Introduction

Prized for its ability to power rocket engines and used in many industrial processes, perchlorate now garners headlines for concerns over environmental pollution. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) estimates that perchlorate affects the drinking water of over 11 million people. When chemists developed analytical methods which identified widespread perchlorate contamination in the late 1990s, research into the environmental problems and potential solutions exploded. The purpose of this book is to summarize the state of the science and developments in engineering relative to perchlorate in the environment. This book describes

• Common sources of perchlorate, • Its behavior in the environment, • Methods for analyzing perchlorate in environmental samples, • Potential risks to human health and the environment, • Regulatory standards and criteria, and • Techniques for remediating environmental contamination.