It should be easy to mitigate any environmental impact. A long, leaky pipe for effluent, and extracting only a fraction of the water pumped in before exhausting

It should be easy to mitigate any environmental impact. A long, leaky pipe for effluent, and extracting only a fraction of the water pumped in before exhausting it, would eliminate any problem. Probably they planned to cheap out and just dump the brine at the shore.