( Buried under 243 acres in an East Tenne...)'Hidden-hero' microbes in soil, water may help naturally clean toxic sites

But soon, Florida State University Associate Professor Joel Kostka and his FSU oceanography department team will help clean up the mess.

During the course of a forthcoming five-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, FSU researchers will be testing a natural method called bioremediation -- the stimulation of naturally occurring microbes that Kostka calls "hidden heroes" -- to promote bacterial growth in the soil subsurface that scrub it of potentially deadly radioactive metal.

If bioremediation proves successful on the uranium, technetium, nitrate and other potentially lethal leftovers at the Oak Ridge site, the process should work to mitigate contamination at more than 7,000 other sites nationwide -- and do so more economically and effectively than most conventional methods.

"The stakes are high and the impact potentially huge," Kostka said. Together, those 7,000 U.S. sites encompass an estimated 1.7 trillion gallons of contaminated water -- that's about four times the nation's daily water consumption -- and about 40 million cubic meters of contaminated soil.

Kostka has a five-year, $1 million share of the total $15 million in U.S. DOE funding for the project, which includes research teams from FSU and multiple universities and national laboratories across the country.

Together, the partners will develop models to help predict the rate at which contamination levels drop when using natural methods such as bioremediation and artificial techniques such as chemical additions and pH adjustments. Subsurface changes are monitored using geophysical methods that send acoustic, electric and other signals i
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Source:Florida State University