Letter to the editor:

Gibbons’ water plan on the right track

Tom Keller, Henderson

Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 | 2:03 a.m.

Regarding Phoebe Sweet’s story in Thursday’s Las Vegas Sun, “Gibbons takes another whack at pipeline plan”:

Gov. Jim Gibbons’ idea of building a water desalinization plant in California in exchange for an equivalent share of California’s Colorado River water turns the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s pipeline plan into a white elephant.

Using estimates for smaller desalinization plants in California, a facility to supply 100,000 acre-feet a year of water would cost about a fourth of the pipeline’s estimated $3 billion or $4 billion. Sounds like Gov. Gibbons and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger need to start negotiating now.

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By davidkstyler

Feb. 25, 2008

3:55 p.m.

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The Governor's suggestion to use desalination as an option is one that is under consideration. However, the point of the pipeline to provide an option to the Colorado River, which is drying up!
There are at least a couple of major problems with desalination:
1. It takes a lot of electricity to operate the plant, which is in short supply in southern California. Southern California doesn’t want to build power plants for its own use, so why would they want one to benefit Nevada? If NIMBY, or Not In My Backyard Yard, prevents the construction of more power plants why would they also agree to the construction of several large reverse osmosis (RO) plants?
B. The plant produces a concentrated salt waste stream that must be dealt with. If environmental approval can be obtained the salt could be mixed into waste water and dumped into the ocean. However, what happens when it is shown that the concentrated salt killed a whale, or dolphins or the lesser spotted purple snail?
RO is a solution but there are challenges to making it work. It will not work for Nevada if the Colorado River is dry or if we waste it.