It is mostly used to just cool the heated power-production equipment. The vast majority of the water used by power plants is returned to the environment, and thus is available for other uses. In 1995, California alone accounted for almost 11 percent of all freshwater used in the United States. Most of the water used in California was for crop irrigation . Florida also is a large food producer but because it gets a lot more summer rainfall than the Central Valley of California, there is less need to apply irrigation water.
Agriculture is a big business in the United States, and a lot of water is used to produce our food.
In 1995, farmers used water to irrigate about 59,250,000 acres of land. That is about 92,600 square miles, which you can think of as a big, square plot of land about 304 miles on a side. As expected, California led the Nation in acres irrigated, about 9,500,000, which was over 16 percent of the national total. Nebraska was next, irrigating about 7,450,000 acres, followed by Texas at about 6,310,000 acres. Agricultural irrigation is much more prevalent in the arid Western United States than in the East.