Geospatial Analyses and System Architectures for the Next Generation of Radioactive Materials Risk Assessment and Routing·

The emergence of a post-industrial information society has a number of implications for those working on transportation risk assessment and routing of radioactive and hazardous materials. Citizens consume more material goods and energy, while also demanding environmental protection and showing minimal tolerance for individual or group risk. The result is increasing regional, state, national, and international regulation. Regulation is carried out at finer levels of geographic detail, and environmental and/or risk analyses at seemingly microscopic scales (e.g., neighborhoods) are common, especially in legal challenges. Meanwhile, both commercial and governmental provision of information and information technology is growing exponentially. The key goal of programs such as the U.S. National Information Infrastructure (Nil) is citizen access to Federal records that may affect them. World Wide Web (WWW) sites provide voluminous databases on everything from early radiation experiment records to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) to every 'Yellow Pages' entry in the United States. The result of these social and technological trends is that today's citizen demands more regulation and is in a position to invoke, and monitor, that regulation through information technology. How will the radioactive and hazardous materials risk and routing community serve these informationsavvy citizens? This paper will suggest a number of consequences for our development of information technologies, especially in the area of geographic information systems (GIS). By cooperatively managing geospatial (map-oriented) data and taking advantage of consumer-driven technologies (e.g., recordable CD-ROM), we can serve, engage, and educate the public in the next generation of risk assessment and routing methods and studies.