In recent years there has been substantial interest in benefits assessment methods, especially as these methods are used to assess health, safety, and environmental issues. At least part of this interest can be traced to Executive Order 12291, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. This Executive Order requires Federal agencies to perform benefits assessments of pro posed major regulations and prohibits them from taking regulatory action unless potential benefits exceed potential costs to society. Heightened interest in benefits assessment methods has in tum given rise to greater recognition of the inherent difficulties in performing such assess ments. For example, many benefits that are intuitively felt to be most important are also among the most difficult to measure. It can be difficult to identify the full range of both benefits and costs. The choice of an appro priate discount rate for comparing benefits and costs over time is proble matic. Even when benefits are quantifiable in principle and agreement can be reached on their valuation, required d, ata may not be available. Thus considerable uncertainty is built into most benefit estimates, even when they are based on the best available data. In light of the complexities and difficulties associated with the perform ance of a benefits assessment, this book reviews the current state of theoretical and methodological knowledge in the field. The review is extensive in that it covers over fifty years of research, theoretical develop ment, and practice."

Planning for the management of nuclear wastes -- whatever their level of radioactivity -- is one of the most important environmental problems for all societies that produce utility, industrial, medical, or other radioactive waste products. Attemps to site low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities in Western industrial societies, however, have repeatedly engendered conflicts between governments, encountered vehement opposition on the part of local citizen groups, and given rise to overt hostilities among involved parties. LLRW Disposal Facility Siting is the result of a study designed to learn more about the causes underlying failed and successful efforts to site LLRW disposal facilities. The study is based on case histories of LLRW disposal facility siting processes in six countries. Siting processes in five states within the United States and in five additional countries are analyzed using information obtained from public documents and supplemented by interviews with key participants. The selected states and countries are major generators of LLRW and each has made efforts to establish LLRW disposal facilities during the past decade. They vary widely in the approaches they have adopted to LLRW management, the institutional structures developed for managing the siting process, the means used to involve stakeholders and technical experts in the facility siting process and the amount and type of data used in making decisions. The analysis of these case histories provides general lessons about the advantages, disadvantages, strengths, and weaknesses of the various approaches that have been attempted or implemented. LLRW Disposal Facility Siting provides valuable data for academics and researchers working in the area of environmental management.

In recent years there has been substantial interest in benefits assessment methods, especially as these methods are used to assess health, safety, and environmental issues. At least part of this interest can be traced to Executive Order 12291, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. This Executive Order requires Federal agencies to perform benefits assessments of pro posed major regulations and prohibits them from taking regulatory action unless potential benefits exceed potential costs to society. Heightened interest in benefits assessment methods has in tum given rise to greater recognition of the inherent difficulties in performing such assess ments. For example, many benefits that are intuitively felt to be most important are also among the most difficult to measure. It can be difficult to identify the full range of both benefits and costs. The choice of an appro priate discount rate for comparing benefits and costs over time is proble matic. Even when benefits are quantifiable in principle and agreement can be reached on their valuation, required d,ata may not be available. Thus considerable uncertainty is built into most benefit estimates, even when they are based on the best available data. In light of the complexities and difficulties associated with the perform ance of a benefits assessment, this book reviews the current state of theoretical and methodological knowledge in the field. The review is extensive in that it covers over fifty years of research, theoretical develop ment, and practice.

Public attention has focused in recent years on an array of technological risks to health, safety, and the environment. At the same time, responsibilities for technological risk as sessment, evaluation, and management have grown in both the public and private sectors because of a perceived need to anticipate, prevent, or reduce the risks inherent in modem society. In attempting to meet these responsibilities, legislative, judicial, regulatory, and private sector institutions have had to deal with the extraordinarily complex problems of assessing and balancing risks, costs, and benefits. The need to help society cope with technological risks has given rise to a new intellectual endeavor: the social and behavioral study of issues in risk evaluation and risk management. The scope and complexity of these analyses require a high degree of cooperative effort on the part of specialists from many fields. Analyzing social and behavioral issues requires the efforts of political scientists, sociologists, decision analysts, management scientists, econ omists, psychologists, philosophers, and policy analysts, among others."