Fostering improved technology:
Taking the long view and the early risk

An interview with Paul Pettit, Fernald Environmental Management Project

In testimony prepared for a May 1999 hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Commerce, Ron Peterson, group president of the Fluor Corporation, said that the $22 million invested by the Office of Science and Technology at DOE’s Fernald, Ohio site had already resulted in more than 20 deployments of improved technologies, with potential savings exceeding $100 million. To learn more about the process of bringing innovative technologies to bear on Fernald cleanup projects, Initiatives interviewed Paul Pettit, project manager, Technology Programs for Fluor Daniel Fernald. Pettit came to Fernald in 1992 when Fluor Daniel took over the site, having previously provided environmental and geotechnical field services with Halliburton NUS, a subsidiary of Brown and Root, one of the FDF teaming partners. Initiatives spoke with Pettit by telephone on July 21, 1999.

Initiatives: Tell us about your career and your current responsibilities.

Pettit: My whole career has involved developing and applying novel technologies—finding and applying better ways to do things. My early career was in commercial nuclear plants, improving decontamination methods and developing better technologies related to materials, chemistry, and plant operations. After that I got involved with geotechnical engineering and improved methods for soil modification, waste pit stabilization, and materials handling. Now, at Fluor Daniel Fernald, I represent the company conscience in technology oversight, and my responsibilities include helping project managers find new technologies to improve service to our customer, DOE.

Initiatives: Describe some of the issues affecting that effort.

Pettit: Remediation project managers on DOE sites have a baseline plan for the work, and they cannot afford to take risks that would jeopardize performance, schedule, or budget to explore something like a novel technology that may not work. I believe that it’s the proper role of a development organization, not the project, to take the risk associated with a potential advance. If there’s an organization saying, “Let’s explore—there may be a better way to do it,” and that group is taking the risk, then project managers are a lot more disposed to exploring a better way, because the project can remain on track even if the new method doesn’t work.

Even with such an organization, it takes effort and time to build up a technology system to be productive. You need to keep the perspective that future users of a technology may be too busy in their present work to recognize and develop all of the approaches they’ll need to apply later. You have to keep overcoming objections, modifying the technology and making it productive, and when the time comes, be ready to deploy the technology to fill the need.

An example is our effort in analytical instrumentation. When Fluor Daniel Fernald first came to the site, there was a lot of analytical work for characterization, and Fernald had a very good laboratory that could turn around all the analytical samples on an acceptable schedule. But as you get into faster and faster remediation with expensive equipment and operators in the field, you need results quickly to keep the job moving. You don’t have the luxury of collecting soil samples by conventional means and waiting for the analytical results to get back from the lab. The operators would be waiting for someone to decide whether to take another excavation lift. The work on improving analytical technology at Fernald started six years ago, but it is only in the past year that our development effort has come to fruition and been recognized as able to save dozens of millions of dollars in overall costs.

Another good example is the application of solution mining methods to aquifer remediation. The first reaction of the project was, “We don’t need to be injecting any water. Our job is to get water out, and pump and treat has worked for a long time.” But the technology people persisted until a demonstration paid for by the DOE Office of Science and Technology showed that this approach was worth looking at.

Initiatives: So your program facilitates that process as a broker and ombudsman for new technology at Fernald?

Pettit: It does, and the reason is that we’ve gained the confidence of the project people by delivering improved technologies that have proven to be better: lower cost or more effective. The people who are going to use a technology have to define what success is, but we’ve been able to deliver some things that can put them in a position to do a better job.

Initiatives: Have end users grown more receptive over time?

Pettit: That can be answered only in a local context. Project people start out by being skeptical of anyone coming in advocating or selling new technology because all it does is reduce the certainty that they have tried to build into their plan. Uncertainty is the bane of all project people, so if you had to characterize them generically, hard-core project people typically don’t want technology development people around.

At Fernald, we’ve worked through these issues. Patience, persistence, and hard work have paid off and have changed some traditional attitudes. For example, the manager of soil and water projects at Fernald has become our strongest advocate for new technology. When the Technology Programs people walk in, he listens and does his part as a technology user to encourage application of better methods. Another example occurred in a meeting with a project team discussing removal of some steel. I was elated when the manager responsible for another demolition project, where the oxygasoline torch was first demonstrated, said, “You shouldn’t do it that way. You should use this new torch we’ve got.” He was the best advocate. None of the Technology Programs people could have done as well as a project person who had become convinced himself.

So at this site the technology program has demonstrated that it is a valuable resource for remediation projects. That’s been done only by persistent work and delivery of products that the project people can rely on. One of the reasons that we’ve had success in gaining the confidence of the users is that OST helped us shoulder the risk at the early stages.

Initiatives: How essential are on-site demonstrations?

Pettit: Demonstrations are almost always essential, like a test drive. If a brand new vehicle you’ve never heard of before comes along, you wouldn’t buy it and put your children in it without some kind of a test drive. If done correctly, a demonstration allows technology users to overcome all the objections and uncertainties, to exercise the novel approach in a way that builds confidence. On-site demonstrations help users realize, “I can rely on it. I can rely on the performance, cost, and schedule and, most important, the safety.” A demonstration is most productive when project personnel specify what parameters are measured and compared to the baseline plan.

I believe project management is sincerely interested in shortening the schedule, lowering the cost, and doing a better job. But if they already have a baseline plan on paper, they don’t want to deviate from that unless they’re really sure that they can come out better by that deviation. What is essential is to have the full cooperation and committed involvement of the technology user. The person whose performance is judged on meeting the objectives of the job has to be involved in overcoming the objections to new technology through defining the performance, schedule, and cost targets that represent an improvement.

Initiatives: Are you involved in stakeholder and regulatory acceptance of new technologies?

Pettit: Yes, in fact, the Fluor Daniel Fernald Technology Program has its own interface with stakeholders through the Site Technology Coordination Group. Fernald Technology Programs serves the remediation projects. When we are trying to find the technology that will best help our customer, we start with defining the need and then look at lots of options. We involve stakeholders and regulators in defining both the need and the vision of the best outcome. We have been operating all the activities of the STCG since about 1993. Stakeholders have input on particular technologies, and sometimes they are more aggressive than you would expect. We learned to do it the right way after bringing some ideas far enough along so people had their hearts set on what they were planning, and then we belatedly became aware of important issues we had failed to consider. So, very early on we modified our approach for technology innovation to include stakeholders throughout the process.

Initiatives: Tell us some more about the analytical technology you referred to before.

Pettit: An Accelerated Site Technology Deployment project has fielded a suite of real-time analytical technologies that support the excavation of radionuclide-contaminated soils. About four years ago Technology Programs estimated what analytical costs were going to be when we actually went to field remediation. There was a cost in the baseline for analytical work, but when we reevaluated it in the light of new understanding, the study predicted additional cost above baseline on the order of $100 million. We knew there wouldn’t be enough money to do the job with existing methods, so we geared up to try to fill that gap with improved analytical technologies. We engaged the Ohio EPA in the early discussions, and they became advocates of improving the methodology.

In collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, DOE’s Environmental Measurements Laboratory, and Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, we modified an agricultural tractor (RTAK) with radiation detectors, geophysical locating devices, and computer programs that take the information as the vehicle drives over soil we need to characterize for our excavation strategy. The operator can see whether he is on course on a display right in front of him. The data are transmitted to a van containing a computer that analyzes the data and signals the operators where to excavate, still within the day’s shift. That very intricate technology replaces surveyors putting a grid out in the field and having technicians take physical soil samples with chain-of-custody forms, sending them to a laboratory and getting results back, perhaps a month later. To get regulators to accept nonconventional indications of contamination isn’t easy unless they have all the confidence they need that it’s reliable. At Fernald we’ve had heavy involvement with regulators from the beginning of the effort to improve analytical technology.

Initiatives: You also mentioned the oxygasoline torch earlier. What about other D&D technologies?

Pettit: Yes, we’re using the oxygasoline torch again and again. Another technology we first demonstrated is the VecLoader, a vacuum system to remove and bag insulation. We see the subcontractors using those devices all over the site now. These approaches have become baseline. When you deploy a new technology, you get the biggest bang for your buck in the first application, and then you improve that new approach only marginally thereafter, but your baseline has improved.

Some of the technologies we’ve brought to Fernald are very simple. The Personal Ice-Cooling System (see related article) can make improvements in both schedule and health and safety. The suits were introduced for D&D work, but they’re also used in soil remediation and waste management. Another approach that’s just coming down the pike is a concrete crushing technology. There’s a lot of concrete here, and if we can use it for improved materials placement in the on-site waste disposal facility or as raw material for the roads we may have to build, we can save millions of dollars.

Initiatives: Does the Fernald approach involve sorting contaminated rubble?

Pettit: Not at this time, but your question shows how you have to think to improve the outcome for everyone. The project people are not focusing on sorting right now, but you know what? If we engage EM-50 to help us cover uncertainties and get over the barriers, we may be ready to lay information down in front of project personnel and stakeholders when they’re ready to think about sorting. We can probably get a chance at improving the technical approach. Otherwise, there will be value in confirming the baseline.

Initiatives: You mentioned solution mining earlier. Does the current demonstration (see related article) increase confidence that an accelerated closure schedule can be met?

Pettit: It does. When Fluor Daniel came to Fernald, the baseline indicated that many of us would be retired before the cleanup job was done. Now everyone recognizes that maybe we can do something really important by defining a very reasonable, much quicker plan for concluding the work here. The groundwater reinjection technology demonstration sponsored by OST was instrumental in a new vision of accelerated closure of Fernald. Otherwise, there’d be a very long schedule for cleaning up the aquifer underlying Fernald.

But these kinds of things and the potential benefits have to be recognized early on, and uncertainties and objections have to be worked through with the project management as they are fighting other problems. The technology people need to recognize that they are providing a service, and they need to shoulder the risks and keep the process moving forward until the project is ready to accept improved technical solutions to do what’s needed at the time it’s needed. You don’t just turn on the tap and technologies fall out and get deployed. You have to work up to them. That’s how this site has been able to participate with resources from DOE. The work that EM-50 has done here with us has been very beneficial to our site, and the savings being generated now and in the future will be substantial, with return on investment far in excess of what both partners have expended in development costs.

Initiatives: Thank you.

Paul Pettit can be reached at (513) 648-4960, paul.pettit@fernald.gov.