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I think it's most likely that it would just get buried or piled up somewhere. Salt is not really a high value product, so I wouldn't be surprised if desal plant
by jartelt 8y ago
I think it's most likely that it would just get buried or piled up somewhere. Salt is not really a high value product, so I wouldn't be surprised if desal plants had to pay people to take the salt from them.
- wuschel 8y ago* Problem 1: It gets into the ground water. * Problem 2: If dumped into the ocean, it increases the salt concentration (see: Middle East). Disclaimer: Worked on some related projects on how to find a positive use for Brine.
- nightbrawler 8y agoDid you arrive at any possible positive uses for Brine?
- wuschel 8y agoI wish we had. No, our team failed to come up with anything that would mitigate the hazardous effects of brine. The scale of brine production is enormous. While there are inefficiencies in the supply chain (energy carrier for reverse osmosis, membrane quality and technologies), we closed the project with the insight we are actively deploying another technology that messes up our planet.
- khafra 8y agoWhat about molten sodium energy storage?
- wuschel 8y agoWe looked very briefly into energy storage and resource production (mining). The scale is the problem. At the end, you still end up with lots and lots of inorganic material, which is toxic for the environment.
- jartelt 8y agoThe amount of salt used in storage applications would likely not even make a dent in the amount of salt produced by large scale desalination.
- jartelt 8y agoLeakage into ground water would certainly be and issue if proper planning was not in place. I would have to think there are ways to prevent this leakage though. We have burying lots of coal ash for many years now and must have some best practices in place. Coal ash is more toxic than salt.
- freehunter 8y agoI'm casually wondering what the ecological impact of just dumping it into the Great Salt Lake or the Utah salt flats would be. Both are already so toxically salty that almost nothing is able to live there.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoThere's brine shrimp in the Great Salt Lake. But there's also industry that extracts the salt from the Great Salt Lake, via evaporation. This shows that, if you've got salt to dump somewhere, there's actually a market for that. (That is, if it's pure. Others pointed out the problem of chemicals added to the salt water to make it easier to process.)
- ticviking 8y agoYeah the issue is all the additives the desal plants add to protect their hardware.
- petecox 8y agoThe Jordanian plan is to pipe brine into the Dead Sea, which is already hypersaline.