turning lake ecosystems into industrial zones, cutting off recreational access to 33,000 acres of the lake, destroying the beauty of the landscape, artificially reducing water levels and availability critical to the ecosystem, and impeding water flow.... and nesting American pelican colonies at Gunnison Island that are now remote but will be less isolated and more accessible to prey species and human incursion by the new development

Canadian discussions and studies are more advanced than in the U.S. and also predict impacts on use of road salt for winter maintenance. In "Climate Change and Ontarios's Winter Roads: Trends and Impacts on Ontario Winter Road Maintainence Ops" and "Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation: A Canadian Perspective," experts agreed that salt usage in southern and western Ontario would be unchanged by global warming, but that salt usage would increase in northern and eastern parts of the province.

For that reason, a year ago, the MOE concluded, as Environment Canada had in 2001, that government units that put salt on roads are seriously addressing the issue and that enlisting their voluntary support is paying big dividends. It denied an environmental activist petition to jettison the voluntary program and replace it with a system of provincial permits issued to agencies allowing them to salt roadways -- or not, if the province so determined.

Twice examined and rejected, the mandatory permit system was resurrected for a third look in the annual report of the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, a government ombudsman agency. ECO Gord Miller called for "comprehensive, mandatory, province-wide road salt management strategy to ensure aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are protected from chlorides." The premier added vocal support for improved salt management. Environmentalists applauded the report as the foundation for renewed investments in mass transit.

While the Ontario Good Roads Association deserves loud congratulations for its effective leadership in improving salt management, the salt industry has displayed quiet leadership as well. Recognizing that sacrificing safe roadways is politically unpalatable and that the new Road Salt Code of Practice embraces the latest technologies from around the world, the Salt Institute and Environment Ontario initiated an effort to measure the environmental effectiveness of the Code's "best management practices." That research effort has been joined by Environment Canada and will be conducted this winter and next.

The ECO did not participate in the multi-stakeholder group that has studied salt management options extensively. That group labored three years and concluded that the only practical policy requires balancing environmental protection with roadway safety and preserving winter mobility and the jobs and economic health it provides. Poor response to a snowstorm would impose more than $357 million a day in lost wages, retail sales and tax revenues, according to a recent study. Effective roadway maintenance needs to be localized, since citizens will not accept unsafe roads.

By all means, let's heed the ECO's call for a "comprehensive ... province-wide road salt management strategy to ensure aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are protected from chlorides." But let's keep local elected officials accountable both for environmental performance and for keeping roads safe -- a life-saving job for which MOE permit-writers are unprepared and unsuitable. And let's invite the ECO to attend the semi-annual meetings of the road salts multi-stakeholders group to learn of the enthusiasm and commitment of local governments to protect the environment against the dangers in mismanaged road salt.

• Scientific studies that show an association between a factor and a health effect do not necessarily imply that the factor causes the health effect. Many such studies are preliminary reports that cannot justify any valid claim of causation without considerable additional research, experimentation, and replication.

• Randomized trials are studies in which human volunteers are randomly assigned to receive either the agent being studied or an inactive placebo, usually under double-blind conditions (where neither the participants nor the investigators know which substance each individual is receiving), and their health is then monitored for a period of time. This type of study can provide strong evidence for a causal effect, especially if its findings are replicated by other studies. Such trials, however, are often impossible for ethical, practical, or financial reasons. When they can be conducted, the use of low doses and brief durations of exposure may limit the applicability of their findings.

• The findings of animal experiments may not be directly applicable to the human situation because of genetic, anatomic, and physiologic differences between species and/or because of the use of unrealistically high doses.

• In vitro experiments are useful for defining and isolating biologic mechanisms but are not directly applicable to humans.

• Observational epidemiologic studies are studies in human populations in which researchers collect data on people’s exposures to various agents and relate these data to the occurrence of diseases or other health effects among the study participants. The findings from studies of this type are directly applicable to humans, but the associations detected in such studies are not necessarily causal.

• Useful, time-tested criteria for determining whether an association is causal include:

- Temporality. For an association to be causal, the cause must precede the effect.
- Strength. Scientists can be more confident in the causality of strong associations than weak ones.
- Dose-response. Responses that increase in frequency as exposure increases are more convincingly supportive of causality than those that do not show this pattern.
- Consistency. Relationships that are repeatedly observed by different investigators, in different places, circumstances, and times, are more likely to be causal.
- Biological plausbility. Associations that are consistent with the scientific understanding of the biology of the disease or health effect under investigation are more likely to be causal.

• New research results need to be interpreted in the context of related previous research. The quality of new studies should also be assessed. Those that include appropriate statistical analysis and that have been published in peer-reviewed journals carry greater weight than those that lack statistical analysis and/or have been announced in other ways.

• Claims of causation should never be made lightly. Premature or poorly justified claims of causation can mislead people into thinking that something they are exposed to is endangering their health, when this may not be true, or that a useless or even dangerous product may produce desirable health effects.

We hope this gets to be a popular site.

An article in the current American Thinker deals with global warming, but it's not my intent to explore the validity of the scientific clash on that issue, only to "steal" an anecdote to make a further point. Author James Lewis shares this story:

Trofimko Lysenko is not a household name; but it should be, because he was the model for all the Politically Correct "science" in the last hundred years. Lysenko was Stalin's favorite agricultural "scientist," peddling the myth that crops could be just trained into growing bigger and better. You didn't have to breed better plants over generations, as farmers have been doing for ages. It was a fantasy of the all-powerful Soviet State. Lysenko sold Stalin on that fraud in plant genetics, and Stalin told Soviet scientists to fall into line --- in spite of the fact that nobody really believed it. Hundreds of thousands of peasants starved during Stalin's famines, in good part because of fraudulent science.

He then provides context:

When the scientific establishment starts to peddle fraud, we get corrupt science. The Boomer Left came to power in the 1970s harboring a real hatred toward science. They called it "post-modernism," and "deconstructionism" --- and we saw all kinds of damage as a result. Scientific American magazine went so far as to hire a post-modern "journalist" to write for it. John Horgan became famous for writing a book called The End of Science, but never seemed to learn much about real science. It was a shameful episode. ....

Pathological science kills people and ruins lives. Such fake science is still peddled by the PC establishment in Europe and America. ...

Britain is even more vulnerable to politicized science than we are, because medicine is controlled by the Left. That is a huge chunk of all science in the age of biomedicine. But the British Medical Journal and even the venerable Lancet are no longer reliable sources. Their political agenda sticks out like a sore thumb. It was The Lancet that published a plainly fraudulent "survey" of Iraqi civilian casualties a few years ago --- the only "survey" ever taken in the middle of a shooting war. As if you can go around shell-shocked neighborhoods with your little clipboard and expect people to tell the truth about their dead and wounded: Saddam taught Iraqis to lie about such things, just to survive, and the internecine fighting of the last several years did not help. The whole farce was just unbelievable, but the prestigious Lancet put the fake survey into the public domain, just as if it were real science. It was a classic agitprop move, worthy of Stalin and Lysenko. But it was not worthy of one the great scientific journals. Many scientists will never trust it again.

The account continues on global warming, but my point is the broader one: politically-correct science may not be scientifically-correct science and relying on PC science (junk science) risks disasters like that engineered by Stalin. That's true for environmental science. And it's true for nutrition science.

Here is a simple schematic of such a system to be used in a 100 kW plant:

This new development marks the first step in a technology that may one day provide a significant portion of the world’s energy. Statkraft is the first company to venture into this technology because it is far more costly than fossil fuel. (However, if the total cost to the environment of fossil fuels were to be calculated, these differences may disappear.) Norway is seriously committed to reducing global warming and this new technology is in keeping with that commitment.

While freshwater/seawater gradients are rather costly, there is a much greater short term economic potential for freshwater/brine and seawater/brine gradients. As a result, utilizing brine from inland salt lakes, solution mines and solar salt operations may be a more economically feasible approach than the Statkraft operation. Whatever the case, through this new development, we can look forward to a green future with the incredible Saline Turbine!

Although not specifically mentioned in his announcement, we suggest that the ideas expounded in The Peace Chlor be considered carefully.

The tone and content of the Secretary Chertoff’s message, coming so soon after our blog was published leaves us little choice but to assume that Salt Sensibility is continually read at the highest levels of government and when an opportunity arises to act upon our foresight and advice, they do not hesitate to do so.

With that vote of confidence we shall continue providing our considered thoughts on all aspects of salt’s benefits to humankind.

The main technological challenge to desalination is the disposal of residue water that contains three to four times the salt content of the input water. A good deal of this material is currently being pumped into deep wells, but the feasibility of this approach is questionable for the future. A major challenge is the determination of best practices to dispose of or utilize the wastewater streams coming from large- scale desalination operations. This was recently highlighted in a previous blog as well as an article in the April issue of Water Conditioning & Purification Magazine, “A Glass Half Full,” by Mort Satin.

In the March SI Report, we suggested that a desalination operation's waste can easily serve as the raw material for another unit operation ("The salt-making/desalination nexus"). Just as former cheese factory waste product, whey, became one of the most highly valued products in the food industry, we speculated that desalination waste streams might prove to be a new source of raw material for the salt industry.

Just this week we see that is exactly what has happened.

Business Wire reported that GE Water & Process Technologies is to design and construct a reverse osmosis seawater desalination plant in South Africa, which will provide 70,000 m3/day of fresh water. In a first, the plant will recover ultra-pure salt from the concentrated brine stream for the production of chlorine, caustic soda, and hydrochloric acid at the refinery.

The $220 million project is part of a larger investment to build a new chlorine refinery in the Coega Industrial Zone, Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

GE’s seawater desalination and thermal evaporation technologies will create around 630,000 tonnes of 99.9% pure salt annually. Reclaiming salt from the desalination brine stream will not only improve the overall economics of the refinery project, but also ensure a reliable and locally available supply of high grade salt for use in the refining of chlorine.

This project will provide freshwater to help lessen water scarcity and use the brine waste stream as a valuable raw material for another unit operation.

This past week, the Transportation Research Board published a new set of research-based Guidelines for the Selection of Snow and Ice Control Materials to Mitigate Environmental Impacts..” (NCHRP Report 577.

Previous studies have exhaustively evaluated the effectiveness of the several deicers being used. The Salt Institute's summer 2004 issue of Salt and Highway Deicing answered the question: “Are you using the right amount of ice control chemical?” It reported results of another NCHRP study (NCHRP Report 526). Still other studies have examined the environmental impacts of salt and other deicing alternatives. None have tried to integrate the questions of material selection, application rate and environmental impact. That’s what Report 577 has done.

The Report examined 42 deicing chemicals, chief among them salt (NaCl) and compared salt with two chloride deicers (CaCl and MgCl), two acetate deicers (KA and CMA) and with abrasives, creating a decision tool to quantify costs, performance and impacts on environment and infrastructure and reach objective recommendations. Here's what the report found:

It didn’t surprise us much at the Salt Institute that the decision tool, applied to priorities of current snowfighting practice as determined by survey, gave the edge to salt. In the temperature range for most snowfall, 25° to 30°, salt (NaCl) scored 90.4 compared to second-place MgCl (71.1 to 76.4), followed by CaCl (64.8 to 76.1), KA (23.9 to 31.6) and CMA (18.2 to 19.2). Sodium chloride retains its strong preference score of 90.4 down to 15° F (at that temperature, MgCl is 83.6; CaCl, 77; KA, 35.3 and CMA, 18.6). This model, of course, reflects the current preference for cost-savings and roadway clearing performance.

The second example weighted all four variables equally, which means environment and infrastructure impacts were half the scoring. Surprise, while salt’s advantage was muted by lowering the weight of its strongest suits, its lower cost and effective performance, the results were unchanged. Salt earned the highest scores down to 15° F and the other deicers follow in rank, though more tightly bunched (e.g. at 15°, NaCl is 75; MgCl, 72.2; CaCl, 68.1; KA, 52.8; and CMA, 43.1.

The real news was the impact using a third example with “environment/infrastructure priority” weighting -- three-fourth of the score representing environmental and infrastructure impacts, a quarter for performance -- and totally ignoring cost. In this example, all four deicers are tightly clustered between 15° and 30° F. Potassium Acetate earns top honors at 63.8 to 67.4; narrowly edging out CMA at 63.5 to 63.6; NaCl is third, 62.5 at each temperature; MgCl is 59.2 to 63.1 (edging out salt below 20° F; while CaCl registers 57.2 to 61.0.

There you have it: an objective study integrating concerns of cost, performance and environmental/infrastructure impacts which shows that salt is the superior choice in most circumstances. There are times and location when other products are preferred, but in normal circumstances salt will be the best choice to keep winter roads safe and passable.

What people tend to forget is that once salt is separated from water, whether it's fresh or wastewater effluent, it has to be disposed somewhere. However, once it's a separate stream by itself, everyone treats it like they treat sludge (not in my backyard). So what's an easy answer to reducing salt. There is none!

Gotcha!

"While highway congestion is increasing, at least transportation-generated pollution is under control," said Salt Institute president Dick Hanneman responding to the report.

EPA’s conclusions reflect the continued significant role transportation plays in improving air quality. Since 1970, aggregate emissions are down 54% despite an increase of 203% in Gross Domestic Product, an increase of 177%in vehicle miles traveled, an increase of 49% in energy consumption, and an increase of 46% in population.

Hanneman attributes a positive outcome and significant progress to Environment Canada's enlightened use of stakeholder consultations during the "risk management" exercise, "clear vision and hard work -- and some significant investments in ujpgrading snow-fighting practices."

Anyone know a youtube.com producer interested in getting out the truth on salt and health?