Bioavailability As a Central Facet of Risk Assessment at Department of Energy Sites. Bernard D. Goldstein, Jack Moore, Gilbert S. Omenn, Charles Powers, and Arthur Upton, Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP)
The Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) is a university-based consortium led by the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in New Jersey and the School of Public Health and Community Medicine of the University of Washington in Seattle. CRESP’s mission is to inform protective and cost-effective cleanup and enhance stakeholder understanding of the nation’s nuclear weapons production waste sites by improving the scientific and technical basis of environmental management decisions. Eight separate task groups have been established to organize research and operations for CRESP: Stakeholder Outreach; Ecological Hazard Identification; Occupational Safety & Health; Social, Land Use and Demography; Exposure Assessment; Data Characterization Analysis and Statistics; and Remediation Technology. In reviewing the various crosscutting themes, the question of bioavailability has been found to be a central issue. Improved understanding of bioavailability will be crucial to develop risk-based decision process protective of health and the environment. The conceptual basis for the role of bioavailability in risk assessment will be presented.
Research supported by the Department of Energy through funds to the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation.