For Mead, Time’s Up

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April 1 Lake Powell inflow forecast, courtesy Colorado Basin River Forecast Center

April 1 Lake Powell inflow forecast, courtesy Colorado Basin River Forecast Center

With the Colorado River forecasts out this week, I’m ready to call it: there won’t be enough water in the river for an extra water release this year from Lake Powell to help bolster the levels in the shrinking Lake Mead. Those declining red dots, month by month in the graph above, tell the story.

The official word won’t come until Friday at the earliest, when the  Bureau of Reclamation releases its April “24-month study”. But the forecast data from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center shows a median inflow into Lake Powell of just 63 percent of normal for the April-July period.

Under the river’s operating rules, if there is extra water in Lake Powell, it can be released downstream to bolster levels in Lake Mead. But 63 percent doesn’t leave any extra. The decision on this year’s releases is done now, based on the best forecast of what Powell’s levels will be at on Sept. 30.

As I’ve written previously, this means that come June, Lake Mead could unequivocally drop to its lowest levels since the it was first filled in the 1930s. I think I’ll plan a trip out that way, to see it for myself.

Nuclear Posture Review, a Bottom-Up Perspective

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Slim Pickens rides the bomg=b

Slim Pickens rides the bomg=b

If you follow nuclear weapons policy, the last thing you need at this point is another analysis of yesterday’s Nuclear Posture Review rollout. But I did have something to say in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req) that represents what I think is an important and underappreciated piece of the debate.

Here in New Mexico, home to two nuclear weapons design labs, we see the system from the bottom up. And as I wrote this morning, the bottom-up perspective get’s a unique airing in the document:

The new review includes an unprecedented emphasis on the work done by the labs and nuclear weapons manufacturing plants, according to sources familiar with past Nuclear Posture Reviews, which were largely classified….

Arsenal reductions place greater emphasis on the maintenance of the weapons that remain, officials said. The problem, according to the review, is that the complex of labs and plants needed to do the work “has fallen into neglect.”

The document calls for:

• A multibillion-dollar replacement for the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research building, a six-decades-old plutonium research complex at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Plutonium is one of the two main radioactive materials at the heart of nuclear weapons.

• A similar multibillion dollar uranium complex at the Y-12 weapons plant in Tennessee. Uranium is the other main radioactive material used in nuclear weapons.

A by deeply embedded historical tradition, there is a military-civilian split between the civilians who design and build the nukes (a job now done by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration) and the warfighters who would drop the resulting devices on commies (the Department of Defense). There were good reasons for the split, but an unfortunate side effect has been a diffusion of responsibility for the complex of labs and plants responsible for nuclear weapon design and maintenance.

Past Nuclear Posture Reviews, and past nuclear weapon policy more broadly, as been focused on the warfighters and the diplomats, with the infrastructure needed to supply the tools of Armageddon a bit of an afterthought. “Oh, yeah, y’all please take care of these warheads for us, will ya?” The infrastructure presents thorny problems of its own, especially maintenance of the very expensive buildings needed to work with icky materials like uranium and plutonium. Without central attention from the senior national security leadership, that infrastructure has been allowed to atrophy to an embarrassing extent.

To be clear, there are two decision paths here. One could be for the national leadership to say we no longer need that infrastructure, because of a de-emphasis on nuclear weapons, and to shut it down. But instead the national leadership has continued to argue for the importance of maintaining an arsenal, but has left the infrastructure piece of the job undone.

Yesterday’s NPR appears to restore the centrality of that boring but essential infrastructure. We’ll see how well actions over the next few years support the document’s assertions.

Next Up: Locusts

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A friend called me out on this morning’s column, a piece about Cathy Plesko, a Los Alamos scientist working on the asteroid mitigation problem (sub/ad req). He said he’d gotten all the way to the end before he realized it was really a column about global warming.

Kaching!

Back in the ’90s, I wrote a lot about asteroids. The LINEAR asteroid search project is based here in New Mexico, which gave me an easy local angle because they were finding all the cool objects. Their automated survey techniques, originally developed to track commie spy satellites, were revolutionary. It was a fun story, but I have a relatively short attention span, and hadn’t really thought much about the asteroid threat for years when I recently heard about Plesko’s work.

She’s doing modeling work on mitigation techniques – essentially what happens when you touch off a nuke to deflect asteroid:

If we ever need to use Los Alamos scientist Cathy Plesko’s research, we’re in nail-biting trouble. But at that moment we’re likely to be very glad she did it.

Plesko is trying to figure out how to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

“You hope you never need it, but you know, you hope you never need car insurance,” said the 29-year-old researcher.

The technical part of the work is fascinating – trying to constrain the uncertainties associated with a bet-the-planet decision. But the really interesting thing to me was the questions the work raises about how we might go about incorporating the sort of science she does into the political and policy process if/when we really have to face up to The Big One:

We’re a long way from knowing enough about the problem to actually deflect an asteroid, Plesko said. But the research raises interesting questions about how society might go about using information developed by scientists like Plesko to make bet-the-planet decisions.

On the surface, it looks like a simple problem — get the scientists’ best advice, then act on it. But cases where we end up arguing about what really counts as their “best advice” are legion, from nuclear waste disposal to genetically modified foods to climate change.

No matter how precise the calculations, there will be uncertainties attached. Rather than deflecting Apophis completely, would the nudge merely shift its path so it hits in the mid-Pacific, saving Costa Rica but creating a towering tsunami that destroys coastal California?

Dan Sarewitz, an Arizona State University researcher who studies what happens at the interface of science and societal decision-making, thinks the asteroid problem would be easier to act on than something like climate change or nuclear waste disposal.

If and when we discover an asteroid actually headed toward Earth, “There will be very little argument about whether that’s a serious problem,” Sarewitz said.

Pentagon Pull In Energy Innovation

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Will it be the Pentagon’s purchasing power and needs that provide the impetus for the energy technology innovation we need to solve the energy and greenhouse gas problems? Dan Sarewitz, in this week’s Nature, argues thus (sub req I think):

F404 Navy jet engine being tested running on biofuel

F404 Navy jet engine being tested running on biofuel

DOD’s infrastructure includes 500 fixed installations (some the size and complexity of small cities), 546,000 buildings and other structures and 160,000 non-tactical vehicles.

Combine these numbers with the fact that no institution on Earth has anything close to the DOD’s buying power and technical capabilities, and it’s hard not to conclude … that the Pentagon has the capacity to become the world’s most important weapon in the fight to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The Pentagon has full life cycle responsibility for all sorts of infrastructure, from buildings to vehicles, and has enormous efficiency incentives, Sarewitz argues:

National security, climate change and energy economics are convergent rationales that provide the DOD with a potentially huge institutional advantage over other energy innovators. A litre of petrol transported along highly vulnerable supply lines to Afghanistan costs an average of about $100. Enhancing the energy independence of forward-base operations in combat zones — to save lives and money — is thus a powerful short-term incentive for energy-technology innovation in everything from building insulation to fuel efficiency for jeeps, tanks and jets, to renewable power generation and storage. The price at which new technologies make economic and strategic sense is enormously higher than what the energy market — or any plausible cap-and-trade or energy tax scheme — would allow.

Where Are They Getting the Water?

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Every time we drove through a new subdivision on the edge of Albuquerque, my Dad used to ask the same question: “Where are they getting the water?”

Tony Davis had a story in the Arizona Daily Star recently that showed the depth to which Arizona has failed to grapple with that question, essentially allowing subdivisions to be built on unsustainable short term supplies with the promise to eventually get more water somewhere, somehow. The proximate cause of the story is legislation authorizing the search for new water and bonding authority to pay for it:

One reason the bill is being seriously considered is that most of these homes have no assured, long-term water supply.

They are being served by a short-term supply that could disappear in a few years to a decade from now because legally, it belongs to somebody else.

The debate on the bill has unearthed some long-simmering issues swirling around the three-county Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District.

The district has signed up more current and future housing developments in Pima, Pinal and Maricopa counties than it has long-term water supplies for.

By 2025, it will be legally bound to provide more renewable water supplies to its customers than the city of Tucson would be serving.

The legislation has stirred fears that customers in the district will ultimately be subject to “rate shock” once the water supplies are on line and the bills come due.

Today, no one knows for sure when the district would acquire water, where it would come from, what it would cost or what the repayment terms would be.

Among possible sources are farmers along the Colorado River, treated sewage effluent, desalination of seawater or salty, brackish groundwater, or rural areas that have groundwater supplies.

The only thing that’s clear is that the cost would be higher than the district’s current water supplies from the Central Arizona Project, which uses Colorado River water brought by canal.

(h/t Michael Campana for pointing out the story)

The Cap and Trade Struggle

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My colleague Sean Olson had a story last weekend that captured the struggle facing those trying to implement state-level cap and trade regulations in New Mexico (sub/ad req):

Republicans and many Democrats agree that a state cap-and-trade system would be a form of economic suicide for New Mexico.

New Mexico is a member of the Western Climate Initiative, the effort to establish a regional greenhouse gas reduction framework. Efforts to pass implementing legislation have gone nowhere, so state officials are now attempting to use the existing regulatory framework, via the state’s Environmental Improvement Board, to use the state’s Clean Air Act authority to do the job.

Sean notes that every major candidate for governor – both parties – opposes the idea.

Colorado has a new interbasin transfer idea

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A bunch of Colorado and Wyoming municipal water utilities apparently hope to gang up on entrepreneur Aaron Million, hatching a pipeline scheme of their own to pipe water across the continental divide to growing front range cities. From Bobby Magill at the Coloradan:

Move over, Aaron Million.

A coalition of municipal water suppliers from the south Denver Metro area and Wyoming announced Thursday at the Capitol that they’re banding together to study a project that could end up competing with the Fort Collins entrepreneur’s proposed Regional Watershed Supply Project and potentially call for new reservoirs to be built in Larimer County somewhere east of the foothills.

Each utility in the coalition will contribute $20,000 to a feasibility study for a massive municipal water pipeline project called the Colorado-Wyoming Cooperative Water Supply Project, which would pipe water for 532,000 people from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir to the Front Range.

To get a sense of the scale here, the pipeline projects would carry something like a quarter, roughly, of the water carried by the Central Arizona Project canal from Parker Dam on the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. Put another way, it’s about a quarter of the water carried by the Rio Grande in an average year through central New Mexico.

The price tag for either Million’s private project or the new municipal alternative, according to Cathy Proctor in the Denver Business Journal, is about $3 billion.

On Moving Water: The Exclusion Problem

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I’ve written in the past about the importance of the notion of moving water from where it wants to be. A lot of our problems seem to happen when we do that, because water wants to be where it wants to be, and its powerful urges are difficult to resist.

My past discussions have focused on the problems that ensue when we engineer big interbasin transfers. But now that I’ve got this big “moving water” hammer, I’m seeing more nails. This week, it’s a piece for the newspaper about Albuquerque’s levee problems (sub/ad req):

The problem is rooted in the nature of the Rio Grande itself.

Before there were dams and levees, it wandered the entire Albuquerque valley, shifting its bed from one mesa to the other over a course of years. Flood control efforts begun in the 1930s confined the river to a narrow channel, with levees on either side to protect valley bottomlands so they could be turned into farms and eventually a city.

Under high flows, the river can push up against the levees, trying to find its way out across the flood plain.

The topography is subtle here, but we have neighborhoods below the grade of the river. That requires endless engineering in response, because the water in the long run would really prefer the low spot.

Previously: on moving water.

Scientization: Delta Smelt, a Case Study

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Friday’s release of the National Academy study on pumping restrictions in the California Bay-Delta system on behalf of endangered fish offers a great case study in “scientization,” the process by which competing political factions repurpose scientific findings to meet their political needs.

Californai Central Valley and Bay-Delta

Californai Central Valley and Bay-Delta

The panel concluded that the pumping restrictions are scientifically justified, a blow for ag interests. But, not surprisingly, both sides found ammunition in the report to support their position, as Matt Weiser and Michael Doyle reported in the Sacramento Bee:

Overall, the panel’s conclusions were nuanced, allowing advocates to read into it, Rorschach-like, their own priorities.

“The report clearly validates the biological opinions,” said Ann Hayden, senior water resource analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s time to stop pitting the economic interests of farmers against fishermen and move forward to find solutions.”

Farmers, on the other hand, emphasized the enduring uncertainties, as well as the report’s observation that other problems besides water diversions have a “potentially large” effect on fish. These include water pollution and invasive species.

“Much more analysis is needed on the other stressors, their impact on endangered species and the relative significance of the pumps,” said Tom Birmingham, general manager of Westlands Water District.

This is what Dan Sarewitz is talking about when he describes the way additional science frequently does not settle political controversies of this sort:

[S]cientific uncertainty, which so often occupies a central place in environmental controversies, can be understood not as a lack of scientific understanding but as the lack of coherence among competing scientific understandings, amplified by the various political, cultural, and institutional contexts within which science is carried out.

Or, as the mysterious and terrific California water blogger On The Public Record explained, the NAS report settled nothing. Instead, those whose political values and interests were harmed by the panel’s findings simply busied themselves finding ways to ignore it:

This is what I predicted. The NAS review didn’t change anything about the political landscape here.