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Expedited site characterization:
THE NEED
With over 30,000 hazardous waste sites nationwide, and 1200 of these on EPA's National Priorities List (20 of which are Department of Energy sites), the cost of cleaning up these sites threatens to become one of the largest domestic expenditures in the nation's history. GAO projects that the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of Defense will spend nearly $1 trillion and the EPA will spend upwards of $150 billion over the next 20 to 30 years.

A big part of this price tag is due to the time and effort required for characterization, which is the first stage of the cleanup process. (Click here for an "InfoSheet" explaining the environmental cleanup process.) Before the cleanup of any environmentally contaminated area can begin, a site must be accurately characterized to determine such things as soil characteristics, groundwater flow and the presence and amount of contaminants.

Good characterization is critical because the results may become the basis for a cleanup remedy. With present approaches, however, the quality of a characterization often suffers as the process itself becomes laborious, time-consuming and expensive. (Of the $6 billion spent in 1992 on environmental consulting for hazardous waste, about 25%, or $1.5 billion, was used to pay contractors for the characterization of contaminated sites. At the same time, about $.18 billion was spent on analytical services devoted to hazardous waste detection. So overall $1.7 billion was spent on the characterization effort in 1992 in the United States for hazardous wastes.)

Expedited Site Characterization offers an approach to reduce those costs, speed the process and more importantly, obtain a better characterization. How? Traditional approaches to site characterization involve collecting samples in the field and sending them to an off-site laboratory for analysis, studying the results and then making repeated trips to the field to fill in information gaps and clarify the initial data. This cyclical process can go on for years before a plan can be developed for remediating a site.

The ESC methodology seeks to change that by incorporating on-site decision making capabilities that permit site characterization to be completed in one phase. ESC demonstrations have shown that the characterization phase can be streamlined, without compromising data quality. By using both on-site analytical and multiple hydrogeologic technologies, the need to send nearly all samples off-site and the need to perform massive subsurface sampling in the absence of local hydrogeologic information is removed.

ESC can significantly remove the probability of having to return to the site to fill data gaps. As a result, the current multiphase time sequence of data acquisition--consisting of sample, analyze, plan and sample--becomes compressed into a single real-time phase, requiring only months to complete. The ESC methodology is not only concerned about what the contaminants are, but more importantly, determines where they came from and where they are likely to go.

Click here for more discussion of how ESC compares with traditional site characterization approaches.

FOR MORE INFO ON ESC, CLICK BELOW

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Last Modified: 1 January 2002 by dave eckels
Expedited Site Characterization: etd/technologies/projects/esc/need.html