Thanks, […?…] I’m not sure as a speaker whether it’s ah, worse to be scheduled just before the break or just after such articulate presentations—of—of—that you’ve just heard.

Ah, I’m going to talk about something a little dryer. It’s the—it’s a—an experiment, if you will, of how the academic, scientific community might be able to be a little bit more responsive than we’ve been in the past. I—we’re—we’re in sort of a—a changing world, ah, you don’t have to, ah, be convinced of it any more than to recognize that we’re in the New York Academy of Medicine right now in—in the location that’s—that’s usually full of dry scientific ah, presentations, in which we have a sponsorship by a citizen activist group of a scientific meeting which hears both sides of the story. And I—I think that’s fantastic. Ah, congratulations to you for doing that.

CRESP is—is something that’s come out of a issue that the Department of Energy, ah, finally recognize it has. It’s called credibility. Ah, I—it’s not a new issue. There’s—there’s a wonderful Jules Pfeiffer cartoon from the 1950’s which shows the atomic energy commission and a bunch of ah, men around the table trying to decide how to deal with the problem that the public is distrustful. And how can we sell, ah, the nuclear—the benefits of ah—of ah, splitting the atom, and they finally come up with a way of doing this. It’s going to be a contest, and they’re going to have a nationwide Mr. and Mrs. Mutation contest. Now, the point is that we’ve got a long number of years having difficulty in believing the government, the Department of Energy, its predecessors, ah, and the issue is how do we get anywhere without some degree of understanding—of mutual understanding—of mutual trust in at least what the facts are.

Ah, Toni Mazaki told us yesterday that ah, it isn’t science—it’s not a scientific issue. I agree with him in terms of the decision process, but I disagree to the point that it’s not just a political issue. […?…] there is the importance to understanding what really is our risk, what really is the risk of the next generation and future generations. We’ve heard the debates about this. The question is, as we try in our society to turn over the decision as was asked for to the communities, to the workers, what are the tools that the workers and the communities and everybody needs to help make these decisions. And part of the tool is ah, science.

Now, how do we get that tool? Ah, how are we able to do it? Well, this is a large step forward—this kind of meeting. Ah, CRESP is another approach to trying to do that. I don’t know whether we’re successful or not. I’m going to tell you about the experiment. I’ll tell you about how it’s going. Ah, obviously, I’m biased about it, ah, I’m the principal investigator of it. Ah, I think we’re very successful if we use traditional academic metrics—how much money have we gotten vs. how many papers we’ve published. We’ve published, ah, lots of papers, we have ah, ah—I have some material here with ah, a variety of different, ah, lists of publications. We’ve got a, ah—the usual kind of modern approach of ah, ah, CD Rom with ah, the ah, abstracts from a meeting in June. There were over 135 papers that were—posters that were presented there on all sorts of different scientific topics.

So under that kind of metric, we’re successful, but that—that’s not really our goal. Our goal is to be able to provide the information that will help people make decisions and to see if by doing this, better decisions can be made, more f—more rapid decisions can be made, ah, decisions that can be made that will make a difference. Ah, are we successful in that? Ah, I don’t know.

What I’m going to do, since I only have a limited amount of time, and as I say, there’s 130 some odd [posters?] we’ve presented--there’s close to 200 publications—is to bre—present to you a couple of stories about what we’re doing. I’ve picked a few that I think might be particularly pertinent. Obviously, I’m not going to pick our failures, ah, but they’re there, we—we have some—we have many, ah, we don’t always, ah, we’re not always very successful in what we’re doing.

Well, let met tell you about who we are first, and how we came about. The Department of Energy, ah, new leadership ah, under the new administration when President Clinton came in, ah, basically went to the National Academy of Sciences and said, ah, does DOE need an independent mechanism to evaluate risk. National Academy said, yes, ah, the DOE then went about in trying to figure out a way of doing this, and after they, ah, decided to give some university some funding through the pork barrel route, they finally ended up with a national competition.

And what we did was to put together a consortium to respond to this and the consortium is shown here. It’s primarily the ah, researchers at ah, the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in New Jersey and at the University of Washington School of Public Health. These are both public health oriented locations, and basically ah, ah, have a group of people who for many years have been active in working with citizen groups in their [st…?]—both state universities EOHSI’s, Rutgers University and the University of Medicine […?…] New Jersey, so we have two state universities, both with public health as a major focus who’ve been put together to compete, if you will, and now s—now successful and being awarded the funds to look at these issues to see if we can be helpful.

Ah, it was sort if interesting. We won the competition on the basis of an argument that said that what you have to do is go and listen to the stakeholders and then develop your research agenda. Here’s the folks we’re going to have involved in it. Ah, the Department of Energy says, you know, that’s just what we need. We really have to listen to the stakeholders, yes, we’ll fund you, you do that, but tell us exactly what you’re going to do. We have to fill out all these government forms.

Ah, we said, no, no, that’s not what we’re talking about. Well, it took about a year before we could finally get through that particular part of the process to end up with something that ah, has investigator initiated work ah, done by a university based, ah, a—approach. Now, as you notice that there’s—there’s a management board, um, all of us, particularly, ah, ah, ah, even Dr. [Ulman?] who’s no longer with us, who’s the original, ah, cofounder of this, ah, ah, had had government experience of some type or other. I ran EPA’s research and development program. [Gil Ullman?] was in the Carter White House and OMB, ah, Jack […?…] ah, ran pesticides and toxics for EPA, ah, g—ah, Art Upton was, ah, former head of the National Cancer Institute and ah, Charles Powers, who’s really running this on a day to day basis has set up a number of public/private partnerships—the Health Effects Institute, Clean Sites, Incorporated, and a whole bunch of others. So, that there’s a leadership that ah, we at least have scars to show that we have ah, worked with the government to some extent. Ah, I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, but we at least have some understanding of the process. Ah, the ah, groups, ah, of researchers are involved ah, in a variety of different task groups, as you can see, they—they—they range from ah, economic approaches to basic laboratory sciences to worker health and safety to the list that’s there—I won’t take the time to repeat it.

Um, one of the fundamentals that we’re working under is that stakeholder collaboration is-is crucial. And what I’ve shown here is something that’s come out of a recent, ah, commission on risk assessment and risk management. Ah, this is a commission that was established by Congress, looking at some of these risk issues and being very confused about them. Ah, there’s three appointees by the President, two by each of the majority leaders, one by each of the minority leaders. Dr. Ullman who, ah, as I say, was the original co-principal investigator was the chair of this. Ah, I was a member appointed by the head of the National Academy of Sciences so I theoretically was non-political in this issue.

And, what we came up with is—is an approach that says that the risk issue—if you will, the risk science—is only one small part of this total. That really the important part is to put the problem in the context first. And to do that you must work with the stakeholders. In fact, we’ve put this as sort of a stakeholder collaboration and we made a—a particular point of—ah, making of the bump, the overlap there ah, larger and more prominent because we really feel that what we’ve seen over and over again is the government basically getting to the public only after they’ve decided what the risks are—they’ve decided what the options are and at this point only when they’ve made the decision do they come to the public and say, well, here’s the decision we’ve made, what do you think about it.

Ah, we see this as an iterative process. We see the need to keeping ah, to--to how—have the public information always go back to have an evaluation of the action. Did it really make a difference? We very rarely do that in our—our society, ah, we have ah, the government—after lots of arguments we’ll have the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, the Food and Drug Administration make a decision. There will almost never be resources to evaluate whether that decision was correct or not: Let’s go on to the next decision. […?…] when we make bad decisions.

Ah, we did leave out an arrow, as you notice, ah, in this iterative process. That’s intentional also. Somewhere along the line, somebody has to make a decision and we have to recognize that. We can’t keep iterating these things for ever and ever and ever, because lack of decision as we see frequently around [Superfine?] sites in New Jersey, as we see around ah, ah, hazardous waste issues all around the country that are site specific—lack of decision just leaves people in limbo. Lack of decision has its own health impact and is something that should be avoided

Well, the hallmarks of our approach is that we’ve mostly involved senior faculty, now our institute has about 85 faculty in it. Not everybody’s involved. Not all the scientists are interested in doing this. They’re interested in—in trying to develop research based upon what people in the community, people in the agencies, ah, the folks involved in this, the workers, are telling us. Ah, some have started out skeptically and now’ve been very heavily involved. Some have started out ah, thinking they wanted to be involved and then have dropped out. And that’s true with both institutions.

Another reason that we focus on research by senior faculty is that ah, we’ve got faculty who are well funded. Ah, none of us in a sense, for a our funding, for our careers, need to do this, and that’s important because a lot of the things that we’re going to be saying are going to be—people are going to be unhappy about, and we don’t want to be in a situation where ah, the department of energy or some congress person decides that they’re going to get even with us and cut our funding and we’re afraid to tell what we find for that reason. So, we worry about that for our junior faculty who we have to mentor whom we don’t want to lose. We don’t worry about that as much for our tenured senior faculty. So that’s another reason to focus on sen—senior faculty.

Our focus is on risk issues. It’s multi disciplinary and it’s integrative, and by integrative I mean that when academia tends to get involved in these kind of issues, it’s through funding that comes through initiated peer—I—initiated research by an investigator. We send our grants in to some central organization. They decide who to fund, and then they integrate the results so the Department of Energy has a $50 million dollar a year environmental management research program where they do excellent research—some of our faculty has these kind of funds,--but it’s—it’s much more traditional. What happens is that the integration of the findings occurs by the Department of Energy. That doesn’t really help the credibility issue to any great extent.

Ah, this just—just briefly describes the various types of research that we do. I think what I’ll do is to go directly into some of the ah—of the, ah, key activities and focus on just a few that are, ah—that I think might be more pertinent and which we have enough time. But we’re doing everything from looking at, ah—and I’ll show you 13 of theirs to—to—to looking at the basics of pump and treat and the engineering and—and ah, ah, models that are pertinent to this, ah, to ah, ah, looking at the multiple related sources issue. I’ll show you a little bit about that.

Ah, a fair amount of the interesting work that—that’s coming out of this has to do with ecological studies. Helen’s told us that it’s not just humans that we have to worry about—ah, absolutely. By having ecologists as part of our—our--our group we can look at this from the point of view of what’s happening to ecosystems. I would remind you that some of the environmental management approaches, particularly if you get into near desert conditions like Hanford, some of the "dig things up and move things around" will destroy the ecosystem for quite some period of time, so when one thinks of how one b—does environmental management, one has to consider ecosystems.

What I’m going to talk to you about, though, is a specific study. It has to do with fishing and fish consumption around the Savannah river. And ah, these is a—these are studies that were done with local universities and a local Savannah River ecology laboratory and I show this not so much to show the time line as to show the players. When we started to work down at the Savannah River site and ah, those of us from New Jersey tend to focus on the Savannah River site, ah, what we found was that there was complete ar—disagreement as to what the risks were in terms of eating the fish in the Savannah river.

Savannah River goes between Georgia and Savannah, so you have two state agencies involved, you have the local, ah—the regional environmental protection agency involved and of course the Department of Energy. And if you look at what the differences were in their risk assumptions, there were differences due to the fact that they really don’t know what the people were eating. Everybody was making a different assumption as to what people were eating of the fish there. It was described by the DOE person as being four ah, trenches filled with armies all lobbing shells in—in random directions because everybody was fighting with everybody else and basically the public was—was asking for—for answers and ah, getting either non-informed or informed in such a way that it was more confusing than helpful.

Well, we did a series of studies ah, some of them were very straight forward. We, first we went and we spoke to all the stakeholders, ah, we—we talked to as many of the groups that fished along the river. We talked to the groups that were, ah, you know, would have a church ah, ah--would meet o—would have their—on Sunday after ah, ah, a services, they’d all ah, catch basically they’d—anything that was caught in the nets would be thrown into a big pot and that was ah, part of the gatherings afterwards. Ah, and found out what people were fishing. We actually fished along. We hired local people, we fished along with them, ah, people were very cooperative in giving us a piece of the fish that they caught—that they were going to keep, ah, we have over 500 samples in the basement of our institute in New Jersey. We’ve counted it for radioactivity, we’ve counted it for mercury, we’ve mainly focused though on what people actually eat.

Ah, the Department of Energy is known for such wonderful assumptions as, for instance in the Savannah River—in the—in the Hanford site, of doing a ah, risk assessment for salmon in—in—in—caught in the Han—in the Columbia River, by just assuming that the local people ate the market basket, the FDA market basket level of salmon that all of us eat. Well, these include Native American groups who not only eat a hell of a lot more salmon than we do, but these—these salmon are part of their culture, they have treaty rights to the salmon. The treaty’s signed in 1855. To go and use a—and the assumption that they’re eating the same thing everybody else is is something that is demeaning and it’s also wrong. So, you end up with the question of what’s the data? Well, it turns out that there’s some black folks along that river who are basically almost subsistence fisher—ah, folks and that ah, their fish—their food intake of this slightly contaminated but definitely contaminated fish are higher than others.

Well, based upon this data, a fish advisory was put out, um, on—obviously you can’t read that, ah, […?…] do so. I want to focus on the fact that we have at the bottom of that fish advisory the three regulatory agencies have put their—their names. So there’s now an agreement. Ah, it’s based upon what people are actually eating. It’s not rocket science. There’s nothing very, very, ah, ah, special about this. It’s simply a matter of going out and working with local people to find out what it is that you’re actually eating and coming up with information that’s pertinent.

We’ve had a big hand in writing this. We sort of served as neutral turf. Ah, our name isn’t on it, this is—this is a decision by the regulatory group—they’re the stakeholders that are involved. Well, we can also approach this and have a from much more involved way ah, we c—we’re—we do a lot of modeling and develop models of—for, ah, exposure assessment and ah, one of the ways to look at this is from the point of view of—of basically, ah, the food web model: What is it that we eat? And how do—does what we eat interact in terms of multiple sources and again, these are the kind of monitoring questions that can be asked, ah, we can also ask it from the point of view of the concern that we all have about multiple sources so the question is, can we develop models—can basic biological information such as absorption and distribution and metabolism and [sounds like fate?], ah, help us to better understand our risks and the risks to ecosystem receptors as well.

Ah, there’s a whole bunch of different models that can be developed. Ah, ah, we’ve—we’ve done so ah, in a number of different ways. Ah, but any time you develop a model you have uncertainty. And so I thought what I’d do is—because they’ve got us into—at least let me show some Tritium data—I know Tritium’s a—a particular concern—is to show what we’ve done in terms of developing better tools to be able to model this information.

You know, one of the real problems when you go and—and do any of these things, is to try to understand what the uncertainties are. Again it’s not what the average person is exposed to that’s of concern, it’s really, what’s the upper bound of this? What’s the worst case kind of situation that we really need to be worried about because some of us can be in that worst case level, and that means understanding the uncertainty in these types of estimates.

Ah, what we’ve done is to develop ah, some approaches which basically, improve the ability to get information. Ah, this is, ah, if you look at this, ah, I won’t tell you what SRSM is—it’s not worth spending the time—but it’s a new approach to modeling, ah, vs. Monte Carlo. Monte Carlo is an approach which, as it sounds is sort of almost ah, a random ah, ah, approach to what the case could be, ah, new—it says "Monte Carlo, a hundred thousand runs. That’s a hundred thousand runs in the computer. That means that doing the uncertainty analys—analysis, it takes an enormous amount of time, and enormous amount of money. We’ve been able to develop approaches. Ah, the SRSM with the [arrow?] forward shows that the—just 70 runs will give us this same ah, type of information.

And here’s a specific use of it for a ah, ground water situation. Looking at the probability of the maximum Tritium level in a specific well--obviously an issue of concern in Long Island. What’s the likelihood of the—what’s the uncertainty, the currents of maximum concentration of that Tritium well. And again, we can do this now in a way that ah, becomes much more cost effective. Again, doesn’t give you more information than we had before, but gives you, in terms of any one specific point but gives you more information in that we can be responsive much more quickly and ah, be able to do this with whatever limited amount of money’s available to—to ah, ah, to be able to analyze more sites.

Now, that’s something that came out of a request, basically by agencies to say, we need to get at this information more quickly. It came out of understanding ah, the public concern of not having the information that’s available. Sometimes we come up with ideas ourselves. This, as far as we know, ah, is the first approach to this at the Savannah River site, at least. Ah, as you go through the pathways, the issue comes up of, OK, some of the radioactivity’s going up in vegetation. In fact, we’re doing studies of how you can use vegetation and different types of restoration ecology to be able to get the ah, material out of the soil in a—in a, both a cost effective and a also much more pleasant manner than the bulldozer approaches.

Um, but gee, what if there was a forest fire? What if suddenly all this stuff burned? Then the plume that we’re talking about, the wind that you heard, ah, about, obviously has an important role there as well. Is that a real a risk? Is that not a risk? That’s something that

someone who, ah, basically did some of the original work in environmental justice, before it was called environmental justice, ah, identify ground fields before they were called ground fields. And so he’s had long experience in this way of using ah, analyses to be able to identify issues that are really important for public policy. And he’s basically looked at the social and economic issues in the community.

Ah, and one of the questions is what happens, you know, what does these weapons sites mea—meant to the local communities. Well, some—some of the economic impact in some of the communities has been very positive. You just do this on an economics point of view and other communities it’s been negative. There’s a justice issue related to that. Ah, some of the areas around Savannah River which are right on the main Augusta, ah, Aiken, ah, axis, ah, seem to have done very well. Other areas have been basically blocked by this federal ah, ah, site—this enormous federal site from participating in the ah, ah, in—in the funds that are coming to the area.

What are plausible economic futures? Well, obviously, if you’re a stakeholder, if you’re living around this area, you want to know what’s going to happen to your community. And again, using a variety of economic analysis we can—we can, ah, look at that. We also survey the communities, ah, just simply asking. Ah, there’s a wonderful study that ah, Dr. Greenburg did where he, ah, basically w—ah, asked a bunch of questions of the planners for local communities. Every community’s got somebody who’s assigned planning. And asked a whole bunch of questions and one of the questions was ah, "how much do you trust DOE?" Well, the thing that correlated most with mistrust of what DOE told them was the answer to the question, "has DOE ever asked you?" People, if you’re not asked—and that’s what’s happened, people simply don’t trust you.

Now, that doesn’t mean that being asked is—is enough. Ah, what we found is we’ve gone through this as we’ve learned from our experiences in New Jersey, ah, ah, we know two things from experiences in Jersey. We know, ah, first of all, what not to do, because we’ve worked with communities very often we’ve done it wrong so often. We also know, ah, that we ah, have a lot to learn about what it is to do. And we’ve expressed that in two laws of—of, if you will, working with communities for—for a government agency. The first law is that you never go to the community if you’ve already made up your mind. And that happens over and over again. If you don’t have anything to discuss, then don’t get up in front of the community and make believe that you do. And the second law is that there are no laws—that every community is different, every situation is different and one has to work with ah, kind of basic principals of openness, of responsiveness.

Ah, you can find things by going through appropriate models and I won’t go through this in detail at all. But just to show you this w—this is what happens in accelerated cleanup in rural sites and what you find is that there’s a tremendous decrease in the local economy once DOE’s left. And here’s what happens in the urban sites. So the urban sites do real well, and that suggests that for the rural sites, we ought to be something as en—we would be doing something as a nation that would help out in this response.

Ah, here’s something which perhaps is biased, but ah, Dr. Greenburg and his colleagues insist that this is the data. This says that the best thing you can do in those areas to invest money is to invest the money in education. We are educators.

Ah, finally let me, ah, just show you briefly a response that—that’s a little bit more controversial. Ah, when we w—went around and asked questions of stakeholders of community groups in the Savannah River site we found that there was a real concern about Tritium and leukemia. And it was based upon two pieces of information. One is there’ve been Tritium spills in the Savannah River—there’s no question that the water supply to these communities had had Tritium in it. Well publicized. Two: There was no question, as you saw from some of the presentations yesterday that there was increased leukemia in the workers working at Savannah River site. Well, the belief was that therefore the Tritium would cause leukemia. Ah, we decided that that’s something that we ought to look at by going back into the data. To do that we had all sorts of discussions with the stakeholders, and discussions with all the players, ah, [O…?…] is the Oakridge, ah, ah, National, ah, Laboratory group, basically. Ah, it’s the associated university—you know about associated universities, many of you here—that’s the Oakridge associated universities.

And what we decided to do was to reanal—analyze the work to—to see if we could investigate the Tritium-leukemia link, to see if we could include women and minorities which had generally been excluded from the previous studies, and to look at each cause of death. And so far, what we found—and I emphasize that this is preliminary—is something that’s relatively reassuring in that if you look at the workers who developed leukemia, none of them so far were the Tritium exposed workers—they were exposed to other, ah, radioactive materials. Now that doesn’t mean Tritium is harmless. That doesn’t mean we excuse Tritium in the river, but it doesn’t seem like a Tritium-leukemia work—risk will work out.

Now, let me raise an issue immediately on this, before I close, which is, to what extent do we tell the public about preliminary data of th—of this type--hasn’t gone through peer review, hasn’t gone through all the scientific [vetting?] that we’d like to have it, but on the other hand, we wouldn’t be doing this study--we—we—there’s no way in the world that we would look at this, that NIASH would look at this were it not for the fact that the community had a legitimate concern that Tritium might be causing leukemia.

What is the appropriate interaction between the scientist and the community, given the scient--the usual scientific reluctance to, ah, ah, speak about anything until we’ve gone through to the end, vs. the community’s desire—appropriate desire to understand the information to be able to integrate new information as it develops. It’s n—I—I don’t have an answer for that, but I point out to you that it’s just one of the many issues that have developed and will continue to develop as we in the academic scientific community try to maybe—just maybe get some humility and just maybe learn to listen a bit, to be able to develop the research that’s really going to be needed to provide the information so that you can make the decisions. Thank you.