You are visiting the web site of the EPSCI Program at the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Ames Laboratory, Ames, IA
The new method, Expedited Site Characterization (ESC), will be used as part of the regulatory-approved remedial investigation at the D-Area Oil Seepage Basin on the Savannah River Site.
"We expect ESC to be a time and cost-saving method for our site and if it is, we would like to incorporate elements of it into our routine remedial investigations," says Brian Hennessey, environmental scientist with the DOE Savannah River Environmental Restoration Division. "We should be able to get usable data in much less time, with quality sufficient to support decision making. Just as important, this project will also have great demonstration value for others considering its use at their sites."
The ESC work will also be done in the context of SAFER (Streamlined Approach For Environmental Restoration), a project management approach developed by DOE that continually focuses data collection activities toward cleanup objectives and the end for which the data is needed. ESC complements that approach by focusing on collecting that data in a timely, efficient manner.
Typically, it can take years to thoroughly characterize a site before a cleanup plan can be chosen, explains Al Bevolo, a senior scientist at the DOE's Ames Laboratory in Ames, IA and manager of the Ames Lab ESC project. "The concentrated nature is what sets ESC apart, as it brings geophysical, geotechnical, hydrologic, analytical and computer software technologies together at the site for concurrent analysis." Gaining an understanding of the area's geology and doing less-expensive screening tests early on provides an overall picture of where the more sensitive and costly sampling techniques should be used. A team comprised of project managers, regulators and technical experts meets daily in the field to make decisions.
Funded by the DOE Office of Technology Development and supported by the Westinghouse Savannah River Company, which operates the site for DOE, the ESC project is under the regulatory guidance of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and EPA-Region 4.
Jeff Crane, EPA Federal Facilities Agreement Project Manager for the Savannah River Site, points out another benefit of ESC. "If it can give you a better balance of data quality and quantity, you can make better and more informed decisions and design your remediation program around less uncertainty. Then you can design it to the proper scale, not taking extreme and costly remediation actions where you don't need to. It's important to characterize in such a way to support the decisions we have to make. "
While many aspects of the ESC and SAFER approaches may seem obvious, they haven't been the norm for several reasons. One is their relative newness--they are not yet widely understood or universally accepted. The work at the Savannah River Site is part of DOE's efforts to spread that understanding.
Within the past year, Ames Lab has conducted similar demonstrations of the ESC approach at a former manufactured gas plant site in Iowa and a DOE site in St. Louis, MO. The ESC approach is currently being considered to expedite the characterization of a contaminated site in Poland.
The Visitor's Day at the Savannah River Site will bring together DOE and other site managers, technology providers, EPA and state regulators, property owners, educators, students and other interested citizens to see the ESC/SAFER approach first-hand.
Ames Laboratory, a member of Iowa State University's Institute for Physical Research and Technology, is operated by ISU for the DOE.
Visitor's Day
The Visitor's Day, scheduled near the end of the work, will give interested parties a chance to learn more about the ESC/SAFER approaches as applied at the D-Area of the Savannah River Site. Attendance will provide participants with an opportunity to network with others who have a stake in environmental characterization technologies and issues. These include:
In addition to a main session discussion of the ESC and SAFER approach as applied to the Savannah River Site, we also hope to offer several mini-sessions providing an overview of the cleanup process in lay terms and field tours where you can see the technologies at work and talk with the experts in the field.
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Please e-mail comments to epsciwebkeeper@ameslab.gov.
Last Modified: 1 January 2002 by dave eckels
ESC Conferences, Articles: etd/technologies/projects/esc/conferart/SRSConfAlt.html