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A large issue is where do you put the brackish or super-salted water? Desalination is great as long as you have the waste impacts managed.
by gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
A large issue is where do you put the brackish or super-salted water? Desalination is great as long as you have the waste impacts managed.
- eropple 4y agoExtremely not an expert, but I wonder if dehydrating it out doesn’t make sense? Solid-form salts are easier to dispose of.
- m0llusk 4y agoThe process can also be used to generate construction materials.
- codenesium 4y agoYou pump it back out into the ocean.
- stevenjgarner 4y agoProbably fine for small-scale use, but on a planetary scale increased salinity could dramatically influence marine biodiversity, not to mention climate from thermohaline circulation disruption [1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_currents/05conveyor1.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_currents/05...
- thriftwy 4y agoIt's not possible to change ocean salinity by any measurable amount by desalination. Except maybe for some very closed off seas, which are already less saline than the ocean.
- kec 4y agoI imagine similar things were said about burning oil and gas at one time. That aside I think the more pressing concern is the local environment, turning the area around your station into a brackish dead zone.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoTo expand on this. There's ~321M cubic MILES of water in the ocean. Total US water usage is about 2 cubic miles per week - which is not even a 100 millionth of the water in the ocean.
- Ekaros 4y agoIt is in the water cycle anyway, so yes globally really makes no difference. But the localized levels of salinity certainly can be effected and be detrimental.
- Ekaros 4y agoSounds expensive to pump it to wide enough area for not to cause issues to marine life. The total amount in context isn't an issue, but the spikes in concentration is.
- redisman 4y agoSea salt prices are about to be negative one dollar per pound
- dontbenebby 4y ago> A large issue is where do you put the brackish or super-salted water? Desalination is great as long as you have the waste impacts managed. We designed a whole thing to store nuclear waste (Yucca Mountain[1], couldn't you put brackish water in something similar but wayyyy less expensive since it's not radioactive? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- gruez 4y agoI think you're underestimating how much waste water is produced by orders of magnitude. Any inland reservoir will be filled within months of completion.