Desalinization: Seeking Solutions for Urban Areas

Re your Aug. 19 article on converting ocean water to fresh water: Desalinization is not a matter of if, but when. I have long felt that California should be split regionally in terms of where we receive our water. Since California agriculture utilizes the lion’s share of water, the fertile San Joaquin Valley should use most of the Sierra snowpack. Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties could use California’s share of Colorado River water.

For the great majority of us who live within 50 miles or so from the ocean, we need to build numerous desalinization plants from the Mexican border to San Francisco. Use the best technology (costs are coming way down); tidal motion might be considered as a clean, renewable energy source. Utilizing the ocean for fresh water is a win-win situation. We would not have to search farther and farther out for more water sources. We would not have to build more dams.

It is better for the few remaining rivers, better for the environment and it is a source that will never run dry.

David Shibley

La Verne

The cost of taking the salt out of sea water is only one of many problems of desalinization. The ocean is a solution of salts of all sorts and suspended metals, and many are quite toxic. When ocean water is processed by reverse osmosis and filtered many times, there is a waste component that must be disposed of like any other hazardous material. This waste component is the brine. This brine contains all of the nasty stuff that is suspended in the water at very dilute amounts, but becomes concentrated by the desalinization process. Smaller cities have ideas to dump it in the ocean. This would be bad for the ocean organisms.

Companies that do desalinization say they water golf courses. Can a desert with water problems like the Los Angeles Basin support enough golf courses to continually spread this brine on thirsty grass? So, if Los Angeles, with all of its various pollution problems, adds the concentrated toxic ocean salts and heavy metals from reverse osmosis, we will be severely limiting our ability to feed and water the community that lives in this basin.

Terry T. Young

Pasadena