Many active and former military installations have ranges and training areas that include adjacent water environments such as ponds, lakes, rivers, estuaries, and coastal ocean areas. Disposal and accidents have generated munitions contamination in the coastal and inland waters throughout the United States. SERDP and ESTCP have been funding research and demonstrations to better detect, classify, and remediate unexploded ordnance (UXO) on land and in the underwater environment since 1995. The 2022 Symposium will offer three technical sessions that discuss test site development; fate, transport, treatment of munitions constituents; and munition burial and mobility.

Controlled Demonstration Sites Leading to Live Demonstration Sites

This session will discuss tests conducted and planned tests, with participation of service, live site managers, and regulators. The session will cover UXO Detection, Classification, Localization (DCL) system descriptions, performances and test conditions encountered, as well as the transition to live site operations.

Legacy and Insensitive High Explosive Constituents: Fate, Transport, Treatment

The Department of Defense’s test and training ranges are a critical asset for the military. Maintaining these ranges is essential to enable troops to train in realistic circumstances at appropriate scales and to develop and test new weapons systems. Associated munitions constituents may pose environmental, occupational, safety, and health risks and mitigating these risks throughout the life cycle of these materials is critical to mission success. This session will address emerging issues in known or suspected toxicity parameters, the fate and transport of these compounds in the environment, and treatment options for wastes from munitions manufacturing.

Munition Burial and Mobility

This session will review ongoing work, including laboratory tests, analytic models, at-sea measurements, plus plans for future efforts. Speakers will also discuss transitioning the Underwater Munitions Expert System (UnMES) to an operations-oriented model useful to service live-site managers.

To learn more about Symposium technical sessions, short courses, posters, and registration, visit the Symposium website.