146
6. Water Quality and Pollution
Considerations
pended constituents than does industrial water. However, a cost function
can be developed that depends only on the quality of the raw water at the
intake of a plant if the degree of treatment is prescribed for each water
treatment plant.
Regional water treatment implies the use of treatment plants to handle
the waste outfalls of numerous point sources of pollution, away from their
discharge locations. Obviously, economics of scale justify the construction
of regional treatment plants. Historical, legal, institutional, and economic
aspects of regional water quality management have been discussed by
Kneese (1964, 1967). Regional water quality treatment subsumes the use
of bypass piping which transfers the waste outflow of a point source to a
less polluted reach of the river basin instead of dumping that waste in the
most adjacent reach which is heavily polluted. In effect bypass piping is a
special case of regional treatment where the treatment plants do not alter
the waste content. Thus piping flows are allowed from each polluter to
each river section, from each polluter to each treatment plant, and from
each treatment plant to each section.
However the use of regional water treatment has not been accepted as
yet in the United States mainly due to the difficulty of answering the
question: who pays how much for the construction and upkeep of regional
water quality plants. This question has been satisfactorily answered in
Germany, for example, where the Genossenschaften (River Basin Water
Quality Management Boards) have built and managed regional water
quality plants with outstanding success for over 70 years. The options of
regional water quality management and bypass piping have not been explicitly entered in the model, but it can be altered to include these possibilities if required.
Another means of water quality control is the use of stream flow regulation or augmentation, that is, the release of a quantity of higher quality
water from an upstream reservoir to maintain or improve the quality of
water in a given stream by dilution. Costs associated with the quantity
and quality of the water released can be identified. The final means of
maintaining water quality that was mentioned, namely in-stream aeration,
involves the use of mechanical means to increase the diffusion of oxygen
into the stream; this method is not widely used, and will not be included
in the model.
Nearly all the water quality management models that have appeared in
the literature have been concerned with the short-term aspects of water
quality, that is, daily or weekly operations. Optimization has been mainly
concerned with the specification of the location of water and waste water
treatment plants on a river such as shown in Fig. 6.1 and their respective
6. Water Quality and Pollution
Considerations
pended constituents than does industrial water. However, a cost function
can be developed that depends only on the quality of the raw water at the
intake of a plant if the degree of treatment is prescribed for each water
treatment plant.
Regional water treatment implies the use of treatment plants to handle
the waste outfalls of numerous point sources of pollution, away from their
discharge locations. Obviously, economics of scale justify the construction
of regional treatment plants. Historical, legal, institutional, and economic
aspects of regional water quality management have been discussed by
Kneese (1964, 1967). Regional water quality treatment subsumes the use
of bypass piping which transfers the waste outflow of a point source to a
less polluted reach of the river basin instead of dumping that waste in the
most adjacent reach which is heavily polluted. In effect bypass piping is a
special case of regional treatment where the treatment plants do not alter
the waste content. Thus piping flows are allowed from each polluter to
each river section, from each polluter to each treatment plant, and from
each treatment plant to each section.
However the use of regional water treatment has not been accepted as
yet in the United States mainly due to the difficulty of answering the
question: who pays how much for the construction and upkeep of regional
water quality plants. This question has been satisfactorily answered in
Germany, for example, where the Genossenschaften (River Basin Water
Quality Management Boards) have built and managed regional water
quality plants with outstanding success for over 70 years. The options of
regional water quality management and bypass piping have not been explicitly entered in the model, but it can be altered to include these possibilities if required.
Another means of water quality control is the use of stream flow regulation or augmentation, that is, the release of a quantity of higher quality
water from an upstream reservoir to maintain or improve the quality of
water in a given stream by dilution. Costs associated with the quantity
and quality of the water released can be identified. The final means of
maintaining water quality that was mentioned, namely in-stream aeration,
involves the use of mechanical means to increase the diffusion of oxygen
into the stream; this method is not widely used, and will not be included
in the model.
Nearly all the water quality management models that have appeared in
the literature have been concerned with the short-term aspects of water
quality, that is, daily or weekly operations. Optimization has been mainly
concerned with the specification of the location of water and waste water
treatment plants on a river such as shown in Fig. 6.1 and their respective