UNITED STATES

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

FALL BOARD MEETING

September 19, 2007

Atrium Suites Hotel

4255 Paradise Road

Las Vegas, Nevada 89109

[NWTRB BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT]{.underline}

Dr. Mark Abkowitz

Dr. William Howard Arnold

Thure Cerling

Dr. David Duquette

Dr. B. John Garrick, Chair, NWTRB

Dr. George Hornberger

Dr. Andrew Kadak

Dr. Ali Mosleh

Dr. Henry Petroski

[SENIOR PROFESSIONAL STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. David Diodato

Dr. Daniel Fehringer

Dr. Bruce Kirstein

Dr. Daniel Metlay

Dr. John Pye

Dr. Gene Rowe

[NWTRB STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. William Barnard, Executive Director

Karyn Severson, Director External Affairs

Joyce Dory, Director of Administration

Linda Coultry, Program Support Specialist

Davonya Barnes, Staff Assistant

[I N D E X]{.underline}

[PAGE NO.]{.underline}

**Call to Order and Introductory Statement**

B. John Garrick, Chairman

U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board . . . . . . 4

**Program and Project Overview**

Ward Sproat, Director,

Waste Management Office, Office of Civilian

Radioactive Waste Management,

U.S. Department of Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

**TAD Update DOE**

Chris Kouts, Acting Deputy Director (OCRWM/DOE) . . . 49

**TAD Update - Industry**

Rod McCullum, Director Yucca Mountain Project,

Nuclear Energy Institute and

David Blee, Executive Director

U.S. Transport Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

**Surface Facilities Design and Operations**

Robert Slovic, BSC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

**Lunch** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

**Preclosure Safety Analysis**

Michael Frank, BSC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

**Public Comment Period** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

**Adjourn** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

[P R O C E E D I N G S]{.underline}

8:00 a.m.

GARRICK: Good morning. I'd like to welcome all of you. This is our third
full Board meeting of 2007.

Our meetings begin with introductions, and I'll start with my own. My
name is John Garrick. I'm Chairman of the Technical Review Board, and my
professional activities are in the risk assessment field and nuclear
engineering, nuclear science. I want to introduce the Board. And, as I
introduce the members, I ask them to raise their hands.

First, is Mark Abkowitz. Mark is Professor of Civil Engineering and
Management Technology at Vanderbilt University, and Director of the
Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Services. Mark Chairs the
Board's Panel on System Integration, and is the Board's technical lead
on transportation.

Howard Arnold. Howard is a consultant to the nuclear industry, having
previously served in a number of senior management positions, including
vice-president of the Westinghouse Hanford Company, and president of
Louisiana Energy Services. Howard chairs the Board's Panel on Preclosure
Operations.

Thure Cerling. Thure is a Distinguished Professor of Geology and Biology
at the University of Utah. He is a geochemist, with expertise in
applying geochemistry to a wide range of geological, climatological, and
anthropological studies. Thure is our technical lead on the Natural
System.

David Duquette. David is Department Head and Professor of Materials
Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. His
areas of expertise include physical, chemical, and mechanical properties
of metals and alloys, with special emphasis on environmental
interactions. David is the Board's lead on Corrosion.

George Hornberger. George is the Ernest H. Ern Professor of
Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia. His research interests
include catchment hydrology, hydrochemistry, and transportation of
colloids in geological units and media. George co-chairs the Board's
Panel on Postclosure Repository Performance.

Andy Kadak. Andy is Professor of the Practice in the Nuclear Engineering
Department of the MIT. His research interests include the development of
advanced reactors, space nuclear power systems, and improved licensing
standards for advanced reactors. Andy is the Board's technical lead on
Thermal Management and where the water goes.

Ron Latanision is absent. He is preparing for some hearings on Davis
Besse, but I'd like to introduce him anyhow. Ron is an Emeritus
Professor at MIT and a Corporate Vice President and Practice Director of
Exponent's Mechanical Engineering and Materials/Metallurgy practice. His
areas of expertise include materials processing and corrosion of metals
and other materials in different aqueous environments. Ron co-chairs the
Board's Panel on Postclosure Repository Performance.

Ali Mosleh. Ali is the Nicole J. Kim Professor of Engineering and
Director of the Center for Risk and Reliability at the University of
Maryland. He has had a major role in many risk and safety assessments,
reliability analyses, and decision analyses for the nuclear, chemical
and aerospace industries. Ali is the Board's technical lead on
Performance Assessment.

William Murphy. Bill is a Professor in the Department of Geological and
Environmental Sciences at California State University-Chico. His areas
of expertise are geology, hydrogeology, and geochemistry.
Congratulations, Bill, on your recent appointment as full Professor.
Bill is the Board's technical lead on the Source Term.

Henry Petroski. Henry is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil
Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University. His current
interests are in the areas of failure analysis and design theory. Henry
is the Board's technical lead on the design of Surface Facilities.

Now, before we introduce the topics for today's meeting, I'd like to
highlight some of the technical areas of current interest to the Board.
During the preclosure period, transportation and design of a surface
facility stands out as current areas of interest and activity. This
year, the Board has received several updates on related topics at its
meetings in January and May. Today, we are going to focus on the
transportation, aging and disposal canister, known as TAD, preclosure
safety, surface facilities design and concepts of integration. And, I
have asked Board member Mark Abkowitz to lead the discussion on the
TAD's concept, and Board members Howard Arnold and Henry Petroski to
lead the discussion on surface facilities design and concepts of
operation.

Collectively, this Board meeting, and future Board meetings, will focus
on DOE's effort to make transparent the integration and operation of the
total waste management system, by which we mean from waste acceptance at
the generator site to emplacement and preclosure operations of the
repository, to performance demonstration and confirmation and, finally,
closure of the repository.

The utility of the transportation, aging, and disposal canisters needs
very careful review. Specifically, there is a need to establish the
risk-benefit of the concept in the context of appropriate timelines and
operations. The extent to which the TAD reduces the worker dose (a
driver for the concept) as a result of less handling of the fuel is
dependent on such factors as the startup date of the repository and
decisions on such fuel handling operations as on-reactor-site dry
storage, dual purpose casks handling, spent fuel aging on pads at the
repository, and possible need for interim storage.

The design of the surface facilities at the repository has not advanced
to the point of demonstrating the optimization of the handling of spent
fuel and radioactive waste in terms of facility complexity, operations
efficiency, the costs associated with each, and radiation exposure. The
issue is the need to address and make visible the impact of design on
such performance measures as safety, efficiency, throughput and
complexity.

Although the topic of thermal management is not on today's agenda, we do
hope to have it on our agenda for the Board's winter meeting. It is
among the more important issues when demonstrating an integrated waste
management system. A technically based thermal management strategy has
the potential to greatly simplify operations, particularly with respect
to the need for waste aging pads and the frequency and duration of
handling waste.

Other Yucca Mountain performance issues being closely followed by the
Board include degradation assessments of the waste packages,
radionuclide source term analyses, water infiltration rates, and
long-term, that is, greater than 10,000 years, long-term radiation dose
assessments at the accessible boundary of the repository.

Finally on the matter of integration of the total waste management
systems, our concerns are not only with the integration of activities
within the Project, but also the integration of the project itself with
other industrial entities. An example of activity integration is the
linking of data and lessons learned from the site characterization
program and exploratory tunnel operations to the design of both surface
and subsurface facilities. The presentations today are intended to
support the Board's desire to have transparency of all of the activities
and the operations that affect the overall waste management system.

Now, let me briefly review today's agenda. As is customary, we will
begin with an overview, both of the overall Office of Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management program and, more specifically, the Yucca
Mountain project. That overview will be followed by an update on the
final performance specifications for the TAD by DOE. After a short
break, we will hear presentations from industry representatives on the
development of the TAD design. And, following these updates on TAD
development, we will hear a two-part presentation of surface facilities
design and operations.

Following lunch, we will have a presentation on the status of the
Preclosure Safety Analysis. The Board is interested in the general
framework of the analysis, how the different scenarios are aggregated,
the approach to importance ranking of safety issues and the development
of the nuclear design basis for safety.

As usual, following the presentations, we have scheduled time for public
comment, an aspect of our meetings that is very important to the Board.
If you would like to make a comment at that time, please enter your name
on the sigh-up sheet at the table near the entrance of the room. And, of
course, written comments are accepted and can be submitted, and they
will be made part of the record.

Some of you have asked about questioning during the course of the
presentations. Our preference is for you to write down your questions,
and submit them to either Davonya Barnes or Linda Coultry. They're in
the back of the room. We will cover as many of these questions as time
will permit.

As we get into the presentations and discussion part of our meeting,
it's important to know about how the Board tends to operate. Board
meetings are spontaneous by design. We express ourselves freely, and we
want to be able to continue to do that. So, when Board members speak
extemporaneously, it is important to realize that we are speaking on our
own behalf, and not on behalf of the Board. And, we'll try to
distinguish between Board member positions and positions taken by the
Board.

As a final note, I am going to ask all of you to turn your cell phones
and pagers to their silent mode to minimize any interruptions.

And, now we are very pleased to have Ward Sproat with us today to give
us the overview of the program and the project.

Ward?

SPROAT: Thank you, John. Good morning, everybody, and welcome. And,
thank you for the invitation to come and speak to the Board again this
morning.

It's been just about exactly a year since my first appearance in front
of the Board as the director of the program. And, at that time, I laid
out to you the four strategic objectives that I've laid out for the
program during my tenure in this office, and I laid out the best
achievable schedule, which is consistent with a number of major
milestones and deliverables that DOE needs to deliver to move the
program forward.

In my time in this program, it seems like every time I get a chance to
talk in public, I am continuously reminded by somebody about how people
have heard DOE say we're going to do "X", we're going to deliver "Y",
and it never happens. And, people always love to bring that up. Well,
I'm here today to tell you and give you a report on where we stand in
providing the deliverables that I said we would provide a year ago, and
where we are on the schedule to do that, and to let you ask me whatever
questions you want about where we're going and what we're going to
deliver from the program.

May I have the first slide, please? We're entering what I'm calling the
period of delivery. And, what I'm going to talk about on this first
slide is a fairly substantial list of major deliverables that this
program needs to deliver to get to submittal of a license application to
the NRC, including the license application itself. And, I want to run
you through all the things you're going to be seeing coming out from the
program over the next nine months, or shorter, because it's a
substantial amount of work, all of which are absolutely necessary to
support moving this program forward. And, I'm here to report to you that
they are all either on or ahead of schedule with the requisite quality
that we need to defend them in the public arena.

So, the first one is the Licensing Support Network. And, I think the
Board is very aware of the Licensing Support Network, a rather large and
extremely expensive tool to support discovery and litigation of the
license application for Yucca. All the parties are required to certify
their systems and their submittals to the Licensing Support Network and
their processes for putting documents and keeping the LSN updated.

DOE attempted to certify the LSN several years back, and failed
miserably for a number of reasons. We are in the neighborhood of between
four and six weeks away from certifying the LSN. The regulations require
the LSN to be certified six months prior to license application
submittal. The date I gave you last year at this time is we'd certify by
December 21^st^. I'm going to tell you we will certify sometime in
October, and it could be early October.

Right now, on the LSN, we've submitted about 3.5 million documents. So,
despite what you might hear from other people about, you know, DOE is
hiding things and they're not putting things in the LSN, 3.5 million
documents is a lot of documents.

We have approximately 8,000 documents that we've identified that are
currently going through the update process to be loaded on the LSN. We
expect that set of documents to be completed in the next two or three
weeks, at which time I will do a final check of all of our internal
certifications, our internal check lists, in terms of making sure we've
done all the internal reviews, documentation that we need to have to be
able to certify the LSN. And, I expect to be able to do that, as I said,
sometime in the month of October. That will be the first major step
forward towards the license application.

I told you last year that we were going to need to revise the
Environmental Impact Statement for the repository, as well as for Nevada
Rail, and that our target date for doing that was going to be
approximately nine months prior to LA submittal. The Supplemental
Environmental Impact Statement, the Draft Supplemental Environmental
Impact Statement for the repository is at the printer. It's been signed
out. It will be released to the public as soon as it comes out of
printing, sometime probably the first week in October. And, then, the
notice of public availability will go out as soon as that distribution
is sent out to the various parties.

We will be holding hearings during the last quarter of the year here in
Nevada and California and in Washington. We're going to provide a 90 day
public comment period per the request of the counties and some of the
intervenors. And, it's a high quality product, and Dr. Jane Sommerson
(phonetic), who led that effort, with her team, did an outstanding job.
So, the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statements are on schedule,
and they will be out as we said they would. And, they will be there to
support the submittal of the license application about nine months from
now.

Something that's not directly tied to the license application, but one
of the things I told you that I said I would do when I came in, when I
talked to you last year at this time, was three independent assessments.
One was on the engineering processes that the program uses. How good are
our engineering processes on design configuration, management design
control, that type of thing. We brought in a team led by Longenecker and
Associates, but they were really an integrator. They brought in a number
of senior utility nuclear industry executives with engineering and plan
experience. They came in for about three months. Their report is in
printing right now. I'm not ready to go through the detailed results of
that report, but I can tell you that it had a number of very positive
findings. Most of their findings and recommendations are associated with
inefficiencies in the way we're doing our engineering, not breakdowns in
the processes. And, so, we will be releasing that report to the public
probably sometime in early October.

The next report you're likely to see\--I'm doing this in kind of a
chronological sequence of expectations\--the next report you're going to
see is our release of the TSLCC, the Total System Life Cycle Cost
Analysis. This is something that was last done and updated and released
in around 2001. And, this is an estimate that says based on the current
design, on the amount of fuel that we're going to have to dispose of,
what's the estimated total cost of the system. This is going to be in
constant 2000 dollars over 100-some year period, and that is currently
in final draft form. We're still making some editorial comments on the
final draft, so I don't have an exact release date for that yet, but I
expect it to be in October, November time frame.

It is going to show an increase over what the 2001 TSLCC was, not
unsurprisingly, but we will be very clear on what the key drivers are.
And, two of the key drivers are, number one, there's a lot more fuel to
get rid of. The assumptions back in the 2001 study, that was based on
the current fleet of operating plants and the expiration of their
current operating licenses. Well, since then, as you know, many plants
have gotten life extensions. And, so, our projection of the amount of
spent nuclear fuel that needs to be disposed of is up substantially, and
that's one of the major cost drivers in terms of increase in the cost of
the total system.

Obviously, inflation is another driver, and some revised estimates in
terms of material costs, staffing costs for running the repository, that
type of thing, are also secondary drivers. And, we will explain all that
when it comes out. But, that's a major study that you should expect to
see sometime in October, or so, and it will show that the total cost of
the repository over its life will be higher than what was estimated in
2001.

Yes?

KADAK: 2000 dollars?

SPROAT: Constant 2000 dollars.

KADAK: Why not 2007?

SPROAT: Because the previous report was in constant 2000 dollars, and we
want to make it easy for people to compare the old report with the new
report. And, you will see the factors in there. If you want to do the
math to escalate it up to 2007 dollars, you can do that. We're trying to
make this so that people reading the old report and the new report can
see the differences in what's driving it.

One of the other independent assessments I talked to you about last year
was an independent assessment of Quality Assurance, both the programs in
terms of how the programs are designed on paper, and how the programs
are being implemented in the major organizations, DOE, BSC, SNL. That
assessment is well underway. We're probably about a month or so from
having that report finalized. We will release that report to the public
also, and probably about that time, the Board may want to have a report
on that, and we will be glad to do that. So, I'm not prepared to tell
you yet exactly what that report says, because the assessment is still
in progress, but you can expect to see that report sometime late this
fall.

The next report that you're likely to see, and the timing on this is
somewhat variable, not because\--let me just say the timing on the
report is variable\--is the Fee Adequacy Assessment. The Nuclear Waste
Policy Act requires the Secretary to evaluate whether or not the 1 mil
per kilowatt hour fee imposed on the nuclear generators to pay for the
repository is adequate. And, this Fee Adequacy Assessment was last
released to the public in 2001, and we intend to release the updated
version of this either late this year or early next year. It depends on
exactly how long it takes us to finalize the report, and the
recommendations in it.

It will obviously be based on the updated TSLCC that I just talked
about. I can't tell you yet what that report is going to say, but it
will be an honest assessment of whether or not the 1 mil per kilowatt
hour fee is adequate to build the repository as the current funding
mechanism for the repository is structured. It will not be necessarily
just based on the current and projected balance of the nuclear waste
fund, which by the way, the current balance of the nuclear waste fund is
about \$20.5 billion, and it's generating a return of about 5.3 percent
a year, which I'm not using or seeing right now.

So, I can't tell you exactly what the Fee Adequacy Determination report
is going to say. I can't tell you exactly when I'm going to release it,
but you will see it, and it will be released sometime probably in the
next six months, or so.

Another report that you're going to see probably in spring time, we have
not set a firm date on this yet, is the Second Repository Report. The
Nuclear Waste Act requires that the Secretary report to Congress on the
need for a second repository prior to January 1, 2010. Well, we're going
to report to Congress in 2008. This is kind of one of those reports like
where you already know the answer. It's a matter of how you're going to
present it. Everything stays exactly the way it is right now, 70,000
metric ton limit on Yucca, current operating fleet. That 70,000 metric
tons will be fully allocated sometime when the spring of 2010 refueling
outages are over. With that set of reactor core discharges in early
2010, Yucca is full.

So, we already know kind of like the final answer on what that report is
going to say. Exactly how we say it, the options, how we present the
options to a second repository, that we still need to work on. But,
obviously, the report will have a lot of math behind it, and how we
project the discharges and the capacity of the mountain, and all that
kind of thing, but, we are going to issue that report next year, and we
already know the primary answer. How we present it and what the options
are going to be to that answer is still not clear.

Then, the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the repository and
the rail line, Nevada Rail Line alignments will be issued probably in
June.

And, then, finally, the license application. What I'll say about the
license application is I've been very clear, very public about putting
out front that we're going to get that license application into the NRC
by Monday, June 30, 2008. And, I'm telling you we are ahead of schedule
in doing that. How ahead of schedule we'll be come March or April
remains to be seen, but we are ahead of schedule to meet that date, and
we will meet that date.

So, those are the reports and the deliverables that you are going to see
coming out of OCRWM over the next nine months. And, I think you can see
why I'm calling it the Delivery Season. These are going to be clearly
scrutinized heavily. I'm sure there will be a lot of public posturing by
various people when they come out, but rest assured that we are not
producing these with the idea of we've got a schedule and we've got to
get out whatever we have. We are putting a lot of time and a lot of
effort to make sure we have very high quality documents that meet the
needs of both the regulator and the stakeholders in defining this whole
program. And, so, I am very optimistic, well, I'm more than optimistic,
I'm certain we will make this happen on this schedule.

So, if we can go to the next slide? Let me give you an update on key
issues that I'm paying attention to, and the Board probably would be
very interested in also.

The first is fiscal year '08, which starts in two weeks, and the
appropriations and budget situation for that, which obviously is
important because to complete the Environmental Impact Statements,
complete the engineering that's supporting the license application,
support the science, work product completion that's supporting the
license application, and the writing of the license application itself,
all that is going to be paid for out of the fiscal year '08 budget.

The President asked for \$494.5 million for Yucca for fiscal year '08.
The House of Representatives voted down an appropriations bill that gave
us all of that money. I would like to point out, in case you missed it,
that while the Energy Appropriations Bill was on the floor of the House,
there was an amendment to the bill offered by Congressman Porter here in
Nevada to basically strip out Yucca Mountain funding. That amendment was
defeated by 351 to 80. Now, people have various opinions about the
political support and the level, it is there bipartisan support in
Congress for Yucca, and I am a political neophyte, but I'm smart enough
to help you get 351 votes in the House of Representatives on anything,
that's pretty good bipartisan support. So, very good support in the
House.

In the Senate, the Energy Appropriations Committee voted out \$50
million less, reported out \$50 million less than we asked for at
\$444.5. They added in another \$1.5 million for Inyo County in
California for their drilling program. So, they reported out \$446.1.
The Senate has not brought their Energy Appropriations Bill to the floor
yet. It's not clear when that will happen. It is highly unlikely that
it's going to happen before the end of the fiscal year, so we're
expecting a continuing resolution for some period of time into '08.

And, that continuing resolution would be at this year's funding number,
which is \$444.5, \$50 million less than what we asked for, about the
same as what the Senate voted out. What I'll tell you is is that we have
planned our '08 spend plans and work plans for that number, the \$444.5.
And, so, based on that, I do have a confidence level that we can get
this license application in as we said we would. We'll have to see what
happens with the continuing resolution. We'll have to see what happens
with the Energy Appropriations Bills. No way for me to predict that, and
I'm not going to try, but overall, that's where we stand for funding for
'08, and we have our spend plans and our business plans set at \$444.5,
and that's what we're going to start executing as of October 1^st^.

The license application. All I'd like to say about that is it is on
schedule, and actually a little ahead of schedule, and that we are
incorporating the results. We have completed the Independent Assessment
that I said we would do on that. We received a several hundred page
report from our Independent Assessment team that had in excess of
20-some people on it, who looked at the previous draft license
application from the 2004-2005 time frame, and generated several hundred
comments/questions based on that. All of those comments and questions
have been given to the LA writing team, so they have gone through all of
them. And, they are dispositioning all of them as they are writing the
license application.

So, we have a very high confidence level that that was a very worthwhile
effort that is informing our content and style on the license
application, based on this independent review by a number of very
experienced people looking at the previous revisions.

Around the organizational issues, as you know, one of my second
strategic objectives is about getting the DOE organization set up for
long-term success. And, let me just talk about quality for a minute.
Anybody who's been involved with this program knows that the program has
had a set of issues with quality assurance in the past. And, I would
invite you, if you haven't, to go to the GAO website and go under the
Department of Energy GAO reports, and look at their recently released
report on Yucca Mountain, which was posted on the website about four
weeks ago.

And, this report was a followup to their previous report that was done,
I think, in 2005, 2004 or 2005, on quality assurance and management of
the program. And, I would invite you to read that. That study was done.
The GAO team was in for almost three months. They were in Washington,
they were out here, and if you are an experienced Washingtonian, knows
that GAO does not like to write generally favorable reports when they
look at other agencies. I would invite you to take a look at that
report, and see the conclusions GAO has drawn regarding the turnaround
the program has made in terms of management, in terms of quality, in
terms of a number of things that GAO found problems with when they
looked at the program two and a half or three years ago.

Their primary issue for the program is that, two things, one was it's
too early to tell whether or not the license application is going to be
a high quality license application. And, that's true. You know, we're in
the writing stage. And, they had interviews with NRC and they asked NRC
if they thought we were going to give them a high quality license
application, and, of course, the NRC said don't know, haven't seen it.
So, the GAO was a little frustrated. They couldn't draw any conclusions
about the perceived quality of the license application that's going to
come out.

And, the other thing they were just questioning was given this
turnaround in the program, and the progress that's being made, can it be
sustained after the Director leaves, which is a valid question. But, I
made it very clear to them, you'll see my letter to them in the back of
the report where I addressed that issue straight on, and said that I'm
spending 50 percent of my time on the selection, the development, and
the training of my senior leadership team, the senior FED leadership
team. So, when I leave, that team is going to be taking this program
forward without me being there, and they will do just fine. So, I'm very
confident that when I leave the program, it will not have what I'd call
reversion to the mean, from where it was before.

In terms of personnel, we have made some personnel changes. Paul Goen is
my principal deputy, has moved out west to California to take the
Director position in charge of the Stanford Linear Accelerator program
out in Palo Alto. His family is from back there, and his wife's family
is from back there, so they decided to make a move.

Cris Kouts is going to be up here in a minute and talk to you, who has
had a very long history in the program, is my acting principal deputy
director, and Chris knows more about this program than I certainly ever
will, and I'm very comfortable with him in this role as the acting
principal deputy director. I am conducting a search, and we will do a
set of structured interviews of a number of senior FED folks, both from
inside the program and outside the program. My intent is to select my
permanent principal deputy by the end of the year, but I'm not in any
rush because Chris is pretty darned good, and he is a candidate clearly
for that position. So, you need to be aware of that change and that
potential change in that key leadership spot that's going to be heading
up this program after I leave.

Paul Harrington, who you've met, was selected as the Director of
Engineering for the program. So, very, very happy with that selection,
with his background. Somebody who you have not met, but I'm sure you
will, in the past, I have just hired in a very recently retired Navy
Captain, Jim Hollrith, who ran the Navy Civil Engineering Corps, built
bases in Europe and a number of other facilities. Very strong
construction project management leadership background, and he is a very
valued addition to my senior management team, and right now, he's moving
into the position that's in charge of actually building the place,
building the repository, and he's got the background and the leadership
skills to pull that off.

So, my message here is that I am paying attention to the organization. I
am paying attention to the people who are going to be here after I
leave, and I've got very high standards in who I put in there. So, I
don't have the same concerns as GAO does about what happens after I
leave, and I've got a lot of work still to do before I do leave to make
sure that management team is cemented in place.

The last thing I want to talk about just briefly, and I've already
talked about to some extent, is the Nuclear Waste Fund and the Fee. This
issue of what I call Yucca Finance 101 is something that has taken me a
full year to really start to comprehend and understand. If you have a
bank account, like I have with the Nuclear Waste Fund, of \$20.5
billion, and you do the Total System Life Cycle Cost analysis and the
Fee Adequacy Assessment, and you run all sorts of scenarios, and you
take a look at how that money will last and, you know, in terms of the
cash flow needs versus how much is in there, and the interest it's
bringing in, and the fees bring in, it looks pretty good. It really
does.

The problem is is that the program doesn't have access to that fund, and
when Congress set up the Nuclear Waste Fund and set up the fee, it was
very clear that their intent was, was that this program not be saddled
with the annual appropriations process and not be saddled with the
competing against all other governmental needs and Department of Energy
needs for Energy Appropriations on an annual basis. They recognized that
they're going to build a repository that has required cash flow between
\$1 ½ to \$2 billion a year, you needed to have a certainty of a revenue
stream to get that program built, executed and build that repository on
a schedule that made sense.

Unfortunately, when the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act got passed in the mid
Nineties, the Nuclear Waste Fund fee was classified as mandatory
receipts. The program itself was classified as a discretionary program.
And, the law does not allow mandatory receipts to be used to pay for
discretionary programs. Therefore, now, we have a disconnect between how
the program gets funded and how the program, where the money comes from,
how the money gets appropriated to fund the program.

As a result, each year, the fee comes in. That amount of the fee that
doesn't get appropriated that year goes into the Waste Fund, and the
Waste Fund continues to accumulate, build interest. Unfortunately, the
interest and the unappropriated Waste Fund fee shows up in the
Department of Energy's appropriations bill from the House and the Senate
as an offset, which means essentially that money is being used in a
current year offset in the year that the interest accumulates, and the
year the revenue comes in. So, essentially, in order for me to tap, or
for the government to tap the Nuclear Waste Fund to build the
repository, whatever amount of money comes out of there has to be
scored. In other words, it's deficit spending, which certainly was not
the intent when the Nuclear Waste Fund was set up, and the use of the
fee was certainly not set up to be used that way.

Well, suffice it to say in my testimony in front of both the House and
Senate Appropriations Committees, I have\--there is a small group of
people in D.C. who are very familiar with the budget process, who
understand this, but most people don't. And, I have made it one of my
key objectives in my remaining time here to go after this issue of
funding the repository with the revenue stream that exists and was set
up by Congress specifically to do this. Because right now, just to give
you an idea, the appropriations for Yucca have been in the neighborhood
of between \$350 to \$500 million a year, and the budget targets that
are set for the out years remain in that same range.

When we re-baselined the program, over the last six months, when we took
a look at the new design, the new schedule, the staffing levels, and we
re-baselined the entire program with the new milestones, what that shows
is that the required cash flows on an annual basis are between \$1 ½ to
\$2 billion a year through 2023, starting in '09. And, clearly, the
continuation of the way things have always been will never get us there.
It just won't happen. So, I'm very pleased so far, that as I have talked
about this with the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary, I've got very
strong alignment and support in the Department of Energy to go get this
fixed from our CFO, our general counsel. I've had discussions up on the
Hill with people who are very interested in trying to get this fixed,
and we actually are going to have a hearing in the House Budget
Committee in early October on the Nuclear Fund Liability issue. So,
there is interest up there to go and make this issue visible, and to see
what we can do to actually get it fixed.

I am not as confident that I'm going to be able to get this fixed in the
next 14 months as I am that I'm going to get the license application in,
but I'm going to give it a damn good try.

So, that's kind of my quick overview, if you will, of where the program
is, what we've got coming up, what I'm paying attention to, and we're
serious about making this work. So, with that, I'm going to open it up
to questions from the Board.

GARRICK: All right, questions from the Board? Andy?

KADAK: Thank you. A couple of questions. You didn't mention EPA rule.
Could you give us an update on where that stands and how that affects
your license application?

SPROAT: The question is regarding the EPA rule, and I think most people
who have followed the program know that by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act,
the Environmental Protection Agency has the responsibility to generate
the requirements for the long-term exposure limits for the repository,
and that NRC has to adopt those standards into their regulations. And,
EPA issued their regulations several years back. They were challenged in
federal court. There's an aspect of part of those regulations associated
with long-term exposure and peak dose that were overturned.

EPA has redrafted the standard, has sent it out for comments. The
comments have been incorporated. It's in final draft. It is in
interagency review, and I believe it's down to one\--there are
discussions going on between the Department of Justice, EPA, OMB, I
believe DOE is in those discussions. I am not in those discussions, so I
don't know exactly all the details. But, we do expect that to be issued
shortly. Of course, I expected that to be issued shortly last December,
but it's out of our hands. So, I don't know exactly when it's going to
get issued.

What I can tell you is it does not have an impact on our license
application, because we know whatever the final number is that EPA puts
out, and the NRC adopts, there is greater than a 50 percent chance it
will get litigated again, and the end result of that litigation is at
least three years off in the future, if by then. So, what we've done is
when you see the Environmental Impact Statements come out, and when you
see the license application come out, you're going to see the TSPA runs
that show long-term postclosure performance out to a million years plus.
You'll see where the area of peak dose is, and you will be able to take
that chart and you will be able to see when a final number gets
finalized, where is that final number relative to the chart. And, the
NRC will need to do that before they actually issue the construction
authorization. But, I don't need it to get the license application in.

GARRICK: Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Ward, I wanted to explore with you a little bit what happens after June
of 2008, what your plans are. My understanding is there's no requirement
that the NRC make a docketing decision within a specified period of
time. And, given the rapid pace at which you're still trying to resolve
issues, for example, around surface facility design and preclosure
safety analysis, I can envision a scenario where your application might
be considered incomplete, in some respects, in terms of how the NRC is
prepared to review an application. And, so, consequently, it's certainly
realistic that there may be a period of time here where the need to
prepare and submit additional information will be essentially
recommended from NRC to DOE, and there will be a need to respond in some
timely fashion.

SPROAT: Sure.

ABKOWITZ: Could you go into some detail as to what happens with your
leadership and your activities planning following June of 1008?

SPROAT: Sure. Good question. First of all, in terms of where we stand
right now, we're having a series of what we call technical exchange
meetings, which are public meetings, with the NRC staff on a number of
very specific technical issues. Had one just last Friday that I attended
on license application content around specific issues, including PCSA.
So, we are, we believe we have a very good understanding of what their
expectations are. We're trying to give them, as best we can, a good
picture of what our approach is in terms of level of detail in the
license application.

I fully expect, contrary to some public statements I've read that other
people have made, this is going to be a complete application. I think,
as the Board knows, when I first got here, there was talk at that time
that there would be multiple parts of the application. Now, an
application just covers certain early\--certain surface facilities, and
something else comes later, I said no, we're not doing it that way. This
is one, full, complete application. And, as we are writing this license
application, we are being very judicious in terms of reviewing
acceptance criteria that the NRC has in NUREG 1804 about the level of
completeness they expect to see. So, I have a very high confidence level
that this LA will be complete to meet their needs for docketing.

One of the ways I intend to make sure we have enough time while I'm here
to get this docketed is get it in before June 30^th^. And, that's why we
are working the internal schedules sooner than that date, and that's why
I'm able to tell you right now we're ahead of schedule compared to a
June 30^th^ date. But, I'm not ready to tell you yet exactly when it's
going to happen. It's still too far out in the future.

The discussions we had with the NRC in our technical exchange just last
Friday, the question of the acceptance review period, which is that
period, once we put it in, they have to decide whether they're going to
accept it for docketing, we talked quite a bit about that period in
terms of what the NRC staff would do and the kind of detail they would
expect to see. And, they told us, you know, they expected that that
review could last up to six months. They said it could be shorter than
that, but because of, obviously, first of a kind regulation, first of a
kind facility, wide range of technical issues, and, just from a resource
constraint standpoint that they have in terms of people they would have
to read the license application and the Environmental Impact Studies,
that it very well could take up to six months. And, so, we recognize
that and we are prepared to support their acceptance review to get them
information they need to do that. But, part of my strategy is get it in
before June 30^th^. I'm not sure if that fully answered your question or
not, but that's about the best I can do right now.

GARRICK: Ali?

MOSLEH: The Total System Life Cycle Assessment, how much of that depends
on the level of detail that you have in the design? I assume that that's
an important valuable.

SPROAT: It is. What we did is the new baseline for the program that we
issued in, I guess, March or April is based on the current design. And,
we got down to the point where we had, we've estimated, quantities of
structural steel, concrete, rebar, and for the buildings themselves, the
shells of the buildings, the thickness of the walls, those type of
things, we've been able to estimate those fairly well. So, the TSLCC,
when it comes out, will be reflective of the current design.

Now, obviously, what we did is the original estimates were developed by
BSC, our contractor who has designed the buildings, we brought in Burns
and Rowe, who has nuclear construction experience, to do an independent
review. And, they reviewed things like, you know, for a building size of
this footprint, nuclear seismic structure, are our estimated quantities
for concrete, steel, you know, cable, those type of things, are those
appropriate or not, and we actually made some changes based on that
review. And, then, plus, we made a decision that we would include
contingency and management reserve at a level that allows us to have an
80 percent confidence level in the results of the estimate. In other
words, there's an 80 percent chance that the actual cost will come in at
or below the numbers we've estimated.

So, we have a pretty good, like I said, we have an 80 percent confidence
level that we've got a pretty darned good defendable cost estimate of
the facilities that have been cranked into that TSLCC. That is one of
the major cost drivers.

Quite frankly, some of the other major cost drivers are just the number
of TADs and casks and transportation overpacks. I mean, those are
significant costs, and the waste packages. The more fuel, the more waste
packages, the more metal that you're going to stick in the ground. So,
those are major revisions from the previous cost estimates that were
done back in 2001.

GARRICK: Ward, you were fairly optimistic about the second repository
report as to what it was going to say, or what have you. Is there an
activity that's ongoing in that regard? Specifically, is there a team
working on that report now? And, is there equivalent of a table of
contents or a spec on what that report is going to be beyond what has
been mandated by Congress?

SPROAT: No, not yet, John. The underlying calculations in terms of
what's the current spent fuel inventory, what is the inventory we're
projecting by certain dates from each plant, we have that data and we've
had it for a long time. That's part of what Chris Kouts' group does. I
mean, they keep track of each plant, what its discharge rates are, how
many bundles we expect to come out, and so we have a pretty good forward
looking projection of spent fuel inventory, which is kind of the basis
of what is going to drive the conclusions in this study and analysis.
So, that's there for us to draw on.

But, the actual writing team, in terms of putting together the table of
contents, and the selection of options to be discussed, alternative
options to be discussed, we haven't done that yet. So, you know, we'll
start that\--we budgeted that activity in fiscal year '08, so I would
expect we would pull that group together and get them started sometime
this fall.

GARRICK: Thank you. Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

The budget for next year is going to be \$444 million. That's a lot of
money. We've been hearing talk about layoffs at various DOE contractors,
and so forth.

SPROAT: Yes.

KADAK: And, we're also kind of interested in the status of the tunnel,
and making sure that that's useful during the period of license review.
And, I guess the question is what is it that you're going to be doing in
the next couple of years while the NRC is reviewing the application for
\$444 million?

SPROAT: Well, let me just talk about\--there's a couple different pieces
to your question. Let me talk about '08, and that funding level and
layoffs. I think I told the Board before last time we got together that
there would be layoffs on the program, regardless of the funding level
for '08, because our appropriations for '07 were at the \$444.5 level,
but we had \$100 million of carry-over. So, we have a burn rate through
'07 of 544. And, even if we got the full 495 that the President
requested, that's a \$50 million reduction. We're not building anything,
so, that's strictly salaries. So, there would have been a layoff anyway.

What we are doing now, actually what we did this summer, as we set the
spending plan at \$444.5, the lower of the House and Senate mark, we put
our plans together to be very clear about what our head count needed to
be and how it needed to come down going into fiscal year '08, and then
after we're in fiscal year '08, with the primary objective being get the
license application completed, and its supporting engineering and
science work products. That's where the money is going.

And, quite frankly, we have taken money away from upkeep, quote,
unquote, of the tunnel. Now, there are still scientific collection
activities going on in there, and we make periodic entries to collect
that data, check on the data loggers, and that type of thing. But, it's
not a priority for us right now.

Now, as we go forward in '09, and I can't talk yet about what the budget
request is that we've sent to OMB for '09, but it's going to depend on
so what do we actually get. The program plan that we've laid out that
gets us to an opening date somewhere between 2017 and 2019 is that there
is a significant ramp-up in spending starting in fiscal year '09. If we
don't get that significant ramp-up in spending, the program is going to
extend out. We'll be very clear with Congress every year of this is what
we asked for, this is what we got, here is the impact on the opening
date of the repository.

So, we're going to treat this like we would in the private sector. If
you're running a major project and go to the board of directors and you
say here's what I need, and they say well, you can't have that much, you
can only have this, the next answer is well, here's the impact of that.
That's what we're going to be doing, telling Congress each year. So, in
terms of what we will be doing in '09, clearly number one is defense of
the license application, retention of the scientific expertise,
retention of the engineering expertise, and the legal expertise to
defend the license application for the three, four, or five year
proceeding that we're going to go through. That's where the primary
focus is going to be.

But, in order to maintain critical path on the program on the baseline
we laid out, there's a lot of other work that needs to go on, the design
and construction of Nevada Rail, the detailed design of the repository
and the surface facilities, the procurement of the TADs. There's a lot
of other stuff that is in that cash flow that if the funding isn't
there, we'll get delayed, and the critical path just gets pushed out.

KADAK: Are you doing a review of\--there are going to be layoffs\--but,
making sure that those critical people who have been working on this
project, whose knowledge you really need, don't go away and work for
some other industry or company?

SPROAT: As best we can. Absolutely. We put together a license defense
targeted team list in both Sandia, BSC, so that we know by names who we
want and what we want them for, and to make sure that we retain them as
we go through this effort.

GARRICK: David and then Bill.

DUQUETTE: Normally, the Board doesn't get involved with economics, but
you seem frustrated at not being able to access the Nuclear Waste Fund.
The fact of\--the calculation tells me that the Nuclear Waste Fund is
generating about a billion dollars a year in interest, or in return
investment right at the moment. You're spending about half of that,
which means that you're re-investing half, which seems like a nice
economic model since you can't build anything until your license has
been approved. So, it seems to me that the\--until the license is
approved, you can't do major construction projects anyway. And, assuming
that Congress will release some of the Nuclear Waste Fund for actual
construction, it doesn't seem like it's that bad of an economic model.
Now, it would be very interesting to see what your cost analysis looks
like for the total project. But, I do think that as a citizen, rather
than a Board member, that the economic model doesn't look that far off
base.

SPROAT: You're right. If the economic model worked the way it was
intended, but it doesn't. That \$20.5 billion, the only way that would
get spent and allocated to this project is if it was appropriated and
scored as deficit spending. Congress has shown no interest in doing
that, and the current basis through the appropriations process doesn't
allow it.

The other supposition that we can't do any construction prior to a
construction authorization is not clear, and I disagree with,
particularly around Nevada Rail. Nevada Rail is on the critical path of
opening the repository, because we need the rail line to support
construction. It is not under any kind of NRC licensing regime, and it's
part of the construction and infrastructure that we need to get this
thing done.

If you were doing this project in the most efficient way, which is
somewhat of an anathema of the government, I understand that, but that's
my job, is to get this done the most efficient way, you don't wait until
you get your construction authorization and turn around and say okay,
now, what do I need to do. Maybe you ought to put a road into the site,
or maybe I ought to go bring transmission lines and have electric power
at the site. You don't wait until then. You do it now. And, that's how
we've built the critical path baseline of the program. So, we need money
now to get that going, and that's what we intend to go after.

DUQUETTE: That's assuming the license application will be approved
eventually.

SPROAT: I'm not going to wait until the license application is approved
to get the infrastructure going that we need to build this on the
shortest potential critical path.

GARRICK: Bill?

MURPHY: Bill Murphy, Board.

Last September when you spoke to us, you were relatively new to the
program at the time, and one of the points that you made was that you
were interested to identify, according to my notes, key risk driving
uncertainties. And, I'm particularly interested in those uncertainties
in scientific problems that pose risks for the repository. And, I wonder
if in the interim, and at this stage, you have identified scientific
problems that are key risk driving uncertainties.

SPROAT: Let me answer the question in two parts. First of all, I'm not
the right person to answer the question to the level that I think you
want, because I'm certainly not expert or well versed in all of the
uncertainties and uncertainty bands around key drivers in the TSPA.
Other people are much better prepared to do that.

What I was speaking about then is that one of the issues I had a concern
about was within the TSPA framework, from what reading I had done, was
were our models consistent in the application of uncertainty and the
characterization of uncertainty in the various parts of the model. And,
so, one of the things I did is turn to Sandia, which is our lead lab and
has responsibility for that analysis, and said I need you guys to take a
look at how the various models in the TSPA are handling uncertainty, and
do we have a defendable consistent approach to that across the set of
models, the suite of models. And, they've done that and the answer is
yes, and they've developed a very\--I know they have developed specific,
I won't use the term procedures, but program guidance that's applied
across the AMRs for doing that. And, that's the best answer I can give
you because I'm not prepared to go any deeper than that. So, Sandia has
answered my concern about that from the level I'm concerned about, which
is consistency of approach.

MURPHY: Thank you.

GARRICK: Any other questions? Andy?

KADAK: I've got three semi-technical ones. Could you tell me what the
program is doing relative to acceptance of MPCs or DPCs without
repackaging? That's number one. What the program is doing\--

SPROAT: You're assuming I can remember all three of these?

KADAK: Well, I'll remind you. What the program is doing on burnup
credit, which is somewhat related, and what the program is doing
relative, which is a cost driver, on seismic design, which from what
we've read is enormous relative to surface facilities? So, it's
acceptance of existing waste storage and transport canisters, burnup
credit, and seismic design.

SPROAT: I'm not going to answer the third because whatever I say will
probably be wrong. But, we have other people here who will be able to
answer that. Claudia, we have somebody you think can answer that in a
way that's\--not right now, but\--okay, I'll probably want to do that on
the record.

The issue of the burnup credit, there is\--we think we have a path
forward. There have been a number of exchanges, technical exchanges
between the NRC and us on criticality analysis and burnup credit. I am
not versed well enough in the details of that that I'd want to engage
the Board on that myself. I'd want to have somebody else do that, and
we'll see if we can do that later today or this afternoon.

On the MPCs, we have drafted a proposed amendment to the standard
contract that basically says that for those who are willing to sign that
amendment, we'd be willing to take their MPCs, you know, and put them in
transportation overpacks and take them to Yucca, and open them up and
then put the fuel in the TADs through our wet handling facility, if
they're willing to use TADs. So, we are in negotiations with contract
holders right now on incorporation of that amendment. So, we have told
them we would be willing to take their MPCs.

KADAK: The one reason that we were concerned about the original plan of
handling bare fuel was the number of fuel handlings taking place. So,
what I was really trying to get at is trying to avoid the reopening of
the canisters.

SPROAT: Right.

KADAK: So, no effort on that front?

SPROAT: It can't be ruled out. But, what I'd say is that given the
number of those situations, that it's not in our baseline design that
we'll describe in the license application. We have a wet handling
facility to open them up, repackage them in the waste packages, and send
them underground. So, that's the base design. Once we get through the
licensing process and we see how that plays out, and we know what we can
do and what we can't do, what potential limits we might have, if that
makes economic and risk sense, there is no reason why we shouldn't be
able to do that. But, we need to do more, some more homework before
we're ready to do that, and I'm not willing to put that into the license
application as the base design at this stage of the game, given the cost
benefit of doing that at this stage of the game. We have not ruled it
out. It's just not in the base design as we're going to describe it in
the license application.

KADAK: As long as you have someone looking at it, I think that's a good
thing. But, I'm not hearing a lot of words about even people studying
the option.

SPROAT: We're not putting a lot of money into it now because it's not
going into the license application. I've got to put that money somewhere
else where I get a bigger bang for the buck. It's strictly a project
management issue.

KADAK: Do you have a feel for the number of canisters that will be in
storage casks at reactor sites by the time Yucca Mountain opens?

SPROAT: Very good question. Ask Chris Kouts that question when he comes
up.

KADAK: He knows. I just wondered if you did. It's a big number.

SPROAT: I'm sure it is. I try not to remember big numbers like that. I
remember big numbers like \$20.5 billion in the Waste Fund that's not
spent.

GARRICK: Okay. Any other questions? Any questions from the Staff? One
question. Go ahead, Dan.

METLAY: Dan Metlay, Board Staff.

In August, you folks issued a draft national transportation plan, which
was subsequently withdrawn. Do you have a sense as to when that would be
re-issued?

SPROAT: It's news to me that that was withdrawn. That was sent out for
comment, for public comment, and I think the public comment period is
either open or just about done, and the intent is then take those
comments and revise it and re-issue it. And, the intent is it's a living
document that will continue to grow and expand as we get further down
the transportation planning process. But, it's news to me that it was
withdrawn.

METLAY: Okay.

GARRICK: All right. Well, thank you very much, Ward. That was a very
interesting and comprehensive overview, and we know how tight your
schedule is, and we very much appreciate your being here.

SPROAT: I appreciate the Board's interest. Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you. All right, we'll now go into the next phase, which
I'm turning over to Mark Abkowitz, and I'll point out to Mark that we're
right on schedule, and he's obligated to sustain that high level of
performance.

ABKOWITZ: Yes, sir. Thank you, John.

As Dr. Garrick indicated, we have a series of presentations here that
will be looking at the TAD program, and an update on its development.
The Board has been following the TAD initiative quite closely over the
past couple of years, and has been particularly interested in the
timeliness of the availability of a TAD canister, as well as its ability
to handle the vast majority of commercial spent fuel.

The way we have the sessions organized today is we'll be hearing from
two different entities. The first will be an update from Chris Kouts
from the Department of Energy, following which we will take a short
break, and then we will hear an industry update after we resume from
break.

Chris Kouts really doesn't need an introduction because he's spoken many
times before in front of the Board, and I think Ward Sproat did an ample
job of describing how important Chris is to the OCRWM program. But, let
me just point out that in addition to his current capacity as Acting
Principal Deputy Director of OCRWM, he has been with the OCRWM program
for 22 years, which also makes him the curator of the institutional
memory of the program.

So, with that as background, Chris, you have the floor.

KOUTS: Thank you, Dr. Abkowitz. Do we have a clicker or\--it's going to
be hard for you to do it, but\--

While we're dancing around here, first of all, it's good to be back in
front of the Board. I'm going to try to give you an update on where we
are with the TAD canister development effort. As Ward indicated, I wear
two hats. One is Acting Principal Deputy, but I also wear my other hat,
which is the Director of the Waste Management Office, which is
responsible for the development of the TAD concept.

We announced going to a primarily canister based approach for the
acceptance of commercial spent fuel in October of 2005. And, there are a
variety of good reasons why we did that. As the viewgraph indicates, it
certainly supports the standardization of the handling of these
materials at utility sites, through the transportation system and at the
repository. It certainly simplifies our facilities at the repository,
reduces our low-level waste, and makes it a lot easier on us.

On the other hand, it does create some challenges for the utilities, and
we're working to minimize those challenges as we implement the program.

Next slide, please. To go into the way back machine, we issued a
preliminary specification for TADs and our vision of what TADs had to be
in order for it to operate effectively at the repository, and also at
utility sites and through the transportation system back in November of
2006, and we initiated a proof of concept design at that time.

We identified four qualified vendors, who are named on the screen here,
who developed proof of concept reports. We essentially received those
proof of concept designs back, and completed our review in March of this
year.

Subsequent to that, we initiated a procurement after we had the proof of
concept designs, we initiated a procurement effectively that allowed us
to go forward to the final design effort. And, prior to initiation of
that procurement, we issued a final specification. You might remember,
we issued a preliminary one back in November. We issued a final in June.
Actually, it was serendipitous with my attendance and presentation at an
ACNW meeting at the NRC. We issued a press release, and at that point in
time, indicated what the final specification would be.

Then, we issued a solicitation in July of this year. I believe it was
July, if you're interested in specific dates, July 11^th^. The
specification went out on our internet site on the 19^th^, I believe, of
June. We have received proposals. The solicitation closed on August
24^th^, and right now, we're in the process of evaluating those
proposals.

And, if you're going to ask me questions about them, it's procurement
sensitive, so I won't be able to answer them. If you're going to ask me
how many proposals we received, I'll say I can't tell you. If you're
going to ask me when you're going to make an award, all I can say is as
soon as we can. So, that process is underway. It's procurement
sensitive, and I really won't be able to discuss it, so I try to get
those questions out of the way to save you the trouble of asking them.

Let's talk a little bit about the final TAD performance specification
that we issued in July. It, as the preliminary one did, essentially
delineates all the requirements that we feel we need for the repository
itself to deal with our postclosure needs and our preclosure needs, and,
also, there are a variety of aspects to that that make it a little
easier to handle at the repository, and makes our surface facilities
more efficient.

We didn't change the capacity going from the preliminary to the final.
We're still at 21 PWRs and 44 BWRs, and if you're going to ask the
question well, why can't we go to larger ones, as Dr. Kadak would say,
when you look at the existing DPCs, they are substantially larger in
terms of capacity than what we're looking at at the TAD. And, the issue
that we have is that we feel that if a TAD is designed, manufactured,
loaded and sealed in accordance with our requirements, that is
disposable at Yucca Mountain. And, that is the subject of our analyses.

If we wanted to go to some other construct, we would have to go through
that analysis and see whether or not we can make that case to the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But, from our perspective, we feel the
TAD works, and will work in our license application, and will be
sustained in our review. To look at, you know, different situations,
different concepts of canisters, and so forth, that would have to be a
different evaluation.

Again, a lot of the issues that drove the TAD specification had to do
with postclosure needs, what our long-term criticality materials are,
and how they are arranged in the basket, and so forth. So, in order to
make a change to that, you're going to have to go back and do a variety
of iterations with our TSPA to see whether or not we can make the case
for that. And, again, as Ward indicated, we are not essentially
investing in that at this time.

KADAK: Could you answer the question for Ward in terms of how many
canisters or MPCs will be in storage at reactor sites by 2017 when the
first canister is shipped?

KOUTS: Okay, let me try to answer it this way. Right now as of this
year, there are about 9,300 tons in storage. But, I will say that
probably less than half of those are transportable. A lot of them are in
storage only overpack. So, the storage only overpacks are kind of off
the table because you can't get them to Yucca Mountain. As we proceed
into the future, obviously, that number is going to rise, and we do have
projections for 2017 and 2020. I can't pull them out of my brain at this
time. But, we do have those estimates available. It's a lot of fuel, and
I believe in the 2017 time frame, we're looking at, ballpark, something
like 17,000 metric tons that potentially will be in dry storage.

What our intent here is that if we can get TADs out in the marketplace,
and effectively in the 2011, probably 2012 time frame, we can hope to
encroach upon that amount that is being deployed at reactor sites. And,
as Ward indicated, we are trying to provide incentives to the industry
in order to utilize TADs. We've gotten some fairly positive feedback
from those who we've talked to, and we're hopeful that we'll be able to
penetrate that market, and hopefully reduce the burden as we go into the
future, because, again, the TADs as we envision them are disposable.
They don't have to be repackaged, and we would certainly want as many of
those deployed as possible prior to the time that we started waste
acceptance.

KADAK: Thank you.

KOUTS: One of the big changes from the preliminary to the final spec had
to do with the length of the canister. The original specification, the
preliminary one that went out, basically was a one size fits all at 212
inches. We've allowed that to float downward to no less than 186. That
allows a substantial greater amount of utilities to be able to be
serviced by a TAD canister. So, that was one of the big changes from the
preliminary to the final spec. The diameter stayed the same, roughly
about 66 ½ inches. Next one, weight, was the same. Maximum average dose,
this is all fed into our preclosure safety analysis calculations. This
is with a shield plug at the top of the cask at 800 mr per hour, and
there's also in the specification, it's allowed to go up to, I believe,
1 rem in certain areas of the cask. But, the average, of the top of the
TAD, but the average has to be no greater than 800 mr per hour.

Borated stainless steel is the required neutron absorber for disposal.
They need to be seal welded. They are handled in a vertical orientation
at the repository. Also, we'll have a common lifting fixture for ease of
handling. And, of course, organic, pyrophoric, and RCRA materials are
prohibited, which again are the requirements for our site.

What you're seeing now, a picture sometimes says a thousand words,
moving pictures sometime say more, this is essentially how a TAD would
be loaded, either at a utility site or at our wet handling facility. You
just saw the canister go into the transfer cask. It's going into the
pool. You'll see it will be about 20 minutes before you get 44
assemblies in here. We only do about two of these to demonstrate it.
But, you'll see the assemblies being pulled out and into the canister,
into position, and we would expect these same operations, and
effectively, we want these designed to be essentially handled the same
way that utilities handle dry storage in canisters on their site today.

So, with the second one, basically, what's going to happen is the
transferred cask is going to be picked up out of the pool. It's put on
first, and basically that's what happens at the pool. What we have here
is, what you're going to see, is the welding fixture, first of all, it
will have to be drained somewhat, drained and dried, and then welded, if
you will.

Okay, that's the first vision I wanted to show you. The second one has
to do with just the transfer of that to a dry storage in a vertical
configuration. Basically, it's being lifted on top of the aging
overpack. The canister is being transferred in. We'll put a lid on.
Actually, these are lifting features that will go in first, then the
lid\--no, the lid goes first, and the lifting features next. And, then,
it goes out to the storage field, and, hopefully, not at this velocity,
and placed into the storage field.

Okay, the next is how this can also be handled in a\--that was a
vertical configuration\--I think we go to a horizontal configuration
next, which is essentially the same process. You transfer the canister
and transfer cask into the aging overpack. The lid is put on, and then
it's put on trunions and let downward and taken out. You're probably
familiar with that configuration. It's used at the various sites around
the industry.

And, the last one is just transfer into a transportation cask. This
would be at a utility site. It would be loading essentially to put it
directly into a cask to take it to Yucca Mountain. These are the
trunions for lifting features, and we have the inflatable impact
limiters, and it goes off. We don't use inflatable impact limiters, but
they look inflatable at this point. Our graphic artist had some fun with
that.

So, those are essentially just to give you a sense of how these would be
handled, both at utility sites and at the repository.

To summarize my presentation, the final spec can be found on our website
at that address. The procurement, as I mentioned earlier, the
solicitation was issued, proposals have been received, and they are
currently under evaluation. And, I'll be happy to answer any questions
that you may have.

Yes, Henry?

PETROSKI: Petroski, Board.

These computer schematics are interesting, but what about physical
prototyping and physical testing of these operations, do you have any
plans for that?

KOUTS: Actually, we don't feel that we need to go to a prototype phase.
We think that this can go directly for use at reactor sites without
going through a prototype. What we heard at the proof of concepts phase
was that the vendors basically were doing analyses based on the current
canisters that they had, and they're very comfortable with what's being
done today. So, I don't think we need to go that extra step in order to
go to a prototype. So, I think we're going to go directly from the
design phase to licensing, and then deployment.

Now, one of the things I'll also say is that part of the requirements of
the solicitation would be that the vendors need to couple with an
industry entity in order to get these deployed as quickly as possible.
And, we're aware that those contacts have been made, and we're going to
make sure that these\--we're just not designing them with no place to
go. We want this procurement to be such that in the various phases of
it, that once it's designed and certified, that there is a path forward
and there is going to be a site that these are going to be deployed at.

So, the bottom line is no, we're not planning on a prototype phase. We
think it can go directly to be deployed at utility sites.

PETROSKI: Is there any new equipment or any of this transportation, or
transfer equipment that's new to this? This is all existing technology?

KOUTS: It's all existing technology. It might be slightly modified for
the sizes involved, but all this is being done all the time at reactors,
and we made a special point in my presentations with the NRC, we're not
doing anything new here. We expect to have the same types of operations
at utility sites, use the same technology. We don't anticipate that
there's going to be anything really new about this.

KADAK: It's Kadak again. It's a small MPC?

KOUTS: Right.

DUQUETTE: Chris, thank you for the presentation. I had a question on the
proposals that went out and what the vendors can come back with. Is it
to design, build specification, or just to build specification? And, I
wondered if things like the manufacturing process, the sealing process,
materials of construction, and so on and so forth, are in the
specification, or can the vendors come back and make some
recommendations for better efficiency, better design, and so on and so
forth?

KOUTS: Well, the specifications are the specifications, and they're not
negotiable in terms of what we need at the repository site. For
instance, if they came back and said, well, you know, what if we use
something other than borated stainless? The answer is no, we need
borated stainless in there, and that's driven from postclosure.

What we really are relying on is the vendors to design it, to license
it, to have it fabricated with an industry partner, if you will, and
have it deployed. So, at every step along the way, we're going to have
to make sure that whatever they do is consistent with our specification.
But, to the extent that they're consistent with it, the design is left
up to them, the actual licensing would be left up to them, and the
fabrication, and so forth. Now, we would have to confirm that if there
are any tweaks associated, for instance, in the fabrication process, if
anything that looks like it's somewhat out of spec, they have to come
back to us to get a "mother, may I" and we would have to approve it.

So, to the extent that there are any changes, they have to be approved
by the Department before basically they can proceed. And, that would be
the same case in the licensing arena. If, indeed, through REIs, the NRC
asked questions and they want to change their design, for whatever
reason, they basically have to come back to us to make sure that we're
okay with whatever changes that might occur in the design during the
licensing process. So, the Department is going to be intimately involved
from the review standpoint to make sure that we're totally consistent
with the specification. And, that's what our fixation will be, is it
consistent with the specification. If it is consistent with the
specification, then it will meet our needs. If it doesn't, then we're
going to have to talk about that.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

Obviously, I understand what you're saying. The specifications can be
very tight. They can be relatively loose. And, I wondered if the
competition you will have among the vendors and fabricators, and so on
and so forth, will involve a consideration of, again, manufacturing
processes, sealing processes, and so on and so forth, or if it's just
going to be who can build it the cheapest?

KOUTS: I'll answer your question this way. I think it's to the
government's advantage to have as wide a competition that we can have
for these. In addition to that, many of these vendors work with segments
of the industry. We want to get as much coverage of the industry as we
can. So, we would like competition, and I think the Department would
like to see that. Again, we'll have to see how the proposals turn out
and see what happens at the end of our evaluation. But, going into it, I
think we want to encourage as much competition as we can.

ABKOWITZ: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

Utilities have pretty much decided what technologies they want for
on-site storage. And, some go NUHOMS, others go NAC, vertical, whatever.
I'm trying to understand the implementation of this relative to TAD. For
example, if I've got, and I'm very comfortable with NUHOMS horizontal
storage systems, will the DOE say well, we are now going to ask you to
store this vertically because that's the way we need to handle it for
transport? Or are you going to maybe issue awards to every generic type
to then conform to the utilities fuel handling operations?

KOUTS: Let me answer your question this way. There is nothing that
would\--our requirement is that the canisters have to be handled in a
vertical orientation at Yucca Mountain, basically, it has to go into a
vertical overpack. There is nothing to preclude it from also being able
to go into a horizontal overpack. So, to the extent that a utility wants
to put this in a horizontal overpack at their site, that's certainly up
to them.

KADAK: So, what you're actually\--I'm trying to figure out what it is
that you're actually asking the utility to do. Are you asking the
utility to do the packaging of the TADs at their reactor sites and then
be responsible for somehow storing the canisters in whatever method they
choose, until you decide to come and pick it up; is that right?

KOUTS: Let me answer your question this way. Let's assume the repository
is open. We pull up to the site. We would pull up to a site with a
transportation cask and with a TAD for them to load from their pool.
Okay? If prior to the time that we begin operations, if a utility, on
their own nickel, wants to use TADs at their site, then that's fine. In
other words, for dry storage purposes, if indeed a utility, based on the
incentives that we're going to be providing them, wants to put, from the
date the TADs are available, wants to put their spent fuel in TADs, we
could also take it from their field. But, at the time of operations, our
expectation is that most utilities will want us essentially to take fuel
from their pool, because if we take it from their field that has a TAD
in it, then, they're going to have to load another TAD and put it in the
field.

So, the bottom line here is that there are two pathways. One is prior to
the time that we begin operations, and while utilities are doing dry
storage, with the incentives that we provide, we would hope that the
utilities will use TADs instead of other storage devices. And, there are
also parts of that amendment that also incentivize them to do that, to
deal with some of the costs involved with that.

KADAK: Now, have you modeled the proposal that you have in terms of
tying up a TAD and perhaps shipment device you have, and trying to
figure out the logistics and the numbers that you'll need to be able to
handle the TAD shipments from reactors?

KOUTS: Yes, we have. And, part of the\--certainly our total system model
analyses make the assumption that not only transportation overpacks, but
also TADs, go to reactor sites for the purposes of loading.

KADAK: And, you expect a two week turnaround time, something like that?

KOUTS: What we're going to do is we're going to\--we have a perspective
of what turnaround times are, and what we need to do is get input from
industry as to how long this is going to take. It's not going to be
quite the same, obviously, as loading a bare fuel cask, because a bare
fuel cask, you don't have to worry about the canister, you don't have to
worry about welding, and so forth. So, it's going to take more time, and
we're going to have to deal with that. So, in terms of the lead times
and the amount of transportation casks that we're going to need, and the
lead time that they're going to need on the canisters, that's something
that we're going to have to work out as we move forward in the future.
But, we are sensitive to that and we do understand the issue.

ABKOWITZ: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

This is somewhat related to Dr. Duquette's question. Do your specs
include reliability and quality requirements?

KOUTS: Let me answer your question this way. For the purposes of our
preclosure safety analysis, yes, we have to address those issues. But,
that's built into the specification itself. And, to try to understand
that, you really would have to see the whole picture of our preclosure
safety analysis and what our rationale is for that in order to
understand what reliability we're building into it. But, yes, we have
addressed that issue in terms of what's in the specification.

MOSLEH: So, based in part on the results or insights from the safety?

KOUTS: Yes.

MOSLEH: I see.

KOUTS: For instance, one of the requirements which is received somewhat
of an interesting response from the industry has been the fact that in a
3G earthquake at Yucca Mountain, hypothetically, that these aging
overpacks cannot tip over. And, there's a reason for that. In our
preclosure safety analysis, essentially we provide the rationale as to
why we need them to be vertical and not falling over in a 3G earthquake
that potentially would happen at the site, although the potential of
that happening is very, very, very low probability event, nonetheless,
we're going to ask the designers to design an aging overpack at Yucca
Mountain such that when the canister is in there, that it would not tip
over. So, that's the simple way I can answer your question. You really
have to understand our rationale for the preclosure safety analysis in
order to understand what reliability has been built into the
specification.

ABKOWITZ: Andy, yet again?

KADAK: Two quickies. Could you describe some of these incentives for the
utility to buy its own TAD, store it, and then have it available when
you're ready to take it? What kind of incentive would\--

KOUTS: It has to do, and I don't want to get into the details, but it
has to do with avoided costs to the government. In other words, at the
time that we would accept it, what avoided costs the government would
incur at that point in time. And, then, there would be basically a
credit given to the utility for the utilization of that device. In other
words, the Department didn't have to buy that TAD, the utility bought
it, so we'd basically have to look at avoided cost to the government.

KADAK: So, you'd pay the utility, or defer some fee payments, or
something.

KOUTS: Something like that.

KADAK: The 3G thing came up again. 3Gs, now, as I understand it, it's
vertical and horizontal; is that correct?

KOUTS: That's correct.

KADAK: Now, what happens with 3Gs to a cask vertically?

KOUTS: We're talking about an aging overpack.

KADAK: Aging overpack. What happens?

KOUTS: It's probably not going to go sideways. It will probably go up
and down.

KADAK: It will fly? 1G is good, 2G is up, 3G is flying?

KOUTS: No, I understand that. But, the question is how high it goes, and
when it comes down, what happens. The bottom line is it's a conservative
approach. I won't argue that.

KADAK: Where did that number come from?

KOUTS: Again, to fully understand the rationale for it, you'd have to
see our preclosure safety analysis, and that will come out later on.

KADAK: That gets back to my seismic question, I guess. The standard for
normal reactor storage systems is what typically in terms of equivalent
G levels, even at Diablo Canyon?

KOUTS: They're much lower. But, again, we look at\--I think you have to
go through and understand the rationale for our preclosure safety
analysis, what our Category 1 or Category 2 events are, what we can
postulate on site. And, all I can tell you, Dr. Kadak, is that we've
taken a conservative approach to this, and we built that into the
specification. And, again, we can't get into the details until the
preclosure safety analysis is made public, which will be about the time
that we submit the license application.

KADAK: The reason I'm asking this kind of question is you're going to be
doing this total cost estimate again, and all these things drive costs
really, really high, and I'm just wondering if anybody is trying to
balance the need for having very, very conservative standards versus the
safety and the cost. And, it doesn't sound like people are doing that at
DOE.

KOUTS: Well, we're trying to get something that works, and what we feel
we can demonstrate in a licensing environment will be successful. I
always leave open the opportunity in the future as we learn more, that
perhaps we can go to a more efficient TAD. There will be a different
generation, and I've said this many times, going to a higher capacity
would certainly be a substantial reduction in overall system cost,
because essentially, you know, the reactors are going to have to do
roughly 50 percent more loadings because we've got a reduced capacity.
So, it's to our advantage to look at those issues. I think where the
program is right now is we're trying to get something that works. Yes,
it may be very conservative. And, if we can take away some of those
conservatisms in the future and go to a more efficient system, we will
do that. But, the first thing we need to do is to get the facility
licensed, to get the system operational. At that point in time, we can
look at how to make it more efficient and to optimize it more.

ABKOWITZ: Let me wrap up with a couple of questions.

I want to get a little more clarity on this issue of the motivation for
utilities to use TADs before our repository would be operational. My
understanding is that there is a fairly large difference in the capacity
of a storage container in terms of a TAD design versus some of the DPCs
that are available today. So, from an economic standpoint, the utility
would be much better suited to put more into a single container. So, is
that part of the incentivizing that you're discussing with the industry
in terms of what DOE would do to make it a break even argument so that
the utilities would, you know, elect to use TADs as opposed to some
other storage device?

KOUTS: Okay. Well, there's one other factor that we haven't talked
about, and that's that absent a contract modification, the Department is
under no obligation to accept any of the devices that currently exist
out there. So, the incentive, I think, that if those devices that do
exist out there that are transportable, if the Department is to accept
them, then what the Department wants in return is okay, we'll accept
those, but we also want an agreement that you will use TADs from the day
that they're available until we begin operations. So, I think there's a
powerful incentive there, because again, absent that contract
modification, the Department is under no obligation whatsoever to accept
them.

ABKOWITZ: So, you're basically using the legal argument over the
economic argument for that position?

KOUTS: No, I think we're using both. I think that we're also sensitive
to the fact of the potential increased cost of these to the utilities,
and we want to look at avoided cost to the government and make sure that
that's addressed appropriately with the utilities.

So, I think one incentive is we'll take your other cans. The other one
is we'll provide also an avoided cost, and I think that's a very
reasonable approach. And, I will say it's not just a legal argument,
it's\--well, it is a legal argument. I testified in court on this issue,
and the courts have sustained the Department. At the time that the
standard contract was written, these devices did not exist. Therefore,
according to one judge's opinion, therefore they could not have been
covered by the contract, therefore, they're not covered by the contract.
So, the Department is under no obligation to accept them at this time,
absent a contract modification.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, let me move on to my last question. I have asked you in
the past and you had indicated to me that the TAD, success of a TAD
initiative rests on having rail available to Yucca Mountain. And, I've
always thought that was kind of the Achilles heel in this whole
business. Can you comment on any additional thought that's gone into
what will happen to this whole plan if rail is either significantly
delayed in its availability to bring TADs to Yucca Mountain, or the
possibility that it's never constructed at all?

KOUTS: Well, there are facilities out there that will be unable to
utilize TADs. They simply don't have the ability at their sites in order
to load them and seal them, et cetera. They don't have the crane
capacity. They don't have the pool size. And, we are going to have a
facility at the repository, the wet handling facility, that will be able
to take truck casks, if you will. I mean, our baseline plan is that we
will have rail availability. And, we're not designing a TAD to be
basically hauled. It's a rail dominated system, and there's just no way
around that.

If, indeed, it never happens, then we'll have to go back and think about
that. But, we will have a facility on site that will be able to take
truck casks. There will certainly be a lot more truck casks than rail
shipments. But, ultimately, I do think we'll have rail. The question of
its availability, you know, that's something that the future will divine
for us.

ABKOWITZ: Will your license application and your preclosure safety
analysis look at the contingency planning required if rail is not
available or not available in a timely fashion? Because it would seem to
me that would have tremendous implications on handling and the risks
associated with that.

KOUTS: My sense is our EIS will look at that option, if you will. But,
the license application that we're making to the NRC will be based on a,
you know, primarily based rail system.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you.

At this point, we are on schedule, Mr. Chairman, and we will take a 15
minute break, and we'll reconvene at 10 o'clock. Thank you, Chris.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

GARRICK: There's an item of business I want to take up that we missed
this morning because we didn't get the question in time. A question was
raised by Judy Treichel having to do with record of decision, and I want
to pass that question on to Ward Sproat, because it was as a result of
his presentation that the question came up.

So, Ward, would you deal with it?

SPROAT: The question, as I understand it, was for the Supplemental
Environmental Impact Statements that I talked about, will there be a
formal DOE record of decision.

On the SEIS for the repository itself, there will not be a DOE record of
decision. All we do is we finalize that Environmental Impact Statement,
and give it to the NRC, and they do their review of it, and they make
their decision whether to adopt it or not for the repository licensing.
So, there will not be a DOE record of decision on the repository SEIS.

For the SEIS on the Nevada Rail, we already have record of decision of
saying that the primary route of transportation is rail. There will be a
record of decision as a result of this SEIS on the final rail alignment
for Nevada Rail. So, there will be a DOE record of decision for that
SEIS, but not for the repository.

GARRICK: All right, thank you.

Okay, Mark, let's proceed with the discussion.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you, John.

We're going to go to Part 2 of the TAD update, and at this time, we're
going to be hearing the industry perspective. We'll actually be hearing
from two different individuals, Rod McCullum, who is the Director of the
Yucca Mountain Project with the Nuclear Energy Institute, and then he
will be followed by David Blee, who is the Executive Director of the
U.S. Transport Council. And, what I'd like to do is\--well, let me ask
you, Rod, would you prefer that we have questions in between each
presentation, or wait until the end of both of them?

MC CULLUM: Actually, it's one presentation. We're going to do a tag
team. I'm going to start out here, David is going to come up and then
we're going to be together for questions at the close.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, very good. Thank you.

MC CULLUM: Thank you, and I want to thank the Board for giving me the
opportunity, and David the opportunity, to share industry perspectives
on this important initiative. It's been 16 months since David and I last
came and spoke to you about the TADs. At that time, I think we, as well
as DOE, were talking about a rather ambitious set of things that had to
happen in front of us. And, as I think Chris Kouts spoke earlier, many
of those things have happened, and they have happened on a very positive
schedule.

I also appreciate what Dr. Garrick said at the beginning of the meeting
today about the desire of the Board to look into the integration of the
project with other industrial entities. From our perspective, I think
summing up industry's perspective in a nutshell, the value of the TAD is
in the integration of the overall waste management system.

We expected it to be, and have seen through what has happened so far to
be a very effective integration tool in terms of integrating the overall
used fuel management system. So, if we can go to the first slide?

It's always important when you get an industry perspective that we have
at least a couple words about why we're doing this. Nuclear energy is
very important to this country's prosperity, to this country's future.
We have 104 commercial nuclear plants. The last time I spoke to you it
was 103. The restart of Brown's Ferry, so that is a growing number, and
I also know there are plans to begin resuming construction of Watts Bar
2. So, that would go to 105, and, of course, there's a number of new
plant projects in the early stages of the licensing process is there.

The existing plants, most of them are getting life extensions, so
they're going to be around a while. We have maintained our 20 percent
share of U.S. electricity generation, even as electricity demand has
been growing. We're certainly cost competitive on existing generation,
and we think the numbers are still yet to come in on the new plants. We
think we'll be cost competitive on new plant generation, particularly if
you figure in the real costs of such things as carbon sequestration
technologies that would be necessary for some other energy sources.

And, of course, one of the key advantages, we are the clean air energy,
we produce a lot of electricity with a very small amount of material
when you look at what you get out of a single uranium pellet that I
could hold in my hand here versus the amount of natural gas, coal or
oil. And, as we're here in a city where the lights burn brighter than
anywhere else in the world, where the air conditioners work as hard, if
not harder, than anywhere else in the world, the opportunity to get a
lot of electricity out of a small amount of material without polluting
the air certainly should be a topic of great interest.

So, going to the next slide, that small amount of material, and
actually, this slide answers your question, Andy. These are the numbers.
We have approximately 56,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel out there
currently. This is pretty close to the number Chris gave, 9,600 metric
tons in 877 casks at 39 sites. By 2017, the earliest date the repository
might open, we anticipate having 22,000 of the 76,000 metric ton total
in dry casks. Now, hopefully, some of those will already be TADs at that
point as they're deployed.

I want to focus on this number for just a little bit, and I think it's
important to note here the difference between those two numbers, 22,000
and 76,000, about 54,000 metric tons, remember, right now the repository
is authorized, as Ward Sproat said earlier, would be committed, fully
committee for the 70,000 tons in 2010. They have allotted in at least
their initial EIS, and I don't know that this would change in the
updated EIS, 63,000 metric tons for commercial used nuclear fuel.

And, if you look at, you know, what DOE has said publicly about wanting
to get 90 percent of the fuel in TADs, well, that's about 56,000 metric
tons of the 63, and you see 54,000 metric tons there that hasn't already
been committed to dry casks, and, again, some of those dry casks by that
time may already, or should already, be TADs. So, there clearly will be
plenty of fuel available to put into TADs to meet DOE's initial design
assumptions.

Changing those assumptions, going to the second repository report we
heard about this morning, you would have to visit the Yucca capacity as
one of the options. Certainly, we believe Yucca can hold a lot more than
70,000 metric tons, there's the EIS number. We have the EPRI work that I
believe you've been briefed on in the past, which indicates that Yucca
Mountain could hold upwards of 500,000 metric tons. So, certainly
there's plenty of opportunity to successfully deploy the TADs to help
manage this inventory more effectively, which is really what it's all
about. And, that brings me to the next slide.

The industry has actively engaged with DOE because we support this
initiative. I told you 16 months ago we supported the initiative. That
has not changed. And, I think our actions speak as loud as any words I
told you then, or could tell you now, the work that has gone, the
commitment industry has put into this. The reasons are the same things
that Chris talked about. You know, we certainly see an advantage in
simplifying the repository, both in terms of its cost and its
licensability. It reduces disposal and waste acceptance uncertainty. I
mean, you're not talking about loading a cask that DOE says, in court
anyway, that it won't accept a cask of uncertain destination. You're
loading a cask that says right on the side of it, you know, ship to
Yucca Mountain. All postage paid, care of Chris Kouts, you know, and
that has\--that's the same joke I told 16 months ago. I'm glad to see
it's still funny to some. But, it is true. There is absolutely a value
to that, to reducing disposal uncertainty.

Now, how that plays into the economics, that's up for each utility to
decide. But, the stakeholders, we believe, will see that. If you are
looking at building an essvicy (phonetic) and talking to your
communities, if you are looking at an interim storage site somewhere and
talking to those communities, the notion that that Yucca Mountain stamp
was on the side of the canister as opposed to this uncertainty out there
we think is important to be able to tell those communities that these
things do have a more certain destination.

And, as I said, it really is, the TAD program and the exercise we've
gone through over the last 16 months has been a tremendous learning
experience and a tremendous integration exercise. We've brought industry
and DOE together. We've taken disposal parameters, we've taken storage
parameters, we've taken transportation parameters, we've brought these
things together and we've talked about, and substantively done things to
make the system work together, and it hadn't been considered before.
And, that has been tremendously valuable.

The next slide, getting into what we mean about integrated used fuel
management. These are the various elements that if you're doing all of
these things, you truly would have an integrated system. Obviously, we
store them in the pools now, and we store them in dry storage
facilities. The TADs will do that. TADs will be transportable.

Now, I alluded to centralized off-site storage, that might be
something\--that's certainly something industry is interested in, that
might be something that's in the cards as we work towards Yucca Mountain
and the recycling facilities that might also be proposed. The TAD has
value there. Again, for the stakeholders at those places, for the DOE
acceptance certainty, and for the licensor, you know, you've got a
standardized canister now. And, that canister will make the design of
whatever interim storage facility a lot more straightforward. You're not
looking at a hodge podge of systems out there that were designed for
criteria that made sense at individual sites. You're looking at a
standardized system, standardized for the repository, and it's also
standardized for interim storage.

And, while I'm not going to try to tell you that we're hoping that we
would ship TADs to recycling facilities just to cut them open, there
certainly is benefit towards if we do start sending some used fuel to
recycling facilities, to the lessons and to the standardization and the
process of integration, the process benefits of what we've gone through
to get to the TADs. The process infrastructure that's now in place, and
if a recycling facility were a research facility and it was uncertain
how that research was going to progress, if fuel arrived in a TAD, if it
went into a reprocessing stream or a research project, great. If it
didn't, it could go on to Yucca Mountain. That also would provide some
additional assurance there, and, of course, final disposal.

So, we see the TAD as having a role, granted, variable amounts of value
in each instance, but having a role in all elements of integrating the
used fuel management system.

Going to the next slide, what we have accomplished? And, I really do
believe that the accomplishments have been substantial here. We resolved
a number of technical issues. I think Chris Kouts had his Slide Number 6
where he listed some of the basic parameters and the lengths and the
materials and the various things of the TAD. Those weren't the things we
started with when we had our first meeting. We had to go through an
iterative process. Industry raised these issues. DOE raised its reasons
why it needed certain things for disposal, and we got to the end of that
process and have an integrated container.

The TAD specification was completed. And, for those of you who might be
skeptics about what Ward said this morning about this era of delivery
that we are in, DOE has indeed been delivering on the TADs pretty
consistently. I mean, the schedule that was set out for the TADs, it's
been within weeks of the schedule that the TADs followed, and it's been
a quality product. The TAD specification has been acceptable enough to
industry that vendors are able to submit the proof of concept designs,
and that the procurement process is now moving forward based upon that
specification.

So, it is certainly, for those who have doubted the program in the past,
certainly tangible evidence that the project can produce quality results
on schedule.

Another often overlooked thing that has occurred, and I do consider it a
significant accomplishment in this process, is that the NRC review of
the TAD specification has been completed. NRC commented on the TAD
specification. DOE responded to those comments. The response to those
comments from DOE as well as from the vendor communities echoing this is
that those are issues that will be addressed in the respective license
applications. But, there's a tremendous amount of value to getting those
issues on the table ahead of those applications so that we can address
them.

A lot of folks, there's this kind of conventional wisdom out there that
the Yucca Mountain licensing process is going to take a long, long time.
It's first of a kind. It's contentious. However, it has something else
that's unprecedented in its nature, too, that goes to its advantage. It
has a more extensive body of prelicensing work between DOE and NRC and
now industry that didn't exist at any other licensing process. And, so,
we would hope in this case, as well as other cases, that the project
would be able to build on what's been done in the prelicensing phase to
have a successful licensing process.

Going on to the next slide, this is basically Chris's slides 1 through 5
condensed down to one slide. I think the value of having them, so I
won't read through all the things that have been accomplished. But, I
think it is important. I think that the value of seeing it all together
is you do see that a lot of work was done in the last 16 months.

I will point out that we had our first significant meeting on January
31, 2006, which was the eighth anniversary of the date DOE was supposed
to be, just by coincidence, the eighth anniversary of the date DOE was
supposed to begin picking up our fuel. So, I will point out and remind
Chris that we've got our tenth coming up soon. So, I hope we can do
something really special for that one.

Also, a couple other milestones here that are on the plate. The vendors
are expected in the procurement that Chris spoke about to have licenses
by 2010, and to complete a demonstration of the first of the TADs in
accordance with those licenses by 2012. In order for that to happen, the
ball is in DOE's court. I mean, within weeks to next month, one of the
things we need to see delivery on is DOE to move forward on these
procurements that it is, as Chris said, is evaluating. But, we hope that
the record of progress will continue so that the vendors will
have\--those are tight timelines\--so that we will have time to meet
that schedule. And, if you're starting to deploy TADs in 2012, you can
go back to the earlier slide and look at what we've got in 2017, all the
fuel still in pools. It really meshes well with DOE's design
assumptions.

And, I think a key point is that industry, DOE and NRC all agree on the
licensing path forward. We've got cross-cutting issues between Part 71
and Part 72, Part 50 and Part 63. We've got to continue to manage those,
but we all agree that those processes have to proceed in parallel.
There's some licensing risks there, but we all have agreed on our path
forward that gets us out of what could have been a chicken and egg
situation, where you've got to be licensed in 63 before you can go to
72. You've got to be licensed in 72 before you can go to 63. So, we're
all in agreement that those processes will proceed in parallel.

Of course, as I mentioned, if you could go to the next slide, a
substantial amount of work needs to be done. I can't stress quickly
enough that DOE does need to move quickly with the balls that are in its
court right now. We haven't had this problem yet, and we don't want to
have the problem where the clock gets eaten up by what needs to happen
on the federal side. The vendors need to be able to do the high quality
work and have the time to do that, and, you know, they have a lot of
things that they do, a lot of existing contracts they're working on.

Financial incentives have to be out there to address the TAD and the
marketplace priorities. That's something we've heard the Board question.
That's one of those balls that's in DOE's court. It was encouraging I
think to hear Ward talk about the type of things being negotiated. That
needs to be closed out in a way that makes economic sense for the
utilities. Therefore, they can commit to buying TADs. The applications
need to move forward, the loading and deployment.

Further system integration needs to occur. The first generation of TADs,
the next generation of TADs may be a different kind of standardized
container for a recycling facility. Who knows? But, the TAD designs do
need to continue to evolve.

So, if we can go to the next slide? This is what I alluded towards, the
parallel licensing processes. You see the DOE process, the wild card and
the EPA standard of course down there. And, although we certainly agree
that the project should proceed forward as that standard is being
issued. You know, our EPRI science would again tell us that there should
be plenty of margin beneath what the existing proposed standard is,
however it comes out, that they should be able to do that.

You notice a lot of dotted lines here? Every time I show this graph, I
was always asked to add more of those that need to coordinate, so that
when a TAD is loaded under NRC regulations, it can be transported under
NRC regulations, and it can be disposed of under NRC regulations. If you
have any mis-matches throughout this process, there's a problem with the
regulation. There's a problem with the regulatory structure if something
gets loaded under Part 50 and stored under Part 71, 72, transported, it
can't be disposed of. So, we need to continue to communicate to make
sure that once under NRC regulations, always under NRC regulations.

You will also notice that there's an annoyingly large amount of stars in
there for the applications for TADs. The reason for that is, and this
came up when Chris was being questioned, it is vitally important to
industry that we have a competitive marketplace for TADs. When you look
at the 877 casks we have loaded, we've done that successfully, we've
done that safely, we've done that cost effectively. That's a pretty
perfect\--it is a perfect record over a lot of operations, a lot of fuel
handling, a lot of loading operations, and I think a lot of basis for
why we have such a good, at least that part of the system that's in
place, is because we have a competitive marketplace where utilities can
choose from amongst multiple vendors to meet their needs. They can find
the vendors that best meet their individual needs. So, that's been one
of the great successes of the TADs. DOE has kept that alive throughout
the process, and it is vitally important that we continue to have
choices of TAD vendors throughout.

Going on to the next slide, who will do what? You see again, as I
mentioned, there's a lot of balls in DOE's court. I don't think there's
anything on there that we haven't spoken of already, and DOE has
demonstrated to us that they're making good on their commitment so far.
A couple big ones remain.

Vendors have, you know, it looks like a few things there, but those are
biggies. The utilities, of course, have to buy the TADs and load them
and store them on site.

NRC has the important role of regulating consistently all the way
through the process. So, that, you know, a lot of integration has gone
into that. We all know what we're doing on this, and I think that's a
good thing.

Moving to the next slide, I'm going to talk about some of the specific
utility perspectives, and then David Blee is going to come up here and
talk about some of the vendor perspectives. Then, we'll get together at
the conclusion. We have a lot of overlap between our membership, a lot
of NEI members are USTC members, and vice versa. But, I tend to speak
more from the utility side, and David will speak more from the vendor
side.

TADs must be compatible with existing systems. I think with the
specification, we don't have any problems there yet. TADs will require
more storage space. There's going to be more of them. So, the pads have
to be bigger. That is a problem at some sites. A few sites may be real
estate limited. Of course, it's less of a problem if DOE starts picking
up fuel in the near term. So, the sooner you show up, the less we're
concerned about that. But, that could get to become a problem as we
deploy TADs somewhere.

Must recognize that procurement decisions are made five years in
advance. And, some of the strategic planning windows are longer than
that. I think with especially the utility entities, as they're defined
in procurement space, participating in the procurement now, I think
obviously the long-range business planning discussions have at least
begun and some of the negotiations in place. So, some of that is
encouraging. But, you know, you can't just switch over to TADs like
that. There needs to be advanced planning, because what you're talking
about here is assuring that you have sufficient space in your pool for
four TADs and continuing to support your refueling outages, and you need
to know well in advance that you have that so the TADs need to be there
in advance. There needs to be certainty.

Proven design and manufacturing capabilities. Again, keeping all the
vendors in the business there is key to making sure we have sufficient
capability. Radiation exposures must be maintained ALARA. We have a very
good track record there. We intend to maintain that record, and that's
even more important with TADs, because we'll be loading more of them.
And, we had a lot of discussions in that regard when we were agreeing on
the final spec.

Cost to utilities must be comparable with existing systems, must make a
good business decision. There was some discussion about whether it was a
legal thing or an economic thing. Certainly, there is economic value to
having DOE agreement for acceptance. And, I will not get in between
utilities in their negotiations with DOE. Everybody is different.
There's some agreements in place. There's some frameworks. People know
what they're getting on their agreements. What would they get with TADs?
However you play those cards, the fuels manager at the utility site
needs to go to his boss and be able to explain the business case, as to
why the TAD is a sound business decision. And, it can't be just because
you feel good about loading one, as much as I feel good about them being
loaded. But, there does need to be a business case for these. And,
again, the TAD designs need to evolve.

So, with that, David will share some of the specific vendor
perspectives, and then I'll have one point to make at the end.

BLEE: Thank you, Rod.

As Rod noted, we have been working together for the past 16 months, our
two organizations, since the DOE announced it was moving forward with
the TAD. I think that has been very productive, and we're pleased that
you are continuing to focus on this important initiative. We welcome the
transparency in the process. We believe that progress is being made, and
I think it's worth looking at why we have been making progress
collectively with respect to the various parties that are involved, the
DOE and the utilities and the so-called technology companies, as well as
the NRC.

I think what it comes down to is, one, this program is predicated on
maximum reliance on the private sector. These aren't my viewgraphs, by
the way. These are just a few thoughts here. Maximum reliance on the
private sector. DOE is not attempting to be a market maker, as it was
with the ill-fated MPC program about ten years ago.

Transparency. This has been a transparent program from the beginning in
terms of the conceptual design, specifications, and as the iterative
processes have gone forward.

Three is it is encourage customer focus. And, I think that's very
important. It's the first time we really have been able to integrate
utilities into the process. There have been on the surface some utility
interaction, but this has forced it because really, this is the
intersection of a lot of things, the intersection of fuel acceptance,
transportation, public confidence, the standard contract, disposition,
the surface facility. This is a key integrator and a very, very
important initiative.

And, I think fourth is a sense of urgency. We've really seen a sense of
urgency from the DOE. I think that speaks well to Ward and Chris and
their organizations, and I think that we have seen\--and, it is tied, of
course, to the license application, too, so that all lends itself to
urgency. But, I think it's been a good catalyst, a good example of how
we can work together in other areas in terms of the basic tenets of
transparency, customer focus, sense of urgency and transparency
throughout the process.

In any event, with respect to specific so-called vendor TAD
perspectives, the USTC represents companies that, what I call technology
companies, but most people call vendors, who actually design and license
the casks, and manufacturers that actually will fabricate the casks
under contract to the utilities. And, we believe that, as I said, this
is headed in the right direction.

Going to the first point here, DOE has been responsive to suggested
changes. The initial conceptual design had nickel gadolinium, uncoated
carbon steel, and had a length that just\--had key components there that
would not have been feasible, didn't turn out to be feasible, and the
DOE adapted to the suggestions, and I think we've got a good product to
show for it.

There's a large amount of work that must be done in a short period of
time. In particular, as we go forward, there needs to be a focus on NRC
resources. The NRC at the same time as they're considering the TAD will
be also considering dry storage applications, the other things they do
in the spent fuel storage office.

I think Bill Brock of the NRC has both the proven experience and a long
track record in this area, but he isn't the master of his budget and the
resources he has, and I think we need to make sure, certainly on the
Part 63 side of things, and they've moved to integrate those, but we
need to make sure that the NRC has resources to consider these designs
if we are going to make the 2012 deadline.

With respect to\--you do have a new player in this as opposed to what
has been done in the private sector before, in the sense that DOE is the
contractor, the customer, and there will be a dual focus. In terms of
the licensing, development of this project, DOE obviously will be, at
least at the beginning of this process, their turnaround times will be
something\--they will have to have very expeditious turnaround times in
terms of their review of the license applications and preliminary
milestones as we go forward.

Lead times must be recognized. I think we told Chris initially that we
thought this would take five years from beginning of the design process
to licensing and actual deployment. And, I think in this case, they
followed suit in the sense that they're moving forward and 2012 is the
first delivery, so I think that's reasonable and we've got to keep our
eye on that one.

With respect to material suppliers, there is concern just generally
through the market in terms of some of the materials, and this isn't
just necessarily specific to the TAD in terms of stainless steel and
other materials, in terms of neutron absorber material that will\--large
quantities of this will be needed. They will be needed in any event for
the dry storage. So, that's a growing concern, not necessarily
restricted just to the TAD.

Lessons learned have been valuable. Again, we're pleased that there is a
focus on a demonstration. Chris didn't actually\--you had talked earlier
about a prototype. It's not really a prototype. But, what is called for
in the RP is delivery of four TAD systems\--well, if they pick four
contractors, each contractor is required to deliver one TAD system to a
utility partner that they're working with. And, we think while this is
not a prototype, it effectively is a demonstration project that's
something we think is very, very important and it is date specific. That
doesn't mean that it will be limited to one, but certainly that is what
is called for in the RP, and we think a demonstration process is
important, and we're delighted that DOE adopted that in their RFP.

Additional seismic requirements. Dr. Kadak mentioned the seismic
criteria, the 3Gs. That is a new wrinkle that wasn't in the proof of
concept that came out in the final spec. That is an issue that we're
assessing, and I don't have an answer for you today, Andy, on that, but
that is something that will be a challenge certainly, and that is
something that's being assessed and we will stay in touch with you on
that.

KADAK: You might talk about other constraints relative to the seismic,
like tie downs not permitted, all that other stuff.

BLEE: Let's see, that's beyond my portfolio. But, again, in terms
of\--it was just this third requirement. There are several requirements
in there. But, it's the third requirement that was put in there in terms
of this 3G, and the first two actually we were anticipating. It's the
third one came up at the very end. It was included in the final spec,
and we're going to live with it. It is a challenge, and I think it can
be addressed and we're working to see how we're going to address that.

So, the bottom line is we believe the TAD design is achievable. We are
hoping that DOE will meet its schedule. In the RFP, it said that the
decision\--awards will be made within 30 to 45 days after receipt of the
RFPs. The RFPs were submitted on August 24^th^. That would be roughly
September 24^th^ for the\--or October 8, sometime between September
24^th^ and October 8^th^ in terms of the award, and any slippage in that
schedule would obviously, for a day's slippage, potentially, in meeting
the very aggressive schedule called for in terms of getting these
designs into the NRC and docketed within a year.

In terms of the TAD overall, from the vendor perspective, this is simply
another iteration of a design that is\--some of these vendors have done
two dozen iterations of their dry storage design. In this case, it has
certain requirements which make it disposable, but it is using some
tangible components that have been used before in other systems. So,
it's an aggressive schedule. What we don't want to see is on the front
part of it, any slippage. We don't have any indication that there will
be slippage in that award, but I notice that Chris didn't say anything
affirmatively about that, but maybe because it's procurement sensitive,
but we do hope that 30 to 45 day projection will be met.

Next slide? Again, with respect to the transportability, we think the
physical dimensions are very similar to existing dual purpose canister
dimensions. The transportation cask designs will be similar. Minimal
burnup credit will be necessary for transportation due to reduced
capacity.

With respect to\--we don't think this will result in increased
shipments. We think DOE had a very modest case in terms of the number of
casks in their rail car load. We think that simply by increasing the
cask shipments by one or two, that you can maintain the same amount of
shipments, total shipments to the program.

You did have a question on the truck transport. There is no truckable
TAD design. That is something that is consistent with the mostly rail
scenario. I don't think this would preclude the development of a truck
TAD design if it was deemed feasible. But, it's something like that will
have to be addressed later on.

In closing, I would say the TAD is an important initiative. We welcome
your focus on this, and that it has potential to contribute to
simplifying integrating the fuel cycle management, increasing
stakeholder confidence, and I think tangible progress has been made. I
believe that we're on track towards a 2012 delivery if these initial
steps in the next few months can be made and taken by the DOE.

And, Rod, you're going to cover the last graph?

MC CULLUM: Yes, if you can just move to the last slide? I'd like to
leave everyone with this image, just to get us back to the subject of
the real value of the TADs is in the systems integration. Those of us
who live and work in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area know it's a
city that's very dependent on its bridges, and we quite often get in our
cars and park on the beltway and wait patiently for opportunities to
cross these bridges sometimes. But, you know, there are many bridges
that make the city work, and we're, in fact, replacing one of the key
bridges, the Wilson Bridge, with a new bridge these days.

The important thing to note here is I really do believe that TADs are
important. They're the pillars of the first bridge that will be built to
cross this gap that now exists, the status quo where we are pretty much
simply storing material to the true world of integrate used fuel
management, where we're doing all those things that I talked about in
that one earlier graph. So, this is the first bridge. It's probably a
little two-lane crossing. Then, you know, perhaps it leads to more
substantial freeway bridges, and then futuristic modes of transport.

But, it is very important that we make that first crossing of that gap
and get to the world of integrated used fuel management, and we have
made in the last 16 months, more progress in that direction than has
ever been made before. And, I'm looking to DOE hitting those balls that
are still in their court out of the park so we can continue to do that.

Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you, Rod and David. I'm going to ask the first question.
If we could go back to Slide 11, I want to pick up on a question that I
asked Chris. The next to the last bullet here, the cost to utilities
must be comparable with existing systems, I sense this disconnect right
now where the utilities are basically saying, you know, we've run this
as a sound business, if it's going to cost us a lot more to use TADs for
on-site storage when we could have put the waste in DPCs, then the
business case suggests that we need to be economically incentivized to
use TADs rather than what we would use in its place.

From what I hear from DOE, that doesn't seem to be an active discussion
or negotiation item right now because of the feeling that there's a
legal basis for utilities basically accepting that they should be using
TADs, because otherwise, there is really no place for dealing with
taking title of the waste that's currently in DPCs. Do you want to
comment on whether I understand the situation properly, and what is
happening to try to resolve those differences?

MC CULLUM: Yes, I'm glad you asked that question. I certainly appreciate
Chris's position. I certainly understand that DOE is not going to public
on the record compromise its negotiating position. But, I think I would
offer you a one pretty substantial piece of evidence that these
negotiations are real and that they are ongoing. I mean, Ward Sproat
talked about them being ongoing. We know that DOE has received bids in
response from the vendor teams on his procurement. These bids, by
definition, had to include interest by utility entities, so we know that
the utilities have engaged DOE in these discussions. DOE has already
paid out, I think last time I heard Ward speak, over \$250 million in
settlements and lawsuits.

There are two major utilities that have settlement agreements with DOE,
Duke and Exelon, where they get certain reimbursed costs, not just from
the past, but going forward for activities that they spend on their site
due to DOE's non-performance. So, I think what has to happen is the
utilities have to weigh the value of what's being offered in the TADs
against what they are likely to get in a settlement absent the TADs. And
again, the only thing I can do, I cannot speak for the individual
members' negotiating positions, nor would I want to say anything to
compromise those positions, as Chris will not compromise his negotiating
position, but just if you look where the procurement is, it is very
strong evidence that those negotiations are real and they're ongoing.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. John?

GARRICK: Speaking of integration, organizational integration in
particular, one of the continuing concerns that this Board has had is
the desire to move in a direction of realism as much as possible in the
design of this facility, and to arrive at practical solutions, not
necessarily solutions that are adopted just because it makes the
regulatory compliance easier. And, we are particularly concerned about
the industry resource as a part of this process, and the mechanisms that
have been employed to get enhanced interaction between industry and DOE
on this project.

You have talked a number\--addressed a number of points about how this
has been improving and working, and what have you. I guess I'd like you
to pick one or two things that you think have been most important in
providing the public with assurance that the industry perspective and
the industry experience is part of the foundation of the design basis
for this project.

MC CULLUM: Well, I think you kind of have to deconstruct the record a
little bit there. But, if you look at the final specification, you look
at what DOE is calling for, and you look at what is not in there, such
as nickel gadolinium, carbon steel, you look at the way that our
experience in loading is reflected in terms of the radiation protection
requirements and the shielding, and I think you're raising a second
point here, which I'll just simply have to take back, which is how you
make that transparent to the public.

But, you have a specification that is not, and by deconstructing the
record, you can go back to things that were in previous DOE repository
designs, nickel gadolinium is certainly a matter of record, and you can
see a difference between, you know, the design DOE was talking about for
its waste packages more than 16 months ago, and what is in that
specification. And, the difference is entirely due to the fact that
industry experience has been brought into that. Every one of the
vendors, and a number of utilities and other players have come to the
table. They, on their own time and their own dime, have come to
meetings, multiple meetings with DOE to get these issues resolved.

But, how do I package that up and wrap it up so the public sees it all?
That's interesting. I think this meeting is an important part of that. I
mean, I think we are putting on the record this discussion that we have
in fact done that. But, if you look at where DOE was 16 months ago, and
you look at the specification there, I think that speaks to\--that's the
best thing I have right now to speak to that.

GARRICK: Well, can you just comment briefly on the role of such
organizations as NEI and USTC in making this happen?

MC CULLUM: Oh, I'd love to brag, yes. We facilitated the discussions. We
hosted a number of the meetings. You know, between David's offices and
NEI's offices, you have a very comprehensive coverage of the industry. I
mean, when I say there's a lot of overlap, the majority of the members
of, you know, the major vendors, for example, are in both organizations,
a lot of the transportation integrators, but David plays a more focused
role with some of those. We play a broader role. Utilities are our
biggest dues payers, and we were able to facilitate this. I think we
were able to drive on DOE. You may have heard some of that today. I
mean, we are continuing to push for DOE to swing at those balls that are
in their court, and to hit them soundly. And, I think that's an
important part of our role.

Yes, David?

BLEE: This has been refreshing, it's been groundbreaking, but the fact
of the matter is there is no mechanism for this being repeated in other
programs. As you know, you all are beating the drum on the surface
facility. But, there was very little interaction at all with industry on
the surface facility, which was just critical, in which they had
considerable expertise to bring to bear there.

When you go to other countries, I just returned from Sweden and Finland,
and a number of you had a trip there, it's being done by the private
sector, so, there is a mechanism for the private sector, but the
transparency of their programs is remarkable. And, that enhances public
safety.

So, in terms of industry input into other elements of the program, in
this case, DOE recognized that, well, consistent with the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act in the transportation sector, maximum reliance on the private
sector to achieve transportation oriented projects. That is the law of
the land. But, too, they welcomed that, they did not try to become a
market maker. But, it has been isolated really to this, and, of course,
there have been ad hoc, I think that, you know, you have a director of
the program who comes from the private sector, who has recognized us and
brought people in.

But, in many respects, you know, I'll give you credit for forcing the
focus on this. That certainly has, and welcoming the private sector up
here to even give our views on this, I think that has been very helpful,
and we hope you'll do that in other areas, because I think that's where
you can serve as a bridge to the private sector as far as some kind of
standing organization. This has been very much ad hoc between
organizations in terms of we were\--DOE was not resistant to the idea of
our getting involved in sort of a working group together. But, again,
it's one of a kind so far, and once they get into the RFP process, or
the contractual work going forward, there is not necessarily a standing
entity that will survive this process. But, I think you can be a
catalyst there and you can be a bridge to a lot of this.

GARRICK: Thank you.

MC CULLUM: Yes, I'd just like to add, I mean, we talked about building
the first bridge here. I think what you're saying is maybe there needs
to be more, and we'd agree, and both of our organizations would be happy
to facilitate other interactions.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. I've got Andy, then David, and then Ali, and then Thure.

KADAK: Yes, I'd like to ask about this integration question. One of the
criteria that was not mentioned here was thermal loading. You are able
to load apparently packages of greater than 18 or 20, or however many
kilowatts in the package, provided all you need to do is meet the
transportation requirements?

MC CULLUM: That's correct. That's why the middle name of the TAD is
aging, because as long as we meet the transportation requirements, we
can load what we can load, and then they will sit out in that earthquake
proof aging pad until they're ready to go in the mountain.

KADAK: And, relative to the integration, have you had a chance to look
at the TSM assumptions about what you will be doing when you get these
storage canisters, these TADs, in terms of do you need to build your own
on-site storage facility, or do you wait for the truck to come, or the
train to come? Have you looked at that?

MC CULLUM: Well, yes, and I think Chris addressed this in his
presentation. Right now, we don't see any substantive change, except for
the fact that we would be loading more containers. I mean, if a utility
has not reached the point in their pool where they need dry storage,
they probably would wait on buying a TAD, unless DOE was saying we're
coming to the gate, you know, I'm sure they'd jump at that. But, once a
utility has already built an SVC (phonetic), or is planning to build
their first SVC if the TAD works into that planning window, it would
simply be loading a different canister into systems that are fully
compatible with the existing systems we use.

KADAK: So, the answer is yes, you have reviewed their planning
assumptions on the TSM?

MC CULLUM: Yes. Well, no, not specifically the TSM. This comes from our
interactions that led to the spec and through the procurement. We do not
see in what is being called for in that specification anything that
would substantially change the way we do business in terms of loading
dry storage.

KADAK: That's a TAD spec, not a use spec?

MC CULLUM: A what spec?

KADAK: A TAD spec, but not a use spec in terms of implementation. What
I'm trying to get at is have you guys looked at what DOE has assumed
relative to how these TADs will be managed at your sites so it can be
effectively integrated into their delivery system, and the thermal
loading is an important characteristic of that.

MC CULLUM: Well, again, without going specifically to the TSM, the
answer is no, we haven't looked at that.

KADAK: Okay. Now, the last question, I'm sorry, just one more, from an
economic standpoint, is it realistic to think that the TADs will be
comparably priced to a much larger canister?

MC CULLUM: No. We don't expect that, and that's the subject of
negotiations in terms of what incentives DOE is offering so that the
fuels manager can go to his boss and explain why it's a sound business
decision to use a TAD. There's no illusion that a TAD will be priced at
the same, you know, on a per assembly basis, the same as an existing
system.

KADAK: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

First of all, I'd like to commend your negotiations, and so on and so
forth. As you probably know, many members of this Board have been very
much in favor of a dialogue between industry and DOE.

MC CULLUM: Thank you.

DUQUETTE: And, secondly, many of us on this Board have been in favor of
the TAD concept from the very beginning that it was introduced.

I have a very naïve question, and I know the number changes all the time
with acquisitions, but how many utilities currently are\--what
percentage of the utilities that have nuclear plants have more or less
signed on to this?

MC CULLUM: Well, that would be getting in between the negotiations. I
mean, nobody is going to publicly\--and, I hate to give this answer, I
really do.

DUQUETTE: But, is it 50 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent?

MC CULLUM: I can only tell you that when we had the interactions with
DOE, we had probably anywhere between 50 and 80 percent of the reactors
represented at the table all the way through the process in terms of the
utility participation in the interactions. As to what utilities have
partnered\--or entitied with what vendors, inside the procurement, I
can't speak to that.

DUQUETTE: I don't want specific names.

MC CULLUM: I can also say that NEI is the policy-making body for the
nuclear industry, and what you're seeing there on integrated used fuel
management is the official policy of the industry. It's been endorsed by
the CNOs of\--chief nuclear officers of all the major utilities, 104
nuclear plants. So, the TAD initiative is within our overall industry
policy, and the industry participation in the TAD development had so far
been, you know, definitely majority, and I don't see, again, as long as
DOE makes good on its end of the bargain, I don't see any reason why
that would change.

DUQUETTE: And, a pseudo-technical question. You mentioned that the
amount of waste that still is to be generated could pretty much all be
handled in new TADs. Do you see a situation where you will unload the
current DPCs at the utility sites into TADs for shipping?

MC CULLUM: I don't see any such situation. I think DOE is designing into
their facility the capability to unload them there, and given that when
the TADs show up, we'll have fuel to put in them, I think the
system\--the system actually will work very well the way it's being
designed, and I don't see any reason to bring the DPCs back into the
utility pools.

ABKOWITZ: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

Mine are related to the design of the TADs in terms of requirements. I
assume that the truckable version is a minor variant of the rail ones;
is that the case?

BREE: Yeah, it would be a\--right now, the only truck casks in existent
in terms of\--is one assembly, and that's just a simple legal weight
truck. This would be a scaled down version, in terms of no one has
actually come out with a concept, but in terms of designs that I've
seen, it would be a multi-element scaled down version, and you'd have to
look at the cost benefit of that, and the feasibility of that just in
terms of fitting with the overall program. But, essentially, it would be
down-scaled to fit\--be carried on a truck.

MOSLEH: Yes. And, then, another one is on one of the slides, I think
it's Slide 12, said additional seismic requirements would be a
challenge. What do you use as a reference for additional? I know 3G, and
then what would be the level that would not be a challenge?

MC CULLUM: Well, I guess this is best illustrated, I have two versions,
I have the draft spec on my shelf, and I have the final spec, and the
draft spec was about a half inch thick and the final spec is about three
inches thick. The difference is entirely due to the appendices that were
added on soils and things like that due to the seismic requirements.

The vendors have, in making proposals, committed to address these, and
it's important to point out here these only really come into play with
the aging overpack design, primarily come into play with the aging
overpack design. So, all the challenge is meetable. You know, it's a
tremendous additional amount of work, as reflected by that difference.
And, when we say TADs must continue to evolve, this is what we mean. I
would think that TAD number one and TAD number 172 might be\--TAD number
172 might be improved, and I would hope we could\--that DOE, in future
licensing iterations, would become more realistic on its seismic
analysis.

ABKOWITZ: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

A number of times you've alluded to the fact that on a number of issues,
the ball is in DOE's court. And, so, I'm just kind of wondering from a
whole process perspective, sort of what are the rate limiting steps from
your viewpoint, and again, both from your side and DOE's side, that have
to be done to make this a real place where you can actually cross the
bridge? What are the things that have to be\--

MC CULLUM: There's really two things. The first thing is in terms of
completing the procurement on schedule, and that also includes some
negotiating on the incentives. So, there's the economic legal piece of
this. If DOE continues to, in its season of delivery here, if it
continues to make good on promises, that's doable.

The second thing is obviously as the vendors are going forward with NRC
and seeking Part 71 and 72 licenses, DOE needs to be plugged in enough
to continue to be giving us the assurance that everything is okay in
Part 63 space. And, that implies the continued openness and interactions
on the part of the Department, and certainly inquisitiveness on the part
of this Board doesn't hurt there.

So, really, in terms of all those dotting lines I showed on the
regulatory graphic, keeping information moving up and down those dotted
lines, that's the second thing. And, the first thing is the financial
incentive procurement piece.

BLEE: I would just add a couple thoughts also. You will need funding.
Dr. Sproat talked about his funding issues. But, you will need funding
through 2012 to make this happen. And, clearly, you're going to have to
have customers. Right now, what we know is if you have the funding to
make this happen through 2012, there's going to be four TADs delivered
in the United States somewhere, maybe three or four, depending on how
things evolve in terms of there are fees. But, you need the utility
customer ultimately, is what Rob was referring to.

And, I think once the\--the vendors need to deliver. Once they, assuming
that the RFPs go forward in the next 10 to 15 days, or the awards go
forward, the vendors have a very aggressive schedule to meet. And, then
really, the focus right now is moving into the NRC's court, so to speak,
and I think if you had the NRC in here sometime for one of your
meetings, I think you'd find that very instructive. I think they are
ready for this\--they are resource limited, to some extent, but I
believe they've identified the resources certainly for the next fiscal
year to move forward with this.

ABKOWITZ: At the risk of turning the baton back to Dr. Garrick late, I'm
going to allow Andy Kadak to once again\--

GARRICK: I stole five minutes of your time. So, you have a little.

KADAK: I'd like to ask about, you mentioned interim storage and NEI's
position on that, in the context of this discussion. Clearly, the effort
to site an interim storage facility will take money, will take
distractions from the Department of Energy, and I'm just wondering where
NEI is relative to priorities about moving this process forward compared
to getting an interim storage facility moving?

MC CULLUM: We see the two moving together hand in hand. Interim storage
is a very high priority for our industry. There's no question we want
DOE to begin moving fuel away from the reactor sites as soon as
possible. Interim storage is best done, though, against the backdrop of
a successful Yucca Mountain project, and that's trying the imagery on
the bridges and the integrated used fuel management I'm trying to leave
here, is\--the government cannot say okay, we're going to do interim
storage now, it's an alternative to Yucca Mountain. That's not
acceptable to anybody. So, yeah, that goes to funding, that goes to
freeing up the waste fund, that goes to all kinds of things, some of
which might not be in place right now, but we don't see those as being
separable. We want to see interim storage and we understand that to
sustain that, you need a successful Yucca Mountain project continuing to
knock down milestones. So, that's the answer.

KADAK: Relative to the resources and the effort of DOE, recognizing, as
you both know, the successful MRS program we had a few years ago, the
successful private fuel storage we have already licensed, do you really
think the DOE should be spending its time doing that instead of, because
I think it will have to be kind of an instead of, because they don't
have the money, they don't have the time, they don't have the resources?

MC CULLUM: Well, I think the point of disagreement here, and I think
we'll just have to agree to disagree, is on the term instead of. I mean,
there's \$20 billion in the nuclear waste fund. If that money is
available to make good on the DOE federal obligation, there doesn't need
to be an instead of.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. Again, Rod and David, thank you for your participation,
and we very much appreciate the effort that industry is making on behalf
of this project.

John?

GARRICK: Thank you. And, I'm just going to turn right around and turn it
over to Howard Arnold for the next couple of presentations.

ARNOLD: All right.

The surface facilities we're about to hear about are not those I saw
when I was new to this Board three years ago. Thank goodness. Good
riddance to dry handling and a million lifts.

Aside from criteria issues like seismic, which will not be addressed
fully today, the main issues on my radar screen are those of providing
enough flexibility, especially in sizing of wet handling, to cover the
wide range of future scenarios, delay of rail lines, timing of TAD
availability, and some of the things we've already been talking about,
and, particularly the percentage of spent fuel that won't be in TADs at
the time of reloading.

Another issue on my radar screen is a degree of detail in design and
safety analysis, which are so far available. My most recent experience
was with a one-step license for our centrifuge enrichment plant, and
perhaps that spoiled me. And, that's also the path being used for new
reactor plants. Essentially a final design would be required at the time
of the license application. But, Yucca Mountain is not being licensed
under that set of regulations. It's going forward under the class
two-step process. This license application is my understanding the
equivalent of an old PSAR, preliminary safety analysis report. Maybe I'm
wrong about that, but that's the way I see it.

In any event, our Board is not the judge of the sufficiency of detail at
any particular point in the licensing step. That's between the NRC and
DOE. Our job is to review what we see, and comment where we see gaps or
issues, and that's what I intend to do.

We will hear first from Bob Slovic, who prior to joining DOE in early
'04, had 24 years of experience with Bechtel on commercial nuclear
plants, and I think that's a great way to start this.

SLOVIC: Okay, thank you very much.

First slide, please. We unfortunately, or fortunately for us and
unfortunately for everybody else, we talk in a lot of shorthands. So,
this particular slide is a number of the acronyms that we use. I
apologize, but they're there. It's one slide of that. So, you'll see
there dual-purpose canister, geological repository operations area,
preclosure safety analysis, which is a product and also the group that
does the product. So, my friend, Dr. Frank, is here and he'll talk to
you later about that. And, you see TAD. So, these are, if you hear
shorthand, if you hear me using shorthand in it, you'll go to it.

The next slide, please? The design of the product is actually being done
in a full-sized three dimensional model, and this is a picture of the
model of the site plan as it existed, oh, about a week or so ago. It
changes daily. You'll see things like here, this is a utility facility,
and it looks like a bunch of sticks, and stuff, because they haven't
finished modeling yet. But, the day that this picture was taken out of
the model, that's what it looked like.

The dark brown is essentially earth work, doesn't necessarily have all
the buildings on it. This again is looking\--this is west. This is not a
very good representation, but that's the north portal. That's where the
waste forms would be transferred to the repository, to the subsurface
repository. The building here is the initial handling facility. This is
a maintenance facility for the transport and emplacement vehicle. These
are some more administrative buildings. This is the wet handling
facility. This is canister receipt and closure facility number one, and
this is the receipt facility. And, we'll get to what each one of those
does.

Further down in the model, but you can't see, it's off the page, there
are two more spots. When we got our requirements to change the
repository to the mostly canister based system, we got the requirement
that 90 percent of the commercial fuel would come to us in TADs. The
other 10 percent would come uncanistered, and uncanistered means either
in casks or in a dual purpose canister. And, we would repackage that
amount.

So, we came up with a system that would meet those requirements. The
system has flexibility. It has some additional capacity that's beyond
that 90/10 split. Anyway, the site plan.

So, the next slide is a little complicated. Hopefully, if you've got a
magnifying glass, you could use it. But, we get various waste forms. I
don't know if you're familiar with the old design. We had single
facilities that were all things to all waste forms, and now we have
multiple facilities, each one with essentially a different purpose.

We get uncanistered commercial fuel. We get dual purpose canisters,
which are for our purposes are uncanistered, because as of now, we can't
dispose of them. We get DOE canisters of high-level waste, which is
vitrified glass, or DOE SNF, which is of various and sundry forms that
come to us. We have the Naval canister, which is also DOE SNF, and then
we have the TAD canister. And, for the purposes of the design, the TAD
canister and the Naval canister, at least the TAD canister in it's
initial configuration, was the same size as the Naval long canister. It
facilitated our efforts to get started.

Commercial fuel is going to come to us in truck casks. I don't believe
there are any licensed truck casks now, but there have been designs in
the past, or in dual purpose canisters, or in TADs from down here. The
dual purpose canisters and the TADs will come via rail. And, that's a
picture of a transportation cask.

We also have the capability to\--again, there's no transportation cask
for it, but the initial handling facility has the capability to receive
high-level waste canisters in truck casks in that facility. The initial
handling facility is the facility that's uniquely designed to handle the
Navy transportation cask. The canister didn't change sizes, but the Navy
changed the transportation cask size, which necessitated a larger crane
and a different crane height in order to make it work.

The canister receipt and closure facility is the work horse facility.
Its purpose is, as stated in its name, to receive canisters and to load
them into waste packages and to close the waste packages. So, it's the
point where waste is transferred from its shipping or storage container
into the waste package to go underground.

The wet handling facility is designed specifically for the 10 percent of
the fuel that's supposed to come to us as either individual assemblies
in transportation cask or in dual purpose canisters.

And, the receipt facility is designed to allow us to uncouple receipt
from emplacement. We have a requirement to receive 3,000 metric tons of
commercial fuel in a given year once we've got the full repository
going. And, we have to receive it in 25 years, but we have a 50 year
emplacement period. So, there can be a break. We don't have to emplace
everything we receive right away.

We do have aging pads. They have 2,500 spaces for TADs or dual purpose
canisters, with approximate capacity of about 21,000 metric tons of
heavy metal. The preferred approach is to load the waste packages and
take them directly to the drift. We do have, we're not going to talk
about, but we do have thermal limits now as to when we can emplace,
which affects the aging pad and other things.

Next slide, please. Again, we've split the waste forms between
facilities. High-level waste, while there's a capability to do it in the
initial handling facility, essentially all of it will go through the
canister receipt and closure facilities. Naval SNF canisters will only
go through the initial handling facility. DOE SNF canisters will only go
through the canister receipt and closure facilities.

Uncanistered CSNF, and that's either individual fuel assemblies or fuel
in dual purpose canisters, will go through the wet handling facility.
And, the TADs, commercial fuel in TADs, goes through the canister
receipt and closure facility primarily for disposal, but they're
actually loaded in the wet handling facility, so we have capabilities to
handle TADs there. And, they're also, they process through the receipt
facility from transportation casks into aging overpacks or side cask.

So, the principal features that we have, in the initial handling
facility, we can load and close waste packages. It is an ITS seismic
structure. It does have\--ITS is important to safety, as determined by
the preclosure safety analysis. It has important to safety mechanical
systems, and it does have a limited amount of dry remediation
capability. We're not interested in reconstituting fuel, or anything
like that, but if we have to replace the bolts on a transportation cask,
or something, to get it to work, that's what we're intending to do.

Canister receipt and closure facility, the other facility with waste
package loading and closure, where the IHF will do approximately 400,
the other 10,600 will go through one of the three canister receipt and
closure facilities. Again, it's an ITS structure, ITS mechanical
handling. It has, because of the considerations of a dropped and
breached commercial fuel canister, we do have ITS confinement, and we
have ITS HEPA exhaust, which is a mitigation thing that we can talk
about under preclosure safety. And, it's also powered by ITS emergency
power.

So, the difference between IHF and canister receipt is the waste forms.
These two particular waste forms, HLW and Naval SNF, do not require
mitigation in order to meet the dose requirements of 10 CFR Part 63. We
do require them for commercial fuel, and, so, that's why the IHF has
these. Because the wet handling facility and the receipt facility both
have the same capability to handle commercial fuel in canisters, either
in DPCs or in TADs, they also have the confinement, the HEPA filtered
exhaust and the emergency power. But, you notice that neither the wet
handling facility or the receipt facility have waste package loading and
closure capability. So, that's a breakdown by the waste forms.

I can't show the entire layout of the\--this is part of the canister
receipt and closure facility. For safeguards and security reasons, I
can't show the entire surrounding areas. But, this is taken from the
model, and this is the area where we, when we receipt transportation
casks, they are received in their 10 CFR Part 71 configuration. And,
this is where we take them out of their Part 71 configuration. It's
inside. The building is reinforced concrete, approximately four foot
thick walls. This particular area has HEPA filtered, important to safety
ventilation powered by emergency electrical power. This structure is
designed to confine any radioactivity dynamically if we have an event
sequence in there.

I need to add that drop of a transportation cask is one of the event
sequences that we have considered. It's not a Category 1 event, so it's
not expected to occur in the life of the plant. But, we're designing for
it because we can't exclude it on a probabilistic basis.

So, in this area, and if this were whatever the transportation cask is,
we bring it in to the building, we shut the building up. All of the
safety systems are running. We have an operator in the facility that
says okay, everything is ready to go, to start doing your jobs.

So, the first thing that happens is the impact limiters, the inflatable
or non-inflatable ones, come off the transportation cask. There's a 200
ton NOG-1, Type 1 single failure-proof crane in this area that will lift
the cask. The casks are nominally 125 tons without impact limiters. So,
they will be raised up, verticalized, and then put into this
device\--well, the device is here. This is shown with platforms under
it. This is a cask transfer trolley, and its purpose is to maintain the
stability, among other things, it moves the cask for unloading, but it
also maintains the stability of the cask in seismic events.

So, when the cask is upended, it's put into here. It's prepped. If there
are outer lids, the outer lids are removed. If there are bolts that hold
on the shield plugs or the shield lids, they are removed. And, when the
cask is ready, it's transferred into this area, which is an unloading
room. There's only one trolley on each train. There are two trains in
the canister receipt and closure facility. There's only one trolley in
each train, but the model has depicted it in two locations.

So, if you go to the next slide, please? This is a little bit smaller, a
little harder to see, but this is the area we were just looking at. This
is the prep area. And, then, when the cask is prepped, it's moved into
here. We do have flexibility to accommodate different size, different
length casks for different things, because some of the casks have to be
shorter because of the waste forms inside of them. But, we have
provisions to basically accept any casks that we would anticipate
having.

All these operations out here are shielded by the transportation cask
itself, by work platforms, by other things, but all the activities are
accessible by operators to do the work.

Once it's moved into this area, the unloading area, there are shield
doors that are shut, and there's a shield gate in the top of the room.

Meanwhile, we would have brought in the appropriate waste package empty
into the other side, and the unloading process is the reverse of the
loading. So, an empty waste package is brought in horizontally. It's put
on its emplacement pallet. The emplacement pallet is how it's handled to
get it down into the emplacement drift in the subsurface. The trolley
upends it, and it moves to the loading position.

Once it's in the loading position, depending on what we're doing, if
this was a TAD, it's a one transfer, one canister out of the
transportation cask into the waste package. If it's a co-disposal waste
package, which co-disposes both high-level waste and DOE SNF, then it's
multiple transfers to load the waste package.

Once the waste package is in place and the cask is in place, the doors
are shut, and these then become\--I'm sorry\--we don't allow personnel
access to it during the transfer because if you see, there's not a hard
connection between the top of the cask and the underside. So, as we're
pulling the canister up into the canister transfer machine, there would
be a significant exposure in there, so no personnel access is allowed in
there then.

The canister transfer machine is essentially a heavy crane, again,
primarily ASME NOG 1, Type 1, with a shielded bell on it. The bell has a
gate on it. There are gates in the floor. We align the canister transfer
machine over the gate, open the gate in the canister transfer machine,
open the gate in the floor. Everything is shielded. And, then, there's a
second trolley on the canister transfer machine that has a hoist on it
that goes down and engages the canister, pulls it up into the bell.
Doors shut, and then moves to the loading position, and the operation is
reversed.

So, all the time during that operation, there is, even though it can be
operated remotely, we still have access to that area.

We also, because this is the area when we're hoisting a canister out of
a cask or lowering it into a waste package, we have\--there's an event
sequence that could occur involving a drop of that particular canister,
failure of equipment, drop of the canister, because of that, these
areas, this room and this room, and there's four of them total, both
have the confinement capability, plus the ITS HEPA filtered exhaust
powered by the ITS electrical.

This is the plan of the transfer room. Here's the prep room that we saw
earlier. Here's an unloading port, another unloading port, and here are
the two loading ports. We also have some staging capability here, a
limited amount. We have the capability to stage two TAD size canisters
over there. For some reason, there's never any intention to do that,
when we bring a TAD canister in, it's to be emplaced, but there may be
some procedural or maintenance requirement that requires us to put us in
staging. So, we have that capability. But, we do intend to use the other
side. Again, because of the co-disposal packages, how the waste will be
shipped to us, we anticipate we'll get a transportation cask of anywhere
from seven to nine DOE SNF canisters, and we only load one per waste
package, so we will then stage them in this area, again, with shield
gates and the canister transfer machine, until we get a series of
shipments, transportation casks of high-level waste, and then we can
load the co-disposal waste packages.

ARNOLD: Excuse me, Bob. We had you down for two separate 20 minute
presentations. Would you rather collapse them into one?

SLOVIC: Yes, I'll just keep going.

ARNOLD: Just keep going and then we'll have a single question and
answer\--

SLOVIC: Right. Originally, the second part was going to be delivered by
someone else.

ARNOLD: Oh, I see. Okay. We'll let you run right through your two
presentations.

SLOVIC: Stop me whenever. I'll go on forever. You know me. Just stop me
when you want to.

ARNOLD: You've got another 20 minutes.

SLOVIC: Okay. The next slide, this is the waste package closure area.
Again, it's a remote system. It's one of the key activities that we have
to demonstrate because the integrity of the outer weld, outer barrier
weld, is very important to the TSPA and to the postclosure activities.
So, we have two robots. I think some of you anyway have been up to INEL
and watched the progress of the welding robots for the closure system.
And, when they're progressing to\--I'll interject\--they're progressing
to build the demonstration facility that will be used to demonstrate the
waste package closure system. Most of our concerns are not that we're
using new equipment, but that we'll be using it in a different way, in
an integrated way. So, that's the difficulty in this.

So, here, the waste package is closed. The inner lid is put on and
welded. The waste package cavity is

dried\--I'm sorry, not dried, is evacuated and backfilled with helium,
and then the outer corrosion barrier lid is put on. It's welded to
multi-pass weld. Non-destructive examination between each pass. And,
then, once the weld is accepted, stress mitigation is performed on the
surface. And, at that point, the waste package is closed and ready to
go.

Next slide? This is the waste package loadout area. You will hear it
called the TEV. It's the transport and emplacement vehicle. It's a
shielded vehicle. And, again, backing up one slide, with the combination
of the\--the waste package transfer trolley is shielded. There's a
shield plug on the top of the waste package. So, again, if there's a
problem with this piece of equipment, you could go in and manually,
unless you're doing transfer, you could go in and maintain the
equipment. So, back to the next one.

So, here, after it's closed in this location, the shield doors open, the
waste package trolley comes out. It's a rail based trolley. There is a
shield plug that's on top of it that protects the\--positions the waste
package and provides some annular shielding. Then, that tilts down and
there is a cart that engages a drive in the floor. There's a cart inside
the waste package trolley on which the emplacement pallet is sitting, on
which the waste package is sitting. So, we don't touch the waste
package. We pull it out.

Meanwhile, the transport and emplacement vehicle has come in. Its doors
are opened. It has a bedplate that's retracted, and then this whole
inverted "U" is lowered on screw jacks so that the waste package on its
emplacement pallet can be pulled into the waste package trolley.

At this point, this gap here is where we will do a visual inspection of
the surface of the waste package. There is a, to be developed,
acceptance criteria for how much of a defect we could tolerate on the
surface of the waste package. So, that's the production.

The handling of canisters in the initial handling facility is very
similar, except there's only a single train in there and a single waste
package closure.

Next, we're going to the wet handling facility. This is a picture of
essentially the pool room, as we call it, the operating area. It has
similar functions to the CRC. Transportation casks come in, either truck
cask or rail based cask. We have a 200 ton crane. Again, the 200 ton
crane, same operations, reinforced concrete structure, ITS ventilation
systems. We shut all the doors, take the impact limiters off, upend the
cask, and depending on what it is, truck casks are prepped over here,
rail casks are prepped in this area.

If it's a cask that contains a DPC, we then, behind this wall what you
can't see is another of the loading and the unloading stations with
another canister transfer machine, so that we have the flexibility, if
we wanted to take the canister out of the transportation cask and put it
into a shielded transfer cask, which we use in here in this building, we
do that.

So, if it's a cask with individual assemblies, it's prepped, and then
it's put into the pool, and it's either unloaded directly into a TAD
that's in the pool, or we have storage racks in the pool for a limited
amount of staging, up to 200 assemblies.

DPCs, if we take them, the capability that we have in the facility, we
get the dual purpose canister out of its transportation cask, or out of
an aging overpack if it's coming from a receipt facility or the aging
pad, and then it's put into a shielded transfer cask which is especially
designed to allow us to do the opening process and to immerse it into
the pool.

So, once it's loaded into the shielded transfer cask, it's put to this
area. This is the DPC cutting area where we essentially reverse the
process that the utilities use to close the dual purpose canister. We
essentially machine off the welds in the reverse order that they were
installed. So, we'll take off the outer lid, uncover the vent and drain
connections. At that point in time, the DPC is still inerted with
helium. So, as necessary, we'll cool it, depending on the thermal load
on it, so that we don't get, when we introduce water, we don't get a big
steam bubble problem. We will cool it.

And, then, once it's cooled, we'll flood the DPC canister with borated
water from the pool, and at that point in time, we can complete the\--or
we can do the removal of the weld that holds the shield plug in. And,
once that's done, we put the lid back on the shielded transfer cask,
which has its own lid bolted on, and then we transfer it from there into
an area of the pool specifically set aside for DPCs, dual purpose
canisters.

There, once the pool water chemistry is okay, or we've got it to the
point where we can unload it, we do the same process. We open the DPC,
remove the lid, and then use a spent fuel transfer machine similar to
commercial utilities to transfer the fuel assemblies from the open DPC
into either the staging rack or to the TAD.

Once the TAD is full, it's brought out of the pool. It also is in a
shielded transfer cask, because the TAD only had shielding on the top.
It's brought out of the pool into this area, which is the TAD closure
area, where initially the lid is welded on. Then, the water is evacuated
and then we do the drying process, vacuum drying or a closed lid helium
drying system, to get it to the portion where the moisture is removed
and the oxidizers are removed. And, then, at that point, it's backfilled
with helium, and then we do the process all over again so we assure that
we have the appropriate amount of dryness and minimal amount of oxidants
in the can.

At that point in time, it's then the lids are welded on. The vent and
drains are closed and the lids are welded on. And this is very similar
to the technology and the methods that utilities are using now for dual
purpose canisters. We don't intend to have to invent anything to do
this. As Jack Bailey says, we don't have to invent Velcro to make this
work. So, we have that.

So, once it's loaded, it's in the shielded transfer cask, the shielded
transfer cask is transferred behind this wall to the canister transfer
machine. And, so, the loaded and completed TAD is pulled out of the
shielded transfer cask and put into an aging overpack either to go to
aging pad or to go to one of the canister receipt and closure facilities
for disposal.

Next is essentially the same. It's just a little clearer picture of the
pool. DPC area is over here isolated from the rest of the pool. We
anticipate that some of the DPCs may have a significant amount of
contamination, loose contamination in them when we open them. And, also,
we've got the aspect of BWR fuel in borated water. So, we're
anticipating that we may have to keep this isolated so we don't
contaminate the rest of the pool until we get this area under control.
Staging racks are here, 120 BWR assemblies, 80 PWR assemblies, and then
we have loading positions for the TADs and the unloading positions for
the transportation cask.

The next slide is essentially the same thing, just a section of it. He
didn't do a very good job hiding the walls. These are actually tanks
behind the wall. They're not in the pool. But, you can see the same
thing. The pool is 52 feet deep. It's about 60 by 70. The operations are
similar to what the utilities do, but it's a lot smaller because we have
a much smaller\--we're sort of reversed. They have a small operations
area and a large storage area, and we're reversed on here because we
don't intend to stage a lot of fuel in here. We're just using it for our
convenience in blending to load TADs.

So, that's pretty much it on the designs. We have the receipt facility
is just the front end of the canister receipt and closure facility. It
just receives casks and does transfers. And, the IHF is half of a
canister receipt and closure facility. We have tried to provide
commonality of equipment between the facilities to the extent possible.
We're using industry standard ASME NOG-1, Type 1 cask handling cranes,
different capacities, different bridge lengths, but essentially the same
thing.

These ones in yellow are equipment that, unique is the wrong word, but
it's some non-standard applications of this technology. The canister
transfer machine is essentially a crane with a shielded bell. There are
other people that have used similar things.

The waste package transfer trolley concept is not new. They have tilt
tables, and things like that, that use this type of worm gear technology
and pivots to handle things. The use of this allowed us to eliminate a
pick at the waste package in another event.

Transport and emplacement vehicle is, you recall from the previous days,
it was a rail car and a locomotive combined together that did the work.
So, they combined it into a single piece of equipment because it
eliminated transfers, and things like that. So, we've done our best to
make it as simple as possible while maintaining enough flexibility to
handle variations in the waste forms that we have.

So, the site transporter is designed for vertical handling, or handling
of aging overpacks with either TADs or DPCs in it. Spent fuel transfer
machine is just in the wet handling facility. TAD closure and DPC
cutting are in the wet handling facility.

Just a couple more slides. The next is a concept of the cask transfer
trolley. Again, it's a seismic frame because we want to, when we've got
it in here, the waste form is still shielded, but once we have the lid
unbolted, if it were to tip over, we could potentially have the waste
form being ejected onto the floor, which would be an undesirable event
and very difficult to analyze. So, the requirement has been placed that
this not tip over in our design basis seismic events.

Next is the canister transfer machine. Again, it's essentially a 450 ton
crane. It has two trolleys, one that handles and supports the shielded
bell with its slide gates, and everything else, and a second trolley, a
70 ton hoist that actually handles the canisters that it's doing.

Next is a waste package trolley. Again, it's a tilting mechanism. It's a
rail based, has a worm gear to hold it. There's very little
likelihood\--we're anticipating we'll be able to demonstrate that we
won't get a slap-down event. There's no failure mode that will cause the
thing to tip over and slap-down. That's our goal.

This is not quite accurate. Actually, the top of the waste package
extends out about three inches above this shield. This is not drawn
correctly, so that the waste package closure system has access to the
top of the waste package when it's closing.

KADAK: No cables on the top to hold it?

SLOVIC: Pardon?

KADAK: No cables?

SLOVIC: For what, sir?

KADAK: For upending or down-ending, I guess?

SLOVIC: There's no cables. There's a worm gear and a motor to drive it,
so that again we're trying to\--I don't know how familiar you were with
the old handling facilities, but the dry transfer facility had
essentially ten lifts for every waste form as it went through. We have
two, one in the cask and one here, so we've eliminated a vast number of
the lifts in the handling by this type of thing.

The next slide is in the down position. So, here is the cart that's
inside the waste package trolley. Here is the emplacement pallet, and
here's the waste package. And, this is the device that engages the drive
in the floor that pulls it out. And, at this point, if you back up one,
at this point, here is the plug on the top that provides shielding
that's removed, and, while it's in this configuration, it's accessible
and we take the plug off, it's not. When it's in the next slide, this is
then\--personnel is prohibited from this area, and it's done remotely.

And, the last picture is the transport and emplacement vehicle. It's a
rail based device. It's on eleven foot gauge rail. It has\--does it have
four or six, I forget\--it has six motors, I believe. Eight? Thank you.
It has eight motors, all gear reduction driven so that it can't run
away. The wheels can't drive the motors. It's designed so that if two
motors fail, the other six still have enough capacity to move the TEV.
It's approximately nine inches of shielding. This portion raises and
lowers on jack screws. It has four normal and two backups.

These are shield doors on this end, and then there's a bed plate that
backs out. And, there is a\--you can't see it in here, but there is
essentially the bottom of the shield that raises up and down engages a
notch in the emplacement pallet. So, it only touches the emplacement
pallet. It doesn't touch the waste package.

Okay, again, other than Part 63, which is the difficult part, we're
trying to use cask handling cranes, side transporters, transfer
machines, TAD closure equipment, DPC cutting, using existing equipment
in current nuclear power plants with what their consensus codes and
standards are. So, the handling cranes, transfer machines, ASME NOG-1,
Type 1.

Next is cask transfer trolley and the waste package transfer trolley
don't have consensive codes. But, we're going to use the elements of
ASME NOG-1 that we can and AISC manual of steel construction to
demonstrate the strength. Again, the canister transfer machine is
essentially a crane, ASME NOG-1. And, again, the transport and
emplacement vehicle does not have a consensus design code. It will be
designed to the applicable portions of NOG-1 and manual of steel
construction.

And, the last slide, surface facility structures are designed in
accordance with the principal codes. They're ACI 349-01, and for the
concrete portion, ANSI/AISC N690-1994 for the steel.

So, that's all I had, unless there's\--I know that you have some
specific questions that I can address, but that's all the presentation
material I had.

ARNOLD: John?

GARRICK: A couple of simple questions.

SLOVIC: Yes, sir.

GARRICK: You mentioned at the outset that this design changes
continuously pretty much, and that it's hard to keep up with it in your
viewgraphs, I take it. What can you say about the stabilizing of a
design? What progress are we making?

SLOVIC: Well, glad you asked. We had, when we had the CD-1 effort last
June, the critical decision one that said we're going with the TAD
canister and we're going with\--go back to the site plan, please. We're
going with the 3CRCFs and the wet handling facility and the receipt
facility.

We then set out a plan, both schedule and products, to produce
approximately 1,300 products between the three engineering projects and
the preclosure safety analysis that would be either direct references in
the license application, or, for instance, if we had a drawing and we
needed to do a calc to support it, then we considered that a licensing
application support product. So, we identified all those products in
conjunction with licensing and preclosure safety analysis, and we've
been proceeding to issue those documents, some of them in parallel with
other activities. So, we've issued more than a thousand, and we have
about\--well, we can do the math\--a little less than 300 to go.

We've also identified about 100 of them that even though they're issued,
that because of changes, the decision to borate the wet handling
facility pool, some other changes about not using programmable logic
controllers for certain functions, required us to change about a hundred
of those drawings. So, we're in the process now of meeting on
essentially a daily basis with Preclosure Safety Analysis to make sure
that our design syncs up with their preclosure safety analysis, that
syncs up with the license application.

So, we're into configuration control at this point, and we're coming up
with a design that meets the license application requirements.

GARRICK: Okay. One other question. In the conventional engineering
world, they have metrics for indicating where the design is from the
standpoint of nearness to completeness, metrics like preliminary design,
Title 1, Title 2, Title 3, whatever metric you want to use. Can you tell
us where we are now with respect to the design and where you expect to
be, say, at the time of the filing of the license application?

SLOVIC: At the time of the completion of the license application, we
expect to be, and don't quote me these numbers, 35 to 40 percent done on
important to safety system structures and components, and probably in
the 25 to 30 percent on the supporting systems. So, we will have a
structural design. We will have designs of the important to safety
systems. We will have designs of the electrical systems that we need. We
will have designs for things like hot water cooling systems for the
buildings, but they won't be to the level of detail that they will for
the important to safety structure systems and components.

ARNOLD: Henry?

PETROSKI: Petroski, Board.

So, in all these guidelines and drawings that you're showing us, are
these just conceptual, or have any calculations gone into\--

SLOVIC: No, these are reflective of the design as it's being completed.
In other words, the picture of the crane in there was based on an issued
mechanical equipment envelope drawing that says the crane is this big,
has this capacity, these dimensions, and these locations. The
thicknesses of the walls are based on the structural analysis that's
been completed to date. The configuration of the building has been
frozen for about a year so that we could do the structural analysis and
get it to this point. So, these are beyond conceptual designs. These are
preliminary designs.

PETROSKI: What about some of these cases where you've looked at the
possibility of something tipping over and you wanted to exclude that by
design? Have there been any calculations made on that?

SLOVIC: We are doing, for those pieces of equipment\--you guys are
great\--we're doing design reports for these new pieces of equipment. We
need to demonstrate to everyone's satisfaction that we can build\--I
don't have a specific finalized ready to go build design for any of this
equipment, but we will have done enough analysis work to demonstrate
that if he needs a particular reliability with our design in the
margins, we can meet that reliability for this particular device. So, we
will have those done in time, at the time of license application
submittal.

PETROSKI: How much interaction is going on between your group and
industry, Idaho, various other places that have some experience?

SLOVIC: It's an interesting question. We interface with Idaho. They're a
subcontractor of ours to do the waste package closure system. So, we
mine that resource as we can for material handling and things like that.
We do have contacts with the commercial vendors, limited, to get their
experience and their input on these pieces of equipment that we're
doing. We have access to operating procedures and information on
commercial nuclear power plants, but we don't have a formal "ask a
utility" a question type of process. We do tend to\--we go through NEI
on occasion, and do those types of things to get their feedback and
solicit their input.

PETROSKI: Do you think there could be improved interaction?

SLOVIC: You know, it's always better to make a decision in an
information-rich environment.

PETROSKI: What about\--have you considered that in much detail yet? For
example, what would be the implications of some upset conditions on your
group\--would have implications for all sorts of other things?

SLOVIC: Give me an example. If I get more than 10 percent fuel?

PETROSKI: Excuse me?

SLOVIC: If I get more than 10 percent uncanistered fuel, is that\--

PETROSKI: No, no, I'm thinking about situations like something is not
supposed to tip over.

SLOVIC: It tips over?

PETROSKI: It tips over.

SLOVIC: Yeah, that's a major impact on the throughput. We have to
recover from that event, and we're planning on recovery actions for
those postulated events. But, that recovery in this case means
termination of the event sequence, not necessarily how we're going to
pick everything up and decide what went wrong and what we have to fix
and what we have to change. So, we're not into that level of detail at
this point. If one of these events occurs, that particular facility is
probably shut down for a while.

ARNOLD: Okay, Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

I'd like to follow up on Henry's last comment about throughput.

SLOVIC: Yes, sir.

ABKOWITZ: Take it from a slightly water perspective. You made the
comment earlier that you're planning from the standpoint of a 25 year
receipt period, I believe you said.

SLOVIC: Correct.

ABKOWITZ: And, a 50 year emplacement period.

SLOVIC: Correct.

ABKOWITZ: So, on average, how many canisters are you anticipating coming
into the facility each year, and how many do you actually see being
emplaced?

SLOVIC: The emplacement is set by the number of canister receipt and
closure facilities that we have. If we have all three in operation, we
can match. Round numbers, we get about 500 casks a year to get the 3,000
metric ton commercial fuel requirement. Approximately 340 containing
TADs, and the balance containing Naval SNF, DOE SNF, or HLW. And, we
have a requirement now, we have to match an emplacement. For every five
waste packages of commercial fuel we emplace, we emplace two of DOE or
other. So, we're anticipating that while we will receive\--the
requirement is for receipt of commercial fuel. So, we'll receive that
3,000 tons into 63,000 is 21 years we can receive it all with that full
capability. And, we have that capability with the WHF, CRCF one, and
receipt facility. But, we don't have a matching emplacement capability
until we build the second and third CRCFs.

ABKOWITZ: So, right now, you have 500, just in ballpark numbers, you
have 500\--

SLOVIC: Casks.

ABKOWITZ: Canisters coming in and\--

SLOVIC: 500 casks. Some of them are multiple canisters.

ABKOWITZ: And, roughly, until the other facilities are built, roughly
the ability to put 200 in the mountain at any given year?

SLOVIC: 160, that order.

ABKOWITZ: 160?

SLOVIC: Well, counting IHF and WHF, 200 a year; right.

ABKOWITZ: So, throughput is really governing the design of the aging
pad? You basically have an extremely large aging pad to accommodate the
shipments coming in at a much faster rate than you can emplace them.

SLOVIC: There's only about a two year difference in the current schedule
between completion of the receipt facility and completion of canister
receipt and closure facility two.

ABKOWITZ: So, once you get two up on line, then the differential\--

SLOVIC: Then we go to 320, and then we can\--we're getting close.

ABKOWITZ: Well, 320 is still a long ways away from 500.

SLOVIC: Correct.

ABKOWITZ: So, a very critical element to the surface design, surface
facility design, is to have a fairly extensive aging pad for the
purpose, not so much of aging as it is that you can't manage the
throughput relative to what's coming into the system. And, that's being
purposely designed that way as opposed to expanding the capacity of the
throughput of the facilities?

SLOVIC: It's just a question of how fast we can put the building on
line. We're talking full capability in, I forget, is it 2022, so it's
essentially seven years after we start, or 2023, somewhere in there.
We'll have three CRCFs, and we could match emplacement. But, at that
point, it's not\--it's the thermal\--his favorite topic\--it's the
thermal requirements. If we're receiving fuel that they're shipping to
us at 25 kilowatts, we have to wait until it's 11.8 under current
conditions before we can emplace it. So, we probably, and if you look at
emplacing all of this 11,000 waste packages in 50 years, you're about
220 waste packages a year, so you need two CRCFs to meet your
emplacement requirements.

ABKOWITZ: And, then, if you encounter an upset condition along the lines
of what Dr. Petroski mentioned, that could take a facility out of
commission for an extended period of time, which would essentially shut
down its throughput capacity.

SLOVIC: For that particular facility, yes.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. And, you're comfortable with the margin for error that
you have in this system? Because it seems to me that you've got a very
significant bottleneck already built into the design, and if you have
any other upset conditions, you've got a large quantity of material
coming in that's just going to be going out to pads where you may be
capacity constrained, and you also have faults out there that you've got
to be worried about. Am I on target with the logic here?

SLOVIC: I don't think that's\--I don't know if that's a question that
I\--if I gave you an answer, it would just be my personal opinion. I
think that's better directed at DOE than I.

ABKOWITZ: And, all of those considerations would theoretically go into a
comprehensive preclosure safety analysis, I would assume?

SLOVIC: Yes.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you.

ARNOLD: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

So, that's actually very close to what Dr. Abkowitz just asked. I
understand, obviously, the safety analysis would have to rely on the
design. But, do you get any formal routine feedback from the safety
analysis, operational and safety?

SLOVIC: The preclosure safety analysis?

MOSLEH: Right.

SLOVIC: Yes, we sit with each other and we interface all the time, and
it is formal, informal. To set aside our deterministic hats for this
particular job, under the Rules of Part 63, it's not prescriptive of how
we do anything. So, we've chosen to use industry standards where
appropriate, because it's familiar to the NRC and we've done it in the
past, and these are acceptance standards. But, we've done\--Dr. Frank,
did you want to answer this?

FRANK: All of these questions are good, and it is the case that a
thorough final throughput ought to be established, including off-normal
accident events. But, I want to put this in perspective. The real events
that will shut down the facility for a while are those that breach a
canister. And, we're progressed well enough along with our risk
analysis, which we're terming preclosure safety analysis here, to know
that those are rare events, well below the threshold of considering them
expected during the lifetime of the facility.

So, I think at the end of the day when you add up the\--if you were to
add up the frequency of all such events, you'd find a very small impact
on throughput, just because it's a low probability, and the sum of the
event sequences would be relatively low.

ARNOLD: Andy?

KADAK: Yes, I'd like to follow up on the throughput question. But, more
with the DPC handling facility, the wet facility. I think, as I remember
the numbers, they were like 2,000 or so potentially DPC type casks
available, or will be available by 2017, or so.

SLOVIC: 17,000 metric tons, or something.

KADAK: Yes. 2,000 canisters, that's probably easier to deal with than a
ton.

SLOVIC: Okay.

KADAK: What's your processing rate for those, assuming you're going to
accept them through that wet handling facility?

SLOVIC: Without having truck casks in the mix, we can do, we estimate we
can do 40 to 45 a year. One a week basically.

KADAK: One a week, okay.

SLOVIC: Because we assume 75 percent availability, so 25 percent down
time for maintenance and other operations.

KADAK: Okay, thank you.

SLOVIC: So, that's, technically that's 2,000 in 50 years if we operate
the facility for that long.

ARNOLD: I have a little question resulting from our visit to INEL, where
we saw that operation you talked about.

SLOVIC: Yes, sir.

ARNOLD: There was some discussion as to whether the helium was actually
necessary at all. Do you have any insight on that?

SLOVIC: I know that the postclosure people are investigating that. I
don't think they have come to a final conclusion as to whether or not
that's needed or not. Remember, when we originally envisioned the
system, we were loading individual fuel assemblies into a basket inside
of a waste package. So, it was a different scenario. But, now with the
TAD inerted with helium, it's just a small volume between the TAD
canister and the waste package inner vessel. But, I don't have a
specific answer for you on that.

ARNOLD: that will be resolved?

SLOVIC: It will be resolved; right.

ARNOLD: Question for Dave Diodato.

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff.

Thanks for your presentation. Just for a point of clarification, you
mentioned that your aging pads would have a capacity for about 2,500
spaces, for 2,500 TADs each. So, how many aging pads are you going to
have all together in your design right now?

SLOVIC: Right now, there are two different designs, but each one is made
up of multiple smaller pads, so that if the situation changed in the
future and we didn't need to build them all, and we intend to build them
in series so that we don't build ones we don't need.

DIODATO: Okay. So, you're going to then in either design, you have 2,500
spaces total of aging pads?

SLOVIC: Correct, between the two pads.

DIODATO: Okay. So, you have two pads that can each hold about 10,000
metric tons for storage?

SLOVIC: They're a slightly different size. I'd have to go look at the
numbers, but they're not quite equal in size.

DIODATO: But, your total capacity is still going to be about 21,000
metric tons?

SLOVIC: Right, we assume that on average, a TAD would have about 8 ½
metric tons in it. So, 2,500 tons times 8 ½, obviously, it would be
licensed for 21. So, if we had a significant number of DPCs, which have
more metric tons in them, then we would have to limit it to the metric
tons, and not necessarily the actual numbers.

DIODATO: Are those aging pads shown on your\--

SLOVIC: They are not on this particular model. They're actually\--and, I
didn't show them because the mechanical model has been updated to
reflect the revised aging pad, but the structural hasn't, so you looked
at them, it was very confusing as to what it is. But, they're
approximately a mile to the north of\--

DIODATO: Joyce Dory is sitting by an aging pad right now.

SLOVIC: Not quite over there, but they're about a mile north of CRCF
three.

DIODATO: All right, thank you.

ARNOLD: Thank you very much, Bob. John, do you want to stay to the
original schedule for coming back from lunch, or do you want to advance
it?

GARRICK: Well, I've been thinking about that, and I think that we'd run
into a problem in changing the schedule because some people don't attend
the morning session, and attend the afternoon session, and I think that
we're probably obligated to stick to the schedule that was announced.
So, I think we will stick to it. So, we'll have an extended lunch time.
1:45 is what the agenda says. So, we will, unless there's further
questions, we will adjourn until that time.

(Whereupon, the lunch recess was taken.)

AFTERNOON SESSION

GARRICK: Okay, can we come to order, please?

One of the things that's difficult about understanding the safety of a
nuclear facility is the plethora of approaches that are used to do the
analysis. There's a whole spectrum of probabilistic, probability based
approaches. There's a whole spectrum of margin analysis basis, and we
see that not only with respect to issues having to do with radiation,
but also issues having to do with seismic, the debate between margin
analysis and a probabilistic based analysis. So, it makes it very
difficult sometimes to establish, I would think, establish, I would
think, establish a consistent policy for\--criteria for doing safety
analysis.

The most important achievement, in my judgment, in the last few decades
has been the movement towards probabilistic based analyses, because they
come closer to kind of telling you the truth of what really happens than
most other approaches, and they also get us away from the masking that
something like a worst case analysis can do, because experience has
pretty well confirmed the fact that in general, the worst case scenario
is not a significant contributor to risk. A rather interesting and
important finding.

We're going to hear about what's going on here with respect to the
surface facilities. And, when I talk about different approaches, even
within the agencies, there's different approaches. The NRC, for example,
is a risk informed oriented agency, but there, there's variation in
where and when they use probabilistic based analyses, and they've
developed other types of approaches, such as the integrated safety
analysis approach, the margin analysis that I referred to earlier, and
then, of course, the PRA based.

We're going to have somebody tell us a little bit about what's going on
for this facility, and I understand it's kind of a mix of what has come
out of the integrated safety analysis, the thought processes, and what's
come out of the PRA processes. So, we'd like to have Mike Frank tell us
a little bit about the general framework of the PCSA, preclosure safety
analysis, how they structure and aggregate the associated scenarios, and
implement the kind of scenario based approach to safety analysis, the
approach that they're taking to importance rank scenarios, and to draw a
very sharp distinction between what the risk assessments say is
important to safety and what the regulations tend to say are things that
are important to safety. And, then, finally, I hope Mike tells us a
little bit about the actual nuclear design basis for safety.

Mike Frank is a consultant. He's with BSC now, I guess, and I have good
knowledge of some of his background, as he was part of a team that I
worked with for many, many years, as was Ali Mosleh. So, I'm looking
forward to hearing what he has to say. Mike?

FRANK: Thank you, John.

Sometimes there are technological solutions that require sophisticated
digital controllers, and of course then there's the shoe-leather
solution, and in this case, the shoe-leather solution is going to work
for this presentation.

Next slide? As John alluded to, this is a presentation in four parts.
One is going to talk about sort of the conceptual framework for the
preclosure safety analysis, which uses probabilistic risk assessment
technology, the scenario based approach, in fact. Then, I want to talk
about what the appropriate level of aggregation is for event sequences
in the PCSA. And, that's a topic that is derived directly from the way
the regulation is written. Then, I'll talk about our approach to
identifying what is important to safety. And, again, it's derived
directly from the words in the regulation for important to safety. And,
then, I'll talk about nuclear safety design basis, and that may not be a
phrase that most people are familiar with. Basically, what that means is
a quantitative probabilistic set of numbers, such as the reliability of
an ITS piece of equipment, that we need to meet in the design in order
to make our compliance case to the nuclear regulatory commission.

Next? Quite a few years ago, 1991, a colleague by the name of John
Garrick and another one by the name of Stan Kappen, introduced this
concept of the risk triplet as a basis for a scenario based risk
assessment. And, they set it out on the basis of three questions. What
can go wrong? And, you answer that question by developing a set of
scenarios of things that can go wrong. And, these are detailed scenarios
that actually get down to the equipment level, what can go wrong with
pieces of equipment, hardware, and what can go wrong with the people who
operate them, what errors the people might make in operating equipment.
So, it is very much an engineering based approach to safety analysis.

How likely is it? And, the answer to that is determined in several ways.
One by historical records, compilations of available evidence, including
historical records, probabilistic engineering analysis, like our seismic
fragility work, or our structural reliability work, and also the
judgment of experts. You answer how likely is it in another way, too. In
some cases, the data one has, or the information one has from historical
records doesn't necessarily match directly with the large pieces of
equipment or processes you have, and, so, there's a breakdown process or
a disaggregation process usually using false reason in risk assessment,
in which one maps the thing that can go wrong, down to disaggregating
that into sublevels and components to the place where you actually have
historical records. And, to be part of a real risk assessment, we all
recognize that these are event sequences that may or may not happen in
the future, and since we're not good at determining what is going to
happen in the future, few of us have crystal balls, uncertainties are an
established and essential part of a risk analysis.

The last part of that triplet is the question what are the consequences.
And, you first have to ask the question what are consequences\--which
consequences are important? What do we need to know in order to make our
case to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? And, in this case, it is such
things as dose to off-site public, dose to on-site workers and public,
and criticality. So, in a non-regulatory environment, the consequences
of interest are defined by the decision-maker, the one who has to make a
decision about whether or not it's safe enough or good enough or
practical enough to go forward. In this case, the regulatory agency has
to make a regulatory decision about compliance. So, in effect, they are
the decision maker. So, our analysis is geared toward regulatory
compliance.

This last point is that this definition of risk, or the risk triplet, is
a good operational definition, in that it is a synopsis of how we
actually are doing the PCSA.

Next slide? This is quick for review. I think most of you are familiar
with event sequences, and for those who are not, I'm going to do this
quickly. They're composed of something that can go wrong initially, a
perturbation from normal operation called an initiating event. The
facilities and equipment and people respond to that initiating event in
a certain way, and, so, there's a set of events that represent the
system, facility and human response. And, then, there's the end states
of interest, which are\--it's another term for consequence of interest,
in this case.

Next? This one chart is actually a summary of the event sequence
development that we're doing for the preclosure safety analysis. You
start with detailed knowledge, and that obtaining knowledge about the
design continues in this process, in the YMP, throughout the design
effort. And, the reason is that we are actually conducting a risk
informed design process, where information about the design as it
evolves is fed back via our risk models into the design, so that at the
end, there's convergence. We know that there is a design that in fact
meets the requirements we're setting.

The next step in developing event sequences, one starts then with this
detailed knowledge of everything you can about the facility, structures,
operations. One develops a top down logic called the master logic
diagram, which starts with, at the top, the end state of interest, say
release of radionuclides, and breaks down into ever decreasing levels
of\--I'm sorry\--increasing levels of detail, breaks down to a point
where one might start identifying appropriate initiating events at the
level of equipment, which is the level that we want to get to, equipment
that goes wrong.

In this study, we're supplementing this top down approach with what's
called a hazard and operability study, which is derived from the
chemical process industry, this is a process that's been around since
the 1960's, in looking at in a very detailed way line by line through
drawings, specific ways in which the process depicted in the drawing can
go wrong. And, this is, one can call that a bottom bottom, or a bottom
up. It's really a bottom level analysis, and it feeds, since it deals
directly with pieces of equipment, it feeds directly to the levels
associated with initiating events.

We're also looking at external events, that is, things that happen
outside by nature, earthquakes and lightening strikes and windstorms and
floods, and we go through an analysis process on that. I'm not going to
emphasize that in this talk.

The scenario approach is depicted here by taking the initiating event,
which is this bubble, and these boxes here represent pivotal events,
which is how the system responds, and the diamonds represent end states.
And, so we have\--and, in this study, we're going to have probably a
couple hundred of these types of diagrams in order to capture the array
of initiating events, and system responses.

As I mentioned in the previous slide, we support the quantification of
these events, that is, the probability of an event, by fault tree
analysis, and that itself is supported by historical records. And, we're
using in this study industry-wide, multiple industry-wide records of
actual equipment failures, field failures, and these are readily
available in actually published compilations.

At the end of this analysis, and all this stuff is done using
uncertainties and these little squiggly lines here are supposed to
represent probability distributions, which represent uncertainties in
the estimates of equipment failures, failure probabilities. And, at the
end, you get results that are expressed also in uncertainties. In this
slide, for ease of, just ease of drawing, I depicted uncertainties as a
band. Mathematically, that's the probability distribution as well.

Next slide? Okay, now a discussion about what the appropriate level is
at which one takes a look at event sequences.

Next slide? In nuclear power plant probabilistic risk assessments, the
first end state of interest is called core damage. And, one obtains a
frequency of core damage, which is the sum of all the event sequences,
probabilities, that\--all the event sequence frequencies leading to core
damage. So, you have one metric, and it's core damage, and one core
damage for that kind of PRA, and you have a summation of all event
sequences that lead to core damage, and that is one measure of risk.

We have a slightly different situation here, because the regulation
delineates different categories of event sequences. And, I want to go
through that. Category 1, which is expected during the preclosure
period, which is nominally 100 years, and that is, therefore, it will
occur one or more times over the preclosure period, that's Category 1
event sequence. Such event sequences are aggregated, on-site dose is
aggregated as a yearly dose and compared to 10 CFR 20 limits. So, that's
one metric for acceptability and compliance for Category 1 event
sequences.

Category 1 event sequences for off-site dose at the site boundary are
also aggregated as a yearly dose, and compared to 15 millirem per year.

Category 2, which is not expected to occur over the preclosure period,
but has a frequency of occurrence greater than 10 to the minus 4 over
that period, those event sequences are categorized one at a time on the
basis of probability only, not on the basis of risk, which would be the
cumulative expected consequence of all scenarios. Off-site dose for each
Category 2 event sequence is to be calculated and compared to the dose
performance goal at the site boundary of 5 rem. On-site dose is not
required to be calculated, again, for this compliance oriented analysis.

The regulation also states that there has to be provision to prevent and
control criticality. We're interpreting that as meaning that for all
Category 1 and 2 event sequences, there should be no criticality,
nothing greater than the K effective defined by the upper safety limit.

If we find event sequences that are beyond Category 2, that is, less
than 10 to the minus 4 over the hundred year preclosure period, then
there is no consequences need be evaluated, in accordance with our
interpretation of the regulation.

Next slide? Now, here's the dilemma. The more detailed I define an event
sequence, the lower I can force the probability of that event sequence.
If I aggregate to the higher level of, that is, if I take and aggregate
very high, then I can\--the probability of that event sequence will
raise. We don't have that problem if you sum all the event sequences.
It's not an issue because it doesn't matter at which level one divides
things out. You add them all up anyway. But, here, you have that issue.

So, what do you do? There is no guidance in any of the literature that
we've seen on this. So, here is an example of what I mean on level of
aggregation. Should a single event sequence include all drops from
cranes of all canisters from all possible sources in the facility, all
cranes in the facility? I can certainly define a perturbation on the
system that says my perturbation is any drop anywhere, and add up the
contribution from all potential locations. Or, should there be more
resolution with respect to sources of the drop, the facilities, and the
canister types?

Again, I said before if I were performing a risk informed analysis
approach, and the decision you make here is very important, because it
governs the reliability requirements of the ITS, important to safety,
systems, structures and components that are derived from the event
sequences.

Next? So, we thought about this quite long and hard, and we came down to
the conclusion that the overriding criterion for making this decision
would be accuracy of our representation. We want a PCSA that is at the
level that we believe best represents the operation facility and the
variation in operations across buildings and from one room to another in
the facility. That was our governing criterion.

And, so, here's an example of what that governing criterion led us to
do. We divide things up into different event sequences because of
variations in the facility configuration and operations. This would lead
to different challenges, that is, how high one lifts a canister, for
example, the number of lifts one has, and the residence time within the
facility of having a canister in a particular location in a facility.
That latter one is important for, dare I say it, earthquake events,
earthquake event sequences. There's different kinds of seismic
restraints associated with different times or different locations in the
building.

There are also variations warranted in event sequences, that is
disaggregation of event sequence warranted because equipment is
different over different facilities. Some equipment is similar across
buildings, but ultimately, the complement of equipment for each facility
is different.

There is also ramifications with respect to the waste form, PWR, BWRs,
DOE spent nuclear fuel, et cetera, and the containers that they're in.
There's variations in robustness over different casks and canisters, and
there are variations in source terms because of the different fuel
forms. So, we need to account for those differences in our event
sequences.

So, a drop in the transfer cell is not the same event sequence as a drop
of a canister in the receipt and preparation area. And, it's not the
same as a possible tilt-down when the waste form is in a waste package
at the other end of the facility. These are all different event
sequences.

So, we concluded that event sequences should be disaggregated to
represent different waste processing functions, different waste forms
and containers, and different facilities. And, what I mean by processing
functions, this is the processing functions that Bob Slovic walked you
through earlier.

Next? Here's an example of what an event sequence might look like when
our study is done. And, those of you who are familiar with risk
assessment may see a portion of this that is slightly unfamiliar to you,
and I'm going to explain that. This is our initiating event. These are
our sub-initiating events, which are major contributors to this
initiating event here. And, this represents what we think is the
appropriate level of aggregation to proceed through the event sequence
and perform and develop our frequencies of event sequences at this
level.

Fault trees are typically developed for initiating events in our
analysis, because these represent actual pieces of equipment failing,
and in this analysis, instead of one fault tree, we decided to
illuminate the major contributors, the next level down, of aggregation,
I should say, to this level, just by putting it on the event sequence
diagram. And, this is strictly for elucidation purposes. I think it just
helps to follow the analysis.

You're going to see these numbers here. These set of numbers refer to
this particular circle, transportation cask dropped, and those relate
back to the master logic diagram. So, we can trace the flow of
information from the master logic diagram into the initiating event
sequence diagram.

Proceeding along, after the initiating event, this set of pivotal events
here in the square boxes is the system response, and we categorize that
in this way. If there is an impact on the transportation cask, we want
to know if the transportation cask remains intact. If it does, then
there's a possibility that its shielding function might be compromised.
If not, we want to know if the\--if the cask does not stay intact, the
next level of question is whether or not the canister inside stays
intact.

Why is this important? Well, when the waste form arrives in our
facility, in the YMP facility, then there are two levels of containment.
One is a welded steel canister, and one is a transportation cask, which
is bolted on the top. These are two levels of containment, and, so, in
order to get a release, you have to violate both levels of containment.

If you do, in fact, get a release, then we ask about the confinement
function of the important to safety HVAC system surrounded by the
building, and we also further ask questions that relate to whether or
not, for commercial spent nuclear fuel in this case, there is moderator
present. Our preliminary criticality work is indicating that without
introduction of moderator in these canisters, into the canister, there
cannot be a criticality, so that's an important question.

Next? Okay, so that's a summary of where we are with respect to the
approach we're taking for the actual analysis. Now, I'm going to spend a
little bit of time talking about important to safety, what constitutes
important to safety for this regulation.

This is right out of the regulation, important to safety, with reference
to structures, systems, and components, means those engineered features
of the repository whose function is to provide reasonable assurance that
high-level waste can be received, handled, packaged, stored, emplaced,
and retrieved without exceeding the requirements of 63.111(b), which is
for Category 1 event sequences. And, I pretty much went over what that
is in the previous slide.

And, ITS function is also to prevent or mitigate Category 2 event
sequences that could result in exceeding the values of 5 rem at the site
boundary.

Next? So, we deduce from this that an SSC is classified as ITS if it
appears in an event sequence, that definition in the regulation only
refers to event sequences, and at least one of the following criteria
apply. The SSC is relied upon to reduce the frequency of an event
sequence from one category to the next. So, for example, we could apply
reliability improvement measures to the HVAC and to the cranes to reduce
a coincident breach and loss of HVAC to beyond Category 2. We can work
to that design requirement. And, in fact, that's what we do.

Next? The next criteria that defines what's ITS is that an SSC is relied
upon to reduce the aggregated dose of Category 1 event sequences by
reducing the event sequence frequency. So, when we identify places in
which people can have a direct exposure within the facility, we put in
design features, like interlocks on shield doors and on crane or
canister transfer machine slide gates, on the TEV, which takes the waste
packages from the buildings down to emplacement.

An SSC is ITS if it's relied upon to perform a dose mitigation or
criticality prevention function. Canisters and casks are ITS because
they serve as a containment, which is clearly dose mitigation. HVAC is
ITS because it is part of confinement. And, the staging racks in the WHF
pool are ITS because they are required to ensure adequate separation of
fuel assemblies within the pool.

Next? So, having talked about what are criterias for important to safety
components, let me talk a little about how we derive the requirements
for them, the nuclear safety design basis. These requirements, unlike
normal engineered\--in addition to the normal engineering requirements
one usually sees in developing a design such as thou shalt meet ASME
boil and pressure, section such and such, or in designing structures,
thou shalt perform your analysis in accordance with ASC 4503, there is
also an additional set which pushes a design toward being compliant with
the regulations that are in 10 CFR 63. And, those are called the nuclear
safety design bases. And, these are derived in part from the PCSA.
They're derived in whole from insights from the PCSA, and they have
the\--and, these nuclear safety design bases have the form as follows.

We define the safety function of the particular ITS piece of equipment.
It's not just the crane is ITS. What's ITS about the crane is preventing
it or reducing the probability of drops. So, that function of the crane
is ITS. And, so, those portions of the crane that deal with that
function are provided a reliability. You've got the probability of
violating that function should be less than a number that we specify.
Nuclear safety design bases are specified for each ITS SSC to ensure
that they perform that function in compliance with the regulation.

Next? So, we have nuclear safety design bases of the\--that reads kind
of like this. The mean frequency of some ITS SSC failure on demand is,
and you state a number. For normal running equipment, like HVAC, heating
and ventilation, the reliability usually depends on inspection and
maintenance intervals, so we specify an inspection and maintenance
interval that is part and parcel of the calculated reliability.

Another one may read such as the mean unavailability of some ITS SSC
over some time period "Y" is, and you give a number. Or, we could say
the mean frequency of some earthquake-induced event sequence is, and you
give a number, probability number.

So, that's the nature of a nuclear safety design bases, how we're
working backwards back to the presentation, how we look and how we
define what is ITS, how we, at what we think is the appropriate level of
aggregation or disaggregation of event sequences, and the general PCSA
approach.

And, that's my prepared remarks.

GARRICK: Okay. Yes, questions from the Board? Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

First of all, I appreciated the presentation, and I do think that the
overall approach that you're proposing is a sensible one. That's the
easy part, however. The hard part is populating it. And, there are a few
things that I wanted to bring out. Some have to do with the time frame
and process for doing that, some of it has to do with the actual
technicality of doing that.

The first thing I wanted to ask is the scope of this analysis, because I
think it's been made clear in the past, and it still appears to be the
case, that the preclosure safety analysis from the standpoint of the
Department of Energy is that it starts at the fence line of the surface
facility design. Is that still the case?

FRANK: Yes.

ABKOWITZ: So, any risk that may be taking place during the waste
acceptance and transportation phases, are basically considered to be a
wash amongst all the different scenarios, design scenarios and operating
scenarios that are being considered for the surface facility and for
emplacement operations; is that correct?

FRANK: We're taking the approach that is consistent with all of the
nuclear power plant risk assessments that I think that's ever been done,
is that our initiating events begin within the fence line of the YMP. We
are not considering at this time initiating events that begin outside
the boundary.

ABKOWITZ: But, do you not agree that this is a different type of
problem. In those other scenarios, everything occurs within the fence
line of the nuclear facility. In this case, it's an integrated waste
management system. That's a message that's being delivered to us more
often lately, and the integrated waste management system for preclosure
operations, as I would understand it, starts at waste acceptance and
ends at emplacement. Is that not the case?

FRANK: Well, I told you what we were doing. The premise in your question
is that this is a different situation, and I think I'm going to differ
with that a little bit. In all the risk assessments I've been associated
with or know about, and that's both at NASA and in the nuclear power
business, there is always this lingering doubt that one has about the
perfection of equipment that's delivered. So, a reactor vessel in a
nuclear power plant is analyzed in the risk assessment as if it were
delivered per its codes and standards, and it performs as it's supposed
to perform. That's pretty much always an initial condition, and we
haven't departed from that.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. So, I'm to believe then that following this line of
thinking, if there's two or three different design and operating
strategies for handling materials at the surface facility and
emplacement, and one of those scenarios triples the exposure of handling
to workers at a utility site compared to another one, in the preclosure
safety analysis, they will both come out as being of equivalent safety;
is that correct?

FRANK: We're just not going there. We're not handling that.

ABKOWITZ: Right. But, you are agreeing with what I'm saying; correct?

FRANK: That's correct.

ABKOWITZ: Those two scenarios would be considered equally safe from the
standpoint of the preclosure safety analysis?

FRANK: That's a hypothetical, because\--

ABKOWITZ: No, it's not a hypothetical.

FRANK: No, it's a hypothetical because we were given a specific set of
boundary conditions associated with processing up to the site, and we
worked the PCSA with that specific set of boundary initial conditions.
So, then, you asked a question if there was a second one, would the PCSA
be the same, would the results be the same. If there were a second one,
and we were given the second set of boundary conditions to consider,
then we would consider the differences associated with the boundary
conditions. That isn't the scope we were given.

ABKOWITZ: Your boundary conditions start at the boundary of the fence
line of the surface facilities; is that right?

FRANK: That's a true statement.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

Mike, let's follow up on this issue of what's included and what's not,
and particularly initiating events. And, I know that you've had
discussions in the context of nuclear, and also space station work that
you have done. That one needs a method basically to ensure that your
coverage is adequate for initiating it. So, for, say, a nuclear power
plant, the top event of the master logic diagram is a heat balance
basically?

FRANK: That's one way of doing it, yes.

MOSLEH: Yes, as a method. And, now, here you have proposed, or you're
actually doing this based on a hazard and operability, a list. How do we
know that that list includes, it's comprehensive?

FRANK: First of all, we can retrieve that viewgraph, but we're using two
methods and merging them. The first method is a master logic diagram,
where we start with the end state, like radionuclide release. And, we
work our way functionally through the system design to determine what
failure, ultimately, failure modes of major pieces of equipment
contribute to that.

There's a second method one can go about doing it, and the second
method, HazOp, does not rely on a list. We actually take what you would
call PNIDs in nuclear jargon, and work through the PNID process by
process, asking the typical guide words, HazOp questions, answering
them, writing down the deviations, writing down causes, writing down
consequences, and seeing if that other method of doing it matches up
well with our top down master logic diagram. And, where it doesn't match
up well, we reconcile the two. We add from the HazOp to the MLD.

MOSLEH: Okay. I thought that you were replacing it by the hazard, but
it's a complement.

FRANK: Yes.

MOSLEH: Now, then, this list includes external initiating events that\--

FRANK: Oh, yes.

MOSLEH: \--that could initiate external to the boundaries of the
facility?

FRANK: Yes.

MOSLEH: I don't know what, a flood would be\--

FRANK: Or a tornado, for example, might initiate, start outside and come
into the boundary.

MOSLEH: Yes. All right, now, the part that I'm a little bit actually
confused about, and I think there is a logical disconnect between the
statement you make on Slide 8 as a basis or justification or reason to
go to 9, namely just aggregation or level of decomposition. And, it's a
frequency based argument here that if I disaggregate, if I decompose
further, the frequency of those events becomes smaller and smaller,
until they become zero effectively, because they become such a unique
event for which the probability is very, very small. But, then, you go
on and say like, you know, because of this, I need to think about how I
want to\--where do I draw the line for disaggregation or decomposition,
and you base it on what you call representational accuracy.

I thought that the basic kind of approach to deciding where you would
draw the line, in terms of level of detail, kind of based on, to a very
large extent, driven by the end state, or the consequence of interest.
And, that's the one that basically gives you the anchor point, kind of
defining how far back\--for kind of a reference point for your
frequency. And, then, the aggregation, decomposition is mostly driven by
how far do you want to take it in order to be able to identify causes,
and for risk management to see where you would actually want to focus
defenses against this, not that the frequency will go down. The
frequency is anchored by the consequence.

And, the other thing is the data availability. So, I don't see why this
argument of, you know, worrying about driving the frequencies too low,
is a case for maybe actually a better argument that you have, which is
the representation on accuracy.

FRANK: Okay. Representation of accuracy is, to my mind, the overriding
argument for selecting a particular level of aggregation,
disaggregation. But, I want to give you an example of where I think
there's a problem if one disaggregates too low a level.

So, I have, for example, a crane and I want to represent this crane as
being composed of multiple components, all of which contribute to the
success of a lift, and therefore, in the reverse, potential failure
modes for a drop.

If I take each individual component and call such that that component in
a crane, the hoist, the support wires, and I say that becomes the
initiating event, I'm at a very low level, I have extremely small
probabilities of frequencies of failure for hoist, for example. And,
that would lead I think to an erroneous notion of what would be screened
out.

If I take failure mode by failure mode of a crane, its frequencies, I
will have, in effect, I think I would be able to screen out nearly all
event sequences such that I would never have to do a dose calculation,
in accordance with the regulation, because if the probability of an
event sequence is less than 10 to the minus 4 over the preclosure
period, I no longer have to do a dose calculation.

MOSLEH: Not if your pinch point is the crane failure; right?

FRANK: That is an initiating event, a successful crane doesn't produce a
drop, so I go off to the next initiating event, yeah.

MOSLEH: So, if you base it on what matters, basically the event of
concern, you know, a malfunction that has a consequence, then your
choice of how far you go down in terms of detail is a matter of, you
know, a number of things, including resources and modeling and things
that are\--you know, data availability and other things, but not that
frequencies become smaller. I mean, you don't screen at that level. You
screen it at the level where the event has some consequence; right?

FRANK: Agreed.

GARRICK: Okay, I have some questions, but I want to get the whole Board
in, so we're going to have to be reasonably efficient here. I have Andy,
Howard, David and Bill. Andy?

KADAK: Yes, thank you.

What you've described here is probably a four or five year process. Now,
is this going to be part of a license application?

FRANK: Yes.

KADAK: Do you want to amplify?

FRANK: Do you want me to amplify?

KADAK: Yes. I mean, the analysis to support all of the failures is not
going to be insignificant. And, then, assigning probabilities to the
events is also quite a challenge. And, even if you get a decent set of
event sequences, then you have all the fault trees to kind of build up.

FRANK: You bet. So, tell that message to DOE and point out that the BSC
is performing a miracle here, because we have really compressed the
normal time period. In doing so, there are great management challenges
to keep everybody together on the same page within the PCSA as well as
working with engineering. We have a very, very large team. This is far
and away the largest team, by maybe a factor of five or six or seven,
that I've ever had to assemble for a risk assessment. We have about 60
people just in my area, and with all of the, including criticality and
dose, it's on the order of 75 people doing this work. So, it is a very,
very large effort with a compressed schedule.

KADAK: And, Norm Rasmussen once said you can get 90 percent of the
information with 10 percent of the effort. Have you tried looking at it
from that perspective to identify what Ali was talking about? Where are
the risk significant issues that you should maybe focus in on with much
more detail than trying to cover everything in the detail that you're
worried about?

FRANK: Okay, first of all, I did not say that we're covering everything
in equal detail. I do believe in a risk informed approach to a PRA. And,
so, yes, things that are much less important, I'm not, for example, in
comparison to a 23 foot drop from a crane, I'm not going to worry too
much about. A collision of a canister into a wall, I'm not going to put
in the same level of effort at all.

KADAK: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Speaking of failures, the hotel warned us that they're going to
do a test of their emergency power generator, and that we may be in
darkness for a few moments any time now, between 2:00 and 3:00. So, if
that happens, just relax. Wait until the lights come back on.

All right, Howard?

ARNOLD: My comment is related to Andy's. You told us how you're going to
do it, but we haven't seen any actual results from your doing it, which
raises a question. The design is proceeding, and if you say well, you
know, the schedule of this is thus and so, but the design gets done,
then you're kind of saying the design\--or this is irrelevant to the
actual performance of the design. I think that, in fact, you've got to
present some information to the designers on a current basis, and I
presume that's all paced so they all come together at the L.A. point,
huh, both the design and the safety analysis?

FRANK: Let me reorient your paradigm here, because I think we're doing
something a bit different in this process.

It's really, the traditional way of thinking about it is that you have a
design and you evaluate the design. Then, the next level of thinking
about it is that you have a design that takes you to\--preliminary,
evaluate that, you give some feedback to the designers, and then you go
to the next level, tier two, or whatever it is, in design, and you do
that again. We're doing this almost continuously, where at first,
insights were given back to the design team based on judgment. And,
then, as the models developed a little more, we could give them crude
order of magnitude estimates, and then as the models continued to
evolve, those estimates we hope get more accurate, or at least more down
to the level of detail that the design is at. And, yes, we hope at the
end, that it matches up right.

ARNOLD: And, the assumption is that when you find something, it can be
fixed by some tweaking of the design?

FRANK: Well, I think that's a big advantage of having a risk assessment,
going along right in parallel, in fact, interwoven with the design. In
the surface facilities, we have that ability, it's just brick and mortar
and steel and we can change that. We know how to design things. So, it
is really just a question of time before it really does all come
together.

ARNOLD: Any idea of when that comes?

FRANK: Well, our stated due date for BSC delivery of a licensing
application, with all supporting analyses done, is end of February 2008.

ARNOLD: Design and a supporting\--

FRANK: Yes, Bob Slovic said roughly 35 percent of the design for ITS
components, that when the associated PCSA, at that time.

GARRICK: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I'm not sure I want to flog a dead horse, or a dying one, but I'm going
to do it anyway. I'm a little bit concerned about the safety case
itself. I'm going to follow up on what my colleague, Mark Abkowitz,
said. We heard this morning that there would be a time when the facility
is being constructed that there could be almost an excess of material
arriving at the site before it can be properly handled as far as
disposal is concerned, probably would have to be put on some kind of
pads, and so on and so forth. It's during that period that if anything
goes wrong at the site, a crane failing, some delivery problem, or
something like that after a year or two, that would expose workers at
the utility who may be loading casks for delivery, will all of a sudden,
all the systems will have to be stopped, including trains perhaps on the
tracks between the two places, which exposes the public to a greater
risk and exposes the workers at the utility to a greater risk. You've
told us what you were asked to do, which is keep inside the fence. I'm
going to ask your personal opinion, and ask you if you think that's
reasonable.

FRANK: Yeah, in developing an overall safety case for an integrated
process of utility to YMP via interim storage or not, if one were
interested in the overall, as one should be interested in the overall
safety associated with the entire disposal process, one should look at
it all. I agree, yeah.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

HELLSTROM: George Hellstrom, DOE.

I just want to make a comment that there is a separate issue or process
that also is going on, that was also spoke of this morning, in the
Environmental Impact Statement, in the Supplemental Environment Impact
Statement.

GARRICK: Okay. Bill?

MURPHY: Bill Murphy, Board.

Are you aware of this event sequence and fault tree analysis approach
being applied to postclosure safety assessments, or performance
assessments for nuclear waste disposal?

FRANK: I am not well-versed in what's going on in postclosure. I
wouldn't be the right person to ask.

MURPHY: Okay. So, you're not aware of any\--

FRANK: Oh, I didn't say that. There is, in fact\--there is a\--the way I
understand it, and, again, I'm not the right person, but the way I
understand it, there's a FEPs analysis, which is sort of a screening
analysis. If it screens through FEPs, it goes through the complete TSPA.
And, my understanding is that they're, in the FEPs analysis, using the
same tool, sapphire, for event tree, fault tree work, that we're using.

MURPHY: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Okay, Mike, it strikes me that one of the things that's going
on here is that the team that's doing the PCSA is trying to please all
the schools of safety analysis, the risk assessment school, the two
approaches that the NRC tends to implement on nuclear facilities, and
then, of course, the DOE approach, and the DOE regulations, and it's
very difficult to do. You know, one of the things that would be very
useful, and it's not clear to me that we'll ever have an answer to this,
is to be able to compare on a common basis the preclosure risk with the
postclosure risk. There's many people, including myself, that believe
that the preclosure dose risk is probably greater than the postclosure
dose risk. And, it's going to be very difficult to get an adequate
resolution to be able to show where the risk is coming from.

I would think that the way the bottom lines would be, if you could do
it, in other words, if you ended up with a CCDF, complementary
cumulative distribution function, on the preclosure, and compared it
with the postclosure, that the numbers would probably be smaller in the
preclosure, but the uncertainties would probably be much greater in the
postclosure. That kind of information would be very useful, it seems to
me. But, the truth is your scopes are different, your approaches are
different\--

FRANK: And, the regulation that we're meeting is different.

GARRICK: \--and, trying to meet all these regulations are different as
well. One of the things that they're doing, of course, in the
postclosure is assembling all of the results into integrated and totally
aggregated CCDFs. You're not doing that. You're doing it by categories.

FRANK: Yes, that's not part of the compliance case.

GARRICK: Right. Right. So, it makes it further\--it further masks what
is really going on here in terms of being able to make comparisons and
in terms of being able to put the puzzle together that characterizes the
total waste management system risk.

And, that brings me to a few specific questions. The NRC has some
interim staff guidance now on things like seismic, and that interim
staff guidance calls for a probabilistic based assessment of seismic
events, where you combine a seismic risk curve with the fragility
information, and get a true risk presentation. Are you going to do that
in this?

FRANK: Yes.

GARRICK: You're going to follow the NRC's\--now, of course, this is a
guidance document, and it's not a rule. It's just guidance.

FRANK: Well, we've elected to perform what amounts to a seismic PRA, as
I am familiar with them from the 1990's to this day, on nuclear power
plants. It's a back ilk (phonetic) where we're developing a set of
fragilities for key components, and we're convoluting that within event
sequences with a hazard curve, and getting a mean probability of
earthquake initiated event sequences.

GARRICK: So, you're not going to do it on a margin analysis basis?
You're really going to do it\--okay.

FRANK: Yes.

GARRICK: This slide that's up there, where it says, "Should a single
event sequence include all drops of all types of canisters from all
possible sources in all facilities," now, you know, in the PRAs for
nuclear power plants, we don't have that problem, because we take all of
the drops and we categorize the drops. We categorize loss of coolant
accidents. You have a small loss of coolant accident with very specific
dimensions and release rates. You have a medium and you have a large.
So, it's a very logical process that you could apply to that kind of a
problem. You categorize these into manageable initiators in a
probability of frequency format. It just seems to me that trying to
force some probabilistic concepts into the licensing requirement really
compromises the complexity of the analysis.

FRANK: It increases the complexity of the analysis.

GARRICK: Yes. That's what I mean. And, one of the things that was done
in some of the early large-scope PRAs, and you're very aware of that,
was a so-called phased approach, where rather than having 50 initiating
events, you had five or six. But, you make sure those five or six
contain in them the equivalent of the 50. And, you, in a very short
period of time, get a\--bouncing off of Andy's comment, in a very short
period time, you'd get a first order indication of what the risk is. I
would think you could do something like that here. It doesn't sound like
that's the direction you're going.

FRANK: Well, I think that was done. I think that sort of top level risk
analysis was done back two years ago in what was called the CD-1 study.
We got those insights, and it was time to break it down in more detail
for this go around.

GARRICK: Okay. Yes, Ali?

MOSLEH: What worried me was applying the screening at almost an
arbitrary level, which is controlled by other guidance other than really
a solid PRA. And, I was wondering, you know, do you really need to
screen events out before you do any analysis?

FRANK: I'm sorry. Let me define what screen out means. In the jargon
that we're using, and I apologize if that wasn't clear, we're calling
something that is screened out as that which an event sequence
quantification shows is beyond Category 2, that is less than 10 to the
minus 4, over the 100 year preclosure period.

MOSLEH: At the initiator level.

FRANK: The whole event sequence, if the initiating event happens to be
there, that low already, then you don't\--one need not quantify in much
detail the rest of it, nor does one need to calculate a dose.

I believe the point of that categorization is\--well, actually, I don't
know what the point of the categorization is derived from the NRC, but
the way we're using it is to define our level of effort associated with
the amount of dose and criticality calculations that we do. And, for
that purpose, it screens out part of the work we have to do.

GARRICK: Any other questions? Yes, Andy?

KADAK: Has DOE finished their, I think it was called their risk margins,
or margin safety analysis, and has that been factored into your
modeling?

FRANK: I have no knowledge of that. Do you know that, the performance
margin analysis?

GARRICK: For the TSPA.

NEWBURY: I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?

KADAK: I thought the last time Ward mentioned that they were going to do
some kind of a safety margins analysis to support the TSPA.

BUDNITZ: That's postclosure.

NEWBURY: I know that, Bob. Claudia Newbury, DOE. Thank you, Bob Budnitz.

Yes, we are in the process of doing what's called a performance margin
analysis, where we will take some of the conservatisms out of the TSPA,
and then use as a comparison to our compliance case TSPA, which will be
in the license to show that we have margin.

KADAK: Okay. Now, back to this question. Claudia suggested that you
might know something about the seismic design criteria relative to the
basis for establishing\--we talked about this morning\--a relatively
high seismic loading. Is that correct?

FRANK: That's correct.

KADAK: Okay, could you share with us how we got those big\--

FRANK: Are you referring to the TAD spec?

KADAK: Well, I'm assuming that the TAD spec, the seismic input to the
TAD storage pad is the same as that associated with the facilities.

FRANK: Yes.

KADAK: So, can you describe how that number was established, or that
risk was established, establishing a certain ground motion?

FRANK: Not in detail. I can tell you that there was recently an effort
completed earlier in the year, an effort completed by the project
seismic geologic team that developed a seismic hazard curve, and that
seismic hazard curve has a roughly the 1 in 500,000 year frequency,
approximately 3G PGA.

KADAK: One in 500,000 years? Now, that's going to be designed for
surface facilities?

FRANK: Well, that is not the design point for the surface facilities.
That just happens to be what the hazard curve ends up at at that very
low frequency.

KADAK: Okay. So, why are we talking about then designing for a 3G event
on the surface pad that may last, at most, maybe for 150 or so years?

FRANK: I think what you're referring to now is the requirement
associated with the AO with a TAD inside to not tip over and withstand
motions at that level.

KADAK: Yes.

FRANK: We are, as a project, as I mentioned before, we took the
commitment to do a seismic risk assessment, which convolutes the entire
hazard curve with fragility curve. So, one needs to understand
responses, even at the high earthquake levels, in order to include that
in the integration.

KADAK: Meaning?

FRANK: Meaning that I'd like to be able to\--that what I would hope to
show, and I don't know how it's going to come out, it's a little early
for that, but when we do take the hazard curve with the seismic event
sequence associated with the full range of those earthquakes, and we
convolute them at the P, that the mean probability of that process will
be less than 10 to the minus 4 over the preclosure period. For that to
occur, there needs to be some strength, or we need to be able to
understand, and in a certain sense, show that at about 3G, at a level
somewhat greater than 3G\--I'm going to back off on that and say it a
different way. In lieu of that calculation being performed by the
vendors, we need to be able to tell the vendors a particular design
point, worse case design point. And, we were not given the guidance
to\--do you want to say something?

KADAK: I'm just wondering who picked the 3G as the design point?

FRANK: It's not a design point. It's part of the hazard curve.

KADAK: But, from what I was told this morning, they're designing to a 3G
event for these TADs. But, let me work it backwards, and use what I know
of the reactor storage pad designs. One in 10,000 years is an acceptable
return period for structures and storage pads.

FRANK: Okay.

KADAK: For roughly 100 years, 40, 60, you can stretch it to 100. Now,
why did somebody decide\--and, you can go and find out what the
earthquake return, what earthquake at Yucca Mountain would be for that
return period, which I don't believe is 3Gs. Maybe it is.

FRANK: It's one in a thousand year, it's less than 3G.

KADAK: All right. Now, what is wrong with using that as the design basis
to show that in the hundred or so years that you might be operating this
storage pad, that it's acceptable as opposed to going to 10 to the
minus, pick a number, that maybe drives you to 3G for your design?
That's what I'm trying to understand.

FRANK: First of all, let's get the\--the design point is different from
the analysis point or the margin point. The design point means that the
vendors go to a level less than 3G, and I don't remember what the TAD
spec says on that, whether it's .4 or .5 or .6, I just don't remember.
And at that point, all of the structural codes and standards with all
their allowables kick in, and vendors need to meet that.

Beyond that design point, there is margin to be demonstrated, and that
margin, given the hazard curve, leads us down to a one in 500,000 year
level. Why one in 500,000 year? 50 years of lifetime times one in
500,000 years, gives us a 10 to the minus 4 over the preclosure period,
so that we'd like to demonstrate that there's adequacy down to our
screen-out point, the Category 2, Category 3 boundary.

WISENBURG: My name is Mark Wisenburg. I'm the Bechtel SAIC manager for
preclosure safety analysis. I want to remind you that Dr. Frank said he
knew a little bit about the seismic design criteria. You're quizzing him
as if he were the expert and knew all the answers. I know a little bit
more. I need to put some perspective on Dr. Kadak's question.

Dr. Kadak is proposing exactly what the Department of Energy originally
proposed by way of a seismic margins analysis with a 10,000 year
earthquake as the radio-level earthquake. That was our original
proposal. We made that submittal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The staff struggled long and hard to determine whether that would be an
acceptable approach. They ruled that inasmuch as a seismic margins
analysis did not provide you with the appropriate probabilistic
framework to make a judgment as to whether you are Category 1, Category
2, or beyond Category 2, that's helpful, and providing insight into the
design, the seismic margins analysis by itself would not demonstrate
compliance with the regulation.

Then, the decision was made to follow, in general, the guidance in
ISG-1. We aren't slave to it. We are taking some exceptions, but, in
general, that is a definition of a seismic hazards curve, and
convolution against that curve of the structural fragility of the piece
of equipment or structure of concern. The seismic hazards curve gives
you the G levels you are talking about. They are points on the curve.

GARRICK: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Okay, well, are there\--okay, question from\--excuse me.

NEVERGOL: If you could just give me two minutes, I need to clarify one
thing to make sure everybody understands. This is Debbie Nevergol from
BSC.

What we've been discussing just now relative to the 3G is only
applicable to the aging overpacks. I wanted to make it clear that from a
design perspective on the buildings themselves, we're designing those
for the 2,000 year earthquake return period, which would put us about at
.58 to .52 Gs, vertical and horizontal PGA. So, much less than the 3Gs.

GARRICK: Oh, that's a very important observation.

KADAK: Why is it that the NRC or somebody thinks the overpack needs to
fly to be good?

NEVERGOL: I think it's a different perspective of looking at the
probabilistic analysis. What they're looking at is at the 500 year
return period, which is equivalent to two times 10 to the minus 6. If we
design for that overturning, and show that it does not overturn at that
earthquake, then we've met our probabilistic requirements. Different
than the approach being taken on the buildings. Correct me if I didn't
say that right.

KADAK: It sounds like it's your design decision to pick the number, not
NRC's.

NEVERGOL: DOE's decision on how to approach this for the aging
overpacks.

KADAK: Ah, ahhh, so we shouldn't be blaming the NRC, should we?

NEVERGOL: I don't blame the NRC for anything.

KADAK: Just to clarify. The building are designed to what standard? What
floating?

NEVERGOL: The 2,000 year return period earthquake.

KADAK: 2,000 year return period, which is what?

NEVERGOL: It is .52 Gs vertical, and .58G horizontal PGA.

KADAK: Okay. And, the only thing that's designed to this 3G is the
overpack?

NEVERGOL: Design is not\--they will be evaluated for overturning,
showing that they will not overturn with the 3G.

KADAK: And, I'm still trying to understand how you get the 3G?

NEVERGOL: The 3G is coming off of the 500,000 year return period
earthquake.

KADAK: And, why did you pick that?

NEVERGOL: Because that's equivalent to 2 times 10 to the minus 6 annual
probability of occurrence.

GARRICK: Which isn't NRC?

NEVERGOL: Which is the 1 in 10,000 over the preclosure period.

KADAK: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: All right, let's see, we had a question over here? Yes, go
ahead, David.

DIODATO: Dave Diodato, NWTRB staff risking universal enmity here.

I was impressed by the challenge of your undertaking here, and also the
significance of it in terms of evaluating the safety of preclosure
operations. And, I was encouraged by your response to Howard Arnold in
terms of yes, you had feedbacks to design, and how that works. Well, as
an aside for a second, you know, Dr. Abkowitz asked about outside the
fence, no, you're inside the fence, but you also include underground; is
that correct?

FRANK: That includes underground operations during the preclosure
period, yes.

DIODATO: Okay. I just wanted to get that clarified. So, in terms of your
feedbacks to design, it seems like there's a lot of opportunities there
for reducing the risk, you know, enhancing safety through design
decisions. So, my question is can you name two or three top scenarios,
contributors to the risk that you've identified, and have there been any
design modifications, you know, feeding back as a result of those risks
that you identified, those major scenarios that contribute to the risks?

FRANK: You used the word major, and I just decided to ignore that, and
I'll give you two examples, because it's hard to know at this point in
my analysis, you know, what's major and what isn't. So, I'll just give
you two examples.

We are sensitive to, of course, the height of the drop, and one could,
you know, push the button and have a crane arise rather high, in fact,
all the way up to where it's called two blocked. So, what we wanted to
do was limit the drop heights to reduce the probability of a breach, and
we did this by design in a couple of ways. Easy ways like safety limit
switches. More sophisticated ways by sensing when the lifted canister
has actually gone through a second floor, and then closing the gates on
it so it can't fall any further than that.

Another example would be associated with the TEV. It is a
semi-autonomous design, which electrically actuates its own doors to
open. The waste package itself is not a\--doesn't provide much
shielding. The TEV itself is what provides the shielding to workers.
And, so, when we saw that it is possible to have a spurious opening of
that door, we put in interlocks to reduce the probabilities, to reduce
the exposure to workers.

DIODATO: Can we have a picture of the TEV that was actually in a
different\--that was in Slovic's presentation.

FRANK: That's right. And, unfortunately\--yeah, I don't think that
picture showed the doors.

DIODATO: Well, no, this shows the doors in the front. I was looking at
this because I don't know if you've ever seen a transformer. This thing
kind of reminds me of a transformer. It's interesting. I was wondering
because you're struggling with the issue of reductionism or, you know,
joint probabilities are getting to be so small, you don't want to overdo
that. So, when you put the transporter in your placement
vehicle\--that's it right there\--into your analysis, what failure
points do you see here that you include in your analysis? You talked
about the doors?

FRANK: Yes, with respect\--that's one thing, respect to the doors. This
thing is built like a tank. It's something on the order of 10 inches of
steel around it, and, so, it is an extraordinarily rugged vehicle. What
we're really concerned about is not damage to the vehicle from a safety
perspective, it's an operational nightmare, but the waste package, we
don't want the waste package to breach. So, we look at derailments,
control commands that cause the TEV to increase speed, and we counteract
that by simply putting motors in that don't have the capacity to
increase speed.

There is a downhill slope at one point, and, so, we want to avoid a
runaway, and, so, what we do is put in 100 to 1 gear box\--gear ratio
gear boxes, so that there can be no back driving, and that reduces
the\--dramatically reduces the likelihood of runaway.

DIODATO: If this thing breaks down in the repository, do you have a plan
for how you get it out?

FRANK: There is a concept for how to get it out, yes. There will be, the
way I understand the concept, is that there will be a similar\--well,
think about it as a train. When a locomotive breaks down, you bring
another little one up with a coupling device, you couple it and you haul
it out of there.

DIODATO: Thank you. I appreciate that.

SLOVIC: Just\--this is Bob Slovic. The transport and emplacement
vehicle, as I said earlier, has about eight motors in it. It will
operate with six, and two of them stalled. Also, with the doors closed
and the bed plate in, it's shielded, or the operators or anybody coming
up to it would be shielded so if it was located on the surface, you
could walk up to it and repair what you needed to do. We haven't gotten
yet to a tractor to pull it out, but that's another option for recovery
type of thing, if it were stalled in a drift somewhere and we couldn't
send humans in.

DIODATO: I appreciate the clarification. The thing that strikes me about
this is the whole risk triplet approach. You talked about how to assess
risk based on past historical experience, and here we have a novel
design for something that's never been\--

SLOVIC: It is, but we're essentially not handling\--the waste package is
designed for, well, it's I think a two meter drop, or it's been analyzed
for a two meter drop. We pick it up a food.

FRANK: Let me respond to that, though, the novel design aspect. The
assembly of it is novel, but it is still composed of motors and gear
boxes and contactors and programmable logic controllers, all of which we
know a lot about.

DIODATO: That makes sense. Thank you.

WISENBURG: This is Mark Wisenburg. I wanted to go back to your basic
question, which you\--by have you identified major contributors to risk.
A fundamental major contributor of risk is cask handling, and mishaps
associated with it. What we have done in the course of interface and
cooperation with design, as the design of the canister base repository
proceeded, we took every opportunity we could to eliminate lifts, and
limit the height of lifts. That is one of the principal contributors of
the risk insight and\--to the engineering design, and a very basic and
high level.

GARRICK: All right. I think we have exhausted our time. Mike, obviously,
you have a big job ahead of you, and we wish you well. It's a major
task, what you're trying to do, and we appreciate your spending the time
with us and telling us where you are.

We're only 12 minutes, 11 minutes behind schedule if you don't count the
break. And, I think rather than having a break, we will move on. And,
that brings us to the public comment period, and I guess I have at least
one public comment that wants to be made by Judy Treichel.

So, Judy, you have the floor.

TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.

First, I want to thank you for asking the question about the EIS and
having the answer given by Mr. Sproat that they were going to bail out
before they had a record of decision, which EISs are one of the most
important things as far as the public is concerned, because we
understand it, and we've dealt with EISs for a very long time, and we
know what happens when, you know, the various processes that go along
and that you respond to the draft and then a final comes out, and if
there is no record of decision, you miss out on a very important part of
the process. But, that's the way it's going to go, and I wanted to find
out that that was what was happening.

There is, I guess for decades, I've been standing here and you've been
sitting there, and you hear me talk about this idea that the sense of
urgency is not a good thing, even though you heard from the industry
that they're delighted that there suddenly is this new sense of urgency
with DOE. And, the idea of keeping to the schedule and trying to rush
through this thing has been the worst thing that they have done all the
way along. Trying to rush something that's a million year project, or
even a 10,000 year project, is a terrible mistake.

And, if you'll remember in the year 2004, they were at about this same
situation. They tried to certify their LSN, they were all set to go to
licensing, and the certification came off of the LSN, and they didn't go
to licensing, and look at all that you've heard since 2004. Isn't it a
good thing that the rush came to a screeching halt. And, it's my
assumption that that probably will happen again, and it's not a
disaster. It's very good for the people of Nevada, those along the
transportation routes, and probably those in reactor communities, too.

The idea that there's a Yucca Mountain address label on a cask that's
sitting at a reactor site and, therefore, gives confidence to people is
not necessarily true. There are a lot of groups out there across the
nation that oppose Yucca Mountain, and many of them are in reactor
communities, and they're far more interested in whether or not that
on-site storage is being done as safely as possible, rather than what
the address label on the thing says. So, there's very different points
of view here, and I think you need to hear those along with the
industry.

I also think there's phrases that went on today that are troubling.
When, I think it was during a discussion of the opening of\--possible
opening of dual purpose casks at a repository, and that decision would
be made after licensing. So, it's like you go down and you get yourself
a driver's license, and then you feel you're good to go for street
racing. That's just not what's going on here, and we hear all sorts of
things like that, and the idea that what we're looking\--or what we're
working toward is something that will work for licensing. Well, I don't
care about something that works for licensing. I care about a waste
disposal that works.

The idea that, I think it was Chris Kouts who said we assume that the
utilities will want us to take the waste right from the pools. Well, if
you follow that through, then what you have here is the TAD going to
Yucca Mountain with waste that's just barely cool enough to qualify for
being transported, and Yucca Mountain turns into, along with its aging
facility, an MRS, because it's going to have to sit out there for a long
time if it arrives that hot.

It also seems very strange that everything is propped up against a rail
line, which isn't there, and it's likely that it may never be there. So,
there are a lot of things that are kind of propped against something
that just doesn't exist yet. And, Ward Sproat and the Department of
Energy and the repository project seem to be trying to outrun the
opposition.

So, what I see is a license application that's going to go in, and a
licensing process that will take place in order to license
specifications and assumptions and pictures and partially done designs,
and I don't think that's why the TRB is here and that's what you were
set up to evaluate.

So, thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you. Yes.

TREICHEL: I'd be disappointed if you didn't.

KADAK: Kadak. Judy, what can we do to bring more of the public into
these meetings? Because it's just very disappointing not to see more of
the people from Nevada listening to some of this stuff.

TREICHEL: I guess you could do what Canada and Sweden and some of the
other places do, and replace their paycheck for their participation so
that you don't take a day off of work, and you don't\--I mean, after
all, we've been at this for 20 years. How many people out there are
capable of going back and finding out what even the acronyms mean. It's
very hard, and that train left the station. Once this thing was
recommended, the site was recommended and Congress acted and we're off
toward licensing, what difference does it make what the public says?

The one thing the public does do is they comment on EISs, but whether or
not that's worth doing in this case or not, when you're never even going
to get a record of decision, that gets thrown over the wall along with
the LA, and that's NRC's problem and the public isn't there. NRC has all
different rules for the way they treat EISs. So, there should have been
a public participation program when it started.

KADAK: Not that I'm recommending this to the other Board members, but
you're saying the evening meetings may be better?

TREICHEL: No.

KADAK: No?

TREICHEL: Stop and start over again. Get yourself a good program.

FITZPATRICK: Am I too late, Dr. Garrick?

GARRICK: Yes.

FITZPATRICK: For a quick one? Is it too late for a quick one?

GARRICK: Sure.

FITZPATRICK: Okay, this will be for Dr. Frank, I guess. This is an
acronym question. The column in your Slide 10, the sequence of analysis
of event sequence, there's a lot of CRC- and then a number. What is the
acronym?

First off, I'm Charlie Fitzpatrick, State of Nevada, and I'm sorry, I
asked Dr. Frank to identify the acronym CRC in his slide.

FRANK: CRC is short for CRCF in our jargon, which is the canister
receipt and closure facility, and what that actual\--those sequence of
numbers refer to is a box in the master. Each one represents a box in
the master logic diagram. So, you can trace the analysis from the master
logic diagram and see where that information is used in the event
sequences.

FITZPATRICK: Okay. And, the second part of the question, just to sort of
try to gauge the enormity of what you have ahead of you, I think I heard
that there could be as many as a couple hundred event sequences. But
even if there were 100 of significance, if they each had to go through
this step by step analysis with these data packages at the base of them,
is what you're going to have to submit in February '08 to DOE as the
final package? Can you give me a guess of the enormity of that?

FRANK: Well, I don't think that what we are going to submit is at all
out of balance with, in fact, complete consistent with a typical
submittal of a risk assessment for our nuclear power plant. I think it's
a similar number of significant event sequences.

FITZPATRICK: Are we talking hundreds of pages?

FRANK: For all the documentation, we're probably talking\--well, what we
will provide the NRC will be, for our analysis, on that order, about 100
or so pages. And, then, of course, there's other documents that have the
details of the calculations.

FITZPATRICK: Thank you.

GARRICK: Go ahead, Steve?

FRISHMAN: Thank you, John.

Steve Frishman, State of Nevada. I think I have to repeat something to
the Board that I said I think two or three times over the years, but
there are enough that probably haven't heard me, and I heard the
misconception again this morning on the subject. And, that's the Part 63
licensing is not the same procedure as reactor licensing. There's a
major difference, and DOE is trying to make them look alike.

There appears to have been at least some misconception that they are
alike by other people, and that's\--the major difference is that the
safety analysis report that goes with the repository license application
under Part 63 is the safety analysis report, and reactor licensing, you
start with a PSAR, preliminary safety analysis report. And, that's a
very large distinction, and a very large difference, and DOE seems to
over the years have continued to believe that what they submit as a
license application will contain what is the equivalent of a PSAR that
will then be elevated up when they go for the amendment for possession.
That's not the way the rule goes. The SAR is the SAR.

Now, that is not an esoteric thing to be thinking about, especially when
you hear such things as 35 percent design at the time of\--35 percent
design for ITS at the time of license application, when you hear that
there will not be a TAD design, they will try to license the TAD
specification. These are important distinctions, and it's, I think, of a
major concern, and it's a misconception that DOE has continued to
foster. They believe it themselves. And, I think they possibly believe
that the NRC will let them get away with it only because the NRC has
been silent all these years on DOE's misconception, and DOE, as it has
done with almost everything else where there's a question that would
have to do with someone else having any control over their program. If
the issue is out there, the one responsible for the answer is silent,
DOE takes it as consent.

So, in a situation where we are going to get an incomplete license
application that DOE is going to try to insist is a complete license
application, and they tell you in this room today, 35 percent ITS
design, simply things, no TAD design, no TAD design because they haven't
got time to do it if they're going to make June of 2008.

So, I just wanted to clear up that distinction. It's a very important
distinction, and it should factor in your thinking about the level of
technical credibility of the upcoming license application, because I
think you need to worry about that. And, it should also at least temper
your thoughts on the extent to which, whether it's complete or not, you
think the work even meets the excellence bar that the NRC has
given\--has said for years and years is going to have to be not
necessarily because they're great champions of excellence, but because
they know if it's not excellent, it's going to take time to get it to
the point where they can process it, and they've got the law hanging
over their head.

I think these are places where your expert advice could come to bear on
the things even in the risk informed world that we have to live in,
because NRC says it is, you can bring these things to bear in your
thinking about what is it maybe that is important enough for DOE to have
to take care of it before they subject the license application to not
only the NRC, but to us who are going to have to spend extraordinary
resources to deal with the fact that they have a license application
that's not complete.

GARRICK: Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Steve. Anyone else?

ARNOLD: John, let me say something to Steve. I'm the one who used the
PSAR term, but the fact of the matter is whether it's a PSAR, an FSAR,
or whatever, the final SAR will be the result of whatever they submit in
the first place, and the answers to all the RAIs that the NRC will
bombard DOE with over the years. So, I'm sorry for using the word PSAR,
but I recognize that what's sent in originally will evolve considerably
before it reaches the end.

FRISHMAN: I won't continue the discussion.

GARRICK: Any other comments or questions?

Very good. Well, the Board wants to thank all the presenters, and all of
the questioners. It was a very comprehensive discussion, I believe, and
a number of issues were raised that were not adequately addressed, which
provides material for future meetings, which there will surely be. And,
we look forward to that.

But, we want to thank everybody for being here, and especially for the
people that made the presentations, and especially the people who made
the public comments. So, with that, we will, without further ado, we
will adjourn.

Thank you.

(Whereupon, the meeting was adjourned.)

[C E R T I F I C A T E]{.underline}

I certify that the foregoing is a correct transcript of the Nuclear
Waste Technical Review Board meeting held on September 19, 2007 in Las
Vegas, Nevada

taken from the electronic recording of proceedings in the above-entitled
matter.

September 26, 2007 [s/Scott Ford]{.underline} \_ Federal Reporting
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