question, and with so much soil requiring disposal that the only option would have been ocean disposal, an action EPA advised was not acceptable. The removal of soil from much larger land areas,an action that would have been required by the EPA limits, would have accomplished only a small increment of additional dose and risk reduction. How the EPA screening level would have been interpreted in planning Enewetak cleanup is a matter for guesswork, It may have been a liability because of the potential for misuse and misinterpretation. I do recall several matters that may be relevant. The task group had little faith in use of air sampling data to determine that significant levels of TRU contamination were not present in the soil. Also, they considered but did not recommend plowing to dilute TRU concentrations below the levels to be considered for soil removal. In retrospect, use of EPA dose limits to plan soil cleanup at Enewetak appears incompatible with the need to prepare a complete spectrum of cleanup alternatives that would give OMB and Congress some choice as to the magnitude of the Enewetak cleanup effort. The task group recommended a conservative application of existing standards for use at Enewetak. In recommending use of dose limits based upon an extremely conservative risk value, EPA ignores these standards. Viewed from the prospective of the Enewetak experience, EPA's development of yet another set of numerical dose values significantly lower than Federal standards and described as limits, restricts rather than promotes flexibility in cleanup decision-making. For Enewetak there where significant areas of land contaminated with TRU elements and fission products, high visibility and public interest and concern, the involvement of land owners and their legal advisors, and concern for the cost of cleanup. Under such circumstances, AEC acting on its own judgment may have found it impossible to justify conduct of soil cleanup not meeting Federal dose limits even with advice from EPA that these limits are not to be interpreted as absolute values to be met in every instance. If available in 1973, dose limits that need not always be applied as absolute values, would have been a new and confusing concept in radiation prediction and I suggest this is true today as well. Though permitted by the EPA criteria, development of cleanup recommendations that present a justification for exceeding a dose limit that is some fraction of the FRC standards for use at Enewetak, would have created a problem for those planning cleanup. Almost any advice that was not supported by existing standards would have resulted in disagreement on technical and legal issues. This could have made cleanup a more controversal political issue than it was. A justification for exceeding EPA's dose limits would have focussed attention away from the fact that basic radiation standards could be (and were) met at Enewetak through a combination of cleanup actions and land restrictions.