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New Solar-Powered Desalinator Keeps Producing Clean Water For 20% Cheaper Without Needing Constant Sunshine
(www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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These are well known problems with desalination. The problem of "what to do with the salt" has been known for at least two decades, if not four. You literally can't just "put it back" without fucking up the ocean wherever you dump it.
It doesn't take much salt to make the ocean unlivable like the Dead Sea. It's a huge problem and "make salt lamps" isn't going to cut it.
Did you read anything I said?
Of course you're going to cause problems if you just dump the brine back in the ocean in a single spot. That's not at all what I was suggesting.
You do realize the ocean isn't uniformly saline, right? There's already natural gradients everywhere and most species of flora and fauna are going to tolerate certain ranges of it.
The Dead Sea is literally 10x more saline than the ocean average. 34% vs 3%.
Dumping into different spots to spread it out could be a solution. It would add expense to the process, though, and we know how capitalism handles that. As for aquifer charging, the brine is thicker than what was taken out. This adds to the problem in that you'll need much higher pressure to drive it, or you'll clog the system at the output point.
If you're going to go the route of least expensive solution, find an area that is unattractive to human life, preferably a desert near the ocean. Pipe in the seawater, using RO to remove as much fresh water as possible. Then take the brine and send it out to evaporation beds covering a large area. You can recover some more water through that process, but, most importantly, removing the water and leaving the salts and minerals requires little energy input this way. The downside is the acreage required.
If you had a geothermal vent to provide heat, it would make the entire process almost carbon-neutral.
Put it in the desert