Physicochemical Groundwater Remediation

Abstract

Restoring contaminated soil and groundwater is one of the most challenging problems faced by environmental scientists and engineers. Any one of a large number of chemicals may contaminate a particular site, and these pollutants may be found in a wide variety of geological settings. The scope of the problem is enormous, with cleanup costs at U.S. Department of Energy sites alone estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It is not surprising, therefore, that once many of the original remediation technologies were found to be costly or ineffective, considerable effort was spent to develop new technologies, most of them in situ.