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ment. Since apparently the Navy has at least indicated serious res- 

 ervations about this technology or maybe even has rejected the 

 technology do you think it is appropriate that we spend or direct 

 NOAA to spend its funds relative to this topic. I am sorry if you 

 may have adready answered this question, but if you would like to 

 address that issue, I would appreciate it. 



Dr. Valent. My approach will be to transfer my reports and our 

 findings and what not to NOAA to a contact that I have been talk- 

 ing to there, Don Pryor, and offer them to him for his use in reply- 

 ing to that Congressional tasking. I do not think they are going to 

 come up with any different findings than we did, and basically, 

 that finding is that a tethered bucket under controlled lowering has 

 about one-tenth the throughput, or in other words, it will cost 10 

 times as much to get the waste to the sea floor using a tethered 

 bucket concept that is controlled on the way down. 



As far as the issue of speeding it up by allowing that bucket to 

 free-fall, that is technically not feasible, but we will be happy to 

 provide all of our information. 



Mr. Saxton. I thank you, and if you would provide a full set of 

 that information, if you have not already done so, to the sub- 

 committee we would appreciate that, because we believe that the 

 changes that were made to the intent of the bill language today re- 

 affirms the authority of the subcommittee to deal exclusively with 

 this matter, so it would be presumptuous on our part to ask you 

 to send that to NOAA at this point. We would prefer that you send 

 it to us. 



Dr. Valent. I see. Thank you. 



Mr. Saxton. We think we have a commitment from all parties 

 now that this process will not proceed until this subcommittee au- 

 thorizes it. 



Dr. Valent. I see. Thank you. We will do so. 



Mr. Saxton. We think that we have made that much progress. 



Does anybody else want to respond? 



Ms. MiLLEMANN. I would just like to respond and say that I 

 think that since there has already been an analysis done of this 

 process that outlined its inherent weaknesses, spending tax dollars 

 to repeat that would be a silly use of money. We also believe that 

 there is no need to start a deep ocean dumping regime. It is also 

 illegal under the law that you and Mr. Pallone worked so hard to 

 pass in 1988, the Ocean Dumping Ban Act. 



So many of the materials that have been discussed for deep 

 ocean dumping are illegal under U.S. law, international law, in- 

 credibly expensive, examined, and rejected. We would prefer to see 

 a continuing commitment to developing the decontamination tech- 

 nologies that are under development in the New York-New Jersey 

 region through the demonstration project and in the Great Lakes 

 region through the ARCS program. 



Mr. Saxton. Thank you. Dr. Grassle. 



Dr. Grassle. I would also like to add that we should not consider 

 the problem narrowly as an engineering problem, that there are 

 some issues about our understanding of deep ocean processes and 

 life on the sea floor which need to be considered before we would 

 contemplate putting waste on the abyssal plain. 



