Environmental Restoration: Part 2 - Site Information and Regulatory Concerns

In Environmental Restoration: Part 2 - Site Information and Regulatory Concerns, you'll learn ...

• How to estimate the direction of surface water flow
• Assessing the general direction of groundwater flow
• Methods to reconstruct the number and orientation of disposal trenches
• How to develop a reasonable inventory of buried radioactive wastes

Overview

Credit: 2 PDH

Length: 32 pages

This course, Part 2, is the second in a series of six sequential courses, Parts 1 through 6, that present the history and steps taken to remediate the environmental hazards created by the land disposal of chemical and radioactive wastes on the campus of a research institute. The practice of shallow land burial of hazardous wastes was widely used throughout the US between the 1960s and the 1980s. However, since the late 1980s both federal and state legislations were promulgated requiring the environmental regulatory agencies throughout the US to investigate operating, decommissioned and abandoned landfills of all types having in mind the ultimate goal of mitigating the impacts these waste disposal sites have on the natural environment.

This series of courses, are written from the perspective of a Manager who leads a team charged with the implementation of an environmental Remedial Investigation (RI), Feasibility Study (FS) and Engineered Remediation (ER) of a hazardous waste disposal site. The courses draw from numerous environmental investigations managed by the author across the US. As such, the scenarios that are presented are similar to those a professional environmental engineering practitioner faces in real life.

The case that is developed here is used as an example and a vehicle to present and discuss concepts and project implementation strategies gained through years of experience. This information is not usually found or taught in traditional or standard academic courses dealing with environmental issues or investigations. In their entity this series of courses can be considered an implementation guide for conducting environmental investigations at hazardous waste disposal sites. The environmental problems in the example scenario are those encountered at a decommissioned hazardous and low-level radioactive waste disposal site owned by a research institute. The presentations are sequenced in the order in which investigations would be conducted by an environmental consulting firm contracted to perform and supervise the work that would be done in order to assess the magnitude of the problem and develop appropriate mitigation strategies for the rehabilitation of the site.

This course, Part 2: Site Information and Regulatory Concerns, follows the systematic examination of existing information about the disposal activities that took place at the site and the interpretation of archived environmental testing results. The purpose was to understand what information was already available and what interpretations could be made in order to plan the next phase of work. The specific items addressed include: Definition of the property boundary and adjacent land uses; Reconstruction of the history of waste disposal at the site; Performance of a preliminary site reconnaissance; Reconstruction of the locations and geometry of the disposal trenches; Compilation of a radioactive waste inventory; Compilation of a chemical waste inventory and Review existing soil, vegetation, surface water and groundwater testing results.

The course identifies when assumptions had to be made where data were incomplete, missing, or of suspect quality. The analytical results of early groundwater, surface water and soil testing are summarized and the value of this information in planning additional field sampling and testing is discussed. This case history explains the difficulties encountered in attempting to interpret existing conditions using this often incomplete or questionable data set.