According to a report by the United Nations Development Programme the world is facing a major water supply crisis and little is being done to address the problem. The report, Human Development Report 2006: Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis, provides disturbing evidence of a crisis that is undermining global development efforts aimed at fighting poverty, disease, and hunger. The water crisis is also said to be potential source for increased conflict both within and across national borders. According to the report, "Access to water for life is a basic human need and a fundamental human right. Yet in our increasingly prosperous world, more than 1 billion people are denied the right to clean water and 2.6 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation."
In the report the importance of access to safe drinking water is illustrated by an analysis of the benefits enjoyed by countries that developed successful water sanitation programs in the past:
"People living in rich countries today are only dimly aware of how clean water fostered social progress in their own countries. Just over a hundred years ago London, New York and Paris were centres of infectious disease, with diarrhoea, dysentery and typhoid fever undermining public health. Child death rates were as high then as they are now in much of Sub- Saharan Africa. The rising wealth from industrialization boosted income, but child mortality and life expectancy barely changed. Sweeping reforms in water and sanitation changed this picture. Clean water became the vehicle for a leap forward in human progress. Driven by coalitions for social reform, by moral concern and by economic self-interest, governments placed water and sanitation at the centre of a new social contract between states and citizens. Within a generation they put in place the finance, technology and regulations needed to bring water and sanitation for all within reach."
The creation of a reliable supply of safe driking water led to rapid increases in life expectancy and decreases in exposure to previously deadly diseases in industrialized nations of the world. There is a clear precedent that shows that it is possible to deliver safe drinking water to large populations of people where no sanitation existed before. The question is whether or not the international community is willing to address the issue or not.
The consequences of inaction are numerous. According to the report:
1. "Every year some 1.8 million children die as a result of diarrhoea and other diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation.At the start of the 21st century unclean water is the world’s second biggest killer of children."
2. "The ill health associated with deficits in water and sanitation undermines productivity and economic growth, reinforcing the deep inequalities that characterize current patterns of globalization and trapping vulnerable households in cycles of poverty."
3. "Some 1.4 billion people live in river basins in which water use exceeds recharge rates. The symptoms of overuse are disturbingly clear: rivers
are drying up, groundwater tables are falling and water-based ecosystems are being rapidly degraded. Put bluntly, the world is running down one of its most precious natural resources and running up an unsustainable ecological debt that will be inherited by future generations."
4. "It is already clear that competition for water will intensify in the decades ahead. Population growth, urbanization, industrial development and the needs of agriculture are driving up demand for a finite resource. Meanwhile, the recognition is growing that the needs of the environment must
also be factored in to future water use patterns. Two obvious dangers emerge. First, as national competition for water intensifies, people with the weakest rights—small farmers and women among them—will see their entitlements to water eroded by more powerful constituencies. Second,
water is the ultimate fugitive resource, traversing borders through rivers, lakes and aquifers—a fact that points to the potential for cross-border tensions in water-stressed regions."
5. "This is a crisis that is holding backhuman progress, consigning large segments of humanity to lives of poverty, vulnerability and insecurity. This crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns."
The report emphasizes that the impact of the global water is being felt primarily by the world's poor. Without clean drinking water, progress and development are hard to imagine:
"Ultimately, human development is about the realization of potential. It is about what people can do and what they can become—their capabilities—and about the freedom they have to exercise real choices in their lives.Water pervades all aspects of human development, " the report notes.
Fortunate children living in wealth can spend their days in school learning, dreaming, and realizing their vast human potential. Compare that to opportunities facing a child living in a region where access to water is scarce, who spends their days fetching unsanitized water for their household and experiences frequent bouts of illness caused by water-borne diseases - and may even be killed by that drinking same water.
The report puts it in broader terms, "In rich countries clean water is now available atthe twist of a tap. Private and hygienic sanitation is taken for granted. And waterborne infectious disease is a subject for history books, not hospital wards and morgues.
The contrast with poor countries is striking. While deprivation is unequally distributed across regions, the facts of the global water crisis speak for themselves. Some 1.1 billion people in the developing world do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water."
But the report also notes that we live in world of unprecendented wealth and technological innovation, making this problem entirely solvable. The problem is not so much a question of whether the problem can be solved. It is more a problem of whether there is the political will to solve it. Nor is it a question of a simple lack of water. Rather the report notes that, "... the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability." It is primarily a matter of building the infrastructure that can provide safe, sanitized drinking water to all humans. It is clear that not enough is being done to solve the problem now. To summarize, I will end with a final quote from the report:
"The business as usual alternative is to tolerate a level of avoidable suffering and loss of human potential that all governments should regard as ethically indefensible and economically wasteful."
Our World is published weekly by Gather Political Correspondent David Anderson. Check out all
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Comments: 70
We have the technology; let's back it up with the political will. PLEASE VOTE!
The quest for sufficient fresh water will rival the quest for oil ihn the coming decades.
Thanks for writing this article.
I wonder how much of this story line was fact and how much fiction? It's seems entirely plausible. Either way, it's a perfect example of what is happening all over the US due to the criminal activity Corporations have taken part in by not ensuring the water that goes back into municipal supplies is cleaner than that which was taken out. We have the same problem here in SE North Carolina. Textile mills dumped millions and millions of gallons of raw dyes from making cloth. The result is the minimum parts per million allowed almost across the board are above the legal amounts. Problem is most if not all of these textile plants are long out of business leaving it to the cities and consumers to clean up. In the meantime, we have so much chlorine in our water to kill the crap in in it that we buy water by the jug or 10 gallon container to drink and cook with.
It's time something was done but who is going to pay. You got it. We will, but we don't have the billions necessary to do the job so then what happens. Nothing!
These practices come with environmental consequences, as they involve altering the natural flow and use of water within ecosystems.
meantime, we waste millions of dollars in the USA on importing bottled water from the island of Fiji, burning more fuel in the process than there is water in the bottle, when most of our localities provide tap water that can be safely consumed. We are dumb!
And the bottled water trend does not provide any protection for consumers either. In fact, it places a heavier burden on the environment and current fresh water sources. Packaging and shipping water actually consumes more water than is in the bottles.
- Besides being a crisis for humans it is a crisis for nature as well. Where do you think all the water for rivers goes now ... right into our houses, farms and industries.
- Since we are not likely to reduce our population, the most urgent and important aspect of this is the environmental one. That is why I believe we need to create a separate human water system. Perhaps remove water from the oceans and purify it and pump it to where we need it, as well as recycle water that we use much better.
- To do this we would need vast amounts of power and heat and to me that means we need to rethink our ban on nuclear power.
I don't want to think that someday in my lifetime that at some point I will have taken my last shower because there is either not enough water or water costs too much to afford personal cleanliness. We have already switched to using a chloramine decontaminant for drinking water that many people are allergic to.
What we really need to do it to look clearly at human population and needs and start to think about what we need to do to allow the planet to survive, as well as ourselves, in peace and prosperity.
> we waste millions of dollars in the USA on importing
> bottled water from the island of Fiji, burning more fuel
> in the process than there is water in the bottle,
I get the emotion behind this, but who is the "we" and just
exactly how do you make this calculation? I'll bet it is not
true, but even if it was what does it have to do with anything.
It probably takes more fuel than volume of water to give
a drink the astronauts too, or to the scientists on Antarctica,
but what does that have to do with anything. There obviously
is not a water shortage on Fiji, right?
When you look at the medical statistics there is one major thing that has allowed human being to reach the advanced ages we live to now 60-100 years and climbing ... it is good physical hygiene, clean water and uncontaminated food.
One of the things that allows us the lives we live today is cheap energy and water, it is not due to the medical advancements, although I'm not putting them down at all, and they do cure diseases that would otherwise kill people. But people would get more deadly diseases and be less resistant to them if they did not maintain good hygiene.
Bottom line is if we keep over populating we are going to run up against some really painful and expensive problems that will destroy us and the solutions are really pretty simple ...
* not so many people
* lots more energy so we can provide resources and recycling without stealing from nature.
I do think Nuclear power is a much cheaper and cleaner power source than natural gas, however when you talk about it vis a vis water conservation, don't forget that each reactor requires thousands of gallons of water to keep them cool and to prevent the dreaded melt down of the reactor. The resulting steam/water is then radioactive and needs to be contained along with the other waste products from that plant.
I think we might be better served to look to solar and wind power.
Back in the eighties my aunt's boyfriend built a solar collector and used it to heat their farm house and outdoor swimming pool. They lived north of Toronto, Ontario which experiences sub- zero temperatures during the worst of winter!
> The resulting steam/water is then radioactive and needs to
> be contained along with the other waste products from that plant.
Where did you get that idea? This is not true at all. Take a look at
some of the block diagrams of how a nuclear reactor works, the
steam is not radiactive in any way. Please, this is the kind of thing
that allows people to blow this stuff way out of proportion.
We have been in a drought for 10 years. The aquifer has slowly but steadily dropped.
I thought only this part of the country was suffering so.
How Stuff Works HowStuffWorks is the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works. Founded by North Carolina State University Professor Marshall Brain in 1998
In some reactors, the steam from the reactor goes through a secondary, intermediate heat exchanger to convert another loop of water to steam, which drives the turbine. The advantage to this design is that the radioactive water/steam never contacts the turbine.
And also solar is available all the time. We've had 18 rainy cloudy days in a row here.
Do you know how much water it takes to manufacture one automobile? It is possible to live a life without a car. I'm living proof.
Post WWII, the idea was sold that anything could be had if it could be built, delivered, sold, and bought...The idea of where everything fit into the big picture was edged out...
the idea of Nuclear Energy was part of that era, as was the idea of the Suburb and all the Stuff to stuff into the houses of the future and the Department Store as the place to get all that stuff to stuff into the houses of the future. To be sure, nothing necessarily wrong with the ideas and desires represented by these things in and of themselves. But how they fit into reality and what their effects and side-effects might be were not seriously considered or considered at all...
The water from the inner loop is radioactive, but water is H2O ... short lived isotopes, it is not radiotive to the degree heavy elements like uranium or plutonium.
If the radioactive water from the inner loop should vent to the atmosphere it has been shown to not significantly increase the ambient local radioactivity, as in 3 mile island. Someone living in Denver Colorado for example receives hundred of times more radiation from living at height than the 3 mile island neighbors did.
The danger from radiation was in a catastrophe like Chernobyl where the reactor melted down and the containment vessel was breached. In that case long lived radioactive elements are released and dispersed into the atmosphere and can be carried by the wind. Chernobyl was 21 years ago, it was not a design that Western companies used of considered and was about 30 years old at the time.
It is true but not significant that there is some radioactive water.
Here is a good link that explains this:
http://www.heavywaterboard.org/htmldocs/general/FAQS.asp
Is heavy water Radio active?
No. It is not.
When & why it is said that there is radio activity in heavy water used in nuclear power stations?
Because some of the deuterium in heavy water gets converted to Tritium by absorbing a neutron a nuclear reactor. Tritium is radio active. Further, some of the ionic impurities that are carried by heavy water as moderator or coolant also get activated in course of irradiation. Hence the radio activity is observed in Heavy Water used in Nuclear reactors.
Is heavy water harmful to health?
No. It is not not.
What is degraded Heavy Water?
Heavy Water which has greater light water content is called degraded heavy water.
Why Heavy Water gets degraded?
Heavy Water has greater affinity for light water. It can readily absorb light water present in air. It can also get degraded whenever light water from other processes gets mixed with it.
Is there any fixed life for Heavy Water?
No. But if it is being used in reactor then the limiting factor in usage is due to radio-activity build up during operation of Nuclear reactor. It can be reduced by removing the activated products.
Every piece of land we use now strangles more of what is left of nature.
Every damn we build does the same.
At the scale at which our population demands food and resources including water nature cannot supply.
Nature cannot supply and renew enough lumber or fish and our half assed attempts to plant rows of trees all the same and say there are more forests now than when the country was founded are lies. Even President Bush .. not my favorite environmentalist talked yesterday about the fisheries being criitical to our lives and overused.
We humans need to separate our supply of energy and resources and recycle them in order to allow nature to survive, and in order to do this in any meaningful way it means we will need huge amounts of power.
Here is a good example:
http://www.changingworldtech.com/
Here is a company that can take garbage and make oil out of it out of the organic parts and then recycle other materials and put it back into economic use. We have to be willing to pay the costs of this, and someting that will help defray that cost to make it reasonable is cheap and clean energy.
> But how they fit into reality and what their effects
> and side-effects might be were not seriously
> considered or considered at all...
I think this is a marvelous point ... and that we could
with a minimal amount of tweaking and pretending
we know it all put ourselves on the road to
stability and sustainability by making the regulation
of side effects like water use, energy use, resource
use, pollution and greenhouse gas emmissions
a cost of doing business. Challenging our industries
to make products that do not steal from the Earth
to provide value or profit by using market forces.
Regarding radioactive steam from nuclear plants -
Bruce to Kathleen: "Where did you get that idea? This is not true at all. Take a look at
some of the block diagrams of how a nuclear reactor works, the
steam is not radiactive in any way. Please, this is the kind of thing
that allows people to blow this stuff way out of proportion."
Then Bruce said: "The water from the inner loop is radioactive,
but water is H2O ... short lived isotopes, it is not radiotive to the degree..."
after describing the same system that Kathleen described...
Kathleen's point was that that water was handled "as radio active" and diverted and secluded as such...
hmmmmmmm .... hmmmmmm .....
Bruce... your Focus is as sharp as ever as is your adherence to 'Factiness' .... (that was sarcasm by the way...)
Regarding the making of fuel (bio diesel/ethanol) out of organic and plastic garbage and using the by product in agriculture -
Here is a good piece on that with good information: "Agrichar"
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977139103
Regarding the costs of doing business and of making necessary changes -
I do not mean to change from Water responsibility to Climate Change but they are related and here is a good insight that relates to both from the Director of the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the University of Maryland:
From Earthweek.com: "The High Cost of Ignoring Global Warming"
"Researchers at the University of Maryland published a report that says inaction in responding to the challenges of climate change in the United States will cost billions of dollars."
...
"Center director Matthias Ruth says that all too often inaction is motivated by the perception that the cost of reducing such destructive emissions is too high.
"Changing technologies, changing land use, changing consumption behaviors, all of those are quite costly," he said. "What has been forgotten in the debate though is the fact that not making the changes that are necessary is costly as well."
He concludes the report by writing that a national policy for easing greenhouse gas emissions is urgently needed to ease the economic repercussions of climate change that are likely to occur in the future. "
From: Earth Week-A Diary of the Planet (week ending October 17, 2007)
http://www.earthweek.com/
and the Agrichar piece I mentioned is by Sam Carana
You need to keep the story straight Bruce and have it jibe with what folks are actually saying... That's partly what I mean by FOCUS Bruce....
Kathleen's original statement was nothing about "releasing radioactive water" ... She did not say that either by inference or in so many words...
You need to keep what people have said straight if you are going to use those points as issues for your response...
This is what she said: "The resulting steam/water is then radioactive and needs to be contained along with the other waste products from that plant. "
There is nothing in that statement about water being released ... That statement reads as such: That water used for cooling the core needs to be contained/secluded/kept somewhere along with the other byproducts of the nuclear reaction...
You somehow read in her statement that: "...she inferred that releasing radioactive water was the normative state for a modern nuclear reaction..."
hmmmm darn those details...
;)
> Bruce... your Focus is as sharp as ever as is your
> adherence to 'Factiness' .... (that was sarcasm by the way...)
> You need to keep the story straight Bruce and have
> it jibe with what folks are actually saying... That's partly
> what I mean by FOCUS Bruce....
These just seemed like rudeness without a real point to me.
that's just pathetic (I'm sure I'm a devil for having said that too... yes???)
Bruce: "the steam that cools the reactor that people see and associate with a nuclear reactor is condensed outside to the atmosphere in the cooling towers."
Kathleen never indicated she was talking about that steam... what she said was pretty clear... you read into it what you wanted to...
Bruce: "Where did you get that idea? This is not true at all. ..."
Your comment is misleading and wrong and a deflection...
Instead of apologizing when seeing you made a mistake you went into a "Poindexter" explanation which was unnecessary and still missed the point she was making, a further deflection of her original point... Instead of apologizing you shimmied what you presented yourself to have originally said...
Those are not nits... those are big fat cockroaches !!! ;)
Why do I bring this do I bring this up? Because you do this consistently Bruce and its quite annoying ... You essentially are having a conversation with yourself...
For instance...
Your provide an affirmation of my comment: "I think this is a marvelous point ... "
and then go on to tweak it away from what I said...
I said nothing about a "minimal amount of tweaking" ...
I said nothing about "pretending to know it all" ...
That is just slimy like a worm...
I do see that your 'rudeness' has a real point .... and it is quite annoying ...
(Poindexter... that's a good one... ;) )
I would dare guess that if just the money this planet is wasting on wars were used to bring safe drinking water and sanitation to the rest of our fellow earth citizens who don't have it, that single improvement could profoundly change the dynamic of our civilization.
> Kathleen said and responded specifically the way
> you did to make a specific point you want to drive
Trying to turn the bleedin' obvious into a crime.
You saw what you wanted to see, not what she actually wrote or said ...
You respond to whatever you want to respond to, regardless of what someone actually says so you will have a chance to say what you've been wanting to say... to drive at ...
Just say what you want to say...without twisting what others have said... See?
That's the Obvious Thing... ;)
You do it consistently... And it is quite annoying ...
Therein lies the 'bleeding' crime... ;)
Devin - You've nailed it. The article was focused on the need to create water sanitation in some of the world's poorest regions, where large concentrations of people lack access to clean water. But I am glad it got people thinking about our water problems here at home as well.
David, A single small step for regions at risk, certainly not The solution, is the water filter straw...
I did a quick search for a story, here is an old one, I'm sure there are more and newer ones:
"New straw to kill disease as you drink" BBC Thursday, 4 May 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4967452.stm
here is a link to one of the companies (I have no affiliation - again, this was from a link in the BBC article, I'm sure there are other companies and organizations):
www.lifestraw.com
Great article...
Nuclear Power - the problem is not with the water, the problem is with the spent fuel. In 1977, electricity producing power companies claimed they had just about solved the problem of how to safely store the spent fuel rods. Thirty years later, they still haven't solved it. Until that is accomplished restarting the nuclear power plant industry would only solve one problem by creating a much bigger and more dangerous problem.
I'm just saying when you look at the alternatives it is not so easy as just saying nuclear is scarier ... the problems with nuclear are political. The problem with waste is because of fears that have incited political action, stopping the use of the Yucca Mountain Repository.
This is an emotional issue ... I just hope it gets resolves. There are on the order of 100 nulcear plants that have been operating in the US for 20-30 years with no problems that I do not think people realize.
http://www.kgoam810.com/viewentry.asp?ID=362581&PT=PERSONALITIES
Both France and the United Kingdom operate reprocessing facilities. These take in spent fuel rods and strip away built-up wastes while recovering the vast majority of the still-useful fuel. In the UK, for instance, according to BBC News, the Sellafield reprocessing center "receives waste nuclear fuel from 34 plants around the world. The metallic outer casing is first stripped away and the spent fuel is then dissolved in hot nitric acid. This produces three things — uranium (96%) and plutonium (1%) and highly radioactive waste (3%)." Both the recovered uranium and plutonium are turned into fuel pellets that can be used to create more energy in nuclear plants. And it is a lot of energy. According to the BBC, "each six-gramme [plutonium fuel] pellet holds the equivalent energy of one tonne of coal." This from a process that reduces nuclear waste by a whopping 97 percent!
Amory Lovins, another critic and one-time British representative of Friends of the Earth, agrees. "If you ask me," Lovins said in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1977, "It'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it."
Ehrlich, Lovins, and almost all of the "green" leadership rightly recognize that nuclear energy would lead to prosperity. From their standpoint, that is the problem. Again quoting Ehrlich: "We've already had too much economic growth in the U.S. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure."
In fact, to turn our backs on nuclear power may be to court disaster. With growing demand worldwide for energy, we may suffer supply disruptions in some of the fossil fuels that currently support our modern way of life. To fail now to rebuild our nuclear infrastructure would be to court disaster, something one of the chief scientists responsible for the development of nuclear technology was already warning about decades ago.
But gradually the realization dawned that wind power is not all it had been cracked up to be by Al Gore-style environmentalists, its most obvious drawback of course being that wind is so unreliable. This creates three separate but related problems.
First, turbines produce only a fraction of their "installed capacity" (in the U.K., around 25 percent), so the amount of power they actually provide is derisory. To achieve the same quantity of electricity that a conventional 2,000 megawatt power station generates would require covering hundreds of square miles of countryside or sea with giant windmills.
Second, so unpredictable are the instances when the wind blows at sufficient strength that conventional power stations must be kept permanently running, ready to step in at any moment to maintain a consistent power supply. Unless this "spinning reserve" is provided by nuclear reactors, this means that any supposed CO2 savings from wind power are largely if not entirely negated. Thus the chief argument to justify the E.U.'s great drive for wind power turned out in practice not to exist.
The third problem, thanks to this unpredictability, is that the more a country comes to rely on wind energy, the more it risks destabilizing its grid through sudden surges or drops in the energy from its turbines.
... On the evening of Saturday, November 4, 2006, a large part of western Europe experienced a black-out due to a massive power surge from thousands of turbines in Germany into the "pan-European grid." From Holland to Italy, it was reported that "a real catastrophe" had just barely been averted.
All this is risked to generate so little power that the 0.05 percent of the E.U.'s total electricity consumption it supplies still scarcely registers, while achieving virtually zero in terms of CO2 emissions reductions.