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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)
(Score: 0, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:22AM (6 children)
apparently the science in "Sciencenews.org" is like the "democratic" in north korea. Removing water from salt water leaves saltier water! OMG Ponies!!
the ocean is a billion and a half cubic kilometers. 142 billion liters per day. Let's see.. we need 10e12 liters for 1 cubic kilometer. This journalist is talking about the danger of spitting into a lake, and giving the size of the spit as his reason. Fish can't swim in spit. He also believes water gets destroyed by us drinking it, and does not go back into the ecosystem.
Someone needs to tell this guy fat metabolizes into water and carbon dioxide in his body. Watch him publish an article about how humans are flooding the oceans by eating unhealthy.
I got a better title: hipster journalist writes an article pointing out his lack of middle school education. Holy shit, this doesn't have an author. It just says "written by staff." Awesome. Sounds like a bunch of dead wood wrote this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:31AM
The problem is the brine should not be dumped right back in. They are adding 2 things to make the process easier, chlorine and copper. Those two have a nasty habit of killing everything around it. If it was just salinity the solution is fairly 'easy'. Just have another pipe where you mix in salt water and treated exit water with the brine. The brine needs to be treated again to remove those two then it is just a dilution problem.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday January 20 2019, @05:05AM (1 child)
Did they change it? They must have changed it. Because it doesn't say staff anymore. It says "By Jeremy Rehm." And, it says Jeremy's the intern. Otherwise known as the Apprentice. That's one of our great traditions. Remember Monica Lewinsky? She did her job and she did it well. According to my friend Bill. And, Jeremy's doing fine. He's in the Magazine business. Very tough business. Every issue they have so many Column Inches they need to fill. And they can fill it with a story about me signing the Save our Seas Act. Working very hard to keep the Garbage Plastics away from Hawaii, from Wash., Ore. & Calif. Or they can fill it with "oh, our Oceans are dieing from too much Salt!" They wanted the Salt story. And that's not Jeremy's fault. Any more than it was Monica's fault that her boss wanted a Knob Polishing. She did as she was told. And he does, I assume, as he's told.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @07:27AM
http://www.humorpower.com/art-rulethree.html [humorpower.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 20 2019, @04:00PM (1 child)
As I pointed out the last time this was posted, it can become a problem when a place with basically unlimited energy (e.g. Saudi Arabia) desalinates lots of water from/to a relatively small body, like the Persian Gulf.
Even the Mediterranean has salt-density currents from natural evaporation, the Strait of Hormuz is a relatively small mixing opening, they're going to be able to upset the salt balance in the Gulf sufficiently to rearrange the ecosystems. Usually this involves lots of unattractive death and putrification of the existing species, and if they don't keep the salt flow constant for thousands of years, it's not going to be replaced with anything diverse or productive.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Sunday January 20 2019, @09:28PM
Yes, completely agree, however that was not my point. What you mention is nowhere in the article. The article claims that desalination apparently removes a lot of H2O from the water - water that apparently does not go back into the ecosystem. I'd guess by destroying the molecule of water, but I doubt the people who wrote it know what a chemical reaction is, so I think they think drinking water is what destroys water. Once inside the body, it's gone my friends. Magic. And magnets - how the fuck does that work?!
What you state is a bunch of people living in a toilet shitting into that toilet, making it more of a toilet. This is actually the perfect result one would want from desalination. Sandniggers in the persian gulf destroying their own little toilet bowl, and their shit staying there, not leaving the gulf? Awesome. As a bonus, we kill off Israel (and I say that as a jew).
The article claims desalination is destroying the world's oceans. They're using "big numbers" of salty water with chemicals like "omg copper" and "omg chlorine" which actually evaporates. They fail to mention any percentages - a super small number. Completely false.
That's like saying 36mil people die from hunger. Huge number. Half a percent? Small number. No one dies from hunger in the world. It's like those anti-smoking commercials that list chemicals in the cig filter to convince idiots how bad cigs are, then say your chance of lung cancer increases 10x so you'll surely get it if you smoke. Yeah, it does increase it 10x. From 1% to 10% - apparently 10% is "sure death."
There are malicious people w/ an agenda, and complete retards who fail basic logic. This article was written by the second group. Idiot "journalists" who major in liberal arts, and can't even get a job writing for a local newspaper so they post their idiocy online while paying rent making me my coffee.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday January 20 2019, @06:05PM
Agreed. This story drops the ball on many basic points. It reminds me once more of the story that sobbing friends were emailing each other a couple years ago about how fukushima was poisoning the pacific. I replied with some quick math showing how a thousand fukushimas could leak into the pacific from japan and seattle would barely feel it, that body of water is so huge.
Washington DC delenda est.