Dr. Clyde Frank is Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Technology Development in DOE's Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management.
Initiatives: DOE's mission to clean up the environment is an enormous commitment and necessarily relies heavily on technology. Perhaps you could begin by giving the readers an overview of just how much needs to be cleaned up and what sorts of contamination DOE is dealing with.
Frank: We have close to 4,000 contaminated sites and more than 1.4 million drums of buried or stored waste. If you just take the stored waste and start piling those drums on a football field, it literally would go six miles high. That's just the stored mixed waste we already have. We also have more than 300,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste and millions of cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste. If we cannot find a use for the 400,000 metric tons of depleted uranium we have, that's going to be a $4 billion disposal problem.
In addition, there are 5,000 properties in the vicinity of former uranium ore processing sites and thousands of facilities awaiting decontamination and decommissioning. We have to deal with a cost-effective mechanism for transitioning facilities and de-risking them so we can decrease the cost of surveillance and maintenance until we can actually decontaminate and decommission facilities that are being transferred. The other important thing is to assess whether these facilities are of economic value, i.e., can some of them be turned over to the private sector for manufacturing facilities? How do we decrease the cost of this operation, taking a holistic view of economics, of risk, and leveraging with the private sector?
If you take the K-25 area, which is 139 acres of floor space, the old diffusion plant [at Oak Ridge], I would guess there is enough concrete in that building to lay a roadbed from coast to coast. If we have to put it in 55-gallon drums and ship it off as low-level, contaminated waste, I would suggest the world invest in 55-gallon container manufacturers, because that's where all the taxpayers' money is going to go.
Initiatives: This is a stock tip, right?
Frank: This is my stock tip for the day (laughs). It's staggering. You start combining the stored waste that we presently have, a hog and haul retrieval operation, a disassembly in the D&D operation; and you add all of those things up over the next twenty years, and multiply it times the real disposal cost, I think you'd come up with a situation where the taxpayers just absolutely would not tolerate it.
Initiatives: Is there any technology available to do anything with, for instance contaminated concrete, other than put it in drums?
Frank: That's the base technology. The concrete at K-25 primarily is surface contaminated. If you can decontaminate the surfaces, then you have "pristine" concrete that can be used for other purposes -- construction, roadbeds, etc. Then there are materials contaminated semi-homogeneously, like the $400 million worth of nickel we have in the DOE system contaminated with uranium. Right now, without the acceptance of de minimis levels, we can process it, but we can't release it, particularly mixed waste. The dichotomy of the whole situation is that I can clean that nickel up, and I can sell it to a country that has a de minimis level as long as the contamination level is below that. And they can buy that material and manufacture finished goods which potentially could be imported back into this country. So it's not only a technical issue, I think it's also a regulatory and societal issue. It's an inhibitor.
The Department of Energy can go through limited release, in which we know what the finished products are and they would be used on federal facilities, where we would not use pristine materials in a contaminated environment. Let me give you an example. There has been a requirement for 30,000 stainless steel containers for the high-level waste glass. It seems ludicrous to go out and buy new stainless steel to make canisters when we have thousands of tons of low-level contaminated stainless steel within the system.
Initiatives: Is it cost-effective to make canisters out of contaminated steel?
Frank: Yes. We're dealing with very, very low-level contaminated material so it is not an environmental hazard to re-process that material. If we do a limited release within the Department of Energy, in which that stainless steel would be used for the canisters, for hot-cell liners or for robotics that are going to operate where you can predict contamination; this material would be in a closed cycle. Once you use the robotics for one thing, you'd recycle it into a different type of product and not have an injection of new stainless steel that is uncontaminated, into these environments. You also have all of the utility of the [contaminated] stainless steel. There's an automatic cost savings when you take a systems approach because every time you contaminate something, the culture says, you have to bury it. In order to bury it, you're going to have to pay X amount of money on a per-volume basis. What the country, particularly the Department of Energy needs, is to call a halt to contaminating new material and set up manufacturing systems that put out products the Department can use in environments in which material is going to be contaminated anyway.
Initiatives : Has any contaminated material been recycled already at DOE?
Frank: There's a private sector organization that is processing contaminated stainless steel for accelerator shielding. This is an initiative being pursued heavily by Representative Lloyd from Tennessee. One of her main interests is to offset some of the costs of environmental restoration waste management and D&D by extracting and using materials within the Department of Energy.
Initiatives: Are there other technologies or processes within DOE under development that would be cost effective like the one you just described?
Frank : Robotics is a big issue, both in decreasing cost since they can work 24 hours-a-day, and decreasing the risk to the individual worker in the hazardous environment. We are also pursuing some applied research in cost effectively stripping surface contamination off concrete and metals. Out of Morgantown Energy Technology Center, we ran a program research and development announcement directed specifically for decontamination and decommissioning. And we have announced or awarded more than fifteen contracts in this particular area.
Initiatives : How important is it for federal agencies to work together in this area?
Frank : The vision is that there's all this money for environmental research, between the Department of Defense, EPA and the Department of Energy. This money turns out to be some of the most valuable money in the environmental area, because it is the only money that can help the taxpayers save money. It is important that all the federal agencies who are technology developers coordinate their activities and not re-invent the wheel. It's important that we have the ability to transfer these innovative technologies from site to site without going through a heavy paperwork process to generate the same engineering specifications from one site to another for a particular problem.
If you take NASA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy, one of the biggest problems from manufacturing operations is contamination of the sub-surface by organic and inorganic materials. If each of the agencies goes off and develops the same technologies or technological systems to resolve their problems, then We're re-inventing the wheel three times.
Initiatives : The DOIT Committee, which is described in this issue seems relevant to this matter.
Frank: I think that's certainly a step in the right direction, because what we have there is the coordination of twenty states and territories under the Western Governors' Association (WGA), Departments of Interior and Defense, EPA and the Department of Energy specifically directed toward the development and implementation of innovative technologies. That brings the regulators, the stake-holders, the developers and the problem holders together to cost effectively address major issues, not only facing the West, and the different federal agencies but throughout the nation. This stake-holder concept, at least in certain areas, particularly mixed waste with the WGA, is going to be just absolutely superlative, and absolutely successful, because these people are very, very serious about solving problems.
But you also need a driving force for implementation of these technologies, and the driving force has to be economics. Environment can be a great economic development tool on a local or state basis, by creating industries that produce and apply these new, innovative, technological systems. What one needs to create are partnerships between the economic development communities within the states or regions, the investment community, the users of these technologies, and the developers of these technologies.
We started a study about two years ago called "The Enterprise" which was the model for creating these types of partnerships. We saw the first enterprise concept coming out of the pipe about three months ago in California where the California EPA, California Economic Development Council, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, Lawrence Berkeley, a business institute that represents private sector investment, created the "California Environmental Enterprise" directed toward the rehabilitation of contaminated lands in urban areas with a high-population density. This is going to be a roaring success because we have the opportunity not to become the "deep-pockets" for the solution of this problem, but we have the opportunity, as a federal agency, to become an investor.
The payoff we get, is that we're going to apply those technologies to DOE and federal facility sites, when they are developed, through the remediation of private lands. We're using privately held lands as test beds for federally developed technologies; and everybody has a stake in it. The investors have a stake, because they're going to make money. California has a stake, because they can transfer these technological systems from one similar site to another in California. The national laboratories are getting their technologies implemented by the private sector. And the private sector, either through small business, large business, or newly generated business, is going to make dollars. So the incentive is naturally there.
Initiatives : Can you give an example of technology already being used that could be immediately transferred to other agencies and industries?
Frank: The dynamic stripping at Livermore really has great potential. We're out there remediating a site and it looks like we'll be able to cut the time of remediation down from 25 to 50 years to probably one or two years. The transfer and applicability to such things as filling stations, etc. can create quite a business. The impact we're having in the private sector right now is in waste stabilization. Vitrification or glassifcation from a disposal viewpoint is economically feasible particularly with respect to the base technology which is now cementation. What you have with cement is an increase of a factor of three in value to create a disposal form and with vitrification you have a factor of three decrease. Remember, disposal costs are based on volume, not waste.
Initiatives: You're already working on reducing waste at the operations level.
Frank : Absolutely, that's inherent within all the operations. It just doesn't make sense to go out and build something that you can't dispose of, or to apply a technology where you've not identified the acceptable disposal for it. Because what you then do is you go into storage, and if you can't solve the treatment problem, then you're storing for infinity, and you're spending an infinite amount of money so storage is not an option economically.
Initiatives: Are there any other technologies or processes You'd like to talk about?
Frank: One of the other things that I am really excited about is Expedited Site Characterization, where you have all the tools in the field to characterize the site including portable computers to put out three-dimensional contamination maps that regulators and the public can see out there. By using non-intrusive, rapidly intrusive, and continuous monitoring devices, one has the ability to cut the characterization of a site from eight to twelve months down to a matter of days. I believe the first time out was in a place called York, Nebraska, and this was operated in partnership with the EPA region. I believe there had already been a million dollars spent on the characterization of that site for an eight-month period. This Expedited Characterization Team, went in, spent, I believe about $180,000 and characterized the site in ten days. I've heard we had over 200 visitors to that site while it was in operation. And the majority of them left very excited about the prospects of Expedited Characterization.
Initiatives: How quickly can Expedited Site Characterization be ready to use at other sites?
Frank: We have asked for nominations of DOE sites for Expedited Characterization, so we are going to move very rapidly to implementation. Something else that comes to mind is a CRADA that hopefully we will get negotiated and signed. It represents probably the largest CRADA that will be signed in the federal government. This is the laboratory automation CRADA with Lockheed and Hewlett Packard with our robotics people. It is to literally automate all of the analytical laboratory methodology for environment. It represents an investment by the private sector and the federal government, I believe, in excess of $10 million. It also represents the generation of a business estimated at $200 million a year in machinery; and it was a competitively procured CRADA.
