LETTER: We don’t need expensive aqueducts to bring water to the Southwest

In Sunday’s Viewpoints section, two authors suggested solving the Southwest’s water supply problem by building aqueducts and transporting water hundreds or thousands of miles from either a river in Louisiana or from Lake Tahoe. They admitted that either approach would be expensive. They are certainly correct about that. And then, the water has to be pumped, at additional continuous cost.

How about a solution that doesn’t require transportation of anything? Well, here’s one.

Build an appropriately scaled (very large) desalination plant on the West Coast either on or adjacent to the San Onofre nuclear generating station, which is currently mothballed. The California coast at that point is already “industrialized,” so the environmental impact would be minimized.

Then plug the newly de salted water into the Southern California water system pipes (OK, that would be some minor transport of water). That water would replace a lot of SoCal’s Colorado River water, especially the Imperial County agricultural irrigation system that currently uses a lot of (probably the largest component) the Colorado allocation to California. (California now gets the largest allocation of the seven states that depend on the Colorado.)

Such large-scale desalination is already proven to work, in that most of the Arab nations depend heavily on sea water that’s desalinated.

Now with the largest Colorado River user satisfied by the Pacific Ocean desalinated water, the river water formerly used in SoCal would be redistributed among the other upstream user-states according to a sharing of the cost to be negotiated among them.

Desalination takes power. If the California electrical grid can’t provide it, then fire up San Onofre and run a wire over to the desal plant.