Pacific Northwest Laboratory environmental technologies available for deployment

The Department of Energy created the Office of Environmental Management (EM) to conduct a 30-year plus, multi-billion dollar program to manage the wastes and cleanup the legacy from over fifty years of nuclear material production. Across the DOE System there are thousands of sites containing millions of metric tons of buried wastes and contaminated soils and groundwater. Additionally, there are nearly 400,000 m3 of highly radioactive wastes in underground storage tanks, over 1,400 different mixed-waste streams, and thousands of contaminated surplus facilities, some exceeding 200,000 m2 in size. Costs to remediate all these problems have been estimated to be as much as several hundred billion dollars. The tremendous technical challenges with some of the problems and the high costs of using existing technologies has led the Department to create the Office of Technology Development (TD) to lead an aggressive, integrated national program to develop and deploy the needed advanced, cost-effective technologies. This program is developing technologies for all major cleanup steps: assessment, characterization, retrieval, treatment, final stabilization, and disposal. Work is focused on the Department's five major problem areas: High-Level Waste Tank Remediation; Contaminant Plume Containment and Remediation; Mixed Waste Characterization, Treatment, and Disposal; Contaminated Soils and Buried Wastes Facility Transitioning, Decommissioning, and Final Disposal