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

3:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
September 2, 2003

On Tuesday, September 2, 2003, the following members of the Remediation Technologies Development Forum's Permeable Reactive Barriers (PRB) Action Team's Steering Committee met in a conference call:

Bob Puls, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Action Team Co-chair)
Bob Gillham, University of Waterloo
Tom Krug, GeoSyntec
Stephen White, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Also participating in the call were Peter Riddle from Environmental Management Support, Inc., and Christine Hartnett from ERG.

NEXT PRB ACTION TEAM MEETING

The next PRB Action Team meeting will take place at the Holiday Inn Select in Niagara Falls, New York, in October 2003. The meeting will consist of three components.

Steering Committee Meeting

The PRB Action Team Steering Committee will hold an informal meeting on the evening of October 14, 2003. Bob Puls said that he will prepare an agenda for this meeting and send it to Christine Hartnett, who will in turn send it to the entire Steering Committee. Puls noted that the Action Team's PRB site profiles would be included as an agenda item. This prompted Peter Riddle to report on the profiles' status: six sites have been updated so far, and five new sites have been identified.

Action Team Meeting

A PRB Action Team meeting will take place on October 15 and 16, 2003. During this meeting, four sessions of platform presentations will be delivered and two open discussions will be held. Call participants provided an update on the planning done thus far on the four sessions, and agreed that the sessions should be held in the following order:

• Hydraulic Impacts on PRB Performance. John Vidumsky, who is organizing this session, was unable to participate in the conference call. Though no formal update was provided for his session, call participants indicated that they are confident that Vidumsky will be able to identify enough speakers.



• Long-Term Performance of PRBs. Bob Puls said that he has already lined up three talks. They will cover (1) the impact of mineral fouling on the long-term performance of PRBs, (2) results obtained from long-term monitoring projects in Germany, and (3) field performance data collected in Denmark. In addition, Puls said, he is quite certain that someone from EPA's Ada, Oklahoma, laboratory would be willing to provide an update on the Denver Federal Center.



• Application of PRB Technology to Source Zone Management. Bob Gillham said that he has secured two speakers (one from the University of Waterloo and one from GeoSyntec) for this session. DuPont has also expressed interest in delivering a presentation. In addition, Gillham said, he thinks he will be able to find someone (perhaps Tom Sale) to speak about the general architecture and characteristics of source zones.



• Novel PRB Applications. Tom Krug said that he has identified six talks for this session, but noted that one of the talks might be better suited for a poster presentation. Krug provided a list of the speakers he has identified. They include Neal Durant (GeoSyntec), John Vidumsky (DuPont), Craig Benson (University of Wisconsin), Steve Shoemaker (DuPont), and representatives from the University of Missouri and EnviroMetal Technologies, Inc.

Call participants agreed that two sessions should be held per day and that each day should end with a 30-minute discussion period. They also agreed that the individual platform presentations should be about 30 minutes long, with 10 minutes of question-and-answer time embedded into that time period.

Poster Session

Call participants expressed interest in holding a poster session on the evening of October 15, 2003. If plenty of poster presenters can be identified over the next month, Puls said, it would be ideal to have the poster session in a spacious room with refreshments. But if the response to the call for posters is poor, Puls said, a separate poster session would not be warranted. Under such a scenario, it would be better to simply set up a few posters in the Action Team meeting room and encourage attendees to view them during coffee and lunch breaks.

ACTION ITEMS

• ERG will set up the next PRB Action Team conference call for September 17, 2003, between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time.



• Gillham will invite Tom Sale to deliver a presentation at the meeting.



• Puls will obtain a status report on two novel application projects--one involving a hay wall and one using woodchips. Puls will find out whether the project managers are willing to deliver a presentation at the meeting, and report his findings to Krug. Puls will also inquire about an effort that is underway to remediate source zones with dithionite. Within a week, Puls will let Gillham know whether a paper could be presented on that topic.



• The four session organizers (Vidumsky, Puls, Gillham, and Krug) will send presentation titles and speaker names to Hartnett as soon as possible. By September 15, 2003, Hartnett will consolidate the information she receives into a preliminary agenda and e-mail it to the PRB Action Team mailing list. At the same time, Hartnett will make another plea for poster abstracts.



• Steering Committee members agreed to forward any poster abstracts they receive to Hartnett.



• Call participants agreed that it would be nice if a sponsor provided refreshments during coffee breaks and/or the poster session. Gillham and Krug agreed to try and identify sponsors.



• ERG will start preparing a speaker booklet for the meeting. ERG will contact speakers and poster presenters to request copies of their abstracts and/or PowerPoint presentations.



• Puls said that he has a document that provides information about different PRB projects. He agreed to send the document to Riddle, who will look at it to determine whether it contains information that is not currently captured in the Action Team's site profile database.