Pacific Northwest National Laboratory technology used at the Hanford Site in Washington state this year received an R&D 100 Award, an annual contest by R&D Magazine sometimes called the “Oscars of Innovation.” The Department of Energy lab developed technology that allows scientists and engineers to remotely look at underground soil environments in real time, in a process PNNL has compared to physicians using medical scans to look within a body.
The technology, developed starting in 2008 and at a cost of about $400,000 with support from the Department of Energy Offices of Science and Environmental Management, has applications for monitoring underground contamination at multiple DOE cleanup sites and better understanding environmental remediation processes, according to PNNL. The technology, called E4D-RT, sends data collected in the field to supercomputers for analysis with real-time imaging returned to the field or a website. “No other commercial subsurface modeling software constructs 3D, time-lapse images of how the subsurface environment changes over time, in real time,” PNNL said in a statement.
The technology has been used for soil desiccation testing in central Hanford, where low-level radioactive contamination is left deep underground from the past disposal of contaminated liquids at the former plutonium production site. In the desiccation technique, soil is dried out to prevent moisture from spreading contamination deeper underground in places where contamination already is too deep for excavation at a reasonable cost. Snapshots of subsurface conditions were collected in 2012 by electrical resistivity tomography, which measures the difficulty of passing an electrical current through the soil, and translated into time-lapse images that showed the drying zone growing underground, indicating areas that had been treated, said Tim Johnson, the PNNL computational geophysicist who developed E4D-RT.
The technology also was used to monitor a project to keep uranium contamination from migrating to the groundwater at Hanford through a chemical reaction intended to immobilize it. Images were provided every 12 minutes for four weeks to allow operators to monitor the progression of the treatment zone as it occurred, according to PNNL.
