I wonder what it would be like to have huge mounds of salt laced with arsenic sitting on the ground west of Albuquerque. Suppose a developer wanted to build a massive subdivision miles from the center of the city and worked a deal with Sandoval County to drill deep into the aquifer around the Rio Puerco and tap into the brackish water known to be there.
Suppose this developer started the project, used a process of desalinization, to clean the water, making promises to clean up the salt and arsenic waste, but then hit a snag in the housing market, abandoned the project, and left Albuquerque and Rio Rancho with its salt waste and poison blowing around in the wind and making its way into populated areas.
Well, surely the state and federal government wouldn’t allow that, surely waste removal would have been accounted for in any development deal, surely we wouldn’t allow the existing residents to be put in potential risk just so an out of state developer could make some bucks.
Stranger things have been known to happen. Companies, and others including the military, promise the moon when it comes to waste removal, but then leave their massive droppings right on the ground or in our water, and more often than not, don’t bother to clean up the mess – or when they’re forced to, do a bad job of it.
So when Sandoval County works a deal, according to the Rio Rancho Observer, with Aeromix of Minneapolis to build a desalinization plant to process some 500,000 gallons of water a day from wells drilled into the brackish aquifer at the County’s expense six or so years ago – to the tune of some $6 million – sane people might pause with concern and trepidation. And to spend all that money to draw people to the Rio Puerco, a remote area distant even from Rio Rancho, borders on the absurd.
500,000 gallons a day is a lot of amount of water. Desalinization pilot projects in Israel are looking to produce 32,000 gallons a day, though major coastal projects hope to supply more than 7 million gallons an hour. But that’s along the coast. Inland desalinization is a very different matter because there is no ocean in which to dump or spray diluted salt waste.
Desalinization is being talked about in New Mexico as at least a partial salvation to what’s proving to be long term drought conditions caused by climate change. Even though eminent water experts like UNM’s Bruce Thomson [See Jack Ehn’s essay “What the Thunder Won’t Say” in this week’s Mercury] don’t think desalination will provide sustainable water supplies for communities in New Mexico,
But Sandia National Labs have a major desalinization and water purification project, Alamogordo is accumulating the funds to build a desalinization plant, and New Mexico State University’s Water Resources Research Institute considers desalinating brackish aquifers around the state a major potential source of new water.
Desalinization is no joke. It’s not some harebrained idea dreamed up by wild-eyed developers. Big money is already being spent by local governments in New Mexico to explore possibilities and build treatment plants. And companies are investing millions in the desalinization technology in hopes of tapping into the gold mine of salty water assumed to be buried deep under fresh water aquifers around America, especially in the West and Midwest.
The problem is the waste. What happens to it? Salt is as potentially dangerous to the fresh water supply as gasoline, industrial solvents, and radioactive contamination. Huge amounts of salt, say from 500,000 gallons of brackish water processed a day, are very dangerous indeed and would require something approaching a whole industry in itself to cart if off and dispose of it safely, somewhere. But what would constitute “safely” and where would that somewhere be? And what would the capricious federal and state regulators deem safe in the long run?
And then there’s the arsenic. Even the New York Times – 2000 miles away – knows that Albuquerque area aquifers have some of the highest arsenic levels of any major metro area in the country.
Arsenic is no joke either, even if it is found “naturally.” Large doses of it are, of course, carcinogenic and as deadly as the delights served to unsuspecting gentlemen in Arsenic and Old Lace. Ask the chronically ill residents of Somerville, Texas, about the impact of air borne arsenic poisoning.
You just don’t want to have a big pile of that stuff anywhere near people, and you don’t want to trust it to any but the most historically responsible waste disposal companies and government agencies.
Inland desalinization plants must subject to the most stringent governmental scrutiny when it comes to waste removal. And who trusts government these days to scrutinize anything other than legislation to do away with laws that require government scrutiny.
I think it’s possible for desalinization firms to become every bit as powerful as the oil and gas industry in New Mexico and send hordes of lobbyists to the Roundhouse in Santa Fe to keep the state Environment Department off their backs.
If local officials can virtually sweep a jet fuel spill of 24 million gallons, perhaps the largest in the nation, under the rug, imagine what they’d do with the desalinated water supply waste in towns that have been led to depend completely on that water.
(Salt Pile phto by Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources.)
September 23, 2013