Comment by MostlyStable
2 days ago
I actually tried to do some back-of-the-napkin calculations about this a while ago and unfortunately, even if you made nuclear regulations sane, so that the cost came down significantly, I still don't think it would be cheap enough for ag use, which is the actual issue with droughts in CA. Municipal water you could likely supply completely with desal and it wouldn't even get that much more expensive, but 70% of water use in CA is for ag, and they couldn't support the price increase.
As it stands, agricultural water users are massively underpaying (given the high demand and dwindling supply); correcting that would make nuclear-powered desal a lot less unattractive. Southern California in particular is a major issue, given the widespread effort to grow crops in the Mojave for whatever boneheaded reason; if they want to do that, then they should absolutely be making their own water via desal instead of robbing Northern California (via the aqueduct system) and Nevada/Arizona (via the Colorado River's mandatory downstream allocations) - and if desal water's "too expensive", then the prices of both of those sources needs jacked up to match it.
Probably won't ever happen, though, given how hard the ag sector lobbies for every direct and indirect subsidy they can get.