Completion Strategy
The strategy for completing the remedial and corrective actions for each of the National Priorities
List Sites and moving into a long-term stewardship and future use condition relies
heavily on groundwater protection. The groundwater pathway represents the primary exposure route
for Hanford contaminants to reach human and environmental receptors. Each National Priorities List
site is large and complex. Therefore, waste sites have been grouped so that similar sites can be
characterized and remediated efficiently to achieve the goals of groundwater protection and
restoration.
The completion strategy for each National Priorities List site, as portrayed
in the Master Schedules for the Groundwater Remediation Project, is described
in the subsites for this page. For the 100 and 300 Areas within the River
Corridor, these schedules are more well defined due to the completion
of interim records of decision for all source control
actions and the establishment of specific Tri-Party Agreement milestones
and commitments to arrive at final decisions for these sites. For the
sites in the 200 Area, most of the operable units are still early in
the remedial investigation/feasibility study and consequently many of
the key decisions have not been made. In addition, final decisions for
the Central Plateau will greatly depend on the residual risks from tank
waste, the long-term contributions from ongoing waste management operations,
and the risks to human health and the environment from decontamination
and decommissioning of 200 Area nuclear facilities. This accelerated
plan provides the basis for actions between now and 2012, and to a lesser
extent after 2012, to be taken by the Groundwater Remediation Project
to complete remediation within regions of the Central Plateau.
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