The role of risk and cost benefit in program budgeting
- Dept. of Energy, Washington, DC (United States)
The primary Environmental Management (EM) program mission is protecting human health and the environment. EM is currently facing a decreasing budget while still having to deal with competing requirements and risks to workers, public, and environment. There has been no consistent framework for considering in an integrated fashion the multiple types of risks and hazards present in the nuclear weapons complex. Therefore, to allocate resources during the budget process, EM is using risk, long term costs, mortgage reduction, compliance issues, and stakeholders concerns to prioritize the funding of activities. Risk and cost-benefit analysis are valuable tools to help make decisions to reduce risks to health, safety, and the environment in a sensible and cost-effective manner. Principles for priority setting using risk analysis are to seek to compare risks by grouping them into broad categories of concern (e.g., high, medium, and low); to set priorities in managing risks to account for relevant management and social considerations; to inform priorities by as broad a range of views as possible, ideally with consensus; and, to try to coordinate risk reduction efforts among programs. The Draft Risk Report to Congress, Risks and the Risk Debate: Searching for Common Ground {open_quote}The First Step,{close_quote} provides the first link between budget, compliance requirements, and risk reduction/pollution prevention activities. The process used for the report provides an initial framework to capture the spectrum of risks associated with environmental management activities and to link these risks in a qualitative fashion to compliance and the budget.
- Research Organization:
- Lockheed Idaho Technologies Co., Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 240909
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-951209--; ON: DE96005882
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Risk-based decisionmaking in the DOE: Challenges and status
The development and application of a risk-based prioritization model for the Oak Ridge Environmental Restoration Program