He had been trained as an electrical engineer in Haiti, but in New York, Louima was unable to get a position related to his education. He worked as a security guard in a water and sewage plant in the Flatlands area of Brooklyn."
So far, desalination has not been a useful solution to the problem. Companies have been trying to create useful desalination plants for decades. The current process is expensive, inefficient, slow and creates toxic residuals. For these reasons, the current technology does not scale up very well at all.
I am not using any form of AI or other assistance. I am just old and have a lot of experience writing. Have a look at my post history to see the consistency in my writing style, even when I’m ripping a conservative apart.
I realize I copy/pasted my last line to the beginning instead of cut/paste, so it looks absurd now that I look at it again. I will fix that now.
With enough demand, enough money for R&D will show up to improve the technology.
But regardless the current costs, that did not stop Israel to source all their water from the sea from very early, as well as other countries have for regions where there isn’t enough drinking water available.
In my country, it’s used to supply our islands territories and even by some hotels for pool water.
And the problem with the brine has me scratching my head, as I’ve read sources where the process required chemical treatment of the water and others where it’s stated the process is entirely physical.
This a really bad take. Seawater deal with RO is a marvel of efficiency, only 2-3 times above the thermodynamic limit of demixing water from salt. It does not really generate toxic waste like coal fired power plants, but does produce lots of brine with various organics (antiscalants, surfactants etc.) that are not that great. The key issue is water is very cheap from traditional sources (surface water and groundwater) and requires rather crude treatment to be usable, resulting in very low cost. Hence why desal is used in areas where they have no choice. If you don’t have surface/ground water source or brackish water source you are doing seawater deal or leave the area…not many choices. At least RO is electrified so it can use renewables but that does not really solve the much higher cost…or issue of brine generation, with zld have a set of it’s own issues costs…
By the same argument, replacing the coal fired power plant with wind and solar wouldn’t pose a challenge either.
The point is, you’ve got to compare apples to apples: either coal power vs. desalinization powered by coal, or renewables vs. desalinization powered by renewables. In every case, the pollution produced by the desalinization process (i.e., the brine etc.) is simply added to the pollution produced by whatever means was used to generate the power for it, which means @soEZ’s attempt to compare desalinization to power generation doesn’t make much sense.
A coal burning plant has a comparisable smaller base of implantation; deactivating the coal plant to have it replaced by a solar or a wind (if even possible) would hardly output the same energy.
By comparison, a desalination plant takes a large area, by the shore, where wind and solar are plentiful, so it can be fitted with such energy source from the start.
The brines can and should be channeled to harvest the salts in it. The salt is raw matter for chemical industry.
It’s amazing how quick we are to find problems to a promising solution but the moment extracting water from surface or underground sources becomes impossible or unfeaseable we will resort to those solutions.
The situation is dire - for us - but the planet is not going to spontaneously combust with us on the surface.
sigh
I am fucking fed up with all the fucking doom and gloom every half shit media outlet burps ou, tailored to stirr panic into everyone and their grandmother.
Everybody is a genius but nobody really has an answer to actually fucking solve anything. Everybody is acting on a pin’s head trying to discover what is going to happen next and in the meanwhile nobody can be bothered to actually do something proactively to enact change, like perhaps voting!
Like it or not, at some point, even for preservation purposes, we will source more of our water from the oceans because it will be that or death.
My country has already transitioned into a fully sustainable power grid, using hydroeletric, solar and wind, and plans to implement more sustainable energy sources is under way. We are also converting a refinery to produce green hydrogen and we’ve already phased out coal, with only a couple of fossil gas plants still in operation. Meanwhile, every sane person is trying their best to make their homes more efficient and even trying to be self reliant on energy, through solar and wind.
We are facing constant droughts and dry spells and public pressure is being put on the government, regardless of color, to implement desalination plants regardless of cost so we can maintain our country alive.
I am fed up with everyone spelling doom and gloom left and right but nobody cares to recognize the small things being done now!
There is a limit for how much water consumption can be reduced, how much water can be reused and how much preserved untouched.
It is actually a subject I actually find interesting. All the criticism put towards the technology could be as easily applied to the internal combustion engine: its inefficient, produces larges amounts of residues and is expensive to run.
There are several large scale operations already in place (Israel sources its water from the sea, as well as several other nations where drinking water is scarce) and even hotels use it to source water for swimming pools.
There is, of course, the problem of distribution but we’ve already invented pipelines, haven’t we? And a water pipeline bursting could cause floods but no great concern lasting environmental damage, unlike oil or liquified natural gas.
All the criticism put towards the technology could be as easily applied to the internal combustion engine: its inefficient, produces larges amounts of residues and is expensive to run.
This was an attempt at being sarcastic.
If we’re running a technology by all means obsolete (internal combustion engine) and do it overlooking its drawbacks running current technology for dessalination can very well follow the same reasoning.
I read a good deal of criticism towards dessalination regarding the disposal of the brine. That is a fair point but those brines could very well be reprocessed for minerals harvesting including lithium, which has great demand. Even by just harvesting the salt, we’d be getting an important resource.
There is, of course, the problem of distribution but we’ve already invented pipelines, haven’t we?
This is true and we already do it. Fresh water is distributed over huge distances using high pressure and volume. The infrastructure already exists.
And a water pipeline bursting could cause floods but no great concern lasting environmental damage, unlike oil or liquified natural gas.
I’ve lived where this happened once and it was not pretty. A low point of high density residencial area got flooded. Water reached somewhere around 80cm high. Damage to cars and ground stories, water distribution interrupted for 3 days. But no lasting damage.
I’m going to be dense as I have no knowledge in this area, but can you just put it back in the ocean? I assume with sea levels rising the ocean is getting less salty so it wouldn’t be harmful as long as we spread it out/did it slowly?
Yes, but how it’s done is hard and expensive. If you just pump it into one spot you kill everything around with high salt concentrations. You can pump it far out to sea and disperse it over a large area, but that requires pipes going out to sea. The pipes would probably be made of metal, which salt water and metal don’t mix well, not to mention the brine in the pipe. You also need pumping stations along the pipe because it can’t perpetually slope down, and if it goes below sea level it needs to be pumped out.
Basically, it’s complicated and expensive and not as easy as just dumping it into the ocean.
I made that same observation some time back and the answer I got was: money.
Why spend the money to develop a technology to harvest a mineral from the sea with probably minimal to no impact to the environment when you can simply use already existing tech and just open a hole in the ground?
America does desalinate in it’s coastal regions. Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.
[…] Increasing desalination is prohibitively expensive. Shipping water inland is preposterously expensive. Even if you spend the money, scaling up takes years or even decades.
Just like oil and natural gas?
There are reasons America, like nearly all other nations, gets a relatively small amount of it’s fresh water from desalination.
The way desertification is advancing in California (there must be other places facing the same problem) there will be a tipping point where mass scale desalination will be implemented.
Yes, which both cost many orders of magnitude more than water right now. If water was dollars per gallon like fuel is, we’d be in an extremely bad spot for livability.
Orrr… a tipping point where the human population becomes wholly unsustainable and starts to tear itself apart in “The Water Wars”, as they’ll be called.
b) [in order to create wealth] factories create jobs
c) jobs return taxes
d) taxes return money
e) money can be returned to factories to hold it in place
For water extraction, we only need to add a line where we state water is replenishable, another stating that is easy and cheap to extract and a third where we expand on how water is a good in constant demand, thus, easily marketable.
Desalination is not a question of “if” it should be established but a “when” one.
Desal itself isnt really that hard, its very similar tech to regular wastewater treatment. What it is though is energy intensive, because the desalinated water starts its life at the lowest altitude and must be pumped up network to be gravity fed like regular water sources. very energy intensive
Desalination does not require fossil fuels. It requires energy. Of which there are many forms. Some of those forms are renewable. It’s not an emergency measure. Desalination happens regularly, right now, today. Read a book.
We could desalinate ocean water with renewable energy. But that doesn’t help the idiots who think they are entitled to live in Arizona / the desert.
Well, put me in a red dress and pony tails and call me Shirley…
Haven’t we discovered other ways to harvest energy besides fossil fuels? Perhaps wind a solar might be an answer to that problem?
My own country is in the process of converting a former refinery into a green hydrogen plant and part of the conversion goes into installing a few gigawatts of power in solar and wind.
Couldn’t this same solution be used for desalination?
Thousands of years ago didn’t have desalination nor electricity… there’s a reason why they moved to fresh water inland.and before you jump there: desalination requires a fuck load of electricity that impacts with other issues.
Those areas, by force. Open a history book and stop trying to make political points with ridiculous hyperbole and flat out lies. People are not receptive to bad news when you intentionally and artificially make the news 10x worse by lying. Water usage is a serious problem. Yes. And there will still be a tomorrow.
I see you posting and I’m still waiting for your proof or reasoning behind thinking there will be no tomorrow when some places lose ground water.
You guys are all smug af with your downvotes, but got absolutely nothing for facts beyond your provocative hyperbole.
Keep in mind I never said losing ground water wouldn’t suck and/or be catastrophic, only looking for some proof it will be “the end of tomorrow” as the upvoted dude with his provocative words stated so definitively.
I keep getting told to read a book or that I know nothing of history or geology, yet all of human history proves me fucking right so far, so I’ma need literally any scrap of evidence from fucking anyone who has something better than a shitty opinion alongside some clicks of a down arrow.
I mean, we sold the entire island if Lana’i to the CEO of Oracle at one point. I wouldn’t be surprised if the government here backtracks on their statement under the guise of getting money to “rebuild Lahaina” and sells land to some rich assholes.
We already let Elliot Fisher, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg buy a lot of land - why not more?
Why are shitholes like this allowed to exist? I thought y’all had separation of church and state. Indoctrination farms are antithetical to democracy and human decency.
Edit: I see from another comment this is a private institution. Disregard.
Edit 2: apparently private indoctrination farms get federal money. Boooooo
In addition to that, which is enough of a reason on its own, the point of giving federal money to universities is to ensmarten the population in general, thereby benefiting all taxpayers. So not only is this a terrible deal for people who are directly and personally affected by this cult’s bigotry, but it’s a terrible deal for everyone who would otherwise benefit from being surrounded by a community of educated people instead of wingnuts.
"religious grounds" just translates to that church expressing its political dominance.. and the need to do that is always seated in greed.. greed for money and power..
it’s all theatre, take something people love (children, mothers) & something people hate (criminals), now they can justify passing any legislation & continue expanding their control over time without fixing the underlying issues like lack of public transportation. but hey, guns are legal…FOR THE CHILDREN!
Should, yes. Does it already exist, yes. It can just be time consuming. Kill one parent surviving parent or guardian or state placed guardian is then supposed to go to civil court and a judge will rule the person pays support. Some would say that is costly but the court fees will end up having to be paid by the person the judge rules against. (Which many attorneys will pick up pro bono because no judge is going to rule that killing a parent(s) didnt cause at LEAST financial/ impact on the child/family.
Maybe. You would basically be created a two-tiered system of punishment. If you kill me you have to pay for my kids, if you kill someone childless you don’t pay.
I am not sure what the repercussions of that would be.
The Honor Code tells BYU students to live “a chaste and virtuous life, including abstaining from sexual relations outside marriage between a man and a woman.”
This is the part I was referring to, but you’re right, on second read- through, sexual relations and romantic behavior can easily be two seperate things.
I think they saw a loophole since they define marriage between only a man and woman, and not including same-sex relations would mean there’s no rule against it.
Either way, it’s a shitty rule, and I, even as a straight person, wouldn’t go to a university that is so insistent on dictating my sex/romantic life
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