- Romania is releasing reservoir water into the drought-stricken Danube River in an effort to bring the country’s only nuclear power plant back online.
- Residents in the greater Berlin area are growing increasingly unhappy with officials allotting large amounts of groundwater for industry, rather than for drinking water.
- Consistently damaging monsoon rains in the Philippines are stoking public outrage over failing or non-existent flood-control projects that many residents say are scams.
- The number of people globally whose drinking water contains toxic levels of manganese may be four or five times higher than originally thought, new research suggests.
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Nearly eight inches of rain fell in just a five-hour span last week in metropolitan Manila, turning streets into canals, stranding vehicles, and inundating homes. Conditions were similarly devastating in villages on the outskirts of the capital, reports the South China Morning Post. After weeks of heavy precipitation that triggered landslides and evacuations, the region has also counted more than 3,000 cases of leptospirosis, a bacterial water-borne disease that can turn deadly if untreated.
Human-caused climate change is known to be increasing the strength and unpredictability of South Pacific monsoons. The danger is well-known to residents, who live through periods of increasingly heavy flooding. But even with this in mind, public outrage is growing over the government’s continued inaction — and in some cases, deception — over efforts meant to protect people from extreme weather.
Since 2011, the Philippines government allegedly spent $32.4 billion on flood control measures. But many of these projects have been revealed to be either substandard, or completely nonexistent, the Diplomat reports. This month, the overtopping of a dam in Manila, which led to even worse flooding, was the latest example of a failed flood-protection project.
“Where did all the money that was meant to protect them actually go? And will someone be held accountable?” Al Jazeera reports. “These are the questions that the government can no longer afford to ignore.”
92 percent of the groundwater extracted from Baruth, a small town 40 miles south of Berlin, is reserved for beverage companies Red Bull and Rauch. Just 8 percent of the supply covers residential water.
Now, as the companies prepare to expand their local operations, people who live next to these factories are raising concerns that groundwater sources are not recharging, Deutsche Welle reports. For some time, gardens are thirstier, locals say, and trees are drying out.
These observations have caught the attention of experts who say that this 90-10 industrial-residential split is based on 30-year-old data that overestimates water availability. Meanwhile, under current law, neither Red Bull nor Rauch is required to publicly disclose how much water they draw.
In the larger Brandenburg state, which includes Berlin, the public’s questions of water use transparency are growing louder. This is especially true in the Grünheide municipality, where water restrictions for residents living adjacent to a large Tesla factory have become commonplace. The factory’s permit allows it to withdraw 370 million gallons of water per year, even as other projects — such as the construction of schools — were canceled due to concerns over water shortages.
The car company’s plans for a factory expansion in Grünheide has spurred local protests in recent years. Roughly 95 percent of Brandenburg’s drinking water comes from groundwater.
After several weeks of a near-total shutdown at Hungary’s Paks nuclear power plant — which produces more than 40 percent of the country’s energy — officials are planning for its full-scale reopening this week as water levels on the Danube River, which is used to cool the plant’s reactors, slowly rise.
The 2-gigawatt nuclear plant’s electricity output had fallen to just 10 percent of its capacity in early August as a result of record-low flows in Europe’s longest river. The Hungarian government went to extreme lengths to salvage even this fraction of electricity generation: officials sank barges to temporarily raise water levels and began the construction of a riverbed sill to regulate flows nearby, Reuters reports.
“At the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, three of the four units are already operating at full capacity. All eight pump systems have now been brought into operation, and the reconnection of the final unit is proceeding smoothly. In two days, we will reach nearly 2,000 megawatts,” Hungary’s Prime Minister Peter Magyar said on social media on Monday.
In neighboring Romania, the Cernavodǎ nuclear plant — itself the country’s largest energy producer, accounting for 20 percent of all electricity — remains non-operational after being taken offline on August 13. Its closure has prompted the declaration of a state of emergency and the adoption of new measures this weekend to boost Danube water levels near the plant.
According to Reuters, these measures include dredging, the construction of pumps and a groyne to divert water to its reactors, and the release of water from nearby reservoirs to boost mainstem river flows.
A study published last month in the journal Nature Water estimates that between 180 million and 220 million people around the world who rely on untreated groundwater are at risk of consuming toxic levels of manganese, an under-the-radar water contaminant.
In 2021, in line with new research about the heavy metal’s impact on infant brain development, the World Health Organization lowered its determination of “safe” amounts in drinking water from 400 micrograms per liter to 80 micrograms. The new marker, according to study, means there is a “four to fivefold increase” in the number of people around the globe potentially affected by manganese poisoning.
“The number of people potentially impacted by high manganese is comparable to that for geogenic arsenic and fluoride, though manganese receives much less attention,” the researchers warned.
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