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Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

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Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#91

Post by hedora »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #75
dralley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You're taking it too literally 2) It doesn't matter if it's small on the scale of the US if it's big on the scale of individual aquifers

> taking it too literally They’re straw men. The problem is almost entirely inefficient farming. Bottled water and golf courses don’t move the needle, but they do absorb activist resources. It’s an incredibly effective rhetorical technique in a public sphere that chases shiny range-inducing factoids.

Nestle gets its water from all sorts of places, so in theory, the size of their global draw vs the size of individual aquifers shouldn't matter.

In practice, it does for some of their processing plants.

For instance, in Ontario, they pull water from aquifers that would otherwise go to tribes that have run out of water:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/oct/04/ontario-six-n...

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#92

Post by mech422 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #50
arcticbull wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody died in Fukushima, except in a bungled evacuation of the surrounding area. Maybe one person in the fullness of time. Nuclear power is literally the safest power source in deaths per TWh - right between wind and solar. [1] We have safe nuclear power, so I'm pleased to inform you that your concern was mitigated, about 50 years ago. [edit] Also, I would point out the worst nuclear accident in history killed 4000…

Great, we're looking at deaths till the point of generation. 4.5 billion years, is the half life of uranium. Come back to me with stats then.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster We're going to be pouring money into that shit show for probably a 1000 years, and an exclusion zone for 20,000. So if you want to move next to Fukushima or Chernobyl you can preach safe nuclear from there, other wise stop the…

iirc, I live near the largest nuke plant in the US. No complaints. Perhaps the issue is more with the people running the plants, then the plants themselves. Also, recycling nuke waste like many countries do cuts the amount of waste down dramatically.

P.S. - we also use grey water for cooling the plant, limiting the amount of fresh water needed.

Edit: According to 1, "All of the nuclear waste collected at Palo Verde over the past 30 years is stored on-site. The waste is currently stored in cement-and-steel containers that take up a space the size of a football field." - seems pretty small for a 30 year life time, maybe a couple of tons / year ?

1) https://chamberbusinessnews.com/2019/10/25/inside-palo-verde...

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#93

Post by cmrdporcupine »

leptons wrote: post #36
Workaccount2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF we didn't find fossil fuels, in all likely hood we would still be living in the 18th century.

Electricity came up around the same time and never stopped - the tech involved with electronics and electric everything has far surpassed that of oil and gas. There were electric cars at the same time ICEs were being invented. Oil and gas won for selfish reasons.

O&G won because the energy density is so extremely high.

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#94

Post by cmrdporcupine »

npongratz wrote: post #40
NegativeLatency wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why invade another country when you can do such insane things as: - pipeline the Columbia River to the SW Region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_interstate_water_pipe... - tow icebergs for the fresh water they contain: https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/can-icebergs-be-towed-t... - pipe water from Alaska to CA: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/california-pipe-water-alaska/

- pipe water shared with Canada out of the Great Lakes, up and over the Rocky Mountains, and down into Phoenix and Las Vegas: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/04/10/g...

Move the people, the industry, and the farms... not the water, thank you very much.

Lots of good arable land here in the upper great lakes basin.

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#95

Post by hedora »

arcticbull wrote: post #60
phpisthebest wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It takes a bonkers 1,611 US gallons (6,098 litres) to produce 1 litre of almond milk,” says the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Pete Hemingway." [1] So that would be 6,000 gallons of water to make 1 Gallon of Almond Milk... that seems to be more than your 800 Gallon figure for cow milk.... Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it i…

Where did you get the idea I supported almond production for milk substitutes. I specifically cited other much lower water usage milk substitutes like oat and soy. > Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner. Also not relevant, but ok. I'll make a note of it. Personally, I think meat should just be much mor…

Regardless, as I understand it, it's well-established that almond milk uses less water per gallon than dairy milk.

However, we grow almonds in areas that don't have enough water, and milk is often produced in areas with surplus water.

Either way, I prefer soy milk.

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#96

Post by hristov »

Mistletoe wrote: post #3

I think the future is going to find the past 100 years or so an insane time in history as we used all the fossil fuels and water up in the blink of an eye on the historical time scale.

That is the least of it. We also radically changed the climate without really seriously trying to change our lives and our methods of growing food to reflect the new climate.

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#97

Post by dgfitz »

arcticbull wrote: post #60
phpisthebest wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It takes a bonkers 1,611 US gallons (6,098 litres) to produce 1 litre of almond milk,” says the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Pete Hemingway." [1] So that would be 6,000 gallons of water to make 1 Gallon of Almond Milk... that seems to be more than your 800 Gallon figure for cow milk.... Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it i…

Where did you get the idea I supported almond production for milk substitutes. I specifically cited other much lower water usage milk substitutes like oat and soy. > Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner. Also not relevant, but ok. I'll make a note of it. Personally, I think meat should just be much mor…

> Personally, I think meat should just be much more expensive, representing the actual consumption of resources in its production. That way we could just let the market sort it out.

When the govt. starts subsidizing, the market cannot sort it out, or at least that is how I’ve seen things play out. I’m not a market expert by any means.

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#98

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

dralley wrote: post #73
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of gallons per minute is not much on the scale of the US. The Mississippi alone has a flow rate of almost ~6M gallons per minute. The US uses almost ~500M gallons of water per minute. Nestle is a pretty large user of water and if it's even 5k gallons per minute that's 1 in 100,000 gallons. That's about how much 24,000 houses use. On the scale of the US, that's not really a lot. Yes, bottled water is dumb. N…

1) You're taking it too literally 2) It doesn't matter if it's small on the scale of the US if it's big on the scale of individual aquifers

Not taking it too literally at all. GP obviously wanted to get on their soapbox about The Corporations and they were corrected / called out re the relevance of that particular rant. At a point it’s breaking HN’s rules

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#99

Post by samtho »

zer00eyz wrote: post #50
arcticbull wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody died in Fukushima, except in a bungled evacuation of the surrounding area. Maybe one person in the fullness of time. Nuclear power is literally the safest power source in deaths per TWh - right between wind and solar. [1] We have safe nuclear power, so I'm pleased to inform you that your concern was mitigated, about 50 years ago. [edit] Also, I would point out the worst nuclear accident in history killed 4000…

Great, we're looking at deaths till the point of generation. 4.5 billion years, is the half life of uranium. Come back to me with stats then.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster We're going to be pouring money into that shit show for probably a 1000 years, and an exclusion zone for 20,000. So if you want to move next to Fukushima or Chernobyl you can preach safe nuclear from there, other wise stop the…

The amount of spent uranium that will need to stored is infinitesimally small compared to the amount of energy that is produced in contrast to the waste that is produced by any other non-renewable source. It will typically get buried deep in the earths crust - deeper than anything save for mining, encased in concrete, and buried over where it would be most unlikely that anything will touch it ever again.

Re: Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

#100

Post by hehhehaha »

parl_match wrote: post #13
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #11

Article mentions California a lot. There is absolutely zero reason that California's cities cannot be fed with nuclear heated desalinated seawater or heck, traditionally desalinated sea water. The only thing holding back this engineering solution are NIMBYs, naive greenies, and mountains of legal paperwork. Water doesn't go away and we have the solutions to make freshwater. The problems are political, not technical.…

> before the water was siphoned away to the coastal cities. Hell, a lot of that wasn't even for cities. Significant and massive lakes, including Lake Tulare, were siphoned away simply to create farmland.

Lake Tulare and the Aral sea are both super sad
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