| Abstract: |
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has facilities in 34
states, and many of these have chemical or radiological contamination that provides
a potential risk to human or ecological health.
Over the next few decades many of these sites will he cleaned up,
and ecological risk assessment will be one tml used to make
decisions about remediation and future land use. The DOE has
developed an overall strategy for making remediation decisions
that involves i
using risk assessment, with stakeholder input,
although the final decisions are the Department's.
The key elements of its ecological risk assessments
involve valuing the severity and likelihood of
occurrence of adverse ecological effects.
It Is currently using a process that
incorporates descriptions of the environinenw risk,
and valuations of the severity and likelihood of an
adverse outcome before, during, and after any remedial activity.
The primary difficulty with the current DOE approach to risk has
been a failure to use existing information to identify either
species of concern or unique habitats at risk, and a lack of
uniformity across the DOE complex. Nonetheless, the inclusion of
ecological risk assessment in the decision-making process will help
achieve one of the new missions of DOE: the protection and
maintenance of blodiversity and healthy ecosystems at sites under
Its control. |