RADIOACTIVE WASTE DISPOSAL OVERSIGHT 



WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1983 



House of Representatives, 

 Subcommittee on Oceanography, 

 Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, 



Washington, D.C. 



The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m., in room 

 1334, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Norman E. D' Amours 

 (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. 



Members present: Representatives D' Amours, Sunia, Boxer, 

 Hughes, Tauzin, and Shumway. 



Staff present: Howard Gaines, Mary Pat Barrett, Darrell Brown, 

 Will Stelle, Margaret O'Bryon, Bob Deibel, and Becky Roots. 



Mr. D' Amours. The subcommittee will come to order. 



I am going to proceed at this time with my opening statement 

 and we will get right into the testimony, except that lately the drill 

 arranged here has been for someone to require a vote on the previ- 

 ous day's Journal, so we may well have to interrupt for 10 or 15 

 minutes shortly after we begin. 



Today the Oceanography Subcommittee meets in an oversight ca- 

 pacity to receive testimony on the subject of radioactive waste 

 dumping. Witnesses will include representatives from three Feder- 

 al agencies — the Department of State, Department of Energy, and 

 the Environmental Protection Agency, also Mr. Clifton Curtis will 

 represent a coalition of environmental groups. In addition, the U.S. 

 Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 

 have been asked to submit testimony for the record. 



Among the topics we will hear testimony on this morning is the 

 implementation of provisions enacted late in the 97th Congress and 

 signed into law on January 6, 1983, which restricted any future is- 

 suance of ocean dumping permits for low level radioactive waste. 

 These provisions included a 2-year moratorium on any such permit 

 and a rigorous set of requirements, including affirmative congres- 

 sional action, before any subsequent permit can be issued. These 

 measures were adopted when the Congress became concerned 

 about the increased interest of utilizing the ocean as a radioactive 

 waste repository. More than a decade after the last radioactive 

 waste was dumped by the United States, we saw proposals by DOE 

 and the Navy to once again consider the ocean option and we 

 learned that EPA was preparing draft revisions of ocean dumping 

 regulations that would have relaxed the radioactive wate dumping 

 criteria. All of this was coming at a time when this subcommittee 

 had learned through a series of hearings that reliable information 

 on past dumping was inadequate or nonexistent. 



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