40 ms·

Do you have a source? I was not aware and would like to learn more.

• germinalphrase 5y ago
  The brine is too salty for marine life causing dead zones.
• ivanech 5y ago
  "Brine, water comprising about five percent salt, often includes toxins such as chlorine and copper used in desalination, it said. By contrast, global sea water is about 3.5 percent salt." "Brine can cut levels of oxygen in seawater near desalination plants" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-brine-idUSKCN1P81PX https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-brine-idUSKCN...
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Can we lay those huge tubes underwater to disperse it drip irrigation style? It's not like it's a lot of salt once diffused, especially with those glaciers melting. We're already assuming far more electricity, so I'm not too concerned about the energy required to pump the brine many miles out, just worried about capital and repair costs.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    I wonder if the salt can be converted into a useful byproduct? Or else if it can be disposed of in an environmentally-friendly way?
    • falcolas 5y ago
      It's not pure salt. It's just water with abnormally high salinity. It would require a fair bit of additional processing to make it useful.
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        Evaporation pools?
        • falcolas 5y ago
          Entirely possible (and occurring already in the south bay), but they scale poorly - they require very large tracts of land since the pools need to be fairly shallow. They're also fairly labor intensive, between harvesting, purifying, and transporting the resulting salt.
          • throwaway894345 5y ago
            The salt has to be transported in any case (whether salt comes from a mine or from evaporation pools). Even if we don't make it into a byproduct but just put it in a big pit of salt adjacent the evaporation pools it would probably be fine (somewhere that we don't need to worry too much about it leeching into the environment, which is already a concern for evaporation pools). Not sure what applications of salt there are or how pure it needs to be (presumably there are other applications besides table salt)? Since we're already positing very cheap energy, we can probably also posit more efficient desalinization plants (resulting brine is even more concentrated, taking the load off of evaporation pools) since I'm assuming that the energy cost is the bottleneck in desalinization efficiency.
  • scythe 5y ago
    >often includes toxins such as chlorine and copper used in desalination This is very avoidable. Most extant desalination plants are in the Middle East and subject to relatively little environmental oversight. While desalination will always produce brine, introducing extra chemicals is something that can be solved at the technology level.
• macNchz 5y ago
  Here's an article about the problems with brine from desalination plants https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-worlds-thirst-with-seawater-dumps-toxic-brine-in-oceans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world...