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DukeInBlack t1_j8mup4q wrote

Reply to comment by GaudExMachina in Scientists Successfully Split Seawater To Produce Green Hydrogen by __The__Anomaly__

Total BS, sorry for a couple of of very BIG reasons We just “borrow” water with law salinity and we will re introduce it in the cycle. There is very little water that is ever lost.

The total amount of human consumption of fresh water is just insignificant, not even measurable, with respect the total amount of water on this planet.

Bottom line: water does not exist in a “state” but in a dynamic cycle. Altering this dynamic cycle to a measurable amount requires a scale that is far bigger (many orders of magnitude) and does not take into account negative feedbacks to the process of increased salinity, like the increase of low salinity water coming from the waste product of this process

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GaudExMachina t1_j8oawiq wrote

It really isn't. A few things to consider:
As I pointed out, the LOCAL effect is the most dangerous.

Infiltration rate of ground water into rock is relatively low, but recharge due to water permeability of rocks into aquifers is on the order of thousands of years. Which means when you take all that water and combust it somewhere else, a reasonable amount of it ends up going into recharge zones and being taken out of the "dynamic" cycle for a while. As well as being removed from the drainage basin feeding back into the soon to be hypersaline environment.

Plenty of research out there to show that very small salinity changes cause significant damage to ecological niches, though it is considerably more pronounced in freshwater systems, it still has far reaching implications in Salt water. Even a small percentage of change in the ocean leads to changes in the freezing point/dissipation rate which can disrupt weather patterns, change density of currents which carry nutrients and also provide turbidity.

You have zero idea about this topic, and are basing what you are saying on a notion that it FEELS like this is just too big to fuck up. And yet here are some things we have done that have fairly drastic impact....our world has been getting warmer since the industrial revolution. Denuding of forests for agriculture has caused drastic changes to groundwater runoff. Using Potash for fertilizer has caused massive algae blooms that have created dead zones in various places around the world. Hypersaline water has destroyed local fishing ecosystems around the Middle East where desalination plants have been very common for a long time.

Don't want to believe? Go do some research on Florida Estuaries and how the spawning grounds of quite a few important marine fish are being changed by salinity changes. (Only a tiny portion of these changes come from the handful of Desal plants Florida has, but the point is that salinity is still important).

Or here is a link of evidence in a local area of how desal plants hurt a sensitive biological marker species. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/142a/293bfa6e2e618b777ab328dacd3e33144908.pdf

I'm sure if you spent more than 5 minutes searching around, you would find plenty more.

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DukeInBlack t1_j8of98h wrote

This is a super niche effect that has been argued over and over many times before.

Yes, there are specific cases where the salinity increase was dangerous for the local, very local wildlife but all, repeat all the study refer to very specific ecosystems usually in freshwater or at the confluence of freshwater with marine water, as you correctly point out.

I argue that none of the proposed desalination plants fall on these categories and starting FUD campaigns based on very picked and chosen data is really dangerous and detrimental to the credibility of future valid arguments.

If you are an hammer does not justify treating everything like a nail. This post was about desalination on large scale. Do you want to post a warning on not dispersing back brine in high concentrations, fine, but proper disposal of brines is not only feasible but totally inconsequential

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GaudExMachina t1_j8ozdwr wrote

So, you admit I have some points, you want to argue over whether its super localized (again as I pointed out and gave alternative disposal scenarios in the original post) versus could have larger cascading effects, as we see in all kinds of complex systems. (See above about fertilizer usage spread on continent, killing marine fisheries)

But ultimately.....it is NOT BS. Not at all. You say as much, and continue to pretend it is all FUD, though it clearly has been "argued over many times" for good reason.

Thanks for your 2 cents......

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DukeInBlack t1_j8plu02 wrote

Arguing about possible cascade effects of brine disposal from large scale desalinization that are are not proven or not even studied is the definition of FUD and BS.

Look kid, I have been an environmentalist well before you were born and well before the whole movement become hijacked by law firms, media clickbait’s and politicians, protested pesticides and antibiotics well before it seems normal to do so but you or nobody should simply clump everything up in the same basket just because it has a possibility of harm even if it is an unmeasurable one.

Ecology is about resources and understanding If the human interaction with the environment but, most of all, is a quantitative discipline, like engineering.

We do not need any more demagogues or politicians but sound minded people and defendable data for any claim we make.

In the Gulf of Mexico there is an exposed salt deposit underwater that is worth several millions years of brine accumulation from providing 100 liters of water to 10 billions humans every day.

And it made by the exact same brine because was the effect of millions years of deposits of sea salts.

Any time an earthquake hits that region, an equivalent amount of many years of best desalination plants in the world gets released and change the ecosystem.

We need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot fighting every single insignificant battle and totally losing the war.

We were manipulated enough to kill the nuclear energy in the ‘70, did we not learn anything ?

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