4 ms·
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 sha
by 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 agoThe 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.