Editor,
I would like to address Bob Anderson's letter published in the Daily Lobo on Jan. 14. There are several debatable statements in Anderson's letter, but I will address only a few.
Anderson suggests that we pump water from the Datil area to supplement the drinking water supply. First, he does not state the actual quantity of water available - sufficient "for maybe several hundred years, if not less" is exceedingly vague. Also, he does not address the quality of water in Datil - if there is naturally occurring arsenic or uranium that would necessitate treatment anyway.
Second, the water utility would have to purchase 48,000 acre-feet of water rights instead of using previously acquired water rights. Datil is 93 miles as the crow flies from Albuquerque. The city would have to lay over 100 miles of pipe, which is another upfront cost considering the ground is not flat between Datil and Albuquerque. Pumping that amount of water from Datil would be a sizable financial burden, and the energy required has significant environmental impact in terms of fossil fuel usage and carbon emissions.
This option is financially and environmentally costly. Anderson also protests the presence of contaminants in the water due to the fact that people live upstream. There are thousands of people living upstream of Albuquerque who also use the river and have been doing so for a long time and who probably have no intention of moving or changing their water use. Therefore, this is a situation the city is aware of and has accounted for in the design of the new water treatment plant. The plant under construction is state-of-the-art and utilizes a multiple-barrier approach to ensure that anything posing a human health risk that survives ozonation - one of the most powerful disinfection technologies available - will be removed in the other two removal processes.
The plant is designed to not only meet and exceed the Safe Drinking Water Act standards, but to meet future regulatory standards. Speaking of the act, the maximum concentration of all alpha emitters, including plutonium, under the act is 15 pCi/L.
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Water-quality monitoring done by the United States Geological Survey is available online at Nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis. The concentrations of plutonium measured in the river at the Otowi Bridge, just downstream of Los Alamos, have been less than 0.01 pCi/L. By the time the water reaches Albuquerque, the concentration of plutonium has been further diluted by Rio Grande tributaries. Also, research suggests that the coagulation and filtration process utilized in the treatment plant is over 95 percent effective at removing plutonium. Therefore, even if something disastrous were to occur in Los Alamos that would cause radionuclides-contaminated water in the Rio Grande, the treatment plant has the built-in capability to deal with it. Hopefully, this information will ease the concerns regarding the drinking water project.
Kelly Isaacson
UNM student
