Anyone read this? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7392072.stm

One of the concerns I’ve heard about over the years regarding water problems in the US West has been these invasive zebra mussels. It costs a lot of money to build new barriers and new pipes that bring water hundreds of miles to desert wastelands overpopulated with invasive subdivisions to have a fail over system while you clean the first set of pipes, but redundancy can’t hurt in the case of an emergency.

Even without that redundancy, I like how it is a non-chemical way to clear out this and other live animal/plant problems. It would have to be tuned and deployed to not hurt people (don’t leave an unattended “automatic” setup at any site people or wildlife that normally wouldn’t be a problem could get into) and larger animals, but the reduced costs of cleaning out these invasive, exotic mussels and other problems might make it worth it.

Of course they still need to study the effects and the ecosystems this is used on and near. You don’t want to kill everything in the area. There are good organisms as well as these invasive ones. But I hope that “nuking” them with microwaves rather than other longer-lasting radiation.

And we could stop invading the desert and live more locally, too. In the interim, at least this seems to be a less disruptive way of fitting in the spaces we’ve carved out. It’s hard to find a balance for myself to live within – much less the entire world. Sustainable and sensible economically. It’s a high cost we pay for convenience some times. And hard to measure the impact down the road.

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