UNITED STATES

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

FALL BOARD MEETING

September 27, 2006

Longstreet Inn and Casino

Stateline and Highway 373

Amargosa Valley, Nevada 89020

[BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT]{.underline}

Dr. Mark Abkowitz

Dr. William Howard Arnold

Dr. Thure Cerling

Dr. David Duquette

Dr. B. John Garrick, Chair, NWTRB

Dr. George Hornberger

Dr. Andrew Kadak

Dr. Ronald Latanision

Dr. Ali Mosleh

Dr. Henry Petroski

[SENIOR PROFESSIONAL STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. Carlos A.W. Di Bella

Dr. David Diodato

Dr. Daniel Fehringer

Dr. Dan Metlay

Dr. John Pye

[NWTRB STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. William D. Barnard, Executive Director

Joyce Dory, Director of Administration

Karyn Severson, Director External Affairs

Linda Coultry, Program Support Specialist

Davonya Barnes, Staff Assistant

[I N D E X]{.underline}

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Nye County Welcome** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

**Opening Remarks**

B. John Garrick, Chairman,

U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. . . . . . 5

**OCRWM Program and Project Overviews**

Edward Sproat, Director, Office of

Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, DOE . . . . . 14

**NRC Perspective on the Safety Case for**

**Geologic Repositories**

Lawrence Kokajko,

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission . . . . . . . . . 56

**Lunch** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

**Overview of OCRWM\'s Yucca Mountain Repository**

**System Postclosure Safety Case**

Russ Dyer, DOE/OCS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

**Barrier Capability and the Assessment of**

**System Performance**

Peter Swift, Sandia National Laboratories. . . . . . 105

\- System performance assessment process:

site characterization; features, events,

and processes (FEPs); iterative modeling

of components and data collection;

identification of barriers; development

of system model (i.e. TSPA)

\- Multiple barrier system concept:

Quantitative estimates of the capabilities

of specific barriers, quantitative estimates

of overall system performance

\- Sources and types of uncertainty in system

performance assessment

\- Representative quantitative examples of

barrier performance

[I N D E X]{.underline}

(Continued)

[PAGE NO.]{.underline}

**The Role of Analogues**

Pat Brady, Sandia National Laboratories. . . . . . . 152

\- The role of analogues in evaluating

conceptual models, numerical models,

and numerical model predictions

\- Insights into source term, unsaturated

zone transport, and system modeling from

the Pena Blanca natural analogue

\- Natural analogues in Probabilistic Hazard

Assessment, Probabilistic Seismic Hazard

Assessment, and long-term climate predictions

\- Engineered system analogues

**The Science and Technology Program**

Mark Peters, Argonne National Laboratory . . . . . . 182

\- Overview of Science and Technology Program

research in source term, engineered systems,

and natural systems

\- Approach used to ensure that results

from the S&T Program enhance the technical

basis of (and confidence in) the performance

estimates for a Yucca Mountain repository

**Performance Confirmation and Long-Term Science**

**and Monitoring**

Frank Hansen, Sandia National Laboratories . . . . . 229

\- Regulatory requirements for Performance Con-

firmation and Long-term Science and Monitoring

\- Performance Confirmation ongoing and planned

activities

\- Long-term Science and Monitoring ongoing

and planned activities

**Concluding Remarks**

Peter Swift, Sandia National Laboratories . . . . . 246

**Public Comments** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

**Adjourn Public Meeting** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

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

9:00 p.m.

GARRICK: After the trumpet sounds, I should be saying it\'s time to
place your bets. Maybe I should say that anyhow.

Well, good morning and welcome. My name is John Garrick. I\'m Chairman
of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. And, on behalf of the
Board, I\'d like to say we\'re very pleased to be back in Amargosa
Valley. It\'s been a little while. It\'s always a nice place for us to
be, and we enjoy it.

And, before I introduce the Board members, I would like to recognize Jan
Cameron, who is Chairman of the Town Advisory Board of Amargosa Valley,
and ask her if she would say a few remarks.

CAMERON: Good morning.

I would like to welcome you here as well. We\'re delighted that you
could come to Amargosa Valley. Since some of you may know, our town
border, our township border, borders on Yucca Mountain. We are, in fact,
the community that would be most affected by Yucca Mountain. Most of us
are not particularly afraid of that. We are hoping that there will be
some positive benefits from the activities out there.

We hope that you enjoy the day. We did order up some very good weather
for you. It is not going to get terribly hot. But, lots of sunshine.
And, I hope that you all will have a very successful meeting, that you
will come back very soon and visit us here.

Thank you for coming.

GARRICK: Thank you, Jan.

As you know, our meetings begin with introductions of the Board, and I
will begin with myself. I\'m a consultant these days, primarily on the
application of the risk sciences to a variety of industries, such as
transportation, space, defense, and nuclear, chemical. My background and
areas of interest are risk assessment and nuclear science and
engineering.

And, as I introduce the Board members, I\'d like them to raise their
hand so that they can be identified by everybody in the room.

At the top of the order is Mark Abkowitz. Mark is Professor of Civil
Engineering and Management Technology at Vanderbilt University, and
Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Services.

Howard Arnold. Howard is a consultant to the nuclear industry, having
previously served in a number of senior management positions, including
vice-president of the Westinghouse Hanford Company, and president of
Louisiana Energy Services.

Thure Cerling. Thure is a Distinguished Professor of Geology and
Geophysics and a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of
Utah. He is a geochemist, with particular expertise in applying
geochemistry to a wide range of geological, climatological, and
anthropological studies.

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

George Hornberger. George is the Ernest H. Ern Professor of
Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. His research
interests include catchment hydrology, hydrochemistry, and
transportation of colloids in geological media.

Andrew Kadak. Andy is Professor of Practice in the Nuclear Engineering
Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research
interests include the development of advanced reactors, space nuclear
power systems, and improved licensing standards for advanced reactors.

Ron Latanision. Ton is an Emeritus Professor at MIT and a Principal and
Director of Mechanics and Materials with the engineering and scientific
consulting firm, Exponent. His areas of expertise include materials
processing and corrosion of metals and other materials in different
aqueous environments.

Ali Mosleh. Ali is the Nicole J. Kim Professor of Engineering and
Director of the Center for Risk and Reliability at the University of
Maryland. His areas of expertise include risk and safety analysis,
reliability analyses, and decision analyses for the nuclear, chemical
and aerospace industries.

William Murphy. Bill is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Geological and Environmental Sciences at California State
University-Chico. His areas of expertise are geology, hydrogeology, and
geochemistry.

Henry Petroski. Henry is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil
Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University. His current
research interests are in the areas of failure analysis and design
theory.

Since our last meeting with you, the Board has restructured its panels
and we would like to share with you what we have done. As most of you
know, we previously had four panels covering, one, the natural system,
two, the engineered system, three, the repository system performance and
integration, and four, waste management system.

Our experience in conducting Board activities and our design to maximize
the use of Board expertise has led us to a structure of three panels and
eight technical discipline leads. The new panels reflect more of a
systems perspective of the repository from the view of preclosure
operations, postclosure operations and performance, and integration of
the total waste management system.

The Panel on Preclosure Operations will focus on accessing the spent
nuclear fuel or waste at the generator site, transporting and handling
of the fuel or waste, and surface-facility design and operations,
including repository emplacement operations. Board member Howard Arnold
will chair this Panel. The Panel on Postclosure Repository Performance
will cover technical and scientific issues, such as the nature of the
radionuclide source term and the movement of radionuclides most
significant to dose through the engineered and natural barriers. This
Panel will be co-chaired by Board members George Hornberger and Ron
Latanision. The Panel on System Integration will evaluate DOE
integration efforts, including activities related to the integration of
science and engineering, as well as the integration of preclosure and
postclosure activities. Board Member Mark Abkowitz will chair this
Panel.

For the technical disciplines and the lead Board members, we have
organized ourselves as follows: for the Source Term, Bill Murphy;
Corrosion, David Duquette; Natural System, Thure Cerling; Thermal
Management, Andy Kadak; Transportation\--he gets double duty\--Mark
Abkowitz; Surface Facilities, Henry Petroski; Performance Assessment,
Ali Mosleh; and Dose Assessment, I will be taking that one on.

As a matter of fact, we have a sheet in the back of the room that covers
all of this. So, if you\'re interested in having that, you can get it
from the table.

Now, at the beginning of each meeting, there are a few routine things
that we do. One is for all of us to be clear about the distinction
between member opinions and official Board positions. Board meetings, we
want to be sure are kept as spontaneous as possible. We express
ourselves quite freely, and we want to be able to continue to do that.
So, when Board members speak extemporaneously, it is important to
realize that we are speaking on our own behalf, not on behalf of the
Board. When a Board position is articulated, we will do our best to
identify it as such.

Now, let\'s turn to today\'s meeting, which is focused on the safety
case for the Yucca Mountain repository. The need for the safety case
arises because it may not be possible, in a conventional sense, to
demonstrate precisely how a repository will perform tens to hundreds of
thousands of years into the future. However, steps can be taken to
increase confidence in the estimates of future repository performance.
And, in fact, the Board has a long history of strongly endorsing DOE
efforts to develop multiple lines of evidence that can support a safety
case for the proposed repository, such as: performance assessment
calculations; safety margins and defense-in-depth; insights from natural
analogues; and performance confirmation.

To be credible and effective in supporting the safety case, development
of each of the elements requires careful consideration and faithful
execution. For example, the performance confirmation plan should
identify in detail the elements of the performance assessment to be
evaluated, how testing or monitoring of those elements would be
accomplished, how information gained from the testing and monitoring
would be evaluated, what actions would occur as a result of those
evaluations, and how frequently such evaluations would occur.

Today, the Board looks forward to hearing DOE\'s approach to the safety
case. There are five scheduled presentations from DOE on the agenda,
beginning with a Program and Project Overview by Ward Sproat, the new
Director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. We
appreciate Ward\'s presence here, and welcome him to what we hope will
be the first of many NWTRB meetings for him.

Following that, we will be getting a presentation by Lawrence Kokajko
from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Lawrence is Director of the
Technical Review Directorate of the Division of High Level Waste. He
will be providing the NRC perspective on the safety case for Yucca
Mountain, after which, we will break for lunch.

Following lunch, Russ Dyer, Chief Scientist of OCRWM, will introduce the
afternoon\'s presentations with an overview of the Yucca Mountain
repository system postclosure safety case. Peter Swift of Sandia
National Laboratories will give a presentation on Barrier Capability and
the Assessment of Disposal System Performance. Pat Brady, also of
Sandia, will discuss the role of analogues. Mark Peters, from Argonne
National Laboratory, will present the Science and Technology Program and
describe his role in the safety case. The idea here is to try to get
everybody to relate their activities to the safety performance of the
repository.

Then, Frank Hansen from Sandia will give a presentation on two other
important elements of the safety case: performance confirmation and
long-term science and monitoring. The DOE presentations will end with
concluding remarks on the safety case by Peter Swift. All of these
elements are important to the safety case, and we look forward to an
engaging and substantive series of presentations.

Now, as usual, we have scheduled time for public comment as part of our
meetings, and that\'s very important to the Board. You will notice that
we have scheduled public comments pretty much at the end of the meeting,
and we have been asked if we could allow some time just before lunch
today for comments for those who will be unable to stay with us the full
day. So, we will allow some time just prior to lunch for public
comments. We are limited on how much time we have for that. So, if you
can wait until the end of the day, that would be appreciated.

If you would like to comment, please enter your name on the sign-up
sheet at the table near the entrance to the room. Of course, written
comments of any extended remarks can be submitted and will be made part
of the record. Some of you have asked about questioning during the
course of the presentations. Our preference is for you to write down
your questions, and submit them to Davonya Barnes or Linda Coultry over
there by the door. They are seated in the back of the room most of the
time. We will cover as many questions as we can.

Finally, I would like to ask all of you to turn off your cell phones and
pagers, at least turn them to the silent mode.

Without further ado, I would like to introduce Ward Sproat. As I said
earlier, Ward has recently been appointed as Director of OCRWM, and from
all reports, has been enthusiastically engaged ever since. We look
forward to hearing his assessment of the state of the program, and to
learning what he plans for the future.

Ward, welcome.

SPROAT: Thank you. Good morning, everybody.

It\'s quite an honor to be here as the new Director of OCRWM, and to be
the head and take on the challenge of trying to move the Yucca Mountain
Project forward. And, what I would like to do this morning is to give
you a little bit of background about myself, because I know a number of
people on the Board, but I know there are another number of you who have
no idea who I am or where I came from. So, I\'m going to give you a
little bit of my background.

So, I\'m going to tell you a little bit about myself. I\'m going to talk
about the new schedule for Yucca Mountain, and how we derived it, and
what it is, because we do have a schedule that we are going to adhere
to. So, I\'m going to talk about that. I\'m going to talk about the four
strategic objectives I\'ve laid out for this program going forward, and
what they are and why they are important. And, then, finally, I\'m going
to share with you my perspective on some key programmatic issues that
this program is facing that I am personally going to be involved with,
and heavily involved with, going forward.

I recognize that probably everybody in this room has more experience on
this Project than I do. And, so, in a way, I feel like there\'s this
fast moving train going on the track, and I\'m running really fast to
try and catch up and grab on and get on board. I hope that from the
discussion this morning, you\'ll get a sense of how well I\'m doing or
not doing in trying to catch up with this program so far. But, I would
encourage you to, you know, when I\'m done, feel free to ask whatever
kind of questions you want to ask, whether it\'s programmatic,
technical, or whatever. And, I hope you\'ll get a sense of logging into
the glean about this program so far, and the kind of level of
involvement that I have as the new Director in the program.

Could I have the next slide? So, who is this guy who has taken over as
director? And, I\'ve got a background probably different than most of
the previous directors. I\'ve got a bachelor\'s in electrical
engineering, and a master\'s of science and dynamics of organizations
from the University of Pennsylvania. And, I\'m a registered professional
engineer.

And, from my perspective, this is the marks of demarcation point in this
Project, from the science, which is still absolutely vital and will
continue, as you\'ll hear later on today, to engineering. We\'re going
to design this facility based on the insights we\'ve gotten from the
science, and we\'re going to move forward with the design and the
licensing of Yucca Mountain. So, we are consciously making a shift in
the focus of this program from science to engineering. I\'ll talk more
about that later.

My professional background. I took an early retirement from Exelon in
2002. I was vice-president of International Projects in Exelon
Generation, and I spent all of 2002 in South Africa as the Chief
Operating Officer of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor International Joint
Venture, of which Exelon was a shareholder. I was down there as a member
of the Board of Directors of that venture for about three years. I was
asked by the board to come down as COO for a year during 2002 to help
the South African management team come up with and freeze a credible
preliminary design, cost estimate, project plan, business case, so that
that project could move forward.

I\'m happy to say that we achieved the goals we went down there to
achieve, and the South African government is moving forward with
building a demonstration pebble bed in South Africa, at Capetown.

Now, prior to that, to give you another sense of my background and kind
of experience that I\'m bringing to the Project, I was Director of
Engineering for the PECO Nuclear Fleet. So, I was the design authority
for the fleet of plants, Peach Bottom, TMI, Oyster Creek, and, so, as
the design authority, I got a lot of experience and background in
nuclear, commercial nuclear plant operations, engineering, licensing,
construction. And, some of those other jobs back that up.

I was Director of Maintenance, held the positions of Directors of
Maintenance, Engineering and Projects at Limerick, so I have a nuclear
operations background and experience also. Next to the last job was
Director of Quality Management at PECO, and this was a culture
intervention across a 13,000 person company to change the culture,
focused on process improvement and quality at PECO based on the lessons
learned of the culture change we made at PECO Nuclear, at the
(inaudible) corporate level.

So, as many of you are aware, this program has had quality issues in the
past, and has a number of issues around quality culture throughout the
organization. I\'m bringing that experience with me into this job also
to address the quality cultural issues that this Project has. I\'ll talk
a little bit more about that in a minute.

And, then finally, at the beginning of my career, I was Electrical
Project Engineer for Limerick Project. And, in that role, I had total
responsibility for the electrical design and licensing of the Limerick
Nuclear Plant. So, I learned a lot about licensing in NRC space there
initially, so, I\'ve been through a licensing process, written part of
the license application, been heavily involved with NRC staff in the
design of nuclear power plants, and I understand how it\'s done.

So, that\'s the background that I\'m bringing with me and it\'s that
experience base that I\'m bringing to this Project as we move it
forward.

Next slide? So, in my third or fourth week on the job, I had my first
hearing in front of Congress and the House, and I announced the new
schedule for Yucca Mountain. And, this is the schedule. We\'re going to
certify the licensing support network, and I think most of the people in
this room understand what the licensing support network is. We\'re going
to certify that on or before December of 2007.

We have to issue a supplemental environmental impact statement on the
Project. We\'re going to do that no later than May of 2008, and we will
submit a docketable and high quality license application to the NRC no
later than Monday, June 30, 2008. This Project does not have, and has
not had a very good track record in delivering on its promises and its
commitments up until now. I can assure you it will meet these dates.
There is no question in my mind, we are changed and are changing the
management processes throughout the Project. We\'ve got new teams put in
place, a new way of managing this, and we will meet these dates. This
Project is going to go forward, and move into the light design phase and
the licensing phase. We\'re going to meet that date.

Now, based on that I also announced at that hearing the best achievable
schedule for opening Yucca Mountain. And, some folks criticized me on
that, saying, you know, that\'s not realistic. I want to make it very
clear I didn\'t say it\'s the most probable schedule, I said it\'s the
best achievable schedule based on the issues that are under control of
DOE and certain external issues that have to get addressed through
legislation.

But, our construction schedule is to start Nevada rail line construction
by October 2009, start repository construction in September 2011,
assuming that we\'re able to maintain the mandated minimum licensing
schedule with the NRC. Everybody, of course, has their own opinion as to
whether or not that will happen or not. But, that\'s what that date is
based on. We will submit the operating license application by March of
2013, and we would expect to receive, a license to receive and possess
and start operations in the mountain by March of 2017. That\'s the
schedule.

We\'re working to, we\'re putting together the Project baseline to that
schedule. We\'re putting the Project cash flows together on that
schedule. That\'s the schedule the entire team of 2,000 plus people are
working to. And, we\'re going to stick to it. So, that\'s the new
schedule that we\'ve put together for the Project.

Can I have the next slide? Coming in, while I was waiting to get
confirmed for seven months, so I had a lot of time to think about this,
I recognized that this program, more so than probably\--I recognized
this program just has a number of issues that need to be addressed. And,
so, I said it\'s very, very important to come in here with\--figure out
strategically what does this program and its management team need to
focus on and make happen in the next two and a half or three years.

And, so, the first strategic objective, very clearly, is submit a high
quality and docketable license application to the NRC no later than 30
June 2008, and we are committed to do that. The entire project is
focused on it. We are changing the way, we\'re putting a whole different
license application writing and review process in place than we ever had
before, and we\'re taking a team based approach. It\'s not going to be a
group of people over here writing it and tossing it over the fence to
DOE to review it. It\'s going to be very much an integrated,
collaborative approach to write this license application to meet that
schedule, and have a high confidence in the management team and the
licensing teams we\'re putting together to pull this off.

One of the things, just to give you an example of what we\'re going to
do differently, we are going to have a licensing strategy team that\'s
going to be involved with the front end of this process, where there are
teams that are going to be assembled to write specific sections of the
license application. They\'re going to come together, take their first
cut at reviewing their section, some of it\'s been written before, what
the gaps are, what needs to be enhanced. They\'re going to come to the
licensing strategy team, which I\'m going to be on, and which there will
be other senior nuclear people who have licensing experience also will
be on that committee. And, they\'re going to present to us what the key
licensing issues are, each of their sections of the license application,
and we will make decisions from a strategic level as to what the
licensing positions are going to be that we\'re going to take in that
license application, and how we think we can defend them, and whether or
not the approaches that have been, at least some people thought we were
going to take, whether or not we want to maintain that position or we
want to change them in the license application.

And, so, we\'re going to do that right up front, and then the license
application, they\'re going to go up, figure out how to incorporate
those strategies into the license application, and then they\'re going
to come back one more time, and if they come back to say we can\'t do it
that way, we think we need to do it this other way, we\'ll review that
and give them an okay to take a different position.

But, the point is there\'s going to be senior management hands-on
experienced people on the front end of this process, making decisions
about the licensing positions, key licensing positions we\'re going to
take in this license application going forward. That\'s going to be on
the front end of the process, and not trying to be shoehorned in later
on like it was before. That\'s subject number one.

The second objective, which you can read up here, is based on an issue
that I think a number of people in this room and a number of people
outside this room have voiced concerns about for a long time, and it\'s
a recognition that the Department of Energy, at least as has been
organized and focused around this project up until now, would have an
extremely difficult time being a credible NRC licensee to want to
license, to build, and run the Yucca Mountain facility under an NRC
license.

In a lot of cases, it is missing some of the key competencies it needs,
both managerial competencies and technical competencies, and it\'s
missing a number of the key business processes that it needs in terms of
business planning, in terms of performance management. And, quite
frankly, it\'s got culture issues that are broader than just in DOE.

The issues that you\'re aware of that have surfaced over the last four
or five years regarding quality issues in the labs, quality issues in
the M&O contractor, are indicative of an immature quality focus culture.
No doubt about it. And, so, the second objective is going to be probably
the one that I\'m going to be personally spending most of my time on
over the next two and a half years, about setting this organization up
for long-term success in terms of having the technical competencies and
skills, but more importantly, the cultural competencies and skills to be
a credible nuclear licensee, given the requirements of today and the
cultural needs of today, in terms of the quality and the technical
competencies that an NCR licensee needs to have to operate this
repository.

Next one? The third one is something that I think most of the people in
the room are also aware of, is that right now, the Department of Energy
has a number of standard contracts with every nuclear power plant owner
in the country to take their spent nuclear fuel. We are in default on a
number of those contracts, and there is growing potential liability to
the taxpayers of this country as a result of that.

This issue has been festering for a while. There have been some
settlements, and as a matter of fact, earlier in my career with Exelon,
I negotiated the first settlement between PECO Energy and the DOE on a
settlement of the Peach Bottom spent fuel contracts. And that settlement
has formed the framework of a settlement between Exelon and DOE, and has
been kind of the basis for other settlements that either have been
settled or are ongoing.

But, the issue here is that we can\'t keep going as we\'re going. There
needs to be an integrated strategic approach to limiting taxpayer
liability around the spent fuel contracts and taking an intelligent
approach where both sides can benefit from this. And, so, that\'s
something else we\'re going to be directly involved with, and there\'s a
lot of different ways to go after this. I was asked in a couple
different Congressional hearings, well, what are some of your specific
ideas, and I said the reality is is there is not one size fits all here.
There\'s a dead plant society, that the plants are shut down, they\'re
torn down and the fuel is sitting on a pad.

There are, on the other side of the spectrum, you\'ve got the Exelons
and the Southerns and the Entergies that are in the nuclear business for
the long-haul. And, then, you have another group of people in the
middle. And, so, one fix is not going to address all of those. But, a
set of creative approaches to those folks I think can generate some net
win/wins, both limiting taxpayer liability, as well as making sure that
the rate payers who have paid into the nuclear waste fund for this stay
whole. So, that\'s going to be a whole area that I\'m going to be
involved with also.

And, then, finally, the fourth area is transportation. And, my opinion
on this is that this is an area that has been woefully underfunded, and
had inadequate attention paid to it over the last five or six years. I
mean, we can come up with a great license application for Yucca
Mountain, come up with a great design, and we can get a license, but if
we can\'t get the fuel there, we haven\'t gained anything.

So, this is an area where I firmly believe we\'re going to spend a lot
of time, a lot of focus, and start to look at this in an integrated,
national strategic process, where we maximize local involvement on the
route planning, upfront, because it\'s going to take a while. We figure
out how the emergency responder, the emergency plans need to be put in
place along those routes, how we involve the counties, how we involve
the states, how we involve the tribes in planning those routes, and to
get that whole process going, because it\'s going to take a while. And,
it\'s been done before, it\'s not\--we\'re not reinventing the wheel
here. It\'s a process that if it\'s done right needs a lot of care and
feeding, and a lot of public involvement, and needs a lot of work to it,
and I want to get that started now. And, so, we\'re going to devote a
lot more resource, a lot more attention to transportation than we ever
have before on this Project because I think it\'s that vital.

Next? So, my last slide, and this is around what I consider are the key
programmatic issues with the program. The first one is around the
organization and culture. And, I talked a little bit about this under my
second strategic objective. Roles and responsibilities in this Project
still are not clear to some people.

I know the Board expressed some concerns in your annual report, and from
one of your previous meetings about the new organization that was put in
place, and had concerns about it. I spent my first six weeks on the job
doing one on one interviews, and small group skip level meetings in the
OCRWM organization to understand, try to understand the organization as
well as what the people in the organization thought about it. And, I\'ll
tell you there\'s still lack of clarity among a number of people about
their roles, responsibilities and how the various business processes in
the organization are working or need to work.

So, this is an area that we\'re going to be focused on as a management
team over the next three months to try and get this fixed, but not fixed
just from a short-term standpoint, but looking at it from a standpoint
of so given the role of OCRWM in the future, in running this repository,
what does that organization need to look like, or the skill sets it
needs to have, what are the competencies, technical competencies it
needs to have, the managerial competencies it needs to have, and start
to put in place a long-term human capital plan to build that capability.

The second area is about quality, and I talked about quality before, and
focused on this. It\'s very clear to me that this is, you know, before
we had the tagline of quality is Job One. For me, this is probably my
Job One. It\'s about introducing and making sure that the people on this
Project, beyond just the people who work directly for me, understand
their role and responsibility about quality.

In my former role at Peco, where I was Director of Quality Management,
and I learned about, you know, Demmings (phonetic) concepts and process
improvement, and a lot of things around that, one of the things I
learned is there is a key metric called the cost of quality. Some of you
may be aware of it. And, it\'s a very good qualitative metric that
allows you to calculate what the cost is of your organization to produce
the requisite quality of product at the tail end of its business
processes.

And, so, you do that by adding up what your training costs are to train
your people to do things right, what your costs of inspections are for
inspecting quality at the tail end of the processes, and what your cost
of rework is in terms of, you know, poor product got out of the process
at the tail end and needs to be reworked. If you add those together, you
get your cost of quality in a very quantitative number.

I haven\'t done that, obviously, for this project yet, but if I was to
guess, out of the budget for this Project for FY07, which isn\'t
finalized yet, but it\'s probably going to be in the neighborhood of
\$480 to \$490 million plus or minus somewhere. That\'s a lot of money.
If I was to guess, I would bet almost a half of that is going to go to
redoing things that have been done already once, and for various
reasons, they need to be done again. That\'s a totally unacceptable
metric, absolutely unacceptable.

And, so, this focus on quality, doing it right the first time, and
getting that message through not just the DOE organization, but the BSC
organization and the National Lab organizations, is something that I\'m
going to be personally involved with and committed to for the remaining
two and a half years of my tenure in this job. And, it\'s absolutely
vital to this program going forward, and it\'s really, really important.
So, it\'s going to be an area that I will be spending a lot of time on.

One other thing about the organization and culture, it\'s clear to me
that up until now, DOE has taken a position on this project that is what
I call semi-hands off. They have taken an approach that says we hired an
M&O contractor, a Management and Operations contractor, and we pay them
to do this project and we stay out of their way and we manage the
contract and not the contractor.

I\'ll tell you right now that is not my philosophy, and that\'s not how
we\'re going to manage this project going forward. That is absolutely
the wrong way to go for a nuclear project like this. It won\'t work, and
it hasn\'t worked. I believe that\'s a fundamental cause of why we have
some of the issues we have in the culture, and the quality issues that
bubble up through USGS and other places over the years. It\'s because
the senior management of DOE did not provide direct expectations and
hold people accountable in the management teams of all those
organizations to execute this Project the way it needs to be executed.
That changes now with me on this Project.

My vision in terms of how DOE is going to be involved in this Project is
going to be quite a bit different from how it\'s been in the past. I\'m
going to hold my management team accountable for knowing what\'s going
on in the details, and managing this program to the schedule, to the
baseline, and executing. And, I\'m going to do that down through the
management chains in all the major subcontractors also. So, it\'s a
fundamental shift in our management philosophy for this program.

Second is around, again, on quality of the technical work products. This
is an issue about okay, so given the quality issues, that they\'re not
there for the past four or five years, what are the implications for the
use of those work products in building a license application and its
defense. Sandia, we had a meeting at Sandia last week for a day and a
half.

I am very encouraged by the senior management team at Sandia and the way
they\'re taking on this project and their role of lead lab. And, they
fully understand that during the licensing defense phase of this, they
will have to stand up and defend the technical work products upon which
the license application is based, and they are preparing to do that by
doing an extensive set of reviews and reworks of the AMRs, the
scientific notebooks, and the other issues, the other technical work
products that have to come together to support the license application.

So, we\'re going to go fix the problems that are embedded in those,
before we submit that license application. Sandia has got the lead for
that, and I have a very high confidence level they understand both the
importance and what\'s needed to do that to do it the right way.

Third is the Sandia Lead Lab transition, just that management shift
itself, is an area where we\'re going to spend a lot of time and
continued focus. As I said, we had a very good set of meetings in Sandia
last week. I have a very high confidence level in that management team
that they have put together, that they can pull this off. But, I will be
personally involved in overseeing how that transition is coming, because
their leadership of the labs and the science program here is absolutely
critical to success, both short-term and long-term.

The last one is an issue that I\'ve come upon over probably the last
four to six weeks that I think is really important. As I\'ve talked to
people, I think a lot of other people recognize this issue, and it\'s
the transition from science to design. And, you know, there have been 20
plus years of very, very good science on this Project done by worldclass
people and experts. And, you folks at the Board have been involved in
reviewing that and involved in critiquing it, and will continue to do
so.

And, I think as we all understand, the licensing construct for Yucca
Mountain is not typical of nuclear power plants. It\'s not like you do
your design, you get a license, and then you build it, and then you walk
away and just operate it. This is an entirely different construct. This
is about doing some base science, understanding the mountain and the
systems well enough to design a repository that can operate well in that
environment, and then a continuing program of science and measurement
and learning over the next 50 years, 100 years, 150 years, whatever it
might be, to confirm that what we know about the natural systems are in
fact true.

And, if we find things that\--we\'re learning new things all the
time\--we find that things are different than maybe we assumed, at this
stage of the licensing process, we go back and we make adjustments in
the design, or whatever we need to do.

So, we all understand this is a continuing learning process. But, the
key thing is we\'re part of the program now, where we\'re putting a
stake in the ground and saying we now know enough to design this
repository and design it right, and that\'s where we are. So, taking the
work that\'s been done by the scientific community and the science
teams, and giving that input to the engineering teams and having them
design and come up with a design bases for the surface facilities, the
sub-surface facilities, the waste packages, the TADs that is based on
what we know as of today from the science, that\'s exactly where we are
in this project right now. And, that\'s got to happen well, and what
I\'ve seen so far tells me there\'s some gaps there.

It\'s not well understood and a well managed process. So, between
working with the Sandia management team, I think they understand that
challenge, working with my management team, I think they understand that
challenge, we\'re going to do some things to force the surfacing\--I
should say force that integration to occur as we build this license
application, so we have a very good, defendable, design base, set of
design bases for those facilities that are linked back to the science
that\'s been done in that program.

So, those are my really key issues, the programmatic issues that I\'m
focused on right now, and will be focused on for the next two and a half
years as we go forward with putting that license application together.
And, I\'m really honored to be here, and I hope my enthusiasm for this
Project comes through, and I\'m really looking forward to working with
the Board as we go forward.

With that, John, I\'m open to questions.

GARRICK: Let me lead it off with one. We appreciate the enthusiasm and
the focus that you seem to be committed to and giving the project. One
of the problems that we frequently encounter is that when there\'s an
issue or a project, a sub-project that is floundering or having
problems, often the reason given is budgets. Transportation, for
example, is one of those.

What is different in your regime than previous regimes with respect to
your ability to get the budgets and control the budgets to get the job
done?

SPROAT: I would say first of all that with a budget of \$480 to \$490
million a year, budget is not the issue. But, I mean, it\'s just not.
It\'s a management issue about how that money is allocated to priorities
and how that spending is controlled and how the line management is held
accountable to spend it on stuff that makes sense.

So, for me, it\'s not an issue of there\'s not enough money. It\'s an
issue of how the management team controls and allocates those funds to
the priorities that it needs to be allocated to, and that\'s going to be
fundamentally different with me here than probably what\'s been done in
the past.

GARRICK: Mark, and then Ron, and then Henry?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Ward, I haven\'t had a chance to meet you personally, but I want to
welcome you to the Project and look forward to working with you. I
actually have three questions that are somewhat independent, and I\'ll
try to be brief.

The first one has to do with your background as a Registered
Professional Engineer, and as a backdrop, the Board is very familiar
with what\'s going on in Finland and Sweden. We\'ve been impressed by
the fact that they recognize that engineering design changes radically
when you start going through proof of concept, and you create sort of a
test environment, and you learn an awful lot. Is there room in your
program and in your schedule to go into a mode that doesn\'t jump
directly from a design that\'s never been proven into construction?

SPROAT: I would say that I haven\'t specifically evaluated that or
considered that as of late. Now, I would say that Part 63, as it\'s
written right now, doesn\'t really allow that time and approach. Part
63, the way it\'s written, is a very front end loaded regulatory
construct that basically requires you to take the science output,
develop the design basis, and submit that, and then basically build it,
where even the second stage of the licensing process, which is to get
the operating license, is very narrowly focused in terms of did you
build it the way you said you were going to build it, and do you have
your staffing and your qualifications of your staff in place.

So, the regulatory construct for this project is really not set up to
recognize or allow an approach like that. Now, having said that, what\'s
very clear to me is that given the science and what we\'ve learned about
this Project and the various natural systems, there are various degrees
of uncertainty around the various physical processes, everything from
corrosion to infiltration to whatever, and each of these factors, for
example, infiltration has, I forget what the Board\'s annual report
said, but there\'s something like eleven or twelve different variables
associated with that. Well, obviously, each of those variables has an
uncertainty range around it.

Five years from now, ten years from now, we\'ll know that uncertainty
range will be a little bit smaller. A hundred years from now, that
uncertainty range will be even smaller. But, where we are today is where
we are, so we need to put a stake in the ground and say here\'s our
design based on what we know, and this is the way we\'re going to go
forward. And, then, based on what we learn in the future, we
may\--that\'s where I would see those changes coming about in the future
as we learn things about the science program.

But, in terms of a step-wise, incremental approach, design the
repository, Part 63 is not set up to allow that.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. My second question has to do with your comments
with regard to transportation as a strategic initiative. And, I applaud
your recognition that this has been kind of an ugly stepchild, if you
will, for a while.

However, you also mentioned that it\'s a process that\'s going to take
some time because of the need to interact with a variety of
stakeholders.

I was wondering if you could clarify for me how that perspective relates
to a DOE transportation external coordinating committee I attended last
week, where your department showed a schedule that the national suite of
routes would be designed by December of 2007.

SPROAT: In terms of\--I don\'t know the process well enough, and as far
as I\'m concerned, the process for doing that is not finalized yet,
because they haven\'t run it by me, and I get a vote. So, whatever we
put out there in terms of what the plan is, what the schedule is, and
the process for doing it, I can\'t address. I wasn\'t at the meeting.
They haven\'t run it by me. So, I guess I\'m not ready to tell you that
I can defend that date yet.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. Well, it\'s a public meeting in which this was presented
to about 70 different associations and tribes and states. So, it seems
to me that that may be one of the culture issues you\'re still working
on.

Finally, I understand from some of the discussion that you had on the
Hill, you had identified that there would be an increase in activity in
terms of independent review of what\'s going on with the Yucca Mountain
project. And, I believe the issue was raised as to what role the Nuclear
Waste Technical Review Board plays, since it was established to perform
an independent review, and my understanding, and correct me if I\'m
wrong, your explanation was that the Board did not have the complete
skill set to do that properly. So, in the spirit of quality and
continuous improvement, I was wondering if you could identify for us
where we need to beef up.

SPROAT: I guess I\'m missing the context of that interaction, because I
don\'t, and it\'s not registering with me where I would have said that
regarding the Board. We are doing\--I\'ve commissioned three independent
technical reviews on this project. One is on the draft license
application, one is on the quality assurance program, and one is on the
engineering processes. All right?

And, I don\'t think it\'s appropriate for the Board to do independent
reviews of those. If the Board wants to, the Board is certainly welcome.
But, from what I need from a management perspective, I\'m looking for
outside expertise, not involved with the project, to take a look at
where those three areas of this project are and give me independent
feedback around that.

So, for example, like on quality assurance, I\'m looking for people who
have been out there and understand what current standards are in
commercial nuclear quality assurance programs, and measure what we\'re
doing versus what the standards of today are. And, if the Board has that
expertise, great. If that person wants to participate, they\'re
certainly welcome. But, I wouldn\'t turn that responsibility over to the
Board and ask you to do that. Because, quite frankly, I don\'t think
that\'s your responsibility.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you.

GARRICK: Ron?

LATANISION: Ward, it was good to hear your comments, and I follow
Mark\'s comment and welcome you to this deliberation.

I have two questions. One has to do with transportation systems, a bit
of a corollary to Mark\'s. I think the Board has long felt that
transportation does have the potential show-stopper characteristics.
And, to paraphrase your language, if you can\'t get the waste to the
repository, then the best engineering design isn\'t going to make a
whole lot of difference.

But, I would like to get a little more clarification on what you mean by
more attention to transportation. There is a plan which is being evolved
that we\'ve heard discussed over the last couple of years. Is it your
sense the plan is not actionable, that it\'s not complete? What does
more attention mean?

SPROAT: What it means is that me, the Director, is going to have more
involvement in the overall strategic plan of how this is going to be
rolled out. The issue of the national routes by the end of 2007, I guess
they haven\'t reviewed that schedule with me, or explained to me how
they\'re going to, or what\'s the process for developing those yet. So,
I\'m a very process oriented guy.

And, so, that might make sense in terms of they show me the process, and
maybe the process is we need to put a proposed set of proposed routes
out there by that date, and then there\'s an integral decision making
process and collaborative process that takes place over the next two or
three years to finalize those. So, I don\'t know if that\'s the case or
not. If that\'s the case, that would make sense.

But, my point is is that there are issues around route selection, rail,
road, the cask design qualification, the railroad cars that carry the
casks. There\'s just a slew of issues. Is DOE going to own the casks and
the cars or not, or are we going to subcontract that out? There are just
a number of issues that a lot of people have different ideas, and maybe
some people think they know what the answer is. All I\'m saying is I
want to take a very systematic, process oriented approach to putting
together an integrated strategic plan that\'s very much in the public
eye so people understand how we\'re going to go about doing this. And, I
think that\'s different from what\'s happened so far.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Second question, and this is kind of a cultural question. It\'s very
clear that your position is subject to the transitions at the White
House.

SPROAT: Yes.

LATANISION: But, even within the term of this President, we\'ve seen at
least three or four different people occupy your position, and one of
the characteristics, at least from my perspective, that leads to
effective development of engineering projects and other kinds of
projects is sustained leadership.

SPROAT: Yes.

LATANISION: I\'m concerned about that.

SPROAT: I am absolutely concerned about that. And, I recognize\--I had
this conversation with a few folks\--it doesn\'t matter really what I do
while I\'m here in terms of putting together a high quality license
application, a really good design, if after I leave, the whole thing
just goes back to the way it was before. I recognize that fully. It\'s
the strategy and the direction I\'ve outlined in terms of DOE\'s role in
this project going forward, in terms of its leadership and management
approach, is fundamentally different than it\'s been before.

Now, how can I influence that set of issues after I leave? Well,
obviously, I can\'t influence it directly, other than while I\'m here
for the next two and a half years, we\'re going to build a very, very
good high quality credible federal management team. We\'re going to put
in some state of the art management processes, business processes, and
performance management processes, with a top notch quality federal,
senior federal level management team that understands those processes,
have bought into them, that basically will run the project long after
I\'m gone out of this position. That\'s how I\'m going to address it. I
have to.

LATANISION: Thank you.

GARRICK: Henry, and then Andy, and then Thure, and then Bill.

PETROSKI: Petroski, Board.

I would also like to welcome you, and I look forward to hearing more
from you. Mark somewhat anticipated my questions and comments regarding
science versus engineering, and I\'m very pleased that you see it as an
engineering project from here on out.

When we visited Finland and Sweden, we were struck, those of us who were
on the delegation, that their time schedule is roughly the same as what
you have put up, and yet for years, they have been engaged in developing
canister designs, placing canisters in holes, casing them in bentonite,
taking them out, dealing with all the practical problems that can be
really showstoppers. Is it realistic for the U.S. to have a schedule
like the Swedes and the Fins without having already started that?
Because they\'ve been doing this long before they applied for a license.

SPROAT: I think the answer is yes, it is. And, I\'ll tell you why. A
couple different reasons. One is we\'ll always know more next year than
we know now. Either we\'re going to move forward with this project or
we\'re not. All right? I\'m a very firm believer that this
project\--I\'ll tell you the level of frustration on Capitol Hill when I
came to this position is palpable. It\'s like get this Project going or
we\'re going to kill it. Nobody said that to me directly, but it\'s out
there.

So, number one, it\'s time to move from continuous science to the
engineering design phase and the licensing phase, number one.

Number two is the issues that you talked about about doing what I call
practical, prototypical building and experimentation is very much, and
should be very much of this program, as well as their program. But,
it\'s not a series type of activity that can be done in parallel,
because what it\'s going to\--I mean, let\'s face it, we\'re talking
about extremely long timelines for the length of these waste packages.
And, so, another two or three years of prototype testing, or something
like that, I don\'t think is going to tell us a lot more than what we
know now.

I think what we do is we say here\'s what we know now, we put a stake in
the ground, we go with what we believe is a defendable set of licensing
positions, and licensing cases, we go through the licensing process to
defend it, and we come up with the best designs for the waste packages
and the repository that we can come up with now, and we modify it as we
go forward. That\'s the only way we can do it.

PETROSKI: Well, I certainly understand that, and I wish you luck.

SPROAT: We will always know more tomorrow than we know today.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Andy Kadak, Board.

Welcome. I\'ve got two quick questions. Your schedule is very ambitious,
and there are a lot of things, though, that are outside of your direct
control.

SPROAT: Yes.

KADAK: And, you pointed it out when you testified before Congress. And,
I think the one key issue is this EPA final rule, because that will
obviously set what you have to design too.

SPROAT: Right.

KADAK: Can you just comment on what you think that is going to be in
terms of schedule, and how it might affect your program?

SPROAT: The latest information we have from EPA is they are intending to
issue that final rule by the end of the year. I\'m sure it will be
litigated. I think that\'s reality. Now, in terms of what the final
maximum exposure limits are, whether it stays at 350 or goes lower, I
don\'t know. There are a couple other issues that EPA has gone back and
forth on, and where they\'re going to come out on those, I\'m not sure.

But, the approach we\'re taking in the license application is that in
terms of that peak dose calculation and when it occurs, we are going to
present the results in the license application over a span of a million
years, show where the peak dose is, show what the uncertainties are
around that peak dose, whatever the peak dose requirements that comes
out of EPA, we\'ll be able to go to the chart and say that\'s where it
is and how the system is anticipated to act at that point in time.
That\'s the best way I know of trying to address it at this stage of the
game.

But, the last piece is about schedule, and is that I don\'t need to have
that EPA standard finalized in order to submit the license application,
because the way we\'re going to write the application, and the approach
we\'re going to take with it. We will need to have that finalized before
the NRC can give us a license. That\'s clear.

KADAK: The second question is you mentioned that there were some science
gaps that existed based on your review. Could you just highlight the
ones that you think are really important?

SPROAT: Maybe I need to clarify. I\'m saying not necessarily science
gaps, but gaps between what the science program has determined, and what
the engineering program is utilizing as design basis. And, there\'s a
couple examples.

My favorite is volcanism. And, there\'s a requirement in Part 63 to
analyze the consequences of disruptive events, which seismic is one
class, and volcanism is another. And, the screening criteria says that
if an event has a probability of greater than 1.0 times 10^8^, it needs
to be screened in and the consequences need to be evaluated.

Now, for people in the audience, just to give you an idea of how small
that probability is, it\'s about the same probability of mass extinction
of all life on the earth. So, it\'s a pretty low probable event. Most
people would say it\'s not credible. But, we have a very deliberate
process of expert elicitation around that that has come up with a number
of what they think disruptive volcanic event probability at Yucca
Mountain is, and it\'s about 1.7 times 10^8^.

Now, a lot of us will argue that if we really think we can calculate
that probability to nine significant figures, we\'re a heck of a lot
better than we really are. I just don\'t buy it. But, if that\'s what
the expert elicitation says, that it\'s 1.7 instead of 1.0 times 10^8^,
then that\'s the number. It\'s screened in. We have to evaluate the
consequences, which we have done, and we\'re in the process of refining
that as part of the science program.

The gap between there and engineering is so do you design for that, and
do you put magma dams in your repository? My answer is no, you don\'t.
You don\'t design for that. It\'s not part of your design basis. So,
there\'s one example of that gap between the science program, the
engineering, and then there are issues around some of the other areas,
like science and disruptive events, and cement type materials, there\'s
some other issues like that. So, we\'re trying to force the engineers to
put down what the design basis events are, and what the design bases are
for the repository and surface facilities, and to make sure we
understand the linkage between that design basis and the science program
output.

GARRICK: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board. And, I also welcome you.

Between the Sandia Lab transition and the transition from a more science
based to a more engineering based project, it seems like there\'s a lot
of new people will be involved. And, so, I\'m kind of wondering how you
will assure that you\'ll maintain institutional memory along with
getting the right people in the right place to do what you want to do.

SPROAT: Very good question. And, the issue about maintaining
institutional memory is absolutely vital at this stage of the game. The
first thing we\'re doing is as we form up these teams to write the
license application, revise the sections we need to revise, we\'re
making sure, very deliberative about identifying the key technical
contributors to that, the people who really understand the science
behind the AMRs and some of the other technical documents, and
incorporating them actively into the teams.

And, then, what we\'re going to do is make sure we have in place the
contractual requirements that we\--for those who are either near
retirement age, or are working for a subcontractor, we\'re going to make
sure we have the contractual arrangements to have them in place and
capture them through the licensing process so we don\'t lose them.

So, we\'re utilizing the license application team approach to identify
who those key people are, make sure they\'re integrated into the license
application teams, and then capture them contractually for the long
haul.

GARRICK: Bill?

MURPHY: Bill Murphy, Board. And, welcome also, and I have one question.

Recognizing the necessity to transition to design and engineering and
moving things in order to move the project forward, I wonder if you
nevertheless recognize that there are still key scientific questions
that are open or unanswered or perhaps scientific problems that are
emerging, particularly in the context of the relatively recent focus, or
change in focus, from a 10,000 year time period to a million year time
period.

SPROAT: Well, my view is this. While we will certainly know more ten
years from now than we know now about some of these issues, we\'ll
probably also have more questions ten years from now than we know now.
As we get smarter, it just raises another whole set of questions.

If you take an approach, and this is my engineering bent, at some point
in time, you say I know enough to get this project started with a basic
design. I also know enough to know where my key risk driving
uncertainties are. And, from the work that\'s been done in the science
and the TSPA, we have a pretty good idea of, you know, there are a
number of uncertainties around a lot of physical processes at the
mountain. There are only a certain subset of those that are key risk
drivers, have really any significant potential impact on risk of the
facility.

It\'s those insights about the risk significant uncertainties that are
the key ones that I\'m most concerned about. I want to make sure that,
number one, we crank our understanding of those uncertainties into our
design, and our design basis, number one. But, number two, we set up a
long-term Performance Confirmation Program to focus on those.

Obviously, there are hundreds, literally hundreds of different issues
out there in a science based program about the mountain that people
would like to learn more about, whether it\'s infiltration, whether
it\'s volcanism, whether it\'s seismicity, whether it\'s heat/thermal
resistance through the rocks, I mean, there\'s a whole slew of those.
But, only a subset of those are really the risk significant
uncertainties. And, what I want to get this Project focused on are what
are the risk significant uncertainties and what do we need to do in the
long-term to reduce those uncertainty bands around those key risk
significant uncertainties.

MURPHY: Can you identify some of those key risk driving uncertainties
for us?

SPROAT: No. I\'ve only been here for 13 weeks. Give me a break. No, I
can\'t. There are a lot of people out in the audience who can, and save
that question for Russ or some people on his team. I think they do a
much better job than I could.

GARRICK: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board. Like everyone else, I want to welcome you to
this Project.

And, I think it\'s to be applauded that a hands-on engineering manager
has been put in place at this time without meaning to denigrate any of
the former directors. It\'s just that I think it is time to move on with
the engineering aspects of the Project.

I did have a specific question, and you may not have an answer for it.
And, that is the concept of reprocessing has recently been reintroduced
as a potential path forward for nuclear waste. I fully understand that
you can\'t count on that for your license application, but I\'d like to
know how you feel about where that\'s going to go relative to future
design of the repository, and so on and so forth.

SPROAT: Sure.

DUQUETTE: And, I\'d also like to make one other comment, and that\'s I
hope that whatever administration comes in recognizes that a program
like this does need leadership independent of politics. But, I can\'t
control the White House either.

SPROAT: I understand. Let me ask\--a very good question about G-nep and
reprocessing, and it\'s a question that a lot of people have raised, and
let me answer it in a couple different ways.

One is in terms of near-term impact on Yucca Mountain and the license
application. The answer is zero impact. We are not going to be\--the
waste forms that will be generated from reprocessing are still, to some
extent, undefined, and won\'t be defined for a while.

The time frames in which those waste forms will actually be generated
and be ready for disposal at the mountain are out significantly in the
future, certainly beyond, you know, the time I\'m involved with the
Project, or even while I\'m still in my active career. And, so, from
that standpoint, the approach we\'re taking on licensing here is that
when those waste forms are defined sometime in the future, and we
understand what those waste forms are, and the types of waste packages
that are needed to dispose of them, we\'ll put in a license amendment at
that point in time to qualify those waste packages and put them in Yucca
Mountain at that point in time in the future.

But, in terms of today and what we know, we\'re going to design this
application based on the high-level waste forms that are currently
defined within the DOE complex, and commercial spent nuclear fuel
unrecycled. That\'s what we\'re going to put in in the initial license
application.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

GARRICK: One more question. Howard? Well, maybe two more questions.

ARNOLD: I add my welcome, heartily, to this.

I just wanted to list a few engineering issues that relate to the
interface between science and engineering, knowing that you already know
about them. But, I was just wondering if there are any comments on
things you\'ve learned recently. One is the post-emplacement criticality
issue, and the requirements, if you take it literally, that it places on
putting difficult to design materials into current designs of the TADs
and other containers.

A second one is the issue of, which comes from the corrosion studies,
the requirements for the surface condition of the waste package, whether
you can stand scratches, gouges, et cetera, or whether they\'re now a
problem. And if they are a problem, what do you have as a surface spec,
and what kinds of inspection can you do after you\'ve handled that
thing, and what repair procedures you have, and so on and so forth. All
these, there\'s a bunch of issues there.

And, of course, the elephant in the room is the issue of thermal
management. There\'s a host of issues there which go to the fundamentals
of aging, what you can load into packages, even the choice of spacing of
drifts. I\'ve only touched the surface, but I know you\'re aware of
these, and they are things that have to be followed.

SPROAT: Right. And, I\'d love to get into the specifics of each one, but
I\'m really not the right person to do that. What I can tell you is is
that each of those issues are a really good example of what I\'d call
that gap between the science and the engineering program, where an issue
has been identified and a tentative solution has been developed that is
either not implementable or just not practical. And, so, we\'re in the
process right now as we go through putting the license application
together, identifying those issues and coming up with specific
strategies, licensing strategies that we\'re going to take, and
licensing positions we\'re going to take in the application to address
each of those.

And, I can talk to you off line about some of those. But, like, for
example, the issue of surface finish on the waste packages. I mean, just
not credible or practicable to have certain high quality, high gloss
surface finishes on waste packages you\'re going to put in a tunnel
underground. I mean, it\'s just not. That\'s not the answer to the
issue.

So, all I\'ll say is that we\'re going to be working those issues very
aggressively over the next six months to make sure we get a very good,
defendable, credible solution to the issue, and present that in the
license application.

ARNOLD: Thank you.

GARRICK: And, finally, George?

HORNBERGER: I certainly don\'t want to be the only one to not welcome
you. So, welcome.

I just had a question that arose when you gave your example about
volcanism, and other comments you made about having a risk based
program. As scientists and engineers, we certainly understand that, and
we understand very well how we would like to measure risk in basically
one dimension. But, we also know that that\'s not how people make
judgments, and I\'m just curious whether there\'s any room in your
concept for design for perhaps considering magma barrier, even though
it\'s not on the one dimensional risk axis, but it might lead to greater
public confidence.

SPROAT: Well, without getting into the specifics of it, obviously, the
whole concept of Part 63 is a risk informed performance based design.
It\'s not risk based design. So, the idea is to understand the risks of
both the natural system, as well as the engineered systems, and to make
informed performance decisions about what to design for, where your key
risk areas and what to design for.

And, that\'s, as the licensee, that\'s our responsibility. And, once we
take that position, it\'s also our responsibility to present that to the
NRC, defend our position, hopefully defend it successfully, and make
that the license design basis for the facility.

And, I\'ll tell you we\'re going to be making that the set of those
decisions through all of the design issues on this repository over the
next six to nine months. And, you know, I\'ll just give you that
example. You might say well, you know, if you put magma dams in, it
would give the public more confidence. Well, the first question is do
you design for something that has the same probability as mass
extinction of life on the earth? I think the answer is no. But, if you
say the answer is yes and want to debate that in the NRC, you know,
that\'s fine.

But, if you decide you\'re going to make that part of your design basis,
the next question is okay, Mr. Licensee, so talk to me about your design
for magma dams, how are you going to qualify it, how are you going to
know they\'re going to do what they\'re supposed to do? All of a sudden
you\'re down the road, not only have you conceded the point that it\'s a
significant risk, which I\'d argue that 1.7 time 10^8^ is not, but now
you\'ve conceded that point, so now I\'ve got to figure out how to
design and qualify magma dams. I say that is a path to failure. So,
that\'s my answer and that\'s the approach we\'re going to take in terms
of coming up with what I think is a defendable, credible design basis
for Yucca Mountain.

GARRICK: All right. Ward, we really appreciate the candidness and
forthrightness with which you\--

SPROAT: Probably too candid, wasn\'t it.

GARRICK: It\'s welcomed, and we look forward to doing this many times in
the future. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Our program calls for a break at this point, and we will do that.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

GARRICK: I have been asked to make a stronger announcement on cell
phones than I made. And, the announcement is that even if it\'s on
vibratory mode, they\'re hearing it in the system here. And, so, the
only solution seems to be to completely turn off all cell phones. We\'d
appreciate that a great deal, because it is interfering with the
communication system. Thank you very much.

Lawrence Kokajko.

KOKAJKO: Good morning. My name is Lawrence Kokajko. I\'m the Director
Designee for the High Level Waste Repository Safety Division in the
Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards at the NRC. And, I say
designee because Bill Reemer, a person who I happen to respect a great
deal, is retiring, and Bill, where are you? I don\'t see. There he is.
Is it still true you\'re retiring? That\'s too bad.

Bill Reemer is retiring after 29 years of federal service, I believe. He
has been a great mentor to me. He\'s been an outstanding individual to
work with, and I have to tell you he will be missed a lot, and he leaves
some very large shoes for me to fill. And, I wish Bill Reemer well in
his retirement.

I\'d also like to introduce two people who will be joining the High
Level Waste Program at the NRC. Jack Davis. Jack Davis is going to take
over my position as the Technical Review Directorate, and be a Deputy
Director in our program. And, Abby Mosini. Abby is back there. He\'s
going to take Elmo Collins\' spot. He is going to take over the
Licensing and Inspection Directorate. Elmo Collins is going to be in
charge of the entire inspection program in Nuclear Reactor Regulations.

Today, I\'m going to talk a little bit on the perspectives of the safety
approach, which is embodied in 10 CFR, Part 63, which is our regulation
for the repository. And, I\'m going to talk about the perspectives from
both an operational and preclosure phase as well as the postclosure
phase. And, first, let me say that I recognize that this is the first
time I\'ve been to the TRB before, and, however, I have spoken with Dr.
Garrick and Dr. Hornberger before at ACNW, and I think I told you then I
had the best job in the house, and I think you laughed at me, and
you\'re right, that was wrong. This is the best job in the house.

Next slide. Thank you. I\'m going to talk about a few things. I\'m going
to talk about roles and responsibilities, the safety approach, the
objectives of the risk informed approach, as codified in Part 63, and,
of course, our confidence in safety.

Next. If there\'s one thing I would like to leave you with, and make
sure everyone understands, is that NRC and DOE have very different roles
in the review of the repository. DOE is responsible for the design,
construction and operation, and NRC is an independent agency, an
independent regulator. We don\'t participate in site selection, and we
don\'t participate in design. However, we do assure that DOE complies
with Part 63 and any other portions of 10 CFR that are deemed
applicable. Some of those other applicable regulations are 10 CFR, Part
20, which is radiation protections to workers; 21, non-conformance
reports, notices to workers; and Part 19, 73, which is security. These
are things that we will be monitoring across a spectrum of regulations,
although the controlling one will be Part 63. And, of course, I hasten
to mention 71, which is transportation.

The review scope will be determined by the application presented. This
is not any different in any other application we have reviewed in
context of our regulatory responsibilities. And, as many of you know, we
have been engaged in many years of pre-licensing activities and many of
you have been associated with the technical exchange we\'ve held, not
only on the key technical issues, but also some of the more engineering
design approaches that DOE has suggested.

Next slide. Part 63 approach is a phased or multi-step approach, and
this approach sets up very defined decision points. The construction
authorization, the license to receive and possess, and the permanent
closure phase. These steps or phases allow for decisions to be made
incrementally at logical points in the development of the repository.
The approach allows for continual learning between the steps that can be
expected to enhance confidence in the safety as each subsequent decision
is based upon new information. The requirement to have the capability
throughout these steps allows for the possibility that if new
information demonstrates that the repository will not be safe, then
whatever waste has been emplaced can be retrieved. And, we do have a
retrievability section in Part 63.

Next, please. More specifically, the Performance Confirmation Program is
directed by our regulations as a program that continues to collect
information to confirm the technical basis for the safety decision made
at the construction authorization step. The performance confirmation
continues to collect information until the time of permanent closure.
And, I\'m going to talk a little bit more about this.

Next, please. The safety approach in NRC\'s regulations contain three
primary aspects: safety analyses that quantify the performance of the
repository and are used to help identify barriers that are relied on to
ensure safety; plans or procedures for safety; and, the continued
oversight of safety. And, I will expand on these, but I hope you will
see at the end that this is indicative of a comprehensive approach
that\'s taken with the totality of information that we have available.

Next. Safety assessments are required for evaluating radiological
exposures for the operational and postclosure phases. Quantification of
safety with respect to dose limits provide an understanding of how
structures, systems and components are important to safety during the
operational phase and how barriers important to waste isolation
contribute to safety during the postclosure period. Importantly, the
postclosure safety assessment is updated with new information from the
Performance Confirmation Program I spoke of earlier, and at those
decision points for the license to receive and possess, and the
amendment for permanent closure. Of course, each of the safety
assessments are subject to NRC review and approval.

Next. Beyond the safety assessment, we also know that there will be
plans and procedures that will be put in place. This provides further
assurance that any safety limits, license conditions are met. For
example, during operations, procedures are required to ensure that
personnel performing the operations are appropriately trained, tested,
certified and requalified. If an event were to happen, we require that
emergency plans are in place. And, this is in addition to anything that
would be normally part of the program, such as quality assurance
programs, engineering design and control procedures, and, of course,
standard and off-normal operating procedures.

I\'d like to digress for just a moment and suggest that DOE at a
technical exchange meeting earlier this year did commit to a systematic
approach to training, for example, which is state of the art process to
qualify and certify trained personnel for nuclear facilities. The
reactor community has been doing this for many years, and I think it was
a\--I\'d like to commend DOE, commend, which I don\'t say that very
often, DOE for committing in that management meeting and technical
exchange to that process, because I think it is a worthwhile program to
do, but also I think it puts the program in better shape for our review,
because that will be a significant thing. And, I would encourage DOE to
make further commitments at those technical exchanges and management
meetings.

For the postclosure period, I previously talked of the Performance
Confirmation Program, and the associated capability to retrieve as a
means to enhance confidence prior to the decision to close the
repository.

Next, please. Continued oversight of safety. Even after closure of the
repository, the regulations prescribe plans for continued oversight and
repository monitoring. Although this continued oversight of safety is
expected to add to the assurance of safety after closure, the
performance assessment of the postclosure period is not allowed to take
account of any additional assurance provided by the continued oversight.
This is a prudent approach due to the uncertainties of society to
continue these oversight activities over periods of thousands of years.

NRC, of course, will review these plans for our review and approval.
And, at that point, DOE would be the sole federal agency implementing
the plan and doing the oversight from that point over.

Next, please. The objectives of risk informed approach. As promulgated
in Part 63\--and I want to stress that it\'s risk informed, not risk
based\--simply put, this approach is implemented in the regulation by
specifying a quantitative measure for the overall performance of the
repository, and in this case, it\'s the dose limit, and the Department
of Energy has the flexibility to design the facility however it deems
appropriate.

The performance assessment used to analyze the performance provides the
tool to risk inform the review, understanding the performance assessment
includes understanding the effects of parameters, models, and
assumptions on the meeting of the overall dose limit, including any
uncertainties. All this information, including the independent
performance assessment work that the NRC has done, will be used to
assist in the review of DOE\'s proposed license application.

I\'d also note that although we\'re talking performance assessment here,
in the postclosure period primarily, there\'s also a preclosure
assessment as well called the Preclosure Safety Assessment. And, it,
too, is a risk informed tool that will help our understanding of the
repository during what I call the preclosure or the engineering phase of
the program.

Next, please. I\'d like to point out that although the quantitative
limits in Part 63 are based on overall performance, there is another
important requirement, and that is the repository system must be
composed of multiple barriers. And, this is a defense-in-depth concept
successfully used within the NRC regulatory program, whether it\'s
reactors or waste management. The repository is to include both the
natural and engineered or man made barrier. Understanding the
capabilities of these barriers is a very important aspect of
understanding the safety analysis.

The regulations require the Department to identify the barriers of the
repository system, describe each barrier\'s capability to limit water
contacting waste or limit the release and transport of radionuclides.
And, this information aids in the overall understanding of the
repository system and is a fundamental aspect of risk-informing the
review.

I would like to point out that the performance assessment includes the
natural features of the geologic setting and the engineered design
features, and the regulations also require the performance assessment to
include those features, events, and processes that are detrimental to
performance, if, of course, they have a significant effect on
performance.

I know people think that there\'s not a lot of defense-in-depth in such
a static thing as compared to, say, the power plants, but waste is
buried deep underground in stable geologic formation at a significant
depth. The repository is composed of multiple barriers. And, there is
required monitoring. And, we believe this does provide that
defense-in-depth necessary to meet the intent of the regulation.

Safety analyses are the foundations of the risk-informed approach. The
regulations identify such independent lines of evidence that the
Department should use to provide the confidence in the parameters,
models, and assumptions used in the performance assessment. They could
include comparisons with detailed process-level models, laboratory
testing, field investigations, and natural analogues. And, I\'m pleased
to see that later presentations will cover some of these topics.

The performance confirmation program is also required to provide further
confidence in the performance assessment. This program would provide
information such as corrosion processes and rates for waste package
material, and this information is expected to be investigated until the
time of permanent closure, which is on the order of roughly 100 years or
more of data and research to be collected to provide additional
confidence in the safety analyses. The initial performance assessments
will be updated with information collected over this extensive period.

The license application is required to have a detailed performance
confirmation plan. And, obviously, this plan is expected to evolve
further as the knowledge grows of the natural system, as well as the
engineered systems. The plan needs to describe the types of experiments
and tests to be conducted, both laboratory and in-situ. And, an
important aspect of our review will be the types of experiments and
tests to be conducted as those tests and experiments need to be linked
to important attributes of the barriers, and include any related
uncertainties. NRC review will examine how the repository design can
accommodate the tests and experiments.

The performance confirmation program is a critical aspect of providing
further confidence in our multi-step approach for regulating repository
development. Information and knowledge will continue to grow and our
understanding and confidence in the safety will increase as a result of
this program. And, I dare say it will also be the same for the DOE
program. And, again, we will be monitoring that this entire time.

And, I just want to summarize very quickly what I took in the previous
other slides, which is NRC, as an independent regulator, has an approach
to the repository safety that is iterative, has defined decision points,
provides safety assessments and technical bases for our decision-making
process, and is forward looking with respect to performance confirmation
and continued oversight.

I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. I realize this is at a
high level, but I do believe this is starting the dialogue that I think
needs to take place on this important topic.

GARRICK: Let me start with a question. I guess I\'m kind of curious as
to where NRC stands with respect to its guidelines for reviewing the
preclosure safety analysis. And, I say that because the standard, of
course, is principally a postclosure requirement, and the reactor
business, while it\'s not invoked literally, it\'s invoked for the most
part, we have the safety goals, but I\'m wondering how you\'re going to
make safety decision with respect to the adequacy of the preclosure
safety analysis.

KOKAJKO: That\'s a good question. First of all, in terms of Part 63, the
preclosure safety assessment is required by the regulations, and there
are performance objectives that they have to meet embodied in 10 CFR,
Part 63, and we will monitor their program for that.

We also know that Part 20 requirements are not in abeyance because of
this, particularly radiation protection standards for workers. And, I
think 63, 111 and 112 provide the objectives that they\'re supposed to
meet for both what I call Category 1 and Category 2 event sequences.

Again, the burden right now is on DOE to provide their engineering
design and their PCSA outputs to tell us what their probabilities are,
and if they exceed certain probabilities, what are the dose consequences
of it.

We have been, as you may know, we have been engaged with DOE over a
year, year and a half now, on all preclosure activities, and we are
still in the early stages of trying to understand the design that DOE is
promulgating, without trying to move into a more definitive statement
regarding consequences, dose limits, as a result of preclosure
engineering design activities.

GARRICK: As I understand it, the preclosure safety analysis requires
probabilities of specific scenarios, but does not integrate the
probabilities that we customarily think of as a risk assessment. Is that
still the situation?

KOKAJKO: I would say yes. However, the next step is if you have that
scenario that is likely to happen, you\'ve got to do the consequence
analysis, or DOE can design to preclude it. And, that\'s again the
difference in our\--this particular regulation, 63 being a risk
informed, performance based approach, allows DOE a lot of flexibility to
make those designs conform, and if they do their PCSA and find out that
there is a flaw, they can go back and beef up the design, for example.
This is not very different from the fuel cycle facilities in Part 70,
and they called it there integrated safety assessment, ISA. And, all new
facilities have to issue, for NRC review and approval, the ISA summary.
So, this is more or less under the newer thinking in terms of regulation
of these facilities.

GARRICK: Questions from the Board? Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

I\'ve got a couple. On this preclosure, as I understand the surface
facilities, they were to be more like the things that you\'ve already
licensed, such as perhaps spent fuel storage pools, surface dry cast
storage facilities, hot cells, fuel handling facilities. Do you envision
any major technical problems in doing that?

KOKAJKO: I don\'t. The biggest technical problem I have is that we have
not seen a final design yet.

KADAK: Right.

KOKAJKO: And, I mean, I\'ve said this in many public forums, the
regulatory information conference, I\'ve said it I think at one of the
management meetings, we\'ve said it in technical exchanges, and DOE I
think is still evolving what they want. Now, at the last technical
exchange, which was less than a month ago, I think, we had some
discussions with DOE on their proposed approach, and their phase surface
facilities, you know, the initial receipt and handling. They\'re
proposing also wet fuel storage facility to handle a\--or some
repackaging that could take place there. Again, it\'s still at a high
level, and this was a consequence of their CD-1 approach, or CD-1
decision point. And, we now are interested in those further attributes.

As a result of the systems looking more familiar with what NRC has
typically seen, I think that we should be able to take advantage of our
historical understanding of these facilities, and work through them, I
don\'t want to say quickly, but as expeditiously as possible.

KADAK: The second question is relative to the flexibility that you have
in terms of assessing long-term behavior in the repository. As you\'ve
heard, we recently have come back from a trip from Finland and Sweden,
and had extensive discussions with their regulatory bodies about how
they\'re approaching the licensing of their repositories, which have the
same goals and objectives as we do. And, they have taken the approach
that looks at several time periods, and I\'ll just highlight those for
you.

In the first thousand years, there will be a detailed assessment, quite
deterministic, but quite detailed. In the thousand to 200,000 year
period, they have a less detailed, but still quantitative. In the
post-100,000 years, it\'s quite a qualitative analysis, or defense,
because there\'s a lot of uncertainties, and in many ways, you\'re only
guessing at what the potential outcomes would be.

In the NRC\'s approach to licensing this repository, is an approach like
that permitted in the current regulations, or are you stuck with the
TSPA and prove with uncertainty bands to five orders of magnitude that
you\'re okay?

KOKAJKO: I think, and I will defer to Bill if he has another view of
this. But, I believe the Part 63 can accommodate different things. TSPA
is a tool that is in 63 that we will monitor and use, and we, of course,
are doing our own performance assessment with our own code to confirm
the work that we\'re getting in the license application. If DOE were to
prepare in their application some process by which you could do, you
know, look at these time frames in this manner, we certainly would look
at it. However, we are also driven by the standards that will be
promulgated by EPA, and, of course, we will adopt in our own Part 63,
and the quantitative limits, which I think is, what, 350 right now, they
still have to meet. How they do that, I can\'t say, but we will review
what has been submitted to us.

KADAK: Just one final follow up. Mr. Sproat gave a fairly compelling
argument about magma dams. Would you have any reaction about that kind
of an approach?

KOKAJKO: DOE needs to put it\'s best case forward, whatever it is.

GARRICK: Well, just picking up from that a little bit\--

KOKAJKO: I\'d like to, you know, by the way, I\'ve met Ward Sproat in
other meetings, and stuff, and I think he\'s a very energetic fellow and
he said he was a process guy, you know, as a regulator, I\'m not a
process guy, I\'m a product guy. Give me the product, and I can do
something with it. I can look at it. I can accept it, reject it, deny
it. You know, these are things that we do as a regulator, so we\'re
interested in the products that DOE will produce.

GARRICK: Before I turn it over to Mark for his question, I just want to
follow up because it\'s relevant to what Andy has just said.

Can you say anything about Ward Sproat\'s comments about the
constraining features of Part 63 with respect to design flexibility and
phasing of activities?

KOKAJKO: We have not had that conversation. I mean, Ward Sproat and I
have not had that conversation. But, I am not sure that 63 is that
constraining. But, Ward Sproat believes so, and that\'s his view. I
don\'t believe it is, though.

GARRICK: Okay. Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. I have a couple of questions I wanted to get really
more clarity on than anything else. The first one picks up on Dr.
Garrick\'s question about preclosure. And, my follow-on question is I
understand that these are separate efforts to evaluate the preclosure
safety situation and postclosure. Are there any plans to also look at
overarching issues to make sure that there\'s consistency between the
two cases? Because it seems to me that one set of assumptions begets the
other, and I want to make sure that there\'s something seamless about
that.

KOKAJKO: Absolutely. At the last technical exchange, one of the things
that we wanted to hear from DOE was some type of integration, the impact
on the preclosure work, and as it impacted the postclosure work. And,
DOE, in fact, after the lunch of that day, brought in someone to address
for about a half hour to an hour, some of those integrated aspects, and
we\'re going to focus more on integration of the two approaches as more
the design becomes known, more of the assumptions become known, and, of
course, our understanding of where they are in postclosure.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. The other question I had, and I may be behind the
learning curve on this, so if it\'s a naive question, bear with me. But,
I\'ve heard a lot of talk about the safety case, the safety case, the
safety case. In fact, sort of the topic or focus of this Board meeting
is the safety case. Is there any kind of prescription or checklist or
something that is available that describes what a comprehensive safety
case should include that can be used as a benchmark against which to see
what you\'re look at?

KOKAJKO: Other than the performance objectives within Part 63, I do not
know of a checklist per se. Each regulation has its own requirements.
For example, Part 71 is very deterministic in what they expect for
normal and abnormal conditions of transport, and what the transport
package has to meet. 63 has much more of a, again, product oriented,
here\'s the limits, you figure out the way to meet them type of thing.
So, no, there\'s no checklist per se.

Other parts of the regulations do have it. Part 71 is one of the better
examples. It says you\'ve got to meet this, this, this, this, this. So,
fir, you know, exclusion to water, those types of things.

ABKOWITZ: So, from the standpoint as a Board member trying to understand
from the technical standpoint how a safety case is being presented, and
its associated credibility, it\'s really geared to these performance
objectives, whether in our mind they\'re being met or not?

KOKAJKO: Correct.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you.

GARRICK: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

I think it\'s maybe a variation of what Mark said. Your basis and
philosophy for the regulation, when it extends to the repository, one
element of it is, say, the quantitative assessment of safety as it\'s
embodied in the TSPA. Another one you mentioned is the defense-in-depth.
Are there any other elements that would constitute the risk informed
philosophy with respect to the\--

KOKAJKO: Other elements that\--

MOSLEH: Any other pillars of\--I think it\'s a safety case issue.

KOKAJKO: As I outlined here, the DOE has to present its safety, in its
license application, its safety assessment. And, of course, we review
that and we\'ll issue our safety evaluation report. We also look at the
totality of their program in terms of operating, plan, procedures,
emergency planning, to give us some confidence that they\'re able to
operate the facility properly, and the QA, of course, will be a
component of that.

We do the performance confirmation program, as well as the rule does
allow that if something doesn\'t look, you know, if it\'s a problem, and
the safety is not going to be there, the retrievability is required.

I will also note that in Part 72, which is interim storage at the power
plants, you have to be able to retrieve fuel there and get it back to
the pool. And, that\'s always been a characteristic of these types of
regulations, which is if things appear that don\'t look right, you have
the ability, or you should have the ability to go back to where you
were, where it was safe.

Defense-in-depth is a philosophy that has been promulgated within the
agency for many years, and whether it\'s in reactors where you have
multiple barriers, or whether you have defense-in-depth of multiple
systems, we do something comparable in all the other parts of the
regulations. And, in this case, emplaced waste is deep underground in
stable geologic conditions. It is also a waste package that we will look
at in terms of its corrosion potential, and, of course, the performance
confirmation program and ultimately, you could retrieve it if you have
to take it out of the ground.

GARRICK: Okay, thank you. Ron?

LATANISION: Lawrence, you mentioned, I think I have the language
correct, but the testing in the preclosure period would be something you
would not only allow and expect, but respond to, and, in particular, you
used the example of corrosion testing. And, I just want to explore how
the NRC would respond to the following situation.

Let\'s suppose that in 20 years after the LA and assuming it\'s
positively disposed, let\'s suppose it were determined that C-22, which
is today considered to be the outer barrier on the waste package, were
inferior to a material that\'s being explored today, a spray deposited
metastable alloy. How would the NRC respond to the proposal that the
outer surface of the package ought to be changed from C-22 to some spray
alloy, spray deposited alloy? Is that an acceptable evolutionary process
from the NRC\'s point of view? I\'m not predicting that, incidentally,
for anyone who\'s listening. But, I\'m just curious about how the NRC
would respond.

KOKAJKO: I\'m a little hesitant to respond, because I don\'t want to
pre-judge what\--I know that that spray alloy is in the OSTI Program,
and also the Science and Technology Program, and I know DOE is actively
investigating that.

As an example of what I said earlier, if DOE comes upon a change that
they need to make, they can prepare the analysis for that, and submit it
for our review and approval. And, one thing that I would like to point
out is that embedded within Part 63 is a change process, 63.44, and DOE
is allowed to make certain changes once they receive approval from us to
operate.

In this case, I think DOE would have to go back and look at the totality
of the information that they have presented, what do they need to do to
ensure safety, and given the magnitude of this change, they would have
to seek our review and approval. But, we have a process in place to do
that.

LATANISION: Thank you.

GARRICK: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

Could you go to Slide Number 4, please? I fully understand that Part 63
is supposed to give you well-defined, incremental decision points, but
obviously there\'s going to be some subjective decision made in any kind
of a safety case. It can\'t all come down to just decision points that
have to be met. My question really has to do with procedure, and that is
who\--obviously, ultimately, the Commission itself will make the
decision whether the license should go forward or not. But, who passes
that decision on? Do you do that by consensus? Does a team report to you
and then you make the decision whether it meets the safety case or not?
How do you\--what\'s the procedure for going through that to be sure
that you\'ve met, that the DOE has met all of the requirements for the
safety case?

KOKAJKO: Generalized processes within the agency are once the
application is submitted, it goes through review and approval. We would
issue a safety evaluation report. In this case, a safety evaluation
report would be vetted very high up in the organization before it would
be signed out. If this were something a little more mundane, say a
normal amendment to a power plant, typically, it\'s stopped at a level
lower than mine. But, on something like this, particularly of a first of
a kind and unique approval, this would be vetted all the way up.

In terms of who makes decisions internally and how it gets to that
point, as Ward Sproat noted, in DOE where they have an integrated team
approach, we do the same thing. We have our staff and contractors
working together as a team, begin to fill in those pieces of the SER
that we have to be able to stand behind and defend. The totality of that
comes together and ultimately, it would come up to my level, or the
person who will fill my role in the future, and that would start the
process for the final say-so on the application.

DUQUETTE: Just a follow up. It goes out over your signature, basically,
or\--

KOKAJKO: It would not go out over my signature. It would probably be the
Office Director of NMSS.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

GARRICK: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

In this slide and the last slide also, and we have seen throughout that
there\'s a notion that you and DOE should allow for continual learning
and progressive confidence, and iterative procedures, and so on. I\'m
wondering how you pass on the information that the NRC has to DOE, and
how DOE transmits information to you. Can you just describe the sort of
feedback between the two organizations so that you both are learning
from each other in a useful way that provides for the safety case?

KOKAJKO: Can I ask a clarifying question of you? Do you mean in the
current environment, this pre-licensing phase, or once the application
is received?

CERLING: Now. So, before the license is received.

KOKAJKO: Okay, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act envisioned that DOE and NRC
would communicate on the program so that we would understand where DOE
was going. This envisioned, and as it has played out, we do, DOE has
submitted material to us, whether it was an analysis model report, we
would review and approve it. Through the KTI program, we addressed 293
agreements, and provided feedback on those. Some of those, we had no
further questions. Some we identified further questions. Some were
significant enough that we wanted to hear back from DOE on in terms of
additional information.

We also assumed and have sent DOE letters outlining our expectations,
particularly before certain technical exchanges that we thought were of
significance to us. And, to say these are the things we want to hear
about. These are the things we want to talk about. And, the technical
exchanges themselves are a way to convey information and to understand
the processes and products that DOE are following and developing.

In the post-licensing phase, we would have\--similarly, we would have
meetings. However, once the LA had been submitted, and we were now
engaged in the review, we would begin to send out requests for
additional information, formal requests for additional information,
which defines the regulatory\--the need as well as the regulatory basis
for why we need the information. Does that address\--

CERLING: Yes.

GARRICK: Bill?

MURPHY: Bill Murphy, Board.

Of course a very important part of the safety case is the performance
assessment model, and that\'s used to judge compliance with those
regulations, and I know that NRC\--you mentioned that NRC is doing their
own PA models, and I think that I\'ve watched that and I think that
that\'s an extremely useful practice, to have a separate set of PA
models. And, you mentioned their confirmatory role from the perspective
of the NRC. I wonder if you would comment on the extent to which the
NRC\'s PA models are independent of DOE\'s models, and to the extent
they are, whether or not the differences can be practically used to
identify important technical problems.

KOKAJKO: In terms of identifying important technical problems, I leave
that to the judgment of others to make that determination. But, I do
believe that our model will help us provide additional confidence that
whatever numbers are ultimately gained are right. In fact, some years
ago, I think it was about 2003, maybe 2004, the State of Nevada
requested through FOIA our current approved version of our TPA code,
which is 4.1 JPD, and it\'s available. I mean, the executable piece.
Now, the source term code in it is not, but the executable is, and I
know the State of Nevada has it. And, I don\'t know if members of the
Board have seen it or not, but that\'s possible to obtain because it\'s
out there in the public domain, and you can make your own conclusions as
to its effectiveness.

And, again, in terms of comparing differences, we have not seen the
TSPA. We will be holding a technical exchange with DOE on TSPA, I think
in early November, and I\'m hoping it\'s a very fruitful exchange. It\'s
going to be a multi-day presentation by DOE, and our questioning of it,
and we\'ll be sending out a letter in the not too distant future, which
will outline our expectations of what we expect that meeting to work
toward. So, I would encourage members of the Board or Staff to attend
that meeting.

MURPHY: Thank you.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

I\'d like to find out\--I mean, I was hoping a little more safety case
stuff would come out, rather than a recitation of Part 63. But, from
your understanding, how much work is NRC doing on actual fuel
degradation in the waste package? Because we think that\'s fairly
important, and, so far, we haven\'t seen a lot of that.

KOKAJKO: We have done some. I don\'t think there\'s a lot going on
within my program right now on fuel dissolution and degradation. Spent
Fuel Project Office has done some, as well as the Office of Nuclear
Regulatory Research, but I would have to get back with you on the
specifics of that.

KADAK: And, just to discuss this Part 63 rigidity or lack of rigidity, I
think Mr. Sproat\'s claim or concern was that in Part 63 when you file
this application, you have to make a determination forever about the
acceptability of this repository. And, I looked at your slide there, it
says allow for continual learning, progressive confidence, and I don\'t
see that\--based on showing me that this thing will work for a million
years.

KOKAJKO: I believe our program does provide for continual learning up to
the postclosure amendment. The postclosure amendment, which DOE would
ask for to say we\'re ready to close this thing up, they\'ve done the
performance confirmation program this entire time, we will continue to
monitor that, and once the postclosure amendment comes in and we approve
it, I mean, the hole would be sealed up, again, this is sort of after I
retire, but\--

KADAK: It seems like everybody wants to retire.

KOKAJKO: The DOE would be the sole federal agency at that point to
continue the monitoring of the repository.

KADAK: But, you understand the distinction I\'ve made, or tried to make,
and that is before you even start construction, you\'ve got to have this
thing completely defended for a million years, and this continual
learning is just confirmation stuff. It\'s not really learning.

KOKAJKO: I think it is learning. The hearing says, at the construction
authorization phase, this is good enough and safe enough for our
understanding today to begin construction, but we continue to do
performance confirmation in order to gain additional information.

If it were true that it\'s a done deal forever more, you know, we
wouldn\'t have a retrievability clause.

KADAK: Right. Well, that\'s insurance.

KOKAJKO: The retrievability clause is meant to say hey, you could find a
showstopper out there, and the retrievability clause says you\'ve got to
be able to figure out a way to pull it out.

KADAK: Thank you.

GARRICK: Okay, I think we\'re going to have to truncate the questioning,
because we want to allow time for some public comment before the 11:30
break for lunch.

So, Lawrence, thank you very much. We appreciate your presentation and
your time.

So, with that, I think we will turn the meeting to a public comment
time, and I have two people that have been identified for making public
comments, and one is Judy, and following Judy, will be Jeff Williams.
Judy Treichel.

TREICHEL: I brought in a piece of paper with a quote on it that people
are passing down the way, because I\'m\--oh, Judy Treichel, Nevada
Nuclear Waste Task Force. I\'m sort of the contact for people around the
country to pay attention to this, normally not science kind of people,
and there was an article published recently in several different places
that included the paragraph that\'s on the handout page, and, it has
raised all sorts of concern and whatever throughout the concerned public
community. And, I guess I would like to ask the NRC representative and
DOE representative if they agree with this statement, because it does
seem to have a lot of people\'s questions. So, think about that. It\'s
just a yes or no answer. It\'s not a big deal, but people are saying is
this really true, and it would apply to the two of you, I would guess,
more than anybody else.

But, people are paying attention, and they do care about this, and the
question actually asks, \"Do we know everything there is to know about
Yucca Mountain at this time?\" And, we had a lot of that asked over the
last two days in a hearing regarding corrosion on the waste package, and
we\'ve been hearing about how it would fail or how it would not fail,
but it seemed like over two days of talking about corrosion, that there
were a lot of new questions that came up. So, people are concerned to
know if the people in charge of the Project feel that they know
everything there is to know. So, I just wanted to throw that out there
and have you answer yes or no.

The other thing is that there is always talk about the deep underground
repository, and I think it\'s interesting for you to note that when you
walk outside of this building and you\'re standing out there, either in
back or in front, the repository is a thousand feet over your head. So,
that\'s something that people understand, but often gets lost in this
because it\'s like you\'re putting it underground where it\'s halfway
between here and hell, if you believe in that. So, these are all
questions, and the kinds of things that people think about.

I don\'t have many questions or comments about what was said today
because it appears we\'re in a transition between science and
engineering, and a transition, significant changes in staff, and so
forth. But, I just, because I\'ve gotten so much mail and calls about
this particular article, I just wanted to quickly ask the NRC and the
DOE if in fact you agree with that statement. And, all it is is yes or
no.

Thanks.

GARRICK: Thank you. Anybody want to comment on it?

SPROAT: Speaking for myself, Ward Sproat, I don\'t know all there is to
know. That\'s for sure.

GARRICK: Okay, I guess our next public statement is from Jeff Williams.

WILLIAMS: I accidentally signed the wrong sign up form.

GARRICK: Be careful what you put under him.

All right. Well, we\'ve got a couple minutes, if we want to ask any
questions of either of two speakers from the Staff? Oh, yes, sure. Give
your name and affiliation.

BASCONI: I\'m Bill Basconi, and I\'m a construction worker, electrician
by trade. I\'ve worked at the test site for a good many years, not
currently, retired. But, I started out there in \'64, with the handling
of nuclear projects out there for well over 50 years. We\'re used to it.

I want you folks to know there\'s a good many Nevadans that take this as
a national issue, not a State\'s rights issue. One of the things that we
do feel you ought to emphasize is the fact that it is retrievable, and
more emphasis should be on the monitoring, the temperature, the
available means to retrieve it. That would be more acceptable to a good
many people. We give the (inaudible) system a hell of a lot more credit
than some.

We think in 300 years, there\'s going to be a lot of answers, but that
might be a renewable energy resource. But, most of us are well aware of
the fact that there\'s not (inaudible). There may not even be coal in
300 years. Nuclear is what\'s going to go, and this deal about assuring
it for one million years is basically ludicrous. My God, one million
years, I\'d like to know how many glacial periods we have in one million
years. We can relate to folks in Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, New
Jersey and the rest of them come down here and help us figure it out in
about 10,000 years.

GARRICK: Thank you. Steve?

FRISHMAN: That\'s a hard one to follow, but I\'ll change the subject.

Following up on Lawrence\'s discussion of Part 63\--oh, Steve Frishman,
State of Nevada\--and the sort of undercurrent of discussion today about
flexibility and the license application, and actually confirm
construction and the stages that we know are Part 63, there\'s a point
that didn\'t come out that I think is an important one, and that\'s that
unlike plant licensing, Part 63 does not go through a preliminary safety
analysis report, and then a final safety analysis report. And, I think
this is intentional.

You have a case here where there\'s a decision that only can really
effectively be made once. And, as I read Part 60, and again preserved in
Part 63, the safety decision, an affirmative safety decision is made
only at the level of construction authorization. That\'s when the
disposal decision is made in that rule, and in the predecessor, unlike a
preliminary safety analysis and then a final safety analysis.

So, when we talk about the flexibility and this question of when the
decision really is made\--we know when the decision is made under the
one. If it\'s an affirmative safety decision, that\'s the one shot. Now,
all these other stages where you have re-evaluation, learn as you go,
amendments if they\'re reviewed and permitted, all of these can only be
negative decisions based on the way the rule is written. They\'re only
confirmatory of the original disposal decision if you do not come up
with a negative decision.

And, the reason for this, as I said, is you only get one shot. If you
don\'t know going in and are able to make a case based on\--that is
convinced based on what you know going in for a construction
authorization under this rule, then you can\'t make an affirmative
decision. And, I think it was intentional and I think it\'s really
important, because you can\'t fix it. And, the alternative to money into
a situation that yes is adverse to safety, but you really can\'t fix,
the alternative is even worse than turning it down in the first place,
because it means you\'ve wasted an awful lot of time. You\'ve created a
situation, if it\'s so bad you have to consider whether and try to
retrieve, with some success or not, then you have something that is
essentially irreversible. And, you\'ve lost lots and lots of money, lots
and lots of time, and creates the possibility of irreversible harm to
people and the environment.

So, I think it\'s important to remember that this rule was written
specifically for repository, and the differences are not to be taken
lightly. And, if you need flexibility on the way in on such critical
things as the extent to which you can rely on your projections of the
performance of a waste package because of problems with the site, then
you\'re not ready to have a disposal decision made. Flexibility won\'t
solve that problem. You\'re in a situation where you do need to know
more.

And, yesterday and the day before indicated in that one crucial area
it\'s pretty clear that people don\'t even understand and agree enough
about the fundamentals, degradation of the waste package in the
environment, which is not very well understood. And, this is a key
failure mode for the repository, the waste package. Unfortunately, it
shouldn\'t be, but it is in this case.

So, if you\'re talking flexibility, sure, it may be convenient, but it
certainly is not, in the particular case we\'re talking about, it is not
amenable to a safety case, because you\'ve got to be able to make the
case, and then if you want flexibility beyond making the case, well, we
can see about it. But, the rule I think is very clear that you\'ve got
to have what you need to demonstrate a case, and after that, if you can
make it better, fine. But, you\'ve got to be able to demonstrate it on
the front end.

GARRICK: Thank you. Andy?

KADAK: Just a comment.

GARRICK: You might make it short.

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

GARRICK: We have an 11:30 commitment.

KADAK: Just a comment. I think this is a conception permit stage, and is
a loading permit stage, and then the final federal action is the closure
stage. So, I think there\'s lots of opportunities, especially if the
systems are retrievable, which I believe they can be made to be, to
correct any mistakes that would be made, or to make any engineering
modifications that are required.

So, I think it\'s not just a one stop, you know, final decision when you
start construction. So, unless I\'m wrong, that\'s kind of my
understanding.

FRISHMAN: My only point is that that\'s not what the rule says.

GARRICK: Okay. I think what we\'re going to do now is recess until
12:30. Thank you.

(Whereupon, the lunch recess was taken.)

[AFTERNOON SESSION]{.underline}

GARRICK: We understand that there\'s a long line downstairs of people
trying to pay their bill and get up here, but I think in the interest of
not denying people an opportunity to ask questions and get their message
across, we\'re going to have to go forward. So, with that, we\'ll ask
Russ Dyer to go ahead with his presentation. Russ?

DYER: Thank you, Dr. Garrick. Can you hear me okay in the back? Okay.

As a preface to this talk, let me say something. There\'s been an often
stated assertion that DOE\'s safety case consists entirely of the
numeric results of the Total System Performance Assessment. And, the
purpose of this afternoon\'s session is to demonstrate that that
assertion is wrong. And, we\'re going to talk about what a safety case
is and what a safety assessment is.

Next slide, please. Let\'s go to not a United States Regulatory
construct, but let\'s go to the International construct, and this is
from the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, who came out with a
document this year, geologic disposal of radioactive waste, and in it,
they give a definition of both a safety assessment and a safety case.

And, for those of you in the back of the room, let me read this.
\"Safety assessment is the process of systematically analyzing the
hazards associated with the facility and the ability of the site and the
design of the facility to provide for the safety functions and to meet
technical requirements.\"

There\'s some elements of what I would call the safety case that aren\'t
explicitly included in here, and that\'s things like treatment of
uncertainty and demonstration of confidence in the results. But, if you
look at the definition of the safety case, it substantiates the safety
and contributes to confidence in the safety of the geological disposal
facility. It\'s an essential input to all important decisions concerning
the facility. It includes the output of safety assessments, together
with additional information, including supporting evidence and reasoning
on the robustness and reliability of the facility, its design, the
design logic, and the quality of safety assessments and underlying
assumptions.

There was an earlier question, is there a checklist for what goes into a
safety case. Not exactly. In the IAEA document, there\'s four paragraphs
that lay out the expectations for what need to be covered in a safety
case. And, we\'ll talk about the similarity between expectations for a
safety case, as laid out by the international community, and what the
regulatory construct of the NRC calls for.

Next slide, please. In 10 CFR 63, and the Yucca Mountain Review Plan,
there is a mandate for an articulation of a case for safety, although
it\'s not called anywhere a \"safety case.\" Now, the State of Nevada
petitioned, I think it was a couple years ago, for a rulemaking from the
NRC to revise NRC\'s 10 CFR 63 to, in part, require an affirmative
safety case for the repository. And, they cited the \"International Peer
Review of the Yucca Mountain Project, the TSPA for SR of March 2002\"
for this concept.

The NRC denied the petition because Part 63 already requires that NRC
consider a broad range of information to support a licensing action, not
just a judgment of whether or not numerical requirements are met. And,
it\'s very clear in the Yucca Mountain Review Plan, which is based on
Part 63, that compliance is more than just showing the models and the
modeling results. There is a demand, a requirement for a comprehensive
scientific basis in support of every important model, model assumption,
and decision that\'s included in the safety analysis report.

Next slide, please. The Safety Analysis Report. And, as you\'re aware,
really, we have two components to our Safety Analysis Report, a
preclosure and a postclosure part. And, what we\'re going to be talking
about this afternoon is focused exclusively on the postclosure part.

The SAR will comply with the requirements of Part 63, it must, and will
need to demonstrate, first, a systematic analysis of the hazards
associated with the facility, and a robust repository system composed of
multiple barriers. It must demonstrate an integration of arguments and
evidence that support the finding of likely safety. And, it must include
a discussion and evaluation of the uncertainties in the analyses and
why, in the face of those uncertainties, the applicant has sufficient
confidence in the postclosure assessment to allow it to petition to move
into the next phase of the repository program\'s life-cycle, facility
construction.

So, here\'s where the confidence and uncertainty is treated that wasn\'t
addressed in the definition of a safety assessment.

Next slide, please. To some degree, this slide reiterates points that
Lawrence Kokajko of the NRC made in his earlier talk, and that is that
there\'s a step-wise decision process defined by regulation, and there
are elements of this step-wise process that lead to an evolving
development of confidence.

The license application and its SAR will provide the basis, obviously,
for NRC\'s issuance of authorization. However, during the construction
phase, there will be a continuation of scientific and safety evaluation
work, even after the receive and possess update to the Safety Analysis
Report. There will, in the operations phase, this is when actual
radiological risk will first occur, it\'s going to last several decades
to perhaps a century or so, during which scientific work and safety
evaluations will continue.

And, some of the things we\'re going to talk about in the follow-on
talks are some of the plans for these long-term programs. It\'s hard to
say exactly what we\'re going to be doing twenty years from now when we
may have the benefit of new instrumentation, new conceptual models, but
we can lay out a broad philosophical approach and some near-term plans
of what to approach.

And, then, a final update to the SAR, this is for the permanent closure
of the repository, will be required at the very end of this process,
and, of course, there must be confidence on the part of both the
applicant, the licensee, DOE, and the regulator, NRC, that there is
sufficient confidence in the performance of the system at that time to
actually close the repository.

Next slide, please. So, in the light of uncertainty, how do confidence
arguments figure into this? Well, by submitting a license application
and its included Safety Analysis Report, the DOE states that it has
confidence in the system safety over the entire repository life-cycle.

Does it mean that we know everything? No. Does it mean that we know
enough to have adequate confidence in the system safety? Yes.

Contributors to this confidence, and part of it is what exists now and
part of it is what will occur over time, is a long-term testing program,
monitoring, and the regulatory defined performance confirmation studies
that will challenge as well as confirm the basis of the safety case.

And, let me just do a little aside here. The term performance
confirmation, to some people, has a negative connotation. It sounds like
a program that\'s designed just to confirm what you\'re asserting. And,
this program cannot be that kind of a program. It\'s got to be a robust
enough program to actually challenge the technical basis for the
important things that figure into the safety assessment.

In our program, the current science and technology program and the
performance confirmation program will demonstrate DOE\'s long-term plan
to continually enhance system safety and efficiency, essentially part of
a viable learning and safety culture that will evolve over time.

Next slide, please. We have used things like natural analogues for both
building and evaluating portions of the safety assessment. You\'re going
to hear about some of those this afternoon, but some of the ones you\'re
probably familiar with, the climate and igneous events and processes,
part of our safety assessment, rely on insights from analogue studies.

Analogue insights have helped us create the current colloid transport
model, and there are also other analogue studies helping provide a level
of confidence in other process-level models, such as the model for
source-term behavior, and unsaturated-saturated zone flow and transport
models.

Next slide, please. In the overall context of providing a case for the
postclosure-system safety, we\'re going to have a number of
presentations that follow me. First, Peter Swift of Sandia is going to
talk about\--to illustrate capabilities of barriers that might give
insight and understanding regarding system functioning. The upper
natural barrier, the engineered barrier, and the lower natural barrier.
There\'s a multitude of ways you could break out the barriers, depending
on whether you\'re lumpers or splitters. We have chosen the lumper
approach, so we\'ve got three fairly large and comprehensive barriers.

Next, we\'ll have Pat Brady of Sandia, who\'s going to illustrate uses
made of analogues, natural analogues, anthropogenic analogues,
industrial analogues, and self-analogues. And, then, finally, we\'ve got
two presenters here to talk about the Science and Technology Program.
That\'s Mark Peters of Argonne, and, finally, Frank Hansen of Sandia is
going to talk about long-term test and monitoring program and the
regulatory required performance confirmation program.

Now, of the four presenters here, three are from Sandia. There was a
question earlier about the lead lab transition. So, let me just address
that very quickly.

The transition of postclosure activities and responsibility, which
includes everything from field work, bench test experiments, modelling,
performance assessment, including responsibility for the preparation and
defense of the postclosure part of the license application. The
postclosure SAR, are the responsibility of Sandia as the lead laboratory
effective 1 October.

We have been going through a lot of effort to get this transition in
place to ensure that Sandia has in place all of the systems and
processes they need to be successful here.

DOE conducted a readiness review of Sandia starting\--it actually
started earlier, but it completed in early September, and we\'re ready
to attest that Sandia has successfully completed the readiness review.

We had about 150 transition issues that we worked with. There are a
number that are going to slide past the 1 October date, but they are not
relevant to performance of the work scope. They are things like
inventorying equipment. Well, whenever individuals move from one office
to another, sometime in mid to late October, we will inventory that
equipment with where they are now, and what organization they\'re
actually working with. So, there\'s about ten items like that.

As of yesterday, we were down to three transition items that need to be
dealt with, consummated this week, and I have every confidence that
we\'ll be able to do that between\--by Friday.

With that, I\'d like to close this off and ask if there are any
questions of the Board?

GARRICK: Yeah, let me start by asking one question.

Russ, if you look at all of the safety-related activities that are going
on, I count some five or six separate activities, if you talk about the
TSPA, the Safety Analysis Report, the Margin Analysis, the Sensitivity
Analysis, the analogue work, and so on, and, so, it seems as though
there is a basis there for collectively, if it\'s done the right way, of
developing something that would indeed be a safety case in the minds of
most people, including the Board, who has been advocating for a long
time the need for multiple lines of evidence. Is that story going to be
told?

Because I think it seems to me at least it has the potential for being
an outstanding story in terms of broadening the horizons for the public
as to the kinds of things that have gone into evaluating the safety of
the repository, much more than any single document, such as the TSPA.
And, given that the TSPA cut-off time is coming up pretty rapidly, it\'s
clear that a lot of this stuff isn\'t really going to get in the TSPA.
How are you going to tell that story, and in what form? And, are you
going to try to connect all these pieces together in some sort of a
comprehensive accountability of the safety case for the repository?

DYER: I think we\'re going to have to tell the story in different ways
for different audiences. The format and content guide for the license
application doesn\'t have a section that is explicitly called the safety
case. But, all of the things that constitute the argument for a safety
case have to be in the LA. It probably would behoove us to put it all
together in a cogent articulation somewhere in the LA, but not everybody
is going to read through the seven or eight thousand pages of the LA.
So, I see the probability of a separate document that would articulate
the safety case that would be consistent with what\'s in the license
application.

GARRICK: Yes, I remember a few years ago, you generated an engineering
document about the repository that had pieces and parts of a lot of the
activities that were going on, including the TSPA, and that document, I
thought, was quite effective in giving simultaneously a pretty global
view of what was going on, and at the same time, had enough depth to it
to give some insights as to the level of the investigations. In other
words, it just seems an opportunity that should be jumped on and taken
full advantage of.

DYER: Agree.

GARRICK: Any questions for Russ from the Board? Yes, Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

I\'m trying to find my notes from Finland and Sweden. But, let me just
summarize by saying they are also trying to do a probabilistic model in
the form of a total system performance assessment. But, they found that
the models end up disguising a lot of key information. In other words,
it\'s buried in the basic formulation of a very complicated code. And,
what they\'re trying to do is take and extract from those very
complicated models, more useful pieces of information that would give
you a good idea of how this repository is really performing, which then
could be perhaps an addendum to your TSPA.

But, clearly, it helps those who are trying to understand how this
repository really works. And, this is beyond sort of the best estimate
thing that we\'ve been talking about for a couple of years. But, that
would be something that I think would be very helpful, and the public
support in both countries is quite strong, because they are trying to
demystify all these horsetails and probabilistic treatments of
uncertainties, to a point, well, here\'s how this repository really
works.

So, I\'m just seconding John\'s recommendation that you really do this,
because, otherwise, it will be a very complicated, confusing document.

DYER: Agreed.

GARRICK: That\'s a short answer. Yes, Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Russ, can you lay out what the plans are to put together the preclosure
safety case, and also comment on how that will be intertwined with the
postclosure safety case?

DYER: I have not dealt with the preclosure side at all. It\'s clear,
though, from\--that a safety case must be applicable for the entire
repository, both the preclosure period and the postclosure period. So,
we can\'t treat these in isolation. Your point is taken.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Does that preclosure safety case fall under your purview as well?

DYER: No.

ABKOWITZ: So, but the postclosure does?

DYER: The postclosure does.

ABKOWITZ: So, is there a management structure that will allow for that
to occur in a highly integrated fashion?

DYER: I think that\'s one of the things that Ward is working on.

GARRICK: Any other questions? Bill?

MURPHY: Russ, as the Chief Scientist, I\'m curious of your reaction or
response or comment on what we heard this morning about a transition
from science to design, and perhaps you\'re in a better position to
answer the question about what are perhaps key risk driving
uncertainties, scientific uncertainties that remain.

DYER: I think some of the places where we would benefit from more
knowledge are in the area of the four coupled processes. I mean, this is
really at the forefront of science. So, whenever you combine the
thermal, the hydrologic, the chemical, and the mechanical, how those all
interact in the, say in the emplacement drift environment, that\'s a
healthy technical problem.

GARRICK: Okay, any comments from the staff? I cheated on you a little
bit this morning by giving you very little opportunity, so I\'ll try to
make up for that now.

(No response.)

GARRICK: All right, I think we\'ll move into the next presentation.
Peter swift of Sandia Laboratories.

DYER: Before Peter gets here, there may be some confusion. Come on up,
Peter. I\'m the Chief Scientist for the Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management. Peter\'s title is Chief Scientist for the lead
laboratory. We also look an awful lot alike. So, we\'ve got the same
title, different organizations.

GARRICK: I heard you once say that you were paid by DOE for your looks.

SWIFT: Well, I am Peter Swift, and if Russ hadn\'t made that
clarification, I would have. Also, I don\'t actually have that title
until next Monday morning. But, it\'s not on the viewgraph here.

As of October 1st when Sandia becomes the lead laboratory, yes, I will
be the Chief Scientist for the lead laboratory. When I say lead
laboratory, that is an inclusive term. That is the science team working
on the postclosure aspect of this project. It will include, of course,
scientists from other national laboratories, from the USGS, from
contracting agencies. This is not simply Sandia. However, Sandia is the
accountable management organization, and Mr. Sproat wants to know where
his science program is going, he will call Sandia. So, my role then will
be to try to steer and guide and direct the course of science done by
the lead laboratory, including the other participants in the project.
Sandia will have the management authority and responsibility for all
those other participants.

So, on to barrier capability and the assessing of system performance.
Going back to Russ\'s side where he showed the IAEA\'s definition of a
safety assessment and a safety case, the safety assessment is basically
the quantitative part. And, we\'re used to thinking of that as the Total
System Performance Assessment. We\'ve heard about that for years.

And, yes, we do need quantitative estimates. They are estimates, and
they have uncertainty in them, and we need to acknowledge that. But, we
do need estimates of the future performance of the system, and that\'s
what I\'m going to talk about. The next talks after that will look at
the more qualitative aspects of the safety case.

And, one more point. The work I\'m talking about presenting here today
is the work of many, many people, most of whom, all of whom, actually,
since the transition has not occurred, all of whom did this work on
behalf of Bechtel SAIC, and some of it goes back to previous M&O
contractors. I want to thank Bechtel SAIC for its work on postclosure
science. I was part of that team also, and it\'s good work today. I\'m
happy to be here representing it.

First slide, please? So, just an overview here of what I\'m going to
talk about. The quantitative aspects of the safety case come in two
categories here, barrier capability and system performance. The
distinction between capability and performance is actually it\'s real.
Capability is a potential capability of how things will work if they
ever had to work in isolation, whereas, the system performance is how
things all work together. So, if, for example, as long as the engineered
system is intact and doing its job, the capability of the natural system
to retard radionuclide movement is just a capability. It\'s not
performing. It\'s sitting there waiting to perform. It\'s a potential
capability.

And, I\'m going to talk a little bit here about the process by which we
build confidence in quantitative assessments. It\'s a methodology
discussion of why do I, for example, have confidence that these models
are something that we should all have confidence in. We have to
evaluate\--it\'s an iterative process. We evaluate both the component
and system performance, and we acknowledge the uncertainty in it.
That\'s important. We\'ve done this for years. We are not claiming we
know everything. We are claiming we understand our uncertainty well
enough to inform decisions, and that\'s what a scientist\'s job is.

And, then, I\'m going to give some representative examples of
quantitative estimates, and these are just examples. Do not walk out of
here saying this is the quantitative safety case. These are examples
that I culled from previous analyses. The point is to illustrate the
concept here, not to give the specific here\'s our last, best and final
estimate.

Next slide, please? The iterative process, it\'s a fairly
straightforward process of first characterize the system and its
components. This is site characterization. It\'s been done for many,
many years on this project. Identify the important features, events, and
processes. Indeed that one happens to be a regulatory requirement
besides being good, common sense. But, this is where we identify what
matter to the system.

Build models of the component. We characterize the uncertainty in those
models and their inputs. We build a system model, we evaluate component
system performance, identify uncertainties, and iterate. We go back
through it. And, when I get to the very end of the talk, I\'ll show you
we have been interacting for quite a long time.

Obviously, these steps go in parallel. It isn\'t a simple, you know, one
year we do one, and then the next. Information is always coming in, The
system is always evolving and has been evolving. But, the iterations we
have in the past used each iteration to inform ourselves as to what
matters and where more information is needed. I believe we are now at a
point where we can inform a decision.

Next, please? Just a picture of the types of things that go into site
characterization and design. And, there\'s nothing in any great detail
that needs to be said here. But, it\'s a nice picture that shows the
mountain, and the underground. And, this is the type information that we
need in order to be able to do a quantitative safety assessment.

Next, please? The identification of the features, events, and processes
relevant to Yucca Mountain. This is\--that features, events, and
processes gets the acronym FEPs. It\'s not a very graceful acronym, but
it is convenient. And, the FEP process is one which we follow. It\'s our
demonstration to you, to the regulator of the completeness of the
analysis.

You can\'t prove a comprehensive or a complete treatment of the future.
It\'s not subject to rigorous mathematic proof or scientific proof.
However, you can demonstrate that you have done the thorough and
exhaustive job to the point of have you considered, and this is one of
the few places that the word \"all\" would be appropriate, can we
demonstrate we have considered all potentially relevant features,
events, and processes. The only way you can do it is to make a long
systematic list and to basically challenge people to find things that
aren\'t on our list. And, if they weren\'t on it, if we didn\'t consider
it, we should have.

And, how do you do this? Well, the international community has been
doing it for decades. There are international lists of things that might
matter for nuclear waste disposal. So, we adopted a list from the
Nuclear Energy Agency. We reviewed our own literature. We went through
iterative review processes, and currently, we have about 370 features,
events, and processes that we evaluate for Yucca Mountain. Evaluate does
not necessarily mean that they are included in the analysis. It means we
have considered whether or not they matter and we have documented that
consideration.

The total number, 370, it\'s not arbitrary, but it is a subjective
number. Obviously, you can define features, events, and processes as
narrowly as you want, or as broadly as you want. What\'s the level of
detail you\'re interested in? The international list that we worked with
had thousands of things on them, and they can be aggregated. That does
not mean that we are overlooking things. It just means we\'re being more
efficient at how we categorize things.

And, the process is open. If and when new FEPs are identified that truly
were not already a subset of one of those 370, we will set out to
evaluate them. And, if it turns out they do matter, then we would have
to rethink where we were.

Next slide, please? Just a quick review of the process that we went
through in this step process. I spent a little time here because I think
this is part of the safety case. This is demonstrating the completeness.
So, we adopt this comprehensive list from the NEA of irrelevant FEPs.
This list is made from many different types of repository programs,
including, for example, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico,
which was in salt. Features about the rate at which salt creeps in an
underground environment are not relevant to Yucca Mountain. So, we take
them off at that point.

We expanded the list with the Yucca Mountain specific ones, and then we
screened them. We evaluate them as to whether they need to be included
in our quantitative safety assessment or not, using criteria that are
actually provided in Part 63, the NRC regulation. And, there are the two
criteria that matter in Part 63.

That\'s the 10^8^ per year probability criterion, which essentially is a
regulatory definition of very unlikely, sufficiently unlikely it can be
assumed not to occur. And, as Mr. Sproat pointed out, that\'s a very
small number, very unlikely event.

And, if we can show that a feature, event, or process does not matter,
has the consequence that is insignificant to overall performance, and,
we can document that, and these screening argument, we call them, are
documented in Project documents, then the retained features, events, and
processes get put into the models, the quantitative models used for
these estimates.

Next slide, please. The component models, here\'s a quick list of what
they end up with. I show these here only for the nominal performance of
the system. We obviously do consider those rare potentially disruptive
events, such as volcanism, that have a probability just above that
cutoff, but do have consequences, but we build a separate modelling
framework for those disruptive events, because the processes we need to
model are different.

So, each one of these components here is something that you can find a
quantitative mathematical model with input parameters and uncertainties,
capable of being solved. We can, and I can\'t tell you in detail, but
somebody in the Project can tell you details about cladding performance,
and waste form performance, because we have that component in there.

Next slide, please. Those are then linked together computationally into
this thing called TSPA, Total System Performance Assessment. And, I\'m
not going to try and walk through this. I\'m comforted to know that
there are people who can explain what everything is in here. But,
briefly, over here in these blue bubbles are models, computational
models, for each of those processes shown in the previous slide, with
the FORTRAN, most of them are in FORTRAN codes, and that sort of thing,
and they pass information back and forth into a system model that
eventually produces an estimate of system performance. We do this
because, two reasons, it is good to know how the system performs, and we
think it will perform what our estimates are, and, second, it is
required. This overall dose measure here is one of the quantitative
standards that the NRC provides, and the EPA provides. So, we will do
this.

We will not claim that this is an easy to follow transparent modelling
system. It isn\'t. But, it can be explained, and we will, in our
licensing process, we will explain it in detail.

Next slide, please. So, why should we, or anyone, have confidence in
these component and system models? We go through processes which I call
them here use \"confidence\" and \"corroboration\" is the words. In
quality assurance jargon, this would be model validation. But, there are
multiple approaches we can use. We don\'t use them all with every model.
They aren\'t all available, but we\'re available. Direct observation.
Obviously, you cannot corroborate a model of a million years with direct
observation, this is what will happen a million years from now. That
tool is rarely available to us. But, many of the components you can, you
can run short-term tests and corroborate.

Analogue information. Independent evaluations where others, for example,
the Electric Power Research Institute, EPRI, has done system level
evaluations for years on this project. We have seen the NRC\'s own TPA
results, they are their system level modelling results, several times.
That\'s useful, very very useful. At the component level, there are many
other independent models we can compare against, and we do.

Internal to our own model, auxiliary analyses and comparison of system
and subsystem results. This basically if just a detailed analysis of our
own model. Does it make sense? Can we take it apart and show you that
our subsystem piece of a TSPA that models a particular process actually
matches the process model that was run previously. And, yes, we do that.

Peer review. It\'s one of the gold standards of science. And, yes, we do
engage in peer review. We want our work reviewed, and we want it
reviewed hard.

The component models are evaluated individually and in the context of
the system model. So, we don\'t just let those models stand on their
own. You\'ve got to see how they work together in the whole system.

Next slide, please. Acknowledging sources of uncertainty. It\'s
essential to answer that question do we know everything? No. And, a
scientist who tells you they do know everything is\--well, it\'s not the
scientist I would want to ask, because there are always going to be
sources of uncertainty. Our job is to explain them and to show whether
or not they matter, to inform the decision in the light of the
uncertainty that remains.

Incomplete data. You can never get, for example, hydrologic data for
every location in the mountain. You would have to take the mountain
apart to do it, and then it wouldn\'t be a mountain.

Spatial variability and scaling issues. It should be pretty clear that
you have data from a limited number of places. You have to make
inferences about how they can be used to represent a large area, a large
volume.

Measurement error. Rarely is this actually a large driver, and to keep
track of it, it becomes of interest in tests that have\--measure very
small things with potentially large errors, things like corrosion tests
where you\'re measuring very small mass changes, you want to be careful
there with measurement error.

Lack of knowledge about the future state of the system. We don\'t know
if these future events, let\'s take volcanism, will it happen or not? We
can give you a good probability estimate from expert judgment. But, that
still doesn\'t tell you will it happen on a given date or not, and we do
acknowledge that kind of uncertainty.

Alternative conceptual models. For almost everything, other scientists,
and including ourselves, can say yeah, there might be another way to do
that. And, where different conceptual models, different representations
of the world are equally consistent with the available information, i.e.
you can\'t prove either one of them right or wrong, then we need to be
able to evaluate both and show the effects that way.

We use Monte Carlo techniques to incorporate uncertainty in modelling.
This is a modeler\'s term, but basically, we run the model repeatedly
with different sets of input values, and get a distribution of model
results. And, that distribution of model results depends on the
uncertainty in the model inputs, and it is our display of uncertainty in
the estimate of performance.

Next, please. Okay, quantitative estimates here. Everything I\'m going
to show here is for illustration purposes only. I said that already, but
it\'s not intended for comparison to regulatory standards.

Next slide, please. We start off with barrier capability before I get to
system performance. Barrier capability, what does a barrier at Yucca
Mountain do? There are three main things a barrier might do, and these
are actually spelled out in the regulation, Part 63, but here they are,
not in regulatory words.

Barriers can keep water, keep the waste dry, limit the amount of water
that reaches it. They can limit the release of radionuclides from the
waste form, and they can limit the transport of radionuclides from the
waste form to the human environment. So, our barriers have to do one of
those three things, basically, and they do.

The barriers can be evaluated separately or as a part of the system.
Separately, it\'s a potential capability, and the full system where we
put the barriers together, complimentary and overlapping capabilities of
multiple barriers. Not all barrier capabilities will be fully realized
in the full system, because some of them are indeed overlapping, so if
one barrier is working, the capability of the next one in line to do the
same job may not be realized.

Next, please. All right, this and the next slide both show the
radionuclide inventory at Yucca Mountain in radioactivity units, curies.
This one tracks it out to 20,000 years. The next slide takes it out to a
million years. I put them both in because the question is relevant, if
you want to know what they\'re both doing, and I did not have an example
that would give us enough resolution in the short time to put it all in
a million year scale. So, I\'m going to talk to this one, but be aware
the next one is there.

And, the point I want to make here starts off with the observation that
this black line, the total radioactivity, it\'s a lot, between 10^9^ and
10^10^ curies at ten years. And, these are the curies that we\'re
tracking. These don\'t include some of the very fast decaying stuff that
is not actually included in the analysis because it\'s gone by the time
the repository would be closed.

But, let\'s figure somewhere above 10^9^ curie, a big number, what
actually is driving that? And, these are radioactive decay curves
through time. For the first few hundred years, it\'s cesium 137,
strontium 90, that\'s americium 241, plutonium 238, plutonium 240, the
green one is plutonium 239, americium 243. This blue line that\'s almost
horizontal, that\'s technetium 99. So, our barriers, we\'re going to
focus here on how much of the radioactivity, that total radioactivity,
our barriers are going to contain.

Can I get the next slide? This is just for completeness to show you the
full million year curve. It\'s the same. This is the technetium 99 curve
here, plutonium 239, dropping off there at about 100,000 years, it
starts to disappear pretty sharply. Neptunium, you\'ve heard quite a lot
about, as a somewhat troublesome contributor, it is down here. It is
four orders of magnitude, five orders of magnitude below that initial
inventory. It\'s a small contributor of the total radioactivity in the
mountain.

And, just before the question comes up, these little steps here are
because this plot was generated using 250 year time steps, those little
right angle bends are not real there, that\'s an artifact of the scale
of the figure.

Next slide, please. All right, keep those figures in mind, or come back
to them when we get to the performance of the engineered barrier system.
I\'m going to start off here with the upper natural barrier. And, what
does this barrier do? It keeps water, it limits the amount of water that
might reach the waste form, and then the waste package. The components
of it, the surface, the land surface that is a fairly effective barrier
preventing water from infiltrating in, most of the water that falls on a
desert does not make it into the rock or the soil. Most of it either
evaporates or is used by the plants very quickly.

And, then, there is the\--what water does make it through percolates
downward through this unsaturated zone, where much of it will then be
diverted around the tunnel by the capillary barrier effect of the edge
of the tunnel.

Next slide. I\'ll talk about that. All right, again, these are draft
results that have come out of ongoing work that\'s derived from past
analyses. The blue line here is precipitation. That\'s average, spatial
average precipitation over Yucca Mountain, and, no, that\'s not measured
at every location over Yucca Mountain. That\'s a reasonable estimate,
taking into account changes in elevation and the real datapoints we have
that were a measure of precipitation. And, this little step here, and
there\'s a very small one there, those are the climate changes in our
future climate model when 600 years from now, and 2000 years from now,
we move into wetter climates in our model. \--which is infiltration,
that\'s how much of the water makes it below the near-surface soil zone.

By the time we get out into the wetter future climates, it\'s less than
a tenth of what was falling on the mountain. It\'s even less than that
in the present dry climates, we believe. And, these other curves down
here, these are the seepage effects, and these are\--I show here the
fifth percentile and the ninety-fifty percentile, as well as a mean of
seepage. The point in showing that is that unlike infiltration and
precipitation, where it makes sense just to average them over the
repository, seepage is strongly affected by the thermal history of the
underground, so it makes sense to show you the range there, because the
drier parts of the\--the hotter parts of the repository will be quite a
bit drier, and it does vary.

But, all right, what\'s the point of this little aside here? About a
factor of 100 reduction in the amount of water that actually falls on
the mountain, 1/100th of that, more or less, might make it into the
drifts. And, I\'ll argue that\'s a pretty effective barrier for water
movement.

Next slide, please. The engineered system. Again, here, it\'s the\--the
components would be the drip shield, the waste package, and the invert
are the ones that are mainly of interest. Also, the waste form itself
and the cladding.

Next slide, please. John, are you going to keep me honest on time here?
I don\'t want to run long.

GARRICK: Yeah, I will. I\'ll keep you honest.

SWIFT: Okay. Now, the results shown here, and these are from interim
draft work that is in progress, and I show these simply as an example of
how we might show the effectiveness of the engineered barrier system.
What we\'re showing here, the top curve is the total radioactivity in
the repository off those earlier inventory plots I showed. And, what we
see here is the amount of radioactivity accumulating through time, how
much of it made it out of the bottom of the drift through time.

And, think in your head back to those inventory plots where I said
cesium, strontium, americium, plutonium were basically 99.9 percent of
the radioactivity, and they aren\'t even making it out of the drift.
They\'re down here. What is making it out is\--actually, cesium does,
it\'s this one here, but cesium, the curve flattens off here because
radioactive decay basically takes it out. Technetium makes it out.
Strontium\--when a curve goes flat here, it\'s a cumulative curve, that
means basically no more is getting out. A curve that keeps on climbing
is what\'s continuing to get out.

All right, so, as modelled here, and this is an as modelled, and I\'ve
got to acknowledge that, these are mean releases, calculated over a
range of uncertainty, but they are shown for a modelling case in which
the engineered barrier was largely effective. We did have, in this
model, early initial failures of the waste packages, hypothetically due
to manufacturing defects. We did have the drip shields intact in this
analysis. The point of showing this is to show that the engineered
barrier system has the potential, I\'m not saying that it\'s doing it
here, but it has the potential to retain the overwhelming majority of
total radioactivity. That\'s eight orders of magnitude of radioactivity
is not getting out. That\'s a tiny number that is, if we have intact
drip shields and nothing but a small number of packages failing early
due to potential hypothetical manufacturing defects.

Next slide, please. Just an example of a single plot. This one happens
to be americium 241. Now, I\'m just showing the americium decay curve,
how much americium is left. And, it\'s just off the scale here, but
basically, the two plots are converging. All that is going to get out is
about, if there were originally 10^8^ curies of americium 241, we\'ve
let out 10^-8th^ of it before the americium has decayed. And, that\'s
pretty effective.

Next slide, please. The lower natural barrier. Here, we have groundwater
flow through the unsaturated zone, and then flow and radionuclide
transport out through the saturated zone through flowing groundwater, to
a hypothetical water well, 18 kilometers south, just\--that would be
just north of the intersection up here at Lathrop Wells.

And, here, we\'re interested in contaminant transport processes, how
effectively are radionuclides transported in moving groundwater.

Can I have the next slide, please? And, this is a little bit
complicated, so I\'ve got two or three slides in a row here on this one.
This is what a hydrologist would call a break-through curve, but it\'s
complicated because it has radioactive in-growth and decay factored into
it. But, we\'ve released a hypothetical unit source of inventory at a
hypothetical time zero. This is not real, this is a hypothetical
analysis. What if we released a unit source of radioactivity into the
groundwater at the base of the drift directly below the waste packages,
how much of it would get out through time. And, so, these numbers are
normalized to one. One was the unit source we let out.

So, after 100 years\--actually, letting out here means 18 kilometers
away. We\'ve actually, the very first models of technetium are just
barely showing up there. But, we don\'t have half the technetium getting
out until, what, 3000 years, or so? Most technetium is held in. These
are mean break-through curves. Now, what\'s going on with this one?
That\'s neptunium 237 where we\'ve let out more than we put in. Well,
that\'s real. Neptunium 237 is a decay product of americium 241, and it
actually\--it does form during that part of the transport process. So,
the figure is a little bit hard to understand.

The other curves on here, plutonium curves, americium 241, showing
basically it isn\'t going anywhere, but it\'s\--the product of neptunium
is.

Next slide, please. Now, the plutonium shown on the previous slide was a
little bit misleading. It wasn\'t misleading, that was what we were
calculating. And, again, these are means over a range of uncertainty.
But, that was transporting almost entirely as colloidal plutonium. If
plutonium were to remain fully in the dissolved state, less than 10
percent of it as on a mean is getting out at 10,000 years. So, that\'s
the point of that one.

Next slide, please. This is to try to make sense of that neptunium one.
Here\'s a neptunium transport profile, a series of break-through curves
without radioactive decay. This shows just the chemistry and the
physical transport of what happens to neptunium in groundwater. This
shows the full suite of uncertainty here. There are, I think there are
200, I\'m not sure how many curves, I should have counted\--I should
have asked somebody. I think there are 200 here. Each one of those is a
possible break-through of neptunium. What does it mean? It means that if
this curve here, that will be the least favorable one, if that
represents correctly the physical processes of a system, then half
neptunium would indeed get out quite rapidly. If the slower one here,
half neptunium would get out, that\'s 10,000 years. Half would be this
line here. All the neptunium would be getting out by the time the curve
got to the top.

So, take this 50 percent break-through line, the median break-through,
when half of the contaminant has reached the hypothetical water well,
and how long does it really take to get neptunium out? All right, we\'re
out here at 6, 7, 8, 9,000 years, by and large, on this. This is a
histogram drawn across this thing here at that level. So, the point
here, the system, taking out that in-growth function, what does it
actually do to neptunium? We believe that the most likely condition of
the saturated zone and unsaturated zone is that neptunium will be
retarded many thousands of years, perhaps many tens of thousands of
years during transport. That is an effective natural barrier.
Retarding\--back up again two slides. Sorry.

We have completely retarded cesium, strontium, americium, most of the
plutonium, and, yes, we are transporting technetium and neptunium
through, but most of it is being retarded many thousands of years. And,
that\'s an effective barrier.

Next slide? Now, system performance. These are what we\'ve been showing
for years as Total System Performance Assessment. This is a calculated
estimate of the dose that a person living at the receptor point, which
is here, might receive thousands of years from now. And, there are 300
curves plotted on here. Each one of these is a different result from
Monte Carlo analysis that takes all those components of the system into
effect. And, each one, taken together, they represent our treatment of
uncertainty. Each one of them uses a different sampling of the
uncertainty in the input models.

So, in that sense, to a mathematician, each curve here is an equally
likely realization of the model. If the parameters of the system are
such that they coincide with this little curve here, then that is our
estimate of what it will look like. The mean shown here in red is the
curve that the\--to 10,000 years here, that the EPA has specified we
should regulate on. And, obviously, the rule beyond 10,000 years is
still in question.

Just a scale on this to put it in perspective. 15 millirem is about in
there\--sorry, it\'s there. And, 350 is up in there. What do we get from
this, other than the quantitative compliance measure that the regulation
asks for? We get a distribution of results that allow us to do a
detailed uncertainty analysis to determine what of the uncertainty that
separated all those curves out, what of it actually matters. We can go
back into the model and say, all right, what was the groundwater flow
velocity, what\'s the dissolution rates of the waste form, was it the
solubility of neptunium, and the model allows us to back that
information out and come back and inform ourselves as to where our
uncertainties are important.

Next slide, please. I show this because in the interest of being
complete with a safety case, we do acknowledge the possibility of rare
disruptive events with large consequences. And, we\'ve been doing this
for years. Here, I show a slide, I think I showed this group four years
ago, but this is the probability-weighted consequences of igneous
disruption. And, I have in the past gone through the explanation of how
we calculate the probability of weighted consequences, how they differ
from the consequences associated with a single event. That\'s beyond the
scope of this talk, but I show it for completeness to show that we want
display, we do display the uncertainty associated with these rare
events.

And, points to make here, just this blue curve is the eruptive, the dose
familiar eruptive event, if an ash cloud were to fall here, that\'s the
dose associated with that. This is the dose from a groundwater pathway,
from a repository that has been damaged by magma entering it. This is
all at a probability of 10^-8^ per year. And, this curve here, the black
one, that is the nominal performance, what the system will be doing if
the volcano doesn\'t happen.

The important point there is that when it comes to looking at very long
terms, the curve we should be worried about, and concerned about,
interested in, actually is a nominal one. By the time we see significant
failures of the engineered barriers, and eventually there will be
failures of those packages, the probability-weighted consequences of the
volcano are not the total measure of interest. The question\--really,
the question of interest is how does the system evolve through time.
You\'re just beginning to see the beginning of that there. On these
analyses, we were starting to show waste package failures by general
corrosion at about 70,000 years, and the curve starting to climb.

Next slide, please. All right, this is my next to the last slide, and I
show this to make the iteration point. This is a composite of million
year doses, I\'m going to go ahead and show the million year curves,
that we have shown going back eight years now to the viability
assessment in 1998, and that was this red curve here. The black one was
our first curve that we published for the site recommendation in 2001
and 2002, and the other two were also part of that site recommendation
analysis.

The point of showing these is that, one, yes, we do do iterations and we
learn from each one of these. The other point is that there\'s
significant differences here in early time, depending primarily on
whether or not we include the possibility of early failures due to these
hypothetical weld defects, manufacturing defects. That\'s what creates
the early curve in here. Uncertainty in this space in here is related to
uncertainty in general corrosion rates in the waste packages.

But, we\'ve got a fairly stable answer out here. I take some comfort in
that. These are not the same model run over and over again. The models
have changed. Our understanding has changed. And, yet, our answers are
coming in there.

Next slide, please. So, I\'ll wrap it up here. Okay, the
quantitative\--concluding points\--the quantitative estimates of barrier
capability are part of the safety case. In fact, this quantitative
safety assessment is required by regulations. So, we will continue to
see quantitative model results.

Why do we have confidence in these? It has to come from our
understanding of the components and their capabilities, our
understanding of how they work together as a system. We have to clearly
display our uncertainty, and we have to be able to show that we have
followed a process that demonstrates completeness, and I should have
added basically, the quality of the process. We have to be able to show
that the work has been done to a sound process.

And, then, the last point, confidence in the overall safety case, which
is basically the case that Russ described, and will be in the license
application. It\'s multiple lines of evidence, and that\'s where the
next talks come from. We\'ll go to Pat Brady on analogues, Frank Hansen
on performance confirmation. These are the\--just one piece of the parts
of the multiple lines of evidence here.

I\'ll take questions. And, I apologize for going long.

GARRICK: Howard?

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

Would you go to Slide 18, please? You can draw from this slide perhaps a
different conclusion than the one you were after, which is that nothing
at all happens until some engineered barrier systems fail due to
manufacturing defects. Actually, the assumptions that go into choosing
the percentage that fail seem to me to be crucial in getting answers to
this thing. And, you would draw a lesson that says I\'d better\--I had
better have a good design, and (b), I\'d better have a very good idea of
how it fails, and why.

Once you assume failure, of course, the rest of it shows the capability
of the other barriers. But, until you have that, if you had a properly
manufactured engineering barrier system, nothing at all happens; right?

SWIFT: Yes.

ARNOLD: Except when you go to the million year case, then there\'s
another rise, which are presumably due to non-manufacturing defect
failures of the engineered barrier system.

SWIFT: Correct.

ARNOLD: Whatever they may be. Now, I\'ve been frustrated in not
understanding either the short-term failures or the long-term failures,
how they actually come about, because they\'re key to this thing.

SWIFT: Okay. The short-term failures considered here are\--were
developed by our waste package design engineers from a survey of
relevant analogue information from the design community, engineering
design community. What is the failure rate of other major comparable
materials, boilers, for example? I did not develop that information
myself. The conclusion was that with high quality assurance and quality
control standards, you can get a very high success rate at building what
you said you were going to build.

But, that\'s not my field. I agree, however, that these results will
essentially scale up and down linearly with the number of packages
they\--

ARNOLD: They depend entirely on that assumption, yeah.

SWIFT: Yes.

GARRICK: Ron, and then Thure.

LATANISION: Let\'s look at this slide. The bottom bullet is an important
statement, the barrier has overwhelming\--has the potential to retain
the overwhelming majority of the total radioactivity. If you look at
this from the point of view of potential corrosion problems, we\'ve been
focusing on the question of what sort of penetration might occur under
certain circumstances, whether it\'s general corrosion or localized
corrosion, what sort of penetration would occur. And, then, the
conversation becomes, well, will that have the effect of allowing
release of radionuclides. Suppose we took the opposite point of view.
Suppose we said what sort of breach would be required in the package to
allow a substantive release of radionuclides, enough of a release to be
of concern? And, then asked the question what sorts of rates of
corrosion, whether it\'s uniform or localized or stress corrosion
cracking, all of which I understand have some placement in the TSPA. I
think that would be an interesting evaluation. Do you think that is
something that could be incorporated into your plans, or\--well, let me
have your reaction to that.

SWIFT: Sure. Yes, it could be done. The modelling tools could do that.
We are aiming here at a licensing case for the NRC, and they want us to
give, as we heard earlier, give our best understanding of how the system
will work, not an estimate of how it would work if it didn\'t work the
way we thought it will work, which I think is what you asked for. And,
I\'m sympathetic. It\'s as simple as saying how many waste packages
would it take to produce Dose X, how many waste package failures would
it take to produce a certain dose? And, it could be done, but it is not
actually part of our licensing basis.

LATANISION: I just add the\--this is Latanision, Board.

Just add the comment, there is always a concern that you could capture
in the words \"so what.\" In other words, if corrosion occurs, does it
really matter? And, I think it would be interesting to know what amount
of corrosion would be required so that one would characterize it as
mattering. And, you know, the way to get to that point would be to do
the sort of reverse calculation. Instead of asking, you know, what might
happen if the Rates X, Y, and Z, let\'s ask the reverse question. How
much would the rate have to be in order for this to be significant?

So, I mean, I understand what you\'re saying. But, I think there\'s a
dimension to the whole issue of the engineered barrier and potential
corrosion phenomena that could be addressed very usefully if we looked
at it from this point of\--from the alternative point of view.

SWIFT: Thank you.

GARRICK: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

Just continuing on this, you know, we\'ve seen these sort of things a
number of times, and I, you know, it\'s never illustrated. For instance,
in this particular case where the levels of various radionuclides are
rising with time, and at the end, they\'ve plateaued, and how many waste
packages in this illustrative example actually result in those curves?
Is it, you know, one, or ten, or a thousand, or how many actually have
failed?

SWIFT: Okay.

CERLING: The first part. And, then, I\'ll ask a second.

SWIFT: That one is pretty quick to answer. There are 11,000-some waste
packages that were in this set of simulations, and the number of failed
packages is\--it\'s sampled probabilistically, but you can think of it
in your head as one. It\'s a small number.

CERLING: One?

SWIFT: Yeah.

CERLING: And, then, second, how is the\--what is the assumption on what
happens to the waste packages, the case where essentially it disappears
when it\--

SWIFT: I suppose you could\--and we\'ve actually run this. This wasn\'t
done that way. We\'ve actually run this case with precisely one package
failed, to simplify the problem, and then you could simply multiply
those curves by 10 to the fourth, I suppose. And, you\'d be there.

Some years ago, we did present to this Board a one-on analyses in which
we added barrier sequentially one at a time, and I presented those, and
I was a little uncomfortable with that exact presentation of here\'s how
the site would work if the Department did not use waste packages.
Because I\'m very sure that won\'t happen, that that\'s not a plausible
future state. And, I\'m looking to try and analyze the plausible ones.
But, the way to get at that would be to look at the effects of one
package failing, which of course is scattered randomly around the
repository, so some of them see seeps and some of them don\'t, and that
sort of thing. But, then you could start with one and scale up from
there, and, obviously, I don\'t imagine a situation in which all the
waste packages fail immediately. That\'s just not a credible future.

GARRICK: Okay, I think David is next, and then Andy, and then Mark, and
then George.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I remember the one on, one off results that you presented to us, and it
basically said you could fail all the containers, and it still would
retain the waste fairly well. I actually had the same question here, and
I think it was answered when you said this was just one container. I
wasn\'t sure. This assumes, I think, if I remember correctly, one
container failing completely, that is, the entire inventory, from one
container being released instantaneously, if I remember that.

SWIFT: Essentially, yes.

DUQUETTE: Yes, but in any corrosion model, of course, that\'s not going
to happen, unless it\'s uniform corrosion over the entire container, and
then it has to get through the stainless steel inner container, and then
through the clad as well. So, this assumption is both conservative and
non-conservative in that it\'s only one container, but everything in
that container is released at the same time, if I understand the model
correctly; is that right?

SWIFT: Yes.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak. Could you go to Slide 26, please? I just want to be sure I
understand what you just said. At that million year time frame, is the
assumption there that only one out of 11,000 containers fail?

SWIFT: No. No. The steep climb shown here, for example, or in here, that
is when we have general corrosion creating failures of a large number of
packages.

KADAK: Okay.

SWIFT: And, in most realizations here, most of these iterations, not
realization, these were all means, each one of them is the mean of many
hundreds of runs. But, in most of them, it isn\'t a safe bet to say all
the packages failed right here. But, that\'s just when the bulk of them
were failing.

KADAK: Okay. So, I guess that gets to the question of standard, at least
for me. In the first 10,000 years, are you going to try to meet that was
it 15 millirem per year dose to the public?

SWIFT: In the first 10,000 years?

KADAK: 10,000 years.

SWIFT: We\'re required to.

KADAK: Suppose you\'re 16 millirem per year, do you meet or do not meet
the standard?

SWIFT: Say that again?

KADAK: Suppose it\'s 16.

SWIFT: Our model says we have 16 millirems a year and 900,999? I
would\--

KADAK: You know, NRC has this thing about numbers, and I\'m just
wondering whether that\'s\--there\'s a range there or not.

SWIFT: That would be something that we would have to discuss with the
NRC.

KADAK: This is something I think you should discuss now.

SWIFT: I\'ll point out that\'s still a rather small number in the world
of radiation.

KADAK: Clearly, but I was really impressed with the Part 63 discussion
from NRC this morning, which was pretty clear what the requirements
were, and I\'m just wondering if you thought about 16, or do you have to
go back and sharpen pencils some more and massage the assumptions?

SWIFT: I don\'t have an answer to that.

KADAK: My other question is when you started looking at all these
horsetails, and you tried to back out what are the significant
contributors, can you give me a list of three to five key issues that
you think you need more data on to better get a handle on those key
contributors in terms of dose?

SWIFT: Yeah, I\'ll start by saying that I don\'t think I need more data.
I\'m comfortable with this display of uncertainty, but where would more
data reduce uncertainty, and what would cause these curves to actually
move? I think that\'s your question. The spikiness in them here is a
function of having assumed that future climate changes occur at
precisely known times. So, each one of those spikes is a future glacial
event, which we had no uncertainty it will occur at year 780,000, or
whatever. I think that is something that we perhaps could have had a
more humble display of uncertainty on. That would have had the effect,
however, of smoothing out those spikes, and in some ways, there\'s a
value in showing them like that.

KADAK: You\'re going to get more data for\--

SWIFT: No, we\'re not going to get more data on that. The point at which
the curve starts to climb steeply here is basically a function of the
general corrosion rate, and if the general corrosion were such that we
were seeing large scale failures before 10,000 years, that will be
something I would be concerned about. We don\'t see that.

The overall magnitude of the curves here, why is it settling in here, a
key factor there would be the solubility of the phases in the waste
form. And, I think, John, this is a point that you\'re coming to. Source
term issues, degradation, although degradation rate of the waste form, a
million years is a long time. If the waste form degrades and takes
thousands of years, or even tens of thousands of years, that\'s still a
relatively short window over a million years. But, if it is stablely
sequestered in mineral phases, which we\'re assuming basically it\'s not
here, then those curves are coming down. That\'s something that Pat
Brady and Mark Peters will talk more about I think.

The amount of water actually reaching the waste, for example, if we were
to see more or less seepage, infiltration, and then the dependent
seepage, that would move those curves up and down, I think.

GARRICK: Isn\'t the convergence driven by the fact that eventually,
it\'s an inventory issue, as much as anything?

SWIFT: I\'m sorry. Excuse me?

GARRICK: Isn\'t the convergence, the eventual convergence due primarily
to inventory?

SWIFT: Yes.

GARRICK: So, this suggests that the inventories on each of the TSPAs
were the same?

SWIFT: By the time you are essentially releasing everything, you ought
to be converging, is what you\'re saying?

GARRICK: Yes. But, that\'s the real driver for the stability.

SWIFT: Fair enough.

GARRICK: Yes. Okay, Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

While we were on this slide, I was just curious why we\'re not seeing
any graphs from the last five years.

SWIFT: The\--obviously, the work has been ongoing, and the\--how do I
best say this. There has been litigation over this, and we would prefer
not to compromise the litigation right now by presenting those results.
Do we have someone here from counsel?

ABKOWITZ: This information is discoverable, and that information is not?

SWIFT: Excuse me?

ABKOWITZ: Is it this information is discoverable, and that information
is not?

SWIFT: This information is in the public record. This is all\--you\'ve
seen all those curves before, or this Board has. We are preparing for a
license application that will be litigated here, and it\'s just a
somewhat sensitive time.

ABKOWITZ: Let me move on to Slide Number 6. My question has to do with
the lower left-hand box. Under the EPA rulemaking, has any consideration
been given to changing the screening criteria in that box to say FEP has
at least one chance in 10,000 of occurring in a million years?

SWIFT: This comment was made during the public comment period on the EPA
rule. I can\'t really comment. This is EPA\'s rule, not mine. However,
it is my own belief that the reason\--and, this goes back 15, 20 years,
this phrase, one chance in 10,000 or 10,000 years\--it\'s intended to be
a sliding window of time, so that the 10,000 year period of interest
could be between year 100,000 and year 110,000. But, the probability of
occurrence during that 10,000 year interval is still one chance in
10,000.

If you take it all the way to one chance in 10,000 to a million years,
you\'re dealing with probabilities that are\--they are no longer in the
realm of being credible. These would be events that have never happened
in the history of the earth. And, it just seems improbable that we see
intent of the regulation.

ABKOWITZ: So, then, 10,000 is somewhat of an artificial number? I could
put in one? It would be a sliding scale?

SWIFT: If you could change it to 10^-8^ per year, which for events that
have\--follow poisson process, you can assume that\'s essentially the
same. And, that might simplify the problem if it was simply defined as
10^-8^ per year.

ABKOWITZ: So, at the end of the day, though, I guess I\'m having trouble
intuiting this, it\'s basically saying, well, if something destructs,
it\'s only going to happen, you know, less than once in every 10,000
years, then I can assume that from year 10,000 to year 1 million, it\'s
no less likely to occur?

SWIFT: The\--you have to make a probability decision based on how likely
something is to happen in a time period. Probability is a function of
time. You specify the time window. Here, they specify 10,000 years. Now,
it is true that the longer you wait, the more likely it is that a rare
event will have happened. However, does that make it something on which
we should\--this is the NRC and EPA\'s world, not mine. But should they
make a rule that specifies we should regulate on something that is so
rare that it may take\--maybe not happen in millions of years, may never
happen, may not happen again for millions of years, meteorite impacts
would be an example, good one, the probability of a large meteorite
impact is on the order of, say, 10^-14^ per year, something like that.
You can get that number from looking at other planetary bodies, the
moon, for example. Do we want to be regulating Yucca Mountain based on
the recurrence of a giant meteorite shower on earth? We\'re missing
something there.

ABKOWITZ: Well, it corresponds with one that we might be in the time of
peak dose, wouldn\'t that change the answer to the question?

SWIFT: If a\--if it occurred during the time of peak dose, would an
event of that rarity change the answer?

ABKOWITZ: Yes.

SWIFT: Yes. Is that a meaningful thing to regulate on? I don\'t know.
That would be the regulator\'s question.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you.

GARRICK: Okay. Moving right along. George?

HORNBERGER: Could we look at Slide 21, please? What\'s your average
groundwater velocity for this slide?

SWIFT: I don\'t know.

HORNBERGER: You can guess. You can tell by looking at that. That\'s a
break-through curve; right?

SWIFT: Yes. Well, at least some water is moving\--enough to get that
first arrival there.

HORNBERGER: Yeah, but I mean this is a single realization; right? This
is not\--

SWIFT: No, these are\--skip forward two slides, please.

HORNBERGER: So, they\'re just the\--

SWIFT: The means take you over a family of results like that.

HORNBERGER: Okay.

SWIFT: So, if you took the mean\--

HORNBERGER: Yeah, if we go back\--well, let\'s use the horsetail.

SWIFT: Go back forward two. Yeah, to a hydrologist, this is a more
meaningful plot.

HORNBERGER: That\'s where I thought it was at, thought it was a single
realization. That\'s why I went to that one.

SWIFT: Right.

HORNBERGER: So, what\'s the median groundwater velocity?

SWIFT: Here?

HORNBERGER: Yes.

SWIFT: The\--

HORNBERGER: I know neptunium is retarded, so it\'s hard\--

SWIFT: Right. So, take the unretarded species. Take the first arrival
and assume that\'s essentially unretarded, a realization which we had
sampled a very low retardation of neptunium. So, we\'re seeing median
groundwater travel times there on the order of hundreds of years.

HORNBERGER: So, my question is then how important is it for you to have
a good representation of this uncertainty? Is this an important thing?
Suppose groundwater travel time were significantly more rapid than
you\'re showing here, would that matter?

SWIFT: First, I want to correct what I just said there. This would be a
single realization in which the median groundwater travel time is a
hundred years. It\'s not necessarily the full distribution of them.
You\'d have to apply, haven\'t got here for an unretarded species like
technetium. But, would it matter? Yes, it\--go back to the slide again.

All right, here, we have\--this is a mean of technetium, the blue curve
here, which is essentially\--shows very little retardation in the
groundwater. And, so, I can infer from that point there that the median
of the\--if I had the full horsetail of technetium plots up there, that
median would be on the order of a couple thousand years.

HORNBERGER: Right.

SWIFT: And, that is actually a useful amount of retardation. I would
rather not have technetium have to\--technetium arriving sooner than
that. So, yes, groundwater travel time does matter, groundwater
transport time.

HORNBERGER: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: All right, Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

Actually, my question was on that slide also, Slide 23 that you just
showed.

SWIFT: On the horsetail?

MOSLEH: Yes, the one on the right, and the frequency. It looks like you
are not assuming that the transport time is a fixed value, that you have
an\--and underlying the\--

SWIFT: Yes, we do.

MOSLEH: I mean, the median.

SWIFT: We do.

MOSLEH: And, you have a distribution of that median.

SWIFT: Yes.

MOSLEH: This is a distribution of that median.

SWIFT: This is a distribution of the median break-through time, the time
which half the contaminant has reached the boundary.

MOSLEH: Right. So, is that not kind of basically in part an answer to
what George was asking? Because there\'s no fixed median time. There\'s
a value median time; right?

SWIFT: Right. And, this is dependent on uncertainty in the material
properties of the flow system.

GARRICK: Ron, you had another question?

LATANISION: Yeah, if we could turn to Slide 17? I\'m interested in the
drip shield. The drip shield takes on particular prominence in the sense
of the cool-down section of the thermal pulse when you might have
seepage. It\'s also expected that it will prevent rock fall from hitting
the waste package, and so on. I\'ve always been very skeptical of
whether it has the capability of really doing that in the long term,
and, so, I\'m just curious from your point of view whether you regard
the drip shield from a science and engineering point of view as being
something that is likely to remain, or whether you see the potential
that it could be replaced by some other\--by bentonite backfill, or some
other approach to providing the same sorts of characteristics that you
were looking for in a drip shield?

SWIFT: Our licensing case will have a drip shield in it. That\'s my
first answer. And, that will use a licensable and appropriate design for
the repository. At the moment, given our uncertainty in localized
corrosion processes, it is serving a function. It\'s not\--it\'s
providing the margin in the analysis. It\'s not an essential part of the
analysis, I don\'t believe. But, if we took it out, you would see more
early failures. That curve where we talked about how many early failures
there were, that would climb based on our current uncertainty and the
possibility of localized corrosion, which is where we were the last two
days.

So, that will be a fruitful place for ongoing work that might result in
a more efficient, cost effective design for the repository. But, at the
moment, it\'s a licensable design.

LATANISION: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Any other questions from the Board? Andy?

KADAK: In terms of dealing with these rare events like seismic, have you
heard of an analysis technique called identifying\--I mean, picking an
event occurring at a certain time, given the repository has certain
inventory at that time, then calculating the dose of that particular
event, whether it be volcanism or a seismic event, and then taking what
they call the mean of the peaks, is that what you use, or how do you
calculate the consequent of a particular event like that?

SWIFT: It might be beyond the amount of time we have here, but
basically, we do calculate\--let\'s take the eruptive event, a volcano
goes off, and there is a\--the highest dose is in the first few years,
and then radioactive decay and surface dispersion of the processes lower
the dose that future generations might receive from a prior volcanic
event. A person living at a time 1000 years from now, the obvious
overwhelming most likely state they will be in is there was no prior
volcano. But, there could have been, it\'s equally likely if there had
been a volcano, and it could have been in any year prior.

So, in probability space, they would receive a probability weighted
component from an event that could have happened one year before, ten
years before, a thousand years before. Each of those possible
consequences has to be assessed. So, let\'s imagine a human living a
thousand years from now, we have to calculate the dose they might
receive from a volcano that happened in year 100, and for year 900, and
so on, and sum those up with the probability accounted for. Does that
answer your question?

KADAK: I\'ll talk to you later.

SWIFT: Okay.

GARRICK: Okay, any other questions? Any questions from the staff? Yes,
let\'s start from the far left, Carl?

DI BELLA: Carl Di Bella, Board Staff.

Could we go back to Slide 6 again? The FEP. And, of course, as you
mentioned, we\'ve just finished a day and a half workshop that was
triggered by the Project intending to screen out localized corrosion
caused by dust deliquescence based on that box, which we call the
consequence box. Now, unlike the left-hand box, which is quantitative,
the right-hand box is qualitative. It\'s got that word significantly in
it.

Is there a quantitative measure of significantly that the Project is
using, and is there one that NRC is using, and are the two the same? Can
you answer that one?

SWIFT: I am not aware of one that the NRC is using. Within the Project,
we have to do this on a case by case basis because the consequence of
interest may be evaluated at some intermediate step. We can show, for
example, that a particular process has no consequence on the next
downstream component of the system. We don\'t have a quantitative
cut-off there. We just have to make the case for the NRC, and for those
others who want to review the FEP screening arguments. We have to make
the case on a case by case basis. Does that answer?

DI BELLA: Not really.

GARRICK: John?

PYE: Yeah, Pye, Board Staff.

I\'m interested in the relationship between design and performance,
particularly the engineered barrier system. You finished a response to
Dr. Latanision talking about cost effective design solutions. What is
the service life of a drip shield? What is the service life of a waste
package?

SWIFT: Let me make sure I understand the question here. From a design
engineer\'s perspective, what should they perceive as the appropriate
service life for an engineered component?

PYE: Correct.

SWIFT: This is\--Mr. Sproat talked earlier about the need to make sure
we are well connected between science and design, and this is an
interesting point, because the scientists here would look at this and
say our job is to understand when it fails, not how long it lives. It\'s
a different\--we turn the problem around.

Intuitively, I want the design engineer to tell me as much as they can
about that package, and I don\'t see this having a service life. I see
this having a life of\--or it could be existence. And, my job would be
to understand how it works. I don\'t impose design requirements. I
don\'t\--postclosure science doesn\'t go to design people and say you
need a 15,000 year waste package, or else. So, it\'s a place where there
needs to be a little back and forth on it. You can infer from something
I just said a few minutes ago that it would be good for demonstrating
compliance at the 15 millirem standard if a salient fraction of the
waste packages were still intact at 10,000 years.

PYE: You talked about back and forth? When should that process occur?

SWIFT: It is happening.

PYE: It is?

SWIFT: It is, yes.

GARRICK: All right, I think it\'s understandable why it\'s not a good
idea for the chairman to go last. I have a lot of questions, but I think
in the interest of responsibility we have to keep on time, we will take
our recess now until 2:30, and we\'ll have to find another time to have
some follow-up questions. Okay?

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

GARRICK: We\'re on our last stretch. It looks like quite a stretch,
however, so we need to move on. We have three more presentations plus
some concluding remarks plus an opportunity for any public comments that
we might want to have.

So, with that, I think we\'ll go with the presentation on the role of
analogues by Pat Brady from Sandia National Lab.

BRADY: Peter Swift started off his talk by showing a bunch of
predictions with various horse tails and so on. What he leaves out is
something that you all know, which is every time you do one of those
realizations, you take thousands of individual data points as input,
shove them into literally hundreds of submodels, which then run in
parallel, some in series. And at the end of the whole operation, the
calculation spits out a prediction of transport for a slew of
radionuclides for hundreds of thousands of years.

Now, the complexity of the calculation and the effort involved is truly
breathtaking, but let\'s be honest. We wouldn\'t be humans, much less
scientists or engineers, if every once in awhile we didn\'t stand back
and say, \"Is it true?\" Is the TSPA calculation really giving us a fair
and accurate indication of what\'s going to occur at Yucca Mountain?

Now, in situations like this, the human brain almost automatically
searches for analogues. It looks for industrial or geologic events that
are somewhat similar to what we\'re considering today and tries to
grapple with whether or not these are consistent with what we\'re
predicting at Yucca Mountain. Now, we use several natural analogues; and
for the next 15 minutes or so, I\'m going to highlight the ones that we
rely on most strongly.

If you\'ll go to the first slide, please. We have natural analogues. For
example, the best one that I\'ll emphasize here is the Pena Blanca ore
deposit. Specifically, there\'s a uranium ore body that sat in the
unsaturated zone in a geologic situation similar to Yucca Mountain for
roughly three million years. And the fact that uranium has been
transported only minor distances gives us some general warm feelings
that the same process might occur at Yucca Mountain.

We have unnatural analogues. For example, we can look at hazardous waste
sites that contain some of the radionuclides that we\'re concerned about
at Yucca Mountain, and we can look at the transport profiles of, for
example, plutonium moving through a fine grain soil at a hazardous waste
site. And we can get some ideas about what the mechanisms and absolute
transport distances of plutonium are going to be like in the fine grain
corroded mass of the waste package at Yucca Mountain.

I\'m going to talk about some engineered analogues, too, in particular
when we get to the case of technetium uptake. Now, the analogues that I
emphasize are primarily going to be focused on the source term. That\'s
partly a personal prejudice, I think, the geochemistry of the source
term. It\'s probably the most critical to assuring the long-term
isolation of the waste, so you\'ll have to bear with me.

In a general sense, we use natural analogues because (a) they\'re easy
to communicate and break through a lot of the calculations. Secondly,
and most importantly, we use natural analogues to identify the dominant
mechanisms. As a scientist, if we calculate, for example, the
dissolution rate and get it wrong by maybe a factor of 2, well, that\'s
a crime, but it\'s a misdemeanor. If we misidentify the actual reaction
mechanism, that\'s a felony. Natural analogues perform their strongest
role when they allow us to identify the mechanisms which will prevail
over long periods of time.

That being said, I have to emphasize that there is no perfect natural
analogue. They are all not quite exactly what we need. Either they go
for periods of time that are too short or distances that are too short
or too long. We\'re always kind of comparing apples and oranges here. So
there has to be a fair bit of effort that goes into matching to make
certain you\'re getting useful information out of it.

Go to the next slide, please. Probably the most well-known natural
analogue is the Pena Blanca site. The work that\'s been done over the
years has primarily been done by the Center and by the NRC. In recent
years DOE has worked at Pena Blanca. Pena Blanca is kind of a trophy
site for Yucca Mountain for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it is a
uranium ore deposit, UO~2~. It\'s slightly oxidized. It\'s in welded
silicic tuff. The UO2 is very similar in composition to the spent fuel
that we\'ll expect to see at Yucca Mountain. There are very few
impurities in the UO~2~ at Pena Blanca, roughly 3 percent. The fuel that
we\'ll be having at Yucca Mountain will have about 5 percent.

There are other\--natural analogues, Oklo and other places. They are
held back by the fact that they have impurities, which kind of obscures
some of the mineral parageneses. This is an arid site. Most important,
it is unsaturated and, therefore, chemically oxidizing like we expect to
see at Yucca Mountain.

What happened at Pena Blanca\--and, again, I\'m drawing heavily here
from the work that Bill Murphy and his colleagues at the Center have
done; so if you correct me, I\'ll defer the question to Bill, most
likely. At Pena Blanca the UO~2~ formed about 43 million years ago.
About seven million years ago there was a dissolution reprecipitation
event where UO~2~ was reprecipitated again. That was exposed through the
course of basin and range faulting so that the ore body ended up above
the water table, and it\'s sat there for the last three million years.

There are a couple of important points that come out of the Pena Blanca.
First of all, there\'s the general good feeling of seeing this stranded
ore body that\'s remained effectively inert for millions of years,
suggesting the same thing may occur at Yucca Mountain. What we used Pena
Blanca for in the Yucca Mountain Project is, we take the alteration
sequence that is observed there and use it to set our solubility models.

At Pena Blanca there is a distinct sequence of UO~2~, acquiring oxygen,
turning it into sherpite. Sherpite then grades into uranium silicate
phases, in particular sodyite, and then farthest out in the alteration
halo, you end up with uranifane, calcium uranium silicate. So the
sequence of fuel, oxidized hydroxylated uranium, silicated hydroxylated
uranium, and calcium uranium silicates, that\'s what we\'ve actually
seen also when we\'ve done our own tests, and particularly the Argonne
drip tests show the same sequence.

Now, what we\'ve done is we\'ve taken that sequence, and we use those
phases in the respective portions of the flow path to calculate the
solubility of uranium. We use sherpite inside the waste package, and we
use a uranifane further out in the far field.

Now, the Pena Blanca continues to be studied by DOE. We\'re hoping to
get useful information about colloidal fluxes out of Pena Blanca. This
is a question that we\'re sort of grappling with right now. Are there
going to be fluxes coming off of the spent fuel? That is, are we going
to get sherpite colloids coming off of the spent fuel? We hope to use
natural analogues to tell us whether or not we will; and, if so, most
importantly, how large are the colloidal fluxes.

Next slide, please. I would argue that although Pena Blanca is a good
site for seeing what happens inside of the fuel rods, there is another
facet of the waste packages that we\'d like to deal with with natural
analogues, and that is the incredible abundance of iron in the packages.
On a molar basis, if you take a waste package and split up what is iron
and what is uranium, you end up with mostly iron. There is seven times
as much iron as uranium. Uranium is a trace component in the repository
at Yucca Mountain. It is primarily a repository for iron, and that has
very important controls over what happens to the chemical state of the
radionuclides and how they\'re released.

There is a schematic over here where we show\--and I should point out,
this is work that was funded by the S&T Program, and I believe Mark
Peters will talk about it later on as well. If, in effect, Yucca
Mountain waste packages, once breached, are going to be large mixtures
of rust with small amounts of uranium, we would expect something like
the bottom case down here. In real life, when you coat something with
iron or oxidized iron, you end up passivating the stuff underneath it. I
mean, this is why steels work so well. You form a\--iron oxide scan on
the surface, and water can\'t get through nor can oxygen, and so the
stuff underneath remains fresh. This happens when you oxidize a nail.

What we\'ve been looking at is trying to see if this happens in a
microscopic sense as well in a waste package where the corrosion
products prevent the oxygen from even getting to the fuel. If this does
indeed occur, it would have a profound effect on the solubilities of
uranium and the other actinides. If you look over there, that vertical
graph just shows the partial pressure of oxygen. The blue at the top,
0.2 partial pressure of .2 atmospheres, that\'s the air we breathe. If
you drop it 40 orders of magnitude, you get down to the point where
uranium dioxide won\'t dissolve. As you go lower and go down into
10^-70^ to 10^-73^, these seem really extreme, 70 orders of magnitude,
but that\'s actually the in situ redox state that you see at the
interface of a nail or any corrosion of a low carbon steel.

Now, what we\'ve done is tried to find a natural analogue, tried to find
a Pena Blanca that had not just the uranium, but had all of the iron as
well; and we were never successful, so we made our own natural analogue.

Next slide, please. Well, let\'s go back one. We made our own natural
analogue. We made waste package mock-ups that are filled with steel and
UO~2~, and we put waters that are close in composition to J-13 to see,
well, could you observe over the waste package what one sees on the
macroscopic scale, can you actually get the self sealing, and does it
actually lower the redox state? And what we find

is\--and I don\'t have a picture of the mock-ups here, but several of
you all saw this at my last presentation\--what we find is that in the
space of about a month, corrosion of steel in the proportions we\'ll see
at Yucca Mountain will drop the in situ redox state about 40 orders of
magnitude and keep it there.

So what this says is that we end up right around the point where UO~2~
quits dissolving because there\'s not enough oxygen, and what it says
is, on a macroscopic sense, at least\--waste packages are about this
big\--on a macroscopic sense over\--so far it\'s been two years\--over
at least a couple years, we can get far more reducing conditions than we
actually see at Pena Blanca and elsewhere. What this means for
radionuclide solubilities is it drops the solubilities of neptunium by
about 10 orders of magnitude and plutonium by 4 orders of magnitude.

All right, well, the question there is, are the results that you can get
for one year or 18 months out of the S&T Program relevant to the million
years that we have to consider at Yucca Mountain? And so, again, we go
looking for natural analogues.

Go to the next slide, please. And the one we found is an old Roman
fortress called Inchtuthil. You see up there that\'s Hadrian\'s Wall.
That was going to be the full extent of the Roman Empire. At one point
they wanted to conquer Scotland, and they went about 150 miles north of
Hadrian\'s Wall and built a legionary fortress, and this happened in
about 84 A.D. Well, they changed their minds three years later and
decided that they\'d just about had enough of Scotland and sent the
legion to the Danube.

They took everything that was valuable with them, burnt everything that
wasn\'t, and they were left with the question of what to do with roughly
a million nails, 700 tons. They didn\'t want to leave them in the hands
of the Scottish tribe, because they would have probably been beaten into
spears and what not to throw at Roman soldiers who were heading south,
and so they buried them.

Next slide, please. This is kind of a quick schematic of the buried
nails at Inchtuthil. I think I said 700 tons, and it\'s 70 tons. It\'s
basically a million nails. They dug down about two meters, buried the
nails, and the volume of the nail cache would be three or four of these
tables stuck together. They stopped well before they got to the water
table, tossed all the nails in, buried it up, disguised the thing, and
headed for Austria.

The whole cache was excavated in the 1960\'s. Oh, yeah, I should point
out that the nails are\--their composition was very close to the
composition of the 8516, the low carbon steel that used to be in the
design before TADs, but I\'ll come back to that. What was found when
these were excavated in the 1960\'s was an enormous pile of rust on the
outer sides, but on the inside the bulk of the nails were pristine. If
you\'d used a regular dissolution rate law with a partial pressure of 20
percent, the air we breathe, the nails would have been gone in a hundred
years, but they\'re pristine 2,000 years later. And the mechanism that
controls this is thought to be that the formation of the iron
oxyhydroxides seals the underlying nails and prevents the access of both
oxygen and water.

So what it says is that over thousand-year time scales, there is the
potential for what we see occurring on the passivation of individual
iron objects. It looks like it can occur in a macroscopic sense.

So how do we use this natural analogue at Yucca Mountain? This goes into
an alternative conceptual model and the solubility AMR. In the
solubility AMR we calculate the dissolved concentrations as a function
of pH for uranium, neptunium, and the rest of them, all at a partial
pressure of 20 percent. The alternative conceptual model uses a much
lower FO~2~ indicated by here, and we end up with much lower values.

Now, one could calculate this occurring as well. And what you do is you
just take the below carbon steel rotary action of iron plus\--excuse
me\--zero valent iron plus oxygen, sending it to, well, any of the
corrosion products. If it goes to magnetite, the calculation suggests
that roughly half of the porosity of the waste package will be filled
once all the low carbon steel is gone. If you go to the more oxidized M
numbers, hematite and gertite, you end up filling the waste package, all
the void space, before roughly a third of the iron has been corroded.

Now, corrosion products are more than just iron. Typically they contain
a lot of occluded water. Occluded water means more porocity occlusion.
The point here is that with low carbon steel and\--I\'ll get to it in a
moment\--the stainless steel, there is a strong potential for the
package to seal itself. Now, this has been changed somewhat in recent
years. The TAD\'s design now calls for the substitution of stainless
steel for low carbon steel. The low carbon steel is calculated to
corrode away at about a hundred years under oxidizing conditions. The
stainless steel, it\'ll take about a hundred times that much. Basically,
the corrosion is expected to take about 10,000 years.

We would expect the corrosion products to be the same, though. Stainless
is essentially about 70 percent iron, and the difference of the
remainder is split between chrome and nickel. The chrome will probably
be chrome-3. The surface chemical properties of chrome-3 are very
similar to those of iron-3, so we would expect to see some of the same
ability to absorb radionuclides. We\'re still playing catch-up on the
TADs design, analyzing the corrosion products and trying to figure out
what the final reaction paths are going to be, so this is kind of a
sneak preview.

Next one. This is a an unnatural analogue, and this is again supported
by Mark Peters\' program, the S&T. What this shows is a micrograph of
what happens when you take technetium and run it past low carbon steel
with a head space that has an oxygen partial pressure equal to that in
the room. That is, under oxidizing conditions, if you put oxidized
technetium past low carbon steel, what you find is the technetium forms
these little blobs\--well, it gets occluded in these corrosion products.
It\'s reduced technetium.

Recall from early on in Peter Swift\'s talk that the technetium
pertechnetate, the large anion in the oxidized form, is the dose leader
(phonetic) in the first 10,000 years. Technetium, when it is reduced
down to Tc0~2~ has a solubility that is very, very low. If you can
reduce it to Tc0~2~, it drops off Peter\'s curves. What we show here is
that low carbon steel has the ability to actually reduce technetium.

Now, this wasn\'t a surprise to us, because, as I pointed out, there is
an unnatural analogue here. This process was patented in the 1980\'s by
Oak Ridge National Lab for treating technetium contaminated water. It\'s
been known for quite a while that steel pulls technetium out, so
there\'s another analogue evidence to suggest that there are sinks
(phonetic) for some of these things that we hadn\'t considered before.

For all these natural analogues that I\'ve been trying to point out
where they go into the TSPA, where they go into an AMR, for this one I
don\'t have an answer yet, because the data is kind of preliminary.
We\'re still working on it, though. I should emphasize that if I were to
write a reaction for this, it\'s reduced iron plus oxidized technetium
going to oxidized\--it\'s a surface complex of iron-3 and Tc0~2~.

Next slide, please. There are several other natural analogues that we
use. One that\'s gotten most of the press is the degradation of basaltic
glasses. The glass that\'s going to be in the codisposal waste forms,
compositionally it\'s not far removed from the basaltic glasses that you
see here in the basin and range and elsewhere. We\'ve measured
field-based glass degradation rates, both putting them in jugs, but also
just analyzing them in situ as well. Those things are used to anchor the
base of the uncertainty band for the degradation rates for the
borosilicate glasses. That\'s an input in the unpackaged chemistry
calculation.

We use the natural analogue of Sierra Negro, a cinder cone that erupted
in Nicaragua in 1995 to validate the ash plume model that allows us to
estimate the thickness of ash flows in the igneous scenarios. For steel
corrosion, as we grapple with the TADs design and we have to come up
with more precise reaction targets for the stainless steel, we\'re going
to expand our analysis of the corrosion of Josephinite and meteorites,
iron materials that have some nickel in them. What we\'re going to do
with that data is, essentially, we\'ll be analyzing those to identify
what the corrosion products are so we can use those when we calculate
sorption uptake inside of the package and then the EBS.

But, again, the trick there is to identify what are the reaction path
endpoints. Do you go to gertite? Do you go to magnetite? Is it an
iron-nickel spinel? That\'s work in progress.

One of the other areas where we rely strongly on natural analogues are
in the selection of mineral suppressants and the reaction path
calculations that are done for the unpackaged chemistry and the end
drift precipitant salts model and the P&CE AMR.

When you use reaction path codes like\--six, you can predict a lot of
wonderful things, some of them which aren\'t really true. A lot of
minerals that are never seen to form at the surface of the earth are
predicted to form. We have to go through and individually suppress these
minerals. We won\'t allow dolomite to grow when water lands on top of
the waste package, and the calcium and the magnesium is concentrated. We
don\'t allow dolomite to grow, because it\'s never observed to grow at
25 degrees. Garnets, although they are stable in sea water and should in
theory grow, they\'re never seen to grow either, so we suppress those as
well.

When we go through and develop a list of the suppressed minerals,
basically we\'re stitching together a host of natural analogues. Every
study where somebody went to a saline like that and said, \"You know,
the calcium and magnesium ratio\'s right, but we still didn\'t get these
particular minerals.\"

All right. At this point I\'m going to stop. I started off by pointing
out that the TSPA is this vast edifice of equations. I would like to end
by proposing an alternative view. I prefer to see the TSPA as a
connected fabric of natural analogues. We use natural analogues to build
the models, the submodels; we use natural analogues to validate the
submodels. And so it\'s the connected fabric of the analogues that
ultimately give us some confidence in the output of TSPA. Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you, Pat. You actually ended with the question I wanted
to start off with; that is, how is the analogue information transformed
or mapped into, I\'ll say loosely, the safety case, but in particular
things like the TSPA?

BRADY: That\'s a big question, John. I don\'t know if I could answer it
all by myself, and Peter might have to hop in. There\'s not a quick
answer to that one, John, because, you see, we use the natural analogue
data kind of from the microscopic all the way to the macroscopic. It\'s
implicit in the safety case, because we try to get the best mineral
suppressions. We try to get the best corrosion\--I mean, the best ones
are not modeled predictions. They come from natural observation. I
don\'t know if I\'m answering your question, though.

GARRICK: Well, you started to at the end of your discussion, and I think
that it strikes a lot of us on the Board that analogues are critically
important here in demonstrating behavior over very long periods of time.
At least my earth science friends tell me that. And, of course, what
we\'re interested in is, how does this information really find its way
into the bottom line results that we see? And to the extent that we
understand that process, I think, would be beneficial.

SWIFT: This is Peter Swift.

To me, coming from the performance assessment perspective, I think I
heard the question to be: How do we use those to derive or support the
quantitative estimates that I showed you?

GARRICK: One of the things that really caught my attention was his
comment about this being very useful, or something to that effect, with
respect to the source term. That would be a very specific area that I\'d
be very interested in knowing how you use it.

SWIFT: That one I\'m going to put back at Pat. Let me say something
first here, Pat. Early on in my talk, I talked about the question of why
you or I or any of us should have confidence in those quantitative
models. And one of the strong bases for confidence would be if the model
makes a reasonable interpretation of the natural analogue, also. Is it
consistent with what we see in the natural world?

It is actually fairly rare that an analogue provides direct input,
because, as Pat said, the analogues are slightly different. The only
real analogue\--true, exact analogue\--is the mountain itself. So we use
those analogues to inform the models and their parameter inputs, but
basically the answer is that it\'s a validation tool. It\'s a confidence
building tool. Does the model make sense? Is it consistent with what we
see in the analogue world?

And now, Pat, do you want to take the question on the source term
analogues and how we use them?

BRADY: Yeah. Trying to predict the transport of things like neptunium
and plutonium and fine grain materials like soils or the corrosion
product mantel, that\'s the forefront of science. If you just start off
and take the off-the-shelf models,\--, stick them in a retardation
equation, you can\'t model what you see in bomb pulse profiles for
plutonium. So there is an incredible burden on us to calibrate our
models for the source term with natural analogues.

We\'re somewhat hampered, though. Plutonium\--there is some data we can
get from Oklo. A lot of it, though, we have to go and look at Hanford,
we have to look at the bomb pulse stuff at Trinity and elsewhere. And
how we\'ve used that, we\'ve used that to examine the possibility of
irreversible uptake; that is, plutonium that goes onto a surface and
then is occluded and becomes part of the crystal because of dissolution
and reprecipitation. We\'re still working on those models.

Neptunium is much more difficult. We have looked incredibly hard to find
neptunium plumes. I was in Spain last week, and my heart sang when
somebody told me that at the Palomaris nuclear bomb accident, there was
actually neptunium in the soil that had been measured. I\'m still
waiting for the data. We don\'t have a whole lot of data that can tell
us what are the mechanism for neptunium uptake. In the absence of
natural analogues, we have to go with surface complexation models, or we
have to look at sequential extractions of the bomb pulse and the
hazardous waste data.

By and large, the simple response to your question is: We try to use
hazardous waste sites to give us some information to modify the original
solubility calculations and the sorption calculations that we do in the
source term.

GARRICK: Go ahead, David.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I\'m glad you didn\'t find iron nails at Pena Blanca. I do want to
caution you\--and Peter actually said it\--that analogues are difficult.
The Roman iron nails require a very long drying cycle as well as a wet
cycle. If it were wet continuously\--and I understand the repository
will have a continuous supply of relative humidity\--then the oxide that
forms from the Fe~3~ plus is not only a good electrolyte, it\'s very
transparent to oxygen. We know that because if you take a piece of steel
that\'s been continuously wet, that most of the corrosion product is, in
fact, hematite, and only a small amount is the Fe~2~ plus, which means
that it\'s oxidized most of it, which means the oxygen gets down fairly
deep into the oxide.

On the other hand, I like your models. I like the swelling and so on and
so forth that you could get from that, but just have to be cautious on
using analogues. And, again, Peter said that.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak.

I\'d like to understand the model, again, that you have for the waste
package. Do you assume that water comes into the waste package and
oxidizes all that iron, and the spent fuel is sort of in the middle of
it, and it gets sucked up or at least squeezed out or\--what is the
visual thing that I can focus on here?

BRADY: To begin with, the fuel is distributed somewhat homogeneously
amongst the iron. So you don\'t have\--I\'ll get to your question kind
of circuitously. The fuel is not in one corner and the iron is in the
other. They\'re intimately mixed. What we do is, when the unpackaged
chemistry calculation starts off, water comes in, you start dissolving
the fuel. The low carbon steel, since it is calculated to last only a
hundred years\--and I\'m talking about what we do right now\--this is
the high F0~2~ case\--within the very first few time steps, all of that
iron is hematite or gertite or ferrihydrate, something like that. That
is able to sorb radionuclides, which come off of the fuel.

Radionuclides come off the fuel according to the dissolution rate law
for the spent fuel. So spent fuel dissolves\--well, we figure in the
first hundred years\--well, we figure that the iron is going to
be\--iron shows up first, fills parts of the waste package, fuel starts
to dissolve appreciably after that. The fuel components have to go
through the iron oxyhydroxides to get out of the waste package.

Did I answer your question?

KADAK: Let me repeat what I thought I heard you say. Water comes into
the waste package and begins to oxidize the iron, okay, which squeezes
the spent fuel, which may, in fact, result in breaking the spent fuel
cladding, which then allows water to get into it, assuming there\'s
more, which then begins the dissolution of the spent fuel, which is then
retarded by the iron, which is wrapped around this whole blob of stuff.
Is that what was\--

BRADY: No, I misspoke then. We made no explicit assumptions about a
swelling pressure breaking through the clad and freeing up the\--

KADAK: Would that happen, though, do you think?

BRADY: I don\'t know. That\'s out of my field.

KADAK: But the image is a solid block of rust wrapped around the spent
fuel pellets.

BRADY: Yes.

KADAK: Held up as a waste package.

BRADY: Yes.

KADAK: And if it continues to get more water, at some point the waste
package itself would fail, and you\'ll have this mass of rusted stuff
that may or\--does that then fall apart, or what are we doing next?

BRADY: You end up going down one of two paths. The way we treat it right
now, you form the rust, you don\'t seal the package. The oxygen partial
pressure is fixed at the ambient level of 20 percent. That\'s analogous
to forming passivating surface layers on the iron at some point so that
there\'s always access maintained for water and oxygen in and
radionuclides out.

The alternative conceptual model that I was describing there was, the
iron oxide is filling up and blocking all the pathways, not allowing
water in, not allowing oxygen in. And the corrosion of the underlying
iron would consume any of the oxygen that was trapped to begin with, and
you\'d be left with a lower in situ redox state and probably an unlikely
path out.

So there were two models\--

KADAK: What is in the current analysis? Which one of those two?

BRADY: The first one I described.

KADAK: The first one. Thank you.

GARRICK: Howard.

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

Well, just answered that one. The current analysis is that everything
vaporizes and is released right away in one package. I mean, that\'s
what I heard in the previous talk. But to ask you my question on this
one, you\'re assuming that the outer envelope remains the same. In other
words, the Alloy 22 package did not come apart; right?

BRADY: We don\'t actually make that assumption explicitly, because I
don\'t think it matters\--

ARNOLD: But your picture had a\--well, it won\'t hold otherwise.

BRADY: I don\'t think it\'ll matter, because whether it stays intact or
if it breaks, you either end up with a contained pile of rust or a big
pile of rust sitting on the ground. The processes which might lead to
appreciable retention is going to be the interaction of the
radionuclides with the strongest\--iron oxyhydroxides. It seems like
you\'ll have that in either case. But I don\'t know what the hoop
stresses\--I think that\'s the right term for Alloy 22\--what it takes
to break something like that.

ARNOLD: Well, water got into it through a hole, and it isn\'t going to
corrode anywhere else around its surface.

BRADY: I thought they covered all that on Wednesday or two days ago.

SWIFT: This is Peter Swift again.

I just wanted to clarify something that may not have been clear in what
I said. In that analysis I showed earlier, the waste package indeed was
assumed to fail in a single time step after the early failure. But we
did continue on with the degradation of the waste form. All the waste
was not available immediately. We went ahead and ran the waste form
degradation and solubility models from there forward. So it was merely
that water was able to reach the waste immediately.

ARNOLD: Reach the fuel itself.

SWIFT: Yes, that\'s right.

GARRICK: Ron.

LATANISION: If we could put up Figure 4, maybe that would help in the
conversation. When iron oxidizes to produce iron oxide, there\'s a
roughly three times increase in volume; and so depending on how much
iron oxide you\'re producing, there must be some sort of internal
pressure created. It may not be sufficient to cause the fuel elements to
break. I don\'t know. That\'s an interesting point. But it could. It
could, yeah, definitely could.

BRADY: There\'s a negative feedback at work, though, too. If you swell
up the interseces of the package, you tend to block the subsequent
access of water and oxygen. And so the question comes down to: Do you
build enough pressure up first, or do you choke off the reactants first?
In one case you crack the package; in the other you just seal it. And we
don\'t know how to calculate that right now, but we\'re working on it.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

I agree in part. The iron oxides are not particularly impermeable to
oxygen or to water, at least in comparison, for example, to the chromium
oxides, which you mentioned also. So there are a lot of permutations
here on all these variables that could be very important.

BRADY: I agree with you. Someone asked the question, I think, of Peter
about what\'s the data you wish you had. And I\'ll say this with the
caveat that I don\'t know a way to measure it accurately. But if I could
wish for the diffusion coefficient of oxygen and water in a corroded
waste package, that\'s the number I\'d love to have.

And for what it\'s worth, the S&T project, that was one of the
objectives was to\--either you go in and you measure through some type
of profiling through a concentration gradient what the diffusion
coefficient is, or you just jump to the answer at the end and see what
the in situ oxygen redox state is by measuring the iron to the

iron-3 and the pH.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Just one final sort of homely analogue here. I keep thinking when I look
at this illustration of my windows when I was still at MIT that were
frozen shut because of the corrosion of the steel frames and could not
be opened. It\'s kind of a similar phenomenology here. That was because
of deferred maintenance, though; it was a totally different\--.

ARNOLD: Did oxygen diffuse into your office?

GARRICK: Thure.

CERLING: Yeah. I\'m not sure if this is directed at Pat or Peter. But
what I thought Peter said was that some of the results of this was
actually included in the loss of the nuclides from the waste package
during the previous modeling. Is that right?

SWIFT: The model that I showed earlier, which is the most recent stuff
we\'ve been running on the releases from a waste package, does include
degradation of the spent fuel, which actually happens fairly rapidly,
and it does include the effects of the iron corrosion products working
both as a source of colloidal material for transport and also as a
source of a sorbent that is stationary as well, so it affects release in
several ways.

CERLING: Does it include anything in this model of sort of this
self-sealing property so that part of the waste package would perhaps
never see any more water.

SWIFT: No. For the results you actually saw of the waste package, the
drip shield was intact in those, and there was water vapor
available\--behind. You\'d have a water film on all the waste, and it
was a diffusive\--. We did not consider the possibility that corrosion,
particularly for example, of the steel inner liner, the
corrosion\--might block water flow, no, we did not consider that.

GARRICK: Before you leave, Peter, some of these phenomena could be
really important in terms of the waste package integrity. And you do
have data; you do have some information. Has there been any
consideration given to trying to incorporate some of these phenomena
probabilistically where the probabilities would be based on whatever
supporting evidence you could find?

SWIFT: That would be something that we would consider, and you alluded
earlier to margin analyses, which we may do, where we look at
information that we don\'t believe is ready now for use in a licensing
case, but which we believe would be valuable information to demonstrate
for our own benefit to ourselves there was additional margin to be had
in the performance of the system.

MURPHY: Bill Murphy, Board.

Pat, first of all, I really like the term \"trophy site\" for Pena
Blanca, and I think that Pena Blanca as well as many, many other
geologic sites offers evidence that very strong redox potential
gradients can be maintained due to self-sealing. At Pena Blanca
specifically there is still uraninite at the site 100 meters above the
water table in a nominally, completely oxidizing environment; but it\'s
completely encased in silica that was deposited hydrothermally, and so
it\'s sealed. And over a scale of millimeters or centimeters, there are
oxygen potential gradients of\--gradients existed at the Inchtuthil site
as well where there was iron in the center and oxides on the outside.

But I\'m concerned at Yucca Mountain about the mechanical integrity of
an iron oxide seal in a seismic environment. And in that context, I\'m
led to question: Were the mechanical properties of the iron oxides at
Inchtuthil investigated? Was it a solid thing that would stand up to
hundreds of earthquakes?

BRADY: The student I have looking into that, Elizabeth Anderson at the
University of Michigan, we even had her tickets bought, and, more
importantly, we\'d gotten\--the trip thanks to Mark Peters, and it got
cancelled at the very end. We were going to go back to actually examine
it. So the short answer is: I don\'t know. The long answer is: We tried.

But back to your original question about the seismicity, yeah, if you
take the bottom thing and dribble it like a basketball down the drift,
and presumably you could smear out some of the iron oxide and expose
some of the spent fuel, but I wonder\--well, I don\'t know of a natural
analogue that would give us a clear answer for that. I have difficulty
believing that you do more than take an intact package and just spread
it into a pile on the ground. I think because of the fact that you\'re
going to have reduced iron all the way out to 10,000 years, so there\'s
going to be dissolution reprecipitation going on. There still might be a
potential to set up these redox\--I mean, you could throw the question
out and say, well, Pena Blanca is in the basin and range. There\'s
seismicity there. Surely that had earthquakes that would have affected
the silica ceiling.

MURPHY: Well, in that case, in fact, 99.99 percent is oxidized, and so
it\'s only very rare remnants of reduced uranium that are left, and
it\'s encased in this silica cement that\'s so hard you can\'t crack it
with your rock hammer. So, I mean, that\'s not the same.

BRADY: But the case of an earthquake spreading it all out, yeah, that
would be something we\'d have to\--I mean, before we put grade weight on
it and the probabilistic assessment that Peter talks about, we\'d have
to have, hopefully, some independent evidence to say, well, it won\'t
happen or it will and it\'s not so bad or it truly is.

GARRICK: Any other questions from the Board? Yes, David.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I just want to share one minor story with you about natural analogues.
In the steam generators in the nuclear industry, there was corrosion of
the tube support plates in that particular system in a very low
corrosive environment that resulted in denting of the tubes in the
boiler. That was a case where iron oxide was being formed on steel at
very low oxidizing conditions in that particular case, and it resulted
in crushing the steam generator tubes.

And so, to me, that\'s also another natural analogue you might want to
consider when you\'re thinking about using iron oxide as a protective
film on anything.

GARRICK: Yes, Henry.

PETROSKI: Petroski, Board.

I\'m a little confused about this cartoon here. Does it represent a
physical experiment that is ongoing, or is it a thought experiment?

BRADY: It\'s both. The thought experiment was, that\'s an anatomically
correct on a volumetric basis. Roughly the low carbon steel is the red,
the blue is the stainless

steel\--this is the old pre-TADs design\--and the yellow is the UO~2~.
Now, the main corrosion rates for the low carbon steel had it all
turning into corrosion products in a hundred years. So that second
picture of the cartoon was just taking that iron and splitting it
amongst gertite, hematite, and at that point it\'s not really
anatomically correct.

That experiment is ongoing right now at Sandia. We\'re doing it with
just the iron. The graduate student I mentioned earlier, Elizabeth
Anderson, is doing the experiments with the uranium dioxide at the
University of Michigan. We still don\'t have results from that yet. So
that was a cartoon, a model. We did the experiments to back it up.

PETROSKI: So you were extrapolating from the experiments to what you
expect to see?

BRADY: In a perfect world, we would have gotten, instead of several
hundred thousand dollars we would have gotten millions of dollars, we
would have real mock-ups, but this was a start.

PETROSKI: So this industrial analogue, as I think you would classify
this, is used differently from a natural analogue in that the natural
analogue is a finished process that you use as validation. Here you\'re
inferring something, and you\'re building a model to validate a model in
a way.

BRADY: Yes. And I said it as we were making our own analogue, because
nature didn\'t provide us the one we needed.

GARRICK: All right. Any questions from the staff?

Anybody else?

Very good, thanks a lot.

Our next presentation will be by Mark Peters of the Argonne National
Laboratory, and he\'s going to talk about the Science and Technology
Program.

PETERS: Thanks for having me back. It\'s an honor to be here. You made
me really nervous, because you put an Argonne guy between a bunch of
Sandians.

Let me explain why I\'m here. Under the Office of the Chief Scientist in
Russ\'s organization, you have the lead lab organization that\'s
responsible for all post-closure science, at least as of Monday. And you
have a separate entity, the Science and Technology Program, as you\'ve
known it over the past few years, and John Wengle is the DOE manager of
that. He had another commitment, so I\'m here effectively presenting on
behalf of John.

So what I want to do today is, I first want to remind myself and you of
trying to put this in the context of the safety case instead of just
going through a bunch of highlights of the Science part of the Science
and Technology Program. There\'s going to be some of that, but I\'m sure
you\'ll bring me back on point if I don\'t make the point. But I\'m
going to try to keep bringing myself back to where this might fit in. I
don\'t have all the answers. I can\'t point to a document yet. You
heard, I think, earlier today that that\'s under discussion. I know
discussions with Ward, he looked at us and said, \"We need to figure out
how we take a lot of this very valuable information and incorporate it
into our case.\" So that\'s something we\'re actively looking at and
thinking about where that fits.

So I\'ll go to the first slide. This is directly from Russ\'s
presentation. I don\'t need to read it. Helps me to remind everybody
safety case is a lot of things. It\'s the TSPA; Peter talked about that.
There\'s multiple lines of evidence like analogues. I think the Science
portfolio, in particular, in the Science and Technology Program fits
into a safety case argument. It probably fits in in the sense of telling
us something about how we think, from a technical perspective, the
system works.

In a lot of cases, this information\--this came up in questions just
after the past presentation how much of this is \"in the TSPA right
now.\" Actually, you\'ll find that probably very little is in the TSPA
right now. But that said, I think it can add confidence in terms of the
safety case.

Next slide. Again lifted directly from Russ\'s. I\'ve already made the
point that I want to make here, but I\'m going to focus strictly on the
Science and Technology Program. Frank\'s going to get up here next and
talk about performance confirmation and long-term testing and
monitoring.

Next. Just a reminder of the mission and drivers of the S&T Program.
Again, I\'m going to focus completely on the Science portfolio. Remember
there\'s a technology portfolio that you\'ve heard probably at least
highlights of over past meetings; but today I want to talk about the
three primary Science Program areas, that being materials performance,
source term, and natural barriers. And, again, what I want to do is give
you a general overview of what we\'re focusing on in each area in terms
of technical areas and then use some highlights from the program to try
to make some general points and then wrap up.

The way we\'re managing the program, I think, is important. Again, John
Wengle under the Office of the Chief Scientist, is the manager on the
DOE side; but we\'ve broken it up into so-called thrust areas, and the
Science thrusts are those three that you see at the bottom. And I think
it\'s important to remind everybody in the audience who manages these
areas on behalf of the Department.

Materials performance area, Joe Payer from Case Western, who I think
most of you know. He was heavily involved in the meetings over the past
couple days at the corrosion workshop. Source term is Rod Ewing at the
University of Michigan and myself. And natural barriers is Bo Bevardsen
(phonetic) at LBL, Yvonne Sang does a lot of work with Bo on that, and
she\'s actually here in the audience as well.

Next slide, please. So first I want to make the point, one of the things
that we\'ve really tried to do\--I don\'t want to dwell on this, but
really what I\'m trying to do here is, kind of in a cartoon-like manner,
schematically lay out the kind of processes that we\'re thinking about
from a technical perspective that occur in those three areas, meaning
the natural barriers, particularly the near field around a drift\--down
here in the lower left\--the material performance in terms of what\'s
going on on the surface of the waste package, and then finally what\'s
going on inside the source term.

A complex set of processes. Don\'t have to tell this audience that
particular\--that\'s self-evident to this audience. But what we\'re
after here is, yes, we\'ve got a case that we\'re ready to move forward
to license application with. We\'re comfortable with that. That said,
there are questions, yeah, we could study this forever and ever and ever
and never answer all the questions. But we\'ve set up a Science Program
that we think addresses some of the key questions from a scientific
perspective.

I also want to mention how we came to the portfolio. I would
characterize it more as a bottoms-up as opposed to a tops-down. We
didn\'t start with TSPA and ask ourselves risk-informed questions and
drive down the program and then say this is the right portfolio. We did
kind of a hybrid of that. We started at the bottom and asked ourselves:
As scientists, what are some of the key uncertainties from a scientific
perspective? And given the people that are leading the areas, I think
you could probably appreciate that we have a broad understanding of the
TSPA as well, and so I can\'t say that didn\'t inform our thinking,
because it did.

So I think we\'ve come up with a program that\'s trying to address some
of those key uncertainties, and it will have a benefit to TSPA perhaps
in future years.

So, first, the materials performance area. Really three major research
areas that Joe has laid out. Looking again at corrosion processes on
metal surfaces in environments where you don\'t expect\--these aren\'t
under water, right. You\'re dealing with metal surfaces that have
deposits, perhaps dust, perhaps thin films of moisture, and
deliquescence processes that might occur above boiling or could occur
throughout the temperature range but may be very important above
boiling. And then, finally, in the case when you get below boiling, you
perhaps have seepage, and you have waters that contact the package at
that point.

So a variety of geochemical environments that one could expect. Given
certain environments, we might, in fact, initiate, say, localized
corrosion, for example, in a crevice; and how does the corrosion damage
evolve. Again, this was the subject of a lot of discussion over the last
two days. And then, finally, tying all this together as how the
environment evolves, what happens inside of a crevice, or how does the
near field environment evolve, how does that fit back in with the
evolution of corrosion damage. So not only initiation, but propagation,
but also starting to think about if something starts, will it stop or
will it stifle or will it slow down. So those are the kind of questions
that we\'re asking materials performance.

Next slide. In the source term area, this is just a picture, a cross
section of a fuel rod. Again, it isn\'t just a homogeneous bunch of
U0~2~. It\'s got cracks, it\'s got some of the products that have
migrated to the gap, so its initial starting condition when it comes out
of a reactor, we need to understand that first before we can really
start to understand how they might be released if they get contacted by
water. And on the right is just an example of some of the bubbles that
form perhaps at grain boundaries, etc. from some of the products.

So in the source term area, we\'re thinking about it in four primary
technical areas. First of all, how does spent nuclear fuel dissolve if
it\'s contacted by, say, drips or it\'s covered with a thin film of
water? Again, these aren\'t sitting in a pool of water. You\'re dealing
with perhaps humid air oxidation at higher temperatures and then perhaps
contact with perhaps water that could form thin films or maybe sporadic
films on the spent fuel.

Let me jump to the third bullet. You\'re going to see some of the same
slides that Pat showed. I\'m not sure whether I stole them or he stole
them, but they\'re the same slides. He went through that in some detail,
but waste form-waste package interactions is code for the sorts of
things that Pat talked about. What goes on if you breach a package,
water contacts the insides, do you, in fact, set up scenarios where you
maybe self-seal and lead to very low partial pressures of oxygen? What
can that lead to in terms of radionuclide solubility particularly the
actinides.

The second bullet\--and that\'s something that we\'ve talked about with
this Board before, and I have a few slides on that to make a couple
points. But this gets at, if you alter the UO~2~, the spent fuel, and
you form uranyl secondary phases, like shopeite was mentioned\--there is
a whole suite of them, I couldn\'t begin to list them all\--what role do
those secondary phases play in perhaps controlling the release of, say,
actinites like neptunium? And that\'s something we\'re spending a lot of
time thinking about in this portfolio.

And, finally, it\'s a complex set of processes, and so we\'re starting
to put together conceptual models and also numerical models of how these
unpackaged chemical and physical processes fit together so that we could
start to try to put this into a coherent picture.

Next slide. Natural barriers. A schematic of a cross-section of the
mountain. You\'re dealing with infiltration of water in the top, flow
through the upper natural barrier, seepage into the drifts perhaps, then
transport through the lower natural barrier out to the accessible
environment and all the things that go into the flow and transport
processes that are complex, uncertain. We think we\'ve captured the
uncertainty moving forward to the license application, but there are
some key areas that are focused on in the natural barriers area.

Again, still looking at the seepage problem, the second bullet, the
notion of a drift shadow where you might have areas below a drift
perhaps by virtue of the presence of the seepage of the capillary
barrier that leads to perhaps limited seepage in the drift. You may also
form a shadow zone, as we call it, under the drift that may lead to
perhaps diffusive transport out of the drift rather than invective
transport leads to longer travel times through the UZ.

The nature of flow and transport in heterogeneous systems, I\'ll show a
few examples of that.

And, finally, multi-scale/multi-physics coupled processes modeling.
I\'ll show an example of that from the work by George Danko. That work
that George did was funded at one time, at least by Nye County. John
Walton talked about it at the workshop the last two days. That\'s now
being carried on through the natural barriers program and S&T, so George
is a PI for those programs.

Next slide. So some results to date, and what I tried to do here, at
least in part, was start to think about, okay, what are some of the
kinds of things that we could develop as we think about talking about
system safety in a more qualitative manner, maybe I\'ll say, although
there\'s quantitative behind it? What are some of the things that we
might be able to say?

So I\'m going to skip the first two bullets. Those are kind of general
bullets that I\'ve already touched on. The third bullet. We talked a lot
at the workshop\--I say \"we\" but I was in the audience\--about the
notion of stifling of localized corrosion. Currently in the total system
performance assessment basis, there is not stifling of localized
corrosion or general corrosion. If it starts, it continues until failure
of breach and effectively failure of the package.

We\'re looking at mechanisms that might, in fact, lead to stifling of
localized corrosion. We think we\'ve got some promising results. As
witness to the conversations of the past two days, there\'s also a lot
of questions. And so we\'re continuing to look at those.

The fourth bullet. I\'ll talk a little bit more about this. Pat touched
on the potential of incorporation or sorption of radionuclides into,
say, alteration products like iron oxyhydroxides, perhaps surface
complexation of technetium as TC0~2~ if it\'s reduced by the iron in the
package. Another thing we\'re looking at is perhaps neptunium sorption
onto iron oxyhydroxides. We have some experimental evidence that that
may occur. And we\'re also doing some molecular dynamics simulations to
understand the sorption mechanisms as well. And I also touched on the
potential incorporation of, say, actinides into secondary uranyl phases.
I\'ll show some data on that.

And then the bullet to talk about the natural barriers, we\'re looking
at perhaps the influence of matrix diffusion in UZ and SZ and how that
might lead to potential retardation of radionuclide transport. And also
we\'ve got some experimental work going on to look at K~d~\'s for some
of the key radionuclides.

Next slide. First off, one of the things that we\'ve done across the
three areas\--I\'ll use the word \"jointly\"\--we\'re jointly funding an
effort that\'s being led from Berkeley\--Carl Stiefles (phonetic), the
PI at Berkeley\--to look at trying to put the processes\--and obviously
this is a work in progress, it\'s a complex set of processes\--but try
to put the near field processes both in the rock and in the drift and to
start to put it together into coherent conceptual model.

And so this is just to point that out, that is an ongoing activity and
we think important, and it could add a lot of value perhaps over the
longer term.

Next slide. Some materials performance. I can skip over this, but it\'s
a collage that Joe\'s put together showing the different sorts of things
that we\'re focusing on in materials performance.

Next slide. Now I have a series of slides that the people at the
workshop will hopefully not fall asleep, but they\'re things that you
saw at the workshop, again talking about corrosion in thin layers of
dust or particulate on the surface of the package. What\'s going on, how
wet is the dust, what are the soluble salts, what\'s the evolution of
the environment, what\'s the processes that are going on in the anode
and the cathode, and those sorts of things. But these are very\--I\'ll
personally call them somewhat unique environments in the sense that
they\'re thin layers of dust, perhaps not over the entire package; they
go through wetting and drying cycles; and what happens under those thin
particulate layers in terms of corrosion processes. Will it initiate
localized corrosion; will it not; if it does, will it stifle\--those
kinds of questions.

Next. This talks about the stifling. This is something that Rob Kelly
showed yesterday during his presentation. Again, looking at primarily
stifling processes, if you initiate localized corrosion, will it stifle?
And there are some processes that could go onto the cathode site in
particular that might lead to some stifling of the localized corrosion.
We\'re continuing to look at that very seriously.

Next slide. Model from folks at Case Western. Rob, I think, also showed
this. The bottom line point here is they\'re doing some modeling\--if
you start with a crevice that starts as a precursor in a crevice former,
anode here, virtual cathode out here, this is the evolution of the
crevice corrosion as a function of time. And it gets to a point where
you actually open the crevice to the outside and perhaps lose critical
crevice chemistry that could also lead to stifling. Again, this got a
lot of discussion. Is this a reasonable case that we might expect in a
crevice on a waste package at Yucca Mountain? I think good question. We
need to continue to do some focused work to try to get to that answer in
the near term.

Next slide. Something you didn\'t see in the last couple days. There\'s
also a program going on looking at the stability of passive films in
these passive metals. This is an example from work from Tom Devine at UC
Berkeley where he\'s using an in situ Raman setup where he can put the
sample actually into an environmental chamber in situ and do Raman
Spectroscopy and look at the evolution of the passive film in the
environment. It\'s an interesting evolutionary technique that gives us
important information about the stability of the passive film, which is
vital to understanding the performance of a passive metal like Alloy 22.

Next slide. Source term. I\'m not going to go through this. I put this
up because when you think about the source term, some people say, \"Oh,
it\'s horrendously complex; forget trying to understand that.\" I don\'t
share that particular viewpoint. I don\'t think Rod does either. So what
Rod and I have done is we\'ve tried working with the PIs. We\'ve tried
to think about the processes and all the important processes that can go
on in the source term, as we term it, and then try to put together a
program that focuses on the areas of key uncertainties. So I don\'t have
programs in every one of these circles. I have programs in the areas
where we think we really have key uncertainties that could be important.
And so that\'s primarily, again, evolution of alteration phases and how
that may lead to uptake of radionuclides, and then also this whole
notion that Pat talked extensively about about the evolution of the
geochemical environment inside of a breached package, and then also how
does spent fuel dissolve in thin films of water. Those are all important
key uncertainties that we need to understand for the source term.

Next slide. I don\'t need to talk about this. This is the same slide,
different title, that Pat showed. So we went through that, I think, in
gory detail. I will say that Pat mentioned the work that\'s going on at
Sandia where he, Kate Helene (phonetic), and Elizabeth Anderson are
doing the work to look at the waste package mock-ups.

We\'re also doing\--I\'m going to show the same slide again, and he
mentioned he showed the\--go to the next slide. He showed this slide as
well. This is work that Ken Kripka (phonetic) at PNNL is doing as part
of Pat\'s project, but it\'s a multi-lab effort. And, again, this is
just showing the reduction of pertechnetate to TC0~2~ and surface
complexation on an iron oxyhydroxide. This could be very, very important
observation in terms of retardation of technetium, which, as Pat
mentioned, is a key contributor to dose in the first 10,000 years.

Another aspect that I don\'t have a slide on of this program is\--I
alluded to it a little bit in a comment earlier\--is the notion of, when
you do form these complex set of iron oxyhydroxides, do they play a part
in sorption of neptunium. And that\'s something we\'re also looking at,
both in experimental and modeling space. And I think the importance of
understanding sorption of neptunium is probably self-evident, a key
contributor to dose.

Next slide. This is just a slide to introduce the concept of the fate of
neptunium in terms of alteration phases. This is from Ph.D. thesis work
of Frannie Skemerski (phonetic) at University of Michigan; she\'s
working with Rod and Uto Becker at Michigan. But she\'s doing a series
of molecular dynamics simulations to understand the energetics of what
happens if you put neptunium ion into uranium alteration phase.
Important to understand these, because what we want to generate here is
an understanding of the crystal chemistry of what neptunium does in a
structure. Does it go into the structure? It doesn\'t go into
everything, we don\'t think. And so if we can generate an
understanding\--and we think we can\--we\'re within reach within a year,
two years. If we can generate that understanding, we think we can put
together a really solid basis for the importance of alteration phases
in, say, neptunium uptake. And this is an important part of that.

Next slide. We have an experimental program associated with that. This
is just one set of results for that. Let me talk generally, and then
I\'ll talk about the specific. We\'ve got several projects going on in
this area, looking at the formation of uranyl alteration phases, the
modeling energetics, but also a lot of experimental work from several
institutions. This particular work is work that\'s been done by Peter
Burns. This happens to be work that\'s in press. It\'s an article
that\'s coming out in *Elements*, the magazine, in December, I believe.

But what Peter\'s done is he\'s done a lot of work growing these uranyl
alteration phases and putting them in hydrothermal bombs with neptunium
and seeing does the neptunium, in fact, get incorporated into the
alteration phases. And one of the questions he always asks himself: Is
it truly going into the structure\--and that gets back to the energetics
calculations that I showed in the previous slide\--or is it sorbed, goes
along some kind of grain boundary in some way?

So what he\'s done and what\'s shown here is, he\'s grown these
crystals, and these are about, for your all\'s benefit, on the order of
50 by 100 micron-type size crystals. And what he\'s done, the top plot
shows a sodium-substituted metaschoepite grown in a hydrothermal bond,
but he doesn\'t have any neptunium in it. And at the bottom he\'s got
another sodium-substituted metaschoepite, but here he\'s grown it in the
presence of neptunium. And you can actually see a line scam with the
laser in this crystal where he\'s burned the crystal with a laser. It\'s
laser ablation, ICPMS, laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass
spectrometry.

But effectively what he does, he blasts it with a laser, makes a cloud,
sucks it into a mass spectrometer, and measures the neptunium
concentration. And you can see when he starts the laser ablation here on
the bottom, he does, in fact, pick up significant amounts of neptunium.
It\'s not calibrated, so the fact that it\'s 500 counts on the side
doesn\'t mean that he\'s got a calibrated scale and it equals 500 PPM in
the crystal. We\'ve got to figure out exactly how much of the neptunium
in the bomb, and this is something Bill\'s brought up in previous
meetings, how much of the neptunium in the bomb is, in fact, going into
the crystal.

But we\'re starting to get real evidence that at least some of phases
uptake neptunium. Now, again, all the phases probably don\'t, but we
think we understand crystographically why that is.

Next slide. Natural barriers. You saw a smaller version of this\--I\'ll
just go to the next slide. A couple areas I want to point out. A lot of
thinking about matrix diffusion that we\'ve been doing is part of the
natural barriers program. Looking at it from multiple fronts, there\'s
work at Berkeley looking at field scale experiments and basically the
effects of matrix diffusion on the scale of, say, a laboratory or field
experiment. There\'s also experimental work going on. This particular
slide is from the Livermore work where Max Shu (phonetic) and his
coworkers at Livermore have been taking intact core and doing tracer
testing along fractures in a fractured core and, through a variety of
techniques, collecting the tracer at the bottom, doing tomography, and
looking at the influence of matrix diffusion as you flow through a
fracture, how much diffusion do you actually get into the matrix, and
what would that do to retardation of a variety of\--radionuclides.

Next slide. Also, Paul Rimos (phonetic) and his folks at Los Alamos,
they\'re taking\--this is actually both volcanics and alluvium, so I\'m
switching more to a saturated zone kind of problem here. This particular
set of experiments is with alluvium, so it\'s been collected from a Nye
County well, and they\'re putting it in a flow through column and
looking at sorption and desorption rates of key radionuclides. The plot
here shows for uranium, for

example\--and this is a desorption curve, so they basically put the
alluvium, run uranium-laden solution through it, and they do anywhere
from one to 14 days, and they then take that same sample that\'s sorbed
a certain amount of uranium, and they do a desorption experiment. And
from that they back out the K~d~, or basically the effective sorption
of, say, uranium. And you can see the K~d~\'s on the forward step are
relatively low; but when you go through the desorption step, it\'s
suggested that they\'re not completely reversible, so there is some
irreversibility of the sorption, and you get fairly high K~d~ numbers.
These are higher K~d~ numbers than we are currently assuming typically
in the current TSPA. Could provide significant benefit. This would be a
good candidate perhaps to look at in terms of margin analysis that Peter
and John were talking about a minute ago\--perhaps.

Next slide. I think this was shown or a version like this John showed
the other day. This is, again, to remind the Board that George Danko\'s
work on looking at multi-phase transport vapor and liquid water in a hot
drift and how that happens actually along the drift. That\'s an
important thing to understand, natural ventilation and convection
processes. It could actually inhibit seepage into the drift, at least
according to George\'s analyses; but it\'s also moving water vapor up
and down the drift and perhaps has interesting consequences for water
balance inside the drift. And so this is an important consideration. The
TSPA currently has a CFD model for these kinds of processes, so this is
a good comparison to that CFD simulation that\'s in the current TSPA.

Next slide. Drift shadow. Somebody has shown you in the past a couple of
examples of how we\'re going after the drift shadow problem. This is a
slide that I haven\'t shown you before, so that\'s why you see it, but
you may recall that we\'re looking at drift shadow. We\'re using a
variety of approaches to try to demonstrate whether we can, in fact,
demonstrate the presence of a drift shadow. One approach is, we\'re in
the tunnel with lithophysal cavities in the topapa (phonetic) and using
uranium series disequilibria\--this is USGS work primarily with
Berkeley\--to try to determine whether there is evidence of shadows
under some of these cavities. And that\'s been, I would say, ambiguous
to date.

We\'ve also identified an analogue at Black Diamond Mine, a sandstone
quarry not so far from Berkeley, where they actually have horizontal
tunnels, one on top of each other, so it\'s an interesting question
whether if you had drifts on top of each other, what that would do. But
the bottom line is, they\'ve drilled a series of holes, and they\'re
about to start doing a series of tracer injections and geophysics to try
to understand whether we would create a drift shadow under those
tunnels. This is primarily a poor sandstone with some healed fractures
in it.

And then this particular set of experiments is worked by Susan Altman
(phonetic) at Sandia National Laboratories. This is done in the full
visualization laboratory at Sandia. They\'ve taken a stack effectively
of bricks, and they flow water through the fractures, and they do real
time tomography of this experimental setup to determine whether there is
a presence of a drift shadow. I don\'t want to dwell on this, but when I
studied this, this is also ambiguous.

So I would argue that drift shadow makes physical sense. If you think
about seepage in an unsaturated rock, it makes physical sense. If we
want to demonstrate it, we need to continue to strive for the
experimental evidence.

Next slide. A couple points I want to make here with the summary. I
think we\'re generating additional insight. I think we will continue to
generate additional insight. I think it\'s focused on the right kinds of
problems. Yeah, we are going from science to design, and that\'s an
important step we need to take; but I still think there\'s some science
that we can focus on some very important problems and get meaningful
results.

The second bullet. This is a personal comment. This program\'s been
really focused over the years on national laboratory investigators. I\'m
a national laboratory investigator. And this is not to denigrate the
national laboratories, clearly. I work for one. But I think one thing
that we\'ve done here is we\'ve brought in some university folks, and
it\'s brought some diversity to the program. And I think that\'s
incredibly valuable. All the programs\--Joe\'s programs got an extensive
university involvement, Rod and I\'s does as well. And it isn\'t just
science for science\'s sake; we\'ve been able to get them to focus on
some important problems, and there are side benefits like people are
getting Ph.D. theses out of these things, and I think that that, by
itself, is also a benefit, especially if you get meaningful results.

And, finally, the last bullet. I think I\'m going to anticipate probably
what John or somebody is going to ask me, \"Okay, this is all great.
Where does it fit?\" I can\'t point to the document where it\'s going to
fit, but I know that we have a challenge to figure out how to take some
of this interesting science information in the next short period of time
and try to put it into a coherent package to put it in as part of the
safety case, clearly. And that\'s the challenge that myself and Russ and
others have in front of us.

So, with that, I\'ll stop.

GARRICK: Okay, thank you. I\'m going to sneak a global question or two
in. You\'re right, I was going to ask that question.

I think, Mark, you\'re aware of the great amount of interest this Board
has in the Science and Technology Program and how we look to the Science
and Technology Program as the most productive resource for addressing a
lot of the questions we have. And so we have a continued interest in it,
especially because we\'re constantly searching for fundamental
understanding of phenomena and other technical questions.

But let me ask just two global questions. One is: Can you tell us what
the current funding level of the Science and Technology Program is and,
two, since you can\'t say exactly where the information goes, can you
say something about the technology transfer mechanism between the
Science and Technology Program and the Project\--the mechanism?

PETERS: Yeah, I understand. Let me take them in the same order you asked
them. The \'06 budget for the whole S&T Program was on the order of 17
million, so that ends up breaking out, roughly speaking\--do you want to
know the breakout? Do you care?

GARRICK: Yeah.

PETERS: Okay. Technology was probably the highest by far. Russ is going
to shake his head yes or no as I go through these numbers to make sure
I\'ve got them. Technology was probably on the order of 10, and then I
would take the source term natural barriers and materials performance
and roughly split them in three for purposes of this discussion, plus or
minus. I think source term was probably higher\--highest\--than
materials and natural barriers, but just for purposes of this.

Process of technology transfer. Good question. I\'m not going to give
you a direct satisfying answer, because we\'re working on the formal
process. We need a formal process, clearly, and we don\'t yet have a
formal process. People like me have been thinking about it for quite a
long time, but it\'s never formulated into something concrete. So Russ
has actually, I know, got currently an action that we need to work with
him on to develop that formal process. That involves working with the
lead laboratory, clearly, to understand how that will happen.

Now, saying that, what we have done in the past is try to integrate
closely with the technical folks who are working on the technical basis
for the license application. And so I hope you take some confidence in
knowing that we have a series of integration meetings with our PIs, and
we always have people from the program\--the TSPA site for
example\--invited, and they come and they listen and they engage. But we
need some kind of formal process for transferring it, and it\'s to be
determined.

GARRICK: I was very pleased with your observation about reaching out to
the universities, and now if you\'d reach out to some of the industry
resources, I think it would even be better.

Okay. Yes, David, first.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I was going to ask the same question on the funding. That\'s about 3-1/2
percent roughly of the total budget for the Project that\--.

PETERS: In \'06.

DUQUETTE: Yeah. But the comment I had is a bit of a different spin on
what John had to say, and that is, I\'ve been on the Board long enough
to remember when Margaret Chu introduced the concept of the S&T Program.
And then we were promised as a Board that it would never be used to
support LA.

PETERS: Right.

DUQUETTE: It was always going to be used to basically advance things
that would be beyond LA and introduce new concepts, and things like the
amorphous alloy program, I think, do that. On the other hand, part of
your corrosion program was used to FEP out something for LA, and it
seems like that\'s not what the S&T Program was intended to do. I don\'t
what kind of response you have to that, but I, as a member of the Board
and my personal opinion, think that the S&T Program ought to be not kept
away from the Project obviously, but be used for more advanced concepts.
And we were told that was going to happen.

PETERS: Yeah, I understand. Let me take your specific comment
about\--I\'m assuming you\'re referring to the screening of dust
deliquescence.

DUQUETTE: Yes, that\'s correct.

PETERS: Joe, correct me, but I was involved in those discussions. That
wasn\'t a direct result of data that came out of the S&T Program that
led to that decision to screen that out. There were people in the S&T
Program like myself and Joe involved in the discussions, but I
would\--Joe is about to step up and either tell me I\'m wrong or clarify
it. I\'ll get back to your other concern, though, Dave, because I follow
it.

PAYER: Mark is correct. That work and the presentations were not
specifically done. The screening of the dust deliquescence was
clearly\--. Charles Bryan was the principal author, Ernie Hardin, and a
cast of many produced that. But having said that, I think it\'s fair to
say, Dave, that there\'s been a change in philosophy of the Science
Program and what\'s its role ought to be. And I think under the current
thinking we need to, in fact, be doing things that are good, solid
science but do have a direct path to incorporation and building the
confidence of the license case. That\'s just a reality of where we are.
We hear Ward very clearly, and I don\'t think we have a problem with
that.

But it is a change in philosophy; it\'s a change in what you\'re going
to do with the money.

PETERS: You stole my thunder. I was going to say the same thing. I was
there, as I think you realize, when Margaret formulated it; and I
understand the reasons why there was the perception that there needed to
be a so-called firewall, I\'ll call it.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board again.

And, again, I\'m not suggesting it was good or bad. It\'s just that what
we were concerned about is what the money that should have been spent
for Science and Technology to support the LA should have been done
within the program itself, saving the S&T Program, per se, as a separate
program that wouldn\'t necessarily support LA or ongoing programs. And
so now it looks like they\'re being morphed together.

PETERS: They\'re not yet, so let\'s be careful. Let me take this in
pieces. They\'re not. Under the Office of the Chief Scientist\--I said
this at the beginning\--they\'re separate. They come together at Russ,
but they\'re separate. The WEED (phonetic) lab has to integrate with me,
but they don\'t control my budget. Clearly, we do priorities together,
but they come together at Russ, so they\'re not organizationally
together, and that was a conscious decision for exactly, I think, some
of your concerns.

Point two was what Joe said. Yes, it has evolved in terms of the way we
think about the way we fit into a safety case, and I think that\'s
because Ward has a different perspective on it. And I\'ll speak for
myself, but we all sat with him a couple weeks ago and listened to that,
and it makes a lot of sense, because the Science portfolio\--we were
always struggling, okay, where\'s the boundary in those kinds of things?
Maybe there isn\'t a boundary. Maybe you protect it by keeping it
organizationally separate, to address your first concern, but maybe
there shouldn\'t be a boundary.

DUQUETTE: I didn\'t mean that it was necessarily a concern. I\'m just
pointing out it\'s a difference in philosophy.

PETERS: It\'s definitely a difference in philosophy, and I think you see
it because there\'s a new RW-1.

KADAK: Okay, we have Andy, George, Ron, and Mark. So, Andy.

KADAK: Kadak.

Yes, I\'m with you on the let\'s make it more relevant to getting some
answers. And the one question that I do have is, I think there\'s one
element in the thermohydraulic modeling that desperately needs attention
in terms of where the water goes. And we\'ve heard a couple of
presentations on\--and I think it\'s Slide Number 24\--that is very
important in terms of answering that question. And if the old model that
we saw about a year ago\--correct me if I\'m wrong, John\--is still
being used, that could be a major technical question in the licensing
proceeding, because it may not be correct, especially when you consider
some of these three-dimensional effects.

So could you just tell me whether or not what you\'re now showing is
being reflected in the analysis of where the water goes?

PETERS: This particular analysis is not reflected in the TSPA. Peter,
I\'m looking at you, but this is George Danko\'s multi-flux
effectively\--coupled with a simplified CFD in the hole. There is the
model that you\'re referring to\--the one that you were referring to
that you said makes the water do this. Could you expand on that a
little? I\'m not sure\--

KADAK: There is no lateral movement of vapor along the drift, and most
of the assumption was\--and maybe it\'s changed\--that the water goes up
into the two-dimensional radial location above the waste packages, so
you don\'t see any of this lateral movement. You certainly don\'t see
the water condensing in the ends of the drift. And there is a certain
assumption about this 81-meter separation, which, you know, if you
don\'t have that right, there\'s a lot of issues that you\'re going to
have to deal with when you come to licensing and the explanation about
how this water really behaves.

PETERS: Let me try, Peter, and then you keep me honest. I won\'t get
into with you whether or not the model is defensible or not. How about I
don\'t get in a debate with you. I\'m not the right person.

But if it\'s the multi-scale from a hydrologic model that you\'re
referring to\--

KADAK: Correct.

PETERS: \--that\'s still the basis for the TSPA.

KADAK: That\'s still the old one.

PETERS: Correct. This is an alternative model for that, and we are
actively thinking about how that compares. So, Andy, am I answering your
question?

KADAK: Yes. My comment is following on what Dave was talking about.
There needs to be, I think, some transfer really soon, because you may
be operating on an incorrect model.

PETERS: Fair enough. Peter.

SWIFT: This is Peter Swift, Sandia.

The TSPA and its supporting models do not have a model like this one
that actually couples the porous media flow in the rock with the open
flow in the drift. However, we have looked at axial flow in the drift.
We have a condensation convection model, which models only the flow in
the open drift axially, and it uses boundary conditions from the
multi-scale model.

So we actually do account for the effects of condensation in the cooler
areas at the end of the drift and away from the hotter waste packages,
for example, but we don\'t do it in the full coupled model as shown
here.

PETERS: But, Andy, what I hear you saying is, this kind of
conceptualization and model, the problem we need to be thinking about
the linking back and forth to test the occult defensibility of our
current basis.

KADAK: Yes.

PETERS: Fair. That\'s a good comment.

GARRICK: George.

HORNBERGER: Mark, Peter earlier indicated that the ground water travel
time was important. A former member of this Board, Dick Parazek, for
years suggested that having some information on fault permeability would
really let us know a lot about flow concerns. And I know we\'ve also had
people suggest that having a closer look at using the Nye County wells
to test DOE\'s mixing of various waters could really help build
confidence in the Program, too.

And my question is: Is the Science and Technology Program looking at any
of these issues to be addressed?

PETERS: Specifically on fault testing, when we looked at the first round
of saturated zone proposals, we did an informal call. We went and talked
to the scientists and said, \"Where are your key uncertainties?\" We
blurred the boundary, but that\'s a separate issue. And one of them was
permeability and isotropy, partly influence of faults, and we got some
proposals in that area and ended up not funding them in the S&T Program.
In my experience in the testing program over the years, it\'s been on
the list but never made it to the level of being funded. It is in the PC
plan, and I think Frank can speak to it, maybe if we would ask that
question again, and Frank can tell you kind of where it\'s at, and I
think Nye County fits into it, if I\'m not mistaken.

GARRICK: All right. Let\'s go to Ron.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Could we go to Number 9? I just want to add a perspective on the third
bullet related to the issue of stifling. The comment that I\'m going to
make is similar to one I made during the day-and-a-half workshop that we
had. But let me preface this by agreeing with you and with John that by
adding the university folks that you\'ve added to the S&T Program, I
think there is great value. When you look at people like Joe Payer and
Rob Kelly and Tom Devine, who you mentioned in terms of the Raman work
he\'s doing, these are very good corrosion engineers. So I think that is
of value.

But I do want to add a perspective here. You mention in your third
bullet the issue of critical crevice chemistry. There\'s a tremendous
database which shows that in localized corrosion phenomena, the
chemistry inside a propagating crevice or pit or crack can become
extremely aggressive. And so in addition to the language that you used
when you described this stifling as perhaps stop or start or slow down,
I think we have to incorporate into that series of potential events
accelerating, too.

There\'s, as I said, a tremendous database indicating that localized
corrosion does accelerate because of the evolution of not just a
critical crevice chemistry, but an increasingly aggressive crevice
chemistry. There is a more limited database in terms of stifling.

In one of the instances that we saw during the past day and a half, the
work done by Ms. Xihua He from NRC, she created a single crevice by
putting PTFE in contact with Alloy 22 in a condensed phase, in a beaker
basically. So there\'s no question about having access to a supply of
moisture. She used an environment that was half 5-molar sodium chloride
and copper chloride added, 10^-4^ copper chloride added to it as an
oxidant, and she showed a potential transient that is purported to show
stifling. I don\'t know whether it does or not. I mean, it certainly
shows a change in the current density and a change in the potential that
one could interpret that way.

But what concerns me is that that\'s not at all a representative
environment in terms of the repository\--

PETERS: Right.

LATANISION: \--either from the point of view of seepage or from the
point of view of deliquescence. And, frankly, I think that\'s true of
much of the other work that\'s being done in the S&T Program on the
question of stifling. And I just want to encourage, first of all, a more
global view of what potential phenomenology may occur. It\'s not just
stifling. There is a potential that it could accelerate, which is
perhaps more traditional.

PETERS: Fair enough.

LATANISION: But, on the other hand, I do want to encourage the use of
representative environments. I\'m not sure that introducing copper
chloride into this chemistry is particularly useful. That\'s not an S&T
project; that\'s an NRC project. But there have been similar chemical
environments used in some of the S&T work, too.

So my plea would be to focus attention on environmental chemistries that
are more representative of what might occur in the repository, either
because of seepage or deliquescence.

PETERS: Let me accept your plea. I think Joe wants to saying something,
but I want to agree with you, actually, because I sat through the
workshop, as you know, I was there. And I was bothered by a lot of
information coming forward, and I was asking myself the same question,
is this like the environment, because we\'re drawing conclusions about
performance of metals in environments that we\'re never going to see.
And perhaps we were part of that, but I think everybody brought
something to the table that wasn\'t terribly representative.

PAYER: Joe Payer, Case.

Ron, you made those comments, and I appreciated them yesterday and take
them seriously today.

I think all of those tests we need to see what the relevance of the
environment is and so forth. But, again, in a workshop where you\'ve got
a bunch of different topics, it\'s hard to get into much detail and that
sort of thing. The whole stifling phenomena, you\'re correct, the
initiation of crevice corrosion, the classic correct textbook of that,
is the Fontana and Green diagram we show where the environment in a
crevice becomes much more aggressive because of phenomena we know.

But that basically focuses on the initiation of crevice corrosion, and
what\'s happening in the work that we\'re doing and other people are
doing in this area is to take it beyond that initiation of crevice
corrosion and follow the propagation of crevice corrosion as the surface
changes, and you have to maintain that critical chemistry.

In some cases, you do maintain it, and there\'s cases of failure
analysis of all kinds of steels in sea water\--stainless steels and
that\--where crevice corrosion has caused serious failures.

But in these corrosion-resistant alloys like the nickel-chrom-moly,
there are other processes that, in fact, will cause the crevice to
stifle and arrest. So it\'s a real phenomenon. It\'s a current state of
research. We\'re not the only ones doing it. At the Electrochemical
Society meeting this fall, there\'s going to be a special symposium on
localized corrosion, and there\'s four or five paper, six or seven
papers, where this will be discussed. So it is a current area of
research.

Having said that, just to reiterate and to encapsulate what we\'ve
talked about the last day and a half, the Project\--we believe\--I
believe\--has justifiably screened out localized corrosion by
deliquescent salts. The Project has not screened out crevice corrosion
under drips and seepage conditions. And the picture we have there is
that you can divide the world of environments up into five or six types
of environments\--carbonate waters, sulfate waters, chloride waters,
calcium chloride waters\--and in many of those categories\--the
carbonate waters\--we believe there is evidence that show they are
non-corrosive, they\'re benign waters. The sulfate waters are not
corrosive.

The environments that can be corrosive are the mixed chloride and
sulfate waters and nitrate and sulfate waters. And if you get the
chloride ratios high enough, you can get into these kinds of
concentrated chloride environments.

So that work is focusing on the subset of environments that we cannot
eliminate from being possible in the Mountain and trying to understand
how Alloy 22 behaves under those conditions. And the picture that\'s
evolving from that is that some cases will probably drill their way
through the waste package. In other cases we can see stifling and
arrest, and now you\'re getting into a how many and how much and
probabilities, and I don\'t know how to go there just yet.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

I guess I\'m not quite as convinced that the case has been made to FEP
out deliquescence-induced corrosion.

PAYER: And that\'s why I said, \"in my opinion.\" I voiced that.

LATANISION: But let me just add that we\'ve come a long way since the
November 2004 meeting when this issue first came up and when the concept
of a workshop evolved. But I think it is important to put in perspective
the fact that if you look into the literature\--and there\'s a vast
literature\--it may be that the literature should change. I\'m not
eliminating a priori the concept that stifling may occur under some
circumstances, but when you look at chemistry in a propagating crevice
or crack and you find that the pH may be units lower hydrogen ion
activity orders-of-magnitude than the bulk environment and that actually
is more aggressive than the bulk environment, then you know that the
rates have got to accelerate. And that\'s a fairly well-established
phenomenology.

PAYER: Agreed. And that\'s what starts it. Let me just tell you, we
take\--I take\--your comments very seriously; because if you\'re looking
at the work and say, \"I still have some questions about it,\" then
there\'s a whole bunch of other folks that would say the same thing. We
take it seriously, we\'re looking at it, we believe it\'s a real
phenomenon. And the question is: How can we say, does it apply all the
time? No. Does it apply some of the time? Absolutely.

So the whole concept of stifling belongs someplace in our understanding
of how stainless steels\--.

LATANISION: Mr. Chairman, I just observed that this is the kind of
conversation that academics ought to have about issues like this. This
is sort of the workshop phenomenon\--

PAYER: But it\'s also the kind of thing that engineers ought to be
thinking about when they\'re designing waste packages for Yucca
Mountain. So I think it\'s not all just a fundamental academic thing.

GARRICK: We\'re getting used to it.

I think Mark is next and then Howard and then Ali.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

I\'m going to ask, I think, a less technical set of questions if that\'s
okay. I\'d like to explore in a little more detail what I perceive to be
S&T\'s search for its identity. And the first question I guess I have
for you: Is there anything that you presented to us today that couldn\'t
fall under the umbrella of the term \"performance confirmation?\"

PETERS: Strictly speaking\--oh, that\'s a tough one. As I define
performance confirmation?

ABKOWITZ: Sure.

PETERS: Yes. I think it could all fit as I define it. Now, as the NRC
defines it or the regulation defines it, probably not.

ABKOWITZ: Well, I\'m trying to grapple this whole concept. You have a
performance confirmation requirement. My understanding is that it\'s to
continue to do some experiential learning that will either validate what
you propose is correct or prove our understanding subset we need to
modify what\'s been proposed. I don\'t understand, in my simple mind,
why this Science and Technology Program shouldn\'t either subsume the
Performance Confirmation Program under it or vice versa.

PETERS: Let me modify my answer, Mark, if I can. In some cases\--I\'ll
use the word \"beyond\" the technical basis of the LA. For example,
drift shadow is not in there.

ABKOWITZ: But Performance Confirmation is supposed to do that, is it
not?

PETERS: No, it\'s strictly defined to confirm the basis for your PA
analysis.

ABKOWITZ: But the Performance Confirmation activities go well beyond the
period of time that the license application is being reviewed.

PETERS: No, I understand. There could come a day where, strictly
speaking, it could transition into the PC Program. I\'m getting bogged
down in regulatory speak. Fundamentally\--this is a personal opinion\--I
could see it being part of a Performance Confirmation Program the way I
think about it, but the way regulation thinks about it\--I\'m not the
NRC, they have their own interpretation\--but I would say they would
keep it separate. We\'re presenting it separate. We\'re not presenting
this stuff as part of the PC Program in the LA as far as I know.

ABKOWITZ: Well, it just seems to me that in explaining what you all are
doing and in making maximum use of what you\'re learning, that issue
should be given serious consideration one way or the other. Now, let me
pursue\--

PETERS: Well, I obviously answered it wrong, because DOE is standing up.

NEWBURY: Claudia Newbury, Department of Energy.

I was going to suggest first that Frank Hansen is going to talk about
the Performance Confirmation Program and remind you that it is in the
regulation and very narrowly defined, and we want to keep it narrowly
defined in terms of what we use as our Performance Confirmation Program.
So while Mark is doing a lot of good work in Science and Technology, we
will have to evaluate it and see if we want to make that as a commitment
to the NRC.

Second is, the Performance Confirmation Program extends until the
license to close a repository, so it is not just during the initial
licensing phase, but through the whole life of the repository.

ABKOWITZ: I understand that, and I\'m hoping that we will continue to
learn as we move down that path, if we move down that path.

Two other very quick questions, if I could follow up, and I don\'t know
whether this goes under Science or Technology or Performance
Confirmation or whatever. I\'d like to hear your thoughts on expanding
the arena of the kinds of things that you\'re thinking about that can
improve the safety and efficiency of the repository. One is: Has there
been any discussion about including preclosure issues?

PETERS: Is that the end of your question?

ABKOWITZ: That\'s the end of my first question.

PETERS: Yes. There is work on seismic that has direct impact on the
preclosure design surface facilities. It\'s an integrated program with
the Project side, looking at the LA side, but also S&T\'s funding part
of it. It\'s looking at updating the process for probabilistic seismic
hazardous\--particularly to take care of the tails on the really low
probability earthquakes. It\'s particularly a problem in postclosure,
but it will have some impact on surface facilities.

ABKOWITZ: Will it also look at TAD?

PETERS: In terms of impacts on the package?

ABKOWITZ: Well, in terms of the materials and its design.

PETERS: It\'s looking at package materials in the sense of structuring
morphous metals, which one could envision applying to a TAD, just like
you could the previous design. So I guess in that respect, yes, but
right now that\'s probably about the extent of it.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. And then my final question, and this gets back to
something that I brought up with Mr. Sproat this morning. It seems to me
that, especially as this sort of evolution is going on with the Program,
might we want to call this the Science, Engineering, and Technology
Program and start to get into using this program as a mechanism for
validating some of the engineering designs so that we do have some
demonstration activities so that we don\'t go directly from design to
production?

PETERS: I\'m not sure this is the right place for that program, but you
clearly need it. I probably don\'t want to comment on whether all of a
sudden now it\'s SE&T Program. I\'d like to stay an S&T Program and
survive that.

GARRICK: Howard?

ARNOLD: Would you go to Slide 7, please? I hear very little
discussion\--I\'d like to focus on the cladding there. One time when I
asked about it, people waved their arms and said, \"Well, in the
aggressive water environment, it doesn\'t last long.\" If that\'s true,
does that conclusion change if you look at the hypothetical situation on
Number 17?

PETERS: Clad integrity\--Zircaloy cladding\--if you go to, say, low
partial pressures of oxygen, what\'s the stability of the Zircaloy
cladding? That\'s your fundamental question?

ARNOLD: Yeah.

PETERS: Let me go back to what the cladding does in the current model,
Peter, and you can stand up and correct me. In the current model,
there\'s actually a fair bit of performance of the cladding in the
nominal scenario. Where you run into cladding failure is in the seismic
shaking in the seismic scenario where you shake it and it\'s breached.

ARNOLD: All right. So you do have some clad integrity in your\--

PETERS: Absolutely. Absolutely. In SR days it was a stand-alone barrier.
Now we\'ve gone to the three, so it\'s within the engineered barrier,
but clad integrity is clearly providing some amount of performance.

ARNOLD: And it would be even better in\--

PETERS: Pat, help me out. What would zircaloy do at low partial
pressures of oxygen?

BRADY: Not speaking as a cladding expert, my guess is that a lower
oxygen partial pressure wouldn\'t be a problem, and here\'s what I base
it on. The 10^-40^ that we measure about halfway down there, that\'s the
oxygen partial pressure you\'d measure in a stagnant light. So this is
not really a bad extreme of a condition. It might be the in situ partial
pressure of oxygen you\'d measure at the bottom of a pool. I suspect as
you got down lower, there would be problems, because, again, the
cladding forms the ZROH~4~ acidation layer; and so at some point it
would be problematic. I don\'t where it is, though.

PAYER: The equilibrium partial pressure for zirconium and oxygen is
much, much lower by 10s of orders of magnitude than it is for iron and
oxygen. So you\'re not going to reduce the zirconium oxide, which is
what protects the zirconium. It\'s not going to dissolve under those
conditions. You could crack it, you could break it, you could get
hydrogen into it and\--it, but you\'re not going to dissolve it.

PETERS: Right. But that\'s a real process. Understood. Okay. That\'s a
process we have to at least consider in our analysis in terms of that.

GARRICK: Ali?

MOSLEH: My understanding is that evolution of the TSPA leads to the
performance margin model or in parallel with that. The question is: Is
it safe to correctly assume that there will be a tighter coupling
between the projects under SNT and the performance margin modeling?

PETERS: This isn\'t something we\'ve talked about in detail yet, but
thinking about it myself, I could see the ability of them to use some of
this information. But is it ready for \"part of the basis in defending
it?\" But they could use this to inform some of those margin analyses. I
think Peter said that earlier; right, Peter? So I think that\'s a
candidate for that, but you guys haven\'t done detailed thinking about
what margin analysis you\'re going to do yet and all that. That\'s going
to go on over the next months.

So I think the answer is: It probably could be, but we haven\'t talked
in detail about which pieces get back to the link.

GARRICK: Have we got anymore questions?

KADAK: What\'s the \'07 budget request?

PETERS: Ward or Russ would have to tell you exact\--for this program?

KADAK: Yes.

PETERS: That\'s not my bailiwick.

GARRICK: Anybody else?

DYER: This is Russ Dyer, DOE.

I believe the \'07 request for the S&T was on the order of \$23 or \$25
million. You\'re shaking your head yes, but I\'m sure we won\'t get it,
because the entire budget is going to be less than the president\'s
request. So until we see what the budget is, which is still hanging
fire, well, we\'re all uncertain as to what\'s going to happen as of
Monday.

GARRICK: Any questions from staff?

FITZPATRICK: Charlie Fitzpatrick, Egan and Associates for State of
Nevada.

I don\'t want to elevate form over substance, but what Dr. Duquette said
surely rung a bell of what Dr. Chu had explained. As a matter of fact,
it was so separate from OCRWM that it even took on a different name. Is
it still called OSTI, the Office of Science and Technology
International, or is that out the window?

Real question. Substantive question. It certainly has a diverse group of
people including graduate students and others doing some work. I was
wondering if all the work that\'s being done\--which is now there\'s a
clamoring to have it transferrable to TSPA and LA\--is all that being
done in accordance with QARD, Rev. 17 or 18, whatever is the current\--

PETERS: The S&T Program has its own QA program in accordance with the
QARD. The majority of the National Laboratory work is done according to
that QA program. In most cases\--I\'ll speak for source term because I
don\'t know\--but in most cases the university work is not done
according to that QA program. That said, we have had auditors go to the
universities, and I\'ve been told as the leader that, in the cases
they\'ve looked at, they have reasonable control. But the answer is: If
it would be used, it would be non-Q, and it would have to be cooperative
data.

DYER: This is Russ Dyer, DOE. Let me address the first question.

As you remember, we had a reorganization within the Office of Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management effective in May. And the old OSTI
organization, Office of Science Technology International, was split up
and reassigned. The International part is now a part of the Director\'s
office and responsibilities; Science and Technology came into my
organization, which is a new organization. So the old organization got
split up somewhat, but the entire Science and Technology Program came
over as a whole under the Office of the Chief Scientist on the DOE side.

GARRICK: All right. We\'re right on schedule. Any other questions from
the staff or anybody else?

Okay, Mark, thank you. Thank you very much.

I guess that brings us to the Frank Hansen presentation. Frank is from
Sandia National Laboratories, and he\'s going to talk about
\"Performance Confirmation and Long-Term Science and Monitoring.\"
Welcome, Frank.

HANSEN: Thanks, John.

I addressed the Board 17 years ago, I think, the very first board when
Don Deere called us in and we talked about field testing. And since that
day I\'ve been in\--well, actually, I\'ve been in repository sciences
since 1975, but I\'m relatively new to this program. When we stand up
the lead lab, I was asked to assume the responsibilities for Performance
Confirmation, so I don\'t stand before you to be a resident expert on
that topic, but I am an engineer, and I do understand what Mr. Sproat
has put forward. And we at Sandia National Labs have stood up and said,
\"We\'re going to do that for you.\"

Now, today\'s talk has three points, and I will cover these three
points; and then I think toward the end when we get to talking, we will
return to S&T, long-term testing and monitoring strategy, and some of
these things. But I want to make sure that I cover the three points that
were asked of me in this presentation.

And the first is the regulatory requirements for performance
confirmation and long-term testing and monitoring. We have a Performance
Confirmation Program, we have ongoing activities, we have planning and
those types of things that are objective evidence of a Performance
Confirmation Program. We call it PC.

And then toward the end\--I think this is where the real interest lies
if I can read the tea leaves of the discussion on the S&T Program\--and
so we will talk about that toward the end.

Next one, please. There are, of course, many expectations for long-term
testing and monitoring related to the safety case, and we will identify
and speak to the regulations to some extent. But there are other
components to the long-term testing and monitoring issues associated
with the repository that aren\'t specified specifically by these
requirements. We talked about that firewall between the compliance and
the other things that are going on. So, in part, we have the compliance,
we have what recently\--and I do mean recently, because it was in the
last couple of weeks when we started to formulate the strategy about
where we need to go with the testing and monitoring strategy that we
actually\--with DOE, the customer\--drew out some concepts for this
evolution of the basis. And then we have the rest of the world. The rest
of the world includes the university participants and S&T, the
literature, research, and so on. So these are the three components.

Next, please. Part 63 tells you what to do. In 63.131 through 134 they
delineate the requirements for the Performance Confirmation Program, and
it\'s straightforward. They say there, \"We want you to have a program
and present a program with the license application that will verify,
monitor, test, and confirm the assumptions that underlie the license
application.\" That\'s pretty straightforward. There are some other
criteria in 63 that allow for R&D in this particular case, and then
there are other criteria in there that require you to update the PC
Program.

Next, please. So, therefore, we have a PC Program that\'s based entirely
on Part 63; and by definition then, it supports the long-term safety
case. In addition, the Yucca Mountain Review Plan provides guidance for
how the NRC will look at the program that we put forward. Now, this
program was presented to the Board by Debbie Barr February 9, 2005, and
I\'m sure the Board probably appreciates it at least as well as I do.
I\'m a student of performance confirmation; I\'m not a master of it. But
the Board has seen all of the background material that went into the
development of the PC Plan, the Performance Confirmation Plan, and,
incidentally it\'s Rev. 5. It\'s been around for about\--I believe the
first draft was some seven years ago, and it has iterated. And I\'ll
talk a little bit about this PC plan.

Next slide, please. Rev. 5 was developed using experts, and they used a
multi-attribute decision analysis; and they identified a large number of
specific testing activities. I was not part of that program, but some
people in the room were part of the development of all of these
activities. And they were consolidated and evaluated, and in the end
they identified 20 specific activities in the PC Plan.

Now, these activities were crosswalked between 63 and the YMRP, and then
they were reflected upon by performance assessment. I say \"reflected
upon,\" because it was non-quantitative; it was qualitative. And we, as
a program, were going forward with the license application\--I believe
it was in the fall of \'04\--and the Performance Confirmation Program
was reviewed with performance assessment and deemed whole qualitatively.

I wasn\'t working full-time on that, and I will explain a little bit
about the recent history of Performance Confirmation, because it has not
been institutionalized as an entity, and that\'s one of the things that
I represent here is we\'re going to institutionalize that.

So then these activities in the Performance Confirmation Program, Rev.
5, reflect the key aspects of the postclosure safety case, and the next
slide identifies these 20 activities. They\'re listed here, and I think
probably in the presentation that you saw in February of \'05, which was
very recent after the compendium was put together and signed off, they
went through what all of these things mean.

The next slide will put a different sort of a perspective on this. Mr.
Sproat got up this morning and said, \"We\'re going to submit a license
application June 30, close of business, 2008.\" Now, I\'m an engineer
just like him\--well, I\'m a civil engineer, but a professional engineer
like him\--and so I have an engineering idea\--and remember that we did
this on WIPP, very similar. George Dials (phonetic) was the person that
made the similar decision; he said, \"We put a stake in the ground;
we\'re going to submit an application to the EPA; and you guys figure
out how to change the science into compliance.\" So here we almost use
that same buzz term, science to compliance, science to engineering. And
so with regard to the Performance Confirmation aspects, we are in that
same situation.

So how do we get from here to there? And that\'s part of the reason, I
believe, that Sandia National Labs and some of the WIPP people were
engaged in helping us get from here to there. And we will get from here
to there. And part of my talk will attempt to explain how I visualize
that. Now, I don\'t have the roadmap exactly identified, but I know what
needs to be done.

In the PC Plan there\'s a schedule. There\'s been a lot of science going
on in the Program, good lord, 20 years or more. I was working in
G-tunnel 17, 18 years ago. There\'s been a lot of science that has gone
on, and there should be some science continuing; but right now the
Performance Confirmation activities are limited. And they\'re limited
for good compliance-related reasons; and that is, when you write that
Performance Confirmation Plan, then you sign up to a regulatory
requirement by review, and it has attended to it several important
features.

We\'ve been trying to stand up the lead lab. We have a PA Program. The
creation of the documents in the Program have been called Technical Work
Plans, TWPs. And I said we don\'t want to call Performance Confirmation
test plans TWPs. We want them to be specifically identified as
Performance Confirmation Test Plans so that people can point to them,
that\'s a regulatory test plan, that is different, that\'s not SNT,
that\'s not long-term testing and monitoring, that is a commitment. And
that commitment has parts to it\--and I will explain those parts\--that
make them specifically different and part of the strategy that I will
use as we develop the Performance Confirmation Test Plans in the
future\--and that also explains why we only have a few being produced
today\--has to do with, when you sign up\--and I think Mr. Sproat would
say\--these things look a lot like a tech- spec.

So if you sign up with the regulator that you\'re going to have\--oh,
I\'ll use something like rock mass modules 30 GPA\--then when it goes
outside of some range, then you are required to report that and assess
what does that mean to the performance assessment. TWPs are more
regular, what we\'re more used to, testing programs.

So when I came into the picture, the program was marching along in
Performance Confirmation space. They had a program. John Arthur called
the group together and said, \"Do we have a program in performance
confirmation?\" The answer was yes. And the objective evidence, I used
the analogy, well, what would we show the regulator if they showed up at
the door and wanted to audit us to show them objective evidence of a
Performance Confirmation Program. And we could point to products, the PC
Plan Rev. 5, and then we undertook, at the behest of the DOE, the BSC
folks undertook the creation of Performance Confirmation Plans.

That\'s where we are today, and we two weeks ago transitioned the
Performance Confirmation Plans that were\--one exists, by the way\--and
we transitioned two that are in process, and probably the most
interesting one will be the fourth one, which, I believe, is the next in
the pipeline. This is the long way of saying that these PC Plans will be
developed sequentially, and some of them will require further long-term
testing and monitoring such that we can write them correctly when the
time comes to write them.

The one that is written is construction effects monitoring. Construction
effects monitoring happened to benefit, because I know something about
rock mechanics. I don\'t know very much about corrosion, but rock
mechanics is one issue, and the deformation of the underground is
something that is characterized for the PA, and they make calculations
against it in terms of drift degradation, deformation, and so on.

And that was identified by the DOE as a deliverable; and it was written,
reviewed, and submitted. And that\'s because we know quite a bit about
that today. It\'s an ongoing activity, and that reminds me that another
requirement that you can read in Part 63 is that many of the Performance
Confirmation activities were started during site characterization and
will continue to Performance Confirmation. So it\'s not always the same;
in fact, we will acknowledge what was done previously, and we\'ll do
what is required in Performance Confirmation when the time comes.

So that one was written. Precipitation monitoring is another one that
has been ongoing for a long time, monitoring of the meteorological
moisture snow, and so on, and other conditions. And that was created in
the last year or so. The primary author was a USGS person, but it
wasn\'t completed yet, but it transitioned to us, so it\'s in the
pipeline. And I identified that within the senso stricto PC Program as a
deliverable in the near future.

Another one that has been ongoing for a long time is seismic monitoring.
There\'s a seismic array. It\'s mostly run by the cooperatives from the
University of Nevada system, and that one\'s in the pipeline.

Next one, please. The expectation, of course, is that we advance the
technical baseline, because we don\'t know everything today, and we
expect that there will be a continuous assessment and involvement of the
Science and Technology. In fact, we just had a presentation on the S&T
Program. We acknowledge that, hopefully, as we march out, we will learn
more. Certainly the technologies will advance such that in many cases we
have to wait till the right time before we can sign up to some of those
PC programs.

And also another aspect that I don\'t think too many folks have
mentioned so far is that we have the S&T, of course, and we have a lot
of folks that influence the program, but we haven\'t spent very much
time reflecting on the international collaboration. And coming from the
WIPP side of the house over the last 10 years or so, I was the
international PI, and so I think that we have a lot to gain from them.

Next one, please. So here\'s where we are. Be reminded that I have not
had a long tenure on this job, and so I\'m telling you the story that I
think is correct. We\'ve had a little bit of discussion with the DOE and
the basis of that discussion and discussion with Ward Sproat, that we
think we see the path forward, and these are some of the components that
are on that path. We already talked about the compliance requirements
for a Performance Confirmation. We talked to some extent about the
impact of the Science and Technology, other monitoring programs,
engineering ES&H and so on, general literature, international programs,
and so on. So the long-term testing and monitoring strategy will
comprise elements of this middle box here. So I\'m going to talk about
the elements of that middle box.

You can skip the next two slides\--the next two slides are just a
restatement of the criteria in Part 63\--and go to the next one, the
evolution of the technical basis. Here\'s the way I see the future of
the Performance Confirmation planning. We have a commitment to send in
the license application in June of \'08; and if you back up from that
date, then there are times when, I think, the phrase is, \"You put your
pencils down.\" The AMR is done, the information goes to the TSPA, then
they run the calculations. So you have to back up from that date.

There will be a time, then, that the authors of the AMRs are freed up in
some respects, because some of those same people will write that
particular section of the SAR. Now, our section of the SAR is Section 4,
and I\'m not really worried about that. But the point of this is that we
will have technical staff, the owners and the PIs from those AMRs, that
will be available to help us define the PC Test Plans.

So some of the impetus and certainly the requirements within the PC
Plan\--see, the PC Plan is relatively generic, has to be. With the
commitment that the details\--the parameters, the ranges, expectations,
and all that\--the details of exactly how you implement that are driven
down into the PC Test Plan, and my commitment is that we will have the
right principal investigator write that information into the Plan.

In addition, there\'s a part of that PC Plan\--and I heard it in spades
yesterday when people stood up at the end of the day and say about the
corrosion\--a couple of different folks said, \"And what difference does
it make? What difference does it make to the TSPA?\" This is a very
important component, and it will be required of the author of PC Plan to
put that information into the Plan.

And these are some of the other examples of the influence\--reduce
important uncertainty. Well, what does that mean? This is the Rev. 5 of
the PC Plan. Certainly there will be Rev. 6 of the PC Plan. How are we
going to get to Rev. 6? Rev. 6 will be issued after we march on out with
TSPA, we perform the performance assessment margin analysis, because the
PA right now is obligated to get their work done to get the Plan in.
Soon we will draw on the PIs to help us understand the important
uncertainties and incorporate that into the PC Plans. But this part that
is embodied in these platitudes here is not the Performance Confirmation
Plan. This is the way we get to the PC Plan; okay?

The next slide is basically what Mark Peters talked about, so we don\'t
need to dwell on that.

Next one, please.

GARRICK: Frank, \--the 50 percent rule, and you\'re into the discussion
time now, so\--

HANSEN: Okay. I\'m just about done.

Next. And I just put this up because it\'s a colorful picture. It says
we have been around the world, we have shared with the European Union,
with ANDRA, with NAGRA, with the Canadian TSX, etc., etc. So we could
draw on these people. The difficulty is that we don\'t have very much
bench strength, and we can\'t really send people out that much, but we
could do better.

Next. Okay. Ongoing and planned activities. I mentioned the Performance
Confirmation test plans. They are being created now. They will exist at
the time of the license application. There are continuing tests; I
mentioned them. We will iterate with the TSPA folks and the principal
investigators, and they will be obligated to provide us with the data,
with the ranges, and trigger points, and all of that.

Next. Conclusion. The regulatory requirements from Part 63 are crystal
clear. This part, long-term science and monitoring, is less
regulatory-driven; and this is where we get to choose what we do.

And so I will end with this: The commitment that we have with the lead
lab is, we will work with the DOE to identify and hopefully write the
long-term testing and monitoring strategy that we need.

Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you. I guess I\'d like to make a comment about Slide 7.
That\'s an impressive list of activities, and some of those activities
are really potentially large-scope efforts. And yet we talk about this
as being a prescriptive program. How much license did you take to
generate this as the planned Performance Confirmation activities? Is
this a direct fallout, in your opinion, from the Part 63 Performance
Confirmation requirements?

HANSEN: Yes, it is. Part 63 is mapped. These 20 activities are mapped to
the requirements for Performance Confirmation and the expectation of the
YMRP. Now, having said that, let me say this: Part 63 says you will map,
and we will map, but how you map and how you go about mapping can run
many orders of magnitude and can expend a lot of effort. So it\'s up to
us to define that program. With a few exceptions, like this one is
fairly defined\--some of these are well defined\--but I also understand,
John, that it\'s an enormous responsibility and a commitment. By
comparison, the drift scale test ran eight years; this program will go
on for decades, a hundred years or longer, until closure, some element.

So we hope to get smarter about these things. Now, I\'ve been involved
with experiments that run a long time; but if you take the drift scale
test, it went on eight years, it cost something like\--I\'ve heard \$53
million or something like that. That experiment, if it were undertaken
in an active nuclear facility, would be much more expensive.

So I will say this: Our goal is to do the right size PC Program and not
more. Like Einstein said, it needs to be as complicated as it needs to
be, but no more complicated than that. So we know that there are big
tickets attached to this, and we have to be smart about its deployment.

GARRICK: Okay. Andy?

KADAK: Kadak.

When we met with Ms. Barr\--I think you said it was in February
2005\--the program that she described was very, very high level. So our
sense was that there really wasn\'t much of a program in place. Now,
what you\'ve described here, again, it also sounds like it\'s very high
level; and it also appears that you\'re reluctant to get specific
because of this tech-spec interpretation. But it seems to me what you
need to focus in on is the critical attributes in each of these areas
and identify what is it that you need to understand about the
performance of the repository to be able to confirm that it\'s doing
what it\'s supposed to do.

Now, who is working in that area?

HANSEN: We are.

KADAK: Who is \"we?\"

HANSEN: I should say, we will. It\'s a future tense, not a current
tense. Now, we do that qualitatively, because we must.

KADAK: Excuse me. The TSPA in all these analyses have certain
assumptions relative to flow rates, chemistry, all these other things.
And it can\'t be qualitative.

HANSEN: That\'s right.

KADAK: So tell me what you\'re doing.

HANSEN: Okay. The plan is that the TSPA folks will help us with this
quantitatively, not qualitatively. The reason that it\'s qualitative
today is because if you ask the TSPA folks, \"Tell us what\'s the very
most important thing. Help us with this, prioritize this, tell us where
we get the bang for the buck, what wiggles the needle.\" They can\'t
really do that very well with the TSPA that they have today. And I can
be corrected with the TSPA folks, but the goal for the more\--and,
again, I\'m not steeped in the vernacular whether it\'s a realistic PA
or the next generation PA or the performance margin model. But these
tools that will be developed will be the tools to help us prioritize the
PC activities.

KADAK: My sense, based on what we\'ve heard at various Board meetings,
is they do know the key parameters; so perhaps you should talk with
Peter.

GARRICK: Russ wants to make the comment.

DYER: Russ Dyer, DOE.

There are a couple of things that play here. TSPA is one. A relatively
new document in the higher\--is the postclosure nuclear safety design
basis, which kind of captures, for the postclosure side, those things
that you\'re talking about. Now, getting the postclosure nuclear safety
design basis synced up with the Performance Confirmation Program, all of
that is coming to Sandia effective Monday. And it\'s going to be their
job to make all of those interconnections between what we have in, I\'ll
call it, a potential tech-spec list, which would be in the postclosure
nuclear safety design basis. With our current understanding and TSPA and
the programs that we need to challenge and test that over time, which is
where the Performance Confirmation Program\--.

GARRICK: All right. Any other questions from the Board?

From the staff? Mark, you\'re quiet at a time when you had raised some
very much to-the-point questions on Performance Confirmation earlier.
Have you got a reaction?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Yes, I\'m still very confused. Thank you.

HANSEN: I\'d like to respond to that. This is a true story. I have not
had a lot of dwell time on this topic. And when I was given this
responsibility, I too was confused, and I misidentified some of these
things, because I couldn\'t sort out the boundary between\--I understand
the boundary between PC and long-term testing and monitoring now quite
clearly. But there are other boundaries like with S&T that are still
nebulous. And so one of the first things that I need to do with DOE,
with some help, we will identify this long-term testing and monitoring
strategy and clarify some of this and illuminate some of this area that
right now is a little nebulous. So I, too, have struggled with that.

GARRICK: Okay. I think that\'s all we have in the way of questions.

Oh, do you have a question?

DIODATO: No, I\'ll pass.

GARRICK: No, don\'t pass. I didn\'t see your hand.

DIODATO: No. Mark asked my question.

GARRICK: Oh, I see. Well, anyway, Frank, thanks very much. We\'re glad
to see you on board.

All right. We\'re now to the point of some concluding remarks, and Peter
Swift is supposed to inspire us with that.

SWIFT: I\'m Peter Swift here again.

When we were discussing the agenda earlier, the Department of Energy had
suggested that it would be good to have a couple of minutes at the end
to try to wrap things up, and I volunteered. But, Ward or Russ, if
either of you would like to speak, please, we have five minutes here.
However, I\'ll use the time. I hope I use it well.

The points here that Russ started off with discussing the international
definition of safety case and safety assessment, basically the safety
case is one of the answers to the question that Pat Brady posed earlier,
which I would paraphrase as: Do we believe this? And we need confidence.
You need confidence and we need confidence that we do actually know what
we\'re talking about. We believe our models; we believe our scientific
understanding.

The safety assessment is an integral part of the licensing case, which
is a different issue. We need to make the issue to this group that we do
have a safety case, we need to make it to the public, we need to make it
to ourselves. And in doing so, that\'s a matter of building confidence
in those quantitative models that I showed, confidence that our
scientific understanding is appropriate\-- the analogue information is
key there\--confidence that we are doing the appropriate due diligent
work to confirm and challenge our understanding. That\'s the Science and
Technology Program, that\'s the Performance Confirmation Program. And
that would be our safety case. You heard it in disjointed form there.

But the NRC will actually make the final safety case before a licensing
hearing board, assuming we reach that point, and I hope we do. At that
point the decision will be the hearing board\'s. We will have had to
make our best licensing case at that point, and that\'s where most of
the energy goes in the next year.

So the bulk of the work between now and June of \'08 will go to putting
our best case together to go into\--our best case; i.e., our best
understanding, not our most optimistic case, no; it\'s the best
understanding we have\--into a case for the NRC to evaluate and then
take appropriately through the regulatory process.

And I will stop there.

GARRICK: Okay. Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

Is Yucca Mountain now accessible to people, or is it still a closed site
because of some\--

SWIFT: You mean, can the public visit the site? Oh, yes, that is
certainly possible. I\'ll let Russ deal with that one. You do need to go
through the DOE office.

KADAK: That wasn\'t the question. I thought there was some need to
improve certain electrical wiring and things like that.

SWIFT: Oh, in the underground.

KADAK: Underground.

SWIFT: Russ, can you comment on how much the underground is available
now?

DYER: Russ Dyer, DOE.

We have periodic maintenance going on. I know there is a large
maintenance program looking at parts of ventilation, but that is
periodic. I mean, it\'s on occasion as to what they\'re involved in and
where. But we try to keep the underground open for visitors in the site
as much as possible.

KADAK: So there\'s work going on now in the Mountain, like technical
work?

DYER: Yes, there\'s some. It\'s mostly a monitoring program test that we
put in place quite some time ago.

GARRICK: Any other comments?

SWIFT: I think for any of the speakers we should have questions or
possibilities.

GARRICK: Okay. One of the things I guess I\'d want to say as part of the
concluding process is that I think there\'s a couple things going on
here. One is, of course, the activities that are necessary to be in a
position to file a license application on the schedule that Ward has
presented. There\'s another aspect of this that I think is very
important and is part of the motivation for some of the Board\'s
questioning and inquiries, and that is: How do you build public
confidence in this project?

I think one of the important reasons that we wanted to talk about the
safety case was that there\'s a lot of activities going on with respect
to this safety analysis of the repository that probably are not going to
necessarily find their way into the compliance documentation. It just
strikes us that that\'s kind of a missed opportunity, that you are doing
a number of things that are very important for public understanding.

Ward made a couple of observations this morning that are in the category
of reaching out to the public and getting them to appreciate the context
of some of these requirements that we address in the nuclear business,
these 10^-6^ and 10^-7^ and 10^-8^ requirements; and we speak about them
so easily and so freely that there is a tendency for us to become of the
opinion and of the state of mind that this is something that\'s really
real. I thought the comment about the frequency of best science having
to do with how often does the planet become extinct as far as life is
concerned\--and these are some of the kinds of numbers we are dealing
with.

I\'ve been involved in probably 50 different nuclear plant risk
assessments around the world, and I am amazed at how these numbers tend
to grow, sometimes without technical basis. And I think that we have to
be very careful about the way we use them and the context in which we
present them. And I think that a little bit of not only representation
of the various things that are going on, that if the public knew maybe
would build confidence, but also that this same kind of analysis and
investigation address the issues of appreciating the risks that are
being addressed here, because I don\'t think we do a very good job of
that.

The reason I was so struck by Ward\'s comment about the 10^-8^ number
was that I\'ve been very heavily involved in recent months in analyzing
the risk of certain threats to society, like terrorism, like hurricanes,
like tornados, like asteroids. And the best information processed in the
way in which we process probabilistic risk information does seem to
suggest that the time between extinction events for just an asteroid
event is something of the order of 50 million years with a bounding of
between 20 million years and almost a billion years. All that indicates
is that there\'s extreme uncertainty, but nevertheless it is a form of
quantification that\'s very important.

So we are talking about events here that are comparable, in some cases,
to those kind of extinction events. And I don\'t think that most of the
public is very mindful of that context, and I see a great opportunity
here to tell a story that at least is reflective of the work that\'s
gone on in this business, and the attention that the industry has paid
to trying to quantify its risk as being a part of that story, I think,
would be a wonderful thing.

So I would hope that as we go down this path of trying to meet our
licensing commitments, we would also realize that getting past the NRC
is one thing; maybe getting past the public is another thing. We need to
be sensitive to what has gone on here, and I think the Project deserves
us to do justice to the work that\'s been done that will probably never
find its way into the license application but is nevertheless important
to this whole issue, in my opinion, of building public confidence.

So that\'s one of the reasons we\'re interested in having the meetings
structured as we did today rather than as a TSPA meeting or a licensing
meeting. We chose to try to come to grips with this concept of whatever
it is that has any relationship to safety, and I think in that
connection we want to thank the presenters and the hard work that was
put into putting everything together for the presentation. As all of you
know, the Board is constantly looking for some results, for some
information, and we realize that some of these activities are still at
the process and procedural state. The Performance Confirmation is kind
of an example of that. But we will continue to have these kind of
sessions to try to have as good an understanding as we can of what\'s
really happening in the trenches and what kind of results are we getting
and how these results are all tied together.

So that\'s part of our feelings with respect to concluding remarks.

SPROAT: I just wanted to finish the DOE talks by, first of all, thanking
the Board for your involvement, your interest, bringing your
professional expertise and experience to this project. Just so you know
how much weight I put on your personal opinions and your involvement in
this project, before I even got confirmed, I got a copy of your last
annual report with the green cover. I read it, I highlighted all the
issues, and on the inside cover I have a full page of handwritten 18
different issues that I took out of your annual report that I think are
very valid issues that we need to address here between now and license
application submittal.

I gave it to Russ, Russ is putting it into the business plan as we go
forward so that we may not have definitive final answers on all those
issues, but we\'re going to go after them, and we\'re going to address
them as best we can between now and license application.

So I\'m telling you that just to give you a sense that I don\'t see you
as a necessary evil to the Program. I see you as a very helpful and
essential part of evaluating what we\'re doing, how we\'re doing it, and
giving us feedback that will add a lot of value to the work we\'re doing
to try and give us a licensable design and a valid design for the Yucca
Mountain system\--as a system.

So I just want to thank you all again for your involvement and your
professionalism and your help, because I view it as help. I really do.
Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you. Okay, I guess we\'ve come to the public comment
stage of our meeting. I have notification here that C. Fitzpatrick would
like to make some comments.

FITZPATRICK: Charlie Fitzpatrick, Egan Associates for the State of
Nevada.

I\'ll keep it pretty brief. You always recite the charter of the TRB at
the beginning of every meeting; that\'s been the custom. The most
pertinent part, \"Conduct an independent review of the technical and
scientific validity of DOE activities related to implementing the
NWPA,\" and for today\'s meeting, \"to review DOE\'s efforts to develop
and articulate a safety case for a proposed geological repository.\"

I don\'t know if this is a question for Peter Swift or for the Board,
maybe food for thought for both. Peter Swift\'s address was on barrier
capability assessment of system performance. There were a lot of charts,
for instance, the last subject of his bullet points, \"representative
quantitative examples of barrier performance.\" We saw horse tail charts
of barrier performance; we saw horse tail charts of system performance
incorporating various barriers.

One of the Board member\'s questions, \"How come they have dates on them
like 1998, 2000, 2001?\" The answer was, \"Well, obviously we\'ve done a
lot of work in that area since. Obviously the results are different.
Obviously those charts are then, and this is something different now.
But we\'re heading into a licensing proceeding, and so we can\'t let all
of our information out of the bag.\"

I think that\'s a big problem for the Board to do its job. How are you
supposed to conduct an independent review of the activities of the DOE?
How are you, Dr. Garrick, supposed to see what\'s happening in the
trenches when you come to a meeting quarterly, approximately, to review
those activities and you get handed horse tail charts from five years
ago that are admittedly changed since then?

So I urge the DOE to step back\--okay, I\'m not from Nevada today, I\'m
just a taxpayer. The DOE has burned 400 to 600 million per year since
those horse tail charts were done five years ago, so that\'s a couple of
billion dollars. As a taxpayer, I think I\'m entitled to see the new
horse tail charts.

And I think as we go forward to June 30, \'08, you\'ll have several more
meetings, ACNW will have several meetings, there\'s numerous technical
exchanges scheduled, and a big question, I think, now hovering over each
one of those is: How much of the current information is being laid out
at these public meetings, and how much is going to be withheld for later
utilization of the licensing proceeding?

GARRICK: Thank you. Anybody care to make a comment?

Are there any other comments that anybody would like to make at this
point?

Well, okay, it\'s been a long day. I think it\'s been a productive one;
and, as I say, we appreciate very much everybody\'s effort, and we look
forward to meeting with you again. We are adjourned.

(Whereupon, at 5:20 p.m. the meeting was adjourned.)