ps. I have no clue what I'm talking about
Animals in the ocean of course do live without fresh water. Some of them just live off of water extracted directly from their food or from metabolizing that food, which produces water. Some animals have specialized cells that excrete salt so that can take in salt water and separate out the salt.
> Testing their solar-thermal desalination technique using samples of water from the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, Guo and his team were able to make the surface self-cleaning. In other words, it extracted freshwater and directed the remaining salts to the passive region where they could be later collected without reducing the panel’s efficiency.
This is not "large" this is a moderate improvement. Albedo is likely only marginally affected, and the solar power input over area is the same.
Depending on this cost of this process it could very likely be a wash in terms of NPV
An RO desalination plant needs electric energy to drive the pumps, which might be generated by panels which are 15-20% efficient. So, if you can have cheap thermal desalination panels, they come out ahead even if 6x less energy eficient, you avoid the whole expensive and fragile desalination plant and you gain a low skill, distributed setup.
"Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water" (2023) https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1002811
ScholarlyArticle: "Highly efficient and salt rejecting solar evaporation via a wick-free confined water layer" (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28457-8
"Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive desalination" (2022) https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...
RO is about 2-4x the theoretical minimum, depending on how much water you're willing to reject.
Easy, but not necessarily good for the spot you're pumping concentrated salt back into.
IMO this is an issue where NIMBYs are using environmental concerns as a smokescreen to block new desal plants from ruining the vibe at their beachfront property. Rhymes with the opposition against offshore wind farms.
I think that problem was known (and discarded as not important) when the first serious water desalination plants were built.
Most of the carbon we spew into the atmosphere came from the air. Ancient plants took it in via respiration.
Sure, and enriched uranium comes from the ground, but that doesn't mean it's safe to dump it back in after the enrichment process!
> So just dilute it back to close to ambient salinity using municipal waste water…
Wouldn't it generally be easier to process that municipal waste water, as is already fairly common?
Uranium can also come from the ocean water (there is, apparently, quite a lot of it in there, relatively speaking). Japan experimented with the technology in the nineties, but it really was much cheaper to just mine it from the ground, so they abandoned it.
If you think otherwise and you're not wrong, and I think you ARE not mistaken since this isn't the first time someone other than myself mentioned it here, that means they're making bombs because we in Japanese public aren't told about it. There has only been just some routine commentaries from local mayors at most.
It's a bit weird though that they have a graph of tons of uranium hexafluoride shipped that shows the last shipment in 2018 and nothing since then.
But you're doing that with the same water you're trying to make in the first place!
A phase diagram tells you exactly how far you need to go.
You know this makes more thermodynamic sense than carbon capture, right?
Just wait for the saltwater to come back around in the sewer.
But, so what? 30% sewage is still a strong dilluant... especially when mixed with more seawater
Im shocked how many people cannot grasp that you can dilute brine's salinity arbitrarily close to seawater's with energetically cheap pumps.
The advanced treatment stages take care of it. Between UV, ozone, and nanofiltration, etc. we can remove the pharmaceuticals.
Actually the problem is the water comes out too pure out of a well designed water reuse system, to the point where the mineral content can be too low and you need to add some back in.
But wait! There's water mass loss due to leaky pipes and outdoor pools!
Mixing salt water and brine is perfectly ok. Just use a phase diagram.
It's not every day that industrial waste happens to be not only edible but also tasty. Too tasty, in fact. Salt is addictive.
Ohio DOT's use of road salt would allow for fresh water to be provided for somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 people.
On one hand, that's nowhere near enough people; it's a small drop in a giant thirsty bucket of water consumption. So we'll still need salt mountains, salt re-distribution vessels, and/or other ways to deal with excess salt.
On the other hand, 160k is a lot of humans. So perhaps we should look into doing things like this anyway.
(But we probably won't. Ohio gets road salt primarily from a mine under Lake Erie that has a very conveniently-located terminus near downtown Cleveland. The mine directly loads trucks, freight trains, and ships...and it's near the point of use already. It's pretty efficient.)
Come on guys please at least attempt to think what you’re about to type, please, I beg you.
Just put it on your fries.
Just make prettier-than-Himalayan salt lamps out of it and sell it to hippies. Easy solution.
this is delusional ecological
Overall though, it’s just such a tiny concern. Ocean is huge. If we kill everything in a 100 foot radius, that’s 0.0000000008% of the ocean being destroyed. Less than a drop in a bucket.