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PREPARED STATEMENT OF EDWARD D. GOLDBERG, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, SCRIPPS 
INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY 
I am Edward D. Goldberg, Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Institution 
of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California. 
For the last quarter century I have been involved in marine pollution problems 
both in my researches and in my teaching. I have written one book, The Health 
of the Oceans, for UNESCO and have conducted workshops for FAO, NOAA, EPA, 
UNESCO, NRC and DOE on the subject. I have published about fifty research 
articles on various aspects of society's alteration of the oceans. 
One of society's pressing problems is the husbandry of the 3 or so billion 
tons of domestic, agricultural, industrial and forest wastes generated each year. 
This global figure represents a cube a kilometer on edge and does not include 
the 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide generated each year by the combustion of 
fossil fuels. The solution of the problem rests upon the identification of dis- 
posal sites such that the renewable resources of the environment are not 
jeopardized in an unacceptable way. 
I submit that for any given waste in any given location the three options, 
land, sea or air discharge, must be evaluated primarily on a scientific base 
such that public health, the integrity of eco-systems and the other uses of the 
environment are not endangered irreversibly. Clearly, recognition in an assess- 
ment process must take into account economic, social and political factors. But 
it is to the scientific concerns that I wish to address my remarks to the end 
that in any waste management problems all options, land, sea or air, must be 
considered. 
Further, I submit that the marine scientists have developed the strategies 
to obtain the appropriate information to initially consider potential impacts of 
waste discharge upon a given part of the marine environment generally in more 
Systematic and knowledgeable ways that their counterparts have been able to do 
in the land domain. I emphasize that in the discharge of wastes to any site 
there is usually inadequate information to predict all possible effects. Still, 
the wastes have to go somewhere. We constantly must work with conventional wis- 
dom, and we constantly must work to improve conventional wisdom. 
For thirty years marine scientists have considered the manipulation of the 
nature of the coastal and open oceans by the entry of man's discards. The 
initial concern involved the release of artificial radioactivities from nuclear 
energy facilities. The investigators recognized the vulnerability of public 
health to promiscuous releases of radioactive substances through consumption of 
seafoods or exposure in beach areas. As a consequence, marine scientists 
attempted to estimate risks on the basis of controlled discharges. Today, 
thousands of curies of radioactivity are released to the Irish Sea, for example, 
by the British Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plant at Windscale, and simultaneously 
the highest exposed individuals are protected. 
During these last three decades marine scientists have been alerted to 
other pollutants such as mercury which have entered certain marine areas and 
have caused mortalities and morbidities through the consumption of seafoods. 
