A Review of Decontamination and Decommissioning Technology Development Programs at the Department of Energy (1998)

This report is the result of a study requested by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science and Technology (OST) as part of its efforts to improve the effectiveness of its Deactivation and Decontamination Focus Area (DDFA). The statement of task for the study, which is provided in Appendix A, directed the National Research Council (NRC) to convene a committee to review the utility and effectiveness of key aspects of the DDFA's program:

1. Approaches used to select and evaluate alternative decontamination and decommissioning technologies;
2. Methods of seeking deployment of the selected technologies among the DOE operating sites, with emphasis on the Large-Scale Demonstration Program (LSDP);
3. Processes used to compare the advantages of the alternative technologies to currently used technologies.

developed by the committee during its study. Recommendations resulting from the study are given in Chapter 3.

In November 1989, DOE established its Office of Environmental Management.⁵ The mission of the EM program is to bring DOE sites into compliance with all applicable regulations while minimizing risks to the environment and human health and safety posed by the generation, handling, treatment, storage, transportation, and disposal of DOE waste. The undertaking was projected to cost billions of dollars each year for many decades to come and to require additional remediation technologies (DOE, 1995a). An Office of Technology Development (OTD, EM-50)⁶ was formed in 1989 within EM and charged with carrying out an aggressive national program of applied research and development (technology development program) to meet environmental restoration and waste management needs within the DOE complex. The basic premise was that through development of new technology, cleanup could be achieved "faster, cheaper, better, and more safely" (DOE, 1995b). Since its inception, OTD (now OST) has employed a variety of programs and approaches to fulfill its charge; Table I summarizes EM-OST initiatives during the period 1989–98 that are relevant to the DDFA.

To ensure that EM's programs focused on the most urgent environmental restoration and waste management problems, Thomas Grumbly, then Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, established a Working Group in August 1993 to implement a new approach to environmental research and technology development. A key feature of this new approach was establishment of five focus areas within OTD to address DOE's most pressing problems (DOE, 1995b). These focus areas were:

1. High Level Radioactive Waste Tank Remediation,
2. Mixed Waste Characterization, Treatment, and Disposal,
3. Contaminant Plume Containment and Remediation,⁷
4. Landfill Stabilization,⁷
5. Facility Transitioning, Decommissioning, and Final Disposition⁸

The focus areas formed the core of OST's integrated team structure for research and technology development to assist EM's mission. As an adjunct to the establishment of the focus areas, the NRC's Committee on Environmental Management Technologies (CEMT) was formed in 1994 at the request of Mr. Grumbly to provide continuing independent advice to DOE-EM on its technology development program. As part of this effort, a subcommittee on D&D was formed under the CEMT.⁹

The DDFA was formed to assure that adequate technologies are available to support EM's task to deactivate more than 7,000 contaminated buildings and fully decommission about 10 percent of them. In addition to the buildings themselves, the task included decontamination of the metal and concrete within those buildings and disposal of some 180,000 metric tons of scrap metal (DOE, 1996b). When the CEMT Subcommittee on D&D was first briefed (November 1994) by DOE personnel, the efforts of the DDFA had been divided into four main activities: facility deactivation, facility decontamination, facility dismantlement, and materials disposition. The subcommittee was given the three draft planning documents that established the DDFA program in 1995.¹⁰ Also in 1995, OST designated the Morgantown (West Virginia) Energy Technology Center (METC) as the lead organization for the DDFA. Now called the Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC), it administers the DDFA programs (Bedick et al., 1996). Table 2 summarizes FETC programs in the DDFA for 1997.

The emphasis in the DDFA was to select and demonstrate technologies that were mature enough to be implemented in actual cleanup activities, i.e., those that were deemed to be ready for the end user. The DDFA intended to look first at commercial technologies that had never been used in the DOE complex or that had been used in the complex but not applied to D&D before developing truly new technologies (DOE, 1996b). The DDFA applies the term "innovative" technology to those technologies that 1) have been used commercially but not yet applied in the DOE environment, 2) are being used in a new way, or 3) are still under development. This approach follows the basic premise within EM that technology development will result in substantial reductions in time and cost and in increased effectiveness of the cleanup work as compared to the baseline case, which assumes the use of "available" technologies¹¹ (DOE, 1996c). To encour-

age DOE sites to use innovative technologies and to develop cost comparison data, the LSDP was established in 1995. The LSDP was intended to be a cornerstone of DDFA and provide a means for side-by-side comparison of "innovative" versus baseline technologies (DOE, 1996b). As specified in the statement of task, the LSDP is a significant part of this committee's review. The program is discussed in detail later in this report.

In 1996, Alvin Alm succeeded Thomas Grumbly as Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management. Mr. Alm announced a Ten Year Plan, which stated: "Within a decade, the Environmental Management program will complete cleanup at most sites" (DOE, 1997c).¹² DOE sites were asked to revise their cleanup strategies and develop plans in response to this new directive. Although it represented a fundamental change in EM's site cleanup schedule, the Ten Year Plan acknowledged that even with the accelerated effort, "50 percent of the work" would remain after year 2006, particularly at the larger sites (DOE, 1997c). Budget estimates show that about 40 percent of the total cleanup cost (in 1998 dollars) will be incurred before year 2006 and about 60 percent after year 2006 (DOE, 1998b). Because D&D occurs near the end of the chain of activities in

each site, and because the most difficult D&D tasks will be encountered at the larger sites, about 80 percent of the total costs of deactivation, decontamination, and decommissioning will be incurred after the year 2006 (DOE, 1997d).

Deploying alternative and more effective technologies is expected to play a key role in the productivity enhancements required by the Ten Year Plan (Alm, 1997). Accordingly a new program, the Technology Deployment Initiative (TDI), was established by OST in 1997 to promote deployment of previously developed OST technologies for actual cleanup applications (DOE, 1997c). The TDI is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

In July 1996 DOE/OST published a D&D technology needs document that was intended to represent complex-wide DOE technology needs (DOE, 1996a). This document was compiled from needs identified by the Site Technology Coordination Group (STCG) that was formed at each DOE operating site. Each STCG consisted of a site coordinator and members who compiled site technology needs in each of OST's focus areas.¹³ Altogether some 535 technology needs were identified, including about 100 needs in the DDFA. Linkage Tables that identified multiple site needs for a given technology subsequently were developed (DOE, 1997a).

In the third quarter of 1996, in DOE's appropriations for FY97, Congress directed that $50 million be used to develop a basic research program focused on long-term cleanup needs across the DOE complex (NRC, 1997). The program, called the Environmental Management Science Program, has the mission to (1) develop targeted, long-term basic research for environmental problems so that breakthrough approaches will lead to significantly reduced cleanup costs and risks to workers and the public; (2) bridge the gap between broad fundamental research and needs-driven applied technology, and; (3) serve as a stimulus for focusing the nation's science infrastructure on critical national environmental management problems (NRC, 1997). Funds provided by the program are awarded competitively to national laboratories, other federal laboratories, and academic and industrial organizations. To ensure that the program is mission oriented and that its achievements are recognized and used by EM, the science program is integrated closely with the focus areas and also is coordinated with the DOE Office of Energy Research to ensure that the broad-based fundamental research and development supported by that office is used (DOE, 1996d). In 1997 basic science program funding for DDFA projects was $1.8 million (Table 2).

The Large-Scale Technology Demonstration Program was intended to be a cornerstone in the deployment of innovative technologies selected by DDFA. In

accordance with its Statement of Task (Appendix A), the D&D committee spent a great deal of time in evaluating the utility and effectiveness of this approach. The stated purpose of the LSDP is to validate performance of D&D technologies and introduce the application of alternative technologies in parallel with baseline technologies (Boyd, 1997b). The demonstration is carried out as a part of an actual, on-going D&D project at a DOE site. To achieve its purpose the LSDP is intended to:

• Reduce risks from first time application of "new" D&D technologies;
• Provide an opportunity to compare performance of new technology to baseline technology; and
• Provide an opportunity to showcase new technologies and vendors.

The LSDP was initiated in July 1995 when FETC sent a Request for Letter Proposals to all DOE Operations Offices. The request contained the LSDP selection criteria established by the DDFA. These criteria included: significance of the proposed demonstration (especially for cost reduction in future projects), readiness of the proposed demonstration, site commitment, and project management (DOE, 1996b). The sites were requested to offer facilities that were undergoing D&D as a part of the site operation to be host facilities for demonstrations of new technologies. This would afford opportunities to test the innovative (new to the DOE complex) technologies alongside baseline technologies. Eight letter proposals were received in response to the request. In October 1995 DDFA selected proposals from three sites to incorporate LSDPs into actual D&D projects. These projects were the Plant 1 uranium processing complex at the Fernald Environmental Management Project in Ohio, the CP-5 Reactor at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and the C-Reactor at the Hanford Reservation in Washington (DOE, 1996b). During this study, committee members visited these locations to observe the LSDP activities in progress and to discuss the demonstration with DOE and contractor personnel on site. Reports of these site visits are given in Appendixes C-F of this report.

The initial LSDPs had several common elements: Decommissioning plans using standard (baseline) technologies already had been established, technology selection criteria had been established (albeit independently at each location), industry-government partnerships were in place, and, most importantly, each site had requested that it participate. Technologies actually demonstrated have come mainly from the commercial sector. Table 3 provides a list of technologies that were demonstrated during the committee's review period.

Cost savings versus the baseline technology were expected to provide incentive for the DOE sites to adopt innovative technologies. In June 1995 the DDFA acquired the services of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps) to establish an independent comparison of the cost of accomplishing a task using an innovative technology versus the baseline technology (Kessinger and Greenwald, 1997). Initially DDFA planned for the Corps to use baseline costs supplied by the site, and independently estimate the cost of using the new technology to accomplish the

same task, based on its actual use in the demonstration. Subsequently, the Corps found that to put the costs on a comparable basis it was necessary that it also estimate the baseline costs (Kessinger, 1997). Further, the Corps found it necessary to average cost standards for labor rates and disposal among the larger sites to obtain a reasonable basis for the cost of implementing a new technology at sites other than the host site (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1997).

As the program got under way in August 1996, the DDFA stated that these first three LSDPs would be completed by the end of calendar year (CY) 97, and an additional five demonstrations would be completed by the end of CY99. By the end of fiscal year (FY) 2000, DDFA planned, by way of these eight LSDPs, to have demonstrated technologies, systems, and methods to provide capabilities to D&D 90 percent of the surplus facilities and materials (Bedick et al., 1996). Information on the results of the demonstrations was to be promptly disseminated to encourage deployment of successful new technologies. This was to be accomplished primarily by short, one-or two-page fact sheets describing the technology and by detailed summary reports (referred to as "Green Books") that would include details of the demonstration and the Army Corps of Engineers' cost comparison data.

Near the end of the committee's review period, in November 1997, the 90 percent demonstration goal had slipped two years, to 2002. Two additional LSDPs scheduled to begin in 1997 had been canceled by the DOE field offices. These were the Rocky Flats Building 779 Complex, which was canceled in August 1997, and Oak Ridge Building K-27, which was canceled in October 1997¹⁴ (DOE, 1997f). By the end of its review period in December 1997, the committee had not received any of the expected technology summaries, and it was understood that none of the three initial LSDPs had been completed.¹⁵

OST has been criticized by both Congress and the General Accounting Office (GAO) for a poor track record in deployment of new technologies.¹⁶ Resistance from the operating sites themselves was seen by OST as a major barrier to deployment of new technologies because the operators considered the new technology to be "risky" or simply "not invented here" (GAO, 1996, 1997). Seeking

to overcome this resistance, OST began the Technology Deployment Initiative in early 1997.

The TDI mission is to deploy technologies and processes that reduce the DOE-EM "mortgage," accelerate site cleanup, and enhance achievement of Ten Year Plan goals (DOE, 1997g; Alm, 1997). Deployment is defined by OST as implementation of a technology or process through multiple sites or applications. To accomplish this mission, TDI provides financial incentives to sites to implement fully developed, previously demonstrated innovative technologies or processes into their existing or planned cleanup activities. OST has acknowledged that accomplishing the TDI mission will require DOE complex-wide cooperation (DOE, 1997g).

The TDI has the following objectives:

• Provide for accelerated multiple deployment of technologies or processes to conduct cleanup (including decontamination and decommissioning) in ways that will reduce EM cleanup costs and support Ten Year Plan goals;
• Provide third-party validation of cost savings and incentives to site participation through reinvestment of cost savings;
• Break down barriers that inhibit implementation of technologies or processes; and
• Achieve closer coordination through joint ownership and funding of projects across DOE EM organizations (DOE, 1997g).

The TDI was to be a multi-year program with an initial funding level of $50 million for FY98. Proposals from DOE field offices were sought for multiple deployment of technologies and processes for site cleanup (including environmental restoration and waste management, as well as D&D). A screening criterion for all proposals was that they show significant savings in life-cycle costs compared with the baseline technology and that deployment throughout the complex be accomplished without additional OST funding. Proposals were envisaged to not exceed $5 million each unless an exceptional return on investment could be shown (DOE, 1997g; Hyde, 1997). By funding the initial deployment of new technologies, OST intended to alleviate site concerns about incurring technological risk or penalties for schedule delays.

As a part of OST's increased emphasis on technology deployment assistance, the TDI program was renamed the Accelerated Site Technology Deployment (ASTD) Program in early 1998, as this report was being finalized. The DDFA announced three ASTDs for 1998:1) Enhanced In Situ Decontamination and Size Reduction of Glove Boxes at Rocky Flats, 2) the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Decontamination and Volume Reduction System, and 3) the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Laboratories (INEEL)/Fernald Environmental Management Project (FEMP) Integrated Decontamination and Decommissioning. Because the TDI/ASTD began near the end of the committee's review period, it is not assessed in detail in this report.