UNITED STATES

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

FALL 2002 BOARD MEETING

September 10, 2002

Alexis Park Hotel

375 E. Harmon Avenue

Las Vegas, Nevada 89109

[NWTRB BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT]{.underline}

Dr. Mark Abkowitz

Dr. Daniel B. Bullen

Dr. Thure Cerling

Dr. Norman Christensen, Afternoon Session Chair

Dr. Michael Corradini, Chair, NWTRB

Dr. Paul P. Craig, Morning Session Chair

Dr. David Duquette

Dr. Debra S. Knopman

Dr. Ronald Latanision

Dr. Priscilla P. Nelson

Dr. Richard R. Parizek

[SENIOR PROFESSIONAL STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. Carl Di Bella

Dr. Daniel Fehringer

Dr. Daniel Metlay

Dr. Leon Reiter

Dr. David Diodato

Dr. John Pye

[CONSULTANTS]{.underline}

Dr. Jared L. Cohon

Dr. Donald Runnells

Dr. Alberto Sagüés

Dr. Jeffrey J. Wong

[NWTRB STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. William D. Barnard, Executive Director

Joyce Dory, Director of Administration

Karyn Severson, Director, External Affairs

Linda Hiatt, Management Analyst

Linda Coultry, Management Assistant

Davonya Barnes, Staff Assistant

[I N D E X]{.underline}

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Call to Order and Introductory Statements**

Michael Corradini, Chairman,

Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board . . . . . . . 5

Jared Cohon, Outgoing Chairman,

Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board . . . . . . . 14

**Comments from the State of Nevada**

Robert Loux, Executive Director

Agency for Nuclear Projects . . . . . . . . . . . 24

**Overview of Programmatic Developments**

Margaret Chu, Director

Office of Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM)

Department of Energy (DOE) . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

**Yucca Mountain Project Plans**

Donald Horton, Deputy Project Manager, Yucca

Mountain Site Characterization Office, DOE . . . . 51

**Introduction to Session on Science and**

**Engineering Topics**

Paul Craig, Session Chair . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

**Science and Engineering Update**

Mark Peters, Bechtel SAIC Company,

LLC/Los Alamos National Laboratory (BSC/LANL). . . 62

**Report on Proposed Science and**

**Technology Program**

Steve Brocoum, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

**Inyo County, CA, Regional Ground Water**

**Monitoring Program**

Andrew Remus, Inyo County . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Michael King, The Hydrodynamics Group, LLC . . . . 119

**Public Comments** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

**Interim Report of the Igneous**

**Consequences Peer Review Panel**

Robert Budnitz, Panel Chair,

Future Resources Associates, Inc. (FRA) . . . . . 151

Frank Spera, University of California

at Santa Barbara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

[I N D E X]{.underline}

(Cont.)

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Post-Closure Thermal Conditions:**

**How Hot Should It Get?**

William Boyle, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

**Update on Corrosion Testing** Gerry Gordon, BSC/Framatome Advanced

Nuclear Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

**Update on Repository Design**

Gordon Pedersen, BSC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

**Introduction to Session on Total System**

**Performance Assessment (TSPA) and**

**Barrier Analysis**

Norman Christensen, Session Chair . . . . . . . . 226

**Electric Power Research Institute**

**Performance Assessment and Barrier Analyses**

John Kessler, Electric Power Research

Institute (EPRI) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

**DOE Performance Assessment and**

**Barrier Analyses**

Peter Swift, BSC/Sandia National

Laboratories (SNL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

**Round Table Discussion of TSPA and**

**Barrier Analyses**

John Kessler (EPRI), Peter Swift (BSC/SNL),

Abraham Van Luik (DOE), Steve Frishman

(State of Nevada), Tim McCarton (NRC), John

Garrick (Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste),

Robert Budnitz (FRA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

**Public Comments** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306

**Adjournment** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

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

CORRADINI: Let\'s all sit down and begin. Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Mike Corradini. I\'m Chair of the Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board, and it\'s a pleasure to welcome you all to the
third meeting of the Board this year.

Before we begin the meeting, it seems important to me at lease to pause
a moment to acknowledge the tragedy of our nation experienced a year ago
tomorrow. Many of you who are here today were attending a Board meeting
in Las Vegas last September 11th. While we\'re together again near the
anniversary, let\'s join in a minute of silent in remembrance of all who
were touched by those tragic events.

(Moment of silence.)

CORRADINI: Thank you. I\'m a new face to many of you, as are four of the
other new Board members you\'ll see sitting at the table. A lot has been
happening with respect to Yucca Mountain since the last Board meeting in
Washington in May, and I\'ll have more to say about that after I
introduce the Board, its continuing members, the new members, and its
departing members.

Let me first give you a brief background of the Board itself. Our Board
was created in 1987 amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Congress
established the Board as an independent federal agency to evaluate the
technical and scientific validity of the activities of the Department of
Energy related to the disposal of commercial spent nuclear fuel, and
defense high level nuclear waste.

The Board is required to report its findings and recommendations twice a
year to Congress and to the Secretary of Energy. The President appoints
Board members from a list of nominees submitted by the National Academy
of Sciences. The Board is, by law and design, a multi-disciplinary group
composed of eleven members with expertise covering a wide range of
disciplines.

Let me now introduce the members of the Board to you. As I introduce the
Board members, I\'d like each one of them, ask them to stand briefly and
be identified. Let me remind you also that we all serve in a part-time
capacity. In my case, I\'m Chairman of the Department of Engineering and
Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. My areas of expertise
relate to nuclear and industrial safety, with emphasis on subjects such
as multi-phase flow and heat transfer and mass transfer.

First, I\'d like to introduce the continuing members of the Board, who I
am sure many of you know. Dan Bullen is an Associate Professor of
Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University. His areas of expertise
include performance assessment, modelling and materials science. Dan
chairs both our Panel on Performance Assessment and the Panel on the
Repository.

Norm Christensen is a Professor of Ecology and former Dean of the
Nicholas School of Environment at Duke University. His areas of
expertise include biology, ecology and ecosystem management. Norm chairs
the Board\'s Panel on Waste Management System.

Paul Craig is Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of
California at Davis, and he\'s a member of the University\'s graduate
group in ecology. His areas of expertise include energy policy issues
associated with global environmental change.

Debra Knopman is Associate Director of Rand Science and Technology
located in Arlington, Virginia. Her areas of expertise include
hydrology, environmental and natural resource policy, systems analysis
and public administration. She chairs the Board\'s Panel on Site
Characterization.

Priscilla Nelson is the Director of the Division of Civil and Mechanical
Systems and Directorate for Engineering at the National Science
Foundation. Her areas of expertise include rock engineering and
underground construction.

And Richard Parizek is a Professor of Geology and Geoenvironmental
Engineering at Penn State University. He\'s also President of Richard
Parizek and Associates, Consulting Hydrogeologists and Environmental
Geologists. His areas of expertise include hydrogeology and
environmental geology.

I\'d now like to introduce the new Board members. Mark Abkowitz is
Professor of Civil Engineering and Management Technology at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, and he\'s Director of the Vanderbilt Center for
Environmental Management Studies. His expertise is in the areas of
transportation, risk management, and risk assessment.

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

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

And Ron Latanision is a Professor of Materials Science, Professor of
Nuclear Engineering and Director of the H.H. Ulig Corrosions Laboratory
at MIT. His areas of expertise include materials processing, corrosion
of metals, and other materials in different aqueous environments. Ron is
also Founder and Chairman of the MIT Council on Primary and Secondary
Education.

I\'m sure all of you will get to know me and the other Board members
during the course of the time, and we look forward to meeting all of
you. In fact, I think, an extemporaneous note, there\'s a lot of you, so
I think it will take a bit of time.

I would now like to introduce the departing Board members, and in doing
so, say a few words about the role of the Board. These departing
members, those that continue to serve, and John Arendt, who passed away
last April, have played an invaluable role in the site recommendation
process that has just ended. They did exactly what Congress requested,
that is, comment on the scientific and technical validity of the
Department of Energy\'s nuclear waste disposal program.

It\'s no secret that different players, both national and local, were
not always completely pleased with what the Board said. But the Board\'s
purpose is to objectively evaluate the technical basis of that program,
and that is what the Board did, and we hope what it will continue to do
in the future. I believe the nation owes a great deal to these
individuals and their contributions over the past few years. So, at this
point, what I\'d like to do is request the departing members to briefly
stand as I mention their names, and afford them an opportunity to say a
few words, if they so choose. Outgoing Board Chairman Jared Cohon will
then wrap up with some of his own remarks.

Donald Runnells is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geological
Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is also a
technical consultant at Shepherd Miller Environmental and Engineering
Consultants. His area of expertise includes geochemistry,
hydrochemistry, and mineral deposits.

Don, anything you would like to say?

RUNNELLS: Just very, very briefly. I must thank the staff of the Board.
They are, as Jerry Cohon often says, in all of their splendor along this
wall. They have made my job, and the jobs of the other members of the
Board, much easier than it would be otherwise. They work hard. An
excellent staff, and I thank them very much.

I also want to say that the Board recognizes the very hard work of the
technical people of the DOE and their contractors. We may not always
agree with the direction or the results, but I want the folks in the
trenches who are doing the technical work to know that we recognize
their commitment, their devotion, and their hard work.

Thank you very much.

CORRADINI: Thank you, Don.

Alberto Sagüés is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South
Florida. His areas of expertise include corrosion and materials
engineering, physical metallurgy, and scientific instrumentation.
Alberto, is there anything you want to say?

SAGÜÉS: Yes, indeed. Thank you. First, I want to echo somewhat the
comments of Don. It\'s been an honor and a privilege to have served the
nation as a Board member over the last five and a half years.

During that time, I was encouraged by the caliber and the dedication of
the Yucca Mountain project scientists and engineers who address the
unprecedented challenge of planning for a system that concerns public
safety for many future generations. I\'m very glad to feel that I, among
others, had a part in making a possible contribution as a reviewer, in
particular, on the importance of basic science and extrapolated
materials behavior into the far future.

Of course, I want to express my great pleasure to have worked with such
a wonderful group of colleagues, Board members, and staff. Thank you
very much.

CORRADINI: Thank you, Alberto.

And then, finally, Jeffrey Wong is Deputy Director of Science, Pollution
Prevention, and Technology in the Department of Toxic Substances Control
at the California Environmental Protection Agency. His areas of
expertise include risk assessment, toxicology, and hazardous materials
management. Jeff chaired our Panel on Environmental Regulations and
Quality Assurance.

Jeff, I think you have some words for us.

WONG: Thank you. Yeah, like my colleagues, I\'d like to say that the
descriptors I have for the Board staff are brilliant, efficient, the
best. I\'d like to thank them for all the support they\'ve given, and
it\'s been a pleasure.

To the DOE, I want to thank all of them for all of their efforts in
trying to explain their activities, and in particular, I\'d like to
thank Claudia Newberry, who\'s been a face that we\'ve always been\--or
at least myself has always been in contact with.

I\'d like to thank Steve Frishman and Englebrecht Von Tiesenhausen.
They, in particular, held me to not only ask some of the real questions,
but always looked for some of the real answers in the time that I\'ve
been here.

To the new Board members, I\'d like to offer my congratulations once
again. I hope you get to have some of those fine cookies from Sally
Devlin and her friends in Pahrump. And also want to point out to you,
according to Bo Bodvarsson, the worst questions, all of them, are very
good questions. It\'s been an honor, and I thank you.

CORRADINI: Thanks, Jeff.

And, finally, there\'s one departing Board member who I have not yet
introduced, and that is Jerry Cohon, who has been Board chairman since
January 1997. As a scientist, Jerry brought to the Board expertise in
environmental and water resources systems analysis. As Board Chairman,
he led the Board through its many deliberations, interacted with the
groups, such as the Congress, the DOE, the NRC, and the State of Nevada,
the affected counties, as well as the general public. He did most of
this while serving as President of Carnegie-Mellon University, a major
American educational institution.

Staff members told me that when Jerry went from being Dean at Yale to
President at Carnegie-Mellon, many of them wondered how long he would
remain on the Board, given the work load associated with his new job.
The pessimists talked about a month or two. The optimists talked about a
year or so. His tenure lasted five and one-half years, a true testament,
I think, to his abilities.

Jerry, thank you for your leadership during this critical time in the
Board\'s history. I\'m sure that in your new off-duty assignment, as I
am told, as member of the President\'s Homeland Security Advisory
Council, you will continue to serve our country in this critical area
with the same wisdom you displayed on the NWTRB.

I should say again parenthetically, since a lot of these remarks were
provided to me, I\'ve only been on the job, so to speak, in my part-time
capacity for about a month, and Jerry has been excellent. We have had a
number of conversations on the phone. I thank him personally for that.

Jerry?

COHON: Thank you very much for those kind remarks. I wasn\'t aware of
what Mike just told you all about what the money was saying about my
longevity in this position. And had I known, I could have offset some of
my blackjack losses over these many years.

Thank you, too, Mike, for giving me time during what is a very, very
full agenda today, and I\'ll try to be to the point, recognizing that a
former chairman is about as valuable to the current Board as
yesterday\'s newspaper.

And while I\'m on thank you\'s, I want to join my colleagues, the other
outgoing members, in taking the opportunity to thank all of the many
people who have had such an impact on this Board and on me personally
during my time as chairman, and people who have made my time as chairman
such a rewarding experience. I want to thank the other Board members
with whom it truly has been a privilege to serve, the Board\'s staff\--a
remarkably talented and technically deep group\--and especially Bill
Barnard, who has done a superb job of managing the Board\'s affairs. And
I have to say more than anybody, he\'s the one who made it possible for
a university president to serve as chairman for five years.

My thanks to all with whom the Board has interacted over the last five
years, and especially the DOE and its contractors. I want to again join
my colleague outgoing members in saying you are very strong
professionals and very good people, and I believe you work very hard to
do the right thing.

In the remainder of my remarks, I want to touch on three themes: what
the Board has done over the last five years during my chairmanship, how
it did it, and a little bit on what it might do in the future.

Mike\'s characterization of the Board I think was just right: to provide
an independent and objective evaluation of the science and technology in
DOE\'s plans for Yucca Mountain. And we\'ve this very well. That we had
everybody made at us at one time or another, and sometimes everyone at
once, may be the best measure of our success.

The Board\'s January 24th letter report commenting on the Secretary\'s
site recommendation was the culmination of years of effort by the Board.
That report was important, it was hard to do right, but it was very well
done and received the attention that it deserved during the
Congressional deliberations. But, in fact, and I want to emphasize this,
it was only the culmination. It is by no means the totality of all that
the Board has contributed to the Nation\'s nuclear waste program.

I have to say this Board understandably has been reticent about
celebrating its accomplishments and contributions. We are, after all, a
bunch of scientists and also engineers who are naturally suspicious of
self-promotion. And I respect that, but as a former member, I don\'t
feel so constrained, so I\'m going to do some celebrating. I\'m not
going to try to be exhaustive. I just want to point out a few Board
contributions that I think were especially important.

First, there is the ECRB, which was called the cross-drift when it was
being excavated and, before that, when the idea was still being resisted
by the DOE, it was called the \"Board\'s Tunnel.\" \"Our Tunnel\" has
yielded crucial information about the proposed repository block and I
feel completely confident predicting there will be even more to come,
and I think much more.

Secondly, as disappointed as I was personally in the Secretary\'s
treatment of uncertainty in his site recommendation, the DOE in fact is
much further along on this issue than they were just two years ago.
Though I tip my hat to DOE for the good work they\'ve done on this, the
Board played a big role in pushing them to do it, and I hope the Board
will continue to do so.

The third one is a subtle point, but I believe that the Board\'s
insistence that suitability, which is an admittedly poorly defined term,
nevertheless, suitability was different from licensability, and pushing
that represented I think a very important contribution to the process.
By insisting on this distinction and arguing exhaustively about its
meaning among ourselves, we helped to preserve the site recommendation
as the important social and policy decision that it was.

Fourth. Proving something not to be true is the hardest thing to do in
science, and a decidedly unglamorous undertaking. Yet, the Board did not
shy away from the challenge presented by the hypothesis of geothermal
upwelling. I think we did a very effective job in marshalling limited
resources and helping to spawn reviews of what was a very complicated
and controversial issue.

Fifth. Only time will tell if the DOE ultimately settles on a hot or a
cold design. But without a doubt, if it were not for the Board, the hot
design would have gone forward unchallenged. Whichever repository design
is ultimately selected, it will be better understood and probably more
robust and resilient than it would have been without our aggressive
questioning.

And, finally, on my short list, the last one I want to mention is one
that\'s particularly important to me. I am proud of the Board\'s
openness and the care with which we manage the public\'s role in our
activities. Most notable has been the public forum that we have provided
at our meetings. We have done that whenever and wherever we\'ve met, in
Washington, here in Las Vegas, and, importantly, in the towns closer to
Yucca Mountain. And, wherever we\'ve gone, we\'ve brought along DOE and
the other major players with us.

There\'s more that we\'ve done, much more, in fact, but let me turn now
to my second theme, which is how we accomplished all of these things,
and the many more that I haven\'t mentioned. There are many ingredients
of the Board\'s success: the outstanding quality of its members, the
superb staff, the hard work and the care applied to the tasks at hand.
These have all been crucial, but I want to focus on the Board\'s
integrity. Created, as we were, to provide independent and objective
advice, our integrity as a Board has been essential to our
effectiveness.

Now, I have to admit that integrity comes in many forms. It includes
having members free of conflicts, both real and perceived, and this is
something that we\'ve been very careful about.

But integrity also means intellectual honesty. And on this score, I am
in awe of what we were able to do. For a moment, I ask you all to put
yourselves in our place. Here we were, eleven people from completely
different backgrounds, differences in training, experience, world view,
charged with producing a single position on highly complicated issues
filled with uncertainty. Producing these positions in a way that took
account of and respected everyone\'s views, while still having something
worthwhile to say, is not easy. I challenge you to try it. But, we did
it, and I believe the key to this was the intellectual honesty each of
us brought to the task and the resulting trust in each other that
developed over the years.

Turning now to my last theme, the future of the Board, I defer to Mike
and the Board\'s current members on the important question of the
Board\'s role after the site recommendation. I can say with confidence,
however, that there will be no less need for the Board\'s excellent,
intellectually honest and independent review of the nuclear waste
program than there has been in the past. Indeed, it makes sense to me
that the closer we get to repository construction and operation, the
more important are sound science and credible science and sound
engineering and credible engineering.

Achieving soundness and credibility will require a solid conceptual
understanding of the repository system and supporting data and
supporting analyses. Furthermore, understanding uncertainties,
communicating them fully and developing plans for dealing with them are
crucial. All of these issues are on the Board\'s beat, and I expect
that, as important as the Board has been up to now, it will be even more
so in the future.

I think we all agree that Yucca Mountain is still a highly complicated
and technically challenging program and will remain so. If the Board
continues to perform as it has in the past\--and I\'m sure it will\--the
Nation will be well served. And, you can\'t ask for more than that.

Thank you very much.

(Whereupon, Dr. Cohon received a standing ovation.)

CORRADINI: Thank you, Jerry.

Before we go on to today\'s agenda, let me describe where the Nation
finds itself with respect to the proposed repository for nuclear waste.

As you no doubt all know, earlier this year, Secretary of Energy,
Spencer Abraham, and then President Bush, both recommended the Yucca
Mountain site as the site for a permanent high-level waste repository.
Governor Kenny Guinn of Nevada then notified Congress of the State\'s
disapproval of the President\'s recommendation, and on July 9th, the
Congress overturned the Governor\'s veto, and on July 23rd, the
President signed a joint resolution of Congress recognizing this.

The formal site recommendation process now is over, and Yucca Mountain
has been officially designated, authorizing the Department of Energy to
submit an application to the U.S. NRC to obtain a license to construct a
repository at the site.

Undoubtedly, this is an important juncture in the life of the Yucca
Mountain project. We\'re very interested in how the DOE will meet this
new challenge, and continue to address the ongoing technical and
scientific issues that the Board is concerned about.

Let me now turn to our meeting agenda. I\'ll try to be brief, because
we\'re already slipping a bit past our time, because we have a very
ambitious agenda and a lot of ground to cover today. Right after I\'m
done, we\'ll start with Bob Loux, Executive Director of the State of
Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who will present the views of the
State related to the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain. Mr. Loux is
responsible for the staffing, organization and direction of the State
Nuclear Projects Office.

We will then have an overview of the current activities of the Office of
Civilian Radioactive Waste Management by Margaret Chu, the Director of
the Office. The Board first met Dr. Chu at the May 2002 meeting in
Washington. At that time, she discussed some of the long-term goals that
she has for the office and the program. We\'re looking forward to
hearing some of the details associated with these goals.

Following Dr. Chu\'s presentation, Don Horton, Deputy Project Manager of
the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office will present an overview
of the project activities, including long-range plans and project
priorities for science and engineering activities. The Yucca Mountain
Site Characterization Office is responsible for the study of Yucca
Mountain as a potential repository site.

We\'ll then take a short break, and Board Member Paul Craig will chair a
session extending to the mid-afternoon that will cover a number of
scientific and engineering topics, including ongoing and planned
testing, igneous consequences, thermal issues, corrosion, design, and a
report of Inyo County, California on their hydrologic studies. Paul will
review for you the agenda for his session in greater detail later this
morning.

At mid-afternoon, after a break, Board Member Norm Christensen will
chair the final session of the day, and as he will explain, that session
will be devoted to comparing different performance assessments and
barrier analyses of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. And that
bring us to the close of this very ambitious one day agenda.

So, let me just say a few more words about public comment and the ground
rules of our meeting. We have scheduled our public comment period at the
end of the meeting in the late afternoon. Those wanting to comment
should sign the public comment register at the check-in table in the
back where Ms. Linda Hyatt and Linda Coultry are seated, and they will
be happy to assist you.

If someone wants to comment and absolutely cannot stay until the comment
period at the end of the meeting, please let us know and we will try to
accommodate you at the close of the morning session. I understand a
couple of people have already talked with Linda Hyatt.

Let me point out, and I\'ll remind you again later, that depending on
the number of people who sign up for comment, we may have to limit the
length of time you have to make your comments during the comment period.

As always, we welcome written comments to the Board for the record.
Those of you who prefer not to make oral comments or ask questions
during the meeting may choose written route at any time. We especially
encourage written comments where they\'re more extensive, and our
meeting time may not allow them to be spoken orally.

And then, finally, I have to offer one usual disclaimer for the record
so that everybody is clear on the conduct of our meeting, and what
you\'re hearing and the significance of what you\'re hearing. Our
meetings are spontaneous by design. In fact, as an aside, this might be
the most choreographed part of my life. I\'ve never had such a long
speech. Those of you who have attended our meetings before, know that
the Board members do not hesitate to speak their minds, and I think the
new Board members will be of similar vein, but I have to emphasize that
that\'s precisely what they\'re doing when they\'re speaking. They\'re
speaking on behalf of themselves, not on behalf of the Board. When we
are articulating a Board position, we\'ll be sure to let you know. You
can find the final Board position in our written letters and reports,
which can be accessed through the Board\'s website.

So, with that, we can begin. Let me start by introducing Bob Loux,
Executive Director of the State of Nevada\'s Agency for Nuclear
Projects. I was looking for Bob. He will present his views of the State
related to the proposed nuclear waste repository.

LOUX: Thank you very much. I will be very brief this morning. I know you
have a full agenda, and a lot of things to cover.

I want to take the opportunity to welcome all of you to Nevada
officially on behalf of the State and the Governor and, in particular,
welcome the new Board members. We look forward to working with you. I
know that you believe and know there\'s a number of challenges ahead
that we\'ll all be working on together. I wish you the best, and want to
offer any way that we can be helpful or be of service, please call on us
and let us know.

I in particular want to thank and congratulate the outgoing Board
members for their long and hard work in this arena. As the past Chairman
has indicated, it\'s not an easy arena. It\'s full of a lot of
controversy, a lot of delicate subjects. And I think the Board has
handled themselves, in particular, very well in dealing with these.

We may not have always agreed on all of the issues, but I think that one
thing that we, and I know the public, could count on is the Board\'s
objectivity, the Board\'s openness and willing to hear not only from
people like the State of Nevada and the affected counties, but in
particular the public, and I think everyone really appreciates the hard
work that you\'ve lent to the project.

In particular, the integrity of Board members and the willingness to
again be a part of this process is very important and something that I
think we\'re going to look forward to as a new group.

I want to mention in particular something the outgoing Chairman
mentioned, and I think that\'s the issue that has to do with conflicts,
and I know that\'s of great concern not only to Nevada, but a number of
other parties, and it really is incumbent on the Board to take a look at
those issues hard if, in fact, public confidence and confidence in the
process of your reports and your activities are a meaningful thing,
which I believe they are. We already have a particularly example even
recently of a conflict that I think is of some concern. The Chairman of
the Igneous Peer Review Group has apparently indicated publicly that
he\'s going to go now and work for the Department shortly after his
tenure in chairing this, which in itself creates at least the perception
of some conflict relative to their activities, and, of course, is great
concern to us.

But having said that, let me indicate that as the project now moves from
more of a political environment to the legal and regulatory arena, the
Board\'s work is even more important than it has been in the past.

Let me close by just letting you know that the State of Nevada, and I
want to talk about this just very briefly, is currently involved, if the
federal government in at least four particular cases that are all in the
U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., we are challenging the
Environmental Protection Agency\'s rules for Yucca Mountain, the period
of performance, and what we think is a gerrymandered control area.
We\'re also challenging the NRC\'s licensing regulation as not being in
conformance with the law that requires any repository to have as its
primary barrier for isolation, the geologic structure.

We\'re also challenging the recommendation of the President and the
Secretary and the guidelines or siting regulations that DOE has used. We
believe those regulations are faulty in that they do not comply with the
law and are aimed at moving from a geologic barrier to one of more of an
engineered barrier, something we don\'t think the law allows. And,
consequently, the actions by the President and the Secretary are
defective as well.

And, lastly, we\'re challenging the Department of Energy\'s
environmental impact statement on a number of grounds, both
procedural\--for example, there\'s still no record of decision from that
particular document that should have been on the table as a part of the
recommendation process\--a number of other substantive issues that are
contained in that document as well.

The first one of these cases is going to be heard in February in the
Court of Appeals. We anticipate probably getting an initial decision out
of the court on the first case probably a year from right about now, and
the others following thereafter.

The only other real activity that is taking place in that arena is that
the government has moved to dismiss all four of these cases, and some
cases as being moot as a result of the President\'s signing of the
resolution, and more recently, the court has denied the Justice
Department their motion in all four of those cases. So, each one of
these cases will be heard on the merits eventually before the Court of
Appeals.

With that, Mr. Chairman, let me thank you again for the time. I know
you\'ve got a big agenda. And, again, thank the outgoing members. We
really have appreciated your work. And I\'ll let you get on with your
business today.

Thank you very much.

CORRADINI: Questions for Bob?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, Bob, I had a quick question for you. I
thought that at least two or three of these cases had been consolidated
and were going to go to the Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. So, have
they consolidated a couple or three of those cases from the State, or is
that not true?

LOUX: They\'ve actually consolidated two cases. First, we separately had
sued the President and the Secretary as a separate cause of action. That
has been consolidated with our challenge to the Department of Energy\'s
siting regulations. And more recently, the environmental impact
statement challenge has been now consolidated with the guidelines and
the recommendation case as well.

So, in actuality, there\'s only three cases. There\'s one against the
Department of Energy on those three counts, plus the NRC case and the
EPA case.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board again. Does the timing of the cases pose any
problem for the State, or is it basically the schedule is to your
liking?

LOUX: It is to our liking. We\'d like to see decisions early out of the
court. We\'d like to see those issues resolved. From our perspective, if
any of the Department of Energy\'s actions are going to be overturned,
or the other federal agencies, it\'s better to know that now than after
things are well down the road.

However, in our view, most of these cases, if not all of them, are
probably fatal to the project in our view. For example, the guideline
recommendation EIS case, if we\'re correct, we\'ve caused the whole
process of recommendation to have to be done over again, if it can be.

So, you\'re correct. The schedule is a little accelerated. Again,
February and March are dates that are coming up for much of these cases,
and we\'re happy with the schedule.

BULLEN: Thank you.

CORRADINI: Other questions?

(No response.)

LOUX: Thank you again, Mr. Chairman.

CORRADINI: Thank you, Bob.

Okay, next on our agenda is Dr. Margaret Chu, Director of the Office of
Radioactive Waste Management at the Department of Energy, and her talk
will be about overview of programmatic developments.

Margaret?

CHU: I first want to thank all the Board members for their willingness
to take on this important and challenging job in overseeing the
technical work of the Yucca Mountain program. And this program not only
takes a vital role for this Nation, it\'s also a very, very important at
a global level, and your contribution has been invaluable to us and to
the program over the years, and I thank you, all of you.

And then I also want to say special thanks to the departing Board
members for their countless hours of hard work in giving us guidance
over the years. Under the leadership of Dr. Cohen, you have played a
pivotal role in the direction of the program, and I sincerely thank all
of you.

And then I also want to welcome and thank the new members for their
willingness to continue on the relay\--I call it a relay\--in providing
us guidance and oversight in the program. And I really look forward to
many years of fruitful interactions with the Board.

Now, first let me give you a very high level summary of the status of
where we are in the Yucca Mountain program. You all know since last
May\'s meeting, many things happened. Both the House and the Senate have
voted for Yucca Mountain to go forward, and the President signed the
Congressionally approved resolution of repository siting approval on
July 23rd. Actually, I attended the signing ceremony at the White House.
It was quite exciting.

And then that approval allows the Department of Energy to move forward
to develop a license application to be submitted to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission.

So, we have turned the corner and then we have embarked on the next
phase of the program. There are two big milestones down the road. Our
schedule is to submit a license application in December of 2004, and
then our schedule is to receive waste December of 2010. And we need a
budget and the resources to make it happen. And in the past, the
transportation program has been lagging behind, and so one of the key
activities now is to ramp up the transportation planning activities. And
another high priority item for me personally is to continue the science
and technology program, and I\'ll talk a little bit more about that.

And as part of the necessary elements of the program, I have also
recently made a commitment to the NRC that I\'m initiating a management
improvement initiative for the program. And the purpose of that is to
line up the troops in the program so we can be ready for the license
application and the steps beyond that.

And then like I said, I really look forward to continued input from the
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and it will be very important for
us in the future.

Now, let me talk about the status of the program in terms of the two big
milestones. One is the December 2004 license submittal milestone. There
are three critical elements to get there. The first is we have to
complete a high quality license application, and the document itself
contains information on the site, information on preliminary design, and
then we have to submit a pre-closure safety analysis, we have to submit
a post-closure total system performance assessment analysis, and then we
have to talk about how we plan to do continuing testing and evaluation
and a performance confirmation program. So, these are the key elements
in the license application document itself.

Along with that, it\'s also an NRC requirement that six months before we
submit our license application, that means in June 2004, we have to put
all the relevant information into what\'s called Licensing Support
Network. This is an electronically web based database. And it needs to
be certified by NRC six months before our submittal. So, this is a
pretty big job.

And then on top of that, we have to ensure we have an effective Quality
Assurance program. That means we have to show everything we said in the
license application we actually have objective evidence, it\'s correct
and it\'s all documented.

Now, given these are the key elements, what are the challenges to
deliver that? The first challenge is it\'s the first of its kind. It\'s
never been done before. So, what are the expectations in the license
application, how are they going to be reviewed, what does it all mean? I
don\'t think anybody knows at a detailed level. So, that\'s quite a
challenge for us at a programmatic level.

And the second thing is the cultural sea-change for our program from a
scientific investigation culture to an NRC regulated QA environment. And
the third is we need to have timely resolution of NRC\'s key technical
issues and other open items.

And then I have been talking to my program folks. I say submitting the
license application is a challenge, and what will probably be even more
challenging to us is during the review period after the submittal of the
license application. How do we defend it? How do we show credibility?
How do we show NRC and basically the whole world that this is a good
program and it\'s a defensible license application?

Now, how do I deal with those challenges? My strategy right now is we
will acquire adequate resources for a quality license application
submittal. So, that means I\'ll have the best QA practices. I will have
the right expertise looking at this, the right expertise, and then the
strategy to deal with technical issues. And then also, I\'ll have the
right expertise, have people that have the NRC licensing experience to
help us in the next phase.

One of my challenges is the time is very short. So, what I\'m hoping is
through this management improvement initiative, to make the program more
efficient, and so I built some schedule contingencies in the next two
years. And then the third thing of my strategy is to clarify NRC\'s
expectations to interactions early and often. Since it\'s the first of
its kind, we need a lot of that. So, that\'s license application itself.

So, the next big milestone is the waste acceptance at 2010. One of the
critical things that needs to happen is we have to receive construction
authorization from NRC in 2007. The reason I say 2007 is after the
license application, there\'s 18 months of NRC review, and then there\'s
18 months of Board hearings. So, 18 plus 18 is three years. So, if
everything goes well, then theoretically we\'ll get construction
authorization in 2007.

And then after that, it means that we need to construct a repository by
2010. So, it\'s a very tight schedule. And in the meantime, we have to
develop the whole transportation capability to support the 2010 waste
acceptance. That means we have to acquire all the casks, the operations
readiness, interactions, and then we have to identify all the shipping
routes, and then we have to be ready for emergency responses.

Now, what are my challenges to get there for waste received in 2010?
First, as I already talked about, is we need to have timely and
effective response to highly rigorous license review after the submittal
of the license application. And since the transportation activities have
been deferred for years, we need to develop and implement a national
transportation program with a very tight schedule.

And then the third thing is the reality. We have to ask for large
funding for the construction of the licensed facility. And given the
current budget caps and system, it\'s very difficulty to have a huge
increase in budget requests.

And then the fourth thing is, again is reality, we have a lot of ongoing
litigation that potentially can delay us.

Now, how do I overcome those challenges? The first thing is acquire
resources and systems to support license application, and then be ready
for the review period so we can get construction authorization in 2007.

The second thing is we will consider a phased construction approach for
the repository design and construction, and the benefits are three-fold.
First, we can start receiving before it\'s a totally complete whole
subsurface and surface facility. The second thing is to help us in the
budget request so I don\'t have to request a humongous amount of money
at one time. And the third thing is we can take advantage of the lessons
learned as we go along if we use a phased approach. So, we can improve
our operations and our systems as we learn more and more as we go along.

And then the third thing is the science and technology program. That, if
I do it right, I believe will increase the credibility of the safety of
the repository. It will give us a chance to continue on with reducing
uncertainty of the repository system. Also, it will give me a chance to
be more cost effective, and look at technology advances as we go along.

And then the fourth thing is to jump-start the transportation program.
What we are doing right now is we start on some policy statements on how
to do the emergency response right now. That\'s a requirement of the
Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Also, we are in the process of initiating some
acquisition of long-lead specialty casks. Let me clarify that. DOE has
very heterogeneous waste, and so there are some cask designs that have
not been done, and nobody is manufacturing them. I\'m not talking about
the commercial side. I\'m talking about the DM waste. And, so, these
take years, and so we\'re going to start the specialty cask acquisition
process so we\'ll be in time for the waste received in 2010.

And then we are looking at other fleet requirements and operational
requirements, and also we\'ll be looking at institutional activities.
I\'ll talk to that a little bit more later.

In addition to that, there\'s some across-the-board challenges. In the
short term, the funding. We need adequate funding for near-term
milestones and ability to manage some of the things we need to do now.
The FY 03 budget request level is \$525 million. The Senate mark was at
\$336 million, and the House Committee mark at \$525 million. This is
current. And the timetable for the House-Senate conference is still
unclear. There are rumors that they\'re going to continue a resolution.
And we have put in an amendment of \$66 million to the Congress that has
not been put in officially, so it\'s unclear what the outcome of the
amendment will be in this process.

From a funding perspective in the long-term, I will look at life-cycle
cost reduction and then also I have to start looking at near-term
reprioritization based on the budget outcome.

And then I\'ll mention a few words about this management improvement
initiative. That\'s a commitment I\'ve made to the NRC. And there are
five areas I\'m working on. Based on years of assessments and audit of
the program, one of the key issues being brought up over and over again
is the roles, responsibilities, authority and accountability of the
program have not been very clear. So, this is one of the first things
that I\'m embarking on, is clarify roles and responsibilities to make
sure everybody knows what their job is supposed to be, how to do it
efficiently.

The second thing is, and I already mentioned it, is the QA program. I\'m
trying to make it more efficient, and then I want to make sure QA is
part of the everyday work rather than people looking at it as an audit
function.

And then also I\'m trying to, in the process, trying to streamline some
of the procedures in the program. And then the fourth thing is the
corrective action program, and then the safety-conscious work
environment.

I do want to call to people\'s attention when NRC reviews the license
application, they not only look at the license application, they look at
the organization as a whole, whether it is ready to embark, for the next
phase, whether it\'s ready to be licensed to go on with the construction
and operation. So, all these things are important, the cultural thing is
an important consideration for NRC. That\'s why I\'m doing what I\'m
doing.

And then I\'ve already started implementing the initiatives in August of
2002. It will probably go on for many, many months.

Next, I\'m going to talk about the science and technology program.
You\'re going to hear more later on from Steve Brocoum on some of the
specifics. But I want to reiterate I\'m committed to develop a sustained
program. I want to emphasize that word sustained. I want to
institutionalize this program. And the purpose of that is to increase
confidence in repository performance by reducing uncertainty, and then
enhance efficiencies and reduce life-cycle costs, improve existing
technologies and develop new ones. And then I want to maintain the U.S.
leadership in nuclear waste management.

What is the relationship of this program to licensing? It may enhance
confidence during the license application review period. And the
relevant information will be integrated into licensing-related
activities as appropriate. And some of the activities may be implemented
through the performance confirmation program. But it is separate from
the core science of the license application.

The DOE task force lead by Steve Brocoum was created in April to start
the planning. And in May, I said I was hoping I could give you a budget
number, but given the budget situation, the initial funding for this
program has not been determined. But I am committed to start a program
in the science and technology. And then your input and review will be
very valuable for the progress of this program.

I also want to let you know my plan right now is to formalize this into
the organization sometime in October. So, there will be a real
organization in my chart.

Now, in summary, with the formal site designation of Yucca Mountain, a
historical milestone was achieved, and one which could not have been
achieved without the hard work and dedication of many people. And as we
move forward, we look forward to the comments of the Board members to
help DOE improve its technical basis. I\'m hoping the science and
technology program will be an important area for the Board members to
review and comment on.

Thank you.

CORRADINI: Thank you, Margaret. Questions? Debra?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board. Thank you, Margaret for giving us this good
overview.

I\'d like to just ask a few questions so I better understand your notion
of culture change and the reconciliation of a compliance culture,
licensing culture, with your desire to have a science and technology
program, not part of that licensing culture. I guess\--and let me put a
third point on the table that I think would also help me to maybe
understand what you\'re saying.

You talk about the importance of improving credibility, not just for the
NRC, but for I think you said for the world at large. And I\'m just
wondering how you bring these pieces together. One could say, or make an
argument, that a compliance culture is actually not conducive to
investigation and exploration for its own sake, or for improved
understanding on its face. It\'s only in the context of what one needs
to do for the regulator.

And I guess my concern here is that in defining culture changes, sort of
an either/or proposition here, either we\'re in a site characterization
investigative mode, or we\'re in a compliance culture and we\'re going
to make this change, that you\'re maybe going to run into some
difficulties in the signals you send internally and externally about the
value placed on an investigative science and technology program that\'s
actually designed to go beyond compliance in the sense of pushing for a
higher level of credibility, looking for continuing to challenge the
models, the technical basis.

CHU: Let me try to answer, but maybe not in the correct order. Let me
first talk about the core science and the license application versus the
science and technology.

The way I view it is license application has its technical basis, and
this is what the core science is about, we continue to work on that
technical basis, work around that technical basis. When concerns and
technology come in is, for example, if we believe that the saturated
zone, say we have taken the license application technical basis is very
conservative, then the science and technology can come in and pick up
some activity and say are there other credits there in the saturated
zone that can supplement the license application technical work, make it
more defensible and vis-a-vis additional information.

Or, there are certain things that we feel that may need some fundamental
longer term understanding to support the technical basis for the license
application. It\'s just simply not here yet. I think the science and
technology program can pick that up and say let\'s go on with those
fundamental understandings that will either beef or say, well, we have
some issues there on our technical basis. Let\'s do good on this job, on
the site, look at some significant\--I want to emphasize that if
there\'s significant fundamental issues that need to be looked at in the
long term, that\'s where science and technology will come in.

I hope that kind of gives you a good feel on the difference between the
two areas.

KNOPMAN: Yeah, that helps. My question really had to do with culture
change as well. Just on your answer, as a quick follow-up, if I may, you
defined short and long-term S&T needs. The short term, though, didn\'t
sound to me like it was in a challenge mode. It was in sort of
enhancement, what can we do beyond what we\'ve got, and that is the
segway into this culture change issue. Will the S&T group be, in a
sense, either play devil\'s advocate or be the in-house what used to be
called skunk works at I guess Lockheed way back when, to have a group of
challengers internally\--

CHU: I hope we will, and looking at all the issues internally, that\'s
part of the goal. But let me address the culture. What I mean by culture
change is, and this really has nothing to do with science and
technology, it\'s, for example, the QA. There are a lot of people,
because they\'re scientists by training, they are not used to this
discipline of documenting things in a process oriented way. So, those
things are very important to the license application, and we can have
gaps in our documentation or process development or decision development
process, and later on, we can stand up and justify what happened. Well,
how did we get to where we are? So, that\'s what I mean by cultural
change. People need to understand how they need to fold in some of this
nuclear culture in their daily work so a license application is
defensible.

Do you have another question? I thought you had three.

KNOPMAN: That\'s okay. I was just trying to\--I raised the question
about credibility. What\'s your measure there of wanting to improve the
credibility of the program outside of what might be required, strictly
speaking, in a license application?

CHU: To me, credibility is something that\'s hard to define. It\'s
through interaction with the Board, interactions with the Academy of
Science folks. Credibility means I\'m going to encourage my technical
folks, peer review publications. To me, credibility means communicate to
the people, to the State folks, to the technical folks, to everybody. To
me, that\'s what it means. And then we can address a lot of the issues
by interactions with a variety of folks, and that\'s what I mean by
increased credibility.

CORRADINI: Let\'s move on. I see Dan, Priscilla and Mark. Dan?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, just three quick questions, but maybe
in inverse order of the way you presented.

You talked about the transportation issues and the need to jump start
the transportation system. But I guess the key question there arises in
that how are you going to interface with the utilities that currently
have the fuel. And in particular, there\'s a lot of utilities, or there
are a lot of utilities, even in my home state, who are putting spent
fuel into dry cask storage in containers that are considerably larger
than are going to be emplaced in the mountain, greater than a 44BWR
container or greater than a 21 PWR.

And, so, have you talked about interfacing with the utilities in trying
to coordinate the efforts so that you\'re not going to end up with
multi-purpose containers that were purchased by the utilities for
storage and transport, but are not going to be suitable for disposal,
and then actually maybe generate another low-level waste stream because
you\'re going to have to deal with those, too? And I realize you have
litigation, so I\'ll let you\--

CHU: First, you know, I want to remind you, Dan, that there are ongoing
litigations with the utilities. So, a certain part of us, our hands are
tied in that.

And, also, the existing contracts with a lot of the utilities on how to
receive their waste, it\'s already in the contract. However, after
saying that, this is a part of our plan in the transportation, and I
forgot to mention that our plan in the transportation program, is early
next year, we will publish a national transportation plan. That will be
really our program plan for the whole transportation program.

Some of it may be real plans. Others, you know, may be plans of plans,
you know, and some will have policies in there, sometimes just putting
down criteria, how we plan to proceed, and it will cover the whole
spectrum. And then the interface with utilities, I hope will be one
thing in that plan. I really can\'t answer you right now. This is
something we\'ll continue to work on.

BULLEN: Thank you. Bullen, Board. Just a quick follow-up on your phased
construction approach, and maybe we\'ll hear about this later on in the
presentations today.

But when you finally put a license application in to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, you\'ll have an application for the full-blown
design, but will you have a defined minimum requirement of, say, surface
and underground facilities that will be necessary for this phased
operation? And how will that be defined, and have you already set that
out?

CHU: We\'re still working on that. My understanding is NRC\'s rule has
certain requirements in there of what the surface storage means. I
believe it\'s as long as it\'s part of the operation, logistics, you can
store some on the surface. And then all the surface design will have to
give enough detail so NRC can review it and have confidence to say yes,
it\'s safe, you know what you\'re doing, you\'re ready to do that. So,
we\'re continuing to work on that.

BULLEN: Okay. One last quick question.

In your long-term science program, you said you wanted to
institutionalize it so that the funding would be stable. What plans do
you have for that institutionalization so that, I mean, from year to
year, you\'re always going to have the ability to have that chunk of
money that you can continue the program, despite the fluctuations of
Congressional appropriations?

CHU: You know, I don\'t have an org chart that has that program in
there, you know, occupy a box. That\'s what I mean by formalize it. And
then I will\--the item in my budget request every year, and it\'s in my
preliminary \'04 budget request right now. So, that\'s what I mean by
formalize it.

BULLEN: Thank you.

CHU: And then after a few years, if I continue to get the funding, it
will get formalized and become a usual item in the budget request.

CORRADINI: Priscilla?

NELSON: Nelson, Board.

Help me to understand how you see the priorities evolving, because from
my perspective, and it may be a bit suspicious or somewhat jaded from
trying to maintain priorities, I could see the issue of a very tight
budget and budget caps established by the organization or by Congress,
fighting for priorities for budget. There\'s this thing called
performance confirmation, which is a part of the license application.
From the science and technology perspective, it seems very clear that
getting something into PC as opposed to not getting it into PC may
actually result in different priorities for funding, and different
security on the work being done. So, the choice of what actually is
considered part of performance confirmation and, therefore, part of
license application, as opposed to what\'s outside and in the science
and technology budget becomes an important issue on priorities, I would
imagine.

So, that issue about what\'s in PC and what\'s not becomes important I
think for Board understanding of where the project is going. And that
seems to be taking place over the next 18 months. You would expect that
to be fully defined in that period of time; is that correct?

CHU: Yes. I think we have a PC talk later. The performance confirmation
program uses a risk based, performance based approach. That\'s how
they\'re going to prioritize what needs to be in the performance
confirmation program. And then my hope is with the science and
technology program, we\'ll work closely with them to make sure they have
this risk based, performance based approach that will be in the license
application. And then how we fold into it, I can\'t tell you right now,
but we will work at it and maybe they may be a little bit more
compliance focused and we may be a little bit broader based. I know I\'m
not quite answering your question, but these are some of the things that
we need to work on.

NELSON: I think that\'s true, and that\'s of great interest to the
Board, is understanding this.

CHU: Okay.

NELSON: Because the decisions about what are considered part of PC and
what are not have different vulnerabilities in a tight budget world, and
we really will want to focus on that.

CHU: Okay, thank you.

CORRADINI: We have one more question. Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz with the Board.

Margaret, up until now, the Board has been focusing predominantly on
issues around the repository site itself, and I see that there\'s still
a lot of important work to be done, and I see the science and technology
program as an instrument where some of that activity might continue and
evolve.

From my vantage point where I\'m showing a new paradigm where there\'s
an entire waste management system that needs to be addressed in terms of
how we get these wastes from their current locations safely destined for
the repository site, and I would like to believe that in your comments
about the science and technology program being an important area for
Board review and comment, that that also extends over to all aspects of
the waste management system, which may include science and technology,
but may also include other methods and practices that are considered,
you know, to be proactive and on the cutting edge. So, I\'d like to at
least hear your personal comment on that.

The other question I have for you is that as part of your management
improvement initiatives, does that explicitly include a
cross-polarization within DOT between various programs? For example, to
what extent will there be interactions between your program and the WIPP
program, so that we might actually learn from experiences, which not
only will put us farther along, but also perhaps in a most cost
effective manner? Thank you.

CHU: The management improvement initiative, at this point, it\'s very
internally focused, and we did not include like cross-polarization with
WIPP and other things. But that\'s a very interesting idea. We will take
that idea and think through how to incorporate those lessons learned.

And then I want to come back and answer your science and technology on
the whole waste management activities. Yes, it is of great interest to
us. So, we are looking at, and we do want to look at the whole waste
management cycle, and that\'s why I also emphasize the life cycle cost
of the whole system, so it\'s really from generation to disposal.

Actually, within the program, actually it\'s outside the science and
technology program, one of the things we\'re looking at is looking at
some of the environmental clean-up waste, and looking at their waste
residuals, and then try to evaluate their waste acceptance criteria into
Yucca Mountain and say are we optimizing that. So, yes, to answer your
question, yes.

But, of course, the reality is what is our budget going to be like. So,
we have to prioritize, and then figure out what is the best way to go
forward. But I\'m looking forward to comments from the Board members.

CORRADINI: Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. We\'ll have to move on.

CHU: Thank you very much.

CORRADINI: Our next speaker is Donald Horton. He\'s Deputy Project
Manager of the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office, and he will
be speaking on the Yucca Mountain project plans. Don?

HORTON: Thank you. I\'d like to thank those Board members that are
departing after today, and thank them for their interactions with all of
us here at the project, and also welcome the new members and look
forward to the path forward on many more interactions as we continue in
the program.

Dr. Dyer regrets that he can\'t be here this morning. He\'s off in
Moscow giving a presentation over there, and he\'s sorry that he
couldn\'t make it here this morning.

What I\'d like to do is to address a few of the areas that we have on
the project as our priorities in the coming years and immediate future.
We\'re going to have much more detailed presentations later on this
morning and this afternoon, but I want to provide a highlight of those
activities. They are the Yucca Mountain status, the major technical
activity streams, such as the repository safety prior to permanent
closure and after permanent closure, the repository safety case, and the
summary.

As you know, the site recommendation and selection was passed this year.
Our next major milestone, as has been discussed previously, is our
license application in December 2004.

As far as the project status, our highest priority is protecting the
health and safety of the workers and the public, and protecting the
environment. We\'re going to have to instill a safety conscious culture
across the project. And what I mean about a safety conscious culture is
not only industrial safety and nuclear safety, but we want any employee
to not only have the right, but deserves the option of raising any
question or any issue on the project, and getting a timely, satisfactory
resolution to that. This is not only in the QA area, but any area on the
program.

We\'re going to be developing a license application that successfully
meets the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements. We plan to submit
the license application to the NRC, as previously stated, in December of
\'04, and we\'re currently working on sections of the LA.

The focus of the technical work is on engineering and design,
performance assessment, scientific activities, and continuing testing
and performance confirmation. All these topics will be covered this
morning and this afternoon.

The major technical activity streams include the repository safety prior
to the permanent closure, which includes the engineering and design, the
design evolution, the preclosure safety analysis. The repository safety
after permanent closure includes the TSPA assessment for the LA.

On the engineering and design, the preliminary design at LA submittal
will emphasize the systems important to safety. This includes the
concept of operations that will be included in LA and provides a basis
for the preclosure safety analysis.

The design is going to evolve, and the level of detail will increase as
DOE learns more and adjusts to the changes in our understanding of the
system.

Progress toward completion of the preliminary design will be tracked
through interim design reviews. And these interim design reviews will be
conducted by DOE at a high level to see the status and the integration
and the adequacy of the design. It\'s not the substitute for the
independent design review that\'s required by the regulations. There
will be numerous of these design overviews, and we welcome the
participation of Board members, as we did in one of the other design
reviews that we conducted, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
on-site reps., and others.

As you can see by the chart on the bottom of this slide, the preliminary
design and the conceptual design are where we\'re at right now. The
detailed design will progress as we continue on in the project. We will
have some of the detailed design completed at LA submittal. We\'ll have
another major portion continued through construction authorization, and
it will continue on after the receive and possess.

The preliminary design that will support the LA will consist of
additional detail and refinements to the design concept for the SR. The
final decisions and approvals of the LA design have not been made at
this time.

The LA design is expected to fall within the bounds established for the
flexible design concept described in the SR and the Environmental Impact
Statement. And I think that we\'re going to have Dr. Boyle discuss this
more at length this afternoon.

The environmental impact analyses are part of the evaluation and the
selection process for any significant design changes.

The PSA is a quantitative analysis of the potential events during
operations and their consequences, or doses to the workers and/or the
public. They start with the descriptions of the site and the design.
They identify the potential events and their probabilities of
occurrence. They assess the adequacy of the facilities to perform as
intended, identify any limits on design or operations, and describe the
means to mitigate or prevent the accidents.

PSA iterates with design to achieve preclosure performance objectives.
It provides a mechanism to integrate the design concepts and evaluate
the performance of these concepts.

The major elements of the TSPA-LA are to incorporate the new scientific
data and information that we obtain as we go along, to qualify and
validate the supplemental science and performance analyses, the SSPA,
and the final environmental impact statement models.

It will also address the NRC Key Technical Issue Agreements. It\'s also
intended to improve the treatment of features, events, and processes,
and the scenario analyses. Performance of the TSPA licensing compliance
analysis will evaluate the dose-based performance objectives and
demonstrate multiple barriers that we have on the program.

On the TSPA, some of the milestones that we have are the TSPA Methods
and Approach Document is due this month. The process Model and
Abstraction Analysis Modeling Reports, the AMRs, are due in June of
\'03. The FEPs for the LA are due in October of \'03, with the TSPA
Model AMR due in December of \'03, and the TSPA-LA Analysis Report is
due in May of \'04.

The repository safety case, or as we refer to it as the licensing bases,
is a set of logic, analyses and calculations, including the quantitative
and qualitative supporting information, that show the repository would
meet the performance objectives.

The DOE safety case will be documented in the licensing bases for the
LA. In addition to the quantitative safety analysis, the preclosure
licensing basis will include a design margin and defense-in-depth
similar to the commercial reactor precedent and experience.

In addition to the quantitative performance assessment results, the
postclosure licensing bases will include multiple lines of evidence,
multiple natural and engineered barriers, natural and manmade analogues,
and continued testing and evaluation.

DOE is considering the merits of preparing a separate document to
communicate with decision makers and the public. This document will be
prepared, as I understand it, right now, it\'s being considered to be
prepared by the Science and Technology Group.

In summary, DOE has developed plans and schedules to submit a license
application to the NRC in December of 2004. The focus of the major
technical activity streams is engineering and design, performance
assessment, and continuing testing and performance confirmation.

Progress towards completion of the preliminary design will be tracked
through the interim design reviews, as I stated, with participation
hopefully of Board members and staff. PSA will be developed iteratively
with the design. TSPA emphasis will be on enhancing confidence and
adequately representing uncertainty.

Continued science, testing and performance confirmation will be managed
in an integrated manner. DOE\'s safety case or licensing basis will be
documented for the LA.

And the last chart just shows some of the schedule that we have laid
out, which I discussed earlier as far as the Safety Analysis Report
Chapter 1, with the interim dates that we have for completion. And then
Chapter 2 is the repository safety after permanent closure, with the
dates for specific deliverables, leading to the initial licensing
support network certification in June of 2004, and the license
application submittal in December of 2004.

We\'re going to be getting into much detail on these subjects, as I
said, this afternoon and later this morning. You discussed performance
confirmation earlier with Margaret. One of the suggestions that some of
our staff had earlier this week was that perhaps this would be a good
topic for a separate meeting with the Board members in the immediate
future. So, we\'re looking at that right now.

CORRADINI: Thank you, Don.

HORTON: Thank you.

CORRADINI: Questions? Dan, then Debra.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, I\'m glad you have this timetable up
here, because one of the questions with respect to design deals with the
selection of the operating mode between high temperature and low
temperature, and I just wondered when will that decision be made in this
time frame?

HORTON: The decision on the design right now I think has been made.
We\'re going in with the SR design. However, this allows a flexible
operation, and Dr. Boyle is going to discuss that later on today. But it
will allow us to operate at a flexible temperature.

BULLEN: I\'ll maybe defer to Bill\'s presentation this afternoon.

HORTON: Okay.

BULLEN: My only other follow-on question is to what extent, when you
talk about your repository safety case, is this case not dependent on
TSPA? What are the other arguments or discussions or analogues, or
whatever you bring into the case? Because a lot of it is deciding how to
set the dose limits and calculate it, and TSPA sort of drives that. But
to what extent is it not dependent on TSPA?

HORTON: I\'m going to have to defer that to Peter Swift or Dr. Boyle to
give us that latitude on that.

BULLEN: A preview of coming attractions for this afternoon. Thank you.

CORRADINI: Debra?

KNOPMAN: Just a clarification. You say twice in your slides DOE\'s
safety case will be documented as the licensing basis for the LA. Does
that mean that the safety case is the identical document to the NRC\'s
required safety analysis report, or are there two separate documents?

HORTON: The safety case and our licensing analysis will be a part of the
LA, and they are synonymous. The Board uses the safety case. We in DOE
are now using the licensing analysis. But they are synonymous.

KNOPMAN: Okay.

HORTON: Does that help?

KNOPMAN: I hope so.

CORRADINI: Other questions? Priscilla?

NELSON: Nelson, Board. I note on Slide 12, DOE is considering the merits
of preparing a separate document, and I personally would strongly
encourage that as a basic way to communicate the decision to the public.

I have a question just overall. You\'ve had a tremendous background in
quality assurance and in the industry in general, and in putting this
package together, which is the license application package, it is made
to look a lot like other projects in many respects, in terms of
deliverables, the kinds of parts that are there. I\'m just wondering is
there any particular aspect of this project that you find very
different, and perhaps difficult to package, as other projects you\'ve
been involved with?

HORTON: Well, the other projects that I\'ve been involved in have not
had as near the degree of science that this project has. Up until this
point, a majority of our work has been in the science and testing area
versus when I\'ve been on other projects, and all that\'s been done and
you start in the design and the construction area, and start immediately
more in the compliance versus thinking outside the box, so to speak.

NELSON: Well, that\'s looking backwards. Just looking forward to the
pall mall movement to LA, it\'s packaged to look like other projects.

HORTON: Yes.

NELSON: Is there anything that\'s very difficult to package?

HORTON: To date, I haven\'t seen anything that will prevent us from
packaging it in something similar to what I\'ve been accustomed to in
the past. I don\'t think that we\'ll have any problems doing that.

CORRADINI: No other questions. Thank you, Don.

HORTON: Thank you.

CORRADINI: We\'re going to take a break for 15 minutes, and Dr. Paul
Craig will begin the next session.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

CRAIG: I\'m Paul Craig, and I\'m a member of the Board. I\'m going to
chair the session this morning. We have a wide range of science and
engineering design issues, and that will extend through the lunch break,
into the middle of the afternoon. We\'re going to start out with a
science and engineering update by Mark Peters of Los Alamos, the Science
and Technology Manager for Bechtel SAIC. We\'ve heard (inaudible) and
missed him at the main meeting. He\'s got a lot of ground to cover, and
we\'re going to hear about lots of progress or lack of progress in many
areas in resolving the Chlorine 36 controversy.

Then comes Steve Brocoum, an OCRWM senior policy advisor, who\'s going
to talk about the DOE\'s proposed science and technology program, and
this will be a more detailed discussion of some of the things presented
earlier by Margaret Chu.

Finally, before lunch, we\'re going to hear about the Inyo, California
Regional Ground Water Monitoring program. Inyo County is one of the
affected counties, and the speakers will be Andrew Remus, Project
Coordinator, and mike King of the Hydrodynamics Group.

After lunch, we\'re going to hear from Bob Budnitz and Frank Spera about
the Igneous Consequences Peer Review Panel and about Bob\'s new job.
Then Bill Boyle is Acting Deputy Assistant Manager of the DOE Office of
Licensing and Regulatory Compliance, who will talk about postclosure
thermal conditions, how hot should it get, and DOE\'s insights about the
controversy of whether there should be a high temperature or a low
temperature design, HTON or LTON.

Then comes Gerry Gordon, Senior Staff Scientist with BSC/Framatome, who
will talk about corrosion testing. And the final talk of this session
will be Gordon Pedersen, Deputy Manager of BSC repository design
project.

That\'s a lot of terrain to cover, and we\'re going to hold you to a
tight schedule. I have my little timer here, so speakers, when you here
this noise, that will typically mean that you\'ve got five minutes.
Actually, this group is well trained, and Mark Peters in particular is
really good covering a lot of information in a very, very short time.

Mark is a Geophysical Science Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and
as I noted, the Science and Technology Manager. Mark, where are you?

PETERS: I\'m going to wander, if that\'s okay with you all. I have 70
slides to do in 35 minutes. I actually have 40 slides. A lot of the
information is in back of the slide. So, we can cover it in questions,
or you can get me at the break.

What I\'m going to focus on is what you all have become used to seeing
from me, and in particular, the science program. I\'m going to be
focusing on the testing program. I\'m going to try to cover status of
the entire program, with the exception of the waste package materials
and the EBS environment area, which Gerry Gordon will touch on this
afternoon.

The same objective that we\'ve had in previous presentations, to provide
the status on the data collection and testing program in support of both
the models in support of performance assessment as well as the design.
That part of the discussion you all had with Margaret is up here. This
is the status of the ongoing program. I think Margaret referred to it as
the core programs. This is the ongoing program that will support the
technical basis for the license application submittal in 2004.

I\'m going to walk through the system, much like I have in the past,
starting with the unsaturated zone, talk about the ESF studies, the
drift scale test, the long awaited slide on Chlorine 36 validation, then
talk about the cross drift studies.

I\'ll walk through the status of a lot of these tests, a lot of it you
saw in the field yesterday, a brief overview of what\'s going on with
the Busted Butte blocks that were taken out, and they\'re being studied
by the Canadian program, AECL, up in Ontario, and then a couple brief
slides on saturated zone updates. And the second half, saturated zone,
and the rest of it, we didn\'t focus on too much yesterday, so this
might be some new information for the new Board members.

And then what I\'ve got as engineered barrier, although they\'re tied
into natural barriers as well, thermal properties investigations, rock
properties, mechanical rock properties investigations, and then a couple
slides on the Atlas Test, natural conduction test, and the breached drip
shield experiments that we did over there. Finally, a couple slides on
waste form investigations going on at Argonne.

And then I also included a slide, as well as one of the backup, on some
of the details of the measurements that we made associated with the June
earthquake, and then wrap-up.

This is a diagram of the exploratory studies facility, going in at the
north portal and coming out the south portal, with a schematic of the
proposed repository block. This is consistent with the site
recommendation. Just to give you an idea, we\'re going to again focus
and I\'m going to talk primarily today about just results from the drift
scale test at Alcove 5 and also the Chlorine 36 validation work which is
looking at samples from Niche 1 down here near Alcove 6, as well as
samples from the Sundance Fault as exposed in the SF.

First, the drift scale test, layout of the drift scale test, a design
this entire audience has seen many times. The observation drift, the
connecting drift, this section here is the actual heated tunnel. It was
heated with nine large canisters with electrical heaters on the inside,
as well as wing heaters in the walls. This test is now in the cooling
phase. The cooling phase started in mid-January of this calendar year.
Still plan for a four year cooling phase.

And then the other colors are simply showing the boreholes that are used
to monitor temperature, mechanical movement of the rock, as well as
moisture redistribution, and also sampling water and gas for chemical
analysis.

This diagram gives you all an update on the temperature along one
representative thermal couple. This is a thermal couple into the drift
wall. About halfway down the heated drift in the ceiling, shows the time
history for temperature on the right, and power on the left. It shows
the cooling phase. You can see up around 200 C., the peak temperature,
that\'s where we maintained it. We got there after about two and a half
years of heating, maintained that to the four years, flipped the power
off, went down to zero power, and we\'re now in the natural cooling
phase, and you can see we\'re around the 120 degrees C. range along the
drift wall. And this just shows how we stepped down the power to
maintain that 200 C., and then went to zero power.

This is a plot of that same thermal couple. It\'s a little confusing on
the Y axis. This is approximately 200 C., so this is just showing the
difference from 200 C. as we enter the cooling phase. It\'s showing a
measurement in green here, so again, we\'re down around 120 C. of that
representative thermal couple.

It also shows the simulations that we would expect for that location for
that thermal couple along the drift wall in terms of our simulation
using TOUGH-2. You can see that there\'s a discrepancy between the
simulations and the measurements. That\'s actually we think telling us
something about how we\'re handling the predictions in terms of what\'s
going on right at the drift wall, and how we\'re handling the radiation
in the drift with TOUGH-2 simulations. Remember, this test was intended
to be a test of the rock, not of inside the drift. But we\'ve been
learning some things about what\'s going on, which is allowing us to
refine our models for drift wall temperatures.

Before I leave the drift scale test, we continue to collect data as well
on moisture, the rewetting process, and also sampling water and gas.
There\'s a little bit more information in the backup on that.

Chlorine 36. The Board is very familiar with this work. We had back in
the mid Nineties, we had discovered elevated levels of Chlorine 36
primarily along structural features in the northern part of the ESF that
were considered bomb-pulse signatures. We went back in to validate those
occurrences by drilling systematic holes across two features, the
Sundance Fault and Drillhole Wash Fault, and had an independent group,
USGS and Lawrence Livermore team, do independent analysis. And you\'re
familiar with the history. We were getting varying degrees of
discrepancy between the two organizations in terms of analysis of the
data.

When I talked to you in January, we thought we were converging. We
thought a lot of it had to do with how we were preparing the samples in
terms of crushing and leaching in the experiments. We were converging
and starting to get the right answer, so then we said okay, but we
haven\'t found bomb pulse yet. Both organizations have yet to discover
elevated levels that would be deemed bomb pulse. So, we went into the
one place where the previous investigators at Los Alamos had found bomb
pulse in core. Remember, the original dataset was taken from blocks
taken from the walls. So, we went back in, got some core from Niche 1,
said okay, here we go, we\'re going to get the same answer. We went the
other direction.

So, we\'re back to where we\'ve analyzed core. The two parties, Los
Alamos continues to reproduce their data internally, I would say. They
found elevated levels of Chlorine 36. Bomb pulse is defined roughly
anything above 1200 times 10 to the minus 15 is considered bomb pulse.
So, you can see Los Alamos found elevated levels of Chlorine 36 to
Chloride ratio, whereas, the U.S. Geological Survey continues to find
levels that are considered more like background.

Both the blanks internal to the organizations checked out okay in these
measurements. So, we\'re in the process of trying to figure out what\'s
exactly going on with this dataset, and then plot out a path forward.

One of the things that we\'re doing as we speak at the U.S. Geological
Survey is they\'re conducting a series of crushing blanks. We did a lot
of work looking at the leaching process, whether you shake it or whether
you just let it passively leach, and we feel like that\'s been
established as not a problem. Now we\'re going to look in more detail at
the crushing.

We\'re also going to write up a report. We\'ve done a lot of work here,
and we continue to delay the report waiting to resolve the issue.
Clearly, the issue is not resolved, so we\'re planning to write the
report, and in that report, we will lay out further experiments. We\'re
considering also bringing in some independent folks to look at our
report and our path forward to see if we\'re thinking about all the
stuff that we should be, some experts in this field.

But I think the bottom line here is we continue to work the issue, but
my last bullet kind of gets the bottom line. DOE at this point does not
intend to change the conceptual model for UZ flow and transport based on
the fact that we have a discrepancy. The current conceptual model
respects the presence of bomb pulse, or so-called fast paths in the UZ.
And that conceptual model will be held as we go forward. But DOE does
feel that it\'s still important to resolve these discrepancies from a
perspective, I would call it in my words, of scientific credibility.

Moving into the cross drift, I don\'t have time to belabor this, but
I\'m going to go through results first of some of the hydrology testing,
or at least some status of the hydrology testing that\'s going on in the
cross drift, in the Board\'s drift, as was mentioned earlier.

We have learned a lot in the cross drift. I would absolutely agree with
the former Chairman. And I\'m going to talk today about Alcove 8
experiment where we\'re doing a drift to drift experiment, and also
about the results of the Lawrence Berkeley work looking at seepage in
the lower lithophysal unit of the Topopah Spring. That\'s taking place
in this area of the tunnel. And also a brief overview of what we\'re
seeing in the bulkhead experiment. Remember that we\'ve got a series of
four bulkheads. This one is current open. But when this experiment is
full up and running, we have this entire back half of the cross drift
isolated from ventilation. So, we\'re looking for natural rewetting,
evidence of seepage, and as the Board has heard in the past, we\'re
seeing some evidence of moisture build-up in there, and I\'ll talk a
little bit more about that.

What\'s also shown on this diagram is the geologic contacts with the
different sub-units of the Topopah Spring, for those geology purists in
the audience who like to know where the different pieces of the Topopah
are exposed in the tunnel.

For those on the tour yesterday, Steve Deats of the USPR talked at
length about the results of the work that they\'re doing looking at
lithophysae distribution or the cavities in the Topopah Spring and how
that relates to stratigraphic\--put in the context of variation within
the lower lithophysal in particular, and how that relates to fracture
distribution.

So, they\'ve done a series of traverses using different geologic
methods, and they\'re looking at a lot of different features, the
abundance of cavities, the size of the cavities, rims and spots, meaning
if you\'ve been down there and looked at this rock, some of the cavities
are actually open holes, others you can see almost white spots. They
look like filled cavities. They\'re accounting for that. Those actually
tend to be higher porosity areas. And then also evidence of lithic
clasts. Those are clasts that were ripped up from the country rock
during eruption, or within a volcano during eruption. And, finally, the
matrix or groundmass.

This work is very important, and it\'s well integrated with the work
that\'s going on in mechanical and thermal properties. The lithophysal
porosity is a very important parameter in terms of understanding the
mechanical and thermal response of the rock. So, we\'re doing this work
co-located in a lot of cases with the actual thermal and mechanical
tests, and just in general trying to get a broad understanding of the
variation of lithophysal porosity along the length of the lower
lithophysal.

I won\'t dwell on this. I mentioned that there were different ways,
different methods being used to get at some of these features, and then
there\'s also lithostratigraphic features, and then they\'ve also then
turned that into a calculated porosity for the lower lithophysal as a
function of stratigraphic depth.

A couple observations. There\'s quite a bit in your backup. There\'s
some detailed maps and a little bit more detail, along with a plot that
shows the variation of lithophysal porosity along the cross drift that
might be more meaningful. But, in general, and you saw this yesterday if
you were on the tour, the greatest amount of the large lithophysae occur
towards the upper part of the lower lithophysal itself. And, again,
they\'re looking at vertical variations within the cross drift and
comparing that with observations from boreholes, as well as outcrops to
see how that may vary laterally, let\'s say, north and south along the
block.

Moving into hydrology, Alcove 8/Niche 3, again that is where the cross
drift crossovers over top of the exploratory studies facility. So,
we\'re using the geometry there to do a drift to drift test. The scale
there, it\'s about 20 meters apart. It\'s important for looking at flow
and seepage processes in the welded tuff.

This is a diagram that schematically shows the experiment. Alcove 8,
again, the distance here from Alcove 8 down to ESF Niche 3 is on the
order of 20 meters, or less than 20 meters. We were doing a test, an
infiltration test, along a fault that\'s exposed at the back part of
Alcove 8, and it\'s also exposed in the front part of Niche 3. That
experiment has been completed. That\'s what I\'m going to focus on with
a short set of bullets today.

We started just recently within the last couple of weeks a larger
experiment, and that\'s a large plot experiment where it\'s not
associated with a fault. We\'ve got a 12 by 12 meter plot, and we\'re
doing large scale infiltration, again ponding water and looking for flow
processes through the welded tuff, and also seepage at a relatively
large scale into the ESF Niche 3 below.

Dave Hudson, U.S. Geological Survey, is one of the PIs for this work,
along with Berkeley scientists, and he just informed me this morning,
actually, yesterday we hadn\'t seen anything, they found wet areas in
Niche 3 this morning. So, there\'s actually dripping starting and it\'s
been, what, about two and a half or three weeks since we started
infiltration. And it\'s occurring, if you were out there with us
yesterday, it\'s occurring in the plots closest to the entrance, the
same place where we were using water during construction. There seems to
be some kind of pathway there towards the front of Alcove 8. That\'s hot
off the press.

I\'m going to focus today on the fault test observations. Again,
there\'s a small fault exposed at the back of Alcove 8. These are some
of the basic observations that we made for that test. Remember, again
we\'re looking at a steady head experiment, so we put a head on, a
constant head there, and then let the feature take as much water as it
can. Over time, we saw a steady decrease in infiltration rates. This
tells you a little bit of the statistics about how fast the wetting
front travelled, a little over a half a meter per day.

Of all the water that we put along the fault, nearly 10 per cent of the
water was actually captured in Niche 3 below. That 10 per cent number is
also the number that we saw in Alcove 1. Remember the Alcove 1
experiment. We did a similar experiment from the surface. But that was
in the Tiva Canyon, a different welded tuff, but similar properties.

We\'re seeing spatial variations in where we\'re seeing seepage in Niche
3. I\'ve shown some of those pictures in past meetings. There\'s also
fluctuations with time. We\'ve introduced tracers for benzo gases,
lithium and bromide, and looking at the break-through of those tracers
in Niche 3 has allowed us to show evidence of matrix diffusion along the
flow path and helped us a lot with building confidence in our models for
the matrix diffusion in the unsaturated zone.

Seepage. Remember, we\'ve got Niches 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the ESF that
we\'re studying seepage processes I would say more at the meter scale,
the drift scale. So, we\'re at a smaller scale than we were at in Alcove
8. Those ESF niches were in the middle non-lithophysal unit, which makes
up the upper 10 per cent, or so, of the current layout. Niche 5 is about
halfway down the cross drift. It\'s in the lower lithophysal unit, which
makes up 70, 75 per cent of the current layout.

The tour then stopped here yesterday. We were standing right here
looking down the tunnel. This again is an experiment conducted by
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where they\'re looking at releasing liquid
into boreholes and looking at seepage processes, and also the threshold
for at what flux you would expect seepage to occur in the lower
lithophysal.

There was some initial testing done last calendar year, and we saw no
seepage in the roof. There was about 300 liters released and we, again,
saw no wetting. We have since gone back in and there\'s always been a
question about the mass balance in these experiments. You infiltrate
water in a borehole above. You see a certain percentage seep. Where does
the rest of the water go? So, what we have done is we have gone in and
excavated a slow along the left-hand side with the hope being that we
would then have a better mass balance on seeing where a lot of the water
is going as it\'s diverting around the opening.

We have now done two tests here recently. I say we, Rob Trauts
(phonetic) is the principal investigator for this work at Berkeley, and
he\'s observed the wetting front and seen seepage. So we\'re seeing
seepage in the lower lith now. We\'ve also got better mass balance
because we\'ve got the slot there to take advantage of. So, that
information is now being used to calibrate the seepage model as they
prepare the models for the license application.

Also, Lawrence Berkeley is also conducting a set of experiments along
boreholes in the roof of the cross drift to look at seepage as a
function of, I would say along the distance of the lower lith as exposed
in the cross drift, that\'s to get at heterogeneity, how fracture
characteristics, permeability and seepage might vary. And, again,
they\'re doing that in long boreholes, 20 meter long boreholes. They\'re
drilled every 30 meters.

They\'ve done three sets of these experiments, and they\'re intending
here pretty soon, probably this week or next, to go in and set up for
the fourth set. And they do a series of air permeability tests, and then
go in and do liquid release tests as a function of distance in the
borehole. They have a set of packers that isolate different elements.

In terms of understanding gained from this testing to date, again,
they\'ve completed tests in three areas. They\'re about to go in and
start the fourth set of tests. The small fractures, a lot of which you
saw yesterday, in the lower lithophysal, that\'s the character of the
fractures in the lower lithophysal, are well connected. They\'re getting
air permeability values on the order of above a darcy, on the order of
10 darcy.

The data do indicate that the lithophysal cavities appear to be sealed
at the bottom to prevent water outflow, and there is evidence from the
experiments that the lithophysae are actually not communicating. The
water is not flowing through them. It\'s flowing around them, probably
is the clearest way of putting it.

But, the bottom line with these experiments to date is they\'ve
struggled, or they\'ve had to really work hard to account for
evaporation, because we\'re in a ventilated tunnel, whereas the niche
experiments have been behind a bulkhead with no ventilation. Here, they
have to worry a lot about evaporation. They have accounted for that, and
they\'ve still established the presence of seepage threshold in the
lower lithophysal. So, this data is also very important for calibration
and validation of the seepage model.

The bulkhead investigations, remember a series of four bulkheads that
block off the back half of the cross drift. This is where we\'ve seen
evidence of moisture build-up in the tunnel. We went in recently between
the first and second bulkhead and we still see evidence of moisture,
although it\'s less than we saw in the last entry, which was back in
earlier 2002.

Remember the tunnel boring machine is powered off. We were having a lot
of problems with heat sources in the tunnel. As we turned off that big
heat source, we\'re starting to isolate smaller heat sources. So,
there\'s still some small temperature gradients in there that are
driving redistribution of the moisture. There is analysis and modelling
ongoing to get the seepage aspects as well as the in-drift process to
better understand the results. So that experiment continues.

Busted Butte. I won\'t belabor this. This is a test that you did not see
yesterday on the tour. This was an experiment looking at the Calico
Hills, similar to what\'s exposed beneath the repository. I\'m going to
talk briefly about some results from Canadian experiments. They took two
blocks, two 2 cubic meter blocks, from the back half there at Busted
Butte.

They were doing two experiments. Again, they\'ve got two blocks.
They\'re doing unsaturated flow and transport experiment, and the
saturated, flow and transport experiment using real radionuclides. These
are some of the observations that they\'ve made in terms of Technetium
and Neptunium. These observations, in terms of what\'s going on in an
unsaturated oxidizing environment versus saturated and reducing
environment in the block, are consistent with expected behavior. So,
they\'re adding confidence to our results from Busted Butted, adding
confidence to our knowledge.

Work that we\'re doing in cooperation with Nye County, again, we
continue to collect information in support of our SZ models, our
saturated zone models, in working with Nye County. This map shows an
update of where Nye County is at in terms of their first three phases of
drilling down gradient of Yucca Mountain.

Two things I\'m going to focus on today, work that Rick Spangler at the
U.S. Geological Survey has been doing using results from the Nye County
program. He\'s been constructing cross sections, and you\'ve heard about
this before, to help revise the hydrogeologic framework model in support
of the SZ model, the site scale SZ model. And he\'s taken the new
information from the Phase 3 drilling and is in the process of revising
cross sections, and those will all be incorporated into the basis for
the license submittal in 2004.

The alluvian testing complex. This just shows the location of the
alluvian testing complex down gradient of Yucca Mountain along one of
the potential flow paths coming out of Yucca Mountain. This is a
potential flow path as shown by the SZ model.

Because of the water permit issues at the site, the multi-well flow and
transport experiment has been delayed. We had been doing some pumping of
the primary well, 19D, prior to stopping work out there, and we\'re
doing some observations from one of the observation wells, and we\'ve
been able to make some very interesting observations about the
transmissivity. When you go to the multi-well observations as opposed to
the single well observation, you get higher transmissivities. Also, M.G.
Marry (phonetic) and others at the U.S. Geological Survey are also
calculating effective porosity, and those again indicate higher values.
Those higher values lead to slower velocities, slower travel times. So,
there\'s a scale effect, but this is all being incorporated into the
basis for the SZ model.

Moving on to thermal properties investigations, the engineered barrier
clearly impacts coupled process and engineered barrier. We\'ve got a
program in both the thermal and mechanical area that\'s looking at both
laboratory experiments, as well as field scale experiments, and that\'s
integrated with the geologic observations and incorporated into the
models. So, this is an overview.

There\'s some more information in your backup about what\'s going on in
the laboratory program for thermal properties, thermal conductivity, and
other parameters, lab tests at three different performing organizations
using different techniques.

And, finally, we\'ve got a field test program for thermal conductivity.
We\'ve got one test completed, two in progress, and two more planned for
next year.

And just to remind you, the field thermal conductivity experiments are
concentrated right now in this area of the cross drift. There\'s more
slides in your backup of layouts of the tests, et cetera, but this is
the results of the three field tests, and also the results of some model
calculations that we\'ve done. These field tests are being used to
validate the model analyses.

The 6-hole test results were not available at the time that this report
was starting to be prepared, and you can see that Tests 1 and 3 do do a
very good job in terms of validating the results from the model report.

We have relatively high thermal conductivities from the 6-hole test, and
we\'re still working out why that is.

NELSON: Which unit\--

PETERS: Those are all lower lithophysal.

Lab properties investigations, you heard a fairly detailed presentation
from Mark Bordenier (phonetic) on this program. Again, we\'re providing
data in support of ground support design, rockfall models, and the
thermal models. We\'re doing large diameter coring for laboratory
testing, in situ field tests, flat jack or plate loading tests. We\'ll
get rock strength and stiffness at the field scale, and also again doing
the lab measurements.

Just a photograph of some of the lab experiments that are going on at
Sandia National Laboratory. In large cresses, they\'re doing uniaxial
compression tests with some of these large cores that we\'re sampling.

We\'re also doing, again, field tests, slot tests, where we\'re cutting
slots in the rock, pressurizing a sliver of rock, I\'ll call it, and
then in this case, actually taking the rock to failure to get ultimate
strength. We currently have three of these either in place or planned.
The first test here in the lower lithophysal is exposed here at the
south ramp. An upper lithophysal test here. This Number 2 is at the
upper lith. This is lower lith. And we\'re also about to start
construction of a third test in the lower lith in the cross drift.
Again, a similar configuration, adding heat to Slot Test 2 and 3.

These are preliminary results from the first slot test. Again, this is
in the lower lithophysal as exposed in the south ramp ESF. No surprise,
the stiffness or Young\'s modulus of the lower lithophysal samples is
much less than what we get in the middle non-lithophysal. That\'s an
impact of the lithophysal porosity. So, these are important
observations. They\'re not unexpected, but they\'re still an important
basis for our models, for the mechanical response of the rock, both
thermally and ambient.

Moving to the Atlas facility, now moving out of the ESF and the cross
drift, we\'re doing a set of mock-up experiments at the Atlas facility.
As you\'ve heard in the past, we\'ve done ventilation tests. We had done
mock-ups of drip shield tests and other types of tests in the past. This
natural convection test was just recently completed. We ran that test at
two different scales. We had a series of heated mock waste packages
inside the drift and we were looking for natural convection within the
drift itself, both with and without drip shields.

This is just a cartoon type figure that shows the kind of processes that
we were looking at within that test, looking at, again, the effects of
natural convection, both along and between hot and cool waste packages.

A very busy slide that tries to point out the results of some of the
experiments. This is actual measurements here from the 25 per cent scale
test, one of the simulations. This is a drift wall, the other drift
wall, the waste package is here in the center. This shows the velocity
distribution for that particular test. This particular simulation shows
half of the drift and how well we\'ve matched the velocity distribution
using the FLUENT code.

So, the promising results are that the peak velocities that we get above
the waste package are matched pretty well between the simulations and
the actual observations. But these velocity distributions are telling us
what sort of convection times are being set up within the drift.

Another set of experiments that were recently completed at the Atlas
facility were put in place to look at what would happen if you did get a
drip on a drip shield, how would that interact with potential breaches
of the drip shield. So, they set up a set of experiments where they had
two chambers within controlled environments. They controlled the
temperature and relative humidity as best they could, and they did a
series of tests where they dripped water, including splashes, rivulet
flow, a very detailed test matrix, and looked at two different kinds of
surfaces, a rough drip shield surface and a smooth drip shield surface,
and did a series of experiments to build confidence in our model for how
seepage flux interacts with the drip shield in a drip.

There\'s a detailed table in the backup that shows the results of one of
those experiments. But we\'re in the very early stages of analyzing
these results. I just wanted to make sure you\'re all aware that that
test is out there, and we can talk more about it probably in future
meetings.

The last two slides. I\'ll move to waste form investigations. These two
slides are focused on work that\'s going on at Argonne. The other part
of our program is going on at PNNL is Washington State. These are two
results from long-term tests. One of the points I want to point out,
these are very long-term tests. We\'re looking at eight and a half years
long tests here. These are drip tests on spent fuel and we\'re looking
at the cumulative release rate of a series of radionuclides for two
different specimens.

The take-home point here is long-term tests, and they continue to go on,
and we\'re seeing that the releases are converging toward two rates. One
rate is what Jim Canaine (phonetic) refers to as the sparingly soluble
elements, the actinides, and the highly solubles are converging at a
different rate.

Also, continued work in looking at solubility and solubility controls,
in particular Neptunium. This is a plot again from work going on at
Argonne, looking at solubility as a function of pH of Neptunium, with
model calculations for what the solubility curve should look like for
two different kinds of solubility controlling phases, one Neptunium
oxide, the other a Neptunium oxyhydroxide.

And the take-home point is here that it looks like Neptunium oxide is
the conservative bounding controlling phase, but it appears that in
reality, it\'s actually a schoepite type phase that may likely be
controlling solubility of Neptunium in spent fuel. So, that\'s ongoing
work as well.

Briefly about the June earthquake. We did have a magnitude 4.4
earthquake. It occurred within the aftershock zone of the June 1992
Little Skull Mountain quake. It was typical of earthquakes that we
expect in the vicinity.

A little bit about some of the observations that were made by UNR from
the strong-motion network. The accelerations were less than a tenth of a
G at 3 kilometers, and much smaller, of course, as you moved further
from the epicenter. We do have underground instrumentation in Alcove 5,
and actually UNR is in the process of installing some additional
instrumentation, but the reduction in peak ground acceleration was about
a factor of 2 to 3 for the earthquake from what we saw at the surface
network. But, again, this is typical of earthquakes, and it occurred
within the aftershock zone of the Little Skull Mountain quake.

So, to wrap up, a very quick meander through the testing program that\'s
going on in support of the basis for the license application submittal,
both in the underground as well as in the laboratories, and we feel that
it continues to address the uncertainties and provide additional
confidence in our models and designs for the license.

CRAIG: Mark, thank you very much. That\'s not only a lot of material,
but you finished on time, to within seconds. Questions from the Board,
please? Richard and Michael.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. Mark, thank you again for the field trip
yesterday, and also for the briefing.

What a breakthrough that you reported that occurred within two and a
half weeks or three weeks. That\'s brand new. We didn\'t hear about that
yesterday in the field. Is that better predicted by modelling? I know
the experimentalist said he thought it would be about 45 days before a
breakthrough would occur. So, I don\'t know if he\'s here in the
audience, maybe he\'s wants\--see whether he\'s happy or I\'m happy. But
how does the model forecast compare?

PETERS: I might ask Bo to give us an idea of what the model might
predict because I\'m not sure what that was. But let me say if you
remember, yesterday there was discussion of the fact that we were
mining, and I said this during my talk, but I\'ll say it again, as we
were mining, we were using water for dust control and we saw some
wetting in Niche 3 as we were mining, and my understanding from talking
to Dave is it occurred at about the same place where we saw the wetting
during the mining.

Bo, do you have any idea what the model would have predicted in terms of
breakthrough?

BODVARSSON: The models for Alcove 8, Niche 3 predict breakthroughs on
the order of weeks, and the reason that we cannot accurately tell you
what the predictions are is the following. The tests, we just predict
what the flow rates are going to be in the tests, and of course the
permeabilities that we use in the models are not that accurate to tell
you exactly what the flow rates are going to be. So, just like in Alcove
1 where you had the first breakthroughs on the order of tens of days,
the same predictions were made for Alcove 8, Niche 3. And that seems to
be coming true.

PARIZEK: Another question about earthquake effects. Was there any ground
low level responses of any consequence?

PETERS: No, there weren\'t any observations of anything. And as an
aside, we also lock the tunnel down, and Sandia goes in and does
convergence measurements to look for any, and we saw no evidence of any.

PARIZEK: Another question about the saturated block experiment for the
Calico Hills, that showed reducing conditions, versus the unsaturated
was oxidizing. Why the difference? There\'s report saying whether in
situ values for oxidation and reduction also occur in the Calico Hills.

PETERS: Agreed. The reason for why it\'s happening in the block I think
is still a point of discussion, whether it\'s microbial activity within
the block itself, or they\'re even entertaining the probability\--they
were injecting fluorescein dye into the block as well, and whether that
could be causing some problems with the redox in the block itself. But,
as you pointed out, it\'s only in the saturated block that we\'re seeing
those reducing conditions.

If we could demonstrate that that kind of thing translates to our
saturated zone, that would be wonderful. Right now, we do not have the
basis to take credit for reducing environment in RSZ.

PARIZEK: But that\'s something that\'s being watched for?

PETERS: Right.

PARIZEK: There were observations made in the cross drift of degradation
along the margins of the tunnel, and those degradations were in part
maybe the tunnel boring machine marks, but it seemed like there may have
been some propagation of fractures into the wall beyond that. And if, in
fact, that\'s true, does that affect the water flow or seepage around
the emplacement drift, or might it if you start opening up, say,
fracture permeability to the right or left of an emplacement drift? I
don\'t know if that\'s in Bo\'s model or anybody\'s model.

PETERS: There would be near field effects. Let me maybe take it in an
indirect way first. When Berkeley does the niche testing, they do air
permeability measurements before and after. Remember, they drill the
holes prior to excavating the niche.

PARIZEK: Usually up in the ceiling?

PETERS: Right. And they also do them to the side and right where
they\'re going to be mined out. They do before and after air
permeability measurements, and they see evidence of enhanced
permeability in the crown, and little change along the wings, at least
based on their measurements, typically an order of magnitude increase in
the crown.

PARIZEK: Do we have those same sort of observations in the cross drift
where these marginal side fractures seem to concentrate?

PETERS: Yes, and I\'ve actually, since yesterday, I talked some to the
folks who do some of the seepage modelling, because this came up in the
cross drift yesterday, and they\'re looking at those kind of local scale
effects when they calibrate the model.

PARIZEK: I have one more question. It\'s a maddening thing in the
laboratory when the power goes off and the experiments are compromised,
and so on. It would also be maddening if the water supply runs out in
testing at the Yucca Mountain site. Do you have some sort of order of
priority of the kind of experiments you would carry on and those you
might have to scrap if your million gallon tank goes dry?

PETERS: I\'m probably not going to touch that question. This is a point
of litigation. This is in the courts right now, the issue of water.

PARIZEK: Well, it\'s just a question of priorities of which tests you
might have to walk away from.

PETERS: Right now, we have no intent to do that. You drove by the
storage tank that we have out there. That\'s, as of right now, we feel
we can maintain the current program, at least in the short-term, with
that water. So, we\'ve not gotten down to any kind of prioritized list
of what we would shut down first, say. But there is testing that is
impacted right now by not having the permit, as I pointed out.

CRAIG: Okay. We have to move on. Michael, and then I have on deck
Priscilla, Ron and Bullen, Board.

CORRADINI: Pass. Dick already got it.

CRAIG: Okay. Then Priscilla?

NELSON: Nelson, Board.

I feel it\'s very important that I say at this point that I was very
impressed by the kinds of fundamental work that are going on right now
out on the project to understand the behavior of the lower lith in
particular. And it\'s striking, the differences in the lower lith
response and behavior from the upper lith and the middle non.

This approach that Mark Borg (phonetic) and others are taking really has
the prospects of a fundamental understanding of why things are the way
they are, and how they\'re going to change, both with respect to stress,
water and thermal pulse. And, so, I\'m very happy that the project has
done this, and I encourage it to continue.

The tie-in from the analytical, which is the approach so many analytical
experiments being carried on, needs the physical experiments to verify,
and that\'s incredibly important and it should be a high priority. So,
there\'s my two cents.

My question specifically right here, given the difference in behavior
between the upper lith, middle non, and lower lith, the decision about
where to locate the crossover alcove, such that the length of rock
involved in the experiment, including both the upper lith and the middle
non, means that you\'re getting both effects, whatever they are, from
both units, and with really very little hope of being able to separate
what might be two different behaviors, one with very strong small liths,
and one without.

Is there any prospect of being able to separate the two behaviors? Is
the project planning on doing that in any way?

PETERS: That\'s a tough one to answer. You understand the history of why
the ESF was primarily in the middle non, as you know, because at the
time, we were looking at more the repository in the middle non lith. The
reason that we\'re in the upper lith and the middle non in this
particular experiment, we planned to cross over the ESF where we did
with this experiment in mind. That was one of the drivers.

Would it be better if we had a test in one unit or the other? Yes,
probably. Can we distinguish the differences, or the pagers? I think we
can get a handle on it because we\'ve got, if you go back to the
picture, go back to probably 8, 9, 10, in there somewhere, there\'s
up-looking and down-looking boreholes drilled up from Niche 3 and
drilled down from Alcove 8. Those are there for active logging, neutron
logging. And if I remember correctly, the contact, the actual upper lith
and middle non lith contact, I think is about 20 meters difference. I
can\'t remember whether it\'s two-thirds down or a third down. But it\'s
within about roughly halfway down, you cross the contact. So, those
boreholes down-looking might give us some ideas about how the two
different units are behaving.

Now, one thing I would say is the water is getting through, so it\'s not
getting diverted at the contact, despite the difference in fracturing
and lithophysal environments. The water is clearly getting through the
fracture network and across that contact. That\'s difficult. I\'m not
answering it totally because that\'s going to be a difficult thing to
still back out cleanly.

NELSON: It is, and when you\'re offering this test as being one of the
ways to calibrate models, and that part of it\'s murky, I mean, I\'m
almost wondering about excavation from the ESF level up and changing
that. It seems important enough that I wondered about the drive to try
to separate. There are a couple ways of doing it, and I encourage you to
do it.

PETERS: That\'s fair. The one other thing I would say is remember Alcove
1 we did as well. Now, that\'s not the repository horizon, but it\'s
still welded tuff, and that was all in a similar unit. And, actually,
the observations in terms of breakthrough and some of the other
observations were pretty consistent.

LATANISION: Latanision. I\'m interested in the moisture in the bulkhead
regions, and particularly the characterization of the moisture, or if
you\'re characterizing the moisture that is being accumulated or
collected. Is there any effort to do that?

PETERS: Yeah, we\'ve got collection systems. Let me back up. When we
first conceived the experiment, we didn\'t expect this amount of
moisture to be involved in there, so early on, we didn\'t have all the
collection systems in place. We put collection systems in place. It\'s
difficult to collect a clean sample back there. What we think are clean
samples look a lot like condensate. They\'re condensate, which has led
us down the path, one of the lines of evidence that led us down the path
that we think this is condensation from moisture within the drift.

LATANISION: Actually, what I was thinking about is whether or not you
might distinguish by monitoring the chemistry of the water between
condensate and water which has been transported and perhaps collected by
leaching species as it\'s been transported.

PETERS: You said it clearly. That\'s our goal. We haven\'t gotten those
two samples yet, but we have systems in place to attempt to capture that
so that we can distinguish seepage versus condensation, is the way I\'ll
put it.

LATANISION: Thank you.

CRAIG: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: I actually wanted to pass.

CRAIG: Pass. Okay, Thure?

CERLING: Yeah, I was just wondering about the redistribution of water
during the heating experiments, and wondering if that overcame the
seepage threshold and how your mass balance was on the redistribution of
water during the heating experiments.

PETERS: You mean the drift scale test?

CERLING: Yes.

PETERS: Let\'s take the first piece. We\'re not seeing any water
dripping back into the heated drift during the cooling. We just don\'t
see any evidence of that. The way I know that is you can look in the
window, but also we have a camera system that we can take in that we
think would be stains on the cans, or whatever. So, we see no evidence
of that.

The second question had to do with mass balance?

CERLING: Just what the mass balance of water is in the redistribution of
water as the system dries out around the heating area, water must be
being driven out, and I was wondering if it was actually accumulating in
the lithophysal cavities, if you pass the saturation threshold.

PETERS: It\'s hard to resolve. Our techniques are low volume average
techniques, and so it\'s hard to resolve that. But let me talk maybe a
little more gross scale, and then maybe we can get a more detailed
question. It does dry out, no surprise, around the heat source. We
don\'t pick up perched or high saturation areas above. It tends to
drain. So, the wetting is to the sides and below. So, we don\'t see any
evidence of saturated areas building up. We see evidence of water
redistribution. It\'s rewetting, on the rewetting into the matrix, as
you probably well know, will take years.

So, I think if I\'m answering your question indirectly, we don\'t see
areas of saturation build-up where you\'d see cavities full of water at
a gross scale.

CRAIG: Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, ex-Board member.

Mark, you mentioned the potential payoff in terms of credit for the
reduced solubility of Technetium and Neptunium and perhaps other things
if you could demonstrate that the saturated zone is in a reducing
condition. The potential credit is enormous, particularly with respect
to Neptunium, my favorite element. What plans, what short-term plans,
what long-term plans do you have to test that redox environment in the
saturated zone? And then I have a short one about the UZ.

PETERS: Okay. Briefly, the history, we\'ve done work on looking at Eh-pH
conditions in the upper part of the saturated zone in the past. We also
did work in association with the Nye County boreholes. But we have yet
to be able to provide a sound technical basis to allow us to take credit
for more reducing conditions. So, there are measurements. Are we looking
at a program to try to still go after that? Yes is the answer. There\'s
in the plan, and I need to caveat that heavily, it\'s in the plan and
it\'s pending all the budget and funding that you heard discussed
earlier, there would be some additional work, do some additional
work-overs of existing wells to try to still continue to chase that.
Because we certainly agree that it would be an important thing if we can
establish that we\'ve got a strong basis for it.

RUNNELLS: The redox measurements that you have now from the Nye County
wells, as I recall, are sort of in the gray zone.

PETERS: That\'s right.

RUNNELLS: They may or may not be reducing.

PETERS: And that\'s a clear way of saying that we\'re still not
confident that we can take real credit, really bring in a strong basis
for the more reducing character.

RUNNELLS: But you do have some plans to even try work-overs of those
measurements?

PETERS: Correct. And also other wells that we can go in and clean out
and do additional measurements, because we haven\'t done all of our WT
wells, our water table wells, that were drilled early in the project,
some of those we might go back in to do additional\--we have plans to go
back in and do additional measurements.

RUNNELLS: Thank you. A very quick question on the UZ. Another process,
potential process that has not been investigated in terms of the
unsaturated zone is the precipitation of secondary minerals. I mean, I
know it\'s been touched on and talked about, but is there any ongoing
work in terms of secondary minerals being precipitated along fractures
that would further retard or precipitate sorb of some of the
radionuclides?

PETERS: Primarily during movement of material during the heat phase,
redistribution during the heat phase?

RUNNELLS: I\'m thinking long-term. Once a waste canister is breached,
the material starts to move down through the underlying UZ, the
potential is there for precipitation of those materials in secondary
minerals. Is there any plan to investigate that, either short-term or
long-term?

PETERS: Well, there may be some people in the audience better to address
this, but I\'ll take a cut at it, and I\'m sure somebody will correct
me. Under an ambient setting, I wouldn\'t expect the secondary
mineralization to be a whole lot different than what we\'re seeing now,
which is primarily calcite and opal. That would be my take on it.

RUNNELLS: You\'re going to have a whole bunch of new materials
introduced from the canisters and from the iron supports, and so on and
so forth.

PETERS: But in terms of taking credit for that in performance base, I
don\'t believe we\'re taking any kind of credit for that in the
performance base. I\'m not aware of any work to really try to bring that
into the basis. That\'s a very good point, but I\'m not aware of the
work that we would need to bring that into the basis.

RUNNELLS: Thank you.

CRAIG: Mark, and then Dave.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz with the Board.

Mark, this is going to be more of a 30,000 foot question in terms of the
entire experimental program. Obviously, the experiments have been going
on for quite a period of time, and during that time, the repository
design has been changing, and the impact of those design decisions will
result, as I understand it, in the construction of the repository across
more layers and a greater proportion of the repository will be sitting
in layers other than what was maybe initially anticipated.

Given Margaret Chu\'s comment earlier about the importance of trying to
increase confidence and reduce uncertainty as we move forward, what
plans do you have to take the experiments that were conducted, or are
being conducted in their current locations, and be able to transfer them
with confidence to the repository design as it changes?

PETERS: So, maybe to rephrase it, how representative is the program that
we put in place at this point to the rest of the block?

ABKOWITZ: Yes, and what do you have in mind to try to address those
issues that are most uncertain as you look at the question of
transferability.

PETERS: I\'ll give a cut at a 30,000 foot answer, and then we can go
from there. We\'ve got the ESF in place that does a pretty good job of
running more south in terms of variability in the middle
non-lithophysal. We\'ve got a cross drift that goes across a reasonable
section of the entire Topopah. We\'ve got boreholes and outcrops that
give us some confidence, I\'d say relatively high confidence, that we
understand the lateral variability.

When we excavate the repository, there will be mapping, observations
made and compared back to the existing dataset. Then that will likely be
part of, and I\'ll call that performance confirmation, PC, commitment in
the license. I\'m predicting an outcome, because we\'re in the process
of developing what will actually be in the PC program as a commitment in
the license. But, in all likelihood, mapping will be there. So, that\'s
one way of getting at it.

There will be other pieces of the performance confirmation program. Some
of this stuff may actually get mapped into that. Then there\'s also a
long-term program outside of PC that will be in place. Some of these
will continue there. We may actually envision doing additional seepage
measurements in other pieces of the repository as we excavate. But I\'m,
and now this is me talking, this is still work in progress to define
that program. But I think we\'ve got a strategy that would allow us to
look at those kind of issues.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

Yesterday during the tour, I think we were told that anecdotally some
fungus and other things were seen inside the bulkhead test. That
suggests the presence of nutrients for those species, and I wonder
what\'s being done about bacterial growth in that area, or at least
analysis of what bacteria are present.

PETERS: We took samples when we first observed it early on in the
experiment, we immediately took samples, and those were analyzed, and
those have been evaluated relative to the overall microbial programs.
Joann Horn of Livermore was involved when we first saw it in helping
identify it, and how that might tie into MIC. The ongoing sampling is
more focused on safety, but in general, it\'s the same sorts of species.
It\'s penicillin is what we\'re seeing. But those observations have been
folded into the program. What are they feeding off of? They tend to grow
on things that were left behind as opposed to things that you would
expect in an ambient drift. So, it speaks to good housekeeping when we
start putting waste packages in a drift.

CRAIG: Mark, thank you very, very much. You\'ve covered, as you always
do, a huge amount of materials, and we\'re precisely on schedule.

Okay, we\'ll next move on to Steve Brocoum. Steve, where are you? There
he is. Steve Brocoum is going to talk to us on the proposed Science and
Technology Program. Steve is an earth science geologist from Columbia
University. He\'s been here many times. Welcome back. And you\'ve got 15
minutes. I\'ll warn you at ten.

BROCOUM: Okay. Today, we\'re going to talk about the objectives, which
Margaret did cover to some degree, what we\'ve been doing to date,
potential science and program activities for \'03, and a summary.

These objectives, you know, Margaret, obviously her\'s are the correct
objectives, but basically we want to increase confidence in the
long-term. This is science technology is kind of off-line, it\'s not the
core science program which you heard Mark talk mostly about today. This
is talking for years or decades of ongoing science to increase
confidence in the program. This will not feed a license application. It
may feed, you know, depending on the results of particular studies, the
license review process beyond the license application. The license
application, in current terms, is just around the corner, December \'04
is roughly around the corner when you\'re trying to put a license
application together.

Similarly, this program is going to go on for at least 50 years, 100
years, 300 years. Technology moves on. There will be new materials.
There will be new ways of monitoring. You know, computers will be
better. We want to take a long view on improving technology.

Finally, we want to achieve efficiencies in the whole waste management
system. We want to look at the whole system and see where we can achieve
efficiencies, if we can spend some money in our program here and save
EM, put money elsewhere, that\'s something we\'ll be looking at.

Finally, we want to continue to promote technical excellence and
maintain leadership in the program.

These are some of the things we\'ve done. There\'s a lot of
infrastructure that has to be put in place to set up a program, and
we\'ve been working on that. We\'ve prepared a management plan. We have
missions and objectives, and so on, and we\'ve prepared draft functional
responsibilities.

Since we were formalized, or as a task force this year, we\'re not in
the \'03 budget. So, for \'03, as Margaret said, the budget is unknown.
For \'04, we are a line item in the budget, but what that amount will be
is yet to be determined by the Department.

We\'ve developed management process for soliciting and tracking and
evaluating proposals. We will probably formalize the process for asking
for proposals, and when that happens, we feel we will be overwhelmed
with proposals. And we want to make sure we\'re fair to everybody and we
can evaluate them and give justification as to why we make calls on
certain things.

And, finally, we screened a large number of things for possible
initiation of \'03. The formalization of proposals wouldn\'t happen
until Fiscal Year 04 time frame. Here, we\'re saying what we do for
\'03, and we kind of did a lot of brainstorming on that.

One of the visions that we have is making sure over the long run, we get
the proper balance, or the, you know, balancing the natural and the
engineered system. The program has been under criticism for too much
emphasis on the engineered barriers. Some of the suits that are pending
in the courts address that issue. We want to take a long view on this
and make sure we can define the performance we\'ll be getting of the
natural system.

We want to, of course, look at technologies that may reduce costs, and
we also want to develop multiple lines of evidence. That\'s from a
comment from the Board. That even came up this morning I think that
someone was asked that question. So, we want to focus also on multiple
lines of evidence.

We want to encourage participation by external groups. You know,
sometimes people accuse us of being insular. In other words, I\'ve been
on the program for many, many years and I\'m certainly insular. So, we
want to make sure we get some new blood, new universities and other
research institutions in addition to the ones we have on the program
already. And many problems are common around the world, like the
saturated zone, and we have lots of opportunities for increasing our
international collaboration, and Margaret has expressed a great interest
in doing that.

So, in terms of our management process, we want to encourage new ideas.
We visited, for example, all the\--well, not all, we visited Lawrence
Livermore, Berkeley, Sandia and Los Alamos, we also visited the USGS,
and we talked to these people. We got a lot of good suggestions on how
we ought to set up a program like this. We intend to visit additional
institutions, for example, PNL, Argonne, INL, also have discussions with
those people.

April Gill has been at the center of trying to come up with a process,
you know, for prioritizing proposals as they come in, assessing them,
and even having a process on line so people that submit proposals can
see what their status is. Again, this would be for \'04 and later.

Also, since, you know, Mark described the core science program. As
things in this science and technology program mature and they may become
something that could transition over to the mainline program, we have to
have a process for doing that also. So, we\'re thinking of what our
interface would be between the science and technology program and the,
say, the licensing program. And we set up a science and technology
advisory group that consists of the managers of all key areas of the
program to meet periodically to discuss these kinds of issues. The
acronym for that is the STAG. So, we will probably formalize the call
for proposals probably for the \'04 time period.

We started basically this year with activities that were proposed
generally internally, and did not make the cut for a proposed FY 03
funding. Earlier in the year, you heard about Peter Swift\'s
prioritization effort, you know, some of the things made it and some of
the things didn\'t. We now go down to about 27 activities that if we got
a reasonable budget for science and technology, we might have some hope
of funding for \'03, that met the objectives that I showed and Margaret
showed earlier.

As the budget realities kind of\--as we face the budget realities, we
further cull the list down to about eight, and management decided to
focus on five priority activities, and these are all still under
consideration and still being discussed internally.

The first is the shadow zone. We\'ve heard about the shadow zone for
years. I don\'t believe we\'ve taken credit for it in the licensing case
now. This is an area that we would like to look at to see if the shadow
zone really exists and to see if that would add to the performance of
the natural system. So, that was the first activity.

Depending on the amount of funding, we may also be able to do other
studies. When we visited Lawrence Berkeley, Joe Waring (phonetic) made a
suggestion that one of the things we could do in addition to this is to
look at tunnels that were here before the atomic age, and then he would
drill up in the ceiling of the tunnel and drill down in the floor of the
tunnel and compare the bomb pulse above and below. That might be
something that we can do, and it\'s relatively low cost. It would be
something we can do if we don\'t have much funding to help plan this
test, for example, when we do get more funding. So, it\'s a possibility.

The second is flow and transport studies at Pena Blanca in addition to
what the program is doing. This is, again, trying to look for natural
analogues. The NRC has looked at this for many years. We have been
trying to get a larger program going. Abe Van Luik has been giving us a
lot of good advice on that.

The saturated zone. That\'s very important. There was some discussion a
little while ago. That is an area that we feel that beyond the mainline
program, we may do some studies there. I think Mark was talking about
the oxidation reduction state of the saturated zone. So that\'s another
area we may want to look at again. It all depends on funding.

Alternative engineered materials. We had a meeting with DARPA, it must
have been two or three months ago, and they showed us some new
materials. These are non-crystalline metals, amorphous metals that have
some very interesting properties. Those may have some application to our
program, so we are discussing with DARPA how we can work cooperatively
to maybe look at this again for the long-term. Now, these may not pan
out. But I think it may be worth looking. It\'s new material.

Finally, coupled processes, looking at the thermal, hydrological or
geochemical or the mechanical interactions near the waste packages and
around. That\'s been an area of interest for a long time. That gets into
the high temperature versus low temperature operating mode. This whole
area is an area I think that we could look at in the long-term to help
the program make the best decisions that it can.

Now, before we decide what we\'re going to do, we would like to bring
external parties in to help us evaluate more specific proposals.
Margaret has expressed great interest in making sure we get new ideas,
new people looking at this, and one of the people that she\'s talking
about bringing on board is Bob Budnitz, who is sitting back here in the
audience. He will be joining the program as soon as all the paperwork is
put together as a senior advisor on science and technology to Margaret
to help her and help us evaluate these kinds of proposals.

So, basically, in summary, we are working on establishing the program to
address those key objectives. It addresses issues and alternatives
beyond the licensing basis. That\'s really important. It\'s beyond the
licensing basis. The mainline program is working towards the license
application. They have their core science. They have their design. That
will feed right into the license application. These kinds of studies are
for beyond that. They may impact the program after the license is
submitted, perhaps during the review process, and even much later.

We are probably going to solicit proposals and we will have a formal
process for evaluating them. We will try to do it as open and in as fair
a way as possible. We can already tell from the visits we\'ve made that
we will be getting lots of proposals. The word overwhelm isn\'t too
strong a word, in my view. And we\'re looking for suggestions from the
Board and from other groups as to directions we are to go look at and
how to better implement such a program.

That\'s my comments today. Thank you.

CRAIG: Thank you, Steve. Questions from the Board, please? Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, former Board.

Steve, could you just summarize for us the current status of the studies
at pena Blanca?

BROCOUM: I\'d like to call Abe. Can you do that for us, Abe? The last I
heard, you thought you had gotten the drill rigs across.

VAN LUIK: Abe Van Luik, DOE. The drill rig never made it across the
border. We have cancelled that contract and we are now actively
searching for a qualified drilling contractor within Mexico to do the
drilling for us, and we hope to move forward in a matter of months in
doing that.

RUNNELLS: Thank you.

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

Steve, I\'m just trying to understand a little bit better what the scope
of your program is. You were really clear that you\'re looking beyond
licensing. Is that correct?

BROCOUM: That\'s correct, yes.

KNOPMAN: In Margaret\'s presentation on Page 10, she has a bullet on the
relationship of the science and technology program to licensing, and
there are three bullets here. The first is may enhance confidence during
LA review. Two, relevant information will be integrated into licensing
related activities as appropriate. Three, some activities may be
implemented through the performance confirmation program.

Can you take that and then help me cross-walk to what you said?

BROCOUM: Okay. What I said is the work we\'re doing, since we haven\'t
even started yet, will not feed the license application. The license
application is due in December of \'04. So, to make an application, the
work that\'s going to feed it has to be more or less defined in \'03.
So, I don\'t think there\'s any work in the science and technology
program, even if we started work today, that could feed the license
application.

18 months after that, submission of the license application, begin the
hearings, the Atomic Safety and License Board hearings. At that point,
we may have some information that could shed some light on issues that
come up at those hearings and beyond. So, I said during the licensing
review process, but not during the initial submission of the license
application. Because the mainline program is trying to get a license
application written for December \'04. They have their technical basis
to do so. So, we will provide information as we develop it for the
mainline program to put in their licensing basis beyond submission of
the license application. So, in my mind, the demarcation is it can\'t be
done for the license application.

CRAIG: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, I want to compliment you on the five
topics that you selected in your sort of winnowing down of ideas that
may be applicable for the science and technology program. And I want to
maybe come back to something that I mentioned when I asked Margaret
questions this morning, in that if you identify a couple of these
programs, and I\'ll just take, for example, the drift shadow effect.

A lot of the work that would need to be done would take more than a year
or two to do, and so I look at stability of funding and types of issues
that you run into, and as you run into the post \'04 license application
and you get into maybe construction authorization, and you look at the
long-term, it\'s the concern that the Board has always expressed that
you get something started that\'s a great idea, and then all of a
sudden, the fundings gets real lean in some years, and I\'m looking at
how you\'d want to preserve these kinds of issues so that the long-term
goal isn\'t lost in the shuffle of we don\'t have enough money this
year. And, you know, turning things on and turning things off you
usually lose data, you lose people, you lose essentially momentum. And I
know Margaret is trying to institutionalize it, but maybe you could
comment a little bit more on sort of the stability of the program,
stability of funding, and how the long-term ideas are going to be fully
incorporated.

BROCOUM: Well, let me start. I think Undersecretary Card is committed to
this kind of a program and would like to institutionalize it. Margaret
Chu has made very clear that she would like to institutionalize it, and
she said she will make it happen. There\'s been talk of a percentage of
the funding. There\'s been talks of various ways to maybe do this. I
don\'t know how we\'ll do it, and so I can\'t give you an answer on
that. But I think the term is long-term, like for example the drift
shadow zone is a three or four year experiment, and many of the other
ideas will be multi-year ideas also. So, it really won\'t work unless it
can be instituted and continued for a long period of time. Exactly how
that\'s going to happen, I don\'t know, because there\'s a lot of
issues, as you know, with funding the program that Margaret went over
this morning.

BULLEN: Thank you very much.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board.

Steve, I thought that there was some credit taken for dry-out under the
emplacement drifts, and this argues that you don\'t have invection in
fractures and it really is a diffusion dominated process. And, if so,
then the drift shadow enters into the performance assessment, and if so,
that\'s a place you could drill and perhaps get data that the moisture
content is lower or not in a year. Kind of the sites around, and this
has been talked about off and on, but isn\'t that one of those things
you could do, or in the act of drilling, would it take a while for
the\--but am I correct that you do take credit for this diffusion
dominated flow?

BROCOUM: I thought for the LA. Are we taking credit? We\'re not taking
credit for the LA, but I\'ll let the experts here\--

BODVARSSON: Bo Bodvarsson, Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

There is in TSPA, and some of the people can correct me if I\'m wrong,
some credit taken for actually putting some of the waste diffusively
from the drift into the matrix. If you do not have seepage into the
drifts, then there is no water really to dissolve the waste and,
therefore, the thinking is that diffusion is the only mechanism that can
get you from the drift into the matrix.

However, there is no credit taken for that there is drier area of the
drift because of the shadow, because actually the fracture will not flow
because there is no flow there in all likelihood. So, that is not taken
into account, but the diffusive releases are taken into account.

Did you understand that? Does that make sense to you?

PARIZEK: Yes. Do you have some candidate sites where a drift shadow
could be investigated if someone asked you for one?

BODVARSSON: Yes, we have been looking at a few sites that are possible
areas for a drift shadow being looked at. In actuality, you know, there
are many, many sites you can look at. You can even look at an old
building that was built many years ago, and you can look at that
building and of course you will see a shadow. In my mind, the concept
can be done in many, many places, so we are looking at different tunnels
close to NTS, close to the Hoover Dam, for example, and also some areas
in New Mexico for the concept, especially for drilling like you propose.

PARIZEK: As you visualize that experiment, that\'s not too complicated a
time frame, or is it a year or two?

BODVARSSON: No, I think you\'re absolutely correct. That is not too
complicated, because basically what we want to do is simply compare the
chemistry of the waters beside and above the drift to that below the
drift, with the understanding that the water flows around the drifts
from seepage areas, that the chemistry underneath the drift is going to
show longer ages and different chemical signatures to those around and
above the tunnels.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I\'d like to address this alternative engineered materials issue. My
understanding was that the science and technology advisory team that
you\'re proposing would be post-licensing. Do you envision a change to a
new material for the canister or the containment modules after
emplacement starts? Because it seems to me this is going to have all
kinds of other effects, including a change in the design.

BROCOUM: There has been debate on the program on this, and I don\'t
think we want to exclude the potential of, say, repackaging later if you
even have a hundred or a 300 year time frame, and materials will advance
over those years. So, I think we\'re going into the license application
with our current design. If we decide to change it, of course, we have
to submit a license amendment to the NRC. But there\'s been quite a few
discussions in this even at the Undersecretary Card level.

CRAIG: The corrosion of C-22 is not on the list. In fact metals is not
on your list, and yet there have been many reviews, including one by the
Board, that identified a number of possible mechanisms by which that
might occur, and there still seems to be no agreement on how to
extrapolate corrosion.

BROCOUM: I believe that\'s in the mainline program. If it\'s in the
baseline program this year or a future year, it\'s not an S&T. So,
that\'s how we\'ve defined and separated the work. So, work is for the
baseline, even in the out years, doesn\'t go to S&T. So, if it\'s in,
and Mark Peters is the one that\'s mostly been involved in helping us
separate what\'s in the baseline program from what should go in the S&T,
and that\'s not always an absolute line. Many times there\'s some
judgment there. But, in general, that\'s what we\'re trying to do.

CRAIG: Thanks, Steve. Any other questions?

(No response.)

CRAIG: In that case, we\'ll move on. Thank you very much. And we now
turn to my part of the world, California, across the border to Inyo
County. Andrew Remus of Inyo County and Michael King of the
Hydrodynamics Group. Andrew\'s biography says he lives in Independence,
population is 400. I haven\'t seen anything like that. I have to add
that that is one of the finest jumping off places in the whole world if
you\'re going to great country. Thank you, and welcome to the Board.

REMUS: Thank you, and good morning. I\'m Andrew Remus.

CRAIG: I\'ll warn you when you\'ve got five minutes to go.

REMUS: Okay, thank you.

I\'m Andrew Remus. I\'m the Project Coordinator for the Inyo County,
California Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository Assessment Office. I
thank you for the opportunity to present our Yucca Mountain Regional
Ground Water Monitoring Program today.

I\'m joined today by Mike King of Hydrodynamics Group. He\'s our primary
contractor for hydrologic studies. And we have John Drewvers, he\'s our
national affairs and policy consultant, with us today. And also Courtney
Smith, he\'s my assistant in the Yucca Mountain program.

Inyo County has a great appreciation for the role that this Board has
played in providing for the past eight years thorough and balanced
oversight of the Yucca Mountain program, and we welcome the opportunity
to speak to you.

Inyo County has been an effective unit of local government since 1991
under the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The focus of our oversight
program has been of both transportation of nuclear waste and radioactive
nuclide transport from Yucca Mountain into Inyo County via the Regional
Ground Water System.

We began utilizing affected unit funding in 1996 to investigate the
possibility of a hydrologic connection between the Yucca Mountain site
and California\'s half of the Amargosa Valley. These investigations led
us to believe that there may indeed be the potential for radioactive
materials to escape the repository block and be transported into Inyo
County.

More specifically, we are concerned about the impacts on the major
spring waters in Death Valley National Park. These spring waters serve
protected habitat and domestic, commercial and tribal uses, and are the
only source of usable water in the park.

As an adjunct to the 1998 Nye County, Nevada Early Warning Drilling
Program, Inyo County conducted a three year investigation into water
behavior in and around Death Valley National Park, including
investigations in the Funeral Mountain Range. That program ended this
last winter, and this spring, DOE awarded the county a \$4.9 million
research grant designed to explore by means of a series of deep
monitoring wells, the possibility of a hydrologic connection between
water resources in California and the Yucca Mountain project.

Mr. King of Hydrodynamics Group will present the County\'s current
technical program, and our project team is available to answer any
questions.

KING: Thank you very much. I\'m going to focus on the technical issues
on the program we\'ve been developing since 1996. Let\'s state the
problem, and then we\'ll go through our program.

We know for a fact that there\'s a lower carbonate aquifer system about
6,000 feet underneath Yucca Mountain. Modelling from the one well that
has penetrated this indicated that there is a significant upward
gradient in this lower carbonate system.

One thing we also know is that the relationship between this lower
carbonate and the carbonate springs in the Furnace Creek area of Death
Valley is not well known. And this is where, thus, our studies have been
focusing.

To continue to state the problem, the hydrologic data we do have
strongly suggests that the Death Valley springs are supported by
inter-basin ground water flow through this lower carbonate aquifer
system.

We think that some portion of that flow through the lower carbonate
system may be from Yucca Mountain. We don\'t know, but we\'re certainly
going to investigate that.

Let\'s get a picture of the problem we\'re trying to state here. So,
here\'s Yucca Mountain. 40 miles to the south is the Funeral Mountain
Range where we enter Inyo County, and then here are the spring flow
systems. A number of the research models show various flow paths for
ground water. Obviously, Inyo County is down gradient of Yucca Mountain,
and possibly within one of these flow paths.

So, what evidence do we have for this hydraulic connection? A lot of the
geochemistry of the springs in Death Valley are incredibly similar to
the lower carbonate samples that we have over in the Amargosa and at
Yucca Mountain.

When you map the structural geology in the southern Funerals and up
through Yucca Mountain, we see that most of the models show the presence
of the lower carbonate as this interconnecting bed of permeable
materials.

Both the U.S. Geological Survey\'s regional model and the Nevada Test
Site model all show flow paths going from the lower carbonate aquifer
supporting this spring flow into Yucca Mountain. So, they have strong
confidence that they think there\'s this connection.

Based on that, what\'s Inyo County\'s concerns? Obviously, we\'re
worried about radioactive nuclide transport through the lower carbonate
into the Death Valley springs.

On a side light, they\'re also worried that this lower carbonate aquifer
with this upper gradient actually is a barrier to ground water
contaminants from radioactive nuclides. This is a good thing. Now,
through all the course, whether it\'s planned development or whatever,
if there\'s any degradation of that upper gradient, it could certain
impact the flows in the springs, as well as provide radioactive
transport into the lower carbonate system. We think if it gets into that
system, it\'s going to go south.

Let\'s talk about a grant program now, the program itself, or the
problem. The program is to have the U.S. Geological Survey map the
geology of the Southern Funeral Mountain Range. That program is pretty
well done. It has one more year to go. Based on that geological
framework model and current geophysics which we just finished, we would
then put together a hydrologic framework model. We\'ll present a
conceptual model today.

The next plan is to drill four deep wells into the lower carbonate
aquifer system. Three of these will be on the east side of the Funeral
Mountain Range. One would be in Death Valley National Park along the
Furnace Creek Fault. We\'re also planning one shallow well, a thousand
footer, at the Travatine Spring in Death Valley National Park. So, one
of our key roles is we do want to penetrate the lower carbonate aquifer
system.

Once we have the wells, we\'re going to pump test them, get some
hydraulic properties, get some water chemistries, and then feed that
information back into our hydraulic models to try and characterize
ground water movement through the system.

This is Chris Fridrich\'s conceptual geological framework model. You
have the lower carbonate system in the Southern Funeral Mountain Range.
You have some corsite materials to the north. To give you a reference
here, these are the major springs we\'re talking about, Navas, Texas and
Travatine Springs at the Furnace Creek Ranch area, which I think if
you\'re going on your field trip, you\'ll stop by.

On the east side of the Funerals, we have one outcrop of the
paleocarbonates. At this point, we\'ll have some discussion about that
point here. So, the question is how is ground water moving through this
system?

The next slide will show you a detail of the east side of the Funerals.
We just completed our geophysics program which involved time domain
magnetics and gravity surveys. Seismic reflection was not going to work
because of the steep nature of the faulting. So, we have a number of
lines, one of them running right through the outcrop sections in this
direction, as well as through here. Remember, this whole area is
wilderness, so we had to leave no imprint on the land when we did our
studies.

There is one private sector of land within the park, which is one of our
target locations, and between this point and this point, a well location
is non-wilderness. This is park wilderness. This is BLM wilderness. So,
we\'re kind of in a box.

Here\'s some of the results of one of the lines, just to illustrate the
kind of work that we\'re coming out with. We actually started
measurements at the outcrops in the mountain range there. We went out to
where the outcrop, the blue being the lower carbonate signature. As we
step off of that, we come over to this private property section, and we
find that there is a portion of the lower carbonate sticking up at a
depth of maybe 200 or 300 meters. So, we\'re looking at some deep wells
to penetrate into that system. So, this is just one of our target zones.

We\'ve done this geophysics through the whole program, and now we\'re
feeding that back into both the geological and hydrologic models to help
improve our understanding.

This is all a conceptual hydrologic framework model through the southern
Funerals. This framework was put together first by Chris Fridrich, who
did the geological modelling. So, I had him project down to the
structurals, on the surface and the subsurface. We then added some of
our geophysics out in this area.

What we find is we have a low permeability, low being very low, almost a
barrier to ground water flow through the central mountain. But what we
do find is that there are some spillways or flow paths through the
mountain range. These are some suggested pathways on how water would
pass through the system into the springs we just talked about,
Travatine, Texas and Navas. There\'s also the Naval Spring, so there may
be a potential pathway for flow through a lower portion of the mountain
range.

So, John Bredehoeft, my partner, decided to try and model the system to
try and characterize can water flow through this mountain, and then how
does it help us in defining where we drill our wells. He took Chris\'s
geological model which you just saw. We take the total flow from the
Death Valley spring system, which is measured over a 20 year period, so
we have a good record on that total flow. And then based on that flow,
John back calculated what the transmissivities would have to be, both
through that spillway to the north, and then what it would have to be
going down into the spring system. So, you see some pretty low
permeabilities.

So, based on that, John goes in and he does his model, and what we see
is you have a hydraulic head here of about 2,000 feet in the areas
we\'re going to be drilling. The springs are at sea level. And based on
that head and this flow path, you can actually\--water will pass through
this system, and it looks like we do have the connection we were talking
about.

Now, to illustrate it a little more, here\'s the Furnace Creek Fault
range, here\'s the area of essentially no permeability, and this is how
we have this incredibly high head pushing water through this lower
permeability material, which is reflected in the Death Valley springs.

To recap a couple of points here, we know the lower carbonate exists. We
have a well that\'s penetrated it at Yucca Mountain. We know there\'s an
upward gradient based on our thermal modelling of that gradient. Death
Valley springs are most likely supported by inter-basin flow through the
lower carbonates. The chemistry of these springs are carbonate springs.
We know that.

Lower carbonate flow path most likely exists through the southern
Funerals. This is based on our surface geology, mapping, that it exists,
and that our hydraulic modelling shows that there is this scenario that
would allow it to flow through the mountain range.

Another thing that we want the Board to consider is the maintenance of
this upward gradient in this lower carbonate aquifer. If you keep the
integrity of that upward gradient at Yucca Mountain, you certainly have
something that adds to the natural barrier to transport into the lower
system.

We also worry that if that water table drops in the lower carbonate, it
will certainly impact, based on our modelling, the discharge in Death
Valley National Park. And that is their only water supply for a million
visitors a year. Thank you.

CRAIG: Thank you very much. Questions from the Board?

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board.

Have you ruled out the possibility of a flow around the southern end of
the Funerals, and then up the fault, Furnace Creek Fault, and just not
had much seepage through the mountain at all? You have these spillways
that are postulated, and you\'re drilling, they prove that out, if you
drill and don\'t find much water going through the spillway areas, then
you\'re still looking for some other pathways.

KING: Well, that\'s been suggested that there is a pathway down by Death
Valley junction, up through that area. We did some geophysics over there
in support of the National Park Service drilling program, part of the
tribal drilling program, their monitoring. We found the lower carbonate
there, but the Furnace Creek Fault is an incredible barrier, we think,
to ground water flow in that area. So, we think that the heads are very
high to the north, and that the gradient may be to the north.

CRAIG: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, could you show Slide 12, get back to
that real quick? The one before that. I\'m sorry. This is actually a
question that Mrs. Devlin whispered in my ear as the slide was going by,
and so I\'ll take some partial credit there, but it\'s sort of valid.

I know your understanding is to try and take a look at the deep
carbonate aquifer, but the question that arises here is you\'re showing
Amargosa Farms area as\--you know, where is the Amargosa River on this
and what kind of impact would it have on the type of flow field that
you\'re looking at?

KING: The Amargosa River is\--well, this is a fault running through
here, and the Amargosa River does pass through in very close proximity
to one of our sites. There\'s a number of shallow wells in there, and
part of our program is to rehab. those wells and try and characterize
what that chemistry is in that upper zone. So, we do want to pay some
attention to it. Maybe in the future, and if money allows, we\'ll put in
an intermediate well in here in the tertiaries.

BULLEN: Thank you.

CRAIG: Other questions? Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Runnells. You mentioned that you\'re going to take a look at
the chemistry of the water. You heard the discussion earlier today with
Mark Peters about the importance of the redox parameter of ground water.
If that ground water in the deep carbonate aquifer is reducing, the
solubility of things like Technetium and Neptunium is diminished
enormously. So, my question is are you going to look at oxidation
reduction potential in those deep ground waters?

KING: The program we\'ve looked at for geochemistry is to try and
characterize the source of the water, where it\'s coming from. So, the
program so far has dealt with major anti-cations, and then we\'ve had
some support from the USGS on doing oxygen, strontium and uranium,
again, which go to source. We\'ve done some Carbon 14. So, the chemistry
beyond that has not been done, other than we did calculate pH and
conductivity and other parameters.

RUNNELLS: If I were working for DOE, I would come to you and say may we
please measure the redox potential in your deep ground waters.

KING: We are offering these wells, we\'re going to put it out on the
internet, and they\'re open for any and all scientists to take samples.
So, that is part of our program, to allow UNLV and others who are more
capable than we are to do that.

CRAIG: Debra, and Richard.

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board. Could we just see the last slide? I just want
to pick up the last bullet of the last slide in the summary of your key
points.

You express concern about the maintenance of the upward gradient in the
carbonate aquifer. Is there any way through historical records that you
can trace changes in the gradient just by virtue of increased pumping in
the Amargosa Valley, for example? Or is there simply not enough
penetration\--

KING: We only have three wells. One of them at Yucca Mountain,
Bredehoeft Well, which was an exploratory well that\'s plugged, and then
Nye County just completed a well. One thing that we do see in all of the
Nye County wells is we\'re seeing this carbonate signature in a lot of
their samples, which never penetrated the carbonate. So, we do think
there\'s this upward gradient. It\'s an interesting question. It\'s a
little bit beyond what we have data to evaluate.

KNOPMAN: Well, I\'m just wondering what you think they could be doing
that would substantially change the\--

KING: Well, we do know there a, when you look at the record at Devil\'s
Hole, there seems to be a correlation between that and pumping in the
Amargosa, and that is a source of carbonate water. So, there seems to be
some relationship to that development and what flows we see in the lower
carbonate or what supports you see from that system.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. As a follow-up question related to that same
topic of maintaining an upward gradient in order to protect the Death
Valley springs, and really that\'s more a withdrawal problem, it seems
to me, how you keep people from tapping into that aquifer and maybe
pulling down the head somewhere in the Amargosa Valley area. Amargosa
Farms wells are all to be shallow, as I understand it, and they may or
may not affect the upward gradient as a result of increased withdrawals
in the future. But deep wells in the carbonate aquifer would be an issue
that would be your concern, and is that a Board issue for us to discuss?

KING: Well, it could be a policy issue, what ground water use you allow
down gradient, or in this system. With the increased growth, there\'s
been some suggestion, and I\'m not the one to say who or what, that they
might go in and actually start mining water out of the lower carbonate
to support growth in this area. Whether that\'s going to happen or not,
it is certainly a policy issue that should be considered, that
maintaining what barriers you do have may be a Board issue, whether
it\'s policy or how you do that with the State Engineer\'s Office, I
don\'t know.

CRAIG: Jeff?

WONG: Since I\'m a consultant, I\'m going to ask a question.

I\'m looking at again the diagram that Dr. Bullen had you put up, the
flow paths. This is not a scientific question. This is just sort of a
policy question, if you\'d like to talk about policy. But if in fact
according to the DOE\'s projections at Amargosa or their point of
compliance, their estimated dose at 10,000 years complies with the
regulations, why would you care what the dose is, or why would you care
about doses that are farther down gradient in Death Valley?

KING: Because of the large permeability of the lower carbonate aquifer
system, those flow paths may actually be fast paths. You know, some of
the earlier modelling we did, and it hasn\'t been verified, we\'re
seeing between a recharge bed in the Amargosa and discharge in the
springs, 25 years. So, that\'s short. So, again, more work needs to be
done, because we\'re the first to start looking at the regional issues
in this detail, so we\'re suggesting more work.

WONG: So, I mean, what you\'re saying is that you could have higher
doses down gradient from the compliance point, or equivalent doses?

KING: Well, Ii have no way of saying that yes, there is or no, there
isn\'t. Is this a potential fast path? Yeah, I think it might be based
on what we\'ve seen in the discussions, and obviously some of the
modelling will help to see if it\'s even an issue.

WONG: If you have higher flow rates, would you expect greater dilution?

KING: I don\'t know. I\'m not a geochemist.

WONG: You know, I\'m asking the questions and I\'m not a hydrologist.
So, thanks.

KING: Sorry.

CRAIG: Okay, I think this means we\'re at the end of this session. Thank
you very much. I understand from our chairman that there are some public
comments, so our procedure is that the chairman handles the public
comments, and you can then tell us when to come back from lunch.

CORRADINI: Right. Thank you, Paul.

I\'ve been informed that there are five individuals that cannot stay for
the public comment period this afternoon, and wanted to speak now. Given
the number and the fact we want to give everybody about an hour for
lunch to get back to the afternoon program, I would request that we keep
the public comments to less than five minutes. I\'ll just go down the
list and call up the individuals. If they could just come up, identify
themselves. If they\'re representing an organization, tell us that.
Otherwise, if they\'re representing themselves, and come to either one
of these microphones.

The first one is Judy Treichel. I hope I pronounced that correctly.

TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force. Just very
quickly, two points on the things that were said this morning. In Don
Horton\'s presentation, it showed the ever elusive design, and that
worries the public that there is not a firm design, and the DOE is not
going in to NRC and saying here\'s what we want to build, this is it.
And then if they need to change it later, or if they assume it will
change, it\'s too early to put in a license application. If it turns out
they need to change it, they can amend the license or make arrangements
later.

I was concerned also when Margaret mentioned early and often NRC
interactions, with NRC/DOE interactions. Those should not be done
without public notice and public accessibility to those. Likewise, if
DOE wants to meet with the Board, we believe that that should be a
public meeting.

What I wanted to say, and I am staying and I\'d like to say something
later on as well, but I didn\'t want any of the Board members who are
leaving to leave before I had a chance to say that I want to give a
very, very heartfelt thank you from myself, from the Nuclear Waste Task
Force, and from the public that we advocate for for the wonderful public
participation opportunities, unique and wonderful public participation
opportunities that you have given to us.

You have listened to DOE. You\'ve had the discussions, just as you have
today, but you have been the only group that we\'ve ever been around, or
that exists, that have allowed us to come into that, and when there were
important things, you actually allowed for interactions between us and
the Department of Energy. We could ask our questions. They were either
answered or not. But it was on the record. And that\'s unique and I
would certainly ask that it continue.

People have come to expect the TRB to ask questions during technical
presentations, as happened this morning, that reflect the public
concerns, and a good example of that was some of the go-arounds that
have gone on about whether or not doses that are being stated have been
probability weighted to make them look less than they would actually be.
And we have really appreciated that, and it\'s really led to some great
understanding.

There are terms that are used that even seem very simple, like risk
benefit, safety, and those terms have to be identified because they mean
very different things to different people, and I would also urge the new
members of the Board to continue doing that.

And just, finally, once again I really want to thank all of you who are
leaving. We in Nevada will miss you very much, and I implore you,
please, keep in touch. You know how to get ahold of us and we would love
to be able to do that.

Thanks so much.

CORRADINI: Thank you. Our second commenter is Mr. Joe Carson.

CARSON: Good morning. I\'m from New York, so I can speak quickly. But
I\'d like to cover my information. I think it\'s quite relevant to the
purpose of this Board.

My name is Joe Carson. How many people recognize my name? I\'m the first
and only eight time prevailing and still aggrieved DOE Nuclear Safety
Engineer, still employed by DOE, still in the Q class, and DOE is still
ignoring my safety issues, which is why I\'m now an eight time
prevailing whistle blower. DOE has paid over \$400,000 in my legal bills
to date.

I have to disagree with Ms. Chu and Mr. Horton about safety conscious
work environment. I must give DOE credit. Ten years ago, DOE\'s nuclear
safety rules were explained to me very clearly. Three rules. One, in
DOE, if it\'s legal, it\'s ethical. Two, if DOE gets away with it, it\'s
legal. Three, the only right a concerned professional has in DOE is the
right to seek employment elsewhere. So, those are DOE\'s safety rules. I
think any objective review of my case would show they\'ve been applied
again and again and again. Still as today, will not even address the
safety issues.

I did not become a whistle blower to have the experience of prevailing.
I became a whistle blower because of safety issues. DOE\'s response is
we weren\'t ordered to address your safety issues. We were ordered to
pay your legal bills. We will not address your safety issues. The same
DOE representing here safety at Yucca Mountain.

I\'m a licensed P.E. I have to critique the presentations here and also
the Board\'s website. Being a P.E. is a legal status. I have a legal
obligation to blow the whistle when necessary, similar to if I\'m a law
enforcement officer, I see a crime, I just can\'t look the other way and
be a law enforcement officer. A member of the public does not have to
get involved. As a P.E., I see something wrong, DOE suppresses it and
it\'s safety, I have to blow the whistle or I have to resign. That\'s
the rules of professional conduct of the State boards across the Nation.

Because being a P.E. is a legal status, I have to at least comment. The
Board\'s website does not make clear its members who are P.E.s, because
being a P.E., again, it\'s a legal status. Legal encumbrances follow
from that status.

My thought for Yucca Mountain and for DOE is that it can\'t be
adequately safe unless the safety professionals for DOE, the
contractors, the work environments\--well, number one, the safety
professionals are trustworthy. By trustworthy, I would mean ethical,
competent and accountable, and they\'re working in a safety and security
conscious work environment. I don\'t think that either case is true in
DOE across the board.

I know I\'m running out of my time. I just want to hit the high points.
Some recommendations on the last page of my memo that I would ask the
Board to consider.

I was involved in an accident investigation about eight years ago at a
DOE nuclear reactor. There had been a fire, and the DOE represented that
the facility that burned was not a nuclear facility, even though it
produces high-level nuclear waste destined for Yucca Mountain, because
before the uranium in the facility was exposed to neutrons, it wasn\'t
that hazardous. So, my question is why do we need Yucca Mountain? We can
store new nuclear fuel in a garage, and DOE\'s point is it\'s not that
hazardous when it\'s new.

I mean, with respect to an accident that contaminated a number of
workers, contaminated a nuclear reactor, and caused a measurable release
to the environment, DOE\'s response was that facility didn\'t merit a
safety analysis because when the uranium was new, it wasn\'t that
hazardous.

So, I\'d request the Board have DOE do a different professional opinion
on the point. DOE has now made this representation to the President. I
took it as far as I could go within the system, and DOE is now on record
in a report to the President saying a facility that produces high-level
nuclear waste is not a nuclear facility.

Now, I do mostly worker safety inspections. Two years ago, Congress
passed a law, and the President apologized to DOE workers for being put
in harm\'s way by DOE without their knowledge and without having
protection. DOE treated these workers as expendable, is my point of
view. I think it\'s a workplace self and safety disaster of national
scale that hasn\'t been owned up to yet by the safety professionals in
America, including the National Academy of Engineering, that I would
allege played a role in this disaster similar to that of Arthur Andersen
at Enron. NEA took many, many millions of DOE\'s dollars to do reviews
related to workplace and public health and safety in DOE, and never once
mentioned the existence or relevance of P.E. licensure or the code of
ethics for engineers to the matters being observed.

When you\'re an engineer, you\'re always an engineer. You have to adhere
to the code of ethics. Part of the code of ethics is you see that other
engineers do, too. It\'s implemented on a strict honor code. That\'s
part of the law.

I\'d make the same request to you with the NWTRB. You have some P.E.s on
your Board. How is the NWTRB recognizing and accepting your legal
responsibilities? I have not seen anything. I\'ve stamped my piece of
paper. I didn\'t see anything stamped by any of the engineers presenting
anything today. If they are P.E.s, I think they have an obligation to
stamp their reports. That\'s what the licensure rules require.

If anyone thinks I am out of bounds, please\--I really want to get this
issue identified and resolved, what a P.E. owes as his professional duty
to the public and workplace self and safety, and what the profession
owes to a P.E. who risks his life to do his duty.

I\'ve approached Senator Harry Reid (phonetic). I\'ve asked him to put a
hold on Carmen Slateral (phonetic), the DOE Deputy Secretary, he\'s a
nominee to be DOE Deputy Secretary, put a hold on his nomination, which
means his nomination will not come up for a full vote until I\'ve
requested Mr. Reid have either DOE go forward with the settlements or
agree to have a third party look at my case and make recommendations to
resolve it, including the safety issues.

My point is trying to settle with DOE is like trying to settle with a
kidnapper or a terrorist. They\'re trying to ruin my life, and if they
say oh, have we\--are you ready to quit now, Joe, it\'s a very cruel
game. I think everyone in this audience and the public in Las Vegas are
partially held hostage by DOE\'s cruel game.

Thank you.

CORRADINI: Thank you. Our third public comment is by Ms. Peggy Mays
Johnson.

JOHNSON: It\'s hard to follow somebody seven feet tall.

My name is Peggy Mays Johnson, and I\'m the relatively new Executive
Director of Citizen Alert in the State of Nevada. So, this is my maiden
voyage before you all.

I usually start my presentations with a few disclaimers. One, I am not a
scientist and, two, I am not a transportation expert. However, I do
bring 30 years of political experience, which I believe qualifies me as
an expert as far as where the Yucca Mountain project is at this point.
The decisions made thus far have been solely political, and now we, the
people, look to you to make somewhat belatedly, albeit the scientific
determination. You see, this is not just a Nevada problem, as Dr. Chu
rightly pointed out when she discussed the transportation challenges.

In 1987, Citizen Alert established a national nuclear waste
transportation task force, because we realized that there were those
transportation challenges that finally the Department of Energy is
recognizing. We believe that you, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review
Board, must, and I emphasize must, spend an appropriate amount of time
on those transportation challenges.

We, Citizen Alert, is challenging the Department of Energy and the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission to determine the transportation routes as
soon as possible, and to hold hearings along those routes, in order to
develop an environmental impact statement to support those routes and to
please tell the truth.

I have been interviewed by many members of the international press since
I took over in April, and I must tell you the world is watching us, and
the world will be watching you.

Thank you so much for your determinations.

CORRADINI: Thank you. Our fourth comment is from Ms. Abby Johnson.

ABBY JOHNSON: My name is Abby Johnson, no relation. I\'m the nuclear
waste advisor for Eureka County, Nevada. Eureka County is one of the ten
affected units of local government, for those of you new to the Board,
that have been talked about on and off today. Inyo County is one of our
AULG colleagues.

The reason why Eureka County is primarily concerned about the Yucca
Mountain project is because of the possibility of a rail spur being
built through Eureka County that would transport nuclear waste through
our county and would be operated for the life of the project, or even
longer.

Three things. I want to thank the outgoing Board members, and I know
people have already said this, but it bears repeating. Thank you to the
outgoing Board members for your willingness to ask the tough questions,
and to pursue the answers, and especially Dr. Cohon, your patience in
allowing public sessions and listening to the public and making sure
that that happens at every meeting. I really think that\'s a great thing
that you\'ve done, and I just want to say that.

The forum that this Board has provided has been and continues to be most
needed. I believe that transcripts from your meetings will serve future
generations as a historical record of how Yucca decisions were made, and
how the key questions were answered. I think that\'s when people say how
did they do this, and then you go back to the TRB meetings and you see
how that dialogue unfolded and how those questions were answered.

Now that the transportation is finally on DOE\'s agenda, I would
encourage the Board to engage in the transportation issues, which is
part of its charge from Congress, and to apply the same level of concern
to transportation that you\'ve applied to the repository issues. I think
now is the time to start doing that, and as a transportation county, we
would certainly appreciate your full attention to that matter.

Thank you.

CORRADINI: Thank you. And I was told we have two individuals, Ms. Sally
Devlin, a member of the public, and I can\'t read the second name. I
apologize.

DEVLIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the Board, members of the
Staff, and many, many dear friends, and we welcome you to Nevada. And we
thank you not only for coming time and time again, but we\'re going to
miss many of you really, especially Alberto and Jared. So, I can only
say we appreciate the time and effort that you\'ve made to come here and
disrupt your life, but you\'re welcome into our lives. And I will say I
am Sally Devlin from Pahrump, Nye County, Nevada, and I life in the
shadow of the test site and Yucca Mountain, and I\'m here ten years,
going on ten years, and at my very first NWTRB meeting when John Cantlon
was the chairman, it was in the basement under Cashman Field, and there
were 400 or 500 people there, and it was a brainstorming session. And I
sat in the room with 40, 50 people. On my right, was Russ Dyer, on my
left, was Bob Loux. To the left of us were seven Indian tribes, and they
said don\'t worry about Yucca Mountain, it\'s never going to happen,
we\'re going to cure all you white guys. And that was my introduction to
Yucca Mountain.

I am so delighted, and I really do mean delighted, having read all those
millions of pages from NRC on the licensing, that you have to talk to
the Indians. That\'s on the next to the last page. It\'s in my report.

The other thing is I am so delighted that you finally, after all these
years, recognize that Yucca Mountain is on the test site. So, I would
like a request, and I see that our Director Chu is there. One of the
things the public doesn\'t know is how to communicate with anybody. I
have never seen a flow chart. I did get one from EPA. I\'ve never seen
one for NRC, and I\'ve certainly never once seen one for DOE.

And the reason I\'m standing here is it is so disturbing to us, the
public, who are going to be totally affected by this whole process,
which I think is already three years behind, according to the GAO
report, but I really feel that you have not communicated with us fairly.
And by that, I mean you are DOE. Now, you\'re not talking to DOD who\'s
going to put 7,000 metric tons of classified waste\--and I will tell you
flatly, as I have at every meeting, you can\'t put classified waste in
my mountain. Because if you try to, how are you going to prevent my bugs
from eating the canisters? You didn\'t mention anything hardly about my
bugs. If you\'ve got fungus, you\'ve got my bugs.

And I would like 9 million, you know how I asked Ken Hess for 100
million for a hospital, we may get one, and I hope Bechtel will work
with them, but you don\'t mention a word about the canisterization. You
don\'t mention a word about the bugs. And as far as I am concerned,
unless you test the bugs on the canisters in situ with microbiologists
and engineers, or rather geologists who have never worked together in
their lives, you don\'t have a valid claim to the proper testing.

The word I hear, and I love it, from our friend Don Horton, and he used
my favorite word a dozen times, model. To me a model is the front page
of Vogue. I have heard it for ten years, and it seems all that you do
do, you don\'t do in situ. Where do these reports go? I\'ve told Dan
about the Carl Stetsenbach\'s (phonetic) report of the chemistry at
Stovepipe Wells. He never found out how old the water was of the flow.
Where did the report go that cost \$3.2 million? I don\'t know. I hope
others will look into it, because it does have the chemistry.

But this is my point, and that is I want a flow chart. To me, you should
be working with DOT. That\'s how I got into this. Because at the time,
the only route you had to put the railroad through was through Pahrump,
and I said over my dead body are you going to do that, and that\'s when
I went back to school. And, so, we had a lot of fun.

The only other thing besides the flow chart that I think you could do is
communicate with one another. And before I leave the podium, I do want
to say something. I want to thank the Board a million times. I\'ve been
with three different Boards, and I shall miss those leaving, and I shall
welcome the new ones. But the most I miss is if you remember last year
on September 11th, we were all at the Crowne Plaza on the day of the
tragedy, and that was a very sad day. Many people couldn\'t get out of
town to go home, what have you. And I think it affected us all, and I do
want to express a moment of sadness, of fear, because our biggest fear
to me is terrorism, especially on transportation and canisterization,
the whole thing. But I really feel we owe you a debt of thanks for
coming, and that we owe those who perished, and what might come from
this, a debt of thanks.

CORRADINI: Thank you.

HUDLOW: I\'m Grant Hudlow. I\'m a chemical engineer and CEO of Allied
Science, Incorporated. It\'s an environmental company. And I also belong
to ENRAN over at UNLV. I have extensive work here already just from this
morning, and I\'m going to write that to you. I do want to highlight
just the, because I think it\'s important that you consider, there\'s
some things missing from this conversation.

The first thing that\'s missing is that it\'s illegal to put more
pollution in a polluted area. That\'s EPA laws. The second thing I want
to mention is that the transmutation option is not being considered. The
NRC has said that if somebody will do that, they will consider getting
rid of the waste through transmutation. Transmutation has been clearly
demonstrated since the Sixties can turn the waste, the 70,000 tons of
waste, into a trillion dollars of electricity. It seems like a no
brainer, rather than throw this stuff in the water, especially near my
house, that a trillion dollars would be more beneficial.

The other thing is that there\'s a French study of a French satellite by
the USGS, and it shows a compression fault that goes from Pahrump
through the Amargosa Valley, and unfortunately, they stopped up at
Lathop Wells, and the upwelling of the carbonate that you\'re talking
about comes up there and provides half of the water for the Amargosa
Valley according to Clauses (phonetic) studies anyway from UNLV.

There\'s also another carbonate spring that goes up in the middle of the
test site through a volcanic area. So, the upwelling that you dismissed
so handily earlier is still there, and it\'s just a few miles away from
Yucca Mountain that it\'s broken through. That carbonate spring
interestingly enough is 2,200 meters deep, which because we\'re at basin
range, the basin is sinking and is very deep, but there\'s still a
connection between the carbonate that\'s over beneath Yucca Mountain.

The main thing I wanted to mention that\'s missing from this is also a
violation of Congressional law, results management is missing. And for
technical people, we tend to ignore that. I can say from personal
experience, it\'s very painful to get into that. I can say also from
personal experience that it expanded my technical abilities by an order
of magnitude, and I don\'t really need to pay too much attention to
agonizing over technical details now. They just come to me, and it\'s
because the people skills increase the use of the technology.

Unfortunately, Congress didn\'t put an enforcement mechanism into
results management, and so we\'re dependent on the GAO, which are also
bureaucrats, to write about something that they know nothing about. The
place to see results management, there\'s a few consultants who are
pretty good at it. The industrial turnaround experts are the ones that
are brilliant at it. Lee Iococa is an example. I don\'t see that kind of
an approach anyplace in the Yucca Mountain project and DOE. Al Alms
(phonetic) was another expert. When I asked him why he wasn\'t spreading
that to the other DOE people, he said, Grant, I don\'t have time. I have
to get money from Congress. Well, that\'s a terrible shame to have a
resource like that that\'s missing and lost.

Thank you.

CORRADINI: Thank you. I wanted to remind others that may have public
comment that we\'ll have a period at the end of the day. Please sign up
in the back with Linda Hyatt or Linda Coultry.

It\'s approximately 12:15. We\'ll reconvene at 1:15. See you then.

(Whereupon, the lunch recess was taken.)

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CRAIG: Okay, could you take your seats, please. We\'re about to start
the afternoon session. Board members, please, especially. And the rest
of you\--would you folks in the back of the room please sit down? Chris
Whipple. Chris Whipple is observed to be interfering with a board
member. Okay, good.

The afternoon session now begins and this first session is what I
particularly enjoy being Chairman of because I get to introduce Bob
Budnitz. I\'m not a nuclear type of person and so I haven\'t known
nuclear people for all that long, but Budnitz didn\'t start out that way
either. He started out as a physicist. A Harvard physicist at that,
which is a very good thing and along about 25 years\--or maybe it\'s 30,
I don\'t know\--we got to know each other and we keep running into each
other periodically ever since. Most interestingly, in the men\'s room at
the Munich Airport. It was one of those random things that happens. More
frequently at the Berkeley Rep Theater. Anyway, be that as it may.

And Frank Spera from Santa Barbara. So, yeah, it\'s time for you to go
now. And you\'ve got 15 minutes. You get to divide it as you wish and
I\'ll warn you when you\'ve got about five minutes left, Bob.

SPEAKER: Oh, we\'re in transcript mode here so that people who matter
will hear.

SPEAKER: It\'s not on yet, so\--

CRAIG: Now. Is it on yet?

BUDNITZ: Yeah. Okay, I said it\'s going to be two and 13.

This panel was impaneled by DOE, actually by, I think it was Bechtel
SAIC, in May. Six panelists. The other five are earth scientists and
volcanologists. I\'m not. I was chosen to chair this because I knew
something about the Yucca Mountain project, which the others didn\'t
know much about. And this is the cover page of our interim report which
was published last week and anybody that wants it can get it by asking,
I suppose ask Gene Runkle or ask the project or ask me.

Six members, Frank Spera, who is here, is going to give the talk, from
Santa Barbara. But Emmanuel Detournay, from the University of Minnesota,
Larry Mastin from the U. S. Geological Survey, F. E. Pearson from
Britian, and Allen Rubin from Princeton are the others. And it\'s their
report, they are the volcanologists. And all the technical content in
that report, which is an interim report, is theirs.

I\'m going to drop off of being the chair of this after this
presentation. And the reason is because, as you heard earlier, I\'m
about to take a position with Lawrence Livermore with an assignment to
go to Washington for two years to support the Science and Technology
Program, and I can\'t do this at the same time.

I\'m just going to do one more slide and then turn it over to Frank.

The charter. To review the technical basis used in the analysis of the
consequences of these events, and to recommend any additional tests that
would significantly strengthen the program. And what strengthen the
program means, in plain English, is that it would significantly enhance
our\--that is everybody\'s\--understanding of these events, meaning
igneous events that could affect the repository.

So with that I\'m going to turn it over to Frank Spera. He\'s from Santa
Barbara. He\'s an earth scientist and he is going to talk about the
principal lessons and insights from the interim report which was
published last week.

Oh, one last administrative thing. You can say it.

SPERA: What should I say?

BUDNITZ: Sorry. The interim report was published last week. The panel
has a final report due at the end of the calendar year. If it isn\'t the
end of December it will be in January some time, in which all this is
going to be wrapped up with this book, A Work in Progress.

SPERA: Thank you, Bob. Yes, actually, I believe the final report is Feb
1.

BUDNITZ: Okay.

SPERA: \'03, and a public meeting second or third week in February.

Okay, what I\'m going to do is go through a little bit of the technical
detail, and then try and summarize it. This is an interim report. As Bob
indicated we had a kick-off meeting in May so we\'ve been working on
this for the last four months or so. And I\'m going to try and summarize
the salient aspects of our work to date. And it is\--and I want to
emphasize, it is interim report. We are still working on this.

The first point is the\--we can actually use the volcanological history
of the crater flats volcanic zone, the volcanic region proximate to
Yucca Mountain Repository, and in particular we can spacially look at
the crater flat zone and in terms of time period, we could look at the
last five million years of geologic history and essentially use the past
as the key to the future to try and predict, at least bound and
estimate. Where do we want to put bounds on? Well, we\'d like to put
bounds on a number of things. Number one, the style of the potential
volcanism, what we call the eruptive chronology. Volcanoes, each volcano
is unique, specific, has a specific eruption history, characterized by
variable products and variable intensity. All right. And we can use, we
can look at previous volcanism and crater flats to put some bounds on
the expected modes of behavior.

We also need to estimate volumes, characteristic volumes of eruption
because, clearly, our mandate here is to study the dike, drift
interaction. And so we need to know what the volume of the possible
eruptive volumes are. And we could put some limits on this based on
geologic history and a number\--a reasonable number, something like a
tenth of a cubic kilometer.

As far as eruption durations for this style of magmatism, the style of
magmatism, we anticipate that potentially could happen. The rates, the
magma flow rates divided by those volumes gives a characteristic period,
right? And the periods of these kinds of eruptions are measured in days
or weeks or months. That\'s the scale. That\'s the time scale.

The other point is that by studying the volcanology and igneous
petrology of the crater flat salts we can specify what we expect volt
composition, devoid of the volatiles\--volatiles are water and CO-2,
which are very important\--but we can specify the volt composition of
the magma. This is important because if we\'re trying to understand the
fluid dynamics of the magma drift interaction, we need to know the
thermodynamic and transport properties of the magma. And unlike redwood
trees, if you\'ve seen one magma, you have not seen them all. All right.
They are very specific. And we are very confident of this composition,
that the potential disruptive Yucca Mountain magma would be alkaloid
salt.

And finally we can also use the theologic history to put some bounds on
the water and CO-2 content of the magma. This turns out to be the
critical variable because magma scan a wide range of properties
depending on the dissolved water and dissolved carbon dioxide content,
so we need to know this number. And the status of this is that we
basically understand this pretty well. The previous DOE work is fairly
robust in this area. Some refinements are possible, in particular trying
to narrow the range of the water CO-2 ratio of volatiles dissolved in
the melt. That\'s a refinement. I think we have a pretty good handle on
this.

The second point of the interim report is that we can use available
thermodynamic and transport property models to determine the state and
specifically the properties of this potentially disruptive magma. All
right, so in other words, once we fix the composition and the volumes,
we can now use some thermodynamics and try and understand the state of
the material. And, this is really critical because the\--basically in
intuitive terms, pipe pressure or even a few kilometers depth the magma
is, most of the volatiles are dissolved in the magma. So if you\'re
looking at this material it\'s essentially a one-phase
quasi-incompressible fluid discus. But as the magma decompresses, the
dissolved volatiles come out of the solution, they go into the vapor
phase. This vapor phase is quite compressible. All right. And so the
state of the magma changes in proportion to the volume fraction of vapor
in the mixture.

So, in other words, to summarize, a magma is a mixture of melt, which is
essentially a liquid, plus vapor. And the fraction, the volume fraction
of vapor to melt varies rather strongly in the last few hundred meters
of ascent. And that determines the state of this material and so it\'s
very important to know what the volatile content is. And this table here
just shows different total dissolved volatiles, the total weight percent
of H20 plus CO-2 in the system and it shows the pressure in black and in
red, or whatever color that is, the depth, approximate depth, at which a
critical value of about .7 is attained in terms of the volume fraction
of the gas. So this will be called the fragmentation pressure.

Okay. The status of this work is, this is something the Panel has more
or less completed. We have completed most of this work and it\'s all in
the report. We considered, we looked at the previous DOE work and
essentially redid it using other models, maybe more recent models, more
or less confirming that work. We have done some elaboration on that.
We\'ve included some parameters and some estimates that weren\'t
explicitly considered in the past. We feel strongly that any analysis of
dike, drift interaction, the fluid mechanics thereof, should use these
properties that we\'ve calculated because they are more internally
consistent and more complete.

Okay. The third point is that we\'re trying to look at now, step back
and look at the sequence of eruptive products from analog volcanoes. In
other words, it\'s not inconceivable, I mean in fact most eruptions
begin with, characterized by certain kind of material that\'s erupting,
certain properties. And the qualities of this material change during the
eruption. Sometimes sequentially, sometimes episodically, sometimes even
periodically. And the implication of this, which I\'m not going to read
through all this, is just that, again, it\'s an intuitive thing. The
initial state of this magma at the time the drift system or a drift is
breached, the state of the magma at that moment is really critical.

And, an easy way to think about this is just to consider three extreme
scenarios. Imagine in one case a melt dominated the system which is a
discus liquid, not a lot of dissolved water and CO-2. So this would be
an example of an analog on the surface of, would be for instance a lava
flow. Compare that to a homogeneous bubbly flow where perhaps the volume
fraction of vapor is 30 or 40 or 50 percent. You know, somewhat
compressible, higher velocity flows, a lot more turbulent, and then
going all the way over to an extremely blow low rich two-phase mixture
in which perhaps the flow is separated in the sense that there is a
vapor phase that\'s moving at a velocity different than the blobs of
liquid.

So\--I guess my time is up here?

CRAIG: Nope. That\'s five.

SPEAKER: Five minutes.

SPERA: Okay. So the essential point here is that the initial state of
magma at the moment of dike drift interaction is something we can put
some bounds on using the geologic history, using thermodynamic and
transport models. All right.

And so the next step is to actually do the dynamics. All right. And this
is actually the essence of the problem. And it\'s a hard problem. But,
we are developing\--the panel is working on this\--a comprehensive
picture that links the fluid mechanics to the fracture mechanics to
understand how the dike will actually propagate, right, using the
appropriate properties. I\'ll come back to this in a second.

This is like a very, very simple model of what one of these things
actually looks like. This is the\--a magma-filled dike and so there\'s
some magma in this region. There\'s bubbles in here. And an important
point is that these cavities\--is that these dikes have what we call tip
cavities. So these are regions at the very top of the propagating dike
that are filled with gas. And the pressure of this gas is a function of
the rate of supply of volatiles through the magma front here to this gas
cavity. And the rate at which this gas can leak out into the country
rock. And preliminary calculations that we\'ve been doing seem to
suggest that the pressure in this cavity tip is rather low; lower than
some previous analysis has indicated. And that\'s partly because the top
through which these cracks propagate are quite permeable. All right. And
this is important because here we show a picture of a propagating dike
and you see that the tip cavity here, and a couple of examples here, an
important point\--and we haven\'t solved this yet\--is the sizes,
characteristic sizes of these cavities. They can be between a meter and
100 meters. It depends on the properties of the rock, the elastic
properties, and the normal stresses that are occurring across the crack.

The point here is that if these tip cavities are very long, on the order
of 10s to 100s of meters, then the pressure gradients in this region can
be fairly small. All right, some of the earlier works, looking at shock
wave development starts with a pressured material at 10 megapascal into
one atmosphere. On the other hand, in more realistic models with these
tip cavities the pressure gradients are much smaller in that region.

So, the main point here, not to get bogged down in details, but just to
point out that to really understand this problem, we need to couple the
fracture mechanics to the fluid mechanics using the volcanological
information. As far as this problem in particular, we expect to at least
pose this problem in technical detail and provide a road map for its
solution. We want to consider explicitly the effects of magma and tip
cavity gas pressure. That\'s very important. What\'s the length of the
tip cavity as well as the gas pressure in the cavity, and we have great
hopes that we\'ll actually do some numerical simulation on this problem
in time for the final report in February. It\'s a difficult problem, a
tough problem, but we feel that it\'s a solvable problem. And so, I\'ll
finish up here in the last 30 seconds.

The principal points in the interim report, we can constrain the
physical properties of the stuff, understanding the phenomena of dike
propagation is the essence of this problem and it\'s a solvable problem,
but it does require understanding the relationship between the fracture
mechanics and the fluid mechanics using the volcanological history and
thermodynamic properties of the magma. Is that my last one?

And I guess the final point here is that, just reiterates the idea that
it is a coupled problem; that we do need to solve this thermomechanical
issue and couple that to the fluid mechanics.

CRAIG: Thank you, Frank. A couple of observations. Michael, you\'re
first on my list.

There has been extensive discussion in the Board about probabilistic
weighting of doses, and these events that you\'re talking about have
loomed very large in there. I see now we\'re starting to really get some
grasp that actually are showing the probabilistic weighting. This
doesn\'t have to do with your report, and that\'s good. That\'s good.
It\'s now becoming increasingly clear from the DOE documentation of it
that these are in fact from a point of view of a probabilistic dose over
the first 10,000 years. He uses the most important class of events. So
it\'s really good that this report is being done and it\'s really
important because it is the big issue from a numerical point of view.

Secondly, the interim report I found absolutely fascinating. It\'s the
best example I\'ve ever seen of a place\--of an interim report that
really spelled out that it was an interim report and the things that you
should look at and not worry about, and things that were going to be
dealt with with last year. It was not an easy report to read, especially
for somebody like me who doesn\'t understand this material. But it was a
very interesting report. You really did a nice job on it. So, thank you.

CRAIG: Michael. And who else is next?

CORRADINI: I guess I had a number of little questions. Let me start with
maybe the most\--I see that you\'ve bounded everything relative to how
you can get the flow out of the region. How are you going to decide
which of these many bounding models is the one to use, or are you going
to look at all of them and see which one creates the biggest effect and
take that? What\'s your strategy for getting some clarity as to what is
the one you\'re going to count on?

SPERA: I think the approach would be to try and put limits on the
critical variables. In this case, for instance, the gas contents of
magmas, to look at the elastic properties of the country rock, range of
permeabilities, and initially, you know, set up a general model that
would be parametric in the sense of being able to account for a wide
variety of these things, and actually run some models looking at extreme
end member behaviors. And trying to get a handle on the dynamics from
that point of view.

The problem is that, you know, it\'s not simply just a review of
available literature but it does\--this problem hasn\'t actually been
solved in quite detail. Volcanologists coming from one school sort of
consider it a pipe in the ground and magma in the pipe. People who do
fracture mechanics worry very much about the actual propagation of the
fracture. Coupling these two is more or less a state of the art problem.
But I think in general in these kinds of studies the way they do it is
to parameterize the models and look at a wide variety and take it from
there.

CORRADINI: But then just to follow up and then I\'ll wait a bit. So that
let\'s say that you develop a parametric model and there are some key
parameters which you\'ll estimate, and then you\'ll do the calculation
and get some results. Is it the pure\--is it the panel\'s approach to
stop there or is it to also suggest a range of parameters you see most
defendable and then carry out the calculation of that regime and look at
those results relative to impact? Where is\--I\'m trying to decide, is
it stopping the parametric model, is it essentially giving your best
estimate as to your judgement as to where the key parameters are? Where
does it stop?

SPERA: It certainly includes the former. And we\'re hoping to actually
go through and complete the analysis. That\'s a little bit dependant on
the time frame and what we can do. But your point is well taken.

CRAIG: Dan Bullen.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. First, let me compliment you on the great amount
of work that you\'ve done, in addition to being a peer review panel. I
mean this is a tremendous amount of new information that you\'re trying
to coalesce between volcanologists and the rock mechanics guys.

SPERA: Right.

BULLEN: But my questions harkens back to the fact we went to the
mountain yesterday and we saw lots of fractures and we know the mountain
breathes and there\'s a lot of gas movement and water movement within
the mountain. And, I look at your bleeding of that gas pressure in the
crack tip to the rock that\'s around there. How do you incorporate the
heterogeneity as it gets to the top 300 meters or so? You know, the
different layers become fractured and it\'s not a easy continuous
homogeneous material, and so it would seem to me that that\'s kind of a
different animal to get your arms around, and so I was just wondering
how your model deals with the heterogeneities in the mountain and the
fractures, and the loss of pressure in that crack tip as it comes up?

SPERA: All right, well, we haven\'t dealt with it to date. Yeah, I mean,
clearly, there\'s a fracture permeability and I think one thing is
perhaps trying to get, you know, put some bounds on it. What the
preliminary calculation suggests that just for the ball park figures,
even dropping them in order of magnitude or so that\--and what\'s a
surprise is that the pressure in the cavity is quite low. It\'s actually
to the forward pressure at that depth. So we may be in a regime where
it\'s leaky enough to allow this gas, even, you know, giving an order of
magnitude the other way. But yeah, that\'s clearly a very important
point, and you know, hopefully we can incorporate some of the
measurements of the anisotropy permeability that are available.

BULLEN: Thank you.

CRAIG: Thure.

CERLING: Yeah, I guess mine was just a related question just in how are
you going to deal with the problem of this, basically we\'ve got a
three-legged volume, 30 percent by volume, of floor space, but it\'s in
two phases, in sort of a 10 percent matrix and 20 percent large voids
that mostly don\'t fill with water. Just wondering how far you\'re going
to take this continuum from fully saturated to\--

SPERA: As far as the permeability structure and how that would\--yeah,
that\'s a good question. I would have to consult with Detournay and
Rubin on that point. We, you know, we\--yeah, I mean that would be very
important to be able to have a good handle on the bounds of the
structure of the permeability and porosity, so I can\'t really answer
that directly, but that\'s certainly something we have to look at. And
we may need to bring in some additional expertise in terms of reservoir
property values from DOE.

CORRADINI: Can you\--Corradini. Can you help me with\--just tutor me a
bit here. So if I have picture one on the left where I have a long link
scale and I have a low pressure, what\'s driving the dike up? I thought
it was the gas pressure fracturing at the fracture point that was
opening the crack. Am I missing the physics there? What\'s driving that
up?

SPERA: Yeah, what\'s driving it in this case to the right is\--well,
this should be like that\--is the excess magma pressure.

CORRADINI: Which is not the gas\--

SPERA: Which it needs to exceed the dike normal pentile stress.

CORRADINI: Okay, right.

SPERA: It needs to exceed that by some increment.

SPEAKER: For the thing to propagate upwards.

CORRADINI: So that can be exceeded by a few bars? Because one of your
conclusions, I was reading through it, said that if the link scale here
is 100 meters, I could see a pressure in that gas void region there of
maybe a few bars rather than 100 bars. So I only need that to
essentially continually push the tip up?

SPERA: Yeah, the excess pressure.

CORRADINI: Okay.

SPERA: Right. Right.

CRAIG: Other questions? Staff? Oh, Richard.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. The missing part of the analysis then would be
in the way in which this energy transfers into disrupting canisters or
waste packages, right? You mean we\'ll set some environmental conditions
within the repository, but in fact how an individual waste canister is
going to be behave is not part of your group\'s analysis?

SPERA: Yes, we would be\--once we have the dike propagation problem
down, we will be looking at the conditions aflow down the drifts and
looking at the, in some sense, easier, more standard problem. So we do
hope to do that. I guess I didn\'t really represent that very well here,
but that is something we want to consider. It\'s actually in one of the
chapters of the interim report. I think Chapter 6 kind of deals with
that, some of those issues. But we do plan to look at the flow into the
drifts and the effects on the waste packages, the dynamics of that. But
thank you for pointing that out because I kind of focused here more on
the root problem.

CRAIG: Still another one.

CORRADINI: Yeah.

SPERA: Yes.

CORRADINI: I\'m sorry. Corradini. So since, I guess I interpreted what
Dick was saying also that you were dealing with what you call the root
problem, but I guess I forgot in Chapter 6, so one of your conclusions
in 4 was that the, and in 6 you repeated it, that the pressures down the
drift compared to a previous analysis, whose names I forget at the
moment, will not be of such a large pressure. So how are you intending
to model, because again I\'m guessing here\--I\'m guessing the phenomena
is such that it would be a high void fraction phenomena, not a low void
fraction phenomena.

SPERA: You mean into the drifts?

CORRADINI: Into the drifts.

SPERA: Of flow into the drifts.

CORRADINI: Yeah. How would you intend to model that, because all that
I\'m aware of in past modeling of this is essentially flow of magma, or
whatever you want to call it, down there carrying away objects. But
here, I could have a very high void fraction regime which is essentially
droplet flow. And what\'s really cruising down those drifts is just gas.

SPERA: Yeah, in the case of the larger tip cavities, that would be the
first material to see the drifts, and it may even be a gas at a few
bars. In the Woods, et al study, I think maybe that\'s what you\'re
referring to, they took the very idealized situation of a magma at 10
megapascals seeing atmosphere pressure in the drifts. And of course,
that will lead to shock waves, and they mainly focused on the shock wave
hitting the end of the drift and bouncing back and the carnage that
would occur. So, yeah, but the point is that, indeed, the volume
fraction of gas in the magma, below the magma front, is spacially
variable as well as the gas in the tip. And the state of this material
is changing very dynamically. And I mean that\'s one of the reasons why
we study the eruption phases of earlier eruptions because the nature of
this material can change during an eruption from a very gas-dominated to
a very incombustible melt. And we want to be able to cover the spectrum
of those types of behavior.

CRAIG: Okay, thank you very, very much. Nice report.

We turn now to the update on corrosion\--sorry, correction. We turn now
to Bill Boyle, Postclosure Thermal Conditions, How Hot Should it Get.
Bill Boyle is Senior Advisor for Regulatory Policy, and he is a
geologist from UC Berkeley. Civil engineering I guess is where you got
your Ph.D, not geology, it says here.

BOYLE: Both.

CRAIG: Both.

BOYLE: So depending upon which audience I\'m talking to, one will either
claim me or deny me.

Okay. I think people can hear me.

CRAIG: Warning means five minutes

BOYLE: Okay. Good afternoon, and thanks for the opportunity to make this
presentation. And I\'d like to acknowledge Martha Pendleton, who had a
significant role in helping put this talk together, and also John Scott
and Lisa Feedar, if she\'s still here, because they take care of the
graphics in the presentation.

So why is this presentation taking place? It was that Dr. Chu (phonetic)
suggested it because this topic has been around for a while, an item of
correspondence between the Board and the DOE. And there\'s the five new
board members, and Dr. Chu thought it might be useful to have a talk on
what it is we\'ve done on this topic and where it is we\'re going.

Now, you can see the title. It was, Claudia Newberry and I were
discussing this when the talk came up, well, what do we call it? And we
didn\'t want to call it hot versus cold. That sounds so antagonistic.
You know, it\'s a term that people use, you know, on the project, and
that sort of thing. And, plus the cold really isn\'t cold. It\'s perhaps
less hot, but it\'s not really cold. And as we were discussing the title
in Claudia\'s office, she happened upon a book on her book shelf. It was
the 1992 National Academy of Sciences Report, Groundwater at Yucca
Mountain, How High Can it Rise. And it was that title that, with
modifications, led to this title. The Postclosure Thermal Conditions at
Yucca Mountain, How Hot Should it Get. Next slide.

The topics I\'ll briefly address today are, what were the fundamental
technical issues, work and analyses done to look at the postclosure
thermal conditions, and work to be done in the future to address the
decision on hot or less hot, if you will. Next slide.

Okay, this is DOE\'s understanding of some of the, the major technical
concerns the Board has raised through the years on this topic. One has
to do with corrosion, that at the higher temperatures, there\'s perhaps
increased possibility of greater corrosion. And the second has to do
with coupled processes, if you will. What\'s going to happen to the rock
and water in the presence of heat, the water all by itself,
thermo-hydrologic, or the rock water and heat together, what changes
might take place. And in particular, the hotter it gets, just the sheer
volume affected by the heat becomes larger. And, if we\'re uncertain
about that, what effects might that have on performance? Next slide.

All right. As I mentioned to some on the field trip yesterday, for all
the countries that are considering repositories for heat-producing
waste, understanding the effects of the heat is quite fundamental, so
even before the Board existed, you know, the Department knew it had to
study the effects of heat, but I think this slide reflects in part some
of the specific contributions that Dr. Cohon mentioned this morning,
this topic of, you know, a hotter design or one less hot was one of the
specific areas of contribution that he mentioned. And these are some of
the things that the Department did, at least in part, specifically to
address some of the concerns raised by the Board.

The first is we did this, it\'s called the LADS study. Many people are
familiar with it. The License Application Design Selection Report, where
a cold design was looked at as well as various hotter designs.

We evolved the Site Recommendation Design from a earlier design, the
Viability Assessment Design, that greatly reduced the impacts of higher
temperatures. I\'ll show another slide in a bit on that.

Just last year in response, in part, to some concerns raised by the
Board we did the Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses Report
that looked at a lot of effects of temperature, specifically with
respect to corrosion and coupled processes. We enhanced our experimental
program, and this is ongoing, and we instituted the Waste Package
Materials Performance Peer Review. Next slide.

Now, this is just a simple graphical representation of one of the
changes we made through the years. I don\'t want people to read anything
into any of the details. Tom Buschek of Lawrence Livermore National Lab
created this for me to get across one of the changes we made. The VA
stands for viability assessment design, and that was back in the 1998
time frame. And for those of you that were on the field trip yesterday,
it was that design that would have had 500,000,000 cubic meters above
boiling, and that would have been the rock in between the two red lines.
It\'s a, you know, rectangle, if you will, extended in the third
direction. That\'s what it was for the viability assessment because the
spacing of the drifts was on the order of 20 meters. But because of
concerns raised about, well, what would all this water that might pond
up above, what might it do to the rock in terms of ceiling fractures or
causing dissolution. There was some concern about that. We switched to
the site recommendation design which greatly increased the spacing
between the drifts, between 80 and 90 meters, and so what these red
lines show for the viability assessment design, it\'s the boiling
isotherm, if you will. Everything between the two lines is boiling.
Whereas, for the site recommendation design, it\'s only the material
with inside the elipse. So we greatly reduce the volume of rock that was
going to be subjected to boiling. So at least from the rock point of
view, we made a great stride in switching from a design with a boiling
isotherm there and there, to boiling isotherms around the drift. Next
slide. Okay, so that was the change for viability assessment to site
recommendation. And as I mentioned for the Supplemental Science or
Performance Analyses, we did even more changes. We looked at even lower
postclosure thermal conditions, which, if you think back to the prior
slide, the rev ellipses would go away. There would be no boiling
isotherm for the lower postclosure thermal conditions. And in the SSPA,
we had three main goals. One was to introduce new data. Another was to
better address uncertainties, and the third was specifically to add in
temperature functions if we could, most specifically for corrosion and
coupled processes, because there\'s many things in the TSPA that are
actually temperature insensitive, like the climate and regional
seismicity. So the areas where we have the temperature dependencies work
for the corrosion and the coupled processes. Next slide?

And what we found is is at the subsystem level, for example, like CO-2
presence in the repository, it\'s concentration of CO-2 gas over the
life of a potential repository, varied between a hot repository, red,
and a less hot one, blue. Similarly, PH of the water that might be
present around the repository varied between a hot or red, and a less
hot, blue. And these aren\'t that different, but if you notice, the red
goes away because the water is all gone in the hotter repository. We
couldn\'t\--they couldn\'t even calculate a PH. So the point is, is we
have many, many instances of this. And we presented them about a year
ago at a panel meeting with the Board on the various changes that we had
made in the SSPA. Next slide.

We take those results and we roll them up into the TSPA and what happens
is that the system level, the results for the higher temperature
operating mode and the lower temperature operating mode essentially look
the same.

Now, this brings up the question, is that real or is that some
limitation of our models? Now, we tend to believe that it\'s more likely
that it\'s real, in part, for any number of reasons. One is our
scientists have been working on it for a while, and they are, you know,
highly qualified and their work is reviewed internally. But also our
work is reviewed by groups like yourselves, Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, independent reviewers that we bring in, like the Nuclear
Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency. We\'ve had our
TSPAs reviewed by Bob Budnitz and Chris Whipple, and others in years
past. Nye County reviews our work, Clark County, State of Nevada. So
we\'re reasonably confident, you know, based\--if we have fundamental
errors or even discrepancies, they will be brought to our attention and
we\'ll have to deal with them. Next slide.

We produced a report before the decision by the Secretary and President
report we did. We promised it to the Board and we finished it in
February of this year. It compared hotter and less hot, and this gets
back to a question Dan Bullen raised this morning about whether our
choice of hot was premised solely upon TSPA, and the answer is no. You
can see preclosure these calculations are independent of TSPA done by a
different group of people, different managers. And for hot and less hot,
both passed the regulatory limits. But for preclosure, the colder
repository because it\'s just bigger and open longer, tends to\--tends
to be perhaps more expensive, ot also perhaps have greater safety
hazards, simply related to increased excavation or longer time frames.
Postclosure, even though there is more uncertainty related to the hotter
condition at the system level, they are the same, as I just showed on
the previous slides. And the results of this study indicate we don\'t
need to make a decision now and we\'ll keep getting data to make a
decision when we have to. Next slide.

Plans to address the postclosure thermal conditions, this relates to
questions asked of Don Gordon earlier this morning. The people in TSPA
will analyze a design that leads to postclosure thermal conditions
similar to the SR design, similar to the one that produced the red
ellipses on that figure a few slides ago. But even doing so, this does
not preclude closing in a cooler mode. You know, we can get it cooler
any number of ways\--adjusting the amount of aged fuel, aging duration,
ventilation, derating waste packages. And subsequent decisions will be
informed by the results of ongoing tests, analyses and modeling. Next
slide.

These are some of the tests that will be used. The drift scale test
people saw yesterday. The cross-drift test is yet to be. Some of these
other tests, the geotechnical test, Mark Peters talked about. Some are
ongoing and others are planned.

This next slide is just a variation on the one I just showed you.
There\'s a time line. The SSPA was last year. The SR, site
recommendation, was earlier this year. License application would be
December, 2004. If all goes well, 2007, and you can see the listing of
the tests over here. The phenomenon they would address described by
these acronyms over here\--thermohydrologic, thermo- mechanical, and how
they are spaced out, bearing in mind that, you know, the ultimate
decisions are out in this time frame, so we still do have time to gather
information and make a decision later for the final decision on hotter
or less hot. Next slide.

And recent test results, I\'ll jump to the bottom line first. Mark
Peters talked about some of them already, and Gerry Gordon will talk
about some more, indicate that large portions of the repository have
relatively benign in-drift environments for corrosion for extended
periods of time, and portions of the repository will pass through
aggressive in-drift environments for a shorter period of time than
previously thought. And we\'re still continuing to do work to get a
better definition of what those conditions are.

And I think that\'s my last slide.

CRAIG: Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Bill. One of your arguments
for the high and low are certainly interesting and it was good to see
how the repository design has changed over time. It certainly is better
than when it had an enormous amount of water sitting above it in an
unstable posture. A number of the Board\'s arguments on lower
temperature design would not be expected to show up in the TSPA type
analysis because they relate to surprises and unexpected failure modes,
which just aren\'t built into TSPA. If your experts aren\'t right about
what the error bars are for certain processes, then you can be in
trouble. And, one of the Board\'s concerns, or connected with that, very
difficult to quantity, but nevertheless, potentially important. So I
would suggest that in a comparison that that point is one that needs to
be borne in mind, even though the numerical results don\'t demonstrate
it.

BOYLE: Right. Right. And I get your point very well. To the extent that
the unforeseen surprise is deleterious, and to the extent it relates to
the temperature, then there\'s, you know, the hotter temperature
perhaps, you know, seemingly that that\'s a negative towards it, but,
you know, our people are aware that we\--particularly during the
Supplemental Science and Performance Analyses, we kept after people to
try and broaden their thinking in terms of, well, what could go wrong.
Push the distributions out, you know, to encompass, you know, all
possible, even unknown bad events.

CRAIG: Alberto Sagüés. Who else? Dan Bollen.

SAGÜËS: Yeah, Alberto Sagüés, Board Consultant. My first observation was
going to be what Paul just mentioned, but I wanted to indicate it\'s not
just uncertainty, it\'s lack of data which also plays an important role
in that, right? Like, while we look at corrosion in the, say your
150-degree regime, only today where the Board is going to be presented
some of the initial information in that regime to any significant
extent. So the HTOM projections over there were based on extrapolation
from information on lower temperatures. So it was not just that there
was an unknowns and knowns, there was just simply no data. Is that
correct? Is that a correct way of saying that?

BOYLE: Well, I don\'t\--with respect to it\'s the word \"no\", no data,
that, you know, without the particulars I won\'t address, but I\'ll
address the more general issue that, you know, by their nature
repositories do involve a lot of extrapolation, and that gets back to my
comment. We\'ve had very competent people working on it for years and
years, and then competent groups like yourselves review us in the NRC.
And so, there are checks and balances on some of those extrapolations.
And data always helps, and so, you know\--

SAGÜËS: Just one follow up. I would say in the case of the Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board, yes, the Board as evaluated the results, but
that doesn\'t mean that the Board agreed with results implied in those
notes over there, right?

BOYLE: Right.

SAGÜËS: So that they\--

BOYLE: No, I understand. I don\'t want to get into\--

SAGÜËS: \--omissions did not update\--

BOYLE: You know, the board didn\'t always\--isn\'t necessarily always in
agreement with some of those results, and that\'s why I, in the
description of the system level results I raised the issue, is it real
or is it simply, you know, the results of the limitations of our models,
which is a question. You know, I don\'t know that the Board ever framed
it that way, but I think that\'s the gist of the question. But we
benefit from questions like that. You know, when the letters come in we
just don\'t throw them away. We look at them and we question, all right,
what\'s the basis for the concern, and you know, what should we do about
it.

CRAIG: Dan.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Can we see Slide No. 12?

This is a great time line because it tells us, you know, relative to
license application what\'s coming up in about two years. You know,
you\'ve got a couple of decisions where you\'re saying your costs and
analysis and tests and the license application is going to go in. But if
the license application goes in and, as I understand it now, the peak
waste package thermal loading is up to somewhere around 17 kilowatts. Is
that, I mean ball park, or\--

BOYLE: I\'ve heard that in discussion. I don\'t know what\--

BULLEN: Let\'s say it goes up to 17. Let\'s just say it\'s a
hypothetical here. Not that it is now. And if you go waste package
facings of two meters you might be able to keep it cool, but if the
waste package facing goes 10 centimeters, which is four inches apart, I
guess the question I have is when do you do something that\'s
irreversible to the mountain? I know the construction is the same for
LTOM and HTOM in that blue region.

BOYLE: Right.

BULLEN: You\'ve got the decision for postclosure simulation in there,
and maybe you pick a panel or a drift or two and you say, I\'m putting
them 10 centimeters apart and if it looks like it\'s deleterious, the
old rock mechanics problems or water movement or something, I can take
them out and abandon those drifts or refill them, or whatever. But when
do you make an irreversible decision that may impact the mountain? And I
guess that harkens back to I\'ve got to have a license application. If I
only have a license application to go hot and then I all of a sudden see
these kinds of things in my confirmatory testing, it\'s different. It\'s
a difficult task, I guess, to back off from hot. Whereas, I look at just
the logical sense, if I decided to go cold with two meter waste space
facing and all of a sudden had the data from the drift that says I could
go hot, I can slide them together, pack more waste in there and address
the issue of going cold to hot. I guess hot to cold and cold to hot is
just another mind set as you get here\--

BOYLE: Right.

BULLEN: \--and I just wondered the rationale behind it maybe.

BOYLE: Well, that issue has been brought up through the years by the
Board, as a matter of fact. Why not characterize it as starting cold and
leading to hot rather than we\'ll start hot and if we have to go cold,
we will. And I guess it is that we feel reasonably, you know, bearing in
mind that both paths and there is some cost difference\--so that\'s why
we\'re at least in part staying with hot.

But back to your question on when is something irreversible done. And
for me, that gets out to when we close it up, for the most part. But any
time during that operational period if we were to determine, let\'s say,
that 10 centimeters was too little, well, you could take some of the
waste packages out of any drift and space them further apart. You could
ventilate longer. You could refrigerate. It\'s simply during\--before
you close it, it\'s simply a question of money. You know, and I don\'t
know that there\'s anything really irreversible, other than\--even, we
start hot and we drive away more water to start with. Well, given enough
time, the water is going to come back.

CRAIG: Debra?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board. If we could look at Slide 9. They\'ve kind of
posed a trade-off here, or not maybe you didn\'t pose it, but you\--one
presents itself. Under preclosure, the second bullet, you say, well,
preclosure safety hazards and costs may be higher for a lower thermal
condition. And then under postclosure you say, well, but you have less
confidence with the higher thermal condition. And, the program\'s, the
judgement that the cost issue, at least for now, outweighs the loss of
confidence\--or maybe you wouldn\'t put it that way\--the reduction in
confidence or less confidence, that you\'re willing to live with in a
postclosure system. That, to me, implies that you have some implicit
sense of what level of confidence you\'re comfortable with, and that
you\'re above that threshold now. Can you express that in quantitative
terms?

BOYLE: Probably not, other than I could\--I think you used a good
adjective. It\'s implicit. I mean it has to be. And, I wasn\'t involved
in, you know, necessarily the meetings or decisions, you know, at the
highest level. I can guarantee you I wasn\'t. But for the site
recommendation\--but I will offer that this confidence, you know, it\'s
the confidence and subsystem effects, which, based upon our best ability
now, when we role them up into this system level, there isn\'t any
change in confidence. So the trade-off is between, you know, this lack
of confidence in the subsystem results which Professor Sagüés might or
Professor Craig might argue, might actually, in the future, translate
into something. But to the best of our ability now, it really doesn\'t
translate into a substantive difference in the measure that\'s\--one of
the measures that\'s of prime importance to us and that\'s the
postclosure dose. So then it\'s the cost, and I guess I wasn\'t in the
room when these sort of discussions were held, but I think most people,
when they would look at two things that seemingly were the same, but one
was more expensive. Many people will tend to lean towards the cheaper.

KNOPMAN: Well, I\'m trying to get a sense of the program sensitivity to
confidence because that has a lot to do with the ongoing research
program and the science and technology program.

BOYLE: Right.

KNOPMAN: And if we\'re already at a point where the program has
sufficient confidence in the science it has, then I think, you know,
lots of people could raise questions about why are you then still doing
all these experiments? How much more confidence are you trying to get?

BOYLE: Right. And I think people tried to get it across in different
ways this morning. It\'s although we\'re doing some of this, you know,
other work that Dr. Brocoum described, the science and technology, as of
this moment we\'re not doing it for licensing. We feel we have enough
confidence to enter in through the licensing phase when we file our
license application in December, so some of the work is being done for
other reasons, like decreased costs for example. Now, some of those,
like take for example the drift shadow. Perhaps as that work goes ahead
it will demonstrate that, well, we don\'t need a drip shield, so some of
the work, it really isn\'t related to our confidence in licensing. We
believe we have enough to go ahead with that. Some of that work is for
other reasons. To help define a better system, if you will.

CORRADINI: Can we go back one slide? Corradini.

Okay, if you said it, maybe I missed it. What are the key parameters
that differentiate HTOM and LTOM? I dragged out the transmittal of the
white paper which you referred to, which is the same plots.

BOYLE: Right.

CORRADINI: Can you remind me, remind us, what are the key parameters
that made these two different?

BOYLE: Well, it\'s the temperature. It\'s\--

CORRADINI: What did you do to the repository design? That I\'m clear.
I\'m with you there. But what did you do to the repository design. The
spacing, the ventilation, what were the key things that made one
operating mode termed high temperature and one operating mode termed low
temperature?

BOYLE: Well, it was done in the model itself. They used pretty\--my
recollection is they used the same TSPA model layout and arrived at the
temperature differences by turning a knob on the model, if you will, of
ventilation. You know, how much heat could be removed via ventilation.
Just to get insights into the analytical results. There really wasn\'t a
comparison of two completely separate designs, one hot and one cold.

CORRADINI: Right.

BOYLE: It was through a temperature knob. And that temperature knob
affects the rate of corrosion and also those thermally-coupled processes
in the rock. And then those results get translated into these dose
calculations out at 18 to 20 kilometers, thousands of years in the
future.

CORRADINI: Right.

CRAIG: My recollection from\--and the others can confirm or contradict
me, was that the primary\--from their presentations is the primary
variable had to do with the corrosion functions for the C-22. That was a
primary temperature dependent, and it was a moderately strong
temperature dependence for that, yeah.

BOYLE: We did other\--

CRAIG: Is that correct?

BOYLE: Yeah.

CRAIG: Is that your recollection, Dan?

BULLEN: Yes.

CORRADINI: So let\'s pursue that. So let\'s say it\'s a\--what I heard
you just say was it\'s something, you\'re not sure, it probably had
something to do with ventilation in the model. Okay. Let\'s take that as
a given. Now I go along and I say all right\--and let\'s go down the
path. Debra actually brought it up. I think it\'s an excellent way of
thinking about it. How much uncertainty would you have to have in the
corrosion temperature effect to cause you to be a concern based on those
curbs? That\'s what I\'m\--I think she said to you and I thought you
were going to go back to the curb, so since you didn\'t go back to there
let\'s take you back there and ask you that question.

BOYLE: All right. I mean, now people can\--and I think different
decision makers would get at it different ways. Now bear in mind these
are for the nominal case results. We\'re not taking into account the
volcanism that Professor Spera talked about. I mean the standard, this
is up around here. 15 narratives. There\'s 10. So remember the standard
is up here, so we\'re orders of magnitude less. We can go to the
metallurgist, the corrosion people, and say, okay, give me unrealistic
models. You know, take the tail of the distribution out\--we can do it
artificially, we can do it in a rational way, and we could start
twisting that corrosion knob. Because the results are very, are more
sensitive to that corrosion knob probably than any other knob. That\'s
what Professor Craig was getting at. Dr. Bullen agreed. That we could
twist that knob and see how we move either the mean, the red curb or any
of these gray individual results and people could see, you know, at what
point would they start becoming less confident or more nervous, if you
will. That\'s an approach to get at the problem, and that\'s what we
tried to do in these results. We strongly encouraged all the scientists
we dealt with, you know, to take the blinders off, forget about the
quality of the data, quality in a QA sense. Any knowledge you have on
the subject, give us your range, and try not to be constrained. You
know, and that\'s what we got. We\'re still orders of magnitude below
the limit.

CRAIG: All right, Dave. Last one.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board. Have you tried to do it the other way where
you actually set the oars on the line at the maximum dose and took a
look at what would have to happen to get you there?

BOYLE: You know, I think people have. Undersecretary Card has asked that
question in various ways. You know, it\'s like, okay, what if? What if
somebody forgets to put the waste packages in, and various things like
that. And I think Peter Swift is one of the talks after myself and
he\'ll show some one-on analyses where barriers were added in one at a
time that gives some insights into, you know, the effect of the system.
We\'ve done similar calculations in the past, including in the
supplemental science of performance analyses and then the SR, TSPA where
we remove entire barriers to see what is the result. And so you can get
insights into which things are more important. And if something really
goes south, you know, tremendously badly, you know, where you might end
up. You know, how much closer to the standard you\'ll be. So we do those
types of analyses. And, you know, the waste package is important.
There\'s no doubt about it.

CRAIG: Okay, thank you very much, Bill.

We now turn to corrosion. Gerry Gordon, who is a metallurgist.
Metallurgical Engineer from Ohio State University. And, Gerry, I\'ll
give you a five-minute warning.

GORDON: I\'ll try from this side.

Good afternoon. Can I have the first slide.

For the next 15 to 20 minutes I would like to update you in two
principle areas. One, the expected aqueous environment that might exist
on the surface of the drip shield or the waste package, and in somewhat
more detail the initial results that have been obtained to evaluate
localized corrosion at higher temperatures. Previously we were limited
on the project to about 120 centigrade. We\'ve since gone up to 150
centigrade, and there are two general types of environments, both brine
solutions, and probably the more relevant environment, thin aqueous
deliquescent brine films. Next slide.

This is a schematic of the evolution, if you will, of the aqueous
environments that there are two sources of water that can contact the
drip shield and the waste package. One is the seepage waters which are,
as long as the drip shield is intact, are diverted around the waste
package. And the other are waters that are contained in various types of
dusts and deposits that could settle on the drip shield and the waste
package surfaces and could react with the relative humidity to
deliquesce and form very thin aqueous brine films. That\'s the expected
environment on the waste package surface at least until the drip shield
fails. Next slide?

This is an example of a, maybe one of the limiting type of environments.
It\'s a high calcium starting water, although it\'s in small type here.
It picks the water from the THC model at a particular time in the
repository time temperature history. In this case, this is for a high
temperature operating mode at 1600 years, and the temperature is down to
about 92 centigrade. And under these conditions taking this high calcium
starting water, which is one of the potential pour waters, and
evaporating it using EQ36 model removing water so the activity of water
is going down with time, and the concentration of the species is going
up. And what we see at very, very high concentrations for this
particular starting water and the ordinate on the right is in roughly
parts per million, it\'s in milligrams per liter, is that both the
calcium and the chloride are over 100,000 ppm, which is maybe\--there
may be on the order of 15 percent each. The nitrate is also high,
although lower than the calcium and chloride. Surprisingly, at least for
me, there also is a fairly high concentration of bromide iron, which is
there in this pour water at roughly one part per million starting
composition. It\'s an order of magnitude lower than the chloride, but it
potentially is an actor in terms of corrosion.

Also importantly, the fluoride content, because of the high calcium in
the water, precipitates out and drops to very low levels, and the PH of
this water, which starts out at about 8.3, drops at these very high
concentrations to about 5. Next slide.

The Board has seen this chart probably several times in the past. I put
it up only to show the three types of corrosion mechanisms that
potentially can lead to a breach in the alloy 22 outer barrier of the
waste package. The dominate mode is general corrosion. That\'s the mode
that is the predominate one in the TSPA because, based on a range of
measurements, the corrosion potential over the full range of
temperatures and environments that have been looked at are less than the
critical potential for breakdown of the passive film, or repassivation.
The rates in general corrosion are on the order of .01 microns per year
mean, which is about 100 angstroms per year. There is a potential for
localized corrosion if the corrosion potential exceeds a critical
potential, and under those conditions the corrosion rate can go up by
orders of magnitude. And in parallel there is a potential for stress
corrosion cracking. Both alloy 22 and titanium grade 7 are extremely
resistant to stress corrosion, but they are not immune in some of the
relevant environments. And consequently, the project has chose, rather
than to deal directly with stress corrosion to mitigate against it by
mitigating the well residual stresses, which are the principle driver
for stress corrosion on the waste package. Next slide.

Although alloy 22 is very resistant to localized corrosion, it can
suffer that type of attack under very oxidizing conditions, and under
conditions where the ratio of chloride to oxyanions, in particular
nitrate, is high. Under those conditions the nitrate tends to act as an
inhibitor. If it\'s low or absent and we have oxidizing conditions, we
can break down the passive film and get localized corrosion. We\'ll see
some examples of that as I go through the presentation.

There are data in the literature generated by the project that indicate
that at molar ratios of chloride to nitrate greater than about five to
one, there is the potential for localized corrosion. And when we look at
the range of molar ratios for relevant environments, they tend to be
less than three to one and often closer to one to one. Next slide. Next
slide, please.

What I\'d like to review are some of the initial higher temperature
localized corrosion tests both in bulk environments and some limited
testing that has gotten underway on thin deliquescent aqueous surface
brine films. These are tests that are being done in calcium chloride in
mixtures of chloride and nitrate up to 150-C. Next slide.

I won\'t dwell on this. It\'s there for your information, but in the
bulk environments these are the two types of crevice specimens that
we\'re using to evaluate the material\'s response. The multiple crevice
assembly and prism samples, both of which have a teflon washer that\'s
pressed tightly against the polished metal surface to form a tight
crevice.

These are some data in phimolar calcium chloride at 90 degrees
centigrade that illustrate the benefit of nitrate. If you look at this
prism sample after it has been dissembled, you see the outline of the
crevice and in the case of chloride plus nitrate at a ten to one molar
ratio, after this cyclic polarization curves that I\'ll describe,
there\'s no evidence of localized attack. To the contrary, in purified
molar calcium chloride, one does get initiation of localized attack at
the edge of the creviced area, and it tends to spread outward and we
think that\'s because very concentrated hydrochloric acid is formed as a
result of hydrolysis reactions in the crevice chemistry and that spreads
outward. And in fact you can see it in terms of gravity as it runs
around the sample.

These are two cyclic polarization curves for these two specimens. This
upper curve, this test, one scans the potential of the specimen in the
solution at temperature in the positive or oxidizing direction and
measures the current density which can be related to corrosion. And if
we look at the calcium chloride plus nitrate, we get to a very high
potential in current density and then reverse the scan. And, we\'ve
picked as a critical potential, and this is somewhat arbitrary, the
potential at which the corrosion current reaches 20 microamps per square
centimeter on the forward scan. And if you look at that critical
potential for the nitrate containing solution compared to the no nitrate
solution, you can see it\'s significantly higher. It\'s a critical
potential, but with the nitrate, in reality, it\'s a potential at which
we have transpassive dissolution and perhaps oxygen evolution. It\'s,
the actual critical potential to break down the film is still higher.
Without the nitrate the film does break down. You can see that here. And
so the critical potential drops from 800 millivolts or so down to a
couple hundred millivolts. Next slide.

These are two cyclic polarization curves for the\--one for the prism and
one for the multiple crevice assembly specimens. And 150 degrees
centigrade, nine molar calcium chloride or 18 molar chloride. And the
margin against localized corrosion is the difference between the
corrosion potential and the critical potential. And for both of these
types of crevice samples that\'s on the order of 200 millivolts for
these conditions.

Also important is to establish that the corrosion potential is stable
with time and doesn\'t slowly increase and ultimately reach the critical
potential. And, you can see that in this case the corrosion potentials
do plateau out.

This is a summary of a lot of cyclic polarization data. The curves on
the left are for calcium chloride with ten to one chloride to nitrate.
The curves on the right for pure calcium chloride. The upper curve is
the critical potential, the lower curve the corrosion potentials. And
you can see there\'s very significant margin until you get to the very
highest temperatures. You can also see that at the higher temperatures,
if you compare this curve with this one, that the nitrate is apparently
undergoing a redox reaction on the metal surface that is increasing the
potential of the sample. So it\'s decreasing the margin relative to pure
calcium chloride whereas at lower temperatures, because of its
inhibiting effect, it provides added margin.

Also, I put on on this chart the boiling points of these different
solutions. The nine molar calcium chloride boils at 154 centigrade. Very
high boiling point. And that\'s about 50 percent calcium chloride, so
it\'s an extremely concentrated solution. Next slide.

Although we were looking at bulk solutions previously, the more relevant
case is where we have a thin aqueous deliquescent film on the metal
surface. In that case the mass of water is very limited and it\'s
possible to get separation of the local cathodes and annodes to a much
greater extent than in a bulk stirred solution. And that can lead to
changes in the PH. And we can see that as we go through the next couple
of slides. Next slide.

What I\'d like to describe are some tests that have been done at
Lawrence Livermore using a thermo-gravimetric balance system. The salt
is deposited in a polished metal surface using an aerosolization
technique. And then it\'s very rapidly transferred to a controlled
humidity, controlled temperature chamber on the thermal balance, and the
weight change is monitored as a function of time as the sample starts to
deliquesce. A number of conditions have been looked at. I\'ll only
describe this first 150-C, 22-1/2 and a half percent relative humidity
case. You can see that on the next slide.

Both alloy 22 and two types of control samples, a glass slide and a
platinum specimen were run through this experiment. You can see the very
rapid initial weight gain as the calcium chloride picks up the water
through deliquescence. And then there\'s a weight loss in all of these
samples, and after about 25 hours or so you reach a stable weight. The
scatter is within the sensitivity of the thickness of the deposit and
the sensitivity of the balance. We\'re dealing with fractions of a
milligram.

But, what apparently happens, and it\'s being confirmed through
analysis, is that initially you pick up the water, the calcium chloride
starts to react with water forming calcium hydroxide and hydrochloric
acid. Hydrochloric acid is volatile at these high temperatures, and so
you start to precipitate out calcium precipitates and then the excess
water evaporates.

Thank you. Go to the summary slide.

Just then to briefly summarize, the waste package surface environment is
strongly influenced by the presence of the drip shield in that it
diverts seepage waters around the waste package. And, consequently,
brines on the waste package will exist as thin deliquescent films. The
calculated lifetime in TSPA of the waste package is equivalent to the
regulatory period and beyond, as you\'ve seen in past meetings. Even if
the drip shield were to fail, the recent results indicate that the
margin against localized corrosion does exist, although at temperatures
approaching 150 C it\'s very small. Remember, these are initial results.
There\'s a lot more testing under way and it\'s planned to go on to LA
and beyond. And the main focus of that is to reduce the remaining
uncertainties in this long-term degradation behavior.

Thank you.

CRAIG: Thank you, Gerry. Questions? Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Could we go to Slide, oh, let\'s start with 15 I
guess.

I\'m very interested in the tests so far, the tests that you have under
way. And I guess I\'m going to harken back to a consistent question that
I\'ve asked all along. And that deals with the effect of radiation. And
in previous presentations to the Board, radiation, or radiolysis wasn\'t
a problem because we didn\'t have a thin film that was at temperatures
greater than the boiling point and now we do. And so if we have a
radiolysis effect that is compounded by the high temperature
deliquescence effect, have you got plans to do radiolysis experiments in
association with these set of four, or more experiments?

GORDON: We don\'t currently have those plans. If you remember, we did
try to simulate radiolysis by adding hydrogen peroxide to the
environment, and it did increase the potential of very high hydrogen
peroxide levels by maybe 200 millivolts. The dose on the waste package
when it goes into the mountain is about 1000 R per hour. After 100 years
it\'s down by about an order of magnitude. And by the time you get to
these kinds of conditions, it\'s pretty low.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. But the problem that you run into now is that if
you\'re in the conditions that are like this, you\'re at the peak
radiation time. Is that not correct? I mean I\'m going to see 150
degrees C at a time that\'s going to be within the 100 or so years after
emplacement. And so the peak radiation time is going to exactly mirror
the peak thermal pulse, and so I guess the question that comes to mind
is, the recent data that came out of the German program for another
alloy C-4, which is similar to C-22, where they saw an effect at about
100 R per hour, as opposed to 1000. And so I guess I would strongly urge
that you again address the radiolysis issue and take a look at this
because the last think you need is for a waste package emplacement to
occur and you have, while this is under control with respect to
corrosion or localized corrosion, and then, \"Oh, shoot, we forgot about
that radiation again\", and then somebody is going to look back in the
transcripts and say, you know, about 20 years ago Bullen said you had to
do that. So, I\'m just really concerned that even though you\'ve done
the simulations, the real institute test, put some radiation in there,
get a cobalt 60 source and do it in a hot cell. I know it\'s expensive.
Argon will do it, but whatever. Those are key issues.

One last question, with your perseverance, if you go to the back-up
slide #2. This is the problem with doing back-up the slides because, you
know, we kind of look at them here. Let\'s see if I can find the right
one. Back-up slide #2, if you will. Next one. That one. I\'m always
perplexed by this slide. I\'ll just keep asking the same question over
and over again. But if I look at the bottom left, and I\'ve got the
emplacement period here, and I\'ve got this relative humidity that keeps
going up, if I\'m ventilating during the emplacement period, how come
I\'m not taking out all that water? Because we were in the mountain
yesterday. It was about 20 percent relative humidity in there. It was
really dry. I just don\'t see it getting to 75 percent, so why does it
do that?

GORDON: I\'m not the right one to answer that.

BULLEN: I know, and it\'s just one of those questions that\--

CRAIG: Okay, okay.

BULLEN: Thank you.

CRAIG: I have four people on deck and we\'re tight on time.

BULLEN: Thank you.

CRAIG: Ron Latanision, followed by Alberto Sagüés, Don Runnels and
Richard Perizak, if we have time, Richard.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board. Let\'s go to #11.

Jerry, am I correct in the perception that there are still no
observations of localized corrosion on smooth surface without crevices.

GORDON: That\'s true, in\--

LATANISION: That\'s correct?

GORDON: \--the range of relevant environments have been tested, yeah.

LATANISION: Right. That\'s good. I\'m very pleased with this
electrochemistry, with one exception, and that is the question of why it
is useful to arbitrarily choose to identify the, I think you said 20
milliamps\--or microamps, why arbitrarily do that?

GORDON: These are initial sets of tests. We do plan to do the
repassivation potential measurements using the Tsujikawa technique where
you break down the film and then you ramp down to where the current no
longer increases at a hold period. Also, we have in our plans, and they
are getting under way, a whole range of potentiostatic tests at a range
of potentials for these different environments to measure the
repassivation potential.

LATANISION: But I mean if I look at those data objectively, I would say
that, you know, you\'ve got very convincing evidence to show that
you\'ve got localized corrosion in the case where you do have a crevice
geometry. And I would say, conversely, that in the case where there is
no crevice, it looks absolutely stable, and so choosing an
arbitrary\--as a definition, an arbitrary data point to suggest that
that is a critical potential, I just don\'t think it is consistent with
the sciences.

GORDON: I think I pointed out that in reality it isn\'t, but it\'s a, by
definition, a critical potential, but it\'s really in a transpassive
range.

LATANISION: Right. But that\'s the point. I mean it isn\'t\--

GORDON: Right.

LATANISION: It just seems to me that setting up a potential element of
confusion perhaps later on when it isn\'t necessary. I think this\--is
great as it is.

GORDON: All right, these are the very initial data at high temperatures.
We do plan to do the more definitive measurements of critical potential.

LATANISION: Right. And you are looking at temperature sensitivity in
these experiments as well?

GORDON: Right, the full range. We planned to go up as high as 180.

LATANISION; Good. Thank you.

SAGÜËS: Yes. Let\'s see #13, please. The trend on the open circuit
potential on the lift is intriguing. That was\--was that a surprise that
it would start\--

GORDON: It was a surprise. We knew there are nitrate redox reactions
that can occur, but to date we really hadn\'t seen them affecting the
corrosion potential. But the kinetics apparently are such that it may be
above 130, 140 C, there is an effect.

SAGÜËS: Yeah. That\'s almost like a 400 millivolt climb over the 90
degrees. That\'s a major deviation in the excursion of the open circuit
potential. Assuming, of course, we don\'t even know yet what would
happen over long periods of time, right? There could be perhaps another
one on top of that?

GORDON: Well, we have tested it in these environments. I think I showed
some of the results, and it does plateau out.

SAGÜËS: It looks like 6000 second curves, you know, like a couple of
hours.

GORDON: Well, right.

SAGÜËS: As you showed in previous meetings, the open circuit potential
experienced dramatic excursions upwards upwards in the long-term test
facility. I\'m very curious to see what would be the terminal values of
that under realistic conditions.

GORDON: There are long-term tests under way at Livermore so we\'ll have
those data available.

SAGÜËS: Because right now you\'re getting virtually no gap there. A 50
millivolt gap or a 30 millivolt gap, from an engineering standpoint, I
don\'t think that\--

One last question on this: We were at the site yesterday and the issue
of microorganism growth and more growth and the like in the east-west
drift kept on being mentioned. Apparently there was a dramatic amount of
mold in the drift. What is the MIC, the microbiologically induced
corrosion program? How is that coming along? Are there any tests being
done on MIC?

GORDON; There is a pretty significant effort at Lawrence Livermore. And
Joann Horn periodically reports on that. I think at the last corrosion
meeting she gave a paper. So it is being looked at and they are trying
to define the more aggressive environments that the MIC can lead to, and
then test in those kind of bulk environments. She is doing a series of
biotic and abiotic tests.

SAGÜËS: Okay. Any potential synergisms with this that could make the
crossover even more?

GORDON: Well, bacteria at 150 C, you know, it\'s a pretty high
temperature. She has been testing up to maybe 90 C.

CRAIG: All right, Don Runnells.

RUNNELLS: Runnells. Gerry, one question. It\'s just organizational. It
isn\'t clear to me how this fits into an organizational plan. I mean are
you in charge of the design, the choice of metallurgical testing? I mean
I\--

GORDON: No.

RUNNELLS: There\'s nothing between the lines in that question. I just
don\'t understand the organization. How do you decide which
result\--which experiment should be done? Is there someone who is
saying, \"Hey, these are the particular waters we should be concerned
about\"? How does that work?

GORDON: Well, it\'s under the Engineered Systems Project. And that
includes the effort at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the
THC model calculations and so forth. The EQ36 calculations. So the
calculations and the experiments are planned out. You know, there\'s an
annual planning consistent with the budget to lay out the programs. They
get reviewed and we end up with a test plan and a model. At the same
time a modeling effort is going on in parallel.

RUNNELLS: Let me see if I understand. Do you sit down in a meeting with
the modelers and the modelers are giving you the results of which are
the most sensitive variables, such as the corrosion rate and there\'s
somebody else there saying these are the waters that we\'re concerned
about and\--

GORDON: There\'s very close interaction with the modelers and the
experimentalists.

RUNNELLS: And then your group, you specifically, design the
metallurgical\--

GORDON: I don\'t, no. I\'m just part of the Engineered Systems Project.

RUNNELLS: Well, who does that? Who says these are the experiments that
we should be doing now?

GORDON: Well, the experimental program from the modeling perspective is
under Dr. Tammy Summers at Lawrence Livermore. And currently in the
testing area at Livermore it\'s Dr. Greg Godowsky.

RUNNELLS: Okay, so they are the ones who will pull together the
modeling, the sensitivity tests and so on, and then say to the
metallurgical testing team, these are the things that we particularly
need? Is that the way it works?

GORDON: It\'s a team effort. No one in isolation does it. We interact
and all the modelers, the experimentalists, materials engineers, all
interact and we come up with what we think is the program that will give
us\--reduce our uncertainties.

DOERING: If I may help. Tom Doering, BSC. I\'m the manager responsible
for the Engineered Systems Project and underneath the performance
assessments. What we have here is we have the environment, we set the
environment, we look at the EPS environment, we work with the natural
systems to understand the natural systems, the environment\--and we work
with the, inside the drift environment. That\'s where we talk about the
waste package material behavior, modeling, testing programs. So we have
all those things that have pulled together in one location so we have a
lot of synergisms going on in that sense. Gerry is one of our senior
staff in metallurgical areas that we all get together and do this. So
nobody does this in isolation. It\'s actually a team effort in doing
this. In fact we\'ve got it so, we set up a lot of teams in the last
year or so to get us further synergism also, so we pull the right
resources as we need them. So as we have the teams together they resolve
the issues and then they move forward on those.

CRAIG: We\'re going to have to cut this off. You look so unhappy. So,
one last sentence.

RUNNELLS: One last quickie then. I think that was 90 percent of the
answer to this quickie.

There\'s almost an infinite range of waters that you could be dealing
with and the folks in the State of Nevada, the scientists who sponsor us
in Nevada, have a different set of waters than you\'re dealing with.
Apparently this team effort you just described is the focus of which are
the most important waters and which are the ones we don\'t worry about;
is that correct?

DOERING: Again, what we\'re dealing with, the infiltration waters while
we deal with the natural systems and we take a look at what\'s the
probablistic distributions of the waters coming in, and then we take a
look at how it is behaving inside the drift when it comes in contact
inside the drift and outside the drift. And then we do the probability
distribution of which waters do we do on the waters, on the packages
themselves, or the drip shield themselves.

GORDON: We are addressing the waters of the State of Nevada has raised
and some of the impurities like lead, arsenic. I didn\'t have time to
go\--there\'s a very large test matrix.

CRAIG: Okay, we are going to have to move on. There were several more
board members who wanted to ask questions, and please do those during
the break because we\'re\--

GORDON: Thank you.

CRAIG: You can do it to me, Richard. When you\'re chairman in the future
meeting you can do the same thing to me.

PARIZEK: Oh. \--may go away by then.

CRAIG: All right, we now move to Update on Repository Design. Gordon
Pederson. And I happened to observe\--Joe Carson in one of the
citizen\'s comments, observed the importance, before lunch, observed the
importance of the PE designation. That is a, being a professional
engineer is hard to come by, hard work, and it means a lot, and Gordon
Pederson\'s resume says he is one of those. Congratulations.

PEDERSEN: Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity to address the Board. I
have a few people from Repository Design, Christine and Allen Linden in
the back, that participated in some of the studies I described. And
Larry Troutner is hiding back there somewhere. He\'s my boss in
repository design and I owe him the privilege of being here today.

I would like to just provide a brief update of where we\'ve gone with
repository design over about the last six months since SR submittal and
talk a little bit about the design evolution process.

The next slide shows some background information on why we did this. The
waste package design is subsurface design. We\'re fairly well evolved
for SR with the surface design, which everybody felt was pretty
straightforward. Using common technology was less important to site
recommendation, and there are some areas there that we wanted to look
at. We also wanted to look at the construction sequencing and costs of
the repository, given the likely funding constraints that these programs
experienced to insure that we could meet DOE\'s goal of getting the
repository built in 2010 with LA submittal in December of 2004.

Next slide was discussed this morning so I\'m not going to re-review the
same material again and I\'ll just skip that one. Go to this slide that
looks at the process.

We have a series of six studies that we performed. Underground layout,
some look at early performance confirmation testing, ground support and
invert design, how to emplace waste packages and drip shields. Primary
focus on surface facilities, and then looking at any requirements there
may be for potential aging. We had a couple of support studies to make
sure that we weren\'t getting into trouble with our science assumptions.
Came up with some recommendations for further review in March, and have
proceeded to this point in time. We\'re in the process of reviewing and
approving the changes. I would have to characterize the changes at this
point as being fairly minor. Basically no changes to invert, or very
minor changes suggested in ground support and fairly minor
constructability changes in subsurface, but some more significant
changes in the surface facilities.

If we go to the next slide, you can see in the surface facilities,
we\'ve moved well away from a very large wet storage facility that would
have been very difficult to build in the time period permitted to
smaller phased facilities, one wet and two partial emplacement dry
facilities. It does provide a phased facility, but it is a full
capability facility up to 3,000 tons per year. Subsurface, looked at one
panel to five smaller panels that I\'ll show in the next few slides, and
looking at a\--considering a wheel transporter instead of rail gives a
lot more flexibility in both building design and movement of waste
packages around the site, particularly when we\'re into multiple
buildings.

The next slide shows changes that we\'re considering at this point in
time were not part of the original studies on waste package looking at
potentially simplifying closure and potential improvements. The waste
package through-put and the surface facility design is the bottleneck,
as you would expect, with the complex closure wells.

We\'re also considering an off-site training facility. This would be a
facility where we would mock-up the technologies for welding. Post-weld
heat treatment, could conduct operator training, have in operation
several years before site operation for operator training and also to
mock up our original equipment so when we installed it in the
repository, it has already been tested.

The next three slides I\'m going to go through fairly quickly. The first
one shows the SR base line subsurface layout. The next slide will show
the revised layout, and the third slide shows superinfusion of the new
over the old.

This is the current design that\'s being considered. It has five face
panels. The first panel is small, eight drifts, hold about 4,000 tons.
The first four panels are enough to hold 70,000 metric tons at a
two-meter spacing. That was just our assumed spacing to conduct the
layout and see how much real estate we required. And as we identified,
we will start some performance confirmation testing initially in Panel
1.

The next slide shows the new layout in cross-hatch red versus the SR
base line and you can see that it uses essentially the same real estate.
We\'ve come just a little bit farther to the east. We\'ve cut off a
portion to the north and to the south where we have potential rock
fracture issues and uncertainties in water table.

There\'s approximately nine kilometers less total excavation for more
usable drift lanes with this current design. So for both the surface
facilities and the and subsurface as a result of the studies, the
construction cost is reduced.

The next slide shows the potential PC test facility. The commitment here
is to start performance confirmation testing early with initial
emplacement. This shows one concept that was looked at in the studies,
which is a parallel drift with some observation alcoves off to the side.
The timing for installation of that would be concurrent with the
construction of Panel 1. And Panel 1 is achievable to start operations
in 2010 with concurrent construction started on Panel 2.

The next three slides show the current waste handling facility design
and two or\--and then the dry facility with a couple of options. As you
can see, and I think the Board probably remembers, the SR design used
very large wet storage pools, a very, very large building. Very
difficult to construct, particularly in a dry site, and I had
some\--really locked this in to manufacturing and other technologies
very early in the designing construction process, so it didn\'t offer
much flexibility in our design.

Where we\'re considering going is three-phase process facilities with
initial dry transfer facility that has some processing capability. A wet
remediation facility and then a second full capacity dry transfer
facility. I believe it gives us the opportunity to learn from the first
facility on line and be able to enhance the design and equipment that we
procure for the later facilities. Say, on this, we also show one of the
surface storage areas. We now think for staging input to the repository
we need, at most, 300 or 400 tons of storage, perhaps even less than
that, and it would be a very small pad at this point in time.

The next slide shows the concept that we studied for the initial dry
facility, and then the full capacity dry facility. These are currently
being worked in the design process to come up with more discreet sizing
and processing capabilities.

The last slide I have looks at potential aging capability up to 40,000
metric tons. We don\'t believe we need aging. We don\'t believe it
really does much for the design at this point, so we don\'t need the
pads, but we did want to look to see that we did have space for
potential pads. There is a requirement for retrieval and we wanted to
make sure that we had space for future retrieval if it\'s required.

That concludes my presentation. Be happy to answer any questions.

CRAIG: Thank you. That was early. Well done.

NELSON: I\'ve got three questions that maybe could be answered all
together. You talk about wheeled vehicles versus trains, and I\'m
wondering whether that means underground transfer or actually using
wheeled vehicles for placement. And if you\'re thinking about that, does
that free up some degrees of freedom in slope and orientation of the
drift? And how did you establish the orientation of the drifts?

PEDERSEN: Okay, well, I think for the drift orientation, I\'m going to
ask Al Linden to address the question. He has probably participated in
the study and is probably better qualified than I am to answer it. The
answers to your questions are yes, we are considering them for movement
of the waste package down to the drift, but not actual placement. We
still have a gantry because we have a drip shield.

NELSON: So you\'re still constrained to general rail slopes?

PEDERSEN: No.

NELSON: No? Okay.

LINDEN: On the matter of the drift orientation, there was a analysis
done approximately two years ago to determine the orientation and it was
established that, I believe it was 30 degrees off the maximum fracture
orientation to reduce the sizes of the rocks.

NELSON: So this is the key block study\--

LINDEN: Yes.

NELSON: \--that was done, not really considering so much the observed
properties that we see now to the lower left.

LINDEN: Yeah, it was the\--the study was done, I believe it was most of
that information was\--

NELSON: Yeah, I think so.

MEMBER: And, Allen, can you answer the slope question, and turn radius
question?

LINDEN: Yeah, the wheeled transport that they are looking at is capable
of handling tighter radius turns and higher gradients. The plan layout
that we have right now still, we have not modified it. It still
maintains the flexibility to go with either the wheeled or the railed.

NELSON: And just one final question. If I look at the layout it appears
to me that Panel #1 is mostly in the upper lift, maybe submiddle MON.
Was there thought given towards extending an early panel to understand
the behavior of the lower lift in which most of the repository lies?

LINDEN: Panel 1 is broke down into 60 percent, as is actually in the
lower lift, and 40 percent is in the middle MON.

NELSON: That\'s not very apparent from the layout, so if there is
additional information on that, that would be good. Do you have a slide?

LINDEN: I actually have a slide here for\--

(Pause.)

NELSON: This is almost as good as the Homeland Security color coding.

LINDEN: It actually shows up better on my computer. The green is\--it\'s
very hard to see, actually, I\'m sorry about the colors. This is Panel
#1. And if you see the green, that is the middle MON lift. And you see
the band that runs through the there. On the outside of Panel 2, here is
the blue, which is the upper lift. We have some upper lift in Panel 4.
This yellow band is the lower lift and then we have a little bit, you
can see the purple. And on here, and there\'s a little bit there, that
is your lower MON.

NELSON: Okay, and just finally, how much below the level of the CRB is
the Panel 1 placement level?

LINDEN: Top of my head, I believe it\'s about 20 meters.

NELSON: Thank you.

CRAIG: Dan Bullen. Probably has a question about blending.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. About what?

CRAIG: Blending.

BULLEN: Well, not quite, but Bullen, Board. Could you go to 12, please.
My question this morning was what\'s the minimum requirement to get a
facility up and opera-tional. And I\'m assuming that that\'s everything
that\'s included with the 1 and the circle around it, Phase 1?

PEDERSEN: Yes.

BULLEN: So you have to have that. So you don\'t need a wet storage pool
to get up and going?

PEDERSEN: That\'s correct.

BULLEN: Okay. So that\'s going to save you some time in construction in
not making a big building. But I still get a little perplexed by your
nomenclature here, and if you would have just said a couple of half
capacity buildings I would have divided it by two and said they each
have a capacity that are equal to each other. So when you give me half a
capacity building that has 500 to 1000 metric tons and then the other
half happens to be 2000 to 3000 metric tons, it looks more like a third,
two-thirds or a quarter, three-quarters. So either take those numbers
off or don\'t call it a half capacity building, whichever the case may
be. And so is it not a half capacity building with 1000 metric tons, or
is it a half capacity building and they each have\--

PEDERSEN: Well, the intent when we did the study is that they would be
half capacity building. And we would have a total processing capability
of up to 3,000 metric tons a year.

BULLEN: Okay, so the bottom is the total, the 2,000 to 3,000 is the
total of the two for Phase three? When you say dry two has 2,000 to
3,000 capacity. You\'re just confusing me with nomenclature here.

PEDERSEN: Yeah, we\'ll fix that.

BULLEN: Okay, and then I\--you just raised one more issue with your last
slide, which is the storage pads. One more. 14. And you mentioned that,
you know, retrieval is one of those issues that you have to be concerned
about, so on these pads will there be shielding devices so that you can
bring 1,000 R per hour waste package out, or where are you going to put
it?

PEDERSON: Well, clearly, there would have to be shielding if you brought
a package out, and how that would occur would be designed.

BULLEN: It just won\'t happen very fast is what you\'re saying?

PEDERSEN: Exactly. We just wanted to\--the purpose of this study was to
demonstrate we had capability.

BULLEN: Right. Thank you.

CRAIG: Richard.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. On Slide 6, you talk about replacing large full
penetration welds. Is this also for the C-22 or just for the stainless
steel, sort of a modification\--

PEDERSEN: Just for the stainless.

PARIZEK: The question really relates to the previous speaker. If you
take 10,000 packages, take the diameter, take the number of welds
you\'ve got 1,000\--I don\'t know what you have, 1,000 kilometers of
weld in C-22. And the question is how is that stuff performed? And we
didn\'t see any corrosion information presented on the welds for C-22.
Now, that\'s the previous speaker and that was the question I was going
to try to get him to answer before.

PEDERSEN: Welds. They are included in the program along with the base
model.

PARIZEK: Are there data, though, already in the welds?

PEDERSEN: Oh, there are data, yes. The welds and the long-term corrosion
test facility, and more recently there are thick section welds that mock
up the welding process on the closure weld. And there are in test
electro-chemically and the whole range of tests.

PARIZEK; Thank you. Thank you both.

CRAIG: Carl Di Bella, do you have a question?

DI BELLA: Thanks. Carl DiBella, Board Staff. I didn\'t think you saw me,
Paul. I\'ve got a question about the repository layout. Could you put
Slide 9 up, please?

Okay, here you\'re comparing the SR layout and the proposed layout. And
the SR layout is these blocks outlined in blue with the so-called
primary block being the upper two-thirds of that left block. And your
new layout, the one I understand is being used throughout the project,
but hasn\'t yet become the formal base line, basically uses that primary
block except for the top part. It\'s the red cross-hatch part, and then
goes over and, at least for the hot design, uses a little bit of the
left of that lower block, I think it was called before, although it\'s
not necessarily lower. Now, my question is this: In its sufficiency
statement that NRC sent to you last November, they said that\--that sent
to DOE last November\--they said that if DOE were to use a design other
than the SR design, meaning like a low temperature design, or they also
said or one of the designs shown in the SSPA, that additional
information would be required. So my question is, for the new layout
you\'re using now, the red cross-hatched area, have you gone back to NRC
and asked them what additional information is required? And if so, what
is that additional information?

PEDERSON: Yeah, to my knowledge, the presentation that you\'ve seen has
been given to the NRC in this forum, but we have not had a detailed
discussion with them to see what additional questions that they would
have on a design for surface or subsurface for both pre or postclosure
safety. We do have a number of meetings planned with the NRC, but I
can\'t, off the top of my head, tell you what they are.

CRAIG: Last question is Dave Diodato.

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff. I wanted to talk about your potential test
facility on Slide 10, briefly.

What\--you mentioned performance confirmation activities that could be
performed there, so what I\'m wondering is if there are any specific
performance confirmation activities you had in mind that could help you
to evaluate the question of whether a hot above-boiler repository or
below-boiler repository helped you to make that decision in terms of
specific criteria, if you can envision at this time that would be
conducted, tests there?

PEDERSEN: I couldn\'t address that. I don\'t know, Mark, if you can
address it, or\--oh, Jim can.

BLANK: Jim Blank, Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The emplacement drift
#3 on that slide is an accelerated, thermally accelerated drift, that
would have ventilation that would least on the order of five to 10 years
so that by the time the 50 to 60 year test is over, we will have seen
the thermal pulse for a 10,000-year repository situation. That is it\'ll
have a pre-ventilation and peak followed by some cooling. And then a
second peak that\'s the post ventilation peak, all occurring with in the
60-year time frame, followed by cooling. We can set the entry side of
that drift to have LTOM temperature peaks in the post ventilation, and
the exit half to have HTOM, or alternatively, we could choose to use two
different drifts and have one of them have the LTOM temperature history
and the other one have the HTOM temperature history. So yes, we are
thinking about that. We\'re thinking about ways we can make that happen
using aged fuel or derated waste packages. But to get a in-drift
temperature and humidity history, that\'s an accelerated version of the
10,000 year history.

DIODATO: Well, that\'s interesting. That gets about half the question.
The half that\'s hanging out there still is what would you look for that
would help you to make your\--evaluate your decision about whether to go
above boiling or below boiling?

BLANK: One of the key things I would look for is, in the presence of
drip shields, I would look for condensation driven loops that would
provide a steady source of invective water to the waste packages in the
two different options. That would be one thing I would look at. Another
thing that you could look at would be changes in the near field,
geochemical or geomechanical changes.

DIODATO: Thank you.

CRAIG: Okay. Thank you very much, Gordon. I think we\'re now at the end
of this session and it\'s time for a 15-minute break.

(Whereupon, a recess was taken.)

CHRISTENSEN: If my colleagues on the Board, most especially, could take
their seats I\'d appreciate it.

While you\'re doing that, I would like to note, a number of individuals
have commented on the need for the Nuclear Waste Board to give some very
serious consideration to transportation issues, perhaps more broadly,
issues dealing with waste management. So I would like to announce that
in fact this has been a matter of some consideration of the Board and
that we will be having a panel meeting on the 10th and 11th of December
devoted exclusively to waste management issues. This will be the waste
management panel. And, most particularly, focusing on transportation
issues. That will be\--that meeting will be here in Las Vegas. The
details of that meeting will be posted on our website relatively soon.
And I encourage as many of you as can and are interested to join us in
that meeting.

I\'m going to declare that we have a quorum and begin. My name is Norm
Christensen. I\'m a member of the Nuclear Waste Board, and I\'ll be
chairing this last session of this board meeting. This particular
session is to be devoted to the Total System Performance Assessment,
otherwise known as TSPA, and related barrier analysis.

According to regulations, TSPA is the primary means by which the
acceptability of the repository will be judged. It is a very complex
numerical model, or perhaps better, a group of numerical models, and has
been the subject of much Board discussion and many Board comments. Most
recently, in our January 24, 2002 letter, we stated that, because of
gaps in data and basic understanding, we have limited confidence in the
current TSPA estimates.

Today we\'d like to continue this discussion and concentrate on two
topics related to TSPA. The first is what appear to be rapidly-changing
estimates of repository performance and the differences in these
estimates produced by different organizations. I\'d like to show you two
slides that illustrate some of these changes.

The first slide shows three estimates of the mean dose rate for the
nominal scenario produced by the Department of Energy in the year
leading up to site recommendation. The first line on this slide marked
12-00 is from the TSPA Site Recommendation, or TSPA SR. The second
marked 6-01 is from the SSPA, the Supplemental Science and Performance
Analysis. And the third curb marked 11-01 is essentially the official
performance estimate used in the site recommendation and final
environmental impact statement.

The second slide shows differences in mean performance estimates or the
igneous scenario. That is igneous intrusion. The black line is from
12-00 TSPA SR, and the blue estimate is from 6-01, the SSPA. The point
of showing these slides is just simply over roughly a

12-month period, rather significant changes occur in the kinds of
outputs that TSPA is giving. The changes in the mean estimates over the
course of one year shown in both slides were due to changes in
assumptions, models, approaches and data. Some of them affect the
10,000-year regulatory period while others seem to effect the post
10,000-year performance.

If we looked at other organizations, such as the Electric Power Research
Institute, EPRI, we would also find changes in mean performance
estimates, some that are outside the bounds of the three DOE estimates
I\'ve just shown.

Now, the Board is interested in learning about the sources of these
differences and their significance and what they can tell us about our
understanding of the repository system and the ability to estimate
performance. The second topic we\'ll deal with will be devoted to
barrier analysis. That is using performance assessment to estimate the
role of different barriers, natural and engineered, played in achieving
waste isolation. We\'ll hear two presentations on these topics. The
first from John Kessler, with the Electric Power Research Institute.
John is the Manager for Spent Fuel Storage, Transportation and Disposal,
at EPRI. He will be followed by Peter Swift, from the Yucca Mountain
Project. Peter is the BSC Subproject Manager for Performance Assessment,
Scope and Strategy, and Manager of the Total System Performance
Assessment at Sandia National Laboratories.

Following these two presentations we will assemble a round table to
discuss some of the issues raised, and I\'ll give you more on that
later.

And I\'m pleased to invite John to come forward for his presentation.
I\'ll follow the same drill that my colleague, Dr. Craig did, and we\'ll
have the dinger go off five minutes before the end of your talk.

KESSLER: I\'ll do my best to dance around the table here. What I\'ll
talk to you about today is pretty much what Norm just talked about.
I\'ll go through quickly, very quickly, in the 20 minutes I have, our
Total System Performance Assessment code, I\'ll quickly mention the
scenario that we included and excluded in the model. You\'re going to
see the results from some of those recent results, then the barrier
analysis, and then I\'m going to finish up by talking about the role for
TSPA in demonstrating safety, since there\'s this clear interest in
understanding how we can rely on it when they change so much.

As opposed to the DOE model which uses a Monte Carlo approach to doing
probabilistic assessments, we use a Logic Tree approach. We use, in this
case, a limited number of branches instead of realizations with discreet
probability and parameter value for each branch. In our particular case
we have a very limited set of branches that subsume or abstract a lot of
processes. We have a branch for the infiltration rates, which is really
that flow near the surface that\'s going to go deep into the mountain.
And we have a focus flow factor that takes that general infiltration
rate and focuses it into some areas and obviously defocuses it at other
areas by the time you get down to the repository level. We have a
seepage fraction set of branches that basically says the number of
containers with invective release where you actually have active
dripping past so many of the containers. We have combined branch of the
solubility for radionuclides and alteration time based on the assumption
that the chemistry that affects one in one direction will affect the
other in that same direction. And then the last branch that we have is
retardation in the unsaturated zone and the saturated zone. So the
implications of the simplified approach and the Logic Tree that we\'re
using is that the approach provides an estimate of the mean or the
probability weighted mean, but that we\'re not going to capture the full
uncertainty range since we\'ve averaged in in each one of these limited
number of branches, a lot of the detailed realizations that you see with
the horse tail diagrams you\'re getting from the DOE results. So that
also means that we have a strong need for sensitivity studies to make
sure that we\'ve got the right branches when we proceed there.

So, given the limited amount of time, I\'m going to launch pretty much
right into the model and the results.

What you\'ll see considers really only the normal release mode, at least
at present. We\'re in the process of adding some things that are more
than just the normal release mode. So really, that normal release mode
is the container and cladding has got to fail for the diffusive release
to begin, and the drip shield failure allows invective release where,
that is, local flow is high enough were you actually would have dripping
on containers.

And then we have a combination of an invection and diffusion through the
unsaturated zone and saturated zone to 18 kilometer fence posts. The
standard normal release mode. What\'s not in the EPRI model, we don\'t
have igneous activity, human intrusion or colloid aided transport, yet.

This result is also another one of those hot-off-the-press, we are in
the middle of incorporating new information, fixing things that we found
needed fixing from last time, and\--whereas aiding diffusion to our
results. And this did change our results quite a bit, at least at
certain times. So this is our new total dose, again\--oops, I think I
cut it off the end here. Oh, I\'ve lost the labeling on my axis. \--is
the probability weighted mean does in millirum per year for the, what we
call the big eight or 10 radionuclides that contribute the most to dose.
And what we have here is an initial rise due to our assumption of one
waste package that failed in emplacement. And this release at these
early times is dominated by technicium and iodine and it is mostly
diffusion related that\'s now causing that\--I\'ll show you in a minute.
You\'ll see how adding diffusion in the one early failure changes our
early release assumptions. And then at later times we have release
dominated by the actonides, primarily neptunium, and basically the slope
of this, the graded, which increases is pretty much in lock step with
our container failure model, with some offsets for the delay of time in
the UZ and the SC.

Since Norm and Leon were both interested in how has our model changed, I
thought I would sort of go through that. The last report we put out was
our February, 2002, Phase 6 report, and I\'m going to call that the old
results, versus the ones I just showed you. And what have we changed
since then? Well, we fixed one error related to tracking release from
the zone with this flow focusing that increased things by a factor of
5-1/2. We incorporated an extra branch for a low probability of
considering a much higher seepage fraction. That is a much higher
fraction of containers that would actually get dripped on. We did that.
That increased doses by about a factor of 4. When we add a diffusion
release from all containers, which we only had from some before, it\'s a
mixed effect depending on the time that we\'re looking, as I pointed out
in their previous curve. So the revised probability weighted mean annual
doses are higher now for the 10,000-year does. Our old value was
basically zero. Now that we\'ve added diffusive release, our new value
is up at about 10 to the minus 3 millirum per year. The peak dose, the
old one, is about 10 to the minus 1, and the new is right up about three
millirum per year.

So seeing the same curve, and not having the graphic expertise of John
to deal with, I used the old sharpie method of adding our results on top
of the DOE results to show where we were, where we lie, basically. So
that the old results are\--where we were in February of this year is
here. With the addition of diffusion and the corrections and adding
additional branches, we now sit up in this range. And, again, I\'m
speculating. Maybe this will come out in the discussion afterward. We
suspect some of our differences are, is that we have a delay here. I
believe that these both assume some early failure release. Our delay
from these early rises is due to our improved, basically, we take more
credit for the saturated zone delays in transport than I believe the
project does. And the fact that we\'re failing more than\--more
containers basically earlier than the project does I think means that
we\'re higher there, but again, we haven\'t quite discussed that all the
way through with the project. And we slope up slower, is due to a
multitude of reasons, one of which certainly is our container failure
distribution compared to the projects.

I\'ve probably talked my way through half of these.

Yes. We assume better saturated zone performance meaning we\'ve got
slower travel times. I\'d say both of us use diffusion models that are
probably conservative in the sense that we assume a very good diffusive
half-way connection between the container and the surrounding rock. And
now we both need to work on that, Abe.

EPRI assumes one early container failure. I believe the DOE plot shown
assumes less than one container failures. That\'s right, Pedersen? Like
at about quarter or so on those?

PEDERSEN: For those plots that were shown.

KESSLER: Right, for the plots that were shown, it was about a quarter of
a container failed early, probabilistically, at least back then. And I
think we assume better cladding and container performance in terms of
that slope-up at later times.

Other things that we do that are different, our time steps are much
courser. That is we\'re taking thousand-year and 10,000-year time steps
versus the much shorter time step the project sees. And, as our curves
tend to be a bit smoother, we\'re also going to lose fidelity, so to
speak, in terms of seeing the effects of any processes or events that
occur over very short time periods because of that.

We also fix our long-term climb to full glacial maximum. We don\'t allow
variations. That\'s another thing that may change our results a bit.

Getting down into an example of a few details here, our biosphere dose
conversion factors are somewhat higher. I think we\'re probably making
fairly conservative assumptions about the importance of non-drinking
water pathways. Dust inhalation is one that jumps out at us, is perhaps
a little bit different about the assumptions that we\'re making.

We\'ve also based doses on a plume size with a groundwater flux of
750-acre feet a year for the total groundwater for the primary dose
releases. And it\'s probably an underestimate again. I think that\'s
more our modeling artifact than real in the sense that we have a very
limited vertical extent of our saturated zone model that\'s confining
that plume size.

Okay, on to barrier importance analysis. Our purpose was to assign some
sort of general value to the various components of the Yucca Mountain
system. Our motivation is sort of a defense in depth. We\'re asking are
all the eggs in one or two baskets. A lot of concern about the waste
packages doing everything. The natural system is doing nothing. We
wanted to be able to evaluate that. So we wanted to provide insight on
important features, events and processes or FEPs. What we do is some
barrier neutralization, which are more the one-off or more than one-off
analyses. And I\'ll give you one or two examples of those.

And then spent some more time talking about our hazard index approach,
which is one-on and then another on and then another on that some of you
have seen\--I revised that\--which is sort of a variance of the full
neutralization approach.

Okay, an example or two of our analyses for the one-offs. This maximum
likelihood wet branch is we did some analyses basically on one
realization that represents, or at least in a branch that represents a
fairly high probability, but nevertheless, was one that probably would
tend to maximize dose and maximize effects here. So let\'s assume that
our base case is this solid line, and if we take out just the drip
shield, we see in our analyses that the drip shield\--removing the drip
shield by itself doesn\'t seem to change much. But when you take out
both the drip shield and the container we get somewhat of a significant
increase in the doses, such that our 10,000-year dose is up here around
10 or 20. The peak may be at around 200 or 300.

Still pretty reasonable doses considering that we are assuming, I would
call it the Sagüés disaster scenario, where all of the containers and
all of the drip shields fail early, and we certainly went what if that,
into the end there where we assume they absolutely all fail. And, I
would argue that having doses that peak in the 10s to low 100s millirum
is\--gives me confidence actually. Assume, making that kind of a severe
assumption.

Another example I threw up here is let\'s just take cladding out as the
only one barrier that we take out. Again, you can see that the doses
would go up a little bit. What I wanted to show was that there\'s
cladding, has potentially a bigger benefits if now you take out the drip
shield and the container and the cladding. You could also look at this
as saying we\'re removing the major EBCF, the major engineered barriers
here. And again, with those gone, we\'re still up here at around 100
millirum per year with the peak when we have, say that the actonite is
starting to come out in the 100s of millirum per year for this one
scenario, which again, somewhat overestimates total dose. But again it
gives you an idea of clad\--effects of removing all three barriers.

Where we remove all the barriers is what we call our hazard index
approach. Really, I eliminate all the barriers, so this is very much a
theoretical exercise. And then we\'re going to add the potential
barriers one by one, and the amount that\'s hazard index, or we do it in
terms of dose, is reduced to indicate some sort of potential barrier
importance for each barrier that we\'re adding.

So begin by suspending your disbelief because the starting point is the
highest imaginable dose. Take all 70,000 metric tons of high level
waste, dissolve it into 6/10th of a cubic meter of water, which is
roughly how much a person drinks in a year, and one individual would get
a dose of something like 10 to the 17th millirum per year. Purely
theoretical. Obviously. But why are we doing this? We want to add all
the FEPs and get some sort of, you know, semi-quantitative estimate or
understanding of the importance of each one of these barriers, is one
way of going at it. We can also include things like basic engineering
decisions, the repository layout, how much you spread the waste out
should affect your dose and we wanted to capture that.

So we looked at these barriers of groups of FEPs, however you want to
look at it, sort of in this order. Think of this as starting from the
inside of the package and working your way out the entire system. So the
first one here, we have it labeled 3000-year alteration time. The waste,
instead of dissolving instantly, dissolves over 3,000 years. The next
one is moderate solubility adding in solubility limits. Then we let the
cladding fail over time, then we let the containers fail over time. Here
is adding now as part of it with invection and part of it with
diffusion, so we\'ve got sort of a limitation on the number of
containers to get wet, and then a diffusive barrier, and then we
disburse the packages throughout the repository instead of concentrating
them all in one place, adding sorption in the EBS. Then we start adding
in the first five kilometers in the natural system. Then we add
basically sorption to that natural system, then we add some more of the
natural system, then we add out to 18 kilometers and then we throw in
the BDCFs for all the other pathways.

Okay, so let\'s start at the top. Hazard index. There\'s my 10 to the
17th. Really, only the peak of this matters. Throw in 3,000-year
alteration time, basically adding in the barrier of the waste form
dissolving over time and bring that hazard index down by three orders of
magnitude because it takes 3,000 times longer to dissolve things. Now we
add in moderate solubility and solubility limitations, mostly from the
actonides, bring that theoretical dose down further. With the cladding
failure over time it helps at the beginning, but eventually all the
cladding fails so you\'re back to where you were. Now we add in
containers failing over time and indeed that reduces things by several
orders of magnitude, again, if all of the containers started failing
over time, you get back to where you were. Drip shields failing over
time doesn\'t really help much more when we add it that way. Reducing
the number of containers that can actually get dripped on and allowing
only diffusive release from the rest bring it down some more. Spreading
out those waste packages over the repository rather than in one place,
again, gives us dilution and that brings the dose down a lot. If we add
in some sorption in the EBS it brings it down and you see, and so on. We
can actually show how this theoretical dose decreases with each barrier
that you add. Okay, well, it decreases this amount for each barrier
because we added them in that order. Order matters in how you add these
barriers. And we can tell different stories depending on which way we
add them. So here\'s one where I\'m basically lumping all, what are
mostly engineered barriers. Let\'s throw all those barriers in it first.
So we start here and come down to here when we add in all the engineered
barriers. That\'s something like nine-ish orders of magnitude. And then
we add in all the natural barriers and we\'re down however many more
orders of magnitude that is.

Now, what if we switched it? What if we put in the natural barriers
first? You can see the relative contributions of those barrier\'s
changes, but there are still big contributions from all of those
barriers. Actually, when we add in the natural barriers first you can
see that our peak here is right about at the dose limit. So what we\'re
arguing is that, even with just the natural barriers, we\'re pretty much
able to do the bulk of the job or at least the Yucca Mountain natural
system is able to get us most of the way down to the regulatory dose
limit. And then if you add the engineered barriers on after that, it
only reduces the dose so much more.

So the conclusions are that many barriers can contribute substantially
to performance. Not all the eggs are in one basket. The amount of
performance does depend on what other barriers are assumed to be there.
The example is the engineered barriers. If you add them first, you get
nine orders of magnitude reduction, but if you add them after the
natural at zero to five orders of magnitude reduction, depending on what
time you\'re looking at. And the natural barriers alone reduce the dose
to roughly on the order of natural background levels.

So what\'s the role for all these TSPAs? As Norm just pointed out in his
comments, the concern is expressed over the instability of TSPA results.
They keep changing on us with time so how can we trust them? I would
argue that that\'s to be expected as we learn more in potentially the
design changes. We\'ve certainly seen these kinds of features contribute
to changes in the performance assessment. I guess I\'d say that I would
trust a performance assessment that changes with, as we learn more, than
one that was pretty stable as we learn more.

As we look at these TSPAs we have to keep them in context to what we\'re
really after, which is all the other aspects of insuring safety. For
example, we have regulations that are pretty protective. We\'ve got a
dose limit that\'s less than 10 percent of natural background. In
addition, that dose limit is to some reasonably maximally exposed
individual, not just an average person, but an RMEI. Multiple barriers
are required. So what if we\'re wrong about a few aspects of our TSPA
models? The NRC multiple barrier requirement off-sets the risk of being
wrong on one of those barriers. We have some margin. We know how we can
deal with things. Many of the other aspects of our current performance
assessment models are conservative. That gives us some additional
confidence. And this use of margin also provides some insurance, meaning
we\'re not right at the limit, but we\'re still below it. So we can be
wrong and still feel like the majority of the barriers are likely to
work and we will be okay.

So what are some alternative then to TSPA? Some would argue, well, maybe
we better go back to the 10 CFR 60/960 subsystem performance criteria. I
would argue that no, we shouldn\'t do that. There will be things like
the groundwater travel time, release rate limits, higher level findings
on all kinds of subsystem performance. I think that\'s a pretty specious
argument. We\'re still going to require performance assessments if we
went back there. Thousand-year groundwater travel time requirement is
going to mean we\'ll have to generate performance assessments for that
kind of thing.

Furthermore, I think after all the work we\'ve all done, our
understanding is solid on the idea that some system components matter
more than others. And that should be part of the regulation and I argue
that the current Part 63 has that in it.

Should we use multiple lines of evidence? Yes. Many TSPA models already
have multiple lines of evidence built into them. There can be
independent ones as well. Those multiple lines of evidence are best used
with TSPA. They can help you understand your performance assessment and
natural and other analogs, if imperfect, still provide good insights, so
they should be done.

Performance confirmation activities. Are they going to be helpful?
Absolutely. Long-term testing to challenge some of those TSPA models
will certainly be an important component to having confidence that
whatever regulatory decision is made is the right one.

CHRISTENSEN: John, you\'re about done.

KESSLER: I\'ve got two more to go. Sorry, Norm.

So we\'ve got two major roles: The quantitative regulatory compliance
and we want to tell many stories about Yucca Mountain\'s safeties and
risks by using alternate models, barrier analysis and the what-ifs that
I showed you.

Well, certainly, both the compliance assessments and the stories are
model dependent. The stories change as the models change, and our
confidence in the regulatory and social decision will likely come from a
combination of those compliance assessments and the stories we tell with
them.

Now I\'m done. Sorry I\'m so long.

CHRISTENSEN: Okay, thanks. Questions? Dr. Runnells.

RUNNELLS: Runnells. John, the example you gave of the importance of the
sequence of adding the barriers was one that I can\'t put my head around
in terms of reality. You have the natural barriers dropping that thing
by some huge number, nine or more orders of magnitude. Then you add the
engineered barriers. How is that physically meaningful? I mean I can see
it mathematically, but I can\'t imagine how you could actually do it
because by the time you talk about adding engineered barriers, the
material has already moved out of its source location. So just explain
that to me, please.

KESSLER: We start with some source term, okay? The engineered barriers
basically would, if we add the source term on, we basically have an
instant release if we have no engineered barriers. Right? And so then it
would\--the natural barriers then govern how that release comes out
through the system with time. Now, if we add the engineered barriers,
basically what we\'re doing is, we\'re saying it\'s not an instant
release anymore, but it\'s a release rate that\'s governed by the way
the engineered barriers perform. So that\'s how it works functionally in
the model.

RUNNELLS: Does that have any physical reality? The other way around I
can see it in terms of physical reality. But the way you just described
it, how would you physically, actually, possibly do it? You couldn\'t,
could you? It\'s just mathematical manipulation.

KESSLER: It\'s more than mathematical\--you\'re half right. I agree with
you that eliminating all the engineered barriers has, in its strict
sense, no physical meaning. Nevertheless, what we were after was to try
to get some understanding of what happens if the engineered barriers are
pretty much degraded and we\'re only relying on the natural system, or
vice versa. So there is some physical meaning, I would argue, it\'s the
idea of removing the functionality of these engineered barriers. Don\'t
think of this in terms of we\'re actually taking, physically, the
barriers out. So we have all the same geometry we had before. We\'re
just taking out the functionality of those barriers.

RUNNELLS: I\'ll catch you later because what you\'re just describing is
not what I think I asked. I\'ll catch you later.

KESSLER: Okay. Sorry.

CHRISTENSEN: Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board. John, I was curious if you could give me a
sense of the\--from a quantifiable standpoint, how many inputs are
required for your model as opposed to the number of inputs that are
required for the program\'s model?

KESSLER: I think the program\'s model has something like 3,000-ish
parameters, about 1,000 of which are adjustable, something like that.
You need to ask Peter when he gets up here, but it\'s something like
that. I haven\'t counted up the number of parameters that we have, but I
would argue it\'s more like 100 or 200. And only a handful of which
actually get varied in a probabilistic standpoint. And most of those are
subsumed in the definition of each one of those processes that are in
those branches.

ABKOWITZ: So which one do you feel is more accurate?

KESSLER: I think that they are both modeling the same process. I think
that, while\--you know, when I showed our overlay on theirs, we\'re
capturing the same behavior of the system, maybe from a slightly
different approach. Well, definitely from some different approaches, but
the general behavior of the system and what are the important processes
and parameters in those. I think more or less we\'re on the same page on
those things. Okay?

ABKOWITZ: That was somewhat of a loaded question so I could offer a
comment.

KESSLER: It sure was. And the point is is that I can\'t tell you which
one is more accurate. Ask me 10,000 years from now and I\'ll tell you.

ABKOWITZ: Well, I want to offer a comment. You don\'t need to defend
yourself any more at the moment.

I get concerned about how well we can microscopically analyze complex
systems. And so I think we get ourselves into a situation, a delicate
balancing act in terms of trying to provide as much explanatory detail
as I can, but it puts us in a situation where we have so many inputs
that we know so very little about in terms of empirical data or other
forms of data that we have confidence in.

So one of the things that I\'d be interested in exploring as the TSPA
process goes down the road, not just from your efforts, but from those
of the program, is the extent to which we gain or lose sensitivity as we
draw back from the very microscopic way of looking at this to a, maybe a
more, what I\'d call screening level. But it could be that we have more
confidence ultimately in the screening results, even though we\'ve given
up perhaps some of the theoretical precision that could have been gained
otherwise. So that\'s something I\'m personally very interested in
watching as we move forward.

KESSLER: One of the things we all need to be doing are sanity checks.
The back of the envelopes with some simple calculations. I know the
project has done it. I know we do it. What I show you, of course, is the
bigger picture, but all those are happening behind what I\'ve showed you
here.

CHRISTENSEN: Debra Knopman?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board. John, let me just make sure I understand why
you\'re\--why EPRI is doing this barrier analysis. There are multiple
reasons why one would undertake this. One is to try to demonstrate the
robustness of the barriers, which appears to be what your primary
motivation is. Another is to use it for insight, less for the results,
per se, of certainly the cumulative results\--just picking up on Mark\'s
point\--more for what it tells you about what you get when with various
processes. And, what the consequences of uncertainty are in those for
any particular process at certain points in time. And that in the
consequent guidance you might get for a research program or performance
confirmation or whatever. What\'s EPRI\'s motivation here for doing this
analysis, and what have you actually\--what have you gotten out of it
besides being able to say natural barriers seem to do pretty well
without anything else?

KESSLER: We were after a couple things. We wanted to\--our main concern,
what started us on this is are all the eggs in one basket. Is really the
waste package doing everything or are there other parts of the system
that, just because of the way we\'re looking at it, we\'re not seeing
it. And we wanted to look at this, let\'s take all the barriers out,
let\'s add them in in different ways to understand how much a barrier
might contribute if other ones, due to our uncertainty or some bad news
from performance confirmation program or something, causes us to rethink
or potentially, in the extreme, eliminate the functionality of some
barrier. So we were after that. So we wanted to do something just simple
in the sense of let\'s take a barrier out, let\'s take them all out.
Let\'s add them to see what\'s there. Are there barriers that are hidden
behind others, in a sense that we were looking at cladding or drip
shields or something like that, or absorption in the natural system such
that, well, it doesn\'t look all that important and so maybe for
research priorities, it doesn\'t look that important. But when could it
become important? When would it really make a difference? It might make
a difference if there are other barriers whose functionality maybe
we\'re depending on, but maybe they are not there due to new
information. So all those things we wanted to get some sort of handle on
with these analyses. The primary one was are all the eggs in one basket.
That was certainly what\--

KNOPMAN: There\'s no uncertainty analysis embedded in your model?

KESSLER: In this particular case there\'s some uncertainty analysis. A
lot of this is for a single branch or a single realization. So these are
more sensitivities rather than uncertainties. The uncertainty part only
comes in in the question of just asking what if that barrier isn\'t
there. The uncertainty of being confident that we have or don\'t have a
barrier\'s functionality available.

KNOPMAN: But no uncertainty in the modeling of these processes that
produced these results.

KESSLER: In the hazard index, no, not in our model. In the one-offs,
yes. We still put the rest of the\--all the branches are in there in
terms of when we do the one-offs. That\'s still there.

CHRISTENSEN: Other questions? John, thank you.

I\'d like to invite Peter Swift. Peter Swift, BSC and Sandia National
Laboratories and he\'ll be talking about the DOE Performance Assessment
and Barrier Analysis.

[^1]SWIFT: Well, I\'m Peter Swift. I\'m going to try and do as well as
John did at getting back and forth through this slot.

I want to start off here by acknowledging the others other than me whose
work this represents. And I

won\'t say them all, it\'s dozens and dozens of people, and of course a
Total System Performance Assessment is built on the work of hundreds of
people. But the people here to be acknowledged are: Rob Howard, who is
the deputy manager of this department\--thank you, Rob\--and the TSPA
team, lead for many years by Jerry McNeish, who is the department
manager of that group, and towards the back, Dave Sevougian, Don
Kalinich, Pat Lee, Sunil Mehta, and I apologize if I missed anyone
there. Those are the guys who ran these analyses and to whom the credit
should go. George Saulnier is not here. He was one of the designers of
this analysis.

Next slide, please.

Leon had asked me to start off with an overview of what he then covered
very well in the one slide that Norm put up, which was a brief review of
the overall results of recent DOE TSPA\'s. So I will walk through that
and provide a little more information on them and provide a basis for
questioning, and then I will go to new results that this group has not
seen yet of an evaluation of what we call sequential addition
(\"one-on\") analyses, similar to some of what John just showed.

Next slide, please.

The most recent work that the Board saw was a presentation by Jerry
McNeish in January. Those were the results of analyses done to support
the Final Environmental Impact Statement to support the site
recommendation. And the model that the TSPA Department developed for
those analyses in shorthand we call the FEIS model. It was similar to
the model used for what we call the SSPA, the supplementary analyses
done in the spring of 2001.

The next full update of the TSPA that this group or any other will see
will be the one that supports License Application in 2004. We do not
have a full TSPA schedule between now and then. But the current work
here, it\'s interim work, it uses some minor updates to the FEIS model.
An important caveat here: this is not, in an NRC sense, fully qualified
work. Some of the models and inputs are not validated. The calculations
are controlled, they\'re reproducible, they\'re archived, we think
they\'re good analyses, but work needs to be done on the validation of
the inputs.

Next slide, please.

All right, this is a figure from\--it\'s actually a figure that I showed
to the Board in June or July of 2001 showing the comparison of the
results from the TSPA-SR, the Site Recommendation TSPA, done in the fall
of 2000, with the new analyses that Bill Boyle talked about, which took
into account additional uncertainty and inputs, new scientific data
available as of the spring of 2001, and which lifted alternative thermal
operating modes.

All three of these are mean annual curves. And Bill showed them as a
horsetail a minute ago. I\'ll show that in a minute. But these are the
means, and most of what I\'ll show today are means.

First-order results that we saw there, what happened when we revised the
model? Well, we included some early waste package failures that produced
this portion of the curve down here (indicating). Slower waste package
corrosion delayed the main rise in dose from there over to there
(indicating). Lower solubilities, particularly of neptunium, also
plutonium, lowered the peak out there (indicating). We had an enhanced
long-term climate model that put in full glacial climates. They produced
wetter conditions, and that produced the spikiness in the curve you see
out there. Each one of those is a glaciation of North America.

And a very important point, thermal effects are small at the system
level. They\'re not small at the subsystem level. The model that
produced these curves had plenty of things that were sensitive to
temperature\--relative humidity in the drift, corrosion rates,
pH\--however, those things\--the period when temperatures were
strikingly different is a period when the packages aren\'t leaking,
except for those that went through early failure. So it\'s not a
surprise to us that we didn\'t see much of a difference in results. The
main action occurs later in time when the temperatures are quite
similar.

Next slide, please.

These are the horsetails, the results of 300 realizations shown on each.
That\'s what you get when you do a Monte Carlo analysis, you sample from
uncertain inputs, produce multiple realizations. The spread in the
results is a measure of the uncertainty in our model output.

The summary measures put on it, the 95th percentile, the mean in red,
the median in pale blue, the 5th percentile is off-scale here. The
regulatory performance measure of interest here is the mean. That\'s
what the NRC is regulating on. And these are not actually regulatory
plots, because the NRC calls for 10,000 years only, which\--somebody
help me out here\--1,000 to 10,000 in just the first line there. And
they call for a probability weighted mean annual dose considers all
scenarios. This is just the nominal scenario. So that leads us to look
at the igneous scenario, which turns out in the first 10,000 years to be
well above the phenomenal as probability weighted.

Have the next slide, please.

Where that takes me, then\--actually, sorry, I should go to the FEIS
update, the most recent results the Board saw. This is the third slide
that was on the introductory viewgraph that Norm showed. And here we
have the red curve is a high-temperature operating mode mean from the
spring of 2001, the black is the fall of 2000, and the two green and
blue ones here are a revised model where we took out temperature
dependence in the corrosion model. This was due to, basically, advice
from our Waste Package Corrosion Team that they were not confident
we\'re going to be able to support that, let\'s see the results without
it, and those are the results we went forward with in the final
Environmental Impact Statement, the blue curve. With taking out
temperature dependent corrosion, we are really pretty insensitive to
differences in the thermal operating mode at the system level.

Next slide, please.

Now, this is the igneous activity that we came to here. And what I\'ve
chosen to do here to make sure that we understand what we\'ve done,
these are not probability weighted, these are what we call the
conditional dose. This will be the igneous dose that people would get if
they were there for it. And here is\--I guess I didn\'t say up there how
many that is\--I think that might be 5,000 realizations pasted in there,
but only showing every tenth, 2,500 curves for an event happening at
Year 100, and then the dose a person would get living 18 kilometers from
the site, or in this case 20 kilometers from the site, in each year
following. So we\'re on the order of I believe the mean up there is
around 13 rem in the first year that a person who was there would get.
This was the model we used in the fall of 2000, the TSPA-SR model.

That dose would drop off in later years. By Year 2000, the person
beneath the site is getting a relatively much smaller dose, about 1
millirem, it looks like. And the dose they\'re getting is from living on
top of contaminated ash from farming and breathing, eating, doing what
people do.

The set of curves down here are means from distributions like those
above for events happening at different times in the future. So if a
volcano happened at the Year 5000, it would look like that pale green
curve. My apologies to the people looking in black and white. And the
dropoff in the first year peak from these conditional events should be,
and is, we\'ve confirmed it, that is the radioactive decay curve.
That\'s the change in repository inventory due to radioactive decay.
Most of the rest of the dropoff on those curves is due to the soil
removal model that we used in SR. Basically it allows for loss of
agricultural soil due to primarily wind erosion.

Now, that\'s the conditional dose, that\'s not what NRC is regulating
on, they do want a probability-weighted dose, so I\'ll show you how we
get to it from there.

Can I have the next slide, please?

And I know it\'s in the handouts, this summation sign comes out as an E.
You might want to correct that, it is not an E, it should be a
summation. What I\'ve shown here in this sketch are examples of
hypothetical dose curves, like the ones in the previous slide, just
means only, let\'s say, for events that might happen. Volcano One might
happen at Time One, Volcano Six at Time Six, and so on.

Let\'s assume for a second that the volcano could happen in any year in
the future. Our analysis doesn\'t know what year it could happen in. But
a person living at any year in the future could therefore be getting a
dose from a volcano that happened far before their time or shortly
before or right in the year they\'re alive. That person\'s
probability-weighted dose is the sum of the probability of all the
events through time times the dose associated with each of those events,
including the events that might happen after their lifetimes. Those
might have a zero dose, but there\'s still some probability that a
volcano didn\'t happen before they lived, it might happen after they
lived.

If you go through this summation through time, the initial times, the
first year dose, the conditional dose, is high, but the probability is
fairly large that the event hasn\'t happened yet. It may happen later.
At later times, as we go out through time, the probability the volcano
has happened before the time that you lived, that probability has gone
up. And after 10,000 years, the annual probability is 10^4^ times higher
than it was in the first year that you\'re living on top of contaminated
ash.

So what happens is that this summation through time starts off
relatively low, climbs, and then starts to drop off again as radioactive
decay reduces the inventory. This is what we thought the formula would
give us.

Next slide, please.

And actually does. The first time we ran it we got this black curve down
here (indicating). That black curve there is the mean generated from the
conditional doses shown two pages back. The right-hand part of the curve
out here (indicating), those are groundwater doses associated with
volcanic event. It damages packages within the drifts, takes a longer
period of time for those doses to reach the 20-kilometer boundary.
Eventually, however, those become doses become significant. In an SR
model, by 10,000 years they\'ve exceeded the ashfall dose.

All right, the blue curve here (indicating) and the red one are the SSPA
doses. We changed them and we changed the model some, so the eruptive
portion of the dose\--that\'s the blue curve\--went up and the
groundwater portion went down. And we know why they went up, basically
reasons are given here. We had some changes in our event probability
recommendations from our volcanologists, changes in our biosphere dose
conversion factors from our biosphere team\--that has to do with the
inhalation dose from ash\--changes in the wind speed data set we used,
and a change in the estimate of number of packages that were damaged in
an eruption. And the groundwater dose went down primarily due to changes
in the solubility models.

All right, I\'m going to\--can I have the next slide here? Oh, that\'s
right, I just had to show you that we have the full uncertainty
distribution associated with those curves.

Next slide, please.

All right, here\--I hope I have enough time to cover this\--switching
here to the current work. This is work just essentially in progress, it
was just finished a few weeks ago, we\'re still evaluating it, are
sequential addition barrier analyses, analogous to the EPRI \"one-on\"
analyses. Sequence is important. John said it and I\'ll say it. The most
obvious example is that if we put the waste package in first, yes, it
does mask the other barriers. It doesn\'t mean they aren\'t working, it
just means that we can\'t see it if we put that in first in an analysis.

The sequence I\'m going to show you here focuses on the natural system.
We put that in first deliberately so you can see its effect. And we left
out the\--not left out\--we put diffusion in at the end of the sequence
primarily to facilitate comparison with EPRI\'s analyses published in
February. At that time they did not have diffusion in their model.

Caveats: the work here is for insight only. First of all, it\'s not NRC
qualified, or not qualified for NRC use. Second, the NRC does require
multiple barrier analyses under 63 Part 115. We\'re not sure this is it,
so I don\'t want people thinking it is. It might be, but we
don\'t\--this is not being presented as part of our License Application.
And this is only nominal performance, just remember.

Next slide, please.

I\'ll start off with this is the bottom line. This is what the system
looks like now with all the barriers in, it\'s the full model as
modified very slightly from where we were last fall and winter. The
modifications: first of all, we added Sr-90, Cs-137 for transport. We
don\'t need them for what we think of as a real system model, but we do
for these barrier-removed models because you get some very fast
releases. In the full system, except for the volcanic scenario, they\'re
not there by the time we start getting doses. We once again updated our
long-term climate states. The effect is very minor from that. We now are
using a regulatory specification of 3,000 acre-feet of water per year.
And one other thing not listed up there, these results now do include
one waste package early failure per realization. We did that to get a
better coverage of the early failures.

So we can come back to that slide later if we need to, but next slide,
please. In the interest of time I\'m going to move very quickly here.
Here are the cases we\'ve got, and you\'ll see these curves in a minute:

Case 1: No barriers. This is the hypothetical, all waste dissolved
directly in 3,000 acre-feet of water per year. A little different from
what EPRI has done, but that\'s 3,000 acre-feet is what the regulation
specifies, the NRC and EPA regulations. It\'s not, by the way, all the
radionuclides in the waste, it\'s just the ones that we\'re tracking. We
don\'t have dose conversion factors for the very short-lived isotopes in
our models, so we aren\'t counting them here.

Case 2: Added waste-form degradation limits.

Case 3: Added solubility limits and colloidal stability.

Case 4: Added cladding.

Our concept here\--and can I have the next slide?\--okay, our concept
here\--this is just a picture of what the mountain looks like\--was that
somehow we\'d manage to build a repository where we left the waste on
the surface, bare fuel rods sitting on the land surface. The only
barriers functioning here are those associated with the waste form
itself. You asked about realism here. There\'s no realism in this. I\'m
very confident this will not be a design, but there it is. So this gets
us through our waste form barriers.

Next slide, please.

Now we\'re going to add the Natural System in. Add surficial soils and
topography. Basically this converts rainfall precipitation to
infiltration. Now we\'ve got a water term, infiltration flux.

Case 6: Add the UZ flow and transport below the repository. Now we\'ve
got transport processes, retardation and so on, working in UZ flow and
transport.

Case 7: Add the Saturated Zone.

Next slide, please. And I won\'t stay on this one, this just shows the
sam information.

Next slide, please.

Now we\'re going to put in Engineered System components in these
analyses. And here\'s a question as to why we called the UZ above the
repository part of the Engineered System and not part of the Natural
System. We could have called it either way. But the main effect here,
what we\'re doing at this step is we\'re changing the infiltration flux
to the seepage flux. Most of that change is due to the drift effects:
capillary effects, thermal effects. So our idea when we called this an
engineered barrier here is that at this point we\'re putting the waste
in an engineered facility, we\'re putting it in a tunnel underground.

Case 9: Add the invert. We get sorption here on the crushed rock invert.

Case 10: Add the drip shield.

Case 11: Add the waste package. In both cases we\'re adding the
degradation models with it.

Case 12: At this point we add diffusion in. We\'d left it out until now
because we were trying to get something comparable with the EPRI
results.

Next slide, please. Next slide, please. That just shows the same thing.

The results. Probably many of you have already been looking at it for a
while. That is equivalent to the hazard index that John showed. Much of
the difference there is due to the different dilution factors, amount of
water we used. The curves here (indicating), there\'s no surprise here.
They\'re listed here in the same order I just listed them through. So
you see adding waste form degradation, adding solubility, adding
cladding, adding the surficial effects to go from precipitation to
infiltration.

What you see on this sequence here\--I have a summary over here on the
right\--in this sequence the UZ below the repository provides the
biggest incremental impact on both the time of the dose and the
magnitude of the peak. The time of the peak shifts from somewhere before
100 years for all those to somewhere out here, what, 40,000 years I
think. That\'s the first full glacial. And the magnitude shifts of the
peak shifts from somewhere in there to somewhere down there
(indicating), about four orders of magnitude. The UZ is doing a lot
here.

Okay, next slide, please.

This one didn\'t work very well in the handouts, I apologize. The point
of this is just to show a simpler version with some of the sort of noise
taken off, so in the components that show the biggest effects. In the
interest of time, I think I\'m going to slide right over that one.

Next slide, please.

We did one more case to look at\--what we didn\'t have the luxury of
doing was the number of cases that John did, where he switched the
order, put engineered first, natural first. We have one such case here,
our Case 13, where we put the saturated zone in before we put the
unsaturated zone transport, just to see\--in the previous slides the
saturated zone wasn\'t doing very much, it was effectively masked by the
unsaturated zone. And not surprisingly, the same things cause delay or
reduction of dose in both. So we put the saturated zone in first, and so
you can see a jump there from infiltration to saturated zone transport
and see what the\--essentially what benefit, in this sequence, you get
from the saturated zone itself.

Next slide. Conclusions here. The first part of these conclusions have
to do with the first part of the talk.

The changes in TSPA results from the site recommendation to the present:
They\'re consistent with the purposes of the analyses. We had an
increasing emphasis on realistic treatment of uncertainty, less reliance
on bounding assumptions, which is where we were in the fall of 2000.
It\'s consistent with incorporating new information as it becomes
available. For example, the igneous disruption scenario, doses there
went up because we had new information about BDCF\'s, wind speed, and so
on.

This point I think is fairly important, uncertainty in relatively few
processes drives changes in the results. Yes, we have many, many
hundreds of uncertain parameters and we\'re looking at ways to perhaps
make better use of that number, but not all of them have big effects on
the uncertainty in the outcome. Waste package performance is important:
early failures, general corrosion rate. Solubility limits are important,
and obviously things that have to do with igneous activity are important
for the total dose.

And the \"one-on\" barrier component analyses provide good insight into
nominal performance. Keep in mind, though, order does matter. If you\'re
looking for them to represent a physical reality, they aren\'t going to.
They\'re deliberately non-realistic analyses, very much like the
neutralization studies in that case where you imagine we neutralize,
say, the unsaturated zone above the repository. This is physically
impossible, we\'re not going to remove the top half of the mountain, but
we can model it. Same thing happens here where we choose, for example,
to model UZ transport before we even put a drift in. That case, by the
way, could be conceptualized as thinking of the waste form as if it were
an ore body, take the fuel rods and somehow embed them in rock. But this
is not physically possible, it\'s just a way of looking at the system.

And I\'m going to stop there.

DR. ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz with the Board. I wanted to make sure I
understood the one-on concept. I understand that the order matters, but
is it fair to assume that you would expect to see either none or some
improvement with the addition of each barrier sequentially?

MR. SWIFT: Yes. If the process is actually a barrier. Diffusion is not,
that\'s why Case 12 where we added diffusion to make a point of saying
that\'s not a barrier because it allows releases from the non-seeping
environments under drip shields. That\'s the only exception to that.
Otherwise, yes, you should see either no effect or reduction.

DR. ABKOWITZ: Okay, if we could turn to Slide No. 19. I was curious,
you\'ve just explained why the diffusion curve shows a higher risk when
added to all the processes that have been added prior, but how do you
explain on the upper part of the curve where you have the\--for example,
the \"add waste-form degradation curve\"\--

MR. SWIFT: Do you want a pointer?

DR. ABKOWITZ: Yes, please, thank you. Just tell me how to use it.

MR. SWIFT: There\'s a button.

DR. ABKOWITZ: How do you explain\--if you believe that assumption, then
you would like to believe that each of these things is going to be lower
than the previous one or along the same line, or perhaps slightly
different because of the uncertainties, but you\'ve got some inflection
points here that I\'d like to understand why they happen.

MR. SWIFT: It\'s because of the question of the release rate. The first
curve, the black one that drops off steeply, obviously everything is
higher than that later in time because you\'re inventory limited,
you\'ve taken the entire inventory and gotten it out already. So things
that push the peak out in time will show an increase at later times just
because you\'ve still got an inventory left in there to be releasing
dose. In many of these, except the first one, we\'ve actually gotten all
the inventory out, and they\'re still falling off out there at later
times.

DR. ABKOWITZ: Okay, so this is\--if you were to carry this out over
billions of years, you\'d eventually have all of the waste out in every
scenario.

MR. SWIFT: Yes, every one of these. I\'m not sure what the geologic
meaning of that would be, but\--

DR. ABKOWITZ: Okay. Thank you.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Dan Bullen.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Could we go to Figure 4, please? I want to
understand this a little bit here. The short time period, from 1,000 to
10,000 years, is essentially the results of a quarter of the waste
package failure, on average, probabilistically weighted, or however you
do that?

MR. SWIFT: No. No. One package failed.

DR. BULLEN: So you failed one package?

MR. SWIFT: Out of 11,000.

DR. BULLEN: Out of 11,000, and that\'s the difference between LTOM and
HTOM because of that. And I guess the concern that I have is\--and I
know you haven\'t incorporated this into the model for waste package
degradation\--but I harken back to what Gerry Gordon showed us a little
bit earlier about Alloy-22 corrosion in critical potentials as a
function of temperature, and Alberto Sagüés brought up the point that,
you know, at 135 to 150, the difference between the corrosion potential
and the critical potential is not statistically significant. I mean they
look like they\'re the same. And so I think about these things sitting
here being close to each and, you know, statistically varying, and then
I think about it sitting there for, I don\'t know, 1,000 years at about
this time. And I\'m thinking, okay, 1,000 years at 135 degrees versus
1,000 years at 90 degrees C and I\'ve got a difference in corrosion
potential of 100 millivolts versus 1,000 millivolts. I just can\'t
imagine that there wouldn\'t be some, in your model, difference in the
temperature-dependent performance of those.

Now you don\'t have that in here now, but the way I look at that, it\'s
just like I just can\'t see it only being an order of magnitude. Because
if this is one waste package failure, I could probably scale that out of
11,000 and say, \"Okay, what if I failed 100 waste packages?\" It\'s
going to scale up linearly, right?

MR. SWIFT: Yes.

DR. BULLEN: So it\'s going to go up 100 times, so I get a two-order
magnitude difference just because\--and I\'m only talking\--I\'m talking
a complete order of magnitude difference in the corrosion potential. So
I still don\'t buy your last statement, thermal effects are small at the
system level. I think thermal effects are massed.

MR. SWIFT: Okay. I\'m not going to debate that last statement. But the
difference\--we do see an effect of the different corrosion rates at
different temperatures. We see it out here, though, when we start to see
general corrosion. The red curve is consistently to the left of the blue
curve out here. The high temperature is consistently to the left of the
blue curve. That is because in the model the packages that are hotter
early basically got a head start on general corrosion. When a system
cooled down\--this model\--they\'d corrode at the same rate, but they
had picked up a head start. They lost quite a lot of the wall thickness
back in this time period here (indicating) when it was hot, but it
hadn\'t gone all the way through until you got way out here.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. I completely agree\--

MR. SWIFT: Okay.

DR. BULLEN: \--and I think those are right. My concern is that this is
localized corrosion, and if it happens early on, then the head start is
much greater.

MR. SWIFT: Right.

DR. BULLEN: I mean you can be 90, 95 percent through a wall, and then if
I\'m doing bulk corrosion, whoops, I\'m through a lot faster.

MR. SWIFT: Yes. Okay.

DR. BULLEN: So those are the issues.

MR. SWIFT: In these models, the conditions, chemical conditions to a
localized corrosion did not occur. They could have occurred and did not
occur in these models.

DR. BULLEN: Right. Thank you.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Debra Knopman.

DR. DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board. I just want to emphasize that if you
change the mechanism of corrosion, it will change your model altogether.
And if you\--God help us, if you lumped in stress corrosion cracking,
for example, you\'d have a completely different model, and I presume you
haven\'t done that modeling yet for disastrous failure due to cracking
or penetration due to localized corrosion.

MR. SWIFT: Yes, actually, the question is a fair one, and I\'m not the
person to answer it. That would go to our waste corrosion team if
someone here wants to try and field it.

MR. GORDON: Yes, Gerry Gordon. We do model that stress corrosion
cracking in the TSPA. Because the cracks are limited in length because
of the distribution of the residual stress and they\'re fairly tight,
the release through them is fairly low, but it is modeled. Also, the
calcium chloride environment is very unlikely on the waste package as
long as the drip shield is intact.

DR. DUQUETTE: If there\'s drip shield?

MR. GORDON: If there\'s a drip shield.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Debra Knopman.

DR. KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board. Peter, in your presentation and in the
write-up on this I get the impression that there\'s surprise that the
largest reduction in the peak of the mean annual dose is coming from the
unsaturated zone. Is this new? Is this a new insight?

MR. SWIFT: It may be. We haven\'t shown results in this way before. Am I
surprised? No. I think the order of sequencing the matter is so much on
analysis that you could structure analysis to show a large contribution
from\--I think if I put in the invert first with bare waste sitting on a
bed of fresh tuff gravel on the land surface and took credit for
diffusion and sorption processes and invert, I could show that to be an
important barrier that way. But yes, the UZ looks good in this.

DR. KNOPMAN: Then just to be clear, this is the first time that the
program has done a one-on analysis?

MR. SWIFT: Yes.

DR. KNOPMAN: Okay. All right, that\'s all.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Paul.

DR. CRAIG: Paul Craig, Board. I\'m happy when I hear some presentations
that let me be really positive, and yours and John Kessler\'s fall into
that category. For the first time today I have seen evidence that the
mountain really does not only something but a lot. And the two
complementary presentations really do a nice job of making that point.
Now we have to look at it, the first time we\'ve seen it, but
nevertheless the initial message is a really clear one, and I would call
it new.

The second thing which I find fascinating is on page 7. And Steve
Frishman and Liz here, and Jerry Kohn, who I wish were here, should be
very happy to see your conditional dose showing these very large doses
when you don\'t do the weighting. As we\'ve heard in many, many
exchanges, this has been a source of enormous controversy, and it all
has to do with presentation and communication, and you\'re now doing it
right, so thank you. Steve is here, but I wish Jerry were here to hear
it, too, because it\'s been a major point of his for a long time.

DR. CORRADINI: Corradini. Can we go back to\--well, it doesn\'t matter
the slide, let me just ask the question. There was a discussion before
about the presence of the drip shield and then the presence of, or lack
of presence of, the container. You did this in a certain fashion where
you put on the\--if I understood this correctly, you put it on the drip
shield and you put on the waste package. Did you do the reverse?

MR. SWIFT: Not in this analysis, but we have run one-off analyses going
the other way, where we\'ve tried taking out just the waste package or
taking out just the drip shield.

DR. CORRADINI: Which has the bigger effect?

MR. SWIFT: The waste package is a larger barrier.

DR. CORRADINI: Okay. By how much? Or the other thing that I guess I\'m
curious about is the way you show this is in terms of total dose. Still
something is not satisfying to me the way this is being shown. Is there
a better way? Have you thought about a way of doing this? Because
showing dose, mean annual dose versus years, or however you do it,
doesn\'t strike me as a manner. If percentage is an appropriate way, is
it a factor based on the one-off or one-on? Do you know what I\'m
asking? On how you would show it. Because what the previous speaker,
John Kessler, had shown relative to natural versus engineered I might
have argued it a different way, but it also would bring up what Dr.
Craig was saying, the natural barriers are on the order of the same
effect as the engineered barriers.

MR. SWIFT: I\'m not sure I have a good answer to that one. Yes, we have
thought about many different ways to show this kind of information, and
someone\'s always not fully satisfied. I think I would prefer, actually,
to take the full system model, put everything in it, and then look at
what the barrier contributions are for things they actually do really
contribute to, like productions in water flux. So that I would like to
compare the effectiveness of the, for example, sort of the infiltration
model with the surficial soils. I think that would tell me the most if I
saw that as a ratio of precipitation to, you know, flux into the model
and the flux out of the model.

DR. CORRADINI: Then let me ask you a different way. If I had this and
you did the full system model, and you have confidence in the TSPA, how
much of a change in a barrier would you need to see before you\'d
actually want to keep it in versus taking it out? Let\'s use the drip
shield as an example. If I selectfully took out the drip shield and I
saw less than an order of magnitude change in the dose, what was its
worth in terms of dose effect as a barrier? Have you asked the question
that way?

MR. SWIFT: That would be a question for the DOE to address. Our function
in performance assessment is to analyze the design as given with the
drip shield, and we can show what importance the drip shield is, but
I\'m not going to say whether it should be there or not.

DR. CORRADINI: Okay, but I\'m asking it\--maybe I didn\'t phrase it
exactly right, but let me try it again. I\'m saying if the
confidence\--if the TSPA is being used for regulatory means and now
you\'re using it as a way of looking at sensitivities, you can also use
it as a way of performance of the design. So if you\'re going to do that
and you have confidence in the procedure or the calculational method as
a relative comparison\--let\'s say I don\'t understand or I would not
believe the absolute number, but I believe the relative number in a PRA
sense\--

MR. SWIFT: Sure.

DR. CORRADINI: \--how much confidence would you have to have? How much
change in an effect would you have to have before you actually would
say, \"I don\'t want to remove it,\" or \"I really need it\"? See my
question?

MR. SWIFT: In fact we have used PA based analyses to support design
going back as far as the LA Design Alternative Study back, what, just
after the viability assessment. We have not tried to quantify the
performance required from a barrier to be worth having. Some of
them\--the natural barriers are there, you know, they\'re there.

DR. CORRADINI: Yes, but I\'m\--

MR. SWIFT: Yes, you were wondering if we\'re getting out money\'s worth
out of the drip shield, for example.

DR. CORRADINI: I wouldn\'t ask it exactly that way, but one might phrase
it that way.

MR. SWIFT: It would be an okay question to ask.

Rob, are you going to offer to make a comment her?

MR. HOWARD: Rob Howard, DSC. We have done those analyses in the past, as
Peter said, with the LA design selection. I would be very cautious to
use a TSPA analysis with dose as a measure for looking at the importance
of a barrier. The way the regulation defines barriers in terms of what a
movement or a radionuclide movement, not in terms of dose or a barrier
function, could be the one that water contacted the waste form, which
the drip shield does quite well. But if you took it and looked at it in
terms of dose, which is not necessarily a barrier function as defined by
the regulation, you could lead yourself down a pathway that you might
not want to. So the tool itself has to be used with extreme caution when
you\'re talking about doing those kinds of value engineering studies.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Alberto?

DR. SAGÜÉS: Okay, well, I was partly guilty back in January, I believe
it was, when you made an initial demonstration of this type and I put
myself in uncertainty school, and I must say that indeed you have
prepared a wonderful lecture on this particular issue and the slide
after this. So I really appreciate it. So the principal too, me out of
uncertainty school. Not right now, but anyway\--

I just wanted to make one more comment on this igneous\--the eruptive
event. That is that of course from a regulatory standpoint this is what
is required, but I think that the thinking has been not just to be
restricted just completely on regulatory issues, but I\'m just wondering
how the general public may be viewing a thing like this. And then now
that you explained it so well, what is being done, then, it is taking
the probabilistic effects of these events and then adding them up and
then doing the proper operating. But I think that this is sort of akin
like saying that you have a chance of getting a cut in your arm or your
chest that\'s maybe 1/8 of an inch deep. You know, and you can have one
of those every year and you will survive. But if you integrate over 50
years, that\'s a 6-inch cut, and that is lethal.

So this is indeed a different\--a very different animal from a yearly
dose in which you presumably in large part of it you get out of your
system. This really is averaging things that may be asked to be averaged
from the regulatory standpoint, but from the real world consequences
standpoint it has a different meaning. Isn\'t it so?

MR. SWIFT: I think perhaps the whole group here in a few minutes could
comment on that. But I would offer as a comment that, first, you\'re
correct in saying it\'s a different animal than some sort of real dose a
person might get. It is, it\'s a probability weighted dose, it\'s risk.
But in fact I think people do make risk-based decisions at all levels. I
think the rest of the group that\'s going to be here in a few minutes
will comment on that. Airplane travel is a good one. The consequences of
something going wrong there are not acceptable, and yet we do it.

DR. SAGÜÉS: Okay, thank you.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Peter, thank you, and I think this is a good segue into
the next segment.

I\'m going to invite the various panelists to come forward as I sort of
introduce the panel discussion. We\'ve asked the Roundtable, a group of
individuals representing various segments of the project and those
outside the project, the following questions: What are the main causes
for differences between TSPA results? How significant are these
differences, and how do they affect confidence in TSPA results? Can any
common conclusions be drawn from the different barrier analyses? And
what do these analyses say about the relative significance of natural
and engineered barriers at Yucca Mountain? And finally, can barrier
analyses be improved? And if so, how?

Participating in the roundtable will be our two previous speakers, John
Kessler and Peter Swift. They\'ll be joined by Abe Van Luik, Senior
Policy Advisor for Science and Performance Assessment at the Yucca
Mountain Site Characterization Office; Steve Frishman, Technical Policy
Coordinator for the State of Nevada\'s Nuclear Waste Projects Office;
Tim McCartin, Senior Advisor for Performance Assessment at the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission; John Garrick from the NRC\'s Advisory Committee
on Nuclear Waste; and Bob Budnitz from Future Resources. Bob, who
appeared earlier, was also a member of the review panel commissioned by
the DOE to review TSPA for the 1998 Viability Assessment.

We\'ll allow each of the roundtable participants who didn\'t make a
presentation to provide opening remarks, limiting themselves, hopefully,
to three minutes each. We\'ll then open up the discussion to the
roundtable participants and Board members.

I\'d like to remind you that at the end of the roundtable discussion
Board Chairman Corradini will open the meeting for public comments.

And Abe, I invite you to start this off. And I\'ll try to kind of direct
questions from my seat back at the desk.

MR. VAN LUIK: Okay. My name\'s Abe Van Luik, I work for the Department
of Energy, I\'m a senior policy advisor to the Project Manager\'s
Office. And I am very pleased with this particular session because I
think we have shown some very recent work that basically takes us
another step towards licensing, and hopefully also towards more public
acceptance of the Yucca Mountain repository.

What we have shown in these analyses is, if you are dumb enough to put
waste on top of Yucca Mountain, you get unacceptable results. If you\'re
smart enough to put it in tunnels, even though you haven\'t put any
metal barriers around it, except you have accepted the waste exactly how
it comes, you\'ve got a dose within the first 10,000 years of about 100
millirem, right around there. And 100 millirem, if you\'ve read your 10
CFR 63 supporting materials, is what the EPA and the NRC say is an
acceptable additional dose for the public. However, they recommend\--and
they did in their regulation\--you need to partition a part of that 100
millirem to waste management because of a lot of other sources in the
universe.

And so we\'re not dumb enough to put things in naked drifts, so we put a
waste package around them, we put a drip shield around them, partially
because of the added confidence that it gives us, even though it
doesn\'t show that much in a dose curve. And lo and behold, what we come
out with is almost no dose for 10,000 years and a peak dose that now,
when we use the regulatory view of the biosphere, is below 100 millirem,
right around a half a million years.

What this tells me is that basically if this repository functions, if we
build it as we say we\'re going to build it, and if it functions as we
see that it\'s going to function, it\'s basically safe forever. And
that\'s a very good message from a DOE perspective to be able to take
out to the public, to policy makers in this country. You know, it feels
good, and I think every step we\'ve taken since that December \'00 SR
calculation has either jumped that curve a little bit up or a little bit
down.

That one in 6-01 we were all excited about because it really brought the
dose curves down, but then our own people\--and I have to give them
credit for this\--said, \"This is well and good, but there\'s really not
very good support for that temperature dependency in our corrosion
model.\" And so to our credit, rather than being self-serving, we
honored our own people and took it back up. And so to me the changes
that we see in the modeling have been in response to the Board saying
get more realistic and in response to our own people saying, \"You may
be more realistic, but there\'s not a good basis.\" We\'re a learning
organization.

Thank you.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Thank you. Having no other logical way to do this, Bob,
I\'ll\--or John, pardon me, I\'ll move it to you.

DR. GARRICK: I had some viewgraphs, but I\'m not going to use them. I
want to just talk to a few points. My name is John Garrick, I\'m listed
here as a member of the Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste. I\'m not
speaking in behalf of the Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste nor the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. My comments are Garrick comments.

My perspective and my remarks today is as an advisor to the chairman of
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on a number of topics, and the topics
that have been most influential in farming some opinions about the
topics of today is trying to assist the NRC in the transition from a
prescriptive based approach to regulatory practice to a risk-and-farm
approach to regulatory practice. And if you look at the letters and
reports we\'ve written to the chairman over the last five or six years,
you\'ll find that there is a rich tradition of advice from the ACNW on
that whole process and how it might be implemented.

The other thing that\'s influenced my position on some of these issues
is my background and history with probabilistic risk assessment. I\'ve
been very active in that field as a methods developer, as a
practitioner, and as a pusher of the risk sciences. And so when I look
at the performance assessment, I look at it in the spirit of does it
meet and match the tradition and the spirit of what contemporary
probabilistic risk assessment has come to be. And that happens to be one
of the primary sources of my concerns with some of the earlier models of
the performance assessment.

As far as problem areas are concerned, I\'ve had problems in the past.
I\'ve been very encouraged with what we\'ve heard today and what we\'ve
seen evolving since the TSPA-SR. The concerns I\'ve had fall into two
principle categories. One is adopting a risk perspective. I think the
approach has not been a real risk approach, it\'s been a probabilistic
analysis of compliance, probabilistic compliance analysis, not
probabilistic risk assessment. The models haven\'t been realistic, the
evidence has not been clearly linked to the quantification process of
the models, and it\'s been difficult at times to understand the scenario
of structuring that they have done and how they integrate across the
various scenarios.

There\'s also a problem in another general category, the
communication\--a simplified physics-based model that is abstracted from
the very complex TSPA, which is abstracted from hundreds of process
models and analysis models. If that abstraction can be performed, it
seems that it would be possible to abstract from the TSPA-SR and the
Supplemental TSPA and the FIS-TSPA to a physics-based model that is much
simpler than what we have to deal with in looking at the real model and
that that would be very useful in communicating results to the public,
and also in addressing this whole question of the barriers and how they
add to each other.

Now, these will come up in the discussions, but I want to address them a
little bit. With respect to the questions we\'ve been asked, what are
the main causes for the differences between the TSPA models, I think
that we\'ve received some excellent information today on what those are.
I think one of the big mistakes that\'s made in presentation of results
are to make presentations of point values on something that has at least
two orders of magnitude of uncertainty between the 5th and 95th
percentile on the performance measure, namely dose. If you show the
curves as they should be, you would see that they\'re much closer
together than they appear over what was shown to us today in the opening
remarks.

The other causes for the differences in the various models is I think
some of them are much more risk-oriented and some of them are much more
compliance-oriented. And of course we have heard about the modeling
assumptions and the great changes. Just between the TSPA-SR and the
TSPA, the supplemental one, there were something like 16 additional
uncertainty analyses performed. There was something like half a dozen or
more fundamental basic pieces of new information, and it doesn\'t take
much investigation of those various changes to justify the changes that
were made.

As far as the significance of these differences, they might be
considered significant in an absolute sense, but I don\'t see them as
very significant in the context that we\'ve seen them presented today.
First off, the low dose values are very small numbers. And if they\'re
varied by factors of 3 or 4 in a parameter for which we have an
uncertainty of two orders of magnitude and between the 5th and 95th
percentile, the curves that present it that way would look like they
were essentially on top of each other. And furthermore, for long times,
for times beyond 100,000 years, there tends to be convergence in the
results, and of course this is primarily as a result of some improved
assumptions on the solubility of the contributing radionuclides.

And as far as the barrier analysis is concerned, I think I\'ll wait on
that until we get into the discussion. I will only say that I think one
very important lesson we\'ve learned from the whole Yucca Mountain
exercise, it is much easier to design an engineered system to a
quantitative specification than it is to characterize a mountain to the
point where you\'ve quantified its containment capability. And as an
engineer, I wonder what I could do with \$4.5 billion in terms of
designing, just getting to the point of designing, a barrier that would
last a million years. I think it could be done.

Also, I would like to say on this whole issue of barrier analysis that
there seems to be a great deal of discussion and debate about the
engineered systems versus the natural systems. To me that\'s not the
right question that we should be asking. The question that we should be
asking is, what is the safety to the public and the protection offered
to the environment as a result of an integrated system? And I\'m pleased
to see on the basis of what we\'ve heard today that we\'re beginning to
pick up on that. And we certainly shouldn\'t be tying one hand behind
our back if it turns out that it\'s much easier to achieve that
fundamental question by putting more emphasis on one system than the
other. We should not be arbitrary about saying that X percent of the
safety has to come from geology and then X percent has to come from the
engineered systems. To me that\'s a silly question.

So that\'s just a few opening remarks.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Steve Frishman, State of Nevada.

MR. FRISHMAN: Well, I\'m just starting on a slightly different subject.
I was glad to see the portrayal of volcanic consequence. And I think
maybe the presenters are getting it right in the sense of presenting in
a way that actually provides an estimate of a real number as opposed to
a number that is meaningless.

As you know, I\'ve been interested in this question of contribution of
barriers for quite a long time. You\'ve heard me speak on it in
different ways at different times. It\'s kind of remarkable what the two
different methodologies that we saw, or different approaches, really
have in common. And what they really have in common is, because of about
two years ago a presentation of a bar graph by DOE that showed
contribution of barriers, what these two approaches have in common is
they\'ve been trying to increase the perception of the natural barriers
ever since. And so that\'s what they have in common.

I think that if you look at the analyses, you can see the way the
performance assessments are being done right now. You can see that,
first of all, the dependence is on the engineered barrier. And while
that may mask some other things, you can take the mask off a little bit
and see how things are working. If you fail one container, you can see
that the natural system is essentially letting go, and it lets go early.
So then it\'s a matter of the biggest uncertainty in the system being
the reliability of the container. So you have a case where you\'re
saying yes, we can meet the regulation, and we can meet the regulation
in spite of what the natural system might be or contribute, but then
you\'re masking what might happen if you are very wrong about the
container. And we have reason to believe that there is at least some
chance that the Department is very wrong about the container. So you\'re
going to go into licensing saying that we\'re relying on this container
and that we expect\--or we want people to find that there is a
reasonable expectation that for the first 10,000 years it will perform
as we say, but at the same time we have this tremendous uncertainty that
isn\'t going to be about the containers, it isn\'t going to be
understood at the time that a decision is made by the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, and we also can look at the performance assessments and see
what happens if you stretch out in time. If you take away the delay of
the container, or caused by the container, you can see the natural
system at work. The projected doses zoom almost immediately.

So the fact that the engineered barrier is being relied on for
regulatory purposes, and then the fact that that reliance carries the
biggest uncertainty in the performance assessment, and third, the fact
that if the uncertainty\--you know, if the worst case of the container
comes true, then it\'s pretty clear from DOE\'s own work that the
natural barriers have very little delay factor and have very little
containment factor.

One thing you have to remember\--and we keep seeing this comparison, you
know, the 10^13^, and it doesn\'t tell you anything about how good Yucca
Mountain really might be. First of all, it\'s a number that, you know,
has no real meaning in the system because the question that is being
asked of Yucca Mountain is can it contain the waste, meaning what gets
out, not what you put in. And in the case of the analyses that we\'re
all looking at, everything that\'s soluble gets out, and the waste
container is only delaying that. And it\'s I think even more important
if you know that everything that is soluble gets out, we also know where
it goes, and we know that it comes back to the surface in the accessible
environment at Franklin Lake Playa. So we ought to be working with
something where the natural system keeps it from being released back to
the natural system in a way that is accessible.

So we\'ll be talking more, but I think you certainly get my point.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Thank you. Tim McCartin with the NRC.

MR. MCCARTIN: Hello, I\'m Tim McCartin with the NRC, I\'m a senior
advisor for performance assessment. Along with Dr. Garrick\'s caveat,
I\'d like to say I am speaking as Tim McCartin, I am not presenting an
NRC staff position.

And I\'d just like to address one of the questions raised to the
roundtable, and that was can barrier analyses be improved, and if so,
how? And I think they can be improved. I have problems with the one-off,
neutralization, one-on analyses. They\'re interesting, but they aren\'t
very informative, in my opinion, in that you see doses change, but in
terms of getting an understanding of why, you have very little
understanding. And I think the example of depending on what order you
put the one-on/one-off analyses, etc., change the results. I\'m very
uncomfortable with analyses that depending on how you do them the
numbers change or your perspective could change. You need to interpret
the analyses correctly. I believe you need to bring to the table a lot
of other information. And I would suggest that one source of information
that one could do when they\'re doing barrier analyses is look at a
delay time. And I think just about every aspect of the repository system
can be somehow put into a delay time, be it the release rate, be it
solubility limits and the amount of water flowing, be it matrix
diffusion in the unsaturated zone, retardation in the saturated zone and
the alluvium, etc.

And I think, however, there\'s one very important thing about those
aspects: they are very radionuclide specific. And that\'s the part of
the information that I find is very lacking when you just see a dose
number. You don\'t know which nuclides are contributing, how much, etc.
I think if you looked at possibly, I don\'t know, 15 to 20 main
radionuclides and looked at what each barrier is doing in terms of delay
time, certainly a release rate, Iodine 129, one of the soluble
radionuclides, is a very small fraction of the inventory. A release rate
has the potential to do a lot for a nuclide like Iodine. Neptunium,
there\'s a lot of it. Well, release rate doesn\'t do as much in terms of
preventing a health risk because there\'s a lot of the inventory. But
there\'s a solubility limit with neptunium. Every radionuclide, the
system treats it differently, and I think if you lay out\--I would
propose for a barrier analysis you could lay out by radionuclide what
part of the system is doing what.

The other reason I like delay time, when I see dose numbers, it\'s very
difficult for me to say whether I believe that dose number is correct.
It\'s a dose number. A more fundamental value, like a delay time, I can
look at possibly natural analogues, I can look at the experimental
evidence, I can do more detailed process modeling, and get an insight,
do I believe the delay time for neptunium or Americium-241, whatever it
is, but you can relate that to specific information that is out there
for Yucca Mountain. And that\'s what I think would be the benefit to
multiple lines of evidence that the Board has supported for many years.
Why should I believe, say, plutonium is absorbed? What kind of
information do you have? I would say you have experimental information,
you probably have analogue information, possibly, from other sites, and
you have detailed process models. And it\'s a way to put the
understanding into context, and I would say the barrier analyses, if it
went to a delay time, a more fundamental process, it would be more
useful.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Thank you, Tim.

Bob Budnitz.

MR. BUDNITZ: I\'m Bob Budnitz, for 21 years I\'ve worked all by myself
in Berkeley, but I\'m just about to become a Livermore employee whose
first assignment is going to be back at RW1 in the Forestall (phonetic)
Building working with Margaret Chu on the Science Technology Program,
just to tell you who I was and who I\'m going to be. But as all my life,
and I assume for the rest of my life, it\'s my views, nobody else\'s.

I\'m really puzzled by something, and I\'ll just try to lay it right
out. There\'s no such thing as any analysis that should ever be done
unless the analyst has a clear objective in the analysis. If somebody
asked me how many people are in this room, I\'d say, \"Why do you want
to know? It\'s about 100, unless you need to know exactly.\" \"How tall
are the people in this room?\" I don\'t have to know how tall they are
to know that they can all fit through that door. It\'s by inspection. So
depending on what question you ask, I mean I might really want to know,
in which case we\'d measure everybody and get a distribution. If you
really, really want to know, you do it to the millimeter.

Analyses need objectives for them to be carried out by the analyst, for
the analyst to decide what pieces of it to concentrate on and what
pieces of it are less important. Because every analysis, except the
simplest 2 plus 3 is 5, is an abstraction of some reality for the
purposes of something. And it\'s the purposes of something that you need
to concentrate on. So all of this stuff has to do with the objectives in
the analysis.

And in that sense I understood, I kind of thought, what John Kessler\'s
objective was, he said it. I saw the slides and I understood what
Peter\'s objective was, and he said it. But I\'m puzzled about what the
objective is in some of these kind of oddball things. I understand why
if you don\'t know the retardation potential between let\'s say 10 and
50 of some parameter, why you might want to do an analysis if it\'s 10
or if it\'s 50. But I don\'t understand why you would assume what the
objective is of assuming that the saturated zone isn\'t there. You can
assume something you don\'t know about it or something you\'re uncertain
about, but to assume that it\'s not there, I don\'t understand that
except in some sort of a cockeyed intellectual sort of making you feel
good. Maybe there are some political objectives, but I don\'t understand
what the technical objective is.

The technical objectives of these things ought to be to help us all
understand the performance, to help the project design a repository that
is as safe as it needs to be, but not foolishly, and to help the
reviewers review it to assure themselves that that\'s so and to help the
regulatory commission review it with their objective, which is to decide
whether to give a license or not. So NRC has to do analysis with its
objectives and the project has to do analysis with its objectives and
the reviewers have to do review or analysis with their objectives, and
they\'re all different. They\'re related, but they\'re all different.

And in that sense, while I understood some of this, some of it doesn\'t
make sense to me. The ACNW and jointly with the ACRS about two or three
years ago asking the question about what defense in depth meant for a
repository. And I was privileged to be one of the experts asked to be
there for a couple of days with Bob Bernero and Tom Burley, and we
struggled with what defense in depth means for a repository, and that\'s
a piece of what this is about, all this multiple barrier analyses about
defense in depth, such as it is. I understand defense in depth for an
engineered system like a reactor, I really do, but here the concepts are
very confused. And I just want to emphasize that some of the questions
you\'ve asked belie understanding of some of those issues, some of these
questions. Without accusing anybody of not really understanding, I
assume everybody in the room understands what I\'m saying, but if you
ask these questions in the wrong way or they can be misunderstood, then
you\'re really confusing rather than helping us all understand.

So with that background, let me just point something out. Certain
bounding analyses are wonderful if your objective is to show something
is bounded. As I said, it\'s easy for me to prove without measurements
that everybody can fit through that door, it\'s a nine-foot door. And so
I don\'t want to decry that at all. Some analyses require the full
uncertainty treatment, others don\'t. Some analyses require realistic
treatment, others don\'t. Some analyses are for the purposes of
compliance and others are for the purposes of understanding, and
they\'re related, but not the same.

So when I bring that perspective to these questions, well, the first
question, what are the main causes of differences among the TSPA
results? Well, see, they\'re in the assumptions or the data or the
models. What else could it be? Unless somebody made an error, you know,
or errors. How significant are the differences? Well, the answer to that
is in the first question. I can\'t answer that except by saying it that
way. And the other questions I don\'t know how to answer. Common
conclusions about the barrier analyses? Depends on what your objective
is. If the project has an objective of seeing do we need to spend \$4.7
billion on the drip shield? That\'s an objective for which an analysis
can be designed\--several\--which then cast light on that. Could we make
it out of something else besides titanium? You can do an analysis about
that as an objective.

But separate from that I don\'t understand this, and so I\'ll just leave
you with that, with just one last thought. As important as these curves
are, the mean values of all of these analyses are only a piece of the
state of knowledge that emerges from that analysis. The full state of
knowledge of the analyst is richer than that. And sometimes that
richness is more important than the mean. Sometimes the objective is the
mean, so that\'s okay, it\'s compliance or something. But if you don\'t
notice that, you may find yourself fooling yourself because you ignored
the principal, often the most important information in the analysis is
not the mean but it\'s the state of knowledge of which the mean is only
one piece of the distribution, which represents what the analyst thinks,
is the result.

And with that I\'ll just pass it on.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: I think at this moment, as I would have suspected, we
are going to be short on time for what I think could be a very long and
rich discussion. And what I\'d like to do at this moment is open maybe
the floor up to members of the Board to ask questions of the panel,
members of the panel to ask questions of one another. We have about ten
minutes to do this. So Bullen and then Mike.

DR. CORRADINI: Can I ask a question? Are you giving up the floor?

DR. BULLEN: Sure.

DR. CORRADINI: Bless your heart. Okay, Corradini. I want to ask Dr.
Garrick, can you go back to\--you made a comment and I\'m intrigued by
it because you\'ve thought about it a lot, that you probably could give
me a little bit more time on it\--tell me what you mean by a
physically-based TSPA model as a higher level to what appears to be
a\--I don\'t want to say abstracted\--but a set of models, and then
could that be used for some of the things that Bob had suggested now in
terms of objectives, where I have a very specific objective and I want
to look at the presence of a drip shield, or the absence of it, or its
benefit, or some other engineered barrier? You mentioned it briefly as
something you thought was important to have.

DR. GARRICK: Yes. Well, look at the nominal case, for example, in the
recent analysis that has been performed. It\'s pretty clear that as a
result of doing uncertainty analysis there has popped up a contribution
to the dose in the 10,000-year time frame, namely Carbon 14. The truth
is, when you turn up the microscope on what they did on the Carbon 14
analysis, it\'s a very realistic analysis. It\'s not a risk analysis at
all, it\'s a very simplified assumption that really obscures reality.
And what I\'m suggesting is, if you take the big model, say for the
nominal case, where you now know that we\'ve reduced the 300 nuclides
and 50 actinides down to less than a handful, and now I\'ve got an
opportunity for a major reduction in scope of my analysis. I can go back
and trace those radionuclides in a much simpler fashion, with not all
the baggage and complication that comes from all the screening and the
screening of features, events and processes that they went through to do
the big model, and just focus on those three or four radionuclides in a
fundamental coalesced physics-based model and answer some questions for
people with respect to barrier analysis that are very straightforward.

I agree with the Board member as well as Bob Budnitz that a lot of the
discussion we heard today was pure fantasy about the on/off business.
That isn\'t what we want to hear. What we want to hear is, if you take
the fuel elements into the tunnels in a paper bag and put them there,
what kind of performance do you get out of the repository. Or, on the
other extremes, if you just take the waste package and put it in the
garage, what kind of performance do you get. Now that\'s very useful.
And I think we do need to get away from these fantasy kinds of concepts
and address the questions that are on people\'s minds.

But as far as the physics model is concerned, this is a common practice
that\'s done in science, taking something very complex, reducing it to
those things that are the dominant drivers of the results, and just
focusing on those and then reducing the number of scenarios down to the
few that dominate the results and build a model based on that. It\'s a
very feasible thing, it\'s done all the time.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Abe, do you want to respond to that?

MR. VAN LUIK: Yes, I would like to. Actually, our MTS contractor,
because they have to review the work of the M&O, have built a simplified
TSPA model, and we have gotten it simple enough to run on anyone\'s PC.
I\'m sure that all of you have a PC that\'s more than 400 megahertz. It
will run on that in just a few minutes. The model actually\--a version
of it\--was put into an interactive CD-ROM that I\'ve taken to high
schools and showed high school teachers and students how to use it. So
as a communication tool, I agree, it\'s very useful, but we haven\'t
cranked it up to the point yet where we can actually do the kind of
sensitivities on it that you\'re talking about. But we listened to you
several years ago, and to the Board, too, saying, \"You need something
simpler so people can actually intuitively learn what you\'re doing.\"
We\'re working on it.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Dan Bullen.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. A follow up on that. By the way, it was again
developed by your MTS contractor, and I think my graduate student did
that, so I\'ve got to put a plug in for him here. But the other issue
that I want to ask is that we\'ve asked for that long ago and you\--the
fall-on question is, is that still based on TSPA-BA, and has it not been
upgraded to TSPA-SR or TSPA\--SSPA or whatever the follow-on is? What\'s
the basis for that model, and is there a plan to upgrade it and actually
use it to help us get a handle on the physics of what\'s going on?

MR. VAN LUIK: It is my purpose in life to make sure that that happens at
some point. But you know, we have had some priority difficulties lately,
supporting SR, etc. So we will get to that, yes.

DR. BULLEN: Thank you.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Other questions? Dr. Parizek.

DR. PARIZEK: To Bob Budnitz. The nation would like to save maybe 4.5
billion on the drip shield. How would you go about doing a simplified
direct analysis that addressed that simple question?

MR. BUDNITZ: Well, it\'s a simple question but there is not a
straightforward answer to it.

DR. PARIZEK: I didn\'t think there would be, but you made it sound like
there was.

MR. BUDNITZ: No, I don\'t think\--no, no. I think I know how to
structure a set of analyses with that objective, but I don\'t think
it\'s simple. Okay, I mean the idea that it\'s simple isn\'t necessarily
the case. Because in fact part of the decision\--remember, the objective
is to protect the public by having a lot of margin for those doses that
have been in the rule making, the public rule making by the two
agencies, okay? And you not only want to do that but I hope that
there\'s lots of margin.

And then you have to ask the question about whether the margin is simply
the number or whether there are certain other considerations. And you
may decide that even though you could meet it without it that this
additional defense\--well, I\'ll call it defense in depth or additional
barrier\--is important because you\'re not as confident as somebody else
is in certain assumptions. So that\'s why, although I know how to do the
analysis, I\'m not going to predict how you do the decision based on the
analysis, okay? I think I know how to structure that analysis. Probably
you do, too. I don\'t know how you\'d structure the decision until after
it was done.

I mean, you know, just to give one obvious metaphor, if I were blind,
the first eye would be a big deal. The second eye isn\'t such a big deal
compared to the first one, you know. If you want to know is it the left
eye or the right eye I\'d want, I don\'t know.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Both.

MR. BUDNITZ: Oh, of course I want both. But when you make a decision,
you have to decide going in and then you have to reevaluate as you\'re
making a decision what your objective is. You have to decide what the
analysis objective is and then decide what the decision\'s objective is,
and sometimes that decision is not simply that bottomline number,
although it\'s as important as it is. It has to do with confidence and
so on. So I would argue I know how to structure that analysis. I sure as
hell don\'t know how to structure the decision. That\'s a tough one.
That\'s why we have decision-makers entrusted with that by the political
system.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Very short comment?

MR. VAN LUIK: A very short comment is I think this illustrates part of
the answer that I would have given to the chairman\'s question about
since this analysis is this way, why don\'t you eliminate that. I think
Gerry Gordon gave a talk where he said that calcium chloride could be a
problem. It probably isn\'t, but one way to make sure that it never is,
is to have that drip shield. And so even though in our calculations it
doesn\'t show up as being very important as a confidence enhancing
feature, we have to weigh that in as another thing into our total
equation on how to design this repository.

MR. BUDNITZ: I just want to throw out a comment. But assuming that the
mountain is a reducing environment and doing that analysis is stupid.
It\'s not, and it never will be. It\'s this mountain. So you have to
stop somewhere.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Mark, is it real quick?

DR. ABKOWITZ: Okay.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: We\'re over here, so\--

DR. ABKOWITZ: I have to respond to Abe\'s question or comment. Abkowitz
with the Board. It becomes an issue at some point because you don\'t
have trillions and trillions of dollars to throw at solving these
problems. So you get to a point where you have to ask the question,
\"What\'s the net return on investment for the next unit of safety that
I might get?\" So I don\'t think we can duck this question. At some
point here we\'ve got to ask the hard questions of, you know, where do
we spend our precious scarce resources and when is enough enough. And I
don\'t have the answer, but it better be part of the question or we\'re
not going to get very far.

MR. VAN LUIK: I totally agree. I\'m just saying that we have to have a
comprehensive look at what this barrier is buying us rather than just a
bottomline number on a model that doesn\'t\--because it considers it not
likely, doesn\'t even consider high concentrations of calcium chloride.
I\'m just saying there\'s more to the mix than just the answer or the
model.

DR. CHRISTENSEN: Maybe that\'s the\--it is the note on which we\'ll end
the discussion. I\'d like to thank the speakers for their presentations
and the panel for the really stimulating discussion. Turn this meeting
back over to Chairman Corradini.

DR. CORRADINI: Thank you. Thank you again, Panel.

While they\'re resituating themselves, let me make one announcement and
then we\'ll have the public comment period. A couple of people have come
up to the staff and asked for a clarification. The panel meeting on
transportation and waste management system issues is scheduled to be
held in Las Vegas on December 10th and 11th at the Crown Plaza in Las
Vegas. I think that was the one piece of information that we didn\'t
know earlier when Norm was mentioning or announcing this. So just once
again, it\'s scheduled for December 10th, 11th at the Crown Plaza in Las
Vegas.

Okay, according to the public comment register we have five individuals
who have signed up for public comment. We have a little bit\--we\'re a
little bit behind, but I think I want to try to make sure we give them
the same amount of time as we gave the individuals in the morning, so
approximately five minutes. I\'d like to call on Brian O\'Connell, Mr.
Brian O\'Connell.

And again, if you could just state, if you\'re affiliated or
representing an organization, who that is, or yourself.

MR. O\'CONNELL: Right, thank you very much. I\'m Brian O\'Connell with
the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, known as
NARUC. I will be brief because I submitted my comments for the record,
so I\'d just like to summarize a few points.

There are many stakeholders in this project. This is mostly for the
benefit of the new members. There are stakeholders beyond the State of
Nevada. Forty-one states have contributed to the Nuclear Waste Fund,
which is maintained by Congress, which might be part of the problem of
why we\'re not getting much return on that investment. So far \$17
billion have been collected from rate payers, actually from utilities,
who pay the Treasury. But the utilities turn around and ask their rate
payers to contribute, so it\'s the rate payers\' money. And my
organization, as the association of public utility commissions, is
looking out for the interest of the rate payers. So I attend most of
these meetings, try to comment on most of the documents that have come
out on the program, but our members are frankly interested in the dollar
investment in the program.

Margaret Chu was correct when she said there is a fiscal constraint on
the project. But that is simply through the doings of Congress, and
we\'re going to work very hard as an association, as a representative of
stakeholders, to help her fully access the funds that come into the
Treasury for their intended purposes.

The Nuclear Waste Fund was designed in 1982 and is well designed. One
mil per kilowatt hour of nuclear power generated and sold goes into the
fund, but so far, on an annual basis, about ten percent, ten cents on
the dollar, that goes in is being appropriated. Somebody asked me,
\"Where is the rest going?\" Deficit reduction and other worthy national
purposes, but not for the program. So we\'re working very hard to help
Congress now that they\'ve gone through the hard part of deciding that
they want a repository to now pay attention to the means of doing it.

Thank you very much.

DR. CORRADINI: Thank you. Our second individual for public comment is
Mr. Herbert Inhaber.

MR. INHABER: I\'m representing my company, Risk Concepts. The title of
the talk, which will also be brief, is \"What is the quality of Yucca
Mountain science and engineering, and how can it be improved?\"

Most of the people here are familiar with the Letter Report of January
24th in which the Board said, \"The technical basis for the Department
of Energy\'s repository performance estimate is weak to moderate at this
time.\" The phrase \"weak to moderate\" has been printed in many places.

One of the most dramatic uses was by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada in a
story in The Washington Post entitled \"The Senator Explodes\". As you
know, Senator Reid is more than nearly 1 out of 100 senators when it
comes to a proposed repository. That is, private groups have said if the
science was as weak as the Board stated, the entire analytic structure
for approval was equally weak.

The Board arrived at its conclusions by dividing their estimate of the
science and engineering into three categories\--weak, moderate and
strong\--and then they went into the strengths and weaknesses of various
aspects of the program. But this is\--how shall I put it?\--a typical
committee style analysis of research productivity and
research\--research productivity.

I\'m not going to criticize the Board because I\'m sure they did the
best they could and they probably spent considerable time coming up with
these numbers. But the adjectives that they used suffer from at least
two difficulties: a) they are not quantitative; \"weak,\" \"moderate,\"
and \"strong\" is not a quantitative approach; and secondly, it\'s not
completely clear if the results are reproducible.

If another\--now I understand that there are four new members\--if those
four new members replaced four previous members, it\'s entirely possible
that the Board might come up with a different analysis today than they
did last year. So the question then is, if I am making these
criticisms\--and I hope they are gentle criticisms\--of the Board, is
there another approach? And I believe there is. This is an approach that
is used by a number of other government agencies\--the National
Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and a host of other
organizations\--in which they try to measure the output of science as
opposed to looking merely at the input. That is, the dollars that go
into science.

For example, in the latest science indicators as issued by the National
Science Foundation, they have approximately two dozen tables devoted to
what I would call \"scientometrics\". It sounds like a real complicated
word, but basically it just refers to the sociology of science, and this
goes back decades. People have studied it on and off for decades because
science is an enterprise unto itself, and sociologists and other
scientists have tried to figure out how does science produce what it
does, how can we say that one research program is better than another
other than polling people in a committee and coming up with an answer.

So I am going to suggest that scientometrics\--and I hate to use that
word\--be used to try to evaluate the science and engineering programs
of Yucca Mountain in addition to what the Board has done. Now you might
say the goal of Yucca Mountain science is to meet regulations not to
produce Nobel Prize winners, which is true. On the other hand, NASA has
a very goal-oriented program in terms of manned space flight, so in that
sense they are very goal-oriented, but they are very proud of their
science accomplishments. And if you look at their web site, you\'ll see
endless discussion of all of the wonderful things they\'ve done in
science.

And as well, the Department of Energy has said because of the
complications of trying to analyze Yucca Mountain, one of the most
difficult scientific questions in recent years, DOE will develop
innovative approaches to science and engineering. And in principle,
those innovative approaches can be measured.

There are many techniques used in scientometrics. Obviously I\'m not
going to try to describe them. They use citation results, co-citations,
and a host of other ways of estimating the effects of a scientific
and/or engineering program.

In the little handout that I placed on the table, I quoted some results
based on a very brief look at how Yucca Mountain has been treated. The
most cited paper on Yucca Mountain in the past 20 years was written in
the Journal of Science, and one of the authors was Kristen
Shrader-Freshette. Some of you may have heard of her. She has been
extremely vigorous in pointing out the many defects of Yucca Mountain
and the entire approach. And the paper that was quoted, cited a total of
350 times, says numerical modeling of natural systems is \"impossible\".
So you can see what approach that she and her colleague took in that
paper. So this indicates that the paper that is most highly cited in
terms of Yucca Mountain is diametrically opposed to the approach which
was taken.

So to summarize, the Board raised legitimate concerns in its January
24th letter. The Yucca Mountain Science and Engineering Program is one
of the largest single-purpose science programs in the history of the
world. The interest of the rate payers\--the previous speaker was
talking about rate payers\--is clearly not served if the science and
engineering program is weak to moderate. And I believe that by using
scientometric techniques we may be able to improve it substantially.

Thank you.

DR. CORRADINI: Thank you. Our third public comment is by Dr. Jacob Paz.
I can\'t read the writing very well, so do I have that correctly, sir?

DR. PAZ: My name is Dr. Jacob Paz, I\'m representing my company and
myself.

First of all, I\'d like to thank the Technical Review Board for
reviewing my letter which has been sent and make a recommendation to
Yucca Mountain project management on the issues of complex mixture of
risk assessment and immigration competition for the nuclear heavy
metals. I\'d like to thank Abe Van Luik also, although we have
different, sometimes, philosophy, and I can somewhat lean with Tom and
Jerry.

My technical comments for today are the following:

Number one, on the corrosion, I think what\'s missing here and should be
included in the testing is this issue of the sulfate which is present in
the mountains. It can issue oxidation reductions and potentially
corrosion.

Second, on bacteria. How many of you have seen the cone in the ocean?
Bacteria can grow under various conditions, and it\'s quite
possible\--and I don\'t know\--that in the future those bacteria can
drive and maybe cause corrosion on the metals.

Third comment: I think, in my opinion, we have to look at the engineered
barrier. More engineered barrier, like I take it there was a scenario,
suppose there is complete failure and corrosion in the chemistry in the
engineered barrier, it could increase the burden on the natural barrier,
the zeolite, and subsequently increasing the migration of radionuclides.
At this point of time we have various uncertainties, but who will
compete with whom? The heavy metals or the radionuclides, which one will
replace? And this is a recent proposal which I\'m going to submit to
YMP.

Second, I think that what is missing here\--and I pay attention\--that
75,000 years from now we\'re going to see an increasing amount of level
of decay of long-term actinide.

And finally, on calling EPA, NRC, I made a proposal on complex mixtures.
If they are open, I will provide everyone with all dissertations, all
the information.

That\'s all. Thank you.

DR. CORRADINI: Thank you. Our next commenter is Ms. Judy Treichel.

MS. TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force. I want to
speak primarily to the new members of the Board. It feels like the
members that have been here for a while that we know each other very,
very well. But coming in at this time is difficult, and especially when
you have a board that sort of turns over and you have members coming and
going. We in Nevada have been here for a very long time, and we were
thinking the other day we\'ve seen our seventh Secretary of Energy. So
we have really seen this thing from beginning to end, and it\'s very
difficult when people come in and have to start over, and it\'s
something that\'s so terribly important to us.

One of the things that I mentioned earlier was the fact that people
don\'t always understand words in the same way. And there were words
that were thrown up here during technical exchanges and technical
discussions that don\'t mean the same thing to the general public. And
the general public here in Nevada are the ones who are going to have to
live with the decisions that have been made, whether they\'re made here
or in the courts or in the Congress.

But a good example is the word \"risk\", and I\'m always a little
hesitant to talk about risk when John Garrick is in the room, we\'ve
been known to have practically shooting wars. But, you know, risk can be
a calculation, which is consequence times probability, but for the
general public it\'s not multiplication, it\'s not the result of doing
some arithmetic, risk is what comes from when you do something
dangerous, and that\'s the way that they see this. And if the public
were to do a risk benefit analysis of Yucca Mountain, they would come up
with something that would say that there\'d be millions of people on
transport routes that would be at risk, and finally Nevadans would be at
risk, but those who benefit are the ones who want to make more waste.
And when the public does an analysis, they sort of thing\--and it should
be\--that when you do a risk benefit analysis, it\'s one individual. I
take a risk for a particular benefit, not I take a risk and somebody
else benefits. So you need to be sensitive of those things when you\'re
thinking about the jobs that you do.

There is also the idea of an acceptable risk or an acceptable dose. An
acceptable risk is when I go to the doctor and I sign the permission
slip and I get an X-ray. That same risk is not something that we in
Nevada are being given informed consent about. So it\'s not acceptable
for us to get a risk or a dose from a repository. We haven\'t signed up
and we haven\'t signed on. And I\'m going to start wearing a whistle
around my neck, I think, that I will always blow when I hear somebody
say that a dose is a fraction of background, or it\'s the same as a
chest X-ray. Don\'t say it that way. It is in addition to. It\'s not the
same as and it\'s not a fraction of, it is in addition to. We give our
permission for the doses that we take. This is one in addition to those
that we have signed up for or given our informed consent for.

For the new members coming in this is a very strange time. As you know,
the site\'s been recommended by the Secretary, the recommendation has
been approved by the President and gone on to the Congress, and it\'s
been approved there. But the fortunate thing is, in this country we have
a court system, so when terrible mistakes are made like that, we can go
to the court system and perhaps get those things overturned. So I don\'t
think you should assume that Yucca Mountain goes along just because
it\'s gotten a Congressional Seal of Approval. It may very well be
unrecommended and it may well be very different and not have the kind of
progress that people are talking about making here. There\'s also a
science and technology program that\'s just barely gearing up and
getting going, and Dr. Chu talked about jump starting the transportation
work.

Because DOE has been so flexible with this thing, I really don\'t think
it matters to you. I think you\'re going to be doing about the same
thing that you\'ve been doing, because it\'s not very clear what
actually was recommended. And I\'m not particularly worried about the
work that you do, I\'m pretty familiar with that, and I feel like I know
kind of what you\'re going to continue to do.

I\'m very worried about who you do it for, and I worry that when I hear
statements like when Bob Budnitz said, \"We need to just get the best
repository we can.\" That\'s not why you\'re here. Just because this
thing was recommended, it\'s not a done deal, and your job is not to
help them make just the best darned dump that there can be. Your job is
to oversee a program, to be extremely critical with it, and I would
worry a lot if any of you came in with a Nuclear Energy Institute
mindset or feeling like the nuclear industry was important to be served.
They\'ve got a problem, yeah, they\'ve got waste, they want to make more
waste. That is not something that Nevada has signed on to help.

I also worry if in starting to look at transportation if there\'s a
feeling amongst any members of the Board that transportation is doable
and that we\'ve done transportation before and so it can just go ahead
and take place without serious problems. All of that transport that\'s
gone on before is not like the Yucca Mountain transportation campaign.
It\'s very, very different, just as this repository program is different
from any other. And the repository program, and perhaps
transportation\--we haven\'t looked at transportation very much, but I
know that the repository program is sort of prone to a situation where
when one thing gets fixed something else or two other things break, and
we see that continually.

And every time I come to a meeting\--and I\'ve been coming to them ever
since my children were the age my grandchildren are now\--and I\'ve seen
vast changes just today in repository design, and those are fixes which
the next time you have a meeting you\'re going to see presentations and
there\'s going to be a lot of very different things because something
else got fixed because this fix broke something. So it\'s a very strange
program.

And just to finish, I really expect you, and the public expects you, to
be very, very skeptical, to be extremely harsh critics, and to be as
open to the public\'s point of view, even though they use different and
sort of simplistic wording, to be as open to their point of view as you
are to the Department of Energy and as you are to the nuclear industry
or to NARUC or any of the other organizations out there. It\'s the
public that winds up taking this thing. And with the Board in the past
we\'ve had a really unique and unusual shared trust, and that just
simply has to continue.

Thank you.

DR. CORRADINI: Thank you. Finally, public comment by Ms. Sally Devlin.

MS. DEVLIN: Again, Mr. Corradini, welcome, and welcome the Board, and
again, last is always best, right, guys? And I really want to say again
thank you so much for coming here, for coming to Nevada. I hope some day
you\'ll come back to Pahrump, and I will not feed you cookies, I
promise. And we love it when you come here, and we\'ll be looking for
that transportation thing that got us into this mess.

I do want to say that I have been working for two years with the State
of Nevada to try and get broadband here, and it\'s finally in the
legislature. And my word to the legislature is xenophobic because Nevada
does not go outside of Nevada, and they\'re very self-conscious about
their gambling and prostitution and all kinds of good things. And Russ
Dyer will get the new menu, so everybody call him, not me. But that\'s
what goes on here in Nevada.

You\'ll understand that, Michael, when you get older.

But anyway, I used the word \"xenophobic\". The word I want to use for
this toastmaster\'s meeting, ladies and gentlemen, is \"continuity\".
And NRC opened this up because, you know, I read every page of that
horrible report. And what I found in that report was they said they can
do anything they want, and they\'re supposed to form boards and they\'re
supposed to get people to do this, that, and the next thing. And I was
talking to Gordon because he\'s going to be around another 60 years,
I\'m going to be sitting on top of Yucca Mountain playing gin rummy with
Abe Van Luik for 300 years, because there\'s no money for stewardship,
remember? And so we do have a bit of a problem. Who is going to take
over this project? Students today want money, they don\'t want to learn,
they don\'t want to innovate. They certainly don\'t want physics. There
are 25 graduate students working at UNLV on transmutation. Not one is a
physicist. A lot of mechanical engineers, a lot of civil engineers, but
no physicists, and very few in metallurgy.

So anyway, we\'ve got a problem with continuity. Where are you going to
get the people\--and this is not discussed\--to do all this stuff for
the next 60 years? You\'re already three years behind the times
according to the GAO, so that brings the time table, if I have enough
fingers, to 2005, then another three years and another three years, so
you\'re already at 2010 if it goes through, then you\'ve got to dig the
hole, and so on. And of course I\'m saying how can you dig a hole\--and
I read Nye County\'s report on the ventilation, and they didn\'t consult
with\--who is it?\--the Interior Department. They didn\'t have a mining
engineer on it. How can you do transportation without DOT? How could you
do my canisters and my blood testing in situ without DOD and finding out
what they\'re going to put in those canisters? How can you do drip
shields without my bugs?

So I\'m really concerned. Continuity is something I think the Board
should seriously look into, because that is the future. And excuse the
expression, but you know, the future, who knows what\'s going to be in
politics, who knows what the terrorists are going to do, who knows what
the politicians are going to do, who knows what Bush is going to do, he
terrifies me. And he terrifies me because I don\'t think he\'ll consult
with me, and I would be thoroughly insulted on that. You\'re supposed
to, you\'re supposed to communicate.

And so my word \"continuity\" I hope goes back to Washington, and I hope
you really do think about it, because it is a major problem. Who are the
educated people? And I consider everyone in this room has an educated
behind at least, right, to sit here all these hours, what else have you
got? So I\'m just saying we\'ve had a lot of fun over the years, but
it\'s true.

So may I suggest you look into this continuity of education and who\'s
going to carry on, because it is not us, it\'s going to be the next
generation and the next. And although Abe and I will be sitting for 300
years, and I hope that Madam Chu, our director, realizes there\'s
absolutely no money for\--what is it?\--when you close the mine. And
this is a mine. So let\'s get everybody involved and let\'s get
everybody educated and let\'s get everybody interested, because to me
it\'s been a fascinating subject, and I can\'t wait to see you all again
at the next meeting.

Thank you. And I have a present for our new leader, and it\'s not a
geriatric periodic table because nobody wanted it, it\'s the July
National Geographic magazine, and it has\--

DR. CORRADINI: Thank you, I have it at home.

MS. DEVLIN: Oh, does anybody want it then? Here I thought I was bringing
you a present.

DR. CORRADINI: I\'ll take it if you don\'t want it, but I have one.

MS. DEVLIN: Well, I brought it to you because I thought it was a very
nice article and well written.

DR. NELSON: I\'d love it.

MS. DEVLIN: All right, Priscilla wants it, and you have it, so she gets
it. So thank you again and\--

DR. CORRADINI: Thank you.

MS. DEVLIN: \--welcome to Nevada. Come again soon.

DR. CORRADINI: And bless you for calling me young. Thank you. The former
chair had another story about Las Vegas, so bless you.

Okay, let me wrap up by thanking everybody today for our meeting. We I
think ended up pretty much on time, and I want to thank all of those
involved: Dr. Margaret Chu and the DOE headquarters staff as well as the
Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office staff, State of Nevada
Nuclear Project\'s Office for their insights early in the day, the Yucca
Mountain Project contractors, in particular Bechtel/SAIC Corporation,
Inyo County, EPRI, and then finally, as we always say, but I don\'t know
if we say it enough, thanks to the NWTRB staff. As usual, and this is
only my second time, it ran flawlessly, and it was not due to me, it was
due to the staff. Thank you, Bill, and thank you to all of the staff.

That\'s it. Also, I\'d like to thank the people in public comment. I
have to admit this is my first time at this, I am truly amazed, you have
a range of comments. Hopefully we\'ll get a larger range of comments as
the years go along. Thank you all.

(Whereupon, the meeting was adjourned.)

[^1]: **"WE HAVE BEEN INFORMED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY THAT THEY
    HAVE MADE CHANGES IN SOME OF THE ASSUMPTIONS USED IN THEIR ANALYSES.
    AS A RESULT, SEVERAL OF THE SLIDES USED BY PETER SWIFT IN THIS
    PRESENTATION HAVE CHANGED. ATTACHED TO THIS TRANSCRIPT IS A REVISED
    SET OF SLIDES AND AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT THE CHANGES WERE AND WHY
    THEY WERE MADE."**