The nation’s nuclear weapons program helped win the Cold War and continues to provide a deterrent vital to national security, but it also left a significant environmental legacy. While environmental cleanup has been completed at most Department of Energy (DOE) sites associated with the nuclear defense program, 15 sites still have decades of waste processing,…
Savannah River National Laboratory is well known for its body of work in tritium, development of technologies for the disposition of nuclear wastes, and advancements in environmental remediation. Not as widely known is SRNL’s work in biological research. For nearly 25 years, SRNL also conducted applied research related to microbiological processes focused on bioenergy and…
A little more than a year ago a charter was signed formally establishing the Regulatory Center of Excellence (RCE) at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), ushering in a new resource to sites across the DOE complex facing the toughest regulatory compliance challenges. Designed as an “as-needed” resource for sites, the RCE provides innovative strategies that…
For as long as scientists have worked to develop nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, scientists have also labored to develop effective means of disposing of nuclear waste products. This need is the mission of the Department of Energy, Environmental Management (DOEEM), “to complete the safe cleanup of the environmental legacy brought about from decades of…
The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Environmental Management is responsible for roughly 90 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the Office of River Protection at Hanford, Wash., and the Savannah River Site (SRS). About 56 million gallons are stored at Hanford, Wash., 900,000 gallons are at INL and roughly…
On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, Japan was devasted by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. The quake caused a 47-foot tsunami wave to crash into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in wide scale contamination of the area’s waterways. Meanwhile, halfway across the world, Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) researcher Anna Sophia Knox, Ph.D.,…
Researchers at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), in concert with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Florida International University, are leading the Advanced Long-Term Environmental Monitoring Systems (ALTEMIS) Project to move groundwater cleanup from a reactive process to a proactive process, while also reducing the cost of long-term…