Los Angeles, like many other cities across California, has been in a drought for a long time. California is prone to dry spells between large droughts, but this drought is much worse than any other seen before. In fact, scientists argue that “most of the region is in an unfolding ‘megadrought’ that began in 2000 and is the second worst in the past 1,200 years.” This “megadrought” is making it increasingly difficult to supply water to the city of Los Angeles. With minimal local groundwater, 62% of the water in Los Angeles is redirected from other sources such as the State Water Project (SWP), the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Relying so heavily on outside sources for water will prove problematic over time. When those sources dwindle, water needs will not be met. The water crisis in Los Angeles can be mitigated by installing nuclear desalination plants along the coastline to supply clean water to the city.
The lack of water is affecting everyone in Los Angeles. Local farmers cannot expect bountiful harvests during the growing season, which affects their livelihood and how much fresh food is available in the city from local farms. Meanwhile, most of the population of Los Angeles is greatly affected by wildfires.
According to the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), “Catastrophic brush fires are occurring at an increasing rate not only in California but across the country.” There is not enough moisture in the ground from precipitation to effectively prevent fires not enough water to pout the fires when they start. Many people have been displaced from their homes due to fires and now have no place to live.
Los Angeles generates a significant portion of its power from hydroelectric power plants fed by aqueducts. Without sufficient incoming water, hydroelectric plants cannot function properly resulting in the possibility of outages. Additionally, Los Angeles is currently enacting water restrictions on citizen water usage. One of the most common restrictions limits watering lawns and gardens. According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Los Angeles is currently in Phase Three of water restrictions. This means that outdoor watering is limited to twice a week using water conserving nozzles. It is also highly recommended that bodies of water should be covered to prevent water loss and cars should be washed only in commercial facilities. The water shortage in Los Angeles is the cause of many issues locals face and affects different aspects of life in Los Angeles.
This year is one of the worst drought years in a very long time. Reservoirs have hit record lows and snowpack was below average during the snowy season. The extreme heat and massive water consumption has diminished the water supply greatly over the past few months. Because of this, the water restrictions will only proceed to get worse. In fact, the water authorities are considering banning the outdoor use of water entirely if conditions do not improve by September. The drought and water shortage in Los Angeles is a very significant problem that must be mitigated as soon as possible for the well being of the city’s population.
Desalination in simple terms is removing salt and other minerals from salty water such as seawater to produce fresh water. Desalination consumes a massive amount of energy. A typical desalination plant will use fossil fuels that not only harm the environment, but also increase the dependence on fossil fuels to support life. Substituting fossil fuels as an energy source with nuclear energy creates a solution for the increasing dependence on fossil fuels. A nuclear desalination plant does not have to be built from scratch, rather, it can be added to any facility that contains a nuclear reactor. Nuclear powered of sea water to produce clean water is a viable solution to the water shortage.
For desalination to work, the desalination plant recycling the water needs to be along a river, lake, coastline, etc. Luckily for Los Angeles, parts of the city are on the coast. A nuclear power plant that includes a desalination facility would need to be built along the coastline to take in seawater to recycle. Desalination is done in one of two ways, membrane (reverse osmosis) or thermal.
IDE Technologies states, “Reverse Osmosis (RO) desalination uses the principle of osmosis to remove salt and other impurities, by transferring water through a series of semi-permeable membranes.” Thermal desalination uses heat to turn water into steam and remove all the minerals and salt from the water. Essentially, thermal desalination mimics the water cycle to clean the water. By attaching a desalination facility to a nuclear power plant, the nuclear energy will give the desalination facility enough power to clean the water using clean energy.
The two different types of desalination are equally effective but have different costs and types of equipment. Thermal desalination uses more energy than reverse osmosis (RO) but requires less equipment. RO is more cost effective than thermal desalination, which makes it a better choice for most locations. The desalination plant used differs for each location depending on what is needed.
A downside to desalinated water is it does not contain the same amount of beneficial minerals as other water sources such as tap water. This should be compensated accordingly with a mineral rich diet if desalinated water is consumed as a main source of fluid intake. Desalination provides fresh water to the community, but some minerals must be made up for because of how thorough the water cleaning process is.
Nuclear energy is a delicate subject with environmentalists. It’s stigmatized because of well-publicized disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi, which in both cases were caused by outside factors. In the case of Chernobyl, design flaws and an unsafe culture contributed to the conditions that resulted in the explosion of the nuclear reactors. The disaster at Fukushima Daiichi was caused by a large tsunami that flooded the cooling water and destroyed the backup generators that pumped the water needed to cool the reactors, which in turn destroyed the reactor cores. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “Nuclear powerplants are among the safest and most secure facilities in the world.” Nuclear power plants are not the most popular with many people because of the few accidents that have happened in the past. Technology and research have made significant progress since then and nuclear energy is safer to produce than ever before.
Furthermore, nuclear energy is an exceptionally clean source of energy. There are two forms of nuclear energy. Both fission and fusion require the use of atoms to produce energy. Currently, fission is the only way that nuclear energy is produced as nuclear fusion requires extremely high temperatures and the use of plasma, neither of which are common on earth. In nuclear fission, split atoms form smaller atoms that release energy. Essentially, nuclear energy is extremely clean because it is a renewable resource that harnesses the energy from atoms. Because a typical desalination plant uses fossil fuels, using nuclear energy as an energy source to power desalination plants will take away the environmental impact of carbon emissions that are a byproduct of burning fossil fuels.
Nuclear energy is far more effective than solar, wind, and hydropower because there are far fewer restrictions on where they can be located. The Office of Nuclear Energy states that “A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. [The Nuclear Energy Institute] says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.” A nuclear desalination plant on the Los Angeles coast would not require a significant amount of space to operate. Because of how effective nuclear energy is, using it as an energy source to power a desalination plant is a great way to produce energy and clean water efficiently.
Nuclear desalination is not a completely unprecedented technology. Multiple plants around world make use of this function. Japan, Kazakhstan, and the United States all have at least one desalination plant. The United States has a nuclear desalination plant in California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant.
However, this plant is currently being shut down in response to many pressures such as environmental activists, the labor union, and the competition of natural gas. In reality, a Stanford research study shows that“[u]sing Diablo Canyon as a power source for desalination could substantially augment fresh water supplies to the state as a whole and to critically overdrafted basins regions such as the Central Valley. . . .” Nuclear desalination plants should provide not only water to the city of Los Angeles, but to the entire state of California as well.
One of the significant issues with desalination is the byproduct of desalinated water. The byproduct is an extremely salty brine that is usually dumped back into the ocean without further treatment. Brine is harmful to sea life because of its extremely high salt and mineral content. One way to remedy this is to release the water through diffusers. These diffusers mix brine with the ocean water as it is being released to prevent it all from sinking straight to the sea floor and destroying the environment. Products such as Epsom salts could be made from brine, but the market for such products is not large enough to make them in such high quantities.
The city of Los Angeles has had water shortages for an awfully long time, with no end in sight, so finding ways to mitigate this shortage is vital. Water shortages are becoming an increasingly common occurrence around the country. As the need for water increases, the way water is conserved and recycled must evolve into a more efficient and conservative manner. Nuclear desalination is an effective way to recycle water using energy produced from its own facility. Desalination could supply the Los Angeles population with the water needed to support everyday life. Because desalination is more of a short-term solution, the larger issue of why there are water shortages in the first place should be resolved to produce an economy that does not rely on having to produce fresh water.
Perhaps in the future, nuclear desalination could be the answer to all of our water needs and a way to lessen the effects of droughts and dry spells. The current priority is ensuring that people have enough water to survive. But the overall goal is to solve the issues behind the water shortages to ensure that situations like those in Los Angeles do not occur elsewhere in the United States.
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Lizzy Leeder is a high school student taking concurrent enrollment (CE) classes through Pikes Peak State College in Colorado Springs. She hopes to graduate high school with an Associate of Science in Chemistry and move on to be a nuclear chemist in the United States Air Force. She participates in a variety of different sports and athletic activities and performs in instrumental musical groups. Lizzy enjoys reading and writing in her free time.
