[JohnMakin]

He addresses brine, but not the waste products that come from brine, and only addresses it in one sentence:

> The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged.

This is not nearly as easy as this sentence implies.

[tuatoru]

Yes it is. We do it with urban wastewater in thousands of locations around the world. This is not a hard problem, nor is it expensive.

[hnmullany]

Waste brine is substantially more dense than regular seawater, so it tends to form a coherent layer that doesn't mix easily: it's why waste brine sinks to the sea-bed and spreads out in a layer.

[tuatoru]

Diffusers are a thing. Fairly well understood.

[konschubert]

Brine is just concentrated seawater. What waste products?

[digging]

The waste product is brine. It's an extremely salty sludge that's toxic to marine life. In the same way that fresh water is "just" diluted seawater, but pumping millions of gallons of it into a coastal ecosystem would wipe it out.

[photonbucket]

The pipe should really go a dozen miles out to sea and then get pump-mixed with the destination water