Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown has a plan to combat climate change, and to help the State of California absorb an extra 10 million residents: Implement space ship like closed system recycling of waste water, such as urine, to allow the water to be recycled repeatedly.
According to Brown;
“We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance,” Brown said. “You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use them with greater sensitivity and sophistication.”
Brown said that, as California struggles to meet a mandatory 25 percent reduction in urban water use, technology would provide long-term solutions, including capturing stormwater runoff and recycling water numerous times.
“The metaphor is spaceship Earth,” Brown said. “In a spaceship you reuse everything. Well, we’re in space and we have to find a way to reuse, and with enough science and enough funding we’ll get it done.”
Jerry Brown might be happy preparing for his trip back to his home planet, but here on Earth, most of us prefer to drink water from reservoirs, rather than piping it in from the local sanitation plant.
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Or for approximately 1-2 cents per gallon they could use a teeny tiny fraction of the seawater (there is over 1,000,000,000 CUBIC KILOMETERS OF WATER in the world’s oceans, just think about that a sec) they’ve been blessed with to any number of people who wanted to move there as much water as they could use. Water and power problems should be far, far behind us with our level of technology and wealth but environmentalists are evil.
True, I think that making sea water into fresh water would be cheaper than trying to collect pee and converting it. Common sense to me…
How about if we use solar energy to evaporate seawater, then use the cool air up above 10 to 15,000 feet to cool the vapor, collect it using a land based capture systems of creek, stream, and river like canals, then pipe the resulting water where needed?
We can build structures to store the water for when it is required.
We can even get cheap power from these storage structures if we plan it right.
Naaaaahhhhh, some ecoloons would probably insist we take the whole shebang all apart, use what water we have to try and save a few minnows, and drink our pee instead.
I think they should send the urine to the almond groves (good source of nitrogen too!) and make make potable water out of sea water. Or SF Bay water, I hear that’s not too polluted.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Singapore has led the way with water recycling and collecting storm water – and they brand it as new water.Didn’t I read somewhere that Mississippi water is drunk several times during it’s journey from source to sea?
Whereas here in Australia we foolishly abandoned water recycling because it was branded as sewerage, and we ended up with expensive desalination plants because of one alarmist Tim Flannery who declared there would not be enough rain to fill our dams. Now: the dams are near full, and the desal plants are mothballed, but consumers are paying in their water bills for Flannery’s Follies.
Singapore? That place right near the equator that gets about 85 inches (over 2.1 meters) of rain each year, on every square inch of land?
If that don’t beat all.
Except maybe moving to a desert and drinking pee…it don’t beat that.
Desalination wont work because as everyone knows California must increasingly use renewable energy to meet the requirements of AB32. There is no solar at night and our one nuclear plant is not considered renewable. Under California law, neither is hydro, so that’s out too. That leaves wind power which is too little and too far from the ocean to supply the massive amounts of power needed to desalinate water.
So his idea must involve a massive baseload increase from fossil fuel, which is illegal.
Have you seen an ocean? Most of them have a lot of waves. The ocean near California has plenty of waves, wave power could be used. But there is no logical reason not to use oil, coal, nuclear hydro, wind, solar, or horses.
I think sooner or later, people will realize that making stuff illegal will not automatically solve the problems that the thing made illegal was solving.
We had all of this happen during Eastern Australia’s drought in the late noughties:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1835830.htm
Spent billions of dollars on a desalination plant which never opened its doors:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/beatties-9b-grid-proves-to-be-a-massive-money-pit/story-e6freoof-1226658095426
You know why it never opened? It rained:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/the-drought-breaks/story-fn59niix-1225952583089
Actually Anto, the Brisbane Desal was used for a few days AFTER the Brisbane flood, because a couple of the normal water treatments works were flooded. The Desal provided some water for the clean up.
He loves this kinda thing – he lusts for CONTROL. He wants to micromanage with an electron microscope.
And nothing will ever be good enough. It’s drink your pee today, tomorrow it will be eat your feces.
California has already been eating his for far too long!
Jerry Brown is not a nut, nor stupid nor an idiot. He is, however, a democrat politician who floats ideas that appeal to his constituents. A 25% cut in use is a no brainer because this state wastes water like there’s no tomorrow. I easily cut mine in half last year and I could cut it further. Last year northern Ca. cut use by 21%, in southern Ca. ….2%. I drive through the valley every week and see flooded orchards, drive through suburbia and see green lawns and lush landscaping. For all the talk of the liberal mind in this state it’s always the ‘other guy’ when it comes to sacrifice and taxes, which doesn’t surprise me much.
But never mind, it’ll rain like it always does, and the reservoirs will fill again and Jerry Brown will go make speeches at an empty high speed rail station down in Fresno after they’ve hurried off the protester and bums and swept up the garbage. The 25%+ of Fresno’s citizens who can’t find jobs will watch and wonder.
Please provide any and all evidence that Jerry Brown is not a nut, stupid, or an idiot.
Talk with those that supply water from reservoirs. The water is not clean. We have water treatment plants for a reason. You can die from untreated water.
Reply to Kyle Danielson
“”You can die from untreated water.””
As with many things, it depends.
Where I live, admittedly a small town far far away, the water is, in general, not treated at all. The exception is that once a year for about a week the reservoirs are treated with hypochlorite to remove the algal build up in them.
The water admittedly reaches only the minimum standard for potable water, but this is because of the way the regulations are written. Water that is not treated, irrespective of the actual quality of the water can never be better than the minimum.
On all actual tests of potability, the water I am provided is the best in the country. It invariably has the lowest bacterial count, whether total or coliform. There are some minor doubts, such as arsenic and mercury levels which are within accepted ranges but higher than is normal for the country as a whole, but these are due to the water being extracted in a volcanic region. The only way around this would be either importation or weak resin ion exchange, both ruinously expensive in the volumes required.
Eighty percent of the water use in California is used by agriculture. These speeches and restrictions are meaningless, they are however an effective way to promote the Climate Change boogeyman to uneducated masses.
A lot Californian’s are unaware that a new tax on gasoline went into effect January 1st, somewhere btween 50-60 cents a gallon. The increase happened to coincide with the drop in global crude prices, so the increase went unnoticed.
What part of “coastal state” do these people not understand? Desalination would be easier and more cost effective.
Desalination of seawater would would take many times the amount of energy required to recycle waste water. It may be conceptually easier, but the cost of energy would be much greater.
Ironic, too, in that because of idiotic energy policies to “fight climate change”, they have driven energy costs up, making desal as a solution to their drought situation uneconomical.
The single, largest power user in the state are the pumps that lift Northern California’s water over the Tehachapis for use in Southern California and this water is already fresh. The costs of desalinating water for the LA Basin and lifting that water to existing reservoirs for storage is astronomical, not to mention there are no new power sources available to do that. California imports 20% coal power from other states now as it is. That number must decrease under AB32.
There ain’t no free lunch.
Just out of curiousity, do the water project pumps need to run 24/7? If not, mightn’t pumping water around the state be a good load for intermittent wind and solar to deliver power to? If so, that’d free up a couple of GWh of dispatchable hydro power every year for loads that aren’t as accomodating. Or would that be too mundane for the ideologues on both sides to accept?
Don K
Pretty much, yes they do need to run continuoously.
The simple mass of millions of tons of water moving through the multiple-parallel, tens of-foot diameter pipes up and across mountain ranges mean that impulses and water hammer and irregularly starting and stopping momentum changes destroy the foundations, the pipes, the pipe mounts and structures, the pumps, and the motors and valves. Yes, you “can” stop and start them – that’s obvious. Just like you “could” drive cross-country in a high-end, top-fuel dragster – changing the engine and bearings and transmission every 2 miles, and refilling the gas tank and re-packing the parachute every 1/4 mile.
CA also imports a lot of power from the great Columbia River system dams of the Pacific NW.
RACookPE1978
I take it then, that pumped storage — which involves pretty much what you describe — can’t work. Should we tell the operators who do it or just let them find out for themselves?
Seriously, how does the water pumping in California differ from the pumping up the 1000 foot drop between the two reservoirs on Schoharie Creek at Blenheim-Gilboa in New York. Is it an engineering problem that could be solved at reasonable cost?
It differs because of the size of the units, the deliberate design of the pumps and turbines, and the deliberate start-up and shutdown control design planning in the pumped storage units. The very, very large pumped powerhouses in NY’s Moses plant, and across the river in Canada, are more typical of the “best practice” methods and very low heights more often used. That one plant in one location can be designed to survive with two-way flow assuming completely filled pipes and inlets does NOT imply the pumps and inlet piping elsewhere can be done that way with the irregular, unpredictable surges from wind and (less variable but still unmanageable) solar plants.
For example, pumping uphill the water that will be reversed and used later to drive turbines requires the pumps (operating about 92% motor efficiency) and the pump rotor (operating at 64% efficiency) be combined to pump water uphill trhough pipes (causes flow loss) into an open reservoir (minor evaporation losses) against gravity. That water then flows back through the suction pipe (again, more flow losses and control valve losses), into the turbo-pump (now operating at a slightly higher efficiency as a turbine, but not as efficiently as a pure-turbine in a straight hydro plant), and is discharged into the river at a slightly higher elevation than the suction (more potential energy losses from the net energy equation.) The hydro turbo-pump turns a shaft and a generator (about 96 – 98% efficient, but not perfect in any case). From that generator, you fight transmission losses and resistance losses sending the earlier electrical power backwards down the HV lines it was in only 6 hours before. None of those losses can be recovered.
It is the Niagara Falls natural hydro power flowing downhill from Lake Eire to the two reservoirs that makes those pumped storage units able refill their stockpiles with little extra power. (Usually, you can only made due with what little price difference between higher daily afternoon rates, and the lower late evening rates to “pay off” the combined hydro-pump units. And both Niagara plants must work with the daily night-and-day water flow changes allowed in the international agreement. But, both stored power units were built against extreme eco-opposition even in the mid and early 60’s. (there and a few other places) that allows pumped storage to work Elsewhere? Not nearly as effective, and nowhere else can it be as efficiently generated and replenished.
It’s good for guffaws, I guess. But the only real issue with it is where you’d place the treatment plants in the LA sprawl.
If it’s Brown, flush it down.
If it’s yellow, let it mellow.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Why is everyone talking about recycling? Can anyone tell me why we can’t have more reservoirs?
It’s the same problem: the eco-Greens, who work hard to stop all water storage projects. They are the ones at fault (and their cousins are the climate alarmist crowd).
Their last big win was getting the massive Auburn dam stopped just short of completeion. More than $1 billion was
spentwasted on the dam. Now it’s just a big ugly hole in the ground.In the UK we have had a large population move towards the South-East over the last 20 years, as the financial services industry boomed. This has meant that infrastructure services have had to be increased, and the water companies identified the need for 8 new reservoirs. They put these in their long-term plans, and organised their budgets accordingly – increasing rates so as to be able to service the interest on the capital loans they would need…
So customers are already paying for these. But government inspectors have halted each one of the projects, citing new European regulations which require countries to make a 20% drop in water use per capita. If we used 20% less water, the reservoirs would not be needed, of course.
Great Britain has no need to drop water consumption by 20%. It rains very frequently here, and there is water in abundance falling from the sky. But the European committee which set the standard is staffed by countries like Italy and Spain – both countries with comparatively low rainfall, and a need for water conservation. Britain didn’t need to worry about water conservation, so it thought it didn’t need any representation….
England has ground water reserves too. Thames Water was sold to MacQuarie Group a few years ago, and they are great at asset stripping. No investement in infratsructure, water rates increasing and borrowing against assets to pay share holder dividends.
Hate to break it to y’all (though I am guessing a lot of folks here already know it) but waste water has been recycled for decades. I worked in water and waste water treatment for many years. A lot of cities reuse some or all of their dilute liquid wastes for irrigation; some communities pipe it out for agricultural irrigation; liquid sludges are sprayed on agricultural lands as are settled solids. Different States and Provinces have their own regulations on the amount of treatment and type of crops that can be irrigated. If you are a golfer, you may have noticed signs on the golf course about not drinking the water from hoses (it’s often sewage effluent).
New treatment technologies such as micro-filtration make waste water suitable for irrigation and with further treatment – for stock watering or even human consumption. Many city boulevards use storm water and/or treated sewage. This isn’t a new idea.
In fact, cities in California are already using “recycled” water:
“There are examples of communities that have safely used recycled water for many years. Los Angeles County’s sanitation districts have provided treated wastewater for landscape irrigation in parks and golf courses since 1929. The first reclaimed water facility in California was built at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1932. The Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD) was the first water district in California to receive an unrestricted use permit from the state for its recycled water; such a permit means that water can be used for any purpose except drinking. IRWD maintains one of the largest recycled water systems in the nation with more than 400 miles serving more than 4,500 metered connections. The Irvine Ranch Water District and Orange County Water District in Southern California are established leaders in recycled water. Further, the Orange County Water District, located in Orange County, and in other locations throughout the world such as Singapore, water is given more advanced treatments and is used indirectly for drinking.[4]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclaimed_water
Golden Brown?
The headline is very misleading.
Nowhere in the article cited is the recycling of urine specifically mentioned. What is talked about is the recycling of waste water in general. There is no proposal to keep the urine separate as opposed to mixing it in municipal waste water as it is now. Recycling municipal waste water would require no new distribution system.
Don’t worry everyone. Bill Gates has put together a $16.5 million dollar fund to design a super duper high tech toilet that will end the problems of the developing world. (& maybe even California).
According to Gates, what Africa needs more than anything else, is an expensive hi-tech toilet that will require a team of trained engineers to maintain. So he has set the best and the brightest of American colleges to work. Gates saves the world, again.
http://www.scidev.net/global/health/news/gates-scheme-to-reinvent-the-toilet-is-too-high-tech.html
Perhaps the odd coal fired electricity generating station or two would be more useful.
yeah, another stunt by gates…when there easy cheap and safe composting or bioloos all over the place they just need shipping TO africa. its hot there so composting in the sun to heat to 50c or more is not hard to acheive, and the waste is perfect soil improver.
Oh the humor and irony !!
Back when Moonbeam was running in the democart primaries in ’92, I was at a friend’s bachelor party at a bar and I found a “Vote for Brown” flyer in the head. I put it in the urinal and all night long when someone had to use the head, it was “I’m voting for Brown!!!”
In many California cities, your tap water contains Chloramine (for disinfection) and Fluoride (to reduce tooth decay). It is not good for goldfish and I doubt it’s good for some plants. The Chlorine and Ammonia will eventually escape to the air; but using potable water for:watering lawns and gardens, car washing, fire fighting, and toilet flushing is a waste of both. Unfortunately distribution systems for non-potable water are not widely available. Perhaps the drought will result in more distribution systems for recycled but non-sterilized water–but, please, not through our primary water system.
BTW, along our coastal hills, fog drip is another source of non-potable water.
Urine has been historically been used to make gunpowder…
Edit:
Urine has been historically used to make gunpowder…
I think there is a joke here somewhere.
Stop p1ssing on my fireworks man 😉
Water availability may be a challenge, currently, but it’s not THAT dire.
I’m sure most readers have gulped some pool water after it was recycled by the splashing of some toddler with sudden big smile on his face.
You know the rules:
1. never drink pool water
2. don’t eat yellow snow
I can drink my ool water.
I do not, but I could.
Because there is no p in it.
Very few people are lucky enough to have access to well water that does not require treatment. The vast majority of people in successful countries get treated water (now there’s another rat hole!). The city I live in injects treated sewage water into the aquifer. Initially it was a solution to keep the salt/ocean water out.
Desalinated water should only be considered in locations that have no access to fresh water otherwise there is more cost efficient technology and practices available to manage water. I’ve been through numerous droughts in So Ca. This too shall pass.
Over the past millennia or two, California has had droughts lasting for hundreds of years.
Just sayin’…
Its embarrassing to me as a Californian that we have a water shortage panic with over 800 miles of coastline and unlimited access to an unlimited supply of ocean water. Our country was was landing men on the moon 45 years ago. We’ve known how to desalinate water since, what, caveman days? Didn’t Grog the Neandrathal write a paper called “Boil, Condense, Drink, Grunt”? Peer reviewed by Dave Cromagnon and Bill Missinglink? There are first graders in our schools with science projects explaining to California how to make ocean water drinkable.
Every raindrop and snowflake is drinkable ocean water.
some of these people you wouldn’t pee on if they were on fire. Brown is one of those people.
Even if it was his hair on fire?
BTW, I am thinking his pants will be bursting into flames any day now, after all the climate lies he be spouting.
Now, that sure would be a my kind of a moral dilema … to pee or not to pee … to pee or not pee … oops, too late, his hair is all gone and he has fallen down.
I’ll make up for my indecision by peeing on his grave.
Wait a minute! He doesn’t have any hair and his eyebrows wouldn’t burn long enuf to allow for a well thought decision … to pee or not to pee.
I guess that I am still just peing on his grave.
In the end, it does give a new meaning to Pee Soup.