DOE OSTI2019
Radioactive contaminants pose risks to human health and the environment. These risks are influenced by factors such as disposal/release and transport mechanisms, location in the environment, potential exposure receptors, and the presence of comingled contaminants. Understanding the behavior, transport, and distribution of radionuclides in the environment is essential to facilitating risk-informed decision-making related to remedial design, action, and monitoring. These decisions are based on significant amounts of complex data that must be accessed, integrated, and analyzed to effectively evaluate data and formulate appropriate conclusions and recommendations. Often, data volume, complexity, and legacy access issues pose severe challenges for analysts, regulators, and stakeholders interested in evaluating scientific data to support decision-making. To address these challenges at the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed PHOENIX (PNNL-Hanford Online Environmental Information exchange) to facilitate risk-informed decision-making by streamlining investigative and analytical processes through the integration and visualization of previously isolated datasets created under distinct regulatory or operational regimes, each serving a specific purpose. With the large volume of data dispersed across many Hanford environmental databases, finding the correct sources of relevant data, accessing them, and relating them in a meaningful way can prove challenging and time consuming. By analyzing Hanford databases, performing substantial optimization using modern data processing methods and developing extensive queries on the refactored data, PHOENIX enables users to access, integrate, display, visualize, and retrieve data that would have been historically unfeasible to examine. The data and information accessible through PHOENIX help inform remediation-related assessments and evaluations, predict and quantify the risks that radioactive and chemical contaminants pose to human health and the environment, and communicate this information to decision makers responsible for risk-based remediation actions. (authors)
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗