Tool for Developing Integrated Strategies for Decontamination and Waste Management - Presentation
Citation:
Lemieux, P., T. Boe, AND C. Hayes. Tool for Developing Integrated Strategies for Decontamination and Waste Management - Presentation. Waste Management 2020 Conference, Phoenix,AZ, March 08 - 12, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation will present the most recent version of WEST, which includes such considerations as affected biomass (e.g., trees), vehicles, and the ability to replace the default Hazus infrastructure databases with custom infrastructure databases.Presented at WM2020 Conference, Phoenix, AZ, March 8-13, 2020
Description:
Management of waste from chemical, biological, and radiological incidents is complicated by the fact that decontamination decisions have a profound impact on the characteristics of resulting waste streams. Wide-area biological and radiological incidents could produce massive quantities of waste that may need to be treated on-site and sent for subsequent disposal as non-contaminated materials, or else be directly disposed of as contaminated materials. The EPA has developed the Waste Estimation Support Tool (WEST) for characterizing and quantifying biological and radiological waste that may be generated from decontamination efforts. This paper focuses on the WEST’s uses for radiological incidents. EPA is currently developing the next version of WEST which will include several substantial enhancements. The most significant improvement for the next version of WEST will include the ability for users to develop contamination scenarios and waste estimates based on previously developed, readily available, and geographically specific infrastructure data.