by Peggy Barnett

Created on: August 07, 2008

A human can survive for days without food for sustenance. With no water to drink, a human's life quickly ends. Corruption of water sources, which nourish the life on earth, can divert the location of populations, create diseases and epidemics, and, in some cases, even extinguish life. By artificially blocking or eliminating the flow of water through nature's tributary circulatory system, life forms dependent on the water source must either adapt or die.

In industrialized countries, with a land mass large enough to support their creation, dams, built to generate hydroelectric energy, affect the flow of downstream water, shrinking its availability, as the drink of life, to those dependent on it. Species sometimes disappear. Lack of natural runoff, from rivers which once contributed more abundantly to groundwater, creates a need in the human population, too. Wells, containing less water, slake a thirst for water imported from other sources, on which other populations depend for their needs.

Arid regions are immediately affected by diversion of water sources. In the desert, it is easy to kill for water. It has been stated, for example, that the supply of water available is the greatest underlying cause of conflict in the Middle East, hiding behind open discussions of oil, politics, and religion. Since there are only three major river systems in the Middle East (the Nile, the Jordan, and the Euphrates-Tigeres), whoever controls the flow of water, controls the region. During recent talks between the United States and Iran, concerning the subject of nuclear reactors in Iran, rather than focusing solely on the nuclear, perhaps the discussion should have centered on the cooling waters required by the reactors, waters on which the Iranians naturally focus.

Nuclear waste, produced by electrical nuclear generators, corrupts and contaminates free-flowing water and groundwater on every major continent on the planet. Leaks, caused by malfunctioning nuclear equipment, have contaminated local wells in the United States, France, and Russia. Toxic trash dumps, have allowed nuclear waste to slowly seep into groundwater as decay occurs in Germany and Australia, introducing radionuclides into the water ecosystem, and increasing the incidence of bone cancer and leukemia in animals who come in contact with it. For countries which have engaged in underground testing of nuclear weaponry, dangerously contaminated groundwater supplies will need to be monitored for at least 1,000 years, since

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