And the Gironde is suffering a megafire
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In most situations you get much more bang for your buck by recycling and purifying sewage water. It’s also relatively easy to build into existing systems because most municipal sewage goes through some kind of treatment system already.
Of course that approach still only helps you stretch out an existing water supply rather than providing a brand new water supply.
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To me those two problems sound quite serious. I was aware of the toxic sludge/corrosive salt problem, and the massive energy use required. Maybe nuclear could support these plants, but the toxic output really is a limiter to where and how much you could desalinate water.
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There does seem to be some uses for the byproducts. From looking online there’s a range of things that can be obtained from like like magnesium, potassium, calcium, chlorine, road salt, regular table salt, and even some more difficult elements to obtain like uranium.
However i’m sure processing the brine is not easy, from what i can tell even just building desalination plants is immensely expensive so processing the brine for additional things is great but adds complexity. Although seeing how bad drought has been this year it might be worth it 
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Yep. The Sydney desal plant has an energy PPA (Power Purchase Agreement) with their retailer to run on 100% offset power. There may be shenanigans there, but they’re pretty open with their carbon accounting. The web page lists their CO2 output, and it’s very modest: single-digit tonnes per month figures. Anyone not familiar with utility-scale power consumption might reasonably think tonnes means a lot. But for a facility this size and capacity, that’s under 1% of what you’d otherwise expect.
https://sydneydesal.com.au/how-we-do-it/operations/operational-information/
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