Solarpunk technology

How many have? You seem to know a lot about it

It's a solar still that can operate continuously without maintenance as it doesn't get clogged with salt. That's a pretty nifty and practical achievement.

They're also proposing it be used at household scale, because the system is so small, rather than scaled up to factory scale.

You are not shitty, you are right.

Large scale desalination produces a lot of brine. There's no way to release it in small amounts because it isn't produced in small amounts.

You could but estuaries are incredibly important ecosystems and increased salinity might be harmful to them. Arguably the best place is oceanic areas with strong currents to promote brine mixing with normal seawater. The worst impacts are where the brine sinks and does not mix, creating a dead zone on the sea floor.

yes they do that in some facilities, it's called sewer discharge and can be quiet effective in a well monitored and designed system, surface water discharge uses a similar method of dribbling brine into the water as part of a system that uses ocean currents and tides to disperse the brine back into the ocean.

While brine return is a complicated and important step it's really not some major ecosystem destroying problem in any of the modern installs - it's just important to model and monitor the system, the same way sewage systems find a location where currents carry stuff away and allow it to disperse brine return systems do, with brine it's just stuff that belongs in the ocean anyway so it all mixes back in fairly quickly.

A lot of people seem to like to learn the difficulties involved in a new tech and then just use negative thinking to exaggerate it into a reason the tech will never be useful even after decades of improvement and investment. There are huge projects around the world which have done really positive things for local ecosystems, they're even refilling the sea of galilee after decades of over extraction and allowing groundwater levels to restore.

Sounds good to me

The brine from this system is not very concentrated

When I first read about this I thought, why not outflow into a tiered salt mine and let evaporation do its thing

Remineralization is a well known and solved problem in existing processes (RO and distillation). I personally built and ran a high performance RO that produced < 5ppm TDS water on my farm, and experienced the ill effects of drinking demineralized water. Excess thirst, urination and muscle cramps.

The WHO published an excellent study on this issue. The issue is not an actual lack of minerals, as we get very little of our minerals from water, but the fact that your body is not designed to absorb water with zero solutes. Effectively the sensors in your gut go out of span and you end up dumping solutes from your bloodstream instead.

The solution is very simple and cheap, that is to add any salt so that your body can detect it. Sodium chloride is fine, being "normal salt" of course, but I add potassium chloride as most of us get too much sodium as is. This is available as "salt substitute".

A pinch in a glass or a tablespoon in a 5 gallon jug is enough to completely eliminate any ill effects. Commercially as mentioned you can blend back some of the brine stream. It's not really a problem as long as you don't effectively deliver DI water to your customers by accident.

Are you worried it's not going to make its way back to the ocean?

Definitely something needing consideration. Currently reverse osmosis plants are pumping super saline water out. I haven't looked too closely at how much damage they're doing. I've heard it's a problem they're trying to address

I also know ice cap melting is reducing salinity in other areas, which effects tempurature absorption and currents.