Polluting pork industry GOP Nebraska governor calls for nitrate study

Republicans in red states are howling because the federal government is buying land to protect it from desertification so groundwater depletion and the absence of public land is draining the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer 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. 

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 farming. 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.

Towns in Nebraska are stepping up sampling municipal supplies where nitrate levels are still rising but the owners of private wells are not. Jim Pillen, the state's Republican governor is a major contributor to nitrate impairment but he wants a study that will pin the blame on farmers. Suggesting that irony is not completely dead, wells in the Republican River basin are the most severely threatened by nitrate poisoning. 

Bacteria in human bodies can turn nitrate, a colorless, tasteless and odorless chemical, into nitrite and then convert it to nitrosamine, a known probable carcinogen. Out of nearly 29,000 private well owners the state reached out to, only 3,478 samples were sent back. The state study happened because it’s a step toward Pillen’s goal of reducing overapplication of nitrogen fertilizers, said Laura Strimple, the governor’s spokesperson, in an email statement. [Many Nebraskans still under threat of high nitrate in drinking water, report finds]

After public outcry scuttled its eminent domain scam federally subsidized Sioux Falls, South Dakota chemical company POET, that enables nitrate pollution to grow corn for ethanol, has entered an agreement to transport waste carbon dioxide through Nebraska in an existing natural gas pipeline to a sequestration site in Wyoming according to a press release.