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Comment by gadflyinyoureye | Hacker News Reader

A large issue is where do you put the brackish or super-salted water? Desalination is great as long as you have the waste impacts managed.

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Extremely not an expert, but I wonder if dehydrating it out doesn’t make sense? Solid-form salts are easier to dispose of.

The process can also be used to generate construction materials.

You pump it back out into the ocean.

Probably fine for small-scale use, but on a planetary scale increased salinity could dramatically influence marine biodiversity, not to mention climate from thermohaline circulation disruption [1]

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_currents/05...

It's not possible to change ocean salinity by any measurable amount by desalination. Except maybe for some very closed off seas, which are already less saline than the ocean.

To expand on this. There's ~321M cubic MILES of water in the ocean.

Total US water usage is about 2 cubic miles per week - which is not even a 100 millionth of the water in the ocean.

I imagine similar things were said about burning oil and gas at one time.

That aside I think the more pressing concern is the local environment, turning the area around your station into a brackish dead zone.

It is in the water cycle anyway, so yes globally really makes no difference. But the localized levels of salinity certainly can be effected and be detrimental.

Sounds expensive to pump it to wide enough area for not to cause issues to marine life. The total amount in context isn't an issue, but the spikes in concentration is.

> A large issue is where do you put the brackish or super-salted water? Desalination is great as long as you have the waste impacts managed.

We designed a whole thing to store nuclear waste (Yucca Mountain[1], couldn't you put brackish water in something similar but wayyyy less expensive since it's not radioactive?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

I think you're underestimating how much waste water is produced by orders of magnitude. Any inland reservoir will be filled within months of completion.

Sea salt prices are about to be negative one dollar per pound

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