Federal Government Releases Environmental, Health, & Safety Research Strategy for Nanotechnology

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.nano.gov/node/695

Federal Government Releases Environmental, Health, & Safety Research Strategy for Nanotechnology

(Oct. 20, 2011) The Federal Government today released a national strategy for ensuring that environmental, health, and safety research needs are fully identified and addressed in the fast-growing field of nanotechnology.

The 2011 NNI Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) Research Strategy provides an integrated research framework to guide all Federal agencies participating in the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the Federal Government’s ten-year-old program for nurturing and coordinating the emerging science of nanotechnology. The research strategy will help the NNI leverage Federal resources and infrastructure to most efficiently produce research data that can be used to protect public health and the environment, while continuing to fuel innovations and capture the value of those innovations for the benefit of the American people.

Drafted to be consistent with the NNI Strategic Plan, which was released in February, the EHS Research Strategy identifies research priorities in order to best drive the responsible development of nanotechnology, one of four main goals of the NNI Strategic Plan. The EHS Research Strategy is grounded in the principles of risk assessment and product life cycle analysis—rational approaches to protecting health and the environment that involve measures of risk at every stage of a product’s development, from preliminary handling of raw materials to final disposal of finished products.

The strategy identifies six core categories of research that together can contribute to the responsible development of nanotechnology: (1) Nanomaterial Measurement Infrastructure, (2) Human Exposure Assessment, (3) Human Health, (4) Environment, (5) Risk Assessment and Risk Management, and (6) Informatics and Modeling. The strategy also aims to address the various ethical, legal, and societal implications of this emerging technology.

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http://www.nano.gov/sites/default/files/pub_resource/nni_2011_ehs_research_strategy.pdf

[saras]

1. I only want one regulation, and they didn't include it.

That's the one saying they WILL repair any damage that they do, NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT COSTS. If they have to run a scaled-back business for fifty years to pay off the costs of cleaning up a mess, so be it. It's their job, not the public's.

And, of course, the cost of cleaning up human deaths is murder charges and whatever penalties are legally in force for them.

Reading the document, they seem completely and utterly convinced, to a religious degree, that nanotechnology is, across the board, a good thing, that any potential problems can be narrowed down to the category of industrial safety, and that their short-term compromises regarding depth of research will prove to be lucky in the long run.

If you think businesspeople and the scientists paid by them made good pragmatic decisions with atomic power, pesticides, medicine, etc. then you'll be thrilled with their decisions regarding nanotechnology.