Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Brian H]

willit wrote: just a thought…….
I live near the Colombia river and have fished it a lot. it seems that we have a large fresh water source near by and that it could be rerouted ( in part) to go backwards and replenish our existing water usage from the vast underground reservoir that nature has given us. eliminating several dams and restoring the natural habitat for fish and wildlife. we would not have to desalinate anything but merely provide a source of energy to pump water back into the source that we have tapped and are depleting. maybe even just lay pipe in the riverbed that water already flows down. it just takes energy.
we have tapped and used the water at a rate and could construct a mechanism where by we reverse the operation at the same rate. for the same amount of years there would be no net change. just paying back what we have used.

The word “vast” is misleading. No pool can replace the catchment area for the Columbia river, even partially or temporarily. Get some numbers, and you will be surprised at how fast that “vast” pool would be drained. As for reversing the flow of the river, there are so many problems with that idea I don’t know where to start. But the big two are: the “used” water isn’t available for re-use in most cases. It has gone off in a thousand directions, including evaporation and industrial processes; and second, the amount of energy required would be in the terawatt-years range. Even with FF, that would require millions of generators, plus all the “plumbing” infrastructure. Much easier to use a mix of purification and desalination directly for the cities. Trying to make the rivers flow uphill is a fool’s errand.