Since the last Initiatives spotlight on the Subsurface Contaminants Focus Area in the December 1998 issue, SCFA has embraced a best-practices, businesslike approach in helping its clients at DOE sites address their subsurface contamination problems. In an era of limited budgets for the development of new technologies, SCFA is focusing on ways to bring the benefits of currently available technologies to its clients while also working to bring to maturity the science and technology projects with the highest potential impacts. SCFA-sponsored projects are closely aligned to user needs, and the focus area is tailoring today’s technologies and tomorrow’s plans for direct application to specific sites.

Shaping a technical assistance process
The Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) was named SCFA’s lead laboratory in June 1999. In this role, SRTC is playing a major part in helping SCFA provide technical assistance. SRTC coordinates DOE sites’ requests for technical assistance to address groundwater or soil contamination and funnels the requests to appropriate experts found throughout DOE’s network of national laboratories. SRTC can also, if required, augment the technical base through connections to industry, universities, and other federal agencies. Among the types of technical assistance that SCFA is prepared to provide, though SRTC, are

• information on SCFA technology solutions, including points of contact, technical insights, references, and background knowledge;
• information on other solutions that are commercially available;
• consulting, scientific or technical problem solving, insight, opinions, and experience to solve restoration problems that are within the scope of SCFA;
• on-site troubleshooting, including minor equipment or system modification to improve functional performance; and
• meeting with regulators, Site Technology Coordination Groups, end users, and other stakeholders as necessary and appropriate to inspire confidence and trust.

To check out the process for requesting technical assistance from SCFA, go to SCFA's Lead Laboratory Technical Assistance Status Board. From here you can obtain a form for requesting assistance and can read about DOE’s environmental expertise found throughout the national laboratory complex, SCFA’s long-range technical vision, and SCFA products that have been generated as a result of providing technical assistance.

A model case of technical assistance at Paducah
At the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, SCFA demonstrated its responsiveness in helping sites identify cleanup strategies. SCFA assembled a Deployment Assistance Team that visited Paducah on November 9 and 10, 1999, to learn firsthand about environmental cleanup problems. Working alongside and in support of an existing framework for evaluating candidate technologies, the team developed recommendations for employing a suite of technologies to cost effectively clean Paducah’s groundwater contamination. These recommendations call for the rapid deployment of technologies in interim actions that directly address source removal of trichloroethylene and technetium-99 as well as the phased implementation and leveraging of some technologies currently being deployed at other sites through the ASTD and SCFA programs. The Deployment Assistance Team’s report, Recommendations for Accelerated Cleanup at Paducah, is available on SCFA’s Web site.

Already in place and functioning at the site to accelerate the acceptance and use of new technologies were two organizations that SCFA counts among its venues for offering technical assistance: the Innovative Treatment Remediation Demonstration and TechCon. ITRD is a DOE initiative for coordinating DOE, EPA, and regulatory agencies in evaluating, implementing, and validating innovative remediation technologies at selected DOE sites. TechCon is another technical assistance program that tracks domestic and international technologies. When Paducah first requested technical assistance from SCFA in February 1999, SCFA used its connection to ITRD and TechCon to help set up a Technical Advisory Group.

The TAG at Paducah includes Paducah DOE and contractor personnel; SCFA, ITRD, and TechCon representatives; representatives from EPA’s regional office as well as its Technology Innovation Office; Kentucky regulators; and experts from EPA laboratories and DOE’s national laboratories. The TAG’s recently completed Innovative Technology Review Report contains approximately 30 technologies that have potential application to enhancing the remediation of the Paducah’s TCE and Tc-99 groundwater contamination. The SCFA-led Deployment Assistance Team that visited Paducah in November 1999 reviewed a working copy of the TAG’s Innovative Technology Review Report in developing its specific recommendations to accelerate groundwater cleanup.

Star performers are "step-change" solutions
SCFA has identified some technologies as "step-change" solutions. These technologies are either brand new (enabling) solutions or solutions at least twice as good as the current baseline in terms of cost or performance. These systems are expected to reduce the risks to health, safety, and the environment and the costs of remediation while meeting compliance requirements. Among 1999’s step-change solutions, SCFA has selected the following five as top performers based on their potential to achieve the most success in saving end users’ money and time and in reducing risks to workers, the public, and the environment:

• Passive Reactive Barrier (OST/TMD ID 46)
• Remediation of DNAPLs in Low Permeability Soils (OST/TMS ID 163)
• Innovative DNAPL Characterization Toolbox (OST/TMS ID 237)
• Hydrous Pyrolysis/Oxidation (OST/TMS ID 1519)
• DNAPL Bioremediation—RTDF (OST/TMS ID 1737)

Testing of DNAPL technologies continues at Cape Canaveral
SCFA represents DOE in the Interagency DNAPL Consortium’s first project—the side-by-side demonstration and comparison of three SCFA-sponsored DNAPL technologies at Launch Complex 34 at the Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida (see Initiatives, Summer 1999). For two years, DOE and its IDC partners DOD, NASA, and EPA have worked together to establish a memorandum of understanding and begin testing and documenting the cost and performance of three innovative technologies for treating DNAPLs, a shared problem.

In January, IDC hosted a tour for nearly 300 technology end users, regulators, and other stakeholders. Vendors from IT Corporation, Current Environmental Solutions, and Integrated Water Technologies presented their respective technology installations: In Situ Chemical Oxidation Using Potassium Permanganate (OST/TMS ID 167), Six-Phase Soil Heating (OST/TMS ID 5), and Dynamic Underground Stripping (OST/TMS ID 7) combined with Hydrous Pyrolysis/Oxidation (OST/TMS ID 1519).

Tour attendees also learned about innovative DNAPL characterization tools (like the Ribbon NAPL Sampler [OST/TMS ID 2238] featured in Initiatives, Spring 2000) that have been tested at the site and about the pre- and postdemonstration performance assessment of the three technologies. Performance assessments will be conducted in accordance with EPA’s Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation (SITE) program. Cost and performance will be available later this year. In characterizing the three test cells, EPA and Battelle systemically determined the location and number of coring samples to take to assess the total mass of trichloroethylene present in the test cells. By comparing postdemonstration cores with the samples taken before technology testing began, SITE will determine the relative performances of the cleanup technologies.

SCFA plans to distribute quarterly e-mail updates on the side-by-side demonstrations to tour attendees and other interested parties. To receive updates, contact Emily Charogu at EnviroIssues at (206) 269-5041, echaroglu@enviroissues.com.

What lies ahead?
An area in which SCFA will play an increasingly important role is in the development of technologies and processes to ensure the continued safety of the environment and public after DOE sites are closed. As the Rocky Flats, Fernald, and Mound sites approach their 2006 early closure dates, the need to establish postclosure monitoring requirements and develop methods and techniques for meeting those requirements becomes more urgent. Even after sites are closed and transferred to the public domain, DOE will retain a stewardship role in monitoring the performance of some of the soil and groundwater solutions promoted by SCFA: permeable reactive barriers, in situ bioremediation and natural attenuation, containment barriers, and landfill caps and covers. The performance of these and other long-term solutions will require monitoring indefinitely to ensure that these technologies are making a lasting contribution to public safety.

For more information on the Subsurface Contaminants Focus Area, see its Web site at http://www.envnet.org/scfa.