Environmental Assessment

Environmental contamination issues including radioactive waste disposal require an assessment of the fate and transport of the contaminants and the impacts the contaminants may have on human health.

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has been a leader in developing and applying source term models for low-level radioactive wastes. Seven computer models have been developed for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to address this issue. These models evaluate performance of the disposal facility, waste containers, and waste forms in estimating radionuclide release and transport in the subsurface (link).

These include two-dimensional transport models BLT (Breach, Leach, and Transport), BLT-MS (Multi- species), BLT-EC (Equilibrium Chemistry Reactive Transport)), and one -dimensional transport DUST (Disposal Unit Source Term), DUST-MS (Multi-species), and DUST-MSD (multiple species with distributed container failure models) and GETAR (Gas Evolution, Transport and Reaction) have seen widespread application in the United States and throughout the world. The manuals and software are available upon request. (contact)

BNL has also worked extensively in risk assessment and management and the use of decision support software to assist in defining clean-up goals and selecting among options for land re-use in environmental remediation problems. Risk assessment work includes use of air dispersion models to predict mercury deposition patterns from coal-fired power plants (more). These deposition patterns were used to perform human health risk analysis. Risk assessment for residual radioactive contamination left after decontamination of nuclear facilities. BNL has conducted several in-depth reviews of environmental decision support software as part of the EPA’s environmental technology verification program.

Future land use options depend on a number of site-specific metrics such as human and ecological risks, remedial options and their technical feasibility, land use options, time required to remediate the land, and costs. Selection of the appropriate choice for future land use requires a balance between these different measures. A new project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s International Proliferation Prevention program teams scientists from the Former Soviet Union and the U.S. to address this problem. This project will develop risk-based protocols for systematically and reproducibly assessing the environmental value of sites having varying degrees of anthropogenic disturbance and contamination. The methodology will be implemented as a comprehensive but modular software package focused on supporting decisions for land use with multiple and often conflicting measures of success. The software will be designed such that the applications will be focused on the processes and events at the site without the overhead of incorporating all processes as is typically done in most software packages. It is anticipated that parts of many of the software programs discussed in this section will be incorporated into this risk-based decision support tool.

The multi-attribute framework will allow for the comparison of alternatives based on established criteria of efficiency, response time, spatial and temporal disturbance of habitats, resulting environmental exposures, ecological risks and costs. Such multi -attribute comparisons will form the foundation for ranking response strategies. After development, the risk-based decision protocol will be applied to assess the environmental and economic value of two sites in the Former Soviet Union that are in the process of deciding future land use options. The sites selected for assessment in this project will be open to not only ecological preservation, but also multiple land reuse alternatives. The application of the protocols will allow testing and validation of ecological assessment methodology and allow exploration of their ability to select cost-efficient and economically viable land use alternatives.

Last Modified: January 31, 2008
Please forward all questions about this site to: Linda Satalino