Marty,

Last year I wrote two comments under the article "Water Is the Next Oil - VC hopes to capitalize on an increasingly scarce resource," Wednesday, April 09, 2008, by Kevin Bullis. See the link http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22052...

The comments were:

Re: water is a public resource

Should water be rationed? Are gas and electricity public resources? Is there a minimum amount of water, gas, and/or electricity that could make non-disruptive social sense at a given location, under private utility management? Can the responsibility to serve be shifted to a regulatory compact with a responsibility of transport at the three utilities? That way the responsibity to serve goes to market competition for service above the minimum non-disruptive service requirement, under efficient pricing in an open market. That will produce rational rationing in the Third Industrial Revolution. The market vs. market competition (that precedes the company vs. company competition) case for electricity is already well documented in the EWPC Blog, where there are more than 110 articles already. Those articles can be though of as a holographic image from a different perspective of the whole EWPC market architecture and design paradigm shift. Please take a look at the EWPC article The Electricity Revolution, that reflects the latest findings on the US and Europe of the ongoing revolution that is heading into a large value destruction dead-end at the moment.

and Re: The Future - Selling Air

"Wall Street-type extreme capitalists..." distorted deregulation by downplaying MIT research by Prof. Schweppe and his team. But, in the end it was government that have kept price controls in the power industry with the great help of lobists. The result, the power industry keeps operating under financial capital.

The third industrial revolution breakthrough market architecture and design paradigm is about eliminating government price controls in the retail markets. The result, the power industry will return back to operate under production capital.

Under EWPC, customers will be able to have a single retailer for a few utilities, like water, gas and electricity. Today's responsibility to serve, where customers can purchase unlimitated water, gas and electricity, is just unsustainable. To support the new open markets utilities will become just transportation utilities with a responsibility to transport in a correspnding controlled markets regulatory compact.

Read please about The Electricity Revolution under another comment above.

Please follow my comments on http://Twitter.com with the hashtag #EWPC

Consider that roughly 95% of the water used by the nuclear industry is returned to the environment free of any pollution other than thermal; future reactor designs are (hopefully) going to allow less energy to escape in the form of steam and warm water. Agriculture, on the other hand, has a hideous track record of fouling streams, lakes, and groundwater with fertilizer, silt, animal waste, and antibiotics since the corporate farming industry took hold. The worst offenders in the energy industry are coal and petroleum; they habitually pollute the aquatic environment from the moment the drilling or excavation begins until the hydrocarbons exit the smokestacks and tailpipes.

I have been watching the water for power articles for some time now, and I have a number of concerns. The water issue alone seems to call out for deployment of pebble bed reactors instead of LWR plants. Given that pebble beds want to operate at about 600 degrees celsius, and molten sodium at or about 1100 degrees fehrenheit, I have a silly question - can we get CSP plants to use gas instead of water for pushing turbines?