Put them down stream of farm runoff so everything is already dead

Build cities from stabilized salt. Bricks, grout, pourable slabs.

We pump brine inland to a large flat expendabe plain and flood it to allow the water to evaporate off and the salt to sette. 20-50 years later, pod racing on the salt flat.

The ocean is way too big for removing some drinking water (which is going to end up back in the ocean anyway) to have a material effect on the salt concentration.

The problem is strictly local: if the brine produced by the plant is dumped in an area with low flow, it can hang around and affect sea life.

If you use a big discharge pipe and put it a decent distance offshore in a current where it can mix effectively, there’s very little effect.

This is not a reason to shoot down desalination plants as a concept, it’s a design constraint to take into account when building them.

That always looked like a no-problem to me. Can't the brine be put in a pool and let evaporate instead? You get drinking water from the desalination plant and salt.

Instead of pumping the brine into a pool, pump it into a ship. As the ship sails, it slowly releases the brine at a rate much more tolerable. When the tanks are 50% empty, turn around and come home. lather rinse repeat.

of course, a renewable powered ship

There are commercial salt harvesting operations which use such brine. No need to flush it back in the ocean.

If you have ever flown into SFO you have seen the reddish pools. (By the way the red color comes from Brine Shrimp, which presumably there is also use for)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/salt-ponds-san-francisco

We had the same problem with power plants dumping hot untreated water back in the environment. This is why cooling towers are synonymous with nuclear power plants. This is an easy solution to fix, but like all engineering it costs extra. For power plants it was fixed through legislation. You literally have an entire oceans worth of water to reconstitute the brine. This was more problematic of older system using distillation.

People are coming up with some wacky solutions, but am I missing something or can you just pull in more seawater and dilute the brine closer to the ocean's natural salinity before you send it back into the ocean?

Or (at least in the US), we will simply stop doing things like growing alfalfa in the desert to feed cows being raised in Texas. Sure beef will be a little more expensive but…

You’re actually right. We’ll probably burn garbage and radio hosts will call people against burning garbage effeminate names.

Desalination cones should work in tropical climates.

[1] http://www.watercone.com/product.html

That's a damn good argument for making sure we don't go into overpopulation.

spoken like a true idealist

Yes but when glaciers melt completely and water deposits are empty we will struggle even with extremely efficient water systems.

Direct carbon capture, electric vehicles, electric building heat, electric industrial process heat, and desalination are all massive new sectors that need to be powered that are barely on the radar of the existing electric grid.

And we need more power to let emerging economies rise out of poverty, where having electric pumps and washing are truely life-changing from a quality of life perspective.

So we need about 5x more total energy while also shifting from 80% fossil to 0% fossil.

This is why I advocate for nuclear while most people advocate for wind and solar. We need advocates for all clean energy. Nuclear can actually use its own direct low-carbon heat to help with buildings (district heat) and industry, and that heat can also help in desal in some cases, though RO is the preference these days and doesn't really need that much heat input.

Tidal power is a thing. Tidal power for ocean desalination eliminates the need for transmission infrastructure. Desalination has so many obvious upsides that I'm increasingly suspicious of the people insisting it's too difficult to contemplate, none of whom contribute anything of value to the discussion.