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 insanumingenium on Wednesday January 16 2019, @05:36PM
Did you perhaps miss the parent comment talking about diluting the brine with seawater? Any way you cut it, implying that the brine is inherently toxic just plain isn't accurate. Yeah, this could be an engineering problem, but it isn't pouring toxic waste into the waterways like they are trying to imply.
Though I am seriously wondering how long it will take someone to come up with some sort of a "use a giant egg beater it mix the outflow with the source water" solution. That will be a fun one. Hell it might even be more efficient than pumping dilution water around. Hell there is probably a solution possible based on using a static structure that when you pump water through it will cause turbulent mixing.