Federal Facility Agreement Annual Progress Report for Fiscal Year 1999 Oak Ridge, Tennessee

The U.S. Department of Energy-Oak Ridge Operations (DOE-ORO) EM Program adopted a watershed approach for performing Remedial Investigations (RIs) and characterizations for ORR because it is an effective system for determining the best methods for protecting and restoring aquatic ecosystems and protecting human health. The basic concept is that water quality and ecosystem problems are best solved at the watershed level rather than at the individual water-body or discharger level. The watershed approach requires consideration of all environmental concerns, including needs to protect public health, critical habitats such as wetlands, biological integrity, and surface and ground waters. The watershed approach provides an improved basis for management decisions concerning contaminant sources and containment. It allows more direct focus by stakeholders on achieving ecological goals and water quality standards rather than a measurement of program activities based on numbers of permits or samples. The watershed approach allows better management strategies for investigations, therefore maximizing the utilization of scarce resources. Feasibility studies (FSs) evaluate various alternatives in terms of environmental standards, the protection of human health and the environment, and the costs of implementation to find the optimum solution among them. Society has to decide how much it is willing to spend to meet the standards and to be protective. Conducting FSs is the process of trading off those criteria to pick that optimum point that society wants to achieve. Performing this analysis at the watershed scale allows those trade-offs to be made meaningfully. In addition, a Land Use Control Assurance Plan for the ORR was prepared to identify the strategy for assuring the long-term effectiveness of land use controls. These land use controls will be relied upon to protect human health and the environment at areas of the ORR undergoing remediation pursuant to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act and/or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. This plan will be implemented by means of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) incorporating its terms with the United States EPA and TDEC. The majority of projects described in this report are grouped into five watersheds. They are the East Tennessee Technical Park (ETTP) Watershed (formerly the K-25 Site), the Melton Valley (MV) and Bethel Valley (BV) Watersheds at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Bear Creek Valley (BCV) and Upper East Fork Poplar Creek (UEFPC) Watersheds at the Y-12 Plant