Hazards: Technology and Fairness (1986)

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HAZARDOUS WASTE FACILITY SITING: COMMUNITY, FIRM, AND 123 GOVERNMENTAL PERSPECTIVES original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. considerations receive little treatment in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and only belatedly are being addressed by the U.S. Department of Energy, with regional distribution questions unresolved. Risk Uncertainty Varying degrees of uncertainty characterize the health implications of waste facility siting. Generally there appears to be little chance of massive uncontrolled releases of radioactive or other hazardous wastes into the environment from well-designed disposal facilities (U.S. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment, 1983, p. 46). Risk assessments of high-level radioactive waste repositories provide some confidence that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's health objective of a limit of 1,000 deaths over a 10,000-year period in its environmental standard for those wastes may be met. On the other hand, residual risks unquestionably exist. The long time periods that characterize the waste disposal task, the limited experience with repository design and behavior, the necessary reliance on computer models for simulating waste behavior, and limitations on model validation and remaining gaps in scientific knowledge all suggest that uncertainties will remain. For land disposal (should it occur) of hazardous nonradioactive wastes, these uncertainties may be particularly substantial because of limited knowledge of: • the likely quantity and timing of releases of particular constituents; • the rates of transport of released hazardous constituents through the environment and their rates of degradation in the environment; • the extent of possible exposures of people and the environment to persistent hazardous constituents and their degradation products; and • the probability of damages (U.S. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment, 1983, pp. 22–23). Compounding these uncertainties is the fact that there is generally inadequate scientific knowledge to decide which locations are best for specific hazardous wastes (U.S. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment, 1983, p. 20). All this suggests that given the magnitude of the siting task—with hundreds of facilities needed—some failures and releases must be expected and that authoritative statements linking the disposal of hazardous wastes at a particular location with associated long-term effects on health and the environment are not possible. Such risk uncertainties not only complicate the management task but exacerbate public concerns about the dangers posed by a particular suggested disposal facility. All this supports a policy