Saudi Thirst for Water Is Creating a Toxic Brine Problem (opens in new tab)

It's from anti-fouling and general corrosion. Not sure what makes these plants special though since a population's regular water supply infrastructure would end up producing the same type of waste from pumps and what not.

> which will get diluted back again

Also raising the concentration of salts in the oceans, especially in the immediate area where they're dumping it back into the ocean in the gulf that has weak ocean currents (due to being a gulf). I can't imagine the wildlife will enjoy that much. It also makes it harder for future desalination, as it's having to desalinate an ever increasing percentage of salt since they just dump it back into the ocean.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/desalination-brea...

Even if it's just extra salty it's still a local problem. You can't just dump it all in the ocean because it would still kill everything. You'd need to dump it out slowly or over a much wider area for the concentration not to be harmful. It's like a polluted river killing everything where it dumps out even if the amount of pollution is inconsequential overall.

The article said the brine has chlorine and copper (added, and remaining).

"It appears plastic-based life forms co-evolved alongside carbon-based life on this body, how interesting, we thought only carbon-based life was possible but there is just so much microplastic with large concentrations in these ancient civilization centers! It also appears they dug up, refined, and relocated the bulk of the uranium and plutonium to this cave system, they must have worshiped it. How bizarre, they could have used this in Snarlsfarogogogog reactors with almost 100% efficiency and only had transmuted metals left as a byproduct. And what is with all of these 'AOL' squares and circles?! This must have been their servant class but there's no discernible means of locomotion"

"They took a garden and turned it into a parking lot."

Like, what a nice overlords they ended up to be?

I don't understand the equivalence to oil at all -- are they saying that one barrel of this contaminated water has the same environmental impact of dumping a barrel of oil in the water?

I don't really understand the relevance of equating water waste to exports, if it were a nation known for pork exports, would they put the water volume in terms of hogs?

  bash$ units
  You have: m^3
  You want: barrels
        * 6.2898108
        / 0.15898729

It seems you're right, yes, should be 200. (Gee, so a cubic metre is ~6 barrels? A 'barrel' is tiny, if that's right, 160 litres or so, much smaller than I imagined.)

Man that ground water took thousands of years to build up and they are draining it in decades. Kinda like oil lol.

They add copper as part of the purification process

Apparently it's for prevention of fouling:

> Combined low concentrations of copper (5 μg/l and chlorine (50,μg/l have been effective in preventing both micro and macro-fouling in over 120 seawater installations since 1987.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242186534_FOULING_P...

With added copper

That impression is wrong.