Environmental Management and Stewardship Innovations

Many countries are now pursuing a “site end state” for historical and complex nuclear and naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) industry sites that are nearing completion of decommissioning and remediation activities. Often this requires the use of controls, such as land use restrictions, to manage residual hazards. Where controls are used, both long-term management and stewardship are needed to ensure ongoing protection of people and the environment. Environmental management provides the practical long-term activities such as monitoring and maintenance of the site. The role of a steward is broader and longer-lasting, perhaps in perpetuity, and it embodies the ethical imperative to “take good care of something.” Deciding on a site end state is challenging. While the steps in the process are generally simple, it is difficult to determine how to consider all the technical, social, environmental, and economic factors in a site end state decision. Where a site end state includes administrative and/or physical controls, its design must be cognizant of the associated management and stewardship requirements. Presentations in this session will explore the approaches, challenges, benefits, and innovations associated with the site end state decision-making process; information required for decision-making; technologies needed to support long-term management; regulatory challenges; challenges in transitioning from cleanup to long-term stewardship at sites; and stewardship programs.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning-Empowered Digitization of Environmental Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are powerful tools for capitalizing on the broad range and large quantity of environmental data to provide insights into complex environmental processes and enable more effective environmental management. Presentations in this session will cover research contributions that encompass a broad range of topics related to application of AI, ML, and big data analytics to environmental monitoring, modeling, and remediation. These include, but are not limited to, development and application of AI/ML or digital twin (DT) models to facilitate understanding and design of multiscale environmental management and remediation systems; physics-informed ML and ML-guided numerical modeling to increase the effectiveness and reduce the effort related to the design of remediation and monitoring systems; reduction of system complexity or identification of influential drivers of environmental system behaviors; and exploratory data analysis, pattern recognition, and signature discovery to provide a better understanding of the system dynamics and spatial heterogeneity.

Innovative Characterization and Monitoring Technologies and Methodologies

The combined effects of subsurface heterogeneity and inaccessibility impede understanding of subsurface environments, leading to increased remediation costs, suboptimal remediation performance, and risks to human health and the environment. Geophysical imaging and new sensing technologies improve our understanding of heterogeneous subsurface conditions, providing a significant and cost-effective source of information that also reduces risk. This technical session will highlight novel uses of subsurface sensing to characterize and monitor contaminated sites. Topics will include the interpretation of geophysical data in terms of (bio)geochemical reactions, autonomous 3D monitoring of engineered remediation processes, and new sensing technologies and analysis approaches to monitor subsurface fluxes of water, solutes, or gases.

Emerging Remediation Technologies

Complex sites face a number of remediation challenges related to multiple contaminant types (e.g., inorganics, metals, radionuclides, organics), the depth and heterogeneous nature of the subsurface, variations in flow/boundary conditions over time, and other site characteristics. This session will focus on emerging technologies for in situ remediation to address these types of complex site challenges in the vadose zone (e.g., to treat sources or control flux to groundwater) and in groundwater aquifers. Topics in this session will include technology development (lab-scale, pilot-scale, or full-scale), implementation approaches, including innovative access and delivery methods, and multi-step or combined remediation technologies. 

Environmental Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization

Environmental restoration work requires management and integration of multiple types and formats of data from multiple authoritative sources (that may change over time), data analysis and interpretation, and effective data visualization. These aspects, as well as ensuring that environmental data is FAIR, are important to support effective communication with site managers, regulators, and stakeholders; technically defensible remediation decision-making; and site operations. This session will focus on tools and approaches for management, access, analysis, and visualization of environmental data. Such data includes traditional monitoring data, geophysics data, remote sensing, near-real time monitoring, spatio-temporal analysis, and numerical model data. Topics will include data-driven analytics, development and application of software, 2D/3D data visualization, risk assessment, and evaluation of remedy performance. 

Critical Minerals (including Rare Earth Elements): The Promise, Challenge, and Environmental Risk

The availability of critical minerals, whether as raw material or through the use of existing residuals as feedstocks into other products, is essential to modern-day economies. Demand is increasing across multiple industrial and defense sectors (e.g., cell phones, batteries for electric vehicles), and they have become a critical element of transitions to carbon-neutral systems. Expanding development of these materials will require international cooperation and must be accomplished through efforts that balance environmental, economic, and social/ethical factors. This session will focus on the environmental and technical aspects of critical minerals development, considering both radiological and non-radiological concerns. Special attention will be given to the potential environmental impacts of mining and extraction, their avoidance or mitigation and, where necessary, remediation. Presentations that touch on other issues, such as economics, public perception, and regulatory frameworks, may also be included. 

Ensuring Sustainability and Resiliency of Remediation Projects

At many sites, environmental remediation involves intensive, large-scale industrial activity that extends over decades. While multiple factors can impact the remediation approaches applied and the resulting end state of a site, stakeholders, including regulators, practitioners, scholars, and the general public, argue that emphasis must be placed on remediation approaches that (1) optimize the balance between the different sustainability dimensions and the related environmental, economic, and social outcomes and (2) integrate observed and predicted effects of climate change to ensure resiliency into the future. This session will explore the many facets of sustainability and resiliency as they relate to such considerations as stakeholder goals for future use of a site, resource conservation, carbon footprint reduction, cost containment, and vulnerability to climate-driven changes (e.g., sea level rise, temperature extremes, catastrophic weather events, wildfire risk). Presentations and discussion will help identify contrasting perspectives of stakeholders, in light of their different roles, fields of practice, and/or disciplines, and highlight potential points of convergence. Topics will include discussions and demonstrations of modeling approaches, decision-making frameworks and tools, implementation strategies, and climate vulnerability assessments.

Multiscale Modeling in Porous Media: Theory to Applications

One of the biggest challenges of predictive modeling in porous media is that different aspects of physical, chemical, and biological systems (flow, transport, reactions, etc.) are interconnected across a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Modeling and prediction of coupled physicochemical and/or biogeochemical processes at multiple space and time scales is critical for achieving a mechanistic understanding of processes occurring in both engineered and natural systems. For engineered systems, multiscale modeling is used in a myriad of applications, including the design and optimization of porous media, combustion systems, fuel cells, and chemical reactors. In contrast to engineered systems, which are often well-characterized, natural subsurface systems generally have uncharacterized heterogeneity with coupled process interactions across a wide spectrum of scales. This gives rise to both emergent properties and scale-dependent behavior that is not always readily predictable. Although significant advancements have been made in the theory of complex, multiscale phenomena, there remain numerous open questions regarding both the appropriate theoretical frameworks needed, and the level of detail required to accurately represent such processes once a framework is identified. This session will explore recent developments in multiscale modeling of both engineered and natural systems and may include presentations on new theoretical approaches as well as case studies involving field applications. This topic is posed broadly and may include upscaling methods and upscaled model formulations, multiscale model coupling, multiresolution or multi-fidelity modeling, linkage of physics-based models with ML, and model abstraction approaches. Of particular interest are the representations of coarse-grained nonlinear phenomena (reactions, nonlinear diffusion, etc.).

Autonomous Measurements and Remote Sensing across Scales

Understanding the spatial and temporal distribution of site characteristics is critical to the design and operation of a remediation strategy or site management plan. Autonomous approaches have the potential to streamline analysis of samples at the lab scale to facilitate high throughput, but also can be deployed at the field scale to perform reliable data collection and telemetry from sensor networks. Similarly, unoccupied vehicles have seen recent growth in environmental sensing and imaging by offering novel approaches to data collection that increase efficiency and reduce risk to field staff. This technical session will highlight the use of automated technologies and unoccupied vehicle sensing platforms to understand site characteristics and monitor field conditions. Topics will range from novel capabilities achieved through automation, the challenges associated with operating automated or unoccupied platforms, the interpretation of data collected from unoccupied vehicles, and the novel information gleaned from studies that deploy these approaches.

The General Poster Session is open to all topics relevant to the remediation of complex sites. Examples include characterization studies, contaminant fate and transport, geochemical and microbiological contaminant controls over contaminant mobility, and conceptual site modeling, among others.