Sodium chlorate green plant parts. It can also kill through root absorption. Sodium chlorate may be used to control a variety of plants including morning glory, canada thistle, johnson grass, bamboo, Ragwort, and St John's wort. The herbicide is mainly used on non-crop land for spot treatment and for total vegetation control on areas including roadsides, fenceways, and ditches. Sodium chlorate is also used as a defoliant and desiccant for: If used in combination with atrazine, it increases the persistence of the effect. If used in combination with 2,4-D, performance is improved. Sodium chlorate has a soil sterilant effect. Mixing with other
Chlorate were once widely used in pyrotechnics for this reason, though their use has fallen due to their instability. Most pyrotechnic applications that formerly used chlorates now use the more stable perchlorates instead. The chlorate ion cannot be satisfactorily represented by just one Lewis structure, since all the Cl–O bonds are the same length (1.49 Å in potassium chlorate), and the chlorine atom is hypervalent. Instead, it is often thought of as a hybrid of multiple resonance structures: Metal chlorates can be prepared by adding chlorine to hot metal hydroxides like KOH: In this reaction, chlorine undergoes disproportionation, both reduction and