UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

\*\*\*

PUBLIC MEETING ON REVISION TO

SPENT FUEL CASK TRANSPORTATION STUDY

Mountain View Casino and Bowl

1750 Pahrump Valley Road

Pahrump, Nevada

Thursday, December 9, 1999

The above-entitled meeting commenced, pursuant to notice, at 10:00 a.m.

PARTICIPANTS:

CHIP CAMERON, Facilitator

MICHAEL DORAME, Nevada

ENGLEBREK TIESENHAUSEN, Nevada

BILL BRACH, NRC

ROBERT LEWIS, NRC

DR. CHARLES MASSEY, NRC

LES BRADSHAW, Nevada

PARTICIPANTS: \[Continued\]

SALLY DEVLIN, Nevada

KENTON BEIRLE, Nevada

EARL EASTON, NRC

GRANT HUDLOW, Nevada

ALICE GANGER, Nevada

LARRY GRAY, Nevada

JIM WILLIAMS, Nevada

P R O C E E D I N G S

\[10:00 a.m.\]

MR. CAMERON: We should have everybody take their seats. We\'ll get
started.

I guess we\'re going to have Christmas music along with the program, so
we\'ll just try to work around it. I\'d like to welcome all of you to
this public meeting. My name is Chip Cameron, and I\'m the special
counsel for public liaison at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And
it\'s my pleasure to serve as your facilitator for this meeting this
morning. And as the NRC staff will be telling you in a few minutes, the
NRC is updating a study on the spent fuel transportation packaging. In
this case, specifically the shipping casks that are used for shipping
spent fuel. The NRC is updating that study, and wants to make sure that
the public, who may be affected by spent fuel, knows what the NRC is
doing, and gets comments and recommendations from you before initiating
the study. And so two objectives today are to provide you with
information, and we\'re going to have some real brief NRC presentations
for you to give you some background on this. And then we\'re going to go
out to you to hear what your comments and concerns are.

If you would like to say something when we go out for discussion, just
raise your hand and I\'ll call on you, and I\'ll bring this mic out to
you, or you can use the microphones here, if you want, but please state
your name and affiliation, if appropriate, for the record because we are
taking a transcript. Tracy, our stenographer, is over there, and will be
recording all of your comments.

My role as the facilitator will just to try to help you keep the meeting
organized and on schedule, and to make sure that all of NRC points are
clear to you. If we need to clarify something you don\'t understand,
let\'s make sure we ask the NRC staff to explain, if we need to.

I also want to make sure that everybody gets a chance to speak today,
and I\'m not going to set any set time limit on your comments, but it
maybe that in order to give others a chance in the audience to talk, I
may have to ask you to just summarize what you\'re saying, so that we
can move on to someone else.

The focus of the meeting is on spent fuel transportation package
performance. Okay. In other words, how does the shipping cask respond to
potential accidents. And you\'ll be hearing more about that. But we
realize that there\'s a lot of concerns about spent fuel transportation
that may be broader than just this study that the NRC is doing, so
we\'ll try to answer your questions on those concerns.

Also, we do have some people in the audience from other federal
agencies, and I\'ll just try to point them out now, and they may be able
to answer other questions about the total regulatory framework for spent
fuel transportation. We have Rick Boyle back here from the Department of
Transportation. And Bill Lake right over here is from the Department of
Energy. And Bob Alcott from ‑‑ also from the Department of Energy. And
there are others here from local governments in Nevada, other than Nye
County. And, of course, Les Bradshaw, who is ‑‑ coordinates the
high‑level waste program for Nye County, is back here. And we\'ll be
going back to him for a minute. And I would just like to thank Les and
Nye County, generally for inviting us to come out to talk to you today
about these particular issues.

What I\'d like to do right now ‑‑ yes, sir?

MR. DORAME: You also have local representation from Inyo County.

MR. CAMERON: Oh, great. I think we met before. Do you ‑‑ you\'re from
Inyo, right?

MR. DORAME: Yes, I am.

MR. CAMERON: Why don\'t you just introduce yourself?

MR. DORAME: My name is Michael Dorame, and I\'m the Inyo County 5th
District Supervisor. And we\'re very interested also in the
transportation issues related to this, simply because of the potential
use of State Route 127 through our County. Thank you.

MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Michael, and welcome for being here. I should
let Englebrek (phonetic) introduce himself, since we\'re going to county
government representatives.

MR. TIESENHAUSEN: My name is Engelbrecht von Tiesenhausen, I\'m with
Clark County.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Great. Well let\'s get started. We do have to end the
formal session at 12:00, but the NRC staff will be here to talk with all
of you after we\'re over. I\'m going to go to Bill Brach, who is the
director of the Spent Fuel Project Office where this study is taking
place. And Bill is going to welcome you and talk a little bit about
what\'s going on. Bill.

MR. BRACH: Thank you, Chip. Good morning. Do I need to ‑‑ Chip, excuse
me? Chip, do I need to use the microphone?

MR. CAMERON: Ah. Can you hear him, Tracy, when he\'s talking from here?

COURT REPORTER: I can hear everything.

MR. CAMERON: All right. Okay. Okay. Oh.

MR. BRACH: Okay. Again, good morning. Want to begin welcoming you to
this public forum, this public meeting, as Chip mentioned I\'m Bill
Brach. I am the director of the Spent Fuel Project Office. The Spent
Fuel Project Office has arranged for today\'s meeting to discuss the
transportation study we\'re conducting. We\'re the people who will be
making the decisions on what gets studied and how. My staff and I
welcome the opportunity to be here with you today, and to listen to your
concerns and your comments in the area of spent fuel transportation. We
appreciate your very specific interest in spent fuel transportation, and
your request that we meet with you here today in Pahrump.

Let\'s begin by giving you a little bit of background about the NRC, and
the Spent Fuel Project Office. The NRC is an independent federal
regulatory agency. Like other federal regulatory agencies, we set and we
enforce safety standards. The responsibilities of the Spent Fuel Project
Office includes spent fuel transportation, and spent fuel storage. We,
NRC, do not actually move the fuel, we regulate those that do. We
approve and inspect the containers or casks that contain spent nuclear
fuel during the transportation. NRC has significant experience in
regulatory atomic energy activities, such as nuclear power plant
operations, medical uses of radioactive materials, radioactive waste
disposal and storage, and transportation of radioactive materials. The
NRC staff has more than 20 years of experience in reviewing cask designs
and construction, reviewing fuel characterizations, as well as observing
the nuclear power plant operations related to transportation. We use
that experience every day to make sure that the activities we oversee
are done safely. We\'re confident that current safe ‑‑ spent fuel
transportation activities are being done safely.

Our mission is to protect public health and safety. How do we do that?
We make rules. We issue regulations. Set the standards. We review what
licensees plan to do before they do it. We use standardized criteria in
reviewing of the applications. We issue approvals.

That\'s not working?

MR. CAMERON: Yeah. You better use this kind. Especially with our
competition.

MR. BRACH: Okay. Got you.

MR. CAMERON: It should be on.

MR. BRACH: Is it on? Excuse me. I trust everyone could hear me before
hand, except maybe the tape.

As I mentioned, we reviewed what licensees plan to do, before they do
it. We use a standardized review criteria to assure consistency across
our reviews, as well as to assure that the applications are adequate
before we issue the approvals, before we issue the licenses or the
certifications. We provide guidance on how licensees can meet the
requirements, the rules. And this guidance is also available to the
public for review and comment. We inspect performance against what is
required by the rules and by the licences, and enforce compliance when
performance improvements are needed to meet the rules, the requirements,
and the conditions of a certificate, or the license.

Let me discuss just very briefly the current study. Let me give you some
points and perspectives on transportation safety and spent nuclear fuel,
the topic that brings us altogether today. Radioactive materials are
just one category of hazardous materials that can be transported, and
spent fuel is a small percentage of the shipments of all radioactive
materials. Our contractors, Sandia National Laboratories, will be
carrying out the upcoming study you\'ll hear about today. But the NRC
staff will be directly involved in evaluating the results and
recommendations in how to proceed. I want to take the opportunity right
now to identify some of the NRC staff members who are here today, and
who will be directly involved in this study. To my right, Rob Lewis is
the project manager for this activity. Rob is also a criticality and
shielding expert involved in the review. Sarah Coplo (phonetic). Sarah,
could you stand, please? Sarah is our containment expert. Ron Parkhill
(phonetic). Ron is our thermal expert. These are the technical
reviewers, and others in our office back in Rockville, Maryland, who
will be directly involved in the technical review and technical aspects
of our study in conclusions and recommendations.

I want to also introduce additional NRC people that are here today.
First to my right, Pat Eng (phonetic). Pat is the section chief, who has
responsibility for the study. Also, sitting next to Sarah in the back,
is Earl Easton (phonetic). Earl is the chief of technical review section
in the Spent Fuel Project Office, and has much involvement in our study.
And also want to introduce another individual from the NRC, Janet Cotra
(phonetic). Janet\'s from our Division of Waste Management. And Janet\'s
division is directly involved in repository reviews, and repository
issues. Janet is here, and I\'ve had some earlier discussions before the
meeting highlighting the importance within the NRC of the interface
between those in my organization that are involved in transportation and
storage, and those at NRC that are involved in repository reviews and
activities.

I\'d like to also introduce the Sandia staff that are here today, and
that would be working for us in preparing the study. First, Dr. Charles
Massey. Charles is the manager for Sandia National Laboratory in charge
of the project. And also Drs. Jeremy Sprung and Dr. Ruth
Weiner(phonetic)‑‑ AUDIENCE MEMBER: Jeremy\'s not here.

MR. BRACH: Excuse me. Dr. Ruth Weiner is here, who are principal
reviewers in support with Charles on the study. Over the last few years
NRC has been making a concerted effort to integrate risk into our
decision‑making process. We do this by making sure on an ongoing basis
that we understand the risks of what we regulate, and we look at and
look for new ideas, new methods to assure ourselves and you that the ‑‑
that what we do every day continues to be the most effective to assure
the public health and safety. NRC\'s goal is clearly to be effective,
and efficient, and realistic by conducting impartial and rigorous
evaluations of our activities. We strive and want to increase public
confidence by soliciting public input and comment and making decisions
in a very much of an open way. I mention again the purpose of today\'s
meeting is to receive input from you, members of the public, with regard
to concerns and issues you have ‑‑ may have on spent fuel
transportation. And of course our fundamental goal is to assure and
maintain safety of activities we regulate.

The effectiveness of the overall transportation process has been proven
successful. And safe transport is clearly a team effort. The shippers
have the ultimate responsibility for the shipment. To the owners of the
fuel, they make the shipment plans, preparations, and arrangements. The
carrier is clearly responsible for their vehicle, its operation and
following the shipper\'s plan. The regulators, and as Chip had mentioned
earlier, the number of federal agencies represented today, it\'s a team
effort on part of the regulators to assure the safe transport. The
Department of Transportation, DOT, is the primary authority on
transportation matters. The NRC, our role is to approve the packages for
spent fuel shipments, and set physical protection standards for the
transportation. The States have a integral role as well, and while State
roles vary from State to State, the States primarily set the commercial
driver\'s license requirements, issue the vehicle approvals, select
preferred routes for transportation, as well as establishing the truck
limits.

There as well are multiple levels of emergency response, with increasing
ability to deal with transportation emergencies. Typically first on the
scene would the local and State responders, but in support of them as
maybe needed, are additional trained hazmat teams that can be called as
available, as well as federal assistance through the Department of
Transportation\'s National Response Center. And for every transport of
spent fuel, there clearly is a requirement and practice for notifying
the States well in advance of the shipments, so that adequate
arrangements can be made with the State and local officials of knowledge
of and preparation for the transport.

As I mentioned previously, public involvement is a key and critical part
of our efforts, and you can help us today, and throughout the rest of
the study by telling us what you think. And I trust that you will be
candid with us in your views. We want to hear from you your opinion
about NRC\'s and Sandia\'s ideas for the study. What your concerns are,
and how you think they could be addressed as part of our study. If you
think of something that\'s not discussed, please mention it. If you have
ideas about how to study and issue, we want to hear them. The more
specific your comments are, the better job we can do in building a
proposal that will address the issues effectively. And please, as I
mentioned, be candid with us. I give you my personal assurance,
guarantee that every comment will get my full consideration.

After we\'ve incorporated the feedback from this and previous meetings
into a comprehensive study ‑‑ excuses me, comprehensive summary, it will
be available to you, and we\'ll be meeting again to receive your
feedback on that summary, and ideas on how to proceed in the study.

Rob will be discussing with you shortly how you can keep us informed ‑‑
or how you can keep informed, and keep your views provided to us as the
study progresses.

In closing, this is a start of an ongoing dialogue. I want to stress to
you that the purpose for today\'s meeting is to let you talk so that we
can understand your concerns, and your issues, and ideas, and
suggestions. We\'re here to listen. And with that, thank you very much,
and I\'ll turn it back to Chip.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Bill, for setting that good open tone for
our meeting today. And we do have two more short presentations for you
on the background of the study and then we will out to you.

Rob Lewis is the project manager of this study. He works for ‑‑ in Bill
Brach\'s office, and Rob is going to tell us a little bit about the
study. Rob, I think you\'ll have to use this particular microphone too.
Okay?

MR. LEWIS: Sure. Thank you, Chip. Thank you,

Mr. Bradshaw for hosting us today. And thank you everyone for coming.

My main goal is to describe this study that we\'re just starting. Now
this study, as Bill mentioned, will look at how a spent fuel
transportation cask performs during an accident. We\'re just in the
planning stages of this study. We don\'t have any results yet. And we
are ‑‑ before we do any work, we\'re going out trying to get public
input, because of our working for you on doing this project.

But before discussing the study specifically, I think it\'s important
that I talk a little bit about the safety of shipping spent fuel,
because spent fuel shipments are made today, and they have been in the
past. And they\'ve been done safely, and we believe in the approach
we\'re using for those shipments.

Why do we believe that the current rules and approach we use for spent
fuel shipments are safe? Well, we know this because of the cask
performance standards we use, the history of safe shipments that we\'ve
accumulated, and the technical studies that we\'ve done in this area.
We\'ve studied it extensively for over 20 years. Spent fuel casks are
designed to pass a rigorous set of tests that are developed considering
the possibility of accidents. Spent fuel casks are the primary safety
device that we rely on in an accident to make sure that everyone is
safe.

The tests that we use are a series of impacts, fires and immersion that
each cask design must, by analysis or by testing, must demonstrate that
it can survive these tests intact. We can discuss this sequence of test
in much more detail after we turn it over to you, if you want. I just
put this up as background because I had provided this handout, and I
wanted to mention what it was about. Our starting point for the package
performance study will be a cask that meets the NRC\'s standards.

I just wanted to mention briefly the history and the technical studies
before I move on. Now we\'ve made, in the last 20 years ‑‑ I should say
our licensees have made in the last 20 years about 1,300 shipments in
NRC certified spent fuel casks. Of those shipments there have been eight
that were involved in accidents. In every one of those accidents, the
cask did its job and there was no release of radioactive materials. So
we\'re very proud of that safety record we\'ve accumulated. And it\'s
very strong evidence that the approach we\'re using is working. In ‑‑
now if you were interested in the routes that those 1,300 shipments
took, their destinations, and the origins, we publish that information
annually. For ‑‑ and anybody can get that data. Just speak to one of us
and we\'ll discuss how you can obtain that information.

But we\'re really here today to talk about technical studies. As I
mentioned, we\'re starting a new technical study. And as I mentioned,
we\'ve been looking at these issues involving spent fuel shipments for
over 20 years. All of the studies that we\'ve done have always showed
that spent fuel shipments, under our current rules, are safe. As we get
new tech ‑‑ as we get new analytical capabilities, new tools to use to
analyze the cask, and as the technologies of the cask have evolved in
the last 20 years, we\'ve continually looked at the current situations
to keep convincing ourselves that what we\'re doing is appropriate and
safe.

These are not an exhaustive list of the studies we\'ve done, but these
are the more important studies. And I really want to call your attention
to the last two, because those are two studies that are in development
right now. Short ‑‑ in the beginning of next year, we will be issuing a
report on an update of spent fuel shipment risk estimates. Now what that
is, that\'s a re‑look at some of the assumptions and analysis that was
done back in 1977. Because since 1977 there\'s a lot of things that have
changed, the cask are larger, they use new materials in them, they have
new technologies, like storage and transportation cask, dual‑purpose
casks. Our capability to analysis the casks has increased dramatically.
The tools we have are better, and the computer power, as everybody
knows, computers have become much more powerful. Every seven years, or
something, they double in power. And projects such as Yucca Mountain
really influence what we project are the timing, the number of
shipments, the timing of the shipments, and the origins and destinations
of the shipments. So as projects like that develop we look at some of
the work we\'ve done in the past to see if the conclusions that we came
to back then are still valid.

Dr. Charles Massey will discuss a little bit about these last two
studies. What we\'re here today to talk about is this last bullet.
This ‑‑ 2003, or so, we will have completed this project that we\'re
just starting today, and what that will be is a look at how the spent
fuel cask perform in an accident. It\'s really a supplement to the 1987
study, whereas the report we\'re issuing next year is a supplement to
the 1977 study. Now together all of these studies, if you will, form a
puzzle that fits together and makes our evidence that approach we use is
safe ‑‑ the approach that is laid out in our regulations is safe.

So regarding this last study. We are working with Sandia Labs to, as I
said, build upon the 1987 model study, and the project that they\'re
working on for us that will be released next year. Since this study
builds upon the 1987 study, it\'s kind of taken on this name Model Study
2. We\'re also calling it prefer ‑‑ what we prefer to call it is Package
Performance Study. The name Model Study 2 is kind of unfortunate to us
because we\'re not redoing the Model Study, which is the 1987 report, we
are just trying to build upon the results. Because we still believe that
the 1987 report is ‑‑ provides good information, it\'s still valid, and
its conclusions are still valid.

We will use this upcoming package performance study to focus our
resources, and to focus our licencee\'s resources on the issues and
design features for spent fuel cask that are most important to ensuring
safety during accidents. And that\'s what we call at NRC, we call that a
risk informed approach. You focus on the issues that are most important
to safety, and by doing so, the overall safety of the system, of an
already safe system, the overall safety is increased.

The step‑by‑step method we plan to use for package performance study is
shown in this second bullet. Now that\'s the method we\'ve been using
for all of the accident studies I showed. The method is very logical.
You look at what accidents could happen, you try to determine the forces
that are created in those accidents, you determine what would happen to
a cask, if that cask had been subjected to those forces, and then you
try to predict the release. In the final step we would like to also look
at some of the more severe accidents that have happened throughout the
country, not accidents that involve spent fuel necessarily, but big
fires, and big train derailments that have happened, and say if a spent
fuel cask had been in that accident, what would have happened? It\'s
kind of an example study, and that provides us some useful insights into
how the cask perform and what kind of accidents they could be involved
with.

Now this project, we believe, will have physical testing, actual
physical testing. In the past studies I\'ve mentioned, we\'ve relied on
analytical tools, computers and engineering judgment, but we haven\'t
actually done actual physical testing of casks as part of our risk
studies. This study we think we\'re going to do that. And that\'s the
reason we picked Sandia Labs to do this study, because Sandia Labs has
facilities to do testing. They\'ve done testing of radioactive
material\'s packages. They\'ve done a lot of it. And they know how to
analyze the tests for ‑‑ and interpret the results of the tests. And the
role of physical testing is also the reason that we\'re trying to get
the public involved throughout this project, because physical testing is
expensive to do, so if we do it, we have to do it responsibly. We have
to be efficient and collect the most useful data, and data that was
really related to furthering the safety case for these shipments.

As I mentioned, we\'ve contracted with Sandia Labs for the initial part
of this project. There is no long‑term contract yet, but we do have a
contract with them that goes through next ‑‑ early next year for them to
do what we\'re call a scoping study. Now the goal of this scoping study
is to go out and collect the public\'s views about what follow on work
should be done to our previous risk studies. To also do a literature
search of information. State of Nevada, for example, has issued reports
related to our 1987 study. Sandia\'s looking at what the State of Nevada
had published in ‑‑ and seeing how information in there could help us do
follow on work, and that\'s what this meeting of today is really about.
We\'re in the process right now of collecting views for the scoping
study. And the scoping study\'s product is an issues and resolution
options report. And that\'s akin to a proposal from Sandia from follow
on work. We expect that to be done in May. We will share that with you
before we proceed with this project. So anything you say today will be
acknowledged in that report. And we will share the report with you
before we proceed to make sure that we understood your comments.

There are forms in the back of the room I\'d like to mention. If you
don\'t get a chance to speak today they have welcome across the top, you
can ‑‑ it has three questions to kind of lead you ‑‑ lead your thoughts,
but you don\'t have to use these questions. If you have any comments,
just fill out the form, leave it with us today. If you can think of it
now, or on the back of the form it has an address. If you just fold it
in three and staple it, you can mail it to us. And if we get those
comments by January, we\'ll make sure that they get into the May report.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is there a particular day in January?

MR. LEWIS: The end of January.

In conclusion, we\'re working for you on this project, and we need you
to be involved. We have come up with an approach to keep you involved.
These are the three things we have come up with. If there are more
things, please feel free to let us know. We\'re doing a web site. We
have a web site already in existence. It might be the best way to keep
involved with the project if you have access to the Internet, because we
frequently update the information on the web site. It has the agendas
for today\'s meeting, for example, and that\'s the address for the web
site. In addition, we\'re holding workshops like today. We were in
Henderson yesterday. And in November 17^th^ we were in Bethesda,
Maryland. As I said, early next year we\'ll be issuing a report that
Sandia\'s doing. And we\'ll also be issuing this issues report that I
just mentioned that\'s about this study, how we will do this study. And
once we have those two reports out, we want to have additional
workshops. We want to come back after you\'ve had a chance to digest the
reports we write. And get your feelings about what we\'re doing.

We have a mailing list. There are some forms on the table, they\'re
color forms, and they have a grayish background, and across the top it
says, \"How to stay in touch with this study.\" If you fill that out and
leave it with us, or if you want to mail it into us, that\'s fine too,
we\'ll make sure that we put your name on the mailing list. Now the
mailing list is for people that prefer not to use the web site, or for
any other reason would rather get the information in a hard copy instead
of using the computer to get it.

In conclusion, I probably ran over a little bit, but I want to thank you
for your attention and we\'re looking forward to hearing what you have
to say today. MR. CAMERON: All right. Let\'s go to our final short
presentation to Dr. Charles Massey from the Sandia Lab in Albuquerque,
New Mexico. Dr. Massey and his group are going to be the ones that are
doing the scoping study that Rob mentioned, and he\'s going to give us
an overview of spent fuel casks. All right. Charles. Okay. DR. MASSEY:
Thank you, Chip. Good morning everyone. As Chip said, I am the manager
of the Transportation Safety and Security Analysis Department at Sandia
National Labs and will be performing the study for the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission.

I want to give you just a very brief overview of spent fuel cask, some
of the particular components of it, and features that we\'re interested
in. Tell you based on that series of studies that Rob Lewis discussed
briefly, what the current state of knowledge is, in our view, on spent
fuel cask performance in these sort of severe accident environments. And
some of the suggestions that we are currently considering for proposing
to NRC to stimulate some thought on your part, and give us feedback on
other areas that you may have interest. Here I put a ‑‑ sort of the
cartoon diagram of a spent fuel cask. Point out a couple features of
here. This is the main body of the cask itself. Very substantial
structure, typically a stainless steel outer shell. And I\'ve put here
on the side a cutaway we\'ve made, it\'s actual full‑size of a cask
that\'s currently used on the road. You can see the stainless steel
outer shell. Inside that is usually some type of neutron absorbing,
shielding material. Then you get really to the inner cask wall here
itself. This is the main structural part of the cask. Here we\'ve got an
inch and a quarter of stainless steel, almost five inches of lead for
x‑raying gamma shielding, and then another three quarters inch of
stainless steel. This is a substantially strong material cask design.

Once the spent fuel itself is placed inside the cavity of the cask, a
lid is attached to the cask, there\'s a seal. Essentially people ‑‑ you
may view this as some sort of a o‑ring. Cask lid put on top. It\'s
bolted down. An impact limiters, impact absorbers are placed on the end.
These absorbers have some type of compressionable material which will
help absorb the force of collision.

Now based on our review and our experience of what we\'ve done to date
so far in studying the response of spent fuel packages to severe
accidents, and these are things not much ‑‑ or how do I want to frame
it? Beyond those that are the cask are currently required to demonstrate
performance to. We are looking at accidents at much higher speeds,
higher fire temperatures, longer duration fires. What we\'re looking at
is how can we predict the performance of the cask in these much more
severe regimes? To do that what we like to do is, as our suggestions to
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is one, go in and really update the
accident rate data. Look at more current features of highways, and truck
and train transportation. Increases in traffic. Different types of
trucks and trains that are used. And then once we have some feel for
what\'s the likelihood that there maybe a train derailment. Say okay if
the train derailment takes place, what\'s the likelihood that, you know,
the train car now is just sitting on its side, or it punctures some
other type of vehicle, train car that may be carrying some fuel. What\'s
the likelihood there\'s a fire, and how long could that fire be, and how
hot could it be? So we really want to go in and do these ‑‑ take a much
newer look at accident sequences.

Again we like to look at cask collision forces much greater than 60
miles per hour. We like some feedback on what sort of speeds you like to
see, and what scenarios can you envision can get us those speeds, and
what types of collision, I guess other vehicles or structures that we
may be faced within a collision.

We like to look at a fire test, fire duration scenario. Right now we\'re
putting up an hour. One of the reasons we get to the time frames is how
long could we have a fuel source, in this case fuel oil, how much fuel
oil do we have available to fuel fire? And so right now we\'re
contemplating proposing a one‑hour test with a cask lying on the ground.
We believe that the most likely scenario if there is a spent fuel
accident, is that the cask will end up in some configuration lying on
the ground. And so we\'d like to a test and demonstrate our ability to
predict performance of the cask and its internal contents using our
computer codes, with a more realistic scenario.

Another area that we would like to do some experimentation on for this
study, is actually to look at the spent fuel rod behavior itself inside
the cask. For the previous studies we have actually not done any testing
on the fuel rod behavior itself. Made some very educated judgments on
the performance of the fuel rods inside the package, based on the forces
that the cask itself sees. So what we\'d like to do is simulate and do
experiments on crushing and impacting the fuel rods itself to get a much
better understanding of how those would perform in a collision and
thermal environment.

And then finally, as Rob stated, we\'d like to do sort of a different
approach to the whole simulation and testing of cask. In the past the
analysis have really just focused on using our engineering judgment and
passed experience with other tests, and experiments that we\'ve used to
validate the computer codes that were used. But in this case we\'d like
to run the pretest predictions of the severe thermal and collision
environments, and do the test to that environment, and then see how well
our model\'s predicted. And our hope is that will show that the models
that we had developed are adequate and very good at predicting the
performance of packages in these severe environments. And do those ‑‑
that testing on a cask, and put representative that\'s representative
enough of cask designs that are going to be used to transport the fuel,
so we could use our models to predict performance on other types of
packages.

And with that I will just leave up briefly, hopefully to give you a
little bit of a guide on some of the areas we are particularly
interested in getting your input on, sort of the basic topical areas
that you may want to consider giving some feedback on, as well as any
other issues that you may have. Thank you, Chip.

MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Charles. Thanks, Rob, for that overview. Now lets
go out to all of you. And to start with, I\'d like to have Mr. Les
Bradshaw from Nye County talk to us about the Nye County Program and
their concerns. You can ‑‑ I think you use these, Les.

MR. BRADSHAW: Thank you. If you wouldn\'t mind, or if you could just
leave that one up there a little bit. I think those are the critical
issues that we want to talk about. Nye County thanks NRC for coming to
Pahrump, and coming to the site jurisdiction for the repository ‑‑ the
proposed repository in Yucca Mountain. We get a little jaded in Nye
County, and we slip and say the repository, because we get a little worn
down on the issue of the probability that it won\'t come here, that
something will be found that\'s not quite suitable. We\'re not ‑‑ we\'ve
neither asked for the repository. We\'ve been asked to bear the
nation\'s burdens. And Nye County takes accumulative ‑‑ look at the
accumulative impacts of the repository program on the County. And I\'m
not ‑‑ I ‑‑ we appreciate NRC coming out.

We know that this particular segment of NRC is here today, and NRC is
doing a lot of other things, and there are representatives of some of
the other pieces of NRC that are doing work here. We understand that
you\'re here to do your piece of work. We are ‑‑ we resist the tendency
of federal agencies to compartmentalize and stove pipe issues on every
account. You have to realize the context in which you are doing this
work, in which the repository comes to Nevada. We have a 18,000 square
mile county. There\'s ‑‑ depending on who you talk to, anywhere from 29
or 30,000 to 36 to 38,000 people here. So about two people for square
mile. Ninety‑three percent of that is managed, or in some cases,
actually vigorously managed by federal government agencies, including
our good friends at the forest service, the BLM, Federal Fish and
Wildlife, DOE, and about six different segments within DOE that we\'re
not really suppose to talk about. We have two DOE people ‑‑ groups here
that don\'t talk very well. And we have some others that we don\'t know
about. The federal agencies that are out on the federal reservations
doing their thing.

So we ‑‑ if ‑‑ and my job for the County is to coordinate the federal
facility\'s activities, and there are so many kingdoms and fiefdoms and
stove pipes to deal with that Nye County absolutely refuses to let the
federal government agencies stove pipe their issues. We have to look at
the total accumulative impacts of federal activities on the health, and
safety, and well‑being, and the quality of life in Nye County. We\'re
fighting, and I\'m saying fighting, although we do it in a congenial
way, and we appreciate you folks being here. These are not personal
issues with anybody, it\'s just business. But we\'re fighting federal
agency actions on a broad range of fronts, including trying to make a
repository here be safe, if it indeed does come here. But we have issues
out there with federal land management agency issues that are trying to
impose oppressive management practices on Nye County and the use of the
public lands. We have dangerous species issues that are further
shrinking the amount of activities that we, as citizens of Nye County,
can enjoy in our own County.

Here we come now to the issue of transporting nuclear waste, and we
urge, as the headline statement from Nye County, we urge you folks to
make this cask design as robust, as safe, as efficient, as risk‑free as
you possibly can on the citizens of Nye County. I draw your attention
and look at these maps up here where we\'ve tried to show the various
transportation routes. Every possible route to get to either Gate 510 or
Gate 100 at the test site is under consideration for transport of
nuclear materials. Every single route that you could possibly think of,
except perhaps the Pole Line Road from Tonopah to Gabbs, that\'s a dirt
road, and there\'s nobody\'s talked about transporting nuclear materials
on that. Bear in mind that we have the low‑level waste campaign that\'s
going on with thousands and thousands of shipments projected over the
next 30 years that we have to deal with.

So you folks ‑‑ your thousands of ‑‑ not you folks, but the canisters
that you\'re going to license, and that will be on the highways, are a
part of a broader mix of federal issues here. So no additional risk to
the citizens of Nye County would be our request. There is absolutely no
reason that this country cannot afford to do full‑scale repetitive
physical cask testing in an open environment, so that the citizens of
Nye County, and others, Inyo County has the same problems we do.
Lincoln, Clark County, the citizens of this State, and I\'m concerned
about Nye County, can have the absolute assurance that if the cannister
tips over, that nothing\'s going to happen. And we believe that that
should be the testing criteria that Sandia goes forward with.

It\'s the same thing we said about the radiation protection standards
that EPA and NRC and others are sort of fighting about. We don\'t
understand why NRC wants to have ‑‑ adopts a 25‑millirem standard. We
like the EPA\'s better, 15, plus a separate water standard. We asked all
of you folks to have a zero‑risk, absolutely zero. And we don\'t
understand why that isn\'t possible. We don\'t understand why the
President of the United States, who would impose a 100‑millirem exposure
limit on these citizens, why the agencies, why they won\'t come out and
assure Nye County that there will be zero additional risk. Why can\'t we
do that? I ask you that question. And I understand that the issue of,
you know, 15 millirems is about like getting a x‑ray or something, and
you say, \"Well you go to the dentist don\'t you, and get x‑rays?\"

Well, it doesn\'t matter. We go to the dentist voluntarily. We have not
asked for this issue. We are being asked, yet again to bear a nation\'s
burdens. All the other sites, the 100 ‑‑ the 70 or so, utilities with
about, what is it, Jim, 110 reactor sites, are getting their burdens
relieved by this process, that will come to Nye County. We estimate
conservatively that 14 billion curies of additional radioactivity will
come to Nevada, come to Nye County, will turn in a gate, either Gate 100
or Gate 510 we, in fact, that\'s another issue, which DOE won\'t even
tell us where they\'re going to turn into the test site yet, so, I mean
who knows? There\'s just so many uncertainties. The environmental impact
statement that DOE recently put out as a draft, is so broad that, I mean
it considers virtually ‑‑ not virtually, but, you know, basically so
many alternatives as to routing that it\'s impossible for these folks
here, folks that are ‑‑ that run town boards, county government, other
agencies, I mean, if somebody wanted to build a school today in Nye
County, if the school district wanted, or we had a new library to be
built, we couldn\'t decide where to put it, so that it could be away
from transportation routes.

This town here that we\'re in, this little road right through here, the
one that you came over the hill on, and I wish you could go back to Las
Vegas by going north and heading out to 95 and then going in, that route
is one of the potentialities for that activity. And if it isn\'t that
that\'s coming down the road here through the middle of this town, which
by the way, is growing at 15 ‑‑ 12 to 15 percent growth rate, and
that\'s 3,000 new people a year that\'s moving here, more or less.
Unless you talk to Rich Thurlow (phonetic), and then it\'s a lot higher,
but there\'s a lot of people here. In 10 years, when the first truck is
scheduled to come down the road, there\'s going to be 60,000 people
living here in this valley, and proportionally more in Amargosa Valley,
the road that comes up from Inyo County and comes up, that is the next
valley that will be developed. So we ‑‑ you have to put all this in
context.

The issue of nuclear materials, and the physical nature of these nuclear
materials is not well understood by the public. We out here, I could say
the same thing perhaps for an urban area like Clark County, the general
citizenry does not understand the physics of nuclear waste. And they
never will in the sense that we are not those experts. So we\'re relying
on folks like you and others to make this a zero risk proposition. We do
not understand why it cannot be a zero risk proposition, and we
challenge you and urge you, if you go forward, to bear in mind that for
this campaign to be successful, if indeed the nation wants to solve its
nuclear waste burden, and go forward with the next 20 to 30 years, and
beyond that for the low‑level waste cleanup issues, hauling nuclear
waste in Nye County, which is what the plan is probably if the
repository goes forward.

But in any case, the low‑level waste campaign is here with us. If you
want to make this successful, and you don\'t want to be having this kind
of discussion 30 years from now, start out on the front end with a
vigorous, and I would dare say expensive, but spend the money. Get the
money and spend the money. A vigorous long‑term real life, full‑size
testing program. I would suggest to you that the term source terms and
computer codes ‑‑ don\'t say those to the general public, because if you
want hear stories about how the federal government has done modeling
upon which they base decisions, I could ‑‑ we could give you some
stories. Just a short example would be the modeling that DOE wants to do
as a basis for its decisions and its draft DIS having to do with
groundwater behavior, as a ‑‑ from the ‑‑ in the Death Valley hydro
logic system, as it leaves Yucca Mountain, travels down gradient, under
the town of Amargosa Valley, heads down to his county, goes across the
border, and does whatever it does. That model ‑‑ or that groundwater
modeling system that DOE wants to use has been criticized by other
national peer review groups as being insufficiently based or a too
sparse of data basis.

So I have to say for the citizens of the County, don\'t get yourselves
into that. There\'s zero credibility for that DOE groundwater modeling
system. Don\'t put yourself in that position. Spend the money. Get the
money and spend the money for a full‑scale cask testing, so that these
folks can know that if that truck tips over ‑‑ bear in mind, under the
scenarios that DOE has putting out, those trucks ‑‑ I\'m just taking the
Town of Beatty, those trucks will stop at a stop sign in Beatty and make
a turn, at however thousands of times that it ‑‑ that ‑‑ for this
shipping campaign, and there will be people eating lunch, maybe 120 feet
away on one side, and if they\'re over to that little bar on the other
side, they\'ll be drinking a cold beer on a spring day there maybe ‑‑
probably less than 55 feet from where those trucks are going to be
stopping. You\'ve got to bear that in mind. Because Highway 95 is our
main street. It ‑‑ it\'s the lifeline of our communities from Pahrump,
Amargosa to Beatty to Sacrabatis (phonetic) Flats, to Goldfield, which
is in Esmeralda County, and Tonopah, and then however you get to
Tonopah, from the last ‑‑ this is our main street, this is the lifeline
of our County.

If that road is closed down, things stop. There\'s no detours. People in
these towns have not asked for this burden. They don\'t seek it. They
don\'t want it. But if it happens Nye County will probably be a good
soldier and shoulder that burden, but we would ask you to let us ‑‑ help
us do that with having an adequate data base on these issues here that
gets people ‑‑ I mean there are people here that are going to tell you
they ‑‑ we ‑‑ you know, they\'re going to say that modeling isn\'t good,
that full‑scale cask testing is the only way to make this happen. Help
us assume this national burden with a data base that will give us some
surety that the citizens, the kids that are going to school up in Beatty
again, the ‑‑ where these trucks will be turning right after they make
that corner where people will be having lunch, they\'re going to come
down, and the main turnoff to the high school is right there, so these
trucks are going to be breaking school buses there. The kids on the bus
didn\'t ask for this. The parents didn\'t ask for it. So we ask you to
help us make this a zero risk proposition.

MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much Les, for that very clear and very
comprehensive statement of Nye County concerns. And I\'d like to go out
to others in the audience to see if there are some comments. Okay.
Let\'s start with Sally Devlin. And go ahead, Sally.

MS. DEVLIN: It\'s so nice to see so many people here. And I want to
thank NRC for coming, and the DOE and the other agencies. It\'s always
fun not only to see you, but to talk to you, because I do know you
listen. And Les expressed it very succinctly just what I said to Bill
before the meeting, everybody seems to have their little category or
whatever, but the most important thing to me is on other transportation
safety issues. And you very cautiously and very correctly didn\'t
mention Yucca Mountain as such, and that this ‑‑ these canisters will be
coming in and placed in the mountain, because that\'s a whole other
subject. You\'re just doing the outer canisters and inner canisters.

Well, transportation is what I got into this in because six and a half
years ago they were going ‑‑ the only railroad plan they had was to
bring everything through Pahrump on the VanSchmidt Line down through
Amargosa and then up to the test site. They have the second one now on
the eastside through the flood plain. And I haven\'t heard you really
say anything about the weather studies. We have extremes of everything,
the 55 degree temperature variances. We have winds of 125 miles per
hour. We have blizzards. We have this, and we have tremendous seismic
activity here. This doesn\'t seem to have been addressed at all.

The other thing that is most important, I mentioned to Bill, we have no
medical facilities. And this stuff, if it came by rail or by truck
through the Carlin (phonetic) one in particular, through Elko
(phonetic), Carlin and so on on down through Vander ‑‑ what have you,
there isn\'t any medical facility. There\'s no medical facility in
Pahrump. There\'s nothing in Nye County. We have a private hospital in
Tonopah, 12 beds. And we have a whole 12 people trained in emergency
preparedness. Now we\'re talking hundreds of miles between nothing.

Now the other thing is when that ‑‑ and he so cute, he\'s so decorous. I
never am. I\'m just bold. And that is these drivers, trains have to stop
every 300 miles, I\'ve read your transportation studies, and trucks so
many hundred miles, and as he said, they would ‑‑ it would be stopping,
but where do you stop in Nevada? You stop at a casino or a brothel, to
go to the bathroom, right? Now that isn\'t even considered, and perhaps
it might not be important in other States, but it certainly is here. How
dangerous are these stops? How long are they required to stop? And how
do you monitor them? There\'s no monitoring. So this just safety issues
are a fun thing.

The other thing is we\'ve talked a little bit about numbers for Yucca
Mountain One, and remember there\'s two repositories, and this is stated
by DOE. And they want 10 to 11,000 casks for the one, double that
that\'s 22,000 casks. Also, 10 percent would be classified DOD waste.
Now I have stated for years, you cannot put classified waste in my
mountain. Now we\'re talking about the canisters. We\'re talking about
you\'re bringing them in, or you\'re talking about over packs, they may
go back and forth, but these actual canisters, there are no designs for
them. There are no outer things. The casks that you\'re talking about,
the stainless steel casks, and we documented this at the last NRC
meeting, have exploded, and just like it did in Japan, they did it in
Michigan and Wisconsin. And NRC regulates them. This is dry storage
again.

But I\'m just saying that this stuff does go on. We have documented
where they sent out a cask in Nebraska in the middle of a blizzard, and
of course it blew over, and it cost 70,000 to clean up. These are all
documented things. And of course NRC, as the regulators, don\'t seem to
know it, because as far as I\'m concerned DOE hides it. This happens,
that haven\'t. But the most important thing is the DOD stuff. And that
is who knows what. And I am sure that 14,000 metric tons have to be
tested Mr. Sandia. We\'re delighted to meet you. We have a lot of
reports from you that have been sent to us by Alan Benson (phonetic).
And we also have reports from Argon (phonetic), and what we have found
is the coatings, the outer coatings, and I\'m going to let Grant talk
about that, are absolutely unsatisfactory.

The other thing is when we talk about the actual movement of the trucks,
in my reports from INEEL, they go 10 to 30 miles an hour. Now we have
non‑existent roads here, they\'re ‑‑ 95, our interstate, that Les
mentioned is a nine hazard; 160 is a seven hazard, and of course, we\'re
four lanes now. We\'re so happy. But the minute that these trucks would
leave the Pahrump border, do they get half lighter when they go the
other 30 miles up to the test site, or up to Yucca Mountain? Because
that is ‑‑ will be a single road. And our roads are a mess, because of
whether, because of this, because of that. And one other terrible word,
of course, is flood. And we do have floods here. So all of the climatic
things, all of the seismic things, all of the rest of them are just
ignored, and the numbers, 22,000 is a lot of numbers. And they
predicted, and this was from the EPA meeting that we recently had, that
one out of 100 will break open. That\'s a very poor record. So there\'s
a lot more, and I\'ll let others talk. Thank you, again for coming.
Thank you.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Sally, for your continued attention to
this issue. Anybody over here have a comment or a question? Yes, sir?
And if you could just state your name, and affiliation for the
transcript.

MR. BEIRLE: My name is Kenton Beirle, and I\'m here representing
primarily myself, as a resident of Pahrump. I\'m familiar with some of
the early stages of your testing program as conducted by Sandia National
Labs, because for many years I was employed at the test site in a
support agency status for the laboratory. So I do have some knowledge
about how your initial safety program began and things that went into
it, and some of the results thereof. I\'m a little bit concerned with a
statement, I believe that Bob made, Mr. Robert Lewis, made here a little
bit ago. Did you say there were 1,300 transportation performances?

MR. LEWIS: Yes.

MR. BEIRLE: And you had a ‑‑ you had eight accidents during those. Was
this on public roads? Where these on public roads, or?

MR. LEWIS: Both road ‑‑ both roads and rail.

MR. BEIRLE: Okay. I just did a little bit of fourth grade mathematics
that comes out to an accident per 164 and a half transportation
performances. I\'m a little confused about that. Because if I were to
call Greyhound, or Amtrak, or any national airlines to schedule a flight
from say here to New York City, and I found out that they had an
accident at ratio of 164 transportation performances, it would scare the
hell out of me. So I\'m a little ‑‑ I question your figures there.
That\'s seems a very, very high percentage of accidences for ‑‑

MR. CAMERON: Can you ‑‑

MR. BEIRLE:  ‑‑ a transportation issue.

MR. CAMERON: Can you try to put that into context for this gentleman,
Rob?

MR. LEWIS: Sure. I think I\'ll start off, I think Earl might want to add
a little bit to this. The 1,300 shipments that were made, I\'m only
talking about the ones that were in NRC certified packages now, so it\'s
only commercial shipments.

MR. CAMERON: 1,300?

MR. LEWIS: 1,300 shipments, yeah, in the last 20 or so years. And there
was, as I said, there was eight traffic accidents in those shipments.
Four of those accidents involved casks that were being returned after
the shipment. They did not have any spent fuel in them. The four that
did have spent fuel in them, the accidents that occurred resulted in no
release, and I think the accidents that ‑‑ the meaning of accidents is
an important factor here, because we count any little event as an
accident in those cases. Again, with that I\'ll turn it over to Earl.

MR. CAMERON: And let me ‑‑ let\'s go to Earl to get some more
information for you, and Rob mentioned counting any little thing as an
accident. Earl, I don\'t know if you can use this gentleman\'s reference
to Greyhound and Amtrak to give ‑‑ to sort of a ‑‑ explain the analogy
between what we call an accident in ‑‑ you know where I\'m going? All
right. Go ahead.

MR. EASTON: Yeah, I think when you try to account for accident safety,
it\'s very important on what your definition of accident is. Now at the
NRC we don\'t, as our mandate, go around and count accidents. We rely on
reported accidents, and those are either reported under the regulations
of the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, in some
cases, or those that are required ‑‑ there are some that are required to
be reported to the NRC. But each type of agency has a different
reporting requirement. DOT for example has a requirement that if you
exceed a certain amount of property damage you have to report it, so
that could be a fender bender. If there\'s any suspected release, that
has to be reported. So there\'s a grey ‑‑ there\'s a grey area in how
accidents are reported, number one. And the type of accidents that we
had here, with the eight accidents, there were several in the category
that just exceeded property damage. There was one in 1971 where a truck
cask slide off the road into a ditch, unfortunately the driver was
killed. It was a transportation type accident. It was like a traffic
accident. The cask was virtually undamaged. Also because of the few
number ‑‑ relatively few numbers of transportation accidents involving
spent fuel casks, relatively few number of shipments, 1,300 with
basically no release. It\'s not a particularly large database. So in
trying to do some of these studies, we have to turn to data bases of
similar types of trucks, similar size trucks, et cetera, et cetera. So I
hope that in part ‑‑

MR. BEIRLE: What I\'m bringing about here is a little bit of an
understanding that Mr. Bradshaw just brought up, when you\'re talking to
the public, when you get down to the raw numbers, that\'s what they will
see. That\'s what I see. And those numbers, to me, didn\'t sound very
good. You know, an accident, so it\'s a little fender bender, out of
every 164 trucks, that is a very high ratio. That\'s what I\'m saying
that the public is going to perceive. Any maybe it\'s only a fender
bender, and it will not involve necessarily the safety of the cask or
anything like that, but nevertheless, it\'s an accident. And if that\'s
the ratio of accidents that you\'re going to put out to the public, they
aren\'t going to see it ‑‑ they\'re aren\'t going to want to see it come
through this State or this County.

MR. CAMERON: Okay.

MR. BEIRLE: And especially, I don\'t, because I have a little bit of a
more of a little concern here, I live in the north end of the valley,
which is squeezed in by the result of two mountain ranges, to a very
narrow little pass. And if you go by either truck or by rail, you are
going to go within a quarter of a mile by truck, up to one mile by rail,
from my house. Now the radiation that is put off by the spent fuel
packages, like Mr. Bradshaw pointed out, there\'s argument going on
between the levels of radiation acceptable, and they haven\'t arrived at
the base number for that. And the words are put out that it\'s
equivalent of an x‑ray, a tooth x‑ray, well that might be very nice, but
is that per truck that goes by my house? I don\'t get a tooth x‑ray
every day, or two or three times a day, or ten times a day. That needs
to be explained.

Also, if you have an accident, what is the radiation level at that
particular place then? What is the expected level of radiation that
could be put out? What if it happens say right down the road from me?
These are very real concerns for me because the other day a flatbed
trailer hauling cargo lost its cargo 1,400 feet from my house. In other
words, at the closet point of the highway passes by my house, his cargo
slid from his truck. Now what if that would have been a cask involved in
an accident? How long is the cask going to lay there? What is the level
of radiation? Those are things that I think we need to bring down to a
layman\'s term, if you will. I\'m familiar with your scientific terms
involved in the nuclear processes and whatnot, but we need to get it
down to the layman terms, the public\'s terms.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you very much, sir ‑‑

MR. BEIRLE: Thank you.

MR. CAMERON: ‑‑ for pointing out the importance of clearly explaining
this. And I know that Rob wants to say something, but you also might,
Rob, if we have the information on it, the issue of a cask traveling on
a truck or a train, passing someone\'s house, what is the radiation
emitted?

MR. LEWIS: First though regarding your last point, the ‑‑ one of the
products of this study we\'re doing, and also of the study that we\'re
trying to publish next year, is a technical report for the engineers and
technical community. But there\'s another product, and it\'s a document
for public ‑‑ a plain English version of all these reports. And we hope
to get that to you in time for the next series of workshops.

And the other issue, we do look at both the safety of the shipment
during routine transportation, and the safety of the shipment during
accidents. Now the study we\'re talking about today is only what happens
after the accident. But we do have limits in our regulations, and they
come from the DOT, Department of Transportation\'s Regulations that set
the radiation level on the outside of packages. And we have established
those limits at levels that provide for safety during routine
transportation. And how do we show this? We show this through our
history of ‑‑ and these limits, I should say don\'t just apply to spent
fuel shipments, they\'re for all radioactive materials packages.
There\'s probably three to five million of radioactive materials every
year. And the limits we set for normal transportation apply to all those
packages. And through the studies and through the history we\'ve
accumulated, we do ‑‑ we determine the environmental and the safety
impacts of allowing those radiation levels during the normal
transportation.

Bill wants to add a point.

MR. BRACH: There are a couple points I want to make and first in Les\'s
earlier comments with regard to a concern that the cask design really be
safe and as robust as possible, I believe that\'s also inherit Sally
Devlin\'s comments, as well as Mr. Beirle\'s questions with regard to
accident considerations. I\'d like to step back with regard to the cask
design and its robustness, accidents do happen, that\'s been the thrust
of the last decision with regard to the 1,300 shipments in the last 20
years of commercial spent fuel. Four accidents involving transport of
casks with spent fuel, which there were no releases. The issue that
we\'re looking at in our study, and we\'re looking very much for your
input now, I want to say we very much, I think, share the common
objective of these casks to be safe, the robustly design ‑‑ the designs
will be robust, so that if an accident were to occur as Mr. Beirle had
just discussed that happened just recently, that if that had been a
transport of spent fuel, and had that been a spent fuel cask that had
left the truck bed that what we\'re looking to do in our study is to go
through the analysis, and as both Dr. Massey and Rob had mentioned, the
consideration of physical testings that would be necessary so that if
that accident were to occur with spent fuel or spent fuel canister, that
we would all feel very confident that the cask design would be robust
and strong enough to have ‑‑ to prevent any release of material.

Yes, there\'d be some corrective actions needed to upright and pick up
the cask. Put it back onto another form of conveyance, and move it on.
But yet there would be no release of nuclear material ‑‑ that ‑‑ or
radiation. That clearly is a goal of what we\'re looking for in our
study. Dr. Massey, I believe has the very first bullet on the overhead
is looking at accident likelihoods, accident rates. And that\'s your
question with regard to the analogy of whether you\'re calling Greyhound
with regard to their safety record, or their accident rates. But we want
to be sure that the information that we have, as we\'re going forward,
is current and as broad as we could make it from the standpoint of
assuring that the data we have is representative of accident conditions.

Will there we a zero risk? We all would like to have a zero risk, but as
you point out, accidents happen, and we want to be sure that our
consideration of this study takes into account accidents that might be
likely, so ‑‑ or might be possible, so that the design of that cask
would prevent the release of radiation ‑‑ or any radioactive material or
radiation from that accident. So I want to stress to you what we\'re
looking to hear from you today, and I clearly heard Mr. ‑‑ in Les\'s
earlier comments with regard to credibility of modeling versus the need
for testing.

Both in Dr. Massey\'s brief presentation and Rob\'s presentation had
mentioned that we see that physical testing is clearly an element that
we feel is going to be needed. The extent, the type of physical testing,
clearly interested in your views. Ms. Bradshaw, you mentioned full‑scale
testing, I\'m taking notes, as well the meeting\'s being transcribed. We
have that. But that all is in the context of assuring and ‑‑ that the
cask design will be such that if an accident were to occur that we would
like to have, and want to have, and need to have the confidence that the
cask will perform as designed or intended, in that accident condition,
so. What to add that because I believe that\'s very fundamental, and I
think that it\'s a common vein in the comments we\'ve heard so far this
morning. Thank you.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. And these table mics do work.

MR. BRACH: Oh, they do.

MR. CAMERON: They just need to be turned on. That would help.

MR. BRACH: Okay.

MR. CAMERON: Charles, do you have anything to add on the radiation
coming off the cask during normal conditions?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: That one doesn\'t work.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: This one doesn\'t either?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Do you want to do that, Charles?

DR. MASSEY: I\'ll let NRC answer that.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. And I would just ask the NRC people to just try to be
as concise as possible so we can hear from the people from Nye County
and surrounding counties. Go ahead, Earl.

MR. EASTON: Yeah. Sandia\'s actually done a lot of studies about the
radiation levels off various casks. I\'ve been told that that will be
made available to anyone who wanted that to contact us. Also, let me
throw in one question. We often have a hard time explaining risk in
other than technical terms, because he tend to be technicians. Any ideas
on how me might express risk in a more meaningful way, I think is
something we\'d be very interested in.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. We\'re going to go for a final
clarification on some of the points raised by the last gentleman to
Janet Cotra from the NRC staff. And then we\'re going to go to Grant and
others. Go ahead.

MS. COTRA: Thank you, Chip. Rob, I just wanted to make sure that the
impression wasn\'t left that one out of every 163 trucks that come into
Nye County is going to have an accident. I don\'t think you meant to say
that. I think it\'s important to point out for people here, and this is
part of the learning curve that NRC is on, and expressing its technical
information in a way that people can understand is that those data that
you put up there weren\'t corrected for the length of the shipment.

So I think if you express them in terms of per mile accident rate ‑‑
now, I\'m not an expert in this area, I\'m not pretending to be, but
there are plenty of people in this room who are, I think, or I would
appreciate it if one of them could confirm what my instinct is, is that
that accident rate is probably lower than the national average on a per
mile basis. And I certainly don\'t want people to think that one out of
every 163 trucks that drives by their school or their home is going to
have even a fender bender carrying one of these casks. So I would like
one of us to clarify that.

MR. CAMERON: Perhaps that was good for now. Thank you for doing that.
Grant, you had your hand up earlier. Why don\'t you go ahead and then
we\'ll go to Michael.

MR. HUDLOW: I\'m Grant Hudlow, and I\'m a member of the NRAMP group,
which is a study group with the UNLV it\'s funded by DOE on the test
site project. And like Les says, we don\'t like to allow you to
compartmentalize your projects. We\'ve learned a great deal from the
operation of the test site itself about what is likely to happen to
Yucca Mountain, transportation, and so forth.

And before I get started into some of that stuff, I\'d like to, if I
can, pick on the three of you. You\'ve made some terrible communication
mistakes and under the idea that you would like suggestions on how to
get the public involved, then I\'d like to critique your talks. When you
use words like safe, valid, substantially strong design, very educated
judgments, what the public hears is that you\'re right and the public\'s
wrong. And that is not what you intend. I can tell you for sure that you
do not want to do that. It drives people away. It stops the
communication. That\'s a terrible thing to have happen. I make the same
mistakes because I\'m a strong personality, and I want to project that.
And so people hear me as saying things that are carved in stone, and I
don\'t intend that at all, but that\'s probably why I\'m so sensitive to
hearing you say that, because I get busted for it all the time.

I\'m also would like to complement you on your candor on admitting that
there have been nuclear accidents. The story that we\'ve heard up to now
is that there has never been a nuclear accident. In fact we had a truck
driver, who drives nuclear trucks, when we suggested that there had been
accidents, was going to come across the table and punch us out.
Fortunately, there was somebody else there that told him to calm down,
and quit it. We know that there are 260,000 over the last 10 years
chemical truck accidents. Only a few of those were nightmares. One of
them destroyed the Sacramento River. Others have blown up towns. All
kinds of stuff.

So when we talk about accidents with nuclear materials on board, that\'s
what we hear, that you\'re going to destroy the river, you\'re going to
take out a town, whatever. And this is a very serious matter to all of
us. And sure, only one accident in a great while will take out a town or
a river, but that\'s going to happen, and we want you to be sure that
the materials that you\'re containing this stuff with are strong enough
to prevent that.

I would like to chide Sandia. The last time I talked to Sandia about
containing nuclear material, they didn\'t know about the Nelson limits.
And the Nelson limits predicted in that project that the material was
going to puncture the cask within two to six months. And when I asked
the DOE to find out the data base when we started talking about
containing this material. It\'s not available. We\'ve got everything
that Sandia could find, and nothing was mentioned on that, so apparently
that was too embarrassing, and it was hidden, and that\'s unfortunate,
because you\'re making the same mistake all over again. Anytime you use
stainless steel around this kind of material two things happen, the
nickel evaporates and the chromium gets punctured within two to six
months. So they may be the outer cask on this. Maybe the outer stainless
steel will be safe. Maybe one of the internal rings will be safe. It\'s
hard to tell, without some testing.

But I\'ll guarantee you that those inner ones are going to puncture
within two to six months, and that\'s totally insane to contain this
stuff with stainless steel. You need to get somebody that knows the
Nelson limits, knows some metallurgy, and get that straightened out once
and for all. And put it in the data base so the next young engineer
comes along doesn\'t make the same mistake.

MR. CAMERON: And Grant, I\'ll have to ask you to just wrap up if you
could. If you have a final point for us that you would like ‑‑

MR. HUDLOW: Yeah. I\'d like to mention that I met Sarah earlier, and I
depend on her to ‑‑ for the NRC to get into these Nelson limits, this
metallurgy, she has the background to understand it. And to make sure
that the MNO\'s and the DOE take care of this problem, so it doesn\'t ‑‑
we don\'t have to keep coming up with it at every meeting.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you very much, Grant, for the advice on
communications and the Nelson limits. And we do have people working on
that. Michael Dorame, Inyo County.

MR. DORAME: I want to thank everybody for taking the time to be here for
us. We\'re also here for you. Neighbors, thank you very much for holding
this. Les, you were so astute in your presentation, I don\'t know how
anybody can follow that one. But very briefly here. Thank you, Chip. You
mentioned 1,300 shipments, and I just wondered over the past 20 years or
so, where did these shipments initiate and where were they going to? And
how many miles were involved? Where were the accidents? What were the
causes of the accidents? Were they preventable, non‑preventable? When we
find that out, what was the location of ‑‑ if there were any emergency
response teams, how were they equipped and/or prepared to deal with
these accidents? What was the resulting factors of anything that was
learned from these accidents? And I think the bottom line here is how do
we get to zero effects? We spend billions of dollars crashing on Mars
and not learning a thing from that one except that we can\'t do this on
the cheap. So I think the message about appropriating and allocating the
funding that\'s necessary ‑‑ put this to the top, the front burner, in
terms of public safety. When this nation engages itself to be number one
at anything, we never, ever go on the cheap. And we educate ourselves
either through propaganda or through legitimate information to educate
everyone that this is a very necessary endeavor, should we transport
spent fuel rods.

We have had a series of accidents in our terrain, in our region. And the
gentleman that mention the high mountain passes, we recently had one in
May, because the driver had no knowledge of the terrain. He had no
knowledge that when he came across Towns Pass, which is west of here in
Death Valley National Park, he was carrying a hazardous material, but
did not realize that he didn\'t know how fast that grade dropped, and
for how many miles. And when he got to Immigrant Pass, he had lost it
already, and the truck disintegrated upon impact, and they had waste all
over the place. Now had that been nuclear waste, I don\'t think we would
have had any survivors to talk about it. There was some ‑‑ I mean it
just disintegrated, it was the velocity of that. It was a violent
collision. So these are the kind of things that concern people like
myself.

The weather is going to play a big part, and that\'s where we start
looking at zero effects. I would expect, having served in the military a
couple of terms, that we would have a discipline, a national discipline
to monitor how we do business. And I realize how a lot of these
shipments are being transported. There\'s a lot of issue with the
knowledge of the drivers and how to respond to emergencies on the road.
A lot of this is contractual, because why? We\'re doing it on the cheap.
And there maybe some requirements that is go out to bid, but then again
I realize that the Federal Government can do what the Federal Government
feels is best for the people. Which means even if we have to in getting
to zero effects, create some type of system ‑‑ we\'ve got GPS, we can
regimentalize everything to a point, like the military, so that we can
keep track of every single shipment. Thereby reducing the amount of
public skepticism and suspicion of what is going on, and enhancing the
credibility of the entire program. You involve the public and what
happens next is that the public becomes that watchdog. The public needs
to know every bit of it.

This thing about how many shipments are coming through? We have no idea.
Who\'s keeping track? We have no idea. Where are they coming from? Where
are they going? How many miles has that guy driven? We have no idea.
There\'s got to be a record for every shipment. I urge everyone who is
responsible for the success of any type of transportation program to
ensure that that becomes part of that program.

Now we the public out here realizing that, Oh, yeah, we can trust you
guys to do the right thing. Well, we have a vested interest in this
nation in various ‑‑ along various routes. It\'s called property values.
I\'m sure you all are ‑‑ have property that you value. What happens to
the value of my property or anybody else\'s property when there\'s a
realization that we\'ve got shipments coming through here with a
potential for an accident? It touches us all dependent on where you\'re
going to be transporting that stuff. I have a similar issue with the
Owens Lake. It\'s dry.

I have discovered, just very recently now, I ‑‑ because I reside in Lone
Pine, that some of our property values are being affected by that dust
now. Now we can\'t go to lending institutions to expand, say our house,
add a room on or something. These kind of things occur. This likely
could happen. And bottom line, please don\'t use this terminology again,
this is not quote, unquote routine transportation. This ‑‑ you raise
that bar to a higher level when you talk about this. And I thank you so
much neighbors. Thank you, Chip.

MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Michael. Before we ‑‑ you guys might have
something to say. There were many questions and recommendations there. I
guess that the only thing that I would single out at this point is the
accident that Michael was talking about, about the truck driver coming
down through Immigrant Pass. Could you just talk a little bit about the
types of accidents that the study would look at, such as that, to ‑‑
that ‑‑ and why you\'re looking at those accidents? To see what would
happen to a spent fuel cask. And then we really do need to see if we can
get other people who haven\'t talked yet on the record. Charles?

DR. MASSEY: Yes. One of the things that we will be looking at in the
study is a revised new look at accident likelihoods and the types of
accidents that take place, like incidences of trucks going through
canyon passes. You know the speeds, the greater speeds, especially going
downhills that you might see. Carrying heavier loads as the trucks get
bigger. There\'s been concern that these packages, because they are
heavyweight shipments, you know, what\'s the impact of those. And plus
other heavy hauls that maybe on collocated on the same highway. So those
are the sort of things that we\'ll be going into much more detail in
this new study is looking at the whole new shipping operations,
especially with more tandem trailers. Those sort of things. How do those
new transportation safety ‑‑ or transportation systems, how do those
affect potentially safety of our spent fuel packages?

I\'d like to go back, very quickly to these eight accidents. If we look
at shipment miles, it\'s roughly a million, it\'s a little less than
that, but it\'s roughly a million shipment miles involving a loaded
spent fuel cask. Four of those eight accidents actually had cask
containing spent fuel, so that\'s roughly one per 250,000 shipment
miles. Now that\'s some type of event that we classified as an accident.
I believe one of them, correct me Earl or Rick, I think it was sort of a
flat tire, where it sort of skidded off and caused a little bit of
damage. Okay.

Now in all those four accidents, there was no damage to the cask
resulting in any type of release of radioactive material. Now what we do
for transportation risk assessment purposes, when we go through these
scenarios, you\'ll say, \"Okay, now let\'s say we just assume that one
in every 250,000 miles we have some type of event that could lead us
into circumstances where we may have something else happen.\" So what we
would assume is that instead of the cask just going off the road, and
ending up in the ditch, and nothing happening to it, say, \"Well, we
know we never had this happen,\" but let\'s say it did happen to run
into a gasoline storage tank. What\'s the odds of that? We\'ll assign
some probability.

Say, \"Okay now we could have a fire as a result. What\'s the likelihood
of how long that fire would be, and what\'s the temperature?\" So you go
through a very rigorous and detailed analysis of other things that could
happen that people could postulate that, you know, maybe very
reasonable. And we want to see what\'s the consequences of those type of
environments on the package.

So it\'s not a ‑‑ it may seem, if you look at the numbers, eight per
1,300, may on its face seem kind of high, but if you look at the
shipment miles and the fact that one per 250,000 miles we just had some
type of event that we\'re labeling an accident, but that there was no
impacts or consequences as a result, we believe that does demonstrate
the safety of the packages.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. And thanks for putting that into perspective. And I
think we should all ‑‑ also remember Michael\'s last point about routine
transportation, too. Rob, do you have something quickly to add?

MR. LEWIS: On that point, by no means did I mean to imply that spent
fuel shipments are a routine matter to us. What I meant by using the
term routine transport was it was a shipment that occurred that did not
involve a transportation accident. Now spent fuel is a very hazardous
material. We know that. It\'s the most regulated substance that is
shipped. And that\'s reflective that it is by no means a routine matter
to us.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. We\'re going to go over here for a comment. And then
we\'ll take this gentleman, and Jim Williams for Nye County, might want
to say something. Yes, ma\'am? If you could just give your name for the
record.

MS. GANGER: My name is Alice Ganger. And I\'m just a very concerned
citizen. I wish I had more ‑‑ had done more homework about the
speculation that these nuclear facilities are going to recycle this
nuclear waste to be used for something else?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No, ma\'am.

MS. GANGER: No?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No.

MR. BRACH: There is within the U.S. no reprocessing of spent nuclear
fuel to reuse the material. The materials that we\'re talking about
being transported to ‑‑ eventually to the repository would be the spent
nuclear fuel used at commercial nuclear reactors, as well as other
Department of Energy activities, but it would not be material, under the
commercial side, that would be reprocessed material or recycled
material. It would be the nuclear material that once it\'s used to the
extent of its usability, if you will, at a nuclear power plant, it would
then be packaged into a canister, and the purpose of our study we\'re
talking about today would the transportation canisters that would be
used to transport that spent nuclear fuel from the power reactor to the
repository, to a disposal facility, or a storage facility. There\'s
not ‑‑ it does not have a recycle or reprocessing aspect to it.

MS. GANGER: Because the sure would save a lot of these meetings and
worries by all concerned United States citizens on the shipping.

My other thought is, I don\'t know where you people live, but how would
you like all these trucks going down your 160, three miles from your
home? I don\'t know, I think there\'s some transportation people here, I
kind of looking at the routes, if they\'re talking about building a
railroad, why ‑‑ Nevada is so desolate, why don\'t they build it out in
the boonies where they don\'t have civilization? Then we don\'t have to
worry as much.

MR. CAMERON: Okay.

MS. GANGER: That\'s fine. MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Thank you for those
concerns. Let\'s go to this gentleman here, and then see what Jim has to
add for us. Yes, sir? MR. GRAY: I\'m Larry Gray with the Town Board of
Beatty. I have a couple personal concerns, and something about your
transportation hitting on what she had just said. There is no one in the
Town of Beatty that\'s more than a half mile from U.S. 95. The town is
centered on U.S. 95. So any other transportation coming through that
area, it\'s going by everybody\'s home. And what I had heard before,
someone asked, what is the amount of radiation coming from these casks,
and you have not given an answer of how much radiation is ambient around
these casks during transportation.

The other question was, I notice, I see a lot of transportation right
now of high‑level plutonium, or something that maybe weapons, but there
is material running down 95 with high‑level security. What is your
security for these trucks? The way ‑‑ my question is, is there ‑‑ you
have security at the place, or at ‑‑ now at the nuclear plant. You have
security at Yucca Mountain. Are these trucks going to be running with
security? Because right now we live in times where terrorists could do
something. We didn\'t think they\'d do anything to a federal building,
but they blew it up. What\'s to stop them with this where it\'s out in
the middle of nowhere?

MR. CAMERON: All right. Let\'s give an answer to the radiation question,
and if someone could simply address the security angle, too.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We\'ll ask Earl on the second, and Rob on the
first.

MR. CAMERON: All right.

MR. LEWIS: The limit ‑‑ the radiation level that\'s allowed on a cask is
10 millirems per hour, two meters away from the cask. Now as you
increase the distance, that amount drops off, but that\'s the standard
that\'s in the regulation, 10 millirems per hour, two meters from the
cask.

MR. CAMERON: And security. Let\'s go to Earl Easton.

MR. EASTON: Also some of the studies have ‑‑ the one that\'s coming out
in February will give more detail on the radiation limits that are
associated with these, so you might want to look for that, and comment
on that.

Physical protection for spent fuel shipments regulated by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, we have several protections in place. We require
armed escorts through any urban area. Unarmed escorts through non‑urban
areas. There\'s a requirement that all trucks call in every two hours.
It has to be in constant communication capability to contact
headquarters, their shipping headquarters. We check to make sure that
the response time for law enforcement agencies at any point along the
way is within the ‑‑ a quick time. Typically, we aim for 15 minutes. We
have truck immobilization devices, where if a truck is under threat, it
can be immobilized so that no one could drive that truck any further.
We\'ve done several studies about the susceptibility of these casks. The
various terrorized weapons, we\'re in the process of looking at that in
further detail. All of these regulations can be found in 10 CFR, Part
73, if you want to follow up in more detail.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. And thank you. And I would apologize to everybody
that we don\'t have more time today, and that the next time we come
back, we\'ll just schedule more time so that we don\'t have to miss
anything here. And I would also encourage you to ‑‑ after we\'re done to
please talk to the NRC staff that are here to amplify on some of those
concerns. But it think we should hear from Jim Williams. Jim. Okay. Go
ahead. And Jim, tell us, you know, who you are, and what you\'re doing.

MR. WILLIAMS: Well, I\'m Jim Williams and I have provided assistance to
Les and his program in Nye County for several years. And I wanted to
sort of take the opportunity of your much appreciated visit to a ‑‑ sort
of to go over a few of these perspectives of the site county on this
program. We do understand that your study is focused on the performance
of a generic cask under extreme accident conditions. And that it
doesn\'t reference a particular transportation program, or even actually
a particular cask that would be used in a particular program. But as you
can hear from comments by Nye County people, it\'s very difficult to
separate sort of the abstract of your study from the particulars of an
actual potential transportation campaign. Nye County sees itself at the
bottom end of the funnel for the entire inventory of high‑level waste
nationwide. And all the low‑level waste that needs to be disposed from
the DOE complex, which is going to ‑‑ into Yes. And this is on top of 50
years of nuclear weapons testing, all in this one community. And so that
does make Nye County\'s position ‑‑ this transfer does make Nye
County\'s position very unique in the whole history of transportation of
nuclear materials in this country. And it also adds in Nye County be
concerned about groundwater effects, in which underground testing
residues are being commingled in groundwater systems that are aimed to
Amargosa Valley and further south.

It also ‑‑ the transportation constitutes a kind of a threat to future
activities, regardless of the probabilities that ‑‑ our concerned here
there\'s a threat of what this could mean in the future to activity
along U.S. 95 to people\'s opportunities for economic futures that
they\'re trying to forge in these different communities and so forth. So
that threat is part of this equation.

Now Nye County has developed a number of notions of what a best practice
transportation campaign for high‑level waste should be. It involves
rail, dedicated rail, dedicated equipment, escorting canistered fuel, a
whole series of things like that. But regardless, I think it\'s the Nye
County ‑‑ as I understand it, it\'s the Nye County position that
whatever that campaign is cross‑country, it should not be less safe
in ‑‑ as it enters Nevada and the site county. So that the notion that
this could be shipped across the country and by dedicated train,
downloaded and put on heavy‑haul trucks, and ‑‑ which would then go
through Tonopah, Goldfield, Beatty, Amargosa Valley is pretty
objectionable in Nye County. In regard to that, and this was a topic
that was brought up yesterday, but I think that we would reenforce the
notion that the study should consider the different combinations of cask
and mode.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Uh‑huh.

MR. WILLIAMS: The fact that a legal weight truck cask of uncanistered
spent fuel could be shipped into this County by legal weight truck, or
by heavy haul truck, or unloaded onto a rail car, all those different
combinations and permutations are in the potentials out there, and we
hope that they can be studied.

On the routing, and I\'m trying to be quick here Chip, there\'s ‑‑ we
are really concerned about ‑‑ routing is very difficult and we fully
understand that this is an aspect that is more properly relayed to DOT
than DOE, and that NRC has certain regulations that regard this, and so
forth. But we\'re concerned about a least risk routing system wide, with
mitigation for the site county, particular for their emergency response
capability to radiation related accidents. Which in the very low ebb in
Nye County right now. And you\'ve heard before the concern about the
impacts on what Nye County considers its main street, U.S. 95, coming
south from Tonopah to Reno, or down to Vegas.

The other ‑‑ last point I\'d like to make is that there is a concern
about the radioactive content of the fuel that could be shipped. I mean
there is ‑‑ utilities are using more highly enriched fuel, longer burn
up, and the waste acceptance criteria allow that fuel to be shipped, or
allow the possibility of it to be shipped as young as five years out of
the reactor. Nye County has made a position that we want to find a way
to be ‑‑ have a legitimate voice in the waste acceptance process, by
which a legitimate local voice, an effective local voice, in the whole
process by which waste is accepted in this County, if it is accepted.
And so don\'t expect your study to solve that for us, but I did want you
to understand that this local government, that is the target for all of
this, is concerned about its role in the sequencing and scheduling of
what may come here.

MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Jim, for those valuable comments.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We\'d also like to have a word here in this
corner, out here, and one of the members of the ‑‑

MR. CAMERON: You got our attention. Go ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We have about a minute left, but I have this
gentleman who interviews for the local television station, and you all
know him, he\'s having a mic and he\'s usually with a mic. So I\'d like
him to say hello and just to welcome you to Pahrump, and since we\'re on
transportation the initial word\'s tire occur to me that the T relates
to timeliness that we had 2003 brought up here, that things are
happening, as we know, day by day in relation to what is being filled up
on low level I guess, as Sally calls it. And the I would mean that
inclusive, as an older person who\'d about to be a 10‑decade man, I know
that kids in our town board in Pahrump has been honored by having some
kids and they\'ve been the most constructive sessions that we\'ve had.
So if the study people were to include these kids, I think they would
find that it might be helpful to them as in outreach all over, and then
the R for the relatedness, the original basis of all this inquiry for
Yucca was 10,000 years, and casks up to that standard, and so forth.
Nothing has been touched upon that I\'ve heard in that regard.

So may I ask for the gentleman whose voice is the voice of the
community, the voice of the valley here to say at least hello and to add
any comment, final word, bottom line, so forth, please?

UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Hello, and that\'s my bottom line.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Thank you, very much.

MR. CAMERON: Well, thank you. Thank both of you. I think we\'re just
about out of time here, and I want to make sure that Bill Brach, who is
the head of the office, closes this off for us today. And the
information that you offered, and the questions were excellent, and will
help the NRC staff I believe. Bill.

MR. BRACH: Okay. One, not to run overtime, but I do want to thank
everybody for their views and comments. There at the very outset of
comments that Les had offered with regard to, again I mention the
concerns about the safe robustness of the cask design, that\'s a
paramount concern to us. Mentioned before the concern about accidents.
Accidents happen, we want to be sure, in our review that we
appropriately consider the types of accidents, the significance, the
severity of accidents, as well as in the cask design. The ability to be
able to demonstrate through our reviews, our analysis that the design is
such that the cask will maintain and perform as designed under those
different accident concerns and considerations.

Yes, whether we live here in Nevada, I live in Maryland, live near an
interstate, work near a railroad crossing, we all, whether we live or
work in areas are near different types of modes of transportation, we
have concerns. We all have concerns for personal safety. Property value
concerns. That our issues are shared in that regard, but I want you to
know that we very much share the interest with regard to a concern on
the overall safety of the transport of spent fuel. And I have ‑‑ from
that perspective I appreciate all of your views and comments that were
offered. I found them very useful, informative. And as we had mentioned,
we will be putting together a summary report of comments we\'ve heard
today, comments from our meetings yesterday during the day, and
yesterday evening in Henderson, and other meetings. Our plans again are
that we will be issuing in the spring a report, as Rob had mentioned, on
our review of our impact analysis statement for supporting
transportation. That study will be coming out in roughly the March time
frame, our report on summarizing the information we\'ve learned and
gained from you here today, and others at previous meetings, as far as
the scope and plans for our study of looking at transportation accident
considerations, that report will be out in the spring as well.

We\'re planning a second series of meetings in the, as Rob mentioned,
late spring, early summer. And we will have these reports out to you
well in advance, so at those meetings you\'ll have the opportunity to
look at the outcome of our reports that we\'ve issued. How we are seeing
those concerns could be addressed in our study plans. We\'d be very much
interested in your views and comments as to whether we heard you and
whether we understood you. And with our considerations of whether you
feel we\'re going down the correct path or not, and looking for all your
input.

Before we do close, I\'d ask that Dr. Massey, Charles Massey would add
one more comment with regard to radiation dose from transport packages.
That\'s come up in a couple of different comments, and I think it\'s
important that we, as best we can, explain that and address, hopefully
address some of your concerns that you\'ve raised today, as well as
laying the footprint or laying the process for how we\'ll consider that
concern in our study plans. Charles.

DR. MASSEY: Yes, as Rob stated the limit for the radiation exposure
coming off of cask is 10 millirems per hour at two meters. What does
that mean? If you\'re standing a little over six feet away from a cask,
stood there for one hour, you would receive 10 millirem. 10 millirems is
roughly the dose you would receive from one chest x‑ray, so in that
second or so that you get a chest x‑ray, you would receive roughly the
same dose as if you stood next to ‑‑ six point six feet away, a spent
fuel cask, that had fuel, that was at the regulatory limit.

As you go away from the cask that radiation dose rate falls off very
rapidly. The way I use to sort of explain ‑‑ some people get a little
sense for why it goes down, is if you stand next to a fire, we\'re
looking at radiation, but if you stand next to your fire, as you start
to walk away, the heat that you can feel coming off goes off very
quickly. Same type of principle applies to the electromagnetic radiation
coming off of the spent fuel cask. At about 100 feet away from a spent
fuel cask, loaded so that it\'s at the regulatory limit, that dose rate
is about the same as you get just from the ground and the air. It\'s
essentially indistinguishable from background. So hopefully that gives a
little bit of context on what is the maximum limit allowed in the
radiation exposure that could come off of these cask.

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Charles. That was a good addition. I\'m
glad you added that. And I would like to thank all of you, and encourage
you to come up and talk to the NRC staff here in the audience if you
have further questions and we\'ll see you again. And thanks again to Les
Bradshaw and Nye County for inviting us out.

Thank you.

\[Whereupon, the meeting was concluded.\]