[IkmoIkmo]

Considering drinking water is some tiny, tiny fraction of the world's water, it's probably not going to be a crazy idea to just dump the salt etc back in the oceans where it came from without causing any crazy imbalance, because we're talking about less than 1% of water.

About 2.5% of all the world's water is fresh water, and of that about 65% is in glaciers and icecaps. The roughly 0.8% of the world's water that remains, another 65% or so is permafrost and ice, only about 0.5% of the 65% of the 2.5% of the world's water is in river's for example.

See for example: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/pictures/watercyclekids/worlds-wat...

So the notion of taking a small fraction of the ocean, desalinating it, and dumping the rest back in the ocean (as will eventually the water itself, later on in the process) probably isn't a big deal.

But then it's just inference, I'm not intimate with the subject. Biggest hurdle for me was always that desal was crazily energy intensive. I can't imagine it's become orders of magnitude more efficient, and as energy costs didn't plummet on such a scale (orders of magnitude), I thought it'd still be. But it turns out the costs are dropping fast.

I mean, I can easily see desal working for drinking water & cooking (few litres a day) for everyone on earth, but things like agriculture are a whole different beast. A kilo of wheat for example averages over 1.000 litres of water, while meat can go all the way up to 20.000 litres. I can't imagine desal for the billions of farm animals we slaughter every year (yes, billions :-/) , each weighing tens if not hundreds of kilos, for example, or even just agricultural production.

I'd be happy to be enlightened!

[banachtarski]

This is emphatically not true. The salinated impurities that are a byproduct of this process will kill everything in the zone that is is reintroduced to. Just because it is a small fraction of the ocean doesn't mean we can easily spread it across the entire ocean. Even then, we are doing an irreversible transformation of the ocean as a whole, and we need to be smart about the waste for the process to be sustainable.

I can think of several countries that did this incorrectly and killed large portions of their coastal ecology as a result.

[ars]

> The salinated impurities that are a byproduct of this process

That's a very inaccurate way of saying that. You are implying that that desalination creates new byproducts. It does not. Any byproducts were already in the ocean.

You just run your outflow pipe far into the ocean, and mix it with ordinary seawater and it's sufficiently diluted.

[infinotize]

That's misleading. It's not technically a byproduct, but taking literally tons of salt that was spread evenly throughout the ocean and dumping it out at high concentration at the end of a pipe has significant (and bad) ramifications for the ecosystem at the end of the pipe.

[amazon_not]

Nobody said to dump it out a pipe at one single point. Spread it out leaky pipe style over a large volume of ocean so that the average salt concentration does not significantly rise.

[mattmanser]

Well, if you can think of them, can you type their names out and share them perhaps?

Or are you generally referring to pollution rather than disastrous desalination attempts?