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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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:19AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:19AM (#788908)

    Can they extract some sea salt next to the brine pipe and call it even?

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:11PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:11PM (#789062)

    Sort of by definition: the salt content of the water is too high for human kidneys to process, so... there's more salt coming out of the water than the humans (and similar animals) consuming the water could ever use. Maybe industrial applications like road salt could use it, but road salt is evil stuff, and in very low demand in most places that run major desalination plants.

    Think of it like a square mile salt landfill, growing 10 feet taller every day.

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    • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Sunday January 20 2019, @11:04PM (2 children)

      by exaeta (6957) on Sunday January 20 2019, @11:04PM (#789187) Homepage Journal
      Sea Salt is pretty useful. It's a great source of magnesium, calcium, sodium, and other ions we could refine into metals and then do stuff with. We just need to move the people trying to extract gold and uranium from seawater near this "desalinated" water instead, and have them refine the super extra salty water instead which would presumably have higher concentrations of the target metals.
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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 21 2019, @12:34AM (1 child)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 21 2019, @12:34AM (#789252)

        presumably have higher concentrations of the target metals.

        Nice thought, if it were economically viable it would be happening.

        One problem: if you refine industrial quantities of Magnesium Chloride for the Magnesium, what do you do with the industrial quantities of Chlorine? Even in the Middle East they don't use that much mustard gas... (yes, bleach and friends, but the current needs for bleach and friends are already met by other already cheap methods...)

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @09:48AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @09:48AM (#789493)

          Couldn't you get Sodium from some other source(Sodium sesquicarbonate?) and make NaCl? (or make Potassium chloride or whatever.)