THE DOE OFFICE OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL COOPERATIVE PROGRAM: CURRENT STATUS AND PLANS FOR EXPANSION

The Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) Office of Engineering and Technology is responsible for implementing EM’s international cooperative program. The Office of Engineering and Technology’s international efforts are aimed at supporting EM’s mission of risk reduction and accelerated cleanup of the environmental legacy of the nation's nuclear weapons program and government-sponsored nuclear energy research. To do this, EM pursues collaborations with government organizations, educational institutions, and private industry to identify and develop technologies that can address the site cleanup needs of DOE. Currently, DOE-EM is performing collaborative work with researchers at the Khlopin Radium Institute (KRI) and the SIA Radon Institute in Russia and the Ukraine’s International Radioecology Laboratory (IRL). Additionally, a task was recently completed with the Nuclear Engineering Technology Institute (NETEC) in South Korea. The objectives of these collaborations were to explore issues relating to highlevel waste management and to investigate technologies that could be leveraged to support EM site cleanup needs. The initiatives in Russia and South Korea were aimed at evaluating and advancing technologies to support U.S. high-level waste vitrification initiatives. The work at KRI was targeted at improving the throughput of current vitrification processes by increasing melting rate and/or waste loading. The objectives of the efforts conducted at SIA Radon and NETEC were to evaluate advanced melter technologies to make dramatic increases in waste loading and throughput. The collaborative effort conducted with the IRL in the Ukraine has the following objectives:  Assess the long-term impacts to the environment from radiation exposure within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (ChEZ);  Provide information on remediation guidelines and ecological risk assessment within radioactively contaminated territories based on the results of long-term field monitoring, analytical measurements, and numerical modeling of soils and groundwater radioactive contamination; and