[thaumaturgy]

No, there is not enough snowpack. It's currently well below the seasonal average for the last 15 years [1], the average for that period is lower than the historical average was when California water policy was first established, and 2014 was the driest period California had experienced for the last 1200 years [2]. Only 2017 and 2019 provided some relief since then.

Current models predict a warmer and wetter California punctuated by extremely dry periods [3]. This is really bad news for a couple of reasons: Sierra snowpack accounts for around 70% of the state's overall water storage, which means it would need to double its total liquid water storage (and where is that supposed to go?), and agriculture is an important part of California's economy and contributes significantly to national food production, but also uses 80% of the state's water supply.

And then there are the aquifers. Subterranean water has been pumped out faster than it has refilled for decades [5], and wells have had to be dug deeper and deeper. In 2016, some communities ran entirely out of water because they were built on underground water supplies that had gone dry. Some of this water storage can't be replenished, because the substrate that stores the water gets compressed as water is extracted and then can't store water again.

Considered altogether, it is currently impossible to collect enough warm water to meet the state's needs.

I love California but the long term water outlook for the state might be enough to get me to move elsewhere. It's very grim.

[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/02/sierra-snowpack-at-61...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

[3]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat...

[4]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2016/3062/fs20163062.pdf [pdf]

[5]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/droughts-exposed-cal...

[Teknoman117]

I hope we start rolling out desalination at scale before things get dire.

As far as powering that goes, we'd either have to start deploying as much renewable energy generation as physically possible or get over our collective fear of building more nuclear power plants. Or both.

One of those self contained, passively safe tanker truck sized 100 MWe reactors that last 30 years that LLNL has proposed a few times sounds like an awful nice way of powering your 40 MW desalinization plant...

[thaumaturgy]

California has a number of desalination plants online already, including the large billion-dollar Carlsbad project, and several more plants in various stages of planning or construction.

I'm skeptical that desalination will be enough to prevent a reckoning over water in the near future though. It eases the strain on parched coastal communities, but it's pretty hard to move a lot of water very far inland. It's also expensive, in both up-front and ongoing costs, and the predicted intermittent wet years are going to make the economics of desalination tricky. And then there's the environmental impact; it's a good bet that 40 years from now, the state will be even drier than it is now, and 40 years of brine dumped up and down the coastline may have more severe consequences than we are anticipating. (To their credit, the Carlsbad project has made a large effort to remediate this with the construction of 60 acres of wetlands.)

For perspective, the Carlsbad plant is the largest in the western hemisphere and it produces enough water for 400,000 residents in one county. It is, aptly, a drop in the bucket.

[Chris2048]

Hmm, is brine a waste product of desalination? Interesting.

Can brine be duped on regular and/or sandy land and make it more fertile via minerals, or will briny/salty land be less fetile?

[Xylakant]

Salty land will become less fertile to the point of becoming a desert. Very few plants actually like salty soil (mostly marsh plants). "Salt the earth" is an expression for that reason.

[saagarjha]

Yes, and it's usually exceptionally bad for any environment.

[Dylan16807]

> I hope we start rolling out desalination at scale before things get dire.

Desalination is easy for household water but probably not practical for farming.

But running out of household water is almost entirely a political and allocation problem to begin with.

So while desalination is one way to prevent dire situations, there's no reason to even have dire situations.

[itsoktocry]

>have to start deploying as much renewable energy generation as physically possible

Do reasonable people still believe we can simply produce millions of square miles of solar panels and wind mills(that have their own production and maintenence issues), and that will somehow solve our energy issues? It's just not going to happen. We need nuclear power....and more.

[Teknoman117]

(which is why I mentioned nuclear power in my comment)

It's sad because it's probably the only thing that'll save us at this point, but it seems to be political suicide. Most of the problems surrounding it are solvable if we desired to solve them. (By 'desired' I mean funding research at an actionable level even though the current regulatory hurdles are expensive)

On a side note, I wonder what the energy consumed mining and refining uranium versus the power that can be generated from it is compared to getting the resources for photovoltaics or the neodymium you need for practical wind turbines.

[drran]

Sun already does desalination at the scale. Just create shadows over mountains to collect all this water at winter.

[rjmunro]

"Just create shadows"?

What does that mean?

[drran]

Launch a drone to spread sulfur dioxide in mesopause above mountains at winter, to create highly reflective clouds, to create shadow.

https://m.economictimes.com/news/science/sulphuric-acid-clou...