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exploitation activities. It is not at all clear that sub-seeibed disposal 

 should be considered a use of the seabed included in the scope of these 

 provisions. Sub-seabed disposal would not appear to be a use of the re- 

 sources of the seabed. No tangible resource would be used, eind it does 

 not appear that the storage capacity of the deep sea sediments is so limited 

 that it itself should be considered a scarce good which should be removed 

 from national appropriation. Provided sub-seabed disposal was performed 

 in resource-poor areas, it would appear unlikely that si±i-seabed disposal 

 sites would become candidates for mineral extraction. Furthermore, while 

 this possibility should be explored further, emplacement would probably be 

 far enough into the sediments that subsequent seafloor mineral activities 

 could still be carried out. Finally, while minerals no doubt exist in the 

 earth's crust beneath the sediments, it is unlikely that it would become 

 an exploitable resource in the foreseeable future. Similarly, it would 

 appear unlikely that the existence of HLW repositories in the seabed would 

 significantly impede mining of the sediments themselves or "underlying resources 

 should this be pursued as an economic activity. 



Also, the ICNT/Rev. 2, in defining the scope of activities siobject 

 to regulation under the seabed regime, limits itself mostly in terms of 

 "activities in the Area", which has a technical definition as: 



. . . all activities of exploration for, and exploitation of, 

 the resources of the Area. ^2 



This would appear to exclude sub-seabed disposal operations. (There is 



some ambiguity in the text on this point, however.) 



Regardless of the technical legal validity of applying the concepts 



of the UNCLOS III seabed regime to sub-seabed disposal, however, political 



