New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste • Hacker News Board

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#141

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:49 AM UTC

ashdksnndck wrote: post #95

ceejayoz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you use fat pipes that go a decent distance from shore, diluting your brine with ocean water, you’ll have a negligible impact on the ocean. The problem is if you dump lots of brine in shallow waters. Old designs did have that flaw, but it’s not that difficult to design around this constraint now that we know about it. IMO this is an issue where NIMBYs are using environmental concerns as a smokescreen to block new…

I can probably be convinced pretty easily with some evidence of that, but you’ll never convince the contingent who is convinced it’ll kill sea life at any concentration or location, so, being able to shut them up by saying “we have no wastewater, we load rail cars with crunchy salt and use it for stuff” still has value.

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#142

Post by sgc » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:51 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #75

sgc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they tend to pipe far out and discharge as far below the surface as possible, since there is a lot of surface life and it is less damaging this way. Ships (with long submerged pipes) would be prone to weather events and generally less reliable than an installed pipe. Perforation would be prone to clogging from build up so a nonstarter I would expect. Adding flex tubing and a relocation robot would be a main…

Ships wouldn't need a long submerged pipe. It'd just need a small hole like a bilge drain or maybe a live well on a fishing boat. Just let the boat cruise around slowly draining back into the ocean. As for surface life, I'm no oceanographer, but is that really the most vulnerable place? The surface is where fresh water rain meets the ocean, so that would dilute the salinity during storms. However, there's nothing to…

I think your sense of scale is off. 90% of sea life is on the surface. 0.029% of ocean water is replenished from rainfall annually. Desalination concentrates are absolutely toxic to life. The current daily volume of brine discharge would require more than half the tankers in the world to be filled and discharged every single day. They would of course not last long with such a routine.

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#143

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:00 AM UTC

shermantanktop wrote: post #103

lazide wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except for the pharmaceuticals anyway

Hey, it's free viagra, prozac, progesterone and multivitamin supplements, all in a glass.

There’s some fat fish out there, I hope we can get those guys some Ozempic too

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#144

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #138

pajko wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could put it back into old salt mines.

Even better, just package it up and eat it instead of digging underground and creating more pollution. It's not every day that industrial waste happens to be not only edible but also tasty. Too tasty, in fact. Salt is addictive.

It’s not going to be pure NaCl though; making Morton salt with it would make sense only if it wouldn’t cost more to process it (net of its resale value) than just disposing of it somewhere not particularly sensitive. I’d propose the Utah salt flats or indeed, kinda love the idea of just sticking them in a salt mine that is all tapped out. If it used to be chock full of salt it seems pretty environmentally fair to make it salty again.

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#145

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:05 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #119

qurren wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Just build mountains out of it and maybe even open a salt-ski park in the tropics for people who don't have snow.

There are salt mountains lining most midwestern freeways as it is for winter.

I just realized that future archaeologists will be tracing our roads using the salt residue!

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#146

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:08 AM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #90

xyzzyz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, 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

So, 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).

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#147

Post by picofarad » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #73

SoftTalker wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to chlorinate water from your own well, unless maybe you have a cistern that you are filling for storage. And who's going to know if you are drinking it or watering your garden?

At the very least I would UV disinfect anything coming from the ground and absolutely make use of a 20 micron sediment filter if only to address cognitive load: Another place, another time, coliform bacteria from the well. Super fun(not).

I vacillate between trusting my well and trusting my RO (10,5,1 micron filters, plus the membrane). But it isn't healthy to drink RO all the time and I don't wanna mess with remineralization.

My well is 100' and 13 years old.

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#148

Post by picofarad » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 5:43 AM UTC

card_zero wrote: post #89

noripcord wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, just take the water, remove the salt & minerals. Over time it'll dilute. Water falls again in the form of rain, obviously, but not the salt. You're not worried? If it's for batteries? For sure they'll extract whatever they can.

Right, remove the salt and minerals. We don't need that much salt, so we'd have to build pyramids or something with it. We drink the water, but then it ends up back in the oceans. The reason I mention that part is because if it didn't, if we could destroy the water, then the remaining water would retain the same salinity, and the concern would be that we drain the ocean dry, which is silly (I refer you back to how bi…

Someone above said 4kg of magnesium per ton of seawater. Apparently lithium is 0.18g per ton of seawater.

That still means there's billions of tons of lithium in the seas, though.

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#149

Post by mejutoco » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:17 AM UTC

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #136

ashdksnndck wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use fat pipes that go a decent distance from shore, diluting your brine with ocean water, you’ll have a negligible impact on the ocean. The problem is if you dump lots of brine in shallow waters. Old designs did have that flaw, but it’s not that difficult to design around this constraint now that we know about it. IMO this is an issue where NIMBYs are using environmental concerns as a smokescreen to block new…

Yeah. Worrying about salt in the sea is like worrying about oxygen in the air. Can too much oxygen in the air sometimes be a problem? Yeah, in some corner cases. Is it a major problem that we can't solve? Not at all.

That makes sense to me. At the same time I know the mediterranean sea is heating up more because it cannot move heat out quick enough. I dont know of any mediterranean air, so I believe more closed water zones would behave different than, lets say, the atlantic ocean.

Re: New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

#150

Post by jillesvangurp » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:30 AM UTC

LarsAlereon wrote: post #40

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #34

So crazy question: take a dehumidifier, attach some solar panels, and deploy at scale for non-potable water suitable for crop irrigation anywhere that isn't a desert. Does it work? And if not, why?

It takes too much energy and produces water too slowly to scale. In general any area with sufficient moisture in the air to explore this also has easier access to rain and ground water.

A lot of energy is only a problem if that energy is very expensive.

The good news in a desert: plenty of sunshine. So you can generate a lot of electricity with some cheap solar panels, there is plenty of space to put some down, and there aren't a lot of NIMBYs around to complicate the permitting process for that.

Some desert ecosystems actually depend on condensation with specialized plants and animals harvesting humidity from ocean breeze. Large parts of e.g. the Sahara border on the Atlantic ocean. Lots of water in the air but not a lot of rain. And even if humidity is low, there still is some water in the air usually.

But the simple fact of course is that there is a lot more water in water than there is in air. If you want to extract meaningful amounts of water from air, you need to process a lot of it.