The agency has acknowledged the health risks of perchlorate but says efforts to reduce its presence in water supplies are succeeding.
Photo: Ric Francis/Associated PressThe Environmental Protection Agency will announce Thursday that it won’t regulate perchlorate in public water supplies, reversing a decision by the Obama administration to mandate limits on the toxic chemical used as an additive in rocket fuel.
The EPA made the decision after a new analysis showed perchlorate is too rare in public water supplies to meet the legal test to set a federal limit, according to senior agency officials. EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler plans to sign an order Thursday withdrawing the 2011 order that called for limits, the officials said.
The EPA’s action is likely to be challenged in court by environmental groups that say perchlorate poses significant public health risks. The EPA acknowledges perchlorate’s link to causing brain damage in infants.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has been suing the EPA over perchlorate dating back to the Obama administration, which hadn’t finalized the chemical’s regulation. Anticipating the EPA’s reversal, the NRDC previously said it would be a violation of a court-approved agreement in the case in 2016 if the Trump administration were to decline to set a federal limit.
EPA officials plan to ask the court to terminate that agreement, arguing that withdrawing the 2011 decision removes its legal underpinnings. They say new analysis done since 2016 under the process to set rules for perchlorate determined it doesn’t meet the legal requirements for federal regulation.
The EPA has acknowledged that perchlorate can limit the thyroid’s ability to absorb iodine and result in hormonal deficiencies, and can harm children in the womb. That can result in brain damage and reduced intelligence.
But their recent determination is that public exposure has fallen sharply in recent years. Of 60,000 public water systems nationwide, 0.03% showed levels of the contaminant unsafe for vulnerable populations, down from 4% in 2011, agency officials said.
“Because of steps that EPA, states and public water systems have taken to identify, monitor and mitigate perchlorate, the levels have decreased in drinking water,” Mr. Wheeler said in a statement last month announcing those findings. “This success demonstrates that EPA and states are working together to lead the world in providing safe drinking water to all Americans.”
Environmentalists and former agency officials dispute the modeling and calculations that led to those determinations. EPA officials say they were based on guidance from agency science advisers and outside experts.
The New York Times reported last month that the EPA was planning to reverse its 2011 decision on perchlorate, although agency officials at the time said no final decision had been made.
Academic research released May 25 suggests that perchlorate’s ability to limit the thyroid is more pronounced than previously understood. A team from Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins universities, and the University of California, Irvine, say their findings indicate the acceptable safe concentration of perchlorate in drinking water is one-tenth of what was previously thought.
The agency now considers a higher limit safe enough, up to 56 parts per billion, senior officials said. The EPA, based on work from the National Academy of Sciences, previously said up to 15 parts was safe, but it was only an advisory, not an enforceable regulation.
The EPA said in 2011 that perchlorate appeared in water consumed by five million to 17 million people in the U.S. It has frequently been a problem at military installations. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that 53 Defense Department sites had levels beyond the advised limit.
The Pentagon and several weapons makers, including defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and perchlorate maker American Pacific Corp., have pushed back against the agency’s attempts to regulate the chemical. They have said it is harmless at much higher doses than those Americans ingest.
Abandoning new limits on perchlorate would be the end of a rare effort at chemical regulation by the agency’s water regulators. It was the only chemical added to EPA’s list of regulated water contaminants in roughly the past 25 years.
Massachusetts, frustrated by federal inaction, moved in 2006 to pose its own limits. It has one of the country’s two prime spots for perchlorate contamination, and the other, California, has also imposed its own limits, both far lower than what EPA had proposed. Those efforts helped cause the declines in perchlorate contamination that the EPA has cited as its rationale for not setting a federal limit.
Write to Timothy Puko at tim.puko@wsj.com
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