3 ms·
Why does that have to be the solution? Why not further concentrate it through evaporation? Then take that and pour it into old salt mines or spent oil wells? O
by MBCook 3y ago
Why does that have to be the solution?
Why not further concentrate it through evaporation? Then take that and pour it into old salt mines or spent oil wells? Or natural gas wells?
- Magiccupcake 3y agoFurther concentrated salt solutions deposit in the device, clogging it causing it to not work. You could harvest the salt, but then it is no longer passive.
- ranguna 3y agoThen don't concentrate it on the devices. Dump the water on a drying pool and extract the salt afterwards.
- djtango 3y agoIronically we'd probably need some amount of water to then purify the salt from the other random stuff
- 6510 3y agoNeed distilled water, luckily we were just making that.
- j16sdiz 3y agoYou are underestimating the volume. In that volume, you need a large drying pool.. which is no better than a parking lot.
- nielsbot 3y agocan we just pile it up into a huge salt mountain? and maybe eat some of it?
- imgabe 3y agoOr just sell it as salt? We use, I don’t know, billions of pounds of salt per year in food production?
- 6510 3y agoMaking usable salt takes quite a bit of doing but as you note, we are already doing it. I ran into this, it seems to explain how the sausage is made: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1968/1/012013/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1968/1/...
- dataflow 3y ago> Or just sell it as salt? We use, I don’t know, billions of pounds of salt per year in food production? Are you sure the math even remotely checks out? Just looking up some numbers, even if we naively assume ocean "saltwater" is just H2O + NaCl (which it obviously isn't): the world consumes around 300 billion kg salt/year, whereas (say) Los Angeles alone uses 700 billion kg water/year. So even if a city like LA provides for the whole world's use of salt, what does everyone else do?
- raducu 3y agoI'm sorry, perhaps my engineering education makes me handwave at problems -- but the water we're desalinating has to return to the ocean someway, it's not like we throw it into black holes, why can't we just dump the brine 20 miles into the ocean, the water we've desalinated will return by other means.
- imgabe 3y agoYou’re assuming we need to get 100% of our water from desalination when it would only need to cover any shortfall from other methods. We’re currently getting 100% of the water we need from those other methods.
- dataflow 3y agoReally depends who "we" is. Israel gets 75% of its water from desalination already, and that's just right now. And a lot of the other water sources right now are nonrenewable (groundwater, etc.), hence a big part of the motivation to look for new ones in the first place. The current situation is not sustainable on its own in many parts of the world, let alone the effects of dramatically increasing population sizes and global warming.