SUMMARY OF THE REMEDIATION TECHNOLOGIES DEVELOPMENT FORUM
PERMEABLE REACTIVE BARRIERS ACTION TEAM
STEERING COMMITTEE CONFERENCE CALL

2:30 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
February 13, 2002

On Wednesday, February 13, 2002, the following members of the Remediation Technologies Development Forum's (RTDF's) Permeable Reactive Barriers (PRB) Action Team met in a conference call:

Bob Puls, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Action Team Co-chair)
John Vidumsky, DuPont (Action Team Co-chair)
Richard Landis, DuPont
Bruce Sass, Battelle
Tim Sivavec, General Electric Corporate Remediation
Matthew Turner, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection

Also participating in the call was Christine Hartnett from Eastern Research Group, Inc. (ERG).

NEXT PRB ACTION TEAM MEETING

Call participants indicated that they hope to have a PRB Action Team meeting during the week of August 11, 2002. Two potential meeting locations were identified during the call: Baltimore and Denver. The former, call participants agreed, will be chosen if Lynn Roberts (of Johns Hopkins University) is able to provide a tour of her laboratory. Bruce Sass will contact Roberts or Chuck Reeter about this possibility, and report his findings to the PRB Action Team Steering Committee. If the tour is not feasible, call participants agreed, the meeting should be held in Denver so that attendees can visit a new PRB installation located near this city. ERG will start making arrangements for the meeting once a location has been agreed upon.

Call participants said that the meeting will extend over 1½ to 2 days, and will focus on the following themes:

• Long-term performance. Sass and Arun Gavaskar will identify speakers for this session.



• Monitoring. Presentations will focus on: (1) the extent of monitoring required at real-world sites, and (2) efforts that are underway to identify cheaper, faster, and better monitoring techniques. Tim Sivavec agreed to identify speakers for this session.



• Site design. John Vidumsky and Richard Landis will identify speakers for this session.



• PRBs and cleanup efficacy. Presentations will address whether PRBs are actually meeting cleanup objectives. Case studies will be presented; some attention will be given to sites that have coupled PRBs with other technologies (e.g., natural attenuation and capping) in an effort to meet cleanup goals. Bob Puls will identify speakers for this session.

Puls asked conference call participants to send the names of potential speakers to him and Vidumsky. The PRB Steering Committee members will meet via conference call on March 13, 2002, to discuss the meeting logistics in greater detail.

IMPLEMENTING A NEW MONITORING PROJECT

The PRB Steering Committee has submitted a pre-proposal to the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program. The pre-proposal requests funds for a PRB monitoring project. Puls said that a full proposal is due at the beginning of March 2002, and that Sivavec, Sass, Gavaskar, Liyuan Liang, and Libby West need to meet (via conference call) to discuss the proposal. The call will be scheduled for February 15, 2002.

TRI-AGENCY DOCUMENT

Puls said that EPA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy collaborated on a 3-year long-term performance study. The project is nearing completion. Gavaskar is working on a document that summarizes the activities of all three agencies. Sass agreed to check with Gavaskar on the document's progress. Matthew Turner said that he is also planning to write some text; he will try to complete it by February 15, 2002.