Civilizational Drought: A Missing Category in the Understanding of Iran's Water Crisis

[NNadir]

A free to read "viewpoint" article on a country which felonious fascists feel free to bomb is here:

Civilizational Drought: A Missing Category in the Understanding of Iran’s Water Crisis Mostafa Hadei and Philip K. Hopke Environmental Science & Technology 2025 59 (27), 13529-13531

Drought is a multifaceted environmental challenge, typically categorized into five main types depending on its impact. Meteorological drought occurs when rainfall is below average over a period. Agricultural drought involves insufficient soil moisture for crop and livestock production. Hydrological drought refers to reduced water levels in water bodies, usually following prolonged dry periods. Socioeconomic drought reflects broader consequences like damage to employment, food security, public health, and the economy. Some also identify ecological drought, involving long-term degradation of ecosystems such as forests and wetlands. (1) While useful, these categories only capture part of the issue. In Iran, drought has become a systemic crisis, requiring a more integrated perspective that reflects its deeper societal impacts.

Iran is facing one of the most severe water crises in its modern history. Average annual precipitation has dropped to less than 250 mm. (2) Surface water bodies have declined sharply. Lake Urmia, once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, has lost more than 90% of its surface area since the 1990s. Heavy reliance on groundwater has caused serious depletion, with more than 70 km³ lost from 2002 to 2015, and unsustainable extraction reported across 77% of Iran’s land area. (3) This depletion has led to depleted wells, saline water, and widespread land subsidence. Parts of Tehran, Isfahan, and Kerman provinces exhibit the highest subsidence rates in the Middle East, exceeding 25 cm annually. (4)

Agriculture consumes more than 90% of Iran’s water, mainly through inefficient flood irrigation and cultivation of water-intensive crops. As a result, water scarcity has reached crisis levels. More than 300 cities and 8000 villages face water stress, with 500 villages reliant on tanker trucks. (5) In spring 2025, Tehran’s dam storage fell below 30%, with some reservoirs dropping to 6%, triggering warnings of water rationing. (6)

Water scarcity in Iran has intensified tensions, especially in central regions. Protests in areas like Isfahan, Khuzestan, and Sistan and Baluchistan driven by mismanagement and interprovincial disputes have sometimes led to arrests or fatalities. These conflicts reflect a long-term crisis rooted in chronic water decline, outdated infrastructure, inefficient agriculture, and unreformed water policies...

It's short, and easy to read the rest for free, if one is interested. If one is not interested, well, so be it.

This is, of course, a human rights issue, although there are people who deny the humanity of Iranians.

One of my critics here, a not very bright critic IMO, who wanted me to believe the world is awash in indium for solar cells - he, she or they seem not to come here anymore, and I couldn't care less - remarked, accurately I think, of me that when one has a hammer, every problem is a nail. The application of this cliche with respect to me of course is that I believe, and will not be dissuaded in during the remainder of my overly long life, that the only acceptable form of primary energy is nuclear energy.

The Persian Gulf is surely damaged by its years of oil traffic and oil wars. An avenue for desalination by achieving, at high very high temperatures, is the application of heating saline water to supercritical temperatures, during which a phase separation occurs since salts are not soluble in supercritical water. I discussed this some years back with respect to restoring California's destroyed bodies of water like Lake Owens and many other destroyed bodies of water in that state:

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

In that post I referred to the phase diagram of saline water, which for convenience, I reproduce here:

I discussed some issues with supercritical water in a relatively recent previous post in this space: Experimental Supercritical (Sea)Water Oxidation of Microplastics To Yield Hydrogen and Other Gases.

At that time, it slipped my mind that I had in my files a paper that had a very nice representation of the three dimensional phase diagram, not of supercritical seawater, but the closely related sodium chloride water system. Here it is:



The caption:

Fig. 1. Phase diagram of H2O–NaCl in temperature–pressure–composition coordinates.

The source: Thomas Driesner, Christoph A. Heinrich, The system H2O–NaCl. Part I: Correlation formulae for phase relations in temperature–pressure–composition space from 0 to 1000°C, 0 to 5000bar, and 0 to 1 XNaCl, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Volume 71, Issue 20, 2007, Pages 4880-4901.

Heating seawater to these temperatures under this much pressure obviously requires energy.

The effect of raising water in the Persian Gulf to supercritical temperatures would be to oxidize all petroleum contaminants in that body of water to hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, in other words, to slowly clean that body of water up.

It is extremely unlikely - almost to the point of absurdity - to suggest that this will happen: As my life winds down, I see that the triumph of ignorance in our times precludes, I think, a "safe landing" for humanity, humanity being a species which includes Iranians. Nevertheless it is conceivable, even feasible, to do this, at least from an engineering perspective, if not from a political perspective, politics have now become entirely devoid of an ethical foundation.

In a "civilizational" setting, on a planetary scale, there is a profound drought of ethics.

Thus the following escapes us:

Iranians, like all human beings, have a right to nuclear energy.

Have a nice day.

[littlemissmartypants]

1. It's always a pleasure to read your posts. Thank you for continuing to share. nt

[NNadir]

4. Thank you for your kind words.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. For some reason, I was thinking Iran had substantial deposits of thorium, along w/Pakistan and India. Not sure why, but

wrong. India and Turkey have oodles of thorium, and somehow I got the idea a few years back that there was a belt of Th deposits stretching across west Asia. Not so; too bad. Development of Th reactors might have been less triggering to US (and Israeli) hawks than enrichment of U.

Looks like it's up to China to pursue this technology, using a revival and extension of the old ORNL molten-salt reactor technology. https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-reactor-without-shutdown/?cf-view

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. Honestly, I don't think the people that matter would care at all about the word "thorium"

Uranium, plutonium, thorium… whatever. It’s a nuclear “reactor” right?

[NNadir]

5. There is a certain amount of hype about thorium, although it does have some advantages, in particular...

...one very relevant to Iran in this times, of making uranium enrichment unnecessary in the case where nuclear fuels are continuously recycled.

Certainly its use would reduce the radioactivity associated with lanthanide mine tailings that drive the useless wind industry and other industries involving magnets, the best magnets being neodymium-iron-boride magnets spiked with dysprosium.

It is often represented that there is more thorium on the planet than there is uranium, but this refers to terrestrial ores. Thorium is not soluble in seawater nor in river water, and thus is not subject to a geochemical cycle as uranium is. Effectively this means that uranium, which cycles from the Earth's mantle from crustal uplift and volcanoes, is extracted into river water, and ultimately into seawater (where it is in low but recoverable concentrations) is inexhaustible; thorium is not, although it is probably true that lanthanide mine tailings might supply all the world's energy demand for many centuries, if not longer.

Kirk Sorensen certainly drove interest in the MSR, a concept that stimulated a lot of my thinking about nuclear energy, but I kind of agree with Nick Touran, with whom I've recently become familiar, that it's not a magic. However the Chinese have apparently built and operated an MSR. At the end of the lecture at the link - apparently even some fusion guys have got the "thorium bug" - he makes some remarks on the Chinese MSR. For various reasons, I don't like FLIBE as a coolant, heat transfer fluid, and the materials science question, the requirement for Hastelloy, is to my mind, problematic.

We don't know many of the details of the Chinese effort, whether for instance, they've just reproduced Weinberg's reactor from the documentation, or if they've modified it considerably.

I'm not sure how much thorium is in the Baotou lanthanide tailings. It could be significant, but I believe their ores are bastnasite, not monazite. I do know these ores are weighted toward the light lanthanides, and thus one would expect thorium to be there as ThO₂ behaves rather like cerium, albeit lacking the +3 oxidation state, but I don't know.

India is definitely in the catbird seat with respect to thorium, and they are actively pursuing its use as a fuel in a way in which I strongly approve, in heavy water reactors. I understand that Australia also has considerable thorium.

I actually like thorium in solid phase fuels, chiefly as a tool to drive continuous uranium recycling without the necessity for enrichment. Uranium enrichment is always an excuse that the Repukes use to start fossil fuel wars.

I'm a uranium/plutonium kind of guy at the end of the day, but I certainly have no objection to thorium fuels, in any of the often discussed permutations. The reactor idea I'm trying to dump on my son before I die would be a breed and burn type with mixed thorium/uranium ceramics driven by critical americium from which one can apparently get a lot of neutrons.

I don't really buy into thorium as the "best thing ever," although the non-proliferation value I discussed here recently is certainly worthy of consideration. It's a part of the program, not the soul of the program. In writing that post I learned something that actually escaped my attention for decades, which is that ²³⁴U has a critical mass. I didn't know that, probably because I never bothered to check. That's a cool thing to know, since thorium will generate a lot of side product ²³⁴U because of the relatively long half-life of ²³³Pa, the precursor of ²³³U.