Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Sunday January 20 2019, @02:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the "Sea-Salt"-is-already-a-thing dept.

Desalination pours more toxic brine into the ocean than previously thought

Technology meant to help solve the world's growing water shortage is producing a salty environmental dilemma.

Desalination facilities, which extract drinkable water from the ocean, discharge around 142 billion liters of extremely salty water called brine back into the environment every day, a study finds. That waste product of the desalination process can kill marine life and detrimentally alter the planet's oceans, researchers report January 14 in Science of the Total Environment.

"On the one hand, we are trying to provide populations — particularly in dry areas — with the needed amount of good quality water. But at the same time, we are also adding an environmental concern to the process," says study coauthor Manzoor Qadir, an environmental scientist at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Hamilton, Canada.

I would take some salt, but it probably contains microplastics.

The state of desalination and brine production: A global outlook (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.076) (DX)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:09AM (12 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:09AM (#788880) Homepage

    The notion of a healthy environment and the notion of unlimited population growth are discordant with each other. You can choose one or the other, but not both. First principles: you cannot have a healthy environment without sacrificing unfettered population growth, and vise-versa. At least until we can manage to infest other class-M planets.

    Resolving such discord is the key to fighting political battles from the perspective of, heh, Climate Change: How can you fight "climate change" with unfettered and unnatural growth of third-world populations?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=4, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:29AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:29AM (#788890)

    First TMB now you? Ok who ordered adulthood for EF???

    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:40AM (1 child)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:40AM (#788893) Homepage

      I am a friendly to all of you. The rest of you just didn't get it yet.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @06:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @06:55AM (#788951)

        With friends like these..

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:57AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:57AM (#788897)

    Like I said in another post earlier today, the really stupid people simply MUST be sterilized for the good of the rest of humanity.

    It's the stupid people who are breeding like rabbits, and they are going to drag the entire earth down with them if they are not stopped.

    The above ideas will upset some people, but we will sterilize them first.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:55AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:55AM (#788917)

      The above ideas will upset some people, but we will sterilize them first.

      Good luck with that, jenius.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @06:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @06:49AM (#788949)

      Didn't we already try that with the b ARC?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @09:06AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @09:06AM (#788996)

      MUST be sterilized

      You first.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:17PM (#789047)

      "stupid people simply MUST be sterilized"
      This is one reason no one wants to address population controls, far to easy to slip into eugenics, unfair practices. Thanks for confirming their fears.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @08:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @08:23PM (#789121)

      Who is going to decide who are stupid? An Anonymous Coward? I'm smarter than everyone in the world and you don't see me bitchin' about ya'!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @05:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @05:04AM (#788920)

    I agree. Barring the occasional asteroid impact, we live in a closed system which has limits that we're bound to bump up against. However, there may be ways to mitigate the harmful effects of desalination.

    Instead of discharging brine into the ocean, maybe we could get it to the right salinity level by mixing it with a stream of treated waste water. Since there'd never be enough waste water reclaimed to desalinate all (or even most) of the brine to ocean levels, we could create an artificial lake somewhere nearby and store the excess. Many of the places where desalination is needed are quite arid, so there ought to be lots of uninhabitable land available to make something like that.

    An arid climate would also help control the water level through evaporation, such that the salty waste would be kept under water, and the expansion of the lake would be gradual enough to be viable for a while. That would give us time to invent uses for the brine lake sediment, which perhaps could be chemically altered into a less dangerous state. Wouldn't want it to go the way of the Aral Sea if it ever dried out, leaving behind toxic dust. Or the Salton Sea. But done right, it might be possible. Still, all the extra handling of brine would exacerbate the energy cost of desalination, and compound the issue of global warming driving the need for desalination. Unless those arid places were all about solar power, which they're currently not.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @12:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @12:04PM (#789009)

    The idea is that as porch monkeys get dat educayshun they will opt to have fewer children just like white folk. Of course our current system of dem benefits significantly incentivizes breeding more future democrats.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @01:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @01:00PM (#789016)

    Not to mention the unlimited economic growth that the financial system needs not to collapse.