Should Water Be Legislated as a Human Right?

Comment: Again, if you think our government will protect our water, you will be surprise; they do not protect our water. One example is Mt. Top Removal, a legal form of mining and the coalmine companies are allowed to dump stuff in the rivers and valleys! Our gov't lets most corporations control our water policies! Therefore, when it comes to protecting our water, the federal has weakened the standards of water that most water we drink is very high in all types of fatal minerals! Therefore, when it comes to uranium mining and milling, they are huge water users and they will ruin our water. The article below is somewhat funny, worried about bottle water in countries where they allow their corporations to ruin their water with mining: Canada and Australia!

Published on Friday, August 14, 2009 by Inter Press Service
Should Water Be Legislated as a Human Right?
by Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS - The growing commercialisation of water - and the widespread influence of the bottling industry worldwide - is triggering a rising demand for the legal classification of one of the basic necessities of life as a human right.

"We definitely need a covenant or [an international] treaty on the right to water so as to establish once and for all that no one on earth must be denied water because of inability to pay," says Maude Barlow, a senior adviser to the President of the U.N. General Assembly, on water issues.

"We’ve got to protect water as a human right," she said, pointing out that the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva would be the most likely venue to propose such a covenant.

But it would be best, she added, if it were ratified by the 192-member General Assembly, currently presided over by Fr. Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, a former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua.

"We need at the United Nations more than a human rights remedy," Barlow told IPS. "We need a plan of action for the General Assembly."

The U.N. says that close to 880 million people - mostly in the developing world - lack adequate access to clean water. By 2030, close to 4 billion people could be living in areas suffering severe water stress, mostly in South Asia and China.

A study commissioned by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), released in March, said the global market for water supply, sanitation and water efficiency is worth over 250 billion dollars - and is likely to grow to nearly 660 billion dollars by 2020.

Barlow said the Council of Canadians, which she heads, is working with countries promoting the right to water constitutionally.

A plebiscite in Uruguay, held four years ago, led to a referendum resulting in a constitutional amendment singling out water as both a human right and a public service to be delivered on a not-for-profit basis.

A Colombian group called Ecofundo has collected two million signatures in a plebiscite that is expected to lead to a referendum on the right to water.

Patricia Jones, an expert on water and manager of the Environmental Justice Programme at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, told IPS that the U.S. negotiated against the appointment of a special U.N. rapporteur on the human right to water during a vote at the Human Rights Commission in March 2008.

Still, an independent expert was appointed, with a three-year mandate, to assist member states to identify the scope and content of the human right to water and sanitation.

"The opposition to the human right to water, of the previous U.S. administration, is changing," Jones said.

She quoted U.S. President Barack Obama as saying in his inaugural address early this year: "to the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow."

For the U.S., she pointed out, the economic stimulus package, and other funding, is going to address water availability issues within the U.S. "We do not have a comprehensive water policy at the national level; water is a devolved power of the states, with regulation through the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Quality Act."

But Jones said the U.S. State Department staff participated in recent consultations on the human right to water and sanitation.

Barlow, the senior U.N. adviser on water issues, said: "We are winning some of the battle against the global corporate theft of water."

"In my country [Canada], for instance, 53 municipalities - some of them big cities such as Vancouver and Toronto - have banned bottled water, and bottled water sales have dropped dramatically globally."

Many municipalities worldwide are reversing the privatisation of their water services. The City of Paris, for example, is bringing its water services into the public sphere for the first time ever.

"We are also successfully introducing the notion of water as a public trust in political jurisdictions, asserting public control over this vital resource," Barlow said. However, she noted, "we must be ever vigilant as new forms of private control are being advanced: water markets, water banking, water trading and water speculation are all on the horizon for those who would impose a market model of water allocation in the place of the public trust doctrine."

Barlow said a recent example was the sale of privately traded water rights in Australia (which were introduced as a way to move water use toward sustainability) to a big American investment fund. This means that not only is this water not in public control, it is not even in the hands of Australians any more, she added.

Asked how investors can help solve the world’s water problems, Jones told IPS that investors can ensure that the water services investments they make would bring about the human right to water.

The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) termed the existing priorities in global water services as "water apartheid," reporting that there was enough water and financial resources to meet the current needs.

Still, it suggested that fully implementing existing legal obligations on the human right to water would go a long way to adjusting funding priorities toward water for the poor.

Some companies, such as Connecticut Water and PepsiCo have adopted a human right to water policy, Jones said.

Barlow said the international community should be watching the "superpowers" who are now looking outside their borders for water supplies - as they did for oil.

She said China is already constructing a pipeline to funnel water from the Tibetan Himalayas.


http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/14-7

Australia’s threatened water resources, and the uranium mining risk

Comment: Uranium mining will and has ruined our water and water all over the world. Modern uranium mining is not any different from the polluting ones over 30 years ago!

What impact is uranium mining having on our water?

The Advertiser, by Jim Green, 25 july 09

ENVIRONMENT Minister Peter Garrett buttressed his decision last week to approve in situ leach (ISL) uranium mining at Beverley Four Mile with the claim that he is “certain this operation poses no credible risk to the environment”.

Thus Mr Garrett adds another chapter to the history of spin surrounding ISL mining.

Environmental debates typically revolve around differing assessments of the possibility of environmental contamination.

But with ISL mining, environmental pollution – specifically contamination of groundwater with radionuclides, heavy metals and acid – is a certainty.

ISL mining involves pumping an acidic solution into an aquifer, dissolving the uranium ore and other heavy metals and pumping the solution back to the surface.

After the uranium has been separated, liquid radioactive waste is simply dumped in the aquifer.

Isolation and containment of the pollutants would not be difficult or expensive, but the mining companies will take the cheaper option of polluting groundwater for as long as the politicians let them……………………

A 2003 Senate References and Legislation Committee report recommended banning the discharge of radioactive liquid mine waste to groundwater. ISL uranium mining is used at the Beverley uranium mine and it is the mining method proposed for Beverley Four Mile, Oban and Honeymoon.

The future of this mining technique is plain to see: short-lived mines leaving SA with a legacy of polluted aquifers.

Spills and leaks are common at ISL mines. The SA Department of Primary Industry and Resources lists 59 spills at Beverley from 1998 to 2007.

Serious questions must be raised as to BHP Billiton’s capacity to safely manage radioactive tailings at Olympic Dam if, as planned, tailings production increases sevenfold to 68 million tonnes annually and water consumption increases to more than 250 million litres daily.

BHP Billiton pays nothing for its massive water take for the Olympic Dam mine, despite recording a $17.7 billion profit in 2007-8. That arrangement is enshrined in the Roxby Downs Indenture Act 1982………

……… The Indenture Act provides a raft of exemptions and overrides from the SA Natural Resources Act 2004, the Environment Protection Act 1993, the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 and even the Freedom of Information Act 1991.

BHP Billiton and the Rann Government are currently engaged in secret discussions over the future of the Indenture Act.

http://antinuclear.net/2009/07/25/australias-threatened-water-resources-and-the-uranium-mining-risk/

No hearing set on mine water dumping in Schuylkill

The Schuylkill River is at the center of a project that would see contaminated water from an upriver coal mine dumped into the river to supply water to the Limerick Generating Station.

Comment: Can you believe the article? They are making decisions about water that will benefit Corporate America and the health of the people is set aside! Remember the article when laws are made in Virginia to benefit the Canadian Uranium Corp that wants to mine uranium mining in all of Virginia. Oh, by the way, does the river dump into the D+ Chesapeake Bay, yes it does!

By Evan Brandt, ebrandt@pottsmerc.com

POTTSTOWN — Eight months after promising a Pottstown-area public hearing on a project in which contaminated water from an upriver coal mine is dumped into the Schuylkill to provide water for the Limerick nuclear power plant, there is still no date set for the hearing.

However, the Delaware River Basin Commission, which has oversight authority of the project, will be discussing the matter next month as part of its bi-annual review of the project, which is being pursued by Exelon Nuclear to benefit the Limerick Generating Station.

"We currently do not have a date yet for the public hearing," said DRBC spokeswoman Katherine O'Hara. She said the staff is continuing to work on analyzing the data collected over the last six years, and the last six months, in order to make a recommendation to the full commission.

"It's still going to happen," she said of the hearing.

She said the agency is cognizant of the need to make the final recommendation available to the public in plenty of time to make any public hearing on the issue worthwhile.

"We want to have it out to the public to give them plenty of time" to understand it and thus bring informed questions and comments to the hearing, she said.

The meeting set for July 29 in the agency's Trenton, N.J. headquarters is one of two held each year to discuss the latest data collected from the river and to share information among the DRBC, Exelon and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which may also issue a recommendation in support or opposition to the project.

At the crux of the matter is water pumped from a Schuylkill County coal mine which, unlike water from many other Pennsylvania coal mines, is not acidic.

For the past six years, the water has been pumped from the Wadesville mine to augment the river's flows as a way to allow the power plant to draw more water from the Schuylkill, particularly during the summer months when flow is low.

Currently, when the water level in the Schuylkill drops too low, the plant must draw water from a series of pipelines and water flows in the Perkiomen Creek and Delaware River.

As part of its application, Exelon has agreed to make annual contributions to a watershed improvement fund that is based on the amount of water it has avoided pumping in from the Delaware.

Pottstown has become a focus for the project because the Pottstown Water Treatment plant in Stowe, 70 miles downstream from Wadesville, is the first place downstream of the river from the mine that water is drawn in for public consumption.

Exelon asked the Pottstown Borough Authority, which owns the plant, to endorse the project, while the Alliance for a Clean Environment, which points to the high levels of iron and manganese in the water, has argued for the opposite.

The authority has, to date, issued no endorsement.

The water pumped from the mine shows 80 times the safe drinking water level for manganese and 20 times the standard for iron.

However, 2005 tests at the Pottstown intake showed those levels to have been diluted down to 17 times the safe standard for manganese and 1.5 times for iron. Those contaminants are removed by processing at the water treatment plant, but may add to the cost of plant maintenance.

The mine water has been added under the authority of the DRBC as a "demonstration project," and Exelon has filed an application to make the permission permanent.

In December, the agency extended for one year permission to continue to conduct the project as a demonstration while it continues its review of Exelon's request to make the permission permanent.

O'Hara said the granting of extensions such as the one used in this case is unusual for the DRBC, but not unheard of.

Data on the project is available at www.state.nj.us/drbc/wadesville.htm — which is the DRBC Web site dedicated to sharing the information with the public.

URL: http://www.pottsmerc.com/articles/2009/07/06/news/srv0000005681596.prt

http://pottsmerc.com/articles/2009/07/06/news/srv0000005681596.txt

Tide of toxic water poses health risk

"The water is half a metre from the surface and about to decant into the Vaal River system"

Comment: The same problems has happen out West and our future if uranium mining is approved in VA!

Bobby Jordan Published:Jun 27, 2009

Acid dissolves minerals in old mines

A river of acid water — enough to fill 600 swimming pools a day — has flooded old gold mines west of Johannesburg and is just days away from spilling over, causing an environmental disaster.

Natural ground water becomes highly acidic after flowing into old underground mines, where it dissolves heavy metals such as iron and uranium. In this form, it poses a health risk to humans and animals and damages the environment and agricultural land.

Long-term exposure to the poisoned water poses major health risks, including increased rates of cancer, skin lesions and retarded brain development.

An overflow of toxic mine water in the past led to radioactive contamination of Robinson Lake — a fishing and picnic area that has now become lifeless — outside Randfontein on the West Rand.

Acidic water is also dissolving huge areas of underground rock, threatening the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site.

The rapid rise in the water level follows the partial closure of a water treatment plant outside Randfontein because of wrangling between the government and mining companies over the cost of cleaning up the toxic mess caused by mining, and the quality of water left behind.

Despite warnings from scientists, the toxic tide — called acid mine drainage — has filled an underground void called the western basin, which comprises hundreds of square kilometers between Krugersdorp and Randfontein, once the world’s richest gold mining area. The water is now half a metre from the surface and about to start decanting into the Vaal River system.

Acid water is also fast filling up two other underground caverns — a central basin beneath Johannesburg and Soweto stretching as far as Alberton, and an eastern basin beneath the East Rand as far as Nigel and Springs.

If left unchecked, this water could also decant and contaminate water that ultimately flows into the Orange River.

The looming crisis in the western basin has prompted a flurry of negotiations between the government and mining companies, which have set up a technical task team in the hope of avoiding a potential environmental disaster.

In the past, pumps kept gold mines outside Johannesburg largely free of water because most water was pumped to the surface, partially treated and released into rivers. Now many of the gold mines have closed or can no longer afford to keep pumping, and vast underground areas are filling up.

“It (the western basin) is the first gold basin that has filled and decanted — to overflow uncontrollably. That’s why it’s an issue,” said Rand Uranium senior consultant for sustainable development Rex Zorab. “It’s not like the central basin where there’s a huge void still to be filled,” he said.

At the heart of the problem are new water management regulations released this year, which direct mining companies to clean all pumped water to drinking-quality standard. Until now, they only partially treated pumped water before releasing it into the Vaal River system.

Mining firms said it would take at least two years to build a new water treatment plant to meet the government’s demands, at a cost of about R550-million. The government says the companies are nevertheless liable for environmental damage caused by discharging partially treated water — so the companies have reduced the amount of water they pump out.

The impasse involves three mining companies: Mintails, DRD Gold and Rand Uranium. Until recently, they treated 25 megalitres of acid mine drainage daily at two plants.

But a stalemate in negotiations over water quality prompted Mintails to partially close their treatment plant in April, causing water in the basin to fill up. It is now just days until acid water starts pouring out of an old mine shaft close to Randfontein — and spilling into the Tweelopie Spruit, which feeds into the Mooi River that supplies untreated water to Potchefstroom. The spruit also feeds into the Crocodile River.

Department of Water and Environmental Affairs spokesman Linda Page said: “They (the three companies ) have been given 90 days to stop discharging into the Tweelopie Spruit. Failure to do so will result in further action from the department.”

Mintails spokesman Basie Maree said: “We are committed to turn the water plant to full production once we have a clear directive on water quality standards and liability impacts.” jordanb@sundaytimes.co.za

http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Article.aspx?id=1024839