88 



Mr. Weldon. I thank our colleague and thank both of you for 

 coming in today, for your excellent testimony, and I appreciate your 

 follow-up to questions that need to be resolved. Thank you both 

 very much. 



Our third panel, the assessment panel, we are pleased to have 

 join us Admiral Marc Pelaez, the Chief of Naval Research for the 

 Department of the Navy; Dr. Garrett Brass, Director of the Arctic 

 Research Commission; and Dr. Lawrence Gershwin, National Intel- 

 ligence Council. 



Thank you all for appearing. We welcome you to the committees 

 and we will, without objection, enter your statements into the 

 record as written and you can be prepared to discuss whatever 

 comments you would like to make. We will start off with Admiral 

 Pelaez. Thank you for coming in. 



STATEMENT OF REAR ADM. MARC PELAEZ, CHIEF OF NAVAL 

 RESEARCH, DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY 



Admiral Pelaez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and distinguished 

 members. I do appreciate the opportunity to discuss this important 

 program that the Office of Naval Research has been conducting for 

 the Congress, actually. It was a congressional initiative, and I 

 think a very good one. 



The Arctic Nuclear Waste Assessment Program, and we have 

 used the acronym ANWAP in a number of fora, was initiated in 

 1993 as a result of United States congressional concern over the 

 disposal of nuclear materials by the former Soviet Union, as we 

 have all heard. It had three principal science and technology objec- 

 tives — and at the risk of burdening the committee, I am going to 

 go through a little bit of that and try and answer the questions 

 that the committee and its staff has posed — the magnitude and lo- 

 cation of radioactive waste in the Arctic marine environment, the 

 transport pathways of radioactive contamination through the Arctic 

 basin and the present levels away from the various contamination 

 sources, and third, the impact on the environment and human 

 health from observed and projected radioactive contamination. 



I would say that this program has strong linkages with both na- 

 tional and international organizations concerned with the Arctic 

 environment, including, and I have a fairly long list in my testi- 

 mony but I will summarize some of them, the U.S. Interagency 

 Arctic Research Policy Committee, the Grore-Chemomyrdin Com- 

 mission Environment Committee, the NATO Committee for Chal- 

 lenges in Modem Society, Norwegian bilateral cooperations. Inter- 

 national Arctic Seas Assessment Program, Arctic Environmental 

 Protection Strategy, Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, 

 and the U.S. State Department, Department of Energy, and Envi- 

 ronmental Protection Agency programs. So I think it has been con- 

 ducted in very much a joint government and international pro- 

 gram. 



Russian participation in the program has been an area of par- 

 ticular emphasis, with over 10 percent, for instance, in 1995 of the 

 funds going to Russian institutions. Russian collaboration included 

 exchange of data, radionuclide source term characterization, a mon- 

 itoring feasibility study, radiological dose assessment to large ani- 

 mals, cooperative surveys throughout the Arctic basin and Siberian 



