What uses 23 billion gallons of water every year?
The math from the article doesn’t quite add up, but regardless of which number is correct, billions of water are going up in the air–literally–every year, and being removed from our watershed. This is water that otherwise might be used for recharging our ever-more-depleted Central Arizona aquifers.
Cheap electricity is good (right?), but massive water consumption is yet another long-term cost of nuclear power that is being ignored.
4 Comments
We probably aren’t willing to pitch tents in the shores of our lakes. So we need AC. Right?
How should we make the a.c. current necessary to run our a.c. units?
Coal?
Hydro?
Wind?
Solar?
Nuclear?
And how much water and carbon is required for each option ?
Any fuel-based technology is going to require water. But the point is that there are many unintended consequences of all the alternatives, and there are many hidden costs.
Doesn’t water that goes up into the air, make its way back one way or the other?
Well of course, but most of it won’t make it back into OUR watershed for the foreseeable future, and the water table continues to shrink…which was the explicit point of my citation to the article.