Republicans rail against WOTUS rules as uranium, nitrates threaten High Plains Aquifer

Throughout its history the US Army Corps of Engineers has had purview over water that flows into bodies that can support navigation and in 2014, through the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, the Obama White House moved to identify more closely the sources of non-point pollution. 

Despite a judge's ruling EPA went forward with new federal rules protecting small streams, tributaries and wetlands. Sackett v. EPA is being heard currently in the Supreme Court of the United States as a test of the authority of the agency to regulate wetland protection when 'significant nexus' or a scientific connection is established to downstream waters of the United States.

Today, the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer is being depleted six and a half times faster than its recharge rate and nearly all the groundwater sampled from it is contaminated with uranium and nitrates from industrial agriculture. 

Nebraska signed the South Platte River Compact with Colorado in 1923. In 1998, when Kansas sued Nebraska over its High Plains use SCOTUS didn't even mention the word "groundwater" and although it never appeared in the initial 1943 Republican River compact the Court ruled its use affects flows. 

In 2008 after Nebraska's 1978 median nitrate level doubled lab tests showed a few municipal wells were exceeding the US Environmental Protection Agency limit for uranium when samples jumped as high as 57 parts per billion. In 2011 one irrigation well just four miles from a municipal water source tested 322 parts per billion of uranium or more than 10 times the legal limit for drinking water set by EPA. 

In a 2015 study researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln reported that 78 percent of groundwater samples from the Ogallala Formation found with unsafe concentrations of uranium were also contaminated with nitrates from industrial agriculture. Researchers learned that nitrates at levels near the 10-parts-per-million legal limit release uranium into the state’s groundwater, which provides drinking water for 85 percent of Nebraskans. 

On Thursday Nebraska joined 24 other red states in a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s new WOTUS safeguards.

Nitrate, largely from commercial fertilizers and manure, may then prompt the release of uranium by assisting in converting solid uranium to a state more poised to jump off the aquifer sediments and dissolve into water. The uranium problem appears to be worst in areas surrounding the Republican River valley and parts of the Platte River valley in central and south-central Nebraska. Parts of northwest Nebraska have tested high for uranium as well. Sitting next to the Platte River, Grand Island has been grappling with uranium in its water for more than a decade. [Flatwater Free Press]

At a defunct AltEn ethanol plant just west of Omaha in eastern Nebraska 150 million gallons of water contaminated with 84,000 tons of pesticide residue have been determined to be too toxic to be spread on area farm ground. In February, 2021 two tanks at the facility burst releasing some 4 million gallons of polluted slurry downstream. Minnesota has taken steps to head off such red state disasters.

EPA leveled its 2015 environmental justice actions in Region 8 against two offenders in South Dakota: Tronox, Inc. at the North Cave Hills/Flat Top Mine Sites and a criminal action against a City of Pierre employee.

Learn more at EPA.