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posted by chromas on Wednesday January 16 2019, @02:28PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 16 2019, @10:12PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday January 16 2019, @10:12PM (#787602) Journal

    Evaporation ponds are a very common method for brine disposal, already. [sciencedirect.com]

    Or they can do like we do here and use wastewater injection! That's the one that creates all the earthquakes that fracking gets blamed for. Brine is a common effluent from oil and gas extraction and injection is how they dispose of it.

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