587 



ous decisions of the parties. I am informed that EPA can also com- 

 ment on your question. 



Mr. D' Amours. Well, before they do I would like to make one 

 thing clear for the record. Again I don't want to make this a point 

 of contention, but I was there, and I had the impression, the very 

 clear impression, as shared by many others, that not only was this 

 not a prejudging of the outcome by most members of the London 

 Dumping Convention (as we all know the proposal passed very 

 handily) but that frankly, there was a prejudging of the safety of 

 nuclear waste disposal by the EPA and the State Department. I 

 just wanted the record to show that there are things that happen 

 at these international conferences that are very difficult to quanti- 

 fy. There was a variety of philosophical approaches on the part of 

 the American delegation, not all of which were expressed as the of- 

 ficial U.S. position. 



I don't think there is anything philosophical, however, about es- 

 tablishing a burden of proof. That is a pragmatic procedural point. 

 But there seemed to have been a prejudice there that this was safe 

 and that we ought not to establish a moratorium because after all, 

 there was nothing wrong with ocean dumping. I want to state that 

 for the record and I will give EPA an opportunity to respond. 



Mr. Sjoblom. I want to remind everyone here that the provisions 

 of the London Dumping Convention are very firmly based on the 

 scientific aspects, otherwise the only way to do as the chairman 

 suggests, would be to ban all dumping of everything in the ocean, 

 and the meeting of the London Dumping Convention, in defining 

 what was allowed and what was not allowed, referred in fact the 

 matter of low-level radioactive waste to the recognized internation- 

 al scientific body to define what was the difference between high- 

 level waste and low-level waste that could or could not be dumped, 

 and what recommendations were good guidelines to use in order to 

 prevent or minimize any effect of such dumping. 



And those are also contained in recommendations of the IAEA 

 that were adopted by all the contracting parties as a matter of 

 good scientific principles during previous London Dumping Conven- 

 tion meetings. 



So my view is that the approach that was taken at the LDC VII 

 was challenging these very bases that the contracting parties them- 

 selves had agreed to in earlier meetings, namely, to put the proce- 

 dural matters to rest, rather than to ignore them, and to ignore the 

 scientific work that had been done up to that point and to in fact 

 prejudge the answer. 



Now, the United States did work, I might point out, and would 

 remind you that we did work to try to obtain a consensus during 

 the various breaks and so forth. We worked to try to get everyone 

 to agree to a common position. We were in favor and fully support- 

 ed the international scientific review of the merits of this subject. 

 And I might reiterate from my statement that it has been at the 

 behest of EPA and the U.S. delegations to these various meetings 

 that the Euroepan dumpsite is being fully investigated today. 



Mr. D' Amours. I remember the work that was done to try to 

 achieve that consensus. The problem was that work didn't begin 

 until the vote had already been ordered. It was much too late to do 

 anything about it. At any rate, there was a last ditch effort made. 



