Jordan is in a tight spot. The virtually landlocked country is 80 percent desert, and the remaining 20 percent loses most of its rainfall to evaporation. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River, which feeds it, are drier than ever. With its population swelling with Iraqi migrants, water is Jordan’s foremost concern.

Most of the country receives water service once a week at best, and unexpected disruptions force the Ministry of Water and Irrigation to deliver water by truck. ”When a country has its back against the wall, you take the least damaging solution,” says Munther Haddadin, the country’s former water minister.

The water ministry has decided that the best way to get water to the capital of Amman is to mine it, tapping into what the department says is some of the cleanest, purest water in the world. The water sits in the pores and holes of the Disi aquifer, an expanse of sandstone some 500 meters beneath the desert in southern Jordan and northwestern Saudi Arabia.

Having just secured the final US $200 million in loans needed from European development banks in May, the government will soon begin building a 325-kilometer pipeline across the country, from the heart of the desert to Amman. The plan is to pump 100 million cubic meters of water from 55 wells in Disi each year. The water will travel about 1300 meters uphill, requiring about 4 kilowatt-hours of energy to deliver each cubic meter, according to Othman Kurdi, the engineer in charge of the Disi Water Conveyance Project. At that rate, the power required to pump ayear’s worth of water is equivalent to the output of a 45-megawatt power plant, or about 4 percent of the country’s electricity production.

”It’s not rocket science, but it’s a megaproject and a challenge in every sense,” Kurdi says. Indeed, the Disi Water Conveyance Project is riddled with complications. Recent research has revealed that the water may not be as pure as project planners had said, and that could make the scheme more complex and costly—and even take a toll on public health. Further, the pipeline project is just a stopgap measure that will leave Jordan permanently poorer in natural freshwater resources while the country pursues an even larger, costlier, and more energy-intensive solution that remains decades away.

By pumping the Disi aquifer, Jordan will be depleting its only strategic reserve of water, a move also being considered by other developing nations that are poor in both energy and water resources. Unlike rivers and lakes that refill with rainfall or melting snow, once this so-called fossil water is pumped, it leaves Jordan forever. Much of the water in the Disi aquifer essentially hasn’t moved since it began dripping into the ground during the Pleistocene era, some 30 000 years ago. ”For developing countries in that region, they have no other choice—using this water is the only way to survive the water crisis,” says Avner Vengosh, a geochemistry professor at Duke University, in Durham, N.C.

Policymakers and water experts had been debating the merits of draining Disi through much of the project’s planning. But in February the debate suddenly shifted, when Vengosh published a report in the journal Environmental Science & Technology describing the Disi water as highly radioactive. He and his coauthors collected samples from 37 wells in the Disi area used mostly for agriculture and mining activities. They found that in all but one well, the concentrations of radium-226 and radium-228 isotopes exceeded the levels considered safe by the World Health Organization and even the more relaxed European Union and U.S. water standards. In some spots, the radiation levels were observed to be 30 times the WHO’s thresholds. Long-term exposure to radium is believed to increase the risk of developing bone cancer.