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from the where's-my-solar-freakin'-cirruswaterfontuseer? dept.
The Dirty Truth about Turning Seawater into Drinking Water:
As countries in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere struggle to find enough freshwater to meet demand, they're increasingly turned to the ocean. Desalination plants, located in 177 countries, can help turn seawater into freshwater. Unfortunately, these plants also produce a lot of waste—more waste, in fact, than water for people to drink.
A paper published Monday by United Nations University's Institute for Water, Environment, and Health in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that desalination plants globally produce enough brine—a salty, chemical-laden byproduct—in a year to cover all of Florida in nearly a foot of it. That's a lot of brine.
In fact, the study concluded that for every liter of freshwater a plant produces, 0.4 gallons (1.5 liters) of brine are produced on average. For all the 15,906 plants around the world, that means 37.5 billion gallons (142 billion liters) of this salty-ass junk every day. Brine production in just four Middle Eastern countries—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—accounts for more than half of this.
[...] "Brine underflows deplete dissolved oxygen in the receiving waters," said lead author Edward Jones, who worked at the institute and is now at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, in a press release. "High salinity and reduced dissolved oxygen levels can have profound impacts on benthic organisms, which can translate into ecological effects observable throughout the food chain."
Whatever happened to the idea of towing icebergs to where water was needed?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 16 2019, @07:49PM
When you see "Get The Truth about..." or "Get The Facts about...", you are about to be fed propaganda whose sole purpose is to try to change or reinforce your opinion about something irrespective of reality. When you see an admonition to get "The Dirty Truth", you already know in which direction your opinion is to be bent.
The inconvenient reality for the "Seawater Dirty Truthers" is that, sure, of course seawater is "dirty" in the sense that if it was already cleaned of salt and debris for drinking, we wouldn't need to be doing all that water treatment. Said treatment takes input of "Seawater" and produces two output streams: Not-so-salty water, for drinking, and water that is a little saltier (=a little dirtier), which is what's left. Concerned about how *much* leftover water there is? The saltier you cook it, the less of it there is. But if you make it "less dirty", you get a larger amount of it. Adjust according to your needs (instead of pitching a shrill fit in article form.) Note: At no time do you have anything other than what you started with, which is the components of plain old ocean water.
Or sending spaceships to do asteroid (or planetary ring) mining to bring back chunks of water ice the size of small moons?