Tracking a river of nanopollution - by Roger Highfield at Telegraph.co UK

[applegrove]

Tracking a river of nanopollution
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 15/01/2007
at Telegraph.co UK


A nuclear technique will shed light on how tiny particles transport pollution around waterways, reports Roger Highfield.

A method that, for the first time, can examine the way "nanoparticles" transport pollutants along rivers and into coastal waters has been developed by a British team.

Fertiliser-laden agricultural run-off, sewage and rainwater containing nitrous oxides from vehicle exhausts can trigger blooms of algae that eventually die and fall to the river bed. Bacteria then gorge on this food, using up huge amounts of oxygen, killing off river life.

Now two leading laboratories in Oxfordshire have teamed up to gain a unique understanding of the role of tiny particles, some only measuring a hundred thousandth of a millimetre across (what scientists call ten nanometres), and found that they are much more influential than previously thought.

Water quality scientists at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) in Wallingford and colleagues at the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory used ISIS, the world's most powerful pulsed neutron radiation source, to study river water, slurry and river bed sediments which contain a complex mixture of 'nano-size' mineral and organic particles, called colloids.

..........SNIP"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml;jsessionid=14HLZLKUFFME1QFIQMFCFFOAVCBQYIV0?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/connected/2007/01/15/npollute15.xml