Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

Explaining Regime Change 161
to that of PCBs, but still much larger (by more than two orders of magnitude)
than those arising from nuclear ocean dumping.
Because of the political and social aspects, the regime’s scientific experts
were reluctant to become involved in the radwaste disposal issue. GESAMP
declined IGPRAD’s request to develop operational definitions of such terms
as “harm,” “safety,” “proof,” and “significance” to be used in studies and
assessments called for in the 1985 resolution on the ground that such definitions,
in addition to scientific aspects, involved nonscientific aspects outside
the terms of reference of GESAMP (LC/IGPRAD 1993, Annex 2, p.
36). Furthermore, because it based its expert advice on the concept of assimilative
capacity, the expert group could not address concerns about radwaste
disposal raised by many regime members. 13 Governments ignored
GESAMP’s expert advice as they wished.
Scientific experts distanced themselves from the highly politicized issue
of radwaste disposal. At the same time, governments and ENGOs took
steps to reduce the influence of marine scientific advisory groups. As already
pointed out, the London Convention originally stipulated that global ocean
dumping regulation should be based only on technical or scientific considerations
and thus ensure that dumping regulations were based on the advice
of marine scientists. At the level of regime principles and norms, however,
the 1991 consultative meeting’s decision to substitute the concept of assimilative
capacity with the precautionary principle significantly reduced
marine scientists’ role as policy experts within the regime. If the regulatory
goal was to reduce waste discharges as much as possible, then regulatory
decisions would be concerned with choosing technologies that best met this
goal. Marine scientists could not contribute to the realization of this goal
(Clark 1989a, p. 295). Probably also for this reason, GESAMP emphasized
that its approach to protection of the marine environment assumed the need
for caution; however, the expert group did not endorse the precautionary
principle, because it found that the principle could not provide a scientific
basis for marine pollution control (GESAMP 1991, p. 8). Noting the
increasing international prominence of the precautionary principle, one
GESAMP scientist even described a general “declining influence of science
on marine environmental policy” (Bewers 1995). 14
Most governments responded to public concerns about ocean dumping
of radioactive waste and wanted to protect their fishing, environmental,
tourism, and related interests against the risk of radiation, however small.