San Diego's Incredible Desalinization Plant

 

By Jill Cowan

It’s Friday. Take a tour of the plant that allows San Diego to get drinking water from the ocean. Plus, Los Angeles is aiming to run entirely on clean energy by 2035.

Sunset Cliffs in San Diego, just down the coast from the Carlsbad Desalination Plant.Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

Whenever California is pummeled by drought — as is still very much the case despite recent rain — a lot of people find themselves asking, “What if we got water from the ocean?”

In San Diego County, it’s already happening at a $1 billion facility by the beach.

Recently, as I reported on San Diego’s decades-long quest for water stability, I visited the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest such facility in the country, to see how it works.

The plant, which opened in 2015 after a long, fraught development, essentially creates 50 million gallons of fresh drinking water every day. Seawater flows through a massive intake pipe directly from the Pacific Ocean, where it first gets pumped into tanks that work sort of like Brita filters to take out bigger stuff — like algae — that shouldn’t be in drinking water.

Then the water makes its way through a labyrinth of pipes where more impurities are removed until basically just salt is left. This makes sure the water is ready for the signature, high-tech reverse osmosis desalination process, which takes place in thousands of tubes stacked high in a cavernous building. The loud hum of the machinery echoes through the space.

Jeremy Crutchfield of the San Diego County Water Authority, left, and Sachin Chawla, president of Poseidon Resources, near the reverse osmosis membranes at the desalination plant.Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

In each of those tubes, there are rolled up membranes that act like “microscopic strainers,” as officials describe them. The water is pushed through at a high pressure, and the membranes catch the salt and other dissolved minerals until all that’s left is pure H2O.

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Finally, the water gets treated to make it more like normal drinking water, before it’s piped miles to be mixed in with the rest of the county’s water, and delivered to taps across San Diego. The salty brine that’s left over gets mixed in with seawater and pumped back into the ocean.

Right now, a relatively small proportion of the county’s water comes from the ocean — about 8 percent. Critics say that it’s some of the most expensive water that exists, and that operating the plant can harm the neighboring ocean ecosystem.

Officials with the San Diego County Water Authority and the private company that runs the plant, Poseidon Water, say that adding desalination has cost each household an average of $5 per month, and that they’re constantly working to make the plant more environmentally friendly and energy efficient.

Above all, they say, the ocean is a rare drought-proof water source worth the investment for some level of certainty.

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Other communities up the coast have taken notice amid the drought; some are exploring seawater desalination plants of their own, while others are considering removing salt from brackish water in rivers. Another Poseidon Water plant is in the works for Huntington Beach.

For more:

Read the full article about why San Diego has plenty of water, despite a punishing drought. Desalinated seawater has been transformative for Saudi Arabia, as well as other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But it may be too expensive for many places that need it. The recent rainstorms brought a suspension of the drought curtailment orders that were imposed during the summer. Storm season, which usually runs from November to March, began early this year but officials warn there could soon be another dry spell, The Modesto Bee reports.

Dark Truths About Chaing Kai-Shek

 

Tēnn Khong Lîm

Studied at University of California, Irvine (Graduated 2012)Jan 4

What are some dark truths of Chiang Kai-Shek?

You guys know about the Rape of Nanking? Or how the Japanese Imperial Army committed numerous atrocities (with photos that I won’t post because they are too gory)? And you guys know how the Japanese war criminals mostly got off free without having to pay any consequences? You guys know whose fault that was? Yup, that’s right, the one and only Chiang Kai-Shek.

Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of the Republic of China during WWII, decided to pardon the Japanese war criminals who desecrated his capital of Nanjing.

This bastard is Okamura Yasuji (岡村 寧次), one of the chief perpetrators of the Rape of Nanjing. Here is his testimony:

"I surmised the following based on what I heard from Staff Officer Miyazaki, CCAA Special Service Department Chief Harada and Hangzhou Special Service Department Chief Hagiwara a day or two after I arrived in Shanghai. First, it is true that tens of thousands of acts of violence, such as looting and rape, took place against civilians during the assault on Nanking. Second, front-line troops indulged in the evil practice of executing POWs on the pretext of (lacking) rations."

He was pardoned and not sentenced to a single day of hard labor or prison times for his crime. And we have Chiang Kai-Shek to thank for that. Why did Chiang fight so hard to pardon him? I don’t know. It’s a mystery, because Chiang Kai-Shek unconditionally pardoned Okamura. He literally asked for nothing in return. He could have made the pardoning conditional, such as:

• Japan must explicitly return Taiwan and Penghu to the Republic of China.
• Japan must return Diaoyutai to the Republic of China.
• Japan must make it illegal and a hate crime to deny the Rape of Nanjing, just like it’s illegal for Germans to deny the Holocaust
• Japan must support the Republic of China, both financially and militarily, at all costs, against the rise of the Chinese Communist Party.

But he didn’t do ANY of that. Chiang Kai-Shek was kind of hoping that the Japanese will come to their own consciousness and do what’s right. Of course, that didn’t happen.

• Japan continues to occupy the Diaoyutai Island, despite the fact that this is a blatant violation violation of the Treaty of San Francisco.
• Japan has a very sizeable population that continues to deny the Rape of Nanjing (or any war crimes) ever happened. The most popular mayors of Tokyo (Ishihara Shintaro), Osaka (Hashimoto Tohru), and Nagoya (Kawamura Takashi), are all Nanjing Massacre denialists. In addition, the most popular political Youtube Channel in Japan is Channel Sakura, made by one of the most famous Nanjing Massacre denialist, Mizushima Satoru. Now, I know that not every Japanese denies Japan’s war crime, but don’t tell me that it’s only a tiny minority that does.
• But the most insulting part is… despite everything that Chiang Kai-Shek did to defend Imperial Japan, the Japanese betrayed the Republic of China in 1972 by establishing ties with the People’s Republic anyway. Today, no other country in the world supports Taiwanese independence more than Japan does.

*sighs* I don’t know what to say :/

At least he got a shrine dedicated to him in Japan! I mean sure, the shrine is located in the middle of nowhere, far away from any major cities, you have drive way out of the way to get there, and that it’s tiny…. but at least it counts for something, right, guys? Right?!

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