Long Term Stewardship - Do We Need A New Paradigm?

Stewardship is often defined as those activities that take place after active remediation to ensure long term protection of human health and the environment, including so-called institutional controls. Clearly if stewardship is to be effective, planning for stewardship must begin well in advance of "closure" The authors are conducting an evaluation of stewardship requirements for contaminant isolation facilities with the goal of providing an approach to the estimation of the types and likelihoods of failure, failure consequences, responses and costs. Preliminary work confirms our suspicions that little actual data are available and that asking these kinds of questions before failure occurs can provide valuable insight concerning possible new approaches to facility and monitoring program design.