Salinity doesn’t really work like that. You can’t just dump a bunch of brine and expect it to just mix with the rest of the seawater. A lot of that depends on temperature, currents, etc. You might just end up forming a brine lake in the ocean if the brine just so happens to end up at the bottom without ever mixing. Not to mention brine isn’t always just concentrated salt and water. It can include byproducts from desalination.
Depends on the desalination method. If there’s no added chemicals, or if they removed them prior, I’d assume it’s feasible. After all, ancient times used to just evaporate seawater and get salt from it.
It might just be an economic problem. Questions such as where are you going to get land for creating huge evaporation pools, is it worth the yield of table salt, etc.
People have made the argument for dumping nuclear waste in the ocean. I believe adding brine to existing brine resivours won’t be too much of a hassle.
Are there any brine reservoir in the ocean? That doesn’t seem to be a thing. It either mixes properly with the ocean if proper mechanisms are set or it just ends up sinking to the bottom of the ocean and killing everything there.
There’s storage inland, but that also has its own problems.
Nuclear waste in the ocean follows a similar idea (although larger in scope). You can’t just dump it and be done. You have to create a plan to slowly release it (over decades) to (hopefully) not adversely affect life
Those are the exact brine lakes I talked about that exist in the bottom of the ocean.
Brine is too dense to be above seawater. They accumulate in the bottom, creating essentially small pockets that kills almost every normal life. Only extremophiles live near it, and even then its usually just surrounding the edges of the lake.
You also can’t exactly guarantee that the brine you make ends up here. They are in the bottom of the ocean, not exactly a place you can pump brine to.
Salinity doesn’t really work like that. You can’t just dump a bunch of brine and expect it to just mix with the rest of the seawater. A lot of that depends on temperature, currents, etc. You might just end up forming a brine lake in the ocean if the brine just so happens to end up at the bottom without ever mixing. Not to mention brine isn’t always just concentrated salt and water. It can include byproducts from desalination.
Reference:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-worlds-thirst-with-seawater-dumps-toxic-brine-in-oceans/
Could you process it further and package it up to sell as salt? Or is this not the same thing as table salt?
Depends on the desalination method. If there’s no added chemicals, or if they removed them prior, I’d assume it’s feasible. After all, ancient times used to just evaporate seawater and get salt from it.
It might just be an economic problem. Questions such as where are you going to get land for creating huge evaporation pools, is it worth the yield of table salt, etc.
People have made the argument for dumping nuclear waste in the ocean. I believe adding brine to existing brine resivours won’t be too much of a hassle.
Are there any brine reservoir in the ocean? That doesn’t seem to be a thing. It either mixes properly with the ocean if proper mechanisms are set or it just ends up sinking to the bottom of the ocean and killing everything there.
There’s storage inland, but that also has its own problems.
Nuclear waste in the ocean follows a similar idea (although larger in scope). You can’t just dump it and be done. You have to create a plan to slowly release it (over decades) to (hopefully) not adversely affect life
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool
Those are the exact brine lakes I talked about that exist in the bottom of the ocean.
Brine is too dense to be above seawater. They accumulate in the bottom, creating essentially small pockets that kills almost every normal life. Only extremophiles live near it, and even then its usually just surrounding the edges of the lake.
You also can’t exactly guarantee that the brine you make ends up here. They are in the bottom of the ocean, not exactly a place you can pump brine to.
I don’t think you understand the scale and scope of modern engineering.