Break through in desalinization!

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Ned
It's also why the average house costs $500k+.

[Dis]

The technology is pretty cool though. I do wonder how they handle all that brine though. There are ecological effects of desalinating such vast quantities of water. California should be okay though- they have huge coasts. You just can't do that in bays.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Pekka
Who needs this technology, when you have plenty of clean water anyway. Desert people should be dealt with what Darwin suggested anyway. Desert = no future. It's not meant to be living quarters of humans. It's evil. Except for Israelis. But for the people in Nevada and stuff.. you have no excuses.

people have been living here for thousands of years. Probably longer than people have been living in that artic wasteland of yours

[Dis]

Originally posted by Lancer
So what population can the world support with this? 15 billion?

There's the US desert southwest, Australia, arab areas, the Sahara...all should bloom, flow with milk and honey, etc...

*clears throat*

you are forgetting people need to eat

[Dis]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Just to get ahead of the game let me ask this: if we desalinate enough seawater to make the Saharan Arabian, and Namibian deserts arable what will be the world wide effects? We'd have to put the leftover salt somewhere. If it's dumped back into the ocean wouldn't the area near the dumping point become toxic to sealife? OTOH planting crops in a large part of the globe that was desert and probably acted as a heat reflector might actually partially counteract global warming.

you are correct sir.

it would be unwise and probably un-economical to use this water for irrigation purposes. There will be massive ecological damage from all this brine being dumpted back into the ocean.

[Dis]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


I love the desert. I just need to be near a large body of water. That would mean SoCal would be perfect for me (especially with the mountains), but it's filled with Souther Califnornians and it's too expensive. I got sticker shock when I was back in Chicago a couple months back.

Interestingly, Southern Florida has just as much of a clean water problem as SoCal. They may be in a swamp, but they don't have enough drinkable water to support them. They want to start piping water south from North Florida. This desalinization technique will help save our water up here.

Virginia has water problems as well.

This technology just isn't for desterts. Much of the United States needs it.

I would have liked to have had it in Mississippi. We had to drink brown water there.

I'm serious. Our water in Pascagoula is brown. Don't believ me? Well I saved a gallon of it. You can come by and look at it. It's considered safe to drink though. I think it's some kind of plant root that discolors the water.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Geronimo


There are plenty of places where salt can be deposited under ground and stay put for millions of years. This is the reason salt mines can exist in regions that have no salt leaking into their ground water from those salt deposits. I don't think there is any practical limit to the amount of salt we could store in this manner.

too expensive I'd say. And you don't realize how much waste we are talking. there simply is no place to put it.

[Dis]

Originally posted by aneeshm
I've got an idea for the disposal of salt . . .

Why not dump it in the Dead Sea ? It's a toxic hole with superhigh salt concentrations . No life in there . An increase in salinity in that place won't hurt anybody or anything . And the amount that could be dumped is practically limitless , even if finite .

the dead sea does actually have life

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Dissident


too expensive I'd say. And you don't realize how much waste we are talking. there simply is no place to put it.

But diss, in the ice age the oceans had a much larger quantity of freshwater extracted from them in the form of evaporation that later snowed down on the landmasses and stayed locked up there in the form of glaciation. This made the oceans saltier than they are today but was not enough of a difference to significantly effect marine life.

Furthermore when we create freshwater in this manner its esentially going to be used in ways that cause it to either get 'flushed' so that it returns to the oceans as freshwater, or it will evaporate and probably reach the oceans later as runnoff. So even if we dump astronomical amounts of concentrated brine into the oceans in making this freshwater we will also eventually send the freshwater back as well, more or less balancing things out. Compare this to the ice ages where the freshwater had to wait many thousands of years to return to the oceans.

[The Mad Monk]

The fact is, this process is unlikely to produce concentrated brine at all -- the pressures required for that would take too much energy, and one of the benefits of this process is, apparently, relatively low energy costs.

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Dissident


you are correct sir.

it would be unwise and probably un-economical to use this water for irrigation purposes. There will be massive ecological damage from all this brine being dumpted back into the ocean.

Why? As a navy veteran, you know how much water there is in the ocean. As long as you distribute the brine emmissions, it would be a piss in the Nile.

[pchang]

I've been to the Nile. And there's no way I'm ever going to step into it.

[Blake]

Heptuple post by Diss?!
I don't think heptuple is even a word!!

edit: Ah the word is septuple, ya learn a new thing every day...

[Dis]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie


Why? As a navy veteran, you know how much water there is in the ocean. As long as you distribute the brine emmissions, it would be a piss in the Nile.

much more difficult to do on the shoreline. You'd have to extend pipelines miles out into the ocean. Although I admit I'm not up on the ciruculation patterns of ocean water along the coast. But I suspect the circulation is rather poor.

In the navy it's not a concern. Our ship is always moving. And our brine production was minimal anyways. We only produced water for drinking/cooking water and for the steam plants. We used seawater for flushing water. And needless to say- we had no irrigation water

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Dissident


much more difficult to do on the shoreline. You'd have to extend pipelines miles out into the ocean. Although I admit I'm not up on the ciruculation patterns of ocean water along the coast. But I suspect the circulation is rather poor.

In the navy it's not a concern. Our ship is always moving. And our brine production was minimal anyways. We only produced water for drinking/cooking water and for the steam plants. We used seawater for flushing water. And needless to say- we had no irrigation water

The effluent tube in the plant where I work distributes the emissions through nozzles over a stretch of two miles. Those systems are quite common. I don't think taking something from the ocean and returing it in a higher concentration will cause any significant damage.

What I meant by referring to your time in the navy was that I thought you must have seen how big the ocean really is. Some waste salt in all that salt water will not make any difference, especially as the desalinated water eventually returns to the sea.

What limits the use of desalinated water for irrigation is not the waste problem, but the supply of low-cost energy. Solar power is still very expensive (I've done some calculations for my own house and came to a pay-off time of over 10 years compared to nuclear power).