this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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Only locally, it's absolutely not a problem globally. That water will go back into the ocean soon enough. We're not generally putting wastewater in aquifers. The same is true of lithium. Both sodium and lithium form salts that dissolve in water, so over time their biggest concentration is in the water and that's why we refine it from salt flats.
I don't consider the refining of lithium to be a huge problem, other than the fact that it usually just means they're trucking a bunch of water to the desert for concentration and evaporation ponds (or worse, using the local groundwater in the desert instead of trucking in desalinated water like they should be).
To put it into perspective, high lithium brine and ore reserves contain about 14 million tons of lithium. Seawater contains over 2 trillion tons. We currently have a yearly consumption somewhere under 200 thousand tons. We won't be hitting a lithium resource crunch anytime soon, it'll just get more expensive. If we ever get hydrogen fusion running, we'd have to separate a bunch of lithium-6 which makes up under 5 percent of lithium.
You make that sound like it isn't an issue. Massive ocean die-offs in a localized area is still a very bad thing.
There's a reason why oil spills are treated with such seriousness. Globally, an oil spill is also not a problem.
It depends on how local we're talking about. If you build a pipe out of the littoral zone into the ocean with multiple outputs you likely wouldn't kill much of anything but a few plankton. The intake pipe is often worse than the output pipe for wildlife.
For a place like, say, the the Persian Gulf, that uses oil for heat desal and gets their intake and output from a sea so it's all littoral and doesn't as quickly exchange it's water with the ocean, of course it's an environmental nightmare. It's naturally saltier without desal because of the higher evaporation rate and small comparative inlet size of the straight of hormuz, but at this point its 25% saltier than the rest of the ocean thanks to that desal.
Are you trying to spell literal? Not trying to be a dick, just unsure if you have a different word in mind.
"Littoral" is effectively equivalent to "nearshore". Makes sense as written.
I misspelled strait, but I was referring to the shallows that contain the vast majority of ocean life due to ease of photosynthesis with littoral. Much of the Persian Gulf is within these shallows. In a lot of ways it acts like a salty inland sea that exchanges some of it's saltier water with fresher water from the ocean, but that's limited by the size of the strait of Hormuz.