5 ms·
Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle.
by xyzzyz 4mo ago
Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle.
- lightedman 4mo ago"Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle." Just make prettier-than-Himalayan salt lamps out of it and sell it to hippies. Easy solution.
- rapnie 4mo agoThat only shifts the problem. Now we need an increased supply of hippies that are hard to come by in a low hippie-tolerant environment.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Easy, but not necessarily good for the spot you're pumping concentrated salt back into.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoThe brine came from the ocean. So just dilute it back to close to ambient salinity using municipal waste water that you are discharging anyway.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> The brine came from the ocean. Sure, and enriched uranium comes from the ground, but that doesn't mean it's safe to dump it back in after the enrichment process! > So just dilute it back to close to ambient salinity using municipal waste water… Wouldn't it generally be easier to process that municipal waste water, as is already fairly common?
- SoftTalker 4mo agoThe analogy would be if you "un-enrich" it. Then it's safe. Or at least no worse than when you took it out of the ground.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> The analogy would be if you "un-enrich" it. But you're doing that with the same water you're trying to make in the first place!
- SoftTalker 4mo agoYou could just dilute it using fresh seawater, if you used enough and (maybe) spread it over a wider area. The amount of water people need for drinking is a relative drop in the ocean.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoBrine doesn't necessarily behave the way you imagine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool
- jaggederest 4mo agoBlue Planet video of a brinicle, content warning for kind of horrifying death of sea creatures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAupJzH31tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAupJzH31tc
- ianthehenry 4mo agoAnd a Blue Planet II video of a brine pool, stronger content warning for much more horrifying death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwuVpNYrKPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwuVpNYrKPY
- 4mo ago
- Enginerrrd 4mo agoMunicipal waste water is a much cheaper way to get desalinated water in the first place though.
- lazide 4mo agoexcept for the pharmaceuticals anyway
- shermantanktop 4mo agoHey, it's free viagra, prozac, progesterone and multivitamin supplements, all in a glass.
- xp84 4mo agoThere’s some fat fish out there, I hope we can get those guys some Ozempic too
- collingreen 4mo agoDemocrats intentionally killing the fishing industry by giving fish free glp1s and cocaine with your tax dollars!
- Enginerrrd 4mo agoThat’s been a solved problem, engineering-wise, for a while. The advanced treatment stages take care of it. Between UV, ozone, and nanofiltration, etc. we can remove the pharmaceuticals. Actually the problem is the water comes out too pure out of a well designed water reuse system, to the point where the mineral content can be too low and you need to add some back in.
- lazide 4mo agoCite for it being solved? All the articles I can find have it as ‘active and growing problem with some potential mitigations which are not universally applied’. All the recycled water systems I’m aware of still have PCC issues and excess ion contamination problems too still.
- xyzzyz 4mo agoMaybe, but dumping crystalline salt is even worse to the spot you’re dumping it on.
- card_zero 4mo agoI wonder. It would have to dissolve, a big block of salt would take a while, kind of like the erosion of cliffs where the salt comes from in the first place. Eh, I guess you're right though, the fish wouldn't like that at all.
- asdff 4mo agoIt doesn't need to be crystalline salt. Just mix the brine with seawater at a really high ratio of sea water to brine then dump that out. 100:1 ratio should be fine I would guess. Quick search suggests seawater salinity variance is already like 10%-15% or so. Even better if you pipe it offshore where currents will take it and not somewhere that doesn't circulate.
- xyzzyz 4mo agoYes, that's my point: if you're next to the ocean, disposing of brine is extremely easy.
- pajko 4mo agoYou could put it back into old salt mines.
- kijin 4mo agoEven better, just package it up and eat it instead of digging underground and creating more pollution. It's not every day that industrial waste happens to be not only edible but also tasty. Too tasty, in fact. Salt is addictive.
- xp84 4mo agoIt’s not going to be pure NaCl though; making Morton salt with it would make sense only if it wouldn’t cost more to process it (net of its resale value) than just disposing of it somewhere not particularly sensitive. I’d propose the Utah salt flats or indeed, kinda love the idea of just sticking them in a salt mine that is all tapped out. If it used to be chock full of salt it seems pretty environmentally fair to make it salty again.
- ashdksnndck 4mo agoIf you use fat pipes that go a decent distance from shore, diluting your brine with ocean water, you’ll have a negligible impact on the ocean. The problem is if you dump lots of brine in shallow waters. Old designs did have that flaw, but it’s not that difficult to design around this constraint now that we know about it. IMO this is an issue where NIMBYs are using environmental concerns as a smokescreen to block new desal plants from ruining the vibe at their beachfront property. Rhymes with the opposition against offshore wind farms.
- eff-nix 4mo ago[dead]
- FartyMcFarter 4mo agoYeah. Worrying about salt in the sea is like worrying about oxygen in the air. Can too much oxygen in the air sometimes be a problem? Yeah, in some corner cases. Is it a major problem that we can't solve? Not at all.
- mejutoco 4mo agoThat makes sense to me. At the same time I know the mediterranean sea is heating up more because it cannot move heat out quick enough. I dont know of any mediterranean air, so I believe more closed water zones would behave different than, lets say, the atlantic ocean.
- 0xFF0123 4mo agoIsn't it more akin in this case to worrying about too much carbon dioxide in the air?
- FartyMcFarter 4mo agoWhy is it akin to that? Doesn't the salt come from the sea in the first place?
- 4mo ago
- threwrfaway 4mo agoActually it's easy and ok. Just mix it with the treated sewage right before it returns. Simple mass action implies the salinity hasn't changed. But wait! There's water mass loss due to leaky pipes and outdoor pools! Mixing salt water and brine is perfectly ok. Just use a phase diagram.
- iberator 4mo agothat's 200% bullshits. Countries that invested into desalination plants are known to create death zones right where brine is sent back - even if miles from the coast
- analog31 4mo agoSomeone tell me why this is stupid, which it probably is: Put the desalination plant on a tanker ship and let it do its duty out in the middle of the ocean, then cruise back to port and dispense the water.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- qurren 4mo agoWhy? Just build mountains out of it and maybe even open a salt-ski park in the tropics for people who don't have snow.
- asdff 4mo agoThere are salt mountains lining most midwestern freeways as it is for winter.
- xp84 4mo agoI just realized that future archaeologists will be tracing our roads using the salt residue!
- make3 4mo agoor just you know.. asphalt residue
- Ekaros 4mo agoActually I have been thinking about this. Surprisingly straight and long cuts in rock formations might be a real thing to track. In at least some places at least some rock blasting is preferred to get aggregate for road foundations. And these tends to be rather straight and rather steep.
- ssl-3 4mo agoAssuming my constants (35g/kg of salt in seawater, 650k tons of salt dumped by the state of ohio every year, 81 gallons per day of individual domestic water usage) are correct and my napkin math isn't completely buggered, and if we look at the salt as a primary product instead of just waste: Ohio DOT's use of road salt would allow for fresh water to be provided for somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 people. On one hand, that's nowhere near enough people; it's a small drop in a giant thirsty bucket of water consumption. So we'll still need salt mountains, salt re-distribution vessels, and/or other ways to deal with excess salt. On the other hand, 160k is a lot of humans. So perhaps we should look into doing things like this anyway. (But we probably won't. Ohio gets road salt primarily from a mine under Lake Erie that has a very conveniently-located terminus near downtown Cleveland. The mine directly loads trucks, freight trains, and ships...and it's near the point of use already. It's pretty efficient.)
- galaxyLogic 4mo agoI think I read somewhere that salt can be used as energy storage medium? So we could get both water and batteries for renewal energy.
- xyzzyz 4mo agoIt’s about thermal storage, you don’t use table/sea salt for that, and you don’t need a lot of salt, because the salt is in a closed loop; it’s not being consumed.
- galaxyLogic 4mo agoBut more thermal storage you want more salt you want, and it's gotta cost something, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery
- xyzzyz 4mo agoIf you read the article you sent me, you'll learn that, just as I said, you don't use sodium chloride, aka table salt, aka sea salt, for these purposes.
- aeonfox 4mo agoA better example are sodium ion batteries, which are about to take off in a big way https://www.catl.com/en/news/6812.html https://www.catl.com/en/news/6812.html
- nkrisc 4mo agoIn an ideal world that crystalline salt by product could be used to offset any imported or mined salt, further reducing the environmental impact of those operations.
- RobotToaster 4mo ago> Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle. Just put it on your fries.
- cyanydeez 4mo agoyeah, if you like to kill everything in a few 100 feet radius and kill some more in the zone of reliance. this is delusional ecological
- xyzzyz 4mo agoBrine might be bad to the place you dump into, but crystalline salt is even worse. Overall though, it’s just such a tiny concern. Ocean is huge. If we kill everything in a 100 foot radius, that’s 0.0000000008% of the ocean being destroyed. Less than a drop in a bucket.
- xp84 4mo agoSo, we could just dump it on the salt flats in Utah? Plenty of places are already super salty, so nothing lives there (unless it’s able to handle that).
- rtpg 4mo ago[dead]
- darksnart 4mo agoOh no, the hassle of managing the raw input for several key industrial processes that is created for free as a side product of MAKING WATER DRINKABLE WITH FREE ENERGY FROM THE SUN is TOO MUCH OF A PROBLEM! Especially considering we could instead murder millions of fish - which we then can’t eat- in the process! This entire technology is doomed! Come on guys please at least attempt to think what you’re about to type, please, I beg you.