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HAZARDOUS WASTE FACILITY SITING: COMMUNITY, FIRM, AND 140 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. reasonably unavoidable risks among those who benefit from the technology or activity. Principle 4 addresses the ethical attributes of the process of risk imposition and, although recognizing that purely voluntary means are not possible, calls for enlarging the degree of voluntarism of risk assumption through, for example, full information (including uncertainty) to risk bearers, full participation in public proceedings, due process protection, and allocation of the burden of proof to the site developer. Finally, Principle 5 sets forth the obligation, once risks have been reduced as much as feasible, to compensate for the residual risks (to restore, to the degree possible, the original condition). Policy Tools A large array of policy tools exist for erecting siting strategies based upon these ethical principles. A number of the more prominent are noted below. Authority and the Systems Approach The allocation of authority needs to be consistent with the systemic scale of hazardous waste management. Since the siting of hazardous waste facilities is demonstrably contentious, sufficient concentration of authority must occur so that the actual deployment of sites in a timely way is possible. Widespread dispersion of authority in the face of a volatile siting process guarantees failure. But it is also essential that the level of the system be properly defined. The management of high-level radioactive waste is clearly a problem on a national scale; the management of nonhazardous solid waste clearly is not. It may well be, however, that assigning responsibility for low-level radioactive waste to the states was a strategic error. Risk Reduction and Safety Assurance The hazardous waste management system must be designed so that all elements and stages are sufficiently integrated that risk reduction can be maximized. For hazardous nonradioactive wastes this means a clear emphasis upon strategies and incentives designed to encourage reductions in waste generation and greater use of waste recycling and conversion, as called for in a recent report by the Environmental Studies Board of the National Research Council (1985). Specifically, this should include banning land disposal or (at least) increasing the costs for land disposal sites to a level consistent with the total social costs of land disposal of wastes. For high-level radioactive wastes, this will involve a careful balancing of the optimal time of interim storage and the timing of emplacement in repositories. Such systemic coor
