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The Selenium Squeeze

Selenium evokes unpleasant specters: stillborn ducklings, fallow farmland, lost livelihoods, toxic water. But for those who have looked beyond these front page images of Kesterson and witnessed a decade of costly research and few solutions to the problem of selenium buildup in our soils and waters, there are new specters: a regulatory crackdown all around, perhaps even the resurrection of the San Luis Drain, once called an "arrow aimed at the heart of the Delta."

Deep down, everyone knows that BurRec Commissioner Dan Beard was right when he said there was no silver bullet. And everyone's facing up to fact that what it's going to take is an all-out, inch-by-inch, penny-by-penny attack on every level of the problem, whether it's overgrazing in the upper reaches of watershed or contaminated crop drainage in the alluvial fans of San Joaquin Valley or North Bay oil refinery discharges and South Bay stormwater runoff. The squeeze is on.

"It's taken ten years to get from oh-my-gosh-it's-a-problem, through here's how might solve it, to now it's time to get serious," says Terry Young of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Farmers and drainers in San Joaquin Valley felt the squeeze first, with closure of the San Luis Drain and the Kesterson ponds. Westlands water district, for example, still has no place to discharge its drainage water. Meanwhile those in the adjacent Grasslands basin are championing a plan to reopen the San Luis Drain. For years, they've been running drainwater into Mud and Salt Sloughs, waterways that also serve local wildlife refuges. But the discovery of selenium made the drainwater unpalatable to the refuges. Grasslands new plan would reopen the San Luis Drain to shunt drainage water directly into Mud Slough, thus freeing Salt Slough for wetland-bound waters.

EPA isn't too enthusiastic. "Moving contamination from one discharge point to another isn't a solution," says the EPA's Palma Risler. "We believe in capping loadings."

According to Joe Karkoski of the Central Valley Regional Board, Grasslands has been trying to do just that. In voluntary compliance with a 1988 10 part per billion (ppb) site specific objective set in the region's basin plan, the Grassland basin drainers cut their selenium discharges by 50 percent between 1988 and 1992 (though some water conservation came about because of the drought). Just as the drainers were writing to tell the Board they couldn't do much better, the Board wrote back saying a tougher statewide objective of 5 ppb would be kicking in.

To meet the tougher standard, other and much more costly options may be necessary, including extending the San Luis Drain down to the Merced River, where there's more water for dilution, or forcing retirement of more farmland. The Board may also consider setting a total maximum daily load (TMDL) for the whole basin next spring, to offer more flexibility and a fairer shake all around. "Selenium in groundwater doesn't respect district and political boundaries," says Karkoski.

"The Central Valley Board's been pretty gentle, they haven't taken these water districts to task yet," says Young. "So we're recommending they formalize the TMDL and develop a mechanism for making sure it gets met." Young plans to complete a major technical paper on this option soon.

While farmers with croplands have been the target of source reduction to date, "It's just beginning to hit home that downstream irrigation efficiency isn't enough," says Tim Hatten of the Soil Conservation Service and EPA. "We need a broader, more holistic, watershed approach," says Hatten, who recently launched a new project targeted at selenium sources farther upstream around Panoche and Silver Creeks. In these upper reaches of the watershed, soils are often exposed, grass scant, and selenium rich. Runoff from Panoche is dumping up to 200 ppb of selenium into creeks and the San Joaquin River at the Mendota Pool, where contaminated and sediment-laden floodwaters often clog irrigation canals.

Hatten is now working with farmers, ranchers, regulators and scientists on a consensus plan to minimize this loading. Elements of the plan - due out in 1994 - will probably attack all watershed sources and include intensified livestock and cropland management, as well as land retirement, and streambank erosion and flood control.

Since most of the San Joaquin River gets diverted south, little of the selenium from these upstream problem areas actually makes it into the Bay and Delta, according to Karkoski. More river-bourne selenium could be a nasty side-effect of decreased Delta pumping southwards to protect fish in the future, however. And a group of water agencies recently proposed a new program that would coordinate drainage discharges with high flows. Though this would maximize dilution, it could also increase loads to the lower estuary.

In the meantime, Dr. Sam Luoma says the type of selenium - called selenite - discharged by the North Bay oil industry bioaccumulates in the food chain four times faster than the stuff coming downriver. So it's no surprise that the oil industry is also squirming under the watershed-wide selenium squeeze. In fact, the S.F. Regional Board has handed down a two-tiered reduction plan to half and then half again the industry's total selenium discharges by 1997. The first half is already on the books in existing discharge permits; the second is a proposed basin plan amendment slated for a Board vote this winter.

Reduction measures now being actively researched by refineries either filter the selenium out, reduce it down, recycle it, treat it or put it through a chemical or biological metamorphosis, but the technology isn't yet problem free.

"Right now, reduction comes at a very high cost economically and environmentally," says Todd Royer of Exxon, "because our lead technology produces so much sludge." Royer says that for every one pound of selenium removed by an iron co-precipitation process, he gets 10,000 pounds of hazardous waste.

"Now we have to weigh how much time it's fair to give them to address technical problems against ever increasing selenium bioaccumulation in the ecosystem," says the S.F. Board's Jessie Lacy - a balancing act regulators both up and downstream will have to pull off to make a serious stab at reducing selenium.

Contact: Joe Karkoski (916)255-3097; Tim Hatten (415)744-1983; Jessie Lacy (510)286-0702

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