A principal goal of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s groundwater cleanup program is to restore groundwater quality to drinking water standards in the upper-glacial aquifer impacted by past Lab practices. This effort that may take as long as 30 years. Cleanup at the Laboratory includes a U.S. Department of Energy component known as long-term stewardship. This component is designed to continue to protect public health, safety, and the environment at and around DOE sites – such as BNL – following implementation of cleanup activities.
The activities that make up long-term stewardship include site monitoring, operation and maintenance of treatment systems, institutional controls such as access restriction, and information management such as record keeping and reporting, to ensure that remedies remain effective. This is in addition to our pollution prevention and waste management programs described in previous issues. For more information about pollution prevention and waste management programs, see http://www.bnl.gov/esd/.
For the Laboratory’s groundwater program, some aspects of long-term stewardship are in place. Monitoring wells can be seen on site and off site. They provide ongoing data to confirm the behavior of affected groundwater. For example, this data helps the Lab determine the effectiveness of the treatment systems.
Once active cleanup is complete, the treatment systems will be turned off, but maintained in a "standby" mode for several years in the event that monitoring activity indicates a need to restart them. Monitoring wells can also provide information on additional pockets of contamination that need to be cleaned.
Consistent with information management, the monitoring data is published as part of the Laboratory’s Site Environmental Report and the annual Groundwater Status Report.