The plant was designed to protect the nearby Ilparpa Swamp from the overflow from the wastewater stabilisation ponds. The plant treats 600 megalitres of water per day, most of which is pumped 6.2 km to the Arid Zone Research Centre. Some of the water is used to irrigate Blatherskite Park, which was previously irrigated with water directly from the stabilisation ponds.

In this part of the plant, water is treated with sulphuric acid to adjust pH, cationic polymer and aluminate to coagulate and flocculate.

The water from the end ponds is pumped to the plant, where the pH is adjusted with sulphuric acid prior to coagulation with a cationic polymer and flocculation with aluminate. Although some solids are removed in the ponds, the intake water for the plant contains large amounts of algae which are removed in the coagulation/flocculation process.

The second stage of the treatment is Dissolved Air Flotation. The removed solids are returned to the ponds, and the clarified water is then chlorinated and sent to the reclaimed water tank. A critical control point sends the water back to the pond if any of the on-line monitoring indicates that the water is not meeting the required standard.

Water that does not meet standards is sent back to the wastewater ponds

At the Arid Zone Research Centre the water goes through a final treatment and storage process known as Soil Aquifer Treatment (SAT). Although this process has been in use in overseas for many years, the Alice Springs plant is the first in Australia. The water is stored in basins located over the original Todd River artesian basin where potable water will be stored underground for future reuse.

Built at a cost of A$10.4M, and opened in May 2008 the project has won awards for its architectural design. Let’s hope it is similarly successful in its application.

The grounds of the plant have been landscaped by Greening Australia using local native vegetation and water from the plant.

I’ve added more photos to the Smartwater Flickr group.

About River Murray Dying

We are hoping to show images which highlight the plight of the River Murray as it slowly dwindles and dies. We are hoping that by gathering the evidence we might have a tool to get something done, to get some meaningful action instead of just words, to reverse the current inaction, to alert those ignorant of the sad state which has been reached, to save our Murray. Sequential photos taken over time would be very useful to this cause but any images showing the downward spiral would be welcome. Hope you can help.

This group is well worth a look.

Our Flickr group, Reclaimed Water Network, on the other hand, still has only 2 members and only 11 photos. I know we are all sitting on more photos that we could be sharing. Finding the right photo for a presentation or lecture can be tedious, and then worrying about having the right to use it…

You can create a Flickr account using your Yahoo ID. A free Flickr account comes with some restrictions on the total number of photos and the possibilities for organising them (about 200 photos and five sets). A pro account, with no restrictions, costs about US$27 per year. Once you have your account, you can upload photos using

• the Flickr Uploadr (available for both PC and Mac)
• iPhoto, Aperture, or Windows XP plugins
• the Flickr web page
• email
• various free third-party desktop programs

You can edit photos using Picnik, organise them into sets, and if you have a pro account, collections. You can even plot the locations on a map.

For each of your photos and videos on Flickr you can set:

• privacy level, which determines who can see your image
• usage license, so your copyrights are protected
• content type, flag your photos and videos as either photos and videos, artwork/illustrations, or screenshots
• safety level, so other members only see images within their specified comfort zone

Then you can share them, by adding them to the Reclaimed Water Network group. You can explore the other groups on Flickr, make contacts with people with similar interests, keep in touch with people you know.

I love my Flickr account, and I am pretty sure Flickr would be a useful tool for the Researchers’ Network. In fact,it already has been, as we found our header photo on Flickr. If people preferred, it would be possible to start an account for the network, and allow members to upload photos to it. But having your own account gives you much more control over  access and copyright.

The site is new, and still under development, however a couple of features look particularly promising. One is the Photo Hub, a collection of photos on various aspects of the water cycle licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License. These photos can be downloaded and used under the condition of the CC license.

Another interesting feature is Incidents Online, a database of water contamination incidents which will be a useful resource for providers, regulators and researchers. The database includes incidents from around the world, from the E. coli outbreak in Burdine Township, Missouri, US which killed 4 people in 1990, to the fluoride overdose in Queensland this year.

The New York Times is running a feature, called Toxic Waters, on water pollution and regulatory responses in the USA. One of the first articles featured concerns the lack of regulatory response to pollution discharges. The feature includes an interactive maps of clean water act violations and of facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants.

Water Futures

A poll which surveyed 1,000 people in each of 15 countries, and probed 500 in Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States on specific questions found that people around the world view water issues as the planet’s top environmental problem, greater than air pollution, depletion of natural resources, loss of habitat and even climate change.

Water Prize

The inaugural Imagine H2O Prize competition has opened for submissions. The competition offers prizes of $70,000 in cash and in-kind services, which will be awarded to the business plans that promise the greatest breakthroughs in the efficient use and supply of water.

The Imagine H2O Prize is designed to encourage entrepreneurs, investors, inventors and academics around the world to address water challenges. This inaugural business plan competition focuses on solutions to improve water efficiency in agriculture, commercial, industrial or residential applications, such as water demand reduction, improved water use, water recycling and/or reuse.

Entries will be accepted from around the world beginning September 1 through November 16, 2009. Winners will be announced at a showcase event in early 2010. The annual competition will feature a different water-related prize topic each year. More details.

Interestingly, the controversy at the heart of this report is one familiar to many reclaimed water researchers: missing peaks and averages.

Here is a sample plot from the report:

Atrazine concentrations in finished water in Evansville Water System, Indiana, 2004

According to the report

How do EPA regulations ignore the high spikes of atrazine? Averaging sampling data can easily mask the
presence of high—even dangerously high—levels of atrazine. In the Evansville Water System in Evansville,
Illinois, for at least 22 days, there were concentrations of atrazine above 3 ppb. In fact, some of the
concentrations were well above 3 ppb—peaking as high as 39.69 ppb. However, when the data taken from
other times of the year were averaged with this peak, the running annual average fell to 3.20 ppb. And
because the average TCT concentration for this system fell below 37.5 ppb, the EPA ignored the peak
atrazine concentrations.

Astute readers may notice that this running annual average exceeds the MCL for drinking water. However,
the EPA Annual Compliance Report for the Drinking Water Program shows that there were no atrazine MCL
violations in 2004 for this system. Under the SDWA regulation, to monitor for MCL violations, systems take
one compliance sample each quarter—and these four sample concentrations are averaged to give the annual
average. The four compliance samples taken in 2004 by Evansville did not detect the high peak concentration
of atrazine that was found through the Atrazine Monitoring Program. Therefore, there was no MCL violation
despite the fact that in reality, the running annual average concentration of atrazine in this drinking water
system did exceed 3 ppb.

The EPA’s response, and data, can be found at their website.

Through its review of these data, the Agency has confirmed that none of the systems have exceeded OPP’s level of concern, a 90-day average of 37.5 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine and its degradates. In fact, the Agency has released 20 CWS from the program because these systems have had no exceedences of EPA’s level of concern after five years of monitoring. EPA has added approximately 20 CWS into the program based on data gathered under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).

This comment by Terence Hale, was made in response to an article titled Huddled Maths at Economist.com about a new journal Rejecta Mathematica.

The mission statement for Rejecta Mathematica states

Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences.

At Rejecta Mathematica we believe that many previously rejected papers (even those rejected for legitimate reasons) can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

• “mapping the blind alleys of science”: papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;
• “reinventing the wheel”: papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;
• “squaring the circle”: papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
• “applications of cold fusion”: papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
• “misunderstood genius”: other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.

Famous papers that have had difficulty getting published include

PAUL LAUTERBUR, paper on magnetic-resonance imaging was rejected when first submitted to Nature. Lauterbur later won a Nobel prize for his work

Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of physics’s missing boson, had is paper rejected by Physics Letters, who claimed it was of no obvious relevance to physics. The paper was later published in Physical Review Letters.

Paul Krugman’s paper on trade with increasing returns to scale, which won Krugman the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008 was rejected by the referees of the Journal of International Economics. Fortunately, the editor, Jagdish Baghwati overruled them.

Senator Penny Wong, Minister for Climate Change and Water has announced that Western Corridor Recycled Water Pty Ltd will host the new National Centre of Excellence in Water Recycling. Located in Brisbane, the centre of excellence will receive $20 million over five years to help develop and commercialise new water recycling technologies.

In addition to Western Corridor Recycled Water Pty Ltd founding partners include University of Queensland, Griffith University, University of New South Wales and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and industry partners including Veolia Water Australia Pty Ltd and GHD Pty Ltd

Senator Wong’s press release

More from the Herald Sun

Well, according to Craigin and Shankar, Scientific Data Collections (SDCs) and Distributed Collective Practice (DCP) are important because they are themselves the subject and objects of research, constitutive of new kinds of science which may also serve as resources for communities beyond those who create them. This is an important aspect of ‘reclaimed water’ research.  There are communities beyond the research community and those communities have a stake in our research.  They, too, want to know what research we are doing and perhaps influence policy decisions made on their behalf.

But the need for policies is always central to what we do.  As Craigin and Shankar note:

SDCs also have the burden of making different segments or kinds of data available to expert and non-expert users, who will have varying authorization for access to different parts of data collections. It is also likely that SDCs will be used by a number of user groups for which that system was not designed.

So, part of the work that I am interested in is how we, as researchers, define which information (data) is suitable for public consumption, which data are we constrained from sharing (due to whatever intellectual property issues are relevant for specific data) and which data we need to embargo prior to publication.  There are many layers that we need to consider and hopefully, over the course of the next few months, that’s something I’ll be able to influence, even if I cannot directly influence any water specific research.

This constitutes what Craigin and Shankar state is the problem of Shared Data Collections and distributed scientific endeavours:

Empirical research into the ongoing development of SDCs will need to take into account the broader policy and funding context of scientific research if SDCs are to live up to their potential as infrastructures for the emergent scientific paradigm. In turn, how such decisions and negotiations take place across time, space, scientific and technical disciplines, and organizational structures will be of interest to the DCP researcher.

Essentially, what they argue is that consideration of the issues must be a priority for distributed scientific groups.  There are sustainability issues, funding concerns as well as the technological concerns that we currently face.  We need to be a bit pro-active in establishing procedures under which we operate and under which all stakeholders in water resources (and water research) gain benefit.

To start off, I think I’m going to need to get a good feel for what water related data resources are out there.  My favourites (being a South East Queenslander) is SEQWater and, of course, the Bureau of Meteorology rainfall/flood information (for SE Qld).

If you have particular favourites, whether publicly accessible or privately curated, let us know in the comments.

Reference:

Craigin, M.H. and Shankar, K., 2006, Scientific Data Collections and Distributed Collective Practice, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 15:185–204, DOI 10.1007/s10606-006-9018-z