PNNL

Abstract

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) established the Groundwater/Vadose Zone Integration Project (Integration Project) in late 1997 to provide an innovative, new approach at DOE?s Hanford Site for protecting the Columbia River. The Integration Project uses a roadmap to identify science and technology needs and to define activities to fill the gaps. The roadmap is the primary guide for planning science and technology research needed to address subsurface problems at the Hanford Site and to develop scientific understanding, information, and models needed to support Site milestones. The scheduling/sequencing of these activities in the roadmap, in turn, are coordinated with site milestones and decision points so that required new knowledge and information is available in time to be influential. Work scope identified in the roadmap is addressed by focused, site-specific investigations funded through the Integration Project and the Environmental Management Sciences Program (EMSP). The EMSP research has addressed a number of key scientific issues associated with the inventory of soil wastes at Hanford: tank-waste source terms, the chemical speciation of tank wastes, water and contaminant fluxes through the vadose zone, and geochemical behavior of cesium-137 and chromium. The EMSP-Hanford Site partnership has been one of several recent activities at the Hanford Site that has created important, positive cultural changes among those involved in Hanford Site cleanup. The strong linkages between the EMSP program and the Hanford Site have been accomplished without compromise to the scientific spirit of the EMSP program.