SUNY Cortland News

    When scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy were looking for a chemist to analyze groundwater contamination near a former plutonium production complex in Richland, Wash., they chose SUNY Cortland Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Peter M. Jeffers.
    In his 39 years of teaching chemistry at the College, Jeffers had developed a national reputation for measuring the hydrolysis, or reaction with water, of chlorinated hydrocarbons like carbon tetrachloride, a solvent used in the processing of radioactive materials. So it was a natural fit for Jeffers to work on the project assessing the carbon tetrachloride contamination in Richland.
    "We were well aware of his work just from looking at the literature," said Jim Amonette, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, which is part of the Department of Energy. "We figured we're green at this and it would be very good to team up with him."
    Beginning in the 1940s, scientists at the Hanford Site, a 586-square-mile area in southeastern Washington state, processed nuclear fuel rods to make the plutonium for the second atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. As a byproduct of that process, one-and-a-half million pounds of carbon tetrachloride were disposed into the ground, contaminating the groundwater on the Hanford Site and threatening the Columbia River.
    Last December, the Department of Energy awarded Jeffers a $67,500 grant to study the rate of hydrolysis of carbon tetrachloride buried underground at the Hanford Site. This award follows an initial grant to Jeffers of $41,799 last year to study the same contaminant.
    Jeffers' role in the project is to determine the rates at which carbon tetrachloride and a second contaminant, chloroform, disintegrate when they encounter water and aquifer minerals at various temperatures below ground. These calculations will verify similar experiments scientists at the Hanford Site are conducting to predict if the contamination will reach the Columbia River.
    "All of these chemicals are found out there in the environment," Jeffers said. "The important question is, 'Are these things going to last forever?' "
    While the contaminants are now present in the groundwater, scientists at Hanford want to be able to estimate whether the chemicals will seep into the Columbia River, from which the city of Richland draws its drinking water. Amonette estimates that the contamination is still about 25 miles from the city of Richland.
    "Sometime in the next 50 or 100 years it may start to affect the groundwater," Amonette said. "One of the biggest questions is, 'Will it degrade away on its own?' "
    That question has been difficult to answer because researchers have typically measured the hydrolysis of carbon tetrachloride at high temperatures, Amonette said. Before work on the project with Jeffers, the lowest temperature anyone had ever measured the reaction was at 70 degrees Celsius, or about 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
    In a laboratory in the basement of Bowers Hall, however, Jeffers has now measured the reaction down to 30 degrees Celsius, or about 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The goal of the project is to extrapolate the hydrolysis down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the temperature of groundwater.
    "It's not glamorous, cutting-edge science," said Jeffers, who inputs his data on a computer site run by the lab in Washington. "They're fairly straightforward measurements."
    Jeffers conducts his experiments by mixing a solution of carbon tetrachloride, which is commonly used for dry cleaning, and testing it in a reactor he built. He inserts the solution into ampoules he makes by blowing glass, a skill he taught for many years to chemistry students at the College.
     As a chemist, Jeffers first became interested in the issue of groundwater contamination two decades ago when he began studying the disposal of trichloroethylene in Cortland by the former Smith Corona plant on Route 13. The company used the chemical as a degreaser in its manufacturing process and some of the material seeped into the ground from storage tanks.
    "From my work, I concluded that the contamination plume was not going to reach the water supply and it never has," said Jeffers, who lives in Homer.
    Jeffers, who retired from teaching at the College in 2005, earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. He has published more than 50 articles in numerous scientific journals and took two sabbaticals as a National Research Council Senior Fellow at the United States Environmental Protection Agency research laboratory in Athens, Ga.