The groundwater that many Nebraskans drink is high in nitrate. Experts fear that those high nitrate levels may make Nebraska children more likely to develop certain pediatric cancers. They also believe that high nitrate poses a variety of potential health risks for adults.
been an issue since farmers started using nitrates and it continues to flow downstream to other states and on out to the Gulf of Mexico
none of our paid off political leaders give any shits
None of the politicians drink the local water.
As stated in the article, this isn’t a big problem for communities with centralized water treatment systems, rather for individual homes drinking well water which is contaminated by agriculture.
In a municipal treatment plant you have a few options for removing nitrates including reverse osmosis (membrane filters with very small pores, allowing them to reject very small molecules), ion exchange (swap nitrate with another, less harmful ion), or biological treatment (use microorganisms to turn nitrate into nitrogen gas).
In your home, reverse osmosis is really the only feasible option, which can be expensive to install and costly to maintain. Ideally, some sort of tax on fertilizer would be used to pay for these in house treatments, but that would increase the cost of food.
