Improving the Environment An Evaluation of the DOE's Environmental Management Program (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Part 4: Utilization of Science, Engineering, and Technology
Part 4: Utilization of Science, Engineering, and Technology
Pages 97-132
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From page 97... ...
Par' IV Utilization of Science, Engineenng, and Technology
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Papadopulos & Associates, Inc. EDGAR BERKEY, President, National Environmental Technology Applications Center, University of Pittsburgh Applied Research Center HAROLD K
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headquarters, citizen groups, environmental advocacy groups, and industries engaged in large environmental remediation efforts. The workshop agenda and list of participants are included in Appendixes B and D, respectively.
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The Department' s historical culture of secrecy and its contamination problems at nuclear weapons sites have profoundly affected public attitudes and opinions. Citizens have expressed concern at the community and national levels about both the potential health and environmental impacts of conditions within the DOE complex, urging that sites be cleaned up.
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, and EM's Office of Technology Development estimates a savings of at least $10 billion. For fiscal year 1995, technology development accounted for 6.5% of the Department's EM budget (waste management and treatment and facility stabilization and decommissioning accounted for 66.0%, and environmental restoration accounted for 27.5%~.
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GENERAL GUIDANCE · We recommend a life-cycle approach in which environmental consideration is given to all processes and products, with a goal of eliminating or drastically reducing waste streams at every stage of the activity. This should apply to both mission activities of the Department and all elements of the Department's environmental remediation efforts, which consist essentially of site characterization, remediation, waste management, and waste disposal.
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To achieve consistency, the Department should attempt, as industry does, to take advantage of flexibility in laws and compliance agreements. However, industry does not have as many constraints as the Department (e.g., in the form of sitespecific advisory boards and compliance agreements)
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For nonimminent risks, risk assessment should be used to identify the benefits of risk reduction as part of overall cost-benefit analyses, which should form the basis for further priority-setting and for the timely resolution of contamination problems that must be addressed as required by law or compliance agreements. TECHNOLOGY SELECTION AND DEVELOPMENT · An explicit, comprehensive approach is needed to identify technology needs, select candidate technologies, and pursue their development.
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· The decision as to whether National Laboratories, universities, or industry should take the lead in the development of any particular technology should be based on a competitive process that undergoes external review, not by formula or some other form of entitlement. Often, forming teams or partners among the different groups for the development of a particular technology is the most effective approach.
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TECHNOLOGY UTILIZATION · During testing and demonstration on a federal facility, the Department should indemnify a technology developer against an unplanned contamination of the environment, but not against failure to properly perform the work. Site operators and the local stakeholders who have taken risks in deciding to utilize innovative technology should be rewarded, not penalized, if a technology fails.
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From page 107... ...
The subcommittee recommends a life-cycle approach to ensure that environmental consideration is given to all processes and products, with a goal of eliminating or drastically reducing waste streams at every stage of the activity. In other words, the Department should pay more attention to the "front end" of the production cycle to minimize or eliminate what comes out the "back end." Generally, it is much more effective from both environmental and cost standpoints to eliminate waste at the source (source reduction)
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However, when they continue to be the primary goals, they become pious statements that cannot be used to make decisions at Department sites and facilities. The Department should take the steps necessary to establish goals with sufficient specificity for decision-making.
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However, as the Department remediation program reaches a funding level of many billions of dollars per year and the Department estimates that the program will last three-fourths of a century, this seemingly intractable issue must be addressed. Reasonable bounds of a range of such levels should be determined nationally.
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For nonimminent risks, risk assessment should be used to identify the benefits of risk reduction as part of overall costbenefit analyses, which should form the basis for further priority-setting and for the timely resolution of contamination problems that must be addressed as required by law or compliance agreements. A serious obstacle to remediation of sites is -that the major factors that contribute to high costs in the remediation program have not been identified.
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The fact that the remediation process is going to continue for over 75 years, at a minimum, affects the approach to technology selection and development. Rushing to remediate now, instead of appropriately characterizing a site or developing a "better" technology, might be the most expensive approach to an already-expensive problem.
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One suggestion was proposed in recent Congressional testimony on Superfund reauthorization: "Communities might be more willing to accept lower cost remediation if a portion of the savings would accrue to the local communities for such things as infrastructure development, improved schools, etc." (Parker, 19951. PROCESS EM has completed useful efforts to implement a new approach to its decision-making processes for technology selection, development, and utilization (DOE, 1994)
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The peer-review groups should include members from outside the Department. Members of external peer-review groups who later develop conflicts of interest should be quickly removed from peer status.
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The subcommittee recommends that the Department's technology-selection process be intimately linked with identified customer needs. We believe that the most important step that EM can take in this regard is to ensure that a structured process is implemented and consistently applied to require consideration of customer needs explicitly and seriously from the beginning of the process.
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The subcommittee thinks that the focus areas that have been defined provide an appropriate structure for accomplishing this objective. The focus areas provide a forum for bringing together technology developers, technology users, potential industrial partners, and other stakeholders for the purpose of developing technical products that can meet customer requirements.
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In addition, the framework needs to have an explicit link between the proposed technology development and customer needs as stated above. The subcommittee recommends that the responsible person or entity for technology selection be clearly identified and that a knowledgeable peerreview group (which is independent and includes members from outside the Department, as discussed above)
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Models for technology development must be strongly coupled to supporting research and development and to technology demonstration and utilization programs. That might be difficult to accomplish, considering the varied nature and dispersed organization of the research supported by the Depar~nent that is applicable to technology development.
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A mechanism that has proved effective in overcoming a number of barriers is stakeholder involvement from technology selection through all stages of development to final implementation. Stakeholder must also be broadly defined and include not only R&D and user personnel, but regulators at all levels, permit writers, and the public.
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Examples of benefits are: decreased likelihood that contamination will reach or affect a population, increased reliability of the method for containing pollution or remediating, decreased production of secondary waste, increasing safety for workers in the environmental management program, and development of a method that might have wide use or commercial viability. As with any analytical tool of this kind, life-cycle analysis has its critics.
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From page 121... ...
Peer reviewers should have information about the costs and benefits of a technology project in comparison with those of other existing technologies to assist them in their evaluations. ROLE OF THE NATIONAL LABORATORIES IN TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT The decision as to whether National Laboratories, universities, or industry should take the lead in the development of any particular technology should be based on a competitive process that undergoes external review, not on a formula or some other form of entitlement.
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Motorola visited the Laboratory on several occasions to inform Laboratory scientists and engineers of the customer requirements, including providing information on the extent of the problem and possible approaches that would be acceptable in the existing corporate and regulatory environment. The Laboratory plans to allocate some of its PY 1996 laboratory-directed research and development funds to start a small number of projects that will be conducted with expanded industry involvement, including that of Motorola and other interested companies.
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These approaches can be categorized according to the nature of the remediation activity as · Technologies related to interim waste-management measures, such as those needed to maintain burial grounds, existing facilities, waste repositories, and plant-waste treatment systems until a final remediation option is agreed on and effected. · Technologies related to final remediation of wastes, such as those needed for processing waste-tank contents, producing final waste forms, and decontaminating and decommissioning equipment and facilities.
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The Department should indemnify a technology developer during test and demonstration against an unplanned contamination of the environment, but not against failure to properly perform the work. The site operator and the local stakeholders who have taken risks in deciding to use innovative technology should be rewarded, not penalized, if the technology fails.
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It does little to solve the Hanford tank-waste problem (although it may help some in reducing worker risks) by emptying the tanks to within 99~o of total cleanup if there has been significant leakage from the tanks already into the surrounding soil.
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1994. Building Consensus Through Risk Assessment and Risk Management in the Department of Energy's Environmental Remediation Program.
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Parker, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Westinghouse Distinguished Scientist Professor of Environmental Systems Engineering, Clemson University. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Sub-Committee on Superfund Waste Control and Risk Assessment.
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The report summarizes major observations made in analyzing the technology-development efforts of the Office of Waste Management, the Office of Environmental Restoration, and the Office of Technology Development and makes recommendations on the basis of some of these observations. Among the observations are the following: technology developers must recognize that environmental technology is needed now for field application to problems that pose a threat, industrial partners must be involved, most of the Department's technology-development efforts are directed toward the enhancement of existing technologies, and a considerable number of environmental technologies and services available in the private sector can be applied now to the Department's environmental-restoration needs.
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Examples of identified secondary barriers are lack of entrepreneurial management, lack of adequate development funding, lack of consistent regulatory enforcement, and limited technology applications for the private sector. Some of the secondary barriers are acknowledged to be outside the realm of the Department.
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It notes that many existing technologies offer risk-reduction and cost-reduction potentials that are not being realized, partly because of regulatory barriers. It identifies the barriers to deployment of new environmental technology as forming the most serious bottleneck and expresses concern that with today's shrinking environmental budgets, investments in environmental science and technology that could substantially reduce future costs will not be made.
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The Depardnent is faced with addressing that problem during an especially tight budget climate. The report suggests that understanding of risks and costs better would be the best way to determine priorities for allocating scarce cleanup funds.
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