It's shameful how our waterways and lakes are destroyed by industry...There's much wrangling over the cotton farmers up-river in New South Wales taking so much water out of the Murray to irrigate. It creates rising salt issues through lack of flow and other very serious issues like excess silt etc. Humans don't seem to care enough I guess.
Hanford (the project) made the plutonium for the bombs that ended WWII. They were feeling their way along and didn't even come close to realizing how dirty they were making the environment. They also continued Plutonium production until the cold war ended. The government got a lot better about handling the waste, but the damage with some of that early stuff could be just catastrophic.
The Colorado River Compact comes due in 2024. The pressure is on with 7 states and two countries involved in the negotiations for the finite amount of water in the Colorado. 40 million people get their drinking and personal water from the river which is a lot more the size of the Murray.
Water management is a thing...I mean there will come a time when people who have clean drinking water will not. There's only so much of it. This was in the news a few days ago in Yass. https://www.yasstribune.com.au/story/6875572/residents-want-a-solution-to-yass-water-quality-issue/
Also, because of drought conditions parts of Australia were on restrictions...I don't mean they couldn't water their lawn, I mean they had no drinking water and had to have bottled water trucked in. Crazy! It's a sign of the times though, and will get worse. It'll end up like that movie Book of Eli.
And I don't know about you, but we 'mericans aren't doing a real good job with the water in the west at all.
There's a difference, you see. Our nation was settled (seized?) from east to west. Water is different on both sides of the Mississippi, and all the laws and compacts were written before we knew how water worked in the west. Had the US been settled West to East the Missouri River would be the longest in the world and water retention would be completely different.
The Colorado has a couple of obvious fuck ups that are going to become apparent in the next 50 years and I do not have any idea what people are going to do, or more importantly what they are going to drink. I actually suspect that a canal will be dug between the Columbia/Snake and the Colorado to 'add water' to the Colorado. That ought to be a pretty fancy public works project...
And the Missouri would not be named the Missouri. Snake maybe? Montana?
That's interesting and something I have never thought about before, the direction in which the country was settled. It makes sense though...I wonder how different things would be?