3 ms·

Everyone keeps saying desalination is the solution but doesn't desalination cause an enormous amount of waste output (hyper saline slurry)? It seems like creati

• Gibbon1 4y ago
  The one the coastal commission blocked was going to mix it with treated sewage to reduce the salinity.
• phaistra 4y ago
  There is always going to be some negative externality to anything humans do. No free lunch in any endeavor. You can find new uses for waste products or reprocess it to something less harmful. The "water crisis" in California is an entirely political problem.
• schainks 4y ago
  It just so happens that a HN startup can use the brine from desalination for carbon capture: https://www.heimdalccu.com/ https://www.heimdalccu.com/
• yazaddaruvala 4y ago
  There are already salt flats in Utah that are basically "hyper saline slurry". Death valley (https://www.nps.gov/places/badwater-basin.htm https://www.nps.gov/places/badwater-basin.htm) in California wouldn't be particularly worse if we dumped "hyper saline slurry" into it. We could also barrel it and put it into the ground. There is also always the refinement approach to create 1. table salt (possibly even paying industries like restaurants, commercial cooking, etc to take it); 2. lithium mining. This slurry might also turn into an asset at scale. Maybe for building roads. Maybe for concrete. Maybe for bricks. We will not really know until we have the surplus, and economic incentive to research it.