Effluent assessment system

Environmental legislation requires that all effluents from the oil mills and refineries should be treated prior to its discharge so as not to pollute the natural waterways. The Division conducts research to assess and improve current effluent treatment systems and to propagate new treatment technology which are cost effective and efficient. Research activities include ... 

Plants are designed to accormnodate routine releases of radioactivity and to minimize releases resulting from abnormal conditions and accidents. However, as indicated in Figure 5.1-11, because an accident resulting in off-site early health effects (death and injuries) would have to be fast, direct, and unfiltered, such a release would most probably be via an unmonitored pathway to the atmosphere. The most important example is a release due to a major containment failure or major containment penetration failure. As a result, effluent-monitoring systems located in routinely monitored release pathways (e.g., stacks) would not be able to assess the extent and the characteristics of such a severe release. 

Some measures of PSM and ESH performance are easy to identify, establish and track. These include accident rates, effluent tonnages and composition and number of days lost to illness. Almost all of these traditional performance measures are end-of-pipe that is, they measure the output of the management system and allow corrective action only after a failure has occurred. The ideal measurement system identifies potential problems ahead of actual failure allowing corrective action to be taken. This requires using techniques such as audits and hazard assessments. 

For a full life cycle assessment, the basic principle is that each material and energy input into the system should be traced back to natural resources obtained from the environment, or to releases into the environment. These are termed elementary flows , and they represent inputs into or outputs from the system being analysed. In an analysis of this type, it may be relatively straightforward to assign a material value to a flow of (for example) water effluent into the environment, but what may be less certain is the environmental impact of such a flow in a quantitative sense. 

Toxic characteristics of industrial wastewater in many countries are still assessed using fish [106-108]. The standardized procedure describes testing with different species in different life stages. For ethical reasons, as well as those linked to cost- and time-effectiveness, labor-intensiveness, analytical output, and effluent sample volume requirements, there is unquestionable value in searching for alternative procedures that would ehminate the drawbacks associated with fish testing. Investigators therefore use an in vitro cell system, which can greatly decrease the need for the in vivo hsh model [37]. 

Assessing current effluent management or treatment system and its operation to ensure steady-state plant or optimisation prior to initiation of the TTE. 

After completion of the WaterTox program, the test battery continued to be applied by laboratories from Argentina, Chile and Colombia to assess different types of environmental matrices. These initiatives facilitated the development or application of new or existing ranking systems that enabled evaluation of the effectiveness of biological treatment for the toxicity reduction of wastes and combined effluents. These studies are described herein. 

The proposed hazard assessment scheme (HAS) used in Colombia is a ranking system where toxicity data obtained from the application of a test battery enables one to determine the degree of toxicity of liquid samples on a relative basis. Test battery results are then integrated into the Potential Ecotoxic Effects Probe (PEEP) index formula developed by Environment Canada for the comparison of wastewaters (Costan et al., 1993). This index can be applied to evaluate the potential toxicity of industrial and municipal wastewaters, and to assess the effectiveness of toxicity abatement measures for effluents. This procedure is easy to apply and can be used with different batteries of tests (see Chapter 1 of this volume). 

Applying the WaterTox battery of tests in Argentina, Chile and Colombia for toxicity assessment of chemical contaminants present in different types of complex matrices by means of existing, modified or developed HAS approaches has proven to be environmentally beneficial. Water and wastewater samples, sewage sludge and biosolids from municipal treatment plants and effluent toxic loads, as well as pure compounds, were effectively scored as toxic or non-toxic with the ranking systems employed, thereby allowing them to be differentiated in terms of their adverse potential. In all cases, similar bioanalytical tools were employed to conduct these evaluations. 

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