Review Of The Department Of Energys Deployment Of Doe Funded Environmental Cleanup Technologies

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017 contained a request for a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine review and assessment of science and technology development efforts within the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM). This technical report is the result of the review and presents findings and recommendations.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies have conducted activities to develop atomic energy for civilian and defense purposes since the initiation of the World War II Manhattan Project in 1942. These activities took place at large federal land reservations of hundreds of square miles involving industrial-scale operations, but also at many smaller federal and non-federal sites such as uranium mines, materials processing and manufacturing facilities. The nuclear weapons and energy production activities at these facilities produced large quantities of radioactive and hazardous wastes and resulted in widespread groundwater and soil contamination at these sites. DOE initiated a concerted effort to clean up these sites beginning in the 1980s. Many of these sites have been remediated and are in long-term caretaker status, closed or repurposed for other uses. Review of the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Defense Environmental Cleanup Activities of the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management: First Report provides background information on the sites currently assigned to the DOE's Office of Environmental Management that are undergoing cleanup; discusses current practices for management and oversight of the cleanups; offers findings and recommendations on such practices and how progress is measured against them; and considers the contracts under which the cleanups proceed and how these have been and can be structured to include incentives for improved cost and schedule performance.

This book provides the National Academy of Sciences' 1995 review of the technology development program for the remediation of the Department of Energy's weapons complex facilities. It makes scientific, technical, and programmatic recommendations to strengthen technology development within DOE and ensure that it meet its goals of cost effectiveness, safety, and decreased risk. The recommendations address DOE's five focus areas: landfill stabilization; contaminant plume containment and remediation; facility transitioning, decommissioning, and final disposition; mixed waste characterization treatment; and high-level waste in tanks. The book also addresses technologies in areas that cross cut the above focus area programs, namely characterization monitoring and sensor technologies, efficient separations and processing, robotics, and waste disposal.

The Department of Energy's Environmental Management Program (DOEEM) is one of the largest environmental clean up efforts in world history. The EM division charged with developing or finding technologies to accomplish this massive task, its Office of Science and Technology (OST), has been reviewed extensively, including six reports from committees of the National Research Council's (NRC's) Board on Radioactive Waste Management (BRWM) that have been released since December 1998. These committees examined different components of OST's technology development program, including its decision-making and peer review processes and its efforts to develop technologies in the areas of decontamination and decommissioning, waste forms for mixed waste, tank waste, and subsurface contamination. Gerald Boyd, head of OST, asked the Board on Radioactive Waste Management (BRWM) to summarize the major findings and recommendations of the six reports and synthesize any common issues into a number of overarching recommendations.

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017 contained a request for a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine review and assessment of science and technology development efforts within the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM). This technical report is the result of the review and presents findings and recommendations.