Fixed capital investments for the uranium soils integrated demonstration soil treatment technologies

The development of a nuclear industry in the United States required mining, milling, and fabricating a large variety of uranium products. One of these products was purified uranium metal which was used in the Savannah River and Hanford Site reactors. Most of this feed material was produced at the United States Department of Energy (DOE) facility formerly called the Feed Materials Production Center at Fernald, Ohio. During operation of this facility, soils became contaminated with uranium from a variety of sources. To address remediation and management of uranium-contaminated soils at sites owned by DOE, the Uranium Soils Integrated Demonstration (USID) Program was formed to evaluate and compare the versatility, efficiency, and economics of various technologies that may be combined into systems designed to characterize and remediate uranium contaminated soils. The USID Program has five major tasks in developing and demonstrating these technologies. Each must be able to (1) characterize the uranium in soil, (2) decontaminate or remove uranium from soil, (3) treat or dispose of resulting waste streams, (4) meet necessary state and federal regulations, and (5) meet performance assessment objectives. The role of the performance assessment objectives is to provide the information necessary to conduct evaluations of the technologies. These performance assessments provide the basis for selecting the optimum system for remediation of large areas contaminated with uranium. One of the performance assessment tasks is to address the economics of full-scale implementation of soil treatment technologies developed by the USID Program. The cost of treating contaminated soil is one of the criteria used in the decision-making process for selecting remedial alternatives