Fort Peck Dam, Like Many US Dams, Needs Repairs that the Nation Cannot Afford

Proposed repairs to bolster Montana’s Fort Peck Dam following epic flooding along the Missouri River last year would cost more than $225 million, according to cost estimates released in 2012 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

But with money short, Corps officials acknowledged they are able to afford only $46 million for damage assessments and repair work for now. Most of that will be spent on repairs to the dam’s spillway.

Dams, which often seem like a good idea when they’re in the planning stage, eventually become fiscal liabilities that will  need expensive repairs and even more expensive decommissioning.

Read the full story.

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America’s Aquifers Are Threatened by Over-pumping and Pollution

Twenty percent of US water for drinking, crop irrigation and everything else comes from underground water.  We seldom think of aquifers as being “endangered,” but that is actually the case, as we continue to overuse their water and pollute them with chemicals.

The great Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the Great Plains, supplies 27% of the nation’s farmland with irrigation water.  It has undergone decades of depletion through overpumping.

The Central Valley aquifers of California are also being rapidly depleted to supply the nation’s fruit and vegetable demand.

The mighty aquifers that supply New York and New Jersey are being drained and polluted.

Among the suggested aquifer-friendly actions we can take are “curbing fertilizer and pesticide use, responsibly disposing of pharmaceuticals and hazardous waste rather than flushing them down the drain, maintaining septic systems to reduce nitrogen pollution, and protecting open space to promote rainwater infiltration and aquifer recharge.”

Edwards Aquifer That Lies Beneath a Large Portion of Central Texas

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Green Energy Experimenters in Oregon Are Pumping Millions of Gallons of Water into Newberry Volcano

In an ambitious plan being undertaken in Oregon, geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano to demonstrate new technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector.

They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn’t dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes.

The site of the geothermal experiment  is the Newberry Volcano, 20 miles outside Bend. OR.

Read more.

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Water Prices Rising Faster Than Other Utilities Services

The price that Americans pay for water is rising faster than the cost of any other utility service in the United States — be it gas, electricity, or telephone charges.

According to the newest report in an ongoing national survey conducted by Circle of Blue, water prices in 30 major U.S. cities rose 18 percent over the last two years and 7 percent in the past year.

Full Details with Map on the Circle of Blue Website

Important New Method for Removing Fluoride from Residential Tap Water Revealed

Fluoride, among the most challenging water treatment issues for residential users, can apparently be removed with relative ease using a newly described treatment method called simply the “Refrigerator Treatment.”  The new approach is radical in that it uses only readily available items to accomplish what has been possible before only through high-tech reverse osmosis and activated alumina methodology.

Full details on this video.

Virginia’s State House, Designed by Thomas Jefferson, To Harvest Rainwater  — May 29, 2012

Fountain Will Soon Be Filled with Rainwater

The Virginia State Capitol at Richmond has been added to the growing number of public and private buildings around the commonwealth that use rainwater harvesting to reduce potable water demand and decrease runoff. Rainwater harvesting is the ancient practice of collecting rainwater for beneficial uses, such as irrigation, toilet and urinal flushing, and make-up water for cooling towers.

For Full Details

Increased Burning of Fossil Fuels Is Making Oceans More Acidic

The oceans have always served as a sink for carbon dioxide, but the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution, especially over the last 40 years, has given them more than they can safely absorb.

The result is the gradual acidification of the oceans.

Changing something as fundamental as the pH of seawater — a measurement of how acid or alkaline it is — has profound effects. Increased acidity attacks the shells of shellfish and the skeletal foundation of corals, dissolving the calcium carbonate they’re made of. Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Ocean acidification threatens the corals and every other species that makes its living on the reefs.

More Information from the New York Times.

New Wind Turbine Can Manufacture Water from Thin Air

The French company Eole Water says that it has  successfully modified the traditional wind turbine design to create the WMS1000, an appliance that can manufacture drinking water from humid air.

The company aims to start rolling out the giant products for sale later in 2012, initially focusing on remote communities in arid countries where water resources are scarce.

The product aims to make water available for traditionally water-challenged rural areas.

Turbine Creates Water From Thin Air

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California Dairies Are Major Water Polluters and Regulation is Lax

California’s Central Valley is home to some of the state’s largest dairies, and in the  Central Valley alone, cows generate the same amount of fecal waste as a city of 21
million people.  Much of this fecal matter goes untreated and pollutes waterways.

Regulators are doing little to nothing to change this.  Not only are the pollution levels frightening, but so too is the lack of care shown by the agency in charge of protecting groundwater supplies.

Read more details.

Getting Rid of Radium in Water:  The San Angelo Dilemma.

by Gene Franks

The water from San Angelo, Texas’ Hickory Aquifer has seven times the allowable radiation level for drinking water. The radiation comes from an elevated level of radium.  Radium is measured in picocuries per liter (pCi/L).  The federal standard for radium in water is five pCi/L.

The standard is based on the notion that water above 5 picocuries raises the cancer risk at a rate of 2 cases for every 10,000 people who consume a half gallon of the water over a 70 year period.

The citizens of San Angelo are faced with a difficult decision on how to reduce the radium level in their water to an acceptable level.  All options are expensive.  Part of the expense is purchasing and operating the treatment equipment, but a considerable additional cost comes from getting rid of the waste from the treatment process.

There are two standard treatments for radium in water–reverse osmosis and cation exchange–plus a third strategy which does not remove radium but dilutes it with water from a non-contaminated source so that the blended water meets standards.

Reverse osmosis readily removes radium, but in doing so it adds it to a waste stream that must be disposed of.  The reject stream, usually called brine, is about 10% of the total water volume.  This ten percent waste stream is most easily disposed of by injecting it into a deep well specifically drilled for the purpose.

Cation exchange works exactly like  home water softeners except that the softening resin is quickly contaminated and has to be trucked to a hazardous disposal dump at considerable expense. The water recovery rate is better than with reverse osmosis, but the spent resin disposal is costly.

Another possibility is a hybrid system that removes the radium from the brine from the reverse osmosis unit with ion exchange rather than pumping it into a well.  With this method there is resin to truck away, but there is less of it. This method is the least expensive of the three over a 30 year period, but it requires the greatest initial capital outlay.

Finally, the dilution method produces no waste but requires very large amounts of uncontaminated water.  In the case of San Angelo, this method is not being seriously considered because the water for blending is simply not available.

In the case of San Angelo, the projected 30-year cost of any of these treatments exceeds $100 million, as the table below indicates.

At this time (May of 2012), San Angelo is debating its course. San Angelo’s dilemma is mirrored in many of the nation’s communities.  Water changes with time, and more to the point, regulatory standards change.  Radioactive water, after all, was marketed as a tonic just a century ago. Now it is a highly regulated contaminant that costs millions to remove from municipal water supplies.

As information grows about water contaminants, regulatory pressure felt by city water departments increases.

In recent years, the change in the federally mandated allowable level for arsenic has put many suppliers that were in compliance with the old standard in the difficult position of having to add expensive treatment equipment to protect the health of customers who are unwilling to have the cost passed to them in the form of higher water bills.

The use of chloramine in place of chlorine is an another often-unpopular change that has resulted from increased awareness of the health hazard posed by spin-off chemicals that result from chlorination.

The next great regulatory battle that the EPA faces is likely to be the need to set a maximum allowable level (MCL) for hexavalent chromium.  When the MCL is established, whether suppliers may face $ millions in added expense depends entirely upon where the number is set. A few parts per billion one way or the other will amount to $ billions in treatment expense.

Protecting public health is the top priority, but water suppliers have their problems as well.  My own view is that the solution to this dilemma of conflicting priorities must involve a compromise that takes into account the fact that only a small percentage of our processed water is actually used for human consumption.  Surely it makes no sense to apply difficult and very costly treatments like those required for radium or arsenic reduction to water that is going to be used mainly for washing cars, watering golf courses, and flushing toilets.

The realities of our current water situation point to increasing use of point of use systems.  Unless we plan to continue to truck tons of radioactive treatment resin to toxic waste sites, home treatment units to provide a small amount of top quality water for the home are in my opinion an essential part of a sensible overall water treatment plan.

In the early 1900s radiation water was sold as a health tonic.