Environmental Remediation Challenge
Develop Biological Solutions for Intractable Environmental Problems
Mission Science Goals and Challenges
Mission Science Goals: Understand the processes by which microbes function in the earth’s subsurface, mechanisms by which they impact the fate and transport of contaminants, and the scientific principles of bioremediation based on native microbial populations and their interactions with the environment. Develop methods to relate genome-based understanding of molecular processes to long-term conceptual and predictive models for simulating contaminant fate and transport and development of remediation strategies.
Challenges: Bioremediation will require understanding biogeochemical processes from the fundamental-molecular to community levels to describe contaminant-transformation processes coinciding with simulated changes in microbial-community composition and structure.
DOE has intractable contamination challenges at diverse sites around the country, making accurate prediction of contaminant behavior critical in determining the need for restoration and in suggesting stabilization or restoration strategies.
Understanding the complex interactions of microbes with contaminants and the subsurface environment— a GTL goal—will allow such predictions to be based on fundamental biological, geochemical, and hydrological properties of specific environments.
DOE is committed to remediating the large volumes of soil, sediments, and groundwater contaminated with metals, radionuclides, and a variety of organics at diverse defense production facilities and sites across the nation (see sidebar, A Legacy of Hazardous Waste).
As an example of the problem’s scope, about 5700 individual contaminant plumes, some quite extensive, are known to exist on DOE land (Linking Legacies 1997). Contaminated soils and sediments at the Nevada Test Site and Fernald, for example, are 1.5 and 0.71 million m3, respectively. One plume at the Savannah River site extends over 7.8 km2, and a plume of 18 km2 exists at the Hanford site. In addition, unknown quantities of waste are buried at numerous sites. Without major breakthroughs in technology, projected costs for locating and characterizing contamination, restoring these sites, and disposing of wastes over the next 35 years are $142 billion (Closure Planning Guidance 2004). Although DOE has the goal of completing the remediation of 108 of 114 contaminated sites by 2025 (DOE Strategic Plan 2003), the 6 sites remaining to be addressed are the most challenging, and successful remediation will require development and deployment of innovative methods.
Bioremediation: Goals and Impacts
- Understand and incorporate the effects of biological processes into computer models describing the fate and transport of contaminants in the environment. This knowledge could result in savings in the billions of dollars by supporting decisions to take advantage of natural attenuation alternatives, use bioremediation for previously intractable problems, or improve the efficiency of conventional technologies.
- Develop new or improved bioremediation strategies and technologies to save potentially billions of dollars over traditional treatments. Bioremediation may offer solutions in previously intractable cases (i.e., where there was no solution at any price).
- Develop new suites of biosensors and performance assessment and monitoring techniques to track progress of environmental cleanup strategies and optimize operation of current cleanup techniques.
Text adapted from Genomics:GTL Roadmap: Systems Biology for Energy and Environment, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, August 2005. DOE/SC-0090.
