90-Day Oral Toxicity Study on n-Nonane in female Fisher 344 Rats and Male C57BL/6 Mice

摘要

Contamination of soil and groundwater with petroleum products is a common environmental problem at Air Force (AF) bases and other Department of Defense (DOD) installations. At over 4000 groundwater contamination sites belonging to the AF, approximately 60 percent involve some type of petroleum product. Petroleum products include gasoline, diesel fuel and jet propulsion (JP) fuel. Millions of dollars are spent each year to assess and remediate petroleum contamination. However, much of this remediation may not be necessary. Site-specific evaluation of the risk to human health from petroleum contamination could save millions of dollars in unnecessary cleanup costs. Though petroleum products are a complex mixture of hydrocarbons, cleanup of these contaminants are often regulated by a single numerical standard for total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH). Soil cleanup standards for TPH vary between states from 10 to 1000 ppm. Most states have a TPH soil standard below 100 ppm; however, most state regulators cannot provide the scientific and/or technical basis for the TPH standards (Staats, 1997). Further, these standards may have originated as arbitrary values set for specific sites. Long chain petroleum hydrocarbons (LCPH) are a category of petroleum hydrocarbons that comprise between 50 and 98 percent of most petroleum products (Hutcheson et al., 1996). Petroleum hydrocarbons are commonly divided into four major groups: alkanes, alkenes, cycloalkanes and aromatics. A qualitative analysis of neat JPA fuel indicates that its hydrocarbon components lie in a carbon range of approximately C(sub 5) to C(sub 15).