SAN DIEGO -- County water officials Thursday praised a study that said it was possible to build a plant at the San Onofre nuclear power facility that would turn ocean water into drinking water. They urged a deeper investigation of the idea.

At their regular meeting Thursday, San Diego County Water Authority board members were presented with the results of the preliminary study searching for "fatal flaws" that would kill the idea of building a seawater desalination plant.

The board, comprised of water officials from across the county, took no formal action, and investigation into the idea is in the earliest of stages.

But several board members said the agency, which supplies nearly all of the water county residents use each year, should continue talks with Camp Pendleton and Southern California Edison officials about the idea of building a plant jointly with Orange County that could eventually turn between 50 million and 100 million gallons of seawater a day into drinking water.

Bob Yamada, the agency's desalination program manager, said agency officials plan to brief Camp Pendleton officials about their preliminary study within the next 30 to 60 days.

"I think we should look at this very closely," Carlsbad Mayor and Water Authority board member Claude "Bud" Lewis said of the potential San Onofre project. "The ocean is our resource."

Greg Quist, the Water Authority's board member from Escondido's Rincon del Diablo Municipal Water District, said, "I like the concept that it's tied to a nuclear power reactor because it's not burning fossil fuels. It's important that we look at this site."

One issue that Water Authority board members did not discuss Thursday was public opinion -- the question of whether people would believe that water processed close to a nuclear power plant would be safe to drink.

Engineers say there is no possibility that the water produced by the plant would come anywhere near San Onofre's radioactive power generators.

Ed Rogers, the board's representative from Camp Pendleton, warned that the board must move slowly in any negotiations with the military base, the largest Marine Corps training site in the nation.

The San Onofre nuclear station is operated by Edison on land leased from Pendleton.

"The purpose of Camp Pendleton is to train Marines to win wars, and anything that detracts from that will (find) opposition," Rogers said. "There is a tremendous sensitivity aboard the base because a whole bunch of people want to build things there. Fallbrook wants to build things. Oceanside wants to build things. Projects of this nature we typically see as encroachment issues."

Water Authority board members, meanwhile, say that finding ways to build seawater desalination plants represents the "future" of San Diego County's water supply.

With little rainfall and few reservoirs, San Diego County imports nearly all the water residents use each year from the Colorado River and Northern California's State Water Project.

But those sources are drying up because of political and environmental reasons and because of record droughts.

Meanwhile, extracting the salt out of ocean water to make it potable was considered too expensive just a decade ago. But technological advances in the reverse-osmosis membranes used in seawater desalination have cut the costs.

The Water Authority has been conducting testy, on-again, off-again talks for nearly four years with Poseidon Inc., a Connecticut-based company, in the hope of building it's first seawater plant, a $270 million facility at the Encina Power Plant in Carlsbad.

If built, that plant would produce between 50 million and 80 million gallons of water a day and be the largest plant in the Western hemisphere.

Yamada said the earliest cost estimates on the San Onofre plant range from $318 million to $558 million for the plant, and another $227 million to $319 million for pipelines needed to deliver water produced by the plant.

Poseidon has agreed to a tentative deal with Carlsbad to build the Encina plant. But most observers believe it will never be built unless the much-larger Water Authority is included in the plan.

Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.