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.