Environmental monitoring, restoration and assessment: What have we learned?

The Twenty-Eighth Hanford Symposium on Health and the Environment was held in Richland, Washington, October 16--19, 1989. The symposium was sponsored by the US Department of Energy and the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, operated by Battelle Memorial Institute. The symposium was organized to review and evaluate some of the monitoring and assessment programs that have been conducted or are currently in place. Potential health and environmental effects of energy-related and other industrial activities have been monitored and assessed at various government and private facilities for over three decades. Most monitoring is required under government regulations; some monitoring is implemented because facility operators consider it prudent practice. As a result of these activities, there is now a substantial radiological, physical, and chemical data base for various environmental components, both in the United States and abroad. Symposium participants, both platform and poster presenters, were asked to consider, among other topics, the following: Has the expenditure of millions of dollars for radiological monitoring and assessment activities been worth the effort? How do we decide when enough monitoring is enough? Can we adequately assess the impacts of nonradiological components -- both inorganic and organic -- of wastes? Are current regulatory requirements too restrictive or too lenient? Can monitoring and assessment be made more cost effective? Papers were solicited in the areas of environmental monitoring; environmental regulations; remediation, restoration, and decommissioning; modeling and dose assessment; uncertainty, design, and data analysis; and data management and quality assurance. Individual reports are processed separately for the databases