A factory is not on a river: three relationships, not one
A gauge has one relationship to water: it measures it. An industrial facility has at least three — where it takes water from, where it returns it, and which drainage basin it stands in — and at a large minority of American power stations those are three different answers. Palo Verde, the largest nuclear station in the United States, stands in a dry desert basin, is cooled by treated sewage piped from Phoenix, and discharges to evaporation ponds. Any single "water body" field would have to be wrong about it twice. This sets out the model Hydrionis uses instead, and the evidence behind each relationship.
Palo Verde, three ways
| Relationship | Water | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Takes water from | Phoenix Area Sewage Effluent | The water body the operator states this facility draws from, on its own regulatory return. |
| Stands within | Centennial Wash | The drainage area the facility’s coordinates fall inside. It describes where the facility stands, not where its water comes from — a plant supplied by pipeline from another catchment stands here and uses nothing from it. |
| Returns water to | Evap Ponds | The water body the operator states this facility returns water to. Frequently, but not always, the same as the source. |
Three answers, and not a river among them. A platform storing one water body per facility would have to pick one of these and be wrong about the other two — and the most tempting pick, the basin the plant stands in, is the one that would imply it draws from a desert wash it takes nothing from.
What each relationship rests on
Two come from the operator’s own statement on a federal return. The third is a spatial containment, and is typed so that it can never be read as a statement about use.
| Method | Relationship | Tier | Facilities |
|---|---|---|---|
| eia-923-water-source | Takes water from | A — Stated by the operator on a regulatory return | 835 |
| eia-923-discharge | Returns water to | A — Stated by the operator on a regulatory return | 754 |
| wbd-subbasin-containment | Stands within | C — Spatial containment within published boundaries | 787 |
A third of these plants do not take water from a river
The waters operators name are frequently not water bodies at all. These are the most common sources that are plainly something else — effluent, wells, municipal supply, ponds.
| Source as named | Facilities |
|---|---|
| Wells | 73 |
| Municipal | 36 |
| Municipality | 26 |
| Well | 5 |
| wells | 5 |
| Sabine River Authority Canal | 3 |
| Coastal Water Authority | 2 |
| Reclaimed Water | 2 |
This is why the facility graph is kept separate from the gauge water bodies rather than merged into them. Of the water bodies American facilities name, almost none matches a water body an American gauge is linked to — and the handful that do match a *subbasin* named after the river, which is a drainage area rather than the channel a plant draws from. No publisher issues an identifier that would join the two, and matching them by name would assert something neither publisher said.
Data behind this
Every figure above is computed from these datasets at build time rather than written into the text. If the underlying record changes, this page changes with it.
Citation
Hydrionis (2026), A factory is not on a river: three relationships, not one, version 1.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/research/a-factory-is-not-on-a-river/