Filter-Toting Woman Detained and Questioned, but No Charges Filed

In what seems to be becoming a common event, yet another airport terminal was evacuated when a water filtration device was discovered in a passenger’s luggage.  In a recent incident, a man was arrested for transporting drugs on an airplane inside a water filter.

In this incident, the woman passenger, who had boarded a plan at the Minneapolis airport with a water filter in her luggage, was not arrested. The water purification device was detected during bag checking and the Bloomington Police Department bomb squad was called in for investigation.

The gory details.

Water and Electricity Go Hand In Hand.  How A Shortage  of Cold Water Creates A  Shortage of Electricity

Climate change is bad for electricity supplies.  It takes electricity to process and deliver water, and it takes water to make electricity. What affects one side of the equation affects the other.

We burn coal or natural gas to boil water to turn turbines to produce electricity. Turbines produce more than 90 percent of our electricity.

Power generating plants are cooled by water in rivers or lakes.  As the water gets warmer, and less abundant because of global warming brought on by the greenhouse gasses produced by running the turbines, it gets harder to cool the plant and electrical production has to be cut back.

According to Scientific American, by 2040 electrical production may fall as much as 16 per cent in the summer, when we need it most for air conditioning.

More about this from Scientific American.

Fort Peck Dam, Like Many US Dams, Needs Repairs that the Nation Cannot Afford

Proposed repairs to bolster Montana’s Fort Peck Dam following epic flooding along the Missouri River last year would cost more than $225 million, according to cost estimates released in 2012 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

But with money short, Corps officials acknowledged they are able to afford only $46 million for damage assessments and repair work for now. Most of that will be spent on repairs to the dam’s spillway.

Dams, which often seem like a good idea when they’re in the planning stage, eventually become fiscal liabilities that will  need expensive repairs and even more expensive decommissioning.

Read the full story.

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America’s Aquifers Are Threatened by Over-pumping and Pollution

Twenty percent of US water for drinking, crop irrigation and everything else comes from underground water.  We seldom think of aquifers as being “endangered,” but that is actually the case, as we continue to overuse their water and pollute them with chemicals.

The great Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the Great Plains, supplies 27% of the nation’s farmland with irrigation water.  It has undergone decades of depletion through overpumping.

The Central Valley aquifers of California are also being rapidly depleted to supply the nation’s fruit and vegetable demand.

The mighty aquifers that supply New York and New Jersey are being drained and polluted.

Among the suggested aquifer-friendly actions we can take are “curbing fertilizer and pesticide use, responsibly disposing of pharmaceuticals and hazardous waste rather than flushing them down the drain, maintaining septic systems to reduce nitrogen pollution, and protecting open space to promote rainwater infiltration and aquifer recharge.”

Edwards Aquifer That Lies Beneath a Large Portion of Central Texas

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Green Energy Experimenters in Oregon Are Pumping Millions of Gallons of Water into Newberry Volcano

In an ambitious plan being undertaken in Oregon, geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano to demonstrate new technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector.

They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn’t dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes.

The site of the geothermal experiment  is the Newberry Volcano, 20 miles outside Bend. OR.

Read more.

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Water Prices Rising Faster Than Other Utilities Services

The price that Americans pay for water is rising faster than the cost of any other utility service in the United States — be it gas, electricity, or telephone charges.

According to the newest report in an ongoing national survey conducted by Circle of Blue, water prices in 30 major U.S. cities rose 18 percent over the last two years and 7 percent in the past year.

Full Details with Map on the Circle of Blue Website

Important New Method for Removing Fluoride from Residential Tap Water Revealed

Fluoride, among the most challenging water treatment issues for residential users, can apparently be removed with relative ease using a newly described treatment method called simply the “Refrigerator Treatment.”  The new approach is radical in that it uses only readily available items to accomplish what has been possible before only through high-tech reverse osmosis and activated alumina methodology.

Full details on this video.

Virginia’s State House, Designed by Thomas Jefferson, To Harvest Rainwater  — May 29, 2012

Fountain Will Soon Be Filled with Rainwater

The Virginia State Capitol at Richmond has been added to the growing number of public and private buildings around the commonwealth that use rainwater harvesting to reduce potable water demand and decrease runoff. Rainwater harvesting is the ancient practice of collecting rainwater for beneficial uses, such as irrigation, toilet and urinal flushing, and make-up water for cooling towers.

For Full Details

Increased Burning of Fossil Fuels Is Making Oceans More Acidic

The oceans have always served as a sink for carbon dioxide, but the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution, especially over the last 40 years, has given them more than they can safely absorb.

The result is the gradual acidification of the oceans.

Changing something as fundamental as the pH of seawater — a measurement of how acid or alkaline it is — has profound effects. Increased acidity attacks the shells of shellfish and the skeletal foundation of corals, dissolving the calcium carbonate they’re made of. Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Ocean acidification threatens the corals and every other species that makes its living on the reefs.

More Information from the New York Times.

New Wind Turbine Can Manufacture Water from Thin Air

The French company Eole Water says that it has  successfully modified the traditional wind turbine design to create the WMS1000, an appliance that can manufacture drinking water from humid air.

The company aims to start rolling out the giant products for sale later in 2012, initially focusing on remote communities in arid countries where water resources are scarce.

The product aims to make water available for traditionally water-challenged rural areas.

Turbine Creates Water From Thin Air

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