Comment on Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water

• starman2112@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That’s what I always thought, but the local effects of hypersalinated water can be terrible for any nearby life

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  • Wahots@pawb.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Create some sort of Dead Sea salt bath / salt therapy place where people can float in the saline waters or something for cheap. Then flood a converted parking lot with the saltwater and dry it off for rusting cars deicing roads on the east coast.

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  • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is mostly a scale dependent issue. The size of this unit means it’s probably not a concern unless you ended up making thousands of them.

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  • JasSmith@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    While true, I consider the issue very minor compared to getting people clean drinking water. There are no perfect solutions in society. Just a series of trade-offs, maximising benefits and minimising costs.

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    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, that coastal community probably didn’t need any fish.

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      • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Large coastal communities don't just go down to the local jetty and cast hooks into the water by the shore. Commercial fishing is done by large ships out in the ocean, far away from the cities.

        You probably wouldn't want to fish near a city's sewer outflows anyway.

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    • merde@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      i consider 🤣 ehm ehm … I consider! I CONSIDER 😁

      who the hell cares about what i consider? upvote this if you don’t give a shit about my considerations 😉

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• assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Thats the big ecological question. If we do this at scale, we’ll be releasing more briny water back into the sea than we take. Over time on industrial scales, what will this do to the oceans? Is the increased salinity negligible, even at large scales? Or will it cause marine wildlife to die out?

  Think of it this way. Burning a pile of wood generates CO2. So first burning a bunch of gas or coal. A couple campfires won’t make a dent on the atmospheric composition. It’s only when we go this en masse and at industrial scales that we add appreciable CO2 to the atmosphere and cause global warming.

  The ideal way to handle desalination would be for us to use the salt that’s produced, so the concentration in the ocean remains unchanged with respect to desalination.

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  • locuester@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But the water is all being returned to the ocean rather quickly. It’s not quite the same with CO2.

    There’s some localized issues to deal with, but it’s not going to be a global salinity increase as we aren’t changing the form of the water and storing it, like the polar ice does.

    So in fact, the ocean should already be desalinating slightly from the melting ice caps.

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    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I thought about the ice caps, yeah. It’s just something that warrants long term monitoring and observation.

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