"They're pretty happy. The urchins had some babies, which is a very good sign," he said.
The water used at the small Poseidon prototype plant in Carlsbad, San Diego County, comes from the neighboring Encina power station.
It is drawn from the sea and serves as a cooling agent in the power station. Once used, it is piped to the desalination plant where it undergoes a four-stage filtration process, passing through coarse and fine sand, a cartridge filter and finally reverse osmosis.
The final stage removes the salt from the water by forcing it through a membrane punctured with tiny holes which, MacLaggan says, are "half a million times smaller than the width of a human hair."
But opponents of the process question the outflow of waste water and the safety of the intake.
"It may harm the area where you suck in water," says Jim Metropulos, a lawyer for the Sierra Club.
His doubts go beyond the purely environmental to address concerns about commerce and big business.
"Is there a need for desalinated water?" he asks. "If you build these plants, they need to be big and to produce a lot of water.
Water supplies could then be enlarged, and would then have to be sold.
"Would expanded supply lead to expanded population growth in areas that are already facing population growth? Are we meeting existing supply needs, or are we going to facilitate growth?"
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