A comparative analysis of hazardous waste remediation alternatives

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has 136 contaminated nuclear-processing sites requiring remediation. Exploiting new remediation techniques will be critical to containing and treating this hazardous waste and to minimizing the estimated multibillion-dollar costs of cleanup. We combined system simulation, facility layout, stochastic life-cycle cost estimation, linear optimization, and various decision analysis techniques in a nine-month effort to give decision makers in the DOE realistic, flexible, and useful information to guide them in making decisions on Superfund remediation technology worth billions. A small team of students and instructors from the Air Force Institute of Technology used the majority of the techniques and tools taught at the institute to tackle this complex and important decision problem.