A New Deal for Clean Water

IN WATER pollution control as well as with mine safety and pesticides, the onset of the New Deal brought a return of government activism. But progress came only slowly and haltingly. 

While the new government agencies pursued this relatively uncontrover-sial work, pressure was building on the outside for an attack on industrial pollution. Proponents of control were gaining in numbers and influence as 

Clean water advocates had only scorn for the existing system of state water pollution control and demanded federal intervention. State capitals had long been under the sway of business interests, and the threat of moving operations to another jurisdiction was a potent counter to unwelcome oversight. A leader of the Izaak Walton League, Kenneth Reid, used his experience as a Pennsylvania fish commissioner to illustrate this point  

In practice, the ability of large corporations to relocate tied the hands of state regulators. Louis Brandeis, the jurist who inspired many New Dealers, famously described the states as the laboratories of democracy. But—as a young Massachusetts legislator named Barney Frank would remark years later—Justice Brandeis s laboratories have a problem you can t run a good experiment if the rats are free to choose their own cages. 

Industry was quick to react. The American Petroleum Institute, well equipped for battle after its years of struggle over oil pollution, took the lead in the legislative arena. The core of the lobbying strategy devised by the oilmen was undeviating opposition to any federal regulatory authority. An internal industry report explained that 

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Natural zeolites have played important roles as in clean-up from nuclear accidents. After the Three Mile Island incident, the SDS (Submerged Dcmineraliser System) made use of a 60/40 mixture by volume of IE-96 and LTA zeolite (A-51) from the then Union Carbide Corporation to immobilise 340,000 Ci of fission products from >1.5 million gallons of water [128], Phillipsite tuff, from Pine Valley Nevada, clinoptilolite, A-51, and IE-96 have all been used at pilot plant scale to deal with high salt, high activity, aqueous wastes at West Valley, New York- site of the PUREX plant used for reprocessing nuclear fuels from 1966 to 1972. 

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