Mendocino
Short Term
A 1,000,000 GPD desalination plant will be built North East of Fort Bragg, Ca and this will supply the immediate area. The brine will be discharged 1 mile offshore and it will be mixed 6 : 1 with raw sea water before discharge. The brine discharge should only have a slightly higher salinity as the ocean and zero harm will be done to the environment.
The lead time on the plant is 8 months and it could be operational within 12 months.
An infrastructure of water supply lines will be built in and around Mendocino and other small coastal towns. Initial temporary pipelines will be above ground, but more permanent pipelines will be buried underground. The installation would be done one block at a time and a one week shut down of each street would be expected.
Long Term
Several more small desalination plants can be built along the coast to supply drinking water to coastal communities. With zero effects on the environment, a lot of the negative issues will be eliminated.
A series of much larger 50,000,000 GPD desalination plants can be built near Honey Lake, CA and the fresh water can be fed into Lake Oreille and Lake Shasta. From there the existing river system will distribute the water to local areas. Settling ponds will initially be used to reduce the amount of brine from being discharged into the ocean.
Once the neutral brine discharge system has been tested and accepted by environmental groups, more brine can be discharged into the ocean. This will allow an almost unlimited supply of fresh water to be distributed around Northern California.
A 50,000,000 GPD desalination plant can be built east of Fort Bragg and the water will be piped into Mendocino Lake. This will in turn flow into the Russian River and supply all of the areas along the Russian River.
All new pipelines will be routed alongside existing roadways.
Power to run the plants will come from Big 4 solar farms located in Western Nevada.