Environmental attorney Sanders says ancient groundwater source in Jordan contains high levels of radioactive substances.

Ancient groundwater being tapped by the country of Jordan, one of the 10 most water-deprived nations in the world, has been found to contain 20 times the radiation considered safe for drinking water in a new study by an international team of researchers. The radioactivity is primarily due to 228 radium and 226 radium - the two long-lived isotopes of radium. The scholarly paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Science & Technology.

The paper is online at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es802969r.

The finding is quite a blow to the hopes of Jordanians, who desperately need a new water supply. Water experts say the minimum needed to meet the basic human needs of drinking, cooking and hygiene is 20 liters (five gallons) of clean water per person per day. It's far from enough to ensure health and well-being-just enough to get by. For comparison, that's about the contents of an average water cooler.

Yet even that that amount would seem like an abundance to the many people on Earth living under conditions of extreme water scarcity. Those people routinely have less than five liters (1.3 gallons) a day available for use. How much is that? Less than one flush of a low-flush toilet. Let's hope a solution to this problem can be made.