Suchergebnisse

The U.S. Department of Energy's Columbia River Comprehensive Impact Assessment (CRCIA) was an ambitious attempt to direct its cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation toward the most significant risks to the Columbia River resulting from past plutonium production. DOE's approach was uncommonly open, including tribal, regulatory agency, and other Hanford interest group representatives on the board that was to develop the assessment approach. The CRCIA process had attributes of the "analytic‐deliberative" process for risk assessment recommended by the National Research Council. Nevertheless, differences between the DOE and other participants over what was meant by the term "comprehensive" in the group's charge, coupled with differing perceptions of the likely effectiveness of remediation efforts in reducing risks, were never resolved. The CRCIA effort became increasingly fragmented and the role its products were to play in influencing future clean‐up decisions increasingly ambiguous. A procedural evaluation of the CRCIA process, based on Thomas Webler's procedural normative model of public participation, reveals numerous instances in which theoretical‐normative discourse disconnects occurred. These had negative implications for both the basic procedural dimensions of Webler's model—fairness and competence. Tribal and other interest group representatives lacked the technical resources necessary to make or challenge what philosopher Jurgens Habermas terms cognitive validity claims, while DOE and its contractors did not challenge normative claims made by tribal representatives. The results are cautionary for implementation of the analytic‐deliberative process. They highlight the importance of bringing rigor to the evaluation of the quality of the deliberation component of risk characterization via the analytic‐deliberative process, as well as to the analytic component.

The field of judgment and decisionmaking research provides a theoretical framework and analytical tools that may be valuable in facilitating the resolution of environmental conflict through mediation. This paper provides an overview of the concepts, tools and findings of this research area, and illustrates how they might be used to build a lvbrieffl for aiding the mediation of a controversy regarding sludge disposal in the New York Bight.

The risk of oil spills is a major environmental issue in the siting of proposed coastal refineries, oil terminals, deepwater ports, and in the leasing of offshore lands for oil exploration and development. As with any kind of risk, oil spill risk assessment is inherently judgmental and no analytic method can eliminate the need for judgment. This paper compares representative examples of oil spill risk assessments with regard to decisions about data, variables, functional relations, and uncertainty. The comparison emphasizes the judgmental basis of analytic methods.

Nuclear waste cleanup is a challenging and complex problem that requires both scientific analysis and dialogue among a variety of stakeholders. This article describes an effort to develop an online information system that supports this analytic‐deliberative dialogue by integrating cleanup information for the Hanford Site, and making it more "transparent." A framework for understanding and evaluating transparency guided system development. Working directly with stakeholders, we identified information needs and developed new ways to organize and present the information so that it would be more transparent to interested parties, with the ultimate aim of fostering greater participation in decision dialogues and processes. The complexity of the information needed for dialogue suggested that several types of communication devices ("information structures") were warranted. Five information structures were developed for the pilot Decision Mapping System (http://nalu.geog.washington.edu/dms). Decision maps hyperlinked decision information to maps of Hanford. Background Information provided context in a narrative format. Decision Paths organized decision process information on a timeline and provided direct hyperlinks to online documentation. The Geographic Library hyperlinked decision documents to maps. Finally, a Discussion Forum allowed users to make comments and view remarks from others. Early lessons from this work suggest that transparency is integral to long‐term management, a participatory design process contributed greatly to its perceived success, and better data integration to support decision making is needed. This work has broad implications for risk communicators and risk managers because it speaks to the design of information systems to support "analytic‐deliberative" decision processes (i.e., those that rely upon both risk science and public dialogue).

AbstractThe mission at many locations of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) complex has shifted
from materials production for atomic weapons to environmental remediation. DOE and neighboring communities are
interested in diversifying local economies, including through the transfer of DOE property for commercial reuse.
But Department leasing programs have raised occupational health concerns in two locations. A 1997 DOE review of
leasing at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, site, and leasing at the Hanford site in central Washington state led us to
examine the building leasing program at Hanford. Because of past operations in Building 313, we recommended that
the building be surveyed for beryllium. Results were positive, and the tenant company may have generated the
beryllium detected. We compare lessons learned from Oak Ridge and Hanford. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals,
Inc.