Water and the Nuclear Uncanny*

I have admittedly spent most of my time this past year focused on water quantity, water rights, acequias, and adjudication. And, right or wrong, I have said little about actual water quality. A convergence of interesting quotes, newspapers stories, local activist influences, and a future course plan are making me reconsider how water quality is pertinent not only to this blog but to all New Mexicans.

Many of you know of the Buckman Diversion Project just northwest of Santa Fe, essentially a filtering bladder dam that parallels the channel of the Rio Grande, and that will allow up to some 5000 afy to be drawn for the city and county water supply once it comes on-line in 2011. This “new” wet water (love the redundancy of this term) is actually not new, however, in that the Buckman project is supposed to be a renewable water source for a non-renewable one – in essence, to replace the Buckman pumping field currently slurping into the nearby aquifer.

I was recently quoted, in some ways unknowingly, in the Santa Fe New Mexican as being rather unconcerned about water quality. Actually, it was about tap water contaminants, and whether or not people tend to reach for bottled water or just tap water, and I shouldn’t have been so naïve as to use the original bait tendered in the story that Staci Matlock was writing. I don’t “laugh off” concerns over water quality as I reach for “another cold one from the tap.” That language was actually in Staci’s Green Line blog post, as she requested some responses to her query about bottled versus tap water. And I came off as glib, especially since I had NOT read the fall 2009 report by the EWG on the local water in Santa Fe (cf Matlock 2010). My post-facto shame (verguenza!) was heightened as I reached out recently to Sheri Kotowski up in the Embudo Valley, who is focused on monitoring water quality in that watershed. For the record, I applaud this kind of citizen science, and I do not discount the concerns over radioactivity and the concerns of people who live near Los Alamos National Laboratories. After reading some books in the past few months (Kuletz 1998; Masco 2006) on the nuclear ecologies of New Mexico and the Southwest, I certainly understand these concerns. And these are not new – Will Graf (1994), a geomorphologist, wrote about Plutonium in the Rio Grande almost twenty years ago, and certainly the Buckman groundwaters have a healthy little dose of uranium in them according to the latest S.Fe water quality report found here (.pdf).

That the Buckman project will draw water opposite some of the drainage canyons that come out of Los Alamos has been cause for concern. The project has reportedly accounted for this, by promising to shut off the bladder intake when a run-off event (rain) occurs in the Los Alamos canyons that might bring radioactive nuclides into the Rio Grande. The graphic (left) shows the treatment process necessary for water drawn from the Rio Grande at the Buckman diversion dam. And there’s an on-going negotiation process, along with a general MOU (memorandum of agreement) between Buckman and LANL about this concern. This is a good plan but I can’t help but think of the old expression “no good deed goes unpunished.” This is a folksy way of referring to Murphy’s Law  and maybe that’s too pessimistic. Then again, who would have predicted the absolute chaos, from a simple and nearby controlled burn earlier in this decade, of the Cerro Grande fire on the eastern slopes of the Jemez that took out several buildings in Los Alamos? Jake Kosek, fellow geographer, author of “Understories” wrote about the link between nuclear ecology in this part of New Mexico and forest livelihoods.

So like the forest fires earlier in this decade, water that comes in from the canyons of Los Alamos should be of concern to all communities downstream, whether you live in Albuquerque or in a rural setting along an acequia. I’ve never seen a radionuclide filter on a head-gate or point of diversion, and the water quality standards now being established and set by New Mexico’s First Nations may be one of the best hopes for ensuring some better norm for water quality in the Rio Grande.
As I wrap up this last month of interviews, field work, and archival dipping in New Mexico, the first course next fall is also on my mind. My usual advanced seminar, Southwest Studies/EnvScience 301, Political Ecology of the Southwest, awaits me in September. For the fall 2010 version of this course, I’m focusing on the Nuclear Borderlands (as I wrote some time ago). So I hope to bring together the nexus of concerns over land, forests, and water in a way that takes the military-industrial complex seriously, while also questioning our current policies designed to mitigate, adapt to, or avoid those risks. Like radioactivity, however, water flows through systems and landscapes. Like nuclear isotopes, water can be “contained” momentarily in a reservoir, but like the half-life of isotopes, water evaporates and escapes. Water, like radioactivity, transcends our typical governance approaches and exposes us all to the realities of a universe in flux. No, I'm not a philosopher (technically), though I'd like to play one on TV. Until next time...
* title of post is derived from Masco (2006: 27-28).