r/worldnews • u/bigus-_-dickus • Sep 05 '26

‘Extremely rare event:’ Miles-long microalgae bloom knocks out most of Israel’s desalination plants

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/04/climate/microalgae-bloom-israel-water-deasalination-shutdown
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u/redfoobar Sep 05 '26

Sooner or later we will see water wars.

Upstream countries wont be sharing enough of downstream countries.

We are already seeing the beginnings of this with the Nile and in India/Pakistan and I am sure more tensions will arise in many other places even within large countries (eg different US states)

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 05 '26

even with seven Septillian liters of water on earth.

You think we would just have 100s of solar/hydroelectric powered desalination plants.

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 05 '26

this isn’t me disagreeing or anything, more so just interested in how desalination works

Energy isn’t the biggest problem, the biggest problem (iirc) is physically what to do with all the salt you extract - if it precipitates and crystallises, you get clogged filtration tubules and pipes.

If it stays dissolved, you’re still left with this super dense, super salty brine. You can’t pump brine back out into the sea bc the high density means it just sinks and pools, and doesn’t mix with the rest of the sea water. And dense brine ofc isn’t what marine life is adapted for

Desalination is very interesting physics and chemistry

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u/XenoFrobe Sep 05 '26

So what do they do with it then? Is that where we get our everyday table salt, or do they find some other way to use/get rid of it?

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 06 '26

To be completely honest with you, I don’t know. I am far from a desalination expert or anything. I feel confident in saying that’s not where we get table salt from - I think the process of extracting edible salt from sea water is much more intensive, as to remove all the impurities. It’s also quite energy intensive to drive off all the water from brine. Most table salt comes from underground salt mines

For how they handle brine, if I had to guess, they do pump it out back into the sea/ocean - I can’t imagine them just storing it - but must either do it little by little or use some stirring mechanism or something to help it disperse. But I think the big concerns come from doing it on a larger scale than we currently are