UNITED STATES

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

FALL 2001 BOARD MEETING

September 10, 2001

Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza

4255 South Paradise Road

Las Vegas, Nevada

[NWTRB BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT]{.underline}

Mr. John W. Arendt

Dr. Daniel B. Bullen

Dr. Norman Christensen

Dr. Jared L. Cohon, Chair, NWTRB

Dr. Paul P. Craig, Session Chair

Dr. Debra S. Knopman

Dr. Priscilla P. Nelson

Dr. Richard R. Parizek

Dr. Donald Runnells, Session Chair

Dr. Alberto A. Sagüés

Dr. Jeffrey J. Wong

[SENIOR PROFESSIONAL STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. Carl Di Bella

Dr. Daniel Fehringer

Dr. Daniel Metlay

Dr. Leon Reiter

Dr. David Diodato

Dr. John Pye

[NWTRB STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. William D. Barnard, Executive Director

Joyce Dory, Director of Administration

Karyn Severson, Director, External Affairs

Ayako Kurihara, Editor

Linda Hiatt, Management Analyst

Linda Coultry, Staff Assistant

Davonya Barnes, Staff Assistant

[I N D E X]{.underline}

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Call to Order and Introductory Comments**

Jared Cohon, Chairman, NWTRB. . . . . . . . . . . 5

**Program Update**

Lake Barrett, Acting Director, OCRWM . . . . . . . 16

**Yucca Mountain Project Update**

J. Russell Dyer, Project Manager, YMSCO . . . . . 40

**Session Introduction**

Paul Craig, Member, NWTRB . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

**Update on Uncertainty Analyses**

William Boyle, YMSCO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

**Update on Materials Testing**

Gerry Gordon, Bechtel SAIC Company. . . . . . . . 95

**Public Comments** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

**Afternoon Session**

**Interim Report on Waste Package**

**Materials Peer Review**

Joe Payer, Case Western Reserve University

Peer Review Team Lead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

**NWTRB Workshop on Passive Behavior**

Alberto Sagüés, Member . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

**Laboratory Tests on Titanium**

**Grade 7 and Alloy 22**

April L. Pulvirenti, Catholic University. . . . . 192

**Performance of Natural and Engineered Barriers**

Roger W. Staehle,

Consultant to State of Nevada . . . . . . . . . . 215

**Comparison of Higher- and Lower-Temperature**

**Operating Modes**

Jim Blink, Bechtel BSC/Lawrence Livermore

National Laboratory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

[I N D E X]{.underline}

(Cont.)

**Biosphere Peer Review**

Eric Smistad, YMSCO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

**Update on Total System Performance**

**Assessment (TSPA) Peer Review**

Abe Van Luik, YMSCO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

**Public Comments** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

**Adjournment** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

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

8:00 a.m.

COHON: Good morning. My name is Jared Cohon. I\'m the Chairman of the
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and it\'s my pleasure to welcome
you all to this meeting of our Board.

Before I talk about the meeting itself, I\'m going to give you some
background on the Board, and introduce the members of the Board and some
special guests that we have with us today.

In 1982, Congress enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which, among
other things, created the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste
Management, or OCRWM, within the U.S. Department of Energy. The Act
charged OCRWM with developing repositories for the final disposal of the
nation\'s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive wastes from
reprocessing.

Five years later, in 1987, Congress amended the Act to focus OCRWM\'s
activities on the characterization of a single candidate site for final
disposal, Yucca Mountain, on the western edge of the Nevada Test Site,
about 100 miles north of here.

In those same amendments in 1987, Congress created the Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board as an independent federal agency for reviewing
the technical and scientific validity of OCRWM\'s activities. The full
Board generally meets three or four times a year, usually in Nevada, and
most often in Las Vegas. The Board is required to periodically furnish
its findings, as well as its conclusions and recommendations, to
Congress and to the Secretary of the Department of Energy. We do this in
Congressional testimony and through our reports.

As specified by the 1987 Act, the President of the United States
appoints Board members from a list of nominees submitted by the National
Academy of Sciences. The Act also requires the Board to be a highly
multi-disciplinary group with areas of expertise covering all aspects of
nuclear waste management.

Before I introduce the members to you, I want to emphasize a couple of
things in what I just said. First, in its wisdom, I believe, when
Congress created this Board in 1987, it did so to create an independent
federal agency. We are not part of DOE, and we\'re not part of any other
federal organization or department. We are independent.

Secondly, our focus is on the science and technical aspect of OCRWM\'s
activities. We are not a policy making body. We do not deal with policy.
We do not approve the sites or approve anything that DOE does. We don\'t
issue a license the way NRC may. Rather. through our advice and reaction
to what DOE does, we influence, provide confidence for, where it\'s
called for, in DOE\'s programs. So, we\'re independent, and our focus is
on science and technology.

Now, let me introduce the members of the Board to you. And, in doing so,
let me remind you that all of us serve on the Board in a part-time
capacity. This is not our full-time jobs. In my case, I\'m president of
Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My technical
expertise is in environmental systems analysis and especially water
resources.

Now I\'m going to introduce each member in turn, and when I do, I\'ll
ask them to sort of raise their hands. John Arendt is a chemical
engineer by training. After retiring from a long and distinguished
career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, John formed his own company. He
specializes in many aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, including
standards and transportation. John chairs the Board\'s Panel on Waste
Management Systems.

And here let me point out the Board maintains five panels like
subcommittee\'s, through which we pursue specific issues. And as I
introduce the members, those who chair one or more of those panels, I
will point out.

Daniel Bullen is an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at
Iowa State University, where he also coordinates the nuclear engineering
program. Dan\'s areas of expertise include nuclear waste management,
performance assessment modeling, and materials science. Dan chairs two
of our panels, the Panel on Performance Assessment and the Panel on the
Repository.

Norman Christensen recently stepped down after serving for ten years as
Dean of the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke University. That\'s
why he\'s smiling, by the way, because he recently stepped down. He
continues to serve as a member of the faculty at Duke, and his areas of
expertise include biology and ecology.

Paul Craig is professor emeritus at the University of California at
Davis. He is a physicist by training and has special expertise in energy
policy issues related to global environmental change.

Debra Knopman is a senior engineer at RAND Corporation in Arlington,
Virginia. Her area of expertise is groundwater hydrology, and she chairs
the Board\'s Panel on Site Characterization.

Priscilla Nelson is Director of the Division of Civil and Mechanical
Systems in the Directorate of Engineering at the National Science
Foundation. Her expertise is in geotechnical engineering.

Richard Parizek is professor of hydrologic sciences at Penn State
University and an expert in hydrogeology and environmental geology.

Donald Runnells is professor emeritus in the Department of Geological
Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He\'s also a
technical consultant to Shepherd Miller, Inc., a firm providing
environmental and engineering consultation primarily to the mining
industry and, as well, to government agencies and other concerns. His
expertise is in geochemistry.

Alberto Sagüés is Distinguished University Professor in the Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South
Florida in Tampa. He\'s an expert in materials engineering and
corrosion, with particular emphasis on behavior of steel in concrete and
infrastructure durability.

Jeffrey Wong is Deputy Director for Science, Pollution Prevention and
Technology in the Department of Toxic Substances Control of the
California Environmental Protection Agency. He is a pharmacologist and
toxicologist with extensive experience and expertise in risk assessment
and scientific team management. Jeff chairs our Panel on Environment,
Regulations and Quality Assurance.

Those are our members. The Board is supported by a superb technical and
administrative staff who are sitting in the second and third rows over
there. Bill Barnard is the executive director of the Board. Unlike the
members who are part-time, the staff serve in a full-time capacity.

You\'ve probably met them already. Unfortunately, they\'re not in the
room. But you know who I\'m talking about when I say Linda Hiatt and
Linda Coultry are sitting just outside the door at the desk out there.
They\'re the two hard-working staff members who are responsible for all
meeting arrangements and logistics. If you have questions about the
meeting, one of the Lindas will be happy to answer those questions for
you, or they\'ll find someone who can.

At this meeting, we have invited three consultants to assist the Board
in its review of igneous activity. William Melson. I will mention them.
They\'ll be introduced again later in the meeting, in any event. Our
three consultants are William Melson of the Smithsonian Institution;
Meghan Morrissey of Colorado School of Mines; and Clarence Allen,
emeritus professor at Cal Tech and a former member of this Board. The
consultants, as I said, will join us later when we focus on igneous
activity, and we\'ll give them a more proper introduction at that time.

On behalf of the Board, I am very pleased to welcome two honored guests
from the Swedish National Council for Nuclear Waste, also known by its
acronym, KASAM. KASAM is a review organization with responsibilities
similar to the Board\'s, to this Board\'s. In 1989, our two
organizations entered into an informal agreement to exchange
information\--a relationship that continues today.

Camilla Odhnoff has chaired KASAM since 1985. She holds a doctorate in
plant physiology and has taught and conducted research at notable
institutions around the world. She entered Swedish politics in 1967 and
served as governor of Blekinge, a province in the eastern part of
Sweden, for almost 20 years. Dr. Odhnoff\'s many accomplishments were
recognized earlier this year when she received an Honorary Doctorate
from the University of Paris, a great honor.

Nils Rydell received a degree in Technical Physics from the Royal
Institute of Technology. He spent over 20 years in the nuclear industry,
culminating in the position of project manager for Sweden\'s first
commercial nuclear power plant. Since 1976, he has worked in many
different capacities in research and development related to nuclear
waste, including posts with the International Atomic Energy Agency and
the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD, the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, in Europe.

We\'re very pleased that you can both be with us for this meeting.

Let me turn now to the agenda for this meeting. Copies of the agenda are
available on the table outside. That indicates the subjects we\'ll be
covering and the times allotted to each of the topics, and we encourage
you to follow along.

At first glance, the agenda might appear to be something of a grab-bag,
and that\'s probably correct, and it\'s for good reason. This is the
last meeting of this Board before the scheduled decision by the DOE
whether to recommend development of a repository at Yucca Mountain. As a
result, there are many topics we want to review before that decision is
made.

There are, however, three broad themes that unite many of the
presentations on our agenda. The first theme of the meeting is a
collection of updates on the program. As is our custom at our meetings,
we will hear about the overall status of the program and updates on
on-going scientific studies.

This afternoon, we will also hear reports on peer reviews on the
Program\'s work in three important scientific and technical areas. We
will also be updated on Nye County\'s drilling program.

The second broad theme is documentation of information to support or
evaluate a possible site recommendation. Tomorrow, the Environmental
Protection Agency will tell us about the recently finalized standards
that would serve as the acceptance criteria for a Yucca Mountain
repository, if one is recommended.

Then, we will hear about plans to address the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission\'s Key Technical Issues. We will also hear about the
Preliminary Site Suitability Evaluation, the PSSE, and supporting
documents, including the Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses,
SSPA.

Some of you might have noticed that there are no presentations on the
agenda dealing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission\'s licensing
criterias for a Yucca Mountain repository, or DOE\'s siting guidelines.
We hoped to have separate presentations on those subjects, but work on
those documents has not yet been completed.

The third broad theme of the meeting is potential repository performance
issues. We have scheduled a session on igneous activity on Wednesday
morning. In addition, several times throughout the meeting, we\'ll be
hearing about other potential issues, including groundwater flow and
metals performance in a Yucca Mountain environment. We have also
included several opportunities for representatives of the State of
Nevada to discuss their work in areas that could affect a suitability
decision.

Finally, let me tell you about some aspects of how we will conduct this
meeting. First, it\'s important that I offer a disclaimer so that
everybody in the audience understands what you\'re hearing when Board
members speak, and the significance of what they say. This does not go
to the content or substance of what they say, but rather a procedural
point.

Our meetings are spontaneous by design. That is, the reactions of Board
members to presentations, the questions they ask are not in any way
scripted or determined in advance. Those of you who have attended our
meetings before know that the members of the Board do not hesitate to
speak their minds. The important point is that you understand that
that\'s just exactly what they are doing. They are speaking their minds.
They are not speaking on behalf of the Board. When we are articulating a
Board position, we\'ll let you know.

An important feature of this meeting, and all of our meetings, is the
opportunity for the public to make comments and to ask questions. We try
to provide as many opportunities as possible for the public to
participate in our meetings. We have an unusually large number of such
opportunities at this meeting. Public comment periods are scheduled at
the end of each half-day session, but we would prefer that if you can
you hold your comments until the end of the day. The mid-day comment
periods are primarily for those who cannot stay until the end of the
day\'s session.

However, even if you are not required to leave, but you feel that your
comment would be more timely at mid-day, by all means speak up and
we\'ll be happy to include you if we can.

Those wanting to comment should sign the Public Comment Register at the
check-in table outside where the Lindas are sitting, and they\'ll be
happy to assist you in signing up and to prepare you to comment publicly
when the time arises.

Let me point out, and I\'ll say it again later, that depending on the
number of people signing up, we may have to set a time limit on
individual remarks.

As an additional opportunity to question or to comment, you can give a
written question to either Linda during the meeting, during the meeting
itself. We\'ll make every effort to ask the question or read the comment
into the record, as appropriate. In other words, the Chair of the
meeting at that time will raise the question or offer the comment at the
appropriate time rather than waiting for the public comment period. But
we\'ll only do that if time allows. We have a very tight agenda, and it
may be necessary for us to defer those written questions or comments
until the public comment periods.

In addition to written questions to be asked by us during the meeting,
we always welcome written comments for the record. Those of you who
prefer not to make oral comments or to ask questions during the meeting,
or if you have something particularly long to add to the record, you can
choose this route at any time. We strongly encourage you to choose this
route if you have a lengthy statement for the record. Again, just submit
the written comments to either Linda, and they will be happy to make
sure the materials is handled appropriately.

Tomorrow morning, we will provide yet another opportunity for public
interaction. Starting at 7:15 in this room, 7:15 in the morning, we will
serve up coffee, donuts, and the Board to any members of the public who
would like an opportunity to express their views or just have an
informal conversation with a Board member. We have found previous
interactions of this type to be very useful, and we hope you\'ll be able
to join us. That\'s tomorrow morning at 7:15 in this room.

Finally, in closing, let me repeat what I said earlier. This is the last
meeting of this Board before the scheduled decision by DOE on whether to
recommend development of a repository at Yucca Mountain. As a result,
this is an especially timely meeting, and we have a very full agenda. We
hope that the information presented during the next two and a half days
will be as informative for those of you in the audience as we expect it
to be for the Board.

Now, with those preliminaries out of the way, let\'s get into our
agenda. It\'s my pleasure to introduce to you Lake Barrett, the Acting
Director of OCRWM. Lake?

BARRETT: Thank you, Chairman Cohon. Good morning, Members of the Board.
It\'s my pleasure to be here this morning to provide you an update on
the status of the Program.

There have been a number of significant developments and milestones
since your meeting last May. Just prior to that meeting, Secretary
Abraham initiated the formal site consideration process with the release
of the Yucca Mountain Science and Engineering Report. In my remarks at
that meeting, I noted that we would release several additional documents
during the summer. We have since completed that effort.

In July, we published Volumes 1 nd 2 of the Supplemental Science and
Performance Analyses. On August 21st, we released the Preliminary Site
Suitability Evaluation. With the release of the Preliminary Site
Suitability Evaluation, the Department announced the schedule for public
hearings in Nevada to receive comments on whether or not the Secretary
should recommend the Yucca Mountain site.

The first public hearing was held here in Las Vegas last Wednesday. This
hearing was video conferenced simultaneously to Reno, Carson City and
Elko, and broadcast live over the internet to all interested parties.
The hearing was also video conferenced from the Senate, allowing the
Nevada\'s entire congressional delegation to contribute their views.

Another hearing is scheduled for this Wednesday in Amargosa Valley, and
the final hearing will be held this Thursday in Pahrump. In addition to
the schedule for public hearings, on August 21st, the Department
announced the ongoing public comment period, which began on May 4th,
would extend until September 20th. Subsequently, on September 5th, the
Secretary extended the comment period an additional 15 days, until
October 5, 2001. The comments received during these hearings, as well as
those submitted in other forms, will be an important part of the site
consideration process.

Over the next several months, the Secretary will carefully consider a
large body of scientific information, as well as views from the public,
in deciding whether or not to recommend the site. While committed to
making progress, the Secretary has also committed to ensuring that sound
science governs each decision.

The public\'s views on the validity of our work are important in any
decision by the Secretary. To encourage public participation in that
process, the Department has sent a letter to government officials and
members of the public whose interest in commenting we had anticipated.
This letter includes a list of suggested topics for public consideration
regarding a possible site recommendation. The list is not intended to be
comprehensive, nor is it intended to inhibit the public from commenting
on any relevant issue related to a possible recommendation of the site.
We also published a copy of that letter in the Federal Register.

Last year, the Board identified its priorities for improvements in our
technical programs. In response to the concerns of the Board, we have
completed a substantial body of technical work on the four areas that
you recommended. The status of these efforts were presented at the
Board\'s Panel meeting in June. The feedback we received during that
meeting is being strongly considered in the development of our work
plans for FY 02 and beyond. We look forward to receiving further
comments from the Board regarding its review of those documents that we
have published.

The analyses supporting the Yucca Mountain Science and Engineering
Report were based on a flexible design that could operate over a range
of temperatures, with the primary analysis and a mode that allowed the
drift wall temperatures to exceed boiling after closure. This design and
associated analyses were used as the basis for the Analysis and Model
Reports supporting the Total System Performance Assessment.

Over the past several years, the Board and other peer review panels have
raised good questions regarding the quantification of uncertainties
associated with coupled processes caused by the thermal pulse. Concerns
have also been raised that certain corrosion processes may be
accelerated at higher temperatures, and that these processes could
introduce additional uncertainties. To respond to these concerns, we
performance analyses to demonstrate the ability to operate the existing
design concept over a range of temperatures by varying operational
parameters such as ventilation, waste package capacity, and waste
package spacing. By adjusting these parameters, the impact of the
thermal pulse can be managed to maintain rock temperatures and waste
package temperatures at levels that may reduce uncertainties.

While completing these analyses, the Program has been evaluating options
for a path forward with regard to the flexible design concept. The goal
of this effort is to refine our approach toward developing a license
application with a sufficient technical basis, while balancing broader
programmatic constraints. These constraints include schedule
expectations for both submitting a license application and receiving
waste, should the site be designated, and the limitations in available
funds based on the level of likely appropriations as well as the time
lag in the appropriation process.

We believe the needs of the Nation may best be met by preserving the
ability to select, from a broad thermal range, a design for repository
licensing and initial operations. Preserving this ability, however, may
require testing and analytical efforts to support production of license
quality documentation for the lower end of the thermal range. This
documentation would supplement the analysis for the upper end of the
thermal range, and the technical and programmatic information developed
would be used to further support the lower end of the thermal range in a
potential license application.

Accordingly, we have directed technical direction to Bechtel-SAIC
Corporation to begin evaluating this work so that the overall cost and
schedule impacts of this effort can be fully understood. Our 2002
budget, which at this point is very uncertain, will strongly influence
our ability to on when to implement this work. We will evaluate these
cost and schedule impacts in light of these broader programmatic
constraints and make decisions regarding the schedule for the
implementation of the technical work. The main issue to me is not doing
the work, but it\'s the timing on when we will be able to do that work.
We will keep you informed on our progress and the decisions on this
important topic.

As I have noted, the Program\'s Fiscal Year 2002 budget is a very key
concern. The President\'s Budget Request was \$445 million for the
Program. Over the summer, both Houses of Congress have considered the
budget request, and each has taken decidedly different action on our
budget request. The House mark was \$443 million, very close to the
President\'s request.

The Senate mark, however, was \$275 million, which is far below the
funding level that is needed to maintain the Program\'s schedule and
momentum toward fulfilling the government\'s legal obligation to manage
and dispose of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive high-level waste. In
addition, the Senate mark also contained language concerning the Program
direction accounts, which if we were ever to attempt to do what was
requested, we\'d basically have to lay off the entire federal staff.
I\'ve assured federal staff that that is a very unlikely scenario. But
this is just some of the uncertainties that we have to deal with.

The Senate mark, however, is tempered by a manager\'s amendment that
contains a \"Sense of the Senate\" statement suggesting that a funding
level more consistent with the Administration\'s request should be
worked out in conference. The conference on the appropriations bill is
expected late this month, or possibly even early October. This continues
an uncertainty which is very difficult for us to manage within the
program. We look forward to having some national resolution on this very
important matter.

Should the actual appropriation reflect the Senate mark, the Site
Recommendation would be very much in jeopardy, because the technical
work to address the Board\'s issues and the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission\'s KTI issues would have to be deferred for some substantial
period of time.

We recognize that our commitments toward addressing these concerns are
central to the Commission\'s views and your views concerning the site
recommendation process. The schedule for other key milestones, such as
the license application and receipt of waste, would slip indefinitely
while a new program is structured with a totally different funding
level.

Although the main points of focus have been a possible site
recommendation and the budget issues, there are other issues going on
within the Program that I would like to mention to you. The Nuclear
Regulatory Commission last Friday in a vote voted to affirm the final
regulations for a possible repository at Yucca Mountain with 10 CFR 63.
This will bring the NRC regulations into conformance with the EPA\'s 40
CFR 197 standards, which include the drinking water standard. This is an
important step in the regulatory structure toward a possible site
recommendation. We will follow as quickly as we can behind the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission with our own site and guideline revisions, 10 CFR
963.

Also on the NRC front, I believe it\'s important for you to know that
the NRC has been extremely aggressive and critical of the Program
concerning our difficulties in implementing the NRC required quality
assurance disciplines and documentation in our Yucca Mountain technical
progress.

Last summer, we started a program initiative to transition into a
potential license application development nuclear organization. However,
we were unable to make as much progress in that area as I had hoped.
Just after this initiative started last year, we had to shift our
primary focus to strengthen the technical basis for the SR decision, and
deferred some of the infrastructure management improvements that we had
tried to accomplish.

We have restructured and re-invigorated both the Bechtel and the DOE
programs to establish the necessary attributes required to be a
potential licensee before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We
described this program in detail to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
staff in two very intense open to the public meetings last Thursday and
Friday. Your staff was in attendance for most of those meetings. The
actual length of those two meetings totalled over 13 hours last week.

Also on the legal front, I\'d like to mention some areas that happened
there. This is a very complex and time consuming area also. There are 17
damage lawsuits that our Program is now being deluged by court mandated
interrogatories and discovery requests considering fuel receipt and also
regarding our contractual obligations. There will also be a very
important oral argument on December 5th before the Eleventh Circuit
Court of Appeals, where Alabama Power, et al claimed that we did not
have the authority to settle the Pico agreement with an adjustment of
charge. They claim that the reduction of payments by Pico into the waste
fund increases the possibility that they may have a fee increase if the
current waste fund cannot support the total life cycle system costs for
the program.

I would also mention that the General Accounting Office is performing a
very in depth inquiry into our schedule, work, scope and control
processes, with emphasis on controlling the total system life cycle
costs and our ability to achieve the 2010 fuel receipt goal. And also
the DOE Inspector General is currently evaluating our spent fuel
acceptance technical interfaces with the utility contract holders, and
separately investigating, at the request of the Nevada Delegation, a
conflict of interest allegation against our licensing legal support
contractor. But all of these other areas I\'m trying very much to
isolate the project technical work from this, so the project\'s primary
focus is and remains establishing a sufficient technical basis for the
decisions that are at hand before us.

I should also mention that last week, we sent a fairly important report
to Congress, that has the alternate means of finding and managing this
program. This was requested by Congress last year, and it was forwarded
to the Congress by the Secretary last Wednesday. I expect we will have
copies of it available for the Board tomorrow here, not the technical
issues, but managerial and financial.

Now, I would like to turn toward repository development strategies. As
we approach the Secretarial decision on whether or not to recommend the
site, the Department and other organizations are evaluating refinements
to the longstanding strategies for repository development.

For example, during the National Research Council Board on Radioactive
Waste Management\'s international workshop in 1999 on geologic disposal,
the concepts of reversibility and staged repository development received
considerable attention. The term \"repository staging\" describes a
process by which decisions concerning repository design, development,
operation and possible closure are made in a stepwise and potentially
reversible fashion, with adequate technical bases for each step.

The decision to proceed at each step in the process is made commensurate
with the level of technical and policy understanding that is available
at that time, and in a manner that allows for subsequent reversibility
if that is necessary from a societal perspective. The Department
believes that this approach may have significant benefits, including the
opportunity for continuous learning and improvement over the life of the
Program.

Concepts involved a repository staging strategy. However, this concept
is not well understood in an operational sense. To advance this
understanding, we have contracted with the National Research Council for
advice on design and operational strategies associated with the concept
of a staged geologic repository facility. Last week, the National
Research Council held a workshop in Washington on this topic. We expect
an interim report from this panel late this year, and a final report
next year.

In March of 1996, this Board issued a report focused on the balance
between storage and disposal of commercial nuclear fuel. The impetus of
that report came from legislative proposals which would have effectively
deferred the development of a repository in favor of central interim
storage, thereby shifting the national policy focus from permanent
disposal to temporary storage.

After reviewing dozens of technical and non-technical issues, the Board
at that time concluded that although there was no compelling technical
reason for moving fuel to a centralized facility during the 1990s, that
federal interim storage capacity would be needed late in this decade.

The Board\'s report also emphasized the need for a balance between the
efforts aimed at permanent disposal and those associated with timely
acceptance of commercial spent fuel. You further recommended that
consideration and development of spent fuel acceptance and storage
capabilities await the decision on the suitability of the Yucca Mountain
Site. The Board is aware that that decision is near.

I am also sure you are aware that strong constituencies, including the
entire Nevada Delegation, believe that spent fuel should stay stored at
reactor sites, and that our budget authority should be shifted to
research on accelerated transportation of wastes. Others claim that
there will never be a sufficient technical basis for Yucca Mountain, or
any other repository, and that our program should be abolished.

Therefore, I expect a renewed debate regarding strategies for developing
the Yucca Mountain facility, and also with the option of a redirection
of the policies set out in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Decisions which
this Board will be an important part of will balance the technical,
programmatic, institutional and fiscal requirements that are facing this
nation and the entire globe in the post-cold war environment that we
find ourselves in. I\'m sure you are aware of developments within the
Russian Federation regarding the law changes on high level waste, and
the virtual recent collapse of the German repository program.

On a related subject, the Department has received a proposal for a study
by the National Academy of Sciences to examine the long-term surface
storage of civilian spent fuel and defense wastes. The Academy has
proposed a careful analysis of the technical, institutional, economic
and policy dimensions of the complex issues of surface disposition. We
presently have that request under study.

Should we decide to fund that study, I expect the Board\'s 1996 report,
as well as current deliberations, will be considered and be an important
part of any such study. This study would also add to the work that we
did on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the no action
alternative, where we evaluated in a crude sense the environmental
impacts of perpetual surface storage of spent fuel at its existing
locations.

We and you have met dozens of times over the past decade, and throughout
those meetings, we have described our plans for characterizing the Yucca
Mountain site and evaluating its suitability for development as a
repository. The Program has made considerable progress and conducted
what I believe is a world-class investigative science program to
determine whether or not the Yucca Mountain site is suitable for
development as a nuclear fuel facility.

Despite these enormous challenges, we have maintained essential momentum
to implement the nation\'s policy for the responsible management of
spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste, and we are now reaching key
decision points. We look forward to receiving your comments on our work
and your views on the sufficiency of the work that we have done to
support the decisions at hand.

Throughout this process, your constructive feedback on our activities
has been instrumental to provide decision-makers and ourselves with an
independent perspective on the technical basis for decisions regarding
geologic disposal. I believe your recommendations have led to a further
strengthening of our technical program, especially in influencing the
evolutionary, stepwise design process.

The stepwise development of a geological repository facility, with
design and operational flexibility and reversibility, coupled with
continuous learning feedback loops, could be extremely important for a
first of a kind program like this.

Looking ahead, I believe stepwise development provides a societal
approach for accommodating uncertainties in decision-making without
foreclosing designs and operational approaches that could provide
superior protection for the public health and safety and the
environment. I encourage the Board to consider this critical issue in
the coming year, and look forward to your input on the work that we\'ve
been doing.

I thank you for your past and future contributions, and would like to
entertain any questions you have for me now, or I intend to remain here
through the entire two and a half days, at any time you wish.

COHON: Thank you, Mr. Barrett. Paul Craig?

CRAIG: Lake, in Jerry\'s initial remarks, he noted that the Board is
concerned with scientific and technical aspects of Yucca Mountain. And,
in my view, this includes the accuracy of DOE\'s communication with the
public.

This question relates to instances where the DOE provides incorrect
information to the public. It occurred recently that my local newspaper
had a report in which a project spokesperson gave information that was
inconsistent with what we\'ve heard here, specifically that there
was\--that the measurements on C-22 were incorrect, and there were some
rates of motion of water through the UZ, which orders of magnitude below
the reports that we\'ve heard here.

Now, what I\'d like to understand is what is DOE\'s policy with respect
to errors of science and technology that are made to the public and to
the press, or your policy with respect to correcting errors when they
come to your attention.

BARRETT: Our intention is not to make errors. We\'re human. If we make
errors, as soon as we find out about them, we try to rectify and correct
them. When it comes to reports in the press, that is a challenge. If
it\'s an error that we honestly made, either honestly or dishonestly, I
don\'t believe we\'ve made any dishonest, if we ever made an error, we
will correct it as soon as it\'s aware. If there is something you have,
if I can have the facts on it, I will try to deal with it, and, you
know, give it to the editor or errata sheet or whatever the case may be.

CRAIG: It would be helpful. In this particular instance, there were
direct quotations, so it was not a question of misinterpretation.

BARRETT: Well, if it\'s a\--let us have the facts, and we certainly
would like to rectify that. We do not want to have the public to have
any more misinformation than they already get.

CRAIG: It would help the credibility of the agency.

BARRETT: Please point out those to us, and we will deal with those, you
know, as quickly as we can if we made errors.

COHON: It\'s certainly an important point, but it\'s a new thought to
think of the media as infallible, as getting quotations correct. Dan
Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Lake, I wanted to kind of follow up a little bit on your comments with
respect to the evaluation of the lower end of the thermal loading, and
your direction to BSC to kind of come up with a plan and a time table
for that work. And I guess I wanted to ask specifically with respect to
the integration of that work with sort of the revision of the QA issues
that you have with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are those coupled
issues? Basically, when you go back and take a look at the AMRs and PMRs
to resolve those QA issues with the NRC, is that a prime opportunity for
you to then go ahead and fill in the needed areas of information for
those AMRs and PMRs for the low temperature operating mode?

BARRETT: What we\'re trying to do is integrate these together. Yes,
there\'s opportunity where that can go together. We first ask what are
our available resources and what is the national direction regarding
this program in our 2002 work. Whatever monies we have available in
2002, we want to make the best we can in the balance program, balancing
the nuclear discipline that the NRC requires of the potential licensee,
coupled with, you know, this date, the art and science that this Board
has pushed. So, we\'re trying to get these balanced. If there are
synergisms in those, we will certainly do so. But, right now, we\'ve
asked Bechtel to look at this, integrate it together, and let\'s give us
options and then we\'ll evaluate this all as soon as the budget becomes
clear to go forward.

BULLEN: Thank you. Just one more quick little question. One of the
issues that sort of engenders a little bit more confidence in the public
is that if you do later on find a fatal flaw, do you have an exit
strategy. And so would the hope be that you\'d have to take a look at
this stepwise approach and then at some point along the way, evaluate it
with criteria to determine whether or not you proceed, and at what point
you decide to proceed, or decide not to proceed? Are those kinds of
things that the NAS is going to evaluate for you?

BARRETT: Yes. A lot of that is already in the basic aspects of the Act
as it exists. For example, the site suitability decision, followed with
the license application, followed with a rigorous licensing process
involving the public, then a license amendment for receipt of material,
and then later on after a lot of the confirmatory work is done and
adjustments as necessary, closure, which would be in our plans nominal a
hundred years from now, when we will have a lot more information
regarding what some of the uncertainties are. So, this would be
introducing more of that. We generally do not use the word staged
licensing, which had history of another time jargon, so we don\'t use
that term. But, yes, I think do go together.

COHON: Thank you. A couple of questions, one with regard to budget. You
noted the great uncertainty of course with regard to the FY 2002 budget,
and there\'s not much you can do about that. I have sort of a general
procedural question, not specifically what you\'re going to do about
that budget, but in a case where you have such widely varying marks
between the two Houses of Congress, what do you do on October 1st? What
kind of assumptions do you make so you can keep moving forward?

BARRETT: I\'m afraid that there will probably not be resolution in the
Congress on October 1st. So, it likely will be under a continuing
resolution, and there are a great many different interpretations of how
to implement a continuing resolution within the Executive Branch. The
classical way is you operate on the lower of the two marks. For us to do
that, we couldn\'t really do that, so we would probably operate on last
year\'s, which would be a continuing resolution, so it would operate on
the nominal 400 level.

What\'s made this a little difficult for us is we started the year low
in costing, which was by design, with the new Bechtel contractor, and
we\'re accelerating on up when Bechtel was bringing things on. So our
burn rate is higher now than 400, so we\'re going to have to kind of
look at it. We\'ve instituted, a month and a half ago, we instituted a
hiring freeze in BSC to try to contain those costs. But it would be my
intent to operate at the current level, the nominal 390, 400 level.
Hopefully, it would quickly resolve itself.

What happens if it goes on like a month or so burning at the higher
rate, and if we end up with a very much reduced one, then the layoffs
become much greater, because I\'ve already burned, say if it\'s a month,
one-twelfth of the year at the higher rate, and makes larger impact. So,
the quicker the nation resolves, the better. But I intend to operate at
the 400, unless I get written instructions from somebody higher than me
not to do that. We still have the laws that we have to abide by, or Dyer
and I go to jail. But we can deal with that.

COHON: We wouldn\'t want that. You mentioned in your remarks NRC\'s
approval of 10 CFR 63. What are DOE\'s plans with regard to its second
guidelines?

BARRETT: Well, the NRC\--what happened, the Commission voted to affirm
the 63, and they gave instructions to the staff, and within the next
week or so, the staff will actually issue, through their administrative
processes, 10 CFR 63.

I am hopeful that within the next 30 days or so, the Commission will act
on our request of May of last year, or the year before, for concurrence
on our siting guidelines, 10 CFR 963. I expect that they will do so
within that 30 day period. As soon as they do, we will then make
whatever modifications we need to to 963, which are very minimal in any
substance, because we just referred to the EPA and the NRC, and put that
through the federal process, which would be OMB and out. So, I\'m
hopeful\--we\'ll move as quickly as we can, and to put the regulatory
structure in place to support decisions toward the end of the year.
There\'s litigation already in the EPA. I suspect there will be more
litigation when the NRC actions become final, and our actions become
final, and then it will be a matter of course. But we will move
expeditiously, which I suspect would be within the next month.

COHON: Thank you, Lake. Debra Knopman?

KNOPMAN: Lake, would you comment a little bit about how the schedule now
is adjusted with the extended comment period, just the way that the
Department intends to respond to public comment prior to a decision?

BARRETT: We will first of all follow the letter of the law exactly and
do all the comments and NEPA regulations and NEPA case law, as well as
the Nuclear Waste Policy Act laws. So we will do all of that.

In addition, the hearing last week was not a satisfying experience for
any party. Hopefully, the one this week will be a little better, but
this is not an easy communication with the public. For example, there\'s
not been really time in the structure that we have of formal hearings
for any answer of questions, for those who wish it. There are many who
don\'t wish it.

So, the Secretary has asked that we look at ways that we can increase
the public process, and we are presently looking at that, and we\'ll see
what implications that would have regarding the schedules. But from a
technical point of view and a programmatic point of view, we are still
continuing to try to prepare the necessary foundation aspects for a
decision around the end of the year.

KNOPMAN: Will there be a written response to public comments prior to
the decision?

BARRETT: There will be a response\--in the decision package, there will
be responses to the comments. Exactly how we sequence and what we can do
ahead is a balancing between legal considerations as well as our desire
to get back and communicate matters that people have brought up. So, we
have to balance that out in consultation with the general counsel. But
this will all be litigated.

COHON: Any other questions from the Board?

(No response.)

COHON: We have a little bit of extra time, and I know Judy Treichel had
a question for Lake. I don\'t know if you want to ask it now, Judy,
taking advantage of the little extra time we have.

TREICHEL: Thank you. Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.
This is a good time to ask it, particularly following on the questions
that were just asked.

On behalf of the Task Force and other public representative groups here
in Nevada, we would like to know if it is possible to get a copy of
whatever the guidance is, or the process is, that you are evaluating,
cataloging, doing whatever it is that you do with public comments. There
must be some sort of written guidance for that, and we would very much
like to see what it is you\'re using as a score sheet, because there is,
as you know, the meeting was a disaster, and there are a lot of people
who are very concerned about how those comments get evaluated.

BARRETT: Our process on that follows the law. As I said, we are taking
the comments. We will catalog the comments and we will respond to the
comments as we go forward. We will\--so that\'s what our process is, and
we\'re in the process of doing that, and looking for ways that we can
better connect and communicate with the public.

TREICHEL: Is there anything written down? Like you\'re waiting now to
receive from the NRC the Yucca Mountain Review Plan. Did you have any
sort of a plan or a written guidance for the acceptance\--I know you
have 30 to 40 people working on public comments, and there is nothing
that\'s written there.

BARRETT: The general framework that we have for responding to the NWPA
comments, let me say, is patterned after the approaches that we do for
the NEPA comments. Basically, we receive the comments in, we catalog the
comments, and we respond to the comments in a written form. So, that is
the general approach we use. We\'re mirroring the approach we\'re using
on NEPA for the FEIS response. We\'re mirroring that process for the
NWPA comments. And we\'re preparing basically internal issue papers that
address the same issues, which are common themes in both processes, but
they\'re separate legal processes.

TREICHEL: All right, thank you.

COHON: Thank you very much, Lake.

BARRETT: Thank you.

COHON: We\'ll now hear from Russ Dyer. Russ is the Project Manager at
the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office. Dr. Dyer?

DYER: What I\'d like to do today is to walk through an update for Yucca
Mountain. I\'m going to hit on some of the same things that Lake was
talking about in a little more detail, and set the stage for some of the
talks that will come a little later.

I\'ll talk about a perspective on site recommendation, the process,
where we are, talk about path forward and plans for Fiscal Year 2002. As
Lake said already, there\'s considerable uncertainty in the Fiscal Year
02 budget. And we\'ll talk about, set the stage really for the actions
completed and planned work in the four areas of Board concern.

First, just a little summary of some of the information that has come
out supporting the site recommendation decision process.

Between the 4th of May and the 21st of August, there has been quite a
bit of information that has been released for public review. The Yucca
Mountain Science and Engineering Report came out on the 4th of May which
describes the results of site characterization studies completed to
date, the waste forms, the repository and waste package conceptual
designs, and updated assessments of long term performance of the
potential repository.

A Supplement to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement also came out
on the 4th of May which gave additional information on design evolution.
A most recent version of the Total System Life Cycle Cost Report came
out also on the 4th of May.

And the last thing that was released on the 4th of May was the Nuclear
Waste Fund Fee Adequacy Report which looks at the most recent estimate
of the adequacy of the Nuclear Waste Fund Fee for covering the cost of
the Program.

There have been a series of reports that have come out since then. The
Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses report, two volumes,
Volume 1 came out on the 30th of June, which updates the scientific
bases and analyses, describes new and updated information developed
since the Science and Engineering Report, and the results of the
unquantified uncertainty and lower-temperature operating mode analyses.

Volume 2, performance analyses, describes the performance assessment
analyses using the updated information described in Volume 1.

And the Preliminary Site Suitability Evaluation was released on the 21st
of August. This describes the results of a preliminary evaluation of the
Yucca Mountain repository system against the Department of Energy\'s
proposed suitability guidelines at 10 CFR 963, which we were just
discussing.

There were three public hearings announced that would inform the site
recommendation decision. The first of those hearings was held last week
on Wednesday, September 5th, here in Las Vegas. This included, as Lake
said, interactive audio/video link-ups to Carson City, Reno and Elko. It
was also webcast, a one-way webcast, non-interactive.

We have two more public hearings this week, Wednesday the 12th in
Amargosa Valley, Thursday the 13th in Pahrump, Nevada.

This chart lays out the public involvement opportunities in 2001 for
both the Environmental Impact Statement, this is the NEPA process, and
also the Site Recommendation Decision Process.

We held a series of public hearings after the Supplement to the Draft
EIS. The comment period is closed. We are in the process of considering
the public comments, with a final Environmental Impact Statement to
accompany the possible recommendation.

The Site Recommendation Process, whenever we release the suite of
documents on the 4th of May, we opened a public comment period. When the
public hearings were scheduled and announced here in mid September,
there was a closure date identified for the public comment period. The
Secretary has since extended that by 15 days. So the current closure
date for the public comment period is the 5th of October. And as Lake
was saying, we\'ll be considering the public comments to inform the
Secretary for his decision.

Just a reminder in the public comment process, we\'re taking comments
just by any means available, either written or oral, at the public
hearings. Comments mailed in, this is the address. Carol Hanlon is out
officer in charge of that. We\'ll also take e-mail, comments by e-mail,
or by fax, and here\'s the relevant addresses to get comments to us
associated with the site recommendation decision.

Just a quick reminder of where the process stands here. This is the
charge of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. These are the public hearings in
the vicinity of the Yucca Mountain site which are called for by the
Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The Secretary\'s decision whether or not to
recommend the site to the President lies ahead of us somewhere.

If the Secretary decides to recommend the site, he must notify the
governor and the legislature of the State of Nevada at least 30 days
before submitting the recommendation to the President.

And then there are two paths here. There\'s a decision tree to go
through. If the Secretary or President does not recommend the site, they
notify the governor, immediately stop site characterization, and the
Secretary reports to Congress within six months on recommendations for
further action.

If the Secretary recommends to the President, and the President
recommends the site to the Congress, should the governor or legislature
not submit a notice of disapproval, the site designation becomes
effective. If the governor or legislature submits a notice of
disapproval within 60 days, then the site would be disapproved unless
Congress passes a resolution of siting approval within the first 90 days
of continuous session. And this would be a simple majority of both
Houses of Congress required to override the veto.

Let me talk a little bit about the planning focus for Fiscal Year 02. We
will be focusing our resources on strengthening the infrastructure to
respond appropriately to the results of the site recommendation decision
process. There is essentially three ways that decision can come out, as
we kind of went through on the decision tree in the previous slide.

If the Secretary decides not to recommend the site, DOE has six months
to report back to Congress with recommendations and begin site
reclamation.

If Congress does not designate the site, DOE will respond to
Congressional direction. We assume that they will provide some direction
back to the Department.

If the site is recommended and designated, DOE will proceed toward
licensing through a planned set of pre-licensing activities. And this is
what our planning basis is primarily focused on, but understanding that
these are also possibilities.

Let\'s talk about some of these pre-licensing activities. Now, one thing
I want to point out is that these are not just Fiscal Year 02
activities. Many of these are multi-year activities.

Complete technical work to meet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission/DOE
agreements that are addressed in the Key Technical Issues, in NRC\'s Key
Technical Issues.

Develop a level of design detail appropriate for inclusion in a license
application; update process models and continue analyses of
uncertainties; conduct an Integrated Safety Analysis for preclosure
operations; conduct Total System Performance Assessment for the license
application.

Support the Nuclear Regulatory Commission\'s adoption of an
Environmental Impact Statement; develop and certify licensing support
network under 10 CFR, Part 2, Subpart J; resolve outstanding quality
assurance issues.

Develop descriptions of post-licensing programs. Some examples given,
performance confirmation, safeguards and security issues; and prepare
and submit a license application.

Let me give a summary and kind of a preview of some of the discussion
that will be held later, primarily today, about some of the
Department\'s work in response to some of the four major concerns that
were raised by the Board.

Since the Viability Assessment, the Board has identified, expressed, and
focused their views and concerns on DOE\'s basis for a possible site
recommendation.

Of course, in January 2001, in Amargosa Valley, these views and concerns
coalesced into four specific areas of concern, which I\'m going to hit
on in a little more detail in the following slides. Meaningful
quantification of uncertainties; progress in understanding corrosion
processes; comparison of lower and higher-temperature designs; and
multiple lines of evidence developed independent of Total System
Performance Assessment.

DOE has worked aggressively to address the Board\'s concerns. We
developed the Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses, which treat
the uncertainty issue. We convened an independent peer review of
corrosion processes. I think Joe Payer will talk a little later about
some of the interim results there. We have reviewed the work needed to
evaluate a range of operating modes, and Lake talked about some of the
work that\'s being brought into at least in the planning stages here. We
more clearly recognized the importance of and explained the multiple
lines of evidence. And we convened an international Total System
Performance Assessment peer review, which concluded last week.

Let\'s go to the first area of concern that the Board laid out,
meaningful quantification of uncertainties. The Board has stated that
meaningful quantification of uncertainties associated with performance
is essential for policy makers. Bill Boyle has talked about this several
times in May and also in June, and will I think be the first presenter
in the panel following this.

We began an effort to quantify the unquantified uncertainties in late
2000. Bill will talk about our progress in this arena.

We\'ll continue to revisit uncertainty evaluations as new information
comes to light to ensure that the effects of minor uncertainties do not
have a non-negligible cumulative effect.

We\'ve addressed the Board\'s concern and believe that uncertainties are
sufficiently quantified at this time to provide policy makers with an
adequate basis for their decisions.

The second area of concern, progress in understanding corrosion
processes, and Gerry Gordon will talk a little later about this.

The Board\'s concern is with the understanding of the underlying
fundamental processes involved in predicting the rate of waste package
corrosion. DOE agrees it\'s important to develop an understanding of the
underlying physical phenomena of corrosion processes.

We convened a peer review in May of this year on the corrosion
processes. As I think Joe Payer will talk a little later, the interim
report is due in September, with the final peer review report due in
April of 02.

We benefitted from the Board\'s international workshop on long-term
extrapolation of passive behavior, which you held in July of this year.
We believe that the bounds on waste package corrosion that will be used
to support the site recommendation decision are adequate and a
confirmatory testing program is now in place.

The third area of concern, lower-temperature design comparison. The
Board\'s concern is that performance projections are very uncertain, due
primarily to the high temperature repository design and uncertainty with
processes operative at these higher temperatures.

DOE is addressing this concern by evolving the higher-temperature base
case design into a design that could be operated over a range of thermal
objectives. And Jim Blink will talk about this a little bit later.

Assessments of repository performance across a range of thermal
environments are documented in the Supplemental Science and Performance
Assessment Report, and described in the Yucca Mountain Science and
Engineering Report.

DOE believes that the performance projections are adequate for the range
of operating environments considered in the site recommendation basis
documents.

The fourth and last major area of concern of the Board, multiple lines
of evidence. The Board views DOE\'s safety case as overly dependent on
performance assessment, and strongly endorses efforts to develop
multiple lines of evidence.

Multiple lines of evidence have been integral to the development of
process and performance models, but this may not have been effectively
communicated.

In April of 01, Board members and staff met with the Department to
discuss the meaning and applicability of these multiple lines of
evidence.

We believe that discussion and evaluation of multiple lines of evidence
have been more clearly explained and is being more successfully
incorporated into documents and plans.

In conclusion, I\'ve got three points to make here. DOE has initiated,
in accordance with the requirements of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and
is proceeding with a process for a Secretarial decision on whether or
not to recommend approval of the Yucca Mountain Site.

DOE\'s path forward depends on the results of the site recommendation
decision process. However, the Department is prepared to respond
appropriately.

DOE understands and has benefitted from the Board\'s concerns and
issues. These concerns have been addressed, and DOE believes that there
is an adequate technical basis for a site recommendation decision.

COHON: Thank you, Russ. That was very useful framing of where you are
and what\'s to come in this meeting.

Questions from the Board? Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Russ, could you go to your Slide 7, please? This shows the timeline for
public opportunities for comments. But I guess just looking at this
timeline, could you also kind of show us where you expect to see a
comment by the NRC with respect to the sufficiency requirements for the
site recommendation? Where along this line do you expect that?

DYER: If I remember right, I think early November is what is expected
from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

BARRETT: Lake Barrett, DOE. At the management meeting last week with the
NRC, the staff said that they were proceeding along the lines of our
request, which was for November 1st for NRC\'s sufficiency, and they
said they were proceeding according to schedule.

BULLEN: Thank you. Just another followup basically, you alluded to the
meetings in May and June that we\'ve had with respect to the evolution
of the process, and I guess the question that I have with respect to the
license\--or excuse me\--the siting recommendation determination is
exactly what design do you expect to put forth with respect to thermal
operating modes? I mean, I know the range is there, but it seemed to me
that the NRC was very concerned about having one design to evaluate. And
have you resolved that issue with them, or not?

DYER: The license application design needs to be developed, and it needs
to be developed through a discipline process.

BULLEN: Okay. But then I guess does that tie into the sufficiency
requirement from the NRC with respect to do you have to identify a
design for SR, or are you just going to go ahead with the flexible
design and you think that the NRC will buy off on that?

DYER: We have a flexible design for SR that the NRC seems to find
acceptable for that decision.

BULLEN: Okay, thank you.

COHON: Russ, a question while this slide is still up. Is there a public
estimate as to when the Secretarial decision may come?

DYER: Our goal has been to support that by the end of this year. There
have been some, whenever the public comment period was extended, that\'s
still the goal, is to do it as soon as possible.

COHON: So, effectively, I don\'t mean to put words in your mouth, but I
understand that to mean that the Program will have done what it thinks
it needs to do to support that decision by the end of the year. And then
when the Secretary actually makes that decision is up to him.

DYER: That\'s correct. His actions are not on my schedule.

COHON: Russ, you talked about the pre-licensing activities. Is there an
estimate yet about how much time it would take to do all of that? And
related to that, is there any time limit on that coming out of the law
with regard to when DOE must apply for a license after approval by the
President and Congress?

DYER: Two responses there. First off, let me, in the law and the Nuclear
Waste Policy Act, there\'s a linkage of 90 days from the time of site
designation, not from the site recommendation. Our planning process now,
we\'re in the final phases of our planning process. Of course, as you
heard there is some uncertainty with that.

When Bechtel SAIC came on board, they have looked at essentially
re-baselining the project out through license application, and we\'re
negotiating right now to see what their recommendation is as to what it
takes to put together a comprehensive and docketable license
application.

COHON: Okay. Could we go to Slide 19, please? I want to take semantic
exception with that first bullet point. There\'s some spin control that
I think is important. I don\'t think the Board has ever stated that the
uncertainty related to Yucca Mountain\'s performance is due primarily to
the high temperature repository design. But, rather, we suggested that
it\'s worth looking at whether a cooler design would reduce uncertainty
related to a high temperature design.

The implication of that is there\'s still going to be high uncertainty,
even with a low temperature design. Do you see my point?

DYER: Point taken.

COHON: Okay. Any others? Jeff Wong, and then Debra.

WONG: Russ, can we go to Slide 16? This is Jeff Wong, Board.

You, in that last bullet, you state that you believe that the
uncertainties are sufficiently quantified for policy makers. How do you
feel that this is so? Does this mean that your current QA problems
are\--they don\'t contribute much to uncertainty? Or all the KTIs are
easily fixed or addressed and they don\'t contribute to uncertainty? I
mean, before we would make\--there\'s a stack of material that you have
to read, and now we talk about stacks of CDs to read. It\'s very
complex, a large amount of uncertainties embedded in that. So, again,
what\'s the justification for making the statement that it\'s quantified
for a policy maker to understand?

DYER: I guess I would split those into two things. First off, in the
quality arena, we\'ve gone back and done impact analysis on many of the
analyses and reports that we\'ve done. And, so far, we haven\'t found
any that of the discrepancies that have been identified that impact the
major results or conclusions from those analyses.

As you\'re well aware, the approach that we had as of a year ago was to
look at bounding analysis. And by looking at more realistic estimates in
the quantification of uncertainty approach, I think we have a better
understanding of what the probable behavior of a repository system might
be.

COHON: Of course, we\'ll be hearing much more about this from Bill
Boyle?

DYER: Yes, Bill will give you an update on that. You look unsatisfied,
sir.

WONG: Well, it\'s the issue that, you know, policy decision making in
the face of uncertainty is always difficult, and I\'m just curious as to
how you prepared your policy makers to understand the uncertainty
embedded in this particular analysis. You had given them training, had
discussions with them? Do they actually recognize uncertainty? How do
you think this is going to be played out?

DYER: I\'m not sure. Nobody from Congress has asked for a seminar on
uncertainty so far.

WONG: Thank you, Russ.

COHON: Debra, did you have a question

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

Jeff took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to ask virtually
the same question. And I was as little bit taken aback by the certainty
with which you talked about uncertainty, that unless you have had a go
around with your policy makers, both in the administration and Congress
as well, I would say that\'s an open pending as opposed to a closed
pending kind of judgment to make about whether you\'re there yet, and
you may want to back off a little bit.

I just also wanted to highlight on Slide 18 a similar concern about
maybe being a little bit more definitive than perhaps you\'re in a
position to make at this time when there\'s a lot of peer review
activity going on, some comments already in on some of these various
things. And, again, I was surprised to hear this pronouncement. It
sounds like you\'re done.

DYER: No. But in conversations with Dr. Payer, there are things that can
be brought into the program that can augment and supplement that need to
be done.

COHON: Any other questions? Don Runnells, and then Carl, and then we\'re
going to close it at that point.

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

Russ, this question is a bit tangential, but I have to ask it of you and
Lake. I\'m concerned about the people in the program, the enormous
pressure that\'s obviously on everyone to get so many documents out in
such a short time. The work load must be tremendous.

In addition, there are concerns about the budget. Lake used the word
layoff a couple of times, which always scares people. Have you suffered,
are you suffering attrition? Are people leaving? Or is the staff
essentially still intact? Have you seen a loss of morale, such that
people decide that this is just too hard, or not? And I introduced that
by saying it was tangential, but it\'s of concern to me.

DYER: It\'s a concern to us also. There has been an enormous amount of
pressure. It has had an impact on morale. I am not aware of any great
flux of people away from the project. It\'s a challenge of leadership to
keep people energized and active in these times of turmoil. These are
very dedicated people.

COHON: Carl?

DIBELLA: This is Carl DiBella, Board Staff, and I\'m glad you\'ve got
Slide 18 up, because my question is also on that second bullet that Dr.
Knopman referred to a moment ago. That\'s an enormously powerful
statement that you have, and I want to investigate it a little bit.

What do you mean by bounds? You could mean bounds on the corrosion
rates. You could mean bounds on the environment that the waste package
is going to experience over the years. Or you could mean bounds on the
possible mechanisms that might be occurring over time. And what do you
mean by adequate? Because certainly in none of those areas do you know
everything.

And now I\'ll let you off the hook. Are the subsequent speakers going to
address this specific issue?

DYER: Of course. I see Gerry scribbling very rapidly here. Bounds can
apply to any of the things that you were talking about.

COHON: Maybe Gerry will also address what you mean by \"the.\"

DYER: You said Gerry.

COHON: I\'m kidding. Go ahead, Car.

DYER: I\'m sorry. You said Gerry, but you also mentioned Professor Payer
and his report as belonging with that bullet somehow. So, I\'m very
interested in hearing what independent, and I think we all are,
independent views would be on that particular issue.

DYER: Right. We\'ll hear from Dr. Payer shortly, I\'m not sure whether
this afternoon or tomorrow.

COHON: Thank you very much, Russ.

For the next phase of the meeting, Board Member Paul Craig will chair.
Paul?

CRAIG: Okay. So, the emphasis is going to be on updates on what\'s been
going on in the program. We\'re going to have presentation, including
updates on uncertainty analysis, materials, that work done both by the
Project and by the State of Nevada, three reports on peer reviews, waste
package materials, biosphere model and TSPA, a report on the Board\'s
workshop on passive behavior, and a comparison of higher and lower
temperature operating modes for the repository. So, that\'s a full
agenda.

My assignment as Chair is to keep the speakers and the discussion on
track. To this end, let\'s see, Bill Boyle\--where\'s Bill\--your
introduction isn\'t finished yet, so don\'t start talking.

I have a little noise maker here, and when you\'ve got about five
minutes left, this thing is going to start beeping until such time as I
get your attention, and then you can continue for a while. And, with any
luck, this won\'t be embarrassing. We have stronger approaches if that
doesn\'t work. That remark isn\'t just for you. You just happen to be
the person who\'s standing there.

It\'s kind of fun when I\--I was looking at the biographies, and I
realized, gee, my state is doing really well here. Russ Dyer has a Ph.D.
from Stanford University, and Bill Boyle from my own campus, but my own
university, did everything at Berkeley, Bachelor\'s, Master\'s and Ph.D.
And with both Stanford and Berkeley at the top of the program, how can
you go wrong? There\'s somebody from other institution sitting here.
He\'s sensitive.

BOYLE: With that, I\'ll start. Thank you for the introduction. I don\'t
know how Stanford did this weekend, but Cal lost in football, so I\'m
glad this isn\'t football.

Thank you for this opportunity. I have 27 slides and 30 minutes. I\'ll
be fast. So I hope to leave time for questions, and I actually brought
my own clock to keep myself on time. So, this will be an update on
uncertainty analyses, which Dr. Dyer had mentioned I\'ve presented on
before, and I\'ll briefly go over what was the original concern, what we
said we would do to investigate it, what we did, and what we will do.

This first slide shows at the top Abe Van Luik presented, I think it was
in this building, but at any rate, a meeting here in January of 2000,
and the Project and the Program\'s approach to uncertainty, to manage,
communicate, assess and analyze them. So, treatment of uncertainties has
always been of interest and concern to the Project.

So as not to misstate in summary fashion the Board\'s concerns, I have
resorted to quoting them. And this is from\--Lake, to answer your
question, it was May of 2000 that we sent the material to the NRC,
because this March 20th letter of 2000 was the Board\'s comments on 963.
And the first paragraph briefly states the general concern, but the
longer paragraph below is a very cogent, succinct description of why
people should be concerned about this issue in the first place for
policy makers. And you\'re free to read it on your own, and if you ever
want to get the whole letter, NWTRB keeps its correspondence on their
website.

And as recently as this year, the Board, in identifying their four
priority items, at the top, they had the meaningful quantification of
conservatisms and uncertainties in our performance assessments. So,
it\'s still a priority item to the Board and the Department.

Okay, this is the first slide that deals with what we said we\'d do. For
those of you that don\'t know, the acronym PORB stands for Project
Operations Review Board, and it\'s a group of senior managers in Las
Vegas in the Department that get together and come to agreement on
scope, schedule, cost. And if you really want to get work done, it needs
to be approved by the PORB, which you can see that there were a number
of PORB activities related to looking into uncertainties, specifically
unquantified uncertainties, and the first action was back in May of last
year, and that was largely to initiate a review, and as Russ Dyer had
shown on one of his slides, it was in late 2000, it was this action that
we also decided to look into quantifying the uncertainties.

And to summarize what we were going to do in all these tasks was to
review what we had done, to do some work on quantifying uncertainties,
which was largely eventually accomplished in the Supplemental Science
and Performance Analyses. But in the end, all the PORB papers always
referred to providing guidance for what to do in the future.

These next two slides, Slides 7 and 8, provide a history of the various
presentations and activities that have taken place. As I\'ve already
mentioned, Abe made a presentation in January of last year. There were
the PORB actions of May and October. Abe also made a presentation up at
Carson City at a Board meeting.

We provided a copy of a report we had done for Undersecretary Moniz. We
provided that to the Board, and the Board reviewed that. At the January
meeting in Amargosa Valley, there was a presentation on work done to
date.

And then came the SSPA. Up until this point, the uncertainties activity
had been pretty much an item all by itself. But when we started the
SSPA, Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses task, the
uncertainties work became joined with it, and the SSPA is a much larger
body of work than just looking at uncertainties.

As part of the original uncertainties work, I mentioned we were
reviewing what we had done, and in May of this year, our management and
technical support contractor, MTS, provided a report on how we had
treated uncertainties in the TSPA-SR.

In May, I made a presentation at the Board meeting in Virginia. In June,
here at the Panel meeting, the two Panel meeting that was held here in
Las Vegas, Kevin Coppersmith made a presentation. In July, we released
the Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses, and this is the most
up to date work on quantification of uncertainties and conservatisms
that we have.

And the last item deals with what we will do. As I have mentioned, in
the original PORB actions, there was always an item to provide guidance
on what we would do in the future, and this report will contain that
guidance. And I\'ll say more about this report later.

I should have done this to start with. The work I present here always
represents the work of many, many others. In the original uncertainties
work, it represents a lot of good work by Kevin Coppersmith and Karen
Jenny and Ralph Rogers. And then the SSPA, it\'s such a large body of
work that it represents many, many people, many of whom are in this
room, but it could have never been produced without people like Jerry
McNeish and Rob Howard is here, a tremendous accomplishment.

It\'s in two volumes, and Volume 1 itself is actually in two parts, if
you have a hard copy of it. And I usually start with Volume 2. It\'s
Total System Performance Assessment analyses of the higher temperature
operating mode, HTOM, a lower temperature operating mode. That allows us
to\--well, those TSPAs are based upon new information, either new
information related to quantifying uncertainties, or just update in
scientific information, or information related to the thermal operating
mode itself.

We took all that information from Volume 1, plugged it in, created two
new TSPAs. That allows us to compare those new TSPAs with the TSPA-SR to
see if we really were conservative, as we had claimed, and how
conservative were we, and were there any changes in uncertainty as we
had added these new models.

For those of you that like looking at the results first, here are three
what are called horsetail diagrams. The upper left is the TSPA-SR
published last December, higher temperature operating mode results,
lower temperature operating mode results, and it\'s easy to see any
number of things which are described in words on some of the following
slides. But in general, the higher temperature operating mode, lower
temperature operating mode as determined by the SSPA are very similar to
each other, and yet both are markedly different from the TSPA-SR. And,
in general, it shows that the TSPA-SR is conservative relative to these
calculations.

And if you look out here at a million years, the far right on each of
the plots, you can see that the spread in uncertainty is much larger for
the SSPA calculations than it is for the TSPA-SR calculation. Be careful
with the Y axes. They\'re the same in these two plots, but different
from that one.

So, how did we get to those calculations in HTOM and LTOM? As I\'ve
mentioned, we added new data. We put in the models. We removed some
bounds or conservatisms with new data or models. And this is an example
I\'ve presented before, but this is actually how it got captured in the
final SSPA, and this is the representation of Neptunium solubility. I
think I presented it at the January meeting. Neptunium solubility on the
Y axis is a function of pH on the X axis, and this curve is what we had
used in TSPA-SR, such that at any given pH, solubility was known with
certainty. It was a constant value. And for the SSPA, we represented it
instead with a distribution of values at any given pH.

So, what effect does such a change have? And that\'s shown in this
figure. This is one of the sensitivity analyses from SSPA, Volume 2 that
incorporated that change in Neptunium solubility, as well as changes in
Plutonium solubility, Thorium solubility, Uranium and Technetium
solubility. But the one that predominantly drives the results is the
change in the Neptunium solubility, and you can see that out at the far
right, it\'s as much as an order of magnitude difference. But what
isn\'t shown here is how the horsetail diagram changed. We\'re showing
the effect on conservatism in this plot, but not the effect on
uncertainty.

These next few slides cover uncertainty, and the information is the same
as what\'s contained in those horsetail diagrams. It\'s just presented
in a different way. As a matter of fact, these two slides represent a
vertical slice through the results. It\'s at the time of peak dose, and
it\'s plotting the results as a cumulative distribution function here
and as a histogram down here. And these two plots show the same
information, just presented differently. People like them in different
ways.

But the main points are that the TSPA-SR is conservative. It\'s shown
that it\'s to the right of the HTOM and LTOM in red and blue, so, higher
doses. And it\'s also less uncertain, which is shown by the steepness of
this curve, and the fact that the SSPA results are more uncertain, as
shown by the flatter slopes and covers more orders of magnitude.

The same thing in the histogram down below. The black bars from the
TSPA-SR are more to the right and narrower to each other, more closely
clumped than are the red and the blue of the SSPA, which are spread out
more, and are shifted to the left, lower dose.

Here was another way to slice through the SSPA results, and this was a
horizontal slice through the horsetails, if you will, plotting the time
it takes to reach a particular dose in these plots, the time it takes to
reach 0.1 millirem per year. And the main point to get here is also that
the TSPA-SR results are conservative, as was claimed, relative to the
SSPA results. They\'re shifted to the left on this slide, that is, they
show up quicker, the dose, and also that they were less uncertain for
TSPA-SR or more uncertain for SSPA, in that the spread of the results,
the flatter slope in the cumulative distribution plot in the upper left.

And, again, the other two plots are just histograms of the same
information, if people would rather look at bar charts rather than
cumulative distribution functions.

The next slides, three slides, cover in written words what I have just
been saying about the horsetails and the two slices. In general, one
thing that we got out of the SSPA is that the LTOM and HTOM, the low
temperature and high temperature operating modes, were very similar to
each other, much more similar to each other than either one was to the
TSPA-SR. And we got the broader range in uncertainty by adding in
additional uncertainties and models, the additional uncertainties by new
models with new datasets, or old models with new datasets.

And if you compare, it\'s the slide with the horsetail diagrams, which
is on Page 10, if you spend your time and look at it, you\'ll see that
after the first 10,000 years, the TSPA-SR, that\'s the base case, is
conservative with respect to the SSPA results, as measured by the SSPA
results, had lower dose after 10,000 years, and the explanations and the
amounts are given right there, as much as three orders of magnitude
conservatism, as measured differences between the means. And at some
years, it was even greater than that.

But during the period prior to 10,000 years, if you examine Slide 10
closely, it will show that the TSPA-SR appears to be slightly
non-conservative, that is, with respect to the SSPA results. That\'s
because with the TSPA-SR, there were no doses prior to 10,000 years, and
yet the SSPA has some, but they are very low doses. And we\'ll come back
to this in another slide.

Now, I was asked to talk a bit about conceptual model uncertainty, and I
have two slides on it, largely to get across what it is we have done,
and also that it is a difficult problem. There\'s the definition of
conceptual model uncertainty. The conceptual models are developed by our
technical principal investigators, based upon available data and
information.

In general, where there are multiple viable models, one is picked. The
others are documented, but one is chosen as the preferred one. And the
Neptunium example, solubility example, on Pages 11 and 12 is an example
of two different conceptual models, if you will, one of which is a
constant at a given pH, and the other has a distribution.

Usually, the principal investigators chose one model that was the most
defensible. Trying to incorporate multiple weighted models in our
calculational scheme is computationally difficult. SSPA captured many
different alternative representations, hopefully based upon ones that
were more physically realistic. And we used them in sensitivity
analyses. Again, the Neptunium solubility example on Page 12 is an
example of one of those sensitivity studies. And so we can get some
measurement of the difference between two different conceptual models,
but in terms of quantifying the uncertainty with the two different
models, it still is a challenge.

I just wanted in this slide to get across\--this has to do with the work
remaining to be done, and we had over the last year and a half many
meetings between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of
Energy on key technical items, KTI, meetings on key technical issues.
And this is just a brief summary of some of the items that have been
agreed to by NRC and DOE, and you can see that many of them, if you read
these closely, they deal with uncertainty and how it is we\'ve treated
uncertainty in our documents, and the work that we have to do to satisfy
the NRC/DOE KTI agreement.

And April Gil, I think, talks tomorrow on the work to be done to address
those agreements. Abe Van Luik will talk later today on this peer review
of our TSPA-SR. And what\'s been done here is just some of the questions
from this peer review group have been summarized. This isn\'t all of
them, but just to give a flavor that this group also has questions about
how it is we treat uncertainty based upon their reading of our
documentation.

This is still in the work to be done. This is the report that I showed
that would be done in November of this year by BSC. The next three pages
have the draft outline for it. This would largely be a summary, Chapter
2.

This is also still, the first part of Chapter 3 is, well, what have we
learned from SSPA and other studies on uncertainties, and this is the
meat of it right here, in part, providing guidance on what to do in the
future with respect to uncertainties, how we treat them.

And also the final chapter, Chapter 4, and it in some ways highlights
something already brought up by Dr. Wong and Dr. Knopman. It has to do
with communication of the uncertainties. And, so we have an entire
chapter that deals with communication of uncertainties.

And my next two slides deal with that. I just want to present this to
show a different way to try and communicate with decision makers, if you
will. The next two slides are 25 and 26, and they present exactly the
same results, but in different ways. This slide is our typical way of
presenting it, which is logarithmic axes for time, and a logarithmic
axis for dose rate, as measured by millirem per year.

I\'ve put the EPA 15 millirem standard on a solid line up to 10,000
years, and then dash beyond 10,000 years. This is for combined nominal
and igneous doses from the Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses
document, with the TSPA-SR mean results shown in black, the HTOM in red,
the LTOM in blue. The red is here the entire way, but it\'s plotted
underneath the blue and you can\'t see it now. I\'m going to put up this
same slide on the overhead projector briefly.

Okay, what I was trying to get across, this is nothing new about
logarithmic plots, but that little teeny mark right up there represents
10,000 years and 10,000 millirems per year, just that one little mark by
itself, which is what\'s represented by all the rest of this plot.

My point here is is that logarithmic scales and log/log scales, most
people don\'t deal with them on a daily basis. I challenge people that
read the Wall Street Journal look for a logarithmic scale, and you
won\'t find them, that most people deal with linear scales.

These are the same results, but on a linear/linear scale. You\'ll notice
it\'s out to 100,000 years, and the dose rate with the EPA standard
shown down here now, with the TSPA-SR in black, HTOM and LTOM down here.
You don\'t see the red because it\'s being printed underneath the blue,
and it\'s right on the zero axis. And this gets back to the question by
Drs. Wong and Knopman, it\'s, well, how would we communicate the
uncertainties to decision makers. If I use this slide, the one on the
left, even if I were to put the horsetails on there, because we\'re
showing means here and our means are biased up towards the top, the
horsetail is going to plot right on the zero axis as well.

And, so, to the extent that our models are correct and they represent
what we\'re doing out there, I think most decision makers would look at
this plot on the left and say it\'s zero, the uncertainty about it is
almost immeasurable, as shown on this plot, and they would feel
comfortable with saying go ahead.

But, it begs the question of, well, what confidence do we have that our
model actually characterizes the system accurately. This topic came up
at an Advisory Committee for Nuclear Waste meeting a couple of weeks
ago, where Chairman Hornberger asked Rob Howard and myself for the SSPA,
if we continue removing the conservatisms, could we get a few more
orders of magnitude performance. And, you know, we could debate how much
more performance we could get, but I did make the point that if you use
this chart, we\'re already at zero. I mean, it\'s hard to go any lower.

So, with respect to communicating, one item I might bring up is for
decision makers in particular who don\'t deal with logarithms on a daily
basis, we might be better off going back to linear scales.

In summary, treatment of uncertainties has been recognized by DOE as
important. It\'s been more than a year we have focused our work on the
conservatisms and non-conservatisms, if any, and TSPA-SR.

The SSPA is the most recent up to date work on this, and the
Uncertainties Analysis report will probably contain no new analyses, but
the important part of this report would be the guidance and how to
communicate. And, as I said, this guidance part would be part of that
report.

CRAIG: That\'s fantastic. Your five minute warning just went off.
You\'re doing great.

Yeah, the data is so compelling now when you present it this way that it
really does suggest that your remarks about the model uncertainty assume
a really high level of importance, because we\'re now in a situation
where the model uncertainty on the metals is really a very, very big
deal in these things. And, of course, it\'s one of the things that
we\'re going to be talking about a lot here.

Okay, let\'s see, let me go in sequence here, Jerry and Priscilla, Dan.

COHON: Cohon, Board.

Bill, I have several questions and comments. I\'ll triage and go
quickly. First of all, I don\'t think you intended it this way, but it
sounded as if you were saying that the base case, by having less spread,
was somehow superior to the other cases which had more spread. You made
two points, that it was more conservative, those histograms showed that,
and that it had less spread. But just to get a check here, you weren\'t
arguing that less spread was a virtue in this case?

BOYLE: Well, that gets back to the quote from the Board\'s letter of
March 3rd of 2000. Some decision makers actually may prefer that less
spread. I\'m not saying that I do, but it\'s\--

COHON: No, no, wait a minute. Your job here, of course, is not to
produce some model that produces less spread and make decision makers
happier. It\'s to produce an analysis based on the most realistic, most
credible understanding you can develop of the underlying phenomena. So,
solubility is a case in point.

Presumably, you use the probabilistic, the stochastic representation,
because you thought it was better in a scientific sense, than the single
model approach. That\'s what I meant.

BOYLE: Yeah, that is true. But I would like to, with respect to the
Neptunium solubility example, the NRC has raised a question about, well,
the data that underlie the probabilistic model, and it\'s this whole
issue, myself personally, I prefer fully realistic, fully probabilistic,
but in defense of those who prefer the bounded approach, as represented
on Slide 11 with the Neptunium solubility with the constant value, it\'s
sometimes the probabilistic models, the underlying dataset, not everyone
is convinced, so people tend to say okay, I\'ll take a bound. And
that\'s the dilemma we have right now, is convincing people sometimes of
the underlying probabilistic models, and if we can\'t, then I think
there\'s been a tendency to switch to bounds.

COHON: Okay, I\'ll pass on that now. Maybe others will have something to
say. But at least the issue has been joined. I have two more things.

First of all, on Page 25, we can look at 25 or 26. Let\'s look at 26. I
think it\'s easier to talk about for just the reasons you said. As we
know, as you\'ve acknowledged many times in these meetings,
communication of this information to non-technical policy makers will be
a challenge. And let me offer some suggestions. This is a better
representation than the previous slide, but it still doesn\'t go far
enough. You should, I believe, and this is one person talking, that this
should be the basis then for making statements to policy makers like the
Secretary that the mean, Mr. Secretary, at 10,000 years, to use your
case, is zero, or essentially zero.

In addition, though, there is a probability of \"X\" that the dose could
be greater than 15 millirems per year. And I think that that is key
information, which is, of course, not captured by this. Horsetail
diagrams have that implicitly, but I think it\'s incumbent on the
Program to say that as clearly as possible to the Secretary and to the
public.

In like fashion, I still have a problem\--I mean, I don\'t object on any
technical terms in the weighting that you do, the probability weighting
that you do of the nominal plus igneous, but I think the Secretary
should be told that there is the probability of \"Y\" that the dose
could be \"X\" thousands of millirems in the event of igneous intrusion,
that you need to sort of de-construct your overall probability
statements and this kind of thing.

So, that\'s a sermon. That wasn\'t a question. But the virtue of what
you\'ve done, and something that I think you should be congratulated
for, is developing the database for doing that. Though, again, there\'s
still very serious problems of the sort that you\'ve known about all
along, and I think you\'re dealing with as effectively as you can, about
what is the correct, quote unquote, or most defensible representation of
that uncertainty.

My last point, and this is a question, your presentation did not cover
this at all, but the Board has communicated to the DOE our concern about
having looked at certain parameters or elements of TSPA with regard to
their uncertainty, and the sensitivity of TSPA results to those, and
then choosing not to carry those forward because the sensitivities seem
to be small. Our concern was that because of such a complicated
interconnected problem, that in putting aside a particular parameter
phenomenon, we might miss, you might miss its contribution to a larger
systems uncertainty.

Have you\--you know what I\'m talking about?

BOYLE: Oh, yeah.

COHON: Have you dug into this? Do you have something to say about it?

BOYLE: Well, I\'ll deal with that immediately. We are aware of the
issue. It was communicated in a recent letter, and also the
international peer review group, or the ACNW, may have commented on it
as well. And I might characterize it in part as, you know, removing
things because they seem locally to have no effect in and of themselves,
but when combined, perhaps they do.

And if we had a fully probabilistic model that perhaps, you know, not
weeding things out prematurely, perhaps we could see, you know, leave
them in if it\'s not too computationally difficult. That\'s probably a
large part of the reason why things are removed now. It\'s just they
don\'t seem to make a difference. Leaving them in, you know, makes the
problem more intractable, so if\--I think it\'s an issue that\'s tough
to deal with.

But, I do want to bring up some other items you brought up here. The
separate igneous, we do have the results separately for igneous. I
didn\'t ask them to be plotted this way, or didn\'t show them, but, I
mean, we could. I mean, the data are there. It\'s simply a matter of,
you know, if we wanted to focus on the igneous, we could.

COHON: Bill, but for the record, I think it\'s very important that doses
be non-weighted.

BOYLE: Okay. And this gets back to\--I think your reason for asking for
that gets to another point you made about these where a decision
maker\--where we would tell the decision maker, look, it\'s zero or
close to zero, with a probability of \"X\" of it actually being greater
than the EPA standard.

And it\'s interesting how people within the project respond to that.
When I asked them that question after your testimony to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission earlier this year, this same topic came up. There
are some people who would look at the 300 realizations from the
calculations, none of which were greater than 15 millirems, and using a
frequent approach to probability, would say it\'s zero, zero
probability, which I think that there are some people in the room that
don\'t buy into that, myself included, because that is the correct
answer, provided 300 calculations was enough. But also, more
importantly, that the underlying model actually is correct. And to the
extent that it isn\'t correct, there is some non-zero probability that
is very difficult to get people to estimate that we would actually be
above that line, using our model.

CRAIG: Priscilla, and then I have Dan and Alberto. Anybody else?

NELSON: Could you show Slide Number 13? I appreciate here that you talk
about high temperature operating mode and low temperature operating
model as opposed to designs. I still do not consider this to be a low
temperature design. But on the upper plot here and on a subsequent
slide, you talk about the steepness of this curve being an indication of
the reduced uncertainty.

BOYLE: Right.

NELSON: And this is confusing to me, and it\'s part of the confusion I
think that still is in my head about mix of different kinds of
representations of simplifications in your model, that you\'ve got some
cases in there in the base case where perhaps a property or an input
parameter has been bounded, or a model output has been bounded, and may
be so conservatively, and in the process of that, the representation of
the uncertainty in that is really lost to many respects.

So, if you had said that that\'s an indication of the conservatism,
that\'s one thing. But to say that the steepness there represents the
uncertainty in the value as opposed to the uncertainty that it is a
bounding representation of mean dose, is\--

BOYLE: Well, that steepness is driven by the bounding representations
which in, you know, plain terms, we are throwing information away. We
are throwing away uncertainty at the price of worse representation of
results, you know, which is the curve is shifted to the right. And, so
it\'s one of those things by going to bounds, the advantage to using a
bound is that it eliminates some uncertainty, just throws it away. We
don\'t use it anymore, but it comes at a price of worse performance, I
think both of which are represented there. The black is shifted to the
right, higher doses, but it\'s got a steeper curve, which it is steeper,
less uncertain, because we threw some of our uncertainty away by
switching to bounds.

NELSON: But I still have trouble with this, because it says annual dose
at the peak of the mean. Now, to me, what that is a representation is
it\'s\--it\'s not uncertainty. It\'s confusing, and when you said that,
I just got stuck on that.

BOYLE: What\'s really represented there for the black curve is is that
we\'ve found the time for the TSPA-SR at which the mean was at a peak.
It\'s roughly 275,000 years. And we just took the horsetails and plotted
them up as a cumulative distribution function, and we sliced the SSPA
results at approximately a million years, because that\'s where the
highest doses were.

NELSON: Well, I understand what you did then, how you got there. It was
the use of the assertion about the reduction in uncertainty and what
that ought to have is significant is one that stuck with me.

Okay, I want to ask you just one other thing. You have on model
uncertainty, you talked about on Slide 18, I guess what I see here is
two aspects of model uncertainty, and I\'m wondering to what extent
you\'re separating them. One is the uncertainty that\'s associated with
the actual conceptual model representing the system that is being
modeled.

And the second one really is the uncertainty associated with the
simplification of the model for inclusion in TSPA. And they may be
approached differently in terms of evaluating the impact of that
uncertainty on the output. Are you separating things at all that way? I
mean, because you say where there are multiple viable conceptual models,
you choose one; right? Now, that means that the uncertainty associated
with the choice of the conceptual model that represents the system is
maybe not evaluated, except for in the engineering judgment, or the
scientific judgment of the selection.

So, is most of your uncertainty evaluation for the conceptual model
related to the simplification aspects for using in TSPA?

BOYLE: I don\'t know that I still get it, but what I\'ll try and use
here are examples to get across what\'s done, and a few examples come to
mind. One is how should we treat the rock deformation? Should we view
the world as an elastic continuum and use finite elements as a
conceptual model and the numerical tool to get at the answer, or should
we use a discrete element model? The mathematics are different, the
models are different.

And, so our investigators have looked at both types, and I don\'t think
either one actually factors into TSPA. But, for design, they will end up
probably choosing one, but using\--knowing that the other model is
available, and looking at them. But they will usually in the end select
one.

Another example is from unsaturated zone flow where we could use a
discrete element representation for the flow. We could use an equivalent
continuum model from a continuous approach, or we could use a dual
porosity model. And our PIs have investigated multiple models, but in
the end, they usually pick one, and all of them involve simplifications,
and all of them have uncertainties.

NELSON: Let\'s just pick one of those. You choose one of those models,
those conceptual models, and then you generate a whole lot of analyses
that tell you how that system performs. And then you have the choice of
how you simplify that.

BOYLE: Yes.

NELSON: In terms of putting it into TSPA. That\'s another question of
uncertainty, because there\'s more than one way of doing that.

BOYLE: Exactly. Sometimes the models aren\'t simplified at all. They\'re
used as is. But in other cases, they are simplified, which just
compounds the problem of, well, how much uncertainty is there in the
result. So, I\'ll agree with that.

NELSON: Okay. Well, it seems like that one is important to quantify the
uncertainty associated with that kind of a simplification for TSPA. I
could see why if you\'re going to a picking of one when you\'re
considering multiple viable conceptual models, that the documentation of
the basis for the selection is a different way of handling that
uncertainty. But, there is an uncertainty that can be quantified.

BOYLE: Sure.

NELSON: Associated with simplification once you\'ve chosen one.

BOYLE: Yeah. And one change that Bob Andrews made after February 12th is
to put\--this is my understanding\--those people that do performance
assessment, that are making that second simplification, if you will,
they don\'t belong to performance assessment anymore, they belong on the
PI side of the fence. So that the people that are coming up with the
detailed representation of the process model, and if there is a second,
you know, a subsequent abstraction, that they\'re in the same group. So,
at least it\'s one group working with it now, and hopefully that will
lead to some consistency in its treatment, rather than the way in the
past, it was the principal investigators would come up with one
representation that might have been very detailed, and then it was a
completely separate group that did the simplifications for performance
assessment.

CRAIG: Okay, thank you, Priscilla.

Dan Bullen. We\'re talking about core issues for the Board, so we\'re
going to let this session run on until we get through.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Just a couple of quick questions, and then I\'ll
defer to my colleagues.

Could we go to Slide 10, please? The comment was made here that
basically\--well, actually, the first question I have is you mentioned
that you got close to peak dose at a million years. But how do you know?

BOYLE: Right. It actually has not bent over yet, but as the various
scientists have looked at it and know the processes involved, you know,
they figure, well, it\'s somewhere beyond a million, but exactly where,
they don\'t know. But, you know, looking at the processes involved, and
also at the steepness of the slope, and depending on how you plot the
results, it\'s are they beginning to turn over. But it does beg the
question. We did not go out to, let\'s say, 10 million years, the next
cycle over, to see where they actually\--

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

I realize that, you know, the uncertainty gets even more pronounced as
you go to 10 million years, but is there a plan or an approach at least
to take a look at trying to identify where the peak dose actually is? I
mean, some lawmaker might like to know it\'s 2.3 million years, and
others might not care that it\'s after 10,000. So, I guess I just wanted
to know.

BOYLE: Right. I think we showed this at the meeting June 20th and 21st.
As is clear just looking at these three figures, particularly the
TSPA-SR to either of the other two, depending on what models we put in,
we could make that peak move, and we can bring it back in under a
million years by simply removing that temperature dependence on the
general corrosion. We\'ve done the calculation without that thrown in,
and it brings the peak back in under a million years.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Just a quick followup question, because you made the comment, and you
don\'t have to go to Slide 15, but you did comment at the last bullet
that the low temperature and high temperature operating modes show
similar effects of incorporation of uncertainties. And I guess the
question that I have is is there reason for that, the inability of the
models to differentiate between the two? Or is there a masking effect,
as Gerry alluded to, from some other total scope of the model? Or have
you dissected it to the point where you take a look at the individual
submodels and identify that there\'s actually the same performance for
LTOM and HTOM?

BOYLE: Well, I\'m glad you asked that, because it was covered back at
the June meeting, and Jim Blink, Dr. Blink, will cover it again today.
My bullet on 15 dealt with at the system level as measured at 20
kilometers with respect to millirems per year. They look essentially the
same.

Dr. Blink will show many calculations, or they are certainly in the
SSPA, where at the process level, things vary a lot, hot to cold, you
know, whether it\'s chemical constituents in the water or whatever, but
when you add it all up with our model, at 20 kilometers, you don\'t see
much of a difference.

CRAIG: Okay. Next is Alberto Sagüés.

SAGÜÉS: Yes, I have a couple of clarification questions. And Number 11,
if we can look at it, please? First, you cannot see very well over
there, but do I understand correctly there is a data point right there
at the pH 7, and about 10 milligrams per liter and logarithm one. I
think there is a little black datapoint right there in the\--right there
on the old curve. Is that correct?

BOYLE: That\'s the way it looks to me. I\'m not that intimately familiar
with the dataset.

SAGÜÉS: I mention that because if that\'s correct, that one datapoint
there, because all the\--it\'s like all the other points combined right
there.

BOYLE: Sure.

SAGÜÉS: Which brings up the question first of all, just to make sure I
understand this right, the little circles are the former assumptions; is
that right?

BOYLE: The little circles are what?

SAGÜÉS: Yeah, the little circles represent the input used for the former
model; right?

BOYLE: Yeah, that\'s TSPA-SR.

SAGÜÉS: For TSPA-SR. Okay. And then the solid red curve represents the
new abstraction; is that right?

BOYLE: Correct.

SAGÜÉS: And that\'s based on the Argonne data?

BOYLE: Yes, Argonne, as it says there in the second bullet.

SAGÜÉS: Okay. I just thought that if I understand this correctly, then,
you know, one of the conclusions one could derive from this would be
that the technique used to try to measure this parameter is inadequate.

BOYLE: Repeat that?

SAGÜÉS: One of the conclusions one could draw from looking at this is
that the method, the technique used to obtain solubility data is just
not good. What could you say to such a statement?

BOYLE: I\'m not a fuel dissolution chemist, and they are the ones, I\'m
sure they\'re highly capable and qualified, and they can probably
present and discuss why they did things the way they did. And, for
example, as I think Professor Sagüés described it well enough, there
appears to be a datapoint right there. And let\'s assume that it is a
datapoint, and again, this shows, you know, as he had correctly
mentioned, this is a long scale, so this one completely dwarfs all these
other effects. This is a factor of ten to a hundred, versus small
fractions down here.

Well, I don\'t know why the scientists did not include that, but it
could be that it\'s an outlier, you know, something went wrong in the
test, but for completeness, they plotted it anyway. But I don\'t know.

And as to that the method is just not good enough to measure the
solubility, again, I am not a fuel solution chemist, but in general, I
think it\'s fair to state we\'ve probably got some of the best people in
the world working on this, and they\'re probably doing the best that
they can.

SAGÜÉS: Anyway, just we\'re talking about uncertainties, so I guess that
sort of extreme interpretation should be sometimes addressed as well.

Okay, the second issue was in Number 26, which is, if I\'m not wrong, is
the linear version of this one that you have here on the right.

BOYLE: Right. It\'s that one right there.

SAGÜÉS: Right. You know, and I agree that, of course, when you look at
it in that manner, things appear to be just totally the same for the
first 50,000 years, and why worry about it, and maybe that was part of
the message that you wanted, if not to convey, at least to bring up the
idea. And suppose that you were to translate that curve used in some
appropriate model into, say, expected incidents of some disease, like
cancer, or whatever, then in that case\--and, again, this is my personal
question. I\'m not making any Board statement here. But in that case, I
think that they probably will have a very different meaning. You will
have, for example, a cumulative number of cancer incidents as a function
of time. And then the thing that you\'re going to start getting into
numbers, which are not going to be negligible numbers, indeed, the whole
concept that such a thing is negligible or not is a totally different
issue. So, I just wanted to point this out and see what you think about
this kind of an observation.

BOYLE: Sure. And the fundamental data are there, as is shown in the plot
to the right, which is the same data, but plotted on a logarithmic
scale. I\'m not an expect in, you know, what increase in cancer
fatalities or cases of cancer would be caused by 10 to the minus however
many millirem per year that is, 10 to the minus 2, 10 to the minus 1,
but people can do that. And I don\'t have that result. I plotted it this
way, because I could just send a quick e-mail and ask them to do it.
But, people can do the plot.

SAGÜÉS: Thank you.

CRAIG: Norm?

CHRISTENSEN: Christensen, Board.

Bill, this is maybe more by way of a comment, but I think these two
slides speak to the different roles of Board and decision making, and
the comment really harks back to the comment that was made by Jeff Wong
and Debra Knopman a bit ago.

Now, I think the Board sees its role as being able\--as a technical
proxy, in a sense, for decision makers, of being able to assure the
technical validity of what is being done, and in that case, the Slide
Number 25 becomes very interesting and important to us, because it
reveals things, and the issue of quantification becomes really critical.

I think the issue, though, that comes up is another kind of uncertainty
that you\'ve mentioned, and it really is a conceptual uncertainty, and
it\'s not so much whether the horsetail diagrams get absorbed in those
lines in Number 26, but whether we feel more confident about the
conceptual models that underlie the two different curves.

In other words, I think being able to articulate that the decision to go
with an analysis that produces the blue and red line is based on
increased confidence, and being able to articulate that. That\'s not
always a quantitative issue. It really has a lot to do with how we feel
about the theoretical underpinnings for the various parts of the TSPA.

So, I would argue that, in fact, from a decision maker\'s standpoint,
the question that might come to me is why are there two curves, and what
was the\--why are we more confident about one approach versus the other?

BOYLE: Well, thank you for the comments. And I agree that even though I
have now presented the results on the left in linear/linear space, I\'m
not advocating not doing these plots, because these little differences
here, the scientists know\--it\'s important to them to know why they
occur. And so we\'ll probably always do it this way, but it\'s not clear
to me that we would want to use these plots for the decision maker.

And the point about being non-quantitative, in using that to help
convince somebody that we\'re more confident, that point is well taken,
too, in particular with respect to conceptual model uncertainty, because
I think it\'s very difficult to get unambiguous quantitative measure of
it. And we might in the end base a large part of our convincing of
people upon, you know, arguments rather than quantification.

CRAIG: Leon Reiter, please?

REITER: Bill, two short questions, one on communication. I\'m just
wondering why in that second plot on your right, you chose to exclude
the four 1,000 years when you didn\'t use those peaks?

BOYLE: I just asked for the results, and this is the way they came. I
mean, we do have the results. There wasn\'t any\--

REITER: But that\'s an important consideration in conveying to somebody
how you choose what to show and not to show.

BOYLE: Sure. Right. Well, we could have gone down to 100, 10, 1; right.

REITER: Well, you just left out the peak, left out the peak dose before
10,000 years.

Second question. In terms of conceptual uncertainty, you know, there are
elements of the Program which have made a great effort to include
different kinds of uncertainty, conceptual uncertainty. I\'m
particularly referring to the PVHA and the PSHA. Just give us an idea
why you didn\'t use some of those techniques to try and deal with the
conceptual uncertainty and model uncertainty.

BOYLE: I mean, we could. This uncertainties work has been going on for,
you know, over a year now, as I\'ve shown, and it started small and
grew. But doing it the way it was done for Probabilistic Volcanic Hazard
Assessment and Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment is an approach,
that they do take time and money, and in the end, perhaps they are
debatable as well, not with respect to the process, but the results.

And that, in part, going to the bounds, as was done in the TSPA-SR was a
method to just say, look, at the price of throwing away some
information, some of the uncertainty, we\'re just going to go with the
bound to make the problem simpler. And, in doing so, it came at a price
of perhaps muddying the waters with respect to what we knew. But that
was the approach that was taken.

CRAIG: Dave Diodato?

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff.

Bill, you\'ve spoken about the pros and cons of a bounding value
approach versus a statistical distribution. But here in SSPA, many of
the parameters have more statistical distribution representation versus
a bounding value representation. So, the statistical distributions have
more variance obviously, they have variance. The bounding values don\'t.
One might imagine that using that approach to try to achieve stability
in your PA analyses, you might have to have more realizations with a
parameter that has variance versus one that doesn\'t.

Now, what I\'m wondering is is there a technical basis for choosing 300
realizations as the number? For example, did you have a target of
stability in the first and second moments of the dose calculations to
choose that 300 realization number?

BOYLE: I would defer that to Bob Andrews or Jerry McNeish, or somebody
like that. But I am aware of the issue. The IAEA/NEA Group brought this
up in terms of their written questions submitted, and it is quite\--you
know, they even did an example calculation for how many runs you would
have to do for a given, you know, probability of some item occurring.
And as to what we did to address those questions, like do we
really\--are the 300 calculations enough, you know, if all the curves,
all those bell shaped curves, or whatever other distributions of data we
have, some of which vary over orders of magnitude, is 300 enough? I\'ll
defer to the TSPA experts. Rob Howard is here. He could always call back
and get the answer from one of his colleagues, and you could bring the
question up again when he talks about the SSPA.

CRAIG: Bill, I think you clearly got the interest of the Board with your
presentation. My own last comment here, I must say I find myself very
uncomfortable with this representation here, even though I understand
the technical reason, one having to do with the low probability but very
high risk, which is omitted from this, as you correctly pointed out, and
the other has to do with the massive model uncertainty that we have on
certain areas. And this kind of graph just doesn\'t let you understand
that kind of consideration, and it seems to me that this is a
prescription for possible trouble.

So, it\'s well worth worrying about, and well worth putting in all the
time that we did this morning. Jerry has given us a dispensation to do
all of that, and correctly so.

We\'re now going to take a 15 minute break\--a 10 minute break. A 10
minute break. Please come back at 10:35.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

CRAIG: Our next speaker is Gerry Gordon, and our Chairman isn\'t here, I
can\'t legitimately make a remark about how the center of gravity is
moving eastward, because Gerry Gordon got his education at Ohio State.
We\'re getting closer to the famous place in Pittsburgh.

GORDON: Good morning. I\'ll start. I\'m a little behind, so I\'ll try to
speed up a little bit. These are the topics that I hope to cover in the
next 45 minutes, or so. There are five areas. I could have covered a lot
more territory in the way of materials update, but time limitations,
I\'m going to just focus on these five areas.

We\'ve talked with the Board at the last couple meetings about the
margin for localized corrosion, very important consideration, inasmuch
as the localized corrosion rates can be very high. This corrosion
potential versus the critical potential, that\'s the margin. The larger
that difference, the more margin.

Consequently, it\'s important to evaluate the corrosion potential and
the critical potential as a function of exposure time. And the longest
term samples we have to do that are the samples from the Long Term
Corrosion Test Facility at Lawrence Livermore, and the samples we looked
at had four years of exposure. The five year samples are due to come out
this February for descaled weight loss measurements.

There are also samples in separate tanks up to about a year and a half
in very concentrated J-13 type water.

You\'ve seen these compositions of the test solutions. I don\'t intend
to dwell on them. The yellow ones are the Long Term Corrosion Test
Facility solutions, and the basic saturated water is the approximately
year and a half exposure of very concentrated, approximately 50,000X
J-13. And these solutions have the range of chloride up to very high
values, fluoride up to about 1600 ppm, and they also have the anions,
nitrates, sulfate, carbonate in different ratios.

This is a rack out of the Long Term Corrosion Test Facility. I think
you\'ve seen this picture before. The water line tends to be about at
the middle of this rack. And to obtain samples with long term exposure,
we selected the U-bend samples, because they\'re easy to get out of the
racks. And, in fact, we selected the samples below the water line. In
removing the samples, we also removed the solution, the hot solution, to
keep the samples from drying out, and we transferred the samples with
their solutions to special electrochemical cells for measurement.

The next slide is a sketch of one of these cells. In the cells, we
included the four year, approximate four year exposed U-bends. Each of
these cells had a different long term test facility environment and
temperature. There\'s also an archive, fresh U-bend, if you will, of the
same heated material. There\'s a platinum electrode, and of course
there\'s reference electrodes. And we\'re able to do cyclic polarization
on the new samples and the old samples, as well as monitor the corrosion
potential as a function of time from the time they went into this
vessel.

This is a summary of what I\'m going to present in terms of data. We
found a relatively large increase in the corrosion potential in one of
the three environments, the simulated acidic water. Potentials in the
other environments, the dilute water, the concentrated water, increased
slightly from the initial potentials. And what was initially somewhat
surprising in the four year exposed solution, platinum electrodes, the
potentially open circuit potential was very similar to the corrosion
potentials of the Alloy 22 in this four year old acidic water solution.

That indicates that it isn\'t just the sample that\'s changed, but also
the solution. It\'s become more oxidizing. I\'ll explain this as I go
into the next few slides.

These are cyclic polarization curves. The two on the right are for new
samples. The bottom one, new sample in a newly mixed solution. The next
one up is a new sample in four year old solution. And then the upper two
are four year old samples, one in new solution, and one in four year old
solution.

What we find if we look at the new samples in new solution as we scan
the potential, measure the current, it reproduces very well the cyclic
polarization behavior described on the waste package degradation PMR.
So, our system is working well.

The new sample in the old solution, the passive portion of the curve is
very similar to the new sample in the new solution. The corrosion
potential is starting to go up, and in fact with time, it continues to
go up.

If we look at the old samples, both in the old solution and the new
solution, the corrosion potentials are high. Remember, this is in the
simulated acidic water environment. There are about 350 millivolts, and
also the passive current density, which is a measure, in a sense, of the
corrosion rate, has shifted to roughly two orders of magnitude lower
rate.

Also note that we scanned these samples up to about 1000 millivolts, or
slightly higher, these old samples, and after the tests, they were
examined with stereo microscopy at fairly high magnification, and
there\'s no evidence of localized corrosion. And these U-bend samples do
contain a crevice where the bolt restrains the legs of the U. There\'s a
Teflon spacer that\'s pressed against the Alloy 22, and even in that
creviced region, there\'s no evidence of localized attack.

I\'ve tried to show schematically part of what\'s happening with these
samples. This is a very schematic active/passive metal polarization
curve. Again, you\'re scanning the potential up and you\'re measuring
the current, and you find in this passive range, that the current is
relatively constant over a broad potential range. This is the cathodic
reduction reaction. In this case, oxygen reduction. And the corrosion
potential is set where these two currents are equal. It sets on mixed
potential, which in this case is the corrosion potential.

If you look at this passive current with time, if you hold the potential
at a fixed value and monitor that current with time, you get a plot of
this type where the current is proportional to the time to exponent N,
which in this case is minus .76. This is for stainless steel, just to
show this schematically.

So, the current decays in the log/log plot in a linear manner, down to
very low values for a passive material. So, this passive current is
decaying with time, and as it does, this intersection which sets the
corrosion potential is also increasing.

So, part of the increase in the corrosion potential is due to this
passive film. It\'s becoming somewhat thicker, but as we\'ll see, it
tends to reach a constant thickness. But also, the perfection of the
film increases, the defect concentration tends to decrease with time,
and that decreases mobility in the effective current, which is related
to the corrosion rate.

So, if we look at the potential, it\'s increasing with time. This is,
again, stainless steel and sea water, or synthetic sea water. At some
point, this film reaches either a constant thickness, or the current
becomes so low that effectively the shift reaches some acintodic value.
So, eventually, the corrosion potential levels off.

These are the potentials measured in the four year old Long Term
Corrosion Test solutions, both the acidic water, the concentrated,
roughly 1000X J-13, and the dilute water, which is approximately 10X
J-13. And you can see for the concentrated waters and the dilute waters,
the potentials that these samples start at in new solution, and this is
out of the waste package degradation PMR, lie in this fairly narrow
range from about minus 100 to minus 250 millivolts.

So, these materials started out in this range, and they\'ve shifted up a
relatively small amount. In contrast, in the simulated acidic water,
which started out about pH 2.7 and ended up about pH 3, or a little
over, after four years, in that case, the potential started here, and it
ends up at 350 millivolts, an increase of about 500 millivolts.

In spite of that increase, we know that from the cyclic polarization
scan, that the critical potentials are significantly higher. So we\'ve
still maintained margin, but we\'ve gotten an increase in potential
that\'s higher than I think we would have expected.

This is the basic saturated water in a separate tank not part of the
Long Term Corrosion Test Facility. These are double U-bends rather than
single U-bends. They\'re two strips of metal bent over a radiused
mandril into a U, and then the vertical legs are restrained with bolts.
And you can see here an increase. You start out with these roughly 13
month old, and they\'re continuing in this cell. We continue to monitor
the potential.

When we put new samples in, they were at very low potentials initially,
and after a few months, the potentials are increasing, and it\'s obvious
they\'re levelling off. This is a pretty low value. And, again, with
this environment, the critical potentials are much higher than roughly
zero millivolts. Because we do have up to 17 months total exposure on
these U-bends, we recently took several pair out of these tanks and took
them apart, since they represent a very tightly creviced metal/metal
contact crevice.

And the next slide is just moderately high magnification photographs of
the inside of the\--let\'s see, this is the inner U-bend, so it\'s the
outer radius of the inner one, and the inner radius of the outer one,
represent this metal/metal crevice. And these were looked at again at up
to 80X stereo microscope. No evidence of any localized corrosion, no
pitting, no crevice corrosion.

So, that\'s very encouraging, because this is a pretty concentrated high
pH environment at 105 centigrade after 17 months.

This is another set of data in fairly concentrated J-13, showing again
the cyclic polarization curves. The critical potentials are up at pretty
high values. We do have a series of potentiostatic rather than scanning
a potential, holding a potential, at a given value and monitoring the
corrosion current. And when one gets above the critical potential, you
start to get film breakdown, and the current takes off. So, that\'s
probably a more conservative way to get at this corrosion potential. We
are in the process of doing that.

In this case, we have Titanium Grade 7 and Alloy 22 and a platinum
electrode for comparison, and we see an initial increase as we did in
the previous couple slides ago in basic saturated water, a large
transient increase, and then the potential levels off. This is over
about 80 days for both the Titanium and the Alloy 22.

We were surprised to see the platinum change, because it\'s inert in
this environment, but it turns out that there\'s a slow build-up of
deposit, and the analysis indicates it\'s largely silica on the surface.
And when we took this sample out, ultrasonically cleaned it and very
quickly put it back in the solution, it went back to this centrally
threshold or plateau value.

Another set of data, I don\'t want to dwell on this plot because
there\'s a lot of data, this is part of a GE Corporate Research Center
stress corrosion crack growth study that\'s been ongoing for almost
12,000 hours. As part of that, these compact tension samples are
monitored in terms of electrochemical potential, and the potential is
very, very stable. This is an Alloy 22 sample against the silver/silver
chloride reference electrode.

At about 8670 hours, we added lead to this particular test. At 1000 ppm,
lead is lead nitrate. And we saw no change in the corrosion potential.
Also, we saw no effect on stress corrosion, which I don\'t have time to
really talk about, but no effect of the corrosion potential, except on
the platinum sample, the potential did shift, indicating that probably
some of this lead is plating out on the platinum surface.

This is a complicated bar chart, and I only want to\--these are the
potentials of four year old samples, new archive samples, and platinum
samples immersed in these various Long Term Corrosion Test Facility
solutions. And if you\'ll focus on the two bars on the left for each
case, they\'re the simulated acidic water at 90 and 60 degrees
centigrade. And what you see is that for the archive, the platinum and
the four year old sample, all in these four year old solutions, have
this very high corrosion potential, or open circuit potential, which as
I mentioned earlier, indicates the solution has become very oxidizing.

When we analyzed the solution, this is the simulated acidic water after
four years, looking at metal ion concentrations. Remember, these racks
have a number of nickel base alloys, not just Alloy 22, as well as some
Titanium alloys. Some of the alloys corrode at a higher rate than Alloy
22. At any rate, we\'re getting a build-up of iron, chrome, nickel and
molybdenum in this simulated acidic water, somewhere from maybe 3 to 5
ppm for iron, chrome and moly, and up to 20 ppm for nickel.

In this bottom plot, we\'ve contrasted the simulated acidic water
compositions on the left with the dilute water, which tends to have a pH
of about 8, it\'s pretty neutral, where there\'s very little corrosion
product, metal ion build-up. And in this higher pH, roughly pH 11,
concentrated water, there is a build-up, but to a lesser, or somewhat
lesser extent than the acidic water.

So, we are seeing a build-up in metal ions, and that can affect the
potential, as we see in the next slide.

These are some data from the literature in 4 per cent sodium chloride,
pH 1. There are open circuit potentials as a function of temperature,
and this base solution has added to it different amounts of ferric and
ferrous ions. The base solution is .3 molar of each of these ions, and
then it\'s diluted by 100 to 1, 1000 to 1, and 10,000 to 1. And the
potentials for each of these dilution ratios are measured as a function
of temperature.

And you see with the 10,000 to 1 where you have very little dissolved
iron, this is a deaerated solution and the corrosion potential of this
alloy, G-3, which is very similar in composition to Alloy 22, and in
fact responds similar in terms of corrosion potential, at any rate, with
very low or no dissolved ferric/ferrous couple, the potentials down near
the hydrogen redox potential where you might expect it, with as little
as 17 ppm addition of ferrous and ferric ions, the potential jumps up
about 200 millivolts, and then goes up more with increasing
concentrations.

This couple sets up a redox reaction similar to the oxygen reduction
reaction that I showed on that schematic. That sets a mixed potential on
the surface of the sample, and depending on the amount of the
concentration of the redox couple species, you can drive the potential
up significantly.

I should just summarize that section that we think that the dissolved
ions from the corrosion process are building up, particularly in the
acidic water, and are contributing to the increase in the corrosion
potential, in addition to the increased resistance of the passive film.

As I described at a previous Board meeting, the corrosion rate database
that the Project is using is based on descaled weight loss after two
years exposure in the Long Term Corrosion Test Facility. Because the
rates are so low, they tend to lie, the median is about .01 microns per
year, and the upper bound is at 10 microns per year. Because of that,
the uncertainties and dimensional measurements and weight loss
measurements, and so forth, and trying to make the measurements, tend to
mask trends in the data like temperature dependency, or environmental
dependency.

So, in our Path Forward efforts, we are looking at several different
techniques to evaluate with greater resolution the corrosion rates. And
one of these techniques involves potentiostatic polarization, and I\'ll
show you some of the preliminary results in the next couple slides.

These are data, this upper curve is in simulated concentrated water.
They\'re all deaerated to get rid of the contribution that otherwise
would occur from oxygen reduction reactions. And, again, we fixed the
potential in this case at about 100 millivolts over the corrosion
potential, and we\'re monitoring the passive current as a function of
time.

And when we extrapolate this plot out to two years, we find that we\'re
getting a rate significantly higher than we would have expected based on
the descaled weight loss. This is converting the current to metal loss.
This 10 to the minus 8 is a tenth micro per year. So, the two year data
lie down in this decade here. There\'s a distribution.

On the other hand, if we use water that doesn\'t have all of the
dissolved salts the various cation and anions

in it, but we use, rather, pure sodium chloride, and we use this
concentration to duplicate some NRC Southwest Research Institute data to
demonstrate our technique was working, and we find that in this case, we
do extrapolate down into the range of two years that we might expect
from descaled weight loss. And, in fact, it looks like it may be
dropping off to perhaps a constant thickness high impedance film.

To explore what\'s causing this higher apparent current, we went to a
platinum electrode in this same simulated concentrated water
environment, and we found that the platinum also yields a current as a
function of time that\'s up in the range of the actual Alloy 22.

This is occurring because of redox reactions in this very complex mix
solution. We have a number of anions and cations. Some of them can under
redox reactions. So, we need to correct this type of data to subtract
out the redox reactions to get the contribution that would occur just
due to dissolution of the metal itself, and not oxidation reduction
reactions that are independent of the corrosion reaction itself.

In this case, I just put this up to show you we\'re starting to look at
the temperature dependency. And, again, these are uncorrected data at
this point. But at 25 degrees C., at two years, these data do
extrapolate down to .01 to .02 microns per year. And you\'d expect these
reduction reactions, since they\'re thermally activated to be lower at
the lower temperature. So, you might subtract still more off of this
after we correct it, but it\'s down in the right ball park.

We plan to use techniques like using a pre-filmed Alloy 22 with a fairly
thick film for the anodic dissolution contribution down to a very low
value. And during this type of process, we\'ll see primarily the
oxidation reduction reactions. Then we\'ll be able to subtract them out.

In terms of the effect of the environment on corrosion, it\'s very
important to define and bound the potential environments. And as you
know from previous presentations by Greg Gdowski, there have been a
series of laboratory evaporative concentration experiments on a range of
Yucca Mountain relevant waters, and I\'ll describe some of those results
a little later.

But, in addition, there are a large number of naturally concentrated
water analogs in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain in lake beds that have
evaporative salt deposits, and we find that these waters, the
groundwaters are carbonate dominated. Depending on the carbonate
content, they tend to divide into two generic categories, the higher pH
carbonate, sulfate dominated waters that tend to have a pH anywhere from
8 to 12, or even 13, depending on the partial pressure of CO2, and near
neutral waters, pH of maybe 5 to 8 that are sodium, magnesium, sulfate
or sodium, calcium, magnesium dominated waters, such as the pore waters.

In addition, in all cases, these waters contain nitrates, as we\'ll see.

You\'ve seen this two or three times. I\'m not going to dwell on it. I
just put it up to show these natural analog lakes for the sodium,
carbonate, sulfate, chloride kind of waters, and for these other more
neutral pH carbonate free when they\'re evaporative waters.

An example of the high pH end is the concentrated J-13, and in that
case, in our corrosion model, we assume that sodium nitrate is the most
hygroscopic salt, and it deliquesces at about 50 per cent relative
humidity. And, so once the humidity reaches that point, humid air
corrosion is turned on. Also, the fluoride content of these waters can
be on the order of 1000 ppm when they\'re concentrated.

In contrast to the high pH waters, these slightly acidic to neutral
brines have the potential to form magnesium and calcium chlorides that
are more hygroscopic than sodium nitrate. And in this case, we can
deliquesce relative humidities down to maybe 15 or 20 per cent, and the
boiling points can be up to maybe 160 centigrade.

This is an example of a concentrated, evaporatively concentrated pore
water. It\'s a simulated UZ pore water concentrated to 1100 X, and you
can see that it has magnesium, calcium, of course chloride and nitrate
in it, and very little carbonate.

After evaporation to dryness and rewetting, these are concentration
ratios, they\'re not parts per million. That may be confusing. So, this
is 300 times this 11.8 to get to the ppm, for example. But you can see
that both the rewetted waters and the 1100X concentrated waters are very
similar, and they tend to be about pH, start out at a little over 7, and
they end up about 5.

In addition to the waters that can form on the waste package and drip
shield, we have to also consider deposits that can form either from
entrained matter that comes in during ventilation, as well as drift
dust. And so we\'re in the process of characterizing both of these
categories, the drift dust and the entrained matter, in terms of their
compositions, and soluble species, and so forth.

As you know, the drift dust tends to be primarily silica polymorphs or
alkali feldspars. We know from the National Atmospheric Deposition
Program, they\'ve been collecting deposition of airborne dust, if you
will, since 1985. There\'s a table in the backup slides of the annual
analysis of those deposits from the Red Rock Canyon region here in
Nevada. And there are waters that have magnesium, calcium, sodium,
potassium, chlorine, there are particles that have those elements in
them. And we\'ll see as we do the dissolved ion analyses from those
various kinds of materials what the dissolved content is.

The issue of trace elements is an important one. And elements like lead,
mercury and arsenic can have a significant effect on both localized
corrosion and stress corrosion cracking. We are characterizing the
natural systems with these species. There are several reports that are
either in publication or now available on lead, mercury and arsenic, and
we are doing evaporative concentration studies to determine the extent
of these that remain in the brines after they precipitate out or absorb
on precipitated particles.

We\'re also looking at these effects on stress corrosion cracking, and I
mentioned to date, in a series of slow strain rate tests and crack
growth tests, we\'ve seen no effect of lead additions up to 6700 ppm in
several different relevant concentrated environments.

In terms of localized corrosion, the molar ratio of chloride to nitrate
plus sulfate is very important. We\'ve talked about that previously in
terms of providing margin against localized corrosion.

These are the molar ratios that I\'ve calculated for the range of
waters, the well water, perched water, pore waters and concentrated
groundwaters and pore waters. And that range lies somewhere below about
2 1/2 molar ratio, concentrated or not.

These are some project-generated data at the University of Virginia done
by Professor John Scully and his graduate students, where they have
taken very tightly creviced Alloy 22 samples, and they\'ve cyclically
scanned them, cyclic polarization, measured the repassivation potential,
which is the lowest potential at which crevice corrosion propagation is
expected, and they developed a database as a function of this molar
ratio. And these are primarily all done in 5 molar lithium chloride.

And they developed from this database through a multiple regression
analysis, an equation, and I\'ve plotted the lines for 80 and 95
centigrade versus molar ratio, and then I\'ve put this band of molar
ratios for the Yucca Mountain relevant waters, and these vertically are
the corrosion potentials that the University of Virginia measures in
these environments.

And you can see very graphically the increase in margin as this molar
ratio goes down against localized corrosion.

In terms of characterization of the passive film, let me just show you
some of the new data very quickly, since I\'m running out of time.

These are data on Alloy 22 in 200 degree C. air. I briefly reviewed
those at the last Board meeting. What we see is the passive film, and
these are tunnelling atomic force microscopy data. We\'re measuring the
film thicknesses as a function of time, and it levels off at a little
under 34 angstroms, or starting to level off.

These are some very recent data done with x-ray photo electron
spectroscopy in concentrated J-13 at 95 centigrade for both Alloy 22,
Titanium Grade 7. And we also see in this case, that the passive film
thickness is levelling off at about 50 to 55 angstroms, somewhat thicker
than the air formed film. And, in fact, the real case will be that
initially, we\'ll have an air formed film, and then it will ultimately
potentially be contacted by water.

This is some of the first transmission electron microscopy to explore
these passive films on Alloy 22, again, the exposure conditions. It\'s a
complicated process to get at this very thin passive film, but in
analyzing it, this is the matrix. We\'re looking through it with an
electron beam after thinning it with a pretty sophisticated technique,
and we find that oxygen and chromium are much higher, of course as
you\'d expect, in this thin oxide.

I know it\'s difficult to see here, but this technique now will allow
us, using another technique called field emission transmission electron
microscopy, which has a very fine 1 nanometer diameter electron beam,
we\'ll be able to determine the structure and analyze these passive
films. So, this is a very promising approach.

This is a similar case for Titanium. We\'re just getting started on that
passive film.

The final subject I want to touch on briefly is microbial influenced or
induced corrosion, and I\'ve got much of the Path Forward effort in here
in the backup slides, because we obviously don\'t have time to get into
it. We know that the project is treating MIC based on linear
polarization measurements, with and without Yucca Mountain microbes
present. We established a maximum factor of 2, and that\'s being used in
the corrosion models to accelerate the general corrosion by a
distribution up to a factor of 2.

Can I switch two or three slides to the conclusion? So, to conclude
then, for Alloy 22, and also Titanium Grade 7, based on a lot of
experimental data, the resistance to localized corrosion is high in the
expected range of repository relevant environments.

That\'s based on observations that the corrosion potential tends to
plateau at values significantly below the critical potential, and also
the low molar ratios of chloride to these buffer inhibitor ions
mitigates or minimizes the propensity for localized corrosion.

The waste package/drip shield surface environments are boundable based
both on laboratory concentration experiments, as well as the range of
natural analogs in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain.

We do have a comprehensive experimental and modeling program underway to
decrease remaining uncertainties in the area of passive film stability
and growth, and I\'ve reviewed some of the initial measurements with
you.

Finally, although I didn\'t review it because of time, there is a
comprehensive path forward in place, including focused effort to
quantify any potential microbiological effects on corrosion.

Thank you.

CRAIG: Thank you, Gerry. Alberto Sagüés?

SAGÜÉS: Thanks for the presentation. I\'m glad to see that indeed the
Project was able to do open circuit potential measurements in the long
exposure test facility. And I think that the results that you presented
today go to show pretty much that surprises can indeed develop in these
systems in the shape of pretty much of an expected open circuit
potential, I would say, under those conditions. And, indeed, you are
trying to find out a number of causes that may be responsible for those
potentials.

I have a specific question. Are you going to try to do any measurements
to see how open circuit potentials may develop when you have a very thin
film of electrolyte on the surface of the package? Because that would
seem to be the kind of condition that one might expect in many case;
right?

GORDON: Right, where we have a deliquescent film, for example. We do
intend to do that. In fact, one of the bullets in characterization of
the environmental effect chart talks to that. We do intend to do that.

Also, the thin film, potentially the corrosion products could build up
to a higher concentration than in the bulk solution, because of the
surface to volume ratio. So, that\'s an important area to look at.

SAGÜÉS: When do you expect to have that kind of research in place?

GORDON: We now have a significant cadre of researches at Lawrence
Livermore, as I think you know, and, so we\'re starting to make progress
much more quickly. So, I would guess in the next three or four, five
months. Alberto, is that a good guess? I\'m sorry, I meant Raoul.

SAGÜÉS: Okay. You were looking at iron ions, and so on. Would you expect
this to create some concern about the use of steel sets for tunnel
stabilization, and so on, like maybe changing to something else if this
looks like it might be a problem?

GORDON: If it turns out to be a problem, we\'re looking at thinks like
clad carbon steel, for example, Alloy 22 clad carbon steel, if that
should become a problem.

SAGÜÉS: Okay. And then I wanted to look at that Figure 30 that you have.
In this case, it\'s a good graph because it summarizes a lot of the
relevant information. The green rectangle are the tests at the
University of\--no, the green triangles are the expected environments;
right?

GORDON: Well, the molar ratio range. The vertical are the corrosion
potentials measured at the University of Virginia in their environments.

SAGÜÉS: Right.

GORDON: Which is a very concentrated sodium chloride. It\'s similar to
the starting range of potentials in the environments described in the
waste package degradation PMR, roughly from somewhere around zero to
minus 250 millivolts.

SAGÜÉS: But, of course, if you now introduce within the realm of the
possible, the kind of potentials that you observe in the long-term
exposure times that might develop when you accumulate a lot of
undesirable species in that electrolyte, then that green rectangle could
become taller, for example, and it may get into what, 500 millivolts
perhaps, or something of that order?

GORDON: Well, remember these are the repassivations in this potential in
this concentrated environment. I would expect that the passive film
heals and becomes more perfect. At these levels, at these thresholds,
repassivation potentials may increase also with time.

SAGÜÉS: But the repassivation is for something\--well, the film has
already broken down; right? So, it would be a reconstitution of the
film.

GORDON: Well, but it would reheal at a higher\--presumably, it would be
a more perfect film. It remains to be seen, but where we\'ve ran the
cyclic polarization on the four year old films, the passive current was
significantly lower, and we did scan up to as high as 1000 millivolts.
Those U-bends are creviced. Where the bolt goes through the holes,
there\'s a Teflon very tight crevice, and we saw no post-test evidence
of localized corrosion with stereo microscopy.

SAGÜÉS: Okay. I don\'t want to get into the details of that, but we may
have to discuss that perhaps. But, at any rate, if you go up to 500
millivolts, you could already have some likelihood of this actually
dissecting that 95 degrees centigrade line, isn\'t it?

GORDON: That\'s true if this line is representative of what I\'ll call
the Yucca Mountain Project relevant environments, which isn\'t 5 molar
lithium chloride. That\'s the only thing I\'m saying. It\'s possible.

SAGÜÉS: I see. And now you have 80 degrees, 95 degrees C. We\'ve been
talking, or people have been talking recently about temperatures as high
as 150 degrees, 160 even.

GORDON: Right.

SAGÜÉS: What would that do to those lines? Even with the present
assumptions of open circuit potential, could we have a problem there?

GORDON: We potentially could have. Again, we haven\'t measured, and you
get to those very high temperatures in magnesium, calcium, chloride
dominated environments, and we haven\'t really measured the
repassivation potentials in those particular environments as a function
of this ratio. But, it could. It could at 160 C., it could cross over
this region.

SAGÜÉS: And if that is the case, you will end up with localized
corrosion, and that would be I think that even within\--even allowing
for all the other mitigating factors that may exist somewhere else in
the repository, I think that, and that\'s again my personal opinion, it
would be a fairly serious problem; right?

GORDON: If it were to occur.

SAGÜÉS: If it were to occur, yes.

GORDON: Right.

SAGÜÉS: And wouldn\'t that be then one of the areas of priority in
trying to investigate what happens?

GORDON: It is an area of priority. Tests are in the Path Forward and
they\'re getting initiated to look at these concentrated potential pore
water kind of environments where you might have high magnesium, more
likely a high calcium chloride, perhaps a small amount of magnesium
chloride.

I showed you some initial data in pure calcium, saturated calcium
chloride, that was a backup chart to the last talk, and it showed that
there was a cyclic polarization plot, if you remember, I do have a copy
of it, but I don\'t have it on a transparency, with nitrate. The cyclic
polarization curve looked very similar to the typical Yucca Mountain
water. Without the nitrate there, then the break-down potential dropped
to maybe 150 millivolts.

SAGÜÉS: Okay. So, still, those are fairly critical issues that will need
to be resolved. Because earlier this morning in the presentation of Dr.
Dyer, that bullet on DOE believes that the bounds on waste package
corrosion that would be used for the SR decision are adequate, and a
confirmatory testing program is now in place. So, I mean, the latter
part is okay, but it seems to me that we may have a few fairly important
matters that need resolution quickly, I think.

GORDON: They do. As I mentioned, the initial results look promising in
saturated calcium chloride, which is maybe a worst case. But, you\'re
right, we do need to do more work.

SAGÜÉS: Okay, thank you.

CRAIG: Don Runnells, and Dan Bullen.

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

I\'ve had a hard time, Gerry, following sort of the line of logic for
the water compositions. I know that J-13 water has been used a lot in
it\'s various degrees of evaporation and acidification. Here, we have
another matrix that\'s experimentally convenient.

You\'ve also talked about pore water and evaporated pore water, but I
don\'t think a lot of experimental work has been done with the pore
water. I think the time has largely been invested in J-13 to this point.

GORDON: That\'s true. More recently, we\'ve started to look at the pore
waters.

RUNNELLS: Can you tell us what is going to be done, what is being done
with the pore water? It seems like one more likely water to contact the
canisters than J-13 water.

GORDON: Well, since Greg Gdowski is in the audience, maybe I should let
him answer that question, since he\'s the principal investigator.

RUNNELLS: That\'s fine with me.

GORDON: I mean, I can answer it to one level. I think he can go into
more depth.

GDOWSKI: Greg Gdowski of Livermore.

I can address the issue of what we\'re trying to do to understand the
water chemistry that is being on the waste package. As Gerry mentioned,
we\'re looking at several aspects of that. One is what\'s introduced
during the ventilation period, what is entrained in the ventilation air,
what particulate matter, what does that bring in.

We\'re also looking at, as Gerry mentioned, what the drift dust would
be. I mean, you have rock there, you\'re going to have some decay of the
rock. What sort of chemistry can evolve from water interacting with that
dust, or deliquescing of the salts contained in that dust.

There is also a significant effort underway to look at scenarios for
water seeping through the mountain, what path it takes through the
mountain, what sort of ion exchange would occur as it flows through the
mountain and flows down the fracture to try and understand what sort of
chemistries are evolving from that also.

As Gerry mentioned, there are primarily two types of water. J-13 is a
type of water that we\'re looking at. It\'s a carbonated based water.
It\'s not necessarily that we\'re looking at a saturated zone water.
It\'s a carbonated based water. We\'re looking at the characteristics of
that, high pH, no calcium, no magnesium, a fluoride level in that type
of water that occurs at high pH. Then we\'re looking at the near neutral
waters that contain calcium and magnesium, but that puts restrictions on
the water also. Calcium and magnesium in water tends to remove fluoride
from the water, so that bounds our water that way also.

But, as Gerry mentioned, we\'re concerned about these near neutral
waters, and we\'re trying to do our corrosion testing on them.

RUNNELLS: How far along that path are you on a scale of something, one
to ten, or zero to 100 per cent, or something?

GDOWSKI: I think\--well, one thing I forgot to mention, also, we\'re
looking at minor constituents of a\--concentrated in these waters. I
think Gerry mentioned we have a fairly strong understanding of how J-13,
or the carbonated type waters, evolve.

We have made significant progress I think in the evaporation or the
evaporative evolution to the brine, the near neutral type waters. What
we\'re lacking right now is some understanding of the contributions to
the dust, the dust that may contribute to the water chemistry, and also
the entrained matters, but we have significant programs underway for
those in this fiscal year, and also the next fiscal year.

I\'m pretty confident that sometime within the next five or six months,
we can put\--

RUNNELLS: Okay, good. Thank you very much.

I have one other quick question I think on Slide 17. Can you tell us the
relevance of this to the repository environment? Here we\'re talking
about different concentrations of iron, and more or less one to one
ratios of ferrous to ferric iron changing the potential. Can you apply
that for us to the repository environment, to the waste package?

GORDON: Right. I\'m using this to illustrate the point that the
corrosion product build-up in the water includes cations, such as iron,
nickel, chrome and molybdenum, and perhaps other cations, and we\'re
finding in the acidic water, a higher concentration of those metal ions,
and we\'re finding a high electrochemical potential. And I\'m trying to
partially rationalize why we\'re finding that high potential.

One reason we think is this build-up in cations, which set redox
potentials on the metal surface that can be hundreds of millivolts
higher. So, we\'re seeing 350 millivolts in the case of a different mix
of ions on Alloy 22 than here. This is just an example from the
literature that shows that fairly small amounts of these ions can have a
pretty powerful effect on raising the potential.

RUNNELLS: Now, I think Alberto Sagüés mentioned this. What does this
tell us about the steel support system in the drifts? Is this saying
something to us about whether or not steel should be used? For example,
is that going to be a bad thing in terms of corrosion of the waste
package, of the canisters?

GORDON: Well, remember the steel, if it degrades and falls, will fall
onto the drip shield rather than the Alloy 22. If it were to fall on the
Alloy 22, and if we had a low enough pH that we could form ferric
chloride, then it potentially could lead to localized corrosion areas
where that happened. With the drip shield there, that\'s very unlikely
to happen. Also, you\'d have to get to a fairly low pH to stabilize this
ferric/ferrous couple, and that\'s unlikely to happen.

RUNNELLS: Okay, thank you.

CRAIG: Dan Bullen for one fast question.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Could we go to Figure 4, please? And this is just a quick question maybe
to help me do my homework, because I haven\'t completely read the 2000
page SSPA yet. But, I guess the thing that I\'d like to ask, and maybe
it\'s not Gerry that I should ask, maybe it\'s Rob or somebody that\'s
doing the PA, but how do you take the data that are generated by the
corrosion in these kinds of waters, and then step it up into the Total
System Performance Assessment, and identify, you know, what fraction of
the packages would you expect to see with certain chemistries of water
on the surface, and then carry out the calculations?

I mean, I know that you come up with essentially corrosion rates based
on the suite of experiments that you\'re doing, and that gets plugged
in. But is there any attempt to essentially differentiate between those
and say, okay, if a certain fraction of the packages are basically in
simulated dilute water with 67 ppm of chloride ion in it, and we let it
go at that?

GORDON: If you remember from the descaled weight loss samples removed
from these various environments in the tanks, we saw no effect of the
environment or the limited range of temperatures, 60 and 90 centigrade.
So, it\'s difficult to differentiate. That\'s the reason we\'re going to
these potentiostatic tests and linear polarization and AC impedance, and
other techniques, to get a better handle on whether there are subtle
differences in the corrosion rate, or within the range that we\'ve
measured, we don\'t see an environmental effect.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. I guess just a followup question then. So,
essentially as you lay out the entire repository, you don\'t see any
differences in water chemistry on the performance of the waste package?

GORDON: That\'s not taken into account\--maybe I\'ll let Rob talk to
that.

BULLEN: I guess it\'s just sort of counter-intuitive, because I would
think if you\'re dropping acidic water on the surface of a material, it
would perform a little bit differently than if you had neutral water.

GORDON: Well, this is acidic water, the SAW.

BULLEN: Right.

GORDON: And its corrosion rate is essentially the same as the simulated
concentrated water, which is a basic water.

BULLEN: So maybe I can infer then that the C-22 is pretty good stuff?

GORDON: It\'s pretty good stuff over a broad range of pH.

BULLEN: Okay.

CRAIG: I\'m going to have to break in here at this point. Gerry, thank
you very, very much. This concludes the morning session. It\'s now time
for public comments.

COHON: Yes, we\'ll turn now to the public comment period, just one
question from the public on this last presentation, not to be responded
to, but it sort of is a thought exercise. What\'s the chemical
composition of water in a glacier? This is motivated by the fact that
this stuff is going to be around for a long time, subjected during times
of climate change, so there\'s something to think about.

Four people have signed up to make public comment at this time. Let me
remind you that there are other opportunities to make comments,
including this afternoon.

It\'s estimated to begin this evening at 5:15. We indicate on our agenda
it will end at 5:45, but we\'re flexible on that, and I won\'t call it
completely open ended, but a lot more flexible than just 30 minutes, if
necessary.

So, with that, as I call your name, if you think you can wait until
later today, or tomorrow, it would be appreciated, just so that we can
stay close to our schedule.

Dr. Paz? And I\'m going to limit everybody to five minutes, please.
Would you identify yourself again for the record?

PAZ: My name is Dr. Jacob Paz. I\'m self-employed by Metal Service,
Incorporated. I used to work at the Yucca Mountain Project.

My comment is\--actually, two comments. Number one, we forget with all
the presentations, one of the issues we\'re facing is corrosion of metal
and metal toxicity and carcinogenicity. And before you make the final
recommendation to the Secretary of DOE, the issue of\--is very
unsettled. I\'d just like to put into the record several publications.

Number 1 is the\--carcinogenicity, and Number 2 is\--antagonism. It\'s
publications from NYU. It\'s very clearly stated.

Recently, we have reported Nickel Plus 2, with UV of chromium and x-ray
interact\--for\--

Furthermore, metals affecting certain microstats in the process of DNA
replication or repair may have a similar antagonistic effect. Further
study is, therefore, recommended.

Another paper from Industrial Toxicology, carcinogenicity of nickel is
enhanced by the presence of other carcinogens, such as visoperine
(phonetic), arsenic, hexo-chromium.

Furthermore, for 3000 relevant articles indicated, at which they have
found, 1000 of them reported evidence of chemical and radiation of\--

To make them state of art is, in Canada, they have carried out research
on drinking water contaminated, applicability of risk measurement
assessments.

Finally, on this topic, is by Yang (phonetic) and others of his group,
stated that 95 toxicological testing of single methods. The issue is
here, we cannot predict what is the risk. The risk is uncertain. I\'m
saying that additional research should be done as soon as possible.

I have an argument with\--the question should be on\--it\'s also EPA and
DOE who is responsible. My position is the following. DOE was mandated
by U.S. Congress to carry out characterization of the site, and they\'re
doing the risk assessment. EPA just writes the standards. They are not
involved in the performance of the risk and the risk possibility of
Yucca Mountain project.

And, finally, the President has called for the best available research
to be conducted, and here, there is an opportunity to do the best
research to get some data before you approve, because I\'m very
concerned about the risk.

And, finally, a paper by Oppert (phonetic), from UCLA, and he stated
that according to EPA regulation and law, you cannot have a site in a
seismic active region with a hundred years flood. How are you going to
put a liner\--and when we have to look about injection and water
treatment remediation, we have to keep in mind that Yucca Mountain
potentially will go through three stages, regular site, separate site
and mixed waste site. Using EPA regulation, you cannot have water as a
method of treatment.

Thank you. And I will submit to the Board all the necessary information
and papers. Thank you.

COHON: Dr. Paz, Karyn Severson is standing over there. Could you give
her those papers and references.

PAZ: I\'m giving them to Dr. Wong.

COHON: Well, Dr. Wong will accept them. He\'ll guard them with his life.
Jeff, don\'t lose those. Thank you.

Sally Devlin? Sally, it would be actually, if you don\'t mind\--oh,
okay.

DEVLIN: My name is Sally Devlin. I am the public, and I am so delighted
that you all came here. I don\'t see any of our officials to welcome
you, so I will officially welcome you. And, of course, I am from
Pahrump, Nye County, where this mess is intended to be stored, and I\'m
so delighted to see my friend Abe here, because anybody who got the
OCRWM bulletin, you see I just hit him over the head with my thing. So,
that was kind of fun.

The other thing is I didn\'t come to excoriate\--and that\'s your
toastmaster\'s word for the day\--but I came to praise Caesar. And
everybody sends me everything, and as you know, I read it, and so I
brought with me one that Bill from NRC sent me about the people that are
going to be on the Board to review the licensing.

Now, I had them all checked, as you well know, and there is one missing.
Now, this is how I\'m going to help Abe do the licensing, and that is
the fifth person that goes on that Board must be someone that has
business turnaround experience, another Lee Iococa, because you know my
opinion. You have nothing. You can prove nothing. And the more I get
into everything, there is nothing.

Therefore, that person had better not be narrow, as some of these
scientists are that will be serving, not consecutively, on the Board.
So, that\'s enough. We want to influence whoever does the licensing to
be a very well rounded business person with the scientific background
who understands transportation, my bugs, health issues, and a few dozen
other things.

Now, I\'ll really get into my meat and potatoes, and I want to thank you
for sending me this book. The PEES has nothing in it except one
paragraph on my bugs. This is the most wonderful book I have read, and
I\'m going to go down a few pages, and Jerry can cut me off when it\'s
my five minutes, but the first A-1 appendix says, and I want this on the
Page 1 of the licensing, Abe, and it says, \"There will not be one
repository, but two.\" And I have been saying this for years. In Lake
Barrett\'s summary, it says not one, but two.

We have 126,000 metric tons besides the DOD thing. Now, the other thing
it says about the DOD waste, and of course we all know they\'re going to
put it in canisters. And as you all know, the bugs came to my attention
from the mess at WIPP, when the bugs ate the canisters.

We\'ve had the testing from Livermore where the bugs ate the rocks, and
we\'ll get more into that when we get on canisterization. But the second
point that I want to make, which is in this wonderful book, which is not
in the PEES, and it says that they don\'t know the temperature of the
tunnels. Will it be 90 degrees C., or 100 degrees or Fahrenheit, or
whatever it is? And this is very important because I came here with
instructions from Grant that it will blow up, and that\'s the Nelson
limits. If it\'s 90 degrees, it will be a little better, if it\'s 100
degrees. So that\'s his comment. And I\'m still trying to get this Board
to find out about the Nelson limits. So that\'s your job for the day.

The other thing, and I will leave you with this, is this is the only
book I have ever read that clearly, and I state this clearly, that it
will take 200 to 225 years to fill these two repositories. The
transportation will be 38 to 50 years. Then they have to leave it open
for 50 years, and maybe they\'ll ever have to retrieve it.

So, I don\'t know about you all, but I know Abe and I are going to live
another 200, 225 years, because we have a lovely adversarial
relationship. But what about you all? Are you going to be here? Are you
thinking of the future?

And then, of course, I have to talk money, as you know, I\'m very
fiscal, and we get into the numbers. And that is the numbers that I have
seen recently were for the one repository, 58 billion. When I started
with the Congressional Report in I think it was \'93, it\'s our ninth
anniversary, by the way, in August it was our ninth anniversary, and I
got into this when you were going to bring it all Pahrump. And when we
have more time, I will talk about transportation canisterization and
health issues. But this is the most important thing, and I think
everybody should realize it, and especially the rest of the nation.

The last number I saw for the first repository was around 60 billion.
That\'s a nice number. And for the second repository, it was around 67,
75 billion. And from the first report to the Congress when John Cantlon
was head of it, it said there will be two repositories, the first
costing 25 billion, the second costing 35 billion. Now, Paul and I and
all these guys, we go back a long way when it said those things.

So, the numbers have doubled and tripled and will continue. And since
Abe and I are going to live 200, 225 more years, I rather worry about
who\'s going to represent you on the stewardship, and that\'s a word
never used. So, we must talk about that. But that\'s just what is in
your writings, and I\'m giving it back to you because the public
doesn\'t know.

Thank you, Jerry.

COHON: Thank you, Ms. Devlin. Tom McGowan? Mr. McGowan, do you want us
to bring the mike to you? You can sit down.

MCGOWAN: No, I\'ll be over there.

COHON: Okay.

(Mr. McGowan\'s complete written comments are attached hereto as an
appendix.)

MCGOWAN: Where it\'s centrally located.

And so I revised my program. I was going to do a quick eight minutes,
but that\'s out of the question, because you all appear to be famished.

COHON: You\'ll have another shot.

MCGOWAN: I\'ll have many shots. The doctors swore up and down, he said
how are you, I said, \"I was hoping you could tell me.\"

My name is Tom McGowan. I reside here on Mars. And as I said, I have
some quickie questions here, but you don\'t want to hear this stuff. One
was for Debra Knopman. Dr. Knopman, I just want to tease you about this.
Another several for Dr. Wong, Dr. Craig, Dr. Bullen, Dr. Sagüés, whose
first name I understand is Arturo, Alberto or Fernando, one or the
other. Alberto. Half German, okay. And you. Are you anybody? Norm? Hi,
Norm. I\'m Tom. And, of course, we have our Chairman here.

So, I\'m going to skip over that stuff and keep it lighthearted,
uncharacteristically.

My public comment today will begin with reflections upon the broader
historical perspective, and we\'ll transition the point of reference to
the fundamental crux issue, with no deference to fragile sensitivities
this time.

Throughout human history, mankind had attained to successfully greater
levels of scientific discovery and technological achievement, all of
which commendable advances have been equally potentially either
beneficial or detrimental to the best public interest of humanity and
our solar orbiting planetary home.

Evidence attests to the fact that the more advanced and sophisticated we
become in terms of scientific knowledge and technological achievement,
the less integrity we exhibit in terms of rational, responsible and
conscionable compliance with the higher moral imperative to protect and
preserve human and all other species of organic life, as well as the
natural environment requisite to sustain life intergenerationally and
for the rest of naturally ordered human and geologic time.

Currently, we\'re at a meteor in terms of the absence of human
integrity, reasonable responsibility, sanity and conscience, and we
obtain as\--self impelled and precipitous decline toward the ultimate
end state of self and mutually induced non-viability, ergo toward our
own induced as immature extinction as a species.

Now, some of us are already on the outgoing ship, so this is really a
word to the wise, some of the younger folks here like Dr. Craig. Be
aware, 2010, or whatever that is. All of you present here are aware that
Darwin\'s theory of evolution did not suggest the species continue to
evolve and then we advance toward an ultimate ideal end state of
perfection as a species, but rather, species evolve laterally, that way,
and until they reach the point where the limits of adaptability and the
natural selection make it impossible to evolve any further, at which
point they promptly become extinct and cease to exist.

Now, anyone who doesn\'t agree with those last four assertions are free
to identify yourself in the public record, feel free to leave the room.
You will not be missed. You will be noted, however, in the public record
as being absolutely incorrigible when it comes to reasoning.

Now, we have to know where we were, where we came from, where we\'ve
been in order to know where we\'re going. And that closely implies that
experience of life is a seamless continuum, and as naturally ordered,
reasoning, doubt, intellect, free will and conscience, we literally can
and responsibly should control the direction, nature and extent of our
progress forward of the time remaining in our own best interests and the
interests of our progeny, if any.

The French artist, Paul Codan (phonetic), subtitled his metaphoric
painting of the South Seas Island, he was en route to the subtropical
jungle, with the inquiry, \"Who Are We. Why Are We Here? Where Are We
Going?\" The metaphysical significance of that human\--question is
immediately self-evident.

(Pause.)

MCGOWAN: Would you like me to summarize?

COHON: No, no, I want you to\--

MCGOWAN: I can. I\'ll continue this for the rest of time, but I\'ll just
summarize now because he\'s here, and I don\'t want him to get away. Dr.
Abe, very quick\--okay.

COHON: I\'d also like you to leave that.

MCGOWAN: Who are you, by the way? Okay.

(Pause.)

MCGOWAN: Let me just sum up for five seconds, please, with your
indulgence.

Dr. Abe, my friend, with all the things going on in the world of stem
cell research, et cetera, how does science intend to clone the soul? And
does it take one to know one?

With that, I\'ll disappear.

(Pause.)

COHON: Don Shettel? Please identify yourself again when you get to the
mike. Thanks.

SHETTEL: Don Shettel from the State of Nevada.

In the spirit of Dr. Craig\'s statement this morning about truth in
advertising laws, I\'d just like to point out a mistake, or a
misstatement in Gerry Gordon, the last speaker\'s presentation in his
backup slides. And, hopefully, it\'s not something worse.

On Page 45 of the backup slides, he makes the statement that lead
species are not very soluble, are only soluble in very acidic solution.

All these calculations that I\'m going to show you are based on, or
calculated from the Geochemist Workbench, which uses EQ/36 database. On
the left-hand side, we have an EH/pH diagram which most people,
scientists at least, should be familiar with, oxidation potential,
vertical axis, pH down here.

Dr. Gordon was referring to lead species are only soluble in the acidic
region, which I presume he means here. These are for these conditions up
here.

Anglesite is a lead sulfate mineral, precipitates at somewhat more basic
conditions than lead chloride. These are aqueous species that
predominate. These are mineral names that indicate fields for condensed
or solid lead minerals.

But in the basic side, we have a very large range here for lead
carbonate aqueous complex. This is at 95 degrees. I\'ll move over here
to 160 degrees. The solubility of lead minerals increases with
temperature. As you can see, the field for the anglesite here under
similar conditions is shrinking. We have an expanded field in the acidic
region for lead chloride complexes, and a larger field for lead
carbonate species.

So, clearly, lead species are not soluble in just acidic, or under
acidic conditions. A more rigorous calculation with the Geochemist
Workbench involves the speciation calculation at a fixed pH, and
scanning at pH range here from 4 to 10. The anglesite precipitates in
this range from a lower pH up to about pH 4 1/2. Anhydite is stable
across the entire pH range here, and calcite starts precipitating at
about this pH, and accounts for these level lines here.

The main point I want to make here is this might be considered the
acidic region, but even with a lead mineral, or condensed phase here, we
have significant solubility of lead species. And then under more basic
conditions, we have an even\--we can have an even higher concentration
of lead carbonate complexes.

And the conclusion here is that although aqueous lead two plus may not
predominate as an aqueous species, it is present and available for
reaction with Alloy 22.

That\'s all I have to say.

COHON: Thank you, Dr. Shettel. Dr. Shettel, if it would be possible, we
would appreciate getting paper copies of those slides.

SHETTEL: These are in the backup slides for Dr.Pulvirenti\'s talk.

COHON: Oh, okay. Those are in the backup package. Okay. And we\'ll be
seeing them, or we\'ll be aware of them again later.

Thank you all for those comments. We will adjourn now until 1 o\'clock.
Eat fast.

(Whereupon, the lunch recess was taken.)

[AFTERNOON SESSION]{.underline}

COHON: Before we start the printed agenda, at the end of the public
comment period before lunch, we had a brief presentation by Don Shettel,
and I neglected to give Gerry Gordon a chance to respond to that, if he
cares to. And I see Gerry has just reentered the room.

Are you ready, Gerry, or do you need Greg to do this?

GORDON: I\'d prefer Greg\--

COHON: Well, we could try to work that in\--do we expect Greg back?
Okay, why don\'t we just look for an opportunity later today, maybe at
the public comment period you could talk to Greg and have him ready and
we\'ll get it on the record that way.

Okay, with that then, I\'ll turn it back to Paul Craig.

CRAIG: Okay. We\'re now starting the afternoon session, where we have a
number of technical talks, and the first of these is the report from Joe
Payer, who has been doing a review of the waste package materials, a
peer review, and their interim report is out, and here is Joe.

You have 30 minutes, and I will make noises at 25.

PAYER: Thanks, Paul. Thank you.

I appreciate the opportunity to come here and present this to the Board.
The plan is, as Paul said, is to give you a 30 minute overview summary
of what\'s in the interim report of the Peer Panel on Waste Package
Materials Performance. There are copies of this report now out on the
table out in front here, if people haven\'t gotten it. And my
understanding is that it\'s also posted on the Yucca Mountain website.

I\'m Joe Payer. I\'m Chairman of the Peer Panel on Waste Package
Materials Performance. And this is a summary of our interim report dated
September 4th.

The Panel was put together by DOE\'s request to Bechtel SAIC to conduct
a consensus peer panel in this area. The important aspects of what our
job is, our charge is to review the current technical basis for the
prediction of long-term performance of materials, waste package, both
the Alloy 22 waste package, and the Titanium drip shield. And, in
addition, to assess the planned experimental and modeling program that
supports that long-term performance.

So, the focus on this is the technical basis for those two aspects, and
our recommendations are provided to DOE by the interim report, and a
final report that will be issued in February.

The panel is comprised of myself as Chair. I\'m a professor at Case
Western Reserve University. Dr. John Beavers is an executive
vice-president of CC Technologies, which is a contract research
organization in Columbus, Ohio that does work on corrosion, materials
performance. Tom Devine is a professor of materials science and
engineering and Chair of the Department of Materials Science and
Engineering at Berkeley. Gerry Frankel is a professor at Ohio State of
materials science and engineering at Ohio State, and Director of the
Fontana Corrosion Center. Russ Jones is a senior scientist and technical
group leader at Batelle-Northwest. Rob Kelly is a professor at the
University of Virginia in materials science and engineering. Ron
Latanision is a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT,
and also Director of the ULIG Corrosion Labs.

All of us have background in materials performance, reliability, life
prediction in different aspects of corrosion, corrosion science.

In addition, the panel has the availability and the use of what are
being referred to as subject matter experts. There\'s on the order of 15
of these people that give the effort an international flavor. We have
representatives from Japan, Sweden, Finland, and England, U.K., and also
other North American participants who have expertise in particular
areas, such as passivity, localized corrosion, geochemistry,
hydrogeology, and so forth. These are people that are available.
They\'re under contract to assist us with this in specific topic areas.

So, the overall efforts here are comprised of the Panel. Our Panel
report is the consensus document of these people, and these folks are
providing technical backup and support to the panel.

In addition, the Project staff has been very cooperative and working
with the Panel, and also we\'ve had representatives from other factions
looking at the Yucca Mountain repository.

There\'s a couple of noteworthy, or several noteworthy events of
technical exchanges that have occurred. on May 23rd here in Nevada, we
had the official kickoff meeting of the Peer Panel.

On July 19th and 20th in Arlington, Virginia, the Board organized,
primarily Alberto was the head of that, the guide of that, an
international workshop on long-term extrapolation of passive behavior.
Several of the Panel members were able to attend parts or all of that,
and a couple of the subject matter experts on our Panel also
participated in that workshop.

A significant event\--I\'ll make a couple comments about that, and I
believe following me on the agenda, Alberto has some time to give you
more of a flavor of what occurred there.

Tied with that meeting, we had what we\'re calling a subgroup meeting.
Several of our subject matter experts, Panel members and interested
others attended, stayed over in Arlington, Virginia for another day to
discuss localized corrosion issues. And some of the Project staff were
able to join us at that as well.

On July 24th in Cleveland, we had representatives from the State of
Nevada, and representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that
came and made technical presentations to the Panel.

On August 10th, out at Livermore, we had a subgroup of Panel experts and
subject matter experts and Project staff people discussing the issues of
waste package fabrication.

So, we\'re working as a Panel as a whole, and also as subgroups within
this area.

This just is the overall schedule. We\'re at September. We\'ve delivered
our September 4th report. There will be an open meeting for
presentation, it will be a full day meeting September 25th here in Las
Vegas. The Panel, Panel members will make presentations in the morning,
and we\'ll have presentations from Project staff in the afternoon. So,
that\'s scheduled for September 25th here in Las Vegas.

We will complete our analysis and evaluation over the October/January
time frame, and we\'re on schedule to\--are scheduled to issue our final
report in February, and the response to that report by the Project is
due in the April time frame. So that\'s where we\'re at.

I\'d like to give you a flavor of some of the general findings, and then
some findings and specific sub-issues that we\'re looking at.

The Panel has found no technical basis for concluding that the waste
package materials being considered now are unsuitable for long-term
containment. There are technical issues that remain to be resolved,
remain to be settled. The likelihood of resolving those and removing
uncertainty is great. This area of corrosion of materials, materials
performance is an area that is amenable to experiment. It is amenable to
modeling. And, so, further work and experiments and analysis has, in our
opinion, a great chance of reducing that.

Much of the experimental and analytical work to support performance
assessment is underway. A large amount of the necessary work is in
Project plans, and remains to be done. So, our opinion is the Project is
moving in the right direction. Their approach is sound, and there\'s
work to be done yet.

The effective control of corrosion of waste package materials is
essential for the long-term performance. The most viable realistic
threat to waste package performance is corrosion in aqueous
environments. So, that corrosion has to be managed, and that\'s been
recognized for quite a while, and it continues to be a critical issue.

So, much of the performance, long-term performance projection revolves
around how do you manage, how do you control corrosion in this
particular application.

Corrosion has been a problem industrially for many years, and there\'s a
common approach that has evolved over that time on how one addresses any
corrosion problem, and that is determining the realistic range of
aqueous environments that can cause corrosion, and then the selection,
the use of materials that are resistant to corrosion in those
environments.

When the packages are dry, in the absence of liquid water on the metal
surfaces, corrosion is not a problem. Okay? So, we\'re only dealing
with, we\'re concerned about corrosion in the aqueous state, when
there\'s water on the metal surfaces.

Nickel-base Alloy 22 and Titanium Grade 7 have excellent corrosion
resistance over a wide range of aqueous environments. The key issue
becomes do they have adequate corrosion resistance over the realistic
range of environments for the Yucca Mountain application. That\'s where
the attention is being given. That\'s where the major issues are.

We looked at several sub-issues or categories of issues in this overall
assessment. One of them was are the correct potential degradation modes,
the processes that can degrade materials, has the Project identified and
are they dealing with the right set of those degradation modes. So, we
have a couple comments on that.

The second is are the environments being determined? Can they be
determined? Is the approach taken by the Project, are they determining a
realistic range of environments?

And then we have comments on three specific corrosion modes, long-term
passive films, these alloys all depend on a thin oxide layer,
self-forming oxide layer, for their corrosion resistance. If that oxide
layer remains intact, the alloys have long, long life, very slow
penetration rates. If that oxide layer breaks down, then the penetration
rates can be more rapid.

So, the three corrosion issues we\'re involved in are the long-term
behavior of passive films, localized corrosion where that passive film
may break down locally, and stress corrosion cracking. And, so in the
remainder of this, I\'m going to talk about the headlines or the
overviews of that from our interim report.

In the area of degradation modes, the Panel concludes that the Project
has identified and is looking at the correct damage modes. Corrosion, as
we said, is the most significant potential degradation mode. And the
Panel has identified three metallurgical processes, three long-time
processes, or processes that can occur over long times that could affect
the corrosion behavior or the mechanical properties of the alloys.

These aren\'t degradation modes in themselves, but they could lead to
changes in corrosion behavior or mechanical properties, and we identify
those three in the report.

The Panel notes that design and fabrication details can have a great
effect on corrosion and mechanical behavior. How the packages are
welded, how the packages are fabricated, what sort of stresses remain,
how those stresses are managed, all of the details of design,
fabrication and assembly and emplacement can have a significant effect
on the corrosion behavior and/or the mechanical properties of the
packages. And, so, there\'s issues there that need to be addressed.

There\'s other degradation modes, for example, just a mechanical failure
and/or hydrogen embrittlement, which is another important failure mode
that needs to be addressed in the Project. And then there are other
contributing factors that can affect those. Radiation effects, radiation
from the, the flux of radiation from the spent fuel itself has the
possibility of affecting the mechanical properties of the metals. The
radiation can affect the types of composition in the aqueous film. And,
so, these areas have to be addressed. They are being looked at by the
Project, and we suggest how much more of that should be done.

Microbiological activity is an area that needs to be addressed. And,
again, the fabrication issues can contribute to this.

The status of this is that the Panel is reviewing Project plans in each
of these areas to see in our assessment where are they, how far should
they go, and hopefully to suggest approaches to get to an answer on
that, so we can compare what\'s being done to what we might suggest
being done.

The view that\'s evolved for understanding the mountain and how it
behaves from a corrosion standpoint and, again, coming back to the waste
package materials, corrosion is the main issue. We see the world,
corrosion folks, as having two distinct water types moving through the
mountain. And the terminology we\'re using here is as the water moves
through the mountain and the rock and is coming down approaching the
tunnels and the drifts where the packages are, we refer to that as
water. When it gets onto the metal surface, we refer to that as an
aqueous environment.

That might seem like nit picking to you, but when you get seven
corrosion folks in a room, that was an important distinction.

Waters, in our mind, are the waters that are moving through the rock,
and changes that can occur to those waters. When they get onto a metal
surface, we talk about the aqueous environment.

Essentially, there\'s two types of waters, and Gerry mentioned this in
his presentation earlier, and it has to do with the relative amounts of
calcium and carbonate in the waters. If the calcium is there in excess
of carbonate, as the waters evaporate, as you remove water, calcium
carbonate precipitates and you\'re left with an excess of carbonate.
And, so you go to mildly alkaline, sodium-carbonate types of waters.

If the calcium is there in excess to the carbonate, as you remove water
from evaporation, you precipitate calcium carbonate, all the carbonate
is removed and you\'re left with the calcium magnesium type waters. And,
so these are near neutral type waters, pH 6, plus or minus. These waters
can go from 8 to 12 or 13.

All of these waters, either the mildly alkaline carbonate waters, or the
near neutral calcium waters, have an ensemble, a mixture of chloride,
sulfate, nitrate, many different anionic species there, and that\'s
important from a corrosion standpoint, corrosion behavior.

The Project has focused on studying these waters, determining these
waters by evaporating, removing water, which can occur because of the
thermal effects, and has shown that these two general solutions
described above are true. And the Panel basically finds that this is a
consistent way to approach this problem, a technically sound way to
approach the problem.

So, two waters are going to be coming into the drifts potentially to
drip onto the waste packages.

When those waters come in contact with the metal surface then, or when
the metal surfaces get wet, we see three different conditions that can
pertain on that metal surface. The first one is a moist dust. Again,
remember when it\'s above the dew point, when there\'s no moisture, no
liquid water on it, corrosion is not an issue. Penetrate rates are
extremely slow.

And, so the metal surface is sitting with a drip shield over it. There
is some dust and particulate that can settle in on that, and Gerry had
some comments about the makeup of that, being primarily silica based
dust and deposits, but it can also have any other environmental species
that settled in on it.

As the package cools down, you will get to a temperature at which
moisture can start to form, and that\'s when corrosion issues have to be
addressed. And in the absence of any dripping, if there\'s no seepage of
water, then what will happen is that moist particulate will remain on
the metal surface and the package will cool down until it gets to
ambient temperature.

And, so that\'s the condition that pertains for the widest area of
surface of the waste packages and drip shield. Moist dust on the
surface. And the question is what kind of corrosion occurs under those
conditions, and are these alloys resistant to that corrosion.

The second class of condition that has been identified is in the
presence of droplets of water that can form and drop down onto the hot
metal surface, when that occurs, you can lose the water and evaporate,
and you have the possibility, the likelihood, of forming mineral scale
and deposits on the metal surface.

So, in the area where droplets of water hit the metal surface, the
condition is going to be scale and deposits on the metal surface, and
the question then becomes how does corrosion\--what\'s the corrosion
resistance under those conditions.

The third important condition from a corrosion standpoint are in areas
where there\'s tight metal to metal contact. And in a corrosion science
and technology, we refer to those areas as crevices.

So, if you take two metal surfaces and place them together, moisture can
get into that creviced area and the chemistry within the crevice can
change from the bulk chemistry. And, so the waters that pertain, the
environment that pertains in that creviced area can be significantly
different than the bulk environment. The processes that go on are well
known. The need is to apply what\'s well known to the specific
applications of the Yucca Mountain project.

And, so we would suggest that the Project undertake comprehensive
experimental and analytical programs, modeling programs, to address
these three conditions with the waters that are coming in.

So, you\'ve got two families of waters coming in, three different
conditions, all of which should be and are amenable to experiment and
analytical treatment.

The Panel recommends that in order to deal with those issues, that you
need multi-disciplinary people. You need some corrosion people, you need
some materials science people, you need some water chemistry people, and
you need that cadre of people working together on designing the
experiments and carrying out the experiments and the modeling. And, so
we recommend that a task force be put together to address those
problems.

Regarding the long-term behavior of passive films, these alloys, both
Titanium and nickel-base Alloy 22, depend upon this thin metal oxide
layer for their corrosion resistance. The question then becomes how
sound is that, how protective is that over long periods of time. And
that was one of the major topics, or the major topic of the
international workshop conducted by the Board in July, was what is the
long-term extrapolation of passive behavior.

Our perception, and we had to word this very carefully, because we had
several Panel members who were there, we had subject matter experts that
were there, the perception of the Panel members sitting through that
workshop was, and I was one of them, that there is not such a great
concern about the protective nature of the passive film itself, the
oxide itself. The concern is will the environment change over time in
some way to break down that film, or are there metallurgical processes
that are occurring in the material below the film that could destabilize
the film? Okay? So, that was our perception.

The Project has concluded, based on looking at the, or the Panel has
concluded, based on looking at the Project\'s data from long-term test
facility, from the long-term passive corrosion rates of these metals,
electrochemical measurements, that the uniform penetration rate on these
alloys is quite low.

The critical question is will that low penetration rate persist? And the
Panel has identified in our report three areas that ought to be looked
at, the intrinsic nature of the passive film itself, changes in the
environment that could cause an instability of the film, and changes in
the underlying alloy that could cause that instability.

And, so, experimental work and analysis over the possible range of
environments is suggested, looking at these long-term metallurgical
processes, and making projections about how rapidly they may go and what
their effects might be. And, finally, in this area, the Panel recommends
that a backup alloy, an alloy in addition to Alloy 22 nickel base, be
carried along in the Program, not in each and every experiment, but
certainly in enough of the experiments, because several of us on the
Panel see Alloy 22 as a placeholder. It represents a highly corrosion
resistant nickel based alloy.

Similarly, Titanium Grade 7 represents a highly resistant, corrosion
resistant titanium alloy. Those aren\'t the only alloys in that class.
And so we would suggest that a backup alloy be included.

We also suggested a comparison alloy, something like 825 perhaps, or
pardon all this alphabet soup, but all these things suggest certain
compositions of metal alloys, and essentially for the nickel base
alloys, as the amount of chromium and molybdenum go up, the corrosion
resistance goes up. There\'s a whole family of those alloys, and the
benefit of including a comparative alloy which has less corrosion
resistance than Alloy 22 is it can give you some feel for where you are
and what your margin of safety is from the realistic environments or
not.

As far a localized corrosion, the nickel-base alloy and Titanium Grade 7
are extremely resistant to localized corrosion over a wide range of
environmental conditions. You can find environmental conditions,
however, that will attack these materials. And, so the question becomes
how do they behave in the realistic environments again.

The framework that the Project is taking is a valid approach, an
appropriate approach. The Panel recommends a more rigorous way of
looking at some of these critical potentials that are being measured,
and the Panel again recommends that the conditions be looked at beyond
the range of realistic conditions, so that some margin of safety or
margin of behavior can be established.

In the localized corrosion areas, there\'s several issues to be
addressed. It\'s been suggested here today, and we certainly support
going to higher temperatures. The issue of once these degradation
processes start, they don\'t necessarily continue to go forever. They
will arrest in most cases, and restart in many cases. And, so that whole
issue of arrest and re-initiation has to be addressed.

Again, we would suggest that the initiation, propagation and arrest
behavior of these alloys be looked at for the three conditions that
persist, or that pertain to Yucca Mountain, moist dust, scale and
deposits that are west, and crevices between metal to metal contact.

Stress corrosion cracking, again, research to date, the experimental
results to date, Project data would suggest that nickel base Alloy 22
and Titanium are resistant to stress corrosion cracking. The mitigation
method, experimental approach being taken to this, is a rational,
technically defensible, logical way to attack it.

The Panel makes some suggestions about deficiencies in the current
program that certainly can be addressed, and the Panel recommends that,
again, that alternative models be looked at in addition to the model
that\'s being suggested now.

The purpose of looking at alternative models are, one, to validate and
support the Project approach, and also to have an alternative in case
this particular model is found to be deficient.

We make two comments regarding level of effort and organization. The
Panel is concerned that adequate resources will not be allocated to
complete the work. There\'s a lot of work that\'s necessary to be done.
In Lake\'s opening comments today, he mentioned some of the budget
pressures that are real. And, so much of the experimental and analytical
work needs to be done. It\'s underway, but needs to be completed, a
large amount of that necessary done, and so anyway, that\'s what we\'re
saying, is it is important that the manpower, resources and level of
effort be sufficient to meet the projected time frames, or something has
got to give, either the decision points or the level of effort.

The Panel recommends a couple areas where we think a closer
collaboration would be very well taken. One I\'ve mentioned already in
the area of determine the aqueous environments. We think that the
corrosion, materials science, geochemistry, hydrology folks ought to be
working in a combined official task group sort of method, or
organizational method.

And we also suggest closer integration between design and fabrication
engineers and the corrosion and materials science experts.

Again, industrial experience shows when the corrosion and materials
science people participate early on in the design stages, that you can
avoid some mistakes further down the road.

As far as going forward, the Panel has identified three categories that
we\'re going to focus on in the remainder of our study, corrosion
processes, environment and everything else. The last is just a curry of
degradation modes, and so forth.

The hope is, and the intent is that the panel will not only identify
issues that need to be addressed, but hopefully, we will also suggest
approaches to be taken to address those issues.

Thanks, Paul.

CRAIG: Thanks, Joe. You\'re precisely on time, 30 seconds.

PAYER: Professors usually are wound up for 48 minutes, as you know, or
the audience walks out.

CRAIG: I\'m going to make a conjecture, which I\'d like you to respond
to, either affirmatively or negatively.

The conjecture is that if you were giving this talk ten years before a
decision was to be made, and the resources were to be provided to do the
work that you\'re describing, and when that work was done, the results
came out as you expected, there were no negative surprises, positive
surprise is okay, then everything would be dandy.

But, in fact, that\'s not the environment we\'re looking at. We\'re
looking at an environment where what appears to be a go, no go decision
is going to be made maybe this year, with no discernable retreat
position, no credible back-out in case the future work doesn\'t get
done, or it does yield surprises.

And you have these qualifiers, like you\'ve not find a technical basis
to conclude the material is unsuitable. That doesn\'t sound to me like a
ringing endorsement. Or the Board\'s workshop, the passive layer could,
in principle, do the job for thousands of years. Again, it doesn\'t
sound like a ringing endorsement. And then the resources are needed to
complete the work, as you just said. So, there\'s a whole series of
these which lead me to conclude that the program is on a good track, but
it\'s got a time schedule mismatch, which is simply intractable.

PAYER: Well, the response is I guess that, two things, I think the
decision point, as I understand it, and our Panel, you saw what the
scope was, it was to look at the long-term performance material
prediction, but obviously we recognize that what we say is going to
hopefully have some relevance on things like site recommendation and
work that needs to be done.

I guess I don\'t agree from my perception that the site recommendation
doesn\'t have a retractable back-out. The decision is going to be is
this a suitable site. It seems to me you could turn the question around
and say is there a sound technical basis to show definitely that it\'s
intractable, that it\'s an unsuitable site. And I think clearly, that\'s
not the case. There\'s some important technical issues that have been
pointed out that could, in fact, with further study, be found to be a
show stopper, but they certainly aren\'t definitive now, and there\'s a
lot of indications that they\'re going in the right direction. And
there\'s a lot of resistance to this.

So, I think in my mind, the criteria for a site recommendation type of a
decision is different than a license application. And that\'s all Joe
Payer. Don\'t put that on the other six guys of this Panel. So, that\'s
the point there.

So, I think maybe that\'s the difference in my distinction, is we\'re
looking at work that certainly needs to be done before you\'re sure this
is going to work. But it\'s going in the right direction. We think
there\'s a lot of promising results.

CRAIG: That\'s a good way to characterize it, a very good way of doing
it.

Questions? Jeff Wong? Jeff, you told me earlier you had already asked
your question.

WONG: I know, I\'m only allowed one question per meeting.

CRAIG: I just don\'t know what we\'re going to do with you.

WONG: This is Jeff Wong, Board. As a student of Alberto\'s classes on
corrosion, I want to ask a very high level question.

These are\--I think that Paul was getting at the fact that you are
asking for studies or suggesting studies at a time when resources, money
and time is getting tight. And to help me understand all the studies
that you\'re asking for, are you asking for the studies to refine the
projected performance of the system, or do you have a belief that
performance can actually exist on the outside of the bounds of the
current assumed or projected performance, or are you asking for these
studies because you believe there\'s actual data gaps in the
performance?

PAYER: Again, this is all my bias, or my perception and beliefs, I
guess, here. My read of where the technical basis for long-term
performance is that is showing promise, is showing good promise. I think
it\'s not enough Is dotted and Ts crossed that I would feel comfortable
marching in for a license application.

I think there\'s areas that have to be filled out. There\'s some
legitimate issues that have been brought up that are worthy of study
that currently the analysis and/or experiments aren\'t available to do
it.

I tend to be perhaps an optimist about these things and think we could
make a metal can that could live in a mountain of ambient waters at
Yucca Mountain. But, the point is that doesn\'t matter. Is the technical
basis there now or not? There\'s other people that aren\'t so optimistic
perhaps on the overall scale. But, again, their opinion at this point I
think is not so important either. You know, where\'s the technical
basis? It shouldn\'t be Payer shouts louder than somebody else, or
speaks better, or that sort of thing. It\'s what\'s the technical basis.

WONG: Well, if it\'s not good enough for a license application, is it
good enough for a site recommendation?

PAYER: That I think is totally in the eye of the beholder. I really
think it is. And that\'s everybody\'s got to do their own judgment on
that. There\'s an awful lot of information that shows that these alloys
behave very well under the conditions they\'ve been tested under so far.
Have they been tested under all the right conditions and all the
conditions you\'d like? Perhaps not.

WONG: So, as I take it, you believe that there\'s performance possibly
outside of the bounds of the projected performance, but you really
don\'t believe there\'s a data gap, any data gaps in what\'s been
presented so far?

PAYER: Well, I\'m not sure I said that. I think there are data gaps. I
think there are data gaps. But there\'s some sound experiments that have
been done. There\'s some sound corrosion behavior that\'s been done
under what I think are relevant conditions. Have we looked at all the
relevant conditions? I think probably not. But there\'s work in progress
trying to determine where the realistic ranges are.

WONG: Thank you.

CRAIG: Debra?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

Let me follow up on that a little bit with some more specificity. This
has to do with the composition of aqueous environments. And on your
slide on that, Joe, you conclude at the bottom, \"The Panel finds this
treatment consistent with the current state of scientific
understanding.\"

I want to make sure I understand what you\'re saying there, because you
later seem to suggest that you want to look at a wider range of
potential conditions. But what you\'re saying you find, the Panel finds
acceptable here is the notion that there are roughly two types of water?

PAYER: What slide is that, Debra?

KNOPMAN: Do these have numbers? It\'s the one that says\--

PAYER: Water composition, it\'s about 5, 6?

KNOPMAN: I don\'t know what number it is.

PAYER: That\'s it. Right there.

KNOPMAN: That one. No, the one before.

PAYER: Back one more. That\'s it. Okay, I think I know where you\'re
going. Let me try to clarify.

This tries to capture what we said in three or four pages maybe in our
report of the status of determining what the composition of water is at
Yucca Mountain. And we think the approach that\--the key spokesman for
that has been Greg Gdowski. The approach they\'re taking with the
chemical divide and the kinds of water chemistry that occurs when you
remove water from these materials, that that is sound ways to deal with
water chemistry in these materials.

So, we think that approach is correct, and we believe these types\--this
idea of two major categories of water, that makes technical sense to us.

KNOPMAN: To what extent did you delve into the issues of chemical
composition at the high temperatures above, let\'s say, 120 degrees C.,
which we\'re now hearing might be\--

PAYER: We recognize that, and we believe that. If you look at\--I mean,
again, it\'s pretty straightforward. If you start with a crystal of
magnesium chloride on a metal surface, or on any surface, and you start
at a high temperature with relative humidity and lower the temperature,
at around 160, 170 Centigrade, you will get liquid water forming on that
particular material.

If you have a mixture of salts, it will, depending on what that salt
composition is, it will occur at different levels. One of the issues I
think that hasn\'t been addressed, and while we\'re trying to focus the
attention on this moist particulate and scale and deposits, and this is
a question I have, if you\'ve got a particulate a millimeter thick on
silica and other things that have settled in on the waste package over
time, and you start cooling this down and you start forming isolated
thin films of moisture in that, is that conducive to causing corrosion,
or not? It\'s not the same as having a specimen fully immersed in a tea
cup of boiling magnesium chloride.

And, so, that\'s a technical issue I think that has to be addressed.
Which way it comes out, I\'m not real sure. But that hasn\'t been
addressed yet.

KNOPMAN: Okay. So, let me just sum up so it\'s real clear.

The Panel is not saying that a full range, appropriate range of
experimental conditions have already been\--

PAYER: Absolutely not.

KNOPMAN: But what you are saying is that the approach to defining
experimental conditions is on the right track, but it needs to be
expanded and\--

PAYER: And I think the other important part of that is we believe, based
on what we\'ve seen so far, that in fact you can put some realistic
boundaries on this environment, that it\'s not everywhere all ways. It
can\'t be the most oxidizing environment you can imagine, and the most
reducing, and the highest acidity, and so forth.

The other clarification of why we think it\'s useful, and we would
suggest that you go out of the normal what\'s expected to be possible at
Yucca Mountain, are the very useful results that have come out of
Scully\'s lab at Virginia on looking at metal behavior in lithium
chloride solutions. I don\'t think there\'s any likelihood of that
environment existing on a waste package. But it\'s a very aggressive
environment that allows us to examine the corrosion behavior of this
material. So, it\'s useful, but that\'s the distinction I think we\'re
saying.

CRAIG: We next have Priscilla. And who wants to talk over there? All
three of you. Okay. This is so important that we\'re going to let our
schedule run a little bit.

NELSON: Nelson, Board.

In your consideration of the environments, there\'s two issues that have
come up in the past, and I want to know whether the Panel is going to
consider them. One is what the environment really is going to be, or
might be like under the drip shield, and the evolution of that
environment as separate from the one in the overall tunnel.

And the second one is the influence or possible influence of the steel
sets, or other ground support that may be there. Will your Panel be
considering that, or have they already started to consider either of
those two?

PAYER: I think in detail, we will not be going into analysis. I think we
cull those out as issues that need to be addressed. We\'re not going to
do\--we don\'t do anything. I mean, we suggest ways of doing analysis.
We, in fact, will be doing some things. We\'ll be trying to do enough
analysis to maybe convince ourselves that that\'s an appropriate
approach or not.

The environment underneath the drip shield I think falls into this moist
dust type of a situation, again, where you\'re going to get a
condensation in that area. If it gets to the point where you would form
droplets of water, if that\'s a feasible thing to occur or not, then you
have to deal with the liquid droplets of water.

NELSON: Well, regarding that evolution of the environment underneath the
drip shield, do you know what the Project is doing to try to
characterize it? Would you expect you, with your expert support, would
be commenting on or addressing the issues of the evolution of the
environment under the drip shield?

PAYER: We have met as a subgroup, a couple Panel members and a couple
subject matter experts, with Project staff working in this area. We\'ve
done that in the past, have discussions just to try to get a feel of
what approach they are taking, where they are in their studies, and I
anticipate that we would get together with that group again to discuss
some of these. If we can get to that specific issue, I\'m not really
sure.

CRAIG: Okay. Among the three of you, who\--Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Just a couple of quick questions.

First, I was intrigued by your comment of Alloy 22 and Titanium Grade 7
as placeholders for the evolution of whatever waste package material and
drip shield material is selected. But, I guess the following question is
do you foresee a change in alloy family, or do you think it\'s going to
be a nickel, chrome, moly kind of alloy that will probably come to the
forefront?

PAYER: My, again, personal opinion is we are at the most corrosion
resistant metals that we have, the Titanium class, and for passive
metals in an oxidizing environment, this is where you go.

The kinds of things that may happen, though, is you just look at the
evolution of the C-series of alloys, it started with C-4, and all these
are jargon names that Raoul might be responsible for some of these from
his past life at Haynes, but there are alloys that have been developed
where you\'re tweaking the composition, and one of the important things
that they\'re tweaking is trying to maintain the corrosion resistance
and offset any of these long-term metallurgical processes or processes
that occur with welding. And it may well be that, and I don\'t know
this, but it may well be that a tweak of the composition, either within
the current specification of C-22, to tighten it up somewhat, or to move
slightly away from that, could avoid a long-range ordering problems. I
mean, I don\'t know. That\'s just pure speculation. But that sort of
thing happens, and that\'s been the natural sort of evolution of those
kinds of alloys.

So, to think that\--I personally don\'t think we\'re locked in to C-22
for evermore, if a better alloy comes along and there\'s time to
substantiate it. At someplace, you\'ve got to draw a line in the sand
and do all your fabrication testing and all that sort of thing. But
we\'re just suggesting that a backup alloy be brought along with this.

The Titanium Grade 7 has a palladium addition to it, and already
there\'s a lot of work of trying to substitute ruthenium for that, and
showing that it has the same corrosion resistance. Well, if that becomes
a commercial alloy five years from now, why lock yourself in for
evermore to Grade 7 if Grade XYZ has the kind of performance. That\'s
all I\'m saying, is keep an open mind of it.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

I think you\'re right, and I think that in the nuclear industry,
there\'s been a history of this when you start with just looking at the
evolution of the 304, 304-L, 316, 316-NG stuff. I mean, these are the
evolution of alloys that are used in the nuclear industry, and so
there\'s a parallel there.

PAYER: But in the licensing mode, you have to qualify each of those
changes, but it\'s a doable, amenable thing.

BULLEN: I guess I have just one more follow-on question, because you
talked about the environment and the dust and the deliquescence issues
associated with the formation of a water film. Did your Panel address
the issue if you had a cooler operating mode and you didn\'t go there,
would it make a problem go away? I mean, if you never went above 80
degrees C. on the waste package surface, does that make a difference in
your expected performance?

PAYER: It would take all those processes above 80 off. But to a certain
point, and I\'m glad you brought it up, because a comment was that I was
involved in the TSPA-VA, the viability assessment, and it seems to me
that one of the very significant things that\'s happened in the Project
since that time frame is, you know, now we\'re talking, the Project is
talking about it, you\'re talking about it, we\'re all talking about
high temperature operating mode and low temperature operating mode. In
that time frame, we\'re talking about a really hot operating mode, and
where the entire footprint was going to get above boiling. And to my
mind, a significant amount of uncertainty has been taken out of the
program when the decision was made not to have overlapping dry-out zones
from drift to drift. Okay? I think that made a significant difference in
just understanding how the process behaves. It\'s still complicated.

How low do you go? It\'s sort of, you know, my colleagues and I were
sitting around the other day and said universities would be a lot less
complicated if we didn\'t have all these damned students. You know, the
heat comes with this stuff, and so at some point, you get to a
trade-off. But the straight question is what do you have to do to get
there? And is a trade-off there or not? So, I\'m open on the\--and,
again, this is Joe Payer\--but high temperature operating, low
temperature operating, you start to get in a mode where there are some
trade-offs. Looking strictly from corrosion standpoint, sure. Lower
temperature is better.

CRAIG: Thank you. Don?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

You answered one of my questions just now. You defined, I think, what a
backup alloy is. It\'s an alloy that is sort of on the horizon as being
potentially even better, and you\'re recommending that one of those be
brought along through the testing program?

PAYER: That\'s a possibility.

RUNNELLS: Okay. Would you choose one if you had to? Do you have an
alloy\--

PAYER: If I had to, I would. That\'s not on my peer panel charge.

RUNNELLS: Is there something that you would say, oh, this is likely to
be as good as C-24, so we\'ll bring it along?

PAYER: I think to a certain extent, I mentioned, and these are not new,
we mentioned three long-term metallurgical processes that can affect
these alloys, and those three are you could precipitate phases that take
certain things out of solution. And so you could have localized
corrosion around that. That has to be looked at.

These alloys in some circumstances are prone to long-range ordering. All
these are detailed metallurgical processes. But that can greatly affect
the mechanical properties of the material. And you can segregate things
like sulfur and phosphorous to grain boundaries and surfaces. That can
have an effect.

The work we don\'t believe has been done enough on those to see if they
are problems or not. There\'s strong indications we\'re on the
borderline, perhaps we\'re below it, where there won\'t be a problem.
But there might be a problem. If that was the case, then I think
tweaking the alloy could be a way out of that.

RUNNELLS: Is your Panel going to recommend a backup alloy?

PAYER: No.

RUNNELLS: Okay. On the slide that\'s on the board here, you talked about
mildly alkaline sodium carbonate waters moving down through the mountain
as a second family of waters. I may misunderstand, but I thought that
kind of water came out of the J-13 well, which is a saturated zone 1000
feet below the repository.

PAYER: Yeah, I\'m a materials scientist explaining to a geologist how
water moves through it. The distinction I have is this. Not necessarily
waters moving down through the mountain. From a corrosion standpoint,
we\'re interested in what\'s the composition of water that could drop on
a hot metal surface, and all the changes that could occur to that water
before it gets there. And what we see, and what we understand is the
case, is there are two distinct classes of those waters based on the
calcium to carbonate ratio.

After it\'s been thermally affected by driving water out of it,
concentrated, you know, the non-volatile species concentrate in it, we
think that water could either wind up being a near neutral carbonate
water, or a\--excuse me, these two\--either mildly alkaline carbonate,
or the near neutral calcium, magnesium based.

RUNNELLS: It doubles the experimental load. It doubles the number of
experiments to carry along those two waters.

PAYER: It does.

RUNNELLS: And I\'m not sure that it can be defended that both of them
are appropriate for the repository horizon.

PAYER: My understand, again, of what I hear now is you\'ll be very hard
pressed to eliminate either one of them. I think they both are
potentially realistic and could occur under some circumstances. And,
also, while those are the two classes, there could be many subclasses
within each class.

CRAIG: Richard Parizek?

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board.

Priscilla sort of asked about this under the drip shield, is there a
third water? That is, if we have condensation of a vapor phase that
somehow gets in the repository environment eventually, things cool down
and we see condensation, and, again, Mark Peters may give us some
information on what we see in the cross-drift in terms of, you know, the
water, either the dripping water or its condensation water, is that a
different chemistry than what\'s listed here of the two types of water
that you have. Condensation on cool packages, it\'s like my toilet boil
in the summer always gets wet, sweats, will that happen in the
repository?

PAYER: Again, my understanding is, and my feeling is, that it would fall
within these two classes. What it could be as a condensate water,
typically, the condensate water is much more dilute. It could be a much
more dilute issue. Well, it better or worse gets into, you know, how
much and how many, and all that sort of stuff.

PARIZEK: It\'s not more aggressive than either of these two, perhaps? I
mean, it\'s almost distilled water.

PAYER: It depends on what gets solubilized and how much it builds up.
But, in general, yes, less concentrated solutions are less aggressive in
a general sense. That\'s true. But I don\'t think there\'s any water in
that that doesn\'t fall into this type of class of materials and types
of study.

CRAIG: Last question from Carl Di Bella.

DIBELLA: Thank you. I wasn\'t going to ask a question, but something you
said, Joe, in response to Dr. Knopman\'s question I think really needs
clarification. And what you said was something like John Scully\'s
lithium chloride experiments, we\'re never going to have that kind of
environment in the mountain, but you need to do these experiments to get
extremes.

And did you say that because you\'re not going to get a high build-up of
lithium in the mountain, or did you say that because you think, your
Panel thinks that you\'re not going to get a high chloride to beneficial
ion ratio happening in the mountain? With regard to the latter, since
you talk very specifically about scales forming due to episodic or
dripping processes, and since you\'re going to have changes in
temperatures and humidities in the mountain, just because of the
different decay of each of the waste packages in the different drifts,
you\'ve got all the forces there for selective enrichment or depletion
of anions, and you can have some sort of separation. So, could you
clarify what it was you meant?

PAYER: Two quick issues. You\'re talking it to a level more detailed
than I certainly intended with the response here. It\'s not a wrong way
to go with it, but I was looking for an example basically of a useful
accelerated test environment that could allow us to probe the corrosion
resistance of these materials and where those boundaries might be from a
temperature and composition standpoint.

Our Panel certainly as a panel has not addressed the issue of how
aggressive and where boundaries, you know, where can you go to those
boundaries. My personal opinion is it\'s still an open question, but I
find it hard to believe you\'re going to get a 6 molar lithium chloride
environment as an aqueous phase in contact with a metal surface and it
will stay there very long. I haven\'t seen the analysis to disprove it.

The issue of segregation and what kind of\--how do the anions segregate,
the chlorides, the nitrates and the sulfates, it\'s an open issue. I
think it\'s amenable to experiment as well.

CRAIG: Joe, thank you very, very much.

The Board ran a Panel last spring on passive materials, and Alberto
Sagüés is going to report on it.

SAGÜÉS: Well, very good. This is sort of an uncommon situation in which
we have a Board member addressing the other Board members. I guess
you\'ll see how we treat each other in a minute.

By the way, I didn\'t make any comments on the presentation, Joe\'s
presentation, because I have read parts of the preliminary report and I
think there\'s a number of very valuable issues there. And this just
came out about\--looking at the performance of materials, not just in
the environments in which they are likely to perform, but also try to go
into areas which are more challenging. It\'s certainly something I agree
very much with.

Okay, very good. In the last months, we have\--in July, we had this
symposium. We are going to be talking about the background of why we
have that, some of the results, and a very quick indication of what\'s
next.

The main concern that we have was this unprecedented extrapolation job
that we have to fulfill, experience for passive alloys like stainless,
aluminum, and some of the materials like Alloy 22 that span maybe a
century or so, and now we\'re talking about extrapolating these
materials over something which is, say, two or three orders of magnitude
beyond that. That\'s something that really has not been done in the past
in the area of materials science.

And we do have, like everyone else, a few concerns about this, and we
have a couple of those concerns specifically that we really wanted to
look at in great detail. What we wanted to see is if we could find out
any plausible mechanisms by which Alloy 22, the passive layer
specifically, could degrade in the long term, leading to increased
corrosion rates. And that\'s item number one of what I\'m going to do in
a second. The deal being that if the rate of dissolution of this alloy
is maybe a hundredth of a micrometer per year, or a tenth of a
micrometer per year, well, then yes, you would expect to have 100,000
years before you chewed through about 2 centimeters thick of that
material.

However, if that rate goes up to as much as maybe, say, a micrometer per
year, or so, then we\'re in trouble, because we are getting close to the
time in which we will have penetration, widespread penetration, over
many of these packages in a period which is comparable to the
performance period, say, 10,000 years, or so. Then we really will be in
trouble. And we\'re talking about a difference between something which
is almost nothing, to something which is next to nothing. In other
words, we are talking about those things in which we\'re looking at a
very, very tiny change making a big different. And that would be number
one. Are there any ways that maybe\--maybe hasn\'t thought about very
much whereby that could go wrong.

The other issue has to do, of course, with localized corrosion. So far,
most of the project assumptions for performance evaluation purposes use
a criterion in which they compare the episodic potential of the material
with some kind of a critical potential. And then there are a couple of
things that could happen, making one of those potentials may start
creeping in the wrong direction as a function of time. Or maybe, the
other possibility, the other process is maybe the whole concept is
really not a very valuable concept anyway for long-term applications.
Maybe there is not such a thing as a critical versus a potential. Maybe
the concept of a threshold is not really very appropriate.

And then, of course, if you can identify things which haven\'t been so
far identified, then what can be done to test for those specific issues.

Finally, one last objective of this workshop was to broaden awareness
within the corrosion community of the Yucca Mountain corrosion issues. A
lot of the corrosion engineers, corrosion scientists in the world are
really not very much aware of the issues that we have to deal with.

This was held on July 19th, and the morning of July the 20th of this
year, and there are a number of things available on our web page. We
have the workshop participants, the background material, the kind of
questions that were given to these participants to trigger those issues,
and finally, there are complete transcripts of the workshop.

The people involved in this read like a Who\'s Who of corrosion science
and passivity, and I\'m not going to go through this list. Some of them
have made presentations to us of the Board on these issues. Some of them
are consultants retained by the Department of Energy, and so on, and you
can look at this list at your leisure.

The printout for this presentation is available outside, I believe, at
this moment. Yes, it is.

Let\'s go to the next slide here, and let\'s look at some of the ideas
that the symposium participants brought up. Now, some of these ideas of
course have already been known and acted upon by the Project. But I\'m
going to highlight some of the things which were considered to be
particularly of interest.

One of the things is that the passive corrosion may proceed at different
rates for the various alloy components. C-22 has chromium, nickel, moly,
tungsten, and so on. And, if that happens, you may end up with a
situation in which you may end up with defects called vacancies. For
example, at the metal-film interface, if that accumulates over long
periods of time, it could create a problem, and the passive rate of
dissolution may become greater than otherwise anticipated, maybe going
over about a micrometer per year, or so. That could really spell
trouble.

And, indeed, the Center for Nuclear Waste Laboratory, I believe is the
exact name, of NRC is addressing some of these things from a theoretical
standpoint.

Another issue of course is what happens if something like a transpassive
dissolution were to take place of potentials which are moderate
potentials as opposed to very high potentials in which transpassivity is
usually observed.

Another thing that was brought up at the workshop was what would happen
with local changes in solution composition, again, near the metal
surface passive layer interface. And in each one of these cases, you may
end up with what could considerably be a substantial increase in the
rate of passive dissolution.

Something that was brought up that really hasn\'t been brought up very
much was that because of the nature of the repository, although the
system could be mentioned to be a very steady state type of system, it
might not be so. There could be situations over the long term, and
perhaps even over the short term, depending on the way in which the
thermal processes operate during the warmer phases of operation, in
which you may end up with cyclic conditions, some packages becoming wet
for a certain amount of time, maybe dry off, and maybe wet again, and so
on.

Under those conditions, the passive layer may respond in ways which are
not well known at this time. Indeed, the passive layer is speculated to
possess an inner film with a relatively low density, and an outer
hydroxide film. And it has been pointed out by symposium participants
that indeed the interaction between the outer film and the inner film
could be adverse under these conditions. And in terms of this, by the
way, are things which are assumed to be\--by some over the symposium
participants which are preparing brief write-ups on these particular
issues which will be disseminated afterwards.

Another issue is roughness of the passive film. So far, conceptually,
one tends to think about the passive film as a relatively thin, a few
nanometers thick kind of layer. But, in reality, whenever you have any
of these processes, you end up with a certain amount of surface
roughness, as evidenced by all kinds of evidence of some
electrochemical\--and in that case, you\'re going to be dealing with a
larger surface area than otherwise experienced, other ways in which the
layer may evolve that are not yet anticipated.

Now, this is really a very general kind of statement, but I include it
to emphasize some issues which are really important. Specifically,
there\'s very little known about the nature of the passive film on most
materials, and specifically on C-22. We don\'t even know whether the
film is crystalline or is amorphous. We don\'t know exactly what is the
thickness of the film. We don\'t have even direct evidence that the film
on C-22 is a double layer film\--double layer is not a proper name\--but
a two layer film, with indeed an inner protective barrier and an outer
less protective barrier. Those things are speculated. Those things are
expected. But it\'s not quite known.

We know very little about the way the thickness of either portions of
the film changes with time, and we don\'t know about whether it\'s a
morphological structure, crystalline versus amorphous, will itself
change with time. So, there\'s a lot\--we\'re basing quite a bit on
that.

Let\'s go now to the next one to talk a little bit about issues that
concern the second question, specifically whether there may be ways in
which the expectations for localized corrosion may be different from
what could be thought otherwise.

Let me highlight quickly a couple of these things. One of the
participants, Norio Sato, brought up the issue that under radiation, and
I\'m talking about likely the low level gamma radiation, you could have,
whenever you have barriers which are of the semi-conductor p-type, in
those cases, you may have increases in open-circuit potential, even
under\--this is because of the process happening intrinsically in the
passive layer, not on the water around the passive layer.

The role of sulfur or other impurities may be forceful, even in the
system, can have some interesting effects. You may have accumulation of
sulfur at the passive film metal interface as the layer as a function of
time, or you may have interactions through segregation phenomena that
have not been until now pretty much considered.

And then the other issue that was brought up by several participants was
possible synergistic effects of chloride and fluoride ions.

I want to highly the particular issues in here. What will happen, or
what will be the behavior of this\--of whatever is on the surface of
C-22 after this long stretch of relatively dry regime, after several
hundred years of being relatively dry, for example, depending on the
final design of the repository. Now, finally, moisture will begin to
develop, and now we\'re dealing with a very long aged dry film all of a
sudden being faced with a wet environment.

And the other issue is that there\'s a lot that needs to be known about
what is happening when you have very deep crevices.

Okay, let me quickly finish by showing some of the research analysis
ideas mentioned by the participants. These are not, I want to emphasize,
these are not\--this is not research that the Board is proposing to be
done. This is what the participants of the symposium felt that might be
of interest.

A couple of highlights on things that maybe have not been done by the
Project to a great extent, or maybe they\'re being done, but they\'re
just beginning. Structure of the passive film as a function of potential
time and anion concentrations, specifically chloride and fluoride. What
happens to the relatively dry films when they are put in with
environments, which is this one over here.

Another thing that I want to highlight, and you can look at the rest of
them in the printout, this is something that the Project is doing to a
certain extent, but it may be the key to a much deeper understanding of
what is going on, specifically to look at the kinetics of the redox
reactions on the passive layer and the transport processes in the
passive layer itself, and looking at this from a fundamental standpoint.
And, of course, investigate the effect of surface roughness and how that
may affect the evaluation of corrosion rates which are being presently
conducted.

Here is one that appears to be quite interesting, that is looking at the
behavior of Alloy 22 when there are increasing amounts of impurities,
specifically different sulfur, different levels of sulfur in the alloy.
And then this is something that of course the Project is addressing to a
certain extent at this moment, but it may be particularly fruitful if
this is continued, ironing out some of the issues that Gerry was
mentioning this morning.

Okay, I\'m going to then finish by going to the next one, and the
symposium participants are preparing the summaries. The Board will
decide how to disseminate this. One possibility is that they may appear
in the form of symposium proceedings. In that case, an attempt would be
made to do it in as standard a manner as possible.

Then, of course, the Board is going to evaluate what we have seen in
this symposium, and that accordingly. Anyway, this is a very quick
run-through to what happened at the symposium, and I will be glad to
answer any questions from my colleagues and staff as well.

CRAIG: Okay. Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

I guess I should have my own perspective because I was at the workshop.
But I guess I\'d like to ask you were there any surprises? Were there
any things that you saw or that the workshop Panel saw that were
surprising in your eyes?

SAGÜÉS: Well, what is a surprise depends on kind of what you are
expecting beforehand. Let me talk for myself first, and I heard the
participants say a good number of things that they expected to be
mentioned. For me, more than surprises, I would like to see new angles
on things that I haven\'t thought about before. For me, one of the most
interesting areas was the mechanism proposed by Phil Marcus on the
possible role of sulfur, namely as the material corrodes passively, the
passive layer begins to bore deeper and deeper into the metal, and it
may encounter a number of defects, but in particular, it may encounter
small amounts of residual trace sulfur in the material. Then they have
nowhere to go, and then it may end up accumulating at the interface, and
that\'s something which I believe was picked up a little bit by the Peer
Review Panel people as well.

That was something that for me was quite interesting because it\'s
something that we haven\'t talked about. Mechanism of possible\--a
potential open-circuit potential changes in the passive layer itself,
because of interactions between either the gamma radiation or
by\--produced by processes triggered by the gamma radiation. That was
interesting as well, as an example of the type of potential mechanism,
think a little bit\--of regularly addressing phenomena of passive
radiation, which came out of the meeting.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. One more quick follow-up. A previous
distinguished speaker summarized this same Panel meeting by saying that
the perception of his Panel was that those who attended the workshop
think that passive corrosion rates of the alloys of Titanium Grade 7 and
Alloy 22 in principle remain low enough for waste packages to survive
for several thousand years. Did you have that same perception, or do you
think the Panel had that same perception?

SAGÜÉS: I\'m sorry, but Joe said, in principle, and I guess that
depending upon what principle, the principle being that the passive
layer is stable, then it\'s going to remain stable by definition. I
didn\'t detect anyone saying that passivity is impossible over a period
of many thousands of years. Indeed, I didn\'t hear any concern of that
type.

I did detect in several of the participants a sense of caution about
making a very long extrapolation. And I did detect, and these are the
ones that I highlighted earlier, that very little is known about how
passive films are and how they operate. We are relatively early in the
history of corrosion science to have what I would say deepens our
knowledge about how these things operate. And these morphological
questions that I mentioned earlier are an example of that. We don\'t
even know at this moment whether we\'re dealing with a crystalline layer
or not.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Just one final comment.

I think there\'s a career in politics for you, because that semantics is
really a wonderful thing.

SAGÜÉS: Thank you.

CRAIG: On that note, let\'s\--Alberto, thank you very much. I\'ll
refrain from giving my reactions to the workshop, except to say that it
was a wonderful, wonderful workshop, and we all thank you, are indebted
to you, Alberto, for arranging it.

Our next presentation is April Pulvirenti. And did I get your name
correctly?

PULVIRENTI: Yes, you did.

CRAIG: I did? My goodness. Wonderful. And, April has just recently
received her Ph.D. in chemistry from Purdue, and she\'s going to talk
about experimental work on Titanium Grade 7, and the famous Alloy 22.
I\'ll warn you when you\'ve got about five minutes to go.

PULVIRENTI: Okay. I just want to start off by saying that there\'s not a
whole lot of theory or horsetails in this presentation. This is entirely
laboratory results. I\'m not going to offer any speculations. I\'m just
presenting you results as we saw them in my lab.

These are going to be laboratory results on the corrosion of Alloy 22
and Titanium 7. We\'ve done both, or we\'ve done a little bit on both, I
should say.

I divided this talk into three different parts. The first part is going
to deal with Alloy 22. The other two parts are going to deal primarily
with Titanium.

The first part is we\'ve tested Alloy 22 under accelerated conditions.
What I mean by accelerated, and admittedly, there\'s been a lot of talk
about what will or will not exist in Yucca Mountain. But since we only
have about a month to test these things, and 10,000 years in the
mountain, we do have to make our conditions a little bit harsher than we
expect. That\'s what I mean by accelerated conditions.

We have tested both disks and U-bends, and we have not been on this
project for very long, so we\'ve done primarily screening. We\'ve
screened for aggressive elements, mostly trace metals, that could
possibly be within Yucca Mountain, and we\'ve tested them with
aggressive elements and we\'ve done a little bit of extrapolation type
studies under milder pH and milder temperatures. This is on disks, and
we\'ve been able to, through both weight loss and by solution analysis,
determine as best we can a corrosion rate in micron per year by both
those methods.

The other type, here\'s the U-bend testing, so we\'re doing both disks
and U-bends. This is sort of a yes/no proposition with the U-bends. We
did dry-out testing. I know that there\'s a low probability of full
submersion, so we have done testing in which we have submerged our
U-bend in something. We\'ve allowed it to dry out, and we have
essentially used the same type of accelerated conditions, and we\'ve
used mostly lead. We have done a little bit of varying pH and
temperature and, again, a little yes/no, just to open it up and look at
it and see if there\'s any signs of corrosion.

Let me wander back and give the results of the disk tests. Now, all of
these numbers are corrosion rates that we have calculated in terms of
microns per year. We\'ve done it both by weight and by solution on the
same disk. For the most part, there\'s fairly good agreement between the
two.

The conditions, we\'ve used these simulated 1000X, J-13 in this
particular matrix. We have accelerated our concentrations up to 5000
ppm, although there is going to be some concentration. We have used an
aggressive pH. 160 was originally thought to be an accelerated
temperature, but from previous meetings, it seems to be not as
accelerated as we thought. These are all 14 day tests.

The elements we\'re going to pick out, of course lead is giving us more
than our control. Mercury is a funny beast. We\'re seeing very high
results with cadmium and tin, some with selenium, and this is
thiosulfate. This is S3 plus. We\'re actually seeing it with a sulfur
complex as well.

Let me go back to this. Because there\'s been so much talk about lead
and about mercury, and I\'ve done a little bit with tin as well, we
decided to use\--we\'ve gone to progressively milder conditions for some
of these elements, specifically lead, mercury, tin and thiosulfate, just
to get an idea of what would happen at a more mild pH, and a milder
temperature or lower temperature.

This is a temperature extrapolation on lead and mercury. These are 30
day tests. And what we\'re seeing is as the temperature is reduced, we
are seeing a reduction in our corrosion rate. However, it\'s still
active, and given more tests, you could easily extrapolate this down,
and if you had a linear line, you could extrapolate to whichever
temperature could be expected. All of these values, again, are in
microns per year. These are all based on solution, and they\'re based on
the nickel. We have the solution results normalized for the other
elements in C-22. Nickel is very close to our weight loss, so we have
chosen to use the nickel solution. So, lead, as you can see, is still
active even at 120, as is mercury.

We have gone to milder pHs on this, and we can see that even if we have
no aggressive species, there\'s still a little bit of activation up to a
pH of around, I think, 2.5. Lead is still active at a pH of 2.5. Mercury
is active even up to a Ph of 5, as is tin. Tin seems to be quite
aggressive in the higher pHs.

At a pH of 14, sodium thiosulfate is also aggressive. So, we have
aggressive species at both ends of the pH spectrum. Now, the sodium
thiosulfate is kind of funny. I think that\'s a weight loss, and the
reason for that is that, and I\'ll show this in a second, the sodium
thiosulfate number, we didn\'t trust the solution data on that because
the corrosion that we saw with this came in the form of flaking, and we
had insoluble material at the bottom. We weren\'t able to dissolve it,
and we didn\'t trust our solution data.

To show you what I mean, this might not be all that easy to see on this
particular overhead, this was a disk that was put again into a high
concentration of sodium thiosulfate, and here is our high pH. And this
is only 14 days. This is under an oxygen blanket. And it\'s very hard to
see, and I have the original printout if anyone else wants to see it,
but you can see sort of a flaking, bubbling wing right around this, if
you can see where the red goes into the gray, you can see sort of a
bubbling. That was before we cleaned it. We cleaned it in a cleaning
solution and brushed it off and sonicated it, and you can see parts
where it looks as if the metal has flaked off.

In this cleaning process, we had a .7 per cent weight loss, and this is
due to sodium thiosulfate. I will also mention that we saw very nearly
identical results, although not so dramatic, with sodium sulfide, which
is S2 minus. So, we\'ve seen it with both\--with two types of sulfur
we\'ve seen this kind of thing.

The sodium thiosulfate we felt was enough\--we did a little bit\--we
went into detail on the testing with that, and we\'ve extrapolated or
gone under more mild pHs, milder temperatures, and even less
concentration to try to take some of the aggressiveness out of these
tests to see if it\'s still active. And you can see here\'s the sodium
thiosulfate at a pH of 14. These are all weight losses again because of
that flaking. We\'re still at 49 microns per year, and as our pH was
mildly down to 6.5, which I believe was within the range I\'ve seen
talked about, it\'s still slightly active.

We\'ve seen the same type of thing with temperature. As we reduce our
temperature, it\'s still active. And these are all 30 day tests. So,
we\'re still active after 30 days. Even when we reduce our concentration
all the way down to 500 ppm, we still see some activation.

So, the sodium thiosulfate still causes corrosion by weight loss over a
fairly wide range of temperature, pH and concentration of the element,
which is what we\'re seeing.

Those were the disk tests. The dry-out tests, we did quite a few of
them. We, again, started off with our saturated J-13 water. This is the
standard solution. We added our aggressive lead to it. We heated it at
either 250 or 230 in a what I would call a partially sealed vessel,
allowed it to dry out at that temperature. We opened it up to look for
it, and what we saw, and of course in the most aggressive, we saw some
pits on the edges. We saw pits on the edges, and we saw a couple lines
on the apex we still don\'t understand.

We had a .1 per cent weight loss. But, again, weight loss is usually
good for general corrosion, but localized corrosion, even a small weight
loss could still mean a lot of local corrosion, and you\'ll see that in
a second.

Again, we saw even more weight loss at 230 degrees and a pH of 1. We saw
some pitting at the crevices underneath our Teflon spacer. And we even
saw it at a pH of 3, not so much weight loss, but we still saw some
crevice pitting. I\'m not going to leave you in the dark. I am going to
show pictures of these particular U-bends.

This U-bend is of the first one, the first entry I had up there. This is
a pH of 1 at 250 Celsius. Within six hours, this dried out, and you can
see that there\'s this little pit here right on the crevice. You can see
there\'s lines kind of around the edge that we don\'t quite understand.
There\'s a pit here on the crevice. And this is a close-up to give you
an idea, and you can see this in the handout, that\'s a bubble from our
mounting technique. This whole pit together is 80 to 90 microns deep,
this particular pit. That\'s a pH of 1 and 250.

If I go to a milder temperature, which is at 230, you can see that we
have a great deal of pitting at this edge and at this edge. We have a
little at the corner. And in some of these we had pitting on the bottom.
This is the most dramatic pit.

Here\'s another picture of it. This is another 70 to 80 micron pit.
It\'s one of these. And this is at 230 degrees Celsius, and this one
didn\'t dry out completely, and that would be with the vessel that we
were using, just to show that even when we go to less temperature,
we\'re still seeing pitting, almost the same amount.

This is at a pH of 3, and here we see it pitting, and this is a great
deal of pitting. On this picture, we can see that\'s our action number,
that\'s our identifier, and you can see there\'s a pit right on it.
That\'s quite a pit. There\'s also some pitting here on the bottom, and
it looks like some beginnings of some pitting even up here.

This is another\--this is probably another 70 to 80. All these pits seem
to be about the same depth, and this was at a pH of 3, or 210. And, so,
when we get up in that high range of aggressive temperature and mildly
aggressive pH, we couldn\'t tell. We needed to do more testing. But it
seems that we were getting pitting, even if we make our conditions a
little milder. And this is under conditions of dry-out, so this has not
been submerged, and this was in the oven for 24 hours. We suspect it
dried out within six. So, this is 24 hours worth of test. That\'s the
C-22 parts.

I\'m going to move into Part 2 now. We did some preliminary, and this is
extremely preliminary, tests using the gamma radiation source, Cobalt
source at the University of Maryland. We chose a solution that was a
simulated 1000X, J-13. We excluded carbonate in light of the pore water
results. As a value, we put in 1000 ppm aggressive species.

Now, in this case, our aggressive species were hydrogen peroxide, which
is an expected product of radiation in water, and zinc 2 plus, which
sounds like an odd aggressive species to put in. We chose zinc because
it\'s known to be an electron scavenger. The main point of that is that
electron scavengers tend to extend the lifetime of a corrosive hydroxyl
radical, which is also a known corrosive species that is formed in
radiation. We were trying to extend the lifetime of that hydroxyl
radical.

My pHs were all at 7, and the temperature is only 40 degrees or less.
So, we\'re talking extremely mild pH and temperature. This was
irradiated over three or four weeks with a total of 89 megarads of gamma
radiation. This particular picture is the before, this is just an
untreated bend. We chose to use titanium foil for this.

This is a piece of titanium in the zinc. Even without any gamma
radiation, we\'re still seeing a slight tarnish. It\'s hard to see. This
particular roughening is about what the surface looks like without any
treatment at all. However, if we add to it our gamma radiation, you can
see even right here that there\'s a considerable spot on this particular
disk, and you can see that there\'s a real roughening of this surface.
And this, it\'s hard to see the scale here, but this is about a 10
micron roughening of this surface.

We see something very similar with the hydrogen peroxide. In this case,
it almost looks as if hydrogen peroxide is aggressive in itself. This
particular sample wasn\'t anywhere near the radiation. In the radiation,
you can see that there\'s considerable tarnishing and some corrosion in
the middle, and this is the surface. This is a metallographic
cross-section, and you can see that there\'s another roughening of the
surface around the 10 micron range. These, again, are very preliminary
results.

Part 3, the tests on Titanium 7 using levels of elevated fluoride and
elevated chloride. We chose to use elevated chloride and fluoride in
light of both the Cragnolino and Abrasio electrochemical results from a
few papers. However, for these two tests, we used disks and we did
U-bends as well, and these are both untreated.

For the disks, we chose two environments. We used a calculated 10,000X
J-13, and in these cases, we\'ve chosen to use mild temperatures and
mild pHs. There\'s no acceleration in the temperature and pH for any of
the tests I\'m about to show you.

The 10,000X J-13, we did disks. We also used a 1X EJ-13, and we added to
it fluoride and chloride to simulate this is where the acceleration was,
was added chloride and fluoride. Again, mild temperature and pH. We used
this identical environment on the U-bends. We\'re not able to get
numbers in terms of corrosion rate because the corrosion products adhere
too well to our samples.

In the 10,000X J-13 environment, here\'s the disk right here, and you
can see that this is dotted all over with pits. And on the edges, there
is also some pitting. These are not defects from fabrication. We take
this pit down here at the end, the metallographic cross-section, that\'s
almost a perfectly hemispherical pit, and it\'s about\--it looks to be
about 40 or 50 microns deep, but this whole disk is covered with little
pits like that, and it\'s in the 10,000 X J-13.

In the other environment with the added chloride and fluoride, just to
show you, here\'s our conditions for this. Here\'s our 1X J-13. I added
to it 35,500 ppm, that corresponds to 1 molar, 1900 ppm of fluoride,
which, depending on which water system you\'re using, that\'s a
conceivable level of fluoride. We have very mild pH. We\'re only at 100
degrees Celsius. After 30 days, we saw this roughening right here with
what looks like some corrosion products inside. This is the cut line for
megallography, and I\'ll show you a section of the metallography.

These two are identical. This, we had the background in the focus on the
optical microscope. This is the foreground in focus. I\'ll show you the
background first. You can see that there\'s roughening even though it\'s
out of focus right here. We can see the individual grains. And this is a
corrosion product up on top we believe to be Titanium oxide. This is a
big pit right here. We\'re also looking at a pit, I\'d like to draw your
attention to this line which follows between the grain. So, this is an
intergranular attack of some sort, and it\'s extremely rapid. This
particular, at its deepest, this is an 80 to 90 micron pit.

If we look at the metal being in focus, we can see that there is attack,
you can see it\'s sort of digging down deeper, this white part is the
metal, digging down deeper into the metal. I have a close-up to show it.
We can see that there is some more intergranular attack here. We can see
that there\'s intergranular attack around here. We can see there is a
section of metal that is somehow either dissolved or come out. We can
see attack everywhere, and you can see on our scale that this is still a
rather deep pit.

We saw these disks and we decided to subject a couple of U-bends to this
same environment, almost the exact same solution, and almost the exact
same conditions, the same EJ-13 with the chloride and the fluoride,
almost the same pH, and the same mild temperature. This is a 35 day
test. Here is the U-bend, and you can see, around here you can see that
there\'s a pitting here. That\'s a very, very deep pit. That\'s in the
hundreds of microns range. You can see that there\'s one here. There
seems to be a surface preparation phenomenon that seems to cause
initiation of the localized corrosion, not on these large bases, but for
some reason, on the edges and in the crevices.

This back here, this is a close-up. This is the under side. We can see
there\'s pitting here. We can see, this is not in focus, but you can see
that there\'s a great deal of roughening here. I have a closer shot of
that.

This is a metallographic picture of the bottom of that U-bend that we
saw, and you can see that there\'s a great deal of roughening. This is
around the hundreds of microns, as you can see, range.

I put two U-bends in under the exact same conditions. I used the same
solution. That was one that I took out. I left this one in a little bit
longer to see what was going on. We can see here, now this one, there\'s
a great deal of corrosion on the apex of this particular U-bend. It\'s
still together. You can see we haven\'t disassembled it yet. There\'s a
great deal of powder here, and there seems to be some pitting here on
the apex. That\'s at 67 days.

At 107 days, you can see something funny. There\'s kind of a line here,
and it looks as if that pitting has extended somewhat. But after 164
days, we took it out. This has only been subject to a toothbrush here.
We see that we have a crack. It goes all the way across, and all the way
through, and it seems to start, you can see it started on the apex, and
it developed, and at 164 days, it\'s gone most of the way through, and
you can also see that even on this side, there\'s a great deal of
pitting here. There\'s a great deal of pitting there, probably around
100 microns.

To give you a better close-up of the pit, this is better shots for the
Board if they want a better close-up. We can see here this is that same
U-bend. This is just the side-on view. You can see that here\'s the
crack, and you can see the crack has gone through the metal and it\'s
about halfway down the inside. If we had left this in for another couple
weeks, we\'re guessing it would have just broken entirely. It\'s a
fairly quick crack propagation.

But at this same time, we have a great deal of either dissolution or
another mode of localized corrosion here, that\'s a great deal of
corrosion on this side. So, we\'re seeing\--and also, we saw evidence of
pitting corrosion and crevice corrosion on the edges. So, this
particular U-bend has three modes of corrosion on it. It\'s got stress
corrosion cracking, it\'s got localized corrosion on this surface, and
it also has crevice corrosion as well.

Just to get a better close-up of the crack right here, you can see it\'s
quite big. This is an SEM shot. This is deposits of corrosion products.
These we believe are corrosion products. We need further study on this
sample. You can see these are the lines of 600 grid. And you can see
it\'s just eating through. We\'re even starting to see some secondary
cracks down this way. And you\'ll see that there\'s a\--the Board will
see there\'s a whitish yellowish type deposit. We think we have it
characterized, but we\'re not entirely sure.

In addition to showing these three modes of corrosion, the solution
itself had a white precipitate, and this particular precipitate, there
were 100 milligrams of it that we know came off of this titanium. An the
test is showing that it is certainly\--it is titanium oxide and it\'s
Anatase, which is not the rutile. It\'s an Anatase, we believe it\'s
only kinetically stable, formed very quickly, I should say, the Titanium
Anatase phase of titanium oxide.

Okay, so I\'ll conclude. At 160 Celsius, Alloy 22, under accelerated
conditions, high levels of lead, tin, cadmium, selenium, sulfate at a
low pH, there are high levels of general corrosion within somewhere
between 2 and 500 microns per year.

If we lower the temperature and raise the pH and make the conditions
milder, we still see general corrosion in the presence of lead, mercury
and tin. It\'s reduced, but we can still see it, and it\'s still active.

At 160 Celsius, Alloy 22 is susceptible to flaking in solutions that
contain either thiosulfate or sulfide at high pH. At lower
concentrations, and more mild conditions, we still see some flaking and
some weight loss.

Under dry-out conditions, Alloy 22 is susceptible to crevice corrosion,
and you saw that very, very localized pitting underneath the Teflon
spaces. Now, that is in a high concentration of lead. This was all found
within 24 hours.

I have conclusions for Titanium 7. Titanium 7 is extremely susceptible
to environments which contain fluoride. The pits that we see that are
filled with those deposits, they happen almost every time we put it into
a solution that contains fluoride. We see it on both disks. We see it on
U-bends. We see marked pitting under those very mild conditions.

Titanium 7 is susceptible to stress corrosion cracking under the same
conditions, again, very mild conditions, and also quite fast. This was
five months, but the cracking itself I think started within about three
months.

And in the presence of gamma radiation, not as much fluoride here,
Titanium 7 is also susceptible to localized corrosion roughening in
solutions that have either zinc, an electron scavenger, or hydrogen
peroxide.

Thank you.

CRAIG: Thank you very much, April. A lot of information.

Questions from the Board? Alberto Sagüés?

SAGÜÉS: Thanks for the presentation. I would like for you to sort of put
yourself in my position. You know, if I\'m say in the business of
evaluating, I don\'t know, a bullet proof vest of some sort, and then
someone shoots at it with a little air pistol, then nothing happens. And
then the next thing is someone shoots at it with a gun, you know, just
makes a big hole through it. And, in a way, the presentation you just
gave is the latter, and some of the other presentations that we have
seen in the past are more like the first.

The point is, of course, if you expose the material to harsh enough
conditions, then things will happen, and we see it in the pictures, and
so on. So, the impression that I get is that yes, if you have an
environment that\'s aggressive enough, C-22 is going to fail in a number
of dramatic ways, as shown by your pictures.

PULVIRENTI: Okay, that picture is Titanium. It\'s not C-22.

SAGÜÉS: I\'m sorry?

PULVIRENTI: The picture is Titanium.

SAGÜÉS: Is Titanium, okay, great. Anyway, what is the point then of your
presentation?

PULVIRENTI: Oh, you mean of the aggressive species point of the
presentation?

SAGÜÉS: Yeah, right. In other words, what is the meaning of this
information and what pertains to the performance of Alloy 22 in the
repository?

PULVIRENTI: Okay, Alloy 22, we needed to use conditions that are more
aggressive than what we expect from a site characterization, very simply
because I\'m not going to live 10,000 years to take one of these out of
the oven. So, we did have to use aggressive species.

I think the point of the aggressive on the C-22, now, they were mainly
screening studies, and so we were just looking for elements that may be
aggressive under harsh conditions, and if we found any elements that
were aggressive under harsh conditions, then you go and you
progressively make your conditions milder and milder to hopefully get a
linear or a log scale line to where you can extrapolate to service
conditions under that amount of time. And you can see that we are
nearing the end of our, at least the end of our planned screening, and I
was showing in the milder conditions, that some of these elements, these
trace elements, in particular, lead, mercury and tin, are still active
even under the more mild conditions.

So, yes, it\'s true if you make your environment aggressive enough, you
can dissolve away, or you can corrode these metals under these
conditions. But if you make the conditions more and more mild, and
there\'s still corrosion, observable corrosion, then it\'s a sign that
there should be probably more study on it to make sure that it can hold
up under our expected service conditions. That\'s the C-22.

SAGÜÉS: But of course it\'s becoming milder, but it\'s still not what I
could call terribly mild conditions; right? I mean, they\'re still
operating at\--

PULVIRENTI: Uh-huh.

SAGÜÉS: So, do you intend to now go all the way down to the other
extreme? Because the interest in these things is not just going to
something which is extremely mild, as some may envision what may have
been done, say, perhaps even by the Project\--that\'s not my
statement\--or you can make them extremely aggressive. But until we get
to some point in between and we span the entire range, I don\'t think
that we\'re furthering knowledge very much. Do you all intend to
continue\--

PULVIRENTI: Oh, I have the plan written out. We received our initial
funding in November, and so we have not been on this project very long.
And, so, we certainly do intend more mild conditions and more testing
under these. As I said, these are all in a relative sense fairly
preliminary, and they are all, as I said, screening for possible
aggressive species, at least for C-22.

SAGÜÉS: Okay, thank you.

CRAIG: Debra?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

I appreciate the fact that you\'re in the early stages of your
experimentation. But I\'d just like to ask a couple of questions here.

When you were doing these experiments on C-22 and Titanium 7, did you
also have some reference materials that you were running alongside?

PULVIRENTI: When you say\--

KNOPMAN: I mean either some other metal or some other alloys for which
there are known, fairly well known corrosion properties under at least
some of these conditions?

PULVIRENTI: For example, have I tested Inconel 600, or something, under
these conditions? We did do a comparison test of Inconel 600 versus
C-22. It was a very small one. Our focus is primarily Titanium 7 and
Alloy 22, and I would have done a backup metal, but Joe Payer only told
us about it a half an hour ago, and I don\'t work that fast.

So, we did do a little bit of a study on Inconel 600, and in the
presence of lead, Inconel 600 did perform. There was more corrosion on
the Inconel 600, but we have thought of comparison studies, but we had
to focus on something.

KNOPMAN: That\'s not an uncommon experimental technique to be running
similar\--running other kinds of materials under similar conditions to
get some sense of perspective.

A related question is whether at least for these, for C-22 and Titanium
7, you were able to match your experimental results in milder conditions
with what is considered standard results of behavior for these alloys
under more, or let\'s say less extreme pH. I mean, I\'m just trying to
find out whether you baselined or ground truthed your experimental
techniques, so that under these more extreme conditions, you have
confidence that you\'re in the ballpark.

PULVIRENTI: When you say baseline, you mean\--

KNOPMAN: Again, you know, if you\'re running any kind of
experiment\--yeah, I mean, there\'s published information both from the
project, but also from industry, I\'d imagine, on these alloys and the
metal\'s performance and corrosion properties under less aggressive
conditions. And the question is can you replicate, with your techniques,
do you replicate those same results so that\--I\'m just try to put in
perspective\--you presented results under very extreme conditions. I\'m
trying to get an anchor on whether your methods of experimentation are
consistent with what is used in another context for study of these
metals.

PULVIRENTI: For background and for information on other metals and other
techniques, I\'ll need to defer to Dr. Roger Staehle, who has much, much
more experience in that. But from what I\'ve seen, many of the tests
that have been done have been electrochemical, and part of our plan is
to do the tests what we call the old fashioned way, as to actually test
the metal rather than to go through a\--rather than to do the test
electrochemically. That\'s part of our idea.

KNOPMAN: I\'m essentially asking whether you calibrated your methods,
and it sounds like you haven\'t quite yet.

The third question is has any of your work been through any kind of peer
review external to your lab?

PULVIRENTI: I don\'t think so, not yet. These are very new results.

KNOPMAN: So, nothing has been published, and you haven\'t had anyone
just come in to doublecheck on how you\'re doing, conducting
experiments?

PULVIRENTI: Not yet.

KNOPMAN: Okay, thank you.

CRAIG: Okay. Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

I\'m assuming that your high temperature experiments were all done in an
autoclave, so there was a high pressure. Do you know what the pressure
was inside that container? Did you do a PV equals RT calculation and
determine that?

PULVIRENTI: The pressure inside the dryout\--well, no, there wasn\'t
pressure inside the dryout. The pressure in the 250 is up around 1200
psi. At 160, I don\'t have that value.

BULLEN: Okay. And the 103 and 105 temperatures for the titanium disks,
were they at ambient? Were they in open air, or were they still in an
autoclave?

PULVIRENTI: They were in a Teflon autoclave, so it wasn\'t pressure, it
wasn\'t under pressure at all. There was a little bit of evaporation
under those. Butt it wasn\'t in a really sealed tight.

BULLEN: And as your follow-on performance plan, are you going to back
down to temperatures like 85 and 95 and 60 degrees C. and see if you can
take a look at the effect of addition of aggressive species into the
same types of environments that the people at Livermore are doing?

PULVIRENTI: For the Titanium 7, we have started a program. We have gone
down to 80, and we\'ve gone from 80 to 160, and we seem to see the same
sort of, at least in Titanium, we\'re seeing the same sort of corrosion.
It\'s just taking longer.

BULLEN: Okay. Bullen, Board, again.

Changing a little bit to your radiolysis experiments, your dose rates
are somewhere between two and three orders of magnitude higher than the
expected dose rates, and I know you wanted to do that so you could
actually see the results. But have you done any experiments to see if
there\'s actually a dose rate effect backed out by an order of magnitude
with respect to the radiation dose rate to see if you can actually see
some kinetics or a threshold for the initiation of the radiolysis
effects?

PULVIRENTI: The radiolysis experiments are hot off the press. This
was\--again, they\'re very, very preliminary. It was sort of a put them
in just to see. So, no, we haven\'t done additional ones. Additional
ones are planned.

BULLEN: Okay. Well, I guess the suggestion I\'d make is that you try and
take a look at the rate effects, because we know radiation goes away as
the packages age. And sort of the peak dose rate that you hear in the
Program is about 1700 rads per hour.

PULVIRENTI: Right.

BULLEN: Which is about two orders of magnitude less, and it can drop off
to as low as, you know, a couple hundred rads per hour. So you\'re three
orders of magnitude less than where you are.

PULVIRENTI: This is true.

BULLEN: So, it would be nice to know where those rates are.

PULVIRENTI: Uh-huh.

BULLEN: Okay.

CRAIG: April, thank you very much.

We now have our last talk before the break, and this is Roger Staehle,
who has been before the Board. Roger, you\'re listed for 15 minutes, and
I\'ll warn you after, how about 12?

STAEHLE: You\'ve no doubt had my pass-out, so I won\'t\--I\'m going to
leave out quite a bit of the pass-out because I think it\'s imminently
readable.

Let me start, first of all, by saying something about how one goes about
predicting, because that\'s relevant here. The issues in prediction in
this case are the following. First of all, you need to define the
conditions at the surface, temperature, chemistry, stress and
metallurgy. That has to be defined in order to make a prediction.

Then you have to know something about these deposits. And, finally, you
have to know something about the modes by which failure can occur. So,
those are the main ideas that are required in order to make some kind of
a prediction.

Now, the framework that we\'re all in here is essentially the same
problem that the commercial nuclear group has in barriers. In commercial
nuclear, there are four barriers. And, furthermore, these devices are
relatively extensively inspected and monitored. Here, there are
nominally also four barriers, the mountain, the container, the cladding
and the fuel. And the reason you think about four barriers is because
you\'re not really sure of how this is all going to work. I mean,
despite the best efforts of people in here, many of whom are very good
friends of mine, and are wonderful scientists, you still can\'t make
really precise predictions. And, so you develop sets of barriers to deal
with these complex problems.

Now, I\'m going to talk then mainly about the issues of temperature and
chemistry and deposits in thinking about how one goes about making
predictions, and where we seem to stand.

Now, this slide that\'s in your pass-out, Page 14, simply gives you an
agenda for thinking, but I\'m not going to talk about it because we
don\'t really have a lot of time here. But I would like to start
temperature by recognizing that if you have no ventilation, that you
have a temperature picture which starts off relatively high, and over
certainly a period of 50, maybe to 400 years, the temperature on the
outside, the container OD, stays relatively high. And, of course, the
temperature of the fuel is higher.

Now, why do I show this? I show this because it\'s my opinion that
nobody will stand for ventilating this site. I think this site, when you
think about ventilation and you think about the politics of ventilation,
that nobody will accept ventilation. So, I think we need to rig
ourselves to deal with a non-ventilated case.

Now, I mentioned this matter of temperature and the possibility of
deposits. There are basically three cases we have to think about. One is
a clean surface, which is essentially the present design. The second is
naturally settling deposits, which will give you higher surface
temperatures, but still have low resistance out the side. Then the case
of complete coverage.

I think the most likely design condition is probably this condition,
where we\'re probably looking at a design temperature at the surface on
the order of about 150 degrees Centigrade, give or take a few degrees.

Now, the problem that we\'re dealing with on the surface is very much
like a problem that the commercial nuclear industry has had at heat
transfer crevices. I\'ve talked to the Board about this before. Within
these heat transfer crevices, there\'s built up a deposit, there\'s
concentration, there\'s corrosion, and that same set of conditions
occurs on the top of a container where there are deposits. And, so, we
can learn a great deal from reviewing what\'s already known about the
deposits and the build-up of material in nuclear steam generators.

This is simply a picture of how these things may occur. So, we\'re
looking at concentrated chemistries, i.e. boiling point elevation, heat
moving through. We\'re looking at formation of precipitates, surface
environments change with time. We have long-range electrochemical cells
which either may be a deep crevice or a lateral crevice, radiolytic
things that Dr. Bullen was just mentioning, deposits, water evaporation,
human intrusion chemicals, mountain chemicals, and so on. So, that\'s
the picture of the problem.

Now, let me deal with the problem in terms of how you actually think
about it. How do you design experiments, how do you do design? Well, I
think there\'s essentially two inputs here. One input is the chemistry
to the surface, essentially the flux to the surface, the mountain
average chemistry, the pore water, the water down the fracture surfaces,
the microbial/fungal, and human intrusion. That\'s the flux to the
surface.

Now, at the surface, you have a set of dynamic processes which are
these: boiling and evaporation, evaporation of volatile species,
long-range cells, precipitation, including retrograde processes,
radiolytic processes, and then gradients in concentration, wetness,
temperature and synergy.

Now, out of that process of an incoming flux, and this set of
modification processes, I think ultimately gives you an unboundable
chemical situation at the surface. I think when you consider the fact,
for example, that in steam generators, people still haven\'t figured out
what the steam generator chemistry is, and with a system this complex,
it\'s not clear to me how it can do better than that, at least in the 30
years people have been working on steam generators.

So, I\'d like to exemplify this problem, this conundrum that we\'ve got,
by identifying the fact that in this system we\'re discussing, we have a
wide range of chemical species, a range of electrochemical potentials,
ranges of concentrations, ranges of wetness, and ranges of synergy. But
the domains for the occurrence of pitting, the occurrence of cracking,
and the occurrence of other species are relatively small.

For example, most stress corrosion domains are on the order of 200 to
300 millivolts wide, or several pH units wide. What that means is that
with this array of conditions, the possibility of hitting a domain of
destruction is very high. And I think we need to think about this
broader picture of the domains that are in front of us.

Now, I\'d like to say a word about the metallurgy, not much more than a
word, but a word or two. Metallurgy of C-22, we have this molybdenum and
tungsten problem that Professor Sagüés mentioned. It\'s a multiphase
alloy. We have a stress relief heat treatment that will put us in the
middle of a range that causes major metallurgical change. We have a
giant heat to heat variability problem, and arrays of chemistries at
grain boundaries which have yet to have been identified, or thought
about\--maybe thought about.

Now, I want to point out very quickly some results on Alloy 600 from the
primary and secondary side of steam generators. These are data which
you\'ll have to look at in detail because I don\'t have time to talk
about it. But in a given steam generator, this is a French steam
generator, 41 heats, and what these data tell you is that some heats
don\'t crack at all, and some heats crack a lot. So, you can imagine
that in this repository, there are going to be \"N\" number of heats,
where \"N\" is a very large number. And the variability of the response
of the heats to corrosive environments will look just like this.

There are other data for other heats that have the same problem. You
will not have a simple\--well, there won\'t be a mono heat here. We\'re
looking at enormous problems in variability.

Now, the next step I mentioned in thinking about design was the problem
of knowing how the corrosion is going to occur, that is, the modes. And
Joe, Dr. Payer, he\'s a good friend of mind, I think still is, has
mentioned a number of these and I won\'t reiterate this in detail. But
when we think about identifying the domains of corrosion, we need to
think about the domains and the range of design, and those domains are
certainly in the range of 150 minimum, up to maybe 250 maximum, where
you have the central influence of a larger coverage.

The chemistries are affected by inputs of mountain average, as I showed
the flux coming down, modifications, as I showed the problem, the
lateral problem, and of course the metallurgy. And, so, when we think
about identifying modes, let\'s look at history. In 1962, Alloy 600 had
only one identified mode of corrosion, and that was done in an obscure
French laboratory by somebody who nobody knew, and showed that in pure
water, Alloy 600 cracked.

Well, it bamboozled the entire technical public at the time. It doesn\'t
bamboozle them anymore because they\'ve had to shut down a lot of steam
generators for that reason. In 35 years, or 39 years, this array of
modes of corrosion on that alloy have developed.

In addition to these\--and I won\'t discuss the details of how we\'ve
developed this. In addition to those major submodes of cracking, there
are another seven minor submodes of cracking which have been identified
and quantitatively studied.

Now, let\'s look at C-22 and see where it is. C-22 is sort of where
Inconel 600 was 38 years ago. So far, and this is, again, the nickel
diagram, C-22 is about where Alloy 600 was. There are, so far as I can
tell, about three identified occurrences of cracking in this alloy in
the general range of the deaerated condition, which is along the
hydrogen line. And, so, will this same array of modes in 30 years look
like Inconel 600? And I think we have to think about that.

Now, one of the reasons for specifying temperatures and specifying
chemistries is to conduct accelerated tests so we can move out to 100
years and 200 years and 1000 years. How do you do that? You have to
start from a base point. Well, what\'s your base point? We don\'t have a
base point. We don\'t have a base temperature, we don\'t have a base
chemistry, we don\'t even have a base metallurgy, aside from C-22, but
that\'s not saying very much.

How do you conduct accelerated tests? In general or frequently use
temperature? What I have here are a set of lines for surface temperature
of 100 C., 160 C. to be predicted at 1000 years. As a function of
activation energy, this is the time required for the test.

Now, simply what this tells you, it\'s just a calculation made several
weeks ago before Professor Payer\'s meeting, if you\'re at a high
activation energy system like stress corrosion cracking, the times you
need for testing are on the order of a year. However, if you\'re in the
range of maybe five to 20 kilocalories, like what, pitting and general
corrosion, you may never run a test long enough to check it out. That\'s
because of the low activation energy.

Now, another problem with accelerated testing I want to point out, and
this is, again, just a little bit too quick, this is a Weibull plot,
probability versus time. This is, in general, what a field behavior
situation looks like at a Weibull beta of 1. Accelerated testing
generally has much steeper Weibull slopes, and so whereas this gives you
an accelerated test by a factor of 100 of this field experiment
essentially at the mean, at 10 to the minus 3 probability, there\'s no
acceleration at all.

And, so, when you run accelerated tests, it\'s terribly important to
understand the fact that the nature of the inherent dispersion of the
data has a big effect on whether you can predict anything or not.

Now, let\'s suppose we\'re conducting a set of tests to model heat to
heat variation. Here\'s a set of tests on crack growth rate for BWR type
applications. These are, what, five orders of magnitude of variability,
of crack growth rate heat to heat. Now, these data down here have been
censored a little bit. Censoring in a sense is taking out the data you
don\'t like. That\'s not totally fair to how this was done. And the
point is if we were to run this many tests on C-22 for any corrosion
situation, we would see a similar dispersion. And I have another slide
that you can look at having to do with a magnesium chloride environment.
You can look at it for yourselves.

Now, another issue in this program in my mind has to do with the
assumptions of design. What do we assume intuitively, innately, somehow
we assume. Now, I\'m not going to talk about these in detail, but my
point here is I\'ve read about 2500 documents in the last months on this
problem. I\'ve got a few more to do yet. But when I read this, I say
what are the assumptions people are making about design. So, I made a
list of these assumptions, and I think at some point, the Board has to
come to grips with the idea that there are assumptions here that need
challenging.

First of all, what are the assumptions? And second of all, shouldn\'t
they be challenged? So, I made a list of these, and you can look at them
perhaps later.

Now, to conclude, first of all, with respect to temperatures, most of
the work today has been done around 95 centigrade, some a little bit
higher, as Dr. Gordon mentioned. But I think that the nominal design
temperature for this system in a non-ventilated case, and even with a
ventilated case with a deposit over the surface, has got to be around
150 centigrade.

If you take all the data that exists today at 95 centigrade, it doesn\'t
help you at all at this point. In fact, if you forgot about all the data
at 95 centigrade, it wouldn\'t make any difference, because it doesn\'t
tell you anything about 150 centigrade.

Second, the present chemistries that are being considered for corrosion
testing are essentially tied up in pore water and J-13, and there\'s
nothing wrong with that, but in view of this flux of chemistries and the
array of things that can change at the surface, it\'s my opinion that
there are no chemistries being used in testing that are relevant to
container performance.

Now, how do you prove that? Well, we\'ve got three days to discuss this.
We could do that. But I think it\'s a serious problem. It\'s not even
clear to me that the surface chemistries can be bounded. I think you can
take good shots at them. There\'s a lot of smart people here, and as I
say, I know most of them, and I know they\'re really quite intelligent
people, but it\'s still, nonetheless, a formidable problem.

People have assumed that stress is negligible. That\'s for good reason.
I think that when you start thinking about how do you heat treat to make
negligible stresses, you will make structures with metal that you can\'t
stand.

Next, the present C-22 metallurgy is not easily defined because of it\'s
multiphase nature. And I think we haven\'t paid enough attention to the
metallurgy problem.

Now, none of the modes of corrosion have been defined in the general
range of temperatures and chemistry expected on heated surfaces. There
are no data.

Now, since there are presently no defined temperatures nor chemistries
that are relevant, there have been no accelerated tests, and the time
required for such tests hasn\'t been allocated.

Now, with respect to the barriers, we know that the mountain doesn\'t
provide a significant barrier. That\'s why we\'re using C-22. We just
discussed the problem with C-22. Wherever chemistry moves through C-22
has not been exposed on the fuel cladding, nor has been tried out on the
fuel.

I mentioned a few points on the assumptions, and I won\'t repeat that.
And, finally, on my conclusions, I\'ll just say the following: that
there are no apparent design bases for the corrosion related design of
the containers. Such bases should consider surface temperatures,
coverages by deposits, bounds of surface chemistry, stress and
metallurgies. Without such design bases, it\'s not possible to conduct
accelerated tests, nor is it possible to develop meaningful statistical
distributions for failure.

CRAIG: Okay. Well, I think you gained us a couple of days worth of
questions, but given our time pressure, who wants to ask the one
question?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Actually, Roger, I\'ve got a couple of quick questions. Invariably, we
run into the heat to heat variability issue of the French steam
generators, and I wanted to ask just two quick questions about that.
First off, part of this was a problem of not complete through-wall
rolling; is that not correct? If you do away with the crevice, part of
the problem goes away?

STAEHLE: That\'s all heat transfer crevice stuff.

BULLEN: Right. And I guess the question that I have is in subsequent
data to this, have they been able to tighten up the characteristics of
the heat to heat variability? Are the problems still as prevalent as you
expect to see here?

STAEHLE: That\'s the same problem in stainless steels and BWRs in the
early days. It\'s the same problem for stainless steel and magnesium
chloride. The heat to heat problem is a big issue, even on homogeneous
alloys.

BULLEN: Okay, thank you.

CRAIG: Alberto Sagüés?

SAGÜÉS: Actually, this is a little bit of a more general nature. You
have a number of statements in the printout, there is no basis for this,
there is no basis for that, and so on. Well, in a sense that is correct
if one refers to it by saying there is uncertainty about this, there\'s
uncertainty about the other, because you\'re never going to have a
complete basis to bound anything, even for systems\--because you\'re
going to run into surprises. So, I would say that those statements are a
little bit hyperbolic. Am I right in that?

STAEHLE: No, I think that, you know, my duty to you and to other people
is to tell you first of all, I think, and to put it in a perspective
that you can deal with. And I do the same thing for all the companies I
consult for. They need to know as close to the truth as I can get. And
when someone says can you predict this, there\'s no basis\--there\'s a
lot of difference between 150 centigrade, especially an activation
energy of 40 kilocalories, and 95 centigrade. And a lot of things happen
in that domain.

Further, on this chemistry issue, I\'ve studied this heat transfer
chemistry a lot, and one of the things we know, even a well defined
system like a steam generator, where the water and the ambient is well
defined, the reproducability and what happens in a crevice still defies
the efforts of the best people I know to figure out what it is. And so
how can we, in a thing like this mountain, be better than that,
especially only after 30 years?

I\'m concerned that we have not faced up to the realities of the
problem. I think that we are talking about things which we would like to
have happen, but not things that are real engineering serious problems.
I don\'t think this is overstated at all. In fact, if I wanted to
overstate it, I know how to overstate things, but that\'s not my
obligation to you or anybody else. But I think you need to pay attention
to these things.

SAGÜÉS: Thanks for clarifying your statements.

CRAIG: You did make reference to the Payer list of research needs. You
made reference to the Payer list of research needs that are emerging
from his review. Do you think that\'s a comprehensive list?

STAEHLE: Well, I think it\'s an interesting list. And Joe didn\'t answer
some things directly either, but I think that there\'s some issues here
that need to be thought about. One issue certainly is the problem of the
deposit surface and the build-up of chemistry and temperature, and the
processes at that surface. That is probably the single biggest issue in
this design.

And I know there\'s some interesting work. I know that Greg Gdowski, I
don\'t know whether he\'s here or not, but is aware of this and thinking
about it, and that\'s not to say that people aren\'t thinking about it.
But I think that\'s the single biggest issue.

The second biggest issue is the lack of information on the dependencies
of the corrosion modes over the array of chemistries and temperatures
that are reasonably definable.

CRAIG: Roger, thank you very, very much.

We now take a 15 minute break. It\'s now 3:20. Please return by 3:35.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

CRAIG: Okay, we are now going to hear from a person I\'m absolutely
overjoyed to introduce. Jim Blink is actually a graduate of my very own
department at U.C. Davis, although we never knew each other, but he was
a student there.

But, nevertheless\--nevertheless, I think it\'s truly wonderful. It\'s a
good department, and we\'re proud to have you as an alum, and you are
now allocated 30 minutes, and I\'ll warn you after about 25, or so.

BLINK: Thanks, Paul. We\'ll see if I really was from the same school
when we get to the Q and A; right?

CRAIG: Yeah. Yeah.

BLINK: I did have the fortune at lunch, the fortune cookie, and it said
my fondest dream will be realized. So, I guess that\'s being here right
now.

What I\'ve been asked to do is to compare the results of the high
temperature operating mode and the low temperature operating mode at the
process model level. So, I\'ll walk through the various process models,
starting with the UZ, and working my way all the way up to EBS
transport.

This is an adaptation of a talk that I gave to a panel of the TRB a
month or so ago. But there have been a few updates to the slides.

So, those are the subsystems that I\'ll try to work my way through.
There\'s one more at the end that I don\'t have a slide for, and that\'s
the UZ transport, and I may do that if there\'s time at the end.

The first one is thermal seepage. There\'s two aspects of thermal
seepage that are important. One is how much\--what fraction of the
repository footprint experiences seepage, and that\'s shown by the pie
charts, and you can see that the high temperature operating mode and the
low temperature operating mode both have about the same fraction, about
half, thus, considerably different than in TSPA-SR, which had about 15
per cent.

The other aspect is where it seeps. What is the volume of the seepage?
And that\'s shown in the left chart, and you can see that other than for
the very early times, that it almost identical. The difference at the
very early times is because we close one repository operating mode at 50
years, and the other one at 300 years, and so you\'re just really seeing
the difference in the closure time there.

The low temperature operating mode seepage is based on the TSPA model,
or it\'s similar to the TSPA model, an ambient model. Whereas, in the
high temperature operating mode, the process model gave a lower result
than the TSPA model, and that gave a lower result still than the ambient
model.

Thermal hydrology will be the area that I spend most of my time in,
because I\'m trying to compare thermal operating modes. This is a chart
that was inspired by Rick Craun of the DOE, who kept asking us are the
models that we use for the high temperature operating mode suitable as
is to analyze the lower temperature operating mode. And, so, what we did
is we took the lower temperature operating mode temperatures, and we
just started to shift them in time arbitrarily to see if they would
overlap the temperature history of the high temperature operating mode.

And this is a little complicated now. The red is the high temperature
operating mode unshifted, and these three curves that are nearly next to
each other are three different shifts of the low temperature operating
mode. The green curves are what I showed to the last Board meeting, the
Panel meeting, which was the low temperature operating mode results at
that time.

In one case, I shifted to match the peak to fall onto the high
temperature, and in the other case, I shifted to match the majority and
let the peak over shoot a little bit.

After that discussion with the Board, we found in our normal quality
assurance process, we found an error in the implementation of the
thermal hydrologic model. And when we went back and assessed the impact
of the error, we generated the blue curve. So, the blue curve is our
current understanding, and we published that in ICN-1 of the SSPA
document. So, the control document that you have has the current results
for thermal hydrology in it.

So, just focusing on the blue curve, you can see that with a shift of
about 2600 years, the temperature profiles are almost identical for a
typical waste package and location in the repository.

What does that mean? Well, in this portion of the high temperature
operating mode, if there are no permanent changes in either the natural
system or the engineered system, then we are starting off with the low
temperature mode at about where we would be at 2600 years in the high
temperature mode.

So, the question to keep in mind is are there permanent changes? And
some of the slides that I\'ll go through later will try to address that
question.

The other point is out in here, these models are the same, the same
model for the high temperature operating mode beyond a couple thousand
years is perfectly suitable for the low temperature operating mode
starting from day one.

So, to get to some of the details, I\'m going to follow the same
practice that I did in the previous slide. High temperature operating
mode is red. Low temperature operating mode, the original charts that
duplicate what I showed you a few months ago are green, and blue is our
current understanding. That will let you contrast visually the
difference between the operating modes, and also the small shift that
was caused by the correction of the error in the calculation.

There\'s a band here, and the band is the variability within the
repository. And I\'m showing the variability in two respects. The
variability here is the variability across the footprint, with the
highest temperatures being near the center of the repository, which is
thermally insulated from the edges, and can only have one dimensional
heat transfer for quite some time, vertical heat transfer, and the
lowest temperatures are near the corners of the repository. And,
actually, if you look at the specific past, the temperature histories
rather than the band, there are really three sets of curves. There\'s
the corner, the center, and then there\'s ones near the edge where you
basically have one, two or three dimensional heat transfer.

This variability is the variability in one location of the repository
amongst the various types of waste packages. Waste packages range from
11.8 kilowatts of peak power, peak thermal power, down to just a few
hundred watts of peak power when they\'re put into the repository. So,
there\'s a variation amongst those packages at any given location.

You can see that the difference between the two modes is of the order of
90 degrees, and the range of variability for either mode is around 20
degrees, depending on what time you look at the curves.

This shows the exact same information, but now I\'m plotting the
relative humidity histories rather than the temperature histories. The
high temperature gives you a depression in the relative humidity at
those early times, followed by an increase back towards the ambient,
which is very near 100 per cent underground.

A couple of interesting things about this. We were very curious as to
why the original low temperature operating mode results had a humidity
depression that persisted for so long compared to the high temperature
operating mode. And that question was asked I think three times at the
last Board meeting, and the hypothesis that we had was at lower
temperatures, the radiation heat transport is less effective.

That hypothesis is true, but it wasn\'t the major effect. The major
effect was actually the error in the calculation that left out a
significant part of the radiation. And it was a very simple
typographical error in an input file that caused it.

Now you can see that the humidity bands overlie each other, and most of
that question has gone away. But it\'s interesting if you look at this
band closely, right there in the blue, there\'s a cross-over point. And
at earlier times for the low temperature operating mode, you have more
humidity depression at the center of the repository, where the
temperatures are higher, and at the later times, you have more humidity
depression at the corners of the repository, due to that hypothesis that
we gave you the last time that the overall efficiency of radiation heat
transfer is less at the lower temperatures.

Another interesting thing about this is when we look at the variability
amongst the waste package types, the variability is much stronger at
those early times after closure for the lower temperature operating
mode. And this is basically the\--this high part here with the lower
depression of relative humidity, those are the defense high-level waste
packages, the ones that only put out a few hundred watts, up to a few
kilowatts, at emplacement.

This shows the same information, but in a different way. What I\'ve done
is plotted the footprint of the repository at four different times, near
closure, near the time of peak temperature, at 2000 years and at 10,000
years, and I\'ve used the same temperature scales for each of those
points so that you could directly compare colors between the high
temperature and low temperature operating modes.

And you can see that, of course, at the early times, the high
temperature operating mode is much warmer than the low. That\'s obvious.
But as time goes on, these things converge back to the same sorts of
distributions. So, not only is the temperature history for a typical
waste package very similar at later times, the spatial distribution and
variability across the footprint also becomes similar.

This is the same information, or the same format, but this is for the
relative humidity distributions. And, again, you can see that we
converged at the same sorts of distributions, and also you can see the
strong influence of some of the natural systems variability on the
results. In this case, it\'s the influence of the infiltration maps that
are produced by the UZ process model.

This chart shows you in CCDF format, a fraction of waste packages that
are above or below a certain temperature or humidity or time which a
temperature/humidity combination occurs. For a moment let\'s ignore the
green curves which were the low temperature operating mode ones that are
superseded, and just compare the red and the blue.

You can see that the distributions, the range from this end to this end,
are similar for the two, and this little notch here for the low
temperature operating mode is the one I told you about earlier, the
defense high-level waste packages, which don\'t have as much humidity
depression.

This shows you the time at which that relative humidity of 80 per cent
is attained, or the temperature at that time, and there is a little bit
more difference now between the high temperature and the low temperature
operating mode, but that\'s to be expected, the high temperature
operating mode being able to dry things out a little longer.

This is the overall result of the sensitivity runs that we did, and all
of these were, in essence, one off runs. The zero on all of these scales
is the temperature that we calculated, minus that for the base case. So,
that is the temperature recalculated, minus the base case. So, zero is
just simply the base case.

So, if you look at these, the base case for lithophysal porosity was 12
1/2 per cent for the lower lithophysal unit. So, there\'s a zero there
for both the high temperature and the low temperature operating modes.

Then we varied the lithophysal porosity from zero per cent to 25 per
cent, which is the range over which the mapping of the ECRB has
produced. So that\'s the variability that we\'ve seen in the limited
area that we\'ve characterized, and we assumed that the entire unit had
those values, which wasn\'t a fair way to do it, but it was okay to get
a general idea of the sensitivity.

And you can see for the high temperature operating mode, the sensitivity
is very large, near 100 degrees, 90 or 100 degrees of potential
variation if the entire unit had those properties. Now, it\'s actually
going to be variable across some spatial scale, and due to the
significance of the result, we will have to do more detailed sensitivity
studies.

You can see the low temperature operating mode isn\'t nearly as
sensitive, about 25 degrees C. spread. You can also see that a low
lithophysal porosity doesn\'t gain you as much temperature reduction as
a high lithophysal porosity costs you in temperature increase. So, that
means it\'s important for us to find out where there is high lithophysal
porosity. We may be able to make some engineering adjustments to waste
package spacing, for example, to compensate for that if we mapped as we
went.

Thermal conductivity is largely\--is the largest factor that\'s
sensitive to the lithophysal porosity, so its results are almost the
same. The other thing that\'s sensitive to the lithophysal porosity is
the specific heat. But that\'s not as big of a factor.

Most of the other factors had quite a small impact. It didn\'t really
matter much when we varied things over the extremes that we\'ve
observed, or believe are possible.

There\'s a couple of things that I\'d like to call to your attention,
though. One is the ventilation efficiency. We varied that efficiency
plus or minus 10 per cent from our base case, and we didn\'t see all
that much effect, of the order of 20 to 20 degrees, depending on which
operating mode we were in.

The other thing on ventilation that\'s important is the ventilation
efficiency that we calculate is a time dependent function, with a low
efficiency at early times, and then an increase in efficiency as time
goes on.

The way that we do our standard calculations for the process model,
which is then abstracted for PA, is we integrate that time dependent
function, and then we reduce the energy in the waste packages by that
fraction. And we do that uniformly in time. We lose that time dependence
in the process.

So, we decided for the sensitivity study to go back and look at that
assumption and see what effect it had. And this is the only bar on the
chart that\'s not the post-closure temperature, peak temperature, but
rather this one is the pre-closure peak temperature as the figure of
merit. And you can see that for both the high and the low temperature
operating mode, it\'s quite significant, 60 or 70 degrees of additional
temperature in the pre-closure if you put in the time dependence. So,
that was a non-conservative assumption we had with respect to
temperature, and now we\'ll have to go back and probably in our next
round of calculations, start doing things with some time dependence, or
at least we\'ll have to look very hard at whether we\'ve got the time
dependence proper.

Now, for the high temperature operating mode, it didn\'t matter in that
the peak pre-closure temperature was still less than the peak
post-closure temperature, except if we started out with a high
temperature operating mode and wanted to preserve the capability to go
to low and never go above boiling, of course it could put that option at
risk. But for the low temperature operating mode it was very important,
because the pre-closure peak in a few decades after emplacement was
above boiling. So, we have to go back and look at this some more and
work it some more.

One last thing on this slide is I\'ve shown three ways here to get to a
lower temperature operating mode. The base case for SSPA was to spread
out the waste packages. But you could just as easily spread out the
drifts if you decided ahead of time, or you could just as easily reduce
the capacity of some of the hotter waste packages, drop them down to,
say, 16 PWR assemblies, while the cooler packages, the BWR packages and
the glass packages, could stay at full capacity. Those three methods
gave this range of peak temperatures, not a very big difference. And
what that tells me is it probably doesn\'t matter as much which way we
choose to get to low temperature operating mode, we can use other
factors, such as worker safety or even cost to influence that decision.

Moving on now to thermal hydrological mechanical coupling, this is an
example of a continuum calculation that was done by the UZ Department,
and it shows you the change in permeability of the rock due to thermal
mechanical processes for the high and the low temperature operating
mode. And you can see visually these are very similar. They don\'t have
much difference.

This shows you the THC, the thermal hydrological chemical processes, and
I\'m showing you the carbon dioxide, the pH, the chloride and the
fluoride in the water as a function of time, in the water or the gas.
And you can see that things are fairly similar, except for the high
temperature operating mode has this period of either a big depression or
no data because there\'s no water there.

This is an abstraction of the previous slide for the CO2 and the pH,
where in order to make the PA calculations more tractable, we divide our
time into specific periods, and we average within those periods. It\'s
showing you the same information, but in a more grainy fashion, and
that\'s the way that it\'s carried forward into the PA, an example of
simplification.

This one shows you the evaporation rate out of the invert. The invert
gets water into it by seepage, by condensation on various interior parts
of the drift, but mostly it gets it by imbibition, by pulling it out of
the host rock. In this case, we have a crushed tuff invert, and that
crushed tuff will pull water from the host rock.

And what you can see, this one is a little hard, but the blue bands and
the red bands are fairly similar. The evaporation rate gets to a
reasonably high level, but it\'s about the same for both operating
modes. So, the additional ventilation and the delay of closure for the
low temperature operating mode compensated for the smaller footprint.

The other thing that I\'d like to call to your attention is in the red
curve, it looks like it\'s a double hump peak. That\'s not actually the
case. If you plot all of the curves for all of the waste package
locations, those curves crisscross and overlap each other. Those peaks
are not the same history. There\'s an early set of peaks for some waste
packages, and a later set of peaks for other waste packages.

This shows you what happens to the pH as you evaporate or condense
water. This scale on the X axis is the degree of condensation or
dilution, and the degree of evaporation or concentration. The red curves
are the high temperature operating mode, the blue curves are the low
temperature operating mode at different points in time. Remember, we
abstracted that previous slide on the chemistry, so those are just the
curves as a function of concentration for those various times.

And the point to be taken from this slide is in a couple of the time
periods, ranging from about 50 years to 4000 years, the high temperature
operating mode can run down to much lower pHs, around 5, than the low
temperature operating mode. So, there\'s more variability in time for
the high temperature operating mode, depending again on how much
evaporation you\'ve got, which in turn depends on the specific local
conditions where it\'s taking place.

Moving on now to corrosion, and June just told me that this work should
be potentiodynamic, not potentiostatic. So if any of you want to make
that correction to your handouts, please do.

This shows you the temperature dependent general corrosion rate for the
Alloy 22. Now, it\'s based on a pinning to the 60 degree data from the
Long Term Corrosion Test Facility at Livermore, and then the temperature
dependence is put on top of that from the potentiodynamic polarization
measurements, which were done quickly in an accelerated environment in
order to get enough data to be able to discern the temperature
dependence.

We think that ultimately, the Long Term Corrosion Test Facility
experiments will also give us the temperature dependence and the
chemistry dependence, but right now, the corrosion rate and the total
amount of corrosion to date is so low that the scatter in the data
overwhelms those dependencies, and you can\'t see them because of the
scatter. But as time goes on and the total numbers increase, there\'s a
chance we\'ll be able to pick some of that out.

In the meantime, we went to an accelerated approach to get the
temperature dependence. Now, when we did this, I think a lot of us
thought intuitively that the high temperature operating mode would
suffer from that comparison because of these much higher numbers at the
higher temperatures. But what it actually turned out is the overall
corrosion in the problem got much less, because the problem is dominated
by the very long periods where you\'re at temperatures lower than 60
degrees.

So, when you look at the total dose curves, a lot of that shift to the
right, that delay in time, is due to the influence of this temperature
dependent corrosion rate.

But now let\'s look at it from a comparison viewpoint. Let\'s take that
curve and multiply that curve by the temperature versus time curves that
I showed you earlier, and then integrate them. And that\'s what this
shows you. The red and the blue are using the median, and the dots are
the ranges shown there, which are 25 and 75th percentile. I could draw
bigger extremes if I choose to, but this is good enough for
illustration.

And what you see is in the first tic mark of this integral, the first
25,000 years, you have a jump, and you corrode a few millimeters of the
20 millimeters total. This 20 millimeter scale is the total thickness of
the Alloy 22. And the difference between the two modes is about 1
millimeter at the end of that thermal period.

After that, they\'re corroding at the same rate, because the temperature
history is the same. Remember that first slide I showed you. And the
difference is about 1 millimeter. So, remember the slide when I said
2600 years of time shift, it\'s valid to think about comparing the modes
if there weren\'t any permanent changes. This is the permanent change in
the engineered system, is we\'ve had about 5 per cent of the thickness
of the Alloy 22 has been compromised by the higher temperature mode
compared to the lower temperature mode, not a very large difference.

I already showed you the chemistries and the THM effects, and they
weren\'t very large on the natural system. I didn\'t go into it, but in
the THC, the thermal hydrological chemistry, I believe that the
calculations that Eric Sonenthal has done in the UZ Department show
about 1 per cent of the 1 per cent fracture porosity, that is, 10 to the
minus 4 of the total volume, being filled with precipitants. And, so,
that\'s not a very large effect for either of the modes. It probably
wouldn\'t change the water flow very much in the mountain.

This shows the result of applying those general corrosion rates with the
sampling and the spreads, and this shows the failure of the waste
packages. The early foot was an early failure. We took another look at
the reliability data, and came up with about one-fourth of our
realizations had one waste package fail early due to the combination of
unlikely effects of human error and computer error. Then this rise here
is due to the general corrosion of the other waste packages.

I should also point out that the general corrosion rates that\'s
inherent in this also has some sampling and some weighting factors for
microbiologically induced corrosion, Mrs. Devlin. And also for aging at
the corrosion weld.

We\'ve heard a lot about localized corrosion, and I\'ve tried to
synthesize the localized corrosion into one graph. This one is a little
tough to follow, but I\'ll try to get through it in the couple minutes
that I\'ve got left.

Here is the temperature on the X axis, and the humidity on the right
axis. And when you close the repository, the temperature rapidly
increases in the red for the high temperature operating mode, or to the
blue for the low temperature operating mode. And the range on those is
due to the range across the waste packages and across the footprint. In
this case, just across the footprint is shown.

Then it progresses back up this pathway in time until eventually it gets
back to ambient temperature, around 25, 26 degrees C., and ambient
humidity, around 100 per cent humidity. I\'ve given you a couple of
weigh stations along here, 600 years and 3000 years, for two different
locations in the footprint for the high temperature operating mode.

This band here shows the window of susceptibility for initiation of
crevice corrosion. The bottom of the bank is the deliquescence curve for
magnesium chloride, and the bottom of this smaller window is the
deliquescence curve for the sodium chloride. The right side is the
thermodynamic condition that we can\'t pressure the drift, and the left
side is the lower temperature limit for crevice corrosion initiation,
which is in the 85 to 90 degrees C. band, based on experiments and some
limited modeling.

The point here is the high temperature operating mode goes through the
window of susceptibility, yet in the TSPA, we don\'t have any crevice
corrosion, and the reason is there\'s actually one more axis for this
graph, which I haven\'t been able to figure out a way to plot it. It\'s
already complicated enough. And that axis is chemistry, and it turns out
that we never, over the entire pH range, we never quite get to an
aggressive enough condition to start crevice corrosion.

So, for the high temperature operating mode, we didn\'t see it, and for
the low temperature operating mode, we didn\'t see it. But we can make
the argument that it didn\'t occur for the low temperature operating
mode on pure thermal considerations, the blue never getting into that
window. The argument is a little more difficult to make for the high
temperature operating mode.

Waste form. This shows you the solubility of Neptunium as a function of
temperature. I think Dr. Boyle showed you that one earlier with
datapoints on it. And this one shows you the clad unzipping rate for the
two modes.

Basically, there\'s some difference in the Neptunium solubility.
There\'s enough of a temperature difference in the neptunium solubility
to make a small amount of difference between the operating modes. But
the actual difference between the base case, the old TSPA, and the SSPA
in the reevaluation of the solubility data, was a bigger effect than the
difference between the operating modes.

All these other factors on the side are factors that we looked at but
didn\'t have a significant effect on the performance.

Engineered barrier system transport. For the SSPA, we put sorption
coefficients for the ballast material in the invert to see if there was
a significant delay caused by the sorption of some of the radionuclides
in the invert.

First of all, you can see that the delay is only a matter of several
centuries, so maybe it\'s not enough to worry about. And these diffusion
coefficients that we used also were temperature dependent, and you can
see that there was a fairly large difference near the peak temperature
time. But when you put that together, you still don\'t have a whole lot
of difference between the two cases.

So, although there is a temperature effect here, it\'s probably lost in
the noise of the overall TSPA.

This goes a little further. This is the sorption now rather than the
diffusion in the invert, and this is the result of a one-off study that
was in Chapter 3 of Volume 2 of the SSPA, where they just made that one
effect, sorption or no sorption. So, they didn\'t make any of the other
changes in this model that are shown in Volume 1 of the SSPA, and you
can see the difference in the dose curves. There is a difference, but
it\'s not a large difference. It\'s mainly a shift in time.

So, the conclusions of looking at this at the process level is, first of
all, the process level uncertainty is reduced for some of the subsystems
for the low temperature operating mode. And we have propagated some of
those uncertainty reductions into the TSPA, but not all of them. So,
when you look at the TSPA differences between the two, you\'re only
seeing part of what we discovered at the process level, and that\'s
largely because we proceeded in parallel with the two volumes.

The thermal conductivity uncertainty and variability, and those are two
separate things. There\'s an uncertainty about the thermal conductivity
at any one location, and then there\'s also a variability amongst the
locations. That\'s the most important effect for temperature, so that\'s
the one that we need to work on.

Our results suggested the differences between the operating modes are
really only significant for the first few thousand years. And beyond
that, the differences are not large. Dr. Boyle showed you the horsetail
curves and the ranges between the threads and the horsetail curves were
much larger than the differences between the means or the bounds between
the high temperature and low temperature operating modes.

So, the overall conclusion is those analyses that are documented in
Volume 1 of the SSPA are a reasonable comparison of the subsystem
behavior, or basis for decisions by the DOE on how to proceed towards
the SR and potential LA.

CRAIG: Okay, thank you, Jim.

Let\'s see, I\'ve got Alberto and Priscilla, and I want to throw in my
own, if I\'m allowed to, or even if I\'m not.

If you\'d turn to Number 16, this is the data that relates to the
activation determination for the temperature dependence of the
corrosion, and that\'s driven by a rather small number of datapoints
taken by Scully at 80, 85 and 95 degrees, and a small range, and at 95
degrees, there are only eight datapoints. One was an outlier, it was an
outlier, but over an order of magnitude, so it really matters. And these
are short-term measurements, they\'re only one hour measurements, and
they were all normalized to the dunk tank results, which is a reasonable
thing to do.

But the fact that there\'s an outlier in QA data does at least suggest
that maybe one should ask what happens to the activation energy if it\'s
included. And that increases it a lot, from roughly 36 up to about 65 or
so kilocalories per mole, which has big implications for the corrosion
rates at higher temperatures.

Now, I have no idea whether that outlier is or is not real, and as far
as I know, there\'s no way to decide at this point. But there certainly
is a question there as to what happens at the higher temperatures.

What are you planning to do about this kind of issue?

BLINK: I guess I\'m going to ask Tammy Summers if she wants to answer
that, or Gerry Gordon. But the one thing I would say is that when we did
the TSPA-SR, with no temperature dependence of corrosion rate, we all
knew that mechanistically there must be some sort of temperature
dependence, and we just couldn\'t see it from the data. So, we sought to
find a way to get at that dependence, and we may not have it perfectly,
but we know it\'s a curve something like that, and maybe it\'s a steeper
curve. And obviously if you have the higher activation energy, you\'re
going to see a bigger difference between the operating modes. But it at
least gave us a chance to look at the sensitivity.

LONG: I\'m Kevin Long from Waste Package Science and Analysis. Indeed,
we actually in the Volume 1, we presented I believe two or three
different corrosion models. Corrosion Model 1 was using all of the data,
including the outlier, and it did result in a slope of about 66 or so.
And we ran waste package degradation curves with that. They were not run
all the way to dose in Volume 2.

The corrosion at earlier times is much higher at higher temperatures,
but also much lower at lower temperatures. And, therefore, the waste
package lifetimes\--well, very few realizations failed, on the order of
2 or 3 per cent, I believe. And, you know, it resulted in a very\--it
would result in a very low dose.

So, we had significant\--if you read Section, I forget which, of our
7335, I believe, you\'ll see arguments for why this is an outlier point.
It\'s P value is something around .04, or something. So, it is indeed an
outlier. And the fact that the data is based on eight replicate samples
even further\--one of which was an outlier, even further convinces us
that that was indeed an outlier.

CRAIG: Thank you. Alberto?

SAGÜÉS: Okay, very good. I\'m glad you brought this transparency up,
Paul, with that question. And it\'s sort of like addressing another
issue that may be more general. When one looks at those graphs, and
let\'s forget about the issue of the outlier for a moment and look at
the 75th percentile, 25th percentile. I think it\'s important for all of
us to remember where this is coming from. That\'s not an estimation of
the natural scatter that may occur in the system. It is an indication of
what the calculations return when you enter a certain number of
assumptions into it, one of the assumptions being those eight samples
which were not actually exact replicates, because they address different
solutions, and so on.

When you take those samples and you make an assumption that that\'s the
same as what you would get when you have an infinite number of samples,
and so on, that\'s what you would get, but, however, if you take say,
for example, a different heat of the same model, and maybe you get a
different number, or maybe if after some time, one of the many
mechanisms that were mentioned at our workshop shows up and causes
something to change, and so on, then the curve would be different.

And I find it bothersome to look at the curve on the right where we have
an extrapolation to a million years, which is fine if we keep in mind
that that curve has the assumption that let\'s pretend that this and
this and this and the other. Otherwise, when you look at the real
uncertainty of that, namely how little we know about the way these
things are, we would have a trumpet of uncertainty if you will. We will
have a curve that will have the horizontal axis, and it will go up
eventually orders of magnitude over what it is right now, maybe an order
of magnitude, orders of magnitude would be a possibility. Which means
that in the context of the specific numerical extrapolation question we
have right now, the curve is fine, but only within that context.

I mean, I\'m saying all this to see if you view it in the same way, or
maybe you think that it has more of a meaning than what I just was
mentioning.

BLINK: I guess I have to agree with your point, and maybe add one
sentence to it, and that\'s if the uncertainties of the passive layer
surviving for very long times are thermally dependent, then that larger
trumpet that you have might be different for the higher temperature than
the lower temperature. Since we don\'t have any idea as to the size of
that trumpet for any operating mode, our assumptions in these
calculations are that the passive layer persists, and that\'s clearly an
assumption on this chart.

If the passive layer doesn\'t persist, then a lot of charts change, not
just this one.

SAGÜÉS: Right. But if one goes after the question of is it good to go to
a lower temperature than to a higher temperature, if you\'re using this
instrument to try to answer that question, then a few things come up
that will not show up in that curve. For example, yes, maybe the
uncertainty will be lower at lower temperatures.

BLINK: Yes.

SAGÜÉS: And then that could change the message dramatically. But that is
not, of course, is not asked in that particular question. And maybe what
would happen is that you may reduce the number of unexpected events that
could happen, which is unfortunately not quantified in the context of
this. Right? That\'s not quantified?

Okay, I just have one quick question on Figure 11, Transparency 11, and
that is what kind of experiments were used to get the data that allowed
predicting this decrease in permeability around the drift due to thermal
stress induced by decay heat? How was the input to that developed?

BLINK: There are two sets of THM models that have been run on the
project. This is the continuum model approach, and there\'s also been
one with discrete blocks, or it\'s called distinct elements, which are
blocks of rock that are bounded by fractures. And the latter model has
been used to calculate the repository situation, and has also been used
to look at the results in the drift scale test and the large block test,
thermal tests that we\'ve done. And the model does a reasonable job at
explaining the data from those tests.

So, I guess the way I\'d answer the question is we\'ve applied the model
for a validation test, and then we\'ve applied the same model to the
repository situation.

SAGÜÉS: I see. Is the effect of seismic activity taken into account in
this?

BLINK: Not in this one. This is THM. The key block analysis includes
normal seismic and temperature effects, and one of our intentions is to
take the results of what we\'ve learned from this part, and move it back
into the key block analysis. I suspect that some of what we\'ve learned
from the probabilistic seismic studies could also be moved back. But
that\'s future work in support of a potential LA.

SAGÜÉS: Okay. All right, thank you.

CRAIG: All right. Priscilla Nelson?

NELSON: Nelson, Board.

I wasn\'t going to ask this, but since this is up, when you talk about
the lower lith. here, are you using continuum matrix properties? I\'m
confused throughout this where lithophysal effects are included and
where they are not. So, let\'s just look here for thermal mechanical. In
this model for the properties and the response of the lower lith., did
this include a mass, a matrix based property, somehow was a bulk
property evaluated for this case?

BLINK: I don\'t know the answer to that one.

NELSON: Okay.

BLINK: Jim Houseworth, do you happen to know?

HOUSEWORTH: Jim Houseworth, Lawrence Berkeley. I believe it did include
the lithophysal properties.

NELSON: Okay. You might want to hang around then if you\'re the person
who knows the answers to these.

Can you go to Slide Number 10? I think all along we have known that
there was these first two variables, variations that you demonstrate
there on lithophysal porosity and thermal conductivity were to be
anticipated, both being very important effects that need to be modelled
very well. And I look here, and first of all, I want to understand the
lithophysal porosity surely has something to do with a bulk thermal
conductivity, so they\'re not independent, unless that thermal
conductivity is matrix thermal conductivity. Can you tell me what that
is there?

BLINK: That is matrix thermal conductivity, and the lithophysal porosity
affects both the thermal conductivity and the specific heat. The first
set of bars use both effects. The second set of bars only vary the
thermal conductivity.

NELSON: What second set of bars? What are you talking about here?

BLINK: The lithophysal porosity bars is this set. When we varied the
lithophysal porosity, we automatically changed the thermal conductivity
and the heat capacity. In the second set of bars, we only changed the
thermal conductivity.

NELSON: Right. And only using matrix thermal conductivity data, or using
bulk equivalent thermal conductivity data that includes lithophysal
effects?

BLINK: We used the lithophysal porosity to reduce the bulk thermal
conductivity.

NELSON: Okay. Which is why you have such a huge spread. Okay. Now, I see
that you\'ve looked at this for the base case, or variation from a base
case, getting peak temperature. But the plots that were done before
about temperature resulting from low temperature and high temperature,
they were not done investigating this. They were done only using this
base case?

BLINK: They were done with these base numbers, the 12 1/2 per cent, the
1.87, 1.27.

NELSON: Okay. So, it seems pretty clear to me that with these big
ranges, that the proper representation of lithophysal porosity and
thermal conductivity in the temperature models can really have an awful
lot to say about what the temperatures are, and the rest of the study
that you report on may be strongly affected by putting in these bulk
properties, which has not been done yet.

BLINK: Other than spreading the properties out across the whole
stratigraphic unit. The next step would be to take this variability and
put it at different spatial scales, with the base case for that being
the spatial scale that we saw when we mapped the ECRB, because at small
scales, it will tend to average itself out, but at the larger scales, it
won\'t. But one of the things to note from that is the center of mass of
that bar is not at the base case.

NELSON: That is right, yes.

BLINK: So, it\'s clearly an area to be looked at.

NELSON: Okay, we need to move on, but, I mean, I think that this could
be a really important impact on the rest of what you said.

BLINK: Agreed.

NELSON: So, it\'s very important.

CRAIG: Okay, we have three more questions, and we\'re pushing on time,
but we\'ll get through them if everybody will be brief. Debra, Leon and
John Pye.

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

On Slide 4, I want to make sure I get the implication of what you\'ve
put down here, because it\'s I think pretty important. What you\'re
showing here is that all things being equal, to some extent, the low
temperature operating mode\--rather, the high temperature operating mode
at best can equal performance\--well, let\'s not talk about performance.
But, at best, replicates the conditions of the low temperature operating
mode, but you\'ve got this 25, or how many years, 1000, 1500 years.

BLINK: 2600.

KNOPMAN: I\'m sorry. 2600 years when something may happen in your high
temperature operating mode that\'s simply not going to happen in the low
temperature operating mode. That is, you\'ve got\--it\'s almost
impossible to imagine how you have better performance in a high
temperature operating mode when you\'ve got 2600 years of something
going on that\'s not happening in the lower temperature operating mode.

I just want to make sure that that\'s in a sense what you said, because
your models now are matching up. You\'re matching up your low
temperature operating mode to what you had before, starting at 2600
years. So, you have your first 2600 years of things happening, of
changes being made. You lose something of your C-22.

Then you\'re saying\--you seem to be concluding that you do also have
reductions in uncertainty with the low temperature operating mode, apart
from the performance issue. Is that correct?

BLINK: I agree with the second half about the reductions of some of the
subsystems uncertainties. But in the first half, the reason for doing
the shift was to show you how the performance would be similar at
certain times, but it\'s not like you delayed the low temperature
operating mode for 2600 years before anything happens. It\'s happening
in both from the day of emplacement, and then the day of closure. It
just may be happening at different rates during those times.

The purpose of showing you the time shift was to show you that the
models that we use for the high temperature operating mode represent the
low temperature operating mode as well. It\'s not like we\'ve done all
of this work that doesn\'t support both modes.

NELSON: I understand that. On the subject of, just real quickly, you may
want to answer this at another time, but let me just put it on the
table. There is a paper that I think is unpublished, but written by a
bunch of Lawrence Livermore folks, as well as some from Sandia, entitled
Uncertainty, a Discriminator for Above and Below Boiling Repository
Design Decisions. And the thrust of the paper is that low temperature
designs, a low temperature operating mode in fact could increase
uncertainties for certain subsystems.

Have you tested the assertions or hypotheses that are presented here,
primarily related to kinetics, and the reduction of uncertainty if
you\'re in high temperature modes and essentially bypassing kinetic
modes of chemical change, and just going right into equilibrium
conditions? Because I\'m just wondering how this fits in with your
analysis that you showed us that shows lower\--some reductions in
uncertainty in some subsystems. So, would the points made in this paper
offset the uncertainty reductions in the systems you looked at?

BLINK: I think before I answer that one, I\'d better take a close look
at that paper to look at the assertions. I\'m familiar with some of
them, but I\'d want to go point by point through it.

KNOPMAN: It\'s Dale Wilder\--

CRAIG: Let\'s do this one off line. I think it looks like it requires
some serious time. Leon Reiter?

REITER: Leon Reiter, Staff.

Jim, I hope that sometime you\'d carry through the different
temperatures into the TSPA analysis. The reason being is that sometimes
there are subtle differences that are important, and sometimes we want
to see whether these kind of calculations get rid of those subtle
differences, make them larger, or bring in new subtle differences. So, I
hope to do that sometime because I think it\'s important.

BLINK: We did have a method to what we did. We ran the one-offs in
Chapter 3 to try to discern which factors had the biggest effect. And
then as we did our work in Volume 1, we also attempted to look for
things that were important enough to carry forward. But, obviously, we
didn\'t have time to do all of the effects, and there may be some
factors or synergistic factors I should look at.

REITER: Right. Just following through on that, one-offs don\'t tell you
everything. The existing SSPA results, there\'s an interesting pattern
there, and I wonder if you\'d explain it. If you look at the nominal
case, we see essentially low temperature performs better than the high
temperature at periods below 10,000 and above 100,000 years. And that
can be up to an order of magnitude.

However, when you get to the period between 10 and 100,000 years, for a
lot of that time, they\'re about the same. The dominant radionuclides
are Carbon 14, and I think Technetium 99. And when you go to the igneous
case, you see the same sort of thing, only this case, before 10,000
years, they\'re about the same. But after 10,000 years, where the
dominant radionuclide is plutonium, the cold has worse performance.

What\'s going on here? What\'s the systemmatics? What\'s causing this.

BLINK: I wouldn\'t read too much in the differences between those mean
curves. I think some of the early effects are probably due to the
closure date. 50 years for the high temperature and 300 years for the
low temperature just gives the radionuclides a head start in some cases
for the early failure packages.

For the longer term ones, there may be some effect of this general
corrosion rate during that high temperature pulse for the high
temperature operating mode. We had about 1 millimeter, or so, of the
Alloy 22 being corroded deeper during the thermal pulse for the high
than the low. And I suspect you will see those. But people like Peter
Swift tell me never look at the mean curve and try to just judge on
that. Look at the individual realizations to try to do that.

So, I guess I\'d refer that to Rob or somebody else.

CRAIG: Okay. We have to move on now. Last question is John Pye.

PYE: Pye, Staff.

Can we look at Slide 18, please? Jim, how should we interpret relative
humidity at the waste package if it\'s boiling? You also mentioned
briefly in your presentation over pressurization in the drift.

Did you hear my question?

BLINK: Yes, I heard it.

PYE: Okay, I\'ll repeat it. What is the meaning of relative humidity on
the waste package above boiling point? And you mentioned over
pressurization, trying to avoid it. Could you explain that in this
graph, please?

BLINK: Well, first, let me do the over pressurization. This curve along
the right-hand side is the thermodynamic curve at the elevation of the
repository horizon, showing you the combinations. If the gas that\'s
above the liquid is 100 per cent water vapor, that\'s the relative
humidity.

So, for example, at this temperature of 130, or so, if you had .89 bars
of water vapor, which is the ambient pressure at that elevation, that
would be 40 per cent of the saturation pressure of water if you put it
into a pressurized system.

Does that help?

PYE: Not really.

CRAIG: Okay, this is one where you two should get together at the end of
the session, I think.

Jim, thank you very, very much. A lot of material. We now move into two
presentations, both relating to peer reviews. One is on the biosphere,
and the second is a TSPA peer review. And the first of these is Eric
Smistad, who is the DOE technical lead for biosphere, igneous activity,
unsaturated zone and performance confirmation. And you\'ve got 20
minutes, and I\'ll warn you after about 15.

SMISTAD: Thank you.

The first thing I\'d like to say is I brought copies of this report for
Board members who don\'t happen to have this report, for Staff members
who don\'t happen to have it, and anybody else in the audience who\'s
interested in this report, I do have about 350 copies, so don\'t feel
bad about asking me for the report.

I\'ll go over the review objective we started with, go over the members
of the team, terms of review, what we asked the Panel to do for us, how
the review was implemented, give a quick one pager on the summary of the
results, and then I\'ll walk through selected recommendations. I\'m not
going to walk through all of them, but just enough I feel to give you a
flavor of what\'s in the report, and then I\'ll summarize.

Objective, high-level objective was to provide, on the basis of
available international standards and guidance, an independent
evaluation of our biosphere methodology on Yucca Mountain.

Peer Review Team. It was a team that was assembled by the International
Atomic Energy Agency. It consisted of six members mainly from waste
management organizations, national advisory boards, and regulatory
bodies. It included an agency secretary and an agency technical person,
scientific secretary.

I won\'t walk through each individual member here, except to say this
was a seasoned group. There is a pretty good bio on each person within
the report itself. So, if there\'s any questions out of that, I can
field those perhaps later.

Terms of review, what we asked them to do, we initially asked them to
review all the documentation we had on the street at the time, and we
asked them to consider looking at the characteristics of the biosphere
system, the FEPs and how that played into our conceptual models, the
appropriateness of the GENII-S code, the code we use in the biosphere,
methodology of choosing our receptor, and then looking at data and
parameters.

Implementation. They did review all the documentation we had at the
time. It was the PMR, 16 AMRs. They looked at both the EPA and the NRC
regs, which were draft at the time. They also looked at the TSPA we had
out, and the TSPA-VA peer review we had, along with some other
miscellaneous documents they asked for.

We had a question and answer exchange, mainly through e-mail based on
what they\'d read in the documents we sent them, and this took place
over August through November of 2000. They then came to the site in
November. It was a one week visit. We had interactive presentations and
discussions with them for a couple days. We took them out to Yucca
Mountain and spent most of the time out in the Valley itself to get them
a feel for what is out there. They held some closed discussions
themselves.

And then at the end of the week, they summarized orally their results to
us. They submitted a draft in January. We reviewed that draft for
factual accuracy, dates and names and that sort of thing. And then they
put out a final report in April.

Just a quick one page summary. We felt that the review was generally
favorable. We thought it focused on efficiencies and enhancements for
the most part. There were 23 recommendations. They did a couple
different groupings here. The first grouping they did was
recommendations they thought that could be carried out within the
regulatory context, and ones they felt that were outside of the
regulatory context, but still may provide some bolstering or increase in
stakeholders\' confidence, as they put it. And these numbers, 14 and 9,
are just a breakout of the 23.

Then as far as the report goes itself, they did more of a classical
chapter grouping. These are the three main groupings that they had in
the report: assessment, definition and then data and model itself. And
those are just the breakouts of the 23.

As far as the assessment approach went, there\'s subtopics here, and
I\'ll walk through an example out of each one of these. Again, I\'m not
going over each recommendation out of each category. Assessment context,
regulatory requirements, and then the integration of the biosphere into
the TSPA itself.

Assessment context. They really didn\'t have recommendation in this
category itself. They had more comments. They did recognize how we kind
of got to where we got to in our biosphere modeling. They understood the
regulatory basis that we were working towards.

They felt that the biosphere modeling was a little less mature than the
rest of the models that we\'ve been working on through time, and that it
appeared to be more of an accessory to the modeling, although they
didn\'t say it was not functioning properly, they just felt it was a
little disaggregated.

And then they thought that this separation was enhanced by the
regulations themselves. They thought they were a bit prescriptive, and
I\'ll talk a little bit about that in the next few slides.

Regulatory requirements. This was an example that they categorized as
outside of the regulatory framework, although you could make an argument
that it could indeed be within the regulatory framework. And it went in
pathways. They felt that we could have done additional looks on possible
pathways that, in their words, could lead to logical extensions for the
compliance case.

And we are, the response here, we are looking at additional pathways
right now. We\'ll look at some more next year. Two pathways that we\'re
concentrating on at this point are inhalation and ingestion by animals,
cows for instance, and the pathway that occurs there, either milk or
perhaps liver.

And the other one we\'re looking at is a pathway that swamp coolers may
introduce, and this is also something that the NRC had brought up in one
of our meetings as well.

Integration of the biosphere into the TSPA. Again, this is something
I\'d mentioned just a few slides ago. They felt that there might should
be something done to better integrate TSPA and the biosphere together.
And we\'re looking into this. The first thing that we\'re doing, and
we\'re starting it now, is looking at a meshing of the GENII code we use
in the biosphere with the Total System Performance code, which is the
GoldSim, and we\'ve done a similar thing with the flow and transport
with GoldSim as well. So, that\'s one of the things we\'re looking at to
try to integrate better and make it more of kind of a seamless
integration.

This is something that would also help in sensitivity analyses, and with
the analysts ease of performing these.

Definition of the biosphere. I\'ll walk through an example of
recommendation for biosphere characterization, and then exposed groups.
And if you have questions on these, I can answer those later.

Biosphere characterization. They thought that we should consider a
program, a limited program perhaps in their words, of characterizing the
biosphere. We don\'t have specific characterization data on the Valley
that we have taken. There is information out there that we have used.

Our plan right now is to look inside of our models and do sensitivity
analysis that may tell us whether or not we want to go out and actually
characterize the biosphere. Is there a sensitivity to a high degree on
some of the parameters or models that we\'ve got in the system now?

In particular, they were concerned with soil related parameters, Kd
specifically. And this is the subject of a TSPA KTI agreement that
we\'re looking into, trying to provide better justification of the Kds
that we are using in our modeling.

Exposed group. They thought that the survey, the food consumption survey
we did in 1997, which we\'re using as our baseline right now, they
thought we perhaps provided too much reliance, put too much reliance on
that particular study. They thought that we should consider all human
activities that could occur out there. An example that they gave was
this fish farm that went belly up out there, I guess, and they were
saying, you know, it\'s gone now, but, you know, it could conceivably
return, since it existed once in the past.

And then, again, they thought that the survey, food consumption survey,
was a snapshot, and that we should look at updating that in time.

We did perform a sensitivity analysis in regards to this, and that was
with the receptor of interest, and it was essentially a consumption
rate, sensitivity analysis where we took our baseline receptor, which is
the residential farmer, and looked at subsistence farmers, someone
who\'s growing 100 per cent of their food in contaminated soil. And
essentially that worked out to be about a factor of three effect to
dose, so that would be a bounding look in this regard, although that is
not what we\'re providing for a baseline at this point.

We may look in time at going after another food consumption survey. We
don\'t know of anything right now that\'s going to lead us out to the
field to do that quite yet. It may be more of a confirmation activity,
performance confirmation activity, if you will.

Model development, data, results. Again, I\'m not going to walk through
all these. I\'ll take a look, an example they provided on\--or a
recommendation they had on FEPs and conceptual models, and then analysis
methods and results.

In terms of FEPs, they thought that we could do perhaps a better job on
explaining how FEPs make it into the modeling, justification, if you
will, and a tracking through the conceptual model. They felt it was a
little difficult to follow, and they thought that we could be helped by
looking at the international effort on BIOMASS that has a method
involved that may help us out. And, in fact, in response, that\'s one of
the things we are doing, is we\'re going back through the BIOMASS
material to see if there\'s anything that might help us out in that
regard.

The flow of FEPs into a conceptual model is a TSPAI KTI agreement we\'ve
got right now. So, the NRC is interested in this as well.

Analysis methods and results. This essentially went at uncertainties.
They felt that we should provide a better explanation of the
uncertainties we do have, and perhaps perform some more uncertainty
analysis to bolster our modeling.

We plan on doing that this next FY, revisiting our uncertainty analysis
and perhaps doing some more. We had done quite a bit of uncertainty
analysis in Chapter 13 of SSPA, Volume 1. That information was not
available at the time of this Peer Review, so they didn\'t have that to
consider in their write-up.

There were some things that they did recommend that we continue, and
that was to carry out analysis out beyond the regulatory requirement,
10,000 years. The food consumption survey, although they thought we
should do more, they applauded the fact that we did go out in the field
and gathered information on this. And then they thought that we should
continue to report conditional doses for the volcanic event.

In summary, we did feel that it was a favorable review. There was
nothing in our minds that came out of it that called into question our
biosphere modeling. And we feel that we have a model we can move forward
with. But they did provide 23 recommendations, as I said. These were
suggestions to aid in the future development of our model.

A lot of the recommendations they have we are looking at in the planning
next year. In fact, we\'ve got them in there now, and we have done some
work, as I said, in SSPA, Volume 1.

And I might mention, I don\'t have it on the slide here, that we are
planning to put out a White Paper next year that sort of statuses where
we are in these 23 recommendations so we can keep track internally, and
also for folks on the outside to see where we are on these
recommendations.

That\'s all I have.

CRAIG: Okay, thank you, Eric. Questions?

COHON: Cohon. You indicated that the Peer Review Panel submitted its
report, its final report, in April 2000. I was curious why now 17 months
later, it seems like\--

SMISTAD: That was a typo. 2001.

COHON: Oh, I\'m sorry. Never mind.

CRAIG: Dr. Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Actually, maybe that will clarify this question, because the Peer Review
was completed using TSPA-SR, or was it using the LTOM and HTOM
supplements that were from SSPA?

SMISTAD: Those weren\'t available.

BULLEN: Okay. So, were there zero waste package failures in TSPA-SR, so
less than 10,000 years, there was zero dose?

SMISTAD: There was very little dose, yeah.

BULLEN: I\'m mistaken. You failed one or two, and had the diffusion
release?

HOWARD: Let\'s keep in mind that there are the base case results that
have zero dose for nominal scenario. You do have cases in that document
that would give you an indication of what the doses would be if you have
waste package fails. You have the human intrusion event. You have
sensitivity cases for juvenile scenarios, and then my favorite, the
disruptive events.

BULLEN: Okay. Thank you. That was Rob Howard.

CRAIG: Jeff Wong?

WONG: Jeff Wong of the Board. This is my third question.

You said that you\'re going to add swamp coolers to the pathway
analysis, or you\'re thinking about it. If you had swamp coolers, is it
because of the presence of air spalls from the swamp coolers? What\'s
the\--

SMISTAD: Contaminated water in the swamp cooler itself.

WONG: Okay. So, does that mean that you\'re going to include the
exposure to showering also?

SMISTAD: I think it would be more of an inhalation thing.

WONG: Showering represents significant inhalation pathway.

SMISTAD: Yeah. It would include showering? Marilyn says yes.

WONG: Okay. And another question. When you say ingestion by animals,
ingestion of what? Water? Fodder? Alfalfa from the farm nearby?

SMISTAD: Yes. All pathways that could get into an animal.

WONG: So are you going to then consider the recycling of manure used as
fertilizer?

SMISTAD: We haven\'t thought about that, I don\'t believe. Recycling of
manure? Fertilizer? No, we haven\'t. I\'ll make note of that.

WONG: I have one more questions, Paul. But I must be getting old because
I\'m forgetting it.

COHON: Jeff, could I\--oh, are you ready?

WONG: Yes, go ahead.

COHON: No, if you\'re ready, go ahead.

WONG: In your view, you know, we heard from Dr. Payer about the
uncertainties with the data gap TCs and corrosion. Which do you think
contributes more to uncertainty, uncertainties in the biosphere or
uncertainties in corrosion?

SMISTAD: Oh, definitely corrosion.

WONG: That was a baited question.

SMISTAD: I don\'t know, Jeff. I guess we\'ve never done that.

WONG: I mean, it\'s whether or not to pursue the influence of various
soil types on the BCDS versus pursuit of corrosion factors. I mean,
that\'s a priority for funding.

SMISTAD: This is a priority call, and, you know, part of the aim of
doing sensitivity analysis on these things is to try and figure out
where you perhaps spend the resources.

WONG: Did the Peer Review Group at all talk about dust tracking models?

SMISTAD: Dust tracking\--

WONG: Yes, I mean tracking, where you, you know, if you have a
residential farmer, he\'s working outside, his family is working
outside, he\'s bringing the dust inside. The dust becomes entrained in
the indoor air, and he starts to breathe it.

SMISTAD: I\'m having a real hard time hearing you, Jeff. I\'m sorry.

WONG: I\'m talking about dust tracking models. And actually, there was
some work at Lawrence Livermore National Labs about tracking of dust
indoors, and then having that, you know, as an exposure reservoir, a
constant exposure reservoir.

SMISTAD: I don\'t recall them talking about that. It certainly wasn\'t
in the report, and I don\'t remember it coming up in discussions or in
the orals. I\'ll check on that, but I don\'t recall it.

WONG: I think if you\'re going to expand your exposure pathways, you
would want to be more comprehensive.

Thank you.

CRAIG: Jerry?

COHON: Cohon. Slide 23. Did you say whether you were going to do these
three things? I didn\'t hear you.

SMISTAD: I didn\'t say, I guess. Yeah, we intend to continue to carry
our analysis out beyond 10,000 years. We don\'t know whether or not
we\'re going to step into a, prior to LA, step into another survey, food
consumption survey. Again, this is part of the sensitivity analysis
we\'ll be performing the first half of next year to tell us whether or
not that\'s something that we should spend money on. And I see us still
reporting conditional doses for the volcanic event.

COHON: You say you see you doing it? I didn\'t hear you.

SMISTAD: We\'re not going to be regulated on it, but we produced it in
just about every document recently that we\'ve got.

COHON: So, yes, you will be reporting conditional doses?

SMISTAD: I would expect we would continue to show conditional doses.

COHON: Thanks.

CRAIG: Richard?

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. Of the 23 recommendations that were made,
several you picked on as being ones you\'re going to address. Will you
explain in the White Paper those that you will not address and why? For
instance, the million year time frame of interest was one you just
commented you probably will consider that. The other one was basically
the species, other than humans, ecological concerns, you know, in terms
of animals and\--

SMISTAD: As a pathway, yes.

PARIZEK: No, not to eat them, but those endangered species have their
own value. I think that was one of the international recommendations
made. Are we going to throw that one out?

SMISTAD: This Panel didn\'t recommend that, and I don\'t see us taking
on that in LA space right now.

PARIZEK: But of the ones you\'ll not include, you\'ll explain perhaps
why they might have been made?

SMISTAD: Yeah. You know, I\'m envisioning this White Paper to talk
about, you know, what we have done, and the results, what we plan to do,
and things that we might just not get to, and the reasons why we won\'t
get to them, yes.

CRAIG: Eric, thank you very, very much.

We now move on to our last speaker of the day, Abe Van Luik, well known
to everybody here, not only for his technical work, but also for his
website and his photography.

VAN LUIK: A little abuse is good for a person. This is Abe Van Luik,
DOE. This is an unauthorized update of the Peer Review, and the Peer
Review Team will not be bound by anything that I say that they mean. It
was made very clear to me by the Chairman that I can say what I want,
but they\'re going to pay no attention to what I say.

I want to give you a very similar outline to what Eric gave.

The thing that we asked for is for the Nuclear Energy Agency, part of
the OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in
Paris, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, part of the United
Nations, to put together an expert team and look over our TSPA, Total
System Performance Assessment, for the SR, the Site Recommendation.

These two statements here I took out of the statement of agreement that
we came to with those agencies. We went ten iterations on it until I got
it right. But, basically, they needed to have stated in there under what
authority they carried out this type of review. And the IAEA is supposed
to do services useful in either research on, or development or
application of, atomic energy, international standards, and in fact they
are working on a generic international standard for repositories even as
we speak.

And the NEA has a mandatee for improving and harmonizing the technical
basis for dealing with nuclear waste related issues among its member
countries, and we are a member country.

The primary subject of the review was TSPA-SR. We made all of the
supporting documents available to them that they could handle. In fact,
I think we spent a lot of money Fed Exing documents over there. It\'s
very expensive. Over there meaning Australia, Japan and Europe.

Documentation of subsequent work was also made available. So, we were in
time to have them look at the SSPA and the Uncertainty Evaluation that
we did this year. However, their charter was to look at TSPA-SR and to
consider these other items as they had an interest or felt a need to.

This review, as the previous one, was not under the Quality Assurance
Program, which means it cannot be used for either product acceptance or
validation. But the comments that we get from them are just as useful as
anything else that we get from the Board, the NRC or anything else.

Two meetings were held in Las Vegas in June and August. Three exchanges
of questions and responses by e-mail between the meetings, and those are
records in our record system. However, the review team will decide what
they want to do with that material, whether they want to use it or not.

August meeting, the one that we just finished a couple of weeks ago,
served to clarify questions as well as responses. And the one thing that
we learned, to my dismay, especially in all the questions that I
answered on behalf of the program, is that I often misunderstood their
question, and in fact I generated some considerable consternation
because I was answering the wrong question, and they thought that I was
purposely answering the wrong question.

But this all came together in the August face to face meetings. It\'s
amazing when somebody explains it to you three times, you actually get
it.

They also, after a whole week of meetings, and they worked almost until
9:30 every night, they presented their preliminary observations to us on
August 31st. The executive summary is due by the end of October. The
final report is due by the end of January, 2002.

These were the members of the team. I know these people. Perhaps some of
you don\'t. Materials sciences, we had Emmanuel Smailos, who is a Greek
working in Germany on the German repository program, and he had some
very interesting insights. All of these other people also had
interesting insights, and it was a pleasure to work with them, because
they caught onto what was important and what was unimportant right away.

These are very unofficial highlights, and the point that Tonis made to
me is you can say what you want, but only the international review team
can report its findings prior to the final report.

Now, these are the recollections of one person, me, in the audience
where the team gave an overview of their very preliminary impressions.

They basically said TSPA methodology that we are using conforms to
international practice. You know, it\'s not outlandish.

TSPA-SR is appropriate for addressing the regulatory compliance
requirements that are the basis for the site recommendation decision.
They read that language very carefully, and it says \"likely to show
compliance with regulations.\" They said, you know, we\'ll give you that
one.

TSPA and process models, and this is the big \"however,\" the big
\"but,\" if it is to provide to the regulator reasonable assurance in
the next step of safety, or is to become part of a comprehensive safety
case with considerations that go beyond regulatory compliance, these
things need more work. So, these things were the pat on the back, and
then here comes the big slap in the face.

They said that good choices were made for the waste package and drip
shield materials, but more experimental work is needed to provide firmer
basis for modeling. And Smailos provided his own list for what he
thought we needed to do, in addition to what we were doing. And it will
be interesting to compare that with Joe Payer\'s Committee\'s
recommendations.

There was much questioning of the cladding model, and I think here is a
case where we actually caused them to think about the differences
between Yucca Mountain and their repositories. Their repositories are
all under very high hydrostatic pressure, and in most cases, they are
surrounded by an envelope about, well, up to a meter thick of bentonite
that swells.

So, naturally, they expect deformation of the waste packages over time,
and cladding is not a consideration. And, so, they thought, gee, ambient
pressure, maybe so. So, they were I think very much questioning the
cladding model, and came away thinking maybe they have a point here. But
it will be interesting to see what they actually say about it.

Movement of radionuclides out of the waste packages through continuous
films of water is incredible, not just conservative. And what one of the
gentlemen said to me was this is how we\--the way you model it here is
how we model it in a saturated repository, is diffusion through free
water. What\'s wrong with you guys? You have a dry site. Okay, so this
will be an interesting observation, how they fill it out.

They liked the unsaturated flow and transport modeling basically, but
the active fracture model they said needs validation. They liked the
model, but they didn\'t see that we had a good enough basis to really
have confidence in it.

The saturated zone flow and transport modeling needs additional site
specific work, and it needs a new regional model. As a matter of fact,
Ghislain de Marsily was on the review committee for the 1997 model, and
he called it substandard and just would not let go of that. He says when
you take the boundary conditions from that model, you are misinforming
your model, which is a much better model. So, we\'re very well aware of
that, and told them we would fix it. And he said, well, until I see the
proof of the fix, this is going to be my comment.

This is one that\'s near and dear to the Board\'s heart. We showed them
the uncertainty report. They said yeah, we agree with this. It says you
need an overall strategy for evaluating and reducing. They insisted that
we reduce some of our uncertainties. And part of the reason for that was
some of the large uncertainty ranges we are using may be conservative at
the process level, but they may be non-conservative at the system level.
This is dose dilution, needs evaluation.

And in close questioning of what they exactly meant by this, they said
we\'re not accusing you of purposeful dose dilution, but there are
standard procedures, like three tests, on which you base an evaluation
of whether or not you\'re artificially diluting dose.

For example, if you have, you know, this is a real trivial example,
we\'re very well aware of this one, but if you had datapoints and you
bring in an outlier and cover them all with a distribution that captures
that outlier, depending on which direction that lies, it may be
conservative or non-conservative. Said basically, we\'re not questioning
what you did. It\'s just you didn\'t give us enough information to feel
good about the distributions that you selected.

So, they said volcanism, although it\'s very conservative in your
assumptions, seems to be handled appropriately, if you want to stand by
those assumptions.

More could be done to evaluate human intrusion. They did not like the
regulatory truncation of that analysis. They wanted something more to be
done there.

They actually read through our FEPs literature, and said we have a
couple here that need evaluation because we couldn\'t find them. And
they happened to be ones that are very important. For example, when it
comes to cladding, the metal degradation of their waste packages causes
an increase in volume, and that crushes their cladding also. We tried to
tell them that we evaluated that, and they said, well, you can tell us
all you want. We looked through your FEPs evaluations, could not find
it. And then we went back and looked and said, yes, we couldn\'t find
it, even though the person that did the evaluation was sitting right
there.

So, these are the kinds of things that they picked up on right away. And
in some cases, in fact in a lot of cases, they said only after talking
to you did we understand really what you meant in the documentation. It
is not yet sufficiently transparent, which was crushing to me, because I
thought we had come such a long way from, you know, where we were a few
years ago.

Impressions. These are strictly my impressions. The review was
technically critical, but I feel it was balanced. The experience level
of the reviewers was apparent very early in the process. Even the first
set of questions they asked, they honed right into the important issues
of, you know, what were the meaningful areas of weakness. And, in fact,
I asked some of them if they were intimately familiar with the
proceedings of the Board and the KTI meetings, and they hadn\'t really,
you know, been.

And what they said was, well, you know we do this for a living
ourselves, so we know what the weaknesses are, and we just hope you have
answers.

Instances of critical observations were based on known problems faced in
other nations\' evaluations of long-term safety. That\'s what I mean.
These people were experienced, and went right into where the
difficulties are.

A very important issue for the review team was the ability to compare
safety evaluations of different nations\' potential repositories. And
this is where they thought that the performance measure prescribed by
the EPA and the NRC really was a hindrance, and we needed to go beyond
it.

They said that the time constraint, combined with the locational
specificity of the target individual is rather unique. No one else
prescribes things quite in that way. And, so, they suggest alternative
performance measures for greater insight. For example, one of the
questions they asked, and this was in response partly to the idea that
in the future, we\'re going to be looking at non-human impacts on the
environment, and they said at least don\'t preclude having the
information available to answer those kinds of questions. Look at the
fate of the radionuclides beyond 10,000 years and beyond 20 kilometers.

Now, luckily, in the EIS process, we are looking at those things. But
they said, you know, one of the great benefits of your site is you\'re
not going to poison the whole world because you\'re in a closed basin.
But at least tell us where your radionuclides are going to go in a
closed basin. Kind of a humorous aside is one of our analysts, and you
know how analysts are, but we assume that they will all be taken up at
18 kilometers. And one of the gentlemen said that is a typical
modeler\'s answer. He says we are looking for some semblance or some
indication that you have a grip on the realities of your situation.

So, it will be interesting to see what this comes out, but I think this
is very similar to what came out of the Biosphere Peer Review, is you
look like you\'re ready to address your regulatory compliance issues,
but convince us that you really understand this system. And I think in
the review, that\'s going to have a lot of play on a lot of issues.

CRAIG: Abe, thank you.

VAN LUIK: I didn\'t hear the bell.

CRAIG: You\'re fantastic. I was counting on you to meet our Chairman\'s
requirement for getting finished with the session, and you delivered.

Questions for Abe? Hey, if no one has any questions for abe, we\'re
actually early.

VAN LUIK: How can you ask me questions when it is an unauthorized status
report?

CRAIG: Okay, Alberto is going to ask a question.

NELSON: Just a clarification. Will this group be meeting again before
their final report? Nelson, Board.

VAN LUIK: In October, at the end of October, they\'re going to give us
their Executive Summary, which will be their high level impressions. And
in January, the end of January, they will give us their detailed report
with all of its recommendations.

NELSON: And will the people be here for both those occasions?

VAN LUIK: They will not. They will send us probably by e-mail the report
for fact checking in both instances, and, you know, that\'s the
protocols we\'ve established. We cannot comment on the substance of the
report, but if they say 23 kilometers and it should be 18 or 20, we\'ll
make that clear to them.

We will receive those reports, and they will tell us when they\'re good
enough to send out. You know, we\'ll make them public, in other words,
as soon as we can. They will publish the final report, just like they
did the biosphere report, and I\'m getting 500 copies. So, I hope
there\'s a lot of interest.

SAGÜÉS: I was intrigued by their statement, or what you reported to be
their statement, that movement of radionuclides out of the waste
packages through continuous films of water is incredible, not just
conservative. Did they give any suggestion as to what would be a
credible model to address how radionuclides make it out of the package?

VAN LUIK: It will be interesting to see if they go to that level of
detail. The comment they were making was that, in fact it sounded like a
Board comment, is that the mixture of conservatism with what they
thought wasn\'t very conservative in some cases, and then this ludicrous
assumption which they thought they were talking about here, where
diffusion has a direct pathway with a film of water all the way from one
place to the other, that that really made for a less credible analysis
than it deserved.

In fact, they kept recommending that we do what do you really think is
going to happen type of analysis, and then use that as a comparison
point. Does that sound familiar?

SAGÜÉS: Is it unfair to ask what do you think it will be, what would
happen to get radionuclides out of the package, or maybe\--you don\'t
need to answer this question.

VAN LUIK: Yeah, my gut feeling is that it would basically take away 90
per cent of the diffusion controlled releases. You would only have a
contribution from the advection controlled releases, and probably it
would lower all of those curves for a long time.

Since you asked the question, I thought it was interesting that
something that I did not know, but you may, is that two European
countries are now looking at Alloy 22. One of them is Germany, and one
of the reasons that he\'s making recommendations to us on what should be
done is to basically bolster their case for using Alloy 22. And he says,
\"I\'m not surprised at all by the results you\'ve gotten so far,
because we\'re trying to dissolve Alloy 22 in salt brine, and it just
doesn\'t seem to happen. It\'s always below measurability.\" So, it will
be interesting to see if two other programs now are looking at Alloy 22,
we may accelerate the credible database that we need.

CRAIG: Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

I\'m just curious, Abe, on Page 10, and you really emphasized it, how
quickly they went to meaningful areas of weakness.

VAN LUIK: Yes.

RUNNELLS: Could you give us a couple of examples?

VAN LUIK: One of the areas that they went to very quickly was the lack
of a coherent evaluation of uncertainty at every step of the process,
that it looked to them like there was a real mismatch between the level
of detail of the uncertainty discussions, for example in the UZ work and
the SZ work, and I think those were the two examples that came out right
away, is one looks like a competent model, the other one looks like a
nice patch over a large unknown.

These people had a sense of humor, which was a little humiliating at
times.

CRAIG: Abe, thank you very, very much. And we\'ve come to the end of the
session.

On behalf of the Board, I\'d like to thank all of the speakers for their
many excellent talks. It\'s been a good day, and we now turn to the
second public session.

COHON: And on behalf of the Board, I\'d like to thank Paul Craig for his
wonderful job of Chairing. Let the record show that we ended exactly on
time, which is a wonderful accomplishment. And they were very good
sessions.

We have three people who signed up for public comment. Before we get
into them, you may recall that the public comment period in the middle
of the day ended with a statement by Dr. Shettel, who also showed some
slides from the backup material from Dr. Pulvirenti\'s presentation.

I want to give the DOE a chance to respond to that, and I meant to do it
then, but did not, but we\'ll do it now. And I believe Greg is ready to
do that. Yes?

GDOWSKI: Greg Gdowski, Livermore.

COHON: Maybe you can remind us what Dr. Shettel showed us.

GDOWSKI: What was shown was an EH/PH diagram, or Pourbaix diagram for
lead solubility, and I wanted to comment that a lot of valuable
information can be obtained from that, but as I show on the slide, there
are other things that need to be considered.

Lead aqueous concentrations are controlled by numerous things, lead
precipitates, lead sulfate, lead carbonate precipitates, but also lead
substitution into minerals, primarily calcite. Lead substitutes very
easily for calcium and calcite.

You also get a lot of lead absorption onto mineral phases such as
quartz, calcite, smectite, and one I can\'t pronounce. And also there
has been a large database put together by the USGS of lead
concentrations in the Southern Great Basins, and it includes Yucca
Mountain.

The mean concentration of lead in all those waters is about 9 ppb. So,
it\'s a fairly low level.

COHON: Greg, from which presentation is this taken?

GDOWSKI: From Jerry Gordon\'s presentation.

COHON: Okay.

GDOWSKI: Slide 44.

COHON: Number 44 in Gordon\'s presentation. Thank you very much.

Now, we turn to those who signed up to make public comment, and we start
with Judy Treichel.

TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.

The question was asked earlier in the day supposing you were ten years
out and you were looking at some of the materials that were being
presented today, and it would seem more appropriate that it be ten years
out when we\'ve heard about all of the work that\'s left to do, not just
on data gathering and on understanding the site, but also on
regulations. And even with all of the work on the Peer Review for the
TSPA-SR, it seems crazy that that would now be being applied and that
we\'re on such a race track.

And a friend of mine earlier today talked about some analogies for what
we\'re doing, and one of them was that if someone came to the FDA and
said I\'ve got a great product, and let\'s just in order to talk about
it say that it\'s a vaccine that would prevent AIDS, so you\'d vaccinate
everybody, and the FDA would say, well, show us what you have, and then
we may or may not allow you to sell this. And the answer is, well,
we\'ve got something we think is pretty good, but we don\'t want just an
approval on that. We want to be able to sell it to get it going, and
then we\'re just going to keep working on it. And if we find out that
there\'s problems then, you know, we can back off and whatever.

And this very much sounds like that, just sort of trust us and let us
go.

And the other analogy when it came to Titanium, and the fact that
that\'s supposed to be added in 300 years, if you look at this part of
the country, 300 years ago, it was probably under the rule of the
Spanish, and they may have made some assurance to the residents at that
time, and I doubt that anybody would pay the price to carry through on
some of the Spaniards assurances that could have been given then.

So, it all seems very, very crazy. And there has been some talk about
the hearing that was held on Wednesday. I\'m still furious about it, and
that sort of colors the way I\'m able to talk, but it was the chance at
that point, when everybody got a chance to check their assumptions, to
see how valid they had been, because the Department of Energy had made
some assumptions about the level of opposition and the sort of concern
that Nevadans had about this project. And they had also made some
assurances to us that they really cared.

And last Wednesday night, we were able to check all of those things, and
I suppose many of you know about how it went. But it was very clear to
those of us who were here for that that public opinion and public
comment is really just a little series of triangles on the timeline, and
that needs to get out of the way, and the Department did not care, and
they gave us very, very short notice. The hearings were absolutely a
travesty. They were held in a dreadful place.

I was surprised that as many people showed up as did, because the whole
thing was televised so that people could watch it at home. And, in fact,
my oldest, my son and his wife watched it at home because on the news,
it said don\'t try to go out there. You\'ll be turned away. You won\'t
be able to get in. The place is full.

So, even with all of that, we had a meeting that was absolutely a
nightmare. And it wound up finally about 2:30 in the morning, the next
morning, everybody was worn out and had left, but I would say that
two-thirds of the people that intended to say something were not able to
do so. And that\'s just going to go on the timeline as a checked off
box, and I think that\'s dreadful.

There was also a lot of confusion, and partly it was fueled by the
letter that Lake sent out suggesting topics that people could talk
about, or that he thought it would be nice to talk about. Because
anybody coming to that hearing knew what they wanted to talk about, and
we were never allowed to talk about alternatives to Yucca Mountain. That
was always not the law, and it was never even allowed in the EIS. And
for somebody to have gotten ahold of the PSSE and read it through in
order to give DOE their comments, was insane.

And that\'s what led to the question that I asked earlier, because there
was a lot of confusion, and people still are calling me to say if I came
out there and I said as a resident, I oppose this project, I\'m raising
my children, I don\'t believe that there\'s enough assurance, you know,
for whatever reason was given, it was our belief that they were supposed
to either support the project, oppose the project, but at least let
their opinions be known so that they would weigh in with the Secretary.
And there\'s a lot of confusion about whether those kinds of comments
will be thrown out, as they are in every other meeting that we\'ve had
where you had a very narrow scope that you had to talk about, and that
was why I asked to see what sort of guidance was given.

And, apparently, you just got 30 to 40 people with absolutely no
direction that are sorting through the mail, and that doesn\'t make
sense to me, and I don\'t think I believe it. And for us to be told now
by Lake when he was answering a question that came from the Board that
DOE is working on ways to increase public involvement, and here we are
screaming through the hearings and heading, you know, full force toward
the site recommendation, it seems just a little late, and it seems very
disingenuine, and I would say that it\'s just sort of adding insult to
injury.

Thank you.

COHON: Thank you, Judy. I\'m interested by that metaphor you, or the
parallel you drew with an AIDS vaccine. And, actually, that\'s worth
thinking about, because, you know, new drugs go through different phases
of trials, including clinical trials, which in fact carry risks to the
volunteers in the trials, and some people die during trials. And the
whole question\--

TREICHEL: They usually start with people who are dying anyway.

COHON: No, actually that\'s not true. I\'m not arguing with you. I\'m
just saying that that\'s a very interesting parallel to think about.
Just to demonstrate the point, in response to your question that
they\'re usually very sick anyhow, you may have read about the
difficulty that Johns Hopkins University went through, and they lost
their NIH funding for several days. That was the death of a completely
healthy volunteer, who had no symptoms of any kind, who died in their
clinical trial.

Now, the point of all this is that is a very well developed system,
based on a phased approach where you try to learn, and you learn, and
you learn, you actually try it out. Now, I\'m not saying that\'s what
ought to be done here. I\'m just saying that, in fact, there is some
precedent for that.

TREICHEL: Do you want a volunteer?

COHON: Judy, if you want anybody else to hear you, you have to talk\--

TREICHEL: Oh, never mind.

COHON: The key word was volunteer. That\'s a good point.

Tom McGowan. Now, before, Mr. McGowan accused me of looming when I stood
over there, not lurking, but looming. I loom. But now I\'m going to sit
down.

(Mr. McGowan\'s complete written comments are attached hereto as an
appendix.)

MCGOWAN: Thank you. Wonderful guy. Anybody got any lights? It\'s the
public light; right?

The reason that the Europeans misunderstood Dr. Van Luik is because he
also happens to be European. Is that correct?

VAN LUIK: Yes, sir.

MCGOWAN: Dutch?

VAN LUIK: Yes.

MCGOWAN: And I am advised that in fact, the Dutch invented the toilet
seat. And a hundred years ago, the Germans invented the hole in the
middle. So they do have some basis of discussion. That\'s all right, Dr.
Van Luik.

Are you ready for this? Now, here\'s the public comment. That was
whatever you guys do.

Tom McGowan, individual member of the human and universal public\--how
do you like that\--residing in Las Vegas, Nevada. I\'ll cut directly to
the bone.

On axiomatic grounds, and I won\'t belabor that, the official generic
\"you\" inclusively are engaged in a prior knowledgeable, willful,
deliberate and intentionally malicious conspiracy to commit the crime of
mass genocide on a historically unprecedented human and universal scale,
intergenerationally, and in perpetuity.

It doesn\'t make you a bad guy. You\'re all very nice, good and decent
people. Believe it or not, Eichman had a great yin for music. He was a
connoisseur of fine beers. Swell guy. Had great clothing and everything
else, and he was miles away, okay, from wherever the action took place.
It was horrendous. Separated by time and distance, but guess what? A
tribunal at Neurenburg said that\'s not a competent legal defense, and
it wasn\'t. So, I\'m telling you this right now, this is the first day
of the rest of your life. You\'re not at the ending of anything. You\'re
at the beginning. Think carefully about that, folks, because I care
about you. If I didn\'t, I wouldn\'t even bother with it at all. The
opposite of love is not hate; it\'s indifference.

You will stand accountable, responsible and liable for your acts,
omissions and recommendations before an international tribunal,
consistent with the legal precedent of universal jurisdiction, not
withstanding rank and station, or sovereign national allegiance\--or
whatever his name is. Okay? All these people say they didn\'t place it,
they think they can get away with it because they\'re out of the
country. Baloney. Okay? They\'re going to the universal tribunal, no
question about it, and they should.

The following six questions are directed to individual members of the
Board, and the final question is directed to Dr. Abe Van Luik\--of the
DOE.

Please respond in real time and on the public record, without reducing
the limited time allotted for public comment. Thank you. Which is timed
to consist of five minutes. Any reduction of that allotted time will be
construed as public censorship, and charged accordingly.

You all remember Dr. Jeffrey Wong. You need not stand up. Consistent
with your experience and expertise in the field of toxins and
environmental disciplines, have you ever known of a toxic or otherwise
hazardous contaminant whose enduring term has ensured impact upon
organic life and/or the natural environment requisite to sustain life,
which exceeds the maximum term of the design-engineered integrity of a
secure containment material?

And, if so, what\'s the most effective means to ensure the permanent
disposal of said toxin, or hazardous contaminant guaranteed secure from
the imposition of impactive consequences upon organic life and/or the
human accessible natural environment requisite to sustain life? That
isn\'t to say toxic radionuclides. Is there any other kind of
contaminant that outlives its container? Yes or no?

A simple nod of your head, or whatever the hell.

Dr. Wong, hello?

WONG: I\'m listening.

MCGOWAN: I can\'t hear you.

WONG: Do you want me to answer that question?

MCGOWAN: No, I was just practicing\--

WONG: Yes or no?

MCGOWAN: Would you please?

WONG: Yes. Yes, there are.

MCGOWAN: Yes, there are. Good. How would you dispose of it?

WONG: Right now, the current practice in America is to bury it in the
ground.

MCGOWAN: Really? Case number two. Thank you, Dr. Wong. And to continue
with Dr. Wong just briefly, what parallel concern, if any, do you
perceive in the instance of the application of your response to the
question if and as placed in juxtaposition to the question of the
underground storage of high level nuclear waste, if any? Do you see any
corollary there?

WONG: I don\'t understand your second question.

MCGOWAN: Okay, good, that\'s fair enough. In the interest of time,
we\'ll just cruise right along.

Board member Dr. Richard Parizek, over there. What method of ensured
absolutely perfect vacuum, if any, would guarantee the permanent removal
of 100 per cent of all forms of moisture from containerized high level
nuclear waste prior to its emplacement in an underground repository?

PARIZEK: You mean the container, to make sure it\'s dry inside?

MCGOWAN: Yeah, completely. Before it gets into the wet thing.

PARIZEK: I understand there is a process by which wastes are to be
shipped, and by which the container is supposed to be dried out prior to
placement.

MCGOWAN: Okay. From Frenauld, for example? You don\'t have to answer
that one at all.

And Board member Dr.\--

COHON: Tom? Tom?

MCGOWAN: \--Debra Knopman.

COHON: Mr. McGowan, may I just interrupt for a minute?

MCGOWAN: Yes.

COHON: This is fun.

MCGOWAN: No, it isn\'t.

COHON: But I\'m not sure it\'s particularly valuable. Now, if you\'re
trying to\--if you would like the Board to consider certain issues,
we\'d be happy to hear them.

MCGOWAN: All right, here\'s\--what you\'re doing is called public
censorship, because you have no control over what I say during public
comment. I will be as polite and sweet and gentle as is feasible and
possible. I\'m not here to embarrass any of you, and I hope you\'re not
here to embarrass me.

Bear in mind I will not be an accomplice to suborn your activity, no
matter how well intended you think you are, because in my impression,
and I\'m absolutely unswervable, you can\'t pump that stuff into the
ground without killing somebody, if not in 10,000 years, in a million or
2 million years. They\'re not here today to speak with them. I will.
Okay? I will speak for them. You will not stop me from speaking.

I will submit a hundred questions this week, and then a thousand the
week after that. You will publish them in every single report to the
Congress, to the President, and the entire world, because those
issues\--and all of us combined. If you don\'t believe that, leave, you
won\'t be missed. But I will not\--that\'s guaranteed. Your name is
what? Right, we got that down, don\'t we. It is ineradicable throughout
all of the history, you people will\--future generation. That\'s what
you were deemed, and here you are dealing with this stuff and that stuff
and everything else.

Where is the repository? Does anybody know? Where is it? You are
extremely well facilitated, except for one thing, the word begins with
an I and ends with a Y, it\'s called integrity. But I\'ve got enough for
all of you, guaranteed. You won\'t forget me. I won\'t let you.

And, Dr. Wong, thank you for responding. The rest of you didn\'t get to
hear the questions. You don\'t have to respond at all. I\'ll simply put
down here that concludes my public comment.

Let the record reflect the Board\'s policy of allowing adequate time for
the DOE\'s participation in the democratic process, does not extend to
include members of the interested and affected public of this generation
or any future generation. How dare they do something like that. I mean
that literally. Think of what you\'ve done, and all the work you\'ve
done is\--by that one action, because now we know where you\'re coming
from, don\'t we.

You want to hear the public? You haven\'t heard them yet. You won\'t
hear them here? You will hear them out in the street. You will hear them
in all of the streets of the world, because that public is not coming to
your government ever again. They have lost faith, trust and confidence
in you. Whose fault is it? Not mine. I don\'t make the laws. I\'m as
pleased as punch that Lake Barrett, Dr. Barrett, had the decency
to\--all those letters, didn\'t you, Lake. It did come. You sent them
all, didn\'t you? Or did you give that\--and your signature at the end
of those letters, was that xeroxed, or did you actually\--how many more
letters have you got to sign, Lake?

Who the hell is kidding whom? You don\'t want to hear from me, sir. You
know why? Because you\'re hearing the God damned truth. Pardon my
French. I love Dr. Abe. I love all of you, every single one of you. And
in spite of almighty God, it is you who holds the key to the future of
mankind. You. And you sure as hell will live to my standards.

I\'ll be back tomorrow, or are we allowed to be here tomorrow? Do you
want me to apologize? Forget about it. Never, ever apologize. Don\'t
reinforce a negative. What for? I don\'t make the laws. I don\'t make
the rules. You did. Now live with it. So, if you want to come back to me
with maybe a card or some flowers or some damn thing and say, Tom, you
know, can I have another shot at that, I\'m not really afraid of your
questions. These people are over 21. They\'re allowed to answer
questions. Right, Debra? You don\'t want to hear your questions, never,
nobody wants to hear it.

It\'s simply this, okay? So I\'ll direct it to mid air. How\--science
and technology. You tell me how Galileo did it, how Copernicus did it,
or how any scientist worth his salt did it? How do you do it, and how do
you live with it once you do it? This isn\'t about Yucca Mountain. This
is about human nature and human means in public, Ladies and Gentlemen.
I\'m here to tell you that in my book, as\--would say, you\'re all
right, but you have room for improvement. You could strive to her
idealized standard, and you will do that, whether I\'m here or not.
Because Halloween is coming and I\'ll come back, guaranteed.

Thank you.

COHON: Mr. McGowan, you\'re beautiful when you\'re angry. That last
question was an especially good one about the separation of science and
technology.

Tom, can you\--now, listen to me. Okay? We\'re happy to have your
questions. Questions come in various forms. If you really want an answer
to questions, we\'ll consider answering them, but this is not the forum
to do it. If the questions are rhetorical, we\'re happy to have those as
well. If the purpose of the questions is to stimulate the Board to think
about certain issues, we\'re happy to hear those as well. But, here\'s
the key point. The Board\'s agenda is its own.

MR. MCGOWAN: I can\'t hear you\--

COHON: You\'re very mobile now. I mean\--the long and short is we\'d be
happy to have your questions. Okay? But the quiz that you entered into I
don\'t think is an appropriate thing.

If you would give it to us in writing, we would very much like to have
it. Okay, we\'ll see you tomorrow.

Sally Devlin?

DEVLIN: Mr. Chairman and fellow people, I\'m here because I was remiss
when I did my report this morning, and I didn\'t tell you where I got
all the information, and it was from the Draft Environmental Impact
Statement for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear
Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain, Nye County,
Nevada. And it\'s Volume 2, Appendix A through I. So, if you want it,
this has everything I was looking for. As far as I was concerned, there
was nothing in the PEIS that was really comprehensible.

But I want to talk about transportation, because nine years ago when the
only plan you had was bring the stuff through Pahrump on the railroad, I
said, \"Over my dead body,\" and I\'ve kept true to that. And I think
it\'s most important for the people here, especially those on the Board,
to know what the transportation situation is in Nevada.

And when we had the Ninth International Conference, the people from
Connecticut and Maine, called the Yankees, came and they were wonderful
about how they had closed down one nuclear plant and stopped another,
and so on and so forth. They even lost their livelihoods because
everything was predicated on the nuclear plants. And they said we\'ve
never heard anybody from Nevada say why you don\'t want our waste. And,
so, I stood up and I told them why we don\'t want their waste.

And I\'m prefacing this with that comment, because I cannot understand
how you can do any licensing, or even write the report, when there\'s no
transportation studies. And I am quoting verbatim, as I did in my report
on the first EIS on Yucca Mountain, you had 200-something pages on
transportation, and then you had the disclaimer. You had umpteen pages
on the canisters, and then you had your disclaimer. And, of course, you
use your wonderful word, absurd uncertainty, is what I call it.

So, I\'m using that term in a very negative way, because I really feel
that way. Everything you have done, you have a disclaimer, and it\'s in
there, and I write it in my report. Just read 200-something pages on
transportation, and then you\'ll see that you say, and I am quoting the
DOE, we have no transportation. We have no canisters.

In this book that I referred to, they show you all the canisters for the
DOD stuff, and as everybody knows, it\'s taken me years to find out what
DOD wants to put in our mountain.

If you remember, the Navy came out to placate me, and I wouldn\'t talk
to them. But I did find out how much spent nuclear fuel from the
submarines there was, and there was very little. The other stuff, again
a disclaimer, we don\'t know. You don\'t know. Abe and I don\'t know.
And I don\'t think the Board knows, because this was all hidden. There
are 8500 canisters of something of this. They\'re going to be in steel
canisters, and of course I have to mention my favorite bugs, because my
bugs will eat it all. And this goes, again, to the disclaimer, and this
is rather serious. Now, let me go back to my original thing about Nevada
and why we don\'t want this nuclear waste in Nevada. Number 1, we have
one intrastate highway, and the report came from INEEL, and it is a 9
hazard highway. There is none higher. 160 is a 7 hazard, almost as high.
You cannot come through Pahrump\--I mean, you can\'t go through Las
Vegas, you come through Pahrump. Now, we have no railroads, and of
course you talk railroads.

And when I started, the cost of the railroad was \$1.8 billion. This
would be from Jean down Sandy Valley to Pahrump. Well, I have recently
requested of our commissioners that we get a properly surveyed by a
surveyor with a stamp, the boundaries of Pahrump. We are somewhere, and
I have this from the census, because I did it in \'90, 370 square miles.
Now, that\'s twice the size of L.A.

Now, what is Pahrump and where is a Pahrump and what is a Pahrump? A
Pahrump is on the von Schmidt line, and that von Schmidt line has never
been properly surveyed by a proper surveyor with a stamp, and the reason
is that\'s the boundary between us in Nevada, we\'re Nevadans, and
California. It also is the boundaries between the brothels and the von
Schmidt line and California.

And I always ask the question because I like a good laugh, is where do
these truck drivers go to the bathroom, and of course the answer is to a
brothel or a casino, because we are known as the hospitality state.
Right?

And when you look at the distance between Pahrump and Tonopah, 220
miles, that\'s a long way between drinks. And, again, we always extend
our hospitality.

So, there are no boundaries. I see my pretty Wendy Dixon back there with
the plan on the rim, which is the BLM land also, and that\'s in the
flood plain. Now, we\'re even working on getting a flood plain map. We
haven\'t had one since 1985, and of course Pahrump will soon be 120,000,
150,000 people because of the number of parcels being sold. So, we\'ll
learn some planning if we have a boundary, and so on.

But, again, NDOT, which I hope is being investigated by Senator
O\'Donnell, promised us a four lane road, and of course they\'ve reneged
on this promise. And I\'ve always said if we had four lanes, would the
loads get half lighter when they go on the single lanes, and that\'s the
situation that we have. We have no roads. We have no railroads.

And I\'ll get to something else more important than that. I just did a
report for the governor because we\'ve had three E-coli epidemics or
outbreaks, or whatever, in Pahrump. And I learned there are 107
different kinds of E-coli, and this was the children of our newly
elected district court judge, and they had many problems, and what
happened was confidential. So, when I called the Health Department, they
said it was confidential, and I said, \"Just tell me one thing. Do you
test the water?\" And they said, \"Well, we test the water if it\'s on
the municipal water system,\" which is CalVada, which is a CCNR, and
they\'re about 1200. 8500 of us are on wells and septic. That\'s me. And
if I were dying of E-coli, the state would not test my water.

So, I went one step further, and I said, \"Okay, what if we have
pandemics, epidemics, bioterrorism, what happens?\" The only agency in
the State of Nevada that is open 24 hours a day with 48 hours of
training is the Highway Patrol. There is no hospital in Nye County.
There is a private hospital, a twelve bedder, in Tonopah. We will get
one in about two or three years, a 40 bedder. But that\'s a long way
off.

So, I\'m getting back into you have no transportation plan. Let\'s get
into that. And let\'s get into the canisterization, which is in this
great big book, and you have no canisterization, and you say so. You
disclaim everything. And the worst part of it is to the public, and
that\'s me, when I see 200 pages and then a disclaimer, you not only
have no transportation and you have no canisterization, but what is even
worse is the plans for the future. And that is you\'re trying to rush
through a license in October and then in 2002, and you really have
nothing but, as we say in the brokerage business, blue sky. And that is
my interpretation of it.

And I want to read one little thing, and I think everybody should get
this report. Thanks to Russ, I talked to him about emergency
preparedness, and only our Highway Patrol can handle anything. When we
have had accidents, and we\'ve had a few of them, the only service to us
in the rurals, which all the stuff will be going down by rail or by
truck, is from Fallon Naval Station. And it takes them from four to
seven hours to get to an accident. And if that isn\'t terrifying, I
don\'t know what is.

So, you know I have been to every DOT meeting, and DOT is not here.
Where are they? Because the transportation of this stuff to get to Yucca
Mountain is numero uno on my list. The trucks, and of course when Lake
Barrett\--is he here\--good, okay. Remember when you said we will
privatize the transportation and that will save 20 billion? And I took
great offense at that, because to me, this is government waste. The
government should transport it, and let those people die, because again,
in this book, it says on the workers, 7, 8 and 12 out of 1000 will die
of radiation poisoning, and those are your numbers, not mine, from the
DOE.

So, this is very scary. That\'s 7, 8 or 9 for the different categories,
or 12, out of your book, and EPA says 1 out of 100,000, 15 millirems,
and NRC says 25 out of a million.

So, I\'m going to conclude, but I do want to recommend a book for
everybody to get, and it\'s called \"The State Road and Spent Fuel
Transportation Safety\" and it\'s done by a gentleman\--I had the one in
\'95. This is the current one out of Denver, and this is the list of
what the different states, 22 states, charge for bringing high-level
waste through their states.

Nevada, for example, charges 500 for the trucking company, \$150 per
truck, plus actual cost for investigation. Now, the way the State of
Nevada works, and again it\'s with transportation, you have an accident,
which will happen, and remember me bringing Price Anderson, which is
mentioned in this, you have an accident and the Highway Patrol takes
care of it. Fallon comes down and cleans it up, 11 hours since incidents
have happened. And then it goes to the Department of Motor Vehicles to
their accident department, and some guy says, gee, that\'s not nice that
it caused \$3 million or whatever worth of damage. And they sit up there
in Carson City, and he\'s a bureaucrat and we get these reports.

So, this is the reason that I said to these Yankees that we don\'t want
your waste because there is no way in this world that Nevada can handle
it. And that\'s it. So, I don\'t know how you can do the licensing.

Abe, I\'m sorry, we\'re getting divorced. We\'re not living together for
225 years.

COHON: Thank you, Ms. Devlin.

That concludes today\'s session. The meeting reconvenes tomorrow morning
at 8:30 in this room. At 7:15 in this room, there will be coffee and
donuts and an opportunity for informal interaction.

My thanks to all the speakers and all who participated today.

(Whereupon, the meeting was adjourned, to be reconvened at 8:30 a.m. on
September 11, 2001.)