2.3: Environmental Remediation

Understand the complex physical, chemical, and biological properties of contaminated sites for new solutions to environmental remediation.

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As a legacy of DOE’s nuclear security mission over the last half century and extending through the Cold War, large tracts of land surrounding DOE weapons production and other sites became contaminated. The magnitude of some of these problems is enormous, and many cannot be addressed using current technology. Despite progress on many fronts, efficient, effective, and affordable solutions to environmental contamination continue to elude us, whether the contaminants are radionuclides, toxic metals, or organic compounds. There is much we need to learn. How do contaminants interact with minerals, plant materials, and microbes in soils? How do they move to the groundwater or other locations where they can adversely affect human health? This poor understanding of how contaminants behave in Nature restricts the development of costeffective cleanup strategies and, in some cases, our ability even to recognize problems. Our challenge is to understand natural cleanup methods, put them to work, and improve cleanup decisions in the future. Our strategy includes the following emphases: • Predict the fate and transport of contaminants with improved tools and understanding of interdependent biological, chemical, and physical processes. • Take laboratory experiments and theory to the field, testing our theoretical predictions and models of the complex natural environment over considerable distances and time scales. • Provide the next generation of computational and experimental capabilities for detailed understanding of contaminant behavior, including synchrotron light sources and the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. • Use Nature’s own tool kit and rely on new understanding of the biology of microbes and microbial communities, geochemistry, plants and ecosystems, biomimetic agents, and nanomachines to explore innovative options for cleaning up the environment. • Develop a basic understanding of complex chemical behavior of stored radioactive wastes to enable the discovery of novel separations and other treatment methods that can dramatically reduce the costs and risks of radioactive waste treatment and disposal.

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