Scientists cook up new recipes for taking salt out of seawater

Post by brokensegue » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #49

brokensegue wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uhm, trucking this sludge all the way to Utah seems pretty pointless. Why not just put it in a dump? Why does it need to be put into water?

Think of brine as industrial pollution. It wont stay in a dump, it will leak out and poison an area for tens of thousands of years.

plenty of industrial pollutants are put into dumps/buried? what do you think we do with them?

From wikipedia

> Other methods [of disposing of brine] include drying in evaporation ponds, injecting to deep wells, and storing and reusing the brine for irrigation, de-icing or dust control purposes.

Post by Retric » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 10:05 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

Retric wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desalination is cheap in day to day terms, it’s the scale of water we use that’s the issue. Sure, we can get ~1,000 gallons of drinking water for 3$ via desalination. That works out to a monthly water bill increase of ~45$ for a family of 5. Unfortunately, crops need incredible amounts of water. So, growing corn etc with desalination would case food prices to ~quadruple.

Since seaweed can grow on salt water, can we perhaps engineer other crops to do the same?

That’s not feasible over time. Evaporation increases the salt content of any irrigated soil over time. Directly using sea water would slowly cover your soil with a thick layer of salt.

To get around this you would need to keep the area underwater and slowly replace your water with sea water. But, at that point you’re better off just farming the ocean which already covers the majority of the earth.

Re: Scientists cook up new recipes for taking salt out of seawater

Re: Scientists cook up new recipes for taking salt out of seawater