massive program to sell fresh water to the United States? In case you didn’t know, the US is not lacking in fresh water resources when compared to other areas of the world. If you’re going to go to the ridiculous extent of fresh water tanker terminals, you’d do better shipping it to Saudi Arabia or the north coast of Australia than to the US.
The US shares with Canada the single largest liquid fresh water reserve on the face of the earth (by far) in the great lakes and associated watershed. That’s not even considering Alaska and all the meltwater there. Yes, there are parts of the US that are tight when it comes to water, for example, the dryer regions of the plains where water resources are tight and there is the potential for aquifirs getting squeezed, but why on earth would the US want to buy water from canada to ship to the plains when we have plenty in the Midwest and the pacific northwest etc. It’s a transport issue not a supply one.
And as for tankers for bottled water: That’s not really what I mean when I say “freshwater resources” Bottled water is a designer product. It’s ridiculous too. They ship that crap from Fiji and France to the rest of the world etc. You can go into a shop anywhere in the world and buy bottled water that came from all kinds of places – And you’d never be able to tell the difference, but eh, it’s what people buy, right?
By the way: The Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal came from a time when there were doomsday predictions about the waters in the great lake watershed being so polluted that they couldn’t be used and a general collapse of the whole watershed in North America. It was dead in the water (no pun intended) before it was even made public.
Warren Heath said:
The reason water is dumped in the ocean is you (Canada) have enough of it that you don’t need to recycle it. As for selling fresh water? It might be precious as a resource, but per unit it’s not precious at all. It’s the proverbable item that is more expensive to transport than to acquire.
The largest oil supertankers carry about 60,000,000 gallons of oil. (They’d carry less water because it’s heavier) And these are HUGE so huge they can’t pass through many straights and can’t even come into most ports.
So this huge tanker, which takes weeks to transport the cargo to a distant spot in the world, is going to only carry something like 20% of what the above desalination plant makes in a day. It would barely support a nominally sized city for a day.
That’s the problem with water. The only way to transport it economically is by river or canal, possibly by a major aqueduct or something.
There is plenty of freshwater to be had in the world and plenty of places that want it. It’s an issue of moving the stuff. There’s just no way to get the waters of canada to the deserts of the world in a way that is economical in the amounts necessary.
Warren Heath said:
To be fair, it’s not being sold to the United States really. Even if most of the oil is being physically sent to the US, it’s really being put on the collective international market. The oil market is kinda funny that way. It doesn’t really matter where the actual product comes from and goes to – it’s all basically collective. This is why things happen like oil being shipped from a Texas oil field to a Saudi refinery and then onto China where it sits in holding tanks until it is used to fulfill a contract for fuel in the UK or Japan.
The reason gas is burned to extract oil is two fold: one, oil is worth more and two the whole project to build a bunch of reactors out on the tar sands never happened.
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May 6th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
DV82XL said:
We are not *that* strapped for fresh water. I mean, if we really were to the point that we had run the Great Lakes dry and were in need of getting water from any location, even by tanker, we always have Alaska which has huge amounts of fresh water. Then there’s all the rain that the Paciffic Northwest gets that goes into the oceans as well as tremendous seasonal rains on Hawaii and places like Guam.
There’s no way the US would need to turn to Canada to start shipping water by tanker. That’s ridiculous. Saudi Arabia, Aruba, even maybe Australia, perhaps.
The water issues in the US are not that we don’t have enough water in total. It’s the fact that we don’t have the water where it is needed. Invading Canada would make it no easier to get fresh water in Arizona. The issue is not getting the water in the first place, it’s moving it.
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May 7th, 2009 at 12:32 am
drbuzz0 said:
This was an old debate that raged up here years ago which I suspect Warren knows as well. Your right the whole thing was ridiculous including at one point using the water from James bay to “flush the Great Lakes out like a toilet.” It was a stupid idea that should have died where it stood, but it was turned into political hay in the 1960’s by several political entities and developed a life of its own.
You have to keep in mind that during the War the US had funded and built the ALCAN highway to Alaska and some high ranking US Army officer had made some negative remarks about the wisdom of handing over the Canadian part of the project at the end of the war. While I’m sure this didn’t get much press in the States it definitely had an impact up here. It didn’t help when in 1948 it was found (from declassified documents) that there had been firm invasion plans developed by the US for Canada had the UK fallen. Given the circumstances of WWII this was probably a good idea from the American POV, but it did give the talk about the highway some credence.
When this water idea showed up in 1959-1960 with the Cold War running full tilt, it was easy to stir up worry, despite the fact that it never got much beyond the concept phase. However it did have the effect of linking water diversion issues to Canadian sovereignty on the political landscape. In the Eighties some firm did want to pump B.C. water into tanker for sale in the State, but it was for the bottled water market, and some B.C. environmentalists started dragging up the old issues.
Thus I was just giving Warren the kneejerk answers that these ideas get.
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May 7th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
drbuzz0 said:
You must not be reading the same news I am. I keep hearing dire warnings about the return of the dust bowl, the rapid depletion of groundwater & aquifers in the Midwest, the disappearance of Mountain Glaciers that feed the Water Reservoirs of Major US cities in the Western USA. Already Water Shortages in Southern US states.
You can’t mine the Great Lakes of water or you’ll have big huge beaches where once there was lakeshore.
It would be much more economical to ship water from Canada to the USA, since it is closer.
drbuzz0 said:
I would say the main market for water from British Columbia, would be California and Western Mexico. The Colorado River is already being seriously depleted and the reservoirs feeding it are drying up. Part of the Global Warming effect on most Mountain Snowcaps & Glaciers. It would make much more sense to save the Colorado River water for Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah & Wyoming. And get fresh water for California from desalination or import from Canada, Alaska & Washington state. One example:
California Faces Water Rationing, Governor Proclaims Drought Emergency
You can’t suck an entire river dry, that would be ecologically untenable, but you might extract 10% of the fresh water that a river is dumping into the Ocean. There may be comparative advantage for Canada to supply water to California over Washington or Alaska. As far as I’m concerned anyone who opposes selling Canadian water to the United States, that is just being dumped into the ocean anyways, is a Moron and a Birdbrain. If Canadians refused to sell our water going into the ocean, I would say California should refuse to sell us their produce, which would otherwise contain Canadian Water anyway – just returning our water in the form of fruits and vegetables. I can’t see how any Canadian would bellyache about us selling the USA our water, and blissfully ignore the coming crisis in Natural Gas, that is rapidly being burnt up in the Tar Sands.
As for the return on investment for shipping British Columbian Water by Tanker to California vs building a Nuclear Desalination plant – which they don’t allow in California, due to it’s Nuclear Ban – that I couldn’t say – you would have to work the numbers. The cost of the Tanker and loading/unloading facilities would be the major expense. With a large nuclear powered tanker – it could move water to California & Mexico quickly and cheaply.
drbuzz0 said:
That’s true of any commodity including water. The problem is the enormous demands of the Tar Sands for Natural Gas is seriously depleting Canada’s NG reserves and shortages of NG for Ontario & Quebec are expected. You might be aware it’s cold up here in the winter, and NG supplies most Canadian homes with winter heat. That’s why I’ve always stated that the Tar Sands project should never have been allowed to proceed without requiring it to use Nuclear Energy for Process Heat and Electricity.
As for The Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal of North America or GCNA project, I would say it was an idea whose time has not come. But come back in another 20 years and it may be quite a different story. The Climate Models are predicting serious if not catastrophic water shortages in the American South, West and Midwest, with many mountain snowcaps virtually disappearing. The sale of Canadian Water on that scale may be quite an advantage to our economy, I don’t have any problem with it. It’s environmental impact on Canada would be trivial compared to effects of burning of Coal for electricity – and that seems to be acceptable – especially to the anti-nuclear environmentalists.
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May 7th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Warren Heath said:
First gas isn’t going to be an issue in North America for some time to come. The finds in the Utica Shale in the St. Lawrence Valley and in the Louisianan Shale are huge, and will change the energy picture for the next twenty years on this continent. There will be a shift to using nuclear power to provide process heat for the Tar Sands long before the gas issue is a problem, and the price of NG dropped in Quebec this heating season past.
As Doc pointed out, tankering water is no solution, and at any rate could only service coastal regions for which desalination would be the cheaper choice. GRAND and NAWAPA the two big water diversion projects that were planned in the Fifties will never pass the environmental reviews that they would have to undergo in both countries and in the end were designed to solve problems envisioned at that time they were designed. And all kidding aside, there would be significant political issues in both nations over such projects that would likely kill the idea before it got off the ground.
I don’t know how old you are Warren, but these were debated at length in the past, and in great detail up here. You might want to familiarize yourself with some of the issue that were brought up at that time – they haven’t gone away.
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May 7th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Posted to my shared items
——————-
Blog post about nuclear desalination, yay!
A very crucial technological capability that is very important to know about. Water supplies are very important to the sustainability of society, and while stable access to water is important to nuclear power plants, those same kinds of plants can also nearly completely resolve water issues in many parts of the world.
IMO, this is one of those ‘perfect’ applications of nuclear power. MSF requires lower quality of heat, and many innovations can be instituted to obtain that heat at a much reduced cost. Thermodynamics works in your favor in this instance.
Plus, storage and other energy uses can easily compensate for the intermittency of demand. Plant rundowns can allow for higher burnup of fuel with lower ore requirements using the lower temperatures. And lastly, desalination institutions help humans establish a better equilibrium with nature. No ecosystem is damaged to produce the product water in any way, and thus every desalination plant reduces the footprint humans have on nature.
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May 7th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Warren Heath said:
I agree that it’s not an issue of the US not having water at all, it’s an issue of having shortages certain places. The US also dumps huge amounts of fresh water into the sea. The Mississippi, the Hudson and many other large rivers just send most of their water into the sea without being diverted. The Great Lakes are nowehere near depletion. We could start to talk about problems with the Great Lakes for water supply if they were anywhere near the point of being overdrawn (they’re not). In New Orleans they pump water up grades to put it into the ocean (fresh water). Yes, there are occasionally droughts in one place or another.
If the Great Lakes were actually in danger they could sacrafice some hydroelectric power to reduce the flow at the Niagra power plants anyway. There was also a proposal a long while ago called the Rampart Dam that would have created another Great Lake size resevour in Alaska.
You propose shipping water to the US in tankers?????
The worlds largest supertankers are going to carry 320,000 cubic meters.
That would supply the water needs of a city like Los Angeles for maybe four or five hours. You want to use this for irrigation, you’re going to need a good 50+ of these supertankers unloading their water **every day** to even make a dent in the Western US’s irrigation needs. If that’s a two day travel time each way, you;d need a flotilla of several hundred tankers to keep this going constantly.
Warren Heath said:
How large are you talking about? As is, supertankers are the largest vessels to go to sea and they’re so large most ports can’t accommodate them and if they get much bigger they’ll face too many problems with potentially bottoming out on shallows or being unable to navigate close enough to shore to unload and load.
If it were so easy to transport water from point A to point B on tankers then explain why the hell we experience droughts in Arizona and flooding in Iowa simultaneously. According to you, it’s just a matter of moving this water from point A to point B instead of stupidly ‘dumping it’
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May 7th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Q said:
Now you are putting words in my mouth, going way beyond anything I said. What I actually did say is that any notion about moving water would require a proper analysis, including moving water from Iowa to Arizona, something I didn’t make any claims about whatsoever. The movement of British Columbia river water to California, for instance, by Tanker is a method that I see no fundamental problem with, but as I said you would have to work the numbers to see if it is worth it. Personally, I agree that Nuclear Desalination would likely be more cost effective, but until I see the numbers I won’t be convinced and California is still refusing Nuclear Power Facilities. Also, the point isn’t whether it would significantly alleviate drought in California, the point is whether it would be economical – that is a reasonable return on investment for the facilities. I could work it out for myself, and if I have some time to waste maybe I will.
And the implications of withdrawing large amounts of water from the Great Lakes would be substantial. Just what, you don’t know and I don’t know – but I expect that it is not that easy or the GRAND scheme would never have even been researched or argued.
DV82XL said:
GRAND is a recycling, not diversion project. Diversion is a much tougher sell. And you sound like a Global Warming Denier. If what the climate models are saying come true, there will be serious – even desperate – water shortages in the American Midwest – wars will be fought over water. Under those conditions, if the GRAND scheme is feasible, and economical, it likely will be done, the pressure would be just too great for the Canadian Government to resist. Also take note that I never said I’m in favor of Grand or any other diversion or recycling scheme, but if the numbers worked out and the demand was there, I don’t have any problem with it – although I don’t know enough about it to make an accurate assessment.
DV82XL said:
The Utica Shale and Haynesville Shale and other discoveries may delay the peak NG crunch in North America significantly but that is far from certain. Even if the reserves are there they take time to develop. We’ve been waiting 30 yrs now for Arctic NG to appear in southern markets, and it looks like we will be waiting a long time more. If the Obama / Gore / Pickens & Ontario’s plans for Wind Energy come about – a lot more NG will be consumed. And the drop in Energy prices this past winter is of course due to the sudden economic downturn. It is virtually certain Canada will run into serious NG shortages in the next 20 yrs, if Tar Sands consumption isn’t curtailed. Nuclear is indeed the solution, but that still ain’t happened.
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May 7th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Warren Heath said:
GRAND is a diversion project it was planned to divert the entire outflow of the La Grande, Eastmain, Rupert, Broadback, Nottaway, Harricana, Moose, Albany, Kapiskau, Attawapiskat and Ekawan rivers. The proposal would divert about 17% of the freshwater in Ontario and Québec. I would suggest that you look at the plan before making a blanket statement like that. Also the 1950’s was a time of grand schemes, (no pun intended) like using nukes to cut a new Panama Canal, made in total disregard of the ecological consequences, which in the case of GRAND would be massive. As I stated up-thread it wouldn’t even come close to making an environmental review in ether country.
Seeing this project as unworkable is just a matter of commonsense based on a more current evaluation, and I’ll thank you not to compare me to GW denier because I find fault with a fifty-year old plan.
Warren Heath said:
This will not happen – its just a scare story told by the same people that turned the GRAND idea into a political whipping-boy, and for the same reasons. If you haven’t noticed by now, the Left in Canada loves to raise the specter of Canada being screwed over by the US, and to claim the Liberals and the Conservatives are puppets of Washington. This sort of propaganda has no place in this discussion.
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May 8th, 2009 at 12:49 am
DV82XL said:
They usually call it diversion when it diverts the water – BEFORE IT REACHES THE SEA – not afterwards. That is called recycling. I’m not sure there would be such significant ecological consequences – and the plan has been updated. Even includes Vast Energy Storage for the Renewable Energy Fans. I compare you to a GW denier because you seem to have no consideration of what lies ahead in a water shortage catastrophe in the United States, if the Global Warming Climate models are correct. Not to say I’m a fan of the plan, I’m just stating that it may be put back on the table if and when the Water Crisis in the USA becomes unbearable.
DV82XL said:
Come now, I could probably link you a hundred articles by experts in the field, claiming there will be an NG crisis in Canada before 2030, if the Tar Sands NG consumption is not curtailed. These experts in the field are quite obviously not out for some political purposes. That is just silly.
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May 8th, 2009 at 1:06 am
They usually call it diversion when it diverts the water – BEFORE IT REACHES THE SEA – not afterwards. That is called recycling. I’m not sure there would be such significant ecological consequences – and the plan has been updated. Even includes Vast Energy Storage for the Renewable Energy Fans. I compare you to a GW denier because you seem to have no consideration of what lies ahead in a water shortage catastrophe in the United States, if the Global Warming Climate models are correct. Not to say I’m a fan of the plan, I’m just stating that it may be put back on the table if and when the Water Crisis in the USA becomes unbearable.
Calling it “recycling” is a pure PR move – the rivers noted will have their waters sent south in the proposed canal, this renaming is just to make it more palatable. And yes it has been well established that at the very least it will kill every indigenous species of flora and fauna in James Bay and the littoral zone.
Warren Heath said:
Show me. Because politics never enters into the gas and oil issue.
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May 8th, 2009 at 1:34 am
A proposal I heard a long while ago was to use oil tankers headed back from delivering their cargo in North America or Europe to the Middle East to carry fresh water. When oil tankers head back they carry water anyway because they need to be ballasted. Older tankers would just put water into their oil tanks and of course this caused contamination when it was dumped, so now they have seperate tanks for ballast water, normally between the double hull. They still ride high though because the water tanks are just enough to keep them balasted safely but not to make them as heavy as when full of oil.
The idea was that they would return to Saudi Arabia or wherever carrying as much water as they could, including in the cargo tanks because it was considered easier and lower in energy to seperate petroleum contaminants from water to make fresh water than to seperate salt from water.
Even in a dry area of the world, a tanker full of water is not worth enough to make it worth while to ship like that except for the fact that the tankers were returning to port anyway and offered a free ride for water.
I don’t know what happened with that though. That was at least ten years ago and I don’t even remember where I heard of this.
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May 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
If you are going to think of shipping water by tanker then I think the place to do it would be the most desperate for water and somewhere where a tanker full of water would make a difference. The one place that comes to mind would be an isolated island which has only salt water and which is forced to use desalination by petroleum to produce fresh water because there is no nuclear energy and they can’t be shipped coal reasonably.
How about the Marshall Islands? I understand that they have been experiencing a perpetual energy and water crisis for the last hundred years because they’re isolated and lack any domestic fuel and being many small islands, many without natural fresh water, they are forced to use deisel generators for electricity and heat to process ocean water. This is hugely expensive of course, so perhaps a tanker full of fresh water could be of advantage to some of those islands. If not, then others have the same problem in the Azores or Solomon Islands etc etc
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May 8th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
drbuzz0 said:
No, not hundreds of thousands of tons. It’s more like 20 million tons per year globally. The chemical industry is the single largest consumer of NaCl and it is used to produce vital products like the ones you mentioned plus chemicals like sodium hydroxide, sodium bicarbonate and many others. It takes a lot of energy to split salt to produce these vital chemicals which is why the US and Europe are rapidly losing the industry to China and a few other areas that actually understand that cheap energy is good.
If things keep up (china building nuclear, coal and hydro plants as fast as they can and us not) we will lose the entire industry to them.
Also, the chemical industry is the largest user natural gas, which has a lot to do with it as a hydrogen source. Hydrogen is critical for fertilizer production and organic products but making it from water with electrolysis is not economical compared to using methane as the feedstock. Gas is also used to produce plastics, carbon fiber and other such products. It is an energy thing: methane is a good source of carbon and hydrogen building blocks and is less energy intensive to use than other sources.
Building a cluster of nuclear reactors to power a big chemical production complex would be awesome. It would be a real economic stimulus (as opposed to a fake one). Russia is starting to seriously consider nuclear reactors built as the center of industrial complexes.
BTW: We are in a similar situation with aluminum production which is dependent on having a lot of energy.
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