Mercury use in Oak Ridge topic of FORNL talk Oct. 11
“Mercury Use in Oak Ridge: Environmental Legacy and Solutions” is the topic of a lecture to be presented at noon Tuesday at the University of Tennessee Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. The speaker will be Scott Brooks, a Distinguished R&D Scientist in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
At the in-person “hybrid” meeting hosted by Friends of ORNL, attendees may bring their own food to eat, but are asked to wear a mask when not eating or drinking. To view the virtual lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.
Brooks will speak about mercury, a naturally occurring element that has been used by humans over the past 3,000 years for the mining of gold and silver, thermometers, barometers, medicines, dental fillings, soaps, paints, batteries, electrical switches and fluorescent lighting.
The most common way people in the United States are exposed to mercury, which is an environmental pollutant of concern, is by eating fish containing methylmercury, which is formed by the action of bacteria on inorganic mercury in lakes, creeks and other aquatic systems.
In a summary of his talk, Brooks said that mercury, which is liquid at room temperature, can enter the air as a vapor. He added that it has a “long residence time in the atmosphere, facilitating long-range transport from source areas. The widespread presence of mercury on Earth is highlighted in ice core records and the findings that water bodies far from emission sources have fish consumption advisories driven by mercury concentrations.”
From 1955 to 1963, the Atomic Energy Commission in Oak Ridge used more than 24 million pounds of mercury at the Y-12 National Security Complex to separate lithium isotopes in support of the nation’s project to develop the most powerful hydrogen bomb for national defense.
“About 3% of that mercury was lost to the local environment, including through direct discharges to East Fork Poplar Creek,” Brooks said. “Intense monitoring, characterization and research on EFPC since the mid-1980s have prompted several remedial actions that have resulted in improvements to overall water quality. Nevertheless, mercury concentrations in fish tissue throughout the creek remain above the Environmental Protection Agency’s water quality criterion of 0.3 part per million.
“Over the past decade, ORNL research programs have made significant contributions to improving our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms controlling mercury behavior in the environment. It has helped ORNL researchers evaluate the efficacy of potential solutions for the remaining challenges in EFPC. The research has taken advantage of many of ORNL’s signature strengths, such as advanced computational hardware and software, neutron science, microbiology and genetic methods, environmental chemistry and ecosystem studies.”
Brooks added that he will highlight achievements by ORNL researchers and their collaborators in science and in the search for solutions “within the framework of our current conceptual model for the East Fork Poplar Creek system.”
Brooks holds three degrees from the University of Virginia; his master's and doctorate degrees are in environmental science.
His research focuses on the coupled geochemical and microbiological reactions governing the fate and transformation of nutrients, heavy metals, and radionuclides in soils, groundwater and surface water. He also works on advancing technologies for reversing the contamination of water and fish with mercury and evaluating the success of such approaches. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications and given more than 300 presentations.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Mercury use in Oak Ridge topic of FORNL talk Tuesday
