There has to be a balance—a rational management plan and some 
accommodation for disposing wastes in adjacent coastal marine regions. Therefore, we 
need the information. We can't stay in this condition of ignorance about what is going on 
geochemically, biogeochemically, and biologically in the nearshore processes. 
The waters are going to continue to receive the wastes; there's no doubt about 
that. Even if we go to secondary treatment, some wastes will go into that system. We 
need to know how the wastes are transported, where they are going to end up, and what 
the likely biological effects might be. 
The only way we're going to get those answers is by tackling more complex 
problems associated with the inshore areas as opposed to blue-water areas. The blue- 
water system is a much simpler, nicer system. I've done both. It's very nice to go out into 
the middle of the Sargasso Sea and look at vertical profiles. The variables are not nearly 
as complex. When I move inshore and try to look at the nearshore fluxes, I've got a real 
mess on my hands. It's much more difficult, and the variables that we have to consider 
are much greater in number. 
Question: Somebody has to decide at what point we have enough information 
to make an investment. What that means is that somebody has to decide what abatement 
is, because some people may be thinking that by investing money, they are going to be 
obtaining abatement, whereas other people may be saying that you're not going to get any 
abatement at all. And somewhere along the line, somebody has to make the decision 
about when to make the investment. 
There hasn't been any absence of willingness on the part of Congress to spend 
money on these problems. But there has been more spending of money on problems and 
not solving them. It seems to me that there has got to be a basic agreement reached 
between the scientists who are willing to say, "Yes, the information is good enough to 
spend a certain amount of money," and the politicians who are willing to say, "We really 
shouldn't just go out and dump hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into secondary 
treatment plants without knowing how they are going to be affected." 
The only thing that would be worse than not spending that money would be 
spending it and not having any improvements for the public to see. And I have a very 
definite feeling that what is going on in Boston is that that meeting of the minds is a long 
way from having happened. What I hear many people saying that we need more 
information about circulation and about sources. 
We have other people on the panel saying that by July 10th, we're going to 
make a decision where we will put a multi-hundred million dollar secondary treatment 
plant that's going to have an outfall located, as best as I can tell, about where the existing 
outfall is. 
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