Office Of Environmental Management Research Articles

End-use energy indicator approach to improve energy performance at the National University of Colombia Bogotá, under the parameters of the ISO 50001 standard

The university belongs to the services sector, which is why it cannot implement traditional industry indicators such as energy consumption per unit produced. For this reason, we propose indicators for the final use of energy. The indicators were developed through an energy review process of the information in the database of advanced energy meters with the support of the Specialist in Geographic Information Systems of the Environmental Management Office (EMO). Additionally, we considered several existing reports that characterized the final use of energy for some buildings and essential data for defining the percentages each final use will have within the conglomerate of loads registered. Continuity was also given to this process by collecting face-to-face information with the support of each building’s environmental manager. This article shows the behavior of two buildings of the National University Bogotá, the Uriel Gutiérrez building and the Roberto Franco Station, to propose an indicator of final energy use. This approach enabled determining in which end-use the load has the highest consumption, taking into account that this may contribute to the management system energy of the university. This article uses the guidelines implemented in the ISO 50001 standard.

What really went wrong at WIPP: An insider’s view of two accidents at the only US underground nuclear waste repository

ABSTRACTWithin a 10-day period in February 2014, two accidents happened at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico – the United States’ only underground repository for nuclear waste. First, a truck fire deep in the mine spread soot over key equipment and disabled the repository’s air monitoring system. Then a chemical reaction breached a waste drum, causing a radiological release that contaminated large areas of the repository. Two Accident Investigation Boards and a Technical Assessment Team identified the immediate causes of the accidents and recommended remedial actions. The author, who served as the Deputy Under Secretary of the Energy Department at the time of the accidents and during the three years WIPP was closed, examines the larger problems within the Energy Department and its contractors that set the stage for the accidents. He places the blame on mismanagement at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; structural problems created by a statutory “fence” between the National Nuclear Security Administration and the rest of the Energy Department, including the Office of Environmental Management, which is responsible for disposing of the waste from more than 60 years of nuclear weapons production; and a breakdown of the “nuclear culture.”

Environment as datascape: Enacting emission realities in corporate carbon accounting

Ecological modernist approaches to climate change are premised upon knowing carbon emissions. I ask how corporate environmental managers know and do carbon, i.e., shape the reality of emissions. I argue that for managers’ practical purposes carbon exists as malleable data. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a period of 20months in a Fortune 50 multinational corporation, I show that managers materially-discursively arrange heterogeneous entities – databases, files, paper, words, numbers – in and between office spaces, enabling them to stage emission facts as stable and singular. Employing Annemarie Mol’s work on multiplicity, I show that multiple enactments of carbon hang together not by an antecedent body (CO2) but through ongoing configurations of data practices. Disillusioning promissory economic discourses of ‘internalisation’, I demonstrate: Management is materially premised upon preventing purportedly internalised carbon realities from entering capitalist core processes. This undermines carbon economics’ realist promises. Staging some carbon realities as in control is premised upon managers’ ongoing, reflexive, partial and always situated configuration of, e.g., standards, formal meetings or digital data practices in which humans do carbon-as-data. Carbon practices are materially-discursively aligned, forming a configuration. This configuration effects carbon as a malleable and locally configurable space rather than as a closed fact. Reconstructing managers’ practices as configuring carbon-as-dataspace, I argue, allows grasping adequately the contingency and constraints of managing carbon as a particular material-discursive form of environment. In conclusion I generalise the environmental management office as a space that can be configured to stage, beyond carbon, other global environments as well.

Visual Data Analysis as an Integral Part of Environmental Management.

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (DOE/EM) currently supports an effort to understand and predict the fate of nuclear contaminants and their transport in natural and engineered systems. Geologists, hydrologists, physicists and computer scientists are working together to create models of existing nuclear waste sites, to simulate their behavior and to extrapolate it into the future. We use visualization as an integral part in each step of this process. In the first step, visualization is used to verify model setup and to estimate critical parameters. High-performance computing simulations of contaminant transport produces massive amounts of data, which is then analyzed using visualization software specifically designed for parallel processing of large amounts of structured and unstructured data. Finally, simulation results are validated by comparing simulation results to measured current and historical field data. We describe in this article how visual analysis is used as an integral part of the decision-making process in the planning of ongoing and future treatment options for the contaminated nuclear waste sites. Lessons learned from visually analyzing our large-scale simulation runs will also have an impact on deciding on treatment measures for other contaminated sites.

Process Results for the Integrated Near-Tank Treatment System Pilot Demonstration

The Near-Tank Treatment System (NTTS) is a supplementary waste treatment technology for Hanford tank waste being investigated as part of the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management's Advanced Remediation Technologies (ART) Program to reduce the number of high-level waste (HLW) canisters that must be processed by the Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The NTTS combines four basic unit operations into one integrated processing plant: caustic leaching, cross-flow filtration, ion exchange, and electrochemical recovery of sodium. Each unit operation has been studied and tested at the bench scale and was combined into a pilot-scale unit for further development. The performance of the Continuous Sludge Leaching (CSL), Near Tank Cesium Removal (NTCR), and NTTS was evaluated by examining the process and analytical data. Overall, the NTTS integrated CSL and NTCR achieved an operational steady state that performed the waste treatment operations for which it was intended. The integrated system was stable and well-controlled, requiring very little manual intervention, and resulted in a product stream which is suitable for downstream sodium recycle, immobilization, and disposal.

ADVANCED SIMULATION CAPABILITY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT (ASCEM): AN OVERVIEW OF INITIAL RESULTS

ADVANCED SIMULATION CAPABILITY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT (ASCEM): AN OVERVIEW OF INITIAL RESULTS Mark Williamson,* Juan Meza,† David Moulton,‡ Ian Gorton,§ Mark Freshley,§ Paul Dixon,‡ Roger Seitz,¶ Carl Steefel,† Stefan Finsterle,† Susan Hubbard,† Ming Zhu,* Kurt Gerdes,* Russ Patterson,# and Yvette T. Collazo* *U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Environmental Management, Washington, DC, USA †Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA ‡Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA §Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA ¶Savannah River National Laboratory, Aiken, SC, USA #U.S. Department of Energy, Carlsbad, NM, USA The US Department Energy (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM) determined that uni- form application of advanced modeling in the subsurface could potentially help reduce the cost and risk associated with its environmental cleanup mission. In response to this determination, the EM Office of Technology Innovation and Development (OTID), Groundwater and Soil Remediation (GWS Simulation; Model; Groundwater; ASCEM BACKGROUND: INTRODUCTION TO EM NEEDS Fifty years of nuclear weapons production and government-sponsored nuclear energy research in the US during the Cold War generated large amounts of radioactive wastes, spent fuel, excess plutonium and uranium, thousands of contaminated facilities, and contaminated groundwater and soil. During most of that half century, the nation did not have the environmental regulatory structure or nu- clear waste remediation technologies that exist to- day. The result was a legacy of nuclear waste that was stored and disposed of in ways now considered unacceptable (11). At the end of US Government Fiscal Year 2010 (FY10), EM had 18 funded sites. Estimates report these sites to contain 40 million m 3 of contami- nated soil and 6.4 trillion L of contaminated groundwater (7). Current groundwater and soil re- mediation challenges that will continue to be ad- dressed in the next decade include cost-effective characterization, remediation, and monitoring of contaminants in the vadose zone and groundwater.

Investigation of spatial and seasonal variation of VOCs at the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo American Indian nation

The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Environmental Management Office utilized passive air samplers to collect baseline data that can be used in the characterization of Tribal community exposures to ambient air toxics. These passive devices were deployed at ten separate sites. Five of these sites are representative of a housing subdivision (Old Reservation) that is located within the city limits of El Paso, TX, which is characterized as urban/suburban. The remaining five sites are situated in another housing subdivision (New Reservation) that is approximately 8 km southeast, in the city of Socorro, TX, in a rural area surrounded by agricultural fields. The project consisted of two distinct study phases, with each phase corresponding to different weather seasons. The first phase occurred from June through August (warm season), and the second phase occurred from November through February (cool season). During each study phase, passive samplers were deployed for 72 h on five separate occasions, mostly at 18-day intervals. Also, conventional 24-h canister monitoring was conducted at one of the monitoring sites in the Old Reservation for a period of 1 year with data collection occurring once every 6 days. Measurements from the two methods occurring during overlapping monitoring periods were found to be comparable, as were the estimates of precision for each method. Monitoring results indicated significant differences in concentrations of most volatile organic chemicals between reservations and between seasons, with automotive emissions the likely major determinant of levels of the majority of the quantifiable compounds.

Managing environmental problems during transitions: The department of energy as a case study

AbstractMany federal, state, and private agencies deal with long‐term environmental problems within a transition framework where political administrations, funds, regulators, regulatory requirements, environmental conditions, and tribal and stakeholder concerns change. In this article, we examine the types of transitions, as well as important stabilities, that agencies face, the interactions with stakeholders that are vulnerable to disruption or failure, and some of the problems that develop as a result of these conditions, using the U.S. Department of Energy (US DOE's) Office of Environmental Management (EM) as a case study. Transitions, or instabilities, include changes in administrations at the federal, state, and local level; public perceptions and concerns; political climate; available funds; environmental conditions (e.g., global climate change, global contaminant transport, local and regional contamination); international and national business conditions; and site conditions (physical, chemical, biological). Governmental agencies operate under several different kinds of uncertainties, including scientific, fiscal‐year economic, technological, and societal. Not all information can be known, and the outcomes from scientific issues or technologies cannot always be predicted. The authors believe that transitions from one set of conditions to another can be more effectively integrated with the long‐term stability of environmental laws and regulations, and with the stability of the treaty rights and concerns of tribal nations, as well as the shorter‐term stability of career personnel and established programs. A sense of stability for government agencies allowing maintenance of ongoing environmental management programs can also be achieved through processes and programs, such as establishing long‐term contracts (for remediation or restoration work), schedule and scope documents, future land‐use documents, National Environmental Research Parks (which obligate lands to study and conservation), and other programs that set the direction of work and activities for many years. Further, two other factors are essential for success within any agency facing transitions: (1) expectations should be both forward‐looking and realistic, and (2) there must be flexibility in both programs and processes. The authors conclude that several features are essential to addressing some of the problems created by transitions, including information, integration, iteration, interaction, and inclusion. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Technical and regulatory considerations in using freight containers as industrial packages

The US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Environmental Management (EM), is actively pursuing activities to reduce the radiological risk and clean up the environmental legacy of the nation's nuclear weapons programmes. The EM has made significant progress in recent years in the clean-up and closure of sites and is also focusing on longer term activities necessary for the completion of the clean-up programme. The packaging and transportation of contaminated demolition debris and low level waste materials in a safe and cost effective manner are essential in completing this mission. Toward this end, the US Department of Transportation's Final Rule on Hazardous Materials Regulation issued on 26 January 2004, included a new provision authorising the use of freight containers (e.g. 20 and 40 ft ISO containers) as industrial packages type 2 or 3. This paper will discuss the technical and regulatory considerations in using these newly authorised and large packages for the packaging and transportation of low level waste materials.

The United States Department of Energy, Office of Environmental Management’s Progress and Challenges in Environmental Remediation and Decommissioning

Le “Environmental Management Program” (EM), pilote par le Departement de l’Energie americain, est responsable de la gestion du plus vaste programme d’assainissement de l’environnement du monde. Son etendue, sa complexite, la diversite de ses installations et des produits contaminants traites et les defis techniques associes sont sans equivalent. Etabli en 1989, le programme EM a pour mission de nettoyer les resultats de cinq decennies de construction d’armes nucleaires et de recherches liees a l’energie nucleaire realisees sous l’egide du gouvernement. Dans le cadre de cette mission, ce programme comporte la gestion des dechets radioactifs liquides et solides, des combustibles uses, des matieres nucleaires, des sols et des nappes phreatiques contaminees et des installations contaminees situees dans 14 Etats, sur plus de 8 000 km2 de terrain, et plus de 4 500 installations necessitant un declassement. Depuis 1989, le programme EM continue son evolution vers une vraie organisation orientee gestion de projets, jouissant de moyens technologiques et d’ingenierie de classe mondiale. Comme le constate la “National Academy of Public Administration “au travers des evolutions en cours, le programme EM est en bonne voie de devenir un organisme tres performant. Non seulement EM est venu a maturite en tant qu’organisme fonctionnel, mais il a egalement fait des realisations remarquables sur le terrain dans les domaines de la depollution, de la desactivation et du declassement ainsi que dans celui de la gestion des dechets d’origine nucleaire. Ces avancees ont ete realisees dans un contexte ou il a fallu travailler avec quelques-unes des substances parmi les plus dangereuses aujourd’hui connues et effectuer des interventions jamais realisees auparavant dans des milieux hostiles, ou l’on s’est trouve devant l’obligation de concevoir, realiser et exploiter des technologies et des installations uniques au monde, afin de resoudre des problemes longtemps consideres comme insolubles. Par ailleurs, ces realisations ont ete menees a bien en privilegiant au maximum la securite et la reduction des risques. En octobre 2006, pour un cout de cycle de $ 6,7 milliards, l’assainissement et le declassement ont ete realises a l’ancien complexe de fabrication d’armes nucleaires situe a Rocky Flats (Denver, Colorado). Cet ancien site du DOE, autrefois qualifie d’endroit le plus dangereux des Etats-Unis, est aujourd’hui un parc national de protection de la faune gere conjointement avec le Departement de l’Interieur. A plus petite echelle, mais de facon aussi importante, les sites d’Ashtabula, Fernald, Miamisburg et Columbus ont tous termine leur phase d’assainissement. Des avancees significatives ont egalement ete realisees sur les autres grands sites DOE tels l’Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge et Savannah River, avec l’assainissement de 85 des 107 sites, l’evacuation de 50 000 metres cubes de dechets transuraniens dans le “Waste Isolation Pilot Plant”, l’evacuation de plus de 8,5 millions de m3 de dechets de faible activite, la stabilisation de quantites importantes de plutonium issues d’armes nucleaires pour stockage a long terme, la stabilisation de plus de 100 panaches d’eaux souterraines contaminees, la desactivation et le declassement de plus de 1 700 installations industrielles, radiologiques et nucleaires.

Glass fabrication and product consistency testing of lanthanide borosilicate glass for plutonium disposition

The Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management (DOE/EM) plans to conduct the Plutonium Disposition Project at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in Aiken, SC, to disposition excess weapons-usable plutonium. A plutonium glass waste form is a leading candidate for immobilization of the plutonium for subsequent disposition in a geologic repository. The objectives of this present task were to fabricate plutonium-loaded lanthanide borosilicate (LaBS) Frit B glass and perform testing to provide near-term data that will increase confidence that LaBS glass product is suitable for disposal in the proposed Federal Repository. Specifically, testing was conducted in an effort to provide data to Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) personnel for use in performance assessment calculations. Plutonium-containing LaBS glass with the Frit B composition with a 9.5 wt% PuO 2 loading was prepared for testing. Glass was prepared to support glass durability testing via the ASTM product consistency testing (PCT) at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). The glass was characterized with X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM/EDS) prior to performance testing. This characterization revealed some crystalline PuO 2 inclusions with disk-like morphology present in the as-fabricated, quench-cooled glass. A series of PCTs was conducted at SRNL with varying exposed surface area and test durations. Filtered leachates from these tests were analyzed to determine the dissolved concentrations of key elements. The leachate solutions were also ultrafiltered to quantify colloid formation. Leached solids from select PCTs were examined in an attempt to evaluate the Pu and neutron absorber release behavior from the glass and to investigate formation of alteration phases on the glass surface. A series of PCTs was conducted at 90 °C in ASTM Type 1 water to compare the Pu LaBS Frit B glass durability to current requirements for high level waste (HLW) glass in a geologic repository. The PCT (7-day static test with powdered glass) results on the Pu-containing LaBS Frit B glass at SA/V of ≈2000 m −1 showed that the glass was very durable with an average normalized elemental release value for boron of 0.013 g/m 2. This boron release value is ≈640× lower than normalized boron release from current environmental assessment (EA) glass used for repository acceptance. The PCT-B (7-, 14-, 28- and 56-day, static test with powdered glass) normalized elemental releases were similar to the normalized elemental release values from PCT-A testing, indicating that the LaBS Frit B glass is very durable as measured by the PCT. Normalized plutonium releases were essentially the same within the analytical uncertainty of the ICP-MS methods used to quantify plutonium in the 0.45 μm-filtered leachates and ultra-filtered leachates, indicating that colloidal plutonium species do not form under the PCT conditions used in this study.

대구지역 주요 도로변 대기오염물질의 농도 특성

Present study was designed to characterize the concentrations of major roadside air pollutants in Daegu and to compare with those of Seoul and Busan. Evaluated were the exceedance frequence of mean concentrations of target compounds(CO, NO<TEX>$_2$</TEX>, O<TEX>$_3$</TEX>, PM<TEX>$_{10}$</TEX>, SO<TEX>$_2$</TEX>) and the relationship for time variation. Two air pollution monitoring stations(one roadside station and one residential station) in Daegu were selected for this study. In addition, one roadside monitoring station from each of Seoul and Busan was chosen for the comparison of Daegu monitoring stations. The data analyzed in the current study were collected from 1998 to 2000 by Daegu Regional Environmental Management Office. The roadside concentrations of NO2 and PM to and the exceedance frequency of ambient air standard levels in Daegu were higher than those of Seoul and Busan. Except 03, the roadside concentrations of all target compounds showed following three distinguished patterns; first, possibly due to increased traffic density, the concentrations increased from 0500 to 0900(LST), second, the concentrations decreased from 0900 to 1700(LST) possibly due to the increased wind velocity and decreased traffic density, and finally, increased traffic density, the concentrations increased again from 1700 to 2100(LST). An implication was that major air pollution sources shifted from residential area to road-area during rush hours.

Long-term stewardship of the environmental legacy at restored sites within the Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex.

It is readily apparent, as the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management proceeds in remediating its vast network of contaminated nuclear weapons facilities, that final cleanup at many facilities will not be performed to a level allowing unrestricted use of the facility. Instead, these facilities must rely on engineering, administrative, and institutional controls to ensure the level of cleanup performed at the site remains adequately protective of public health and the environment. In order for these controls to remain effective, however, a plan for long-term stewardship of these sites must be developed that is approved by the U.S. Congress. Although this sounds simple enough for the present, serious questions remain regarding how best to implement a program of stewardship to ensure its effectiveness over time, particularly for sites with residual contamination of radionuclides with half-lives on the order of thousands of years. Individual facilities have attempted to answer these questions at the site-specific level. However, the complexities of the issues require federal support and oversight to ensure the programs implemented at each of the facilities are consistent and effective. The Department of Energy recently submitted a report to Congress outlining the extent of long-term stewardship needs at each of its facilities. As a result, the time is ripe for forward thinking Congressional action to address the relevant issues and ensure the remedy of long-term stewardship successfully carries out its intended purpose and remains protective of public health and the environment. The regulatory elements necessary for the stewardship program to succeed can only be implemented through the plenary powers of the U.S. Congress.

Prioritization of Ten Embankment Dams According to Physical Deficiencies

Ten embankment dams managed by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management Office of Dam Safety have been prioritized according to their physical deficiencies. Based upon visual inspection reports by several independent engineers engaged by the Department of Environmental Management and using a computer program that automates the risk indexing procedure, the 10 dams have been assigned a risk index (or priority ranking) number that identifies potential deficiencies in the physical condition of each structure and provides an evaluation of the overall importance of these deficiencies. Comparisons of the computed total risk indices for all dams in an inventory provides a basis for prioritizing future maintenance and repair actions for that inventory. Examination of the risk indices for each physical condition at a single dam can also give an indication as to which deficiencies may be the most significant. This paper will assist dam safety engineers in evaluating the potential benefits of the appl...

Radionuclide traceability for U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Management Radioanalytical Services

In 1999, the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) National Analytical Management Program (NAMP) established a Radiological Traceability Program (RTP) as a new initiative for the radioanalytical acitivies related to the environmental programs conducted throughout the DOE complex. The National Analytical Management Program entered into an interagency agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish traceability to the national standard for DOE-EM radioanalytical activities through the NIST/reference laboratory concept as described in ANSI N42.23-1996.1 Using the criteria established by the RTP, NAMP named two DOE-EM laboratories as reference or secondary laboratories and established a program with NIST that demonstrated the concept of traceability. In order to gain and maintain traceability to NIST, each reference laboratory must meet the performance criteria as defined by the RTP and NAMP. Traceability to NIST is tiered down to each radioanalytical laboratory (monitor or service) that successfully participates in the performance-evaluation programs offered by the reference laboratories. Essential to the RTP is the demonstration that the reference laboratories can produce performance-testing (PT) materials of high quality as well as analyze/verify the radionuclide concentration to the required accuracy and precision. This paper presents the elements of the RTP and the program requirements of NIST and the reference laboratories.

Innovative characterization, monitoring and sensor technologies for environmental radioactivity at USDOE sites

The mission of the U. S. Department of Energy Office of EnvironmentalManagement (EM) is to clean up its contaminated sites from the past productionof nuclear weapons. Within EM, the Office of Science and Technology (OST)is responsible for providing a full range of science and technology resourcesneeded to support resolution of EM cleanup and long-term environmental stewardshipproblems. This responsibility includes implementation of a technology developmentpathway from basic research to development, demonstration, and deploymentof scientific and technological solutions needed by DOE sites. One OST Programis the Characterization, Monitoring, and Sensor Technology Crosscutting Program(CMST-CP), which aims to provide innovative technologies (i.e., faster, better,cheaper, and/or safer) for environmental characterization and monitoring.This paper describes several technologies that CMST-CP has supported for developmentwith significant benefits realized or projected over the baseline characterizationand monitoring practices. Examples of these technologies include mapping ofsubsurface radioactivity using Cone Penetrometer and drilling techniques;a Rapid Liquid Sampler for Sr, Ra, Tc, and Cs using 3M Empore™ Rad Disks;Long-Range Alpha Detectors; a Compact High Resolution Spectrometer; BetaScint™for determination of Sr in soil; Laser-Induced Fluorescence Imaging techniquesfor mapping U on surfaces; the Environmental Measurements While Drilling System;and the Expedited Site Characterization methodology.

DOE'S QUALITY SYSTEM PROGRAM: COOPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Implementation of a Quality Systems approach to making defensible environmental program decisions depends upon multiple, interrelated components. Often, these components are developed independently and implemented at various facility and program levels in an attempt to achieve consistency and cost savings. The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) focuses on three primary system components to achieve effective environmental data collection and use. (1) Quality System guidance, which establishes the management framework to plan, implement, and assess work performed; (2) A Standardized Statement of Work for analytical services, which defines data generation and reporting requirements consistent with user needs; and (3) A laboratory assessment program to evaluate adherence of work performed to defined needs, e.g., documentation and confidence. This paper describes how DOE-EM fulfills these requirements and realizes cost-savings through participation in interagency working groups and integration of system elements as they evolve.

Reconciling Anthropocentrism and Biocentrism Through Adaptive Management: The Case of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and Public Risk Perception

Environmental policy issues often cannot be resolved owing to differences between anthropocentrists who adhere to neoclassical economic principles and biocentrists who argue in favor of a broad conception of sustainable development. This article examines the two perspectives in the context of radioactive waste management by presenting a case study involving public risk perception of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). WIPP is a mining program under-taken by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management to demonstrate the safe transportation and disposal of transuranic waste, a by-product of nuclear weapons production. The authors conclude that U.S. waste management programs such as WIPP can garner support only if a means for genuine, meaningful public participation is provided through adaptive management principles that “bridge the gap,” to the extent possible, between anthropocentric and biocentric perspectives.

Effect of electrode configurations on phase equilibria with applied electric fields1This research was supported by the Environmental Management Science Program, Office of Environmental Management, US Department of Energy, under contract DEAC05-96OR22464 with Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation.1

Applying an electric field to some boiling binary mixtures has been shown experimentally to increase the separation factor by as much as 10%. In this work, an electric field was applied across the interface of boiling mixtures of 2-propanol–water via electrodes located in the vapor and the liquid. The shape and separation of the electrodes and the strength and polarity of the electric field were altered to investigate their effect on the vapor mole fraction, the current, and the vapor temperature. The results show that greater voltage differences, in the absence of excessive electrical current, lead to higher concentrations of 2-propanol in the vapor. However, it was found that varying the electrode separation at a given potential difference, and thus the electric field strength, has little effect on the vapor composition. The effects of the applied potential difference are reduced with elevated current and under conditions where liquid dynamics such as dripping, splashing, or jetting provide an opportunity for charge to be transferred between the electrode in the vapor and the liquid. It is also shown that directing the electric field from the vapor to the liquid produces a lower current, and the effect on the composition is larger. These findings, in combination with calculations of the interface charge density, suggest that improvements in the separation efficiency achieved by an applied potential difference are not due to effects of the electric field in the bulk fluids, but rather are induced by charge accumulation at the vapor–liquid interface.

MAGNETIC-SEEDING FILTRATION*

ABSTRACT Magnetic-seeding filtration consists of two steps: heterogeneous particle flocculation of magnetic and nonmagnetic particles in a stirred tank and high-gradient magnetic filtration (HGMF). The effects of various parameters affecting magnetic-seeding filtration are theoretically and experimentally investigated. A trajectory model that includes hydrodynamic resistance, van der Waals, and electrostatic forces is developed to calculate the flocculation frequency in a turbulent-shear regime. Fractal dimension is introduced to simulate the open structure of aggregates. A magnetic-filtration model that consists of trajectory analysis, a particle build-up model, a breakthrough model, and a bivariate population-balance model is developed to predict the breakthrough curve of magnetic-seeding filtration. A good agreement between modeling results and experimental data is obtained. The results show that the model developed in this study can be used to predict the performance of magnetic-seeding filtration without using empirical coefficients or fitting parameters. * This research was supported by the Efficient Separations and Processing Crosscutting Program, Office of Environmental Management, U.S. Department of Energy, under contract DE-AC05-96OR22464 with Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corp. Accordingly, the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or allow others to do so, for U.S. government purposes.