INEEL researchers won funding for seven U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Management Science Program (EMSP) projects, and will support three additional projects led by other institutions. This research will bring $6.2 million to the Laboratory over the next three years.

EMSP sponsors basic environmental and waste management research. Results are expected to lead to reduced costs, schedule, and risks associated with cleaning up the nation's nuclear complex. This year, the EMSP awarded seven of 35 projects to INEEL researchers, who will directly support the DOE's mission of environmental science through this research.

"This was a great year for the INEEL and I am very pleased with the contribution made by scientists working in the Subsurface Science Initiative," said INEEL Subsurface Science Initiative director Michael Wright. "We wrote good, solid proposals and the reviewers saw the merit of our ideas."

"This research will result in significant new knowledge of the movement of contaminants through the subsurface of the INEEL site," said George Schneider, the DOE Director of Environmental R&D.

Through their EMSP research projects, INEEL scientists will study how contaminants move through the subsurface, taking into account flow through cracks, flow conditions, and pollutants that attach to suspended particles. A separate team plans to create tiny particles of material that degrade solvents, and study how well they can be put into the subsurface and be controlled to move to where solvent contaminants exist. Tests will show how well engineered particles can clean subsurface contaminants.

Researchers will study how quickly naturally-occurring microbes can degrade a common solvent pollutant, trichloroethylene, a remediation approach being used at the INEEL. The goal is to determine the rate of degrad
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Contact: Deborah Hill
dahill@inel.gov
208-526-4723
DOE/Idaho National Laboratory
11-Nov-2002