21–30 of 161 posts
So basically pump seawater up from the Gulf of California across the border over a flat floodplain to the Salton Sea (south of joshua tree) and use cheap PV to run desalination plants that will restore one of our biggest environmental disasters https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sea-worth-salt back into a vacation hotspot greater than Palm Springs. Costs of the PV and desal (relatively cheap but still absurdly ex…
Shouldn’t the same URL submitted again redirect to mine?
Is there a certain cutoff when someone else can submit the same URL?
(I’m not complaining, I just want to understand what the rules are)
Apart from whether the economics make sense brine disposal from desalinization is a big issue. Waste with high salt concentrations can wipe out marine life - it would be nice if this piece took the issue a little more seriously. It's a continuing problem in the Canary Islands which are dependent on desalinization plants: "Rejected brine is a serious threat to marine ecosystems, causing negative effects on both flora…
He literally addresses brine in the article.
The author, who holds a PhD from Caltech, proposes taking advantage of the decreasing cost of solar power to enable a new age of clean water abundance in California, sustainably, with the potential for massive revenues and profits at all steps in the value chain. Even if the author's calculations are off by a factor of two, the proposal looks like it could work. At a minimum, it merits serious consideration. The status quo will not solve our pressing environmental problems.
The main challenge an innovative large-scale project like this one would face, I think, is a regulatory bureaucracy which to me often seems like it was designed for the technologies and infrastructure of the 20th century, not for those of the 21st century. I shudder to think of, say, inspectors who are highly trained on narrow technical matters, but who lack a fundamental, multi-disciplinary, big-picture view of the entire project, deciding whether to approve individual tiny little parts of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped…
Basically, I think you could take the Brine and just put it somewhere else. Like, into mine shafts, or into evaporation pools for mining purposes.
Apart from whether the economics make sense brine disposal from desalinization is a big issue. Waste with high salt concentrations can wipe out marine life - it would be nice if this piece took the issue a little more seriously. It's a continuing problem in the Canary Islands which are dependent on desalinization plants: "Rejected brine is a serious threat to marine ecosystems, causing negative effects on both flora…
> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped…
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?
Apart from whether the economics make sense brine disposal from desalinization is a big issue. Waste with high salt concentrations can wipe out marine life - it would be nice if this piece took the issue a little more seriously. It's a continuing problem in the Canary Islands which are dependent on desalinization plants: "Rejected brine is a serious threat to marine ecosystems, causing negative effects on both flora…
> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped…
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...
So basically pump seawater up from the Gulf of California across the border over a flat floodplain to the Salton Sea (south of joshua tree) and use cheap PV to run desalination plants that will restore one of our biggest environmental disasters https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sea-worth-salt back into a vacation hotspot greater than Palm Springs. Costs of the PV and desal (relatively cheap but still absurdly ex…
Isn't that the same story with Vegas? Would it exist without the hoover dam?
Not saying it doesn't work. Clearly it does, at least for a time or up to a certain level of population (Phoenix is banning new development because it's literally out of water, California is poster-child for water wars).
I guess it's something about spending that much effort and human capital to force something so inherently unsustainable that just seems... wasteful? Full of hubris? I don't know, maybe it's just a general sadness that this much ingenuity isn't being spent elsewhere where it could amplify existing natural forces instead of fighting a never-ending battle against entropy for something that doesn't want to exist.
Or maybe I'm just an internet sourpuss without enough vision. I just can't shake the "why are we doing this" melancholy about this.
I don't mean some grander point about environmentalism or development, I mean that I have specifically examined solar desalination for the Imperial Valley and he's missed a much simpler way to get the water from point A to point B.
See, there's this other basin in nearby Mexico called Laguna de Salada which is basically an empty salt flat about ten meters below sea level. If you flood that by dredging a canal (about 10-20 km and not very high), you only have to transport the desalinated water about five kilometers to get it into the Imperial Valley drainage basin.
There's no need to back up the Colorado and mess up what's left of the delta, plus you can put the rejected brine back into the now Golfo de Salada where it will mix more slowly and (hopefully) less destructively with the seawater to the south. The area will still be something of a dead zone, but it would only replace an existing dead zone.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-an...