When water gets in short enough supply, we will burn coal, garbage, tires, anything to power desalination plants.

Or (at least in the US), we will simply stop doing things like growing alfalfa in the desert to feed cows being raised in Texas. Sure beef will be a little more expensive but…

You’re actually right. We’ll probably burn garbage and radio hosts will call people against burning garbage effeminate names.

Burning garbage may be one of the best things you can do with garbage - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us...

As you can set it up to burn very hot and have all sorts of scrubbers on the outcomes.

Burning anything is never the right answer in a world of climate change.

We are scrambling to find ways to capture atmospheric carbon and store it underground and burning garbage is literally the opposite of that.

If handling waste and burying it costs X carbon, and burning it creates Y carbon, and Y is less than X, then burning is better than burying.

You'd have to do the math, it's not manifestly obvious that it's not the case (especially once you consider all the transportation involved in sending waste around the country and across the ocean).

On first principles, there's no reason that the cost of transporting trash to the incinerator is any less carbon intensive than transporting trash to a landfill.

Maybe people prefer incinerators in their community over landfills in their community (unclear), but if that's the case, that's a policy decision and not one that seeks to minimize carbon emissions.

Lots of recycling (has) been transported across the ocean to China.

It's likely that landfill are the way to go in many cases, but people don't like them.

Desalination cones should work in tropical climates.

[1] http://www.watercone.com/product.html

This is brilliant.

The same designer made this Terracooler which is also a fascinating idea.

http://www.terracooler.org/

Does this exist? The product page mentions that the planned price is "below € 20", but the news page doesn't have anything newer than 2007

That's a damn good argument for making sure we don't go into overpopulation.

there is a second side to this systems-diagram, which is roughly.. conservation, efficiency, waste-reduction

spoken like a true idealist

Yes but when glaciers melt completely and water deposits are empty we will struggle even with extremely efficient water systems.

IIRC These can have thier own host of problems because the 'brine' byproduct doesn't mix well back into the ocean and can settle/pool and create marine dead zones. Although suppose that will be less of a priority if people are thirsty.

Put them down stream of farm runoff so everything is already dead

Farm runoff normally has the opposite effect, providing too many nutrients causing things like algal blooms.

So the brine and the farm runoff will cancel out and the result will be just right for nature. Right? Right?

Always a good time for[0]:

Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.

Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.

Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?

Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!

Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=P9yruQM1ggc

Build cities from stabilized salt. Bricks, grout, pourable slabs.

We pump brine inland to a large flat expendabe plain and flood it to allow the water to evaporate off and the salt to sette. 20-50 years later, pod racing on the salt flat.

I think this causes its own host of issues as there are a load of other nasties such as arsenic etc in seawater which would build up there.

How does that work for e.g. small scale salt farming in many European countries that flood areas with sea water, then harvest the salt after the water has evaporated [0]?

Is it just a case of the scale making it safe?

0: https://www.timeout.com/croatia/things-to-do/ston-salt-works

I think so, yes. One person salt consumption seems wayyy less than the brime that would be created by desalination of the freshwater he needs.

Arsenic in Pod fuel too.

The desalination plan provide water when the groundwater reservoirs are too low to fulfill freshwater demand.

The brine slowly go down through geological layers. After 5 years it reaches groundwater reservoir.

20-50 years later, the regions become famous for its fun pod racing and for its numerous ghost cities around the old plain.

The ocean is way too big for removing some drinking water (which is going to end up back in the ocean anyway) to have a material effect on the salt concentration.

The problem is strictly local: if the brine produced by the plant is dumped in an area with low flow, it can hang around and affect sea life.

If you use a big discharge pipe and put it a decent distance offshore in a current where it can mix effectively, there’s very little effect.

This is not a reason to shoot down desalination plants as a concept, it’s a design constraint to take into account when building them.

the hard part is what water of different salinity doesn't mix the way you think it should

That always looked like a no-problem to me. Can't the brine be put in a pool and let evaporate instead? You get drinking water from the desalination plant and salt.

Instead of pumping the brine into a pool, pump it into a ship. As the ship sails, it slowly releases the brine at a rate much more tolerable. When the tanks are 50% empty, turn around and come home. lather rinse repeat.

of course, a renewable powered ship

There are commercial salt harvesting operations which use such brine. No need to flush it back in the ocean.

If you have ever flown into SFO you have seen the reddish pools. (By the way the red color comes from Brine Shrimp, which presumably there is also use for)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/salt-ponds-san-francisco

Which is good, but may not potentially scale up - if we were desalinating 5X, 10X as much seawater, it seems unlikely we could make use of that much salt, and would have to bury it or dispose of it some other way.

People are considering using salt as a building material now:

https://www.archdaily.com/994769/could-salt-be-a-material-of...

When you have a practically free resource which is waste from a large scale industrial process, cottage industries to make use of the free waste sometimes pop up. It's a solvable problem.

Then your house melts with the rain

Article talks about that kinda. You have to read at least halfway through it.

Look what you've done! I'm dissolving, dissolving! Ohh, what a world.

And it’s not just salt. Other chemicals can be harvested from that brine before you need to dispose of the leftovers, e.g. magnesium carbonate. I know because I run a climbing company that sells chalk (MgCO3) from that production pathway.

We had the same problem with power plants dumping hot untreated water back in the environment. This is why cooling towers are synonymous with nuclear power plants. This is an easy solution to fix, but like all engineering it costs extra. For power plants it was fixed through legislation. You literally have an entire oceans worth of water to reconstitute the brine. This was more problematic of older system using distillation.

People are coming up with some wacky solutions, but am I missing something or can you just pull in more seawater and dilute the brine closer to the ocean's natural salinity before you send it back into the ocean?

Like saying we need to recycle more to fix the landfill problem. Recycling fixes nothing with over consumption.

Problem is that everything needs X powered by clean energy, which means we need both a lot more clean energy and, if we want to slow/stop climate change, to massively reduce our use of fossil fuels... which requires a lot more clean energy.

We also, so far, globally have not shown any evidence of replacing fossil fuels with green energy, only supplementing them.

Direct carbon capture, electric vehicles, electric building heat, electric industrial process heat, and desalination are all massive new sectors that need to be powered that are barely on the radar of the existing electric grid.

And we need more power to let emerging economies rise out of poverty, where having electric pumps and washing are truely life-changing from a quality of life perspective.

So we need about 5x more total energy while also shifting from 80% fossil to 0% fossil.

This is why I advocate for nuclear while most people advocate for wind and solar. We need advocates for all clean energy. Nuclear can actually use its own direct low-carbon heat to help with buildings (district heat) and industry, and that heat can also help in desal in some cases, though RO is the preference these days and doesn't really need that much heat input.

Tidal power is a thing. Tidal power for ocean desalination eliminates the need for transmission infrastructure. Desalination has so many obvious upsides that I'm increasingly suspicious of the people insisting it's too difficult to contemplate, none of whom contribute anything of value to the discussion.