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area. Therefore, the United States is not eligible to join many such 

 groupings. The Baltic Sea is a long way from the United States, as 

 indeed is the Mediterranean. 



Ms. MiKULSKi. Can you tell me, in your work in the State De- 

 partment, is there any level of sentiment, or the level of sentiment 

 for banning ocean dumping totally, regardless of level? 



Mr. Brown. Well, I guess the short answer is that the sentiment 

 is expressed by the fact that we do not any longer do ocean dump- 

 ing. I make a distinction here between ocean dumping and the 

 examination of subseabed disposal, which may or may not be ocean 

 dumping, depending on how you define it, but the short answer is 

 that some such sentiment exists. 



Ms. MiKULSKi. Around the world? 



Mr. Brown. Well, only 4 countries of the 47 who are members of 

 the London Dumping Convention are dumping, and you can imag- 

 ine why: Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United 

 Kingdom. They are all small countries, they are all countries with 

 nuclear power programs, fairly active nuclear medical programs 

 and the like, and land-based dump sites are very hard to find in 

 those heavily populated countries. 



Ms. MiKULSKi. Is there any evidence that there is illegal dump- 

 ing going on, for example, here in the United States, in terms of 

 land-based disposal of toxic and hazardous wastes, as I am sure you 

 are aware of from newspaper accounts, and others, that there is 

 illegal dumping that goes on. Some guy thinks he is dumping 

 molasses some place, and it is PCB. 



I wonder, as our country monitors, and looks at these things, is 

 there any evidence of illegal dumping? 



Mr. Brown. None that has come to my attention, and one reason 

 why I think it would be perhaps a little more difficult is the very 

 danger of the substances themselves. They are radioactive, which 

 means that they must be specially packaged, or the guys who dump 

 them are going to suffer. It is not a question of just dumping the 

 stuff in a drum, and rolling it off the pier. But we do not have — at 

 least I have not seen — any evidence of illegal dumping. 



Ms. MiKULSKi. The third question, and then my final one, be- 

 cause I know we have to move on. 



The way this is dumped in place, of course, it must be shipped. I 

 will be asking EPA about the nature of the containers. 



But do we have very strict provisions on the safety of the vessels 

 carrying these materials around the world, so that you say, al- 

 though this is a safe spot, it has to travel through a whole lot of 

 ocean to get to the alleged safe spot. Do we have very strict 

 provisions on containers, on the types of vessels shipping them, et 

 cetera? 



Mr. Brown. Well, the Nuclear Energy Agency at OECD is re- 

 sponsible for setting up the procedures in accordance with IAEA 

 recommendations. I am not personally familiar with those, but it 

 may be that one of your other witnesses, either in EPA, or NOAA, 

 would have better knowledge of the technical characteristics of 

 what is required of the ships than I would. 



Ms. MiKULSKi. Thank you. 



As a daughter of Madam Curie, who wonders what she did to 

 Mother Earth, when they invented this stuff to start the whole 



