The U.S. Department of Energy’s Integrated Field Research Challenge site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has long served as a field laboratory for studying the cleanup of groundwater contaminated by decades of nuclear-weapons production and waste disposal. The site has had uranium contamination as high as 60 milligrams per liter in groundwater and up to 800 milligrams per kilogram in sediments, according to Erick Cardenas, Wei-Min Wu, Mary Beth Leigh and others in a 2008 paper, 'Microbial Communities in Contaminated Sediments Associated with Bioremediation of Uranium to Submicromolar Levels.' For comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant level for uranium in drinking water is 30 micrograms per liter (0.03 milligrams per liter), the benchmark used to judge progress at the Oak Ridge Integrated Field Research Challenge site.
Weekly ethanol injections stimulate denitrifying, iron-reducing and sulfate-reducing bacteria
