It's true that environmental impact matters (although the amount of salt we're talking about is negligible - it's hard to wrap your mind around just how big the

It's true that environmental impact matters (although the amount of salt we're talking about is negligible - it's hard to wrap your mind around just how big the ocean is vs. the amount of water being extracted from it). Desalination plants have been run for a long time in Israel and Saudi Arabia. To give you an idea of the scale involved, one of Israel's large desalination plants produced 332 acre-feet of water per day. The Red Sea is around 1.8 * 10^11 acre feet of water, so assuming the Red Sea never got replenished, that would take... 1.5 million years to empty it out. The plant is removing about 1,300 tons of salt per day, which may sound like a lot, but consider that the ocean currently has about 5.0 * 10^16 of salt in it, it's not significant, assuming they were discharging the salt to the ocean - which they don't! The output of a desalination plant is more brine produced than freshwater produced, so it's not at a very large concentration and the impact on sea life is minimal. Nuclear isn't a distraction because nuclear was already installed, was working, and is sustainable. Researchers are working on a lot of things, but research doesn't equal something that can actually meet demand for water today. Desalination works today and people rely on it for water around the globe. This would be a great improvement over trying to empty out Lake Mead and the Colorado.