Distributed Energy Systems Leaking Carcinogenic Nitroanisole All Over the Planet.

In 1993, in Germany, in a Hoeschst Chemical plant, there was an explosion that lead to the release of 10 tons of a chemical mixture known as 2-nitroanisole (aka 2-nitromethoxybenzene).

The compound is a known powerful chemotoxic carcinogen. The mechanism for its carcinogenicity is described in some detail in Carcinogenesis, Vol. 25, No. 5, 833-840, May 2004.

In recent years, it has been noted in studies of fire personnel who cleaned up this toxic spill suffer many single strand breaks in their DNA, see for instance, in the primary scientific literature, Scand J Work Environ Health 1995;Z 1:36-42, which may be accessible on line for free.

This disaster in Germany been the topic of endless threads here on why we should ban dyed clothes, unless they are tie-dyed clothes that one is wearing on his or her way to a protest designed to eliminate Vermont as the only state that effectively produces electricity without dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere.

Just kidding, at least in describing this disaster as the topic of endless threads here. The ONLY carcinogen EVER discussed at E&E is maybe the MOST trivial one, tritium. Even though tritium can inspire great paroxysms of angst from people who clearly know nothing at all about tritium, even though average tritium concentrations have fallen by a factor of thousands since 1963 with the end of open air nuclear weapons testing, tritium gets lots of attention here where we hear only what we want to hear. There has been, I would bet NOT ONE, thread on this website about nitroanisole, possibly because nitroanisole is a serious carcinogen, rather unlike tritium. We don't want to hear about nitroanisole.

So be it.

The mechanism of the carcinogenicity of 2-nitroanisole has been further elucidated in a paper in a paper in the American Chemical Society Journal http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/tx0499721?prevSearch=%2528environmental%2Bfate%2529%2BAND%2B%255Babstract%253A%2Btritium%255D&searchHistoryKey=">Chem. Res. Toxicol., 2004, 17 (5), pp 663–671

In this paper the mechanism for the detoxification of nitroanisole was elucidated by labeling carcinogenic nitroanisole with tritium!!!!!!!! GASP! OH MY GOD!!!!!

HOW COULD THEY!?!?!?!?!?!

I don't mean to seem unconcerned with this great tragedy confronting all of humanity, tritiated nitroanisole, but the paper used the labeled nitroanisole to identify how the nitroanisole metabolites were and were not binding to DNA.

Esoteric. Most people couldn't care less.

So what does this have to do with my particular bete noire, the pop enthusiasm for distributed energy and its tendency to spread as many point source pollution devices around the earth as is possible in one consumer's life time?

Well, in my neck of the woods - that would be New Jersey - where nobody dies from dangerous fossil fuels and everybody who does die dies because of tritium at Oyster Creek Nuclear reactor - an air sampling experiment on particulate matter released by, um, distributed energy devices, cars, trucks, lawn mowers, that sort of thing - was collected and analyzed.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B757D-48CG9YG-J5&_user=1082852&_coverDate=07%2F31%2F1993&_alid=1192696556&_rdoc=3&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=12896&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=10&_acct=C000051401&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=3a7f380af0ccc37285c079ed57038c9c">Atmospheric Environment Vol. 27A, No 10. pp. 1609 1626. (1993).

The authors of this paper went around collecting particulates from air - the same stuff people breathe - and trying to find out of what was they were made.

They had all kinds of fractions and, writing of one they wrote:




Personally, by the way, I am in favor of banning experimentation that I don't understand, or can misinterpret easily by googling around websites where there are people who are as stupid as I am, and who will thus mutter exactly what I want to hear.

I am also in favor of banning cars and trucks, but let's see how far I get with that one. (To be sure, NNadir is such a hypocrite that were he to need an ambulance, he'd get in it, nitroanisole be damned, rather than bicycle to a hospital.)

Along this line, I could make a great argument for banning biology, based on a paper I have in my files on tritium contamination of trees near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories former tritium labeling facility, Building B75 where the authors of the paper claim that



(cf Hunt, et al, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2003, 37, 4330-4335)

This certainly suggests, I think, that an international priority should be to put a stop to biomedical research, which is obviously very dangerous particularly as tritium seems to be involved.

I am also in favor of banning Canada, where they are holding about 20 kg of tritium against the day that someone actually tries to build a fusion reactor.