14 Environmental Management Technology Development panels with membership outside of DOE, these panels will not serve the same role as that of external peer reviews. Peer review can be conducted in many forms: project-focused rapid response, specific technology area review, and comprehensive research needs assessment. By making use of this full range of review modes, DOE-EM can avail itself of constructive criticism without slowing progress toward its technologydevelopment goals. A helpful associated activity is expert elicitation, which uses expert judgment in a controlled and structured manner to enhance the knowledge base for making a decision. Expert elicitation is being used to provide important input to the performance assessments of the potential repositories and facilities for the disposal and storage of nuclear waste. Agencies such as DOE and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) are developing detailed guidance documents based on their experiences with expert elicitation. Because of the interrelationship between peer review and expert elicitation, the committee intends to review these guidance documents in future considerations of the peer-review process. Peer review is being applied to some current programs, such as those of the Landfills Focus Area. Examples of such activities are the review of technology projects presented at the TRU (transuranic waste), TRU Mixed, and Mixed LowLevel Waste Treatment Technologies Technical Peer Review (November 13-15, 1995, in Dallas, Tex.), and the Non-Destructive Assay/Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDA/NDE) Review (January 25-26, 1996, in Pittsburgh, Pa.) Another documented effort is the recently completed review of a microbial filter project, prior to the commitment of funds for development costs in later stages of development. These examples illustrate that peer review can be used to help guide environmental technology development throughout the EM program. The committee emphasizes that DOE needs an effective external peerreview process and that it should be implemented in a uniform, consistent manner. Recommendation: DOE-EM needs to develop and uniformly apply a standardized peer-review process designed to assess the following parameters in all five focus areas: the appropriateness of the identified technology needs, the appropriateness of projects to meet specific technology needs, and the soundness of the technical approach being used or proposed on separate projects. Information Gathering on Technologies Available and Being Developed in the United States and Abroad The DOE-EM program needs to improve its awareness and understanding of the availability and development status of technologies applicable to its multiple waste-management problems, not only in its own laboratories and contract organizations, but throughout industry, universities, and worldwide. It should be Improving Development 15 well. DOE-EM needs this knowledge of available technologies for the three main purposes that follow: to compare its technology needs to the status of technology, leading to the identification of technology gaps that require development efforts; to ascertain the extent to which proven technologies that exist in other agencies, the private sector, or overseas might be applicable to a specific problem, thus providing the possibility that further technology development is not required; and to assess the potential for commercialization and collaborative development of the technologies being considered for development. Review of the DOE program and documents have shown that DOE's efforts to keep abreast of the status of technologies related to its needs have been inadequate. Technologies that already exist have been redeveloped, more so in areas related to wastes containing hazardous chemicals (e.g., DNAPL issues), than in areas related to wastes containing radionuclides. In addition, developers routinely are urged to pursue commercialization when many technologies are only applicable to unique DOE wastes or situations. There is also a risk that necessary technology development may be affected adversely, using the rationale that privatization could meet the needs, despite the fact that environmental cleanup conditions are unique to the DOE system and there is no incentive for the private sector to develop technologies. Recommendation: DOE-EM should undertake an explicit effort to inventory the status of technologies relevant to its interests and disseminate the results throughout the program. This inventory should consider both the wastes to be addressed and the conditions (e.g., requirements for remote operation). It should cover both domestic and international venues and all sectors (government, commercial, academic). Such an inventory will allow DOE-EM to identify those research areas where solutions or partial solutions are already available from external sources, as well as those development areas where major DOE-EM technology-development efforts are 3 TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT IN DOE: FOCUS AREAS AND CROSS-CUTTING AREAS Focus Areas The five CEMT subcommittees reviewed and evaluated the wastemanagement technology-development activities in the five focus areas of DOE's EM-50 program. Each of the subcommittees has met with DOE headquarters and field staff who have responsibilities for a focus area. In addition, three of the subcommittees have visited the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, S.C., where waste-management R&D remediation operations are being conducted. The subcommittees have studied DOE focus-area planning documents and interviewed several levels of management to assess the applicability and quality of the technology-development programs. The subcommittee reports in Appendix A contain the substance of their assessments, including conclusions and recommendations concerning the work of the focus areas. Some of the conclusions and recommendations in the five reports are strikingly similar and apply to the activities of all five of the focus areas and cross-cutting areas. In the focus and cross-cutting area studies, some general findings of technology development emerged. These same findings are described as the five major points highlighted in Chapter 2. Some of the specific recommendations for the focus and cross-cutting areas are discussed below. Recommendations: Plumes Focus Area 1. The Plumes Focus Area should identify the major risk and cost drivers associated with remediation of DOE contaminant plumes and develop an integrated systems approach to drive technology development that meets the EM strategic goals of risk reduction, cost efficiency, environmental restoration, and regulatory compliance. 18 Environmental Management Technology Development The strategic goal recorded in the Environmental Management Program Strategic Plan (USDOE, 1994b) highlights the goal of reducing plume characterization expenditures by 50 percent by fiscal year 1997, a goal that seems optimistic. An integrated systems approach is recommended because it might enable DOE to achieve such a cost reduction while still obtaining sufficient characterization data. This recommendation is especially important, because numerous contaminant plumes have not been adequately characterized yet. 3. An assessment should be made of what has been accomplished and learned so far in the Plumes Focus Area. Each remediation or demonstration could be probed to identify successes and lessons learned, addressing the questions of what it did and did not accomplish, and why. These lessons learned could provide valuable scientific data in charting progress and learning about remediation attempts and could serve as a guide for future approaches. It is important to look at all learning experiences as well as successes, because these experiences have valuable information content. Eventually, a good rationale for technology development could be developed, ideally based on both field data and theoretical models. 4. DOE should establish a process for developing specific cleanup goals for each of its contaminated sites within the regulatory framework, because the appropriate approach for remediation of a site depends upon the cleanup goals, intended land use, and technical impracticability issues. Recommendations: Landfills Focus Area 1. Greater effort is needed in long-term performance testing and monitoring of engineered containment techniques and systems, including covers, caps, barrier walls, and floors. 2. A problem-solving orientation in technology development is advocated. The subcommittee acknowledges the focus area's efforts to date in these areas and offers three preliminary suggestions to improve and help implement the problemsolving orientation: a) A ranking/categorization for landfill-related problems based on relative risk would be useful to drive technology development in DOE. These analyses need not use sophisticated models and may already exist to some degree in DOE literature. b) Technology needs should be established from this risk prioritization and used to identify priority technical tasks. c) These technical tasks would then be organized into product lines, based on technology rather than the waste type (e.g., TRU/Mixed Waste-Arid; TRU/Mixed Waste-Non-Arid; Low-Level Waste/Other-Arid; Low-Level Waste/Other-Non-Arid) as is currently the practice. The proposed technology grouping would include five product lines: i) characterization (or assessment), ii) retrieval (encompassing technology development for any Technology Devlopment in DOE iii) treatment (including both in- and ex-situ methods), iv) containment and monitoring, and 19 3. Each technical project would benefit from clearly established goals, a strategic plan to guide development, and an action plan describing how these strategic goals are to be met. DOE's current system of "gate" reviews is supported and should be used more broadly throughout the Landfills Focus Area as a helpful tool in technology-development planning. Gate reviews are DOE's system of determining the level of maturation for specific technologies. Gates represent the successive stages of technology development in EM-50's "technology maturation model” used to track the project they fund. For instance, the lowerlevel gates (1-3) correspond to R&D, gate 4 is the stage where the decision whether or not to continue funding the technology is made, and higher-level gates (5 and 6) include demonstration and the final stage of implementation. Recommendations: High-Level Waste in Tanks Focus Area 1. Substantial technology-development needs remain to be addressed if the high-level waste in tanks is to be successfully remediated. The DOE should continue to support a balanced technology-development program integrated across all involved organizations, including EM-30, -40, and -50, and Energy Research. 2. A number of important technology needs related to managing highlevel waste in tanks are common to the four DOE sites that have alkaline nitrate supernatant-saltcake-sludge wastes. For the most part, the needs of the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) site are expected to be significantly different from other sites because the waste is acidic. Integrating technologydevelopment efforts would be desirable in order to develop technologies in a costeffective manner and to share the results to the extent they are applicable at multiple sites. However, the subcommittee has not yet had the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing focus area. 3. Program requirements and constraints for technology development should be specifically defined. Issues that should be considered are waste characterization, retrieval from the tanks, processing, immobilization, site closure, and disposal. Recommendations: Mixed-Wastes Focus Area 1. Because waste treatment is only one, albeit essential, step of the management of radioactive mixed wastes, decisions related to selection of a treatment technology or to development of a new technology should be made in the perspective |