[en] For several years Westinghouse Savannah River Company (WSRC) has been examining ways of reducing monitoring costs. Most of these efforts have been aimed at reducing the number of wells sampled or reducing sample frequency. With regards to monitoring around the M-Area Settling Basin, we are now examining a possible reduction in the number of constituents analyzed. Constituents that can be dropped entirely are nonhazardous inorganics generally referred to as water quality indicators. Monitoring for these parameters is sensible when a facility is in detection monitoring, but it is much less useful at a facility like the M-Area Basin. The water quality indicators are helpful in detecting whether or not a facility has impacted the environment. But their concentrations are not important in themselves. At M-Area, it is well documented that the facility has impacted groundwater quite seriously with a known group of hazardous constituents. So the concentrations of the nonhazardous constituents are of little interest. At M-Area there are 41 Point of Compliance (POC) wells monitoring an area of about .25 square miles and about 236 plume definition wells monitoring the surround 4 square miles. The POC wells form a picket line around the facility and are intended to detect any constituents leaching from it. They are also intended to determine whether such constituents exceed action levels. Plume definition wells are added to define the plume created a particular set or subset of contaminants. The M-Area plume definition wells were installed in several phases over a ten year time span as SRS struggled to define the extent of a large plume of TCE and PCE. These wells were not located for the purpose of monitoring the numerous inorganics and radionuclides on the unit's monitoring list. Many of the inorganics and radionuclides are relatively immobile in groundwater and cannot be expected to appear in the widely scattered TCE/PCE plume definition wells