UNITED STATES

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

SPRING BOARD MEETING

May 9, 2006

Hilton Tysons Corner

7920 Jones Branch Drive

McLean, Virginia 22101

[NWTRB BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT]{.underline}

Dr. Mark Abkowitz

Dr. William Howard Arnold

Dr. Thure Cerling

Dr. David Duquette

Dr. B. John Garrick, Chairman, NWTRB

Dr. George M. Hornberger

Dr. Andrew Kadak

Dr. Ronald Latanision

Dr. Ali Mosleh

Dr. Henry Petroski

Dr. William M. Murphy

[SENIOR PROFESSIONAL STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. Carlos A.W. Di Bella

Dr. Daniel Fehringer

Dr. Daniel Metlay

Dr. David Diodato

Dr. John Pye

[NWTRB STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. William D. Barnard, Executive Director

Paula Alford, Professional Staff International Liaison

Joyce Dory, Director of Administration

Karyn Severson, Director, External Affairs

Linda Coultry, Program Support Specialist

Davonya Barnes, Office Assistant

[I N D E X]{.underline}

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Call to Order and Introductory Statements**

B. John Garrick, Chairman,

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

**Program and Project Overview**

Paul Golan, Acting Director,

Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. . . 17

**Introduction of Transport, Aging, and Disposal (TAD), Cask System
Development and Implementation**

Mark Abkowitz, Member, NWTRB . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

**Transport, Aging, and Disposal (TAD)**

**Cask System Development and Implementation**

Christopher Kouts, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

**Industry Perspectives on TAD**

Rod McCullum, Nuclear Energy Institute . . . . . . . 106

David Blee, U.S. Transport Council . . . . . . . . . 120

**Lunch** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

**Total System Model Analyses Supporting**

**the TAD Concept**

Christopher Kouts, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

. Total System Model Analyses

. Development of CD-1 Documentation

**Effect of TAD Decision on Surface Facility Design**

Paul Harrington, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

**DOE Inquiry into USGS E-mail Issues and**

**Reanalysis of Infiltration Data**

Gene Runkle, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

**USGS Inquiry into E-mail Issues**

William Alley, U.S. Geological Survey . . . . . . . 231

**Preliminary Analysis of the Maximum Disposal**

**Capacity for CSNF in a Yucca Mountain Repository**

John Kessler, Electric Power Research Institute. . . 237

**Public Comment Period** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

**Adjourn** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

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

8:00 a.m.

GARRICK: It\'s been suggested that I point out that there\'s a table in
the back of the room, if those of you who have laptop computers, if you
prefer to have a table over your lap. So, we have a facility to
accommodate that.

Good morning. Good morning, and welcome. My name is John Garrick. I\'m
Chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. And, on behalf of
the Board, I\'d like to say we\'re very pleased to be in Washington, and
we like to have at least one of our meetings per year in Washington to
allow policymakers and others interested in the national ramifications
of the Yucca Mountain Project, the proposed Yucca Mountain Project, to
attend and participate in our meeting.

As you know, at each of our meetings, we introduce the Board members,
and I think I want to do that first.

In my case, I am in the role of a consultant these days, primarily in
the application of the risk sciences to a variety of industries, such as
transportation, space, nuclear, chemical, and so on. And, my background
and areas of interest are risk assessment and nuclear science and
engineering.

Now, as I introduce the Board members, I\'m going to ask them to raise
their hands when their names are called. And, I\'d like to start with
the newest member of the Board, namely William Murphy. As most of you
know, for nearly a year, we have had a vacancy on the Board due to the
resignation of former member Daryle Busch. He replacement, Dr. Murphy,
was appointed to the Board on March 20th of this year, by President
Bush. Dr. Murphy is Associate Professor in the Department of Geological
and Environmental Sciences at California State University, Chico. His
research focuses on geochemistry, including the interactions of nuclear
waste and geological media.

Now, let me introduce the rest of the Board. First is Mark Abkowitz.
Mark is Professor of Civil Engineering at Vanderbilt University, and
Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies.
His areas of expertise include transportation of hazardous materials,
risk management, and innovative uses of information technology. He
chairs the Board\'s Panel on the Waste Management System, and as a
result, will be leading much of the discussion today.

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

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

David Duquette. David is Department Head and Professor of Materials
Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. His
areas of expertise include physical, chemical, and mechanical properties
of metals and alloys, with special emphasis on environmental
interactions. His current research interests include studies of cyclic
deformation behavior as affected by environment and temperatures, basic
corrosion studies, and stress-corrosion cracking.

George Hornberger. George is the Ernest H. Ern Professor of
Environmental Sciences and Associate Dean for Sciences at the University
of Virginia. His research interests include catchment hydrology,
hydrochemistry, and transportation of colloids in geological media. He
chairs the Board\'s Panel on the Natural System.

Andrew Kadak. Andy is Professor of the Practice in the Nuclear
Engineering Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His
research interests include the development of advanced reactors, space
nuclear power systems, improved technology-neutral licensing standards
for advanced reactors, and operations and management issues associated
with existing nuclear power plants.

Ron Latanision. Ron is an Emeritus Professor at MIT and a Principal and
Director of Mechanics and Materials with the engineering and scientific
consulting firm, Exponent. His areas of expertise include materials
processing and corrosion of metals and other materials in different
aqueous environments. Ron chairs the Board\'s Panel on the Engineered
System.

Ali Mosleh. Ali is the Nicole J. Kim Professor of Engineering and
Director of the Center for Risk and Reliability at the University of
Maryland. He has performed risk and safety assessments, reliability
analyses, and decision analyses for the nuclear, chemical and aerospace
industries. He chairs the Board\'s Panel on the Repository System
Performance and Integration.

Henry Petroski. Henry is the Aleksander S. Vesic Professor of Civil
Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University. His current
interests are in the areas of failure analysis and design theory.
Ongoing projects include the use of case histories to understand the
role of human error and failure in engineering design, as well as models
for invention and evolution in the design process.

At the beginning of each meeting, there are a few routine things that we
do. One is to read the following statement for the record, so that
everybody is very clear about our behavior as Board members and our
method of operation.

Board meetings are spontaneous by design, and Board members are
encouraged to express themselves freely. However, I want to make clear
that when the Board members speak extemporaneously, it is important to
realize that we are speaking on our own behalf, not on behalf of the
Board. When a Board position is articulated, for example, in a letter or
a report, we will do our best to make clear that it is a position of the
entire Board, and not the opinion of an individual member.

Before I go over the agenda for today\'s meeting, let me give you a
preview of the Board\'s annual report for 2005. We expect that that
report will be printed and distributed within the next few weeks. Among
the Board\'s findings and conclusions, are some of the following.

First, let me address the issue of natural barriers.

The Board believes that the Project has made great strides over the last
few years in developing a sound understanding of the magnitude and rates
of mountain-scale groundwater flow in the unsaturated and saturated
zones under ambient conditions. Further, the Board considers the
Project\'s findings with regard to chemistry of the water in the
unsaturated and saturated zone under ambient conditions to be broadly
consistent with a large body of empirical data and experience. Although
the Project should continue to evaluate new data as it becomes available
to refine its conceptual models as warranted, the Board does not believe
that significant investments in further research in these areas should
be a high priority for the Project at this time.

The Board believes, however, that additional work on radionuclide
transport is warranted. In particular, research on secondary
mineralization, matrix diffusion, colloid-facilitated transport, or
other processes that might significantly affect the rate at which
dose-significant radionuclides are transported. These could yield very
important results, particularly with selected radionuclides, such as
Neptunium 237 and Plutonium 242.

The report includes serious concerns about technical issues underlying
the Project\'s thermal-management strategy, a topic that\'s been
commanding a lot of attention from the Board of late.

First, the rationale for the Project\'s choice of thermal criteria is,
at best, unclear and may possibly be inadequate. For example, the 11.8
kilowatts per waste package limit appears to have a somewhat arbitrary
basis.

Second, the implications for thermal management of the Project\'s
provisional decision to implement the canister-based system do not seem
to have been fully evaluated. In particular, given the relatively
limited amount of spent fuel blending that can be carried out at a
utility site and given the trend toward higher burn-up fuel, a
canister-based system may increase the difficulty of achieving
compliance with thermal management criteria.

Third, the Board is not persuaded that the thermal-hydrological models
being used to predict postclosure temperature and relative humidity
within the drifts have a strong technical basis. For example, the
thermal conductivity of the rock at Yucca Mountain is important for
predicting thermohydrological conditions in the proposed repository, but
few measurements of this parameter have been made.

Also, consider what our report says about the near-field environments.

The alloy 22 outer barrier of the waste package will not corrode
significantly unless liquid water is present on the waste package.

The Project maintains that potential localized corrosion of alloy 22 at
elevated temperatures can be excluded from its Total System Performance
Assessment calculations. The Board believes that the technical basis for
this exclusion is not compelling.

Because aqueous conditions can exist at elevated temperature, future
performance assessments should either include general and localized
corrosion at elevated temperatures or present a clear and compelling
technical basis for not doing so.

There is considerable uncertainty about the source term incorporated in
the Performance Assessment. The Board is pleased that the Project is
seeking to improve its understanding of the source term through research
sponsored by its Science and Technology Program.

Let\'s talk a little bit about postclosure risk.

The Board remains concerned that by adopting a conservative
compliance-based approach for projecting postclosure risk, the Project
discounts the importance of letting policymakers, the public, and the
broader technical and scientific community know what the Project\'s
experts believe are the intrinsic capabilities of the proposed
repository at Yucca Mountain. Having more definitive information on the
adequacy of the natural system and the levels of conservatism involved,
for example, may well provide all interested and affected parties with
important and relevant information.

The issue here is not that the Board thinks that the Performance
Assessment is conservative. The issue here is that the Project has
maintained it to be a considerably conservative analysis, although they
use the term \"reasonable conservative.\" But, at the same time, have
dedicated an entire appendix in the Performance Assessment to
conservatism, and on looking at that, one has to ask, well, what do the
experts really think is the performance capability of the repository. It
seems that the answer to that question is something that we\'re all
entitled to have.

The Board believes, therefore, that the Project should carry out a
realistic performance assessment, perhaps in parallel with its efforts
to develop the compliance case, to establish a \"baseline\" for
measuring how \"conservative\" or \"non-conservative\" the Project\'s
licensing case might be.

Another means for increasing the confidence in the conclusions coming
from the Performance Assessment that the Project is now conducting would
appear to prepare full and realistic process models that account for the
transport of the two radionuclides that appear to be the major
contributors to peak dose over the long period, over the one million
year period, namely Neptunium and Plutonium.

I should point out that in just recent days, the Board has received a
response from the Department on many of these issues, and we have not
had an opportunity as a Board to evaluate that response. So, on that
evaluation, we might be modifying some of these observations.

Now, continuing with the report and what it says, what does it say about
the design and operation of surface and subsurface components and
facilities?

Well, the Board looks favorably on the Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management\'s provisional decision to implement the
transportation, aging, and disposal concept, the so-called TAD concept.
It believes that such an approach holds potential for minimizing the
handling of the spent nuclear fuel assemblies, for simplifying the
design of surface facilities, and for reducing occupational exposures.

The Board remains concerned that the Project has not fully evaluated the
range and consequences associated with the implementation of the TAD
system. Exploration of these consequences is a major goal of today\'s
meeting.

The Board believes that the Project needs to refine further its drip
shield design and implementation approach.

One more comment about what\'s in our report, and it\'s about the waste
management system.

The Board is pleased that the Project has begun development of the Total
System Model, which has significant potential as a tool for
understanding the performance of the waste management system.

We recommend that the Project enhance the Total System Model in a number
of ways to increase the model\'s utility in evaluating the waste
management system. Specifics are covered in the report.

The Project also should evaluate phased approaches to developing the
waste management system. For example, it should consider handling
\"normal\" spent nuclear fuel first, and exceptional fuel types at a
later date. It should consider early shipments that are easy to load,
use a single transport mode, travel a relatively short distance, and
follow routes used previously in shipping radioactive materials.

Those are some of the highlights of the report. And, there\'s a lot more
detail, as you will be able to see, when the report is published in a
few weeks.

Now, let me turn to today\'s meeting, and set the stage, if I may. And,
one of the things we like to do is kind of remind everybody of the
perspective of the Board.

In evaluating the technical validity of DOE activities, the Board
considers a number of factors, including, first, the relevance of the
activities to the long-term performance of the total waste management
system and short-term performance of the repository operating system.
And, by performance, we mean safety, security, and throughput.

Second, the extent to which the activities improve or reduce integration
of the total waste management and repository systems, and whether the
activities improve the fundamental understanding of the technical and
scientific issues involved in managing spent fuel and high-level waste.

To repeat, the three most important factors are to evaluate the effects
of the activities on performance, integration, and fundamental
understanding. And, the fundamental understanding is probably, is in
many respects, the most difficult challenge we have on many of these
issues.

During today\'s meeting, we will concentrate on the issues of
performance and integration as we review the upcoming decision by the
DOE on possible adoption of the canister-based system for
transportation, aging, and disposal. As we said, the so-called TAD
concept could have the potential to improve the throughput of the
repository surface facilities, reduce the potential for accidents, and
reduce worker radiation exposures.

The Board has long been interested in the feasibility of the
canister-based system and recommended as early, in its second report, I
believe it was, in November 1990, that DOE evaluate the merits of such a
system. The Board welcomes the DOE\'s decision to study the TAD concept.

Today\'s agenda leads off with an overview of the entire Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management program, including the Yucca Mountain
Project, by Paul Golan, the program\'s Acting Director. Following Paul
Golan\'s overview, I am going to ask Board member Mark Abkowitz to
introduce and lead the discussions on several presentations on the
proposal transporting, aging, and disposing system. A presentation on
surface facilities will immediately follow the discussion of technical
analyses supporting the TAD.

Finally, after our review of the surface facilities, we have asked for
presentations on two additional topics. The first is a status report on
the DOE\'s inquiry into the U.S. Geological Survey e-mail issues. And,
after DOE has reported on its inquiry into the e-mail issues, a
representative from the U.S. Geological Survey will inform us about the
agency\'s own inquiry. And, we\'re looking forward to that. Our final
presentation of the day will discuss a recent analysis by the Electric
Power Research Institute to estimate the maximum disposal capacity for
spent fuel in the Yucca Mountain repository.

And, as usual, following the presentations, we have scheduled time for
public comment, which is an aspect of our meetings that is extremely
important to all of us. If you would like to comment at that time,
please enter your name on the sign-up sheet at the table near the
entrance to the room. And, of course, written copies of any extended
remarks can be submitted, and will be made part of the meeting record.

Some of you have asked about questioning during the course of the
presentations. Our preference for that would be for you to write down
your questions, and submit them to Linda Coultry at the back of the
room, and leave this information at the sign-in table. We will certainly
cover as many questions as time will allow.

Now, before we get started with the presentations, I would like to ask
all of you to turn your cell phones and pages to the silent mode to
avoid distractions during our meeting. That\'s just to remind you of
what we mean.

And, I\'d like now to introduce Paul Golan to kick things off with a
program overview.

Paul was designated Acting Director of the Office of Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management on May 8, 2005, by the Secretary of Energy,
Samuel Bodman. The office\'s mission is to develop a disposal system for
the Nation\'s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at
Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of
1982. We\'re delighted to have Paul with us today.

GOLAN: Thank you, Dr. Garrick. Can everybody hear me in the back? Thanks
for inviting me and allowing me to speak today.

My name is Paul Golan. I\'m the Acting Director, and as Dr. Garrick
pointed out, I\'ve been with the Project about a year. I think yesterday
was my one year anniversary of being part of the Project. But, in a lot
of ways, I\'ve been associated with this Project a lot longer. I grew up
in Illinois, and Illinois right now has the largest backlog of spent
nuclear fuel in the nation, derives about 50 percent of its power from
nuclear energy. And, so, I was the one who was using all the lights and
everything else like that growing up.

From there, I joined the Naval Nuclear Power and Nuclear Propulsion
Program, and I\'ve seen the seas for about six years. Another aspect of
what we\'re going to dispose of at Yucca Mountain, is the Navy Nuclear
Propulsion System\'s reactor cores. Lastly, I came by way of the Office
of Environmental Management, which is the Department\'s clean-up
program, of which we have Savannah River, Hanford, and Idaho, which is
high-level waste that was generated as a result of the strategic
deterrent we developed during the cold war. The high-level waste at
Hanford, Savannah River, and Idaho will also be disposed at Yucca
Mountain. So, while I\'m new to the program, I think I have some\--going
further back.

An interesting thing I learned in coming to this Project is just how
important Yucca Mountain is to this country, and how it allows us to
have a diverse supply of energy that\'s less dependent on fossil and
less dependent on foreign sources. 20 percent of our nation\'s energy,
electricity, comes from nuclear power, and the waste that generates that
electricity is going to come to Yucca Mountain.

If you look at the amount of power that the waste that\'s going to be
disposed of at Yucca Mountain has produced, it amounts to the equivalent
of about burning five billion tons of coal. And, I think that\'s
something that we can leave our next generation, is a resource that we
haven\'t used, and it\'s also eliminated the burning and the discharge
of pollutants into the air. I think the number is around 700 or 800
million tons of gases and particulates that have been avoided as a
result of our using nuclear power.

About a year ago, Secretary Bodman did ask me and a small team to come
to the Yucca Mountain Project, and his guidance was quite simple to me.
He said, \"Find ways to make it simpler, safer, and more reliable.\"
And, over the last year after understanding where we are, there\'s a
number of things and a number of changes that we\'ve instituted, that I
would like to go through some of those today that goes along the path of
safer, simpler, and more reliable.

The first item that I do like to talk about, though, is the item that\'s
in front of Congress, is our 2007 fiscal year budget. And, I think folks
in the room would probably know that a lot of the committees are
actually doing their marks this week and next week before the May
recess. So, if I can go ahead two slides to the 2007 budget request?

Our request in 2007 is \$544.5 million. The request amounts to about
\$156.5 million out of the waste fund, and \$388 million out of the
defense fund. As everybody in the room understands, the nuclear waste
fund, there is a levy on the sale of nuclear power across the country.
There is a corpus which has about \$18 billion in it today. The rate
payers contribute on the order of about \$700 to \$800 million a year
for that levy. The \$18 billion in the corpus actually accrues interest.
The corpus is invested in government securities. In the last year, we
generated about a billion dollars in interest through the corpus.

The four areas that we\'re going to be focusing on in 2007 are largely
extensions to some of the initiatives we\'re undertaking this year. The
first is the development of the license application with the clean
canistered approach. I\'m going to talk about that approach a little bit
later. But, we\'re working right now in developing the license
application.

While we\'re going to have to redevelop portions of the license
application, both the surface portions where facilities weren\'t going
to have to be built, we\'re redesigning some of those facilities. We\'re
having to redevelop some of the subsurface portions of the license
application. It is going to have some short-term cost in terms of how
much time and how much money it\'s going to cost, but we think the
benefits of going down this approach far outweigh the short-term costs
that we\'re going to have to incur.

The second item that we\'re investing in this year, next year, and over
the next two years, is improvements to the safety infrastructure of the
site. A lot of the facilities, a lot of the infrastructure is old, and
it needs to be improved. We have workers who are still working in cargo
containers. We have an electricity grid that basically is not where it
should be today. We frequently lose power. The communications
infrastructure is not where it should be in terms of the reliability.
Some of the emergency services are located up to 45 minutes away from
the site. We\'re looking at bringing some of those services closer to
the actual repository, and on the repository.

We have over 200 workers who work on the site every day. The site has
thousands of visitors a year, and we want to make sure that the people
who work at the site, and the people who visit the site, the regulators,
all have an environment that\'s safe.

We\'re also intending, with our 2007 budget request, to invest in the
transportation infrastructure. And, this is not the work that\'s
associated with the Nevada Rail Line, which we\'re in the process of the
Environmental Impact Statement right now. There\'s a lot of long lead
items associated with transportation, such as the rail cars, the rolling
stock, the escort cars, and things like that, all the infrastructure
necessary to take the waste from where it is today to where it needs to
eventually go.

One of the things that we\'re looking at is trying to follow the model
of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project used in developing its
transportation infrastructure. I think that, largely, that is a very
successful program on a number of different fronts, and we\'re trying to
get in front of this transportation system, much like WIPP did back in
the Eighties and Nineties in putting together its transportation
infrastructure. There\'s training, there\'s education, there\'s public
interaction that has to happen before we move our first shipment of
radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain.

The last area of focus that we\'re looking at in 2007, again, follow
onto 2006 improvements to the quality and culture of this organization.
Gene Runkle is going to talk later on about a report on e-mails
associated with infiltration work on the USGS. But, the quality and the
culture of this organization is something that we\'re taking a hard turn
on in improving and making it truly something that can be licensable by
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

If you look at our \'07 request compared to our \'06 request, we
actually received \$495 million in 2006. About \$49 1/2 million of that
request, of that appropriation, actually went into an integrated spent
fuel recycling project, which the money, although came to our
organization, the Radioactive Waste Management Organization, that money
is actually being spent and the program is being managed by the Office
of Nuclear Energy within the Department of Energy.

The clean canistered approach, which we\'re going to spend a lot of time
today talking about, let me just give you a rationale on why we wanted
to do this, again, safer, simpler, more reliable. I come from an
operations background, and what I take out of my operations background
is that every time we do something, every time there\'s an activity
which involves a worker and a hazard, there is the opportunity to have
an accident. What we\'re trying to do is take as many of these
interactions out of the process, and one of the ways we\'re trying to do
that with the clean canistered approach is basically receive the
majority of the fuel in a canister where the workers are not going to
have to handle the fuel, and they\'re not going to have to handle the
fuel as many times.

Every time we take out one of those interactions, we think we make the
operation more safe. If we look at the whole design of the facility
compared to the design that we had before, there\'s a number of large
facilities that we\'re no longer considering building today.

So, the question is where are we in that, because we announced the clean
canistered design back in October. We directed our contractor back then
to develop a design. One of my engineers in my organization had a good
idea, and said, \"What could make this really interesting is we have
competing designs.\" So we asked another contractor to develop a
competing design for what this clean canistered approach would look
like.

At the end of March, we received two designs, one from our contractor,
BSC, another from another contractor, our MTS contractor, Management and
Technical Support contractor. And, there\'s a lot of things about both
designs that looked good. So, my staff right now is reviewing both
designs. Our intent is, in June, to take the design packages to the
Secretary of Energy Acquisition Board, and make our presentation there,
and, then, to basically get two designs, not complete designs, but two
designs approved by the Acquisition Board.

And, again, the question is why are you doing two designs? If we look
towards managing risks, project risks, there\'s different ways that you
can manifest managing risks. One way is to put a great deal of
contingency or extra money on a part of a project that has risks, and
the other is to have a backup, or a Plan B. So, for the areas of the
Project where we feel that there is significant program risk, rather
than just say we\'re going to have 100 percent contingency, we\'d like
to carry at least to the next step, a contingent design.

Now, the design that we eventually submit to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission in our license application, we\'ll have a single design.
Right now, we\'re at a point right now where we can\'t make that. So,
there\'s going to be a number of aspects of our design that we\'re going
to continue forward with parallel designs.

Our status and schedule right now, again, is to be in front of the Board
in the June time frame, and then later this summer, after we\'ve
incorporated that into our baseline, is to promulgate an intended
licensing schedule.

About a year ago, in March of 2005, we were made aware of some
disturbing e-mails associated with the infiltration work that the USGS
performed for us. We published a technical report, which Gene Runkle is
going to walk through in more detail later on today. But one of the
things that we did in preparing that technical report, we started with
assuming that we had nothing, we started with independent work that was
not derived by the Project. We looked at the infiltration rate
estimates, a science that\'s independent that the Project has come up
with for the three predicted climate conditions at Yucca Mountain, and
we plotted those as a function of the amount of precipitation versus the
amount of infiltration you expect into the mountain. And, we took the
USGS work and we laid it on top of that. And, what we found for the
three predicted climate conditions at Yucca Mountain is that the USGS
work was consistent with independently derived work.

Nevertheless, we\'re going to replace that work, because the process
that USGS used to develop that work didn\'t meet our quality
requirements. We\'ve asked Sandia National Laboratory to redevelop the
computer approach for the infiltration rate estimates. They\'re in the
process of doing that right now. And, later this summer, we expect to
have a final product from them, which after independent review, we will
place before a model.

We\'re spending a good deal of our management time focusing on quality
and culture. There\'s a number of work stoppages and work suspensions
we\'ve ordered over the last several months, because our work
requirements weren\'t met. We suspended work associated with the
temperature and humidity gauges, because we had issues with calibration.
We suspended work associated with chemical standards, because our
requirements weren\'t met for procurement of those chemical standards.
We stopped work, actual physical work, in the\--for laying a cable,
because we weren\'t sure that the national player codes were met in
terms of how that cable was marked, and we also suspended work in
December when we could not verify that we had proper flow-down of
requirements when we actually did design work.

We\'re taking hard looks at these things right now, and rather than say
we\'re going to come back and fix it later, we\'re going to fix that
work now. Because, in my mind, rework is a defect, and we have to find
these issues either before they happen, or right after they happen, and
correct the problem on the spot. And, rather than taking months or years
to find out an issue, we want to find out these issues in minutes,
hours, or days. We\'ll take aggressive action.

We\'re also working on looking at how we report our Project status. When
I got to the Project, we had what was called the dashboard, the red,
yellow and green dashboard, which talked about\--there were a hundred
indicators\--what we\'re looking at is the Project. And, what we found
through a number of our reviews is that the same problems were coming up
again and again, and we\'re doing the same kind of corrective actions,
yet we weren\'t getting any kind of change in performance.

So, what we did is we\'re looking right now at retooling our performance
indicator system. We\'re focusing right now on the effectiveness of
corrective actions. Once that we can verify that we had a good
corrective action program, that we can verify the effectiveness through
change in performance, through improvement of performance, we\'re going
to start to grow the things we looked at, the things we\'re reporting.

But, one of the things that we found was that we were probably looking
at too many things, and in some cases, not the important things. So, we
want to\--we\'re right now in the process of looking at fewer things.
We\'re looking at them deeply. We\'re developing processes so we can
actually measure systems without disturbing the systems. I do have a
background in physics, and I do know the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle.

We had a tendency when we measure things, to actually change the
performance, and we were getting something different. Our measurements
were telling us something different than it was when it was actually
happening. So, again, we\'re focusing on measuring fewer things,
measuring them more effectively, so that when we actually take an
action, we can say we\'ve now fixed the thing, and we\'re going to
follow up, but we don\'t expect to have to fix this thing in the future.

Talk about the infrastructure, operate, the worker safety, operations
that we\'re taking at the site. Scott Wade is working that right now.
Again, simple things, such as taking workers out of cargo containers,
putting in a more robust emergency response infrastructure, improving
the communication and electrical distribution at the site. We\'re even
looking at the road, which I think a lot of you know has been there
since the early 1950\'s. It\'s a two-lane winding road, which we think
poses some worker safety risks.

In January, we designated Sandia National Laboratory as our lead
laboratory. Dennis Berry is here today. Again, using the WIPP model, the
Waste Isolation Pilot Project model, we took advantage of one of the
great national laboratories in Sandia to coordinate and organize our
scientific work. We chose Sandia because of their success with the WIPP
project. They were very successful in organizing and coordinating that
work.

Right now, we\'re in the process of transitioning the work from our BSC
contractor to Sandia National Laboratories, and while we\'re working
that hard, and as you can imagine, when you\'re talking about the scope
of work of about \$100 million a year, there\'s issues that we\'re
working, but we expect to complete that transition this year.

And, again, what we\'re trying to do is take advantage of the things
that we\'ve learned before. Everything that we\'re trying to implement
here, not only safer, simpler, more reliable, but if we don\'t have to
invent it, if we can use a model that\'s worked before, we intend to use
it here.

As part of the trust and verify culture, as we\'re asking ourselves how
do we know? We have established an independent technical review
consortium. Last month, we named ORISE, the Oak Ridge Institute for
Science and Education, basically to do independent technical review of
our work. And, the people say, Paul, why are you doing that? And, I said
well, there\'s things that I just don\'t understand, so I would like a
second opinion. It\'s kind of like going to the doctor. If the doctor
tells me I need to get my eye removed, I\'d probably get a second
opinion. So, we have established ORISE to basically come in and if we
have an issue or a question with the technical part of our work, ask
them for review.

Now, for folks who are not familiar with ORISE, it\'s a consortium of
about a hundred universities around the country. I think Vanderbilt is
on that consortium. It\'s based out of Oak Ridge. Homeland Security, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency uses this
consortium for independent technical review. As we have done some of our
work through the year, for instance our technical report on the
infiltration work that USGS did, we went off and got some experts
outside of the Department to review the technical work.

Gene Runkle, who is going to talk about that report today, went off and
interviewed people individually to do some independent work for us, and
when we did the independent technical report for the infiltration, we
actually got three people who are not associated with the Department, a
professor from the University of Arizona, professor from the Colorado
School of Mines, and an expert from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
We spent a lot of time getting those people assembled to do that work.

With this consortium here, we now have a hundred universities at our
fingertips. And, again, trust but verify. Trust but verify, part of
about changing the culture. What we\'re trying to ask ourselves is how
do you know the data is good, and how did you verify that the data was
good? We\'re looking forward to using Oak Ridge and moving forward.

Contract status. I\'m going through a number of different things right
now, some of them technical and some of them non-technical. We had a
five plus five, five year plus five year, contract with BSC. The first
five years of that contract expired in March of 2006 year. We executed a
one year extension to that contract, to the 2007 time frame, March 2007
time frame. And, right now, we\'re in discussions to execute that second
year of the option year of the contract with Bechtel. That\'s where we
are on that.

Organization. I have to go to my organization slide. Yesterday, as a
matter of fact, this organization became effective. When I got to the
Project about a year ago, I looked at the organization and we had east
and west designations to the office, and we had two deputies, and we had
what I\'ll call more of a linear organization, some people would call it
a scope type organization, where folks necessarily didn\'t have to work
together.

What we have done is we focused on our core function. Okay? We have
basically this represents the repository itself. This line represents
the waste, which is going to go to the repository. And, this bottom line
of the organization represents the support that we all need to do our
work. Up here, I have the office of Quality Assurance, which is a direct
report to my office. That\'s a change from where we were a year ago.
And, the other thing that I\'ll point out, right in this office here,
not as a separate box, but we have the Office of Employee Concerns,
which again reports directly to me.

One of the things we have done over the last year is we now have that
office, and the safety conscious work environment, the Office of Worker
Concerns, is a single program for the entire Office of Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management.

Another reason why we changed it, because I was asked a question, and I
said, \"Who is responsible for this,\" and, you know, a lot of people
would just sit on their hands, so I would ask the question the next day,
and I said, \"Who would be responsible for this?\" Well, on day one, I
got nobody raising their hand. On day two I got three or four people
raising their hands. And I thought there was a little bit of confusion
in terms of roles and responsibilities.

So, right now, the way I like to look at this is we have the Chief
Scientist, the person responsible for organizing, integrating our
scientific work across the entire Project, is Russ Dyer. Russ will be
here today. He will be talking. There\'s Russ. Everybody knows Russ.

The second part of this is we\'re going to have to design a repository,
so we have the Office of Chief Engineer, and that will be Paul
Harrington. Paul is responsible for the engineering aspect of this
Project.

Mark Williams is the regulatory authority. Mark is personally
responsible for developing a license application for the Department of
Energy, not only the license application, but any other regulatory
interaction we have, whether it be with the EPA or any other regulatory
organization.

Eventually, we are going to have to do construction. In the early parts,
we\'re going to do some safety related infrastructure construction.
Scott Wade is responsible to basically develop, maintain and develop the
infrastructure for this Project.

And, lastly, as we go to operations, John Arthur is the site operations
manager. John is basically at Yucca Mountain.

So, as we go through the project, we go from science to design to
license, to build, to operate. And, so, as we go through this process,
we\'ve spent a lot of time on science. Right now, the major activities
that were undertaken, the Department has undertaken, is the license and
design of this Project. As we go through the licensing, and we get an
actual construction authorization, the elements of work will move into
our infrastructure. And, then, we\'re going to get to the point of
operating, and we\'ll have an operations manager who is responsible for
operating the repository.

The next one down here, we have to prepare, transport and dispose of the
waste. Chris Kouts is basically responsible for the Waste Acceptance
criteria, and getting the waste, working with industry, working with the
government agencies, getting the waste ready to move.

Office of Logistic Management and Transportation. Again, the process of
getting the waste from where it is to where it needs to go. And, then,
last, which you notice this is vacant today, is that once the waste is
at the site, how do we do in the thermal management, and how are we
effectively emplacing the waste into the repository. And, as we go from
preparing, to transporting, and disposing of the waste, you will see the
predominance of the activities go from the left side of this chart to
the right side of this chart.

At the bottom here, we have four support functions. Project controls,
that\'s the baseline, that\'s earned value, that\'s our configuration
control board. We have a single person who is responsible for all those
processes, Ken Powers.

We have actually separated off procurement in a separate organization.
And, as we look forward into time, whether it\'s procurement of rail
cars, the rail line, or the major facility, we wanted to have a separate
contracting organization, because that organization is going to have a
lot of business through it. Different from the Office of Government
Services, which provides for CFO type of functions, the HR type of
functions, and, lastly, the Office of External Affairs.

So, we tried to take the organization, which was basically linear, east
and west linear, we tried to fatten it. As I tell my direct reports,
you\'re as responsible, Russ is responsible working his interactions
with Paul Harrington and Mark Williams as he is working for me as the
boss. We have tried to develop an interdependent organization where
these people feel and believe the need to work with one another, and
unless they mutually succeed, none of them will succeed.

We implemented this organization yesterday. There\'s some things we\'re
doing to fully implement the organization, such as changing procedures,
and things like that, but right now, this is the organization that is RW
today, and as Dr. Garrick asked before, we like single points of
accountability. Today, I think we have that. And, again, if we want to
talk about that later in terms of who is responsible for this, we can.

Licensing schedules. As I mentioned earlier, right now, we\'re in the
process of reviewing the conceptual design from the contractor. We\'re
expected to be in front of the Board in the early part of June. Later in
July, later this summer, we expect to have a schedule that we intend to
live by.

Lastly, the Department did introduce legislation associated with the
Yucca Mountain Project last month. There\'s three reasons on why we did
legislation and why we did it right now. First, legislation is required
by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In order for the Department to receive
a construction authorization from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we
need to permanently withdraw land. 147,000 acres around the repository.
The only way you can do that permanent withdrawal is through
legislation.

We modeled the land withdrawal for Yucca Mountain around the land
withdrawal for the Waste Isolation Pilot Program in Carlsbad, New
Mexico.

Second, recognized that times have changed since when the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act was passed in 1982, and when it was amended in 1987. It was
first passed shortly after Three Mile Island. It was amended right after
Chernoble. I don\'t think policymakers necessarily saw the continued
growth of nuclear power through license extensions, and as we look right
now to our future, the importance that nuclear energy can play in the
21st Century in the United States energy mix.

One of the things we asked for and requested in our legislation is to
eliminate the administrative cap, the 70,000 ton capacity limitation
that was placed in the original Act, and basically make the capacity
dependent on what the mountain is technically capable of holding.

The last aspect of the legislation, we seek to provide clarity and
predictability. Part of that is funding reforms. Go back to one of my
first slides. The waste fund generated, you know, \$800 million in
receipts and a billion dollars in interest. We received less than \$200
million from the waste fund in 2006. So, we\'re seeking funding reform
in our proposed legislation. The other thing we\'re looking for is
predictability and clarity.

There\'s some aspects that we would read the Nuclear Waste Policy Act,
we think we have the authority. What we seek with the legislation is to
ensure that when we go down a path here, it\'s clear to everybody that
that path is consistent with the law.

So, with that, I\'d just like to summarize, and then we\'ll get into
questions and answers. We\'ve engaged in some significant change over
the last year. We think that these changes are consistent with the
Secretary\'s direction of safer, simpler, and more reliable. We\'re
working right now to take a lot of those changes that we introduce and
make them part of our systems and make them part of our culture. Going
forward, opening up the repository is vitally important to our Nation,
and I\'m confident that with these actions that we\'ve taken, and the
actions that we plan to take, that the Department will meet this
challenge.

GARRICK: Howard?

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

I\'m sure glad your description of the task you\'re giving ORISE, sounds
somewhat like the charter of this Board. And, I\'m curious what
distinction you see in the questions you would ask them versus what you
might ask us to look at?

GOLAN: That\'s a good question. Again, it\'s not meant to challenge what
your Board charter is. But, for instance, when we completed our
technical report on infiltration, which Gene Runkle is going to talk
about later today, we asked the question does this make sense. And, so,
we wanted to get some people who were independent of the Project to take
a look at it, and basically provide their feedback to us. And, so, it
allows us, when we have technical questions with some of the work
projects, we say does this really make sense, and if it does, let\'s get
a second opinion.

So, I think it\'s meant more for some of our real time work products,
and basically allowing ourselves access to a large body of experts out
there who can provide\--you know, this may not make sense. I don\'t know
if we would have been able to give you our technical report and ask for
a review, like we did from the three experts that we had from School of
Mines and Arizona, to incorporate those comments into our report. I
don\'t think it\'s counter to this. I think it\'s complementary. And,
again, part of it is trying to engrain the trust but verify culture into
our organization, so that we\'re critically looking at our work.

GARRICK: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

One of the things you mentioned with respect to the USGS was that
you\'ll be redoing some of the analyses and rewriting the computer
codes, and all that sort of thing. I was just wondering if you had a
notion of what time frame you\'ll have to complete this analysis and
bring the whole thing, some sort of resolution?

GOLAN: Sure. We passed last fall Sandia National Laboratory, so we
developed the computer approach. We\'ve been working with Sandia.
They\'ve given us indications that they\'re going to have completed that
work in the summertime frame of this year. After that work has been
looked at and peer reviewed, then it\'s our intention to replace the
USGS work with the Sandia work in the infiltration model. So, we\'re
looking at the summer and the fall.

GARRICK: Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Paul, I\'ve got a few questions on different topics. I\'d like to start
with your organizational chart. The Board for some time has been
communicating to the Department of its concern that the left hand and
the right hand are not connected well enough, and what I\'m referring to
is the connections between waste acceptance, transportation, surface
facilities, design, emplacement, and postclosure. And, I looked at this,
and I wonder where is the box or the Office of Project Integration?
Who\'s responsible in this organization for making sure that all of the
intricate tendencies are connected and properly connected?

GOLAN: This box right here. Office of the Director. And, let me just
spend a little bit of time on this. And, I would invite you to talk to
any of my direct reports, Chris Kouts, Russ Dyer, Paul Harrington.
We\'re really working to try to behave differently in an organization.
And, in some ways, the structure is less important than how people act
in that structure. And, to me, it\'s more important that Russ Dyer,
Office of the Chief Scientist, understand that there is a critical
interface between the science of the repository and the characteristics
of the waste. And, my job is to make sure that Russ and Chris work
together and understand that. And, I\'ll know my job is complete when I
don\'t have to ask Russ or Chris have you talked to each other about
making sure that this waste meets your criteria down here.

So, I would say at the outset that there\'s no way that you can develop
an organization that is just going to automatically work together. What
makes an organization work together is leadership. And, the leaders
acknowledge that their individual success is dependent on their mutual
success. And, again, it\'s a challenge. It\'s a leadership challenge.
But, one of the things that we\'ve, again, tried to take out, is we\'ve
tried to take out the fact that I work in the east and I work in the
west. I work in the repository. I work in Washington. We\'re trying to
take out some of those beliefs that people had, and say we have one
project, we have one mission, and it\'s our job as leaders to work
together to make that happen.

So, again, from an organization perspective, it\'s going to be my job to
make sure that these guys, they need to work together to the point that
they\'re working together instinctively.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

So, can I presume then that the accountability for making sure this
project is seamlessly integrated rests with you?

GOLAN: Yes, sir.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. Let me move on now to the surface facility. In the work
that I\'ve seen up to now with reference to the surface facility design,
I\'m somewhat confused about two different amounts of waste that are
being discussed to be emplaced at Yucca Mountain. There\'s the 70,000
number, and the 142,000 metric ton number. Can you comment on how the
surface facility design work is progressing relative to those two
assumptions?

GOLAN: I can. Right now, Yucca Mountain is statutorily capped at 70,000
metric tons, and that\'s our limit, and that\'s the basis that we\'re
designing our facilities for. We have analyzed waste up to 120,000
metric tons. There\'s another number out there that I think was closer
to the 142,000 tons, which represents all the projected waste from the
current reactors to all the life extensions. So, that\'s what those
three numbers represent in my mind.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Irrespective of that number, I wanted to indicate at least my personal
appreciation that the Department has developed the total system model. I
think it\'s one of the really bright lights in the last couple of years
that have come out of the program.

And, in that context, I see that this model is a very important tool in
being able to reconcile some unresolved issues at this point with regard
to the surface facility design, because we\'re just now learning how
some of the dependencies on the preclosure side as an integrated system,
and in the relationship between preclosure and postclosure affect issues
of throughput and safety and thermal management, and so forth. So, I
would strongly encourage the Department to utilize this tool and to
expand its use.

And, having said so, I have my doubts that rushing to the finish line to
get a surface facility design in front of the Board in June is going to
be a positive exercise. I would encourage you to study this issue much
more thoroughly than in the next 30 days.

GOLAN: We will. But, again, the purpose of the critical decision one for
the conceptual design is to get something so that we, as an
organization, can work\--it\'s not going to represent the completion of
that design. It\'s going to represent going back to the executives on
the project management process, before we were on this task, which was
the dry fuel handling, we\'re now going back, we\'re going to give you
our technical basis for why we think this task is better.

And, then, the second part about that is here\'s the things that we\'re
going to do in order to continue that design, and here\'s the milestones
that we\'re going to put in place for us to be measured by by the
Secretary. And, then, when we come back for our critical decision two
decision, they\'ll have some ways to say are they going fair or they
going afoul on that.

So, in my mind, the conceptual design, the meeting that we\'re going to
have next month, represents adjusting, and basically, adjusting the
baseline from where we were to where we want to go, and in no way
represents a detailed design at this point.

ABKOWITZ: Let me move on to my last question, which has to do with
transportation. There\'s two related questions.

First of all, can you apprise us of the status of the evaluation of the
Nevada Rail Line? We understand there may be an alternative route being
reevaluated in addition to Caliente.

GOLAN: Sure. And, I may have to get back to you with all the details
after I go back and talk to my office today. But, one of the
requirements of our initial Environmental Impact Statement is to come
back at a time in the future and go back and look at all the routes,
look at all the potential routes that would actually go to Yucca
Mountain. We have made contact to basically see if there\'s any interest
in looking at some of the routes that we hadn\'t looked at before. What
I\'d like to do is come back after I\'ve talked to my Transportation
Manager, and let me come back this afternoon and provide you a little
bit more thorough answer on that.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. And, finally, related to transportation and
routing, you mentioned the WIPP model as a successful model, and I
concur that it was done very well. But, if you look back over the
history of that, the stakeholder interaction at a local level, the
engagement process began many, many years ahead of time, and the
kick-off point for that was understanding what the routes were going to
be, so you could then meet with the local stakeholders and really get it
done operationally, and from an emergency response viewpoint. Do you
know to date the Department has been reluctant to identify the routes
that would be used, and, so, my question to you is how do you plan on
implementing one of your objectives that you discussed absent having
made that decision?

GOLAN: Sure. One of the things that we\'ve done in 2007 is requested
more money for transportation. I will say that every year, we request
money from Congress through the Administration, and every year, we get
less than requested. And, policy decisions were made through the years
in terms of where those cuts were taken from. And, over the course of
the last six or seven years, the Department has received about a billion
dollars less than what it\'s requested. So, part of our 2007 request is
looking to actually make investments in the things that you\'re talking
about, in terms of routes, in terms of separations, in terms of the
community interaction here. Again, I\'ll know more about how successful
we\'re going to be when we get through the 2007 budget process, though
we\'ve specifically asked for additional money in the next fiscal year
to see if we can start that process.

GARRICK: Thank you. Andy, David, Bill. Andy?

KADAK: Yes. Kadak. I\'m looking at this organization chart, and I\'m
wondering how one as a principal integrator could manage 13 direct
reports? That\'s a very heavy burden, and having been an executive,
that\'s a huge number if you\'re going to do it well. Could you explain
how that\'s going to work for you?

GOLAN: Well, I\'ll just cite two examples that appeared to have worked
in the past. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program I think has about two
times as many direct reports. I could be mistaken, but I think Admiral
Donald has I think about 20 direct reports. It can work. Another, if we
go back about 2000 years, in terms of the number of direct reports, and
that is TAD. But, this will work.

GARRICK: That didn\'t work very well.

GOLAN: I apologize for that. In terms of leadership, you can have layers
in an organization, and the question is can you go to the layered
approach, or, let\'s say this box would have four direct reports, and
then under each one of those direct reports, they would have four more.
Or, you could look at a flatter organization, and then you have to ask
yourself, again, from a personal perspective, which organization, either
a cascaded organization, with flowing down direct reports, or a flatter
organization with more direct reports is going to work. I would submit
to you here is that if at the end of the day here, people are looking at
me for direction, for feedback, for success, I will have failed. My job
is to make these folks look to one another for success, say give me the
feedback, I need your dependency, I need to understand what you\'re
doing here.

And, so, rather than the situation, let\'s say this was tiered down,
let\'s say this layer worked for the Chief Engineer, and this layer
worked for the Regulatory Authority, I\'d rather not have this person
having to go through the Office of the Chief Engineer, over to this
office down here, and then down to here, for interaction. Because every
time I think you do that, you create a potential loss of information
flow. I\'d rather have this person feel a need, feel a requirement to
talk to this person over here, and interact, communicate, and establish
dependency.

KADAK: Well, I don\'t need you to defend it. I\'m just saying it\'s an
observation that you should be aware of, and how this thing is going to
work, is going to be interesting to watch. I have a couple of other
questions.

Could you go back to your focus chart there? In terms of the budget
request, and I\'m looking at the last line which says \$50 million from
the waste project is going to go to another project. What\'s the
justification for that, and is there similar cutout for \'07?

GOLAN: No. This is what Congress did. Congress put in a requirement in
our budget for \$49.5 million in \'06 to go to the Integrated Spent Fuel
Recycling Project. So, we didn\'t request it in Fiscal Year 2006. This
is what we requested. None of this \$544 million would go into this
project that year, based on our request. So, this was something that
Congress did that was a departure from the Administration\'s proposal.

KADAK: Is that coming out of the Waste Fund?

GOLAN: No, this is coming out of Defense. And, in fact, if you look at
the \'06 budget, out of the \$495 million that were appropriated, \$100
million came out of the Waste Fund, which all went to Yucca Mountain.
But, the balance, or \$395 million, came out of Defense.

KADAK: In terms of your license application, what is the constraint
that\'s driving the delay on submission?

GOLAN: Well, there\'s a number of things that we need to make sure are
in the license application before we submit it to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission. First of all, we\'re changing the surface design. Okay? And,
as we talked about before, we\'re in the process of reviewing the
conceptual design. In order to submit a license application that can be
documented by the NRC, it needs significant more detail than we would
necessarily for conceptual design. We\'re looking at design detail on
the systems and safety for the surface design, for the surface facility.

Second aspect that we\'re looking at right now is the infiltration
model. Again, we\'ve made a decision to replace the infiltration model
upon successful completion of that by Sandia National Laboratory. We\'re
in the process of doing that right now.

The third aspect is EPA radiation protection standards. We have a draft
standard out right now. We\'ve provided comments on that draft. The
comment period closed last November. But, we\'re looking for the final
EPA radiation protection standard. And, again, if it changes from the
draft standard, then there\'s going to be additional rework that we\'re
going to need to do.

The last is we\'re working on improving the quality and the culture of
the organization. We\'re going to have to demonstrate to the NRC, and
before that, we\'re going to have to demonstrate that our quality
standards have been met, and that we\'re operating consistent with a
quality program before we submit that license application to the NRC.
And, I would submit to you we\'re not there yet. We\'re working to get
to that point.

So, those are the things, the major things, that we\'re looking at right
now in terms of the things that we\'re going to need to do to get to a
license application.

KADAK: So, assuming that you had the TAD decision, when do you think the
license application might be final?

GOLAN: Until we\'ve looked at that, and until I\'ve gone to the
Secretary and got that approval, I\'m not going to comment on that
today, Andy. What I\'d like to do is that once we do do that, and get
that, we\'ll come back and we\'ll brief you all on that in terms of
licensing schedule.

KADAK: One final question.

GARRICK: Go ahead.

KADAK: Why does it take so long for your office to respond to Board
letters?

GOLAN: We\'re working to change that. I want to make sure that we\'re
answering your questions. So, there\'s times I go back and make sure
we\'re answering the question, we\'re fulling considering your
recommendations and advice. But, we\'re working right now to try to
improve our response rate back to you all, and that\'s something that
we\'re going to try to improve on.

GARRICK: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I guess I haven\'t paid much attention to where the budget has come
from, but I thought you were the Director of the Official of Civilian
Waste, and I see that DOD is about\--well, almost three times as much as
the Nuclear Waste Fund. Has that been traditional? I just haven\'t paid
much attention to how that budget has come out.

GOLAN: From when the program started in 1984, through 1992, the program
was funded exclusively through the Nuclear Waste Fund to the tune of
about \$3 billion. Starting in 1993, there was a defense component that
ranged from \$100 million to about \$200 million through fiscal year
2001, which was slightly less than the Nuclear Waste Fund component.
Starting in\--and, in fact, I\'ll just give you the numbers here. In
2004, \$190 million came from the Waste Fund, \$390 million from
Defense. In \'05, we received \$343 million from the Waste Fund, \$229
from Defense. And, in \'06, we received \$99 from the Waste Fund, and
\$346 from Defense. Part of this is recognition that the Defense, over
the first ten years of the project, didn\'t make a contribution, so
there\'s a catch-up that has to be made. Because there\'s a ratio in
terms of every generator pays their fair share, so over the course of
the first ten years, Defense made no contribution. I think that Congress
right now is in a little bit of a catch-up mode, and making the Defense
contribution get caught up so that it has provided the proper share.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

Is that another way of saying that it\'s easier to hide the money in the
Defense fund than it is in the\--

GOLAN: Not at all.

DUQUETTE: \--the Nuclear Waste Fund.

GOLAN: Not at all.

DUQUETTE: Okay. Let\'s go back to your organization chart. I count 14
boxes on that chart, and by my numbers, I think that there are five
acting, including your own position, two vacant positions, including the
Director\'s position, and at least one relatively new position, Russ
Dyer\'s position. So, more than half of this organization chart is still
in flux, and I think one of the things I\'ve been concerned about, and I
think other Board members have been concerned about it, is stability in
this particular Project. It\'s been a revolving door for managers to
come and go through. What are you and/or the Secretary doing to
stabilize it and to get some of these acting position into real
positions rather than acting positions?

GOLAN: Well, as far as this, neither the Secretary nor I have no play on
getting that filled. The President has made the nomination. The nominee
is given a clearance, is\--and a hold on that person. There\'s a couple
things that we\'re doing that not only look at the early part of the
Project, but in terms of the senior management part of this Project. One
of the things that we\'re trying to do is take some examples from Naval
Reactor and started an intern program, and we\'re actively seeking to
hire about 12 college graduates with degrees in physics, mathematics,
chemistry, engineering, early sciences per year. And, we\'re actually
going after graduates from the University of Nevada, to bring people in
at the start of this Project to build a technical base.

We\'re recruiting to fill a number of our positions today. I think one
of the things you\'ll see here is we\'ve given over 200 FTE\'s, full
time equivalents, from the Office of Personnel Management, to manage
this project. We\'re about 30 under right now in terms of the actual
federal staff. The rest of the program right now is to recruit people
into this project. We brought in Mark Williams, who is new to the
office, but comes from a background of the Nuclear Propulsion Program,
but also spent about ten years in Naval Reactors. We\'re trying to
recruit folks, senior folks, recent retirees from Naval Reactors, from
the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. We\'re actively seeking to fulfill
our Office of Quality Assurance with a full-time person right now.
We\'re re-advertising again.

But, what I will say, you know, one of the difficulties we have to bring
people for this Project for a number of reasons. First of all, Las Vegas
tends to be a high cost of living area. And, there is differences, in
terms of what I can pay individuals, versus what the private sector can
pay individuals. We\'re trying to work on getting some of those
authorities back here through accepted\--things like that.

But, in terms of stabilization, the only thing I can say is that if we
provide meaningful, challenging work and a good work environment,
that\'s going to be one of my goals that we use in terms of providing
stability to the organization. I can\'t stop people from leaving because
they want to retire. In fact, we just had a retirement in the Government
Services Office. The manager of that office was a federal employee for
35 years in the CRCS program. Thought it was a good time to leave. I
couldn\'t stop that from happening. But, we\'re trying to bring new
people in at the very start of the program. We\'re trying to develop a
pipeline of experts. We\'re recruiting right now, and we\'re really
trying to provide good, meaningful, important work for people, so that
people want to come to this Project.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

Let me just pose a comment, and it\'s my last comment. There probably
will be a new Director named soon. I presume that this organization
chart has been vetted by the Secretary, or at least someone at his
level. We\'re not looking for a guarantee, but why wouldn\'t a new
Director coming in simply want to put his own organization in place,
rather than this organization?

GOLAN: There is no guarantee that\--well, first of all, to answer your
first question. This organization had to go to the Secretary\'s office,
and I personally agree with the Deputy Secretary on this in terms of the
rationale. But, as you said there is no guarantee. I have to ask,
though, that this is the program that\--the Department that we\'re going
to operate. If we do good things, if we have logic behind our decisions,
if we have a good rationale technical basis for this, for not only the
organization, but the other things that we\'re doing, hopefully when
people come in, they\'re going to say that\'s a good idea, that\'s just
what I would have done.

But, again, at the end of the day, there\'s really no guarantees. We\'re
trying, again, I ask myself this every night when I go home, does what
we do make things safer, simpler and more reliable. And, whether it\'s
organization, whether it\'s leadership, whether it\'s design, whether
it\'s the science, and again, you can ask any one of my direct reports,
always ask that question, are our decision, are our actions consistent
with those principles. And, if they are, I think they stand the test of
time.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

GARRICK: All right. Bill, Ron and Ali. Bill?

MURPHY: Murphy, Board. I want to get that on the record.

You answered this question in part in response to Andy\'s question about
scheduling. But, one of the big developments, as I see it, in the
program in the last year has been the concern about million year time
frame as opposed to a 10,000 year time frame. And, I wonder if you
perceive or sense a change in priorities or a set of new scientific or
technical issues that might need to be addressed in response to that
change?

GOLAN: Well, I think if you go back to our models, our models always
consider both time frames. And, again, in terms of the change in
priority, I can\'t comment on what happened a year or two years or three
years ago here. You know, my priorities, safer, simpler, more reliable.
You know, one of the philosophies I have is that if it\'s safer, if
it\'s safe for the worker standing next to it, it\'s probably safe for
the neighbor, and it\'s probably safe for the community here.

As we look to the million year time frame in terms of the period of
geologic stability here, you know, our models can go out that far. One
of the things that I will just say is is that I\'ve been reluctant to
give a schedule, and Andy probably is going to twist my arm at the break
here and ask about it, because what we\'re really trying to focus on is
let\'s make sure we have all the pieces together, let\'s make sure we
have the technical basis before we can comment on what the schedule is
going to be. You know, at the end of the day, schedule is very
important, but let\'s make sure we have something that we can actually
point back to and say this is the base for it.

GARRICK: Ron?

LATANISION: Paul, could we turn to the slide on the new legislation? I
don\'t remember which number that is.

GOLAN: The last one.

LATANISION: This new legislation is required by the Policy Act? Is there
a time limited mandate attached to it? I\'m wondering what the timing
is.

GOLAN: The timing is before we get a construction authorization from the
NRC, we\'re going to need to have some permanent withdrawal of the land.

LATANISION: A permanent\--

GOLAN: Permanent withdrawal of the land, of the 147,000 acres.

LATANISION: Yes.

GOLAN: So, in terms of the timing interaction, that\'s what would be the
connection there.

LATANISION: What I thought you said was one of the motivations was to
increase the capacity beyond 70,000 metric tons. Is that also correct?

GOLAN: Yes, what we\'re looking to seek to is take the Administrative
limit off, and make the capacity consistent with the technical
capability of the Project.

LATANISION: The thought that I have is that there clearly is a renewed
interest in nuclear electric generation, but there\'s also an interest
in new designs in terms of reactors, new fuels, therefore, different
waste forms. Is that something that will be integrated in some fashion
into this new legislation, or is that too far ahead of the game?

GOLAN: I think that\'s too far ahead of the game right now. What we\'re
trying to deal with is the set of circumstances that we have today. And,
again, you know, the nuclear movement into the future here, we\'ll have
better indication of what that\'s going to mean to the repository. After
we understand that and consider it, it will be time to say what exactly
will happen in terms of any type of legislation, or not.

LATANISION: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

Back to your organization chart. Which one of these offices has the most
direct responsibility of interacting with the utility?

GOLAN: Chris Kouts.

MOSLEH: I see. And, then, which one would be responsible for integrated
analyses of the TSPA?

GOLAN: Again, the integrating analysis, you know, Russ Dyer here is
going to be my point person, the Office of Chief Scientist is going to
be responsible for the TSPA, so he\'s going to have to integrate that
with our regulatory authority, Mark Williams. And, then, again, at the
end of the day here, in terms of other management processes, such as
configuration controls, it would have to be coordinated, if we\'re going
to make a change, we\'d want the change to be documented, and we want
the change to be promulgated, and that would happen through the Office
of Project Control here with Ken Powers.

GARRICK: Okay, we have a couple of people that have already asked
questions wanting to ask some more, but before they do that, I\'m going
to get a few licks in. The privilege of the Chairman, but I\'ll try to
be brief.

Paul, you didn\'t say anything about the Science and Technology Program.
And of course, a good deal of the information that this Board has
received to answer a lot of the questions we have come from that
Program. Can you say something about it?

GOLAN: Sure. Science and Technology is a large part of this Project.
And, again, in trying to keep my comments to the prescribed time this
morning, I limited them. We would be more than happy to write a mission
and function statement of the entire organization for the Board. But,
the Science and Technology people work for the Office of the Chief
Scientist. So, the people that you\'ve been working with before, John
Rangles and company, they\'re working in this office right here. We want
to bring the Science and Technology together here.

GARRICK: Okay. I think that we\'re very interested, too, in following
the level of effort that has been dedicated to science and technology,
particularly in the areas that you\'ve heard us identify frequently in
the letter to you and in today\'s opening remarks, and the meeting
yesterday. We\'re very interested in being able to map as much as we can
from the Science and Technology Program to these questions as possible.
So, we\'re most anxious to see that Program being viable and move
forward.

In that connection, you\'ve made frequent reference to independent
review and peer review, and made specific reference to independent
review regarding the infiltration rate estimates that will be coming out
of Sandia. Is that the kind of thing that ORISE will be doing?

GOLAN: Yes, they will.

GARRICK: Now, how is ORISE budgeted?

GOLAN: Well, in this fiscal year, we have about \$2 million on that
instrument. As we go through the fiscal year 2007 process, if the
Department receives about what it would cost, we\'re looking at about
\$3 million for that next year.

GARRICK: About \$3 million next year?

GOLAN: Yes, sir.

GARRICK: Yes. Okay, And, I\'ll cut off most of my other questions,
because I had several, but one thing, and the only thing I\'d say about
the organization is that the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste
Management does more than just the Project. Has anybody
challenged\--and, like Andy, I have managed organizations that are under
the gun from clients to get projects done, and I have been monitor in
terms of the level of effort that every individual whose name is on the
organization chart with respect to that project. Can you say something
about the level of effort, the time commitment to the Yucca Mountain
Project of that top layer, of these individuals? Because I know some of
these people have other things that they have to do.

GOLAN: Are we talking about this box here, or this here?

GARRICK: No, I\'m talking about the Science, Design, License, Build,
Operate, that\'s the working, those are the offices that, as I
understand it, are going to be making the Yucca Mountain Project happen.

GOLAN: And, the question is what level of\--

GARRICK: The question is what\'s the level of effort of these people to
Yucca Mountain? What percentage of the time do they really dedicate to
the Project? I think one of the concerns that the Board has is that in
order for a project of this complexity and this magnitude to really
happen, there needs to be a, as you\'ve said yourself many times, an
unbelievable amount of dedication and focus and commitment. And, I guess
we\'re looking to not only achieve the Project, but to achieve what
other Board members have talked about in terms of integration and all of
the problem solving that goes with it.

We know that a lot of time is taken in other things, in budget meetings,
in planning meetings, and managing the Science and Technology Program,
that is not necessarily Yucca Mountain specific, et cetera, et cetera.
So, what I\'m trying to get at is where are the people that are really
100 percent motivated, dedicated, and committed to this Project?

GOLAN: Let me say a couple things. First of all, this guy\'s commitment
is 100 percent, and I will say this, I\'ve spent time in budget and
planning meetings, but that supports our cost.

GARRICK: Right.

GOLAN: If these guys aren\'t 110 percent, I would be a little bit
surprised here. I will say this. We as an organization spend too much
time in meetings.

GARRICK: I agree.

GOLAN: Far too much time in meetings. I see people scheduled, and
they\'re double and triple booked for ten hours a day. And, a lot of
those meetings aren\'t to make decisions. A lot of the meetings are for
information exchange. And, so, management goal is that we have the
primary purpose for a meeting is to make a decision, and I am working,
and, again, you could talk to any one of my direct reports here, I ask
them, challenge them how much time are you spending in meetings, and,
over time, I think you will find that the amount of time they\'re
spending in those meetings, in information meetings, has gone down, but
I still think we spend far too much today. Again, that\'s one of my
challenges, and that\'s one of these challenges for everybody here, is
effective use of their time. Less time in meetings, more time
communicating, more time doing the necessary management and leadership
work necessary to move this Project forward. And, you can\'t do it
with\--you know, I liken it to you can\'t do it if you\'re just talking
to the same people for ten hours a day.

GARRICK: That\'s right. All right, we\'ve got to wrap up in a couple of
minutes here. But, Mark, you have a short question, I hope?

ABKOWITZ: A very short question, and I think it\'s a good seague from
the last comment. Abkowitz, Board.

Given that you are accountable for integrating this project seamlessly,
and given that you think you spend too much time in meetings, I was just
curious if you\'re going to be staying with us for the rest of today\'s.
Because the TAD Project cuts across just about every box on the diagram.

GOLAN: Yes, I am.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, we look forward to it.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Yes. Kadak, Board.

We\'ve had a new wrinkle with this Global Nuclear Energy Partnership,
and I\'m wondering what contingency plans you are making regarding that
project, specifically relative to waste forms. And, clearly, waste forms
are a strong aspect of licensing this repository, and from what I
understand from the GNEP program, that waste form is yet to be defined.

GOLAN: I\'ll just talk briefly about GNEP here. The Secretary asked me
to run the Yucca Mountain Project, and that\'s what my job is, and
that\'s what the job of this office is. The Global Nuclear Energy
Partnership is an office run out of the Office of Nuclear Energy within
the Department. Dennis Spurgeon is now the Assistant Secretary for that.
And, while the benefit of GNEP are tremendously powerful, you look into
the future, in 10, 20, 30 years from actually seeing that, that whole
process be completed.

In a license application today, we contemplate reprocessed waste from
West Valley, from Savannah River, from Hanford, from Idaho, and I know
all about that waste here. Well, in some sense, we have already looked
at what reprocessed waste looks like, and it\'s already incorporated
into our waste acceptance criteria. But, we\'re proceeding along with
our base case. I think it\'s about 13,000 tons, or so, of reprocessed
waste that exists today. If you look at it, I think, under this scenario
here, we\'re looking at about 6,500 tons of that waste actually coming
to Yucca Mountain. I think that\'s half of that would come to Yucca
Mountain. But, we\'re proceeding along with our base case.

Yes, if the GNEP technologies come through in the future, will we
consider it? But, right now, we have to go to something, and that
something is our base case, the same base case that we had in January of
this year, and it didn\'t change with GNEP. Now, we stay close, keep an
ear to the ground on what the GNEP folks are doing, but, remember,
that\'s a longer term proposition. This is a near-term proposition that
we\'re moving forward on.

KADAK: So, no impact, basically?

GOLAN: No.

GARRICK: Okay. Well, thanks very much, Paul. We hope the time you spend
with us today is not logged as speeding time, and, in any event, that it
is very much worth your time.

So, I am now going to ask Mark to take over and introduce the next
comments.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you, John. Good morning.

As Chairman Garrick noted, I chair the Panel on the Waste Management
System. And, Dr. Garrick has asked me to lead discussions today on the
TAD system, and I am pleased to do so.

I\'d like to start this session with just a few remarks from the
perspective of the Board, and then we\'ll get right into the
presentations.

As most of you know, until recently, planned operations at the surface
facilities involved removal of individual spent fuel assemblies from
transportation casks, and placing them into packages for disposal, a
process that could have resulted in as many as four lifts for an
individual assembly. A canister-based system would substantially reduce
the number of lifts needed because the entire contents of a canister can
be transferred in a single lift. Reducing the number of lifts can
improve facility throughput and reduce the potential for accidents
during lifts.

A canister-based system also has the potential to simplify the design of
the surface facilities. If individual spent fuel assemblies are to be
handled at Yucca Mountain, there could be a concern about oxidation of
any assemblies that have undetected failures in the cladding. With a
canister-based system, those assemblies that are sealed in canisters
would not be handled in air, so concerns about oxidation would be
reduced. It might not be possible to use a canister-based system for all
the spent fuel destined for Yucca Mountain, so some capability to handle
bare spent fuel might still be needed. However, the size of such a
facility presumably would be fairly small if the bulk of the spent fuel
can be handled in canisters. We understand that the DOE\'s current
proposal involves wet handling of bare spent fuel, so the potential
difficulties involving an inert atmosphere can be avoided.

The Board is aware, however, that there is no free lunch here. There is
a potential for a canister-based system to increase the cost or the
complexity of the overall system. For example, it might be difficult to
achieve an optimal thermal blending of spent fuel assemblies, resulting
in an increased need for surface aging capacity, longer-duration
ventilation of the underground part of the repository, or other measures
to deal with the decay heat from spent fuel. Also, by the time a
canister-based system could be put into operation, which we understand
could be a decade, or so, in the future, a significant amount of spent
fuel will have been placed into dry storage casks that may not be
compatible with DOE\'s TAD system. The need to transport and dispose of
that fuel, in addition to fuel initially placed into canisters, adds
complexity to the overall system.

So, with that as background, the two primary objectives of today\'s TAD
session are, first, to examine the effects of a canister-based system on
the overall performance of the repository system, including waste
acceptance, transportation, surface facility operations, emplacement,
and long-term waste isolation.

Secondly, to help determine whether adoption of a canister-based system
would improve or reduce integration of the equipment, facilities, and
operations needed to move spent fuel from reactors to final disposal
underground at Yucca Mountain.

Our program is structured as follows. Chris Kouts of the Department of
Energy will begin this session by giving an overview of the TAD concept.
While the Board has some familiarity with the TAD concept, we also
recognize that this has been evolving over the last several months, and
we look forward to an update on the current status of the TAD proposal.

If a canister-based system is to succeed, I think we all recognize that
significant participation and acceptance of the proposal will be needed
from two particular industries: the utilities who must be willing to
order, load, and seal the canisters, and the cask vendors who will
design and fabricate the canisters and associated transportation and
aging casks. Today, we will hear a joint presentation by representatives
of these industries to get their perspectives on the TAD concept.

After lunch, Chris Kouts will come up to bat again to present an
overview of the technical analyses that will support a decision to
adopt, or to reject, the TAD proposal. Among other things, we hope that
this presentation will tell us both the assumptions that have been made
in defining the analyses, as well as analysis results and
interpretations. Of particular interest is how much spent fuel can be
realistically shipped and disposed of using TAD, what might happen to
the spent fuel that will have been placed in dry storage before TADs
become available, how TADs would affect operation of the transportation
system for shipping spent fuel, and how a canister-based system might
affect thermal management of the repository system, waste emplacement,
and long-term performance of the repository system.

The final presentation in the TAD component of today\'s meeting will
focus on the effect of the TAD decision on surface facility design.
DOE\'s Paul Harrington will be offering these comments.

So, I\'d like to invite Chris Kouts to come up to the podium, and begin
the session.

As background, Chris has served in various management and technical
positions in the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and the
U.S. Department of Energy. He has been responsible for managing overall
program policy-related activities, including the development of program
strategic and contingency plans, interactions with Congress on policy
matters, and activities for storing and transporting spent nuclear fuel
and nuclear waste.

Chris?

KOUTS: Thank you, Dr. Abkowitz.

Thank you. It\'s a pleasure to be here in front of the Board again, and
I\'m going to try to give the perspective of where the Department is in
terms of developing of the TAD concept, and walk through the
implementation steps that the Department is going to consider.

As Paul indicated, and the Board is aware, the Department is in the
process of examining the approach of a canister-based system, basically
dealing with the transport, aging and disposal of spent fuel in a
primarily canister-based system. This would have particular advantages
and benefits that we\'ll talk about in a little while, and I\'ll discuss
this afternoon. We\'re also in the process of considering the approach
to provide incentives to the vendors to develop these systems, and also
for the industry to utilize them.

If we go to the next slide, the TAD system has the unique advantage of
standardizing the system of at-reactor storage, of transport, repository
aging, and disposal, that potentially can allow the integration of
commercial spent nuclear fuel and the whole process of the handling of
these materials from the facility sites to the repository. It has the
benefits of utilizing the facility packaging and handling experience at
reactors to eventually the packaging that would historically have been
done at the repository. And, it has the substantial benefits at the
repository from the standpoint of reducing worker exposure, reducing the
amount of low-level radioactive waste generation at the site. It reduces
the cost and complexity of our facilities that we have to have on site
in order to deal with these canisters, and it also, as the Board and Dr.
Garrick indicated, can reduce a variety of technical issues that we have
to deal with in the licensing of our facility.

If we can go to the next slide? Performance specifications. The task for
the Department is to once we have approval, as Paul indicated, from the
Secretary\'s office to proceed with the canister-based approach, is to
issue a performance-based standard from which the vendor, at the utility
site right now, will develop various designs related to that
specification. There are actually about seven different areas that we
would expect that the vendors would have to deal with. The first is the
TAD canister itself. It would have to deal with that canister would have
to meet the requirements of Part 71, Part 72, and also meet our disposal
specifications, and our use in the repository.

The vendors also would need to develop a transportation overpack that
takes the canister from the utility site, the canister would be placed
in the transportation overpack, and moved over the rail lines of this
Nation to the repository site. Also, a transportation skid would be
necessary in order to handle that.

There are four additional aspects of that specification that would deal
with handling on site at the repository that has to do with the type of
lifting devices that we would use with these materials, a shielded
transfer cask that we would use on site at the repository, an aging
overpack in case we would need to age that canister. We would need a
long-term thermal goal, and also an on-site transporter. Now, these are
specific to our needs at the repository. Any needs that the utilities
might have, the vendors would work directly with the utilities to
develop whatever equipment is needed on site at the utilities to handle
these materials on site, there are similar devices to lift these
materials, lift the canisters off of similar devices for on-site
transport and for transport casks to move them into transportation
casks.

Let\'s go to the next slide. The performance specifications that are
currently being developed, we have not received this, we have asked
Bechtel to develop that for us. We have not received that yet from
Bechtel, but our expectations are that these requirements will look at,
will have to be consistent with our long-term TSPA. In other words,
whatever designs these canisters, or the vendors come up with, those
designs have to meet our long-term performance goals, have to be
consistent with our TSPA, and should effectively mirror what our current
waste package design configurations are.

I should say also that we\'re leaving it up to the vendors to determine
what waste fuels they will cover, the ones that they\'re most
comfortable with in terms of what facilities they deal with, what other
reactor sites they deal with. They will be looking specifically on
those, and we\'ll have to make sure that we get coverage for all the
fuel types, and we will be monitoring that very carefully. But,
basically, that\'s going to be something that the private industry will
drive.

We will also have to, in the performance specifications, identify any
needs that we might have for handling these materials on site. And, of
course, any operational requirements, in terms of how you might require
the utilities to verify that they have loaded and provided these
canisters in a manner that we can accept them into the repository site
for aging and disposal.

Our licensing approach, if I can go to the next slide, is essentially to
issue this, the performance specification, and the vendors will be
responsible to work directly with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in
terms of getting certification for Part 71, which is for transport, and
for Part 72, which is on-site storage at utility sites. Part 63 will be
the responsibility of the Department, and our intent is to have the
performance specifications as part of the license application, such that
the TSPA that we have will be consistent with the performance
specification that we issue hopefully later this year.

Now, the Department will be intimately involved with the vendors at
every step along the way. Once they develop a conceptual design, the
Department will have to review that, and determine whether or not it
meets our long-term disposal needs, and also meets our on-site handling
needs. As they go through the certification process with the NRC for
both 72 and 71, if there are any changes that happen during that
licensing process, they will have to come back to the Department and,
again, we will have to determine whether or not that canister design is
still in concert and essentially consistent with and meets our
performance specifications.

So, although the Department will issue the specifications, we will be
involved at every step along the way should there be any changes. I\'ll
also talk about this later. But, if there are any changes as we go
through the licensing process, after we go through NRC review with the
repository, if there are changes associated with the performance specs
that occur, then we will have to make sure that the vendors are aware of
that, and can accommodate any changes in order to make this compatible
with our long-term disposal.

If we can go to the next slide? As I said earlier, we\'re planning to,
assuming we can work out the details, after we receive it and review it
and are comfortable with it, we will issue that to the public, the
performance specifications to the public, and essentially, we will
solicit TAD concept design. At that point in time, after those designs
are developed, we will review them again to make sure that they are
consistent with our specifications. And, upon DOE approval of those
designs, at that point, the vendors will make representations to the NRC
for certification of the specific design.

I think I\'ve covered basically Slide 8. If there are any modifications,
again, in the development of the designs, the NRC reviews. Again, the
Department has to again review those modifications to make sure that
it\'s still consistent with our disposal specifications.

Slide 9. Once we receive, or the vendors receive Part 71 and 72
certification, we will develop essentially a list of those systems that
are compatible and are acceptable, and if that list changes as we go
through various evolutions of the TAD design, we will update that list
as appropriate.

Go to Slide 10. Once we get through certification, the cask vendors will
begin to fabricate, and the utilities will begin to deploy this.

I will talk about, for a moment, the decision on the part of the
utilities to use these for at-reactor storage on their sites will be a
utility decision. It will not be a Departmental decision. The
Department, according to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and I think it\'s
been upheld by the courts, can in no way provide any funding to
utilities for storage of their materials on site. That\'s the
responsibility of the utility industry. However, should they intend to
do that, as the fabrication occurs and as we\'ve heard before at utility
sites, we have to be assured that they meet our disposal specifications
at each step along the way. And, any modifications that might arise from
the fabrication of these materials, again, the Department will have to
be involved in that process, and make sure, again, that any
modifications that have been made in no way affect the ability of the
Department to demonstrate compliance with the long-term disposal needs
of the repository.

Similarly, if we go to Slide 11, if utility sites load the materials,
and load spent fuel into these canisters, we have to also make sure that
they do it in compliance with procedures, according to an NRC approved
QA program. And, before we would take them from the utility sites, we
would have to make sure that the utilities would certify that they have
followed basically all our verification requirements in order to satisfy
the Department that, again, at every step along the way, these materials
and these canisters can be disposed of.

We would also want to emphasize the fact that DOE asserts no regulatory
control over utility sites. That is the purview of the utilities. They
are private businesses, and the Department has no regulatory authority
over any of their operations on their site.

When we get to waste acceptance operations, Slide 12, assuming that the
utility begins to move fuel from the pool, we will provide a TAD
canister and a TAD overpack, which the utilities essentially will load
the canister, according to our needs and specifications, place it in the
transportation overpack, and then we will receive, assuming all the
paperwork is appropriate and done and has been certified by the utility,
then we will accept that at the reactor gate. If the utility site has
secured these and used them on-site, then we won\'t provide them,
obviously, another canister. We\'ll basically give them an overpack,
which they will load their canister into, and we will, again, take title
to it at the reactor gate.

Now, if you go to Slide 13, assuming that the utilities have loaded
appropriately, and have certified to the Department that they followed
our verification requirement, at that point in time, we transport it,
and there are no off-normal events, essentially, the Department will
review those canisters suitable for on-site aging at the repository, or
disposal directly underground and be placed inside of an emplacement
drift.

If there is an off-normal event after we have taken possession of the
TAD, then the Department would have to analyze whether or not that
off-normal event would have affected the ability of the canister in
order to meet our long-term disposal requirements. And if we do make
that determination, then we\'ll have to remediate that, and potentially
repackage it, again, in the case of an off-normal event that occurs
either over the road or occurs at the repository site.

In conclusion, we feel that TAD systems will enhance the management and
disposal operations. As I mentioned earlier, the benefits associated
with this can be substantial to the Department. Our expectation and our
intent is that the TAD performance specifications will comprise part of
the license application. We\'re going to rely on the commercial industry
to design and engineer TAD system components, which is consistent with
the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. That basically directs the Department to
use private industry to the maximum extent feasible in the
transportation arena.

The final slide, the Department will be involved at every step along the
way, from the development of the design, to the licensing process with
the NRC, to the fabrication process, to the loading process, every step
along the way in making sure that these canisters are handled, developed
and designed, licensed, fabricated and loaded according to our specific
needs at the repository. And the final oversight in our list at the NRC,
they have regulatory authority for Part 71, and 72, and 63.

And, with that, I\'ll be happy to answer any questions that the Board
might have.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. Let\'s start with Dr. Latanision, then Dr. Petroski,
Kadak, and Garrick.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Chris, I know we\'re going to hear from industry representatives later
today, but I\'d just like to get your take at this point. Do you sense
that the vendors and utilities would buy into this concept, or are close
to buying in? What is your sense of their reaction to this?

KOUTS: Well, I think they\'ll speak for themselves, but we have had
several meetings with the vendors and with the utility industry on this.
I think they are supportive of the approach, especially the concept that
we\'re going to rely on industry to develop these. I think we have had
some very good discussions on technical issues associated with the
implementation of this, and what aspects of the performance
specifications would effectively create issues for the vendors in order
to get 71 and 72 certification. And, there\'s been a good give and take.

I think the utility industry, from my interactions with them, and Mr.
McCullum will be talking later, but I think they\'re supportive. I think
that they feel that this can help the implementation of the repository,
and get to the point I think where the industry wants to be, which is to
get the fuel off their sites. That\'s not to say there aren\'t technical
issues that we\'re going to have to work through, and I think we have
had some good discussions about those, but I don\'t see any
insurmountable issues at this point. If there are issues that we\'ve had
to go back and look at what potential impacts on our TSPA might be,
carbon in the waste package has been an issue. We\'re looking at that.

The vendors have a substantial problem with that, and we\'re looking at
how we might deal with that. Carbon is important, Russ can certainly
explain why we need carbon in the waste package, because it does have
the ability to retard radionuclide transport. But, we\'ll have to
basically get to a trade-off process and make some decisions as to how
best to go forward. But, I think my impression, and I\'ve been at all
the meetings, and we\'re going to hold more meetings, has been fairly
positive, a very positive dialogue, and I think the industry is
supportive.

LATANISION: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Henry?

PETROSKI: Petroski, Board.

Maybe you could clarify something for me. We heard Paul Golan talk about
two designs for clean canisters, and they were going to be compared, the
better one chosen, I assume. How does that fit in with what you\'ve just
described, where the utilities or the vendors are going to effectively
design the canisters. Are we talking about a conceptual design versus
detailed design?

KOUTS: I think what Paul was referring to is that the contractors had
competing designs for the surface facilities at the repository site.
This would all be handled in the same canisters to meet the same
performance specs. So to the extent that\--as we go forward with the
industry, yes, they will have designs. We have, our specification will
have specific weight limits, will have specific length and size
requirements associated with it. And, the facility designs will all be
compatible with that, regardless of which approach, design approach, we
take for surface facilities.

So, the integral part that these individual facilities will be handling
will be the same. And, I think the approach that we\'re taking using
private industry to deal with that, I think is the right one, and I
think there\'s been a similar concept in the past, back in the Nineties,
and I think that trying to go with one design, there\'s a major
roadblock to its implementation, and I think that having competing
designs within the development of a canister, I think is really the best
way to go, and I think it\'s been endorsed by the vendors and also by
the utility industry. You can ask them that when they have their
opportunity to speak.

ABKOWITZ: Andy?

KADAK: Yes, Kadak, Board.

I\'m trying to get a grasp of the logistics here. It\'s clear that the
industry can design transport canisters and storage canisters for Part
71 and Part 72. What isn\'t clear is if you can dispose of those
canisters, which you won\'t find out until after the licensing procedure
is over, so, I\'m wondering how this fits. Would you try to explain that
for me, please?

KOUTS: Well, you\'re correct, Dr. Kadak, that the existing dry storage
technology has been around at reactor sites right now, in the
Department\'s mind, so our disposal concept requires criticality
controls that do not exist in those canisters. But, those canisters, in
many cases, are larger and don\'t fit our thermal goals, and so forth.
So, the concept here is that we want to proceed with a design of the
canisters based on what we know now. And, one of the issues we\'re going
to have to deal with is the risk that as we move forward, that those
specifications may change as we go through the licensing process for the
repository, and that\'s an issue we\'re working on now, and it\'s
something that we\'re going to have to deal with. The utility industry
has made that comment to us, about if they move down the path of
implementing this based on a design that is developed based on a
specification that we issue this year, how is the Department going to
help the utilities with that risk. And, that\'s an issue that we\'re
working on, and we plan to address that in the implementation of this as
we move forward.

KADAK: You haven\'t really answered my question. If the final
determination relative to disposability of these canisters will not be
made until let\'s just say seven years from now, and you\'re now asking
cask vendors to design TADs to what you think the specifications will
have to be, and suppose they\--would you expect them to start building
these things now, or not?

KOUTS: Well, let\'s talk a little bit about the time frame involved.
Assuming that we issue a specification later this year, sometime later
this summer after we make a decision to build. If it\'s likely that the
vendors probably could not be before the NRC for another two to three
years with 72 and 71 designs, they will probably go forward with on-site
storage designs first, and then probably go through certification of
that later, then, you\'d have to go through the NRC licensing process.
So, I guess what I\'m trying to imply to you is that as we move forward,
if we see changes, then we\'ll have to adjust to that. And, if there are
changes, then, obviously, the implementation of this will be deferred.

I think this is going to be something that we\'re going to have to deal
with. I agree with you from the standpoint it will not be a disposable
canister until the repository receives a construction authorization from
the NRC and we get final approval of the performance specification from
the NRC. However, the Department has taken this approach now. We feel we
can potentially deal with that risk. We know a lot more today than we
did ten to twelve years ago when we went down this path.

Back then, we didn\'t have an EPA standard. Our concept of the
repository disposal strategy was substantially different than it is now,
and I think it comes down to the level of confidence that the Department
has in its approach. And, I think we are much more confident in our
approach for disposal today than we were ten years ago. I will fully
concede your point that the ultimate arbiter of this will be the NRC,
and we won\'t know for sure until it\'s licensed. However, if we want to
get these systems out to the utility sites in the near-term, we need to
start working on that now, and we can adjust the process as we move
forward.

KADAK: Just one other question. It gets to the technical specification,
the performance specifications. It appears that the TSPA is going to be
the criteria on which these TADs will be developed, and we\'ve been
looking at this for some time now relative to the maximum kilowatt
loading, and heat transfer characteristics, and temperature
requirements, and so forth, for the repository. That\'s a fairly
inflexible criteria, and one of the things that you heard Dr. Garrick
mention was that we have some questions about the bases for those
criteria.

What flexibility are you going to have or give to the vendors to allow
them to maximize the value of this TAD relative to the repository, and
their needs, which is storing as much spent fuel as possible in their
dry cask storage systems?

KOUTS: I think we\'re talking about a couple of issues when we discussed
that approach. First of all the design of the TAD itself, basically it
has to do with a range of fuel types, a range of fuel types, and a range
of burn-ups, and a range of ages, basically at least a five year cool.
So the design ability of that canister to handle spent fuel will be
across a range of parameters of fuel. So, that\'s one issue.

The next issue is, and I think what you\'re getting to, is how do you
operate the system effectively and efficiently to meet our thermal
goals, and how much aging will we have on site, and the ability of the
utilities to come close to our thermal goals so the system operates
efficiently and effectively. We don\'t have to have a lot of storage on
site. The facilities basically can move their fuel when they need to.
And, I think in many of the analyses that we have done in the total
systems model, and I\'ll speak to that this afternoon. I think that\'s a
workable issue.

Remember, the 11.8 kilowatt per package is the thermal goal that we need
to meet for emplacement purposes. That doesn\'t necessarily apply for
when we begin to accept these from reactor sites. Utilities, I think
will work with us to try to meet our thermal goals. If they can\'t, then
they will bring the canisters on site, and we will age them until we\'re
ready to emplace them.

So, again, the design needs to be able to handle a wide range of fuel
types and burn-ups and ages. The actual implementation of it and the
optimization of how the system works, I think will evolve and we will
have to do the best we can based on when we begin to pick up what the
utilities have on site, and their ability to work with us on those types
of issues.

KADAK: When can we see the performance spec?

KOUTS: The performance spec? Right now, the Department doesn\'t have it
from Bechtel. So, I can\'t provide that to you. We hope to get that in
the near term. At that point, the Board has access to all our documents,
certainly we can make that available to you.

ABKOWITZ: John?

GARRICK: Garrick, Board.

I would assume, Chris, that success of this operation is somewhat akin
to the success of any operation that involves materials handling and
throughput. Given that the utilities are pretty much able to send stuff
whenever and how much and in whatever volumes they please, essentially
at any time, and given the pressure that\'s kind of on the Project to
not have any more than a certain level of on-site storage, what are your
thoughts about how you\'re going to manage the waste streams to the
repository?

We hear a lot about you having to have flexibility, a lot of
flexibility, but we also hear that it doesn\'t seem to apply as much to
the originators, that is, the matter of flexibility. How are you going
to manage that?

KOUTS: Well, I think the best way to answer that question is that the
Department does have a contractual arrangement with the utilities, and
we have a contract under which we will have to operate. And, there are
certain requirements to that contract. However, in all my discussions
with the utility industry, my expectation, and I think their
expectation, is that they will work with the Department to try to meet
our needs at the repository as well as their needs at their sites. So, I
don\'t look at it as if the waste generators are not going to be
supportive of the process, and are not going to try to work with the
Department to try to make the system operate efficiently. And, I think
we should ask that question also to the industry representatives which
you\'re going to have following me.

But, I think we have to design the system such that we can handle all
the fuel types and deal with the anomalies, if you will. But, I think
when we get to the actual operation, my expectation will be that, again,
that if the generators will work with us, try to meet our thermal goals.
If they can\'t, then hopefully, they\'ll be close so our aging on site
will be limited, and we can move forward with the system in a reasonably
optimized fashion.

GARRICK: One of the other things that I was curious about is were other
alternatives considered to the vendors having to license their
canisters?

KOUTS: We certainly thought about other alternatives. I think, however,
I guess my response to that would be that the vendors have much more
experience than the Department does in terms of dealing with the
certification of canisters and transportation systems associated with
the TAD, and they would be far more effective in moving that issue
forward than the Department will, or requiring that expertise. I think
that the history of the implementation of this program, and when I
headed the transportation program back in the late Eighties when we were
developing our own casks, and we were doing it under DOE contract, we
were still using private industry at every step along the way to deal
with those interactions.

And, I think it\'s the Department\'s view, and I think it\'s the right
view, that we need to use the experience of the vendors, and their
expertise in terms of how to get these things done, licensed, certified,
if you will, and, also, since they have to essentially be used at
utility sites, they work with the utility sites every day in terms of
the implementation of dry storage systems, so they would have the most
information available. What we want to do is to tap that expertise in
order to move this initiative forward.

GARRICK: Okay, thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Howard?

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

I just had the same question as Henry Petroski, but I didn\'t understand
the answer. I heard Paul Golan say that he has two competing designs
going\--I don\'t suppose either of those\--are these installed into
facility designs, or what?

KOUTS: I think what Paul Golan was talking about was different facility
designs, not canister designs, different facility designs, and, Paul, do
you want to\--

GOLAN: Yes. The design is for the facilities at Yucca Mountain. And, for
instance, when we looked at the design, it was based on the fact that
this is the way we\'re going to manage the project risks. When we got
our design back, we had one design that had the fuel shielded at all
times. You could basically walk up to that waste package without being
(inaudible) of the shield. Another aspect of the design, where instead
of moving the fuel through the facility, (inaudible) as we got into
waste package disposal. All the implements across the waste package, the
waste package basically stayed (inaudible). When we saw that kind of
innovation with the key design, again, we\'re looking innovation, we
learned a lot of good things by having two people, two organizations,
come with their best ideas.

So, as we moved to the next step in the critical decision process, the
critical decision going to conceptual design (inaudible) down select.
From the project management perspective, and he (inaudible) to see the
design, and what we did is we took the design, facility design on the
table, and they were, for instance, you know, looking at one system
that\'s, for lack of a better word, more trolley based, and the other is
more based on the fact that the waste package stays (inaudible), We had
to see which one (inaudible). and which one could get a license, and,
so, we\'re keeping those and at some point before we go to, you know,
the detailed design that we\'re going to submit to the NRC, we\'re going
to take one of those, but right now, we want to keep that information
going. Again, what we do is we provide specifications that your
facilities have to be able to accommodate this kind of waste. And, the
two vendors, the two contractors right now, are giving us their ideas on
how we can best, from a facility perspective, accommodate those waste
packages.

ARNOLD: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

You spoke very eloquently about how this TAD has great benefits to the
DOE, but you didn\'t really mention the benefits to the industry. So, I
was just wondering, you know, what is it, given their existing
inventories and other problems that you feel will make it, or the DOE
could do to make it a benefit to the industry?

KOUTS: Well, that\'s an excellent question, and I think, without getting
into some of the measures the Department is considering in relation to
how we might reduce the risk for the utility industry in the
implementation of this concept, I think what it does provide the
industry with is if they decide to, or obviously, if they need to go to
additional dry storage as they move into the future, they will have a
device that they know the Department will accept without having to
repackage, without having to do anything else with it, which is
something I think that the industry would very much like.

So, in that sense, it can help standardize on-site storage at utility
sites, and it also helps standardize the entire system. We\'re dealing
with essentially the same types of casks throughout. The utilities will
get used to dealing with those same types of casks. It will help with
their operations. So, when we go down to a standard approach, it helps a
great deal, I think, in terms of providing certainty about how these
materials are going to be handled at the utility sites, and also how
they will be handled within the waste management system.

ABKOWITZ: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

I\'m very interested in the process that you are taking to develop the
performance requirements, and ultimately, the best performance
requirement would be within a kind of iterative process, optimization.
What are your overriding constraints, things that were your anchor
points that you\'re starting with?

KOUTS: I think our approach to this has been not to perturb, at least in
the initial generation path, is not to perturb our current long-term
approach to performance assessment. We want to have the specifications
nearer our concept of the waste package that the Department wants to
proceed with. This means that the capacity of that TAD, initial capacity
would be 21 pwr\'s, for the reactor assemblies. I think that\'s a
constraint that we want to start with at this point.

In addition to that, we want to make sure that our criticality needs in
the underground, what we\'re going to have to demonstrate to the NRC
about criticality over the long term, of emplacement, those have to be
met. I think those things are probably paramount in our minds in terms
of the development of the performance specification, and they need to be
consistent with our performance assessment. Also, the material
properties that we need in the waste package in order to demonstrate
long-term performance, all those are factored into the performance spec
as we see it, and those are reasonably\--obviously, those should be the
ones. We want to make sure that the canisters meet Part 71 and 72. The
challenge here, if you will, is our long-term disposal, will be driven
by our total system performance assessment, with the other requirements
that you need for 71 and 72, provide that in the specification, and have
the vendors take our disposal needs, and try to make the 71 requirements
and the 72 requirements work.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thanks, Chris. Abkowitz, Board.

I\'m going to ask a few questions, and then we have some staff
questions, and some Board members that want to ask additional questions.

First of all, what is the realistic schedule for having TADs available
for use? And, just how many years from now?

KOUTS: I would say that we\'ve asked the same questions to the vendors,
and once we\'ve issued the performance spec, how long before we would
expect to have a system operating, and I would say potentially five or
six years.

ABKOWITZ: This includes approval from the NRC? I mean, you\'re saying
six years from this date, it\'s realistic to assume that TADs will be
delivered to the front doorstep of the utility, and they\'re going to
use it?

KOUTS: I would put it this way. I would say it\'s five to six years, and
I can\'t comment whether or not we\'d be through the licensing process,
I think we would have designs that would meet our performance
specifications that we would issue this year. If we were done with the
licensing process at that point, then I would say yes, but that\'s
certainly difficult to handle until the licensing process is finished,
we wouldn\'t know for sure. But, assuming that the utilities are willing
to assume a certain amount of risk, we could potentially have them at
reactor sites within five or six years.

ABKOWITZ: And, if the TADs are used for on-site storage, my
understanding is that they would be more expensive per kilowatt hour,
per kilowatt than the traditional storage. So, to use it for on-site
storage without knowing for sure whether they will be taken to the
mountain that way would have to be a DOE initiative?

KOUTS: That\'s what I referred to earlier, is that the Department is
looking at ways that we can address the risk that the utilities might
incur by having these on-site, and then if for some reason they turn out
not be\--I mean, we\'re looking at that issue, and we have the standard,
we appreciate it, and we\--but, I\'m not prepared at this point to
discuss how we might do that.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. On a parallel track, and please verify this for me. I
think we\'ve had this discussion before, but I want to make sure I have
it straight. The entire TADs concept requires a rail spur to Yucca
Mountain. In other words, delaying the rail spur or no rail spur has
direct and complete implications on the TAD concept; is that correct?

KOUTS: I would certainly agree. It\'s much easier to move these systems
by rail than it would by heavy haul, and our expectation would be that a
rail spur would be needed in order to move these.

ABKOWITZ: Let me rephrase the question? Is there any point in going on
right now that assumes that\--that does not assume a rail spur is in
place for moving TADs?

KOUTS: Well, the ability of the Department to receive waste by truck is
something that we are looking at. But, we would not anticipate that we
would move TADs by truck, if you will. We would need a rail spur to do
that.

ABKOWITZ: So, again, to get back to my original point, any TAD that\'s
going to move to Yucca Mountain has to be moved to Yucca Mountain by
rail; correct?

KOUTS: I would agree with that.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. Okay, the next thing I wanted to ask you about is
that I was curious about the meetings with the utilities and the
manufacturers, but you haven\'t mentioned anything about having a
meeting with NRC. It would strike me that if those are the people that
are going to pass, you know, if you have to pass the litmus test with,
it would make sense to me that I\'d want to engage them early and
frequently. Could you tell me what your relationship is in that regard?

KOUTS: The Department certainly respects the regulators\' view about the
implementation of this concept. We have had discussions with the NRC in
relation to the development of a technical exchange that we will have
later this summer after we issue the performance spec. The discussions
with the NRC, it was their desire that they not have a technical
exchange until after the performance spec was issued. But, we have had
discussions with them about the concept in the context of developing
that plan for that technical exchange, and they\'re certainly aware of
it. NRC officials\--

ABKOWITZ: So, if I understand you correctly, the Department has
approached the NRC about getting engaged and the NRC said we\'d rather
defer on those discussions until you have a specification to present to
us?

KOUTS: That\'s one of the views. And, also, that the NRC\'s view that
they have meaningful exchanges with the Program, they\'d like to do it
in the public, and the technical exchange, in their mind, would be most
beneficial after we have had the performance specifications on the
street, hopefully as soon as possible.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. And, then, one final question. If we could go to Slide
13, please?

The first bullet, I take, my interpretation of that bullet is that if
someone has stamped certified on the shipment when it leaves the
utility, the reactor site, unless there\'s been some upset in
transportation, there\'s no need to verify that things were done
correctly. So, we have 70 to 80 different locations that are stamping
certified, and as long as there wasn\'t an accident during
transportation, there\'s no need to look at these canisters again. And,
I was wondering if there\'s been any discussion about having some kind
of sampling strategy in place so that when these canisters arrive at
Yucca, that at least some percentage of them are opened up for purposes
of verifying that the quality control in 80 different locations is
correct?

KOUTS: Well, I would submit to you, first of all, that reactor sites
where these will be loaded, and these will be handled\--operate now
under NRC qualified QA programs, just as the Department operates under
NRC qualified QA programs. The certification that we will request the
utilities, in our plan, at least, is to make sure that it\'s loaded
properly, is something that I don\'t\-- I think the Department needs to
be assured that the canister, when it was fabricated, met the specifics
of the design, it was certified by the NRC, it was loaded in accordance
with the needs of the\--the Department\'s needs for disposal, that it
was properly inerted, that it was properly dried, inerted and properly
sealed. I would submit to you that if the Department has to go through a
process where, after we take the canister from the utility site, and we
have to open it up in order to determine whether or not it was properly
sealed and whether or not it was properly loaded, I think that defeats
the purpose of this concept.

The idea was to move away from the handling of bare spent fuel, and the
idea that, again, we\'re going to have to go through a sampling, or a
sample size or whatever, again defeats the purpose, and again will
defeat the concept of trying to\--my thought here is that once it is
properly loaded and sealed, unless the Department has a reason to
believe that something has happened to that canister from that point
forward, that there is no reason why we could not use it in aging and
put it in the ground. Again, that\'s the concept. I\'m sure we will have
some comments and some thoughts from the NRC in relation to that, but I
would also submit that, again, we\'re going from one NRC licensed
facility to another NRC licensed facility, so hopefully there will be
some uniformity of treatment in terms of the quality of how these
materials were originally packaged.

ABKOWITZ: Dr. Duquette?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

My question really, or comment, is really on the same subject. It seems
to me that there are at least two aspects to the process. One is going
to be the transfer of currently stored waste into TADs. And, the second
part of this is going to be once that presumably is all transferred into
TADs and ready for shipment, there would be another process that would
occur for newly generated waste that was going directly into TADs rather
than into interim storage and into TADs. Do you envision on-site
supervision of any kind by the Department other than just licensing the
facility?

KOUTS: I\'m not quite sure of your question. Are you talking about at
the utility sites?

DUQUETTE: Yes, that\'s correct. At the utility sites. You\'re going to
have to transfer the waste that\'s already in storage at many of the
sites. And, that\'s going to have to be transferred into TADs before it
can be shipped, I presume. And, then, I presume that the concept is that
in the future, you wouldn\'t have the same kind of interim storage at
the site, that the transfer would be directly into TADs from the reactor
when waste was generated. And, that means that you\'re going to have a
large amount of activity initially with the transfer of the current
waste that\'s already stored on many of the sites, with, I presume,
somewhat of a slower process after that some years down the line. You
mentioned, I think, just a minute ago, that it would be going from a
licensed facility to another licensed facility. And, I guess my question
is do you envision the Department having to provide supervisory staff at
the sites to make sure everything is done properly?

KOUTS: Well, I\'ll go back to the bullet I had at the bottom of one of
those slides. The Department has no regulatory authority whatsoever on
the utility sites. Our expectation is that we will have verification
requirements, and the individual utility sites will have to verify that
they met those. The NRC on-site inspectors at those facilities, they
would be overseeing those operations on a day to day basis, just as they
would be at our facilities. So, my sense is that there will be plenty of
NRC oversight on all the activities.

The Department, again, has no regulatory authority over what happens
there. We certainly have an interest and we want to make sure that it
meets our needs, and we will do that through the proper verification
plan. But, right now, we have no plans or intentions of having personnel
on site to inspect or to deal with that. We really look at that as
responsibility of the utility sites, and I think that\'s a fair question
to ask the utility representatives that you\'re going to have later,
whether or not they want DOE on their sites potentially overseeing their
activities.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

I\'m still a little bit struggling to try to understand. You apparently
have refusal rights to accept spent fuel from the sites. And, the TAD
clearly, if it is licensed and acceptable, is an acceptable waste form
you will take.

KOUTS: That\'s correct.

KADAK: And, the expectation is even if it can\'t be disposed, you have
some obligation to take it, because you had incented the industry to go
in this direction in some way?

KOUTS: Yes.

KADAK: However, there\'s a lot of spent fuels at the sites now, which is
licensed for transport to storage, but not disposal. Are you saying you
will not accept that spent fuel for shipment to Yucca Mountain until
they transfer it to a TAD?

KOUTS: Let me answer that this way, and I\'ll answer it legalistically.
For over 15 years, the Department has taken the position that dry
storage systems that exist at reactor sites are not covered by the
standard contract. And, I will submit to you reading March 31 of this
year, the Smut case against the Department, where this issue was
(inaudible) by Judge Braden, who I testified in front of, she agreed
with the government\'s position that those materials are not covered by
the standard contract. Now, I will say this, that the Department has
remained open to discussions about how to address this issue, and is
willing to meet with the utilities should they desire to meet with us.
None of them have come forward to meet with us as of yet. Also, our
surface facility designs will have the capability of dealing with those
systems should the contractual issues be addressed.

KADAK: To follow up\--

ABKOWITZ: Okay, go ahead, and be quick.

KADAK: So, you\'re saying that you will accept their fuels, no matter
what?

KOUTS: That\'s correct.

KADAK: And, how is this going to work? How is this really going to work
for the Department if that\'s the only criteria that you now have?

KOUTS: Well, as I indicated\--

KADAK: In other words, you cannot accept TADs, because you say bare fuel
in the contract.

KOUTS: That\'s correct. The Department\'s view is that if we provide the
designs to the utilities, which is disposable, that those would be
acceptable into the system. Again, this is an issue that we\'re going to
be working with the utilities on. Nonetheless, we will be providing all
the equipment, if you will, for the utilities to load the material. And,
I should say also that this is primarily a canister approach. If there
are utilities who cannot handle a TAD, for whatever reason, they\'re not
capable, or for other reasons, we will still have some bare fuel
handling capability on-site to address that.

ABKOWITZ: Carl DiBella, you have the last question.

DI BELLA: Thank you. Carl DiBella, Board Staff.

My question is it seems to me that this strategy for the TAD depends on
many things, among which is the willingness of NRC to accept a license
application that includes performance specifications for the TAD as
opposed to a mechanical design. Can you say why you believe the NRC is
willing to accept this?

KOUTS: Well, let me give you a view on that. Our total system
performance assessment takes an individual waste package, and that
individual waste package is an average, it\'s an average of radionuclide
content, it\'s an average of chemical content, it\'s an average of
everything. And, I would submit to you that if you have a waste package
that meets those averages, there is no reason why that canister in
compliance with specification could not be (inaudible), as long as the
Department can demonstrate that whatever it\'s going to place in Yucca
Mountain is consistent with that specification, and that specification
essentially balances the impact, if you will, of the emplacement
materials over the long term. So, I think that this is an area that
we\'re going to have to assess further.

I would also submit to you that there\'s been numerous comments made
over the years by various NRC Commissioners about the\--something like
this approach should be pursued in order to help standardize the
handling of materials both at the reactor sites and at the repository.
So, my expectation is, at least with the Commissioner level, that from
an NRC perspective, that this is an approach that will potentially work,
that it\'s up to the Department to demonstrate in its application, in
its license application, and certainly for the vendors to demonstrate
that they can design this to the specific needs of the Department. But,
nonetheless, I think the approach can work, and only time will tell if
it will.

ABKOWITZ: Chris, thank you. You have been very patient about answering a
number of questions. You can tell, I think, the Board is thinking pretty
deeply about the whole TAD concept.

We\'re going to take a short break now. We\'ll recess for ten minutes,
and reconvene at 11 o\'clock.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

ABKOWITZ: We are ready to resume our program.

Our next presentation in the TAD session is going to be a tag team
presentation entitled Industry Perspectives on TAD.

During the DOE\'s discussion earlier today, they made reference to the
engagement and constructive discussions with the utilities and the cask
manufacturers, and speaking on behalf of those two parties today, we
have Rod McCullum representing the Nuclear Energy Institute, and David
Blee representing the U.S. Transport Council.

Rod has been working on used fuel management issues at NEI since 1998,
currently serving as NEI\'s Director of the Yucca Mountain Project. He
has over 20 years of nuclear engineering, licensing and regulatory
policy experience. In his current role, he advances industry-wide
efforts to reduce business risks associated with used nuclear fuel
disposal by working with industry leaders and DOE managers, as well as
scientists and regulators, to develop a more effective disposal system.

David Blee serves as Executive Director of the U.S. Transport Council,
which is a national coalition for policy, business and public education
issues affecting nuclear materials transporters, suppliers and
customers. He is also the Managing Director of the Forrestal Group, a
Washington, DC-based strategic management firm that specializes in
policy and business strategy for the energy and national security
markets.

I don\'t know who is going to do what first, but if the two of you can
make your way up here, one or the other, or both, the floor is yours.

MC CULLUM: Good morning. It really is a pleasure to be here this
morning, and address what is really an exciting and elite opportunity,
as presented by this DOE TAD initiative.

We, in industry, consider it an exciting opportunity because it\'s
something that has the potential to really move the Yucca Mountain
Project forward, and we consider it a unique opportunity as well as a
challenge, because it is something that requires a level of integration
across the entire waste management system in almost unprecedented levels
in terms of both DOE, NRC, the utilities, the cask peddlers, the
transporters, and that\'s why you\'ll be hearing from two of us today.
Because even though USTC and NEI have considerably overlapping
membership. In fact, most people that come to all of our meetings are
members of both.

Every now and then, David and I have to remind each other to invite the
one guy who is not in one or the other\'s organization, but we really
are with both USTC and NEI capturing the entire industry that\'s
concerned here, and even though this is a very unique challenge of
integrating across the system, the good news is, and we\'ll talk about
it today, is that we are doing that. There\'s a tremendous amount of
interest. We\'ve had several meetings with DOE that we will discussed.
And, if ever I put out a call to one of these meetings across the
industry, and David with his membership as well, we get almost unanimous
response that everybody wants to be there. So, there\'s just tremendous
amount of support and a tremendous amount of interest in this.

If we could go to the first slide? I\'ll talk a little bit about how
we\'re going to break things up and discuss this today. David will be
coming and joining me at the podium about midway here. I\'m going to
talk about why Yucca Mountain is important to the national interest.
And, I think we would talk about some of the\--there were some questions
about risks before, and why we should take on some of those risks and do
some of the things we\'re doing.

I think it\'s important to see in the context of why this is important
to the national interest, and also to see why the TAD initiative itself
is pivotal to ensuring that we do get the progress at Yucca Mountain. I
want to emphasize the word \"progress\" here. It truly is, you know,
it\'s not the absolute date that the first stick of fuel moves, but the
fact that we are continuing to make progress, and the TAD is probably
the best near-term opportunity we have to make real progress at Yucca
Mountain.

So, I\'m going to talk about those two aspects, and then David Blee is
going to come up here, and he\'s going to talk about the specific
process that we\'re going through between industry and DOE to achieve
this, and then back to the end, I\'ll talk a little more of some of the
things the Board might be specifically interested in in terms of some of
the details of the issues we\'ve been discussing within that process.

If we can go onto the next slide? Here is one of the key reasons why
it\'s important, especially when we look at the world situation today,
and three dollar gas at the pump, this almost becomes quite a
frightening graphic, because not only do you see a fairly notable
increase, and this is for the Energy Information Administration, the
U.S. consumption, you see the gap between our ability to meet that with
domestic production actually growing in the future years. And, another
thing, this is against a backdrop where the curves of consumption growth
are much steeper in places in the world like China and India, very large
countries, so the need to produce more energy, is definitely, you know,
a strong reason for moving forward.

If we can go onto the next slide? Just keeping up with that production
curve, you know, the production curve that I think most of us would say
is inadequate, because it does not at all begin to close the gap, and
certainly made me recognize the overall global situation. But, even
within overall energy, we\'re looking at a 45 percent increase in
electricity demands in the United States by 2030. That\'s a pretty
incredible increase in what\'s now about a quarter of a century. And, to
maintain this, we\'re going to have to build, you know, there\'s a lot
of energy choices and I want to talk about that for a second. We\'re
going to have to build 50 nuclear reactors, 261 coal-fired plants, 279
natural gas plants, and 93 renewable facilities of 100 megawatts or more
there.

So, what really is in play here is energy choices, and Yucca Mountain
and the progress in Yucca Mountain is one of the things that affects
these energy choices, just as progress in coal sequestration technology
might affect how many of those coal plants we really build, or how price
spikes might affect how many of those natural gas plants we build.
Progress on nuclear waste disposal is a key component of this, and will
weigh on any choices.

I will submit to you that no matter how slow or fast Yucca Mountain
proceeds, we will build more nuclear plants in this country, and we will
get to that in a second. The question of how many and how well we will
keep pace and with what energy mix, and the real important thing is that
we have the appropriate mix of energy sources. This is something that
plays into that, and the TAD specifically is something that is, again,
our best near-term opportunity to weigh in.

If we go to the next slide, we\'ve been maintaining our market share in
the nuclear industry, and I like what the Secretary of Energy told Mr.
Golan at the very beginning with these, the notion of safer and more
reliable operations. That is, indeed, how we can\--a safer, simpler and
more reliable operation. That is, indeed, how we have been accomplishing
maintaining the market share in nuclear, even though we have not built
any nuclear plants since the last one went on line in 1991. And, yet
with shorter outages, more efficient outages, power upgrades, life
extension, efficiencies, becoming safer and simpler and more reliable in
everything we do, we have to date maintained our market share.

And, if you can go onto the next slide, the public is very much okay
with that. And, then, this truly is something I want to\--it\'s
remarkable that you look back where, you know, the Three Mile Island,
and you can see the two curves cross around the time of Chernoble. But,
since then, it\'s been sustained improvements in public conception. When
you look at the energy choices we might make in the future, there\'s
very strong public support for saying nuclear should be one of those
choices.

And, so, going onto the next slide, the same public that is supportive
of nuclear overall, Skip Wellman calls this the \"yeah, but what about
waste?\" And, this is the situation we are currently faced with. And, I
think this will be an important record perhaps to come back to when we
start to get into the discussion part here. It puts the numbers to some
of the concerns I heard being expressed earlier. You know, 53,000 metric
tons, maybe closer to 54 by now. Right now, almost 9,000 of that is in
dry storage. That\'s material that\'s in containers other than a TAD at
this point.

We can see some of those details of how many casks that is and where
they are. We are estimating that by 2010, if we talk about five to six
years to get this deployed, you know, we\'ll almost double that to
15,000 MTU\'s, and we will be adding, I think the most important figure
on the chart is the one at the bottom, we will be adding about 1,000
metric tons per year. So, there\'s a tremendous incentive here on
everybody involved with the TAD initiative to get it on line as quickly
as possible. The sooner in the scheme we have TADs, the less non-TAD
fuel we\'ll have to address.

And, I think that\'s why we have noted that the DOE has been looking at
this with a very big sense of urgency. We\'re working with a good sense
of urgency. We want to do it right. We\'ve got a lot of basic
experience, having licensed almost 800 casks now, there\'s a tremendous
amount of experience, and we want to make sure that that experience is
fully factored into everything we do going forward.

If we can go to the next slide? So, you know, kind of to get away from
the nuclear commercial here, and a little more back into this, to
summarize that aspect of it, there was some discussion about GNEP. The
nuclear industry very much endorsed GNEP initiative, a very bold vision
into the future. It\'s a future we would like to see. It\'s something
that is going to take a number of years to deploy, and we feel strongly
that no matter what you do, nothing magically makes every one of the
radioactive types that we\'re concerned about disappear. And, we also
feel strongly that in order to build that public confidence in the GNEP
version, in order to build the confidence that we can achieve the waste
disposal system in the future, we have to demonstrate we can manage the
waste disposal fuel system\--the waste disposal system in the present.
So, Yucca Mountain supports all possible scenarios, we believe.

We believe that Yucca Mountain can serve as a scientifically sound
repository. We thank the Board for its continued diligence and efforts
to guide improvements in the science. A decision was made back in 2002,
based on what we believe is a very conservative safety case, and I hear
Dr. Garrick asking for more understanding of what the scientists really
believe, and I think that will help us as we go forward to the next
step, which is, of course, licensing, which we thoroughly believe will,
you know, there\'s the question of is Yucca the site, and now the
question of can you license a repository at that site. And, we feel that
the licensing process is very rigorous and will answer that question,
and protect public health and safety.

So, all these things, and I talk about advanced technology, it\'s very
important that we remain committed to Yucca Mountain, and the efforts
we\'re seeing in front of the Department of Energy and of the industry
is evidence of that commitment.

So, kind of trying to connect the nuclear commercial, if you will, with
the TAD, and I think it\'s important for the Board to consider these
points. Yes, it is true that the TADs will greatly simplify the Yucca
Mountain design. Will every stick of fuel currently in every one of
those casks go into a TAD? No. But, the vast majority of the fuel that
will produce over, whether it\'s 70,000 or 120,000 or 140,000, or even
more later on, certainly might be able to go into a TAD, at least over
the next several decades, before we get to the point where it\'s
something other than fuel.

So, clearly, we\'ve simplified the repository design. We absolutely
believe, and, again, we look at the curve and the success we\'ve had in
industry, the simpler being more licensable. We\'ve demonstrated that.
We\'ve had to simplify our operations, and we improved our ability to be
efficient.

Now, really the key point in linking the nuclear message to the TAD
message is this, and there were some questions on this earlier. What\'s
in if for industry? Obviously, there\'s going to be a need for
incentives. There\'s going to be a need for equitable distribution of
risk, however, the companies that are building the new nuclear plants,
and I though I had a slide in here on the number of companies that were
doing nuclear plants, but, you know, they see some real advantages, and
that\'s really what it goes to, from our standpoint. We want to maintain
our market share. And, in terms of maintaining market share, there are
real advantages to the TAD. Granted, as in the bottom sub-bullet here I
mentioned there are things like, you know, the small canisters, there
are things that make our business more complicated. But, we do see
disposal and waste acceptance uncertainty. It will be a canister that
will be, the DOE will say is ship to Yucca Mountain care of Chris Kouts,
postage prepaid, you know, I hope it would say postage prepaid on the
side of it. That reduces a lot of uncertainty in our business, and helps
us when we are trying to convince the larger world, that public that 70
percent believe in nuclear, you know, that we should build more plants,
that we should be able to maintain, or even increase, our market share.
Increasing stakeholder confidence. that\'s a very important plan with
us. You know, when we put dry cask storage on your site, and you have to
go out and explain that to your neighbors when they see it from the
road. And, the explanation now is we can talk about how safe it is, and
all that great stuff, and that\'s a good explanation, and it\'s always
worked, even in states where it was challenging at first.

However, you are now giving your neighbors a different message with the
TAD. You\'re saying here\'s a cask that will be here for 20 years. Okay,
maybe 40, and maybe we\'re not quite sure about when it will\--you know,
again, you\'re saying this is a disposable cask, you understand, on your
site, and it\'s got that, you know, postage prepaid care of Chris Kouts
message right on the side there, so they can go to him instead of us.
But, you know, it really does, I think, help us with our, you know,
interacting with our stakeholders. And, again, it\'s helping to create
the environment in which we can build more nuclear plants. It\'s about
how the TAD\'s link to energy choices we can make. And, when you start
to look at all the risks and all the benefits, and, again, just like you
told people, look at what types of clean air technology we\'ll be
deploying, and the natural gas people, look at the international market
forecast. This is one of the things we have to look at. This is one of
the things we have to get done now in order to continue to create that
environment in which our public support will continue to increase, and,
more importantly, investor support, which means a lot to public support
in our business.

If we go onto the next slide? So, I want to dwell on this a little bit,
and I think one of the things I want to point out about this slide is
this is a graphic, and there\'s been a lot of coordination on technical
issues that we\'ll talk about in a second, but this says graphically I
think the same thing Chris said in the words on his slide about how we
intend to move forward, how we get things to fit together.

You know, what we have here is DOE\'s preparing here, that\'s this
slide. Now, I used to be able to show these kind of charts with dates on
them and, I\'m hoping DOE will give me the ability to do that again in
the future, the very near future. But, DOE will issue the performance
requirement, and we feel that will be coming this summer, and we\'ll be
able to pace our interactions with DOE, we think that can happen.
That\'s what goes into the license application, and this is a very
important concept here. The level of information which will be put into
those performance requirements has to be of the same type of level that
will go into, that did go into initial license applications you expect
at nuclear facilities.

But, it\'s important that we go forward with an application based on
that performance spec, and allow the market with the TADs to develop,
similar to the market we have now, I think to insist on one final TAD
design before you move forward. But, first of all, that pushes
everything way out, and really, you know, the greatest risk, we talked
about risk, the greatest risk is to try to find zero risk, you know,
that would be not doing anything at all, kind of what you\'d get if you
wait for all the questions to be answered before you do anything. And,
there needs to be equitable ways of sharing risks as we go down this
path.

Certainly, we think that a preponderance of the risks should fall upon
the entity that was supposed to be getting the deal in 1998 now that
it\'s 2006. But, we\'re not going to get into that because we\'re about
the technical issues and we\'re committed to resolving those first. So,
you go with the performance specs which feed this process down here that
you\'re all familiar with, the license application. Meanwhile, you\'ve
got vendors designing the TAD, and maybe one of the most important
features here is the double arrow that exists between the NRC review and
the vendor design process, and right now we\'re establishing the
foundation for that kind of interaction and it\'s going very well. And,
realize that in order to get our process to a certain point, and we\'re
going to start bringing in the NRC more.

In fact, there\'s a meeting down in Florida, the NRC is getting together
in Florida, and I\'ll be shortly heading to the airport to get to it.
So, we\'re starting to have some discussions today and over the next few
days about that, and we\'ll continue to do go over these processes.

The important thing here is there\'s three stars here, and it could be
five, it\'s important that we have choices here. It\'s important for the
different utilities with different needs, different vendors with
different capabilities that we have now in this competitive marketplace,
I think for this to be successful, and, again, you get to the sense of
urgency going back to the numbers of casks, for this to move at the
speed at which you\'d have fewer non-TAD casks to deal with, it\'s
important we have an incentive for competition. One of these stars is
going to want to be first, and that will drive progress.

Also, you will get better designs, and designs that will be able to
cover the range of needs. You have 103 nuclear plants out there, where
different utilities are used to dealing with different vendors. They
deal with different vendors for different reasons. That needs to be kept
intact. And, then, also, you notice here the new designs will continue
to be on line. There\'s not one day this process stops and, you know,
sorry, you can\'t get into the market, the market is closed. That would
be almost as bad as having no competition at all, is to not let the
market continue to improve the design, particularly when you look at
things like GNEP coming on line, where you may actually have different
waste forms. But, you know, you need to accommodate different types of
fuels as industries on the front end change.

So, this is how, you know, we see this thing together. And, again, when
I go back to Chris\'s slides, I see the process he was describing in
words. He was describing this arrow with the way he described
interactions and the need for a competitive marketplace. So, at this
point, you know, that\'s the\--well, I guess I\'d say the philosophy of
this. I\'ll ask David to come up here and join me and talk a little bit
about the interactions we\'ve been having, and then I\'ll come back and
get into a few of the details and answer questions.

BLEE: Before we get into this slide, I\'d just like to say that we
certainly welcome the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board\'s focus on
the TAD, and the transportation issues generally. It\'s been very, very
helpful. And, we welcome that.

We\'ve heard a lot about potential today. We agree that this issue has
tremendous potential if properly managed. It really is crosscutting, as
has been noted, in terms of the linkage to the license application, the
linkage to simplifying the surface facilities, which is, of course,
related to that; safety, in terms of driving transportation, driving the
integration and innovation that Mark Golan talked about, and
discouraging stove piping, and really showing demonstrable progress.
It\'s very possible that this TAD could be deployed before you see a
license application approved by the NRC, and what we are looking for, of
course, is progress on the Yucca Mountain Program. This is a key driver
to a lot of these things.

We do believe that, as Dr. Kadak noted, the private sector has shown it
can license and design canisters very successfully, and the utilities,
along with the so-called cask vendors, have shown that they can deploy
these systems. 800 systems have been deployed safely at 34 sites, and I
think that record speaks for itself, and it\'s been done in tandem with
NRC oversight regulations. So, we are certainly adding that one
additional element to this, that we are guardily optimistic about this
achieving its objectives.

With respect to the\--I think, again, this is not total altruism, but we
think maximum reliance on the private sector is a key ingredient. I
think Chris Kouts talked about past lessons learned from the Nineties,
in terms of the approach to mandating development. And, we do that the
competitive process, the flow of competition, we do believe there are
some things that need to be done to jump start some of that. But, for
the moment, I know that the commercial companies have much at stake
here, their commercial and competitive interests and the interests in
trying to further this thing. So, I think we\'re encouraged by what the
dialogue with the Department, and certainly the results so far with
we\'re looking at a mid summer result.

This is a statement we put together with working very, very closely
obviously with NEI and the utilities, in terms of\--sorry about that. We
obviously have a vested interested, as you heard. It has great
potential, and the utilization of the private sector is critical to its
success. And we have convened a group of experts to provide technical
input to the DOE. I\'ll talk to you about that in some detail.

So, next slide? The goals of our interaction with DOE have been to
provide DOE with technical input for the TAD development. We have,
again, through our group of experts, had a number of technical
exchanges, and I think that has been very helpful to providing the kind
of input into the Department\'s programs that is really necessary in all
elements.

We have encouraged and facilitated the resolution of technical issues,
and Rod will get into that in some detail in a few moments\--pertaining
to TADs in a timely manner, such that DOE can be in a position to issue
performance requirements in mid 2006. We appear to be on course for this
collectively, and we are encouraged that since its announcement in
October, that we may see the first fruits of this labor very, very
shortly.

We are also working to ensure these performance requirements are
reasonable and adequate to support the timely development and
straightforward storage in transport licensing of TAD designs by the
private sector. That goes without saying.

We\'ve been maintaining the focus on TAD performance issues, not
withstanding commercial or contractual issues, which we believe can be
addressed once the technical performance requirements have been issued
this summer. There\'s no sense in getting into standard contracts,
getting into the other commercial and competitive issues. We wanted to
focus really simply on goal one, which was job one, the developing the
performance spec.

We have also provided technical input related to the design of the
surface facilities at Yucca Mountain, in terms of TAD handling and
whatever fuel is shipped to the site with respect to other types of
containers.

Key challenges that we are addressing are, again, managing the time line
that you saw that Rod put up there in terms of some of the time line
that we\'ve sort of put out in a pro forma way. I think Chris Kouts
talked about up to five to six years is a possibility, and I think while
we didn\'t have dates on there, that\'s certainly something that\'s
within the realm of possibility.

Managing the performance requirement and content. We have tried to keep
very focused and very laser focused really on developing the performance
spec, and not let it get into other issues that I\'ve mentioned before.

Material selection, criticality control is something that Rod will talk
about. And, avoidance of over conservative design inputs. Again, the
experience, the hands-on experience of the canister manufacturers and
vendors and utilities has been instrumental to that. And, then,
achieving appropriate scales of test inputs. Again, another key input by
our group. And, we have also stressed the emphasis on solving local
issues locally. We don\'t want the TAD to solve all the issues
associated with the DOE Yucca Mountain Program. We\'ve tried to,
whenever an issue came up that maybe could be solved by the surface
facility, we\'ve encouraged them to take that back and see if they
couldn\'t solve it by the surface facility, rather than the designing
the TAD to accommodate\--to solve that problem.

In terms of looking ahead a little bit, in terms of our crystal ball,
while TAD commercialization has been on the back burner, we believe this
issue is critical to the ultimate success of the TAD. We believe that
the TAD performance spec is only a first step towards realizing the full
potential of the clean canistered approach to the repository, and it\'s
our opinion that market forces alone will not trigger the design,
licensing, and fabrication of TAD canisters. I think the DOE recognizes
this, and I think to this end, they have issued a notice of program
interests on April 26th to identify qualified companies for the next
phase of the TAD development.

The next step should be establishment of contractual mechanisms to
design,license, fabricate \"generation one\" TADs, at least until such
time the market is ready to be able to drive the development and sales
of future generations of TADs.

As I mentioned, we had a number of technical information exchanges on
this issue. We\'ve met on four separate occasions, and had exchanges, in
some cases, day long sessions. We believe the questions are being
answered and the issues are being resolved, and progress is being made.
So, again, we are laser focused on driving towards the issuance of a
performance spec this summer. And, again, we are optimistic that we are
on course, that DOE is on course for that.

While this is still a work in progress at this point, we have additional
interactions planned between now and, depending on your definition of
summer, but we hope it\'s mid summer, when the TAD specification is
issued. So, that\'s really about the process. and now Rod is going to
talk a little bit about some of the technical issues which are of great
interest to you.

MC CULLUM: Yes. And, I know the Board likes to spend about half the time
on presentation and half the time on questions, so, we will quickly
introduce these. And, I figure they might be a topic of discussion. If
we could go to the next slide?

This is going to be a two page list, just so you all know that it\'s not
just us getting together with DOE and singing Cumbaya, there\'s real
meaty technical discussion going on here.

This is a summary list of the issues we are in fact discussing. Chris
mentioned carbon steel. You know, we have a lot of experience with our
pools, and the word unacceptable, bare carbon steel doesn\'t work in our
pools. DOE I think has received that message. There really are two
solution paths. One is coatings, and we\'ve provided some information on
coatings. Perhaps the more preferred and more likely path would be for
DOE to find that it has enough carbon and stainless steel to meet its
postclosure needs. And, you know, certainly our EPRI analysis would
indicate that that would be the case. You know, there\'s two paths, one
of which we think has a strong probability of success. Shielding
requirements. Again, this is where you want to look at a facility that
builds a layer into its own design, you want to look at realistically,
what the radiation doses are going to be, and also building in the
facility as to not encumber the TAD with more shielding than needs to be
built into it, and making it less wieldy for transportation and storage
and handling.

Criticality and reactivity control. We\'ve had a lot of discussions
about a wide range of topics in this. And, I would submit to you
probably the one topic when we say it\'s a work in progress that needs
the most additional discussion is this issue of Gadolinium. Again, we
see a potential solution for that here, but we in the industry provided
some information. It\'s not that we don\'t think Gadolinium would
perform the function that DOE does. It\'s the question of do they have
enough information on the Gadolinium in the form they\'re going to be
using it to support a licensing process, and maybe they do want to for a
Part 63 perspective, but they might not for a Part 71 perspective, and
maybe that\'s okay. Maybe it\'s an issue where for Part 71 and Part 72
perspective, the Gadolinium coils don\'t do anything other than take up
more space than warranted. Whereas, in Part 63, they do perform a
function.

But, we\'re going to continue to discuss this issue. I think that\'s
particularly not as much everything criticality, but the issue of the
role of Gadolinium.

Thermal requirements. You know, DOE I think I want to compliment them
here. They have been very understanding. I think this is one of the
issues where they\'ve moved their position to align with our position.
The role of aging at the repository, DOE is going to be willing to,
they\'re not imposing repository performance requirements on the TAD.
They\'re going to load TADs to greater than 11.4 kilowatts, and age them
to 11.4 kilowatts. We have shared some information with them on how long
this might be, and, you know, we\'re talking decades in a couple of
cases, in many cases. But, it\'s not an unreasonable period of time,
given the aging facility we\'ve seen in DOE\'s plans to date.

Canister handling. Again, solve local problems locally. These issues
have been fairly straightforward.

Go to the next slide. Aging pad seismic requirements. We\'ve designed
casks in places like California. As long as we had the seismic envelope,
we don\'t see this as being a problem.

Overpacks and transfer casks. Again, you saw from Chris\'s presentation,
we\'re looking at the whole system, and I think we are providing the
information we need to credibly do that.

The same thing with package closure and seal integrity. Regulatory
interfaces, that\'s the key point, that\'s where there\'s some risks,
you know, making sure that risk is addressed in terms of the contractual
and commercial issues. But not taking the risk, not going ahead and
developing TADs for Part 71 and 72 in parallel with Part 63 licensing
process. But to think about how it impacts the energy choices we make in
the future. Not a good idea.

ASME Code compliance. DOE seems to know what it wants to do there, and
we don\'t disagree.

Transportation issues, again, the overall system is being looked at.
These things, in a way, they helped us in transportation, because right
now, these big dual purpose casks that we have on our sites, some of
them are licensed for storage only because of the higher\--you know,
some of the fuels we now have, without more burnup credit, we\'re having
challenges licensing them for transportation. So, in a way, the TADs
will be even more transportable by being smaller.

So, you know, these are the issues. Going onto the concluding slide
there, you know, we really believe that the TAD is an important
initiative and it\'s reflected by the fact that all the members of both
David\'s organization and my organization are approaching it with a
great sense of urgency, as is DOE. And, that\'s the commitment.

We\'re addressing the technical challenges, and as David has mentioned,
you know, one of the things we wanted to do from the outset was let\'s
not let the commercial become a barrier to resolving the technical
issues. Let\'s resolve the technical issues first, and once we know what
the TAD is going to do technically, what the performance requirements
will be technically, then we can talk about the commercial and
contractual issues.

You know, if you press us on questions, probably David and I will
politely \"no comment,\" they\'re just discussions that have to occur.
Folks have contract rights, and commercial interests, and I\'m not one
to give any of those up. But, DOE has indicated a willingness to do
this. And, if DOE goes forward as forthrightly in this area as they have
in the technical area, we see no reason to believe it can\'t succeed.

So, with that, David here will answer all the questions.

ABKOWITZ: Questions, Andy?

KADAK: Yes, Kadak.

I had a couple of questions that I asked Chris earlier that maybe you
can help me answer. Do you expect to have the utilities repackage their
spent fuel at the\--at your sites for TAD loading?

MC CULLUM: The current expectation\--the short answer to that would be
no. However, that gets into, you know, contractual negotiations.
Clearly, there\'s some cases where they can\'t, and I\'m sure you are
familiar with places like Maine Yankee and Trojan where there\'s no more
pool.

You know, DOE has I think done a very good job of saying we\'re going to
provide a limited bare fuel handling capability, and we\'re going to try
and get these TADs on line as quickly as possible, so we don\'t have to
over-rely on that limited capability. The question of will any utility
ever agree to repackage an existing canister? And, again, that\'s a
contractual question, and it depends on how that negotiation comes out.

I think right now, we need to work on minimizing the number of cases in
which we will face that dilemma.

KADAK: One of the assumptions in the total system model is that roughly
90 percent of the fuel, spent fuel in existence, would be TAD-ed. Do you
think that\'s a reasonable assumption, given your answer?

MC CULLUM: I think it might very well be. If you go back to the
whatever, I think it\'s Slide 8, which is the slide that has the numbers
on it, yes, that slide there, I mean, right now, you\'re at a little bit
over 10 percent. You know, you might get up to 20 percent. Now, can,
over time, DOE actually handle more if they had to age it longer, if
they had to\--you know, there\'s a throughput question, you know, will
they have to amend the license at some point if they\'re going to hire
more than 10 if they\'re not successful in the negotiations.

Again, I\'m not going to presuppose if there are going to be any such
negotiations, or how they will conclude. But, you know, in a world where
orders of magnitude start to become important, if we move in the next
five or six years, and I\'m speaking on behalf of my utility members, we
would like to see it even faster.

If we move smartly forward with the TADs, we\'re not going to be far off
that 10 percent. It\'s not going to be that great of a challenge when
you look at the overall system.

KADAK: So, you think the utilities can blend to the DOE requirements,
whatever they are?

MC CULLUM: Well, I wasn\'t answering that\--I will clarify. I wasn\'t
answering that question from the standpoint of blending, I was answering
the question from the standpoint of accepting existing dual purpose.

As far as blending goes, everything we talked about, as long as we can
load it to meet transportation and storage heat loads and criticality
requirements, and all that, DOE has seemed to indicate that they would
then age it on their sites until it meets their thermal requirements.
We\'re not anticipating any blending for thermal reasons on our sites.

KADAK: And, one last question relative to burnup credit. Clearly, it\'s
an important criteria. From what you have heard from the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, do you think that criteria should be applied to
performance specifications for the TAD?

MC CULLUM: Yes. And, we think that more burnup credit is in order.
We\'re working to get that on existing packages, and\--

KADAK: Did you say more or full?

MC CULLUM: Full would be good with me, as close as we can get to it.

KADAK: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: John?

GARRICK: Yes, you\'ve done a very nice job of giving us a glimpse of the
large number of parties who are involved in this, and the components,
and even some indication of some of the technical problems that are
involved, such as some of the materials and materials compatibility.

Given that there are such a large number of parties, are you satisfied
that if everybody that\'s involved in this has the level of appreciation
for the complexity of the Project that is necessary in order for them to
really appreciate the goal that they have to serve to make it
successful?

And, putting it another way, one of the things that is very useful for a
project of this complexity is a road map, and the road map that is
sufficiently detailed that it\'s clear to every institution, every
organization, every company that is involved, exactly where they fit in
this grand scheme of things. Do you envision such a road map evolving,
or being developed, or having it early enough where it really does
enhance the communication and integration that this Board has a very
genuine concern about?

MC CULLUM: Yes, we do. Let me answer the first part of that question by
saying yes, I do feel everybody appreciates the complexities. And, also,
that\'s why everybody wants to\--they all understand the role they play
in it.

If we could go to Slide 11, which is the graphic I put up, absolutely I
anticipate there being a road map. This is very notional, I understand
that\'s not a road map. I really look forward to DOE coming forward
later this year in the schedule for the licensing process, so that we
can start to evolve from this. I mean we need to preserve all the
notions that are in there, and we need to stick to some of our
commitments about the structure of the licensing process. That we start
with performance specs, moving forward in parallel, and we have that
very critical double arrow there, but that double arrow certainly needs
to be much more well-defined. I mean, it\'s not nearly that simple in
terms of making sure that everybody up here knows what\'s going on here,
and everybody down here knows what\'s going on up here. That needs to be
structured and, we at NEI, and I\'m sure, David would say at USTC, are
committed to working together with DOE to begin, once they have a path
forward for themselves to make sure they give it that structure.

BLEE: I wouldn\'t want to say that every member feels exactly the same
way. These are the consensus views. But, in terms of\-- the key is
reliance on the private sector, and there are a variety of ways that DOE
can incentivize the private sector and create demand for utilities or
create demand for these TADs. And, I think we don\'t want to have, in
terms of this is the process, we don\'t want to have a command and
control micro-management of how the private sector goes about it.

Again, they have proven over the last 15 years, they are extremely
capable of getting the job done, the utilities, working in partnership
with utilities, are extremely capable of doing it safely and
successfully. And, I know that Paul Golan, for instance, is using off
the shelf, proven experience to the maximum extent possible\--did I say
that right? No.

So, I think, again, we have accomplished\--and, I think the only new
element to this is the Part 63. It\'s not a new element, but it is an
element that has to be managed. But, if you look at the process to date,
we are encouraged by what we have seen so far in terms of DOE\'s
approach to it, decision making, all of those are good harbingers we
believe.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. Bill?

MURPHY: Murphy, Board.

You mentioned in the discussion of materials, that carbon steel would be
unacceptable, and that the possibility would arise for coatings, but the
most likely path would be to reassess carbon steel for repository
performance. In that case, I presume there would be some other materials
that you would use or propose. Could you talk about that?

MC CULLUM: Yes, we would be looking at stainless steel, and our
expectation is that you would be able to find enough of the iron that
you need in\--I may have said carbon before, I apologize\--in the
stainless steel to meet the postclosure. Again, this gets into, you
know, peeling away some of the conservatisms in the analysis, and
finding out what\'s really there. If you can do it with stainless,
there\'s no need for carbon. We\'re okay with stainless. It works a lot
better than trying to engineer a coating that, you know, is sure to last
in one case, and not last in another case.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you. Rod, I had a question for you. You mentioned
you\'re leaving to go to Florida to attend meetings involving DOE and
NRC; is that correct?

MC CULLUM: Yes, I\'ll be more clear on what that is. It\'s the annual
Industry Dry Storage Forum, and this is something that was planned even
before we knew about this Board meeting. That was my slight on
Heisenberg\'s and your measuring our momentum there.

NRC attends that, you know, the media attends that. It\'s an open forum.
This year, we have expanded it from two days\--it\'s normally two days
every year\--we\'ve expanded it to three days, specifically because of
the TAD initiative, because there is so much interest in that. And, this
will be the first, you know, time we\'ll be really interacting with the
NRC on this initiative, as well as DOE.

And, we have taken a position that we want to, before DOE gets too far
down its road with NRC, and I think Chris answered the question with NRC
appropriately, it\'s appropriate that both the folks that are going to
be providing the performance requirements, as well as the folks that are
going to be providing the fuel that goes into this, have agreed it will
work before we start to generate too much of a regulatory path forward,
and we\'re getting to that point.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. This leaves me very confused. DOE and NRC, you expect,
will be engaged in discussions on TAD in Florida over the next couple of
days? We were told a short while ago that DOE has been wanting to get
together with NRC for a long time to talk about TAD design and
specification, but had been told by the NRC don\'t show up at our
doorstep until you have a spec. So, help me out, please.

MC CULLUM: I\'ll let Chris clarify that.

KOUTS: You may have misinterpreted my remarks. I think that the industry
conference that Rod\'s referring to is one\-- we plan to give
essentially the same presentation there that we gave here. I want to say
that in terms of interactions with the NRC, I think that the Department
needs to remain respectful of the NRC\'s role as a regulator, as I
mentioned in my discussion, the NRC actually wants that interaction,that
public interaction to be done in a manner where we have some technical
information in front of the public in the form of a performance
specification, and I think the NRC\'s view and the Department\'s view is
that until we have a specification out, discussions with the NRC would
essentially not be as productive as they might be with that.

So, I don\'t think there\'s been a reluctance to meet with the NRC. I
think there is a lack of substance upon which we can have meaningful
public discussions, and we hope to have that public discussion after the
performance specification is received.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you. I now want to move to the issues that you
raised where you said if we ask questions, you\'ll probably have to say
\"no comment.\" And, Dr. Kadak asked you the first of those, which was
are the utilities willing to place spent fuel in dry storage back into
the pools? I gather that was a no comment?

MC CULLUM: Yeah. That is a no comment.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. Now, I\'ll go and ask the question are utilities willing
to trade within the waste acceptance gueue in order to make TAD
workable? Is that also a no comment?

MC CULLUM: I will go as far as to point out that the queue slots are
fungible, that they could be traded. However, when it gets too
expensive, the willingness of anybody to actually do that, I\'ll have to
say no comment.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. And, then, my final question, which I\'m expecting a no
comment from, is are the utilities willing to purchase more expensive
TADs without assurances that the waste will be moved, using them for
storage, without assurances that they will be moved?

MC CULLUM: You know, again, there\'s a bit of a no comment in there
because that gets into the whole idea of how is DOE going to incentivize
the purchase of the cask for the TAD. But, I will say, as I pointed out,
that\--and, whatever happened to that one slide that showed all the
companies planning on building reactors? There\'s about a dozen
companies that are involved right now, spending real money and we may be
seeing\--we should be seeing in the mid to latter stages of this decade,
license applications for new reactors. Yeah, if you can go to it in the
handout there, you will see that.

But, the Chief Nuclear Officers and Chief Executive Officers of those
companies do see a value in the TAD, which they are weighing against the
increased costs of the TAD. Now, again, DOE is going to have to take on
the appropriate amount of risk. You know, this just shows you how
substantial the efforts are at building new reactors. And, when you look
at creating a business environment in which these new reactors will be
able to build them, as I said, we will build some, regardless of what
happens at Yucca, there are some places where their needs are so great,
will we build 50, like I showed on the other slide? Will we build 100?
Who knows? But, creating the best possible business environment, the TAD
helps that. So, you know, maybe I can give up a little bit of
negotiation there, but it is true that there is value in the TAD, and as
long as it\'s properly incentivized, where I can\'t comment at this
point, yes.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. I want to take those answers and reflect back on Dr.
Garrick\'s reference to a road map, and Paul Golan\'s insistence that
the program will be integrated and he will be accountable for that. The
inter-dependencies of what\'s happening here, if you study them, and I
know you have, is that how much can be actually put into TADs has
dramatic implications on both the safety and the throughput and the
thermal management issues at the mountain. And, it\'s very difficult to
sit here and understand how a surface facility can be designed, and what
kind of emplacement strategy is sensible, without knowing whether you
can really put 90 percent, or 80 percent, or 70 percent, or whatever the
number is.

So, it strikes me that you have a very serious chicken and egg problem
here, and I have a very difficult time understanding how a license
application and a TSPA can be submitted without resolving a number of
these issues.

So, you made a comment that the DOE and utilities are approaching this
problem with a great sense of urgency. My suggestion is the road map
that is on the critical path of a great sense of urgency is getting rid
of the litigation problem you have, because I don\'t really believe that
anyone believes that you guys can jump into bed and really solve this
problem as long as you are competing with each other on these issues.

MC CULLUM: Well, yeah, again, I can\'t comment on the results of the
legislation. But, I would agree if we haven\'t been jumping into bed
already in terms of going through the technical issues and resolving the
technical issues, I don\'t know what more we could do. It is\--there
have been substantial meetings, substantial discussions, substantial
show of support. You know, it is true that in most business lines in
America, you know, we\'re in a hotel, I\'m sure there are\-- Hilton is
suing somebody, somebody is suing Hilton, suppliers, whatever. But
companies that are suing each other do business together, and there are
ways to do that. There are ways to structure this that you don\'t have
to say, well, we can\'t do anything until everybody settles their
lawsuit.

And, we have been working. Believe me, lawyers approve everything we do.
Lawyers do approve everything we say. But, it goes back to, again, risk
management. We cannot, and I\'m not talking safety risk here, I\'m
talking business risk, financial risk, licensing risk, you cannot create
a zero risk environment. We need to make sure that the risks are
equitably distributed. We need to make sure that we do have a road map,
I think was an excellent way to put it, that allows us to move forward
in the face of those risks, as we think the parallel path approach does
that.

The greatest risk of all is zero risk, because then nothing happens, and
we start to make energy choices. And, I hate to do that.

ABKOWITZ: Dr. Duquette, do you have a question?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I can\'t let Dr. Abkowitz off the hook with finishing his session on
time.

But, a more technical question, and getting off philosophy into a
technical area, did I understand you properly that you think carbon
steel is not good for TADs. That stainless steel will be okay, and that
we\'re looking at overkill by even looking at Alloy 22?

MC CULLUM: We\'re talking about the internals. We fully support Alloy
22.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Before we adjourn\--oh, okay, Dr. Kadak, do you have one quick
question?

KADAK: I\'m trying to clarify in my mind what you mean by incentivize.
Do you expect the DOE to pay each of the cask vendors to develop these
designs? Because from my understanding, they\'re not likely to invest in
a technology that may not be used. And, when do you think that if they
do this, when do you think that these TADs would be available for
purchase, I guess is the way to call it now? Two questions.

MC CULLUM: Yes. Well, I think on the first question, DOE has said
they\'re going to incentivize, and we\'re going to react to whatever
proposal, the vendors are going to react to whatever proposal, and then
I have to go back in the no comment space.

On the second question, I mean, we have talked about a period of years
here. I think that if we get past that first question, if you get a good
answer, and that\'s a very good question, obviously, that\'s why we\'re
getting right to that crux now, if we get a good answer to that
question, it might happen faster than the five to six years we talked
about. I think that, you know, our companies that are interested in
creating the environment, the new plants would like to see it happen
faster than that. So, I hope that answers your question.

Before we adjourn, can I answer one question that Chris got that I
haven\'t gotten yet?

ABKOWITZ: I\'m sorry, what\'s that again?

MC CULLUM: One question that Chris got that I wanted to\--and I forgot
to mention it in the talk that I answered. Can I ask myself a question?

ABKOWITZ: Sure, as long as you also answer one that\'s been submitted to
me.

MC CULLUM: Okay, I\'ll do that first.

ABKOWITZ: And, I don\'t know if this is you or Chris, but the question
was will DOE specification require that all materials be put into a
TAD\--that all material that\'s put into a TAD be intact, in other
words, no damaged fuel? I don\'t know if that\'s a question you or Chris
should answer for us.

MC CULLUM: You know, they have to accept all the fuel. You know, there
are provisions for things being different, for what was originally
defined as canistered fuel. What is the definition of damaged fuel? The
answer was that if they have to\--we have to have a system that can
accept all fuel, whether that\'s something they choose to accept in the
TAD, or whether that\'s something that they\'re going to handle in some
other way, I don\'t want to presuppose that at this point.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. Did you have a question you wanted to ask yourself?

MC CULLUM: Yes. The question that was put to Chris was about a sampling
program, getting into the casks and looking at what\'s really there. I
did want to point out that in our vast experience with Part 71 and Part
72 licensing, reactor records, records that were developed in an NRC
license environment that was very rigorous are always considered
acceptable, and we would expect that in the environment of the TAD, that
we would continue the same regulatory process, that we\'re expected to
know what goes into the casks before we put it in there with high
certainty, and that does not have to be questioned in the future. We
would expect what\'s been good traditionally for decades in Part 71 and
72 licensing, would also be good, even with the extension of Part 63
licensing.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you, and thank you, Rod and David, for your time
and patience.

We\'re going to adjourn now, and reconvene at 1 o\'clock.

(Whereupon, the lunch recess was taken.)

[AFTERNOON SESSION]{.underline}

ABKOWITZ: Our first presentation, we\'ll have Chris Kouts back up here
again to talk about the total system model analyses supporting the TAD
concept, and then he will be followed by Paul Harrington, who will talk
about the effect of the TAD decision on surface facility design. Then,
we\'ll take a break, and I will hand the baton back to Chairman Garrick
at that time.

So, I would like to invite Chris to come back up here and start us off.

KOUTS: Can everyone hear me? Okay, I don\'t see any nos. Thank you, Dr.
Abkowitz.

Before I begin my presentation, I would like to clarify something I said
earlier, and I was reminded by a member of my staff that when we did
announce the TAD concept back last October, the NRC did request that we
meet them early on to discuss how we might implement it. However, it was
the Department\'s view at that time, and my view at that time also, that
until we had more technical work done, until we had something
substantial to discuss, that we didn\'t think that those interactions
would be meaningful.

Subsequently, we have discussed a technical exchange with the NRC, as I
said earlier today, and we do plan on having that. However, I did want
to clarify that. The NRC did want to meet, and the Department was
reluctant to do that until we had a more defined approach, and more
technical work done on the TAD system. So, I don\'t think I have any
other mea culpas at this moment.

I do want to, as we get into the total system model, I\'ll just say
this, that I am somewhat of a student of history, and for those of you
who know something about Arthur Wellsley, who was the first Duke of
Wellington, and a great British statesman and great military commander,
and you probably remember that he defeated Napoleon at the Battle of
Waterloo, but he did a lot of other great things in his military career
before that in India and in the Peninsula campaign, then later became
the first Prime Minister. And, at the end of his life, he was asked by
one of his great grandchildren if he had any regrets, and he said
essentially, one comment, and he was a very terse individual, he said,
\"I should have given more credit.\" And, by that, many of the men and
the units who served under him, whenever he wrote his dispatches at the
end of battles, he was very terse, he did not cover all the bases, so to
speak, and he bruised a lot of feelings, especially when people\'s lives
were of concern.

So, trying to learn from the Duke\'s mistakes, I do want to give credit
for a lot of the development in the total system model to Don Kim, who
is a member of my staff, who I know has briefed the Board on numerous
occasions, occasions where I couldn\'t be there, both members of staff,
and I do want to give Don the credit to which he is due for the work on
this model.

Now, moving to the presentation, if we can go to the next slide, I\'ll
talk a little bit about the model overview, and I will talk about
essentially the study that we did prior to the time that the Department
made the decision to go to TAD. This was a study that we commissioned
back in, I believe, March of last year, and we made a variety of
assumptions, and we\'ll walk through some of the results of those
studies that helped inform the Department\'s decision about going to
TAD.

If we can go to the next slide? As the Board is aware, we continue, the
Department continues to develop an integrated solution to the overall
waste management system. There are a lot of diverse issues associated
with trying to develop that solution. And, the development of the total
system model, which has occurred over the past several years, is one
tool that I think helps us analyze the system. It helps us analyze
alternatives. It helps us analyze policy implications, or going
different areas and the policy shifts, and different programmatic paths
that we might take.

So, from that perspective, it\'s been a very useful tool. It\'s not the
only tool we use. Nonetheless, it\'s gotten the interest of the Board,
and I certainly appreciate the comments made earlier.

Let\'s go to the next slide. I\'ve gone over some of this material in
the past, and I\'ll do it briefly, but we\'ll talk a little bit about
the architecture associated with what the total system model is.

On the left of your screen here, where you see we have a preprocessor
essentially where we develop the logistics, the actual pickup parameters
that we would want to go through to pick up fuel from utility sites and
defense facilities. That feeds into SimCAD, which is a trademark model
that we use that\'s been essentially used by a variety of organizations
around the country, more and more used by the pharmaceutical industry.
Many industrial process lines use it to try to hone in on that, how they
can operate more effectively and efficiently.

It\'s essentially an object directed, or an object oriented code such
that basically one section of the code asks if it needs something, it
calls for something from another section. In other words, if the
repository needs a waste package, or if it needs a transportation cask,
that trigger essentially goes back to the system and pulls that through
it.

So, the driving force behind the implementation, or what makes the code,
what is the forcing function essentially, has to do with our baseline
requirements, our acceptance schedules, and so forth, that we have in
our baseline documents.

The TSM creates, one of its advantages is that one thing, it has a
graphical user interface, which I will get to in a moment, where the
operator can look at how the system is operating, and you can see
whether or not there\'s a choke point in the system. The operator can
address that. You can also learn from the operation of this system in
terms of where those choke points are and where we need to work on
certain aspects.

And, another advantage of it is report generation. It gives us
incredible amounts of data every step along the way about how an
individual package, or a bundle of fuel, if you will, moves through the
system. You know, it\'s pad through the system, transportation routes,
so forth and so on. So, it\'s very, very informative. It\'s a work in
progress, and we will continue to make it better as we get additional
data, and as our facilities get more refined and our designs get a
little bit more further along.

I will talk a little bit about the inputs to the code. On the left, we
have a variety of things, including spent nuclear fuel characteristics,
DOE high-level waste, spent nuclear fuel characteristics. We look at dry
storage parameters, just about anything you can think of from a utility
perspective we can model.

From a transport perspective, we essentially take the routes that we
used in our EIS we published in 2002, and we use that routing mechanism,
both for rail and for truck. We use transit times based on understanding
of how these would move through the transportation system. We can do a
variety of truck and rail options and look at, as I said earlier, it
allows you the flexibility to look at alternatives, and understand how
the system can operate under a variety of different conditions.

As far as the repository is concerned, one of the drivers in terms of
putting packages underground obviously are thermal limits. So, that
trickles back to the system in terms of what we pick up from the
utilities, what we have to age on site, and also what we can put
underground and the amount of that aging. And, we will talk about that
when we get to some of the results a little later.

And, I think we\'ve talked about most of the things I want to talk about
on this slide. Those are the inputs.

The outputs, again, we get amount of truck/rail or shipping schedules, a
variety of inputs, or outputs, if you will, as to how the materials move
through the system. We can get dose, not only at DOE facilities, we can
get it along the transportation routes, we can get it at utility sites.
Life cycle cost, it\'s certainly helpful in that perspective, not so
much as an absolute, but in terms of a relativistic view of how one
option, system option will look to another.

We can, as I mentioned earlier, get a read-out as to how much aging we
have to have on site based on the type and the amount of fuel that we
picked up. And, what\'s very important to us is that we can understand
whether or not we\'re meeting our apparent requirements that the
Director wants in terms of whether or not we\'re moving the fuel through
the system in the amounts that we expect to move it, and it helps inform
us as to the capability of our designs as we move forward. And, it also
gives us a perspective of uncertainties and sensitivities with the
system.

And, the other interesting part of the code is for those of you who have
seen it operate, is it does provide a synergistic understanding of how
the system works, how one element of the system can trickle back and
affect another one, or how you can adjust various aspects of the system
in order to accommodate uncertainties.

Let\'s talk a little bit about the graphical user interface on the next
page. This is just one very broad screen that you can pull up,
essentially the top of the screen shows you utility sites themselves,
and those utility sites are broken down to the amount of fuel that sits
within a spent fuel core, or that resides in storage. We use industry
data. The last call we had for industry data was, I believe, in 2003 in
terms of where they were with dry storage. That actually reflects 2002
information. Nonetheless, we regularly go out to the industry, ask them
to update our information. So, we are using the latest information that
industry has to provide us.

Transportation routes, as I mentioned earlier, the next two sets, we
have rail and we have truck. Basically, we are using the routes that
were identified, routes that were identified in our EIS in terms of how
we move across the system. Barging options are also considered, you
know, heavy haul to a barging option is also considered. We look at all
those alternatives.

And then, of course, when we get to the geologic repository operations
area, the lower area, that effectively essentially models what we expect
to have in terms of surface facilities on site, and also, again, the
amount of dry storage we\'ll have on site, or aging on site, in order to
meet our thermal needs. It\'s a very powerful tool, and for those of you
who watched it operate, it\'s very, very helpful.

Let\'s talk a little bit now about the system study that we started in
March of last year. That was essentially to evaluate the feasibility of
the TAD concept using essentially commercial spent fuel. Right now, our
baseline assumption for DOE materials, including spent fuel and for
vitrified materials, are that they will come canistered to the
facilities, as well as the Navy spent fuel that will be canistered when
we receive it.

So, what we had to do at that point was do some kind of internal
adjustments to the model, not really based on design information, but
based on what we would anticipate that canister handling facilities
could do on site. We looked at about 70 combinations of parameters, some
of which I will talk about in a minute, came up with about 40
alternative scenarios. And, again, our intent when we did this study was
not so much to try to determine how the system would be optimized, or
optimally operate, but, rather, to understand the bounds of the
operations, and the upper bounds and the lower bounds, if you will, of
how we would operate between that. Because we could get the extremes
down, we knew that the answer would ultimately be somewhere in between.

And, when I start to talk about things, let\'s go to the next page for a
moment. The first couple of slides that you will see will be, when I
show you some of the results, will be based on what I would consider to
be the old system, the old system meaning the bare fuel handling system.
And, we will show you essentially how we viewed that in operation. And,
then, when you overlay the concept of a canister system, not going to a
bare fuel system, and you can look at the effects of what that does to
the system.

Let\'s talk for a moment about the different parameters that went into
it, and I think this bears some discussion, so I think the Board
understands exactly how the model operates and how we use it to
understand the different parameters and the outer bounds of the
operation.

Let\'s take the first example, in terms of accepting spent fuel from
utilities. We have two items there, YFF10/YFF5, and there are actually
variations, two variations of each of those. And, what do we mean by
YFF10 and YFF5? That\'s youngest fuel first, 10 year cool. So,
essentially, we\'ll take the youngest fuel that the utility has on site,
and we can also adjust whether or not it\'s in the pool, or whether or
not we\'re taking it from the dry storage site. And, we can do a very
strict interpretation of that, or we can do a not so strict
interpretation.

A strict interpretation means if the utility can\'t meet YFF10, or YFF5,
we skip it. We don\'t pick up any material from that site. Or, if you
take a little bit more of a less strict view, you essentially look at
what you can load the cask with, bring it to the site, and then we have
to determine how much aging would have to be done. So, we look, for each
of these parameters, we look at the outer bounds, if you will, a strict
implementation of it, or a not so strict implementation of it. Again,
this gives us an understanding of the bounds under which this system
will operate.

Similar for, let\'s see, other things here, the same thing with heat
load. We can do at 11.8, which is our current design basis in terms of
what the heat load is for each individual waste package. We can do that
on a strict basis, meaning we\'ll load a TAD at a reactor site, and it
will either meet 11.8, or we don\'t accept it, and we\'ll just skip
that, or we can look at the closest they can get to that 11.8, and then
bring it on site and age it to the necessary amount.

And, we looked at three different heat loads in that study. We looked at
a very cold heat load, a cold heat load, at 7.5 kilowatts. We looked at
a higher heat load at 18 kilowatts, and we looked at strict and
non-strict versions of each of those.

In addition to that, we looked at different sized TADs. We looked at the
baseline case for our waste package right now, which, as I mentioned
this morning, was a 21 PWR, or 44 BWR. We looked at a 32/68, 32 PWR, 68
BWR. We looked at the various heat ranges associated with that. And, we
also looked at going to a smaller TAD. So, we tried to cover in this
study as many different scenarios as we possibly could in order to
understand, again, how the system potentially can operate.

And, let\'s see, is there anything else I want to cover here? The other
thing I think is important to note is that we had a base case a few
years ago in terms of our transportation capability, or the
transportation infrastructure capability at the utility sites. Those
assumptions were based on, essentially, that there was more capability
to handle heavier devices at the utility sites than actually exist
today. About two years ago, we went out and did another survey, if you
will, and we found that some of those assumptions needed to be adjusted,
and I will show you some of the effects of that as we move forward. And,
I think that\'s pretty much all I wanted to cover on that page, and now
we will go to some of the results.

Let\'s take the baseline scenario, what we call Case 0A. And, this is,
let\'s go back in history a little bit, this is when we had an FHF,
which was an initial dry handling facility. We had a CHF, a canister
handling facility for defense materials, and we had two large dry
transfer facilities, DTFs, that were for handling bare fuel on site.
And, when we modeled that, with certain assumptions, and that\'s, as you
can see here, we\'re moving things mostly in rail. The shutdown sites
dump to pool, which means that the shutdown sites don\'t get rid of
their pools. They basically put all their material in their pools, and
take the material from the pools. YFF10, I think we have already talked
about, and 11.8 kilowatts.

And, what we are looking at here in the upper left is what our
capability is at the repository site, with that older system, to
process. And, effectively, this dip that you see here, or valley curve,
as some of our analysts like to call it, is essentially reflective of
the fact that our heavier production facilities come on line later than
the initial operation of the facility, therefore, in terms of meeting
our waste acceptance baseline, which is 400 metric tons the first year,
600 the next, 12 the next, 2000 the fourth, and 3000 thereafter, that we
had a deficit of about\-- that we work off in the first 30 to 40 years.
And, the total amount of the deficit in any one year, the greatest
amount is approximately 11,000, 11,000 behind, 11,000 tons behind in
taking the amount of fuel that we want to from the utilities.

Again, this informed us of what the capabilities of that were, of that
system were. And, when we look at the amount of aging on site that we
would need, that\'s roughly about 2000 site-specific aging canisters, if
you will, that we would use on site in order to cool the fuel down to
what we needed. That\'s roughly about 9 metric tons per canister, so
that\'s roughly about 18,000 metric tons. So, that, again, gives us an
idea of what our system was prior to the time that we decided to go to a
canister approach.

I\'m also going to show you the impacts, on the next slide, of going to
essentially the new infrastructure data that we developed from the
utilities. Now, you see we have a very minor valley curve, if you will,
if you go to the next slide, with the primary difference being the
capabilities at the reactor sites to handle larger casks. Again, these
are bare fuel casks.

And, the other interesting information here is that in terms of handling
a bare fuel cask, the handling of a bare fuel cask at the repository,
whether it\'s a truck cask or a rail cask, it essentially takes the same
amount of time. You\'ve got to take all the bolts off, you\'ve got to
move the personnel barriers, take the bolts off, mate it to the cells,
do all the things you need to do. The actual transfer of the fuel
doesn\'t take very long. So, essentially, if you\'ve got lower capacity
casks that you\'re operating on, you have to run a lot more casks
through the system and through the repository surface facilities in
order to get the same amount of fuel.

And, what we\'re finding here is that you see a much larger deficit for
that older system, if you will, based on the fact that the capabilities
of the sites, the assumptions that we were using, changed. And, with
updated assumptions, again, our requirements were not being met as well.

The other thing on the right side of that curve, I think gives you a
perspective based on different heat loads\--or, not heat
loads\--there\'s heat requirements for disposal going to the coldest,
which is the red line\--I should\--yeah, the coldest, which is the red
line, which is the top, down to the hottest repository, if you will. So,
it\'s 7.5 on top, 11.8 in the middle, and 18 kilowatts down below. And,
you can see that the amount of aging that we have is very, very
sensitive to the emplacement regime that we have at the repository. But,
the colder the emplacement regime, the much more on-site storage we\'re
going to have, or on-site aging that we\'re going to have to do.

Okay, now, let\'s look at our TAD system here. And, this is one, a
specific case where we looked at our ability, and, again, when we did
this study, we didn\'t have any designs to base this on. The modelers
made some assumptions associated on the cask handling facility that we
were already in the process of designing in terms of its ability to
handle TADs.

What we find here, if you go to a mostly rail scenario, and at this
point, we looked at a medium TAD, which we call the 21/44, and a small
TAD, which is a 12/24, and looking at legal weight trucks for some
sites, you can see that in this scenario, at least, the mythical
facilities, if you will, that we developed in order to model, that we
can meet our annual processing abilities at the, in other words,
accepted and deal with it at the repository site.

The one issue, however, is that we could get a great deal of aging, or
need a great deal of aging associated with that, based on the total
amount of fuel that we have to move.

So, again, this provides some perspective as to what a TAD system would
look like. Let\'s look at one where we\'re changing another parameter
here. Again, this is using the TAD system, an 18 kilowatt case, the
former one was 11.8, and you can see that there\'s quite a difference in
terms of our processing capability. What this dip shows toward the end
of the operational life of the repository is that we\'re running out of
fuel at the reactor sites that\'s cool enough in order to just transport
it, and that\'s why we\'re getting this dip. And, that\'s effectively,
potentially, what can happen.

In addition to that, this also looks at the other parameter we revised
here, is a large TAD, and you will find when you go to a large TAD, and
even to an 18 kilowatt package, it doesn\'t provide you that many
benefits, because you\'ve got ten more slots that you\'re utilizing. And
in order to meet the heat load, it\'s even more challenging to do that
with a 32/68. So, you\'re not getting a lot of benefits in terms of
reduction in aging going to a larger package.

Again, this gives you a flavor, if you will, of the types of analyses
that we conducted. And, the summary I think to all of this is that when
we did these analyses, we felt that our capabilities, based on our
understanding of the types of facilities that we would need on site,
that effectively, that our system requirements could be met to meet our
waste acceptance goals. The aging limit, depending on how you looked at
the system, could stay within what our current plan is, which is roughly
about 21,000 metric tons of aging, and we can get the specified amount
of material in the statutory case, which is the 70,000 metric ton
repository, done within 50 years of initial receipt.

I know the Board will probably have a variety of questions, and I\'ll be
happy to try to address them now.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you, Chris. Board members want to start the questioning?
Dr. Kadak?

KADAK: Kadak. I\'m curious about based on our conversation this morning,
what the key assumptions you assume in the TSM are regarding packaging
of the TADs, and particularly the spent fuel that is now in storage at
the reactor sites, and the ability to blend for, let\'s just say, the
11.8 kilowatts?

KOUTS: Okay, I think the bottom line is what the model indicates, and it
depends on the scenarios that you run. But, depending on how you
operate, you can meet the 11.8 for the statutory case, which is the
70,000 metric ton case, 63,000 of that is spent nuclear fuel, commercial
spent nuclear fuel, and about 7,000 of that is defense material. So,
what the models show is that you can stay within our 21,000 tons of
aging, which was our initial plan, and still meet those requirements.

KADAK: This is surprising, because when we had some of our meetings with
the utilities, they didn\'t feel that they were able to meet the
blending requirement, which, if I understand it correctly, is now going
to be a requirement for TAD.

KOUTS: Okay, let\'s take first things first. In terms of the performance
specification that we will issue, we will not require that the TAD has
to be 11.8 kilowatts. We will not require that. Our expectation is that
we will want to design the TAD for as broad a heat capability as
possible, and I think the only limit that it will have is probably that
which would allow it to still be transported, which my assumption is
somewhere around 21 kilowatts per cask, or per TAD, if you will.

So, our expectation is we\'re not going to put a heat load, or heat
design requirement on the TAD other than you have to have a certain heat
rejection capability, so that it meets the same requirements that we
have, that a waste package would have in a drift. So, in terms of the
heat transfer capability internal to it, and the heat flux that comes
out of it, given a heat source, we\'re going to have to have that same
requirement, and that\'s something we have discussed with the industry,
and I don\'t anticipate that that will be a problem.

But, in terms of your question, where you\'re getting to is whether or
not we\'re going to require an 11.8 kilowatt TAD to be loaded at the
utility site, if they can do that, fine. If they can\'t, then we\'ll
have to take it to our facility and age it, and then it will have to age
there until it\'s ready to be emplaced and meet our thermal
requirements.

KADAK: So, let me just make sure I understand what you just said. You
said as long as the TAD can meet, from a heat load perspective, that the
TAD can meet the transportation requirements, which looks arguably
perhaps more limiting, for on-site storage requirements, you will accept
it for either disposal or on-site storage?

KOUTS: The simple answer to the question is yes. If it meets the
requirements of the, you know, if it has the right criticality controls,
it has the right internal materials, and so forth, then that would still
be acceptable. But, what I think you need to separate out here is what
we could accept from the utilities and move over the rails, if you will,
to Yucca Mountain, and then what we could put in Yucca Mountain based on
our thermal requirements.

So, yes, we can accept that from the utilities. Our desire would be to
try to minimize our aging on site, or to the extent they can\'t support
that, and we\'re servicing the utility site, then we\'ll take those
materials on site and we\'ll age it until it\'s ready to be emplaced.

KADAK: What is the outside window on the time permitted for on-site
storage at Yucca Mountain?

KOUTS: That would all be determinate of the license that the NRC gives
us to operate, which could be\--our ongoing assumption has been
historically that for our preclosure safety analysis, we\'re looking at
a 50 year time period. That\'s not to say that the operation of the
repository couldn\'t be extended beyond that if we were unable to get
that in. But, then, our preclosure safety analysis would have to be
adjusted.

ABKOWITZ: John?

GARRICK: Chris, I\'m very interested in the level of detail of the
scenarios that are input to the model. And, I\'m sure I would have had
answers to these had I been able to attend some of the meetings that the
Committee members have attended. In particular, I\'m interested in the
representation of the interfaces between major activities, like
acceptance and transportation, and transportation and the repository,
and even more particularly, the fuel handling, the actual fuel handling
operations.

Now, your Table 5, or your Slide 5 and 9 give some insight into that.
But, could you give us a little confidence-building explanation of how
some of these details are represented in the model?

KOUTS: Sure. First of all, our desire, in terms of doing modeling with
any of the components within the system, is to go to that individual
system component to get the information, so if there is specific
information associated with the design of the facility, we will go
directly to the designers and ask them, at least for the purposes of our
needs to model it, what the capabilities are for those facilities.

For instance, how long does the repository\--the repository designers
are designing an acceptance cell in one of their facilities. How long
does it take, and what\'s their expectations for how long does it take
for them to handle a cask, whether it be a truck cask or a rail cask?
How long does it take them to unload it? How long does it take them to
return it to service? All this kind of information is basically received
from the people who are actually doing the design work. We take that
information, and we input that into the model.

So, the modelers don\'t sit down and make up this information. We go
internally to the program, to those sources, and to the extent that we
can, we try to find a document, or documentation, associated with every
assumption that we use, so we always have traceability of exactly what
we\'re modeling and what we\'re analyzing.

So, the simple answer to your question is that we go to the source, if
you will, for that information. Except, in the case, the only point
I\'ll amend is that when we were doing this study, we had to make some
assumptions associated with how canister handling would be done, since
we really hadn\'t designed any facilities for TADs back when we started
this, back in March of 2005. So, we had to take the old canister
handling facility that we had designed, which was designed essentially
for DOE spent fuel canisters, and for DOE high-level waste canisters,
and make some assumptions associated with how those might be handled
within a facility like that.

But, the simple answer to your question is that we go back to the
source, if you will, the source of information within the Program, and
document exactly where we get that information. We try to keep that
updated as much as we can.

GARRICK: The model, of course, is primarily for the purpose of
simulating different operating scenarios, and you\'ve heard the Board
raise the question of whether or not you intend to consider upset
conditions. The problem with addressing upset conditions in most
simulation models is that the details that you need to really represent
the kind of failures and faults that generally happen is such that the
model can sometimes blow up.

Are you intending to move in that direction, however?

KOUTS: As we get further into this. I totally agree with you, Dr.
Garrick. Our ability at this point would be okay, if this facility is
shut down, we\'ll shut that facility down, now, let\'s see how the
repository operates in response to that, how much we have to put in
aging, how much other facilities could potentially take. But, what
you\'re suggesting is more modeling in there, you know, off-normal
events, if you will, where there would be a down time in certain areas.
I think that\'s something that will be coming, but I don\'t think we\'re
there right now.

GARRICK: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

I was going to ask a very similar question, so I\'ll just follow on on
that. When do you think you will be able to get onto that sort of a time
scale to look at these events that have a lot of inertia that are
sometimes hard to change once systems get going?

KOUTS: I think that the modeling will need to be updated to reflect the
design work once we have a decision as to whether we\'re going formally
to the canistered approach, which we hope to receive in the next month
or two, then there will be a lot of design work that will be done to
address the facilities that we will need in order to operate. I think
once those designs mature over the next year, we will get that input in
there, and I think we can potentially run some of the scenarios with the
Board that it is interested in. But, until we get a little bit further
along, again, you know, we are re-baselining the program, and we get
some design work done, we are not going to be in a position to do, from
my own perspective, meaningful analysis that will be helpful to us. But,
I think that is certainly something that we want to do as soon as we get
far enough along in our design.

ABKOWITZ: Ali?

MOSLEH: Mosleh, Board.

On how you\'re planning to utilize this system, and we understand that
you have the foundation for when you do a number of quite interesting
exercises, I was wondering if you had the space, whether you can
actually do optimization, or not?

KOUTS: I think that\'s\--I don\'t think we are at the stage where we can
think about optimizing. I think we need to get a system that we think
can work, and work safely, and perhaps inefficiently, and then perhaps
we can look at ways to make it more inefficient\--or efficient, I should
say, excuse me. But, right now, given our level of where we are in terms
of marching down a new path, I think we can gain insight into the model.
Just as these charts indicate, going to a larger TAD, for instance, can
bring certain benefits from the standpoint of, yes, you can move,
potentially move more fuel from the reactor sites, but you still have
limitations on the amount that can actually handle those larger TADs.

The same thing with heat load, if your 11.8 heat load stays the same,
going to a 32/68 waste package will require much longer aging because
you\'ve got more assemblies in there, and the amount of time it will
take in order for them to age down to 11.8 could be a problem.

So, again, this is something that I think we\'re going to monitor and
try to figure out how best it is going to operate in the future, but our
initial intent here is to try to get something that will operate
initially. It may not be the most efficient, but along the way, we will
look to make that more efficient as we move forward.

MOSLEH: On that line of spending to keep it relative, I think I asked
this question sometime back, but I\'m asking it again to see if you are
actually moving in that direction, and maybe the treatment of
uncertainties in a rigorous way, because I think at this point, you\'re
selecting points from a range of parameters that you have and that you
run scenarios individually; right?

KOUTS: Well, I think all we can do is bound the problem I think at this
point. I think we can understand the best that it can operate under a
certain configuration and the worst that it can operate under a certain
configuration. And, the answer is it will probably be somewhere in
between.

But, again, without further design work, without further understanding,
without getting a specification out and actually getting some designs
and understanding what those designs look like, and how they can be
handled, and so forth, I think we\'re going to have to hold off. We can
do some theoretical analyses, but how applicable they will be to how the
system will essentially operate, you know, I don\'t think it would be
that useful.

MOSLEH: So, you are basically not\--you have knowledge limitation as
opposed to computational?

KOUTS I think we can model anything. I think the effectiveness of the
results of the model are all dependent on your inputs. If your inputs
are still imprecise, then it doesn\'t make a lot of sense to optimize
it. But, as your inputs become more precise, and as you get a better
idea as to specifically what your buildings look like and how they are
going to operate, then I think you can start looking at those kinds of
issues and determine, hopefully, I think, and my desire is actually as
we go through the design process, and once we receive the go-ahead to go
to the canister approach, hopefully in the next month or so, there is
going to be a great deal of design effort underway to try to make these
facilities, to get to the level of design that we\'ll need for a license
application.

And, one of the discussions we are having internally is how the total
system model can help that process, in other words, can provide some
guidance as to how the system and how those facilities can operate
effectively, and more efficiently while they are designing it. So, I
think that\'s something I think that we have the money for this year,
and we will be able to do that. And, you\'ve heard about our new
organization. That\'s one of the things that I hope to work very closely
with the designers of the repository to make sure that we are getting
TSM inputs and making sure that at least they are being informed by how
this is going to work.

ABKOWITZ: Chris, I\'m going to take my turn in the order here, as you
know, as Chair of the Waste Management System Panel, and someone who has
been studying TSM for a while, maybe I\'m going to delve a little deeper
than what your presentation has showed us so far.

KOUTS: Okay.

ABKOWITZ: I do want to start, though, by commending your office once
again for developing what I think is an excellent tool. It\'s well
founded. It\'s representative. It\'s transparent if you allow it to be.
I think it offers very important insights that the DOE really needs to
take stock of, and in many respects, I think it\'s not even fully
utilized at this point.

I want to start actually by going to your concluding slide where you
have come to the conclusion from the study that the 21,000 metric ton
aging capacity limit is achievable, and emplacement can be completed
within 50 years.

Why did you not show us the results, or the run that showed those
results?

KOUTS: There were 40 different combinations. What we selected in terms
of showing to the Board, and the Board does have the report and you know
basically which scenario that is, my desire here was to try to show how
the model can show us, if you will, based on different assumptions, how
the differences, you know, visible differences in how the system can
operate. In terms of the actual scenario that indicates this, actually,
there were several scenarios, not just one. And, we can certainly pull
out that report and walk through that with you.

ABKOWITZ: It would seem to me that the key study observation from Phase
One was that the aging pad was large enough, and that emplacement could
be completed within the expected time frame, and it would be worthwhile
to show that.

Now, I would like to go to the scenarios that you did present, and I
think they were scenarios 10 through 13. There were four all together?

KOUTS: Right.

ABKOWITZ: Are you aware that you presented to the Board four cases that
have been run on the 142,000 metric ton scenario, which I believe has
really nothing to do with the scenario that you are supposed to be
offering a license application under; is that correct?

KOUTS: That\'s correct. One of the reasons I run, and I demand that we
run all the fuel through it is because if we only run the 70,000 ton
case, then we don\'t understand the implications of the first 70,000
tons on successive, and whether or not that goes into Yucca Mountain, or
whether that goes into another repository somewhere else, you know,
that\'s not what we\'re trying to understand here. But, we do run the
full gamut of the fuel, so we understand, again, from the system
standpoint, if there are any effects from the first 70,000 tons, if you
will, and how that might affect the second 70,000. And, simply all you
have to do is just go to approximately 50 years of operation, and you
get a pretty good idea as to where the cutoff is for the 70,000 ton
case.

ABKOWITZ: If we could go to Slide 12 then?

KOUTS: Okay.

ABKOWITZ: Which I believe is the slide where you were making comments
that you thought this was a fairly realistic scenario to represent what
the cutoff ratio might look like? And, picking up on your comment a
minute ago that if you look at the first 50 years of operation, that
would mimic pretty close the first 70,000.

You have an aging pad of close to 70,000 metric tons being shown there;
is that correct?

KOUTS: Right.

ABKOWITZ: 7,000 casks at 10,000 a piece. So, how do you come to the
conclusion that your aging pad of 21,000 is compatible with your 70,000
here?

KOUTS: Let me help you with that. Our acceptance capabilities that we
model, as I mentioned earlier, four, six, twelve, two, three, so, in the
fifth year of operation, if you will, we are moving 3,000 metric tons a
year, and what you are seeing on the upper left there is that the
facility has the capability to process those in TADs. So, when you are
really looking at total amounts of operation, in order to get the 63,000
metric tons that you need, it\'s roughly 25 years of operation.

Okay, so, if you look at the first 25 years, if you will, here you are
roughly\--again, this is an imperfect case. It\'s a scenario, and so
forth. If you design the repository, and if your acceptance was such
that you only wanted to run the 70,000 ton case, and you cut this off so
you didn\'t accept fuel beyond that 70,000 tons, and you were working
off instead of bringing more fuel in, okay, and aging it, what you were
doing is waiting for the ones that you were aging to get to your heat
load, then what this peak, and so forth, would not be as high and
wouldn\'t be moved to the left. So, you would stay still within the
21,000 requirement.

Again, we ran this model, we ran this case to understand the effects, if
you will, of the entire inventory, if you will, as opposed to the 70,000
ton case.

ABKOWITZ: You referenced a heat load, and I wanted to get some
clarification on one aspect of heat load, which is the line load one,
which I know that you have also tried to understand the implications. As
I understand it, it\'s 1.45 kilowatts per meter. Is that at emplacement,
or at closure?

KOUTS: I believe that\'s, as we look at it, it\'s at emplacement.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, at emplacement.

KOUTS: Correct.

ABKOWITZ: My understanding, in looking at the, and Paul, I hope you are
hearing this, my understanding, in discussing this issue with your
repository folks, is that the 1.45 limitation is such that that has to
be met either every seven packages or every 40 meters. My understanding,
in looking at the results of the TSM work that\'s been done so far, is
that that has not been a constraint in running this. But, if you
actually look at the way loading takes place, you are not anywhere close
to satisfying that objective.

KOUTS: Well, again, the model does what we tell it to do. And, our
assumption is that if we have an 11.8 package, and we intersperse with
that the DOE materials in between, because we use the DOE materials, if
you will, to lessen the line load, if you will, that, again, we need
that. If we need the model that differently, we can model that
differently, but that\'s what our going-in assumption was.

ABKOWITZ: And, I don\'t want to take forever here, but I think I can
wrap a ribbon around this. You have an excellent tool. You have the
ability to push this tool to a place where it can really answer the
total integration questions. There is no reason why this tool can\'t
put, as a constraint in the process, the line-load limitations. And,
when you put those line-load limitations in, and you realistically
represent them, and when you put in different scenarios for how much of
the percentage of waste is actually going to be countable, and you start
to put all of those issues into this pool, and you allow the different
pieces of the organization to openly communicate and understand what
everyone is doing to everyone else, you might be able to win this
project. If you don\'t, you will definitely lose.

KOUTS: Well, I certainly take your comments to heart. The TSM is not
something I hide. It\'s something that we do a lot of missionary work
within the program. My expectation is we\'re going to be using it a lot
more as we move forward. And, I think your comments are excellent, and I
believe we will be doing it.

ABKOWITZ: However, let me just also add that I understand from Mr.
Golan\'s presentation this morning that all of these questions have to
be answered so that you are presenting something in front of a group by
June 30th; is that correct?

KOUTS: I don\'t want to speak for Paul, but I will. I think the design
concept, the approach that we\'re going to take to surface facilities,
to the canister concept, as Paul indicated, we\'re going to be providing
the Energy Systems Acquisition Advisory Board within the Department our
design approaches as to how we plan to go to the canister based concept.
That\'s not a final design. That design, once we get the approval of the
Deputy Secretary for the Secretary, we will then go into a very
substantial design process and try to develop exactly the kind of
designs we need for the license application.

So, if you have the impression that our design work stops after we have
a decision, no, our design work is in very preliminary stages. Once we
get that go-ahead, we\'re going to be marching down that path, and this
model will help inform that design process.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, let\'s move on. Dr. Petroski, I believe you have a
question?

PETROSKI: Petroski. If I understood you correctly, you said that you
bounded with the worst and best cases that you ran, effectively. And,
that you haven\'t run any upset cases yet, but you might. It seems that
experience with really complicated systems, like this one appears to be,
has not been such that you should be too optimistic. And, I think of,
for example, the Denver airport baggage handling system. I\'m sure they
had a lot of simulations that bounded with worst and best cases. And,
also, I think about NASA\'s shuttle program, where I think they were
going to fly every week, or something like that, in their initial
simulations.

How do you answer the potential critic that you are doing it better than
they do?

KOUTS: That\'s an interesting question. The only way I can answer that
is that we\'re taking it step by step, and our first step is to
basically get approval to walk down this path, formal approval. We\'re
working with the industry to try to get the benefits of their
understanding of how to handle these materials and how to handle
canisters. I think industry input into our design, based on their
experience with what\'s going on at reactors, will be very critical to
us. And, any path that you march down in life has risk associated with
it.

I think all I can tell you is that we, as the Department to the program,
felt that this was the better path for us to march down, and we\'re
going to do our best to make it work, and I think we have some very
bright people working on it, and we\'re going to try to do the best that
we can, and, at the same time, being flexible hopefully, so that we can
adjust this as we move forward, and make it operate more efficiently as
we move to the future.

Your comment is excellent. There is a long history of plans that don\'t
work out, and this program has a few. Nonetheless, you know, I think we
have a new approach. I think it\'s a viable approach. I think it can
work, but it\'s going to take a lot of hard work by people, a lot of
integration, as the Board has indicated earlier, a lot of talk and a lot
of sharing of information, such as from this model, in terms of design
process. If we do that, then I think we have a good shot at making it
work.

PETROSKI: Give it your best shot, of course.

KOUTS: That\'s all we can do.

ABKOWITZ: Dr. Kadak?

KADAK: Yes. Can we go to Slide 12, please? I\'m trying to understand the
TADs and aging number. Earlier, you said there\'s 9 metric tons of heavy
metal in a cask.

KOUTS: Right.

KADAK: So, nine times 7,000 is\--

KOUTS: 63,000.

KADAK: Right.

KOUTS: Right. And, again, this case models approximately 142,000 metric
tons of material.

KADAK: Roughly half of it would have been roughly in aging pads?

KOUTS: Right. That\'s if, again, you\'re looking at the end of the
operating reactor lives. You\'ve got a lot of hot fuel that\'s out there
that has to cool. If we\'re moving it to our site, it\'s not being
cooled at the reactor site, therefore, you get a very high, if you will,
a high aging field. However, again, getting back to what I was
responding to Dr. Abkowitz\'s question, if we\'re only emplacing 63,000,
this curve, and you cut it off, basically, the acceptance, the amount of
acceptance you have cuts off probably within the first 30 years, and
you\'re basically emplacing and waiting for that aging pad to go down
the last 20.

KADAK: You also state there that the shut-down sites dump to pool. Am I
to interpret that that there is an existing spent fuel pool operational
at the shut-down sites?

KOUTS: That\'s correct. We can\'t dump to a pool unless there is a pool.

KADAK: Okay. And, what I\'m really going to get to is the assumptions
that are driving this analysis are not necessarily correct, especially
for shut-down sites.

KOUTS: This is a simulation of a scenario.

KADAK: Well, why show it to us if it\'s not real? What we\'re trying to
understand is the real capability of the system, and perhaps worst case,
best case. I think it would be nice to see what you really expect to
see, and then kind of look at it and make some judgments about whether
the system is workable, and then go off-normal. You know, was that
youngest fuel first?

KOUTS: Yes.

KADAK: At five years. Now, is that a credible assumption for a model
like this?

KOUTS: That\'s a very credible assumption for a model like this. It\'s
one of the scenarios, if you will, that looks at kind of a worst case
situation. Contract calls for a minimum of five year cool aging. So, if
it is the youngest fuel, five year cool, this is the worst scenario that
we could expect. If we\'re looking at a different scenario, perhaps ten,
you know, YFF10, which is ten year cool, youngest fuel first, then that
curve changes. The intent was to try to show the bounds and the
implications of kind of a worst case situation.

KADAK: The other question is is this work\--I mean, I don\'t know what
assumptions you made in the facility design of the surface facilities to
be able to process this stuff. From what we have heard from you and
others, that design isn\'t finalized. Now, what is it that you have
assumed in the facility, the surface facility design, that supports this
kind of calculation? And, more importantly, is this calculation being
integrated into the facility design?

KOUTS: Okay, let me help you with your comment. I said at the beginning
of my talk that this work was done last year. It started in March of
2005. We did not make the decision to go to a canistered approach until
October 2005. What you have here and what I indicated earlier, and
perhaps I wasn\'t clear enough in my remarks, was the fact that we took
some educated guesses about what the surface facility capabilities of a
canister-based system might be. And, those educated guesses were based
on our understanding of what the capabilities were of the old system
canister handling facility that we had developed up to a certain point,
which we are no longer designing.

So, this work basically was done last year to try to understand whether
or not a canister-based system made some sense, and whether or not we
ought to walk down that path. In no way is this intended to reflect any
of our current designs. Those current designs are being developed now
during the process that we\'re going through with the critical decision.
And, my Acting Director would like to say a few comments.

GOLAN: Thank you, Chris. I know you didn\'t want to speak for me, but
you did a good job.

As we contemplate the canister design, the first thing we want to do is
prove the concept. And, one of the things, as we have talked about
before, we like the monitor approach. We like to look at things in terms
of off the shelf. And, when we talk about throughput, the most important
part of the throughput is getting throughput, in other words, getting a
facility that can actually move waste through the facility.

The other part of our project that we have only partial control over is
the amount of annual funding we get. And, so, I would just tell you as
we look at these facilities, as we look at these facilities over time,
the question is is that if one facility can process \"X\" number of
canisters per unit of time, and we want to get to \"Y\" in terms of
total process through, one of the variables that we can actually
manipulate in this case is the number of facilities we actually place at
Yucca Mountain, depending on what we project our annual funding to be,
and what would be a good throughput.

But, again, the first thing we want to do is prove that we can get the
throughput through a single facility. After we do that, if we do this
right, then we can say okay, now, what\'s the next logical step to ramp
up that throughput through either this facility or maybe of seven
facilities.

ABKOWITZ: You\'ve got the last followup.

KADAK: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: The last question.

KADAK: I guess what I would recommend, if I\'m in a position of
recommending anything, is that you ought to take your best shot at what
you think the surface facility should be to handle the volume that you
are expecting, and make sure that the model that you now use, which may
not be obviously perfect, but at least represent your current thinking.
And, I\'m not hearing that, and you\'ve had over a year or so to change
it, since you\'re working on the new TAD concept.

And, secondly, to run a case that is more realistic that you might,
having all these discussions with the utilities, feel is feasible that
would show that there is some true value in a TAD concept, given all of
the contractual issues that you have to deal with. And, then, I would
feel, and I think you should feel, comfortable that if you have
off-normal situations, then you make the adjustments in your flexible
mode, as opposed to being so flexible you are not sure what the
facility\'s capability is, which I don\'t get from these charts, because
I don\'t know whether this is even close to being real. And, then, maybe
a hundred others.

KOUTS: Just a comment, and perhaps it was my error that I chose the
slides that I did choose. But, the intent of the slides was not to show
the world as we expect it to be, but more on the capabilities of the
model in order to show us the impacts of different scenarios.

Now, what I would strongly commend to you reading, and you already have
the whole report, we run not only the 142,000 ton case, but the 70,000
ton case, and you can look at those and you can gain perspective from
that as to type of aspects of the system and how it would operate, and
how it can operate successfully. Again, that is based on our simulation
of facilities that had yet to be designed when we did this last year. As
we move forward, we will be getting more to the actual capabilities of
the facilities we are designing, and we will be able to do more of
exactly the kind of thing that you want us to do.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, I think we need to wind up Chris\'s session. First of
all, thank you for being tolerant of our questions. I think, as you can
tell, there\'s a great deal of interest in what TSM can do for the
Program. And, I think that we are beyond needing to know how flexible
and agile it is, and really much more smack dab into the how can it be
used constructively and realistically to deal with what we think are
some highly inter-dependent issues that have to be resolved.

So, thank you, Chris, and I\'m sure we\'ll ask to hear from you in the
future, and I hope you will be equally as willing to participate.

Our final presentation in the TAD component of today\'s meeting is a
design and engineering update on the surface facility, and the effect of
the TAD decision on surface facility design. Paul Harrington will be
giving that presentation. Paul is the systems engineering lead for the
Director of the Office of License Application and Strategy at the Yucca
Mountain Project, and leads the effort within OLAS to develop
engineering processes and products.

However, I saw from the work chart that perhaps that responsibility has
changed somewhat, since I believe I saw you as the Acting Chief
Engineer. Is that correct?

HARRINGTON: Yes, you did.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. So, we\'re glad to have you here today, not withstanding
whatever title and responsibilities you presently carry.

HARRINGTON: Thank you.

I will talk about surface facilities, and also to put into context a
little bit of the subsurface and the waste package.

The day has been sort of illustrative for me, though, in terms of what
your interests are, what your questions are with respect to surface
facility capabilities, so I\'ll talk through that. I will talk about
what the CD-1 revision process is and is not. It is a change to a
previously approved CD-1 that we got back in 2004 that was based upon a
primarily bare fuel assembly handling process. And, we have adopted, as
you have heard, the canister-based approach. Go on to the next slide,
please.

And, because of that, we thought it appropriate to go back to the Energy
Systems Acquisition Advisory Board to tell them that we were proposing
to make a, we think, relatively significant change to how we handle fuel
in the repository. So, for that reason, we\'re going back for a CD-1 to
accommodate that canister-based system.

It is not the final design. It\'s not even the preliminary design. It\'s
the step from a conceptual to a preliminary design. The CD-1 will be
followed by a CD-2, which will go from a preliminary to a final design,
and then, finally, a CD-3.

So, in this, we gave direction to Bechtel SAIC in October to provide a
revised CD-1 package to accommodate this canister-based approach. We
gave several requirements along with that. Those included, not
precluding the ability to change waste package, thermal content, to
change waste package size in the future. We want to have a facility set
that is flexible enough to provide for changes in the future. But, this
particular CD-1 action is focused on accepting canister-based fuel
rather than having to handle it there.

So, for purposes of bounding the problem, we defined the TAD capacity to
be the same as was in the standard waste packages, same thermal output,
but, again, not to preclude the potential for changing in the future,
for system optimization, for reacting to future changes, and waste
streams.

I need to also introduce the concept of the preclosure safety analysis.
I\'ve heard several people talk about the postclosure analysis, the
TSPA, but for the license application, we also have to provide a
preclosure safety analysis. That is driven in part by the amount of fuel
that gets handled through a repository, and the rate of fuel handling.
So, when we talk about looking at the capability of the facility to
accommodate different amounts of fuel in the future, if the 70,000 limit
were raised, as an example, one of the effects is the need to reassess
the PCSA limitations, requirements, on facility design and safety basis.
It\'s not to say we couldn\'t do that, but right now, the nominal
throughput through the facilities is 3,000 MTHM per year. To provide
some margin on that, we evaluate in PCSA space, 3,600 MTHM per year.

If we determine that due to a need to process greater amounts on an
annual basis through a greater number of facilities, I\'d have to redo
the PCSA accordingly.

We\'ve already talked about the attributes of the canister-based
approach. So, going onto Page 4, this, again, is a conceptual design.
It\'s with a range estimate. The product we got has a modular, flexible
configuration. It was based upon an assumption of 90 percent of the
waste stream coming in TADs disposable. One of the criteria for
evaluation of the design, though, is flexibility to accommodate
potential changes to that for other criteria.

If in the future we find it not to be only 10 percent uncanistered fuel,
we want to understand how the system as a whole can accommodate
potentially a greater percentage of uncanistered fuel.

This design that we got from BSC had some dedicated facilities for
receipt and waste package closure. We will talk about those in a little
more detail a couple of slides later.

The overall set of products that support the revised CD-1 action include
the conceptual design report, the actual design product. Along with
that, though, we have a preliminary hazard analysis. That looks at
facility operating hazards, similar to the NRC required preclosure
safety analysis. There\'s also a risk assessment. That\'s more
programmatic risk. Can we get the funding? Will utilities participate in
supplying TADs, other more programmaticly things.

A project execution plan, how we propose to implement the repository
facilities. Some cost and schedule information. And, there\'s also an
acquisition strategy.

Next, please. As a reminder, until we get through the ESAAB decision,
and get approval from the Board, this information is preliminary.
Because of that, I did not include general arrangement drawings, but
I\'ll talk conceptually about what we expect to have happen inside each
of the several sets of waste handling buildings.

After we get the ESAAB approval, development of the products to support
the license application will have to be done. Those will have to be done
in full accordance with configuration control processes to provide a
basis to support the license application. But, the current activities
with respect to selection from competing alternatives is being done more
as a management process.

There are three main sets of surface facilities in the new design
concept. The first facility is the receipt facility. The intent of that
primarily is to accept incoming TADs or dual purpose canisters that are
too hot to be disposed of at that time that need aging, and send them
out to the aging pads in compatible overpacks for aging.

The canister receipt and closure facility is fairly similar to the
previous canister handling facility. It can receive incoming
transportation casks directly. We have actually eliminated the previous
approach where we had a TCRRF, transportation cask receive and return
facility, that received incoming transportation casks, off loaded onto a
site specific rail system, a site rail transfer cart system, and then
used that system to disburse to the waste handling buildings. That was
just an extra set of lifts, and an extra complication that we\'re trying
to minimize. So, we don\'t do that any longer, but instead, send the
actual national rail conveyances or truck conveyances into the
individual waste receipt or transfer buildings.

So, the CRCF can accept individual transportation casks, open and
transfer the disposable canisters be it TADs or Naval or DOE SNF or DOE
high-level waste, into waste packages, close those waste packages, do
all of the inspections, testing, backfilling with helium, that has to be
done on the waste packages, then load those onto the subsurface
transporter for transport to the underground emplacement drifts.

Finally, for the individual fuel assemblies that would come in
potentially in truck casks without benefit of any sort of canister, or
in non-disposable canisters that would need to be opened at the
repository and transferred out of those non-disposable canisters, there
is the wet handling facility. The intent there is that transportation
casks would be put into the pool, similar to reversal of the outloading
at the reactor sites. The casks would be opened. The fuel assemblies
removed from the transportation casks, or if they were in a
non-disposable dual purpose canister, removed from that DPC, and put
into a TAD, rather than trying to take the bare fuel assemblies and put
them directly into a waste package. We didn\'t want to put the waste
package into the pool for several reasons. We decided to go ahead and
just load TADs in that pool and then transfer the TAD over to the
canister receipt and closure facility, and put it into the waste
package, and close the waste package there.

So, in the wet handling facility, any bare fuel assembly handling that
would need to be done would take place. Those bare fuel assemblies would
be moved into a TAD, the TAD closed in the wet handling facility, and
then that TAD moved over CRCF for loading into a waste package, and
transported underground.

The subsurface facility for these primary sets of surface facilities is
essentially unchanged from what it had been before. There\'s still the
four panels with the series of emplacement drifts within each of the
panels. The perimeter drift, ventilation system stays the same. The
method of emplacement of the waste packages on the pallets into the
drifts remains the same.

As part of future optimization, we\'re looking at ways of potentially
simplifying the waste package pallet interface to simplify transport and
emplacement of that. But, that\'s not part of this current CD-1
exercise.

The waste packages themselves for the commercial fuel will change, in
that the internal basket structure that had been in the 21 PWR, the 12
PWR, the 44 BWR, in essence, that basket structure is now the internals
of the TAD. As we talked earlier today, there are some issues with
material compatibilities. So, some of the materials may need to change.
But, that basket structure that had been in the commercial waste
packages becomes essentially the internals of the TAD.

The TAD obviously has the cylinder, the wrapper around it to provide the
confinement function, the handling function. The waste packages that the
TADs will be put into are very similar to the waste packages for the
Naval long canisters. It\'s simply the two walled cylindrical waste
packages with no internal basket structure in and of itself. The basked
structure is part of the TAD. They are similar in size to the Naval long
waste packages.

Next slide, please. Some of the features of this is that the handling of
the bare fuel assemblies, uncanistered fuel, will be done in pools, no
longer try and do that in the bare fuel hot cells, dry cells, as we had
had in both the previous fuel handling facility and dry transfer
facility. That just introduced too much operational complexity. Also,
recovery from off-normal events, or even maintenance activities. Just
handling it in the pools we think will be simpler, cleaner.

Canister handling. We took a page out of the Navy\'s approach to how
they intend on handling their canister at their facility in Idaho. And,
rather than trying to handle the canisters, since the canisters
themselves don\'t have full body shielding, the previous approach had
handled them in hot cells remotely, there was no local access to them,
what we will do is introduce a fuel plug into the closure end of the
canister, so that as we load the canister into the waste package, and
then provide shielding around the OD of the waste package, that will
support having local access to the waste package closure welds.

Inspection, reweld. If we have to do any rework of that weld, not to say
that we intend on having that be a manual weld with someone sitting up
there with a torch and trying to do those, but, instead, to facilitate
setup of automatic welding equipment, facilitate rework of that weld not
be constrained to having to do all of that remotely in a hot cell. That
just, operationally, we think makes a lot more sense.

There are a couple of different ways that we can approach that. In the
full diameter canisters, those will include shield plugs within the
canister itself. The Naval ones already have had those in as part of
their designs. We will add that to the TAD.

The partial diameter canisters don\'t have those in the ones that have
already been made, neither the multi-canister overpacks, I think they
have a small one, the high-level waste canisters don\'t, but when you go
to open a transportation cask with a series of small diameter canisters
within it, even if those canisters had internal shielding, you would
still have the streaming from the annular space between the waste
package\--or between the canisters. So, we will go ahead and insert the
small diameter canisters, high-level waste and DOE SNF and MCOs, into
the waste package, and then put a shield plug on top of those small
diameter canisters, but inside the waste package, to give the same
benefit of being able to then to locally access the waste package
closure welds.

The deletion of the separate site rail system I already mentioned.

Potential effects on the preclosure safety analysis. In the design from
last year, we only had two Category 1 event sequences. Category 1\'s are
those that are likely to happen one or more times during the life of the
facility. So, for a 100 year duration, 10^-6^ per year, or

10^-2^ per year. Category 2 are those that have about 1 in 10,000 chance
of occurring over the preclosure duration, 10^-6^ per year for a 100
year duration.

The two Cat 1 event sequences that we had were drops or bumps of
individual fuel assemblies. That was driven by the number of them that
we had, approximately 221,000 individual assemblies, and as I think Paul
mentioned earlier, we were potentially going to have to handle each of
them as many as four times. So, that was a lot of individual lifts,
moves. So, even at a 10^-5^ drop per lift probability, that still put
that into Category 1 event sequence phase.

With the reduction by a factor of ten of the number of bare fuel
assemblies to handle, and the change in the handling approach, there
will be less lifts to make, so it\'s looking at this point like that
will move from a Cat 1 into a Cat 2 event sequence.

Also, since it will be in a pool instead of in a dry area, either in air
or in an inerted cell, the consequence of that drop in a pool will be
lesser, simply because of the confinement provided by the water in that
pool. There have been some drops in utility pools, and they are fairly
readily recoverable.

Likely, there will be little change to the Category 2 event sequences.
Those have been primarily associated with drops of the larger
components. The transportation casks, the MPCs, DPCs, rather, the waste
packages, simply due to the number of them, factoring in that same
10^-5^ drop per lift, those were Category 2s.

Now, we have added some TADs. There will be on the order of 8,000 TADs
additional to that number of large lifts, but it does not look at this
time like that will move that from Cat 2 into Cat 1 space. Consequences
of those will be the same as before.

The ITS classifications before have been driven primarily by the
components that were necessary for lifting and movement of the different
waste forms, and, then, for the confinement provided in the event of
potential drops and breaches of those waste forms, and the mitigating
features. So, the lifting components, the cranes, the structure for
confinement, the ventilation systems, the power to run the ventilation
systems, those are primarily the ITS set before. Likely, it will be that
same set now. We still have the need to minimize the potential for
drops, so all of the lifting components associated with this will
continue to be ITS.

There is still, obviously, the potential for a drop. So, we will still
credit confinement for the structures that have waste forms inside of
them that would pose a problem in a drop and breach. We will still need
to provide the ventilation and power where we need to credit those
confinement functions.

Next slide, please. The independent engineering study that\'s been
alluded to, late December, early January, we had our Site Support
Services contractor take a look at alternative design concepts that
could also be used for approaching a canister based handling system. The
intent was to further simplify, think a little bit further out of the
box than we directed BSC to do. Part of the BSC direction was to
consider parts of the design that could be used without significant
rework. We didn\'t want to try and start all over again. We gave MTS a
little more latitude to be a little more creative.

They came up with an approach that I will talk about in a moment that
had some similarities to the BSC approach, and it also had some
differences.

The similarities were, not surprisingly, to also step away from bare
fuel handling in a dry environment, be it these are inerted or in air,
and, instead, shift to a pool based concept. And, also, to provide local
shielding for the canister-based approach, so that if there were
equipment problems, maintenance crews would have a much simpler time of
recovering from that.

The differences, though, were in the equipment for how to handle the
canisters. Paul mentioned earlier the tilt table approach. In the BSC
approach, basically, the canister, the TAD is moved from spot to spot.
It\'s inserted into a waste package. The waste package is moved, lids
are installed, closed, moved, down-ended onto a transporter to be taken
underground. The waste is moved several times through the facility.

In the MTS approach, the transportation cask comes into a building.
There\'s a shielded transporter, transfer cart, that\'s moved over it.
The canister is pulled up into that shielded transfer cart that\'s moved
over a waste package, an empty waste package, that\'s loaded into a
shielded overpack on a large table, and the canister, or transfer cart
shutter opens, canister is lowered in there, and then lids are put onto
it. And, between the shielding provided by the shield plug inside the
canister, and then by the surrounding shielding on the waste pack
itself, there can be local access to do all of the closure processes.

The waste package is then closed, inspected, any rework to the welds is
done, and this device, the tilting table, has the capability of movement
up and down, of rotation, and translation, so the waste package would be
lowered. The plane of the table would be rolled into a horizontal
position, and then the access of the waste package would be spun around
180 degrees, and then a hydraulic ram would push it on a series of
rollers in a horizontal configuration onto the subsurface transporter
bed plate.

So, there potentially would be exposure as the waste package is being
moved out of that shielded container onto the transporter bed plate.
Also, at the point of removal of the transportation cask lid until the
shielded transporter is put onto the transportation cask for the DOE
SNF, the partial diameter canister, there may be some shine there.
Likely we can develop an approach for that. But, it has some potential
benefits in terms of simplification of the overall handling process.

So, that\'s sort of the fundamental difference in the MTS approach.

So, we are doing now evaluation of the features of the two sets of
design. I would not expect to end up selecting either the MTS study in
its entirety, or the BSC design in its entirety. What we are evaluating
are the relative merits of the different features for cost,
constructability, licensability, flexibility, to adapt to future change,
those sorts of things. And, we will, over the next several months, go
ahead and do different down selects.

One of the things that people are doing yesterday and today is laying
out the schedule for these different features, looking at how long will
it take to create the design to support a license application for
adoption of features. That will help drive the schedule for doing this
series of down selects on the individual features.

So, in summary, simplification of waste handling, again, is preliminary
until we get to ESAAB in the next month or six weeks. We will update the
baseline and develop the LA supporting products after the ESAAB. Most
significant change is certainly in the surface facilities, and some
reduction and minimization of event sequences.

With that, I\'d be happy to take questions.

ABKOWITZ: Do we have Board members with questions? Okay, I will
recognize Dr. Garrick.

GARRICK: The surface facilities being engineered facilities lend
themselves very well to contemporary analysis methods, safety analysis,
risk assessment. I know how the preclosure safety analysis is generally
done, but has there been any consideration of, at least for this
component of the system, doing a more comprehensive risk assessment?
And, the reason I ask that is because you are going to learn so much
more about what happens inside this engineered facility by considering a
level of detail of scenarios that you would never probably consider in a
simulation model. So, I am just curious as to whether or not it has been
under consideration. It would certainly answer a lot of questions about
performance capability, particularly if the emphasis was put on
operational risk as opposed to necessarily safety risk.

HARRINGTON: Let me answer the safety risk part first. Over the last year
or year and a half, I am sure you have seen a lot of the technical
exchange results between us and NRC, and it\'s clear that there is a
need for a much more fully developed set of design and safety analysis
than we had maybe been thinking several years ago.

So, with respect to facility performance specifically, where we are now
is doing much more than what we had defined earlier as the Tier 1, lump
mass model, 2D structural analysis. We will now be at the point of
nearing what we have referred to as a Tier 2, 3D SASI model doing
seismic hazards analysis, doing fragility analysis on the structures,
convolving the results of those. That\'s been determined to be the level
of design and safety analysis to really support the ability of that
structure to perform its credit and safety function.

With respect to the operational evaluation, most of the focus has been
on the safety evaluation, frankly, to show that we can deliver the
safety basis that we are crediting in the nuclear safety design bases.

A lot of the point, though, of the canister-based approach is to
simplify the operations. You heard Paul talk earlier about his
operational perspective. That\'s why we are talking more with Navy now.
We will actually be going up to their facility early next month to try
and pick up those operational lessons learned to try and simplify the
operations.

One of the comments I might mention, we\'ve talked some, one of the
earlier issues dealt with operator exposures. I think I heard that a
little earlier today. We had done a series of facility occupational
exposure dose estimates. Those were driven by the operations that we
took as we go on as part of the normal facility ops. We found, not
surprisingly, that the bulk of the operations came from the
transportation cask handling, simply because of the need of the
operators to locally access that.

What those did not consider was off-normal recoveries, and that\'s one
of the reasons that we are enthusiastically stepping away from the much
more complicated dry bare fuel assembly handling, and trying to shift to
the canister-based approach that allows local operational access in the
event of off-normal recover needs.

GARRICK: Just one simple question. What does the Energy Systems
Acquisition Advisory Board look for, what do they evaluate?

HARRINGTON: For CD-1, this progress from conceptual to preliminary
design, it\'s focused primarily on requirements and schedules. Have we
identified clearly what the facility needs to do? Are those requirements
clearly articulated and captured? And, is there a project execution
approach that will likely get us there?

Paul, I think wants to add something to that.

GOLAN: The first thing that we\'re going to have to justify is to
provide the basis for going down the path that we\'re going down as
opposed to the previous path. The second part is, as Paul articulated,
what does this look like, what\'s the technical basis? And, then, as we
go through the project management manual, what are the next series of
steps that I\'m going to be held accountable, that this office is going
to be held accountable to by the Acquisition Executive for getting down
to the next level of design.

So, we have to provide a technical basis for the design, as well as the
cost, schedules, scope and all the other considerations to get down to
the next level for this design in the design evolution process.

GARRICK: Thank you.

ABKOWITZ: Howard?

ARNOLD: This is going to sound more like a comment than a question.
Arnold, Board.

First, you\'ve whetted my appetite to learn more about the two
alternative ways of going, trolley versus I guess tilt table, is the way
you described it. And, I guess I\'d just comment that there are some
major decisions to be made. And, then, you\'ve got to go into a process
of detailed layout, and all the rest of it. And, it seems to me we are
quite a ways away from a license application when you put those
activities end to end.

The other question I have, and you\'ve raised it, is the off-normal
capabilities, presuming that\'s going to be key, because basically
you\'re centering on this facility, now, a lot of things that can happen
that can only be done here versus somewhere else.

HARRINGTON: Can only be done here versus somewhere else in what respect?

ARNOLD: Well, for example, those dry storage sites that no longer have a
reactor home, you\'ve got to bring all that stuff in and do it there,
maybe accidents on the road, who knows. But, you have to plan to do a
lot of things at Yucca. HARRINGTON: That\'s why we have the capability.
We need to have the capability to handle individual fuel assemblies,
because not all of these sites would be able to do TADs.

ARNOLD: I\'m certainly in agreement with that. I\'m just saying that you
have a long road ahead of you.

HARRINGTON: Yes.

ABKOWITZ: George?

HORNBERGER: Paul, you mentioned that your safety cases, of course, have
to include seismic analyses. My question is your TAD, your whole concept
is to simplify things. Does the TAD concept simplify your seismic
analyses? I know one of the concerns I guess has been the size of the
footprint for the storage pad, and now you have introduced a pool as
well. So, does this simplify or complicate, or do you know?

HARRINGTON: Oh, I think it simplifies it. Remember, that we had a pool
in the old designs. We have never not had a pool. Even in the last
design in DTF, there was a remediation pool, just for the same reason.
The design prior to that when we had the five lines, the site
recommendation design, that had pools. So, this has not complicated
that.

Did that answer\--

HORNBERGER: How about does it impact the design of the TAD system
itself, the canister? Do you have to be sensitive to satisfying
constraints that might have to be met for the storage, aging?

HARRINGTON: Dry canister storage also would have to satisfy seismic
criteria out there. So, to accommodate that in the TAD, I don\'t see as
a significant additional complication for TAD. Any dry canister storage
system that we would have at the repository is going to have to be
qualified for the repository loads.

ABKOWITZ: Paul, I wanted to get a little better handle on how specific
the surface facility design specification is or needs to be at this
point in time. Is it sufficient to just be able to say I need a canister
handling facility, or I need a wet pool, or do you have to kind of get
down to how many bays and what my processing capacities are? I\'m
sensing that you\'re not to that point yet.

HARRINGTON: We actually have some facility layouts, sketches, that we
will use as the basis for the CD-1 action. The conceptual design report
is probably 700 or 800 pages long. There\'s quite a bit of discussion,
description, sketches, that are contained in there. So, it\'s not simply
a very brief text discussion. For the CD-1 revision, we have to be able
to show not only that we\'re adopting this canister-based approach, but
how, and as Paul said, why it is likely to succeed.

Now, we\'re asking the Board to accept a change from a position they had
already approved, so I need to give them sufficient basis to believe
that it\'s likely accomplishable, and that it warrants a change from
previous position to this.

So, we have GA\'s. There\'s a lot of facility design in there. The
hazard analysis, the preliminary hazard analysis, there\'s actually a
look through the various operational hazards that the facilities can
see, drops, potentials for drops and breaches, and loss of powers and
recoveries, and those sorts of things.

ABKOWITZ: So, you actually have\--the designs are sufficiently far along
that you can actually specify how many different processing activities
can happen in sequence or in parallel?

HARRINGTON: Yes.

ABKOWITZ: And, are those being evaluated in TSM?

HARRINGTON: I would ask Don or Chris for that. I think that they are.
Don is saying yes. I\'ve seen the TSM a few times, and they model the
canisters as they come through the facilities. So, they\'re looking at
how long in takes in each spot in the facility. I think his model has
been based on the previous design. I don\'t know if they have done it
yet for the concept that we\'re looking at now. I don\'t think that they
have. Have you?

ABKOWITZ: There\'s a difference between allowing the processing to take
place, and to actually have designated a certain number of processing
units, and then be able to see how it performs. That\'s what I\'m trying
to get at.

HARRINGTON: With respect to the TSM, I will let Don or Chris answer
that. But, before he does, I\'ll say that for the facility design, we
have designated a number of different handling units, if you will. We
have identified the need for two, and potentially three, of the CRCFs.
That is driven by the expected throughput through each of those
facilities, which is driven by the expected duration of each of the
functions that takes place within there.

What I don\'t know personally is how much of that has gotten into the
TSC. Don, if you could answer that?

KIM: Don Kim with DOE.

Paul is correct. We haven\'t seen the specific reports that the
contractor has provided so far, but within the TSM analysis, the concept
of the layout, the modular layout of the facilities was provided, and we
did a throughput study to help understand the number of weld cells that
may be necessary to achieve the throughputs. So, there is analysis being
done that we are waiting from the M&O, and I do believe that we are
going to see that shortly.

ABKOWITZ: Wouldn\'t you need to see that and evaluate it before going in
front of this Board?

HARRINGTON: The action that we\'re asking for from this Board is really
approval of the change from the bare fuel assembly handling approach,
and primarily dry cells, to a canister-based approach. That\'s the main
conceptual difference. The number of cells that I might need, I think I
know now, based on the preliminary work that we have done. We will
validate that through preliminary design. But, I don\'t want to
overstate the degree of design completion that the CD-1 represents.
It\'s conceptual to preliminary. It\'s not even the output of the
preliminary.

ABKOWITZ: But, does it need to pass the test of safer, simpler, and more
reliable?

HARRINGTON: And, I think it does.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you. We have time for just two more questions. We
are running a bit behind. Dr. Kadak and then Dr. Arnold, then we will
wrap it up at that point.

KADAK: Yes, Kadak. I\'m just surprised that, you know, since we sat
through an engineering update and you had done all this work, why
didn\'t we see some engineering updates relative to the surface
facilities?

It was very hard to follow your discussion relative to what has changed.
Is the pool twice as big? Three times as big? You got rid of a big fuel
handling building, or two. Could you share with us some more detail than
you said about the high-level stuff?

HARRINGTON: Okay. The reason I didn\'t show more detail to this is until
I get it through ESAAB and get that approval, I thought it was premature
to do a public briefing like this on something that the Department has
not yet approved. That\'s why I chose not to put sketches up there. But,
as far as where we are with the concept, what we\'ve had before,
consisted of two dry transfer facilities, one CRCF and one FHF. The two
DTFs were on the order of 600 feet on a side. They had a couple of
transfer cells for bare fuel assemblies, and down at one end, were pools
that were on the order of 30 feet square, or so, for the off-normal
remediation purposes. They were for those remediation pools.

The one canister handling facility was on the order of 450 feet long by
about 300 feet wide, and it had two closure cells in there, but it
basically was a single line through there that could only handle
disposable canisters\--well, canisters. It couldn\'t do any bare fuel
assembly handling in there.

The fuel handling facility was the last addition to the suite of
facilities that came on in January of \'04, and that was to be a small,
simple facility that was intended to be able to be constructed as
quickly as possible to start receipt operations as quickly as possible,
much lower throughput capability than the other larger ones. Physical
size on the order of 300 by 150 or 200 feet.

Those buildings are replaced by a different set of buildings. The one
CHF is replaced by two or three CRCFs, same function, disposable
canister receipt, and emplacement, loading into a waste package. Similar
size.

The two big dry transfer facilities, on the order of 600 feet on a side,
they\'re gone. The equivalent really is the one wet handling facility.
Pool size on that is on the order of 70 feet by 60 feet, if I remember
right. And, these are obviously not fixed final dimensions. But, for
concept purposes, what we think we need to do in that pool at this time,
that\'s about what it is.

And, then, the FHF, the facility that could have handled bare fuel
assemblies, that also is gone. And, we have a receiving facility that,
in essence, takes the place of the old TCRRF, transportation cask
receipt and return facility. The receiving facility is a fairly simple
building. All it does is receive a transportation cask, and removes the
canister from that, puts it into an overpack to take out to aging,
that\'s its primary purpose. It\'s on the order I think of about 200 or
300 feet square.

So, physically, the buildings are quite a bit smaller, and they are much
simpler on the inside. But, until we have ESAAB approval to make this
change, I just thought it premature to start putting up drawings and
talk in much detail to that. I apologize if it was confusing.

KADAK: I don\'t think what you said was particularly earth shattering.
It\'s just a question of at least comprehending what you are doing, and
I hope in the future, you will be able to share with us more
information.

HARRINGTON: I do, too. I\'d like to come back and brief you after we get
ESAAB approval, and provide more detail.

ABKOWITZ: Howard, you have the last word.

ARNOLD: Okay. Good news first. Compared to almost two years ago when I
first saw a definitive design of all those buildings, I think you\'re
better off than you were then, despite the uncertainty.

Now, the bad news is you still have a number of major decisions to make.
And, to me, it\'s going to be a while. And, I already said that.

HARRINGTON: That\'s why we are laying out the schedule that I referred
to a moment ago, just to understand better when we have to make those.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you, Paul.

Mr. Chairman, I\'ve succeeded in putting us behind yet again, and I turn
the baton over to you.

GARRICK: I\'m going to allow us to have a ten minute break.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

GARRICK: Our next agenda item is the DOE inquiry of the USGS e-mail
issues, and reanalysis of the infiltration data. It\'s going to be given
by Gene Runkle.

Gene works in the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and
he\'s been there since 2001. He now works in the Office of Project
Control, providing independent oversight for Program elements and
project control processes. Previously, he supported the OCRWM Director
in changed management activities. Before coming to OCRWM, he conducted
environmental, safety, and health technical support activities in DOE\'s
nuclear weapons operations.

He has also been involved at the National Laboratory level in providing
support and technical information for some of the regulations.

Gene, we\'re glad to have you.

RUNKLE: Thank you. Could I have the next slide, please?

What I\'m going to talk to you about today is the evaluation of the
technical impact of the USGS e-mails on our Project. I will also talk to
you about some of the additional work that\'s ongoing right now, both at
Sandia and at Idaho National Laboratories, to redo the infiltration
modeling work, and give you some of the results, the most recent results
from the Inspector General\'s investigation process.

The first thing I\'d like to talk about is the technical report. This is
a report that was initiated after the discovery of the USGS e-mails back
in March of 2005. What we were looking at there was the impact on the
site recommendation, the key technical information that we had, the
agreements that we had with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the
impact that the infiltration model work had upon the license application
processes.

We focus mainly on the AMR that was completed by the USGS in June of
2000. That AMR had been updated in 2004 with some additional inputs. The
question that we had was whether the net infiltration rates could be
independently corroborated by published data. This was the question that
we focused on. And, then, to look at any impacts that it might have on
the site recommendation and the KTIs.

It\'s important to note that the report that we have here and the
results will not be used as part of the technical basis for the license
application, or for any quality effective work.

The draft report that was prepared was reviewed twice by an independent
group of experts that we brought together. Dr. Peter Wierenga has
extensive experience in hydrology with the University of Arizona. Dr.
John McCray does a lot of modeling work at the Colorado School of Mines.
And, Dr. Tim Green is with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and has a
lot of experience in reviewing infiltration and hydrology type work.

The independent review, the initial one that was completed in the
October time frame, had a significant impact on the content of the
report. The reviewers really indicated that there was a lot more
corroborating data existing than we had brought forward in our report at
that time, and they provided additional references, and suggested that
we spend a lot more time on going back and looking at the outside
literature. And, we proceeded in that manner.

After that was completed, we also focused heavily on the technical basis
for the conceptual models. After that was completed, another draft of
the report was provided to the reviewers, and we finalized the report in
February of this year.

This is a chart that is in the report. There are copies of the report in
the back. We have also provided hard copies for all of the panel
members. And, in the back of the report is a disk with all of the
references that we are allowed to provide. There are some proprietary
references that we have given you the reference to that you can go to
the website and pick them up, but we were not legally allowed to provide
those on our disk.

This particular chart here shows the results from the Yucca Mountain
modeling work that was performed by USGS. It also gives you the solid
line, which is a Maxey Eakin estimated recharge, and it compares it to
several different methods, the Chloride Mass Balance, a couple of
others, that provide some corroborating information on the results.

Some of the key findings that we have here, we found that the conceptual
and numerical models built on earlier work are technically sound, and
they\'re based upon the physical processes that govern water cycle.
These are widely documented, and are available in the open literature.

The USGS net infiltration rates are consistent with the arid and
semi-arid climates across the U.S. The net infiltration is a very small
percentage of the precipitation, and usually within 1 to 6 percent of
the precipitation values.

The net infiltration rates have been presented publicly, and are also
published in several scientific journals that we have listed in the
report. We have carefully chosen only those that were refereed and peer
reviewed type references, so that we were not just bringing in
presentations at meetings or other opportunities where there was not a
peer review or some in depth review. Our outside independent panel was
very strict on that process. The net infiltration estimates used\--

KADAK: Could you just help me understand what it is you\'re showing?
Which is the USGS?

RUNKLE: Oh, I\'m sorry. I missed a viewgraph.

KADAK: I\'m just trying to see what are you trying to tell us with these
two charts?

RUNKLE: On this particular chart right here\--I missed one. I\'m sorry.
This particular chart shows the comparison with the other corroborating
data, and this one is the Nevada Hydrographic Basin Recharge, as well as
the other Columbia Plateau, and other Southwestern U.S. data. And,
there, we have plotted with the red squares, the triangles, and the
dots, which represents the monsoon. And, these are the nine results from
the infiltration work by USGS.

So, essentially, what we are showing here is the data from the USGS
modeling work, fits well within the regions of these various climatic
variances that we see from across the country.

KADAK: So, the focus should be on the red square and the green dot?

RUNKLE: And the blue triangle?

KADAK: Okay.

RUNKLE: Those are the ones that were in the USGS modeling effort.

Okay, the one thing on this particular graph is we are equating the
infiltration rates that we see here from USGS work with recharge
estimates. There is some difference there, slight difference, but for
comparative purposes, both the technical people that prepared our work,
as well as our reviewers, felt that they were equivalent. It could be
used for comparison purposes.

Next viewgraph. This is where I was. I\'m sorry, I jumped ahead there.
The net infiltration rates that we have seen on the previous two graphs
back that had been used for the site recommendation are consistent with
and corroborated by the independent data, and they support the site
recommendation.

Next viewgraph. As a result of the detailed review that has been done at
Idaho National Laboratories, we developed a new version of the software
that was provided by USGS. This work took a line by line approach,
taking every coded line and recoding it and making sure that there was
full understanding of the algorithm behind it and the mathematical
equations associated with it.

The evaluation and the updated documentation against other current
procedural requirements was performed, and where there was an
alternative approach, where the reviewers from Idaho felt that there was
something that should be changed, there was a toggle switch put in the
code so you could run it either as it would be run with the USGS work,
or as they felt that it should be corrected. And, so, there are two
methods that can be done using that code.

There are currently no plans to use this infiltration 2.2 in any future
quality-affected work. It was something that we developed early on in
this process as we were figuring out the path forward. But, it is
something that will be available in our system, if we needed to go back
and reference that particular work.

The work that will come forward into the license application is
currently being performed at Sandia National Laboratories. They are
using the Mass Accounting System for Soil Infiltration and Flow. This is
a Mathcad worksheet process, and it incorporates a revised
evapotranspiration model.

That is different from the INFIL work that was done by the USGS, and
that is probably the most significant change that we see in the new work
that is coming forward.

There is independent verification that\'s ongoing, as this is being
developed. Dan Stephens from Albuquerque is providing that oversight and
insight as we are developing that process.

We also have sets of data that are in our system that have been impacted
by the USGS e-mail process. Several datasets have been developed by the
people that exchanged e-mails. We have gone back through the system, and
are looking at that with a lot of rigor. Only a small number of the USGS
datasets will be used in the replacement modeling. Those are unique and
irreplaceable at this point in time, and only after we have thoroughly
checked and validated that data will we bring it forward into the new
modeling efforts.

We\'re going to have three bins that will exist with the new data as
it\'s brought forward. Use-As-Is, where there\'s no additional effort to
qualify the data. Anything that we needed to remediate to bring into
full procedural compliance, to look back on who prepared it, and how it
was brought forward. That is all being done. And, then, we also have a
category Do-Not-Use-As-Is, there are traceability issues. So, we will
have fully traceable packages that will be brought forward in the new
modeling efforts.

The ITT is looking at datasets that include the neutron probe moisture
and the other listings that we have in the center there. It\'s either
being requalified or redeveloped, and it will meet our quality assurance
requirements and our procedures.

Again, Dan Stephens is providing concurrent independent review of this
process.

In December of \'05, the USGS agreed to accept the infiltration model
for re-evaluation. They were looking at an evaluation of transparency,
traceability, and looking at appropriateness and the mathematical
accuracy.

After re-running the simulation that were provided in the 2000 AMR, our
plans are to provide DOE with a technical report detailing the results.
And, Bill Alley will be talking next about that process that they are
following, and will give you some updates.

Again, this particular work will not be part of the license application.
It will be simply put on our model platforms.

Recently, the Department of Energy\'s IG, as well as the Department of
Interior\'s Inspector General, has provided their outputs from their
criminal investigation activities.

They have provided their factual record to the U.S. Attorney\'s Office,
District of Nevada, and the U.S. Attorney\'s Office has declined to
pursue criminal prosecution in this case.

There were three internal control deficiencies that were noted. There\'s
a delay in surfacing and dealing with the e-mails, inconsistent with
sound quality assurance protocols. There was a long delay in the
reporting process from when the e-mails were initially discovered, until
they were reported. There are some scientific notebook requirements that
should have been in place and were not. And, critical control files
relating to the U.S. Infiltration AMR were not maintained in accordance
with the processes that were in place at the time. Those have all been
called out in their most recent report of April 25, and we will be
addressing those issues.

In conclusion, our technical report has found the net infiltration rate
estimates support the site recommendation, and are corroborated by
independent data.

The Idaho National Laboratory model work has updated, fully documented,
and has streamlined the user interface for the USGS modeling work that
had been done in the original 2000 AMR.

Sandia is developing the replacement for the infiltration work, and that
is underway.

There is an Information Technical Team led by BSC that is evaluating the
data inputs and making sure that it meets all procedural and quality
assurance requirements before it is applied to any future work.

Again, USGS is re-evaluating and re-running the INFIL 2.0 code, and will
provide us the results of their evaluation. And, I\'ve given you the
input from the recent IG investigations, and we will be addressing their
observations.

With that, I\'ll take any questions.

GARRICK: Thank you. Questions from the Board? Andy?

KADAK: Kadak. You focused on one of these areas, which is this
infiltration model. Has DOE looked at the extent of condition relative
to other similar types of e-mails, or issues that have been raised? I
know you didn\'t search all your e-mails, but have you found anything
that resembles anything like this?

RUNKLE: We are currently doing the extent of condition of evaluation
that is a Level ACR-5223, and that activity has been underway since July
of last year. The results of that team is coming to closure at this
point in time. They are focusing on looking at other AMRs and other AMR
processes to identify any recommendations that they have in that area.
They are also looking at nuclear culture and quality culture, and
improvements in that area.

And, the other is the extensive work that we have done as far as looking
at e-mails, both legacy e-mails, relevant e-mails that are going into
the system to support the license application, non-relevant e-mails, so
we have looked at approximately 100,000 real time read, to its extent,
e-mails, and then addressing all of the outcomes of that. We have also
looked at the condition reports and employee concerns, and all of that
information is being brought together in a report.

KADAK: So, do you expect any further studies, like this one, to track
things down?

RUNKLE: I beg your pardon? I\'m sorry.

KADAK: Do you expect, based on your reviews, to have additional issues
that need such an inquiry that you just finished with the USGS e-mail
issues?

RUNKLE: It\'s preliminary at this point, but we have not seen extensive
involvement in other parts of the organization.

KADAK: I take it as a maybe.

GARRICK: I\'m sorry. Go ahead, Paul.

GOLAN: I\'ll just address your point, Dr. Kadak. We\'re looking at that
right now. There have been things that have been brought to my
attention. Gene has been leading that team. Certainly, nothing to the
extent that we have seen in the USGS. But, we are finding things, and we
are addressing them right now. But, none of them have come close to what
we found here. We did learn a lot from this process, and there was a
good team that was put on it.

RUNKLE: And, I\'m a little hesitant to give out too much information at
this point, because it\'s preliminary, and we have not briefed internal,
but we have not seen extensive involvement. But, there will be
recommendations in the other areas.

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

So, is it safe to say that as far as the infiltration study goes with
respect to the USGS, that there will be no new experiments or
measurements made, that it\'s just going to be purely a re-evaluation of
existing and corroborating the quality of that data?

RUNKLE: Of the data. There are some data that are being reworked, but
it\'s fairly small as far as the percentage. But, we are going back in
to ensure that the information that we\'re bringing forward is correct
and accurate. Some of the new evapotranspiration work is using other
data in addition to the work that has been done in the past. Again,
it\'s a very small amount of the information that was developed by these
folks at USGS that will be brought forward.

GARRICK: George?

HORNBERGER: Can I follow up just a little bit on that? The
evapotranspiration, I mean, that is the one new thing that you indicated
that Sandia was going to incorporate, a revised evapotranspiration
model. Can you shed a little light on why that decision was made?

RUNKLE: There was a review that was done by Sandia in this area, and
they felt that there was some newer information that could be brought
forward from a modeling perspective. And, that\'s what\'s being
incorporated. That work is underway, and it will be available as we get
those reports completed to support the AMR on infiltration.

HORNBERGER: You mentioned that there was also some new data, I think?

RUNKLE: That\'s what I understand, yes. There will be new data brought
in to support that new modeling concept.

GARRICK: Garrick, Board.

With respect to the more broader question, and with all the
corroboration you\'ve had, and the independent reviews and the
supporting evidence that the infiltration rates were reasonable, why
redo the work?

RUNKLE: Why are we redoing the work?

GARRICK: Yes.

RUNKLE: In order to be credible.

GARRICK: But, isn\'t all the corroboration making it credible? Why are
you spending my money?

GOLAN: Can I, Dr. Garrick?

GARRICK: Yes.

GOLAN: Although the results were consistent with independently derived
results, what other scientists did, it didn\'t meet our quality
requirements. And, if it\'s not going to meet our requirements, I\'m not
going to send it to the NRC to ask them to meet their requirements. So,
it didn\'t meet the requirements. I made a programmatic decision last
fall to replace it. I\'m the one who made that recommendation to the
Secretary. I\'m responsible and accountable for that. But, part of it is
is it didn\'t meet our requirements and, therefore, we\'re not going to
use it.

GARRICK: Thank you. George?

HORNBERGER: Paul, before you sit down, can you give us some indication
of what fraction of the data and analysis from the USGS didn\'t meet the
quality assurance? I assume it\'s quality assurance?

GOLAN: It\'s quality assurance, the quality assurance requirements on
infiltration. And, I think Gene could probably speak more in terms of
the percent. So, if you have some numbers in terms of what\--

RUNKLE: I don\'t have numbers. It\'s really the overall quality
assurance perspective that has been brought to question by the e-mails.
And, so, trying to defend against that from a technical perspective is
very difficult. What we are doing is making sure that our quality
assurance requirements are fully met with this work that\'s ongoing at
Sandia. There have been quality assurance surveillances performed, and
there will be a quality assurance audit performed prior to, or near the
completion of the work, as well as an independent set of reviewers will
be brought in to look at not only the process, but also the technical
aspects of the infiltration modeling. So, we are really adding a lot
more rigor in here. This has had a lot of attention nationwide in this
area, and has been a very serious impact to our program.

GARRICK: Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, Dave Diodato from the
staff?

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff. Thank you.

I just wanted to follow up and get some clarification on the MASSIF
code. Your findings and your evaluation technical impact report said
that the infiltration rate estimates supplied by the USGS were
consistent with and corroborated by independent data. So, you felt good
about that, your independent analysis felt good about that. So, that
suggested the analysis itself was sound technically. So, what I\'m
wondering is are all the, other than the evapotranspiration methodology
that\'s being developed in MASSIF, I assume is how it\'s pronounced, or
MASSIF?

RUNKLE: Right.

DIODATO: Other than the change in the evapotranspiration, are all the
other physical processes that were simulated in the old code now going
to be simulated in this new code?

RUNKLE: Many of them are using the same modeling concepts. There may be
some changes and some nuances there. The biggest difference is in the
evapotranspiration modeling activities. Those will, again, we will have
all of that documented in the AMR process, and that will be available
for review.

DIODATO: Thank you. With regard to Figures 5 and 6, you showed the Yucca
Mountain estimates on these figures. In particular, the range of
precipitation is between 400 and 500 millimeters. Did your independent
experts provide you with some insights or hypotheses as to why these
numbers were lower than either the Maxey Eakin estimates or the other
field estimates shown in your plots here?

RUNKLE: We did not. We realized that when we compared these, they are
somewhat lower. But, again, you know, this is looked at, you know, as
all of the data together, and we did not go back and specifically say
this is because of this, or we did not look at the background as to why
that is that much lower.

DIODATO: Thank you. The one final question is you are developing INFIL
2.2 up in Idaho.

RUNKLE: Yes.

DIODATO: And you talked about the changes that are going to be
incorporated in that new revision of the code, what\'s the purpose for
developing the code?

RUNKLE: The purpose of that development was early on in the Summer of
2005, we were not sure where we were going to be as far as the license
application processes, and this was looked at as a method that may bring
credibility to the process. And, so, that was initiated at a time, and
it ran in parallel with the work that had been ongoing at Sandia. So,
they were two paths to come to the same conclusion. We are now on a path
that we will have time to complete all of the work on infiltration by
Sandia, bring it back into the TSPA process, and bring it forward into
the licensing application.

DIODATO: After concluding the work on INFIL 2.2, then I guess you\'re
going to abandon that?

RUNKLE: That would be set aside, yes. That\'s what I indicated in the
viewgraphs. That is, it will not be brought forward as part of anything
in quality-affecting work with the LA.

DIODATO: Would you place that code in the public domain, though, as a
service to the public?

RUNKLE: I\'m sorry, I couldn\'t hear you.

DIODATO: Would you place that code in the public domain when you are
finished with developing it?

RUNKLE: Yes, it will be available.

DIODATO: Thank you.

GARRICK: Any other questions from the Board, from Staff?

(No response.)

GARRICK: It\'s a tough job, Gene. Thank you very much.

RUNKLE: Thank you.

GARRICK: Our next presentation is going to be given by Dr. William
Alley, who is the Senior Advisor for Ground Water at the U.S. Geological
Survey. He has responsibility for major Federal groundwater programs
managed by the USGS, including the USGS Yucca Mountain Project Branch,
and provides leadership in technology transfer and training across the
bureau.

We welcome you.

ALLEY: Thank you.

First of all, I should say that the discovery of the e-mails written by
USGS scientists showing both a lack of respect for QA, and in some
cases, suggesting non-compliance with QA, has been a traumatic
experience for our organization over the past year, as you might
imagine. And, we take the matter very seriously.

We continue to work with the Department of Energy and their contractors
to resolve the technical issues, many of which Gene Runkle just
described, and we are also taking actions to assure that such problems
do not occur or extend elsewhere in the project. And, I\'ll mention a
few of those in a moment.

First, I think one point it\'s important to make here is that certainly
in the media, this has been simplified into a \"data falsification
issue.\" And, to date, there is no evidence that anybody anywhere made
up any data on the Project. The issue which we have had to struggle with
is circumvention or misrepresentation of QA during development and
application of the net infiltration model, INFIL. I think it was just,
Paul Golan and Gene Runkle just mentioned, the reason they are going
through such a thorough analysis is because unfortunately, attendant to
that is essentially an individual saying they\'re going to do one thing
and tell somebody else they\'re going to do another, and that completely
undermines your work when you have something like that out.

Gene just described the extensive review of the INFIL model, and its
datasets. While we are working with DOE as part of this effort, for
example, initially, DOE had difficulty reproducing some of the
infiltration maps from the model output. We resolved those issues early
on, and we have been able to produce all the maps from the information
provided.

In addition, we are working with DOE to assure that all the model output
parameters, et cetera, can be tracked to original sources. That\'s the
other major activity really, is trying to trace data back.

And, finally, we believe that the INFIL model should be documented in
the general users manual, similar to other USGS models, such as MODFLOW,
to assure its transparency and availability to the scientific community.
We\'re undertaking this activity, which includes testing and refinement
of the code. In fact, we will use this code. This code is a code that\'s
being used elsewhere in the United States besides Yucca Mountain in the
Western United States, so we feel it\'s very important that we go
through this process and have a very clear documentation.

Indeed, our examination of the infiltration modeling work has reinforced
the need for published products that are more concise and accessible to
the scientific community. So, lots of scientists can actually see
what\'s there, and put their own opinions forward.

In a sense, informed scientific QA, is a way, an essential element of
QA. The INFIL model, like any other model, is based on a set of
assumptions, and many possible approaches could be used for the same
problem. So, it\'s important it\'s very clear, concise to people
knowledgeable in the field exactly what was done.

Thus far, I have focused on the technical elements. We also need to
address the attitudes toward QA that were expressed in the e-mails.
We\'ve held a continuing series of group discussions and all-hands
meetings with employees of the Yucca Mountain Project Branch within USGS
to reinforce areas of concern as they have arisen\--an example would be
the proper dating of scientific notebooks\--and to try to maintain
morale on the Project as we move forward and keep people informed as
best we can of what\'s happening.

With the release of the IG reports, we are planning the equivalent of a
stand-down day in which the entire Project staff and management will
stop day to day activities, and focus on the types of problems that were
revealed by the e-mails. Also, a chance both to reinforce ethical and QA
principles, and to allow an open discussion between management and
employees on how we can address QA in the most efficient and responsible
manner.

To further ensure that our work will stand up to scrutiny in the
regulatory process, we have been soliciting an extent of conditions
review, and we had a contract out for that. We were close to closing
that, and we had some contractual problems, so we are reopening that
again this month.

Again, that would be somebody independently looking at the
organizational questionnaires, audits, conducting employee interviews,
et cetera, to see if the problems that were attitudes expressed in these
e-mails are evident anywhere else in the organization.

In closing, I would like to say that I know from my experience with the
Project that the vast majority of scientists in the USGS Yucca Mountain
Project are extraordinarily dedicated to the Project, and do their
utmost to act faithfully to its principles and demands. Unfortunately,
the extraordinarily poor judgment and actions of a few individuals have
caused the bad light to be cast upon the whole Project this past year. I
think our folks have done well in dealing with that, but it\'s been a
very trying time for essentially anybody that\'s associated with the
Yucca Mountain Project and USGS because of the bad actions of a couple.

With that, I\'d be happy to discuss any questions you might have.

GARRICK: All right. Questions from members of the Board? Howard?

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

Have you undertaken any specific disciplinary actions?

ALLEY: We\'ve been waiting for the IG report for any disciplinary
actions, which we have received within the past two weeks. The full IG
reports are being evaluated by our personnel people. We have a plan to
try to address these issues. I should say that because of the Federal
employees, there\'s a certain confidentiality that goes along with that.
I can\'t really speak to it today, but certainly that\'s being
considered now as the IG report is out.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak. What would you ascribe to be the root cause of this event?

ALLEY: Myself?

KADAK: Yes.

ALLEY: I think there\'s a number of things here. First of all, I think
you had a couple of scientists who were not following the rules, and
probably were not kept tabs on enough. Second of all, they were under a
lot of pressure. There was a lot of pressure. If you read the e-mails,
you can see there was a lot of pressure to get things done very quickly.
They were developing a model and applying it, essentially developing
code and applying it at the same time. And, so, I think they were very
frustrated, and I think that their frustrations carried over to trying
to deal with\--there were some changing situations, too. So, I think
that there were sort of several elements, really, that probably led to
the whole event.

GARRICK: Any other comments from this Board or the Staff?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Dr. Alley, we very much appreciate your having the courage to
come here and share this information with us, and we look forward to
reading the report and get better informed. And, we\'re very pleased
that it didn\'t materially impact the underlying science.

See how easy it is to get back on schedule? You have a question?

All right. Our next presentation is going to be given by somebody
that\'s presented to us several times, John Kessler. John is the manager
of the High-Level Waste and Spent Fuel Management Program at EPRI, the
Electric Power Research Institute, or formerly. His background includes
Yucca Mountain total system performance assessment using probabilistic
methods, colloid-aided contaminated migration research, low-level waste
and spent fuel storage system design, and waste solidification R&D.

John has certainly been a pioneer in the application of the
probabilistic risk assessment methods to repository design.

Welcome.

KESSLER: Thank you, John.

And, I just want to start right out by damaging my credibility in not
knowing what date it is at the bottom there. I apologize for that.

On the next viewgraph, I actually do know what date it is. I want to,
first of all, acknowledge the authors and remind you that what I\'m
presenting will be issued as a report of preliminary work. That report
has been submitted to EPRI publications, and should be available at the
end of this month.

I\'d like to acknowledge the report authors. Mick Apted from Monitor
Scientific here in the front row, was the lead author of that. John
Kemeny from the University of Arizona worked on rock mechanics issues.
Fraser King on waste package degradation. Al Ross on regulatory issues.
Ben Ross on infiltration. Frank Schwartz on looking at the saturated
zone. And, Wei Zhou on doing the modeling.

Next viewgraph, please. In terms of the motivation for this work,
certainly it\'s no loss on the industry, as well as anybody else, that
spent fuel inventories are rising, and at the current rate of
generation, they will rise past 63,000 metric tons in a few more years.

This viewgraph shows really the distribution of where that spent fuel is
sitting right now. The blue portion of the curve is what\'s in pools.
The red portion is what\'s in dry storage. And, the take-home message
here is, again, nothing new to you, which is that the pools are just
about full, which is why the thickness of that blue part isn\'t
increasing anymore, and essentially for every stick of spent fuel that
you put in a pool, discharging from your reactor, you\'ve got to put one
stick of fuel in dry storage until we have some sort of off-site
solution.

Next viewgraph, please. So, the purpose and approach, again, I want to
remind you that this is a preliminary analysis of the maximum physical
capacity of the geologic repository at Yucca Mountain. We were looking
only at the disposable commercial spent nuclear fuel, and, again, we are
at this point aware that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act limits Yucca
Mountain to 70,000 metric tons. Of that, 63,000 metric tons has been
designated for commercial spent fuel.

The approach that we took in this preliminary analysis is that we wanted
to assure minimal impacts on the cost and schedule of DOE\'s current
70,000 metric ton design, in the sense that, first of all, we want to
consider only Yucca Mountain real estate that\'s been characterized
already by DOE. Second of all, we wanted to start with DOE\'s current
line-load, the high-temperature operating mode repository design, the
11.8 kilowatts max per package, 1.45 kilowatts per meter, and not
essentially move away from that particular design, but merely add to it,
at least for our preliminary analyses.

Then, we applied thermal constraints on natural and engineered barriers
that we felt were appropriate. Again, for this preliminary analysis, we
used conservative convection only thermal modeling. That is, we used
TOUGH2 code, and I will talk about that a bit more. We have identified a
few alternatives in this preliminary work that may further optimize
commercial spent nuclear fuel disposal capacity, and we intend to
explore that more as the year rolls on.

Next, please. This viewgraph really is just kind of where we started
from. It\'s a, if we at least pre-TAD, these dimensions down here in
terms of spacing between the units of containers that we heard about
this morning, is what we use for our initial study. Maximum waste
package temperatures were in the 160 to 180 range. The DOE design had
the 81 meter pitch between the drifts to maintain the sub-boiling pillar
of tuff for drainage of condensate water.

This particular viewgraph down here just gives you an idea of how big
that pillar is in the current DOE design. You can see that the lateral
extent of boiling is more likely to be only maybe 5, 10 meters out,
which leaves a very large pillar that stays below boiling at all times
in DOE\'s current design.

Next viewgraph. So, when we did our analysis, we assumed really the
following temperature limits. First of all, we looked at cladding, the
350 C cladding limit, and I\'ve got optional there, because we are aware
that, for example, in NRC\'s TPA, they don\'t take credit for cladding.
In our own analysis, we suggest that cladding could be a backup
engineered barrier, that in terms of its overall incremental
contribution to overall performance, it\'s not large. Nevertheless, you
don\'t want to throw away a barrier unnecessarily. So, we\'re holding
onto that for now.

In terms of waste package surface temperatures, in the last backup
slide, I show you what we estimated for a peak waste package temperature
all the way up to 309 C, what the EBS failure distribution would be.
What we find is that even up to that temperature, and presumably we
could go higher than that, we find really no significant degradation of
the long-term integrity of the waste package. You will see that in the
permutations we looked at, we don\'t get anywhere near even the 309 C in
our models.

Rock wall, we retained the 200 C limit. We recognize that there is
somewhat higher temperature that one could even go to on the rock wall,
that low to high Crystobolyte phase change doesn\'t occur until you are
up about 228, or so, and 200 C provides you some margin there to stay
away from that phase change that causes somewhat of a thermal expansion.

And, as you will see, we have relaxed the goal of maintaining the
pillars below boiling for all time. In the model results I will give you
a sample of, we had a very short period in which the pillars dry out,
and I will go through those details in a minute.

Next, please. We looked at three different options in terms of expanding
the potential technical capacity of Yucca Mountain. In the first option,
we really looked just at an expanded repository footprint, just
increasing the real estate, looking to see what rock has been
characterized adjacent to the main block that DOE is proposing now.

In Option 2, we looked at a multi-level repository, in this case, a
three level repository, where we, again, retained 81 meters between the
groups of three vertically spaced drifts.

Option 3, we did it the other way, where we had really drift triplets
all at the same elevation, where the spacing between drift triplets is
retained at 81 meters. What we were interested in is the range of
expansion factors, really, you know, the multiplying in terms of
capacity factors on the current 63,000 metric ton of commercial spent
nuclear fuel limit.

And, the last thing that I will talk to you about is we looked at
combinations of options. One with Option 2 or 3.

Next viewgraph. I apologize for this not being the best of figures. But,
what I want to talk about is that the current repository is a one-level,
high-temperature operating mode design. What we looked at was expanding
it over a larger area. What I want to point out is that the Topopah
Springs tuff units are very thick, not only in the primary block here,
but also in adjacent blocks off to the west of Solitario Canyon, and
even to the east of the Ghost Dance Fault, as well.

So, the point is is that in the neighborhood of the primary block, there
is still quite a bit of thick units of Topopah Springs tuff to
potentially look at.

The proposed repository happens to be right about at the location of
this fold. There\'s a white line here. In fact, that fold thickness is
reasonably to scale in terms of the drift diameter. So, you get an idea
of how much space there is in addition to the current drift horizon
within the Topopah Springs units. It\'s on the order of about 170 meters
thick in this region.

We have major northwest trending faults that define suitable rock blocks
between units here, and we recognize that there would be a respect
distance that would need to be considered as you go perhaps and expand
the repository on the other side of some of these faults.

We believe that you can generally maintain 200 to 400 meters of rock
cover as you look at other areas as well, and that you could maintain
roughly 200 to 400 meters to the water table below.

Next, please. Regarding our Option 1, which is really to extend the
footprint, we just took this figure out of the DOE\'s Final
Environmental Impact Statement. And, in addition to really the primary
block here, when they looked at a low temperature operating mode, they
looked at expanding into a block to the east of the Ghost Dance, as well
as a small block to the south of the primary. And, finally, they looked
at a couple optional areas even farther west, all west of the Solitario
Canyon. These are all discussed to some degree in the FEIS.

Next, please. So, when we looked at not only the FEIS results, but went
back through the literature of other areas that were considered, and at
least somewhat characterized throughout the years, when we did our own
study here, we were confident that we could go to roughly two times the
current footprint, that there was plenty of good rock right in adjacent
blocks to the primary block, roughly doubling the available acreage.
And, it\'s possible that if one were to maybe make use of some of the
other blocks, you could get up to a factor of 2.6 to 3.5 times the
available area that\'s being used in DOE\'s current design.

Next, please. The second option was looking at a multi-level repository.
This is just a cartoon of what a three-level repository might look like.
In our particular model, we looked at additional drifts that were 30 to
50 meters above and below the current DOE HTOM design. And, we looked at
some of our options, and I\'ll show you in a minute here, at the same
and lower line loads. We looked at 1.45 and down to 1.0 kilowatts per
meter.

Next viewgraph, please. Multi-level repository designs are not new. They
have been considered before. DOE has considered them themselves for
Yucca Mountain. The Europeans and Japanese are considering using
multi-level repositories. And, back in \'99, Charles Fairhurst in a
report to the ACNW presented some ideas for multiple level repositories.
In this case, he was looking at Richard\'s Barrier approaches.
Nevertheless, the concept of a multi-level repository was introduced
then.

Next, please. The third option is looking at the grouped disposal
drifts, where in this case, we\'re looking at groups of three, with 81
meters between each one of those groups of three, and roughly 20 meters
between each of the drifts in the triplets. That leaves us 41 meters
between these groups, which we will call our pillar in this case. And,
again, we looked at same and lower line loads, 1.45 and I think this
should be half of 1.45, the table corrects that, per meter that we
looked at, depending on the particular drift.

Next, please. All right, getting onto what our preliminary model looked
like for this. We used TOUGH2. It\'s the same code that DOE, Yucca
Mountain Project has used. This is a 2D model initially, so this is a
conservative model in the sense that we have essentially no heat
transfer off to either the sides or the ends, so that this particular
model here which has\--this is a unit cell of the model where you can
see again the half cells for the vertical and the two half cells for the
horizontal triplet model. This would represent the very center of the
hottest drifts, the model that we looked at here.

I\'ll show you in the next viewgraph that this was calibrated against
some DOE results, and the Option 2, the vertical triplets, is on the
left here, and Option 3, the horizontal sets, are on the right.

Next. This is just a quick viewgraph to show that we calibrated our
model using parameters for the units that are within the range of what
DOE used to get roughly the same peak drift wall and side temperatures
here. And, in this case, we plotted our gas saturation versus time,
which really is an indication of the amount of time that the area right
around the drifts is dried out.

Next, please. Okay, for the multi-level repository, the ones that are
stacked, the stacked repository design, we looked at really six
different permutations. In this case, we looked at 30 meter or 50 meter
spacings. We looked at initial line loadings of either the current 1450
watts per meter or 1000 watts per meter for all waste packages, which is
two-thirds of the line load now. So, two-thirds times three is an
expansion factor really, an increased density factor of a factor of two,
and, of course, we looked at up to three here.

We looked at ventilation times from zero to 50, or 50 to 300 years, with
different ventilation efficiencies based on the ventilation AMR produced
by DOE.

Next, please. This is one example of the output we got for a particular
Option 1 here. And, I know it\'s a little hard to see, especially for
those poor souls in the back of the room. But, what I\'ve got here on
the left three is the temperature distribution around those stacked
drifts versus time. The top line is 55 years, second line is 100, third
line is 1000 years after closure.

What is of more interest, or perhaps clearer, is when we look at gas
saturations versus time, where again, this darker orange color is a gas
saturation of one, meaning that that portion of the repository has dried
out. And, what you see is that at about 100 years, or roughly about 200
years, we get a temporary dry-out of the entire pillar. And, then, by
the time it is at 1000 years, again, we have a lot of the pillar back.

Next viewgraph, please. This is a pretty busy viewgraph of temperature
versus time at various positions within the package and across that
pillar. What I want to really draw your attention to is this gas
saturation versus time viewgraph for this case. This light blue inner
curve here is at the center point of the pillar. And, what this suggests
is that in this conservative model that we developed, we show a full
dry-out of the pillar that only lasts for a few hundred years before we
start resaturating the center of that pillar. And, as you see, we\'ve
got a good section of the pillar back even within the first thousand
years.

So, one of the other things that we conclude is that block condensate
water is unlikely to be transported via heat pipes through the thermal
barrier to the emplacement drifts. Again, what we see is that the liquid
water that might pile up temporarily in the pillars is laterally,
there\'s some lateral distance before it could potentially drain into
those lower drifts off to the side. I think that\'s very unlikely that
that would happen.

Next viewgraph. Okay, now, from the stacked drift design, we go to the
side by side triplet designs. We again looked at six more cases. In this
case, those triplets have 20 meter spacing, again, with 81 meters
between the groups, leaving a 41 meter pillar. We looked at initial
loading of either the 1450 watts per meter, which gives us an expansion
factor of three again, to a differentially loaded, line loaded, where we
again preserve the 1450 watts per meter in the center of the three, and
then go with half thermal loading in the two side drifts, which would
give us an effective expansion factor of two, again, looking at
different ventilation durations and efficiencies here.

Next viewgraph, please. Here again is one example output for this
particular grouped design, where you can see temperatures evolving, both
up and then back down again, around these drift triplets, versus time,
again, 55, 100 and 1000 years. And, here\'s the gas saturation,
evolution versus time, and what you see again is that at 100 years, down
at this level, we have dried out the drift completely, but then within a
few hundred years, and certainly by 1000 years, we\'ve got a sub-boiling
section of pillar available again.

Next, please. Same viewgraph. Again, I want to draw your attention to
this light blue curve, which shows you the duration of time at which the
entire pillar dries out. Again, you can see that it\'s just a few
hundred years, and then we have started dropping below boiling in the
center of the pillar.

Next, please. So, the derived expansion factors from these three
options. For the extended footprint, we have determined that you can go
to roughly 2 to 3 1/2 times the acreage that we think is available, with
a current commercial spent nuclear fuel limit of 63,000 metric tons.

For both the multi-level repository, and the grouped-drift repository,
we looked at increases in density of factors of 2 to 3.

Next, please. So, if we combine Option 1, the increased footprint, with
Options 2 or 3, the increased density, even at the end of this
preliminary study, we were confident that at least four times the
existing commercial spent nuclear fuel limit can be emplaced at Yucca
Mountain, with even the current or limited additional information. That
would give us about 260,000 metric tons of technical capacity.

And, then, if you wanted to work hard, you could go possibly upwards of
nine times the existing commercial spent nuclear fuel limit that could
be emplaced at Yucca Mountain, which gets you up to about 570,000 metric
tons.

Next, please. One of the questions we have certainly been getting since
we started presenting this work is that, well, gee, aren\'t we already
close to the dose limit, and how would we increase the capacity by
batches of four to nine, that would go over it. Well, that might be the
case in a conservative model. In EPRI\'s model, when we try to use the
more best estimate approach, what you see is that our peak dose at a
million years is under a tenth of a millirem per year, and on a long
scale, you can see where 15 and 350 are relative to our results.

Why are our results different? It\'s primarily because we are assuming
that the neptunium solubility is governed by secondary phase
precipitation rather than Np02, which I believe is what DOE is moving to
now, and we also do not feel that there are any high temperature
deliquescence issues, and that the Alloy 22 is going to last a long
time. We don\'t see any localized or stress corrosion cracking in the
Alloy 22 analysis.

Put those two together, and we get peak doses on that range. So, that
again, with the more best estimate model, we even increase this by a
factor of four to nine, we\'re still well below those kinds of numbers.

GARRICK: I want to make sure I understand this. This is for the high
capacity?

KESSLER: No, this is\--we have not done a TSPA on the high capacity.
I\'m sorry, John, I should have clarified. This is for the base case,
the 70,000 metric ton HTOM design. That\'s what this dose analysis is
for.

GARRICK: Okay.

KESSLER: Thank you. I should have clarified that.

And, so, what we are saying is is that if you roughly said that the
source term was directly proportional to the loading, you could multiply
these numbers by factors of four to nine. We don\'t believe that\'s the
case, especially for the stacked repository design. We believe that
given somewhat longer dry-out times, the fact that you could have a
drift shadow that protects the lower two drifts from the upper\--or, the
upper drift protects the lower two, you might actually have a lower
proportional release rate, or average release rate, such that we don\'t
even think the dose would go up by that much.

But, thank you for the question. This is for the 70,000 metric ton
design.

Next, please. We\'re not done. I\'ve tried to emphasize that this is our
first pass at this work. We are currently looking into what additional
analyses we want to do, and we are open to suggestions even.

We certainly want, first of all, we want to do more detailed kinds of
thermal modeling. We recognize with this simple 2D model that we\'ve got
that\'s really modeling the center of the repository, we are missing a
lot of edge effects that would cause us to over estimate the peak
temperatures, as well as whether the pillar would really dry out or not
if we went to more detailed models.

We are also looking at construction issues, or will look at construction
issues. We don\'t expect there to be any. Certainly stacked drifts or
side by side drifts with the kind of spacing we\'ll look at with the
kind of rock properties we\'re looking at is far from unprecedented.
Lots of mining experience in doing those kinds of things.

We also recognize that as we look into those construction issues, that
the second or third drifts may not even be drilled until the first
drifts are starting to load. Remember, we want this work to be done, our
vision is that this work would be done in parallel with the first 70,000
metric tons being licensed, constructed, et cetera.

Certainly, there would be a need for additional ventilation if the
desire was to keep temperatures where the current HTOM design is for the
preclosure period. Again, we don\'t believe that that presents any
insurmountable technical challenges. It does require more ventilation
shafts, but we don\'t see any particular reason why that couldn\'t be
done if there\'s a desire to do so.

We\'re looking into whether additional surface aging may allow even
higher mass loadings, or some other options. We\'re going to look at
different loadings within the drift triplets, in addition to what we
have seen here, or what I have shown you here. We want to do some
description of the additional site investigation and R&D needs, and, in
general, schedule for completion. We want to look at the effects of
higher pillar temperatures on fracture opening and closing, maybe
running some UDECK models. And, we are going to try to do the second
phase of this work toward the end of this year.

Next, please. So, just to summarize, again, emphasizing this is
preliminary analysis of the Yucca Mountain maximum physical capacity for
commercial spent nuclear fuel. We\'re going to do some more work
throughout this year to explore the options in more detail. But, our
conclusion now is that we have a lot of confidence that we can get
certainly four times the existing limit, and with additional work,
potentially up to nine times the existing limit for commercial spent
nuclear fuel in Yucca Mountain.

The options that we looked at have minimal impacts on cost or schedule
of DOE\'s current 70,000 metric ton design, and that we have started
with DOE\'s high temperature operating mode, line-loaded repository
design, 81 meter spacing. We\'ve used current site characterization
information, and that additional information that\'s required to expand
the repository can be collected in parallel with the licensing and
construction of the first 70,000 metric tons.

Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you. All right, Bill?

MURPHY: That was very nice and very provocative and optimistic, also, I
would say.

You mentioned some possible uncertainties associated with the 2D model
as opposed to a 3D model, and you refer to it as being conservative with
respect to temperatures and heat flow. Are there possible problems
associated with this, the alternate design associated with edge effects,
or other things? Have you identified problems that might occur, for
example, the vapor transport in the third dimension, or concentration of
the liquids around the margins, or anything else? Is there a down side
to these options?

KESSLER: Well, as I said, we have not looked at edge effects yet, so we
haven\'t looked at that. Our feeling is that it\'s not going to be a
major stumbling block for a potential design like this. We haven\'t
looked into that one. Other questions were we are going higher in
temperature right around the drifts than what is currently in the DOE
projections. Our peak waste package temperature, instead of being in the
160 to 180 range, for some of these options, go up to about 200 C, maybe
a little over that, the waste package surface temperature. The rock wall
temperatures, we have looked at in these designs go up to about 200 C,
but not beyond 200 C. So, again, we don\'t see that as being a major
issue.

We are going to look at, because we are going to somewhat higher
temperatures all the way across the pillar, we do want to look at the
effects potentially on fractures, opening and closing due to that
thermal expansion across there.

Are there problems? There are challenges. It\'s not going to be
something you can just plunk down. We recognize that more work would
have to be done. Nevertheless, we still feel confident we are not being
optimistic with our factor of four number. Factor of nine, we recognize
more work would have to be done. But, with a factor of four, we are very
confident that the technical basis can be made for a factor of four.

GARRICK: Let me ask a corollary to Dr. Murphy\'s question, a corollary
question.

Have you learned anything from this exercise about performance parameter
dependencies?

KESSLER: Well, that\'s an open question. Certainly, we haven\'t looked
at that many parameters yet. I want to emphasize this is preliminary
work. We\'re still looking into those dependencies. What you have seen
us look at is spacing, line loading, and vertical versus horizontal, is
what we have looked at so far. And, again, what I think surprised us,
even with this what I still would argue is a conservative 2D model, is
that the temperatures and the amount of dry-out were less than we
expected. So, we noticed that.

And, even what we\'re still missing is mountain scale convection, so
we\'ve still got those things that can be put in.

GARRICK: One of the most dramatic doesn\'t have anything to do with the
capacity question, was your dose slide, indicating the impact of a
source term that involves secondary phases. It\'s those kind of things
that really can add a major impact.

KESSLER: Right. And, I think that the reason I put that in was that we
have gotten questions about, well, gee, isn\'t DOE close to the limit
now, whatever it is, EPA will decide the limit, and, therefore, we
couldn\'t possibly extend it, just based on dose rate considerations.
Well, DOE is going in with a current design, and the degree of
conservatism now, and perhaps with additional work\--I think not
perhaps\--definitely with additional work, those conservatisms could be
revisited in the future, such as neptunium solubility, such as the
long-term Alloy 22 degradation. And, if that work is done in parallel
with DOE proceeding with the designs and the models they\'ve got now, we
could justify expanded capacity, and still show reasonable doses, you
know, certainly doses in compliance with the ranges of numbers we\'ve
been seeing EPA proposing.

GARRICK: Ron, and then David.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

John, I would like to follow up on your last point. And, I am just
wondering what sorts of conversations you\'ve had with the DOE folks, or
whether some of the folks who are here could comment on the Project\'s
response or reaction to this study? Perhaps Russ, or some of the other
folks on the Project?

KESSLER: Well, I will say from my perspective, we didn\'t ask for DOE
input. This was requested by EPRI\'s members, and DOE saw it at the same
time that the public saw it. So, I don\'t know if DOE has a reaction.
You know, Russ or somebody can say it.

DYER: Russ Dyer, DOE.

I\'m assimilating it, just got it now. I know that we\'re looking at
some things that are somewhat similar, some of the options for how you
might configure the underground, looking at stacked drifts, things that
might take advantage of drift shadow effects. But, we\'re just looking
at it in the \"what if\" category right now.

GARRICK: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

You did just right at the end comment on the Alloy C-22, and as I am
sure you are aware, the property of the C-22 can degrade at higher
temperatures because of possible metallurgical changes, and there seems
to be some indication that as you increase the temperature, the
localized corrosion resistance decreases. You had a throw away comment,
I don\'t mean that pejoratively, that you think the Alloy C-22 is going
to last for a very long time.

KESSLER: Yes.

DUQUETTE: A number?

KESSLER: Can you go to the very last viewgraph, please? Let me see. I
can give you a number here. 29, please. This is for a case where we have
a peak waste package temperature of 309 degrees C. And, please note the
scale, 10,000, 100,000, million, 10 million. We can run models forever.
But, the idea is is that even by a million years, here\'s the drip
shield in terms of cumulative fraction failed for this, quite high
temperature design, or high temperature case that we ran, versus time,
and the waste package is the black line here. Again, fraction failed
versus time, and what you see is that we are out in the\--by the time we
get to a million years, I believe our number is 15, 20 percent failed,
something like that, even for this high temperature case. We have taken
into account the changes in the properties as we go up to those
temperatures.

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

What failure model are you using for this data? Is it just simply, is it
creep, is it metallurgical transformation, is it embrittlement material,
is it stress corrosion cracking, is it pitting? What failure mode are
you assuming?

KESSLER: I will do my best to remember. Okay? Fraser King is the better
person to answer this question. My recollection is it is localized
corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, general corrosion, MIC enhanced
corrosion, thermal sensitization have been considered, and I\'m guessing
I\'m missing something. But, those are the ones I remember that we have
in our model.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

GARRICK: George?

HORNBERGER: John, you showed your dose curve, and you suggested that the
Project, if they were to revisit the conservative assumptions, that
there might be room. However, the Department has taken the approach, at
least up until now, that they need to have a reasonably conservative
approach to meet the license application. So, in your estimation then,
if they stick with that, they really don\'t have much room; is that
correct?

KESSLER: Maybe, maybe not. Again, we recognize that to expand the
capacity is going to require a few changes in some things that are on
the books now, so to speak, like the current law still is 70,000 metric
tons, even though we have these proposals out there.

If one were to look at expanding the footprint, especially if you went
to one or the other side of the fault, potentially, you would have
different flow lines down to the Amargosa Valley region, and it may no
longer be a basis upon which EPA chose the 3,000 acre feet per year of
water usage into which you dump essentially all of your radionuclides
passing the compliance point, may not be appropriate in such a design.

In that case, it would require, obviously, legislation, multiple
legislation, changes in regulations. We\'ve got time. This is the point,
that what we are proposing doesn\'t change the current design, doesn\'t
require a change in regulation. It does require a learning over the
long-term. We do think that there\'s already a lot of data out there to
support an expanded footprint to some degree, and that as we learn more
and DOE might develop a better basis for removing some of these current
conservatisms, then we think that compliance could still be maintained.

In addition, I already mentioned that for the stacked design, it may be
that the lower drifts would be protected somewhat by the upper drift and
your source term may not increase that much. We haven\'t looked at it
yet. But, those are all possibilities.

So, the answer is maybe, maybe not. We recognize that over the periods
of time we\'re talking about, to characterize, develop, support, defend,
license, amend, an expanded repository design would be some time, and
DOE would have that time to do that.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

Given your presentation, what advice would you give to DOE so as not to
preclude the options that you are talking about in terms of being able
to situate or site such a facility in the future?

KESSLER: I don\'t think that what we\'ve done here\--we deliberately
chose the options we chose, Andy, so that DOE would not have to change
anything. Okay?

KADAK: Well, I\'m talking, for example, location in the rock formation,
in the center, put it a little bit lower?

KESSLER: I believe that where they\'ve got it is roughly in the center
of these zones that we\'re looking at, that you could go certainly 30
meters above and below, and stay out of the formations above and below,
and 50 meters above and below, in a lot of cases, and still have plenty
of room above and below.

KADAK: The technical question I have is have you had a chance to review
the DOE multi-scale model and compare it with your hydrothermal
modeling?

KESSLER: Yes and no. We have reviewed their multi-scale model. I believe
we have talked about it in previous EPRI reports as well. We haven\'t
incorporated the multi-scale model. This is really a single scale model
that we have looked at here. Okay? We recognize that there are mountain
scale effects, that there are edge effects, that we haven\'t gotten into
yet, and that\'s what gives us the confidence to suggest that what we
have done is conservative, and that if we get into multi-scale models
and start incorporating elements of that, conceptual models, that at
least for the conceptual model part of the multi-scale model, we think
that would only help with this kind of an approach. But, in terms of
what we\'ve done here, no, we haven\'t incorporated the multi-scale
model yet.

KADAK: Have you been able to correlate the 11.8 with the 1.45 line-load
and your peak temperatures?

KESSLER: We haven\'t worried about it. We have assumed the same line
loading, with the same spacing as I showed you in Figure\--whichever it
is. Okay? So, that\'s not something we\'ve investigated yet. But, we
recognize that TADs are going to add a bit of length, such that if you
put in the same amount of, you know, kilowatts per waste package, the
line loading might go down a bit. Never mind, don\'t worry about it.

KADAK: Okay.

KESSLER: But, we haven\'t investigated that yet, other than looking at
different line loads, 1.45 kilowatts per meter, 1 kilowatt per meter,
and .725 kilowatts per meter, we have looked at in some of these
permutations.

KADAK: And, do you believe the need for having a pillar of that
magnitude is important to the thermal hydraulic performance of the rock?
In other words, they take that as a design constraint, a design
requirement. It sounds like your model suggests that you don\'t need
that as a design constraint, and you could tolerate much smaller pillars
and still have the same effect of performance.

KESSLER: Correct. That\'s what we think, that the size of the pillar
that DOE has now is very ample, let\'s just put it that way, and that,
again, with additional work, one could justify a smaller pillar than
what DOE has done.

KADAK: I need to ask a localized corrosion question. Could you tell me
how you FEPed that out?

KESSLER: Well, we looked, as you may be aware, you know, it was before
your time on the Board, we have looked into the deliquescence issues,
and are still looking into the deliquescence issues. When we did that,
we found no evidence of localized corrosion. We have looked at the
binning of the near-field waters, and, in fact, another report that I\'m
getting into the system that will come out at the end of this month, we
re-evaluate that binning, and does it somewhat differently.

Fraser King, our waste package degradation guy, last week at the
International High-Level Waste Management Conference, gave a talk on how
localized corrosion is limited to one bin that I believe has a 1 percent
probability of occurrence. I\'m probably going to get\--oh, here I go. I
don\'t know whether I\'ve got stress corrosion cracking or localized
corrosion the right way. I think stress corrosion cracking was the 1
percent chemistry bin. The localized corrosion actually occurred in 2
bins, with a total probability of 71 percent. So, we do take it into
account. We haven\'t FEPed it out.

GARRICK: Okay. Bill, did you have a question?

MURPHY: Yes, please.

You mentioned that you have a model for incorporation of neptunium in
secondary phases, and that apparently has a significant effect on your
results that show, for example, that iodine is a more important
contributor to dose, ultimately. Could you elaborate a little on that
secondary phase model, what phase is it, and are there other
radionuclides incorporated in it?

KESSLER: Co-precipitation with uranium and, goodness, I wish Don
Langmuir was here. We again, EPRI published this work\--last year, EPRI
put out a report evaluating the three neptunium phases, Np205, Np02, as
well as secondary\--precipitation into secondary minerals, primarily
uranium, with the U02 rate there. Don and Company looked at quite a few
mechanisms, quite a few phases, and if I started naming names now, I\'d
just get myself in trouble. So, that report is out. I can make it
available to you. It\'s publicly available on our website. I will get
you a list.

MURPHY: Thank you.

KESSLER: Mick, do you want to add anything?

APTED: Apted. Just a notion. Some of the responses John has been making
are all correct. Going backwards, some of Bill\'s early questions,
another issue, you worry about some of the other issues we\'re worried
about. Certainly, the underlying Calico Hills and the Zeolite issue
there, we\'re taking that on board, too, in terms of possible
alteration.

I should point out in addition, talking about the sort of
conservativeness of the three-dimensional modeling, I think at a
previous Board meeting, even February or November, Sandia made a
presentation to you on the Board on sort of three-dimensional effects,
and sort of strong condensate formation at the ends of cooled drifts, up
to 50 percent or more, and the condensate could be disappearing. We
won\'t capture that in our model. So, in a sense, we are building up far
more water there in the condensate zone than we think probably would
occur in a three-dimensional model.

I think Dr. Garrick had a question about what properties we\'ve sort of
explored or tested on a performance basis. I think one of the key
properties you see that we are testing is that none of these particular
options lead to any sort of condensate flow or sort of flooding of the
repository environment at any early time. So, in that sense of testing
when water will return to the system, we find that these systems perform
pretty much the same as the current design in terms of water beginning
to be the bad actor for corrosion, and eventual release.

KADAK: Is that due to the hotter repository for longer periods?

APTED: It\'s not particularly\--that was my next point that Dr. Duquette
raised, and some others\--although John showed a 309 degrees curve. I
mean, we looked at various, you know, going up in temperature, where are
we going to get uncomfortable for the very reasons you pointed out. But,
in these simulations, our peak temperature is only 200 degrees. Okay?
And, the time/temperature evolution of these plots that you see that
John showed are very similar to the current one horizon type.

So, we get back to the same sort of transition temperature that the
corrosion people are concerned with in very comparable times. And, so,
this entire three level or triad, they are performing very similar in
terms of time and temperature, and history. If there\'s any difference,
it\'s probably that they stay dryer longer than the current design,
especially the second and third when we stack them up.

KESSLER: The next point. Just take a look at\--this is Figure 28 in the
backup slides. What you see is for a maximum waste package temperatures
in these twelve options, there\'s only one that goes to 229. And, for
the drift wall temperature, we never exceed 200. And, this column right
here gives you an idea of how long the pillar completely dries out, if
it does at all, even in our conservative model.

APTED: And, if we go to Figure 5, Slide 5, that curve on the bottom
there, the bottom left, that\'s not an EPRI figure, that\'s from the
paper that was given last week at the High-Level Waste Conference. It\'s
entitled Multi-Scale Thermohydrologic Model for License Application of
Yucca Mountain. So, that\'s not our calculations. That\'s, indeed, what
the project is finding from their interrogation of their set of
properties for infiltration, thermal conductivity, and I think there\'s
one other factor that they\'ve got there, probably permeability of the
rock. So, that solid line that John was pointing, about 8, going down to
10, is sort of the mean boiling distance away, so that\'s
where\--there\'s probably an engineering conservation factor,
conservative factor, about a factor of 4 in this 81 meter pillar
distance, based on DOE\'s own analysis.

GARRICK: Thanks, Mick. Any questions from the Staff? Yes.

DIODATO: Dave Diodato, Staff.

John, thank you for a very stimulating presentation. We appreciate it.

I wanted to turn to Slide 9, and just look at your extended footprint
option here for a second. To the west of Solitario Canyon, there\'s
areas 5, 6, 7 and 8 that are labelled there. And, if we back up to Slide
8 now, we can see that Solitario Canyon is marked by that where the
drop-off in the block, the normal fall from the extensional dynamics of
the mountain, and at that point, the water table is about 60 meters
higher on the western side of Solitario Canyon than the east. So, all of
a sudden, the water table is coming up a little bit.

The other thing that I think about when I look at those rocks, there\'s
this yellowish Paintbrush Tuff non-welded unit that\'s 40 percent or so
porosity, so that provides kind of a lot of storage, and people think
that maybe that can help the transients to come into the system, and
help to shed water, and it comes off, and so, it kind of provides some
kind of a performance function for the repository in that sense.

So, if you go to the west on your white line, now you kind of come down,
and I wonder what the role of PtN is there, and then where the water
table is in areas 5, 6, 7 and 8. So, I\'m just wondering if you\'re
thinking it may, you know, in the event the waste packages don\'t last a
million years, then could there be some performance implications of
siting waste over to the west of Solitario Canyon fault?

KESSLER: That\'s why we have a range, David. We recognize that the
properties in every single one of those blocks isn\'t the same. The
blocks aren\'t the same size. They\'re not the same thickness. So,
that\'s what we have come up with, is a range of potential expansion
factors.

Again, if we assume that some of these givens are not given, like depth
of a load, the ground surface, or distance to the water table, which are
to some degree arbitrary and you could make them performance based in
the future, you could get some more flexibility. But, we are very aware
of the kinds of concerns you are raising, which is why we have this
range in expansion factors.

Again, between the combination of the increased footprint that could be
available, and some increase in density, that\'s why we\'re confident we
could go to at least a factor of four higher. But, the factor of nine,
we recognize is perhaps optimistic, would require a lot of
investigation, questioning what the design criteria should be, and
what\'s the basis for them, the degree to which we have confidence in
the long-term degradation of Alloy 22, all of those things would go into
getting up to expansion factors on the order of factors of nine.

DIODATO: Well, that makes sense, and I can understand that response. So,
then, have you developed maybe a risk based order of preference of which
of these options you would like to see explored first?

KESSLER: No, we haven\'t. At this point, we were looking for some
preliminary results on some different kinds of options, looking at some
different layouts that we could build, we could add onto the current
layout, and this is as far as we\'ve gotten so far.

DIODATO: Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you, John. We very much appreciate the presentation.

This actually concludes our formal presentations. But, before we move
into our public comment phase, I guess I\'d like to make a comment or
two about what happened today.

The last meeting, I believe those of you that were in attendance recall
that I had registered a couple of complaints. One of those complaints
had to do with the presentations being too congested in terms of
allowing the Board adequate question and interaction time. Today, I
think we saw exactly what we are looking for. The agenda worked very
smoothly. The Board had adequate time to ask the questions, and I just
want to be sure that the presenters realize that we appreciate that very
much. And, we hope that this is the way future meetings are conducted.

Now, we come into the part of the meeting that we think is very
important, and that\'s the public comment period. I have been given two
names of people that want to make a public comment. And, of course, if
there\'s others, if they so indicate, we can allow time for them as
well.

The first name I have is Michael King, who is a consultant, I believe to
Inyo County. Is Michael here?

KING: Hi, I\'m Mike King. I\'ve been a long-term consultant for Inyo
County. As a consultant, flying halfway across the country, I have to
come up with one comment.

I\'d like to address comments this morning regarding legislation to
permanently remove lands for the\--by DOE over the Yucca Mountain
facility.

First of all, Inyo County would certainly applaud this legislation, and
DOE\'s effort. If you look at it, hopefully we\'ll have no incidence in
transporting waste to the site. The canisters perform well. The site is
closed. The creation of this permanent wildlife preserve has the
opportunity to provide a long-lasting legacy to protect the public from
disturbance of the waste, as well as providing this buffer from the
waste itself, short of creating the Yucca Mountain God that strikes you
down, we think this legislation has far ranging capability.

The concern I had was this morning, I believe Paul Golan indicated that
they are using the WIPP, numbers from WIPP to determine the number of
acres to be withdrawn. My partner, John Brederhoff, worked for the
Attorney General for New Mexico. The issue there that he found from a
hydraulic standpoint was the oil and gas development in the area, that
it would possibly impact the hydrology and the repository\'s
performance.

Groundwater development was limited. There wasn\'t a big interest in
land development in the area. And, the hydrology and the salt repository
lended itself to creation of a simple square boundary around this.

Now, if we switch to Yucca Mountain, the Department of Energy has
invested quite a bit of money in Nye County drilling wells and the
hydrology. For the Board\'s information, Nye County has applied for
water rights to extract 20,000 acre feet of water in the area, in the
Ash Meadows area. BLM is currently looking at liquidating several
hundred acres of land in this area.

Now, our hydraulic studies show that this level of groundwater
development could certainly encroach upon this legislative boundary as a
buffer, particularly it could certainly impact the gradients and make
sharper gradients from the Yucca Mountain site down gradient. You also
look at we\'ve got this porous volcanic rock system on the high-level
waste, very different from what we have at WIPP.

We are also concerned that this development will impact the lower
carbonate aquifer system, which provides a barrier to radionuclides
because it has an upper gradient in it.

So, here\'s an opportunity for this legislation to provide an adequate
buffer, not necessarily a simple square buffer over the repository to
consider the hydrology and actual site conditions, and don\'t just apply
the WIPP conditions to this site.

If you look at the Nevada Test Site, adequate boundary was defined there
to contain the underground nuclear waste events. We have no trouble
taking public lands for baseball parks.

So, when we look at a high-level nuclear waste project, here is an
opportunity to actually do the science, and we encourage DOE to do the
science and look at the data they\'ve already paid us to do, as well as
their staff, to define a boundary that would make sense, and provide
this long-lasting legacy of protection to the public.

Thank you. I don\'t know if DOE can address the use of the WIPP data or
not, whether there\'s scientific basis to that or not.

GARRICK: Russ, do you want to try that?

DYER: Russ Dyer, DOE.

I think what Paul was talking about was the WIPP precedent, the
legislative approach. I know that we looked at developing, as we looked
at potential areas, we did look at what was needed to provide a
protective boundary, based on a technical basis, not just on a precedent
of that\'s what was done at WIPP.

GARRICK: Thank you. All right, the next name on the list is Charlie
Fitzpatrick, and it\'s shown here as an attorney for the State of
Nevada.

FITZPATRICK: Thank you. This will be brief, and I think Mr. Kouts would
probably be the person, and I think he\'s left, so this could turn into
comments instead of a question.

But, first, his presentation focused on the TAD system proposed, would
simplify DOE operations, minimize handling of\--minimize fuel handling
at the repository, reduce worker radiation exposure at DOE facilities,
reduce complexity and cost at DOE facilities. But, there would be a
concomitant transfer to the utilities, to some 80 locations around the
country, to purchase equipment, hire people, train them, quality
assurance, and so on, to buy the TADs, pack them, send them off.

So, I just wondered if any study or analysis has been done, and if it
will be publicly available as to what, either individually or
cumulatively, the cost burden placed on the utilities around the country
would be if this change were made, where that responsibility was moved.

The second question is a totally different arena. Mr. Kouts indicated
that all the TADs would be sent by rail to Yucca, and, therefore, the
rail spur would have to be in operation for the TADs to get there. After
DOE published its FEIS, it published what it called Supplement Analysis,
in which it predicted that for some years, it would be likely that waste
would have to be brought to Yucca without benefit of the spur being
complete. And, so, it discussed rail as far as near Yucca, Caliente or
some other location, followed by transfer to truck, and taken the rest
of the way.

And, so, I guess the question is if what Mr. Kouts said is correct, or
stays the same, would not the transfer of the first TAD to Yucca be
delayed for years by the anticipated circumstance of a spur, rail spur,
not being available for years after the license is received?

GARRICK: Thank you. Well, your questions will certainly be a part of the
record.

Are there any other\--yes, a former colleague?

PARIZEK: Richard Parizek, a citizen and taxpayer.

I had a question that was going to be to Director Golan about the
funding status currently related to the Science and Technology Program,
and maybe Russ Dyer could respond to that. In the natural systems area,
a number of projects were funded, but only at half rate. And, a question
was whether or not that has been resolved or not, because some of those
projects are quite important to the list that you had cited earlier this
morning, and at half funding, some of them wouldn\'t really get anywhere
at all.

So, that\'s one question, has there been any motion on adding to the
missing money for those projects?

GARRICK: I don\'t know. Russ, do you want to comment?

DYER: I\'ll take a shot at it. This is Russ Dyer, DOE.

We have looked at the portfolio of S&T programs for this year. For some
of the programs, we have plussed up the funding. For a lot of the
programs, we\'re still hanging on, and have not provided any additional
funding, that\'s true for most of the natural systems work. We\'re
looking at we\'ve got an awful lot on our plate, and what do we
absolutely have to do this year.

PARIZEK: Continuing then. Maybe the start-up on some projects, you could
do paperwork or maybe some calculations, but anything that requires
field activities, or instrumentation, might get deferred, and may not be
a good use of that money if they start something, but can\'t ever finish
it. But, you mentioned this morning that there were important issues
that you recommended go forward, and one of them was the work on
radionuclide transport, colloid transport, and I would think both on
saturated zone and unsaturated zone, secondary minerals and matrix
diffusion. I would assume that that work, if it\'s ongoing or needs to
be ongoing, would only come through the Science and Technology, a
national program source of funding.

DYER: No, I don\'t think that\'s necessarily true. I mean, some of the
division of work between us and the repository program, we need to
relook at that, a better look at integrating some of those programs. So,
because some work is currently being done in S&T doesn\'t mean that
we\'re not going to pick that up with a baseline program at sometime in
the future.

The programs that you mentioned, those are all very worthy programs, and
if we can figure out a way to continue them, I mean, nobody wants to
kill them, we might have to put them on back burner for a few months,
but everybody believes that certainly come the, say, the \'07 budget
time, that there will be a S&T program that will continue these kinds of
work. We\'ve got a sticky wick in here for the remaining few months of
fiscal \'06.

PARIZEK: I asked the questions mainly as an outside observer trying to
keep track of the Program. We don\'t always know what\'s being worked on
or not being worked on. That\'s the purpose of those questions.

John Garrick, you also mentioned that at least some conceptual modeling
need not go forward or begin a low priority, a statement I think you
made this morning. And, I would submit that, for instance, the role of
faults in Yucca Mountain, in terms of potential fast pathways that might
cause flow lines to deviate further west than was originally suggested
by some early computer runs, and that was information shown to me for
the first time last summer, I guess it was at the Devil\'s Hole
workshop, two workshops ago, showed that maybe a role of higher
permeability pathways could shift the flow lines to the west, and that
would shorten transit times compared to a southeasterly alluvial route.
And, given that, that\'s a conceptual, a difference, quite a significant
conceptual difference.

So, I would submit that there is an example where conceptual model
refinements may not be trivial, or shouldn\'t be relegated to the back
burner issue, particularly as it relates to transport and the role of
faults. There is a Nye County initiative to look at locating perhaps
horizontal drill holes to look into faults, to add to further
understanding that. So, if that work gets done, maybe it will address
this point.

Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you very much.

All right, any final thoughts, comments, by any of the Board members or
the Staff? I think we have had a very good day. I think we have made
progress, which is what we are looking for, and I think the time has
come where we can adjourn the meeting for the day.

Thank you very much.

(Whereupon, at 4:55 p.m., the meeting was adjourned.)