Opinion ID: 407564
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: living with uncertainty

Text: 385 Having expressed my concerns with the particulars of Judge Bazelon's analysis, I am compelled to respond specifically to the central, and equally harmful implication of the majority's opinion. Whether his holding is based outwardly on procedural or substantive grounds, the effect of the majority's analysis is to state that it is error for the Commission to proceed in the face of admitted uncertainties. 386 In our everyday lives we make countless minor and major decisions, hopefully without stepping beyond the bounds of reason, despite unfathomable uncertainties. We drive our cars without understanding fully the potential risk of injury and death; we eat, drink, and breathe without total certainty that the substances we ingest will not cause long-term disease; we plan for our futures without assurance that that future will not be obliterated by unexpected wars, plagues, or natural disasters. Of course we try to evaluate the risks of automobile accident, fatal disease, and possible calamity as well as we can. But when those risks are truly incalculable, and potential outcomes are truly uncertain, we necessarily face a decision: do we stop until all uncertainties are resolved, or do we proceed cautiously in the face of uncertainty, making tentative assumptions and predictions, and revising and perfecting those predictions as more information becomes available? 387 In the nuclear power area it is Congress which has made the decision to proceed in the face of uncertainties. 155 Congress has charged the NRC not only with authority and discretion to decide how best to proceed, but also with a mandate to predict likely future developments. 156 As a reviewing court we are entitled to demand that the Commission's predictions be based on logic and the best available information; we may further demand that the Commission seek out new information as it becomes available, and that it continually modify its rules to reflect the state of existing knowledge. 157 A reviewing court exceeds its authority, however, when by the stringency of its review it effectively forces an agency to employ new procedures or to rewrite its rules until it reaches what the court believes is the best or correct result. 158 388 Judge Bazelon's opinion today invites this court to exceed the scope of its authority in just this manner. By holding that generic uncertainties must be treated as separate environmental impacts which, unless explicitly factored into a generic rule, 159 must be considered anew in each individual proceeding, Judge Bazelon is dictating to the Commission when and where, and under what conditions, it must consider a policy question Congress has empowered it to decide. Yet, after Vermont Yankee II, courts must candidly acknowledge that the choice of when, where, and under what conditions the regulatory agency makes such policy determinations lies within the agency's discretion, especially when uncertainty is rife and technology is fast-developing. 389 It is not clear just how the invalidation of the S-3 Rule and the remand ordered in this case will help the NRC to make a better decision than it has already made. Whenever toxic materials are placed in a container, a risk is created that human lives will be endangered. The magnitude of that risk, however, depends on a variety of factors, including the amount and toxicity of the materials being isolated, the duration of their isolation, and the long-term integrity of their container. A comprehensive assessment of the likelihood of injury to human life from waste repository releases would require examination and evaluation of almost an infinite and at this time incalculable number of variables. 160 390 Judges Bazelon and Edwards have effectively imposed upon the NRC and its licensing boards an impossible task of predicting this court's response to their activities. The agency cannot be sure that another aspect of its rule or procedure will not be discredited in a future appeal unless it hunts down every factor it can think of and attempts somehow to qualify and evaluate its uncertainties as environmental costs, an equivalence which has not been thought to exist before. It goes without saying that such an effort would require an enormous commitment of agency time and resources. The only certainty achievable by this process-and it will be achieved-is delay in the development of nuclear power. 391 More significantly, even if the NRC chose to devote all of its time and staff to studying the risk to human life of long-term waste storage-at best a questionable allocation of agency resources 161 -it still could not root out all uncertainties. 162 Even if it managed by further research to place boundary values on those uncertainties, and thus succeeded in producing a risk value, 163 of some sort, the NRC still would have accomplished only half of its statutory task. At some point the agency would still have to decide whether or not that level of risk and uncertainty was an acceptable one. 164 392 There can be no doubt that the decision whether to stop or proceed in face of a certain level of risk and uncertainty is a policy choice clearly within the agency's discretion. Yet the majority's opinion today amounts to nothing more clearly than a judicial proclamation that the current level of risk-assumption is unacceptable. As then-Professor (now Judge) Breyer pointed out with respect to Judge Bazelon's Vermont Yankee I opinion, however, this kind of risk-acceptability determination disguised as hard look judicial review allow(s) courts to play too prominent a role in determining how the United States will produce energy in the future. 165 Were courts to apply Judge Bazelon's unusually stringent standard of review to other NRC rulemakings, alternative energy sources-whose production is not so carefully regulated and whose long-term environmental effects are even less well-known-will become artificially attractive to the public utilities who must choose the most economical, reliable, and accessible of the available sources of energy generation. 166 Furthermore, if judges myopically focus on the risks and uncertainties peculiar to any particular type of energy, they will likely create another, equally real and equally problematic type of uncertainty-namely, uncertainty about regulatory delay which destroys the regulated firms' incentive to innovate. 167 393 At oral argument in this case, counsel for the petitioners assailed the Commission for failing to reflect in its rule one particular type of risk-the risk of repository leakage resulting from random drilling. According to probabilities, counsel argued, such drilling could cause a repository leak once every 2,500 years-in retroactive perspective, once from now to before the Battle of Marathon. Given that some have projected the expected life of a long-term waste repository as 250,000 years, counsel contended that the Commission had ignored a substantial risk. 168 394 Lord Rothschild, a former director of the British Advisory Council for Science and Technology, has made a telling point about such apparently authoritative utterance(s) about substantial risks: 395 There is no such thing as a risk-free society.... But there is no point in getting into a panic about the risks of life until you have compared the risks which worry you with those that don't-but perhaps should. Comparisons, far from being odious, are the best antidote to panic. 169 396 Even assuming the worst-that counsel is perfectly correct 170 and that a repository failure caused by random drilling would in fact cost thousands and thousands of lives 171 -before we decide to panic we should compare the risks described by counsel with some of the risks we normally confront, and accept, in our everyday lives. 397 In effect, petitioners' counsel urges us to postpone all nuclear power plant construction because the Commission has adopted a rule which removes from individual licensing proceedings the consideration of a risk substantially less than the risk that he would die on a given day from a volcanic eruption 172 or from common influenza! 173 I think it safe to say that such risks have never stopped petitioners' counsel from making either short-term or long-term plans in his everyday life. Indeed, he would probably deny that he had even failed to consider those risks; instead, he would probably assert that he had considered and dismissed them, just as we daily dismiss the countless possible, yet unpredictable, risks and uncertainties which fill our daily lives. I find it highly anomalous that counsel so fervently argues that far smaller risks should prove not merely significant, but dispositive, in an area so multifaceted and complex as the NRC's regulation of the licensing of a light water power reactor.