Moving Beyond Pump and Treat Toward Enhanced Attenuation and Combined Remedies T-Area, Savannah River Site

Groundwater beneath T-Area, a former laboratory and semiworks operation at the Department of Energy (DOE) Savannah River Site, is contaminated by chlorinated solvents (cVOCs). Since the contamination was detected in the 1980s, the cVOCs at T-Area have been treated by a combination of soil vapor extraction and groundwater pump and treat. The site has received approval to discontinue the active treatments and implement a full scale test of enhanced attenuation--an engineering and regulatory strategy that has recently been developed by DOE and the Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council. Enhanced attenuation uses active engineering solutions to alter the target site in such a way that the contaminant plume will passively stabilize and shrink and to document that the action will be effective, timely, and sustainable. The paradigm recognizes that attenuation remedies are fundamentally based on a mass balance. Thus, long-term plume dynamics can be altered either by reducing the contaminant loading from the source or by increasing the rate of natural attenuation processes within all, or part of, the plume volume. The combination of technologies that emerged for T-Area included: (1) neat (pure) vegetable oil deployment in the deep vadose zone in the former source area, (2) emulsified vegetable oil deployment within the footprint of the groundwater plume, and (3) identification of attenuation mechanisms and rates for the distal portion of the plume. In the first part, neat oil spreads laterally forming a thin layer on the water table to intercept and reduce future cVOC loading (via partitioning) and reduce oxygen inputs (via biostimulation). In the second and third parts, emulsified oil forms active bioremediation reactor zones within the plume footprint to degrade existing groundwater contamination (via reductive dechlorination) and stimulates long-term attenuation capacity in the distal plume (via cometabolism). For T-Area, the enhanced attenuation development process proved to be a powerful tool in developing a defensible strategy that provides a high degree of performance while minimizing adverse collateral impacts of remediation (e.g., energy use and wetland damage) and minimizing life-cycle costs