Risk Policy for the Remediation of Polluted Sites. P. Santucci, A. Oudiz, and J. Brenot, Institut de Protection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, IPSN, BP 6, 922265 Fontenay - aux - Roses, CEDEX, France, telephone 33 01 46 54 81 59, fax 33 01 46 54 88 29, e-mail pascal.santucci@ipsn.fr or jean.brenot@ipsn.fr
Contamination of land results from a wide variety of industrial practices, either past or ongoing. Mines and ore mills, oil refineries, gas stations, chemical plants, nuclear installations, factories using radioactive substances, waste incinerators are the main sources of industrial pollution. For example, there are in France 467 gas stations which must be dealt with during the next ten years and for which a decontamination policy has to be defined by the operators and the authorities in charge of environmental protection and public health.
Decontamination should be considered for two reasons. On the one hand, most of the polluted sites are close to urban communities, and sometimes they are even completely surrounded by highly populated areas. Populations and environmental groups put pressure on site owners and public authorities and they ask for remediation. Furthermore site owners may have financial interest in decontaminating if a change of use is intended for the site.
What grounds a decontamination policy? How far to decontaminate? The paper will recall firstly the two basic principles of such a policy, that are justification and optimisation. Secondly two approaches will be detailed and their advantages and limits will be described. The first approach relies on risk based criteria which in turn lead to derived intervention criteria concerning water and soil, through a backward procedure requiring risk-exposure modelling. Decontamination options are then studied in terms of feasibility, efficiency and cost with respect to the previously defined criteria. The second approach is to perform a risk assessment by conventional exposure-risk modelling for the site concerned. This permits a better evaluation of the uncertainties inherent to each step of the assessment. Regarding decontamination, many options have to be described with no a priori restrictions. These technical data will be used jointly with general risk objectives and social considerations, to select an "optimised" option more respectful of the whole social context. In our opinion, the second approach recognises the specificity of each site and provides public authorities with a more open and understandable decision process. Examples from European experience will illustrate the main points of the paper.
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