This articles addresses how people make decisions in community settings when any option, though beneficial to some people, may cause harm to others. We focus on decisions surrounding field research on, and the use of, a category of bioremediation-- using microbes to immobilize below-ground plumes of metal and radionuclide contamination at United States of Energy legacy waste sites. As part of a multi-year project, we previously developed a conceptual framework called PACT (Public Acceptability of Controversial Technologies) and analyzed recordings of citizen advisory board meetings at three sites facing subsurface contamination issues. In this paper, we report on a series of quasi- experimental workshops undertaken to test hypotheses about the determinants of societal acceptability of controversial remediation technologies that emerged from out past work.