[CPEO-MEF] "Fingerprinting Perchlorate Sources"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Fingerprinting perchlorate sources
A new technique identifies the origins of perchlorate even after 
microbes break it down.

ERIKA ENGELHAUPT
Environmental Science & Technology
February 28, 2007

Perchlorate, found nearly everywhere, has become a fiery topic over the 
past few years. The chemical, which occurs both naturally and as a 
residue from explosives and rocket fuel, interferes with thyroid 
function and is particularly dangerous to children. In research 
published today on ES&T's Research ASAP website (DOI: 
10.1021/es0621849), a team led by Neil Sturchio of the University of 
Illinois Chicago reports on advances in perchlorate fingerprinting (75KB 
PDF) that could help resolve some hot debates surrounding the chemical's 
origin.

Communities with perchlorate contamination want to know where it came 
from and who is responsible for cleaning it up, and isotopes can help 
answer those questions. But perchlorate can also linger from decades-old 
sources, such as cold war rocket-fuel production, or the historical use 
of nitrate fertilizers from Chile's Atacama Desert, which naturally 
contain perchlorate. "These change with degradation in the environment, 
and we need to know if those isotopic signatures are preserved. We need 
to know if the Atacama signature would degrade to look like man-made, or 
vice versa," says Andrew Jackson of Texas Tech University. "This work is 
important to society," he adds. "Millions of dollars are spent cleaning 
up perchlorate, and we need to understand what we're cleaning up."

...

For the entire article, see
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/feb/science/ee_perchlorate.html

--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


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