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How the West’s Energy Boom Could Threaten Drinking Water for 1 in 12 Americans – ProPublica

How the West’s Energy Boom Could Threaten Drinking Water for 1 in 12 Americans

PRO PUBLICA by Abrahm Lustgarten and David Hasemyer, The San Diego Union-Tribune – December 21, 2008 11:23 am ESTThis story was co-published with the San Diego Union-Tribune and also appears in that newspaper’s Dec. 21, 2008 issue. The Colorado River, the life vein of the Southwestern United States, is in trouble.

The river’s water is hoarded the moment it trickles out of the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado and begins its 1,450-mile journey to Mexico’s border. It runs south through seven states and the Grand Canyon, delivering water to Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego. Along the way, it powers homes for 3 million people, nourishes 15 percent of the nation’s crops and provides drinking water to one in 12 Americans……………………..The river is already so beleaguered by drought and climate change that one environmental study called it the nation’s “most endangered” waterway. Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography warn the river’s reservoirs could dry up in 13 years………………..

Hot Water

One of those alternative sources of energy is uranium, which is essential to the production of nuclear energy. In the last six years, new uranium mining claims within five miles of the river have nearly tripled, from 395 to 1,195, according to a review of BLM records by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based policy organization.

Although few of those claims will actually be mined, mining has a track record of contamination that alarms water officials dependant on the river. The Metropolitan Water District points to a 16 million ton pile of radioactive waste near Moab as a warning of what can happen when mining isn’t carefully controlled. The pile sits on the banks of the Colorado at the site of a mill that once processed uranium or nuclear warheads. The plant closed in 1984, but the Grand Canyon Trust estimates 110,000 gallons of radioactive groundwater still seep into the river there each day. The U.S. Department of Energy decided in 2000 to move the pile away from the river. But the planning was so complicated and the cost so high — estimates top $1 billion — that the first loads of waste won’t be hauled off until next year…………………Drilling for uranium creates pathways where raw, radioactive material can migrate into underground aquifers that drain into the river. Surface water can seep into the drill holes and mine shafts, picking up traces of uranium and then percolating into underground water sources. The milling process itself creates six pounds of radioactive and toxic waste — including ammonia, arsenic, lead and mercury — for every ounce of uranium produced……………………………..ne study compared the EPA’s environmental impact statements for 25 sites to what really happened after mining took place. Water at three quarters of the mines was found to be contaminated, even though the mines used technology and techniques that the EPA had said would keep the environment clean, according to the research done for the Environmental Working Group by Jim Kuipers, an environmental engineer in Butte, Mont.

At least four large mines that operated as recently as the 1990s — long after new regulatory standards were put in place — have caused so much contamination that the EPA designated them as priority Superfund cleanup sites. One rendered a 20-mile stretch of a Colorado River tributary completely dead……………………………

Obama’s greatest opportunity to address the conflict between water and energy may lie not in undoing policies from the past, but in looking to the future.

“The administration has an opportunity to start thinking about water as a national resource,” said Nevada’s Mulroy. “We have no rear view mirrors anymore.”

How the West’s Energy Boom Could Threaten Drinking Water for 1 in 12 Americans – ProPublica

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium

December 22, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized