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Comment by nickkell | Hacker News Reader

Solutionism rears its ugly head

"Solutionism" is a fantastic word for this particular slur, since it gets to the heart of why technological solutions to our problems are not considered: because they might solve the problem, thereby robbing the politicians of their ability to wield the problem as a weapon against the population.

Particularly the idea that we should conserve our way to carbon neutrality instead of figuring out how and spending the money/effort to do a lot of carbon capture drives me crazy. We're not suddenly going to stop pulling ancient carbon out of the ground in the near future, and these same people are always talkig about how we are already at the point of no return, so if you really care about the carbon problem, you'd recognize we need to figure out how to pull some of it out of the cycle (of course it's also good if we don't use too much fossil fuels, but that's never going to be enough and politically impossible, good luck telling the third world they shouldn't consume like we have been doing).

We should continue investigating methods for carbon capture.

But none of them look even close to cost competitive.

That was true of solar power 20 years ago, too. But eventually, we got there.

We will probably get there with carbon capture too.

Though I do agree, we should focus more heavily on nuclear power now, because it is much closer to ready-for-prime-time than carbon capture.

Still, I think that carbon capture is an excellent future technology for the production of carbon-neutral liquid fuels. Liquid fuels are super great, and they can be made into a very clean portable power source through the use of nuclear power and carbon capture tech.

Each dollar diverted to nukes from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.

The money spent on coal alone while waiting for a nuke to come online would suffice to build out enough solar and wind to match the nuke's output. The money spent on the nuke itself would pay for many times that much solar and wind. The solar and wind would start displacing carbon emissions almost immediately, not many years later. Displacement would increase throughout construction, and power generated early would help fund subsequent construction.

Carbon capture cannot be any kind of solution to excess carbon emission rate.

However, after carbon emissions has been substantially curtailed, we will need to capture the carbon already exhausted, because otherwise it hangs about for many decades, doing harm the entire time.

I'm curious why you think technical solutions are "ugly." Political solutions seem far more intractable and ugly.

If we produce huge quantities of clean water by desalination of sea water, we will produce huge quantities of brine.

What do we do with this brine? Certainly not dumping it in the sea?

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

There you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine#Wastewater

From your sub-link:

"Wastewater brine can pose a significant environmental hazard, both due to corrosive and sediment-forming effects of salts and toxicity of other chemicals diluted in it."

Unpolluted brine from desalination plants and cooling towers can be returned to the ocean. To limit the environmental impact, it can be diluted with another stream of water, such as the outfall of a wastewater treatment or power plant. Since brine is heavier than seawater and would accumulate on the ocean bottom, it requires methods to ensure proper diffusion, such as installing underwater diffusers in the sewerage.[13] Other methods include drying in evaporation ponds, injecting to deep wells, and storing and reusing the brine for irrigation, de-icing or dust control purposes.[12]

Seems like a well known problem with some solutions already in place

Why not put it into the sea from whence it came?

That is dumping it in the sea, which creates a new set of problems.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2190929-growth-of-desal...

That article is trash. The link to the study doesn't even work.

I'm not sure dumping it in the sea would be a problem. At first it seems it would have to be because it would seem to lead to ever increasing brine levels which surely cannot be good.

But I'm not sure the brine levels would actually be ever increasing.

Consider the water that we take out. Short term it goes somewhere on land to be used for some purpose humans deem useful to have land water for, but after that I'd guess that much of it eventually returns to the sea.

At some point wouldn't we reach a steady state where the rate we are taking water out to desalinate equals the rate that water from past desalination is returning?

At that point brine levels would be higher than before we started widespread desalination, but they would not longer be rising. As long as that new steady state higher brine level is not too high it might be OK.

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