tury. However, critics say that many details of his proposal would have the effect of gutting the wil derness system. Current law allows no more leasing of wilderness lands at any time after Dec. 31, 1983. Under Watt's proposal, that dead line would be moved up to the present, but the question of devel opment after the year 2000 would be left open. According to Watt's draft bill, regions now under study as wilderness areas could be as signed by the administration for private development if it decided they are unsuitable for wilderness designation. Present law forbids de velopment in all study areas, and Congress alone has the authority to determine if these are unsuitable as wilderness.
emissions within 10 years of enact ment." The policy would allow the states up to three years to agree on state emission reductions and to re vise their state air plans according ly. It also favors the creation of an acid rain fund to help states fi nance scrubbers and other controls for sulfur dioxide.
SCIENCE Crop losses from ozone to only four crops amount to $1.9-4.5 billion a year, according to an analysis pre pared by the Office of Technology Assessment and released by Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. (D-Calif.).
The Endangered Species Act, en acted in 1973, is due to expire Oct. 1, 1982, and a final version of the bill must be completed by May 15 if it is to be reauthorized. The act makes it unlawful for federal agen cies and any project aided by feder al money to harm an endangered species or damage its habitat. Inte rior Secretary James G. Watt has said he favors redefining the term "harm" to exclude damage to criti cal habitat and include only direct physical attack. The Reagan ad ministration has cut funding for the act and has listed only one new species for protection. The law's supporters note that no project has been permanently stopped because of its threat to an endangered species.
STATES The Virginia Electric and Power Company is running out of space to store its burned-out nuclear fuel at the Surry generating plant (oppo site Jamestown) and may have to shut down the plant as early as March 1985 unless it finds a way to get rid of some of the used-up fuel. Officials say building new storage facilities at Surry would take too long. It is one of the six U.S. plants that will soon exhaust their storage space. Currently the storage pool at Surry is packed with about 1 mil lion lbs of radioactive waste in 40 ft of cooling water. At a February meeting the National Governor's Association requested an acid rain control program to ac complish "phased reduction of sul fur dioxide and nitrogen oxide 212A
Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 16, No. 4, 1982
Brown: releases crop study This loss represents about 5% of total agricultural production. Yields of corn, peanut, soybean, and wheat were analyzed. Not in cluded in the study were damage to other crops and timber and losses caused by other pollutants such as acid rain. The National Crop As sessment Network (NCLAN), a research program funded by EPA and begun in 1980, gathered the data. This was originally planned as a multimillion dollar six-year study, but the Reagan administra tion is reducing its budget from about $2 million to S300 000 a year. Quantitative measurements of toxic organics in "alternative fuels" and resultant effluents may be made with a combination of gas chroma tography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) being developed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). Presently, the complex character of effluents, and low (parts per billion (ppb)) concentra tion of some toxic compounds com plicate the analysis. A modified GC/MS approach, NBS says, can monitor selected ions or compounds for each analyte. Researchers have analyzed, for example, five phenols from 0 to 1000 ppb, and five poly-
nuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) at 1-300-ppb concentra tions. Is ozone pollution lowering cotton and other crop yields? Howard Heggestad, a U.S. Department of Agriculture plant pathologist, be lieves so. He notes doubled cotton yields between 1946 and 1966, be cause of improved varieties and better production methods. But since then, despite improvements, yields have reached a plateau or even decreased, with at least some impact ascribed to ozone pollution. The greatest harm from ozone (and SO2), he says, is to the leaves. A California cotton variety showed a 15% loss, as compared to the same variety grown in purified air. Some varieties developed some ozone tol erance in California, but experi ments with ozone in Maryland showed marked yield and quality degradation. PAH analysis by EPA Method 610, using high-performance liquid chro matography (HPLC) can be im proved if time can be reduced and equipment investment is economi cally advantageous. The Applied Science Division of Milton Roy Company's Laboratory Group says that its Adsorbosphere C 18 (3-μιη) LC column meets these criteria, while allowing accomplishment of PAH analysis. It uses 254-nm ul traviolet detection, with a flow rate of 1.26 mL/min, and no gradient. Dimensions are 100 X 4.6 mm. The company says that analyses can be done in less than 9 min, as com pared to 17-40 min with, say, reversed-phase columns whose di mensions are also larger. Pest infestations and their econom ic damages might be forecast through work with insect pheromones (sex attractants), according to the Maryland Agricultural Ex periment Station (College Park). A working model using male fall armyworm moths lured to traps by synthetic pheromones correlates the numbers trapped with eggs fe males lay in a cornfield. Given the number of moths attracted in, say, a week, one might predict the amount of infestation, the possible damage, and the optimum time and application of pesticide. The armyworm, "eating" corn plants from the inside out, can cause extensive damage. University of Maryland Professor Floyd Harrison is devel oping the model.
