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

Farm runoff normally has the opposite effect, providing too many nutrients causing things like algal blooms.

So the brine and the farm runoff will cancel out and the result will be just right for nature. Right? Right?

Always a good time for[0]:

Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.

Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.

Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?

Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!

Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=P9yruQM1ggc

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.

I think this causes its own host of issues as there are a load of other nasties such as arsenic etc in seawater which would build up there.

How does that work for e.g. small scale salt farming in many European countries that flood areas with sea water, then harvest the salt after the water has evaporated [0]?

Is it just a case of the scale making it safe?

0: https://www.timeout.com/croatia/things-to-do/ston-salt-works

I think so, yes. One person salt consumption seems wayyy less than the brime that would be created by desalination of the freshwater he needs.

Arsenic in Pod fuel too.

The desalination plan provide water when the groundwater reservoirs are too low to fulfill freshwater demand.

The brine slowly go down through geological layers. After 5 years it reaches groundwater reservoir.

20-50 years later, the regions become famous for its fun pod racing and for its numerous ghost cities around the old plain.

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.

the hard part is what water of different salinity doesn't mix the way you think it should

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

Which is good, but may not potentially scale up - if we were desalinating 5X, 10X as much seawater, it seems unlikely we could make use of that much salt, and would have to bury it or dispose of it some other way.

People are considering using salt as a building material now:

https://www.archdaily.com/994769/could-salt-be-a-material-of...

When you have a practically free resource which is waste from a large scale industrial process, cottage industries to make use of the free waste sometimes pop up. It's a solvable problem.

Then your house melts with the rain

Article talks about that kinda. You have to read at least halfway through it.

Look what you've done! I'm dissolving, dissolving! Ohh, what a world.

And it’s not just salt. Other chemicals can be harvested from that brine before you need to dispose of the leftovers, e.g. magnesium carbonate. I know because I run a climbing company that sells chalk (MgCO3) from that production pathway.

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?