Performance-based requests for proposals and "green books" were two of the hot topics at the Applied Research and Cleanup Technology Colloquium held April 29 to May 2 outside Phoenix, Arizona. An Emmy award was also presented to Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Science and Technology Clyde Frank. The colloquium was sponsored by Weapons Complex Monitor and the Western Governors' Association.
Jim Owendoff, deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Environmental Restoration, or EM-40, was the keynote speaker. Setting the tone early for the significance of performance-based (rather than process-based) contracting, Owendoff summarized his points by saying the future use of DOE's sites should determine the cleanup objectives. According to Owendoff, once the level of desired cleanup is determined, DOE can define performance specifications in a request for proposals and let the market drive the alternatives. Steven Warren, who is also with EM-40, echoed Owendoff's comments and said that if RFPs are handled this way, market forces will drive down the cost for effective cleanup. Several speakers also said stakeholders should be involved in identifying the acceptable engineering specifications of final waste forms that can be written into performance-based RFPs.
At the conference, Frank officially unveiled several newly released Innovative Technology Summary Reports. The books, which have green and white covers, have come to be nicknamed the "green books." They contain information about technologies ready for deployment that were developed with funding from DOE's Office of Science and Technology. (For more about the reports, see related article.)
During a light-hearted moment of the colloquium, an authentic Emmy statue was presented to Frank. In 1995, the Southern Regional Emmy Awards selected an episode of "Technology Today" as the winner of its education division. "Technology Today" is a series of 26-minute programs for the Public Broadcasting System. DOE funded development of the award-winning episode, and the Medical University of South Carolina produced it with guidance from the Savannah River Technology Center. Technologies featured in the episode were developed by DOE laboratories and dealt with waste remediation, minimization, management, and analysis. The statue was first accepted by Claire Sink on behalf of DOE on June 17, 1995.
