Isn't it sad that certain negative outcomes can be easily predicted by anyone bothering to think things through, yet no effort ever seems to go to mitigation, only spin and crocodile tears after the fact.
jadero
joined 1 year ago
My first thought was "wait, people still think it's psychosomatic?" Then I read the article and realized that they were not referring to people in general, but to actual doctors!
It never fails to amaze -- and annoy! -- me how often simple curiosity and wide-ranging reading leaves me better informed than many actual professionals. It's almost like they got their education and training, then stopped engaging.
Anyway, rant over. I'm glad there are people out there taking things seriously and I hope you continue to meet with success in your treatment.
As long as nobody is using drinking water for irrigation, the output does pretty closely match the input.
But my point was that we can treat that water for use and reuse. That way, the desalination is kept to a minimum.
It's not quite that simple. After extracting water, matching salinity would require extracting salt or adding water. It's not that there aren't sources of water that can be used for salinity matching, including the output of sewage treatment, the reality is that it probably makes more sense to treat that water than to desalinate in the first place.
Extracting the salts might be a source of valuable minerals and metals, but there is still no free lunch.
As far as I know, we still would be putting stuff back that doesn't make a good match for what we took. That means depending on the natural environment for dilution and "treatment". That has been an ongoing problem for humanity. We're very good at exceeding the capacity of the environment to cope with our wastes.
I completely understand the comment about perpetual motion machines, but tend to think that it's more of a scale management problem than a strict prohibition.
The impossibility of perpetual motion is not a reason to shut down research into methods of making power production and power consumption more efficient.
Are you saying that dealing with the waste brine is impossible in any way, shape, or form and that this is a reason to not pursue desalination research?
I used to be municipal water treatment plant operator (Level 2). I'm well aware that treatment waste is something that must be dealt with in any plant that does more than just disinfection.
I already admitted to not being up on the state of the art, but I was under the impression that there are potentially viable methods of dealing with waste brine in environmentally sustainable ways. Perhaps not at a scale that allows literally every human to use desalination for all needs, but that there are cases where desalination is a good solution.
My curiosity has been piqued. I will, of course, start looking for resources on waste brine management, but any pointers you have will be much appreciated.
One of the challenging issues with a complex problem is that the problem is not solved until the whole thing is solved.
One of the nice things about a complex problem is that you don't have to solve the whole thing at once in order to make progress toward a complete solution.
I don't know the state of the art on dealing with waste brine. If that is already deemed insoluble above a certain scale, then we better not invest in anything that exceeds that scale. On the other hand, if research into handling waste brine in sustainable ways is ongoing and making progress, then why not continue attacking the extraction problem?
Interesting. One of the chemicals they reference is tetrachloroethylene. According to this Wikipedia article:
My grandfather had Parkinson's. I would imagine that he had plenty of exposure in his work as a mechanic from about 1925 on.