A paradigm shift: an introduction to structured decision making for sustainable waste management and remediation - 15649
- Neptune and Company, Inc. (United States)
transport of contaminants and human health risk assessment. Most often these modeling activities are carried out in a conservative fashion, usually beyond even the conservatism that is built into the associated regulations and guidance. Decisions are aimed primarily at compliance with regulatory objectives, rather than optimization. This leads to unnecessarily costly remediation and under-utilization of the nation's relatively few radioactive waste disposal facilities. Risk assessment decisions under CERCLA and RCRA might seem to perform better, but if anything this is because the focus is on shorter-term decision-making because long term fate and transport modeling is not considered necessary in most cases. However, some more complex contamination problems suffer from the same basic issues as radioactive waste disposal in terms of the need for complex fate and transport modeling and subsequent risk assessment. At least CERCLA addresses optimization in the feasibility study, but it does not address how to perform that optimization in the face of uncertainty or stakeholders who have different competing objectives. Other environmental issues that fall outside the realm of DOE Orders, NRC regulations, and regulations such as CERCLA and RCRA, have found a different path towards effective decision-making. This includes land reuse and watershed management decisions, for which there is a focus on sustainability and on stakeholder involvement throughout the decision making process. EPA is using 'structured decision analysis' to achieve the primary goal of maximizing societal welfare. These same tools and approaches can be brought into environmental and waste management decisions that need to be made by DOE. Structured decision analysis provides a formal process for capturing not only the science side of the problem, but also the costs and value judgments of the stakeholders, to reach an optimal solution. But this approach requires a paradigm shift within the DOE and NRC environmental and waste management programs. That is, it requires a willingness to engage a new approach that will provide a path towards effective optimization in the decision-making process for the complex environmental problems faced by DOE and NRC. Because of the current nature of problem solving for these types of problems, which involves many layers of conservatism, this structured decision analysis path towards optimization will also realize substantial cost savings for these programs, while maintaining or improving defensibility and transparency in the decision making process. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, Inc., PO Box 27646, 85285-7646 Tempe, AZ (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22824490
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US--19-WM-15649
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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