National
Water Center, Eureka Springs,
Arkansas
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healing the waters
The Turbid Tap (Water) Dance 1/24/1998
Protecting Watersheds Can Save Billions in
Water Watershed protection must be considered part of
the overall water supply “Watershed protection must be considered part of the overall water supply and delivery strategy,” says TPL President Martin J. Rosen. “The EPA estimated that it will cost billions in concrete and steel to make our water safe to drink. But to rely exclusively on water treatment not only costs more, it undervalues the additional benefits of protecting open space, including habitat preservation, recreational opportunities, and flood control.” The TPL report, Protecting the Source, underscores alarming declines in both the quality and quantity of America’s drinking water, and traces those declines directly to ill-conceived and uncontrolled development in the watersheds that protect and replenish our drinking water supplies. The report comes at a critical time. Lands that supply groundwater are being paved over at an alarming rate; aquifers, underground water supplies, are being tapped out and some have already been lost. Ground and surface waters alike are becoming increasingly polluted; hundreds of municipal wells have had to be closed and capped because of ground water contamination. Several cities have had to abandon reservoirs overwhelmed by development’s pollution. “Its a lot cheaper to prevent pollution than to take it out later,” says Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the American Water Works Association. The 1993 Milwaukee cryptosporidium outbreak, which claimed 103 lives, proved that technology cannot infallibly provide safe drinking water. Milwaukee’s water was both filtered and disinfected at the time of the outbreak. (Editor’s Note – It is this incident to which author/poet Miriam Ella refers to in the opening stanza of her poem on the opposite page). Thomas C. Leslie, executive director of the Consulting Engineers Council of Georgia reports that over a 70 year period, Atlanta and its surrounding communities have had to abandon eight water supplies, all degraded by watershed development. The message, he says, is clear: “If you don’t control the watershed. don’t build a reservoir, because eventually you’ll have to abandon it.” TPL’s report demonstrates that the preservation of even
small amounts of watershed land can significantly reduce contamination and
increase quantities of source water. New York City, by investing $1.5 billion to
protect and conserve its watershed, will Preventing the problem, through watershed protection, is faster, cheaper, and has lots of other benefits. Adding up the costs and benefits, watershed protection was not a difficult decision.” Sterling Forest, a key portion of the watershed supplying water to 25 percent of the population of New Jersey, is being protected for less than $55 million-with the added benefits of preserving more than 15,00 acres of mature-growth forest for recreation and wildlife. “Land-use planning is an absolute necessity in watershed management,” says New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. “Some watershed land simply must not be developed. Its natural value in buffering, storing, filtering and recharging far exceeds whatever commercial development value it may hold.” National polls consistently show overwhelming support for protecting water quality. Voters in New York and California last year approved referenda that would fund watershed protection, including land acquisition. Localities are also funding long-term protection of watershed: Dade County, Florida, imposes a 3 percent surcharge on water bills; Spokane, Washington, residents pay $15 a year specifically for aquifer protection, and Providence, Rhode Island, collects a special water tax to fund watershed acquisition. Based on its findings, TPL recommends that:
“Protecting the watershed,” Massachusetts Water Resources
Authority Executive Director Doug MacDonald says, “pays both short and
long-term dividends. The short-term return is the ability to deliver drinking
water that is as palatable as it is potable, at a low cost. And the long-term
return is that you repeat the short-term return year after year.” here
The Task Force to Bring Back the Don: "Never doubt that a small group f
committed citizens can change the world. The Task Force to Bring Back the Don was formed in 1989 by the City of Toronto and a group of concerned citizens who believed that the Don River Valley could once again become one of the great natural spaces in the City.
Over ten thousand volunteers have taken part in semi-annual plantings, clean-up days, pond and wetland restoration projects, the creation of wildflower meadows and wildlife corridors, safety and access improvement projects, and community education and involvement programs. Thirty-five thousand trees and shrubs have been planted. The detritus of years of dumping has been largely removed. Regular presentations to schools and outside agencies, guided walking tours, canoe trips down the river and the creation of lively and provocative public art pieces along the river’s edge have made the public increasingly aware that the river runs through us. We have much to celebrate; there is still a great deal to do before our goal of a clean, green and accessible river valley is attained. Cuernavaca "City of Eternal Spring"
. . .
Nuclear Power:
Legislators intended the law to provide PI with enough storage capacity to last until 2002. As soon as the law passed, though, NSP extended the storage capacity life to 2004 by leaving fuel in the core longer. This makes the waste more difficult to manage for the next 240,000 years, and never mind that throughout the decision-making process, NSP claimed that higher fuel burn-up was not possible. Through 1997, NSP tried and failed to get the legislature to get rid of the storage capacity limit, and NSP knew it would fail again in 1998. NSP switched tactics and sought permission from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (MPUC) to cram 195 additional waste assemblies into the PI storage pool. This would extend PI reactor operations until 2007. The North American Water Office (NAWO) opposed NSP's proposal before MPUC to no avail, and is challenging MPUC authority to supercede the limit set by law in 1994 in the Minnesota Court of Appeals. We like our chances. Meanwhile, ever since 1994, NSP has led the nuclear industry's irresponsible efforts to get a high-level nuclear waste dump in a parking lot next to Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and to establish a private dump somewhere in Indian Country. NSP wanted a private dump on Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, and when that failed, now is seeking a private dump on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation in Utah. NAWO and its many allies continue working diligently to stop these ill advised projects, and fortunately, NSP has so far had no more success with these various "Mobile Chernobyl" proposals than it had in the Minnesota Legislature. The nuclear waste management strategies sponsored by the nuclear industry all rely on putting waste into thousands of dry storage casks. The industry pretends it knows how to unload and maintain casks after a storage period, but it doesn't. The industry's underlying assumption is that essential cask unloading and maintenance procedures are simply the reverse of loading procedures. But they aren't. So every cask that gets loaded may end up releasing its deadly radionucloids into the environment as a result of thermal shock, liquid metal embattlement, metal creep, or any of a number of other ill-understood degradation modes that are not accounted for. NAWO is attempting to address this troubling situation through a petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), asking it to establish cask management rules that account for these degradation modes. The NRC was forced to open a rule-making docket, but the issues remain unresolved. At any rate, no dump outside of Minnesota is accepting PI high-level waste. It is not likely such a dump will exist by 2004, when authorized PI storage capacity is full, assuming NAWO prevails in state court this fall against the PUC. Even if NAWO does not prevail, NSP will be hard pressed to have a dump outside of Minnesota for PI waste by 2007. In other words, if the forces of Truth and Justice in Minnesota can, for the next four years, prevent NSP from changing the law, we will force PI to close. And the door to a safer energy future based on the efficient use of locally available renewable energy will be knocked open a bit further. Our hope is that we can shut these reactors off before nuclear steam generators explode, or some other human or mechanical failure results in catastrophic radiation releases.
NSP and
other Mid-west electric utilities want
to
broker an additional 5,000 MW of For better or worse, new large power lines are needed to transmit this imported hydro-power into the U.S. People in East-Central Minnesota and West-Central Wisconsin have already organized to defeat the first of these power line projects, the Chisago Project, which NSP wanted to cross the Wild and Scenic St. Croix River at Taylor's Falls, and then go east and south. Putting the breaks on the Chisago Project only opened the door for Minnesota Power Co. to resurrect the Arrowhead-Arpin Line, which would transmit the same Manitoba hydro-power from Duluth down to Wausau, Wisconsin, and into the Milwaukee/Chicago area. So now, people are organizing ferociously against the Arrowhead-Arpin Line. Already, four counties and the Lac Court Oreilles Tribe have passed resolutions against this power line. Central to the organizing strategy against these power lines is the fact that they are not needed for the "greater public good." They are only needed to transmit bulk power to distant load centers for the aggrandizement of private corporate interests. By what right do these corporations get to exercise the power of eminent domain? On the other hand, if landowners all along the line route must be made business partners, and compensated according to how many kilowatt hours passed through their property on an annual basis, the delivered price of electricity won't be so cheap. The captains of industry who covet cheap power in de-regulated energy markets may then decide to look again at safer, cleaner, more equitable energy options. Concurrently, transmission constraints limit the amount of renewable energy from wind capacity mandated by the 1994 law that can go to market. If landowners along these line routes become business partners in bringing that wind energy to market, we may set precedence regarding how electricity is brought equitably to market in a restructured electric utility environment. We shall see about ideology, pragmatism, and how crazy people are. In short, our energy future is still up for grabs. If enough of us learn to understand our stake in public electric utility decision-making proceedings, and organize to defend our interests, our children may still have a fighting chance. If we help them learn how to fight! George Crocker co-founded the North American Water Office in 1982 with his
wife, Lea Foushee, to reduce pollution and environmental racism caused by large
nuclear, fossil fuel and hydro power plants. Through public education,
organizing and intervention, they promote the transition to energy management
based on the efficient use of local renewable energy resources. Since 1988, this
work has been primarily focused on Northern States Power Co.'s nuclear
operations on Prairie Island. Prior to founding the North American Water Office,
George worked with farmers across West-Central Minnesota and North Dakota who
were fighting against the huge direct-current power line stretching east from
the Coal Creek Station in North Dakota to the Twin Cities. Between 1973 and
1978, he worked in the food co-op movement. He worked in the Draft Resistance
Movement during the Vietnam War, and served 18 months in federal prison for
refusing military induction. George is on the Steering Committee of the Prairie
Island Coalition, is a board member for Minnesotan's For An Energy Efficient
Economy, and helps provide direction for the Sustainable Energy for Economic
Development (SEED) Campaign. He is also on the Steering Committee for the
Nuclear Waste Citizens Coalition, which coordinates the national movement for responsible nuclear waste management. George and Lea live in an off-peak solar
powered home, demonstrating webs of truth feel Rosemary Zieroth resigned from her
technical writing career ten years ago to enter semi-retirement and found
herself writing poetry. The poems in this publication are from a group of poems
she calls "The Earth and Me." Ms Zieroth has written for local
newspapers in Carroll County (Arkansas). She is currently enjoying her nine
grandchildren spread from Connecticut to Arkansas. |
National Water
Center Barbara Helen
Harmony :: email:
peace@ipa.net
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In
Milwaukee, nineteen ninety-three,
a water bug danced over the graves of children, fifty to one hundred, while thousands more circled the floor,
The restoration of
the Don has relied partly on the assistance and expertise of
This
popular grassroots groups "Ixtelloati" gets together on Sundays to
help each other build dry toilets in their homes. They also use them as
demonstration models for their neighbors.
In 1994,
Northern States Power Co. (NSP) had to make a nuclear waste deal in the
Minnesota Legislature. The resulting law had three primary parts: it increased
high-level nuclear waste storage capacity for NSP’s Prairie Island Nuclear
Power Plant (PI) by 680 waste fuel assemblies; it set a limit on the amount of
high-level nuclear waste that PI can produce; and, it mandated renewable energy
development in several ways. But the heart of the deal is that unless a
federally authorized program is accepting PI high-level nuclear waste when the storage capacity limit is reached, NSP will shut down the twin
530 MW PI
reactors.
Nuclear power, however, is not the only threat to an efficient
and renewable energy future.