TRACKING CLEAN UP AT HANFORD
The Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order, known as the ''Tri-Party Agreement'' (TPA), is a legally binding agreement among the US Department of Energy (DOE), The Washington State Department of Ecology, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for cleaning up the Hanford Site. Established in the 1940s to produce material for nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project, Hanford is often referred to as the world's large environmental cleanup project. The Site covers more than 580 square miles in a relatively remote region of southeastern Washington state in the US. The production of nuclear materials at Hanford has left a legacy of tremendous proportions in terms of hazardous and radioactive waste. From a waste-management point of view, the task is enormous: 1700 waste sites; 450 billion gallons of liquid waste; 70 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater; 53 million gallons of tank waste; 9 reactors; 5 million cubic yards of contaminated soil; 22 thousand drums of mixed waste; 2.3 tons of spent nuclear fuel; and 17.8 metric tons of plutonium-bearing material and this is just a partial listing. The agreement requires that DOE provide the results of analytical laboratory and non-laboratory tests/readings to the lead regulatory agency to help guide then in making decisions. The agreement also calls for each signatory to preserve--for at least ten years after the Agreement has ended--all of the records in it, or its contractors, possession related to sampling, analysis, investigations, and monitoring conducted. The Action Plan that supports the TPA requires that Ecology and EPA have access to all data that is relevant to work performed, or to be performed, under the Agreement. Further, the Action Plan specifies two additional requirements: (1) that EPA, Ecology and their respective contractor staffs have access to all the information electronically, and (2) that the databases are accessible to, and used by, all personnel doing TPA-related work. The Hanford Environmental Databases document and track the progress of Site cleanup--Hanford Environmental Information System (HEIS), Hanford Well Information Data System (HWIS), the Waste Information Data System (WIDS), and the Hanford Geographic Information System (HGIS). HEIS contains the date, time, location, and results from samples taken during activities such as field investigations and groundwater monitoring. HWIS contains the details of the wells and boreholes on the Site. WIDS tracks the waste sites--from discovery through cleanup. Each of the databases is supported by several applications for entering or retrieving information. HGIS keeps track of the locations for waste (WIDS) sites, wells and boreholes, and other sampling site locations. Of the applications used to extract data from the Environmental Databases, the Hanford Map Portal (QMAP) is the newest, and perhaps the most efficient. QMAP combines the HGIS spatial information with the information from the other databases so that users may browse to, or query, the waste site or well of interest. A query of a waste site or well engages QMAP to find the object and then the user may access the appropriate database. This paper describes the Environmental Databases and their maintenance, as well as the applications used to access them. Collectively, these databases are a critical element in formally documenting the work and associated decisions made during the cleanup of Hanford.
- Research Organization:
- FGG (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC06-96RL13200
- OSTI ID:
- 840683
- Report Number(s):
- HNF-24532-FP, Rev.0; TRN: US0502137
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Conference title not supplied, Conference location not supplied, Conference dates not supplied; Other Information: PBD: 27 May 2005
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE WASTES, AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
BOREHOLES
ECOLOGY
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
LIQUID WASTES
MANHATTAN PROJECT
NUCLEAR FUELS
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
RADIOACTIVE WASTES
US EPA
WASTE MANAGEMENT