No, I don't really support any government superprojects.
But: Do you have any notions for modern equivalents for Depression-era superprojects that might actually be beneficial?
I think a pumped diversion of the Mississippi and/or Missouri rivers, over the Rockies and into the Colorado River or Rio Grande, would be very impressive. Or perhaps the Columbia or Snake rivers, down south to the Colorado River. It could help with the flooding that frequently strikes the lower half of the Mississippi, it would burgeon the faltering reservoirs on the Colorado River, and while it wouldn't be energy neutral, it could be buffered by recapturing pump energy used to pump water up-hill via hydroelectric dams on the downstream end.
Arizona already moves thousands of cubic feet per second through the canal systems that were largely put in place in the late 19th and early 20th century, on the Salt River. The CAP canal is 336 miles long and delivers almost 500 billion gallons of water to Phoenix every year, or 16,000 gallons per second, which is about 2100-ish cubic feet per second. On a daily basis, the Granite Reef diversion pushes 1000-1500 CFS uphill through the Goldfield mountains, off the Salt River and into canals that move to the south and east for hundreds of miles. These are all largely 1900's era technological feats.
I'd be horrified by the amount of Eminent Domain that would inevitably be flexed by such a project, and the scope of corruption and graft that would line contractor pockets.
I bet that pumping from lake to lake through Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico or Colorado could be possible. Aiming for the San Juan River at Navajo Lake in New Mexico would eliminate the need to meet up with the Colorado River itself; the San Juan tumbles downhill on its own to feed Lake Powell from the east while the Colorado comes in from the north.
I admit that when we're talking about Mississippi River flooding, we're talking in excess of 4.5 million CFS. A diversion of 10,000 CFS is a pittance compared to that, and honestly would be about the most you could put through smaller tributary rivers that feed the Colorado River Basin from the Rockies. The Colorado River itself can't handle much more than 25,000 CFS and that's in a flood state. But managed well, preemptively, it could offer an additional threshold of buffering to frequently flooded cities between St Louis and New Orleans.
