Brine, salt water, things that come out of Desalination plants are normally put back in the ocean at an environmental cost. Why cant the brine be pumped somewhere safe, or have the salt removed and put somewhere safe? Arent there plenty of places on land to put all of that salt? Why cant the brine be pumped into the desert to evaporate?
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The scale of it is completely off the charts. Storage is infeasible. A desalination plant produces around 1-1.5 the amount of brine for every amount of fresh water. A desalination plant produces hundreds of thousands of m^3 of fresh water a day meaning at least that amount of brine daily. For reference, an olympic sized swimming pool has around 2000-2500 m^3 capacity – so the amount of storage for 1 day’s worth of brine (every day) would be around 100 swimming pools.
Even though desalination is expensive, water is still (relatively) inexpensive and is impractical at high costs. Pumping water or brine anywhere is expensive. Unless the desert is within a few tens of miles (at the most!) of the plant, the cost of pumping the water would be financially infeasible, not to mention having a huge carbon footprint from using all that energy.
The effects of brine isn’t huge, all things considered. With any sort of wave activity at the sea or ocean, the brine mixes and becomes insignificant within a fairly short distance. Of course, it needs to be discharged responsibly (ie not near sensitive marine ecosystems or fisheries etc). But remember the evaporation off the ocean removes far more water (like millions of times more) from the ocean a day than any amount of desalination plants could ever hope to do although it doesn’t do it in a concentrated area.
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