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University of Idaho Researchers Share in $1.5 Million DOE Grant for Bioremediation
March 29, 2006
Moscow, Idaho – Three researchers in the University of Idaho Environmental Biotechnology Institute will receive $410,000 to assist in a collaborative bioremediation project at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls. Professors of Microbiology, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Ron Crawford and Andrzej Paszczynski, along with postdoctoral fellow Janice Strap, are part of a team that will work to better understand how naturally occurring processes result in the breakdown of the toxic chemical trichloroethylene (TCE).
The UI team will collaborate with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and North Wind, Inc., an Idaho Falls-based environmental engineering firm, who share in the three-year, approximately $1.5 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Environmental Remediation Sciences Program. The project may lead to establishing new environmental clean-up procedures for other TCE-contaminated sites around the U.S.
The field phase of the research project takes place at the Test Area North at INL, where a large TCE plume contaminates the Snake River Plain Aquifer. The site has been the center of bioremediation research for more than a decade. One currently approved clean-up strategy is called “pump and treat,” where contaminated water is pumped to the surface and TCE is removed.
But researchers also have found microbes in the subsurface that are degrading the TCE by a natural process.
“In the last decade, we’ve been able to establish that natural attenuation is occurring,” said Crawford. “The grant will allow us to model the process to quantitatively describe the natural communities of methane-oxidizing bacteria are degrading the TCE. It could save millions of dollars in clean-up costs, especially if it is applied nationwide.”
The project involves putting special reactors several hundred feet deep in wells at the site to study the microbial processes taking place and take measurements.
The interdisciplinary team of scientists will jointly design the subsurface bioreactors, work in the wells at the experimental site, devise sampling procedures and perform molecular biology and ecology experiments to define and study the organisms involved in TCE destruction. An overall objective is to develop a mathematical model for the monitored natural attenuation, which will help determine if the process can be successful at other TCE clean-up locations.
“This problem is not unique to INL,” said Crawford. “If we can develop a model based on the INL data, that model can be used to predict the viability of the monitored natural attenuation process at other locations.”
CONTACT: Jeff Olson, University Communications, (208) 885-8934, jolson@uidaho.edu
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