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Chairman Glenn. Would that be within EPA or, because it is 

 international, is it going to automatically fall under the State De- 

 partment to do something with it? 



Mr. CosTLE. Right now, it falls between the cracks. I think if you 

 create a Department of Environment, with a more broadly con- 

 ceived mission of developing a national and international environ- 

 mental strategy, it can participate in that, it can provide some of 

 the support structure to see that gets done. 



Chairman Glenn. Dr. Hair, you were going to say something a 

 moment ago? 



Dr. Hair. Going back to your first question. Senator, the best def- 

 inition that I have heard of risk is that it is a function of hazard 

 and outrage. Two examples: If you live adjacent to a hazardous 

 waste site that may be totally contained, you are not being exposed 

 in any capacity, the hazard is, let us say, theoretically zero, but the 

 outrage is high, because, as a citizen in that community, you don't 

 know the extent of your exposure, because we haven't as a society 

 communicated that adequately. 



On the other hand, if you take the occurrence of naturally occur- 

 ring radon in many homes around America, the hazard is quite 

 high, frankly, but the outrage is quite low, because it is naturally 

 occurring. So there is a combination of needs that we as a nation 

 have to address, one, better understanding what risk and relative 

 risk means and communicating that effectively to people so they 

 can make responsible decisions about what they are or are not will- 

 ing to tolerate in terms of risk. 



You ask some questions of the earlier panels about Superfund 

 and its failures in a variety of ways. Much of that comes from the 

 question of risk, and one of the really critical questions that has to 

 be addressed in its reauthorization is that, in dealing with that 

 question, we have to look forward to what is going to be the use of 

 that particular land. 



For example, if it is an industrial site that is going to remain as 

 an industrial site in the future, it is absurd to have the society 

 clean that up to a zero background tolerance, to a tolerance where 

 we would want to have children playing in it. If that site is going 

 to be used for inhabitation, it is as very different kind of issue. So 

 those are some of the fundamental questions that we have to get at 

 in terms of the larger risk question, how we communicate them, 

 and then allowing the public to responsibly participate in the deci- 

 sion-making process. 



Chairman Glenn. That is a hard one, but there needs to be some 

 way of doing that and I don't know how you do that exactly. I 

 think we are going to have in some of our sites — I hate to even say 

 this, but I think it is going to be so expensive to clean up some of 

 these spots, we may be better advised to at least temporarily me- 

 morialize them, put a fence around them and a guard on the gate 

 and use the money to clean up many more sites elsewhere. I don't 

 know how you prioritize things like that. 



I come back to our experience with the nuclear situation, the nu- 

 clear weapons program, where the chant was "The Russians are 

 coming, the Russians are coming, we have got to produce." What 

 are we going to do with the waste? Well, we will put it out behind 



