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> 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 b
by ceejayoz 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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
- threwrfaway 5mo agoYou can dilute the brine in a facility before disposing.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoGo on. With what?
- asdff 5mo agoSeems like you could just dilute it with seawater at like 100:1 ratio and it would be negligible done offshore. We already dump our shit 5 miles out.
- threwrfaway 5mo ago100:1 is overkill and energetically very wasteful. It's a fairly straightforward chemical engineering problem.
- Joker_vD 5mo ago> Sure, and enriched uranium comes from the ground Uranium can also come from the ocean water (there is, apparently, quite a lot of it in there, relatively speaking). Japan experimented with the technology in the nineties, but it really was much cheaper to just mine it from the ground, so they abandoned it.
- numpad0 5mo agoJapan is also barred from doing own enrichment, being a non-nuclear state. Though, there nevertheless is a dormant set of requisite facilities.
- redsocksfan45 5mo agoYou're wrong. Japan does do their own enrichment, 150k SWUs at Rokkasho with plans to bring that up to 500k SWUs a year soon. If they chose to make.bombs instead of fuel, they could make dozens a year.
- numpad0 5mo agoThat's the dormant plant. Rokkasho-mura plant is officially incomplete for decades, doing tests and upgrades without actual production. If you think otherwise and you're not wrong, and I think you ARE not mistaken since this isn't the first time someone other than myself mentioned it here, that means they're making bombs because we in Japanese public aren't told about it. There has only been just some routine commentaries from local mayors at most.
- yorwba 5mo agoI think you might be confusing the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant (not yet operational, intended for plutonium extraction from spent fuel) and the Rokkasho Uranium Enrichment plant, which has been running at 75 tSWU/year (I think that should be kSWU or tSW) since 2023-08-24 https://www.jnfl.co.jp/ja/business/about/uran/daily/enrichment.html?20230828 https://www.jnfl.co.jp/ja/business/about/uran/daily/enrichme... 112.5 tSWU/year since 2025-06-26 https://www.jnfl.co.jp/ja/business/about/uran/daily/enrichment.html?20250630 https://www.jnfl.co.jp/ja/business/about/uran/daily/enrichme... and 150 tSWU/year since 2025-11-20 https://www.jnfl.co.jp/ja/business/about/uran/daily/enrichment.html?20251125 https://www.jnfl.co.jp/ja/business/about/uran/daily/enrichme... It's a bit weird though that they have a graph of tons of uranium hexafluoride shipped that shows the last shipment in 2018 and nothing since then.
- turkeyboi 5mo agoEnriched uranium is perfectly safe to dump but it would be stupid to do so. Fission products are nasty but uranium itself is not, comparatively.
- Enginerrrd 5mo agoMunicipal waste water is a much cheaper way to get desalinated water in the first place though.
- lazide 5mo agoexcept for the pharmaceuticals anyway
- shermantanktop 5mo agoHey, it's free viagra, prozac, progesterone and multivitamin supplements, all in a glass.
- xp84 5mo agoThere’s some fat fish out there, I hope we can get those guys some Ozempic too
- collingreen 5mo agoDemocrats intentionally killing the fishing industry by giving fish free glp1s and cocaine with your tax dollars!
- Enginerrrd 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoMaybe, but dumping crystalline salt is even worse to the spot you’re dumping it on.
- card_zero 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoYes, that's my point: if you're next to the ocean, disposing of brine is extremely easy.
- pajko 5mo agoYou could put it back into old salt mines.
- kijin 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago[dead]
- FartyMcFarter 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoIsn't it more akin in this case to worrying about too much carbon dioxide in the air?
- FartyMcFarter 5mo agoWhy is it akin to that? Doesn't the salt come from the sea in the first place?
- 5mo ago
- threwrfaway 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.