Members of the School of Engineering's nuclear remediation team-Assistant Professor Gene LeBeouf, Professor Frank Parker, Professor James Clarke and Professor David Kosson-stand in the lab where the long hours of analysis take place.

Most people wouldn't want to spend much time on a remote island in Alaska where the winds gust up to 150 miles per hour and where the rats reign supreme.
       There are even more compelling reasons why Amchitka Island will never become a popular tourist destination. Three nuclear bombs were detonated under its surface from 1965-71, and its molten-glass "shot cavities" took more than 20 years to cool back down to normal temperature. And as if those occurrences wouldn't be a sufficient deterrent, Greenpeace reported their (subsequently disputed) finding in 1996 that radionuclides from these tests had been detected in the terrestrial and freshwater environments.
        Nonetheless, the Vanderbilt engineers who specialize in nuclear remediation are eager to begin work there next summer with their colleagues from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. The grim and forbidding island holds out the promise of revealing valuable clues in the battle to reclaim or contain the land sacrificed during the 1951-1992 Cold War arms race.
       The School of Engineering Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has played an important role in tackling the challenges presented by the world-wide legacy of the nuclear age. From contaminated areas in Russia and the Czech Republic to the major nuclear processing sites in the U.S., Vanderbilt engineers have lent their expertise and conducted leading-edge research into the complexities of environmental protection from nuclear and other contaminants.
       Chaired by Professor David S. Kosson, who also heads up the national Remediation Technology and Exposure Assessment Task Group for the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP), the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) remediation specialists are helping find effective ways to clean up nuclear weapons production facility waste sites and to design systems to safely and efficiently contain wastes for thousands of years into the future.
       It's a daunting task.

Cold War, hot legacy
In the U.S. alone, more than 1,000 nuclear warheads were detonated and almost 150 sites were used in nuclear weapons production. Of those sites, portions of more than 100 are too severely contaminated to be cleaned up sufficiently for unrestricted use and must be isolated and contained, perhaps in some cases for tens of thousands of years.
       In Russia, imprudent waste management resulted in widespread contamination, including the Arctic Ocean; the Kara Sea; the Techa, Yenisey and Tom Rivers and some 75 square miles of land in the Ural Mountains that remain uninhabitable today after deliberate releases to the Techa River in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a tank explosion in 1957 and wind-driven contaminated Lake Karachai sediments.
        "Approaching the problem of nuclear remediation is like fighting an octopus," says Professor of the Practice of Civil and Environmental Engineering James H. Clarke. "You cut off one tentacle, and two more grow in its place."
       Like the other Vanderbilt environmental engineers, Professor Clarke is stimulated by the complexities involved in finding solutions. Awarded with a Department of Energy (DOE) Corporate Award for his work at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory to evaluate risk involved in using sonic drilling to assess buried waste, Professor Clarke also helped write the National Research Council's 2000 report on long-term management of legacy waste sites.
       The report predicts a strong probability that institutional measures will at some point fail to safely contain the wastes and notes that scientific understanding of the complicated factors and forces involved in contaminant behavior is inadequate. The report recommends additional research as well as development of institutional management strategies that take probable failure into account.
       Professor Clarke and Frank L. Parker, distinguished professor of environmental and water resources engineering, emphasized those points in a recent presentation to CRESP to gain funding for their research into risks and costs predicted to be associated post-closure containment systems.
       "We in the scientific and engineering community understand that long-term containment approaches will probably fail," Professor Parker says. "But the systems that are being designed currently are not taking this probable failure into sufficient account."

Focused study, international implications
Professors Parker and Clarke will analyze the design for the Oak Ridge secure landfill to determine what it will take to achieve landfill security, given the probable risks and costs of the system. They expect that their work will lead to more effective system designs that can be used in other sites, as well, along with better post-closure approaches and more realistic funding methods.
       Also assisting the Oak Ridge Operation is Eugene J. LeBoeuf, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. While a summer faculty research fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Professor LeBoeuf studied ways to use dissolved natural organic matter in in situ remediation to facilitate the process of removing hazardous metals and radionuclides from groundwater flows.
       "The presence of dissolved organic matter can assist electron transfer, thus enhancing the reduction of many metal and radionuclide species to less soluble forms, dropping them out of solution to immobilize them in place," Professor LeBoeuf says.
       He currently is employing advanced characterization techniques to better understand how the physical and chemical structures of soil and sediment organic materials react in the environment. He and his research associates have applied for a patent for their new design for a long-term vapor phase reactor vessel to study the process of sorption/desorption processes of organic contaminants in unsaturated conditions. This basic research, recently awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, will lead to better understanding of how organic matter in soils and sediments bind and sequester contaminants.

CRESP role broadens remediation leadership
Like his colleagues, Professor LeBoeuf is excited about the School of Engineering's important role in the nationwide remediation work conducted by DOE-funded CRESP.
       Professor Kosson, who joined Vanderbilt from Rutgers University last spring, has led several projects at the Savannah River Site (SRS) through CRESP activities. "CRESP initially focused on remediation and waste-management activities at the Savannah River Site and the Hanford Reservation in Washington," he says. "In our second five-year phase, CRESP will expand its activities to Oak Ridge Reservation, Rocky Flats in Colorado, Idaho National Engineering Environmental Laboratory and Amchitka Island in Alaska."
       Vanderbilt researchers have already been involved in CRESP SRS projects to evaluate risk prioritization, to evaluate SRS background groundwater quality through statistical methods and to assess cesium-137 mobility in SRS surface soils.
       In Amchitka, Professor Kosson expects to examine potential pathways radionuclides could use to contaminate the Bering Sea and the North Pacific Ocean. "The Bering Sea is a native Alaska population fishing area and also accounts for a large fraction of the fish supplies for the United States," he says. He and his associates will evaluate potential movement of radionuclides from shot cavities to the marine bodies and assess the risks to human beings and other living things.

Global expertise
Expert in assessing nuclear contaminant behavior in various waterways is Professor Parker, the first environmental engineer certified by eminence by the American Academy of Environmental Engineers.
       "Professor Parker's expertise in remediation is globally recognized," Professor Kosson says. "He recently presented an overview of the world status on radioactive waste to the Scientific Forum in the General Conference at the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in September."
       Professor Parker has examined environmental impact, risks and means of preventing and alleviating damage at Russia's three reprocessing centers for spent nuclear fuel. One project concerned Lake Karachai at Mayak in the Urals, the most contaminated known area on earth. He and his associates determined that the sediments in the Techa River posed a threat to the downstream population and made recommendations to reduce the probability of failure of the dams and to prevent a recurrence of the 1967 redistribution of windborne radionuclides from Lake Karachai.
       Professor Parker has also worked for the Department of Energy to find ways to recycle or dispose of some 30 million tons of waste concrete from decommissioned military sites around the country. The plan was predicted to save the U.S. up to $1.3 billion.

Interdisciplinary future
"Nuclear remediation is a field that requires the cooperative and concerted efforts of people in many areas and absolutely demands a multidisciplinary approach," Professor Kosson says. "The School of Engineering is fortunate to include depth as well as breadth of environmental expertise and to be able to draw from the wealth of knowledge and experience within the several schools of Vanderbilt University."
       Professor Kosson is working with other Vanderbilt schools to achieve the CRESP goal of enlisting cross-disciplinary support in building consensus on long-term efforts to protect the environment from the Cold War legacy.
       "Maintaining appropriate systems and awareness over a thousand or more years is an unprecedented goal, but that's what will be needed if future generations are to be protected from environmental contamination," he says. "We will be working with people in fields like divinity to help us find ways to pass down a tradition of effective stewardship of these potentially hazardous areas far into the future."