Environmental Restoration 1997 annual report

During 1997, the Environmental Restoration Program at the Savannah River Site achieved all of the ``Breakthrough Goals`` that were established with the regulatory agencies in 1995 to advance their cleanup efforts. Effective focus on field remediation was demonstrated by the allocation of 75% of program funding to remediation activities. The Remediation Phase is complete or has begun on sixty-nine waste sites that represent approximately 80% of the known environmental and health risk. The average time required for the assessment phase of active projects was reduced by 50%, from 49 to less than 24 months, which allows cleanup actions to start twice as fast as before. Breakthrough performance has tangible results. During 1997, all of the funding allocation was used effectively to accomplish environmental restoration scope worth over $123 million. That represents a validated cost efficiency of over 20% for the third straight year. Over half of the 500 contaminated acres at SRS have been cleaned up or are currently in the remediation phase. Almost 3 billion gallons of groundwater have been restored by removing over half a million pounds of organic solvents.