[ozim]

Is handling leftover brine accounted for in the calculations?

You know you cannot simply dump it back into ocean in one place. It is also a problem in Gibraltar or so to say they have it figured out but it costs them a lot of money.

[jillesvangurp]

Run a pipe out a few miles to where the ocean drops to a few hundred meters and the currents are strong and job done. This is not a technical challenge in any way, just a minor cost overhead. Pumps and pipes; that's all you need.

This is not the reason the US doesn't desalinate. It is actually actively making things worse in the places where it can still extract water from aquifers. Removing the water allows salt water to penetrate those thus destroying the local ecosystems. It's also speeding up the desertification of other areas.

Desalinating ocean water (done right of course) is part of the solution, not the problem.

Solutions like discussed in the article are more interesting for smaller/rural setups. Interesting but desalinating at industrial scale is a solved problem already. Can it be done cheaper. Probably and that would be nice. But it can be done economically right now. The largest challenges here are bureaucratic, not technical.

[detritus]

Given Gibraltar dumps all of its sewage straight into the Med untreated, I don't really think it much cares.

[haarts]

I was stumped when reading this. But it appears to be true!

https://www.yourgibraltartv.com/society/28113-tender-awarded...

[beagle3]

Gibraltars population is 32K, which makes this less crazy than it sounds at first.

[jack_riminton]

A shocking number of places in mainland UK do this too

[makomk]

I'm pretty sure there's nowhere in the mainland UK that just dumps all its raw sewage in the sea or in rivers - everywhere on the mainland was retrofitted with sewage treatment a while back. Now, those retrofits aren't perfect and sometimes raw sewage still overflows due to storms for example but we don't just routinely discharge all the sewage into the sea. There are still places in Spain, Ireland, and some other EU countries that haven't managed to build sewage treatment yet and actually do discharge all their raw sewage either into the sea or into rivers leading to it. (Yes, this is almost exactly the opposite of the narrative pushed by the British media.)

Gibraltar apparently doesn't have sewage treatment because they have some salt-water flush system for toilets due to fresh water historically being so expensive there and they seem to have had difficulty getting a treatment system that works with that.

[extraduder_ire]

Boil-water notices due to cryptosporidium and other nasties in drinking water are somewhat common in some places in Ireland. The difference in water quality and hardness between places that aren't very far apart is pretty striking.

[jack_riminton]

nah it's pretty bad https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/uk-beac...

[concordDance]

This is probably fine for non-industrial wastewater tbh. Feces, urine and biodegradable toilet paper aren't putting anything in the ocean that isn't already there in vast quantities.

[detritus]

It's honestly not so wonderful an idea when you're downstream of it, which given the Med has a significant and continuous in-flow, means that people along the Costa del Sol swimming in the sea are probably having more than their fair allowance of Gibraltarian effluent.

[oldbbsnickname]

It may or may no longer be the case but Santa Cruz, CA beaches on the boardwalk received raw sewage during storms due to overflow comingling.

[beembeem]

This is the case across much of the US. Seattle dumped 100 million gallons of untreated storm & wastewater in 2022.

[bagels]

You can, but it has negative effects. Just like we can create landfills, we can choose to destroy a part of the ocean.

[ImHereToVote]

If we have a long pipe the pipe can mix the brine over the length of the pipe. This is what is done currently. No dead zones necessary.