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If 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
by ashdksnndck 4mo ago
If 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?
- ceejayoz 4mo agoA more apt comparison than you realize. Most of the carbon we spew into the atmosphere came from the air. Ancient plants took it in via respiration.
- FartyMcFarter 4mo agoThat still doesn't make it a good comparison. The salt emitted by desalination plants is already in the sea now, it's not salt that went somewhere else.
- parineum 4mo agoAnd the water we take out eventually goes back.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- xp84 4mo agoI can probably be convinced pretty easily with some evidence of that, but you’ll never convince the contingent who is convinced it’ll kill sea life at any concentration or location, so, being able to shut them up by saying “we have no wastewater, we load rail cars with crunchy salt and use it for stuff” still has value.
- kortilla 4mo agoThe goalposts will just shift to attack that excess salt instead. It’s like all of the FUD about datacenter water usage while people shove almonds in their mouths.
- nkmnz 4mo agoIn Germany, it's the water usage of a Tesla plant vs. the neighboring asparagus farm.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo agoI wish we could reimagine carbon credits to that degree of stringency. You offset a kg of carbon emissions? Let's see that kg.
- Someone 4mo ago> 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. I think that problem was known (and discarded as not important) when the first serious water desalination plants were built.
- iamjs 4mo agoThe city of Corpus Christi, TX is currently considering options for desalination plants—all of which pump their brine into the shallow water inside the bay or the ship channel.
- senordevnyc 4mo agoSounds on brand for Texas.