this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago

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.