- Chapter 2 -

          - Solving the Fresh Water Crisis -

Some foolish people think that the water supply
shortages now hitting many states are somehow
predetermined by nature. Nothing is further from the
truth. What is required is to start up the long-delayed
water improvement projects, and nuclear desalination
programs to reverse the ecological and biological
catastrophe now in the making. 
   {Won't You Please Let Your Grandchildren Have
Drink of Fresh Water?} was the title of a
mass-circulation report commissioned by Lyndon H.
LaRouche, Jr. in 1982. The document called for using
``plain common sense'' to advance nuclear desalination
technologies and the North American Water and Power
Alliance (NAWAPA). In the preface to the pamphlet,
LaRouche wrote: ``next to a general thermonuclear war,
the greatest single environmental danger to the
American people over the coming two decades is the
danger that whole regions of our nation will simply run
out of usable fresh-water supplies.'' 
   Whenever we as a nation have failed to make the
necessary investments in water supply infrastructure,
we have suffered. If we ignore these needs today, we
will suffer again. We are already seeing the return of
water-borne illnesses, such as cholera, which were
epidemic during the decade of the 1890s. Dustbowl
conditions, like those of the 1930s, are threatened
once again. 
   Today, serious water supply problems are worsening
in California and other western regions; Florida and
the Southeast; the upper Missouri Basin; the coastal
regions of New Jersey, Virginia, and the Gulf. Across
the country, local water treatment facilities are
breaking down; coliform bacteria contamination is
rising. Conditions are so bad in the Rio Grande River
Basin that cholera will break out soon. 
   People in these locations are suffering water
supply problems because necessary water works
developments were systematically stopped over the past
25-30 years. Moreover, wherever you live, you and the
entire U.S. population are feeling the effects of
drastically inadequate per household supplies and usage
of water, in terms of declining amounts of water going
into farming, food processing, manufacturing,
transport, and power generation, nationally. 
   Look at the amount of water that goes for making a
car. George Bush--and his loyal opposition--talk of
selling thousands more cars? To manufacture one car,
takes an average of over 10,040 gallons of water
directly, and thousands more indirectly. If a purchase
order from Japan came in tomorrow for thousands of
cars, many auto plants couldn't fill it because the
effort would drain local water supplies. Will they
blame that on foreigners too? Or maybe, on ``nature?'' 

            - The National Water Budget -
   Most people think of rivers, lakes, aquifers, and
water wells as resources fixed by nature, to be either
conserved or consumed. On the contrary. The only
relatively fixed feature of the water cycle in North
America is the overall annual precipitation, which
amounts to an average 4,200 billion gallons a day
(bgd.) Of that, about 1,200 bgd reaches the 48
coterminous states, where man's intervention over the
past 200 years has directly affected what water
engineers call the average dependable supply of runoff.
Today this dependable supply totals about 515 bgd, and
it is not a fixed figure, but the result of man's
activities to clear channels, drain swamps, prevent
evaporation, and create storage capacity. (You can
think of the quantity of 1 billion gallons as a column
of water whose base is the size of a football field,
and whose height is over four times that of the
Washington Monument.) 
   As of the 1960s, the United States, with over 190
million people, was using overall about 308 bgd, which
was 60% of the average dependable supply of 515 bgd at
that time. This supply reflected the dam-building of
the interwar period--the Grand Coulee, the Hoover, and
the Colorado River development, the Tennessee Valley
Authority, and the post-war California Water Plan
(adopted in 1957) to date. Plans were made to continue
large-scale water projects to provide for the future.
To serve a population in 1990 of 250 million, it was
projected that 588 bgd were required. 
   Toward this objective, the U.S. Geological Survey
conducted a systematic analysis in the 1960s of the
nation's water resources in order to assay which river
basins had a water surplus or deficit; and where
man-made interventions were necessary to increase flow.
The map shows 18 of the hydrologic regions drawn up by
the U.S. Geological Survey. Most of the 48 coterminous
states receive between 20 and 40 inches of rainfall a
year; but one-third of the area has less than 20 inches
of annual precipitation--mostly in the dry western
states. 
   Designs were drawn up in the 1960s for a
continental water development program, called the North
American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA). The
idea--shown on the map, is to divert water southward
that otherwise flows unused, into the Arctic Circle.
NAWAPA would add at least 135 bgd to the lower United
States, and additional water supplies to Canada and
Mexico. 

              - Ecological Degradation -
   But the NAWAPA project was abandoned. Regional
water projects were also stalled; and desalination R&D
was all but shut down. The results are today's water
shortages and ecological degradation--all man-made. The
hydrologic region map shows some of the worst water
problem areas. 
   @sb|{California}. The state has been
obtaining 40% of its annual water needs from pumping
ground water, which in 11 of 50 major aquifers, has led
to an overdraft crisis. For example, thousands of
square miles of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley have
sunk. 
   @sb|{Florida.} The water supplies for
Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, and many other population
centers are threatened by the saline intrusion into
ground water sources, because of heavy pumping. 
   @sb|{East Coast.} Long Island, N.Y.
supplies are threatened because the underlying aquifer
has been mined to the point of sea water intrusion.
Virginia Beach, in the James River system, is in a
similar crisis. 
   @sb|{Texas.} Land subsidence as a result
of ground water pumping has occurred in the Houston and
Galveston areas, causing costly damage to bridges,
buildings, roads, and underground utilities. 
   @sb|{Rio Grande, Lower Colorado River
Basins.} This region, plus southern California, the
U.S. border zone of {maquiladoras}--slave labor
assembly plants--has become a biological breakdown zone
because of the lack of safe water. Water-borne diseases
are spreading, and cholera is expected soon. 
   The present-day national water budget is seen to
be even more inadequate if measured in terms of what
should be the minimum per capita, per household and per
acre water supplies in a growing economy. During the
1980s Reagan Bush ``recovery,'' water use has been
drying up along with economic activity. 
   Per capita, water withdrawals (removal of water
from the annual precipitation flow) for all uses
increased from about 528 gallons per person per day in
1900, to nearly 2,000 gallons per day in 1980. The
development of modern agriculture, and the application
of electrification, account for the lion's share of the
increase. 
   But since 1980, per capita withdrawals have, for
the first time in the past 100 years, gone into
decline! The estimated per capita use of water in 1985
was 1,673 gallons a day, down from over 2,000 gallons
daily in 1980. This reflects economic policy shifts,
not drought. 
   Water use is declining for American households in
each of the three major categories of use: household
functioning and related urban uses; irrigation for
agriculture; and for meeting the needs of power
production and industrial plant requirements. 

                - And, the Solution -
   @sb|{DESALINATION.} The Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico constitute
``reservoirs'' of virtually limitless capacity, given
the installation of advanced technology nuclear
desalination facilities--the modular high-temperature
gas-cooled reactor (MHTGR) design. If these plants are
sited at key points along the Pacific, Gulf, and
Atlantic coastlines, their sweetwater output can
reverse the ecological decay now taking place. 
   The Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California--bigger than many national water systems,
has before it a custom design by General Atomics for an
MHTGR modular installation that could produce 106
million gallons of fresh water a day, in addition to
466 MW net electric power output. This prototype is
adaptable for other locations. 
   @sb|{NAWAPA}. The northwestern region of
North America receives about one-quarter of all the
rain and snow hitting the continent. The NAWAPA plan
would divert 15% of this flow (now draining northward,)
into a natural wonder reservoir--the 500-mile-long (up
to 10 miles wide) Rocky Mountain Trench in British
Columbia. 
   The project should proceed in three phases, so
that the benefits of each stage lay the groundwork for
succeeding development. {Phase I}: Send water
eastward across the Canadian Plains provinces,
providing water for irrigation there, as well navigable
channels that would connect the Pacific Ocean to the
Great Lakes, allowing for the regulation of Great Lakes
and St. Lawrence Seaway levels for the first time.
{Phase II}: Sending water southeast across
Montana and the Dakotas, where it would recharge the
depleted Ogallala Aquifer on the High Plains, augment
the flow of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and
link the Canadian Plains with the Mississippi by a
navigable canal. {Phase III}: Channeling water
to the dry Southwest. 
   @sb|{REGIONAL PROJECTS:} Lift the
arbitrary bans--imposed in the false name of
``environmentalism''-- on tapping such flows as, for
example, the runoff of the northern California rivers,
now going out to sea unused. 
                    


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com