Full Description

In support of requirements in the Safe Drinking Water Act, the National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL), has been developing analytical methods for chemicals on the 1998 contaminant candidate list (CCL) and for other chemicals of emerging interest. The purpose behind this effort is to provide analytical testing methods that can be used the the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in unregulated contaminant monitoring (UCM) to gather nationwide occurrence data of these chemicals in drinking water. This occurrence data will support the USEPA's decision-making process regarding future regulation of these chemicals in drinking water. Ideally, these methods will be specific, accurate, sensitive, and suitable for compliance monitoring if the chemical is regulated in the future. Specificity is of special concern when collecting UCM data, because with non-specific methods, there is the potential of regulating a chemical based on false positive occurrence data. Because many of these chemicals are not easy to measure at low concentrations in water matrices, method development has been an on-going challenge. Adding to the challenge is the fact that often the health effects information available for a chemical at the time of the method development are insufficient to provide a target detection limit. This paper discusses two chemical groups of interest to USEPA that fall into the category of emerging contaminants, explosives and nitrosamines. A new analytical method for explosives and related compounds, USEPA Method 529, was completed in 2002. A method for nitrosamines is expected to be completed early in 2004. Includes 6 references, tables.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 11/02/2003 Number of Pages: 5 File Size: 1 file , 240 KB