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Nord Stream pipeline blasts stirred up toxic sediment
The explosions that blasted holes in the underwater Nord Stream gas pipelines kicked up long-buried toxins at levels high enough to threaten marine life for more than a month, analysis of the site suggests.
Last September, a series of four explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines — which run from Russia to Germany — close to the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, releasing more than 100,000 tonnes of methane into the sea and the atmosphere. It isn’t clear who was behind the explosions, but the most recent speculation is that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible.
Beneath the dramatic sight of bubbles belching from the sea, the explosions also threw up sediment from the sea bed, returning it to the water column. A team of environmental scientists,
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https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/personal-issue-templates/issues/70286/8-tw-2023led by Hans Sanderson at Aarhus University in Denmark, were concerned that the consequences not be overlooked, particularly considering that the blasts happened in the vicinity of a historical dumping ground for chemical warfare, including mustard and arsenic agents from the Second World War. They scrambled to work out how these chemicals might affect marine life.
Blast impact
The researchers used decades of monitoring data of the sediment in the busy shipping area of the Bornholm Basin, and hydrological models of sediment transport, to work out the impact of the blasts, each of which is estimated to have been equivalent in power to the explosion of 500 kilograms of TNT. Their models showed that the explosions, which happened at about 70 metres deep, threw up a total of 250,000 tonnes of sediment, which reached up to 30 metres below sea level. Sanderson and his colleagues took the known concentrations of various contaminants in the sediment, including the biocide tributyltin (TBT), heavy metals and the chemical-warfare agents, to see what was being stirred up.They worked out how much of each contaminant would become bioavailable and calculated a toxicity threshold for the sediment. Any more than 5.8 milligrams of sediment re-suspended per litre of seawater was predicted to be harmful to marine life. The team found that the contaminants in the sediment, including lead and TBT — an endocrine disrupter used to protect ship hulls — accounted for most of the toxicity. Lead and TBT alone were responsible for 75% of the toxicity.
The sediment thrown up by the Nord Stream 1 blast contained contaminants that breached the threshold safety level for 15 days, at depths of between 95 and 53 metres. For the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the threshold was breached for 34 days, at depths of between 78 and 42 metres. In total, the blasts contaminated 11 cubic kilometres of seawater for more than a month. The work, which is under peer review at a journal, has been published as a preprint1.
‘Impressive modelling’
“It’s an impressive modelling exercise,” says Rodney Forster, a marine scientist at the University of Hull, UK. And the teams’ calculations of the sediment plume’s dispersion show clearly that the sediment didn’t reach the sea surface. “That explains why, apart from the bubble plume, no visible suspended sediment plume can be seen in satellite images after the event,” Forster adds.The contaminants’ impact on marine life won’t be known definitively for months, if not years. But Sanderson is concerned about some of the region’s animals. The area is a known cod-spawning site. “There are high concentrations for a long duration in a large area,” he says of the contaminated sediment. “It could potentially have a quite significant impact” on cod stock. And the presence of TBT is “not good news for these organisms”, he says. The blasts happened at the end of the cod-spawning season, and the eggs float at depths that the stirred-up sediment reached. Sanderson speculates that the physical weight of the sediment could be another problem for the eggs, weighing them down so that they no longer float at the optimal depth to thrive before they hatch.
Other animals potentially affected include the harbour porpoise, of which there are estimated to be only 500 left in the Baltic Sea. The loss of even one would affect this population. It is possible that the blasts damaged the porpoises’ hearing, and so their ability to communicate.
Sanderson says that the team’s research shows that sediment content needs to be addressed alongside any activity that stirs up the sea bed — such as installing pipelines or wind turbines, or fishing. “There are also environmental impacts of conflicts and these also need to be clarified,” he adds.
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How do we smell? First 3D structure of human odour receptor offers clues
Finding could advance our understanding of how human olfactory proteins recognize specific scents, including the pong of ripe cheese.
Miryam Naddaf
Twitter Facebook EmailThe OR51E2 receptor is activated by propionate, which has a cheesy odour.CREDIT: Antonio Nardelli/ EyeEm/ Getty Images
It is thanks to proteins in the nose called odour receptors that we find the smell of roses pleasant and that of rotting food foul. But little is known about how these receptors detect molecules and translate them into scents.
Now, for the first time, researchers have mapped the precise 3D structure of a human odour receptor, taking a step forwards in understanding the most enigmatic of our senses.
The study, published in Nature on 15 March1, describes an olfactory receptor called OR51E2 and shows how it ‘recognizes’ the smell of cheese through specific molecular interactions that switch the receptor on.
“It’s basically our first picture of any odour molecule interacting with one of our odour receptors,” says study co-author Aashish Manglik, a pharmaceutical chemist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Smell mystery
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EditIklan
The human genome contains genes encoding 400 olfactory receptors that can detect many odours. Mammalian odour-receptor genes were first discovered in rats by molecular biologist Richard Axel and biologist Linda Buck in 19912. Researchers in the 1920s estimated that the human nose could discern around 10,000 smells3, but a 2014 study suggests that we can distinguish more than one trillion scents4.Each olfactory receptor can interact with only a subset of smelly molecules called odorants — and a single odorant can activate multiple receptors. It is “like hitting a chord on a piano”, says Manglik. “Instead of hitting a single note, it’s a combination of keys that are hit that gives rise to the perception of a distinct odour.”
Beyond this, little is known about exactly how olfactory receptors recognize specific odorants and encode different smells in the brain.
Technical challenges in producing mammalian olfactory-receptor proteins using standard laboratory methods have made it difficult to study how these receptors bind to odorants.
“Almost all of them really don’t like being in any other kind of cell other than an olfactory sensory neuron,” says Matthew Grubb, a neuroscientist at King’s College London. This means that they cannot be grown or stabilized in commonly used cell lines. “You would have to dissect probably thousands of mice noses” to replicate samples, says Grubb. “It’s just not feasible.”
To overcome this, Manglik and his colleagues focused on the OR51E2 receptor, which has functions beyond odorant recognition and is found in gut, kidney and prostate tissues, as well as olfactory neurons.
Vinegar and cheese
OR51E2 interacts with two odorant molecules: acetate, which smells like vinegar, and propionate, which has a cheesy odour.The authors purified the receptor and analysed the structure of propionate-bound and unbound OR51E2 using cryo-electron microscopy, an atomic-resolution imaging technique. They also used computer-aided simulations to model how the protein interacts with the odorant at an atomic scale.
They found that propionate binds OR51E2 through specific ionic and hydrogen bonds that anchor the propionate’s carboxylic acid to an amino acid, arginine, in a region of the receptor called the binding pocket. Binding to propionate alters the shape of OR51E2, which is what turns the receptor on.
These molecular interactions are crucial: the researchers showed that mutations affecting arginine prevented OR51E2 from being activated by propionate.
“This is our way of kind of lining up the dominoes to understand how pushing on one side of the receptor turns the other side on,” says Manglik.
On the scent
Scientists have long dreamed of building a molecular atlas of olfactory receptors that maps their chemical structures and which combinations of receptors correspond to particular odours. But “that’s been very much out of reach for the field”, says Manglik.The OR51E2 receptor is specific to propionate and acetate. But “it’s not all about single odorant binding to single receptor molecules”, says Grubb. OR51E2 is a class I olfactory receptor; only around 10% of human olfactory-receptor genes encode this type. The rest code for class II receptors, which typically recognize a broader range of odours. “They may have very different mechanisms,” says Vanessa Ruta, a neuroscientist at the Rockefeller University in New York City.
Studying other examples of human odour receptors and elucidating their structures is crucial, she adds. “It will allow for a broader understanding of the different ways that odorants are recognized.”
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How stem cells make a human brain
In a technical “tour de force”, researchers have analysed multiple traits of individual cells to pinpoint those that give rise to crucial components of the human brain.
The analysis, published on 16 March in Cell1, uses a combination of protein and RNA analysis to painstakingly purify and classify individual stem cells and their close relatives isolated from human brains. Researchers then injected different types of cell into mice and monitored the cells as they divided and their progeny took on specialized roles in the brain.
The hope is that this study, and others like it, will illuminate how such developmental programmes go awry in neurological diseases — and how they can be harnessed to create new therapies. “The census of stem and progenitor cells in the developing human brain is really just beginning,” says Arnold Kriegstein, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. “This work offers a nice window into some of that complexity.”
Cellular ensemble
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The brain is an intricate symphony of different cells, each of which performs essential functions. Star-shaped cells known as astrocytes, for example, are important for supporting metabolism in neurons, and loss of astrocyte function is linked to neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. Oligodendrocytes are cells that create a protective, insulating sheath around the connections between neurons. When they are damaged — as in diseases such as multiple sclerosis — communication between neurons slows or stops altogether.Guardians of the brain: how a special immune system protects our grey matter
To understand how such cells arise, stem cell biologists Irving Weissman and Daniel Liu and their colleauges at Stanford University in California harnessed new technology that would allow them to study the developmental destiny of individual cells taken from human brains.
The team isolated brain cells from human fetuses that were 17–19 weeks old and tested the cells for a battery of 11 proteins on the cell surface, including six that are associated with neural cell development. They also analysed RNA levels as a measure of gene activity and used this information to purify 10 kinds of cell that are likely to give rise to astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and neurons.
The researchers then injected the purified cells into mouse brains. Six months later, they analysed those mice to find out where the cells and their descendants had migrated, and what cellular identities they had taken.
The approach enabled the team to define a new kind of progenitor cell that gives rise to glial cells, a grouping that includes astrocytes and oligodendrocytes (see ‘How to make a brain’). These progenitors are derived from cells that are more sparse in mouse brains than in human brains, says Liu. “We think that this cell type might be important for specific adaptations that primate brains have made,” he says.
How to make a brain: Diagram showing how stem cells and closely related cells develop into three main types of brain cells.
Source: Ref 1.The team also found that high levels of a protein called Thy1 are associated with cells in the oligodendrocyte lineage. This runs counter to previous findings, which suggested that Thy1 was a marker for neurons rather than oligodendrocytes, says Steven Goldman, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and head of central nervous system therapy at Sana Biotechnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Such differences could also be the result of the new approach’s improved resolution of different cell types, Goldman says, adding that the work is “a technical tour de force. … They upped the level of the field.” Weissman says that the technique might be useful for studying other kinds of stem cell as well.
Complex brew for a brain
The study is an important contribution to the growing knowledge of the cellular lineages that give rise to the human brain, agrees Kriegstein. But he notes that the development of human stem cells in mice might not fully reflect how the cells would develop in human brains.Goldman worries that the lineages derived by the analysis do not reflect the plasticity of neural cell development. Other research has found that some cells in the brain can begin down one lineage, only to change paths and emerge as an unrelated neural cell, he says. Liu and Weissman think that some of that apparent plasticity was instead an artefact of studying mixtures of cells, and might not be as pronounced when using the stringent selection criteria for purifying cells that they developed.
But Goldman suspects that other factors influence how committed neural cells remain to their lineage. “The nervous system is more complicated in terms of diversification,” says Goldman. “There’s still a lot to learn.”
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Humans have lived on the Tibetan Plateau for 5,000 years
Modern inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau are descendants of people who have occupied the ‘roof of the world’ for the past five millennia. In the biggest study of its kind, researchers sequenced dozens of ancient genomes from the region, revealing where its ancient settlers came from and how they adapted to high-altitude living1.
The Tibetan Plateau extends from the northern edge of the Himalayas across 2.5 million square kilometres. It is a high-altitude, dry and cold region. Despite its inhospitable environment, humans have been present on the plateau since prehistoric times. Denisovans, extinct hominins that interbred with both Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans, lived on the northeastern edge of the plateau 160,000 years ago. Stone tools made 30,000–40,000 years ago are further signs of an early human presence in the region2.
But when people established a permanent presence on the plateau — and where they came from — has been a matter of debate, says Qiaomei Fu, an evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who led the study.
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https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlasboard-atlassian-package/issues/27742/hd-2023Historical records date back only 2,500 years. Dating of sediments with human hand- and footprints in the central plateau indicated that people might have lived there permanently as long as 7,400 years ago3.
Fu and her team sequenced ancient genomes from the remains of 89 individuals, dated to 5,100–100 years ago, unearthed from 29 archaeological sites. Their study confirms that permanent occupation of the region pre-dates historical records. It also paints a complex picture of where early Tibetans migrated from, and how their interactions in the region and with their lowland neighbours shaped their heritage.
“It’s very exciting that we are getting ancient DNA from this geographical region,” says Vagheesh Narasimhan, a computational genomics researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
Eastern origins
Analysis of the genomes reveals that the ancient occupants of the Tibetan Plateau have strong genetic links to the Tibetan, Sherpa and Qiang ethnic groups that live on or near the plateau today. Comparisons of the oldest genomes with ancient and living people across Asia suggest that the ancestors of modern Tibetans arrived on the plateau from the east. By contrast, India and the rest of the Asian subcontinent were populated by immigrants from eastern Eurasia and central Asia4.“They were definitely East Asian, and they were northern East Asian,” says Fu. The genomes reveal fresh influxes of genes that suggest lowland East Asian immigrants arrived on the plateau more than once. Trade with millet farmers from the upper Yellow River region of what is now northeastern China was probably responsible for interactions between existing Tibetan settlers and newcomers before 4,700 years ago. During the past 700 years, there has been a further influx of genes from the east.
“There’s a continuity,” says Irene Gallego Romero, a genomics researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, “but there is also consistent movement of influences in and out of the region.”
Evidence of these interactions has existed in the form of pottery and other artefacts, but this is the first definitive sign that populations were exchanging more than their culture and knowledge, says Fu.
Living the high life
The genomes also reveal how Tibetan settlers adapted to their environment. Many present-day inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau have a version of a gene, EPAS1, that allows them to thrive in the lower-oxygen environment5. The high-altitude variant of EPAS1 is thought to have originated from Denisovans.Fu and her team were able to track the increasing prevalence of the high-altitude EPAS1 variant over time. Whereas just over one-third of the studied individuals dated to before 2,500 years ago had the variant, nearly 60% of those dated to between 1,600 and 700 years ago had the gene. That’s still lower than the 86% incidence in present-day Tibetans, suggesting that there’s been rapid selection for this variant in recent prehistory. “It’s a poster child for natural selection in humans in recent times,” says Narasimhan.
It’s still unclear when the high-altitude EPAS1 variant first appeared. “It would be really interesting to know how far back that goes,” says Gallego Romero. Fu is keen to answer this question by sequencing genomes of older remains, if they are discovered on the plateau.
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Ukraine’s fight against Russia. Climate catastrophe. International news to watch in 2023
A year ago, few predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin would launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine (and that Ukraine would successfully repel it). Or that China would – almost overnight, amid rare large-scale protests – rescind its zero-COVID policy. Unexpectedly high food and energy costs have pushed up global inflation to 8.8% from 4.7% during the last 12 months, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Predictions, forecasts, future-gazing. These are pursuits that can often be, to use a British phrase, a mug’s game. Something only a foolish person, armed with incomplete information, would attempt. Still, there are some international story lines that are likely to dominate global headlines in 2023. Here’s a selection to watch for.
Ukraine: Will there be a real ceasefire?
There appears to be no end in sight to a war that was started by Russia, has displaced millions of Ukrainians across Europe and led the West to supply ever-more-heavy weapons to Kyiv. “The fighting is likely to be at least as intense in 2023 as it was in 2022,” said Daniel DePetris, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank. “Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will talk about their interest in ending the war through a peace settlement, but the two leaders will have vastly different interpretations on what that peace will look like and what it will take to get there.”Russians escaping Putin’s war on Ukraine: A new home – and a moral dilemma
Ukrainian soldiers prepare to fire a French-made CAESAR self-propelled howitzer towards Russian positions near Avdiivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Monday, Dec. 26, 2022.
Iran’s clerical regime in a corner
Nationwide protests about women’s rights and a litany of social and economic grievances rocked the Islamic Republic in 2022. Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear capabilities appear to be increasing, it is supplying weaponhttps://bitbucket.org/atlassian/personal-issue-templates/issues/69579/6-scream-vi-2023
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https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlasboard-atlassian-package/issues/27432/uhd-1080ps to Russia for the war in Ukraine and the regime’s leaders show no signs of willingness to nurture diplomatic channels to the West. “For the last decade, Iran has been politically and economically stagnant,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, a dual American-Iranian who runs Bourse & Bazaar, a think tank focused on Iran’s economy. “The country’s future is less predictable than it has been in a long time, and this poses a challenge for Western policymakers worried about the threats an increasingly unstable Iran might pose.”
‘Woman, life, liberty’: Iranians on why they’ll risk beatings and death for change
How the world is protesting Iran over Mahsa Amini’s death and women’s rights
Climate: ‘It’s going to get a lot hotter, and wetter’
United Nations scientists believe there’s a 50% chance global temperatures will rise, at least temporarily, to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels between now and 2026. Staying below 1.5C is the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty adopted by a majority of the world’s countries in 2015. “The climate story of 2023 is going to be about political backlash,” said David Callaway, a former USA TODAY editor-in-chief who runs Callaway Climate Insights, a newsletter that analyzes what the global business community is doing to mitigate climate risks. “In the U.S., Republicans will weaponize financial and political efforts to curtail global warming with hearings, investigations, litigation, and more penalties against Wall Street banks. In Europe, the EU’s new carbon border tax will provoke international protectionist threats just as the continent is trying to scramble through the energy crisis caused by Russia. As for the climate, it’s going to get a lot hotter, and wetter, with all the social and environmental pain that goes with that.”Climate Point: No, it’s not all China’s fault, and other climate change myths
Climate activists participate in a protest action in Glasgow in November 2021 during the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference.
Tigray: An uncertain road to peace in Ethiopia
A fragile peace has been established in one of last year’s deadliest conflict zones, a civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. An estimated 383,000 to 600,000 people died in Tigray between November 2020 and August 2022, according to Professor Jan Nyssen and a team of researchers at Ghent University, in Belgium. “The durability of the peace agreement will partly depend upon whether Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed manages to deal with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki’s destabilizing efforts in Ethiopia, as well as territorial claims by the Amhara militia to parts of Tigray,” said Kjetil Tronvoll, a Norwegian expert on Ethiopia who has studied the region for decades.The largest war in the world: Hundreds of thousands killed in Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict
Captive Ethiopian soldiers arrive at the Mekele Rehabilitation Center in Mekele, the capital of Tigray region, Ethiopia, on July 2, 2021. According to Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters, more than 7,000 captive Ethiopian soldiers have walked from Abdi Eshir, about 75 km southwest of Mekele, for four days.
China vs. Taiwan: Combat or just drills?
China is unlikely to invade the self-governing island of Taiwan that Beijing considers part of its territory, according to analysts at the International Crisis Group, a Belgium-headquartered think tank. But tensions have been rising as China has launched a series of increasingly aggressive war games in the Taiwan Strait and Taipei has bolstered its military defenses. In September, President Joe Biden said U.S forces would defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, comments that appeared to go well beyond long-standing stated U.S. policy on Taiwan of “strategic ambiguity” and followed a visit to the island by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that angered Beijing.Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan:U.S. tensions with China escalate
“Breaching Taiwan’s defenses would be a slog and, having seen the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing likely grasps the international opprobrium and economic cost an offensive could trigger – even if the U.S. opts not to intervene militarily,” the International Crisis Group wrote in a recent assessment of the issue.
August 3, 2022: U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi waves to journalists during her arrival at the Parliament in Taipei, Taiwan.
Threats to democracy: key 2023 votes
There are international elections of consequence every year. Two to keep an eye on in 2023 are in Pakistan and Turkey.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dominated that country’s politics for two decades. “Once a pillar of the Western alliance, the country has embarked on a militaristic foreign policy,” Dmitar Bechev wrote in a recent analysis for Carnegie Europe, a foreign policy think tank. “And its democracy, sustained by the aspiration to join the European Union, has given way to one-man rule.”
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How the US will remove ‘forever chemicals’ from its drinking water
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed the first limitations on a set of pervasive and dangerous ‘forever chemicals’ in US drinking water. The chemicals, known for their strong carbon–fluorine bonds, are difficult to destroy and have become widely dispersed in the environment. Scientists and engineers are busy developing ways to extract the chemicals more efficiently from water and soil and break them down, but water utility companies warn that meeting the EPA’s new standards will be expensive in the short term — possibly prohibitively so for small water-treatment facilities.
“This is a huge deal, in terms of protecting public health, but also in terms of what it’s going to take to accomplish,” says Michelle Crimi, an environmental engineer at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York.
Tainted water: the scientists tracing thousands of fluorinated chemicals in our environment
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https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/personal-issue-templates/issues/69535/1080p-twProposed on 14 March, the regulation targets perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), a class of thousands of nearly indestructible compounds used in everything from non-stick cookware and waterproof clothes to industrial materials and cosmetics. Once called miracle chemicals for their hallmark durability, PFAS accumulate in the environment and in people; even minute amounts increase the risk of cancer, as well as the risk of developmental and other health problems1, research shows.
The EPA suggested a voluntary limit for PFAS in drinking water in 2016, but this is the first time it has advanced a mandatory requirement. The core of the proposal would restrict two of the most dangerous PFAS compounds, PFOA and PFOS, to four parts per trillion. That is the lowest level that is detectable using current laboratory tests, although the agency has determined that there are risks associated with much lower concentrations. Another four chemicals would be regulated as a mixture.
Similar movements to rein in PFAS are afoot internationally. At the extreme end of the spectrum, the European Union is considering legislation that would ban the production of PFAS altogether.
Health costs
Achieving the EPA’s proposed regulation won’t be cheap. PFAS contamination has been found in around 2,800 communities in the United States, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization based in Washington DC, and research by the group suggests that it probably affects the water supplies of at least 200 million people2. And although the use of PFOA and PFOS has mostly been phased out in the United States, the group has identified around 30,000 industrial facilities that could be using countless other compounds in the PFAS family.How to destroy ‘forever chemicals’: cheap method breaks down PFAS
Numerous states have already set limits on PFAS in drinking water, and water providers have demonstrated that existing technologies such as carbon filtration can reduce PFAS amounts to undetectable levels. But installing such technologies nationally could be costly, with the financial burden falling disproportionately on smaller water-treatment systems. For facilities large and small, adding PFAS filtration will have to be weighed against other priorities, such as replacing lead pipes, says Chris Moody, a regulatory analyst with the American Water Works Association (AWWA), which is based in Denver, Colorado, and represents more than 4,300 utility companies that provide some 80% of the US drinking-water supply.
By one measure, the EPA estimates that implementing its proposal nationally would cost around US$772 million annually, but a study commissioned by the AWWA using similar assumptions suggests that the price tag could be around $2.9 billion a year. The EPA says that more than $9 billion is already available through a US infrastructure law enacted in late 2021, but Moody stresses that this is just a start: the AWWA-estimated cost over 20 years is $58 billion.
If history is any indicator, however, costs will probably come down over time, says Melanie Benesh, vice-president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “With regulation often comes market innovation,” she adds.
Innovative solutions
Scientists and engineers started investigating technologies years ago, when the risks posed by PFAS became clear. Research has focused on methods to more efficiently remove PFAS from drinking water, clean up groundwater contamination or destroy the chemical compounds.The upshot is that a variety of promising technologies are now available, from carbon filtration and ion-exchange systems that can separate PFAS from drinking water to electrochemical and gasification methods to break down PFAS, says Patrick McNamara, an engineer at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But scaling them up to be practical could be challenging, he adds.
For her part, Crimi is working with the US Department of Defense to test a technology that could be used to clean up plumes of PFAS contamination in groundwater before they leach into drinking-water supplies. Starting as early as this year at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, groundwater will be collected inside a horizontal well and funnelled through a reactor developed by Crimi’s team that uses ultrasound waves to break the carbon–fluorine bonds in PFAS3.
“We know it’s effective in the lab,” she says, but there are always things to learn when scaling up to field operations.
The EPA is accepting comments on the proposal until mid-April.
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