The Integration of Risk, Quality of Life, and Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Risk Management of Sites with Mixed Wastes. D. B. Chambers, N. C. Garisto, and G. M. Wiatzka, SENES Consultants Limited, 121 Granton Drive, Unit 12, Richmond Hill, Ontario, L4B 3N4, Canada, telephone (905) 764-9380, fax (905) 764-9386, e-mail: senes@senes.on.ca; A. J. Thompson, Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, 2300 N Street N.W., Washington, DC 20037-1128, USA; and W. Goldammer, Brenk Systemplanung, Heider-Hof-Weg 23, D-52080, Aachen, Germany
The explosion of environmental rules, regulations, and environmental liability assignments over the last dozen years has heightened corporate awareness of the need to characterize potential environmental liabilities, to develop a proper perspective on these liabilities and to take appropriate measures with respect to managing potential environmental remediation costs and liabilities.
Defacto environmental management considerations including standard engineering design and costs to meet evolving regulatory criteria need to be expanded to encompass a broader decision framework explicitly including assessment of regulatory and legal options, contingent environmental risks quality of life issues and the benefits of proactive management of the environment. The use of a probabilistic framework for the assessment of the various design options, resulting consequence analysis, and the potential social and political responses to these possible options provides a dynamic approach that empowers decision makers with new insights into the underlying assumptions, their uncertainty, and the stability of the resulting predictions.
This paper, illustrating the application of such a probabilistic analysis framework to the
multivariate analysis related to the decommissioning options of a site with mixed
wastes (i.e. radioactive and chemical wastes), provides an interesting and illustrative
example of such an approach. The example illustrates the integration of risk, cost/benefit
and quality of life issues in a decision process designed to choose the best cleanup
method among several alternatives. Current issues being addressed include:
In addition, the paper provides a discussion of the organizational considerations critical to the successful realization of such an effort, (namely the creation of a project team providing the key legal, environmental, financial, engineering and scientific expertise and practical experience). The paper describes the formulation of the problem, the development of necessary data in the form of probability distribution and describes the potential environmental liability in the form of (subjective) probability distribution of current dollars.
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