Cost of Remediating a Contaminated Site

Manufacturing

A remediation study is conducted in order to determine what remediation will need to be done in order to bring a site up to standard. The history of the site is the first step in this -- the history actually should guide the process. In this case, we have no idea what the history of the site is, so we probably have to test for everything. The remedial investigation therefore will begin by determining the nature of the contamination at the site, and then proceed to identify the risk to human health and the risk to the environment. Further, the study will need to include treatability testing to estimate the types of treatment options, their performance levels and applicability, in order to get a sense of what it might cost to remediate the site in question (EPA.gov, 2016).

The EPA outlines several different types of site contamination. There are different rules governing the different types of sites, and of course we do not know what type of site this was. Thus, at the beginning, it should be treated either as a superfund site or a brownfield site. Because the company wishes to develop this site, and there is no evidence yet to support involving the federal government as would be the case in a superfund site, the company may opt to treat this as a brownfield site until it knows more.

There are a number of different tests that will need to be conducted on the site. It will need to be tested for a variety of dangerous pollutants -- radioactive material, mercury and other heavy metals, different types of hydrocarbon pollutants, pesticides and other chemicals and polychloro biphenyls (Khan, Husain & Hejazi, 2004).

Once the nature of the contamination is known, the next step is to identify the potential technologies available for remediation. For any given contamination, there are multiple potential remediation methods. The cost analysis should only focus on the types that relate specifically to the type of pollutant and the intensity with which it is found at the site. Cost estimates on several different methods should be procured, but since this is a site that our company will be using, only those that will work to fully rehabilitate the site will be considered. The costs associated with obtaining these estimates are, of course, not to be included in the final decision, as they will be sunk costs at that point.

Radiation should be measured in terms of its type and its radioactivity. Measures used are the curie and the Becquerel. There are different types of radiation, and the site will need to be tested for all of them. The reason for this is because the exposure levels for the workers at the site will be high, since they will spend hours each week working at the site once the facility has been built. The site will therefore need to be tested for alpha, beta and gamma radiation (NRC.gov, 2016). It is not necessary to examine for absorbed dose -- how much the soil absorbs -- because of the imperative to ensure that workers are not exposed to this radiation over a prolonged period.