Underlying the desert of southern Idaho lies the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer, which is the size of Lake Erie, covering 10,000 square miles1. This is an amazing resource for Idaho when you look at what other countries without water are having to spend to desalinate water for their people.
A couple of years ago, through my investing work, I had the opportunity to hear a speaker from the Saudi AramCo fund share that a 600-cubic-meters-per-day desalination plant was currently being built in the Gulf, but that a 3,000-megawatt power plant had to be built at the same time to provide the power for it. Based on the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average cost to build a natural gas power plant in the U.S. in 2013 was $965 per kw—which would translate to at least a $2.9 billion investment to build a 3,000-MW power plant, besides the huge cost of the desalination plant. But this is what they have to do; water is a base critical need.
Another speaker noted that only 3 percent of the earth’s water is fresh and 68.7 percent of that fresh water is actually frozen. The next speaker, who invests university endowments and family offices in $1 billion projects, noted that alfalfa farmers pay $25 per acre-foot for water upstream on the Colorado River, while almond farmers downstream in central California have to pay $2,000-$3,000 per acre-foot and are lucky these days to get any allocation in drought years.
Idaho has a naturally occurring vast amount of fresh water that other countries and states are spending significant dollars to secure. And yet, although we have spent considerable energy in our state appropriating water rights between users, is anyone protecting the aquifer?
For many years I have really appreciated Idaho’s Attorney General Lawrence Wasden’s willingness to take a strong stand for Idaho’s aquifer; he has been the only one saying no to more waste while the U.S. government put pressure on the state to bring in more nuclear waste to be stored above the aquifer at INL.
“Lawrence Wasden didn’t draft the historic 1995 agreement between Idaho and the U.S. Department of Energy regarding radioactive waste at the Idaho National Laboratory, but he’s determined to protect it. It has resulted in Wasden coming under political pressure. That’s because he has refused to sign a waiver to bring more spent nuclear-fuel rods to the INL until the DOE makes good on its promise to begin processing 900,000 gallons of liquid sodium-bearing high-level waste stored at the site into a solid form. That liquid waste is currently housed in three large stainless-steel tanks reinforced by concrete located above the Snake River Aquifer. It has been there for 60 years”2.
In the 1950s, the federal government dumped nuclear waste from weapons production at INL in open pits. Since INL is located right on top of the aquifer, some of that waste has leached into the aquifer. We taxpayers have spent $9 billion to date to try to clean that up, Beatrice Brailsford, from the Snake River Alliance, tells me. She has written, “Hazardous and radioactive materials has escaped from every single project, and the leaks are, in fact, too numerous to count. Under Superfund, each of the nine major facilities was made a Waste Area Group, as was the Snake River Aquifer.”i
About 10 days ago, Attorney General Wasden and Governor Brad Little were able to reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy for hopefully a path forward that protects the aquifer and gets the waste out, while working with the DOE to resolve prior breaches. I appreciate their work and hope that our federal government keeps to their promises this time. Idahoans must protect our naturally occurring Snake Plain Aquifer for the valuable asset that it is.
[1] Samantha Wright reporting, Boise State Public Radio.
2 www.idahostatejournal.com/members/idaho-a-g-explains-firm-stand-on-nuclear-waste/article_ea484799-f84c-5c48-9c71-76153aa83e82.html
i Surface contamination has reached the aquifer from, for instance, reactors operating without containment. Some of the big ticket items remaining are drying the 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing high-level liquid waste and then adding that to the rest of the high-level waste powder and turning it all into a solid. That will be very challenging. The plutonium burial grounds and the high-level waste areas will have to be capped. Except for the core areas where either nuclear activities will continue or substantial contamination will remain even after the Superfund clean, the hope is that INL, including groundwater, will be suitable for unrestricted use in 2095.” Beatrice Brailsford
