10 Infrastructure Projects We’d Like to See Get Off the Ground

In his victory speech, Donald J. Trump vowed to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” The investment is long overdue: The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its most recent national assessment, rated the country’s infrastructure as a D-plus, just above failing. The group estimates that, by 2025, the nation will need a $1.44 trillion boost over current funding levels to meet growing needs.

Since 2009, when Barack Obama doled out roughly $800 billion in a stimulus package, that money’s been hard to come by, largely blocked by partisanship. But advocates hope the election of Trump, who made his fortune in real estate, could launch a building boom. The Republican president, so used to seeing his name on gilded skyscrapers, hotels, casinos and golf courses, could cut a deal with congressional Democrats, who view public-works projects as an engine for job growth.

Assuming Trump can indeed pass a bill, we at NationSwell have a few ideas for him to consider. A big, beautiful wall’s not one of them; instead, here’s the top 10 shovel-worthy alternatives we’d like the new administration to undertake.

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The Counterintuitive Solution to California’s Drought Crisis

As drought lowered reservoirs and scorched front lawns, California residents looked longingly to the great body of water at the continent’s edge: the Pacific Ocean, tantalizingly close but undrinkable. At least, until recently.

This December, Poseidon Water, a Boston-based infrastructure developer, opened the world’s largest desalination plant in Carlsbad, Calif., a coastal city just north of San Diego. Seventeen years in the making, the new facility removes the salt and purifies 50 million gallons of ocean water every day. At the moment, the technology is expensive — nearly double the price of importing water from outside the county — but Poseidon’s executives believe that extreme weather events and population booms in the future will make water scarcer and, by extension, drive up the price.

“Seawater desalination is the only water supply in the county that’s drought-proof,” says Jessica Jones, spokesperson for Poseidon. “It’s not dependent on snowpack or rainfall.”

Reverse osmosis membranes, inside the Carlsbad Desalination Plant.

A water source like it has been a dream of humankind’s since ancient times, when marooned sailors first tried to remove the salt from seawater by catching the steam rising from boiling pots. In the 1960s, scientists hit upon a way to extract pure water molecules from a tainted source. Using reverse osmosis, the briny water (already treated to remove algae and silt) flows through pipes equipped with a porous membrane, its holes barely one-millionth the diameter of a human hair, Jones explains. At extremely high pressures, the water molecules pass through these microscopic holes, but salt ones are too large to fit. Jones compares the process to trying to fit a baseball into a tennis ball can.

The process works so effectively that Poseidon is in the final stages of obtaining permits to open a similar plant in Orange County’s Huntington Beach. Environmentalists have voiced concerns about damage to sea life sucked in by the facility, but to offset any loss of marine life, Poseidon is restoring wetlands south of San Diego to be a bird and fish habitat.

Could Poseidon’s executives be correct in their belief that technology like this will be the only way to prepare for a harsher, dryer world that’s rapidly approaching?

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