The Environmental Systems Research (ESR) Program, a part of the Environmental Systems Research and Analysis (ESRA) Program, was implemented to enhance and augment the technical capabilities of the INEEL. Strengthening the Technical capabilities of the INEEL will provide the technical base to serve effectively as the Environmental Management Laboratory for the Office of Environmental Management (EM). This is a progress report for the third year of the ESR Program (FY 2000). A report of activities is presented for the five ESR research investment areas: (1) Transport Aspects of Selective Mass Transport Agents, (2) Chemistry of Environmental Surfaces, (3) Materials Dynamics, (4) Characterization Science, and (5) Computational Simulation of Mechanical and Chemical Systems. In addition to the five technical areas, the report describes activities in the Science and Technology Foundations element of the program, e.g., interfaces between ESR and the EM Science Program (EMSP) and the EM Focus Areas. The five research areas are subdivided into 18 research projects. FY 2000 research in these 18 projects has resulted in more than 50 technical papers that are in print, in press, in review, or in preparation. Additionally, more than 100 presentations were made at professional society meetings nationally and internationally. Work supported …

This report provides the results of detailed hydrologic characterization tests conducted within newly constructed Hanford Site wells during FY 1999. Detailed characterization tests performed during FY 1999 included: groundwater flow characterization, barometric response evaluation, slug tests, single-well tracer tests, constant-rate pumping tests, and in-well vertical flow tests. Hydraulic property estimates obtained from the detailed hydrologic tests include: transmissivity, hydraulic conductivity, specific yield, effective porosity, in-well lateral flow velocity, aquifer flow velocity, vertical distribution of hydraulic conductivity (within the well-screen section) and in-well vertical flow velocity. In addition, local groundwater flow characteristics (i.e., hydraulic gradient and flow direction) were determined for four sites where detailed well testing was performed.

The goal of this research project is to increase water savings and show better ecological control of natural vegetation by developing hydrogeological-geophysical methods for characterizing the permeability and content of water in soil. The ground penetrating radar (GPR) tool was developed and used as the surface geophysical method for monitoring water content. Initial results using the tool suggest that surface GPR is a viable technique for obtaining precision volumetric water content profile estimates, and that laboratory-derived petrophysical relationships could be applied to field-scale GPR data. A field-scale bacterial transport study was conducted within an uncontaminated sandy Pleistocene aquifer to evaluate the importance of heterogeneity in controlling the transport of bacteria. Geochemical, hydrological, geological, and geophysical data were collected to characterize the site prior to and after chemical and bacterial injection experiments. Study results shows that, even within the fairly uniform shallow marine deposits of the narrow channel focus area, heterogeneity existed that influenced the chemical tracer transport over lateral distances of a few meters and vertical distances of less than a half meter. The interpretation of data suggest that the incorporation of geophysical data with limited hydrological data may provide valuable information about the stratigraphy, log conductivity values, and the …

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Characterization and monitoring are important parts of environmental remediation of contaminated sites by the Department of Energy--Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM). The actual remediation process often cannot begin or even be planned until characterization is complete. Monitoring is essential to verify the progress of remediation and of the waste stream. However, some contaminated sites are difficult, costly, or have a high exposure risk to personnel to characterize or monitor using the baseline technology or current practice. Therefore, development of new characterization and monitoring technologies is time-critical to remediate these sites. The main task of the Characterization, Monitoring, and Sensor Technology Crosscutting Program (CMST-CP) is to develop and deploy innovative characterization and monitoring technologies that improve performance and reduce personnel exposure, cost, and detection limits. However, to evaluate different proposals for new technologies to decide which ones to develop or deploy, it is necessary to compare their cost and performance to the baseline technology. The goal of this project is to facilitate the direct comparison of new technologies to the baseline technology by documenting the current practices for site characterization and monitoring at DOE sites and by presenting the information in an easy-to-use, concise database. The database will assist the CMST-CP …

The Consortium for High Performance Buildings (ChiPB) is an outgrowth of DOE'S Commercial Whole Buildings Roadmapping initiatives. It is a team-driven public/private partnership that seeks to enable and demonstrate the benefit of buildings that are designed, built and operated to be energy efficient, environmentally sustainable, superior quality, and cost effective.

This report provides the results of detailed hydrologic characterization tests conducted within newly constructed Hanford Site wells during FY 1999. Detailed characterization tests performed during FY 1999 included: groundwater flow characterization, barometric response evaluation, slug tests, single-well tracer tests, constant-rate pumping tests, and in-well vertical flow tests. Hydraulic property estimates obtained from the detailed hydrologic tests include: transmissivity, hydraulic conductivity, specific yield, effective porosity, in-well lateral flow velocity, aquifer flow velocity, vertical distribution of hydraulic conductivity (within the well-screen section) and in-well vertical flow velocity. In addition, local groundwater flow characteristics (i.e., hydraulic gradient and flow direction) were determined for four sites where detailed well testing was performed.

This project was initiated by the Department of Energy in response to a request from the HVAC industry for consolidated information about alternative heating and cooling cycles and for objective comparisons of those cycles in space conditioning applications. Twenty-seven different heat pumping technologies are compared on energy use and operating costs using consistent operating conditions and assumptions about component efficiencies for all of them. This report provides a concise summary of the underlying principals of each technology, its advantages and disadvantages, obstacles to commercial development, and economic feasibility. Both positive and negative results in this study are valuable; the fact that many of the cycles investigated are not attractive for space conditioning avoids any additional investment of time or resources in evaluating them for this application. In other cases, negative results in terms of the cost of materials or in cycle efficiencies identify where significant progress needs to be made in order for a cycle to become commercially attractive. Specific conclusions are listed for many of the technologies being promoted as alternatives to electrically-driven vapor compression heat pumps using fluorocarbon refrigerants. Although reverse Rankine cycle heat pumps using hydrocarbons have similar energy use to conventional electric-driven heat pumps, there are …