Deciding for the Future: Balancing Risks, Costs, and Benefits, Fairly Across Generations

The key challenge of this National Academy of Public Administration project is captured in the subtitle of this report, Balancing Risks, Costs, and Benefits Fairly Across Generations.
The US DOE initiated the project to seek the Academy's advice on the broad issue of how to balance risks, benefits, and costs in the allocation of federal resources to projects that affect current and future generations, such as the cleanup of hazardous wastes generated by DOE and its predecessors in their nuclear weapons work. The specific task given to the Academy was to design the elements of a methodology that could take into account the needs of present and future generations. The work was carried out under a DOE contract with Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory.