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As many of you may be aware, the Environmental Task Force was established in 

 1992 to determine the role that our nation's national security assets could play in 

 answering key environmental questions in addition to fulfilling their more standard 

 intelligence and defense role. The ETF brought together a team of about 50 prominent 

 U.S. environmental and global change scientists ~ now known as MEDEA ~ who have 

 been reviewing our most advanced reconnaissance satellite programs and Navy systems, 

 as well as a number of additional classified military and energy programs, to determine 

 what unique environmental and global change information could be derived from these 

 data. Working with both our Intelligence and Defense Communities, MEDEA is 

 developing and demonstrating the capabilities of the national security systems to generate 

 environmental information. These capabilities can be used to help monitor and predict 

 the impact of ocean dumping of radioactive materials and other toxic wastes, and would 

 offer a significant source of information for any future activity to assess the effect and 

 magnitude of such dumpings on the world's oceanic environment. 



Today I would like to summarize those aspects of this work that would help 

 address the environmental impact of radionuclide waste dumping into the oceans. 

 Although MEDEA has not conducted a demonstration to determine specifically how 

 national security systems could monitor radionuclide waste or help in risk assessment, it 

 has demonstrated a range of environmental capabilities of these systems that have a 

 direct bearing on their ability to provide such information. 



These capabilities fall into two broad categories. The first, is the ability to detect 

 directly and monitor the location of toxic pollution, either by observing the pollutant 

 itself or by observing its effects on the local environment. I will discuss in a moment a 

 MEDEA demonstration concerning an oil spill in the Komi Republic of Russia that 



