Here in the Albuquerque metro area, there’s been a great deal of discussion about desalination of waster from deep brackish aquifers to provide new sources of supply. A lot of talk. But not much action, other than an interesting pilot-scale project now underway west of the community of Rio Rancho. The area is growing rapidly, …
I have to commend Bill Hume for his op-ed in yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal. (Really, I do have to. He agrees with me!) Clearly, municipal and state growth planning that includes a hard-nosed recognition of water realities is the only strategy for confronting the offset water tap-out. And, new sources of water or new technologies for …
From the morning paper (sub/ad req.): Los Alamos National Laboratory could expose its workers and neighbors to a massive and potentially deadly radiation leak in a major earthquake, independent federal safety auditors concluded in a report released Tuesday. Such earthquakes are rare — one every few thousand years in the Los Alamos area, according to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Seismic Risk at Los Alamos’ »
Also from this morning’s paper, a brief report (business model, ad/sub yada) on yesterday’s Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly meeting. I tried to balance the progress made on water conservation with the grim message I’ve been pushing in my recent work on this regarding the supply-demand deficit in New Mexico’s heavily populated middle valley: Water …
Cally Carswell has a story in the latest High Country News about domestic groundwater wells in Washington state that nicely illustrates a common problem throughout the western U.S., including here in New Mexico. In Washington (like in New Mexico), you can legally drill a well to serve domestic needs – essentially a single house. Individually, …
From this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req.): The notion of turning the Rio Grande through Albuquerque into a concrete channel like the Los Angeles River, while we drain away the groundwater beneath us and let the bosque die, is probably a nonstarter. But the idea has a way of focusing the discussion, a sort of worst-case …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: On Living Within Our Water Means’ »
A look at the science and financing behind the “CO2 is Green” ads running in New Mexico (ad/sub req): It is hard to square Leighton Steward’s cheery message with the vast swaths of dead trees across the mountains of northern New Mexico. “Fall of ’02 is when they started to die,” biologist Craig Allen told …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: A Look at CO2 is Green’ »
Back in the 1970s, Congress asked the Bureau of Reclamation to study the feasibility of extending a water line across western New Mexico to carry water from the San Juan River to Gallup, New Mexico. Gallup’s a desert city, dependent on a limited aquifer. Gallup sits on the edge of the Navajo Reservation. The Navajos …
Continue reading ‘Navajo-Gallup Water Project Moves Several Inches Forward’ »
While much of the discussion of “new water” in the western United States involves desalination of seawater, there’s an experiment getting underway outside Albuquerque that is part of a new approach to the problem: desalination of brackish groundwater. My colleague Rosalie Rayburn has a story in the Albuquerque Journal on the latest testing going on …
Tower of Babel Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I love the New Mexico State Fair. This is why: a giant Lego rendition of the Tower of Babel. Everyone’s strange and wonderful obsessions come together at the fair.