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By Sam Masson
In this issue of OWT, you’ll find several informative features about the changing topography of the wastewater industry’s landscape. When these puzzle pieces are assembled, they should form a detailed picture of where the industry is now, as well as offer suggestions about how we might best get where it’s going. We show you how bacterial source tracking helps identify the origins of contaminated water. As a filtration medium, could recycled glass actually be a “better mousetrap,” and, if so, why hasn’t the world beaten a path to its door? That’s a question that I hope some readers will pick up on, and it will be interesting to see how in the years to come, we’re going to find new ways to reuse many of the things that today, we’re content to simply throw away.
“Beyond ‘Treatment’” provides a fascinating glimpse into how Homeland Security is changing the way we deal with our waste. This story has been a long time in the works, because it’s a subject that gets caught up in classified information and security clearances. We’re very pleased with how cooperative our contacts were, given the strict limitations to which they were bound. Like our last issue’s cover story about the Hanford nuclear waste facility, this feature demonstrates how important “what you do with it” is, and how what may have been acceptable yesterday isn’t going to cut the mustard tomorrow. The Columbia River was the concern in the Hanford piece, but this story is much more about national security. The Homeland Security Act causes ripples across the wastewater industry, extending well beyond research facilities like the ones mentioned in this article and waste disposal sites like Hanford. Decentralized water treatment and Homeland Security also have to do with structural improvements at our nation’s power-generating facilities. Containment domes at “modern” nuclear plants (“modern” in the US being nearly 30 years old) are some of the strongest, most secure structures in the world, encased in more than 3 feet of concrete and over a foot and a half of steel. But, when uranium fuel rods are used up, they are moved out of the containment domes and transferred to cooling ponds that are not sheltered under such ironclad conditions. Although these “cool pools” are buried underground at most sites, more than 10% are still located topside. Either way, I find it unsettling to have 40,000 metric tons of radioactive water—sprinkled around our nations’ cities, crops, and aquifers—that could turn into radioactive steam or smoke in the event of a natural disaster or an act of terrorism. Although spent fuel rods aren’t viewed to be as great a risk to national security as “live” reactors, and despite plans to ultimately transfer this waste to somewhere that will supposedly be “safe” for thousands of years, what do we do in the meantime? The answer lies in the manner with which we respond to these challenges, and how we arrange the “puzzle pieces” outlined in this edition of OWT, each one reflecting different issues of the onsite industry: technological issues, like mobile clarifiers and glass filtration; community need, as detailed in the Warren NODP; safety concerns, such as those described in our robotics story; environmental responsibility, as we see in the pulp and paper industry; and, last but not least, the relatively new dimension of national security. Although many of us don’t operate hazmat disposal sites or nuclear power plants, plenty of overlap exists between the ever-changing environmental challenges being faced across the onsite industry, the ways in which those challenges are met, and our shared concerns about their eventual outcomes.
Send an email to sam@forester.net
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- July/August 2006 |
