Comment on Student project consumes 17% of energy of traditional desalination plants

FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• apex32@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Why is increasing salinity of the ocean bad? Doesn’t that happen all the time on a much greater scale as ocean water evaporates into the atmosphere?

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s bad. Very bad.

    e360.yale.edu/…/salt-scourge-the-dual-threat-of-w…

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    • pankkake@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Your link (or at least what I’ve read from it) doesn’t cover why it would be bad to make the ocean saltier; it only talks about the rise of the salty ocean water.

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      • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I think it makes it pretty clear how increased salinity affects the climate, but here you go-

        agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…/2021GL095748

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• jimbolauski@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The brine solution will contain concentrated amounts of elements, like lithium. That concentrated solution may be economicly viable to process.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Fine. What do you do about the salt?

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    • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Fine. What do you do about the salt?

      We distribute it to fanbases across the internet, who are adept at managing it.

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    • Octavio@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My idea was you take it to a played-out salt mine, and you just put it right back in.

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• Stoneykins@mander.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I can’t find a better explanation anywhere for how it works than “it uses condensation”

  So I have to guess the seawater is evaportated directly from the waters surface or something, which would just leave all the salts in there. That would be exactly as problematic as a traditional desalination plant pumping it’s brine back into the ocean. Maybe my guess about how it works is wrong though.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, it seems to me that you only have three options when it comes to the brine, and none of them are good- bury it and hope it doesn’t get into the water table, leave it where it is and hope it doesn’t leak, or dump it back in the ocean and increase ocean salinity. I don’t see another option.

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    • Stoneykins@mander.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I wonder how expensive shipping brine would be… Probably very until we can get it ludicrously concentrated.

      But then I imagine we could take it somewhere like the middle of an uninhabitably hot desert and just fill up a low point in the topology. The combination of distance from where people live and dry hot conditions drying it out as fast as possible would possibly work?

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• DrM@feddit.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t know if that works with brine. But what I know is that many regions fill old mines with salt and heat it up with excess energy from solar in the summer to use as general energy storage and for heat in the winter. That might be a good way to repurpose the brine

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I said this in another comment- I’d be very worried it would get into the water table. That brine is not just salt. It’s also full of toxins. But maybe there are good solutions that I don’t know about.

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    • DrM@feddit.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah it was just something I came up with. We can only hope that someone will find a good solution on what to do with it

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