Expediting environmental cleanup--nationwide stakeholder involvement in U.S. Department of Energy`s plume focus area

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) faces a major challenge in cleaning up its contaminated sites throughout the United States. One major area of concern is the plumes in soil and ground water, contaminated with a myriad of different pollutants. DOE recently established the Plume Focus Area to address these problems. The mission of the Plume Focus Area is to enhance the deployment of innovative technologies for containing and cleaning up contaminant plumes in ground water and soil at all DOE sites. By involving a range of stakeholders in the selection, demonstration, and evaluation of new technologies, the deployment of these technologies can be enhanced. Through this strategy, technology users join with other stakeholders to assess the appropriateness of new technologies for addressing plume contamination, and characterize the conditions under which those emerging technologies will be acceptable. If new plume cleanup technologies are to be deployable, they must improve on today`s baseline technologies. If sites and their stakeholders understood the technologies, recognize that their concerns are reflected in the evaluations and demonstrations, and participate in assessing how technology performance addresses their concerns, the likelihood of acceptance of those technologies is greater. Thus, broad stakeholder acceptance becomes part of the definitionmore » of an improved technology, evaluated in parallel with technical performance, cost, and other traditional parameters. This paper further describes the goals and objectives of the Plume Focus Area and emphasizes the importance of stakeholder involvement in achieving them. The process of coordinating with DOE sites is described to highlight how stakeholder input is considered throughout the Plume Focus Area decision-making process in selecting, developing, demonstrating, and evaluating innovative technologies to address plume problems.« less