Can "toilet to tap" save the Colorado River?
Zombified uranium industry twitches; spring runoff forecast looks grim
š„µ Aridification Watch š«

The 40 million or so people who rely on the Colorado River for drinking, bathing, irrigating, cooling data centers or power plants, or filling their swimming pools with have a problem. The amount of water being pulled out of the river for all of this stuff exceeds the amount of water thatās actually in the river ā at least during most years in the last couple decades. And on the rare exception that supply exceeds demand, the surplus does little to dent the deficit, resulting in perennially low reservoir levels and chronically high water-manager stress levels.
There is exactly one way out of this mess: The collective users simply need to use less.
Yet while the solution may be simple, itās not exactly easy to carry out. Thatās in part because people keep moving to the region, increasing demand. Plus, as the climate warms, we need more water to keep the crops or the grass or ourselves from drying up, making cutting consumption difficult and even dangerous.
An even bigger obstacle to reducing use is the societal urge to try to solve problems by consuming more, building more, and doing more (see the rise of the āAbundanceā movement among American liberals). Using less goes directly against that urge (see Trumpās recent executive order titled: Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads). That inclination drives the slew of schemes to try to produce more water, whether its by building dams, throwing dynamite into the sky, seeding clouds, desalinating seawater, or draining the Great Lakes and piping the water across the nation and over mountains to water Palm Springs golf courses. While itās true that dams have given folks a bit more time to find a solution, building more of them now ā with the exception of stormwater capture basins ā wonāt do any good (since even existing reservoirs are far from full).
But there is one thing we can do more of to help us consume less: recycling. While the idea of recycling water inspires turn-off terms like ātoilet to tap,ā the practice is actually quite common in the Colorado River states. (And, really, if you live downstream from any other community, you are probably drinking the upstream townsā recycled wastewater, though that isnāt counted as recycling, per se.)
A new report out of UCLAās Institute of the Environment & Sustainability gives the rundown on wastewater recycling in the Colorado River Basin, and reveals that Arizona and Nevada are way ahead of the Upper Basin when it comes to reusing water, yet still have room for improvement. And it finds that if all of the Colorado River states aside from Arizona and Nevada were to increase wastewater reuse by 50%, they would free up some 1.3 million acre-feet of water per year, which is about one-third of the way to the 4 million acre-feet of cuts deemed necessary.

To be clear, not all water recycling is ātoilet to tap.ā In fact, most is not. In Las Vegas, for example, treated effluent is used to irrigate golf courses, and itās also returned back to Lake Mead, which is then credited against Nevadaās water allotment. And in Arizona, treated wastewater from the Phoenix-area is used for steam production and cooling at the Palo Verde nuclear plant (which evaporates a whopping 45,000 gallons of water per minute), and treated effluent is used to ārechargeā groundwater aquifers (eventually ending up in taps).
While recycled water can be used to irrigate crops, you canāt really recycle irrigation water. That fact, in a way, is why Nevada is the leader in Colorado River water-recycling: Almost all of its allocation from the river goes to the Las Vegas metro area for public supply/domestic use, with virtually none of it going to irrigate crops. That means most of the water eventually goes into the sewer system, making it available for recycling. And that, in turn, makes it easier to slash water use in cities than on farms, further throwing off the balance between agricultural use and municipal use, and putting more pressure on farmers to either sell out or become more efficient, which has. Its own drawbacks.
Water recycling can have unintended side effects, too. While itās nice that Palo Verde doesnāt rely on freshwater, the 72,000 acre-feet of recycled water it uses per year all evaporates ā it is a zero water-discharge plant ā meaning it does not soak into aquifers or otherwise benefit ecosystems, as it would if it were used to water parks or was discharged back into the Gila River. And, water treatment is highly energy-intensive, so the more water you want to recycle, the more power youāll need.
Ultimately, using less water in the first place is going to be necessary. But recycling what we do use could help.
āļø Wacky Weather Watchā”ļø

In the days following my April 1 snowpack update, the snowpack updated itself, with a nice storm bolstering snow water equivalent levels by up to two inches in some places. But it was closely followed by an unusually warm spell, which erased all of the gains and then some. What that means is a relatively paltry spring runoff for many of the Upper Colorado River Basin streams, with water levels likely peaking earlier and at lower levels than in 2021. How much earlier and lower depends on how warm or cool (and dry or wet) the rest of the spring is, but at this point itās safe to say it wonāt be a big water year for irrigators or boaters.
Iām especially worried about the Upper San Juan River and the Rio Grande, both of which have their headwaters in the southeast San Juan Mountains, which are running close to empty, snow-wise. Yes, Wolf Creek got pounded by the April 6-9 storms, but it has also experienced some abnormally high average temperatures over the last several days ā the average temperature in the Rio Grande Headwaters on April 12 was 45.5° F, compared to the median for that date of 32°. If that continues, what little snow is left will mostly be gone within weeks.
Meanwhile, the high temperature in Tucson and Phoenix, neither of which have received more than a hint of precipitation during the last eight months, exceeded 100° F on April 11, setting new daily records and further desiccating the soil.
It may seem a bit early, but I think itās time to start predicting peak runoffs for Four Corners area rivers. Iāll start with the Animas, which Iām pessimistically predicting will peak on May 17 at 2,950 cubic-feet per-second, based on previous yearsā snowpacks and peak runoffs. I say āpessimisticā because if Iām right, it would only be the fourth time this century that the Animas peaked below 3,000 cfs. Hereās hoping Iām wrong.
āļø Mining Monitor āļø
Is the uranium mining renaissance upon us? I donāt think so. But the industryās zombified carcass is beginning to twitch ā figuratively speaking, of course. The stirrings include:
A couple of weeks ago, the Energy Information Administration crowed that U.S. uranium production last year was the highest in six years. That sounds huge, right? Really, itās not: Production was virtually zero from 2019 to 2023, making last yearās total of 676,939 pounds look pretty good. But as recently as 2014 ā which was not boom times, by any means ā production was nearly 5 million pounds. The big 2024 producers were in-situ recovery operations in Wyoming and Texas, as well as Energy Fuelsā White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah. It should be noted, however, that the White Mesa Millās production was not from the companyās mines, but from its āalternate feed program,ā which is to say it extracted uranium from other folksā waste streams.
Energy Fuels is now producing ore at its Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon and hauling it by truck across the Navajo Nation to the White Mesa Mill. The company says it plans on beginning production and shipment at its La Sal and Pandora Mines as well. This represents the first conventional ore production in the U.S. in years.
Western Uranium & Vanadium says Energy Fuels has agreed to purchase up to 25,000 short tons of uranium ore from WU&Vās Sunday Mine complex near Slick Rock, Colorado, in the Uravan Uranium Belt. They plan to begin shipping later this year.
Meanwhile, there is plenty of noise around a potential nuclear renaissance, as tech giants look to promised advanced and small modular reactors to power their electricity-guzzling data centers. But there are no reactors yet. I tallied some of that talk for High Country News.
Is there a less value-laden word for the hype around nuclear than "renaissance"?
Thanks for pointing out how much water is evaporated and taken out of the system by Palo Verde: it's water that could be sent back to taps, reducing the fresh water draw of Phoenix, or sent down the Gila.
Water is a big deal for most "thermal" powerplants, though not solar or wind or batteries. A couple of the few recently-completed nuke examples promoted as relatively economic overseas were cheaper/ish because they utilize seawater cooling. In Finland, Baltic water, in the UAE, Persian Gulf water. Both were also kept cheaper/ish by use of semi-incarcerated imported labor from Poland and Pakistan respectively.
Most importantly, the Finns have shelved plans for more nukes as they realized that it's cheaper and faster to keep expanding their wind turbine fleet, and utilize some summer solar, and build heat pumps and heat storage, both small and ginormous. The Emiratis are shifting gears, unsurprisingly, towards massive solar. 5.2 GW dc. The link says it all: https://www.power-technology.com/news/uae-24-7-solar-pv-battery-storage.
Nuclear...
Resurgence?
Regurgitation?
Reincarnation?
Reexamination or review? (Mostly a lot of discussion so far, there still aren't even any functional quarter scale prototypes of "SMRs".)
Resuscitation? That captures it for me.
Back to water; Bill Gates's "sodium-cooled" reactor circulates that sodium through the core, then to a steam boiler-turbogenerator-cooling tower system. So it evaporates water just like every steam power plant in the West. Apparently testimony to the Colo leg was misleading, at least to reporters.
China and nukes? The few that are actually under construction are on the SE coast. Solar and wind dominate current Chinese power additions.
I follow a blog about Spring Creek Basin Wild Horses - the gal that posts there has been saying there's not a lot of water in the streams or creeks (this is Colorado) I dont know exactly where in Colorado this is, but she does a really good job of not only keeping track of the various bands of Horses, but cant say enough for the BLM people who take care of area. One of theirs got removed a while ago (due to firings) but somehow they managed to get him back on the crew.
I dont hear a lot of good about most BLM people who are involved in the "management" of Wild Horses, but the guys and gals in that area have been super. Nice to hear of something good - these days!