Show Title: Cleaning Up The Dirt
Producer: Bill Kelsey
Time: 27:40
>>>TODAY ON IMPACT, CLEANING DIRTY SOILS.
---(About 30 feet below the surface we have 15 acres of this residual oil that's left in the system, which continues to contaminate ground water, and continues to be a source of contamination, and will continue to be for many, many years. The biggest challenge for us is to find a way to remove that material so that we can shorten the cleanup time frame.)---
>>>THIS IS IMPACT, A WEEKLY LOOK AT ISSUES AND ANSWERS THAT IMPACT OUR LIVES AND THE WORLD AROUND US, PRODUCED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA'S INSTITUTE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES.
>>>IN PRIVATE HOMES, IT CAN START SMALL. A JUG OF INSECT KILLER HERE, AN OLD CAR BATTERY THERE. THEN THERE'S THAT PAINT LEFT OVER FROM LAST YEAR'S FURNITURE REFINISHING PROJECT. SUCH ITEMS CAN TEND TO ACCUMULATE OVER THE YEARS, SOMETIMES EVEN ENDING UP IN BACKYARD DUMP SITES, PERHAPS WITH EVERY GOOD INTENTION OF DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THEM... SOMEDAY, MAYBE WHEN THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTS ITSELF. IN ALACHUA COUNTY, A "TOXIC ROUNDUP" PRESENTS SUCH AN OPPORTUNITY TWICE A YEAR, WHEN RESIDENTS ARE ENCOURAGED TO BRING IN THOSE LEFTOVER CHEMICALLY BASED PRODUCTS THAT CAN'T SIMPLY BE PLACED IN THE TRASH. BUT THERE'S MORE TO THIS EVENT THAN SIMPLY PROVIDING A COLLECTION POINT; CHRIS BIRD, WHO IS ALACHUA COUNTY'S ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION DIRECTOR, HOPES EDUCATION IS TAKING PLACE AS PART OF THE EVENT.
>>>CHRIS BIRD, ALACHUA COUNTY ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION DIRECTOR: I think we are trying to help people understand how to be environmentally smart consumers. And a lot of the wastes that we receive at our Toxic Roundup from households and businesses; a lot of times it's a matter that somebody bought more of a chemical or a product than they really needed. You know, these days it seems; itlooks like you get more on sale; a larger size, or something like that. But what we find is the cost of disposing of some of these chemicals, particularly the pesticides and things like that; sometimes the cost of proper disposal is actually more than the cost of the product in the first place. So we really are trying to educate the public on the need to only buy what you think you need.
>>>WHAT FIRST HAPPENS TO THE COLLECTED ITEMS IS EXPLAINED BY JILL PARKER, SENIOR ENVIRONMENTAL SPECIALIST FOR THE ALACHUA COUNTY ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION DEPARTMENT.
>>>JILL PARKER, SENIOR ENVIRONMENTAL SPECIALIST: You kind of break it down into four categories, one being fuel supplemental type material such as oil base paints; paint thinners; anything that can burn. That material's blended together into a slurry and burned as supplemental fuel, which is good in the fact that it helps reduce the dependency of other companies on fossil fuels. They can burn the supplemental fuel. Other items, such as pesticides, need to be incinerated according to EPA guidelines, so we lab pack those materials off, and they're sent to an incinerator. The other materials, are materials like acids and bases--and we do a neutralization of those materials, and then we send them to the local waste water treatment plant.
>>>PARKER SAYS NOT ALL OF THE MATERIALS BROUGHT TO TOXIC ROUNDUP ARE PROCESSED FOR DISPOSAL.
>>>PARKER: There's a lot of materials that are brought in that actually are still useable. And so we have a very strong re-use program, such as fertilizers that are brought in; are re-used for their general; you know, for their original purpose. And then, over the past couple of years, we've started a new program where latex paint that comes in is re-blended by a local manufacturer, Suntech, and redistributed back out into the community, so that material is being re-used, and today, I believe we've recycled about 20; two-thousand gallons of latex paint.
>>>PARKER SAYS PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT KEEPING CHEMICALS OUT OF LANDFILLS HAS BEEN BUILDING IN RECENT YEARS. BUT AT THE STATE'S DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION IN TALLAHASSEE, SEVERAL FLORIDA LOCATIONS WHERE CHEMICALS WERE DUMPED IN EARLIER YEARS ARE OF SPECIAL CONCERN. THE ENVIRONMENTAL ADMINISTRATOR FOR HAZARDOUS WASTE CLEANUP SAYS FLORIDA DOES HAVE SOME 60 SUCH SITES.
>>>DAN DiDOMENICO, FLORIDA DEP ADMINISTRATOR FOR HAZARDOUS WASTE CLEANUP: Until recent history, and I'll place that within the last 10 or 15 years, have we only become aware of what we were doing to our environment in terms of dumping and spills. I think, yeah...20 or 30 years ago, people just didn't realize the problems they were causing. They basically would have an industrial process. They'd dispose of it into an unlined pond. And there were no immediate consequences of that.
>>>NO IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES, BUT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA'S INSTITUTE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES, RESEARCHERS ARE FINDING THAT HEAVY METALS SOMETIMES FOUND IN SOILS WHERE INDUSTRIAL SPILLS HAVE OCCURRED CAN FIND THEIR WAY INTO THE FOOD CHAIN, DR. PETER FREDERICK, AT THE DEPARTMENT OF WILDLIFE ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION, IS INTERESTED IN MERCURY'S EFFECT ON VARIOUS SPECIES OF BIRDS.
>>>DR. PETER FREDERICK, UF DEPT. OF WILDLIFE ECOLOGY: There are certainly other heavy metals that can be detrimental to wildlife. The interesting thing about mercury is that mercury, unlike a lot the other metals, has no known biological function. So it isn't really one of those trace elements that you take pills for, or that you feed your livestock. Zinc, cadmium, and other heavy metals are actually trace elements that you do want a little bit of. Mercury? You don't want any.
>>>DiDOMENICO SAYS KEEPING FLORIDA LANDS CLEAN TAKES ON SPECIAL IMPORTANCE, BECAUSE OF THE WATER BENEATH THEM.
>>>DiDOMENICO: We get over 90; 92-percent of our drinking water from our groundwater, which is different from other states. A lot of states rely on surface water and other sources. But here in Florida, we really have to be concerned about our groundwater simply because so many people use it as a drinking water supply. Once the contamination does get into the groundwater, it can be very difficult to get out. The technologies for some compounds are just not there yet for extracting the chemicals, or extracting chemicals from the groundwater, once it's gotten down deep... The biggest challenge we face today is extraction; getting the contaminants up, out of the ground.
>>>IT'S A PROBLEM BEING SOLVED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA'S INSTITUTE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES WHERE THE SCHOOL OF SOIL AND WATER SCIENCES HAS TAKEN ITS RESEARCH ON THE ROAD. DR. SURESH RAO, UF PROFESSOR OF HYDROLOGIC SCIENCES, SAYS A FORMER FIRE TRAINING AREA IN UTAH, MAY BE TYPICAL OF INDUSTRIAL SITES WHERE, EARLIER IN THE CENTURY, SIMPLY REMOVING TOXIC CHEMICALS FROM VIEW WAS THE PRIMARY CONSIDERATION.
>>>SURESH RAO, UF PROFESSOR OF HYDROLOGIC SCIENCES: The number of sites in the U.S. at which some type of remediation is required by regulation has been estimated to be on the order of tens of thousands of sites. The sizes of these sites can vary from very small areas to several acres. And these sites are on government facilities such as bases; Hill Air Force Base is where we are now. And there are government facilities; other facilities and industrial sites. And the costs to clean this up have been estimated to be in the order of a million dollars or more at each site. And if you add up all the costs, it could be several billion or trillion dollars. And clearly, that kind of money is spent over time periods of 20 to 30 to 40 years, and sometimes longer. And so the drive then is to find cheaper, better, and more efficient technologies so we can proceed with cleaning up aquifers in a shorter time, and to higher efficient levels that are environmentally acceptable.
>>>ALTHOUGH THE PROBLEM'S NOT VISIBLE, HILL AIR FORCE BASE IS BUT ONE OF SEVERAL U.S. MILITARY INSTALLATIONS HAVING WHAT THE COMPREHENSIVE ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSE AND LIABILITY ACT OF 1980 REFERS TO AS A SUPERFUND SITE... AN AREA POSING PROBLEMS SERIOUS ENOUGH TO QUALIFY FOR SPECIAL FEDERAL CLEANUP FUNDS. AT THE BASE, BOB ELLIOTT IS CHIEF OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL RESTORATION DIVISION. HE SAYS HILL IS WHERE CERTAIN MILITARY HARDWARE HAS LONG BEEN BROUGHT FROM OTHER BASES AROUND THE WORLD FOR OVERHAUL.
>>>BOB ELLIOTT, HAFB ENVIRONMENTAL RESTORATION DIV: We at Hill Air Force Base have a unique problem in that this has been a maintenance depot since the 1940s and, as a result, has significant quantities of wastes that were generated associated with those maintenance activities. So although our problems are very similar to other problems at other Air Force bases, the magnitude of the wastes at these sites at Hill Air Force Base is significant in nature. At this particular site, you know, there are estimates that there may have been 100,000 to 200,000 gallons of waste fuels, oils and solvents disposed of here. Fire fighting; firefighter training exercises also resulted in a large amount of contamination, because they poured waste jet fuel out on the ground and ignited it to train firefighters in lifesaving and fire fighting exercises associated with their particular jobs in life safety associated with fire and crash incidents.
>>>HILL AIR FORCE BASE IS OF SPECIAL INTEREST TO THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY'S LABORATORY FOR GROUNDWATER RESEARCH. CARL ENFIELD, WHO IS SENIOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST AT THE LABORATORY, SAYS HIS ORGANIZATION IS RESPONSIBLE FOR REMEDIATION RESEARCH.
>>>CARL ENFIELD, U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY: So, what we have developed then, is a group of studies where we are comparing different approaches to try to accelerate this cleanup. It's being funded by the Department of Defense in a program called SERDP; the Strategic Environmental Research Development Program. SERDP is a national program that covers many different facets of the environment from paint stripping to methods of monitoring the movement of whales in the ocean. But our particular area is the cleanup area, and we have a program that is trying to evaluate methods of extracting the source area of contamination.
>>>THE GEOPHYSICAL SETTING OF HILL AIR FORCE BASE IS AMONG REASONS IT HAS BEEN SELECTED AS A TEST SITE TO EVALUATE DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGIES THAT COULD CLEAN CONTAMINATED SOILS. TO THE WEST OF THE BASE IS THE GREAT SALT LAKE...A LAKE BOB ELLIOTT DESCRIBES AS DEAD, AND HIGHLY CONCENTRATED IN SALTS AND MINERALS.
>>>ELLIOTT: The area that Hill Air Force Base is located on is former deltaic formation from ancient Lake Bonneville, which was here 14,000 years ago and is currently, or would currently be known today as the Great Salt Lake. It's receded to that level. As you look out across the mountainside, you can see a terrace; upper terrace level along the mountains. And that was the level at which the lake existed; extended up into Idaho, and down into central Utah. The deltaic formation creates a lot of complications for us in remediation because of the braided stream channels and reworked deposits that are found in that delta. Since that time, Lake Bonneville receded, and the Weaver River has cut back through that deltaic formation, and as you look across the valley, you can see a heavily treed area, which is where the Weaver River is now. But that river cut through this deltaic formation.
>>>WHEN IMPACT CONTINUES, AN UP CLOSE LOOK AT THE RESEARCH SITE, AND THE RESEARCH.
>>> AT A SITE ALONG HILL AIR FORCE BASE'S PERIMETER ROAD, ACADEMIA HAS ITS OWN USE FOR THE KIND OF TEMPORARY SHELTERS OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH MILITARY ENCAMPMENTS.
>>>RAO: This is the site where many years ago, there has been chemical disposal, and the groundwater had become contaminated. And this area was selected for establishing the test cells because this is where the maximum contamination is found, and this technology should be tested. And what we're looking at is the various constructions that, inside of which is the test cell, actually, and this is simply protection from the elements. It gets quite hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter months, so various designs of protection are seen here. And there's a total of eight test cells that have been constructed to evaluate eight different technologies.
>>>RAO SAYS A COMMON THEME TO ALL OF THE TECHNOLOGIES BEING EVALUATED IS THAT THEY INJECT FLUIDS DOWN INTO THE GROUND IN THE CONTAMINATED ZONE; FLUIDS MAKING CONTAMINANTS BELOW THE GROUND MORE SOLUBLE. THE FLUIDS, ALONG WITH THE CONTAMINANTS, ARE THEN EXTRACTED. DR. LYNN WOOD, A SOIL SCIENTIST FOR THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, LOOKS AT THE LONG-PRACTICED ALTERNATIVE AS A RELIC FROM THE PAST.
>>>LYNN WOOD, EPA SOIL SCIENTIST: Probably the most prominent method that's applied to most sites; most Superfund sites, certainly, is what's called pump and treat remediation, where contaminated water is pumped from the site and treated at the surface, and clean water is injected in its place. But we've found over the past few years at least that that's a very ineffective method of cleaning these sites up.
>>>CARL ENFIELD DESCRIBES JUST HOW INEFFECTIVE THE OLD METHOD IS.
>>>CARL ENFIELD, EPA SR. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST: Superfund work in using Pump and Treat technology would mean that at a site like Hill Air Force Base, it would take thousands of years to do the remediation because it wouldn't be possible to clean it up in a timely fashion. It just is physically impossible to get it out in using water by itself.
>>>AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA RESEARCH CELL, AUTOMATED EQUIPMENT METERS FLUIDS DOWN INTO THE AREA OF CONTAMINATION. SOME 75-FEET AWAY IS THE TANK FARM PROVIDING A CONTINUOUS FEED OF CHEMICALS TO THE CELL; CHEMICALS THAT, IN A SOIL AND WATER SCIENCES LABORATORY, HAVE PROVEN TO BE HIGHLY EFFECTIVE CLEANING AGENTS. ON THIS JULY MORNING, IMPACT FINDS DR. MIKE ANNABEL, WHO IS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING SCIENCES AT UF, CHECKING THE MIXING PROCEDURE.
>>>DR. MIKE ANNABEL: Well, right now we're in the influent tank farm which has a number of tanks for different research groups that are looking at different technologies for cleaning up the aquifer at HAFB. Right now, what we're doing here is, we have two tanks set up; the large black 6-000 gallon tanks, and we're mixing up surfactant, which we're pulling out of 55-gallon drums, and alcohol. And the surfactant we're using is called Brij 97, and it's used for cosmetics primarily. And we'll be adding to that, into our tanks, water and alcohol, which is a pentanol that we'll be using.
>>>ANNABEL SAYS IT WILL TAKE TWO DAYS TO MIX THE 5,000-GALLON BATCH, WHICH IS THREE-PERCENT SURFACTANT AND TWO-AND-A-HALF-PERCENT ALCOHOL. MEANWHILE, A SECOND TANK, IN WHICH THE SURFACTANT AND ALCOHOL WERE MIXED WITH WATER SEVERAL DAYS EARLIER, IS SUPPLYING THE MIXTURE.
>>>ANNABEL: The solutions that we're putting in are designed, of course, to remove the contamination that's there, which is an oil phase, which is a very complex mixture of hydrocarbons--mainly jet fuels and some chlorinated solvents that they used for degreasing activities at the base. The oil itself is a very dark black mixture that; this was taken from one of the wells just outside of the cell area that we're working in. What you're seeing here is water on the bottom of the vile, and a less dense than water phase on the top of here. And it's black and quite viscous, and very hydrophobic, so it's very difficult to remove.
>>>SOME FIFTEEN FEET BELOW THE SOIL SURFACE OF THE TEST CELL IS WHERE HEAVY OIL CONTAMINATION IS FIRST ENCOUNTERED.
>>>ANNABEL: And that extends all the way down to a clay layer that we encounter about 26 feet down. So between roughly 16 and 26 feet down, about a 10-foot zone of heavily contaminated aquifer: That's the zone we're trying to flush right now.
>>>BUT SEVERAL OTHER TEST CELLS ARE CLOSE BY AND THE IMPACT CREW WONDERS WHAT KEEPS ONE CELL'S FLUIDS FROM FLOWING INTO ANOTHER CELL.
>>>ANNABEL: The test cell is constructed of sheet pile walls which isolates us from the rest of the aquifer. So, a couple purposes for that: One is so we can control the flow inside the zone, and we can control the water table within the system, and we can do a good mass balance on our study, and also we can contain all the fluids that we put in and we extract.
>>>ONE SET OF STAINLESS STEEL TUBES WITH WIRE SCREEN OPENINGS HAVE BEEN DRIVEN DOWN INTO THE SOIL TO SERVE AS INJECTION WELLS, WHILE ANOTHER SET IS IN PLACE FOR EXTRACTION.
>>>ANNABEL: What we basically do is control the flow through the cell by pumping our solution into four injection wells on one end of the cell. The injection wells are connected to the influent tanks that we saw earlier. The pumps deliver the flow to the injection wells, and here we just can see the surfactant-alcohol solution going into the well.
>>>FIFTEEN THOUSAND GALLONS OF THE SURFACTANT-ALCOHOL SOLUTION WILL BE PUT THROUGH THE TEST CELL, JUST HOW EFFECTIVE IT IS IN CLEANING THE SOIL HAS ALREADY BEEN PREDICTED THROUGH COMPUTER MODELING BACK IN GAINESVILLE. DR. WENDY GRAHAM IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF AGRICULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA'S INSTITUTE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES.
>>>DR. WENDY GRAHAM, UF GROUNDWATER HYDROLOGIST: It's sort of analogous to medical imaging where they inject dyes into your body, then look to see where they go to try to find tumors and that kind of thing. We're injecting tracers in there. And from the response of these tracers, we have methods to help us map hydraulic properties of the aquifer, and contaminant distributions within the aquifer.
>>>WITH A COMPUTER SCREEN REPRESENTING THE TEST CELL, TRACERS SHOW HOW THE FLUIDS WILL MOVE. DR. KIRK HATFIELD IS U-F ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CIVIL ENGINEERING.
>>>DR. KIRK HATFIELD, UF CIVIL ENGINEERING ASSOC. PROF.: With these various tracers, we've monitored their concentrations as a function of time. As we monitored their behavior inside the test cell, we were able to develop some technologies that would tell us where that NAPL might be expected to be found in certain portions of the test cell. In other words, certain portions of the cell may be clean; cleaner than others. And so if you wanted to target your remediation, or cleanup activities, then you could use the technologies that were developed with this group to make a statement about where you should target those technologies.
>>>HATFIELD SAYS SUCH TARGETING COULD SAVE MONEY, WHILE HELPING VERIFY THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE SITE COULD BE CLEANED UP. AT THE UTAH SITE, ANALYSIS OF THE REMEDIATION IS PERFORMED ON SAMPLES WHERE IMMEDIACY IS IMPORTANT, BUT THE NUMBER OF SAMPLES FAR EXCEEDS THE CAPACITY OF THE ON-SITE ANALYZER, SO MOST OF THE E ON-SITE WORK INVOLVES THE PROVIDING OF SAMPLES WHICH WILL BE SHIPPED TO THE UF CAMPUS.
>>>JIM JAWITZ, UF GRADUATE STUDENT: So we apply a vacuum and pull up samples, and over approximately 20 days, we take about 5,000 samples from the various depths and various locations. Currently, we're at a four-hour sampling interval, so we all sit down every four hours and we sample from 96 different locations, spread three dimensionally throughout the 15 by 11-foot cell. We're pulling samples from what we call multi-level samplers, which are stainless steel tubes which penetrate to approximately between 16 and 28 feet below the ground surface. Each of these different color vials represents a tube that penetrates to a different depth. And we have a system; a network of samplers spread throughout our cell, and we watch the movement of the chemicals that we're injecting at the different depths throughout the whole cell.
>>>AFTER THE SOLUTION PASSES THROUGH THE CELL; THROUGH THE SOIL AND PLUMBING BENEATH IT, STILL MORE PLUMBING CARRIES IT TO A SECTION OF THE TANK FARM SET ASIDE FOR THE HANDLING OF EFFLUENT. IT'S HERE THAT A 21,000-GALLON TANK WILL HOLD THE SURFACTANT-ALCOHOL SOLUTION FROM UF'S TEST CELL AND WHAT IT HAS CLEANED FROM THE SOIL. PLANS CALL FOR MOST OF THE EFFLUENT TO BE TREATED RIGHT ON BASE.
>>>JOHN GINN, HAFB ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION COORDINATOR: Hill Air Force Base, as part of the agreement with the research groups, is providing for ultimate disposal of the waste that's being generated throughout these demonstrations. Our essential plan is to meter as much of the remedial fluids as possible, to the Hill AFB industrial waste water treatment plant, in hopes to save potential incineration costs. High level wastes that will be coming out of the ground: If we're not able to send it to the Industrial Waste Treatment Plant, several of the research groups have protocols in place to concentrate the wastes; to take their overall waste stream and separate it into two waste streams. A high level and a low level waste. And the high level waste has been slated to go off base for off-site incineration, and the low level waste, of course, to the industrial waste treatment plant.
>>>BEFORE WASTE FROM THE UF TEST CELL PASSES INTO THE TANK, IT TOO IS SAMPLED AS PART OF A TEST THAT REVEALS CHANGES THAT ARE MORE EASILY SEEN; A PROGRESSION THAT IS APPARENT EVEN TO THE NAKED EYE. CLAYTON CLARK IS A Ph.D. STUDENT AT UF'S SCHOOL OF SOIL AND WATER SCIENCES.
>>>CLAYTON CLARK, UF Ph.D.. STUDENT: Here is a comparison of two composite samples from the effluent of the cell; contaminated soil. In my right hand, I have about a four-hour sample. Just after we began flushing. In my left hand, here; this is after the first day, or first pour volume, and the first, what, 25 hours. And you see the difference in the color as more of the NAPL is being removed from the cell.
>>>AS THE EXPERIMENT PROGRESSES, CHANGES TO THE FLUID PASSING THROUGH THE CELL ARE EXPECTED TO LEAVE IT IN AS NATURAL A CONDITION AS POSSIBLE.
>>>ANNABEL: Toward the end of the experiment, we're going to stop injecting alcohol, and switch over to a surfactant only solution. The idea there is to help the removal of the alcohol first, and then eventually, after a couple pour volumes of surfactant, we'll switch over to water, and we'll displace all of the surfactant out of the cell. So, eventually, we'll bring the cell back to completely water and will have displaced all of the flushing solutions that we're using.
>>>AS THE EXPERIMENT NEARS COMPLETION, MANY QUESTIONS ARE BEING ANSWERED. AS FOR THE TECHNOLOGY'S RELIABILITY, RAO SAYS "SO FAR, SO GOOD."
>>>RAO: The time element of long cleanup times and incomplete remediation, meaning not being able to meet the remedial goals in a prescribed time period, will be overcome by using these kinds of technologies. And that's the future of where we're going with it.
>>>IT'S A FUTURE RAO SAYS INVOLVES MORE TESTING; TESTING THAT COULD BRING COSTS DOWN WHILE DEMONSTRATING THAT THE TECHNOLOGY CAN BE USED IN INCREASINGLY CHALLENGING SITUATIONS.
>>>RAO: These field tests are important for that. to be able to go to different locations; test the same kind of technologies in different contamination settings, like a different geographic region of the country, perhaps that has different aquifer properties, or a different type of contaminant, rather than a jet fuel chlorinated solvent mixture we're doing here. So this project is heading to another site, hopefully, in another geologic setting in another location. Another base, perhaps.
>>>LOOKING BEYOND PROOF THAT THE TECHNOLOGY WORKS, ENFIELD SAYS THERE ARE TWO OBSTACLES TO OVERCOME.
>>>CARL ENFIELD, U.S.E.P.A: One of these obstacles is getting acceptance to innovative technologies. There are several problems with that. One is a regulatory problem, and the other is a problem of consulting firms. When they're trying to use a technology, they want to have something that they know will work. If they know it works, then they can make their profit and maintain a reputation. But when they're trying to do something that's very innovative, there's a chance that they could make a mistake. Making a mistake then, makes it so that they lose reputation, because they are staking their reputation every time they go out and try to do a remediation. So we need to have some way of giving incentives to the people who use innovative technologies in the field, so that they are not held liable, or they are not held accountable, necessarily, for potential errors that might be made. And not lose sight that this is still innovative technology.
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>>>IMPACT. A WEEKLY LOOK AT ISSUES AND ANSWERS THAT IMPACT OUR LIVES AND THE WORLD AROUND US, IS PRODUCED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA'S INSTITUTE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES.