Cry Me a (Dry) River

“’tis an ill bird what fouls its ain nest.”
--Scottish proverb

The recent announcement by a group of intrepid researchers that they have created a substance they call “dry water” serves as a remarkable case study in unintended consequences, and it hasn’t even been used yet.

The stuff is not really “dry”, and in many ways, it is also not really “water”, but without getting too technical, we’ll let the contradiction stand, because we rather like contradictions – they are whimsical, and get one’s linguistic creativity flowing.

Powdered liquids have the ability to “store” a variety of substances, most notably carbon dioxide, in ways that prevent their escape into the atmosphere. The producers of “dry water” are touting this ability as a potential boon to production methods which have run into conflicts over the quantity of carbon dioxide they produce – having a way to trap the greenhouse gas means these industries can manufacture to their hearts content, without worrying about contributing to global climate change.

Or can they?

Touting the storage properties of “dry water” is all well and good, but where, pray tell, will the “dry water” be stored once it is super-carbonated?

This is the classic problem with nuclear energy, as well. Per kilowatt, assuming nothing goes wrong at the power plant (an assumption the residents of Three Mile Island or of Chernobyl are not likely to be prepared to make), the typical output of a nuclear power plant is more environmnetally friendly than that of practically any other production method available. Solar and wind power have fewer outputs, but per kilowatt, they have more costly inputs in the form of manufactured materials.

The problem with nuclear power, of course, is that unlike solar or wind or geothermal (or a host of other renewable production methods), nuclear power has a residual element in its production – nuclear waste. The detritus of a nuclear power plant is, similar to the carbon dioxide suspended in “dry water”, contained in lead lined barrels which do not allow any of the toxic radiation to leak into the environment.

But that’s not the end of the story. Those barrels store the nuclear waste… but where do we store those barrels? In 1957, the National Academy of Sciences first recommended that the best means of protecting the environment from spent nuclear materials would be to bury the waste in rock deep underground. The site selected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a geological feature located about 80 miles from Las Vegas.

Residents were not amused, and said so, so loudly that the project was put on hold. And now, 53 years later, this bad idea is still being pushed by those who want the government to change its mind, those who do not want to admit that hiding the problem does not make it disappear.

The phenomenon of “Not in my backyard!” (aka “NIMBY”) is as old as politics, and is especially poignant in the realm of waste disposal. Nuclear waste disposal in particular carries with it the specter of silent invisible “stuff” that could prove lethal should anything leak. It is small wonder that no one wants this stuff in their neighborhood, even with assurances that it is containerized, and nothing could go wrong. Particularly since there are so many readily available proofs that something can always go wrong.

The evidence that nuclear waste is not safe is so incontrovertible that no one disputes it. Rather, proponents of nuclear energy argue that it is not persistent, because it eventually becomes stable non-radioactive waste, and that putting it deep in a rocky hole means we can forget about it. It is “safe” there, and so we are “safe” out here.

The problem with this point of view is that it ignores what we know about how the universe really works. Unforeseen forces can – and do – always alter our present circumstances. Assurances that Yucca Mountain is not geologically active – meaning that there are no fault lines which have generated measurable earthquake activity in the past several millenia there – are utterly meaningless.

There are no places on Earth which are truly not geologically active. Everywhere there is surface, there is geologically active Earth; we live on a solid crust, which floats on a gooey liquid center; predicting what the Earth’s mantle will do next week is not always possible for the best geologists. Predicting what it will do fifty years from now is preposterous. It will probably continue to do nothing at Yucca Mountain. Given that if it does something improbable, it could kill everyone living within a several hundred mile radius, is it worth the risk?

And putting waste in a hole is quite literally just kicking the can down the road; how long until the hole fills up? Where will new waste go at that point? How many new holes in the ground will we have to find? How many new “geologically inert” locations will we need? There are currently 121 nuclear waste facilities throughout the country; it would be nice to reduce that number to just one, but wouldn’t it be better to not have any at all?

The sad history of landfills in this country ought to be an indicator of how infantile is the thinking that we can just bury anything in a hole and it will be alright. The death and destruction of cancer and malnutrition and slow environmental poisining caused by the leaching of toxic chemicals from every landfill in the country is not as sexy a news story as potential nuclear radiation poisining, but it is every bit as real.

Further, we have the sad story of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), most notably the “Dirty Dozen” chemicals proscribed by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, to which the United States is not a party. These are chemicals – like chlordane, or DDT, pesticides which, though now banned in this country, are persistent – they will not “go away” because they simply don’t break down. They will stay in our environment indefinitely, poisoning every plant or animal which comes into contact with them.

Several of the “Dirty Dozen” show up – in small quantities, naturally – in your city tap water. But don’t worry, there are standards, it’s “perfectly safe” to drink…. Oh, and Myrtle has this great investment opportunity, but you have to act now, before the regulators catch wind of the offer…

The fact that these chemicals cause endocrine damage and contribute to obesity, of course, is the least of your worries. Sterility? Cancer? ADHD? Autism? Hypothyroidism? Hypertension? Any of these things get your attention? All these conditions and more have been made much, much worse in recent decades by the accumulation of poisons in our air, our food, and our drinking water as a result of the type of thinking that says it is okay to use “just a little bit” of a given chemical, or to develop just a few acres of wetland, or to burn just a little bit of trash… or to bury our waste in a hole, whether we’re talking about home refuse in plastic sacks, or nuclear detritus in lead coffins.

So excuse us at Myrtle’s if we are a little suspicious of the notion of carbon capture, no matter how high-tech the material in which it is being captured.

Better than holding carbon dioxide in a powdery version of an emulsion, why not try a truly revolutionary approach to waste management – why not avoid creating the waste in the first place?  And if you can't come up with a production method sans carbon outputs, maybe you can... do without?

In the great list of manufactured items which produce carbon dioxide, which items on that menu are things we really need? There are not that many. Breathing is the only one that comes to mind which there’s just no way around – everything else, we ought to be looking at alternatives.

There is a thin line between clever and stupid. Bokonon would argue that “dry water” has obviously crossed that line. It may not be Ice-9, but if we all choke to death on our own waste, will it really matter how precise our literary analogies were?

We recommend a shift in perspective. The quest for sources of energy and resources “out there” drives the quest to make our processes for extraction, production, and consumption less noxious. We certainly applaud the desire to make things less noxious, but we recommend an end to the cynical assumption that we need things “out there” in order to achieve this end. Sustainability is more than just a buzzword; it is a valid description of systems which can perpetuate themselves with the pre-existing resources which form the starting point of your inquiry.

In the case of planet Earth, the only input we get is from the sun. There are a variety of inputs on a micro level – for example, wind flows across practically every patch of land on the planet; temperature differences between the surface and subsurface layers almost everywhere on Earth are also sufficient to provide energy; numerous other examples exist of resources which may be used without being diminished. Making use of these natural features does not require us to come up with any magical substances straight out of science fiction. A dry martini makes sense; dry water just doesn’t.

In fact, in the traditional schema of Carbon Storage and Sequestration (CSS) systems, increasingly, the push by proponents is for biochar systems. Biochar is the material left at the end of the pyrolysis process – the decomposition of organic material by heat in the absence of oxygen. This is typically non-toxic “stuff” which stores carbon dioxide and other gasses in such a way that as the materials decompose over time, the carbon dioxide reuptake process is much easier – biochar acts as a kind of replacement for the processes that take place naturally in rainforests, for example.

There are literally hundreds of different CSS schemes out there; unless someone demonstrates, however, that “dry water” fits the description of a sustainable variant – that is, that it processes carbon dioxide in a way that reduces the impact of production, use, and disposal of goods without increasing production and consumption of any other variables beyond their replenishable limits – we aren’t convinced. We’d rather avoid the pool-pah if we can at all help it.

Happy farming!