Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
May 16, 2024
A dry April around the Colorado River Basin melted hopes for a second-straight banner year of big runoff to swell Lake Powell’s reservoir storage, government hydrologists say. The result is a likely holding pattern for drought responses over the next two years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead are unlikely to rise as they did after the strong snowpack that accumulated over the 2022-2023 winter, but are also unlikely to tip the Southwest into a new tier of water austerity measures. The mountain snow season started out dry, came on strong in the middle, and came to an abrupt standstill in April.
With the exception of the Colorado headwaters and Arizona’s Verde River, most areas of the seven-state watershed experienced below-average April snow and rain, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. What had generally been above-average snowpack water content throughout the region in late-winter turned toward normal or below average as meltwater started flowing toward Lake Powell.
Snowpack numbers drop during a drier April
For the water year that began in October, total precipitation in areas flowing toward Lake Powell stood at about 97% of the 30-year average this month, he said. A relatively dry month above the big reservoir had reduced an April 1 snow-water equivalent reading that was 113% of the median to just 89% by May 1. Snow-water equivalent describes the amount of water that would result from melting snow.
Reclamation, which manages Powell’s releases past Glen Canyon Dam, now predicts the water flowing toward the reservoir through the end of runoff season in July will come in at 81% of average, totaling 7.9 million acre-feet. With the agency set to release 7.48 million acre-feet toward Lake Mead this year, Powell’s storage capacity is not expected to change much. It is currently 34% full and most likely will end the year at 37%, according to the agency’s calculations…
Within Arizona, the Salt River Project’s outlook for water supplies is strong for the second year in a row. The metro Phoenix supplier said its Salt and Verde watershed reservoirs entered May at 93% of capacity.
Manager of the Conejos Water Conservancy District and fourth-generation farmer and will lead the nine-member board
Conejos County’s Nathan Coombs was elected new chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board this week. It’s a major role for the fourth-generation farmer who will lead the 15-member board for the next year.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board includes nine representatives from each major Colorado river basin as well as the Denver area.
“I’m honored to serve as chair of the CWCB, to bring in my experience working in the challenging landscape of the San Luis Valley, and lean on the experiences of the rest of the board,” said Coombs.” We face so many water challenges in Colorado, so it’s critical we all come together to find creative solutions.”
The Rio Grande cutthroat is the only trout native to the San Luis Valley. Evidence suggests it was a native fish to Lake Alamosa 700,000 years ago. Photo credit: Ryan Michelle Scavo
Coombs serves as the representative of the Rio Grande Basin and is manager of the Conejos Water Conservancy District. In recent years, Coombs has partnered with biologists at Trout Unlimited to improve habitat for fish in the region’s rivers and streams. Coombs takes over as CWCB board chair from Greg Felt, representative of the Arkansas River basin and chair from 2023 to 2024.
Lorelei Cloud, Vice-chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, and Southwest Colorado’s representative of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which addresses most water issues in Colorado. Photo via Sibley’s Rivers
Lorelei Cloud was elected as vice chair. Cloud serves as the representative of the San Miguel-Dolores-San Juan drainage basin, and also serves as vice chair of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. Cloud is the first tribal council member to join the board and is a leader in Colorado, bringing critical tribal voices to the table.
In March 2023, Colorado Governor Jared Polis appointed Coombs and Cloud to the CWCB to represent their basins.
“Directors Coombs and Cloud joined as board members last March, and have made valuable contributions over the last year,” said CWCB Director Lauren Ris. “We are excited to see what they do in the next year in these leadership roles – from navigating tough conversations to leading productive brainstorming to listening to viewpoints from across the state.”
Editor’s note: This story was adapted from a press release originally published by Stanford University.
The huge, long-lasting wildfires that have become increasingly common in recent years can cause changes in soil chemistry that affect water contamination, air quality and plant growth. These changes, however, are poorly monitored and rarely factor into post-fire recovery efforts or risk assessments, according to a CSU-led article published May 14 in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
The literature review, initiated and led by Thomas Borch, a soil chemist and professor in CSU’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, found that better techniques are needed to monitor fire-induced changes in soil chemistry. This enhanced monitoring could inform decisions on how to treat drinking water sourced from burned areas, support reforestation, and protect workers against toxins during post-fire cleanup, rebuilding or revegetation.
The work was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University. CSU doctoral student Jacob VanderRoest and postdoctoral researcher Holly Roth also contributed to the review article.
“A better understanding of the molecular mechanisms in soil can help explain, for instance, why drinking water from a forest fire-impacted watershed is suddenly more toxic, or why a forest is not coming back,” said Borch, a senior author of the study.
“In our study, we mesh organic and inorganic chemistry together, whereas a lot of fire research will typically just consider one subject area,” said Claudia Avila, a soil biogeochemist who co-led the study with Alandra Lopez while both researchers were postdoctoral scholars in the lab of Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Professor Scott Fendorf.
Credit: Colorado State University
The review highlights evidence from recent studies suggesting wildfires may release more planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than anticipated. Charcoal-like remnants of burned wood and other organic materials, known as black carbon, may not trap carbon dioxide for as long as scientists had hoped.
“Carbon that’s gone through forest fires and becomes black carbon can actually turn more readily into carbon dioxide by microbes than previously thought,” said Fendorf, the Terry Huffington Professor at Stanford.
“From a climate perspective, we still have a poor understanding of how much of the carbon that is left after a fire has the potential to be transformed into greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide,” said Borch, who worked in Fendorf’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow 20 years ago.
Wildfires can have many benefits for ecosystems, the authors note. For example, some fires can increase the nitrogen content in soil organic matter and augment the water solubility of soil organic carbon, setting the stage for regrowth. However, recovery depends on the presence of other chemicals. For instance, certain types of organic molecules formed in soil during fires, called karrikins, are needed for many seeds to germinate. If the local soil chemistry and fire conditions do not produce enough of these karrikins, revegetation may be stunted.
Other research included in the new review has shown that wildfires can double the soil concentration of a group of toxic chemicals known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which can induce chemical reactions that inhibit revegetation. These molecular-scale effects could well explain the mystery of vast areas where trees have struggled to reestablish after wildfires in the Rocky Mountains, Borch said.
Wildfires can also alter the chemical properties of inorganic materials such as metals within soils. Fire can change the metals into dangerous forms that readily move through the environment, ending up in the air or nearby water, the authors explained. The collaborators from Stanford University had previously documented high levels of a hazardous form of the metal chromium at wildfire sites resulting from heat-induced transformation of naturally occurring, benign forms of chromium. At sites where extremely hot, long-lasting fires cooked soils to high temperatures for extended periods, chromium persisted for many months until the next large rain event.
Other research on chromium indicates that after lower-intensity fires, remnant plant and animal tissue in soil can allow the toxic form of chromium to return to its inert form. Taken together, these studies illustrate the broader reality that wildfire impacts on soil chemistry depend on the intricate nature of the fire and landscape, including fire duration and temperature.
Predicting and mitigating wildfire risks
Broader surveillance and modeling could inform wildfire management decisions and strategies for protecting lives, property and natural resources. Avila offers an example of how this approach to informed stewardship could help prevent the leaching of metals into drinking water supplies.
“By identifying an area that has a high potential for, say, chromium release, we can call for prescribed burns that are lower intensity and reduce the potential for high-intensity, toxin-releasing fires,” said Avila, who is now an assistant professor of environmental and ocean sciences at the University of San Diego.
“If we can grasp the complexity of the intertwined processes that are happening both on the organic and the inorganic side, then that helps give us the ability to predict outcomes for different fire, landscape and geological conditions,” Fendorf said.
Summers of Smoke
For decades, Colorado State University has been at the forefront of fire science, earning its reputation as one of the leading institutions studying wildfires. Explore other stories on wildfire research at CSU.
West Fork Fire June 20, 2013 photo the Pike Hot Shots Wildfire Today
BIG NEWS: On May 16, the Bureau of Land Management proposed ending new federal coal leasing in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, which is by far the nation’s largest coal-producing region. The announcement comes on the heels of the finalization of a trio of more stringent rules for power plants. Together, the two moves could one day substantially diminish coal-fired electricity generation in the U.S., if not wipe it out altogether.
CONTEXT: Can we please stop accusing President Biden of “climate indifference” — and worse? I mean, seriously, folks: He may not have ended oil and gas drilling on public land, but he is standing up to the fossil fuel industry more potently than any president before him.
Granted, this is not a ban on coal mining. The gargantuan mines of the Powder River Basin will continue to churn out the carbon-intensive fuel for years. But when they deplete their current lease areas, which is expected to occur between 2035 and 2060, depending on the mine and region, they won’t be able to expand. That could potentially keep more than 48 billion tons of coal in the ground that otherwise would be mined and burned, thereby avoiding a heck of a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutant-spewing.
“This decision opens new doors to a future where our public lands are not sacrificed for fossil fuel profits and, instead, can prove a bulwark of ecological and community resilience in the face of a warming climate,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, in a written statement.
The coal industry, as one might expect, is enraged, as are Wyoming and Montana leaders. Even Sen. Jon Tester, the Montana Democrat running for re-election against a full-blown climate change denier, is pushing back and considering ways to kill the plan. You can count on lawsuits challenging the plan, but keep in mind that the proposed leasing halt is the outcome of environmentalists challenging a Trump-era land-use plan.
Thing is, if the coal-burning industry continues to follow current trajectories, it may have perished on its own by the time this leasing ban kicks in. Yes, the Big Breakdown of coal has faltered somewhat in places: Rocky Mountain Power recently announced it was extending the life of some of its coal plants, for example. But it’s still underway as can be seen in the Powder River Basin, where first quarter 2024 coal production was more than 20% lower than a year earlier.
Coal-burning is going bye-bye, one way or another. Instead of trying to fend off the inevitable, local and state officials would be far better off seeking alternatives and ways to ensure that the transition is just and less painful.
Waste rock from the Sunday Mine Complex near Slick Rock, Colorado. Western Uranium & Vanadium hopes to start producing ore here in the next year or so. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
On May 13, President Biden signed into law the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act, which does exactly what it says: bans imports of low-enriched uranium from Russia or Russian entities. And the domestic uranium mining industry is radiating with joy (see what I did there?) over the possibility it will boost efforts to reopen long-idled mines in the West.
Sen. John Barrasso, the Republican from Wyoming, first introduced the legislation back in 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, as a way to cut off funding for Putin’s war machine. Sen. Ted Cruz put it on ice, purportedly to get his way with some other legislation, but finally removed his hold on it this spring. And, despite the MAGA GOP’s growing fondness for Putin, the bill finally made it through the House and Senate earlier this year before heading to Biden’s desk.
This is a big deal because U.S. utilities currently get almost all of their nuclear reactor fuel, i.e. uranium, from non-domestic suppliers. In 2022, about 12% of U.S. uranium purchases — or 4.9 million pounds of it — came directly from Russia. And another 25%, or some 10 million pounds, came from Kazakhstan, where the mines are mostly operated by Uranium One, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned firm Rosatom. Uranium One also operates in Namibia and Tanzania. (Uranium One formerly owned mines and in-situ operations in Wyoming, too, but sold out of the U.S. in 2021).
In other words, the ban potentially creates a 15-million-pound gap between supply and demand that must be filled to keep reactors running. And domestic suppliers are scrambling to fill the void by reopening long-idled mines and constructing new ones in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, and Colorado. Energy Fuels — which owns the White Mesa uranium mill in southeastern Utah, the Pinyon Plain near the Grand Canyon, and several other projects in Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming — was giddy over the ban, tweeting: “We stand ready to help supply the #nuclear market with responsibly produced US #uranium.”
As the Land Desk has written before, much of the talk of a uranium mining renaissance is merely hype intended to mine investors’ bank accounts more than to extract actual ore. And most of the press releases about this or that upcoming firm’s latest exploratory drilling results are just a bunch of ballyhoo. Even if they do pan out, it wouldn’t be until years or even decades from now.
But the import ban, paired with sustained high uranium prices — around $90 per pound for the past six months — certainly will shoot some adrenalin into the figurative veins of established producers, which have been in a zombie state for the past several years. Energy Fuels, for instance, reports that it is producing uranium ore at its Pinyon Plain (Arizona) and La Sal and Pandora (Utah) mines, though it is stockpiling the rock for now rather than shipping it to its Utah mill for processing. The company is also preparing its Nichols Ranch (Wyoming) mine for production as well as its Whirlwind Mine, which lies along the Colorado-Utah state line on the eastern slopes of the La Sal Mountains outside of Gateway.
But even Energy Fuels’ outlook is tempered: They say they’ll start shipping ore, start producing at other mines, and ramp up permitting for other projects, if market conditions remain strong. And they may not. Miners in Canada and Australia may respond to the high prices and the Russia ban by substantially ramping up production and exports to the U.S., which would dampen prices and make it once again unfeasible for American mines to operate.
But in the short-term, it appears that uranium country is going to experience at least a mild mining resurgence. And it’s happening under some of the same mining laws that failed to mitigate the devastating impacts of past booms.
One of the ways I like to procrastinate — er, learn new things — is to cruise around the West via Zillow in search of the last affordable place to buy a home. Usually I don’t find much. But last week, the Los Angeles Times did my work for me by publishing a list of the only towns in the state where the median home sale price is $150,000 or less. LA Times staffer Terry Castleton writes:
Damn, I thought, these sound like some nice little secret gems! So I read on. These are some of the towns they came up with: Trona, Dorris, Macdoel, Tulelake, Boron, Yermo, Hinkley, Johannesburg.
Now, you might be thinking: Why is this jerk sharing this? Isn’t he worried the towns will be overrun and gentrified if the word gets out?
Well, no, I’m not too worried. First of all, it already appeared in a very big newspaper. Second of all, I’m not sure most of these towns are prime candidates for gentrification. I mean, consider Trona: a tiny little place sandwiched between an old coal plant/soda ash processing facility and a sprawling borax evaporation ponds.
Trona, California, from the sky. It’s still affordable and wonderful for folks who want to live in an industrial site. Source: Google Earth.
Here’s a sampling of homes on the market in Trona:
So, yeah, not bad prices, really. Especially considering that beyond the industrial facility is a bunch of desert expanse that I’m sure is beautiful.
Yermo, also on the list, looks similar, but it’s far less remote. And the LA Times story seems to have gone to its head, real estate-wise. The four homes on the market aren’t all that cheap (between $175k and $229k) — possibly due to its proximity to that desert gem of a city, Barstow. Ditto with Hinkley, famous for being the polluted place in Erin Brokovich. Yay.
I actually considered moving to Boron, another one on the list, after I graduated from college. The local high school was desperate for teachers and willing to hire folks without a teaching certificate. It was tempting, I must admit, especially for a desert rat like myself who could appreciate the sublimity of living on the edge of an open pit borax mine. Thing is, a lot of the land around there is an air force base, and the mountains are kind of far away, limiting exploration. I demurred.
Anyway, it’s worth checking out the other towns on the list if you’re seeking something affordable. They may be the only places left in all the Western U.S.
