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

64 Chapter 4
marine environment and “may, for this purpose, formulate, present, or support
specific proposals in the United Nations and other competent international
organizations for the development of appropriate international
rules and regulations in support of the policy of this Act.” 15
Two days later, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus submitted to
the Senate a draft of a bill for national legislation. The bill was part of a
comprehensive and wide-ranging action program that built on the 23 legislative
proposals and the 14 acts to clean up air and water submitted to
the Congress the year before. “Upon introduction in the Congress it was
clear,” wrote one of the staff members to the hearings, “that the issues
would be primarily jurisdictional, not substantive: a political demand for
the legislation was evident; the regulatory techniques chosen were acceptable
without objection.” (Miller 1973, p. 59)
The Scientific Basis of Ocean Dumping Regulation
Ocean scientists presume that the oceans have an identifiable assimilative
capacity. 16 This concept relies on the capacity of the oceans to absorb and
neutralize pollutants. It follows that as long as this assimilative capacity is
not exceeded the marine environment will clean itself. Consequently, pollution
occurs when a certain marine capacity is exposed to pollutants that
exceed the upper level or capacity of assimilation of contamination. In this
definition room is given to a certain legitimate use of the waste disposal
capacity of the oceans, as long as the regeneration of the ocean resources is
not prevented. It is therefore necessary to consider specific conditions—
such as mixing capacity, turnover time (it takes, for example, 25–40 years
for the water in the Baltic Sea to be renewed), stratification of water, temperatures,
and level of biological activity—when defining the assimilative
capacity of a certain region. As used by professionals, the word contamination
signifies what is less than clean but not quite polluted. 17
In the early 1970s, knowledge of environmental effects of ocean dumping
was at best rudimentary. In 1971, R. B. Clark, British scientist and editor
of Marine Pollution Bulletin, described the state of the art in marine
pollution research as follows: “Most knowledge of the biological consequences
of marine pollution is derived from studies in temperate waters.
Information about these environments is woefully inadequate, but it is encyclopedic
compared with what we know about even the basic ecology of