Uranium found in half of America's public water systems, study finds▼

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Published 159d ago

The town of Hastings rises up from the arid Nebraska prairie. It's the birthplace of Kool-Aid, which you can't have without water. So, people in Hastings take their water seriously. It is a precious resource that is not to be wasted. Marty Stange is the environmental director for the city, where about 25,000 people live. He's worked for Hastings Utilities for 33 years, where the city runs tests to make sure all of the water there is safe to drink. "We follow all the state and federal guidelines for that testing," Stange said. A few years back they decided to check some of the areas that the city wasn't drawing water from yet, but would be in the coming years. That's when they made a discovery. "We just want to do enough of a scan to make sure that we haven't missed something," Stange said. "Then, all of a sudden, we started seeing uranium levels in areas that were higher." Tests showed uranium the radioactive element most commonly associated with all things nuclear at levels 10 times the Environmental Protection Agency's allowable amount in the water supply the city would need. "We were going to have to do something that was a surprise to us we needed to deal with uranium as well," Stange said. SEE MORE: Cleaning up our nation's waterways is proving harder than expected More than 1,400 miles away, Dr. Anne Nigra and graduate student researchers gather around her office at  Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health  in New York. Source