About the focus areas
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has established an integrated approach for addressing waste issues based on problem, or focus areas. The focus areas are subsurface contaminants; mixed waste characterization, treatment, and disposal; radioactive tank waste remediation; decontamination and decommissioning; and plutonium stabilization. Three crosscutting technology areas support the focus areas: characterization, monitoring, and sensor technology; efficient separations and processing; and robotics.

Since its establishment in 1991, the efficient separations and processing crosscutting program has identified, developed, and tailored separations technologies and processes to address high-priority waste remediation problems involving high-level, low-level, transuranic, hazardous, and mixed waste. Separation methods concentrate contaminants, purify waste streams for release to the environment, or downgrade the waste to a form that is easier and less expensive to dispose of. Many dollars can be saved if new separations technologies and processes produce even a marginal reduction in cost.

Mission
ESP-CP’s mission is to address the separations and processing needs of the focus areas by providing separations technologies to recycle chemicals, minimize process wastes, and, if possible, recover economic values. The technologies provided improve performance, safety, environmental protection, and economics as compared to baseline technologies. ESP-CP also is instrumental in transferring separations technologies to the U.S. industrial sector.

To achieve its mission, ESP-CP provides separations and processing technologies that work in the following ways:

• remove dilute radionuclides and toxic materials from aqueous and solid phases,
• condition and treat wastes to enhance separations (e.g., calcination, leaching, or dissolving sludges),
• remove bulk constituents from waste streams to recover chemicals for recycle and waste minimization,
• separate solids from liquids, and
• destroy complexants and bulk anions.

Current work
For fiscal year 1997, ESP-CP is funding 31 multiyear tasks that fall into three main categories: separations processes, chemical reactions, and process development. More than half these tasks include university staff and outside collaboration. Descriptions of each task are available on ESP-CP’s home page at http://www.pnl.gov/ eff_sep/index.html.

ESP-CP success
An estimated $750 million cost savings to EM can be attributed to a cumulative $75 million investment in ESP-CP, based on its four most mature tasks alone (see first four bullets below)—a 10:1 benefit-to-cost ratio for the program. Additional cost savings are expected as other tasks are brought to fruition.

ESP-CP has received high marks from organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, and the Strategic Laboratory Council. The program has the best Small Business and Innovative Research performance in EM-50 and has received wide praise for its technical exchange meeting and proposal and project peer review process.

Program management
In August 1996, the Oak Ridge Operations Office was designated the field lead implementation center for ESP-CP and, as such, has responsibility for providing technical expertise, information gathering and dissemination, and linkage to end users. Involvement of ORO as field implementation center is being blended with the existing ESP-CP structure of a DOE-HQ program manager supported by field coordinators at Richland, Savannah River, and Oak Ridge.

Deploying ESP-CP technologies
ESP-CP has sponsored the following technologies that are now being used or considered for use at DOE sites. (The names in parentheses are the principal investigators on these projects.)

• Volume reduction by plutonium distillation (Ed Garcia, Los Alamos National Laboratory) was selected by the Office of Nuclear Material and Facility Stabilization (EM-60) for use at Rocky Flats.
• Crystalline silicotitanates sorbent (Norm Brown, Sandia National Laboratories) was selected by Oak Ridge for cesium demonstration. This technology also won an R&D 100 Award.
• Electrochemical destruction of nitrate/nitrite and caustic recycle (David Hobbs, Savannah River Technology Center) is a serious option for the Office of Waste Management (EM-30) at the Savannah River Site.
• Water-soluble chelating polymer filtration (Gordon Jarvinen, Los Alamos National Laboratory) is being considered for treating LANL’s acid plutonium waste. Additional projects at LANL are evaluating the potential of the technology for industrial applications. In 1995, the LANL project team and collaborators at Boeing Aerospace received an R&D 100 Award for the application of polymer filtration to recycle metals from electroplating operations. Micro-Set, Inc. has licensed the technology for electroplating and some related areas. While application of polymer filtration to electroplating operations is nearest to commercial deployment, the prototype equipment developed for these markets is expected to be readily transferable to operations at DOE wastewater treatment facilities or in glove boxes at LANL’s Plutonium Facility.
• Sodium nonatitanate is being considered for in-tank strontium removal at SRS.
• The extended TRUEX process (Phil Horwitz, Argonne National Laboratory) is a leading option for high-level waste processing at Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
• Hanford stakeholders have continuing interest in the ESP-CP- developed "clean salt" process for selectively removing sodium nitrate from Hanford Site tank waste by a large-scale fractional crystallization process (Dan Herting, Numatec).
• Improved environmental sampling in the field (Jane Bibler, Savannah River Technology Center) helps determine radionuclide concentrations in seawater.
• Ligand modeling results (Ben Hay, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) are being used at ANL for solvent extraction design.

Because of sharply declining budgets, ESP-CP will not solicit any new work in FY98 or beyond. ESP-CP appreciates the past interest in the program shown by scientists and engineers and regrets that it will be unable to sponsor further valuable work on separations and processing.

For more information about ESP-CP, see its home page at http://www.pnl.gov/eff_sep/index.html.

Correction
In the February spotlight on the D&D focus area, Argonne National Laboratory should also have been included as one of the members of the Strategic Alliance, the Integrated Contracting Team for the CP-5 large-scale demonstration project.