An approach for testing attainment of soil background standards at Superfund sites
After the soil at a Superfund site has been remediated it is necessary to determine if the remediation effort has been successful. This determination involves comparing concentrations in soil at the remediated site with cleanup standards. The cleanup standard may be based on technological capabilities a risk assessment, or site-specific background concentrations. In this paper we discuss an approach for using two complementary nonparametric tests, the Wilcoxon Rank Sum (WRS) test and the Quantile test, to assess attainment of site-specific background standards at remediated Superfund sites. The tests are complementary in the sense that the WRS test is more powerful than the Quantile test to defect shift alternatives, i.e., to detect when the remedial action failed more or less uniformly throughout the Superfund site, whereas the Quantile test has more power than the WRS test to detect mixture alternatives, i.e., to detect when remedial action was inadequate in only a portion of the site. The approximate minimum power of the Quantile test is obtained and used to develop sample size tables for the test. A simple hot spot'' test is also used to insure that remedial action is conducted at least locally when any measurement exceeds a specified upper-limit value. 13 refs., 2 tabs.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (USA)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USEPA
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC06-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 6215360
- Report Number(s):
- PNL-SA-18298; CONF-9008155-3; ON: DE91004895
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: American Statistical Association (ASA) conference on statistics and national security, Anaheim, CA (USA), 6-8 Aug 1990
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
REMEDIAL ACTION
EVALUATION
SOILS
DECONTAMINATION
COMPILED DATA
CONTAMINATION
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
RADIOECOLOGICAL CONCENTRATION
RISK ASSESSMENT
SUPERFUND
US DOE
CLEANING
DATA
ECOLOGICAL CONCENTRATION
INFORMATION
LAWS
NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
NUMERICAL DATA
POLLUTION LAWS
US ORGANIZATIONS
054000* - Nuclear Fuels- Health & Safety