Science And Technology For Doe Site Cleanup

The Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management is developing a technology roadmap to guide planning and possible future congressional appropriations for its technology development programs. It asked the National Research Council of the National Academies to provide technical and strategic advice to support the development and implementation of this roadmap, specifically by undertaking a study that identifies principal science and technology gaps and their priorities for the cleanup program based on previous National Academies reports, updated and extended to reflect current site conditions and EM priorities and input form key external groups, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, Environmental Protection Agency, and state regulatory agencies. In response, this book provides a high-level synthesis of principal science and technology gaps identified in previous NRC reports in part 1. Part 2 summarizes a workshop meant to bring together the key external groups to discuss current site conditions and science and technology needs.

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017 contained a request for a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine review and assessment of science and technology development efforts within the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM). This technical report is the result of the review and presents findings and recommendations.

The Hanford Site was established by the federal government in 1943 as part of the secret wartime effort to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The site operated for about four decades and produced roughly two thirds of the 100 metric tons of plutonium in the U.S. inventory. Millions of cubic meters of radioactive and chemically hazardous wastes, the by-product of plutonium production, were stored in tanks and ancillary facilities at the site or disposed or discharged to the subsurface, the atmosphere, or the Columbia River. In the late 1980s, the primary mission of the Hanford Site changed from plutonium production to environmental restoration. The federal government, through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), began to invest human and financial resources to stabilize and, where possible, remediate the legacy of environmental contamination created by the defense mission. During the past few years, this financial investment has exceeded $1 billion annually. DOE, which is responsible for cleanup of the entire weapons complex, estimates that the cleanup program at Hanford will last until at least 2046 and will cost U.S. taxpayers on the order of $85 billion. Science and Technology for Environmental Cleanup at Hanford provides background information on the Hanford Site and its Integration Project,discusses the System Assessment Capability, an Integration Project-developed risk assessment tool to estimate quantitative effects of contaminant releases, and reviews the technical elements of the scierovides programmatic-level recommendations.

Beginning with the Manhattan Project and continuing through the Cold War, the United States government constructed and operated a massive industrial complex to produce and test nuclear weapons and related technologies. When the Cold War ended, most of this complex was shut down permanently or placed on standby, and the United States government began a costly, long-term effort to clean up the materials, wastes, and environmental contamination resulting from its nuclear materials production. In 1989, Congress created the Office of Environmental Management (EM) within the Department of Energy (DOE) to manage this cleanup effort. Although EM has already made substantial progress, the scope of EM's future cleanup work is enormous. Advice on the Department of Energy's Cleanup Technology Roadmap: Gaps and Bridges provides advice to support the development of a cleanup technology roadmap for EM. The book identifies existing technology gaps and their priorities, strategic opportunities to leverage needed research and development programs with other organizations, needed core capabilities, and infrastructure at national laboratories and EM sites that should be maintained, all of which are necessary to accomplish EM's mission.

Research Needs in Subsurface Science provides an overview of the subsurface contamination problems across the DOE complex and shows by examples from the six largest DOE sites (Hanford Site, Idaho Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge Reservation, Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site, and Savannah River Site) how advances in scientific and engineering knowledge can improve the effectiveness of the cleanup effort. This report analyzes the current Environmental Management (EM) Science Program portfolio of subsurface research projects to assess the extent to which the program is focused on DOE's contamination problems. This analysis employs an organizing scheme that provides a direct linkage between basic research in the EM Science Program and applied technology development in DOE's Subsurface Contaminants Focus Area. Research Needs in Subsurface Science also reviews related research programs in other DOE offices and other federal agencies (see Chapter 4) to determine the extent to which they are focused on DOE's subsurface contamination problems. On the basis of these analyses, this report singles out the highly significant subsurface contamination knowledge gaps and research needs that the EM Science Program must address if the DOE cleanup program is to succeed.

One of the largest, most complicated and expensive environmental problems in the United States is the cleanup of nuclear wastes. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has approximately 4,000 contaminated sites covering tens of thousands of acres and replete with contaminated hazardous or radioactive waste, soil, or structures. In addition to high-level waste, it has more than 250,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste and millions of cubic meters of low-level radio-active waste. In addition, DOE is responsible for thousands of facilities awaiting decontamination, decommissioning, and dismantling. DOE and its predecessors have been involved in the management of radioactive wastes since 1943, when such wastes were first generated in significant quantities as by-products of nuclear weapons production. Waste connected with DOE's nuclear weapons complex has been accumulating as a result of various operations spanning over five decades. The cost estimates for nuclear waste cleanup in the United States have been rapidly rising. It has recently been estimated to be in a range from $200 to $350 billion. Costs could vary considerably based on future philosophies as to whether to isolate certain sites (the ""iron fence"" philosophy), or clean them up to a pristine condition (the ""greenfields"" philosophy). Funding will also be based on Congressional action that may reduce environmental cleanup, based on budget considerations.

The Department of Energy's Environmental Management Program (DOEEM) is one of the largest environmental clean up efforts in world history. The EM division charged with developing or finding technologies to accomplish this massive task, its Office of Science and Technology (OST), has been reviewed extensively, including six reports from committees of the National Research Council's (NRC's) Board on Radioactive Waste Management (BRWM) that have been released since December 1998. These committees examined different components of OST's technology development program, including its decision-making and peer review processes and its efforts to develop technologies in the areas of decontamination and decommissioning, waste forms for mixed waste, tank waste, and subsurface contamination. Gerald Boyd, head of OST, asked the Board on Radioactive Waste Management (BRWM) to summarize the major findings and recommendations of the six reports and synthesize any common issues into a number of overarching recommendations.