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Appendix E Other OST Programs Not all OST funds are allocated to the four Focus Areas and three Crosscutting Programs; in fact, only approximately 40 percent of the FY 1998 budget request was directed toward these seven programs. ~ _ This appendix summarizes information learned by the committee about the other OST-funded programs and the decision-making processes used therein. Two examples of these other OST programs are the Industry Program and the University Program. The IP and UP managers interact with Focus Area and Crosscutting Program managers to define relevant and appropriate scopes of work for the contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements that they manage. As with the Crosscutting Programs, the Industry and University Programs use the Focus Areas' prioritized lists of technology needs to determine work scopes. A process of communication among program managers leads to refinements of the concepts underlying the technical challenges that comprise the technical specifications of the solicitations. These two programs, and others, are described in more detail below. The following information comes from DOE publications, from a May 1997 committee site visit to the FETC facility in Morgantown, West Virginia, and from a November 1997 committee meeting in Washington, D.C. INDUSTRY PROGRAM The IP receives OST funds that are available for technology development work in the private sector (i.e., for PIs outside the DOE-EM complex and national laboratory systems). The major role of the IP is to translate needs provided by the Focus Area and Crosscutting Programs into technical performance requirements for solicitations to permit companies to submit bids. The IP strateav is to provide a site independent, "brokering" mechanism between the Obl program office requesting the work (and generating the technical specifications of the solicitation) and the private sector. The IP is administered by program managers at FETC, a government-owned, government-operated contracting shop with expertise in fostering DOE partnerships with private industry. The IP issues solicitations to the private sector with two types of procurements: ROAs and PRDAs. Each of these announcements is for work related to Focus Area and Crosscutting Program technical topics. The IP funds are controlled separately from these of the Focus Areas and Crosscutting Programs; hence, program managers of those program units must coordinate with IP managers to arrive at an approximate amount of IP money and an approximate number of IP projects that will be funded each year on behalf of each Focus Area and Crosscutting Program. The IP relies on the outputs of the Focus Area and Crosscutting Program units to generate its statements of technology development needs that are used to develop solicitations to the private sector. Iteration and feedback among program managers is used (Bedick, 1997), because the initial needs statements are sometimes not sufficiently well-defined to serve as technical specifications. The DOE procurement process is then followed, with contracts awarded as phased procurement vehicles so that 146
AppendlixE Other OSTPrograms 147 OST program management has the flexibility to terminate funding of an activity at specified phases of its development. Another "iterative-collaborative" process is the decision of how much of the IP funds goes to support work in each of the Focus Areas and Crosscutting Programs. Equity issues arise in these negotiations, but the FETC office claims to have no bias or partiality since it is not a DOE-EM site with environmental cleanup needs. Targeted funding designations for the amount of IP funding to each Focus Area and Crosscutting Program are made in future DOE budget projections (i.e., IRB), but the final budget allocation depends on how well a particular solicitation succeeds (i.e., the industry response to the solicitations offered). The Source Selection Official (SSO) running a solicitation has significant say in this; formally, these decisions are made by the FETC director or designee, which in practice usually amounts to agreeing with the SSO. The two major decision points of the Industry Program (Bedick, 1997) are: 1. the outyear program planning, done in collaboration with Focus Areas and Crosscutting Programs (i.e., budget targets for future solicitations and the specific technical subjects of future solicitations), and 2. "internal to FETC processes"-the iterations to define technical procurement specifications out of generally written statements of needs, as discussed above, which are collaborative with the same program units. Since its inception in the early 1990s, the IP has reviewed 1,500 proposals and has expended $186 million in 83 separate contracts. Only about a dozen companies have been repeat winners of a procurement contract. The award of a contract typically takes about nine months. Of the 83 projects, 18 were terminated before completion; 18 were funded to completion (i.e., to the level of maturity represented by gates 5 or 6); and 47 are ongoing. Fourteen projects have already been deployed at multiple DOE sites, with others ready for deployment in about a year. The projected $1.5 billion cost savings associated with the 14 technologies already deployed, using some of the assumptions in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers comparisons to baseline technologies (Bedick, 1997), implies about an 8:1 ROI for the IP. and FETC Procurement Process The DOE procurement process is applicable to both PRDAs and ROAs solicitations of the IP. PRDAs are one-time solicitations based on specific technical specifications that are open for 45 to 90 days. ROAs are broad, general statements of need that are open to bids for a longer time (typically a year). The process detailed below was established to ensure compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs), Department of Energy Acquisition Regulations (DEARs), and FETC standard operating procedures (SOPs) (Christy, 1997). Proposals received in response to a solicitation are first reviewed by a team of four reviewers, consisting of an FETC project manager, a Focus Area or Crosscutting representative, a field representative, and an outside expert (from academia, industry, or a national laboratory). The first two are federal DOE employees; the last two need not be. The first and fourth are selected by FETC, the second and third by Focus Area or Crosscutting Program personnel. The four individuals review a proposal separately, noting strengths and weaknesses as judged against four criteria: 1. technical approach (weight 33 percent); 2. merit of the technology (weight 33 percent); 3. personnel qualifications, project organization, experience and commitment (weight 20 percent); 4. facilities and equipment (weight 14 percent).
148 Decision Making in the DOE-OST The four reviewers then meet to translate the* individual assessments into a collective numerical score (on a scale from 1 to 5) against each of these criteria. These ratings, combined with the predetermined weighting factors associated with each of the four criteria, produce an overall numerical rating for the proposal. This result is then transmitted to a Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC) of DOE employees, typically FETC and headquarters personnel, who consider additional "program policy factors" such as regulatory impacts, cost sharing, available funds, the degree to which the work would complement or enhance an existing effort (or, as a negative, whether it is duplicative of other work that would meet the same particular need), whether the approach meets the policy intent,' and whether the approach is truly novel and innovative. The TEC makes a recommendation to the SSO, who decides which proposals to fund. Usually, this official picks what the TEC recommends. The solicitation process ends with a "quality debriefing" meeting to all parties that submitted proposals and that elect to attend. These debriefings give legally pennissible feedback on general considerations for the way proposals were rated to assist proposal writers to produce better submittals in response to future solicitations. Sometimes a bidders' conference is held before a solicitation is ended, to respond to bidder questions and requests for supplemental technical information by giving this information to all bidders. The integrity of this review process is enforced by FETC program managers. Government procurement restrictions dictate conflict of interest requirements on reviewers and the nondisclosure of proprietary company information. Committee Observations on IP The arguments (Marker, 1997) that are made about using FETC as a preferred procurement office for OST are that it has · lower overhead costs than DOE field operations offices; · no partiality (i.e., no conflicts of interest as to which DOE-EM site is favored in any decision, since FETC is not itself a DOE-EM cleanup site); · expertise at soliciting from industry in a fair and open competition with a national (nonparochial) focus, in a way that is uniform because all Focus Area requests are treated the same way; and · an established "one-stop shop" for industrial players who do not want the difficulty of negotiating procurements with separate DOE sites that have differing ground rules. The committee observes that the purchasing practices of OST are at best duplicative, and appear to be contusing and cumbersome and to lead to poor purchasing decisions in some instances. UNIVERSITY PROGRAM The University Program is at present a collection of four groups of universities that receive funds through grants and cooperative agreements because of congressional appropriation's language. The OST program managers have limited power in directing the use of these funds. Each annual grant is approximately $3 to $5 million, and the total annual program is funded at approximately $18 to $19 million. ' As reported by FETC program managers, a major difficulty in reviewing technology development proposals lies in understanding the needs of the DOE-EM complex and the relevance of the proposed technology to meet these needs.
Appendix E-Other OST Programs The UP participants include (Bedick, 1997, 149 · Florida International University, which through its Hemispheric Center for Environmental Technology conducts test and evaluation activities in support of the D&D and Tanks Focus Areas as well as the CMST Crosscutting Program; · Florida State University, which through its Institute for Central and Eastern European Cooperative Environmental Research conducts joint technology development with Russian and Central European organizations, including a Czechowice oil refinery cleanup project; · Xavier and Tulane Universities, which conduct biotic and abiotic studies on hazardous waste and novel modeling approaches for transport; and · Mississippi State University, which through its Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory supports several Focus Areas with specialization in instrumentation and control systems. These universities are funded to do work that is of a more applied engineering nature than typical basic science university research. The University Program manager strategy is to make an effort to identify DOE-EM problems, cast them in appropriate terms, and offer them as research opportunities to these academic institutions. For example, one university conducted a thermodynamic modeling analysis in rheology, which is relevant to the DOE-EM problem of high-level waste in tanks and in the mixing that occurs during a melter pour. TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION SYSTEMS APPLICATION INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM The TISA International Program of the has supported DOE-EM collaborations on technical projects done through cooperative agreements that have been signed by high-ranking officials (outside OST). So far, four such agreements have been signed. One is with the Former Soviet Union (FSU), because of an administrative directive to stabilize the post-Cold War nuclear community and the fact that the FSU has similar cleanup problems, f~rst-rate expertise, and a 1:30 labor cost ratio compared to the United States. Another is with Poland (through the FSU agreement), which has similar contamination problems and a 1:10 labor cost ratio. A third agreement is with Argentina. This agreement was signed for the following reasons: · the Quadro-Pact Agreement of 1994, · an emphasis on environmental cooperation at the December 1994 Summit of the Americas, and · the Department of Commerce listing of Argentina as one of the top 10 emerging markets. The fourth agreement is a DOE cooperative agreement signed with the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) of the United Kingdom, primarily for application of AEA HLW tank technology in DOE-EM. When asked by the committee about countries sucl; as France and Japan with developed nuclear technology, OST program managers responded,;Walker, 1997) that those countries with developed nuclear expertise were already represented in EM cleanups by the partnerships of companies such as COGEMA and Seimens with American companies in bids on EM cleanup contracts. TISA DOMESTIC PROGRAM TO FOSTER REGULATORY AND STAKEHOLDER ACCEPTANCE The OST has long supported efforts to work with stakeholder and regulatory groups to obtain their support for the introduction of new technologies applied to EM cleanups. The decisions of what work to fund in this area are made largely within the TISA Domestic Program.
150 Decision Making in the DOE-OST One example of the type of work supported is that of the National Technical Workgroup (NTW), an interstate group of regulators of mixed waste, who meet to share information on common issues that arise in their experiences of permitting mixed waste storage and treatment facilities and operations. However, not all stakeholder and regulatory interaction work is funded through the TISA Domestic Program. For example, the Subsurface Contaminants Focus Area works directly with the Southern States Energy Board (SSEB) in obtaining regulatory approval for new technology. The key idea in support of OST involvement with both the NTW and the SSEB is that each activity was designed to foster regulatory acceptance of a technology in other states if it were successfully demonstrated in one state. Stakeholder interactions are handled in each Focus Area through interactions with the Community Leaders Network. Each major DOE-EM site has a Site-Specific Advisory Board (SSAB) or Citizen's Advisory Board that is funded by DOE-EM, as well as other interest groups supported by local government or private institutions. OST investments in these activities show that attention to nontechnical barriers, such as stakeholder and regulatory acceptance of new technology up for demonstration, has been a program priority. The TISA Domestic Program (formerly known as the Office of Technology Integration (OTI)) funds the STCGs, the gate and peer reviews, and a host of other activities designed to promote the awareness of OST efforts and to gain stakeholder and regulatory acceptance of new technologies. This program fulfills its general mission to facilitate the acceptance of new technology by funding five types ofwork(Lankford, 1997): 1. decision integration, meaning cost savings analyses, stage-and-gate management, peer reviews, and ITSRs (also known as "green books"); 2. technical application and implementation facilitation, including STCGs; 3. regulatory cooperation, including the interstate technology regulatory cooperation;2 4. public and tribal participation, including the CLN; and 5. information for decisions, including the Technology Management System and communications such as newsletters and web pages that promote awareness of OST programs and disseminate specific project accomplishments. This program suffered a significant budget cut in FY 1998, which necessitated a priority ranking of work packages. ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SCIENCE PROGRAM (EMSP) The EMSP funds basic research at early stages in the stage-and-gate maturity model. The EMSP has a congressional charter (U.S. Congress, l995d) to consider basic research for novel remediation methods. The EMSP has a structure similar to that of the OST Focus Area& while technology needs identified by the STCGs go to the Focus Areas, science needs identified by site ad hoc workshops go to the EMSP. Research proposals submitted to the EMSP for funding undergo two reviews-one by the DOE Office of Energy Research to assess the proposal's scientific merit and another by DOE-EM to assess the proposal's potential relevance to site cleanup problems (i.e., to ensure that the science needs it addresses are tied to some EM site functional cleanup requirements). This national program collected science needs from the major DOE-EM sites. At a committee site visit to Hanford in January 1997, John LaFemina discussed this site's EMSP "Science Needs Process" resulting from a two-day Hanford workshop in 1996 sponsored by the Keystone Group, the Tanks Focus Area, and the Wiley Laboratory (also known as the Environmental Management Science Laboratory). In l 2 The TISA Domestic Program fielded a similar program from 1992 to 1996, the Western Governors' Association Committee to Develop On-Site Innovative Technologies.
Appendix E-Other OST Programs this exercise, workshop attendees prioritized them by a list of cnteria. 151 i' dentified 38 site science needs (23 of which were for tanks) and In principle, the EMSP science needs and successful science-based projects should transfer to the technology development program, perhaps by evolving to technology needs and/or technology development projects. The EMSP is at too early a stage in its development to have a substantial basis for judging its effectiveness and the nature of any of these kind of interactions. Successful research results of EMSP projects should feed into OST's RD&D process. If this happens on a significant scale, EMSP decision making could substantially influence the overall cleanup of DOE- EM sites. In practice, however, the connection is tenuous. OST's technology management difficulties are not at the beginning of the pipeline. On the contrary, it is the pileup of projects awaiting either demonstration or deployment that has raised questions about OST's success. In addition, with the relatively small budgets for EMSP and the early stages of OST's RD&D process, the EMSP decision- making process is not likely to have much influence on the overall performance of OST over the next three to five years. A time horizon of 10 to 20 years is needed for a significant relationship to emerge. Although EMSP decision making does not affect the near-term success of the OST technology development program, the EMSP decision-making process for proposal selection does appear to function satisfactorily. A previous NRC report, Building an E.ffective Environmental Management Science Program: Final Assessment (NRC, 1997a), reviewed the proposal selection process for FY 1996 and concluded that (1) meritorious projects appear to have been selected' (2) collaborative efforts were well represented, (3) new DOE researchers were attracted, and (4) where firsthand information was available, the committee was able to confirm the overall quality of the merit review panel. ACCELERATED SITE TECHNOLOGY DEPLOYMENT PROGRAM In 1997, with increased attention by the House Commerce Committee to the issue of a Return on Investment on the $2.6 billion expended since the start of the program in 1989, OST headquarters management created the ASTD program (formerly known as the Technology Development Initiative) as an EM-50 competitive solicitation to DOE field offices for their proposals of how they could use EM-50 funds to reduce a site's cleanup costs. The intention of the ASTD program was to award EM-50 money to a site to underwrite the first-time use of a new technical approach applied to a cleanup project already scheduled for the near term. A requirement of the proposals was to perform an ROI calculation showing the cost savings (or cost avoidance) relative to the baseline remediation method that would be used in the ~ . ~ ~ . ~ absence of EM-50 funds. This requirement implied that competitive proposals would go only to those cleanup jobs for which a baseline remediation method already existed and that a credible cost estimate existed for the baseline method. The ASTD program was not designed to be a demonstration program for unproven technologies. The technical methods under comparison had to be proven techniques, with sufficient engineering and performance data to use as a basis for cost estimates. The better-than-baseline technologies could come from any source, either from outside DOE-EM or from formerly funded DOE-EM technology development projects that had matured into viable cleanup techniques. A subordinate aim of the program was to determine the degree to which technical innovations that enjoyed past funding support by EM-50 were represented in the suite of new and cost-saving technologies that were part of successful bids. This program is an explicit attempt by EM-50 program management to address the barrier to implementing new technologies in DOE-EM site cleanups. It has been argued (Frank, 1997b) that, strictly speaking, since no new technology was under consideration for development in the ASTD, this program should not be funded by discretionary EM-50 funds. Instead, other DOE-EM offices should be the proper programs to fund the ASTD activities proposed and selected, activities that reported more than an order of magnitude in cost savings (or cost avoidance) to DOE-EM. The ASTD effort to review site and field office proposals did not formally involve interaction with other OST program units. The initiative for generating proposals lay with the field office representatives
152 Decision Making in the DOE-OST of the community of problem owners ant! technology users (i.e., EM-30, 40, and 60~. Although STCGs and Focus Areas were not Connally involved, the network of site contacts made by the STCGs and the Focus Areas was most probably an asset to the proposal writers, particularly in finding other DOE-EM sites for second and third applications of a first-time remediation technology. A proposal selection committee chose 20 proposals for funding out of 89 received (Walker, 1997b), using $27.7 million of FY 1998 funds. These 20 proposals were consolidated into 16 projects, each with a typical duration of two years. They represent collectively a ROT of greater than $~.3 billion, if each project is funded to completion by OST (this would require a continued commitment of OST funds of $21.! million, $10.9 million, and $~.4 million in FY 1999, FY 2000, and FY 2001, respectively) and replicated at other sites, as specified in the terms of the proposals.
