Acceptance of the Expedited Site Characterization (ESC) approach in environmental cleanups

It has been several years since the Department of Energy (DOE) first started promoting a new characterization approach for CERCLA/RCRA activities at DOE contaminated sites. This approach, referred to as Expedited Site Characterization (ESC), has been demonstrated, reviewed and observed by DOE and other agency program managers, and used in actual regulated site activities at DOE's Pantex Site, Savannah River Site, and the Nevada Test Site to confirm its cost and schedule savings and, more importantly, its effectiveness. Since then, on a national level, many new EPA policies and initiatives have been introduced for environmental activities in general to speed up the cleanup process. State regulatory agencies are closely cooperating under new programs to reduce the barriers for use of innovative approaches and technologies in remediation programs. And several programs have emerged from federal agencies such as Departments of Commerce and Defense and Energy, to assist the acceptance of new concepts and approaches to environmental problems. The combination of these many changes and trends in environmental policy and activities has an influence on the future use of ESC for site characterization programs. The issues facing ESC acceptance are very similar to the issues facing innovative technology acceptance. This paper will describe: the reason for DOE's original push to introduce ESC into environmental management programs, what ESC means, what is its acceptance today in particular with respect to the changes occurring nationally in the environmental business, and expected future use of this approach in both the private sector and DOE. The emphasis in this paper is NOT so much on what ESC is but on how ESC gains acceptance.