If that’s still too much, use 20 gallons.
It’s a matter of spending energy on pumps, but it’s totally doable.
Also, the ocean salt content will not be increased by this, since the desalinated water will eventually make it back to the ocean.
I’m sure that ocean currents will eventually equalize the salt, but if you’re continuously dumping salt into a specific area, it’s going to make that region of the ocean saltier.
On average it's pretty close, but you can definitely get impacts from increased local salinity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16859 (just random ecamples)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world... (view in incognito)
That should be an obvious non-starter for anyone remotely familiar with the unique geography and ecology of the area.
However, as with all human endeavours, scaling up will scale up the problem. And we won't pay attention to that until it's a huge issue.
This just makes your prior point seem like it comes from a needlessly misanthropic place.
At the end of the day we're still limited by our biology and brains, evolved for very different setting than the world we now live in. We try and we get by but by and large we're not doing great at large scale issues, whether it's jobs or housing or healthcare or saving the planet or just plain getting along with each other.
We're primates adapted for small group living in local communities, abruptly given way more power than our biology was designed for. Is that misanthropic? I dunno. If dolphins had opposable thumbs, they'd probably have gotten themselves into a similar bind.
Species will always come and go, and they're going to die off faster than we can protect them, sadly. We only get to decide which ones to prioritize, at different personal, local, national, global levels etc.
I'll try to find some analyses this weekend if I can.
If you want to see what a tourism place looks like when you destroy its ecology, you only need look at the abandoned areas around the Salton Sea.
I'm optimistic we could:
* Build ocean pipelines that disperse brine over much larger volumes of water to minimize impact on wildlife
* Dump the brine water in engineered desert fields where it will evaporate and deposit salt reserves.
In general, we should be aware of the whole lifecycle of a solution, and optimistically believe we can solve each problem with more work.
Honestly, the Salton Sea would be a great place to dump the brine. It would keep the water levels up and reduce the respiratory issues caused by drying, and any ecosystem to be destroyed has been thoroughly destroyed for decades.
Nix the "turn the manmade salt lake to a manmade fresh lake" plan, and use the created freshwater for agriculture directly, or send it off to LA, or do anything with it that isn't "refill the accidental lake that already has evaporation and pollution issues". It's a salt lake, use it as one.
Between that and the increasing availability of sodium ion batteries it may never actually be economical to mine the Salton Sea, especially considering people actually live nearby and would be affected by the mine; unlike the mines in northern Nevada.
Construction is already beginning.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/12/07/lithiu...
Casey's proposing we mine the brine for useful minerals. You're right he's glossing over details, but a citation addressing the economics of brine disposal with his proposed processing would add more to the discussion.
On one of my hard drives, I've got an engineering / construction plan for a moderately sized intake + discharge for a small RO facility that would've passed muster in Australia, which has pretty reasonable environmental protections. Round numbers - the intake would have cost $25 million and the discharge more like $75 million. You need a massive structure to be able to emit that brine back into the environment in a way that doesn't just nuke the surrounding marine life. Huge pipes + check valves + cascading discharges, all either on the ocean floor if there aren't reefs and other sensitive areas or even worse from a cost perspective, tunneled out to a depth that can handle the amount of salt.
Seawater is ~35g/L of TDS - the author is talking about 5 million acre feet of desal - what's that, 20 million tons of salt annually?
(1) https://www.wateronline.com/doc/new-10-mile-long-sewage-tunn...
(2) https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/ploovol4_15.pdf
Pipes tend to last a long time, in large part because it's relatively straightforward to manage the chemistry problem in the pipes.
“ In general, anthropogenic activities pollute the coastal marine environment, altering the environment’s physiochemical properties and resulting in changes in marine communities. Physiochemical conditions can be altered by the presence of pollutants, hypoxia, organic enrichment, decreased hydrodynamic conditions, and, more recently, brine discharge (de-la-Ossa-Carretero et al., 2016). Salinity elevation in receiving soil and water bodies and the territorial consequences of brine with high total dissolved solids on benthic marine life close to the discharge site are the most important environmental challenges associated with brine disposal (Miri and Chouikhi, 2005; Panagopoulos et al., 2019).”
Lots more detail in the article on studies of specific populations as well as discussion of mitigations and alternatives.
The gigantic Hambach open-pit mine grows by 0.3km³ a year, so that could take it (but it can't take the Saudi million m³/day plant). By the time the mine is depleted, the resulting 18km³ pit would not be filled by our single hypothetical plant for over 300 years, assuming it won't evaporate. Which leads to:
The evaporation pools might work: they'd "only" have to be 3000 acres (12 km²) to gather the 4GW of solar power at 1kW/m² for 8 hours a day to continuously evaporate that much water daily[2]. Which is certainly large, but not completely impossible. But then there's 2 million tonnes of salt per year which will accumulate continuously over time.
[1] the largest is over a million
[2] not including water not bring a perfect absorber of solar energy or differing insolation
Or, just be the world’s biggest producer of pickles
This guy claims that Lithium may be partially responsible for some weight gain in our population, but also, that desalination plants cause extra lithium as well.
If it was mined out, that would be viable, but if not...
And despite the initially valid-seeming high hopes for their amazing scholarship, currently it looks that they are too crackpot-y :/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...
Will the contaminant hypothesis of modern obesity be judged true by expert consensus before 2032? 8% yes 92% no
He literally addresses brine in the article.
As far as I can tell, the author just kinda glossed over the brine situation. Some minerals can be sold, but his solution for the excess salt was just to turbulently mix it back into the ocean, if I'm reading correctly. The sibling comments here explain why that isn't trivial (cost and wildlife impacts). I found them illuminating!
No it's not. It's a community of corporate, media and tech people opposed to hacking and the hacking ethos. It's mostly a business forum.
Current front page items include a paper on vector databases, an example of AI garbage that showed Amazon in a bad light, a quite in-depth treatment of “Trilinear Point Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering” hosted on a PhD’s own github page, you know github, a huge gathering place for hackers to share their code with each other? An article criticizing Unity about banning an open source LGPL application, written by a developer of said open source product, introducing a competing platform to further decentralize the app store landscape, an article critical of Boeing, an article critical of Apple, a radical rocket design, bluetooth mesh networking, an open source python notebook project, an indie developer’s project to run stable diffusion in an iOS app instead of from some corporate server, an article on the ethics of immersive tech, an article on mysticism and empiricism, an article on epistemology…
Yeah, real dull business environment here. I’d totally rather go back to my training on peer performance reviews.
If you can’t find anything interesting on this site, it is a you problem.
"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."
We’re all so sorry that you can’t just do whatever you want while unleashing the externalities on society at large. You want to hack, go do it in your basement where you can’t affect the rest of us. You want to engineer, you have to answer to more people than just your mom asking what you want for dinner.
Frankly I wish there were a better place for the hackers to congregate without the capitalists. But whatever, at least the discussion here is civil and interesting. Best place I've found since Slashdot of old.
It's civil. Nothing interesting about the comments at all. Even the dullest person on earth would find the comments mundane and boring.
Do you have other similar forums you recommend?
> The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged.
This is not nearly as easy as this sentence implies.
On the Californian coast, there is already at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bay_Salt_Works , a sea salt production facility that uses salt pools. They produce 80k tons annually of salt, which means they process 2666k tons of seawater to get that. If that one salt production facility used brine as their source instead of seawater, they would have allowed the facility to produce 2580k tons of freshwater. The "urban" usage of water in California is 10 million acre-feet (ish), so that's not exactly a significant amount.
>flaunt its unequaled excellence by exporting alfalfa to all corners of the globe.
really not sure if this is satir.
"Rejected brine is a serious threat to marine ecosystems, causing negative effects on both flora and fauna. This is especially so when the optimal initial high dilution capacity is lacking in the discharge system. Consequently, brine discharge plumes spread over large areas of the sea floor and modify the structure and distribution of benthic communities such as seagrass habitats. ... Rejected brine disposal costs are between 5 and 33% of the whole desalinization process, depending on the characteristics of the brine, its pretreatment level before disposal, disposal method, and volume"
from: Jiménez-Arias, D., Morales-Sierra, S., García-Machado, F.J., García-García, A.L., Luis, J.C., Valdés, F., Sandalio, L.M., Hernández-Suárez, M. & Borges, A.A. 2020, "Rejected brine recycling in hydroponic and thermo-solar evaporation systems for leisure and tourist facilities. Changing waste into raw material", Desalination, vol. 496, pp. 114443.