Perchlorate in the water

(Hat tip: Brown and Caldwell California Water Newsletter.)

The Manhattan Mercury News has an opinion piece on the regulation of perchlorate in the water. Author Jim Suber is not happy with the way the EPA has arrived at its numbers.

Boo! That scare you? It's a familiar pattern by now, and it's being played out with perchlorate, an ancient, naturally occuring salt of perchloric acid, HClO4.

The pattern he sees is:

Use new technology to find some chemical in the environment.

Conduct studies.

Propose a standard.

So then California begins to set a standard, and then the federal Environmental Protection Agency dusts off some guideline positions of allowable contamination of drinking water by perchlorate (4 to 18 ppb) and then announces its intention to leapfrog the entire legally determined regulatory process by announcing its goal to attain a limit of 1 ppb of perchlorate in water. So much for any element of objectivity imparted by EPA in its lead role as conductor of the various steps of review, analysis, comments,further studies and so forth during the prescribed process. In fact, the EPA makes a mockery and sham of the review process, and it needs its hand not just slapped, but its face.

Implementing this standard will cost everyone a fortune.

And now that we have a proposed standard, any data will be passed through a filter:

This month (January, 2005) the National Academy of Science is supposed to report just what the effects of perchlorate are on human health. If favorable for the scaremongers, it will be cited as proof. If unfavorable, it will be disparaged and then ignored by non-governmental outfits who will sue the EPA, which will be happy to be sued, for strict standards immediately imposed. The upshots will include: more expensive drinking water; scarcer irrigation water; likely fewer lettuce and other specialty crops coming from the far West and more from overseas, where they use Human Dung often for fertilizer. I'm not making this up. Here's a refresher on what a part per billion is. It's about one half of one teaspoon of water mixed into 660,000 gallons of water, the amount that fills an Olympic swimming pool.

And all of this will eat up resources for an improvement in health that is very slight, if it exists at all. These are resources that would probably have a greater impact on health if used almost anywhere else. But now they can't be.