> freshwater is suposedly the most valuable resource in california and here is a way to make it practically for free. this pipe dream of yours would cost over a trillion dollars, easy.  your drawing depicts you going over (or through) the san bernardino and san gabriel mountain range. once with fresh water going to death valley and once coming back from death valley back to la. you are crossing a mountain range twice, either having to bore thru it or pump over it. not only that but you are taking about pumping water 250 miles inland, and then 250 miles back. to fill a portion of the death valley lake bed to act as a desalination plant thru evaporation you are going to need at minimum a 60" pipe to carry the volume of water you are talking about. then set up a solar boiler in death valley? you are going to have to condense the water vapor in death valley and then pump fresh water back, you cant have a water vapor pipe running back to la, it will literally explode every day. the volume of air in a pipe that long, at boiler pressures, would blow that pipe out constantly. i would guess on the low side, this is a $500 billion project and on the high side closer to $1 trillion. this isnt "free" water this is a monumental project that would never repay itself and therefore is the reason nobody has ever tried something like this. cost to benefit ratio, anybody investing looks at a cost to benefit ratio. if the cost exceeds the benefit, they wont move forward. in this case, the up front start-up cost would exceed the amount of money they could potentially make before the project aged to the point of retirement. you would be smarter to build a desalination plant near the coast and pump water 1-5 miles inland to a plant there. besides, you literally have ocotillo and el centro desert right outside the salton sea where you would only need to pump water a few miles. again, bad idea, this isnt going to work, there is no need to go any further.
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