Improving Remedial Planning Performance: The Rattlesnake Creek Experience
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Buffalo District, 1776 Niagara St., Buffalo, NY 14207 (United States)
- Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Ave., EVS 900, Argonne, IL 60439 (United States)
- Cabrera Services, Inc., 29 Railroad Avenue, Middletown, NY 10940 (United States)
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Buffalo District, has responsibility for characterizing and remediating radiologically contaminated properties under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). Most of these FUSRAP sites include radionuclide contamination in soils where excavation and offsite disposal is the selected remedial action. For many FUSRAP soil remediation projects completed to date, the excavated contaminated soil volumes have significantly exceeded the pre-excavation volume estimates that were developed for project planning purposes. The exceedances are often attributed to limited and sparse datasets that are used to calculate the initial volume estimates. These volume exceedances complicate project budgeting and planning. Building on these experiences, the USACE took a different approach in the remediation of Rattlesnake Creek, located adjacent to the Ashland 2 site, in Tonawanda, New York. This approach included a more extensive pre-design data collection effort to improve and reduce the uncertainty in the pre-excavation volume estimates, in addition to formalizing final status survey data collection strategies prior to excavation. The final status survey sampling was fully integrated with the pre-design data collection, allowing dual use of the pre-design data that was collected (i.e., using the data to close out areas where contamination was not found, and feeding the data into volume estimates when contamination was encountered). The use of real-time measurement techniques (e.g., X-ray fluorescence [XRF] and gamma walkover surveys) during pre-excavation data collection allowed the USACE to identify and respond to unexpected contamination by allocating additional data collection to characterizing new areas of concern. The final result was an estimated soil volume and excavation footprint with a firm technical foundation and a reduction in uncertainty. However, even with extensive pre-design data collection, additional contamination was found during the excavation that led to an increase in the soil volume requiring offsite disposal. This paper describes the lessons learned regarding improving remedial planning performance from the Rattlesnake Creek experience and evaluates the level of project uncertainty reduction achieved through pre-design data collection. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, Inc., PO Box 13023, Tucson, AZ, 85732-3023 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21210673
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-09-WM-06378; TRN: US09V1101081135
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Waste Management 2006 Symposium - WM'06 - Global Accomplishments in Environmental and Radioactive Waste Management: Education and Opportunity for the Next Generation of Waste Management Professionals, Tucson, AZ (United States), 26 Feb - 2 Mar 2006; Other Information: Country of input: France; 5 refs
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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