> Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from.

Easy, but not necessarily good for the spot you're pumping concentrated salt back into.

The brine came from the ocean. So just dilute it back to close to ambient salinity using municipal waste water that you are discharging anyway.

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ceejayoz 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> The brine came from the ocean.

Sure, and enriched uranium comes from the ground, but that doesn't mean it's safe to dump it back in after the enrichment process!

> So just dilute it back to close to ambient salinity using municipal waste water…

Wouldn't it generally be easier to process that municipal waste water, as is already fairly common?

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SoftTalker 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

The analogy would be if you "un-enrich" it. Then it's safe. Or at least no worse than when you took it out of the ground.

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ceejayoz 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

> The analogy would be if you "un-enrich" it.

But you're doing that with the same water you're trying to make in the first place!

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SoftTalker 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

You could just dilute it using fresh seawater, if you used enough and (maybe) spread it over a wider area. The amount of water people need for drinking is a relative drop in the ocean.

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ceejayoz 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

Brine doesn't necessarily behave the way you imagine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool

	▲	jaggederest 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Blue Planet video of a brinicle, content warning for kind of horrifying death of sea creatures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAupJzH31tc

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Enginerrrd 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Municipal waste water is a much cheaper way to get desalinated water in the first place though.

	▲	lazide 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		except for the pharmaceuticals anyway