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.
The 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.
> 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Yeah. 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.
That 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.
> 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.
It's about 3 parts per billion. Uranium is about $85/pound, so you'd need to be able to completely process/extract about 40 million gallons of saltwater for $85 to break even. The real cost there is orders of magnitude higher. It's one reason the claim about the Earth having vast amounts of uranium is quite disingenuous. The amount of cost efficient accessible uranium is only enough to last ~1 century at current consumption rates. If nuclear energy scaled up significantly, we'd run out in a matter of decades if not less, or we send the price of uranium skyrocketing and the price arguments would need to be significantly adjusted.
You'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.
You 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.
That’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.
Cite 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.
Someone 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.
It 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.
It’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.
The impurities are exactly what give sea salt from various regions their distinctive flavors and mineral profiles. The salt should be edible as long as it wasn't pulled from seriously polluted waters. It might even sell for a premium.
I 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.
that'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
Assuming 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.)
Actually 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.
It’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.
If 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.
In 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.
Oh 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.
So, 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).
Brine 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.
Easy, but not necessarily good for the spot you're pumping concentrated salt back into.