Saltwater corrodes firefighting equipment and may harm ecosystems, especially those like the chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles that aren’t normally exposed to seawater. Gardeners know that small amounts of salt – added, say, as fertilizer – does not harm plants, but excessive salts can stress and kill plants.
The problem with desalination is that there’s a super-concentrated salt sludge that needs to be discarded after the process. Dumping that back into the ocean creates excess salinity which fucks up the ecosystem in the immediate area.
Not saying that desalination isn’t a good idea, just that there’s more to think about than “put seawater in, get tap water out”.
Why cant it be turned into sea salt (the “spice”)?
I don’t know, but if I had to guess like everything else it comes down to money. It’s energy intensive to desalinate seawater to the degree it’s drinkable, and now we’re talking about adding even more energy to refine it even further to make it suitable for human consumption. That makes any recovered salt expensive compared to natural salt deposits. Much easier (read: cheaper) to just scrape salt deposits that have already evaporated.
We got around that in San Diego by already having several acres of evaporative pools to process sea water into salt at the south end of the bay. The desalinization plant is just helping our ability to create sea salt by dumping the waste salt product into an absolutely huge first stage evaporative “pond.”
If you wanted I can literally take pictures of the south end of the bay, and all the “salt ponds,” that we’ve, apparently, built, and are expanding.
Sell that shit to the north east! BAM.
I would imagine the thousands of cubic kilometers of freshwater currently entering the ocean from global warming far outbalances the little water we take from desalinization, and the net effect even if we put that salt back is quite a bit lower salinity.