Hazardous Waste Site Management Water Quality Issues (1988) / Chapter Skim
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In some cases, no existing technologies can achieve these Tow levels. On the other hand, setting less stringent cleanup levels based on practicality or cost-effectiveness could result in solutions that cause unanticipated harm to human health and lead to costly legal battles between governmental agencies and impacted or interested parties most notably various environmental organizations and citizens groups.
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Finally, two speakers were asked to assess the adequacy of two key scientific areas that play a major role in specifying cleanup levels, namely, ground water modeling and risk assessment. Each issue paper was followed by a formal critique, and workshops were held to assess the scientific and technical bases used in the standard-setting process (the workshops addressed engineering, hydrogeology, risk assessment, and regulatory strategies)
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The cleanup levels specified for ground water at Superfund sites must be based on applicable or relevant and appropriate requirements (ARARs) provided by other federal environmental statutes such as the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
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Section 121 was an important and controversial attempt to produce uniformity in the remediation process according to explicit criteria and standards. But has Section 121 provided explicit and unequivocal guidance to EPA and other regulatory agencies for setting cleanup levels at Superfund hazardous waste sites?
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This fact places a greater burden on the science of quantitative risk assessment, which relies in turn on the accuracy of predictions regarding the fate of recalcitrant or poorly degradable organic contaminants in the subsurface environment a highly complex environment, when compared to surface waters or the lower atmosphere. Drawing on his experience with the implementation of the Clean Air Act, Dowd stressed the importance of developing methods for setting standards at hazardous waste sites that use the best available scientific knowledge, that can be verified by current means of measurement, and that use safety factors or logical conservative assumptions.
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to establish target cleanup levels at both NPL and non-NPL sites. Generally, these methods are rational; that is, they use procedures that are based on our current scientific understanding of contaminant fates and human exposures, they attempt to provide safety factors that explicitly address the areas of limited knowledge, and they are linked to regulatory requirements established under other federal environmental statutes.
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From page 7... ...
Although the writers of SARA had hoped to define an objective and uniform method for setting ground water cleanup levels, as discussed in Linda Greer's paper, the overview of the decision process presented in the paper written by Edwin Barth, William Hanson, and Elizabeth Shaw of EPA suggests that a case-by-case approach will still be used in reaching a record of decision for the remedial action at each site. Whereas target cleanup levels must be selected from applicable or relevant requirements, the final cletermination of the cleanup levels rests on the "appropriateness" of the requirement, taking into account such imprecise concepts as fund balancing, technical feasibility, and cost-effectiveness.
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The remarks by Ronald Esau, representing an impacted water utility with 60 percent of its water supply source at risk from accidental industrial releases of organic contaminants, and Linda Greer, from the Environmental Defense Fund, an influential national environmental organization, indicate that support for cleanup levels less stringent than background or a low risk level of 10-6 appears unlikely from these groups. Such a posture can also be expected from other water utilities.
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Whether or not this is a substantive issue would require more extensive analysis. The Status of the Tethnical Formation Base Risk management decisions associated with setting cleanup levels at hazardous waste sites rest on three broad scientific and technical disciplines: hydrogeology, risk assessment, and remedial engineering.
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SUMMARY The process of setting cleanup levels at hazardous waste sites poses new challenges to the regulators, the regulatory community, and the impacted parties, when compared to the implementation of other environmental statutes. Although all participants in the debate over the details of the risk assessment/risk management process desire an objective, tractable method for setting cleanup levels, numerous obstacles make this goal difficult to achieve.
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From page 11... ...
lssne F~ers and Pr~ocateUr~ Comments
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