Expedited site characterization

Expedited Site Characterization (ESC) is being offered as a new, more cost-effective way to perform DOE environmental site characterizations. Site characterization of environmental cleanup sites can be costly and time consuming. {open_quotes}Traditional techniques,{close_quotes} though effective, are the outgrowth of cautious and often restrictive regulatory control. At some sites up to 40% of the funds and 70% of the time spent on cleanup operations have been devoted to characterization. More realistically, the DOE`s Ten Year Plan (TYP) Cost Rollup by Category (high budgetary version) budgets $1.34 billion to remedial action assessments out of a total of $9.7 billion in remedial actions - about 14% of the total TYP expenditures for this type of cleanup work. The expenditure percentage for characterization drops to a much lower 3% of total expenditures during outyears, after 2006, as most of the assessments will have been completed during the early TYP years. (The sampling and monitoring costs, however, rise from 7% of the budget during the TYP to 30% during the outyears as this activity continues and others decline. Improved characterizations could have the potential to reduce the need for some of these ongoing monitoring costs.) Fortunately, regulatory agencies have begun to relax many of the constraints on site characterization allowing more efficient and innovative approaches to be applied. Argonne National Laboratory`s Expedited Site Characterization is perhaps the best defined of these new approaches. ESC is founded on the premise that it is cheaper, faster, and more efficient to develop and test a conceptual model (or {open_quotes}hypothesis{close_quotes}) of contamination at a site than it is to collect data on a statistical basis and then attempt to model a site from those data. The difference between these two approaches has been described as a {open_quotes}scientific versus an engineering approach{close_quotes}