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Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle.
by xyzzyz 3mo ago
Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoyeah, if you like to kill everything in a few 100 feet radius and kill some more in the zone of reliance. this is delusional ecological
- xyzzyz 3mo agoBrine might be bad to the place you dump into, but crystalline salt is even worse. Overall though, it’s just such a tiny concern. Ocean is huge. If we kill everything in a 100 foot radius, that’s 0.0000000008% of the ocean being destroyed. Less than a drop in a bucket.
- xp84 3mo agoSo, we could just dump it on the salt flats in Utah? Plenty of places are already super salty, so nothing lives there (unless it’s able to handle that).
- rtpg 3mo ago[dead]
- lightedman 3mo ago"Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle." Just make prettier-than-Himalayan salt lamps out of it and sell it to hippies. Easy solution.
- rapnie 3mo agoThat only shifts the problem. Now we need an increased supply of hippies that are hard to come by in a low hippie-tolerant environment.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Easy, but not necessarily good for the spot you're pumping concentrated salt back into.
- iberator 3mo agothat's 200% bullshits. Countries that invested into desalination plants are known to create death zones right where brine is sent back - even if miles from the coast
- SoftTalker 3mo agoThe brine came from the ocean. So just dilute it back to close to ambient salinity using municipal waste water that you are discharging anyway.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> The brine came from the ocean. Sure, and enriched uranium comes from the ground, but that doesn't mean it's safe to dump it back in after the enrichment process! > So just dilute it back to close to ambient salinity using municipal waste water… Wouldn't it generally be easier to process that municipal waste water, as is already fairly common?
- SoftTalker 3mo agoThe analogy would be if you "un-enrich" it. Then it's safe. Or at least no worse than when you took it out of the ground.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> The analogy would be if you "un-enrich" it. But you're doing that with the same water you're trying to make in the first place!
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- qurren 3mo agoWhy? Just build mountains out of it and maybe even open a salt-ski park in the tropics for people who don't have snow.
- asdff 3mo agoThere are salt mountains lining most midwestern freeways as it is for winter.
- xp84 3mo agoI just realized that future archaeologists will be tracing our roads using the salt residue!
- make3 3mo agoor just you know.. asphalt residue
- Ekaros 3mo agoActually I have been thinking about this. Surprisingly straight and long cuts in rock formations might be a real thing to track. In at least some places at least some rock blasting is preferred to get aggregate for road foundations. And these tends to be rather straight and rather steep.
- ssl-3 3mo agoAssuming my constants (35g/kg of salt in seawater, 650k tons of salt dumped by the state of ohio every year, 81 gallons per day of individual domestic water usage) are correct and my napkin math isn't completely buggered, and if we look at the salt as a primary product instead of just waste: Ohio DOT's use of road salt would allow for fresh water to be provided for somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 people. On one hand, that's nowhere near enough people; it's a small drop in a giant thirsty bucket of water consumption. So we'll still need salt mountains, salt re-distribution vessels, and/or other ways to deal with excess salt. On the other hand, 160k is a lot of humans. So perhaps we should look into doing things like this anyway. (But we probably won't. Ohio gets road salt primarily from a mine under Lake Erie that has a very conveniently-located terminus near downtown Cleveland. The mine directly loads trucks, freight trains, and ships...and it's near the point of use already. It's pretty efficient.)
- galaxyLogic 3mo agoI think I read somewhere that salt can be used as energy storage medium? So we could get both water and batteries for renewal energy.
- xyzzyz 3mo agoIt’s about thermal storage, you don’t use table/sea salt for that, and you don’t need a lot of salt, because the salt is in a closed loop; it’s not being consumed.
- galaxyLogic 3mo agoBut more thermal storage you want more salt you want, and it's gotta cost something, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery
- xyzzyz 3mo agoIf you read the article you sent me, you'll learn that, just as I said, you don't use sodium chloride, aka table salt, aka sea salt, for these purposes.
- aeonfox 3mo agoA better example are sodium ion batteries, which are about to take off in a big way https://www.catl.com/en/news/6812.html https://www.catl.com/en/news/6812.html
- nkrisc 3mo agoIn an ideal world that crystalline salt by product could be used to offset any imported or mined salt, further reducing the environmental impact of those operations.
- RobotToaster 3mo ago> Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle. Just put it on your fries.
- darksnart 3mo agoOh no, the hassle of managing the raw input for several key industrial processes that is created for free as a side product of MAKING WATER DRINKABLE WITH FREE ENERGY FROM THE SUN is TOO MUCH OF A PROBLEM! Especially considering we could instead murder millions of fish - which we then can’t eat- in the process! This entire technology is doomed! Come on guys please at least attempt to think what you’re about to type, please, I beg you.