Ranking Hazardous-Waste Sites for Remedial Action (1994)
Chapter: FRONT MATTER
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NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competencies and with regard for appropriate balance.
This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.
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The project was supported by the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Petroleum Institute, the Monsanto Company, and the Coalition on Superfund. Contract #NAS90-191.
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COMMITTEEONREMEDIALACTIONPRIORITIESFORHAZARDOUSWASTESITES
PERRY L. MCCARTY (Chairman),
Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.
YORAM COHEN (Vice Chairman),
University of California, Los Angeles, Calif.
MARK M. BASHOR,
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Atlanta, Ga.
KIRK W. BROWN,
Texas A&M University, College Station, Tex.
JAMES W. GILLETT,
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
ALAN J. GOLDMAN,
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.
MICHAEL R. GREENBERG,
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
ROBERT E. HAZEN,
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and Energy, Trenton, N.J.
GLENN PAULSON,
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Ill.
MITCHELL J. SMALL,
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa.
LOUIS J. THIBODEAUX,
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, La.
CURTIS C. TRAVIS,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
VICTORIA J. TSCHINKEL,
Landers and Parsons, Tallahassee, Fla.
JULIAN WOLPERT,
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
JEFFREY J. WONG,
California Environmental Protection Agency, Sacramento, Calif.
BOARDONENVIRONMENTALSTUDIESANDTOXICOLOGY
PAUL G. RISSER (Chair),
University of Miami, Oxford, Ohio
FREDERICK R. ANDERSON,
Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, Washington, D.C.
MICHAEL J. BEAN,
Environmental Defense Fund, Washington, D.C.
EULA BINGHAM,
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio
EDWIN H. CLARK,
Clean Sites, Inc., Alexandria, Va.
ALLAN H. CONNEY,
Rutgers University, N.J.
JOHN L. EMMERSON,
Eli Lilly & Company, Greenfield, Ind.
ROBERT C. FORNEY,
Unionville, Pa.
ROBERT A. FROSCH,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
KAI LEE,
Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.
JANE LUBCHENCO,
Oregon State University, Corvallis, Ore.
GORDON ORIANS,
University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.
FRANK L. PARKER,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and Clemson University, Anderson, S.Car.
GEOFFREY PLACE,
Hilton Head, S.Car.
DAVID P. RALL,
Washington, D.C.
LESLIE A. REAL,
Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind.
KRISTIN SHRADER-FRECHETTE,
University of South Florida, Tampa, Fla.
GERALD VAN BELLE,
University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.
BAILUS WALKER, JR.,
University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, Okla.
Staff Program Directors
JAMES J. REISA, Director
DAVID J. POLICANSK, Associate Director and Program Director for Natural Resources and Applied Ecology
KULBIR BAKSHI, Program Director,
Committee on Toxicology
GAIL CHARNLLEY, Acting Program Director for Human Toxicology and Risk Assessment
LEE R. PAULSON, Program Director for Information Systems and Statistics
RAYMOND A. WASSEL, Program Director for Environmental Sciences and Engineering
COMMISSIONONGEOSCIENCES, ENVIRONMENTANDRESOURCES
M. GORDON WOLMAN (Chair),
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.
PATRICK R. ATKINS,
Aluminum Company of America, Pittsburgh, Penn.
EDITH BROWN WEISS,
Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.
EDWARD A. FRIEMAN,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif.
W. BARCLAY KAMB,
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.
RAYMOND A. PRICE,
Queen's University at Kingston, Canada
THOMAS C. SCHELLING,
University of Maryland, College Park, Md.
ELLEN K. SILBERGELD,
Environmental Defense Fund, Washington, D.C.
STEVEN M. STANLEY,
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.
VICTORIA J. TSCHINKEL,
Landers and Parsons, Tallahassee, Fla.
WARREN WASHINGTON,
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colo.
Commission Staff
STEPHEN RATTIEN, Executive Director
STEPHEN D. PARKER, Associate Executive Director
MORGAN GOPNIK, Assistant Executive Director
JEANETTE SPOON, Administrative Officer
SANDRA FITZPATRICK, Administrative Associate
OTHERRECENTREPORTSOFTHEBOARDONENVIRONMENTALSTUDIESANDTOXICOLOGY
Science and Judgment in Risk Assessment (1994)
Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride (1993)
Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children (1993)
Issues in Risk Assessment (1993)
Setting Priorities for Land Conservation (1993)
Protecting Visibility in National Parks and Wilderness Areas 1993)
Biologic Markers in Immunotoxicology (1992)
Dolphins and the Tuna Industry (1992)
Environmental Neurotoxicology (1992)
Hazardous Materials on the Public Lands (1992)
Science and the National Parks (1992)
Animals as Sentinels of Environmental Health Hazards (1991)
Assessment of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Studies Program, Volumes I-IV (1991-1993)
Human Exposure Assessment for Airborne Pollutants (1991)
Monitoring Human Tissues for Toxic Substances (1991)
Rethinking the Ozone Problem in Urban and Regional Air Pollution (1991)
Decline of the Sea Turtles (1990)
Tracking Toxic Substances at Industrial Facilities (1990)
Biologic Markers in Pulmonary Toxicology (1989)
Biologic Markers in Reproductive Toxicology (1989)
Copies of these reports may be ordered from the National Academy Press
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PREFACE
The National Research Council established the Committee on Remedial Action Priorities for Hazardous Waste Sites in 1991. The committee was asked to examine the principal ranking methods being used or considered by federal and state agencies to rank hazardous-waste sites for remedial priority. Among the issues to be considered were the technical and policy purposes of the ranking methods, the effectiveness of the methods in achieving their intended purposes, the assumptions embodied within the methods, the uncertainties in the methods' results, and the methods' flexibility for considering new information and for analyzing and comparing the cost effectiveness of remediation. The project was supported by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the American Petroleum Institute, Monsanto, and the Coalition on Superfund. In response to a request from DOD, an interim report—completed in June 1992—assessed the methods, assumptions, and constraints of DOD's Defense Priority Model (DPM), which was being developed to assist in decision making for hazardous-waste site restoration. This final report contains the results of a broader, more comprehensive study, not only of DOD's DPM, but also of EPA's Hazard Ranking System (HRS), DOE's proposed Environmental Restoration Priority System (ERPS), and to some extent, systems being used by various states.
Estimates of costs to meet the current national goals of cleaning up hazardous-waste sites extend beyond hundreds of billions of dollars. Serious questions are being raised as to whether the United States can afford to remediate all these sites. Regardless of whether priority setting is achieved explicitly in a manner open to public scrutiny, or implicitly in some obscure manner, priorities
are certainly being A reliable system is needed to manage this expensive remedial effort in order to provide adequate protection of human health and the environment while making efficient use of financial resources. In this study, the committee examined the approaches being used by different agencies, assessed their effectiveness, and developed recommendations for the future.
During its initial meetings, the committee received information about the ranking models and overall priority-setting systems being used or developed by several federal and state agencies. The committee found no written descriptions of priority-setting systems that are used in the private sector to make remedial decisions. The committee was not asked to determine, nor did it conclude, whether any of the models was better than the others.
The committee considered the possible use of a unified national approach to improve the decision process for hazardous-waste site remediation in the future. Arguments for and against a unified procedure are presented in this report.
The committee would like to extend its appreciation for the cooperation provided by many individuals who furnished the committee with information about the different priority-setting systems. We especially would like to thank Marcia Read, Kevin Doxey, and Thomas Baca with the U.S. Department of Defense, and Judith Hushon with Environmental Resources Management Company, who devoted considerable time and effort to assist our review of the DPM and DOD's priority setting process. In addition, they participated in the scoring exercise of the five restoration sites. From the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, we would especially like to thank Dorothy Canter, David Evans, Stephen Caldwell, and James McMaster for informing the committee about EPA's priority setting with the HRS. In addition, Lawrence Zaragoza of EPA assisted in the scoring exercise. From the U.S. Department of Energy, valuable input for the ERPS evaluation was provided by R. Patrick Whitfield, Thomas Longo, Frank Baxter, and Thomas Cotton (J. K. Associates). John Pendergrass of the Environmental Law Institute provided the committee with
information on the numerous approaches being used in priority setting by various state agencies. Others who provided valuable assistance in the scoring exercise were Jill Morris (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Michael Gresalfi (SAIC), and Stuart Haus (MITRE).
In such an effort, a great deal of coordination is required for committee meetings, much information must be gathered, and documents must be typed, distributed, integrated, and edited. For this, a great share of appreciation must go to Raymond Wassel, the NRC staff officer for this project. He not only expedited the interactions between committee members and provided valuable input to the report itself, but also consistently reminded the committee members of their duties and responsibilities. The committee also extends its appreciation to others on the BEST staff for their assistance, including James Reisa, director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology; William Lipscomb, research assistant; Felita Buckner, Adrienne Davis, and Ruth Dan-off, Program Assistants; and Anne Sprague, information specialist. I would also like to thank others on the BEST staff who provided assistance for this effort and Robert J. Crossgrove, editor of this report.
Finally, I would like to thank the members of the committee, who devoted so much of their time to this effort. Their backgrounds are diverse and their perspectives about the issues under consideration varied considerably. They provided a stimulating environment for addressing the issues of importance. I believe the results of their efforts provide an excellent framework for priority setting in the future.
PERRY L. McCARTY
Chairman
