FEATURE ARTICLE
Managing the Environmental Legacy of U.S. Nuclear-Weapons Production
Although the waste from America's arms buildup will never be "cleaned up," human and environmental risks can be reduced and managed
Kevin Crowley, John F. Ahearne
Reducing and Managing Risk
Since its creation in 1989, the cleanup program has focused on developing and executing negotiated milestones to achieve specific cleanup tasks or levels of contaminant reduction, while at the same time (according to some critics) maintaining high levels of employment at sites that no longer have a national defense mission. It is becoming clear that many of these "activity-based" milestones may not be achievable with current technologies. Furthermore, the milestones are not designed around goals of protecting human and environmental health. If achieving such protection is the ultimate goal of the cleanup program, we believe that it may make more sense to organize major programmatic milestones around agreed-to levels of risk reduction without specifying in advance the specific remedial actions to be taken to achieve those reductions.
The judicious use of "risk-based" milestones could have several benefits. Such milestones could, for example, provide a better measure of progress and encourage the investment of funds where the greatest risk reductions could be achieved. They also could encourage greater creativity in the selection of "end states" for cleanup and the remedial actions to achieve them, creativity that is lacking in current activity-based milestone approaches.
Of course, the use of a risk-based approach requires that risk estimates be developed for site hazards. The cleanup program has had difficulty developing a risk-based analysis—the sites are complex, not all of the contaminants (groundwater plumes, for instance) have been located and characterized, nor is all of the waste adequately characterized. The cleanup program does not even use the "risk" concept consistently: Sometimes risk is defined based on effects on the health of off-site populations only, not including on-site workers, and other times risk is defined programmatically, that is, whether a particular action can be completed on time and within budget.
» Post Comment