LETTER: Desalination is no solution to Las Vegas water problems
Lev Schneiderman recently wrote a letter to the Review-Journal in support of desalination. He is missing many facts. Desalination plants aren’t discussed more frequently because they’re not a realistic option.
For a few: They’re expensive. Prohibitively so — to both build and run. They’re inefficient. It costs at least $2,000 to produce one-acre-foot of water. The plants are enormous, hideous monstrosities, which no beach town wants. Desalination requires huge amounts of energy — the opposite of “going green.” It’s the coastal equivalent of strip mining and deadly to sea life. It produces a byproduct of millions of pounds of salt that cannot be disposed of simply or efficiently or, for environmental reasons, be “dumped back in the ocean.”
For those reasons and others, desalination is a non-starter. Especially in environmentally conscious California.