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U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY RESEARCH AND TECHNICAL SUPPORT NEEDS RELATED TO CONCEPTUAL MODEL DEVELOPMENT FOR SUBSURFACE REACTIVE TRANSPORT MODELING OF INORGANIC CONTAMINANTS, RADIONUCLIDES, AND NUTRIENTS
Citation:
Puls*, R W. U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY RESEARCH AND TECHNICAL SUPPORT NEEDS RELATED TO CONCEPTUAL MODEL DEVELOPMENT FOR SUBSURFACE REACTIVE TRANSPORT MODELING OF INORGANIC CONTAMINANTS, RADIONUCLIDES, AND NUTRIENTS. Presented at U.S. Federal Interagency Workshop, Albuquerque, NM, April 20 - 22, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
EPA's Office of Research and Development is responsible to EPA's Office of Solid Waste to provide research and technical support for waste site closures and the development of technical guidance in support of environmental regulations and programmatic policies. ORD is also responsible to EPA's regional offices to provide technical assistance for Superfund and RCRA cleanups. Many of these sites involve inorganic contaminants. Adequate site conceptual models are often lacking at many of these sites due to inadequate data, improper interpretation of data, lack of understanding and/or use of reactive transport models for site assessment purposes, and other factors.
Another area of increasing focus is research on ecosystem restoration. While the majority of the focus here is on surface water quality, issues related to ground water - surface water interactions and sediment loading are also important. Non point source pollution from urban runoff, concentrated animal feeding operations, and agricultural practices have been identified as key stressors, with nitrogen management an increasingly important component of many restoration efforts. Nutrient management plans are often proving to be inadequate in controlling the transport of nitrogen, phosphate and other nutrients into receiving streams. It is possible that the conceptual models and transport models being used to assess nitrogen transport for these types of sites are inadequate.
The challenge confronting the USEPA, like many government agencies, is how to leverage scarce and shrinking resources to improve our capabilities in site conceptual model development and the development of improved reactive transport models for site assessment, remedial performance and watershed restoration efforts.