The DOE National Transportation Program Cost-Estimating Model

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) carries out a significant amount of transportation each year, including waste remediation activities at the sites for which it is responsible. In future years, the amount of material transported is expected to increase, and the costs of this transportation are expected to be large. To support the assessment of such costs, a cost-estimating model was developed in 1996, peer-reviewed against other available packaging and transportation cost data, and used to calculate the costs for a significant number of shipping campaigns of radioactive waste. This cost-estimating model, known as the Ten-year Plan Transportation Model (TEPTRAM), served as the cost-estimating model for radioactive material shipments in developing the DOE Office of Environmental Management's Ten Year Plan. The TEPTRAM model considered costs for recovery and processing of the wastes, packaging of the wastes for transport, carriage of the waste and a rough estimate of labor costs associated with preparing and undertaking the shipments. At the user's direction, the model could also include the cost for DOE's interaction with its external stakeholders (e.g., state and local governments and tribal entities) and the cost associated with tracking and communication (e.g., use of the DOE TRANSCOM system). By considering all of these sources of costs, it provided a mechanism for assessing and comparing the costs of various waste processing and shipping campaign alternatives to help guide decision-making. Recognizing that a more user-friendly version of a cost-estimating model would be more useful to the DOE packaging and transportation community, the National Transportation Program sponsored an update of the TEPTRAM model. The new Transportation Cost Estimating Model (TRANSCOST) was developed to fulfill this need. TRANSCOST utilizes a series of input and output screens to facilitate information flow, and a number of new features were added on the basis of features identified by the DOT transportation community as being desirable