• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.1 no.2 s.2
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• pp.371-398
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• 2001

Sciences and technologies are the sources which have formed presently highly developed civilizations and cultures and have enhanced the quality of human lives. But we see the dark sides of them as well as the bright sides, and we have the consciousness of environmental crisis and destruction of lives caused by them. Thus were are criticisms against human-tropism or technology-tropism from nature-tropism or deep ecology. However, if people would continue to have the desire of enjoying the present quality of their lives, they should try to develop and improve pro-environmental technologies. In this vein, we have the necessity of making environmental decisions and solving environmental problems by information technologies. Since the second half of the last century, 'environment' is the key word because we have the consciousness of environment strongly. As we solve human problems by making decisions of actions, we must face with environmental decisions in order to solve our environmental problems. If we have the better understanding of the nature of information and the role of information technology, and the relation of information technology and decision-making, we are able to design environmental systems and implement their optimal interfaces of environmental components. For this purpose, we are obliged to combine several useful technologies including GIS, DSS, Knowledge-based system and artificial neural networks. Therefore the developments and cooperations of these fields in environmental decision making enables us to live in the better and comfortable surrounding in the near future.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.87-96
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• 2007

Risk assessment was carried out in order to improve the remediation and management strategy on a contaminated gunnery site, where a flood control reservoir is under construction nearby. Six chemicals, including explosive chemicals and heavy metals, which were suspected to possess risk to humans by leaching events from the site were the target pollutants for the assessment. A site-specific conceptual site model was constructed based on effective, reasonable exposure pathways to avoid any overestimation of the risk. Also, conservative default values were adapted to prevent underestimation of the risk when site-specific values were not available. The risks of the six contaminants were calculated by API's Decision Support System for Exposure and Risk Assessment with several assumptions. In the crater-formed-area(Ac), the non-carcinogenic risks(i.e., HI values) of TNT(Tri-Nitro-Toluene) and Cd were slightly larger than 1, and for RDX(Royal Demolition Explosives), over 50. The total non-carcinogenic risk of the whole gunnery range calculated to a significantly high value of 62.5. Carcinogenicity of Cd was estimated to be about $10^{-3}$, while that of Pb was about $5\;{\times}\;10^{-4}$, which greatly exceeded the generally acceptable carcinogenic risk level of $10^{-4}{\sim}10^{-6}$. The risk assessment results suggest that an immediate remediation practice for both carcinogens and non-carcinogens are required before the reservoir construction. However, for more accurate risk assessment, more specific estimations on condition shifts due to the construction of the reservoir are required, and more over, the effects of the pollutants to the ecosystem is also necessary to be evaluated.