I have repeatedly suggested over the years that the US needs to do some massive engineering projects. Dredging out the Great Salt Lake and refilling a much deeper version of it with ocean water, stock it with ocean fish and submersible mobile nuclear reactors, and you have a Good Thing. More, the US should build pipelines hither and yon, vast continent-crossing constructions that can transport not only water but also generate power by plating them with solar panels. Why would we want such things? Gentlemen, behold:

None of this is supposed to be under water.

Here's what the Missouri River looks like just across from Nebraska City into Iowa. If you ever drive to Kansas City, you're probably familiar with this interchange of I-29 and Highway 2. The Missouri looks like an ocean.#NSP575 pic.twitter.com/kwkkAs5fha

— NEStatePatrol (@NEStatePatrol) March 21, 2019

Much of the midwest is currently underwater, with the only way to get rid of it is for that water to flow down local rivers. But while the midwest is current cosplaying as Atlantis, other regions remain bone dry. Imagine if that water, or at least a lot of it, could be pumped over the Rockies into the Colorado River, which no longer even reaches the sea because so much of it is tapped off for agriculture and the cities of the southwest.

Along with those pipelines, a project that seems like it should be worth doing is sort of reverse-irrigation. Nebraska sits atop the Ogalala Aquifer, which the farms of the region *need* for irrigation. But the aquifer is being drained dry *fast,* all while billions of tons of unwanted water sit on top of it. Pumping that water back underground would be a chore, and potentially dangerous… filling those voids with water could well “inflate” the ground and create earthquakes. But you know what’s worse than earthquakes? A million acres of productive farmland turned into desert because the aquifer is dry.

Sure, massive pipelines – say, a bank of a dozen pipes each five meters in diameter – would consume vast amounts of real estate. The only way to accomplish this would be via eminent domain, a process that makes me twitch at the best of times. But I am not a libertarian absolutist; sometimes this needs to be done, in contrast to the insane Green New Deal notions of replacing aircraft with trains. The GND would mandate far *more* such land grabs, for a far lesser purpose. Because trains can (and should) be replaced with aircraft, but nothing much replaces water.

Such pipelines would be very valuable for a number of non-irrigation roles. A bank of pipes sixty meters wide would, it seems, make a perfectly fine sub-structure for a new transcontinental highway; so long as you are building the pipes and putting a road on them, you could built a “roof” over the whole thing, covered in solar cells. A fifty meter wide band of cells a thousand kilometers long would have *vast* power generation potential. By roofing over the road you would prevent snow on the highway; the vast thermal mass of the water underneath would keep the roads warm in the winter. The electrical power would allow for regular electric vehicle charging stations; if the technology works out, *perhaps* the cars could tap off the power directly while running, and not use their batteries at all. Self-driving electric vehicles could thus run down the highway at 85 miles per hour non-stop, allowing a person to travel cross-country in short order. My 1,200 mile drive from Utah to Illinois could be accomplished in 14 hours with such a system; this is, realistically, not much more than what’s required to fly there (my last such flight started at waking up at 4 AM and getting to Illinois at something like 6PM so, call it 13 hours devoted to the process), and would certainly be a lot faster than taking a train which would have to stop regularly.

The vast thermal mass of the water could also provide cooling for nuclear reactors strung along the length of the pipes.

The effort needed to build the system would require a vast amount of manpower. One of the very few things that the original New Deal did halfway right was the Works Projects Administration, which put millions of men to work building *infrastructure,* buildings and roads and bridges and dams. A pipeline system like this could be at the heart of a revived WPA; blighted urban areas could be effectively depopulated of their unemployed, given good, high-paying jobs actually *doing* *something* rather than merely existing on welfare.

Climate change is coming. Exactly what it will entail is unclear, but it looks like weather-related chaos is very likely. So we can either accept that the great American heartland will be maybe drowned, maybe dried out in mega-droughts, while California bursts into flames; or we can Build Stuff that would be useful *regardless* of climate change. Imagine what the current Housing and Urban Development budget ($32 billion) could do if devoted to something like this.

A pipeline system like this will mean that the US will *need* a massive revival in the steel industry. And the tools and techniques that allow you to make thousands of kilometers of massive pipelines, with a gigawatt-class reactor complex every fifty or hundred miles means you have the ability to make a hundred Seawolf class subs a year, backed up by a couple dozen “whatever replaces the Ohio class” boomers per year.