Water and Power - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 250

the oil companies employ many Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree Indians , the
tribes have protested the development of their ancestral land. They worry about high
rates of unusual cancers that have suddenly cropped up in their villages and wonder if
toxins leaking from the mines have flowed downstream from Fort McMurray to Lake
Athabasca, where Indian villagers fish.
After a scathing 2007 report by Doug Radke , Canada's former deputy minister of the
environment, on Alberta's “inadequate” enforcement of “outdated and incomplete” en-
vironmental regulations for tar sands mining, the provincial government produced an
interim plan to guide water withdrawals from the Athabasca River. But Alberta prides
itself on a freewheeling Wild West ethos, and the development of new tar sand mine
sites hasn't slowed a bit.
• • •
As US states try to cut their carbon footprints and search for alternatives to hydrocar-
bons, the Obama administration has considered building new nuclear power plants for
the first time in decades. But nuclear power uses more water—for steam generation and
cooling—than any other kind of power plant, which will have to be taken into account.
In 2007-8, a heat wave forced a power plant in Georgia to reduce its output because
discharge water could not be cooled enough to stay within the environmental limit. A
nuclear plant in Alabama had to shut down for a day to avoid endangering wildlife with
heated discharge water. According to the Associated Press, water shortages threaten to
curtail the output of up to a quarter of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors.
The debate over disposal of nuclear fuel has also been influenced by concerns about
water. A federal plan to store spent nuclear fuel at a repository deep inside Yucca Moun-
tain , about eighty miles northwest of Las Vegas, was suspended by Energy Secretary
Steven Chu in 2009 because of a long-running disagreement over whether the radioact-
ive waste would seep into groundwater there and contaminate the area.
To avoid a disastrous water-energy collision and promote a true water-energy nexus,
federal and state officials will have to start managing the two resources together, as a
holistic system. If they are going to keep ahead of the mineral and energy industries,
which are already planning how to use water in the next century, government agencies
will have to become less reactive and learn to think the way business does: long term.