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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

That’s not how it works though. The place where you release the water, a local hot spot is created and the heat takes a while to gradually dissipate. If you continuously release hot water, then a permanent localized hot spot is created.

This may work for some marine species, but will also be damaging to others. If it affects a keystone species negatively, like say corals, then a larger die off can happen.

This is the exact logic why desalination plants are widely considered bad. Yes, if you look at the entire ocean, you’re barely increasing the salinity of the water, but for the local neighborhood where the waste water is released, the salinity goes up to the point that even saltwater fish find it toxic.

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It's usually a silly complaint, though. The change is to a small area, and small areas are naturally different temperatures for all sorts of different reasons. Dredging the beach and changing the water elevation will have similar temperature effects.

At electric beach it creates a nice, unique ecosystem and there's nothing wrong with that.

I wouldn't consider the entirety of Gulf of California a small place. They're staring down environmental impacts from desalination plants.

Desalination is a different process to heating though, for instance the sea won't lose excess salt to the atmosphere.

The sea does lose salt to the atmosphere, just less than it does of water, so it doesn’t reduce salinity. Wave action releases enough salt to smell salt in the air, and a bit makes it up higher to provide cloud condensation nuclei.

Wow! I didn't know that.

It's a good thing the problem we're talking about doesn't exist there

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07900627.2023.2...

Yes, as your article clearly explains the problem we are discussing - heat pollution - does not exist there. The article is talking about salinity, not heat.

I think the issue is that location matters. What can be a huge problem in one location, might not be a problem in another location.

There is nothing inherent with desalination that requires releasing the salt back into the ocean.

There is a big difference between separating sea water into fresh water and a concentrated brine against separating sea water into fresh water and solid salts. If you could do the latter efficiently then it would be easy, put it back under ground or sell it to people as sea salt, use it to salt the roads etc.

Is it that big of a difference?

So just dump the hot water a few kilometers out, where there's a desert.

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