Site Specific Advisory Boards Research Articles

Sustainability as a Priority at Major U.S. Department of Energy’s Defense Sites: Surrounding Population Views

Sustainability is rapidly becoming a widely accepted and desired attitude, as well as a stimulus for both environmentally-conscious individuals and firm behavior. However, does the public interest in sustainability also extend to large U.S. federal agencies? Does the public care about on-site sustainability programs? To answer this question, we surveyed 922 people who live within 50 miles of one of four U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) major facilities: Hanford, Idaho National Laboratory, Savannah River and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Only 14% expressed no interest in DOE’s on-site sustainability efforts. Five percent said that they were interested enough to join a local community group to provide feedback to the DOE; 49% were interested and wanted more information, as well as interaction with the DOE’s site-specific advisory boards or local elected officials. Compared to other DOE on-site activities, respondents rated sustainability as “somewhat important”. Native Americans who live near a site, are familiar with it and self-identify as interested in environmental protection disproportionately belong to the “most interested” category. We conclude that public interest is sufficient to merit outreach by DOE to involve interested and knowledgeable local residents in on-site sustainability plans.

Citizen board issues and local newspaper coverage of risk, remediation, and environmental management: Six U.S. nuclear weapons facilities

AbstractWe examined site‐specific advisory board (SSAB) minutes and local newspaper coverage of the Fernald, Hanford, Idaho, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats, and Savannah River sites of the U.S. Department of Energy (US DOE) in order to determine the importance of risk‐related issues related to remediation and other forms of environmental management. About one‐third of SSAB issues were risk‐related, and these were disproportionately major issues at meetings. The media focused on risks associated with remediation and other forms of waste management. The analysis implies that contractors and government officials need to establish and maintain communications with advisory panels and accentuate these contacts well in advance of contemplated new actions. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Comparison of DOE and Army Advisory Boards: Application of a Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Public Participation in Environmental Risk Decision Making

This article is part of a growing body of literature evaluating public participation approaches and implementation efforts. It compares the characteristics and performance of citizen advisory boards established by the U.S. Department of Energy's Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program (DOE/EM) and by the U.S. Department of Defense's Army (DoD/Army) as a major part of the public participation programs that were undertaken to help the agencies plan and implement the cleanup of their contaminated installations. We first present the elements of the Acceptability Diamond, an evaluative framework developed by the authors through extensive fieldwork on public‐federal agency interactions that identify five objectives of agency–public interactions and public participation programs, and link them to existing literature. We then use the Acceptability Diamond as a basis for comparing the performance of the DOE/EM and DoD/Army advisory boards. In the early 1990s, both DOE and DoD participated in the Federal Facilities Environmental Restoration Dialogue Committee (known as the FFER Dialogue Committee) and were influenced by the Committee's recommendations on public participation. However, the Site Specific Advisory Boards (SSABs) subsequently established by DOE/EM and the Restoration Advisory Boards (RABs) subsequently established by DoD and the Army were governed by significantly different policies and management. We describe some of these key differences and compare the performance of the SSABs and RABs. The article draws on a series of research studies conducted by the authors on the DOE/EM public participation program from its inception in the early 1990s through its transition to accelerated cleanup in 2002 and also on a recently completed study of seven Army RABs.

Consensus Seeking Versus Truth Seeking

Postmodernists have long argued that giving an egalitarian voice to all citizens by seeking consensus decisions with cooperation improves social welfare more effectively than the competition traditionally used with common sense and scientific evidence as part of truth seeking in a democracy. In a recent evaluation of its policy on consensus, the Department of Energy Environmental Management (DOE-EM) encouraged its Citizen Site Specific Advisory Boards “to work toward consensus” in order to be “fair,” thereby improving American democracy, according to the lead evaluator. But no empirical evidence has been collected from the field by the Evaluation Team to validate the DOE’s policy. In contrast, the literature and field data contradict the Team: consensus seeking retards cleanup; the coercion necessary to seek consensus reduces trust; and consensus-seeking favors risk perception rather than scientifically determined risk. In contrast, the competition of ideas driven by truth seeking significantly accelerate...

The Hanford 100 area: The influence of expressed stakeholder values on remediation decisions

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) environmental challenges include remediation of numerous contaminated soil sites in the Hanford 100 Area in Washington State. One can identify key themes in 100 Area cleanup: expedited procedures for remediation, considerations for groundwater contamination, a goal of unrestricted land use, and complexity in remediation decisions. The Record of Decision for 100 Area soils developed through an extended public process, and these key themes, in turn, reflect values expressed by the Hanford Advisory Board, the applicable site-specific advisory board. We describe two occasions when DOE/Headquarters attempts to change 100 Area remediation provisions encountered public opposition. DOE could have been better served on these occasions by a comprehensive understanding of how the remediation decisions developed from expressed stakeholder values. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Making decisions about hazardous waste remediation when even considering a remediation technology is controversial.

This paper investigates the circumstances under which proposed hazardous waste remediation technologies are socially acceptable, that is, considered seriously as options in a public arena. First, it summarizes a conceptual framework that guides investigation and interpretation of site-specific remediation decision-making. Second, it describes an initial application of that framework to the public participation venue of U.S. DOE Site-Specific Advisory Boards. Investigating the attributes of involved parties and of site context highlights technology acceptability as social decision-making that involves technical and technological issues rather than as a process driven by the technology itself.