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

3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
December 10, 2001

On Monday, December 10, 2001, 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)
Arun Gavaskar, Batelle
Liyuan Liang, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Bruce Sass, Batelle
Tim Sivavec, General Electric Corporate Remediation
Richard Steimle, EPA
Also participating in the call was Christine Hartnett from Eastern Research Group, Inc. (ERG).

PROPOSAL FOR A RTDF MONITORING PROJECT

Tim Sivavec said that the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) has issued a call for proposals titled Diagnostic Procedures To Evaluate Remediation Performance at Chlorinated Solvent Contaminated Sites. He noted that some Steering Committee members plan to submit a proposal, and asked whether one should be submitted on behalf of the entire RTDF PRB Action Team as well. Conference call participants agreed that it should, noting that SERDP's call for proposals aligns well with the monitoring project the RTDF PRB Action Team has been talking about performing. A 10-page pre-proposal must be submitted to SERDP by January 10, 2001. Sivavec will take the lead on this; as a first step, he will draft an outline and identify sections that need input from PRB Steering Committee members. The outline will be completed and distributed by December 18, 2001, and discussed via conference call on December 20, 2001.

If the RTDF Action Team is awarded funds, call participants asked, how will resources be managed across the entities that participate in the work? Bob Puls said that he would research this issue. He agreed to contact the RTDF Bioremediation Consortium's co-chairs for input: that team has successfully performed projects that involve a large number of individual entities.

Call participants spent the remainder of the call discussing what exactly the PRB Action Team hoped to accomplish by performing a monitoring study, and how their proposal should be structured. Puls noted that Steering Committee members have expressed interest in two types of monitoring projects:

• A database building effort. During the June 2001 Steering Committee meeting, some interest was expressed in performing intensive monitoring at a few select sites.
• A "smart monitoring" program. Interest has also been expressed in identifying monitoring techniques that offer cheaper, faster, and better solutions for sites.

Call participants agreed that SERDP would be interested in projects that identify diagnostic tools that offer high-quality data at a more affordable price. Cutting monitoring costs, they agreed, will make PRB technologies attractive to more end users. It would be useful, Sivavec said, to identify a parameter that correlates well with long-term performance and can be monitored easily and cheaply. It would be particularly appealing, he noted, to identify diagnostic tools that are passive, can be operated remotely, and lead to system correction or optimization. Puls said that it would be very useful to develop an affordable monitoring scheme that provides information on capture, treatment, and continued system performance.

Call participants agreed that the RTDF Action Team's pre-proposal should include a table that lists diagnostic tools that might be worthy of testing. No final decisions were made about which tools should appear on the list. Discussion focused mostly on different types of in situ sensing probes.

Call participants offered the following suggestions for the pre-proposal:

• Make it clear that the techniques tested could have broader applications, and might serve as beneficial diagnostic tools for other non-PRB remediation technologies.
• Address geochemical parameters, hydrology, and capture zone.

Call participants agreed that the PRB Action Team's monitoring project should be conducted at one or two specific sites. They did not think it was necessary to specify sites at this point, however.