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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • This plant is part of a bigger chain. So while yes, on its own it seems waste of effort, as part of the entire chain it’s a reasonable step to be more environmentally friendly and recover some energy in the process.

    A local plant desalinates water, resulting in fresh water and a brine solution that has much higher concentration of salt in it than regular sea water.

    Dumping the brine solution on its own would kill most plant and animal life around the dump site due to large saltwater concentration, so an alternative method must be found to dispose of the brine.

    Waste water from other processes can be mixed with the brine to bring it more in line with seawater salinity, making it safe to reintroduce to the ocean without severe ecological impact. This waste water is deemed to difficult or intensive to purify and treat to bring it back up clean water standards, and I’m assuming tested or filtered so as not to introduce hazardous chemicals that could damage the reverse osmosis membranes as well as sea life.

    Because there is way to mix the waste water and brine through membranes that can be used to generate electricity, this process is utilized to recover some of the energy expended in purifing the original batch of seawater resulting in the brine.

    It’s not a perfect process but it is a means of getting some use out a waste product, similar to burning garbage or rotting food rather than just dumping it into a pit and letting it rot and release methane.







  • That’s not a point in favor of why they coexist. The military is going to fund uranium mining one way or the other, given the potency of nuclear weapons as a deterrence, as well as their own militarized applications of nuclear reactors powering aircraft carriers.

    The only valid argument for why military planning influenced civilian nuclear power because the military also tested and decided on nuclear power for various applications because it was efficient, reliable and had long term viability with minimal space investment. But even the military came to the conclusion it wanted nuclear power where it could get independent of wanting nuclear weapons.

    Edit: And as a bonus, just because this myth is so dumb, Chicago-1 predated the Manhattan project and is directly cited as being an inspiration for the Manhattan project, not the other way around as people keep trying to claim. Even without nuclear weapons we would still have uranium powered nuclear reactors, and they’d probably be more prevalent without all the fearmongers hopping on the big oil bandwagon and spewing propaganda that couldn’t be further from the truth.



  • I know enough to know that if you’re worried about pollution from Nuclear then you should be worried about all the waste products in production of solar panels which can be extremely toxic. And that if you’re specifically talking about the amount of radiation a megawatt reactor will produce in it’s life time you should never venture anywhere close to a coal burning plant because the amount of radioactive material they let loose into the atmosphere is orders of magnitudes greater than you could get from a uranium reactor, with thorium reactors being predicted and shown in small scale testing to have significantly less dangerous byproducts left over. With several theories and proposed designs for fusion and thorium reactors that could recycle spent fuel and further reduce the amount of high level waste a facility would have at the end of it’s life cycle, because unlike all other forms of energy generation, the nuclear facilities contain and keep their waste products on site for decades and only transfer it off site during decommissioning.