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Comment by ivanech | Hacker News Reader

"Brine, water comprising about five percent salt, often includes toxins such as chlorine and copper used in desalination, it said. By contrast, global sea water is about 3.5 percent salt."

"Brine can cut levels of oxygen in seawater near desalination plants"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-brine-idUSKCN...

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Can we lay those huge tubes underwater to disperse it drip irrigation style? It's not like it's a lot of salt once diffused, especially with those glaciers melting.

We're already assuming far more electricity, so I'm not too concerned about the energy required to pump the brine many miles out, just worried about capital and repair costs.

>often includes toxins such as chlorine and copper used in desalination

This is very avoidable. Most extant desalination plants are in the Middle East and subject to relatively little environmental oversight. While desalination will always produce brine, introducing extra chemicals is something that can be solved at the technology level.

I wonder if the salt can be converted into a useful byproduct? Or else if it can be disposed of in an environmentally-friendly way?

It's not pure salt. It's just water with abnormally high salinity. It would require a fair bit of additional processing to make it useful.

Evaporation pools?

Entirely possible (and occurring already in the south bay), but they scale poorly - they require very large tracts of land since the pools need to be fairly shallow. They're also fairly labor intensive, between harvesting, purifying, and transporting the resulting salt.

The salt has to be transported in any case (whether salt comes from a mine or from evaporation pools). Even if we don't make it into a byproduct but just put it in a big pit of salt adjacent the evaporation pools it would probably be fine (somewhere that we don't need to worry too much about it leeching into the environment, which is already a concern for evaporation pools). Not sure what applications of salt there are or how pure it needs to be (presumably there are other applications besides table salt)? Since we're already positing very cheap energy, we can probably also posit more efficient desalinization plants (resulting brine is even more concentrated, taking the load off of evaporation pools) since I'm assuming that the energy cost is the bottleneck in desalinization efficiency.

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