Re:Why Is Desalination So Difficult?
by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @05:04PM
(#36607096)
The Salton Sea is over a hundred miles from the ocean, though, with at least one mountain range in the way. It might be a good dumping ground (or maybe not - there at least were fish in it, if there still are, this would almost certainly kill them). But it would definitely take a lot of energy to pump the water there.
Great movie: Salton Sea
Re:Why Is Desalination So Difficult?
by margalabargala on Thursday July 06, 2023 @01:54AM
(#36611837)
It would take one mildly expensive tunnel. As a bonus, you might be able to put hydro turbines on it, if they can handle the salt.
The Salton Sea's salinity is already well over that of the ocean (44g per liter compared to 35), and is getting saltier. Considering that the very existence of the Salton Sea is already an ecological disaster, I don't really see dumping salt into it to be another one.
The Salton Sea is 70 miles from the Pacific Ocean. If this were built, it would be only the third longest water tunnel in the world, and second in the US.
> the freshwater plume of the Amazon River extends more than 60km into the ocean.
It really doesn't, or perhaps only in the most pedantic sense.
That "ocean" is still the mouth of the Amazon itself, and most of it's less than 10 meters deep. It's really the estuary of the river itself. See: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2017.0002...
As a visceral example of this in the other direction, the freshwater plume of the Amazon River extends more than 60km into the ocean. [0]
I would love to see these plants placed in areas where there's a nearby dry below-sea-level basin, into which the brine may be discharged. The Salton Sea in CA is one example, there's another similar location in Egypt I'm aware of. The advantage of such locations is they are usually extremely hot and arid, which means there's generally not much of a local ecosystem or human population, and there is ample solar power availability.
[0] https://eos.org/science-updates/the-amazon-rivers-ecosystem-...