SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 fyngyrz on Wednesday January 16 2019, @09:06PM
That's pretty good as far as it goes; puts the remaining water back into the atmosphere (generally a good thing), and leaves the salts behind.
Then brick those, seal them from the atmosphere (or otherwise process them, I'm no chemist) so they don't revert to a brine, and stack them... somewhere.
Another thing:
When that freshwater is made, and (for instance) goes down human and animal throats, it eventually should return to the atmosphere and/or sea / freshwater bodies. Water isn't "used up" by our systems in the sense that it's consumed. It's more of a wash and transport mechanism.
The wash bit adds different things to it than it originally had, and I suspect that might pose a similar problem, or perhaps even more of a problem should it reach the sea or freshwater bodies. But again, it can be evaporated, the solids stored as sealed or otherwise non-soluble bricks, and the water returned to the atmosphere.
There are a couple simple (if large) problems here, but it doesn't seem like they should be insurmountable.
--
Jst Sy N to Lssy Cmprssn.