alt Hacker NewsIf you use fat pipes that go a decent distance from shore, diluting your brine with ocean water, you’ll have a negligible impact on the ocean. The problem is if you dump lots of brine in shallow waters. Old designs did have that flaw, but it’s not that difficult to design around this constraint now that we know about it.
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.
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> The problem is if you dump lots of brine in shallow waters. Old designs did have that flaw, but it’s not that difficult to design around this constraint now that we know about it.
I think that problem was known (and discarded as not important) when the first serious water desalination plants were built.
I can probably be convinced pretty easily with some evidence of that, but you’ll never convince the contingent who is convinced it’ll kill sea life at any concentration or location, so, being able to shut them up by saying “we have no wastewater, we load rail cars with crunchy salt and use it for stuff” still has value.
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Yeah. Worrying about salt in the sea is like worrying about oxygen in the air. Can too much oxygen in the air sometimes be a problem? Yeah, in some corner cases. Is it a major problem that we can't solve? Not at all.
The city of Corpus Christi, TX is currently considering options for desalination plants—all of which pump their brine into the shallow water inside the bay or the ship channel.