Despite opposition from the Pentagon, the Schwarzenegger administration is planning to issue safety guidelines Friday for ammonium perchlorate, a toxic ingredient of rocket fuel, munitions and fireworks that has tainted drinking water supplies in 29 states.
The pending guidelines would make California the first state in the nation to regulate perchlorate. The federal government has yet to act.
Environmentalists, however, have criticized California's pending standards as being too lenient.
Studies of laboratory rats have shown that even tiny doses of perchlorate can affect the thyroid's production of hormones that are critical to early childhood development, which suggests that the pollutant could be particularly threatening to pregnant women and young children. However, the level at which perchlorate poses a danger to human beings remains unclear.
The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which conducts research into potentially harmful pollutants, has called for a health goal of 6 parts per billion for perchlorate, according to several officials in the California Environmental Protection Agency.
That figure -- equivalent to roughly six drops of water in a typical home swimming pool -- would become the basis for a final regulation by the California Department of Health Services limiting how much of the chemical can remain in drinking water supplies.
Military contractors and the Pentagon, whose Cold War-era activities are responsible for most of the perchlorate pollution, have heavily lobbied the Schwarzenegger administration to delay setting a standard. Cleaning it up could cost them billions.
Environmental groups are also unhappy, contending that the governor who touted his green credentials during last year's recall campaign appears to have watered down the health goal at the last minute.
"It sure looks like bending in the direction of industry, and that is not what we were promised," said Bill Magavern, a Sacramento lobbyist for the Sierra Club.
Perchlorate, which has been used to power missiles and the booster rockets that help propel the space shuttle, has become the focus of a nationwide controversy. It is unregulated, though California has been recommending that water agencies shut down wells that contain perchlorate at 40 ppb or higher.
The entire lower Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 15 million people in the Southwest, including Southern California, is tinged with perchlorate that is leaking out of a former rocket fuel factory in Nevada.
