441 



Mr. Studds. I have many more questions but let me go first to 

 Mr. Anderson. 



Mr. Anderson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was looking at your 

 demonstration a moment ago, the drums that you were seeing, the 

 barrels. They look like they were in very good condition. Did you 

 pick out good barrels to show? The reason I ask the question was 

 because in your testimony in San Francisco I believe it was, you 

 stated, 25 percent of all the barrels you observed were damaged. 

 And you provided, and we have pictures I believe, you provided 

 pictures showing them pushed in, concaved in, one almost busted 

 in half, and also showing fish life and other forms of life growing 

 from the same damaged barrels. I wondered why the barrels you 

 show today were in such good condition as compared to those we 

 found on the west coast. 



Dr. Mattson. Well, that is a very good point. It occurred to me 

 as I was watching. We should have put in some other slides when 

 we were putting this together. I apologize. There are other reasons 

 though. Mr. Dyer did purposely pick an undamaged barrel to bring 

 to the surface because it was quite a distance he had to drag it and 

 he did not want it to fall apart en route. And he did not want 

 people to be exposed to radiation when they pulled it on board the 

 ship. It is also true that the biological activity in the Atlantic sites 

 is much less than the biological activity in the Farallon Island site. 

 So the pictures you see in the Farallon Islands with sponges and a 

 lot of organisms attached to the barrels are different than what 

 you see in the Atlantic site. 



Mr. Anderson. You answered me. I was told it was probably too 

 hazardous to pick up the more damaged barrels. 



Mr. Dyer. Could I respond to that briefly? I think that one of the 

 things we brought out in our California testimony was the packag- 

 ing differences. In the Pacific site most of the packaging was a 

 sandwich configuration. You simply poured a 10-inch cap of con- 

 crete into the bottom of the 55-gallon drum, you put your waste in 

 the middle, and then you packaged the concrete over it. This left 

 significant air voids. And when you subjected these voids to high 

 pressure, you had implosion. And what we noticed, I think in 

 fairness I should say, is we did not see any imploded radioactive 

 waste drums in the Atlantic dumpsites. Most of the barrels we 

 looked at were what we call a monolithic design, that is, homogene- 

 ous concrete mix. There were only very small air voids present in 

 those waste packages. So we have two different kinds of packaging 

 systems. 



Mr. Anderson. I did not want the committee to get the impres- 

 sion that all the barrels looked that good as the one we saw here 

 today. 



Now, you said in your testimony that you had four dump site 

 locations, two in the Pacific Farallon Islands and two in the Atlan- 

 tic. And following up on my testimony earlier here today and in 

 the map we put out, which I assume you have copies of, we show 

 that the sites that you chose to make your survey, site B and site C 

 on the map I am showing, are both not within the actual dump 

 sites, the licensed dump site I should say. For example, the first 

 one here was done by the Nuclear Engineering Co. That in the 

 map was the square, was the rectangle that we have here. That 



