Report details alternatives to Colorado River water

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:

The ideas range from tearing out thirsty groves of salt cedar to towing icebergs down from the Arctic, from seeding clouds over the Rockies to filtering salt from seawater. When it comes to squeezing every drop from the shrinking sponge of the Colorado River, few options, it seems, are too complicated or expensive.

A new report examines 12 ideas for augmenting the river’s flow, and not even the most audacious of the plans — importing icebergs, for example — has been rejected out of hand.
Bill Rinne, director of surface water resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said he took two things away from the report: All options are still on the table, and none of them seem to provide the perfect solution. “I don’t see a real silver bullet,” he said.

The report, paid for by the Southern Nevada Water Authority and compiled by an outside panel of experts, was delivered to Secretary of Interior Dirk Kempthorne last week. Water managers in the seven Western states that share the Colorado will use the findings to help them decide which of the 12 options to pursue first and when. Rinne said he expects those talks to begin before the end of the year.

The stakes are high for Nevada, which stands to receive the first 75,000 acre-feet of water created through so-called augmentation of the Colorado River. If expanded through reuse, that’s enough water to supply more than a quarter of a million homes.

The report cost about $750,000 and took more than a year to complete. It evaluates options in terms of water quality, reliability, relative cost, projected water yield, technical difficulty, environmental concerns, and permitting issues.

Among the more promising options: cloud seeding and tamarisk (salt cedar) removal. Read the rest of this article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal by clicking here.

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