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This is not only about efficiency. As noted in the article, it would reduce the pollution of highly concentrated brine rejected into the ocean. See for instanc
by idoubtit 7y ago
This is not only about efficiency. As noted in the article, it would reduce the pollution of highly concentrated brine rejected into the ocean.
See for instance this article of the Guardian about a region in Chile where the majority of drinkable water comes from a desalination plant built in 2003: "The salt they pump back in kills everything'" https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/02/the-salt-they-pump-back-in-kills-everything-is-the-cost-of-chiles-fresh-water-too-high https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/02/the-salt-they...
- MertsA 7y agoIt only does that by virtue of being much less efficient and spread over a larger area than traditional desalination plants. At the end of the day unless you're storing that brine or trucking it off somewhere you have to dump it back in the ocean. That "highly concentrated brine" isn't all that concentrated to begin with as it's less than a 50% increase in solutes coming out of the discharge pipe and gets mixed and diluted in the ocean relatively quickly. That article is just a fisherman blaming an unrelated problem on the closest thing around.