Risks of Hazardous Waste Sites versus Asteroid and Comet Impacts: Accounting for the Discrepancies in U.S. Resource Allocation

Abstract

Approximately $6 billion is spent annually in the United States on the cleanup of sites regulated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA, or Superfund). The current health risks posed by such sites are thought to be quite small; the expenditures are justified primarily as protecting hypothetical future residents of these sites. Approximately 0.05% of this amount, or $3 million, is spent annually by the U.S. government on the detection of asteroids or comets that could strike the earth. Such damaging impacts do occur from time to time--most recently in 1908 in an unpopulated region of Siberia--but no person is confirmed ever to have died as a result. Anticipated impacts over the course of 1 million years would yield deaths that, when annualized, total approximately 4,000 per year. The risk reduction goal for CERCLA is 15 orders of magnitude greater than that for asteroid/comet detection. A modest increase in resources devoted to asteroid detection would greatly increase the chances of early detection of a threatening object, allowing an effective defense to be attempted. This article argues that the much lower risk-to-resources ratio for CERCLA cleanups than for asteroid and comet detection can be explained by four primary factors: (1) the regard for future generations, since CERCLA benefits mainly the unborn; (2) concrete fears, since toxics are much more feared than asteroids or comets; (3) the source of the threat, since toxic contamination is caused by human beings, unlike impacts from space objects; and (4) the greater political constituencies for hazardous waste cleanup than for space object detection.

Risk Policies in the United States: Definition and Characteristics Based on a Scoping Review of the Literature

“…Apart from technological and industrial risks, the authors were interested in natural risks, sometimes in the “Act of God” category. The cases described in our sample involved floods, landslides, invasive species, and asteroid hits . Last, social risks were the least well represented in our sample.…”

“…More specifically, the risks involved transportation issues, food issues, energy issues, including nuclear, or cutting‐edge scientific developments such as nanotechnologies . Chemical risks and industrial risks connected with contaminated soil formed a large part of the sample . Apart from technological and industrial risks, the authors were interested in natural risks, sometimes in the “Act of God” category.…”

“…As we will see in the following sections, public interventions to regulate risk are relatively recent, and must often be innovative in order to deal with “previously unknown” situations. The only case that does not follow this pattern is asteroid hits, which have been happening for millions of years, and have been observed several times throughout the world during the 20th century …”

Does Concern‐Driven Risk Management Provide a Viable Alternative to QRA?

“…Advocates of QRA claim that using explicitly documented assumptions, knowledge, facts, and data (encapsulated in risk models) to assess predicted changes in risks caused by alternative risk management interventions has many potential benefits in improving societal risk management decisions. Among these are: correcting misperceptions about the sizes of different risks (e.g., Emmons et al ., 2004) and about the relative contributions of different preventable causes (e.g., environmental vs. diet and exercise) to adverse health effects such as cancers (e.g., Wold et al ., 2005); focusing resources and priorities where they are likely to be most productive in improving outcomes (e.g., Allio et al , 2005; Gerrard et al , 2000); anticipating and managing otherwise unforeseen consequences of current and proposed policies; and bringing a valuable “rational” perspective to concerns and anxieties over risks and to deliberations and politicized debates over risk management policies.…”

Weighing Risks and Benefits

“…Today, risk analysis employing collectivist riskweighing is applied to a wide category of social areas, such as the health impacts of air pollution (Pandey and Nathwani, 2003) and radioactive waste repositories (Cohen, 2003), the effectiveness of airbag regulation (Thompson et al, 2002) and accidentpreventive measures in road construction (Usher, 1985), and the effectiveness of efforts to detect asteroids or comets that could strike the earth (Gerrard, 2000), just to mention a few examples.…”