UNITED STATES

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

WINTER BOARD MEETING

January 24, 2007

Atrium Suites

4255 South Paradise Road

Las Vegas, Nevada 89109

[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

[SENIOR PROFESSIONAL STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. Carlos A.W. Di Bella

Dr. Daniel Fehringer

Dr. Bruce Kirstein

Dr. David Diodato

Dr. Daniel Metlay

Dr. John Pye

[NWTRB STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. William D. Barnard, Executive Director

Joyce Dory, Director of Administration

Karyn Severson, Director External Affairs

Linda Coultry, Program Support Specialist

Davonya Barnes, Staff Assistant

[I N D E X]{.underline}

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Opening Remarks**

B. John Garrick, Chairman,

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

**OCRWM Program and Project Overview**

Edward F. Sproat, III, Director,

Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. . . 11

**Ongoing and Planned Activities of the Office of the Chief Scientist -
Baseline Program**

J. Russell Dyer, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

**.** Scientific Investigations Supporting

the License Application

**.** Infiltration Studies

**.** Seismic Ground Motion Studies

**.** Volcanic Hazard Assessment Update

**.** Cl-36 Investigation

**.** Fostering Intellectual Continuity From

Repository Licensing to Closure

**Ongoing and Planned Activities of the Office**

**of the Chief Scientist - Science and Technology**

John Wengle, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

**.** Source Term

**.** Natural Barriers

**.** Materials Performance

**Lunch** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

**Ongoing and Planned Activities of the**

**Office of the Chief Engineer**

Paul G. Harrington, DOE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

**.** Status of Surface and Underground

Facility Design

**.** Surface Facility Operational Design

and Capacity

**Waste Management Planning and Integration**

Christopher A. Kouts, DOE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

**.** Status of the Transport, Aging, and

Disposal Canister

**.** Status of Operational Integration from

Receipt to Emplacement

**.** Total System Model

[I N D E X]{.underline}

(Continued)

[PAGE NO]{.underline}

**Yucca Mountain Transportation Strategic Plan**

J. Gary Lanthrum, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

**.** Feasibility and Impact Assessment

of Identified Routes

**.** Status of Infrastructure Acquisition

**Yucca Mountain Site Operations**

Scott A. Wade, DOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

**.** Status of Site Water, Power,

Infrastructure and Tunnel Access

**Public Comment Period** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

**Adjourn Public Meeting** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

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

8:00 a.m.

GARRICK: Good morning. On behalf of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review
Board, I\'d like to welcome all of you, and thank you for attending our
first meeting in 2007.

As you know, our meetings tend to begin with introductions, and I\'d
like to go through that process with you right now, and I\'ll start with
myself. My name is John Garrick. I\'m Chairman of the Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board. My professional life these days is primarily
that of a consultant, primarily on the application of the risk sciences
to a variety of industries. My background and areas of interest are the
risk sciences, with emphasis on quantitative risk assessment, and
nuclear science and nuclear engineering. Among my Board assignment is to
have the technical lead on dose assessment.

Now, as I introduce the Board members, I ask that they raise their hands
when their name is called. First, Mark Abkowitz. Mark is Professor of
Civil Engineering and Management Technology at Vanderbilt University,
and Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management
Services. Mark chairs the Board\'s Panel on System Integration, and is
the Board\'s technical lead on transportation.

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

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

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

George Hornberger. George is the Ernest H. Ern Professor of
Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia. I think he\'s enjoying
this year at Berkeley on a sabbatical. His research interests include
catchment hydrology, hydrochemistry, and transportation of colloids in
geological units and media. George co-chairs the Board\'s Panel on
Postclosure Repository performance.

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

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 co-chairs the Board\'s Panel on Postclosure
Repository Performance.

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

William Murphy. Bill is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Geological and Environmental Sciences at California State
University-Chico. His areas of expertise are geology, hydrogeology, and
geochemistry. Bill is the Board\'s technical lead on the Source Term.

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

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 clear about the distinction between member opinions and
official Board positions. Board meetings are spontaneous by design. We
express ourselves quite freely, and we want to be able to continue to do
that. So, when Board members speak extemporaneously, it is important to
realize that we are speaking on our own behalf, and not on behalf of the
Board. We\'ll do our best to identify what represents Board positions.

Before we begin today\'s discussion, it is my task, my sad task to
acknowledge the passing of two individuals who made substantial
contributions to the program, and to the project over the years.

John Arthur passed away on December 26th after a 27 year career with the
Department of Energy. The Board first heard from John almost four years
ago when he became Deputy Director of the Office of Repository
Development. Actually, I had connections with John much before that in
the nuclear weapons business, particularly with respect to nuclear
weapon safety, and with respect to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
John\'s considerable acumen in managing an extremely challenging
national program, and the unflagging enthusiasm and energy that he
brought to the public service will indeed be missed.

Bo Bodvarsson passed away on November 29th, this past year. Bo authored
his first Yucca Mountain technical paper in 1986. His subsequent
research supported fundamental field investigations and lead to
substantially improved conceptual and numerical models of fluid flow and
radionuclide transport in fractured unsaturated rocks, earning him the
respect of his associates and colleagues. We will remember Bo for his
leadership and for his exceptional ability to understand, and, more
importantly, to explain the relevance of complex hydrologic phenomena.

Both John and Bo will be remembered as friends and for their personal
and professional contributions.

Today, the Board looks forward to a broad and thorough project overview
and status report from managers of the Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management. The presentations begin with Program and Project
Overviews by Ward Sproat, Director of OCRWM. Ward was confirmed Director
of OCRWM by the United States Senate on May 26, 2006. Since his
confirmation, he has announced his intention to submit a license
application for the construction of a repository at Yucca Mountain to
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on or before June 30, 2008. We
appreciate Ward\'s presence and look forward to his remarks.

Following Ward\'s presentation will be a presentation Program Chief
Scientist Russ Dyer on the ongoing and planned activities of his office
that support the project baseline.

After a short break, ongoing and planned activities that support science
and technology, including work on source term, natural barriers, and
materials performance, will be described by John Wengle. After that
talk, we will break for lunch.

Following lunch, Paul Harrington, Chief Engineer of OCRWM, will describe
the ongoing and planned activities of his office, with a focus on
surface and underground facility design, operations, and capacity.

Waste management planning and integration will be the broad focus of
Chris Kouts\' presentation, with particular emphasis on the status of
the transport, aging, and disposal, or \"TAD\" canister concept,
operational integration, and the Total System Model.

Following a short break, Gary Lanthrum will present the Yucca Mountain
transportation strategic plan, including the feasibility and impact
assessment of identified routes and the status of infrastructure
acquisition.

Finally, Scott Wade will discuss Yucca Mountain site operations,
including the status of water, power, infrastructure, and tunnel access.

As usual, following the presentations, we have scheduled time for public
comment, an aspect of our meetings that is extremely important to 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 of the room. 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 is for you to write down your questions
and submit them to either Davonya Barnes or Linda Coultry. They are
seated in the back of the room near the entrance. We will cover as many
questions as we can, time permitting.

Finally, to minimize any interruptions, we would like to ask all of you
to turn your cell phones and pagers to their silent mode.

I\'m pleased to introduce Ward to lead off our discussions. Thank you.

SPROAT: Thank you, John. And, good morning, members of the Board, and
good morning, members of the public.

First, John, thank you very much for your kind remarks about John and
Bo. Their loss is a significant loss to the program, and a shock to all
of us who knew them and valued them, and your taking the time to
recognize them here is very much appreciated. Thank you for doing that.

What I\'d like to do this morning is, as you can tell from the topics
that John talked about that we\'re going to talk about today, this is
not the typical let\'s get down into the detailed science kind of NWTRB
meeting. This is more about the big picture of where we\'re going, key
aspects of the program, how we\'re managing it, the directions we\'re
going to take, and give you an opportunity about how we as the
management team are approaching this program, what we are doing, what
we\'re concerned about, what we\'re really working on, and focusing on.
And, that\'s what I want to do with my presentation kicking off this
morning, kind of giving you the big picture.

And, what I\'m going to do, as I do that\--can I go to the next slide?
What I\'m going to do is just go over and quickly give you a recap of
what I told you at the last meeting. I think that\'s really important
from a big picture standpoint. I want to give you an update on certainty
issues that you are probably either aware of or would certainly like an
update on, things like budget and the EPA standard, and things like
that, just so you\'ve got the latest up to date information that I have
regarding some of these key issues.

And, finally, I want to give you an overview of what I\'ll call the key
areas of senior management attention, the areas that I\'m personally
heavily invested in, and going to be working on very heavily during this
coming year.

Go to the next slide. This is something I showed at the last meeting. No
dates have changed. It\'s been three or four months, we haven\'t changed
any dates. The milestone dates are still the same. And, I think as
you\'ll recall from the conversations we had at the last meeting, key
milestone there are License Application submittal on or before June 30,
2008, with a best achievable\--and I underline the word

again\--best achievable that I talked about at the last meeting, the
beginning in March 2017.

But, those are the key milestones in the project as we have laid them
out. They are based on a minimum construction period of time. In other
words, if you\'ll notice the rail line construction, to meet those dates
is to start October of 2009, that is, implications for design, and
you\'ll be hearing later, I think, that, you know, we\'ve started the
design on that preliminary design.

The environmental impact assessments are going on on that. So, we have
looked at this program from an integrated standpoint, and taken a look
at what we need to make this date happen, you know, with certain
assumptions. And, that\'s our milestone schedule. That\'s the schedule
we\'re programming into the overall program baseline and major
milestones, and we\'re building the cash flow requirements for the
project needed to support that. And, so, we\'re treating this as an
integrated total project, with milestones, schedules, and a lot, a lot
of planning detail behind that. And, you\'ll hear a little bit more
about that later today.

Next? Remember, last time, I talked about the four key strategic
objectives for guiding the program as we move forward. The first one is
about the license application. You\'ll hear more about that a little bit
later today also. But, we are fundamentally, we\'re managing the
licensing process for this, and the development of the license
application fundamentally different than we did before.

We have a number of integrated teams. This is not an exercise like it
was before where contractors were writing things and tossing it over the
wall to DOE, and DOE would come and toss it back. We have integrated
teams of scientists, engineers, licensing engineers, attorneys, working
together in drafting a writing these sections of the license application
on a very detailed schedule, with the engineering inputs, the science
inputs, that are needed to support that schedule planned, mapped out and
being managed with weekly senior management overview meetings. So, this
is being treated as a real project with real deadlines, and real
milestones, and being treated in an integrated way with all the key
players coming together to write this thing, and do it right the first
time, and not have a number of circuitous repetitive iterative processes
put into it.

I\'ll talk a little bit more about what I\'m doing and what some of the
senior management team is doing about that in a few minutes.

The second is about the organization. I\'m also going to talk a lot
about that a little bit later. But, the one piece I\'d like to point out
about this, I talked about the need to build the capability within the
DOE senior management team to carry this program forward, to bring in
the skill sets and the expertise we need to really manage this program
for the long haul. I\'m very proud to announce that on Monday this week,
our new Director of the Office of Quality Assurance started. Is Larry
Newman out there? Larry, could you stand up?

I\'d like to introduce Larry Newman, who is the new Director of the
Office of Quality Assurance at OCRWM. Larry has a very broad and long
experience in the commercial nuclear industry. He\'s held senior reactor
operating licenses for both PWRs and BWRs, has led nuclear operations
training organizations, has led the Nuclear Site Quality Assurance
Organization at TVA, and has extensive nuclear operations training and
quality assurance background. And, so, it\'s that kind of expertise and
experience that we\'re looking to bring into this program to set it up
for long-term success.

So, that\'s just one small piece of what we\'re starting to do under
this strategic objective. But, I wanted to introduce Larry, because
you\'ll have an opportunity, I\'m sure, to meet him and hear from him at
some future meetings.

Next slide, please. The third one we talked about last time was about
the continuing mounting federal obligations associated with the
non-performance of the standard contracts. One of the things I\'d like
to point out is that within this area, there are certain things that my
office can do, and there are certain things we can\'t do. For example
everybody who\'s currently suing the federal government over this, those
negotiations take place between those parties and the Department of
Justice. The Department of Energy doesn\'t play in that, not directly.
We can\'t negotiate that directly. We support DOJ.

But, there are some other things that we\'re working on that we think
may have some potential impact there, but they are in the early stages
of discussion and conceptualization, and I\'m not ready to talk about
those yet.

And, then, finally, the last piece is about transportation. And, the
recognition that we can do a really great repository, come up with a
great design, great license, we can even get it built, but if we can\'t
get anything there, we\'ve just wasted a lot of time and a lot of money.
And, so, the recognition of the transportation is a very key part of
this overall program, and the aspects of it, which are very complex in
terms of planning, route planning, interaction at the state, county,
local levels, emergency responder training, it\'s a major effort for us,
and you will hear a little bit more about that today in terms of how
we\'re moving forward, we\'re putting together a very detailed strategic
plan. We\'re implementing the transportation piece of this project.

Next. Three key update areas. One is legislative proposals. Last
meeting, I talked about the legislative package that the administration
had sent up to Capitol Hill to fix a number of legal and structural
issues associated with the program, things like land withdrawal at the
Nuclear Test Site, Nuclear Waste Fund access, some other things like
that. That legislation died at the end of the last Congress.

We are currently evaluating whether to send another legislative package
up, and what would be in that package. Those discussions are going on. I
anticipate some decisions on that in the first quarter of this year.
Don\'t have any definite dates on that yet, but we are in active
discussions of what we want to do in terms of sending up additional
legislation, and if so, what would be in it.

So, I just want to be clear that that other legislative package that we
talked about last time basically died at the end of the last Congress,
and new legislation, if we send it up, would have to be reintroduced in
this Congress.

Under FY \'07 appropriations, as you know, the federal government is
under a fiscal year from October 1st to September 30th, so we\'re now
four months into FY \'07, and we don\'t have an approved budget. We are
under continuing resolution, which means just keep doing exactly what
you did last year, and you\'ll have exactly the same amount of money as
you had last year.

That continuing resolution expires on February the 15th. There is, I
guess the best way I can describe it, is we are not getting consistent
messages from the Hill as to how this is going to get resolved. It seems
like everybody has got their own opinion. So, I\'m not going to put any
money on this at all, how this is going to come out. But, there\'s a
possibility of\--there\'s some school of thought that says there\'s
going to be continuing resolution for the remainder of the year, and
it\'s going to come out fairly soon.

There\'s another school of thought that says we\'re going to get to the
15th, and there will be another interim continuing resolution bill, and
there\'s some school of thought that says we\'re going to do an omnibus
bill and it\'s going to have a bunch of changes in it, and earmarks.
Nobody knows. There doesn\'t seem to be a consistent message coming back
from our contacts on the Hill. So, the bottom line is just like every
other federal program, we are under continuing resolution to the 15th of
February, and we\'re trying to figure out how much money we actually
will have for the remainder of the year.

Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

I thought you had to be at the lowest of the Congressionally approved
committees, rather than just run on your\--

SPROAT: It depends on how the continuing resolution bill was written.
The continuing resolution bill we\'re operating under right now is
basically exactly what we did, what we were authorized last year.

KADAK: So, no budget cuts for you right now.

SPROAT: As of\--it\'s less than what we asked for in our \'07 budget.
So, from that sense, it\'s a budget cut.

KADAK: Okay.

SPROAT: In terms of what we\'re going to get, I don\'t know.

And, then, finally, on the EPA standard, and just to refresh your
memory, this is the issue where the EPA is required to issue the Yucca
Mountain Environmental Impact Standards, in terms of release limits and
long-term exposure limits. And that draft standard is now in interagency
review, which means the EPA has finished their work in a draft form.
They\'ve sent it out to the various other governmental offices, DOE,
DOJ, OMB, and there are discussions going on on those interagency
reviews right now.

It\'s kind of like the continuing resolution. There\'s not a clear
consensus as to exactly when that final revision to the standard is
going to come out, but I personally expect it to happen in the first
quarter of this year. There\'s an awful lot of people working on it,
trying to resolve issues and get everybody on the same page across the
different organizations of government. But, exactly how long that\'s
going to take, I don\'t know. But, I am expecting it\'s\--if you were to
ask I\'d say the probabilities are its going to happen in the first
quarter of the year, but I\'m not ready to commit to that, because I
can\'t commit to that. I\'m out of the loop at this stage of the game.

So, those are three key issues that are currently going on that, you
know, at this moment that impact the program I thought that would be
appropriate for the Board to understand where they stand.

Can we go to the next slide, please? All right, this is my last slide.
This is the one I\'m probably going to talk the most on, and it\'s about
giving you a sense of what I\'m paying attention to as the Director. Now
that I\'ve been here for seven months, I\'ve learned enough to be really
dangerous about this program, and I\'ve got three specific areas that
I\'m focusing on on a going forward basis, the license application, the
organization, and the Congress. And, I want to talk about those three
areas and how I\'m going to be spending my time in those three areas.

First is around the license application, and when I talk about that, I
really mean the application, the license application, the Supplemental
Environmental Impact Statements, the licensing support network. All of
that is part of delivering the license application. We are doing\--we
have instituted monthly program review meetings. We just had our fifth
since I\'ve been here yesterday. It\'s a half a day meeting, where we go
through with all the senior management team from DOE, BSC, Sandia, USGS,
all the key managers sitting around, and we\'re going through these
projects, where they stand, what the issues are, what are the cost
organizational issues we need to work, and getting them on the table and
working them. We\'re assigning teams to work them, and reporting back to
us.

So, it\'s a whole fundamentally different way of managing this program
than what we\'ve done before. We\'re treating this as an integrated
management team, and the focus on that, license application, and the
SEISs, and the LSN as projects, with project directors and project
schedules and deliverables, are how we are managing this program going
forward. And, that\'s why I feel very confident that we\'re going to
meet that June 30th date, and if not, beat it.

The second area is around strategic licensing decisions. And, this is an
area that I think the Board will be interested in as we get further down
the road this year, and into next year. As I\'ve gotten involved with
the program, what I\'ve recognized is that there were decisions made in
the past, or there were issues where decisions never were made, and
things were just kind of drifting along in terms of, okay, we\'ve done
the science work, we\'ve analyzed the data, we\'ve run the models, and
we\'ve identified issues. And, obviously, as this Board is very well
aware of, around all of the issues with some of the time frames we\'re
talking about, there are great uncertainty bands around some of the
issues. And, so, what position the program and the project is going to
take in the license application around some of these issues, how we
address the uncertainties, how we take some of these what we\'ve learned
from the science, and incorporate it into the design, how we are going
to structure the license application to reflect what we know, with
varying degrees of uncertainty, and the design approaches you want to
take to address those, there\'s some very key licensing and strategic
decisions that are needed associated with that.

And, so, what we have done is we have put together a strategic licensing
team that I share with people from both inside the program, with people
from outside the program, who have real world NRC licensing expertise,
and not just people who, like me, who licensed stuff 30 years ago,
but\--or 20 years ago, but people who have been actively involved in
risk informed regulation, which Part 63 is, and more up to date
licensing activities, where the licensing team and the design teams will
bring issues to us, and we will debate them and we\'ll make decisions
about the positions we\'re going to take in that license application.

So, my purpose in sharing that with you is to let you know that in terms
of senior management involvement oversight in terms of key decisions
that are being made about how this repository is going to be designed,
how it\'s going to be built, how we think it should be licensed, that\'s
going on now, and it will continue to go on over the next two years as
we move through finalizing the license application.

The second area is around the organization. And, I think I told you at
the last meeting, and I am very serious about this, that while that
license application is priority number one, this is priority number 1A,
and it\'s about setting this organization up, the DOE and the program
organization up for long-term success. It\'s not just about getting the
license application and saying hey, great job, and then walking out the
door. This is about making sure that this program has the capability of
designing, licensing, building, and operating this repository for the
long haul. And, it has a number of different issues associated with it,
and aspects to them. I just want to touch upon them very briefly.

One is around business processes. Now, you might say why should we care
about business processes within the federal government. Well, I think a
number of you have been involved in the industry and involved with
technology long enough to recognize that you have some very smart
people. But, if your processes aren\'t top notch, where they\'re in
control, you\'re getting good data, you are controlling it, you are able
to retrieve it, you are able to manage it, then you\'re going to have
problems. And, so, we\'re taking a look at what I call the key business
processes of how this program does business, configuration management,
data management, document control and document management, which from my
taking a look at it, with some other people looking at it, it\'s
working, but boy, is it inefficient. And, it is byzantine. And, it is
fragmented.

And, so, if we think we\'re going to make this program set up for
long-term success, we\'ve got to figure out how to do that, using
today\'s standards, today\'s technology, and make it simpler, so that
when people, you know, if you come back and ask me, you know, show me a
dataset, it doesn\'t take five people five days to find it. You know,
you can press a button, and print it out. So, we have a long way to go
there. But, that whole issue of business process analysis, business
process modernization and streamlining, and getting our key business
processes in control is what this is all about.

Staffing. I talked about it the last time. I\'ll keep talking about it
every time we get together. It\'s about making sure that this
organization has the skills and competencies in it for long-term
success. And, so, what we\'re doing right now is I\'ve had everybody in
my organization, as of Monday this week, it was due, give me a one page
summary of their education and their experience. I needed an experience
inventory of, you know, who have I got on this program and what\'s their
background and experience. That\'s never been done before. So, part of
this is understanding what we\'ve got in the organization, what their
background, skills, and education are.

The next piece is taking a look at what the gaps are between what the
organization needs to look like three years, five years out, what the
skill sets are that it needs versus the skill sets it has, and then
identifying those gaps and then targeting those gaps to be filled
through recruitment and hiring, and to go after that aggressively. And,
DOE has not done that very well in the past. It just hasn\'t. It hasn\'t
been a priority.

You know, obviously, there are other issues under this also, like
succession planning. There are a lot of people whose\--in this program
is the same as mine, and the idea of getting it set up for long-term
success, with younger people coming in, is very, very important.

The third area is management development, and this isn\'t about well,
okay, the current DOE, in general, government approach in general, is,
you know, there\'s a suite of courses out there, you can look them up
and you go on the computer into computer based training, this is not
about that. This is about being very clear about the management team and
the leadership team for this program in the future, understanding
today\'s business, understanding the industry, understanding the
requirements of an NRC licensee, and being able to manage effectively
towards that.

So, we\'re doing things like we\'re bringing mentors in from outside,
from the industry, to come in and work next to my management team in a
mentoring role, to kind of accelerate the knowledge and experience
influx into the organization. We\'re going to be setting up rotational
assignments where maybe two, three, four week things, where senior
managers and supervisors from my team go out and they go live in a
nuclear power plant for a month, a good nuclear power plant for a month,
and follow people around and just see how it operates. This is about a
little more thinking outside the box, but accelerating the learning
process within the organization about what they need to look like, how
they need to act, and what the organization needs to look like for
long-term success.

Along that, that last piece is around the culture, and there are two key
areas around the culture that I want to talk about. And, in the future,
I hope we\'ll have the opportunity to talk to the Board about quality in
more detail. But, you know, this program has a history of issues around
its quality assurance program, and I\'ve spent a lot of time reading the
outside reports, the inside reports, condition reports, and I think
I\'ve got a pretty good understanding of the evolution and the root
causes of what went on.

And, all I\'m going to say about it right now is that now that I\'ve got
my three headed quality management team, with Larry Newman on board for
us, and his counterpart from BSC, and the counterpart from Sandia, I\'m
going to be working very closely with those three people about
overhauling the quality assurance program in all three organizations,
overhauling, and not overhauling the implementing procedures, but a
major cultural intervention across the entire program that I\'m going to
be personally involved with in going out and talking to everybody on
this program about the expectations and what the price of the mission is
in terms of quality expectations, if they want to continue to work on
this program. That\'s one of the root causes of the problems it\'s had
in the past.

DOE senior management hasn\'t been involved, hasn\'t been setting the
expectations across the program, and they\'ve been kind of insular
within their own little DOE house. Not any more. If you want to work on
the program and you\'re working for me, you\'re going to meet our
standards around quality expectations. And, that\'s going to be a very
heavily\--that\'s going to take up a lot of my time in this coming year.

Somewhat associated with that, but also a separate focus, is the
corrective action program, another process within the program that has
had chronic problems in terms of its effectiveness and its ability to
get fixed. And, the difference now is the senior management team across
the program is focused on this issue. We\'ve put together a single
corrective action request that brings in all of the myriad, a couple
hundred CRs that have been written over the years on the corrective
action program, and Paul Golan, my Deputy, and Scott Wade, who is our
sustaining sponsor, and we are working together across the program to
fix this once and for all, because it\'s an underpinning and a base of
having a strong nuclear culture, and continuously improving and learning
organization. So, that\'s getting a lot of senior management attention
at this stage of the game. So, that\'s about the organization.

The last piece I want to talk about is the Congress. As you know, the
Congress, we have a brand new Congress, we have a lot of new members.
And, what I started to realize as I, right before Christmas, I sat down
and said I want to understand the nuclear waste fund. You know, I\'ve
heard a lot about it. People, you know, keep saying things about it,
does the money exist, the money is not there, where does the money go? I
don\'t know the answer to those questions. So, I sat down with people
who run it, and it took me an hour plus to start to understand it.

Now, okay, I\'m not the sharpest guy in the room, but, you know, I
figure if it takes me over an hour to kind of start to get it, how many
people out there don\'t get it, particularly, how many people in
Congress don\'t get it and don\'t understand it. Plus, when you add in
the fact there\'s new members, there\'s new staff, there\'s turnover in
the staff, when you recognize that this program, from both an
appropriations standpoint and an enabling legislation standpoint, is so
dependent on Congress for its future success, you have a Congressional
staff that really doesn\'t understand the legal construct of the
program, how it was set up, why it was set up, the legal construct for
how it\'s supposed to be funded, you won\'t be successful.

So, there\'s a major piece of what I need to do this coming year in
terms of educating the new members of Congress, the staffs, some of the
existing members of Congress and their staffs, about how we got to where
we are, why we are where we are, the nuclear waste fund, how it\'s set
up, and how it\'s going to be needed in the future to make this program
go forward.

And, then, finally, the last piece is about building credibility on the
Hill. I\'ve met with a number of senators of congressmen and their
staffs from both Houses, and I can tell you that there is bipartisan
support for this program up on Capitol Hill in both Houses of Congress,
absolutely. And, bipartisan, by very senior people on both sides of the
aisle in both Houses.

Their biggest problem has been that this program, the Department of
Energy has not given them great confidence of the Department\'s ability
to pull this program off. And, so, it\'s incumbent on me and how me and
my management team, how we manage this program and start delivering and
doing what we said we were going to do, absolutely critical to building
credibility up on Capitol Hill so the people are not only willing to
listen to what we have to say as we try and educate them, but they\'re
willing to do something about it. So, that\'s where I\'m going to be
spending also a lot of my time in the coming year.

So, that\'s really the message I wanted to deliver in terms of, you
know, management focus areas and key issues, and I hope that gives the
Board a little more sense about where we\'re trying to go with the
program. So, with that, John, I\'ll open it up to questions.

GARRICK: Andy, do you want to start the process?

KADAK: Yes. Kadak, Board.

I was very intrigued by your organizational plans, and maybe this is a
good opportunity for you to perhaps comment on Commissioner
McGaphigan\'s (phonetic) comment about taking this project away from DOE
and putting it into a quasi government corporation of some sort, which
has been discussed for many, many years, as you know. But, do you feel
that your approach here might address some of those concerns?

SPROAT: Yes, I do. I guess about two months before I got confirmed, I
sat down with Commissioner McGaphigan, because I\'ve known him for quite
a while from some other projects, and he expressed to me a number of the
concerns that he expressed in that interview that he did.

I would like to point out, though, depending on which paper you read his
interview in, there were certain comments that were left in and certain
comments that were left out. And, from the LJ article, which I read
yesterday, I noticed there were two things left out of that article. One
was Commissioner McGaphigan did say he felt that Yucca Mountain was
licensable, and the second one was he felt that the senior management
team now in charge of this program was the best it\'s ever had, and has
a chance for success. That wasn\'t in the LJ article, but I just wanted
to point that out.

In terms of\--but, the concerns he has in terms of some of the
management challenges and continuity of leadership challenges that this
program has had, because of the way it\'s structured, he\'s not the only
person who has expressed those same concerns.

I would say, however, that there are a number of issues that are broader
than just that associated with this. And, quite frankly, just the
creation of another quasi governmental agency will not fix those
problems. So\--and, that\'s probably as far as I want to go with this. I
think Commissioner McGaphigan had a lot of, you know, had a number of
very good points that are valid, and that how we\--and, some of those
issues will need to be addressed for the long-term success.

GARRICK: Other questions? Yes.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Ward, I want to compliment you for the description of the management
issues that are being given your attention. I think they\'re right on
target. I just wonder if at this late date, and it is\--this is a
project that has been underway for quite a long time\--is this too late,
too little, too late?

SPROAT: I don\'t think so. And, I\'ll tell you why. When you take a look
at\--first of all, let me say there are a lot of very good people on
this program, both within DOE and the contract organizations. I\'m very
pleased with the management team now in place at BSC, and the management
team at Sandia. I think the senior management teams there have the right
mindset, have the right vision to drive this program forward.

Building an organization for the long-term success of the program is a
long-term effort. However, for the people we have in place in the
program right now for where we are in terms of completing the
preliminary design, doing the license application, and defending it over
the next three, four, five years, I think we\'ve got the right people in
place. And, during that period of time, it gives us the opportunity to
further build this organization, DOE organization, you know, bring in
new people from the outside, develop the skills and competencies of the
work force and the management team, and set it up for long-term success
for the next phase of the project, which would be construction. So, I
don\'t think it\'s too little, too late.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Let me just ask one very specific question, and this relates to the
interaction with the utilities and the ongoing litigation. The show
stopper in this whole process that is associated with transportation
continues to be out there as an issue. How are you going to improve\--I
don\'t see on the list, although it may be buried in one of the items
listed here\--how are you going to improve on the communications with
utilities with that litigation hanging over\--

SPROAT: I have a judgment that for reasons that aren\'t quite obvious to
me, that in the past, certain people have hid behind that as an excuse
why there can\'t be dialogue and discussions with the utilities around
this. I don\'t buy it, you know, because I\'m now\--I have been on one
side of the argument, and now I\'m on the other. And, you know, what\'s
clear to me is I personally, and my organization, can\'t negotiate
settlements for those lawsuits. That\'s DOJ\'s job. I can\'t\--that\'s
not our job. We support them when they ask for the help.

But, for where we are right now, for every single one of those sites
where either spent fuel or high level waste exists, my organization
needs to know what the plant layout is, what the equipment is, what the
capabilities are in terms of, you know, if we want to take the MPCs out
and move them, or if we need to repackage things in the TADs at the
site, what are the capabilities, what can they do, what can\'t they do,
we need to understand all that. And, the only way we understand that is
going and sitting down and visiting with them. And, whether they\'re
currently involved in a lawsuit or not shouldn\'t matter at all. And,
from my standpoint, it doesn\'t matter. We\'re going.

LATANISION: So, meeting are underway, or you\'re going to implement on
that basis?

SPROAT: Yes.

LATANISION: And, one final question. This is Latanision, Board.

What were the legislative proposals that you had sent up last year that
have been tabled that you\'re revisiting?

SPROAT: There was a relatively lengthy set of provisions in that
legislation, but there were a couple key ones. One was land withdrawal
at the Nuclear Waste Test Site. But\--normally has control of that land,
but it hasn\'t been withdrawn for future public use. Before the NRC can
give us a license to construct, that land has to be withdrawn to
show\--the Department of Energy can show that it has permanent control
of that land site for in perpetuity.

There is the issue of the nuclear waste fund, where all the current
revenues coming into the nuclear waste fund, and the expenses are scored
as deficit spending. So, in other words, whatever money gets
appropriated to me for the repository program is kind of like
independent of the \$750 million a year that are coming in from the
utilities to pay for this program.

Getting that fixed is another issue. And, there were about five or six
others that were of different levels of legal detail that I just can\'t
remember.

LATANISION: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

I wanted, Ward, to echo Dr. Latanision\'s comments about the effort
you\'re making to re-invent the way in which the program is being
operated. One of the aspects that I notice is missing, and I would like
you to comment on, is the lack of a senior management advisory council
that would be made up of experts and representatives from fields such as
utilities, cask manufacturers, transportation carriers, logistics
providers, local, state and tribal officials, and even public citizens,
and I was curious if that thought has crossed your mind, and if not, why
not?

SPROAT: The thought has crossed my mind, and it is there, it\'s
not\--didn\'t want to put it up there right now, it\'s not at the top of
my priority list, but it is something I intend to address. The issue,
though, is\--one of the issues is that I need to be clear in my own
mind, before I go and propose that, how it fits in with your role, the
role of, you know, there\'s, I think there\'s a requirement around
independent oversight on the quality assurance side. I\'m still trying
to dig through some of the historical stuff to find out what\'s
required, number one.

But, in terms of an advisory board, I like the idea, but there are
federal laws required that when an advisory board gets set up, how is it
set up, how is it constituted, how are people selected. It\'s not
something that I can just say we\'re going to do it, and I want you,
you, you and you. It\'s a more complex process. So, what I\'d ask you to
do is hold that thought and ask me about it again in about six months.

GARRICK: Howard?

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

I think implied in that strategic licensing decision\'s bullet are some
key technical issues, and I\'m asking basically are you able to spend
enough time on them. For example, one is the criticality issue.

SPROAT: Right.

ARNOLD: And, the current difficulties I think in providing poison in the
TADs, and so forth. Another one is modelling of early failure in the
waste packages. These are real tar babies, and if they don\'t get enough
attention early on, I think they\'re going to bite\--

SPROAT: Well, all I\'d say, Howard, is this is not about solving the
technical issue. What this is is recognizing the current state of the
technology assessment, and the modelling methodologies associated with
it. This program has a number, and it\'s more than ten, issues where
there are varying levels of uncertainty around our understanding of
these various processes over very long periods of time. And, this Board
knows that. I\'m not telling you anything you don\'t know. But, the
point is is that the approach, we are not taking an approach that says
we need to have all of those processes very well understood, with very
narrow bands of uncertainty before we\'re going to submit a license
application. That\'s not required. That\'s not the approach the law or
the regulations require, and we\'re not doing that.

What we need to be able to do in the license application is to say very
clearly here is what we know, here are the uncertainties around it,
here\'s the position we\'re taking relative to its importance, and the
approach that we\'re going to take in the future to further narrow those
uncertainty bands, and how we factor that into our design. That\'s what
we need to do, and we can do that now.

GARRICK: Bill?

MURPHY: Bill Murphy, Board.

I was very interested in your comments under business processes, the
discussion of data management, and in conducting technical review, I\'m
interested in where the data are. And, I\'ve been looking at the
documents that exist. Presently, there\'s quite an enormous suite of
abstractions, technical abstractions, and from those, are derived
technical basis documents that seem to me to capture the technical
information that is likely to be used in support of a license
application. And, I\'m wondering in the context of revisiting data
management, if you foresee updates to those, or revisions to those, or
if that structure is going to continue to be a core of the technical
information you have available.

And, one specific question\--

SPROAT: There\'s two questions. But, go ahead, keep going.

MURPHY: One specific aspect of this is that most of these documents were
published in the 2004 time period, and have a great deal of relevant and
useful information, but they\'re almost exclusively focused on a 10,000
year time period, and I\'m wondering how the variation, or the different
concern about the relevant scales might be addressed.

SPROAT: Okay, that last question first, I\'m going to punt. I\'m not the
right guy to answer that question. Okay? Russ can talk\--ask Russ that
question. Okay? I\'m not the right person. But, let me go back to your
first question, which really had two pieces of the answer. One was
around how you manage and control the data that\'s been collected. And,
right now, that data exists, you know, that data started being collected
20 years ago, and it exists in myriad data bases under different sets of
controls, under different programming languages, and one of the things
that I\'m primarily focused on is getting that all together in a common
up to date database so it\'s easily searchable, easily retrievable, and
it\'s under control, and it\'s consistently applied. That\'s the primary
focus of what I\'m trying to do when I talk about business process.

The second part of your question, though, which is a very appropriate
question, was okay, so you\'ve got all this data that you have
accumulated over the years, what are you doing\--I don\'t want to put
words in your mouth\--but, what are you doing as you build this license
application and updating all the inputs into it, how are you making sure
that data is right. And, we put together, we asked the Sandia management
team to put together their overall plan to make sure that\--because,
they\'re going to be the people who, when we get into defense of the
license application, are going to be up there answering questions about
the AMRs, and the models, and the TSPA results, and all that stuff that
I don\'t fully understand, but they\'re going to be the people who have
to be able to talk about the quality and the level of reviews, and the
validation of that data that\'s come in upon which the license
application is built.

And, they\'ve put together, I believe, a very, very strong plan that
says as we finalize this license application, we finalize the analyses
going into it, we will be able to assure through our independent checks
and certification process that\--and in some cases, rework, like we\'re
redoing on the infiltration model, where we\'re reworking data where the
quality was either, you know, the chain of command was lost and the
control was lost, where we have to redo it, to bring that back in so
that we have a fully validated and defendable basis for the results in
that license application.

So, there\'s a lot of rework going on to make sure that the data that
supports that license application is correct.

GARRICK: All right. Henry and then I\'d like to ask a question before
our time runs out.

PETROSKI: Petroski, Board.

I appreciate your update. It\'s very, very interesting. What interests
me is the culture question. Basically, I wonder how much time do you
expect to spend on this issue? How long do you think it\'s going to take
to change the culture, and how will you know that you\'ve changed it
successfully, or what are your measures of success?

SPROAT: Very good question. Let me answer the third part first. So, how
are you going to know this is successful data? We do annual surveys, and
the survey instruments we\'re using, you know, I did this back in the
private sector, too, and I\'ve been pretty impressed by the thoroughness
of the survey instruments. They\'re benchmarked. They\'re very widely
used. But, the cool thing about them is is that the respondents are
allowed to write in individual comments.

Well, the last survey, which was done, finished in July, there were 487
people who took time to write down specific comments that weren\'t
covered, you know, covered things that weren\'t in the multiple
questions, and, I\'ve read every single one of those. And, what we\'re
doing, for example, is that in DOE, all of my senior management team, we
put together, we\'ve designed a facilitated session where the managers
will be sitting down with their teams over the next four weeks for a
minimum of a two to three hour session, where they\'re going to be
talking about what people told us in the survey, get clear on what they
said, get a sense of is it getting better, is it getting worse, or is it
still staying the same, and get some feedback from that.

And, then, we\'re going to be working as a management team in February
about taking that data back from those feedback sessions, and laying out
more definitively what are we trying to shift the culture from, to where
are we trying to shift the culture to. And, that then gets cranked into
the overall strategic plan for that second strategic objective. It gets
cranked into resurveying on an annual basis, with maybe some spot
surveys on a periodic basis, and maybe a particular organization to see
if there\'s a problem, or things are changing. There\'s ways to measure
this.

And, it\'s been done before. I\'ve done it before. And, your first
question was how much time am I going to be spending on this. About
half. I got the license application process in place. I\'ve got a
management team in place to run that the way I think it needs to be run.
I\'m going to weigh in on some technical issues like there\'s licensing
strategy issues. But, I think that\'s moving the way I want it to move.
The organization is where I\'ll probably be spending half my time.

PETROSKI: Thank you. Follow up just briefly. If there\'s a question of
quality, and if the culture of the organization now is having trouble
with quality\--

SPROAT: That\'s not\--I wouldn\'t say that.

PETROSKI: You wouldn\'t say that?

SPROAT: No, I wouldn\'t say that.

PETROSKI: How would you state it then?

SPROAT: I would say that there is a recognition of the need to do things
right. Some people feel they\'ve gotten mixed messages in the past
about, well, do you what right, or do you want fast, and it\'s not an
either/or, it\'s both, and we need to help educate the management team
about so, what happens in terms of when that dilemma happens, what do
you do about it? Do you ask for help? Well, people don\'t like to ask
for help. It\'s almost like guys not liking to ask for directions.

So, it\'s not an issue of people don\'t care. There\'s a
perception\--there\'s been a history on the program that management says
one thing, but says we really don\'t care about quality, you\'ve got to
go get it done. Which I find very interesting because from what I can
tell, this program really never had a real tight schedule, so how people
were schedule driven, that\'s still a mystery to me. But, that\'s for a
topic for another time.

So, anyway, in terms of driving this issue of quality, I\'m going and
talking to the entire thousand person BSC organization next month for an
hour on just that, and we\'re going to work it.

PETROSKI: Good luck.

GARRICK: Garrick, Board.

Ward, you started off your presentation making reference to implementing
a fundamental integrated approach. Of course, as the Board members have
commented, this is something of good news and of great interest to the
Board. Is the activity you are implementing to manifest that going to
generate some products that are confidence building, that it in fact is
working? And, what I\'m thinking about is functional flow diagrams that
actually show how the functions are performed, and how the preclosure
activities connect with the postclosure activities, and how, in fact,
you have developed a framework that gives you sort of a metric against
which you can assess and measure progress towards indeed a fundamental
approach. Because, we\'ve had difficulty finding documentation that does
reflect that in a convincing manner, documentation of a systems
engineering type.

SPROAT: Your observations of that issue I think are correct in terms of
a lack of that top down driven integrated management approach. One of
those processes, one of those business processes I talked about here is
business planning. Now, you might say why should we care about business
planning? One of the first issues I picked up on that everybody was
willing to tell me about when I got here was we\'re all working to a
different plan. We don\'t have a common plan.

Everybody is making their own decisions about what\'s important, and
they\'re working on their own stuff. The whole concept of business
planning is there is a top down and a bottoms up approach that comes
together where you\'ve got a strategic direction, set from the top,
which is what those four strategic objectives are about, but you\'ve
also got a bottoms up approach of, you know, the tactical aspects of
here\'s what we\'ve got to accomplish that meet those objectives, and
here\'s when we\'re going to do them. And, then, holding people
accountable. And letting everybody in the organization know what their
piece of the plan is. That hasn\'t existed in the past, and that\'s what
we\'re putting in now.

Now, at a higher programmatic level, we are re-baselining the program.
And, what I mean by re-baselining is the top level major milestones,
some of which were up there, there\'s some other internal DOE ones that
weren\'t up there, that results in a, you know, a top down driven set of
schedules and plans to deliver this program on that schedule. That\'s
going on now.

GARRICK: I guess the real question is are there some products being
developed that are confidence building that in fact this approach is
being implemented?

SPROAT: Well, I guess I\'m a little confused. Is your focus on
programmatic management or is it on technical work flow process? In
other words, the process flow through the surface facilities. I\'m not
clear on which area you\'re talking about.

GARRICK: I\'m really talking about what\--I\'m trying to interpret what
you mean by integrated, fundamentally integrated approach, and see if
that matches up with what the Board has been seeking to better
understand. And, that is, how all the pieces and parts are integrated,
and what management tools are being used to measure the level of success
you\'re having.

SPROAT: The answer to your question is yes, we are developing those, and
you\'ll be able to see those as they get further developed.

GARRICK: One final comment that\'s an extension of Henry\'s comment on
culture. And, I was very pleased to see you identify specifics with
respect to cultural issues and cultural changes, such as quality and
corrective action programs. And, I was even more pleased to hear you use
in context the word nuclear culture. I think several of us have been
somewhat critical of the lack of a nuclear culture in this program. And,
I think it\'s evident not only in terms of the management processes and
the preparation of reports, it\'s evident in the population of what I
would call real nuclear experts in some extremely critical areas that
are fundamental. And as you know, this Board stresses fundamental
understanding, and we all have our pet projects in that regard, and mine
is what I would consider to be the absence of fundamental nuclear
chemistry with respect to the development of the source term.

But, I was pleased to hear you comment and to implement activities that
bring project people closer to fuel handling operations, and activities
associated with nuclear power plant operation. And, I think that is very
valuable.

SPROAT: Just one thing I didn\'t mention about that. The Department of
Energy has an agreement with the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations,
which this program has never\--I shouldn\'t say never\--has under
utilized in the past. And, I\'m going down there with a few of my senior
folks, down to Atlanta, next month and we\'re going to really strengthen
that, or leverage our relationship with INPO, as we develop the
organization.

GARRICK: Very good. Andy, did you have\--

KADAK: Kadak, Board. Just a brief question.

How does the lack of a final EPA standard affect the progress of your
program at this point?

SPROAT: It does not. And, the reason it doesn\'t is because we\'re going
to do the analyses to show how the repository responds under\--during
the various lengths of time under the various scenarios, and the EPA
standard, when it comes out, will be the EPA standard. And, so, it comes
down to where we draw the acceptable line on the last graph, on the last
page of the license application\--not quite, but pretty much that. And,
that\'s really the only effect it\'s going to have at this stage of the
game.

KADAK: Thank you.

GARRICK: Any other questions?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Any questions from the staff?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Well, thank you very much.

Okay, I guess we\'re ready for Russ Dyer.

DYER: Good morning.

Next slide, please. There\'s a number of things I want to talk about
today, and we can really kind of break them up into three different
areas. First off, I\'m going to talk about\--this may address I think
part of Bill\'s question to Ward\--scientific investigations supporting
the license application. What\'s driving change that will be captured in
the license application. Where are things changing since the time of the
site recommendation, the 2001-2002 series of documents that we put out
that documented the state of knowledge at that point in time.

Then, I want to talk about four specific areas where there\'s been new
information, knowledge developed, what we\'re getting out of it. The
infiltration studies, you\'re aware that we\'re redoing infiltration.
The infiltration model and analysis, I\'m going to talk about that a
little bit. I\'m going to talk about some of the seismic ground motion
studies and what is driving those seismic ground motion studies, which
is in fact one part of the proposed draft EPA regulation. A volcanic
hazard assessment update, we\'re well on the way to fulfilling some
regulatory commitments we made with the NRC to revisit the almost a
decade old probabilistic volcanic hazard assessment. And, then Chlorine
36 investigations, there was a series of reports that came out in the
summer of 2006, and I just want to give you kind of a brief overview of
what we found to date.

And, then, the last thing I want to talk about, this is a long title,
but it ties into the organizational and cultural element that Ward was
talking about. What are we doing to try to foster continuity and growth
of the intellectual culture community, if you will, from now on into the
future?

So, let\'s go to the first topic, and this is going to be almost
a\--what I\'m going to get to eventually is a long list of things that
are changing. But, first, let\'s go through what are driving the
changes.

Well, the starting point is the technical foundation, which was
documented at the time of the site recommendation and the final
environmental impact statement. And, this is all of the technical basis
documents and technical arguments that fed into the Total System
Performance Assessment. And, some of the significant things that have
changed since the time of the TSPA include changes to some of the
component models based on updated science, and some of these include
infiltration studies, new saturated zone borehole data. Nye County has
some new boreholes, and we have information from those boreholes.

Obviously, changes to the repository design. The incorporation of the
TAD, the transportation, aging and disposal canisters has driven some
fairly major changes into our analysis. Extension of the models for the
post-10,000 year analyses, and I\'ll talk about a fairly major change
this has driven in the seismic scenario class.

At the time of the site recommendation, we excluded seismic features,
events and processes based mainly on low consequences. We can\'t do that
anymore, and what that ends up doing is driving the need to look at
cumulative effects over a long period of time.

And, enhanced treatment of uncertainty, breaking out and being more
explicit about the treatment of both the aleatory and epistemic
uncertainty. And, then, there\'s additional analyses that are related to
the proposed, the draft 10 CFR 63 rule change.

Next slide, please. Okay, in the TSPA-input models and analyses, the
AMRs, the analysis and modelling reports, some of the things that are
expected to change driven by either science updates, requirements for
post-10,000 year analyses, or model improvements, these are general
categories of things that we\'ve kind of lumped together. So, there\'s
new infiltration studies, infiltration, unsaturated zone flow,
calibrated properties, unsaturated zone radionuclide transport,
unsaturated zone transport abstraction, drift seepage abstraction,
multiscale thermohydrology. These are all AMRs that are kind of lumped
together that are driven by one or more of these drivers I\'ve listed at
the top.

We\'ve got new data from the Nye County Early Warning Drilling Program,
and there\'s an update of the regional groundwater flow model. Also, the
hydrogeologic framework, saturated zone flow, saturated zone transport,
saturated zone flow and transport abstraction. These, again, are AMRs
that are driven by changes up here.

Because of the work we\'ve done associated with the update of the
probabilistic volcanic hazard assessment, we\'ve got new igneous data,
new analysis, atmospheric dispersal and deposition of tephra framework
for igneous activity. In the biosphere, we\'ve got new soil input
parameters.

Next slide, please. The design changes, primarily TADs, but some other
design changes you\'ll hear about from Paul Harrington later, and the
requirements for the greater than 10,000 year analyses have driven us to
some changes in the drift scale thermal-hydrologic-chemical seepage
model, in-drift convection and condensation, in-drift precipitates and
salts, the engineered barrier system radionuclide transport abstraction.

And, kind of another category, if you will, dissolved concentration
limits, in-package chemistry abstraction, waste form and in-drift
colloids, and the associated radionuclide concentrations, waste package
inventory allocation.

And, kind of the materials performance arena, stress corrosion cracking
of the drip shield, waste package outer barrier, and stainless steel
structural material, general corrosion and localized corrosion of the
waste package outer barrier, analysis of mechanisms for early waste
package/drip shield failure.

Obviously, I\'m not going to spend any time\--almost each one of these
things could be a topic of a pretty lengthy and very interesting
presentation. But, I am going to spend some time about this one a little
later, and that\'s seismic consequence abstraction, and the drift
degradation analysis. I\'m going to be at a pretty high level, but I do
want to talk about what happens when you need to look at the cumulative
consequences of a very long period of time.

And, the number of waste packages hit by igneous intrusion. This is
driven in part by design, and in part by new information from the
volcanism studies.

First, let me now I want to shift and talk specifically about the
infiltration studies. So, I\'m going to spend about three slides here
kind of summarizing where we are on the infiltration studies. And, I
think everybody is aware of what drove the need to revisit infiltration,
and in 2005, we chartered Sandia\--this is before they became the lead
lab\--but, Sandia was charged with assembling a team to develop a
replacement infiltration model. And, that infiltration model is being
documented. There\'s a complete revision to the model that will come out
in this analysis and modelling report, and we\'re scheduled to put that
out this summer.

The preliminary results from this model indicate that the new
infiltration rates are somewhat higher than the previous infiltration
model result, but they fall within the range of recharge estimates for
groundwater basins in Nevada.

Next slide, please. And, let me tell you where I get that conclusion
from. Here is a graph, and on the X axis is precipitation in millimeters
per year. It goes from zero to 700 millimeters per year. And, the Y axis
is a log scale, but it is plotting infiltration or recharge in
millimeters per year. So, .1, 1, 10, 100, 1000. And, there\'s a number
of different techniques for making the correlation between precipitation
and infiltration, going back to the Maxey Eakin technique developed here
in Nevada in 1950, which is this blue line, which has a number of step
functions in it, if you will.

There are different methods, the chloride mass balance method,
groundwater, water balance model, all of which have different symbols on
here. But, for the new infiltration model, we\'re looking at three\--the
present day climate, which is the red dots, generally fall in here; the
monsoon climate model, which is the green sideways diamonds, and you see
them primarily in this region here; and then the glacial transition
climate, which is blue triangles, and they generally fall up in here.

Now, how does\--and, you can see that for all of these techniques, they
fall roughly in this band here. So, it appears that what is coming out
of the infiltration model is reasonably consistent with other techniques
for trying to get this correlation between precipitation and
infiltration.

Now, how does this compare with the previous model that we had? Well,
for present day climate, the red dots, the mean, it\'s a little hard to
figure out what the mean here is when you\'re looking at a log plot.
Right now, it looks like it\'s about 13.4 millimeters per year. That\'s
about 3.7 times what the old infil. model gave us.

For the monsoon climate, the mean is about 19.8 millimeters per year.
That\'s about 2.3 times what the old infil. model gave us. And, for the
glacial transition climate, that\'s the blue triangles in here, the mean
is about 30.5 millimeters per year. That\'s about 2.3 times what the old
infiltration model gave.

Next slide, please. Yes, sir?

KADAK: Can you say why there\'s such differences from the old to the
present day?

DYER: Yes. Next slide, please.

KADAK: Okay.

DYER: There\'s a couple of things that I think\--the models are slightly
different, and there\'s a slightly different treatment of the data. I
mean, we built a new model from essentially the ground up. When we look
at the new model, the most important parameters are soil depth, soil
water-holding capacity, and precipitation. I don\'t think you would get
the same list of most important parameters in the old infil. model.

The differences can be attributed in part to the following. There\'s a
more thorough treatment of uncertainties associated with soil and rock
properties, especially in the soil depth, the soil hydraulic properties,
near-surface bedrock permeability.

One of the major changes between the old infil. model and the new MASSIF
model is that the new model does not account for evapotranspiration from
bedrock below the soil zone. It accounts for evapotranspiration down
through the soil zone, but not in the bedrock like root zones and
fractures in the bedrock. And, that\'s because we didn\'t have
sufficient data. When we went back and looked at it, we did not judge
that we had sufficient data to really come up with a defensible estimate
for that. But, in total, we think the approach yields reasonably
conservative estimates of the infiltration.

Now, what\'s the impact of this? Well, because infiltration sets at the
top of a long series of processes, culminating eventually in a dose
calculation, it\'s going to lead to revisions in some of these
downstream models, like the unsaturated zone flow and transport model,
drift seepage abstraction model, the multi-scale thermal hydrology
model, and, of course, TSPA. And, our current schedule is to complete
all of this AMR and all of the documentation associated with it by June
of this year.

Let me go now to seismic studies. And, there\'s a couple of things I
want to talk about in the seismic arena, and we\'re going to talk about
both preclosure seismic applications, and postclosure, those things that
are required to support design under 10 CFR 63. We\'re\--somewhat
different than I think the nuclear industry has experienced to date.

One of the things that we need to do is provide a seismic hazard curve
for the surface facilities area to be used in a probabilistic analysis
demonstrating preclosure performance, consistent with the requirements,
these specific requirements of 10 CFR 63.

We need to update the preclosure ground motions to reflect additional
geotechnical data for the surface facilities area and repository block.
Some of that information we\'ve already gathered, some we are in the
process of gathering, and I\'ll talk about that.

Continue geotechnical investigations to enhance the confidence in the
surface facility area properties for licensing defense. These would be
things that are not necessarily available for the time of license
application, but will be available in a licensing defense

Some of the things that are being done to update the preclosure seismic
ground motions is to incorporate additional geotechnical data collected
since 2001. There\'s quite a bit of it. Bring this into a seismic hazard
curve for the surface facilities area, and incorporate approaches to
reasonably bound extreme ground motion at Yucca Mountain.

You remember probably several years ago, some of our seismic analysis
using existing process and approach drives you to results that seem to
be physically unrealistic, and how to deal with that has been a major
challenge. All of this is going to be documented in a revision to this
Analysis and Modelling Report.

Now, what\'s going on in the realm of geotechnical testing? What\'s
going on? Well\--I\'m sorry, next slide. Yes. It will support licensing
defense. One of the major things we\'re doing is boreholes, additional
boreholes in the surface facility area. Once we got the new
configuration of surface facilities, and the layout for those
facilities, we need to get site specific information for that layout.
And, we\'ve got a program underway to provide that information. A large
part of that program is the boreholes and the downhole tests in those
boreholes. And, that will be going on through the summer.

This will facilitate additional downhole velocity testing. To complement
this, we\'ve had a program for looking at spectral analysis of surface
waves for some time, but will be expanding that survey to include the
update surface facility area.

We\'ll be doing additional downhole velocity surveys in existing
boreholes on the repository block. This is to help us get the seismic
response better understood. Doing dynamic property testing of larger
alluvium and tuff samples to better understand size effects, and doing
in situ dynamic property testing of alluvium.

Next slide, please. Now, in postclosure, a different set of issues and
problems. One of the first things that we need to do is because of
design change, the incorporation of the TAD canister and overpack into
the disposal system. We need to explicitly represent that. And, then,
because of the need to accommodate the very long time period that is
covered by the draft EPA regulation, we can\'t just screen out seismic
consequences based on low consequence, but, rather, must accommodate
them, and not just once, but look at what happens as the cumulative
effects of multiple seismic effects over a very long period of time.

So, not only do you have the seismic effects taking place, but you\'ve
also got corrosion effects going on and the accumulation of rockfall in
the drifts. I\'m going to show you a cartoon in a minute that kind of
shows the progression in time. And, we need to look at other failure
modes for both the waste package and the drip shield, rupture of the
outer corrosion barrier of the waste package, rupture of the drip shield
plates, buckling of the drip shield framework, the possibility that some
part of the system may lose its functional capability due to primarily
cumulative seismic effects.

And, as I said earlier, a big part of this is looking at the cumulative
effects from multiple events.

Let\'s go to the next slide, please. Now, there\'s a number of things
that get incorporated here. I mean, we\'ve got the corrosion models
going on, but kind of in the background at each time step on the
analysis. But, what needs to be incorporated is what\'s happening
associated with seismic effects.

So, in the early stages, which might be out here before you really have
much rubble accumulated around the waste package, looking explicitly at
what might happen due to ground motion, where the waste package would be
banging into the drip shield or bouncing up and down on the pallet,
which can induce damage which might lead to enhanced failure modes in
the future, and I\'ll say corrosion, could lead to an actual break at
some point, too, over time, as we have both just rattling of rock in the
crown, and perhaps seismically induced damage, you\'re going to start
accumulating material surrounding the drip shield and waste package.

And looking at how this rubble is going to change the functional
capability of both the drip shield and the waste package, at very long
periods of time, hundreds of thousands of years in the future, you have
a substantial\--our modelling shows a substantial degradation of the
drift. And, how does that change the seepage in the near field of the
waste package? How does it change the corrosion environment on the waste
package? And, then, finally, out here, you\'ve got essentially loss of
any functional capability of the waste package to contain waste.

Next slide, please. And, this is just the words that I said on the
previous slide.

Next slide. Now, let\'s turn to the volcanic hazard assessment. In 1996,
we did a probabilistic volcanic hazard assessment using formal expert
elicitation process, and right now, it provides the basis for the
license application.

But, in exchanges with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 1996,
there were questions raised, and we made some regulatory commitments to
go back and address some of those questions. And, we did that by a
program of field studies. We did some aeromagnetic surveys. I\'ll tell
you about those. And, we drilled and sampled some aeromagnetic
anomalies, which could have been buried volcanic occurrences, data
analysis, and we also made a commitment to do an update to the formal
elicited probabilistic volcanic hazard assessment.

The PVHA, as I said, what we will have for the\--to support the LA is
the PVHA that was conducted back in 1996, actually conducted about \'94
through \'96, finished up and documented in \'96. We will be finishing
this new work in fiscal year 2008.

Next slide, please. So, what are some of the things that we did
associated with this? Well, we did a pretty extensive low-altitude
helicopter-borne aeromag survey that gave us much better resolution to
create an aeromagnetic map to look at magnetic anomalies in the area,
and basalt having more iron in it than the rhyolitic tuff that makes up
most of the rock mass, or the paleozoic carbonates. The presence of
basaltic, young basaltic rock usually shows up as an aeromagnetic
anomaly.

And, we identified a number of anomalies on the aeromagnetic map, and to
date, we have drilled seven of those anomalies to determine what they
are, and how old they are. And, where we\'ve drilled anomalies and
encountered basalt, and we haven\'t done that\--actually, of the seven
that we\'ve drilled, three of the anomalies are actually in Miocene
tuff, but they weren\'t buried too deep, so they gave kind of a false
positive on the aeromag map.

What we found from age dating, both potassium argon and argon/argon
dating is that of the anomalies drilled that were actually basalt, only
one of them is a relatively young basalt, Pliocene basalt, and that was
in northern Amargosa Desert, it\'s south of Highway 95. The other
basalts are older than 9 million years. And, essentially what this
confirms is that the spatial patterns that were kind of developed as an
understanding at the time of the original PVHA, we\'ve confirmed that.
We have, if you wish, reduced the uncertainty about the
representativeness of that understanding. We found no buried Pliocene or
Pleistocene basalts to the east of Yucca Mountain in Jackass Flats.

Next slide, please. Now, the expert elicitation process is a formal
structured process, which has a number of stages associated with it that
involve developing a common understanding of data to start off with,
then field trips, interactions to further this common understanding.
Then, individual interviews with the experts, followed by feedback,
giving the experts an opportunity to revise their input.

The end result is the probability of igneous events that could disrupt
the repository. And, if I remember correctly, the result from the 1996
PVHA is on the order of 1.7 or 1.8 times 10~-8~ per year, as a
probability. And, we\'ll see whether that changes at all, or
dramatically as a result of the PVHA. This will be documented in the
update report and update to the igneous framework analysis report.

Let\'s go to the next slide. This shows the schedule of things that need
to be done as part of this overall planned activity. The things that you
see in yellow are things that have already been done. Where we stand
right now is preliminary hazard calculations and sensitivity analyses,
and that\'s going to run from January to April of this year. The next
workshop where all of the experts get back together and provide each
other feedback will be in May of this year, and we\'re looking at the
final results in June of \'07 to January of \'08, and then wrapping
everything up in either somewhere between late this year and the middle
of 2008.

Next slide, please. Okay, Chlorine-36 investigations. It\'s been a
while, but in 1996, while we were constructing the exploratory studies
facilities, we had a number of tests that were following the TBM, as we
excavated underground. And, one of the results that came out fairly
early in the excavation of the ESF was a report from Los Alamos
investigators that they had detected high values of Chlorine-36, this is
the Chlorine-36/Chlorine-35 ratio, in rock samples from the ESF. And,
this is what\'s known as bomb pulse chlorine. There\'s an elevated level
of Chlorine-36 in the atmosphere, mostly associated with the Pacific
Nuclear Weapons Testing in the Forties and Fifties, which put large
quantities of Chlorine-36 in the atmosphere.

And, if you detect elevated levels of Chlorine-36 at depth, that
suggests that you have had water from the atmosphere get down to depth
in a short period of time, 50 to 60 years. So, this was taken as
evidence that some fast pathways for water movement exist from the
surface down to at least the depth of the exploratory studies facility.

DOE subsequently conducted a peer review of the LANL results. One of the
things that the peer review suggested was additional studies.

Next slide, please. So, there were a number of additional studies that
have been conducted. One, in 1999, DOE initiated confirmatory studies
led by the USGS and Lawrence Livermore, kind of made up one team, and
Los Alamos National Lab, the original discoverers of the Chlorine-36
anomaly made up the other team.

And, the results were kind of enigmatic. The USGS/Livermore team did not
replicate the earlier results of Los Alamos, and even the Los Alamos
results weren\'t exactly the same as what they got the first time. They
did replicate some of the earlier results.

In 2003, DOE chartered an independent study of all the Chlorine-36
studies to date, and we asked an entity of the what\'s now called the
Nevada System of Higher Education, the Harry Reid Center, here located
at UNLV, and involved an individual from New Mexico Institute of Mining
and Technology, also was involved in this.

Now, I\'m going to go back a little bit. The original USGS/Los
Alamos/Livermore, and I forgot to mention the Atomic Energy of Canada,
AECL, was involved in the joint validation study. The report on that
came out in August of 2006, and this is about\--this summarizes about
four years of effort on the part of all of these entities, and this is
the citation for it, and this is posted on the web. That\'s where you
can find it. It documents the joint validation study, including previous
studies, the methodologies used to analyze the samples and evaluate all
results, the results, and conflicting interpretations, because even
though there was a unified sampling program, and we were working with
splits from the same sample, we got different results from the different
studies. Besides Chlorine-36, this also discusses tritium and
Chlorine-36 and study conclusions and recommendations.

Now, what about the study conducted by the University of Nevada people?
Well, that was documented this summer in a July of 2006 publication, and
they talk about what they found, how they used it. They looked at some
other things besides Chlorine-36, Chlorine-36, Technetium 99,
Iodine-129, and what\--this report kind of summarizes what they found.

One of the problems that they had was contamination of the lab. In fact,
early on, the lab was so contaminated that they actually had to walk
away from it and construct an entirely new lab, because you\'re dealing
with measurements and parts in 10 to the 15th, which is pretty close to
a godzillion, I\'m not sure exactly what it is.

Okay, so what did we find out of all of these? Well, the USGS/Livermore
team did not find elevated values of Chlorine-36 in samples from, some
from around the Sundance Fault zone, as previously reported by Los
Alamos. Los Alamos confirmed their earlier reported elevated values only
in one location, although they found some new samples in the
cross-drift, which was not available at the time of the original study.
They found some samples in the cross-drift that gave elevated values of
Chlorine-36.

The Harry Reid Center, whenever they finally got their lab and their
analytical line working, they were only able to process I think it\'s
seven or eight samples. Only one sample gave an elevated value of
the\--anomalous value of Chlorine-36.

But, the Harry Reid Center did report detectable levels of Technetium 99
in six of nine rock samples from the ESF, and that\'s something that
we\'re going to need to follow up on.

Why this disparity? Well, how can you take credible labs, give them
essentially the same experiment, and get different results?

Next slide, please. Well, Chlorine-36 measurements are very difficult,
and the interpretation is challenging. And, some of the causes may
include sample contamination. We certainly saw that in the laboratory
that was put together. There may be a very heterogeneous local
distribution of chloride. There may be micro-environmental controls that
are complex and poorly understood.

But, our take is that we have got bomb pulse Chlorine-36 detections at a
limited number of locations in the ESF, which indicates the presence of
few fast flow paths within the repository host rock.

So, how do we accommodate that in the current models? Well, the current
unsaturated zone flow and transport models reflect this Chlorine-36 data
in what we think is a reasonable and conservative manner. We have about
1 percent of the fast and transient flow paths\--well, fast and
transient flow paths carry about 1 percent of the water, primarily
through faults and fractures, in our UZ flow and transport model, but
they don\'t significantly affect the overall flow paths in the
unsaturated zone.

And, where we stand right now is we\'re not pursuing the Chlorine-36
issue further at the moment. We think we\'ve adequately addressed it in
the existing state of models that we have. It would appear that perhaps
we need some advances in Chlorine-36 technology before we can fruitfully
use it in this arena.

And, let me close with a talk about what do we do for the future? How do
you\--this program was involved in site characterization for almost 30
years. There was a pretty large cadre of scientists that spent a
significant part of their career on this program. Their work is
documented in a series of papers. We are, to address one of Bill\'s
earlier questions, we are committed to updating those technical basis
reports, be they of analysis modelling reports or whatever, as the state
of knowledge evolves.

Now, we\'re not going to be doing nearly as much field work as we did at
the time of site characterization. We\'ll be picking and choosing the
important things that we need to focus on. But, how do you get the cadre
of personnel who can look at results coming out five or ten years from
now, maybe not in our program, it may be a result published in a
European journal, or something like that, and being able to make a
determination that that is a\--that can perhaps have significant
implications for this program. How do you foster the continuity and
development of what I\'ll call the intellectual cadre?

And, Ward mentioned this earlier. I am also of the white haired
population. And, we\'ve got an aging population of experienced
management, and it\'s not unique to us, not just management, but it\'s
across the board, engineering, scientific, other technical staff. And,
the reality is there\'s a significant learning curve for the development
of productive workers. When we bring somebody on, even if they are
technically up to speed, it takes somewhere between nine and eighteen
months to bring them up to where they feel confident to really jump in
and really contribute to things.

Identifying and attracting candidates to mentor and providing the staff,
be it engineering, scientific, or other technical staff, with career
development opportunities is a challenge, especially if you\'re focused
on something for right now.

So, balancing the short-term project work and goals with the long-term
needs and goals in a multifaceted, and what\'s got to become a
multigenerational program is one of the big challenges, and it\'s tied
to the second strategic objective that Ward laid out.

So, we\'ve got to enhance the management approach to conduct of both the
short-term and long-term work, and I have, for my part, Andrew Arrell
(phonetic), the manager of the Sandia effort, and I talk about this on a
pretty regular basis, about how we can do it. He\'s got the bulk of the
problem, because Sandia has about 500 employees, and in my organization
all together, I\'ve got about 12.

Next slide, please. Well, some of the things that you can do to foster
this environment, and this is in addition to the things that Ward talked
about about strengthening staff, recruiting, succession planning, but
what can you do in addition? What can you change as what I\'ll call a
programmatic environment that can foster this objective?

Well, one of the things to do is to seek excellence in documentation so
that the person that picks up a product in ten years doesn\'t have
lingering questions about how something was done or where this
assumption came from.

One thing that we I think are going to be able to put more emphasis on
is publication of project documents in peer-reviewed literature. John
Wengle is going to tell you we put a real premium on this in the S&T
program, but we have not had that much of a premium for the project.
And, as a result, much of the project information resides in what many
people call the gray literature. It is copiously documented, but getting
to the documentation is not terribly easy, and it\'s not well circulated
in the peer community.

The Science and Technology Program is a venue that we can get ideas both
in and out, an exchange of information, ideas, and a dialogue. And, John
will talk about that, because this gives us an opportunity to interact
with a great many organizations and people across the country.

Monitoring what\'s going on in both U.S. and international research and
development is a major thing that we need to look for for the future.
This is one of the things that we\'ve charged Sandia with, is monitoring
what\'s going on in all the various technical areas, to understand when
something might arise in a publication that could potentially have an
impact on the program, and being able to evaluate that potential impact.

Fostering development with Nevada institutions. We have a cooperative
agreement with Nevada institutions now, and we need to continue that. We
probably need to refocus that periodically to look at the things that
are of highest priority to the program.

We participate in a lot of international programs now, and we propose
that we continue to do that, again, for the idea of the remaining
currency of information and remaining part of the active technical peer
community.

And, then, providing\--this is actually one of the things that was a
rationale behind the idea of developing and selecting a lead lab. And,
that\'s to provide the repository program with a pathway for continuity
for the scientific, management, and institutional continuity of the
program. And, that\'s going to be one of Sandia\'s challenges, is
bringing in the fresh people, moving them through programs within
Sandia, developing the expertise, developing the competencies that will
eventually be an advantage to this program.

And, with that, I would like to take the Board\'s questions, if I may.

GARRICK: Thank you. George?

HORNBERGER: Russ, I have a couple questions with regard to the
infiltration. And, I realize that this is high level, so please take my
questions as being at a high level. We\'ll get into details at a meeting
we have scheduled coming up.

But, I was curious the model, the original model, of course, had Alan
Flynt\'s very detailed model of a representation of the spatial
variability. So, is it the intent from a new approach to just multiply
all those numbers by 3.7, or something?

DYER: No. No, I\'m not sure\--I told my staff member, who actually
follows this, to stay at work and work today. So, I\'m\--I\'ll try my
best here, and maybe if I\'m wrong, somebody from the audience will
correct me. They never have hesitated to do that in the past.

If you\'ll remember, though, one of the major things that came out of
this in the Flynt model was the nine infiltration maps, which showed the
spatial variability. And, there will be nine infiltration maps in the
new MASSIF model also. So, there will be a spatial variability.

HORNBERGER: That\'s based on separate work?

DYER: It\'s separate work, but primarily it\'s going back to the same
data.

HORNBERGER: Okay. Second question has to do with data. So, the 13.9
millimeters per year that you mentioned is certainly within the range,
but if you look at all of the data bases, the data based estimates,
it\'s sort of on the higher end of that range. And, my question is as
you move forward to incorporation into TSPA, I think that there were
three cases, low, medium and high, to take account of uncertainty in net
infiltration, and multiplying 4 millimeters per year by 5 might make
sense. Multiplying 14 millimeters per year by 5 is maybe questionable.
So, are there going to be changes in how you do that?

DYER: Well, there\'s a couple of things. We\'ve got\--this is a
reasonably conservative estimate that will be the basis for TSPA. But,
there will be a\--I\'m trying to remember what we call it now\--it\'s
not a realistic, but a better estimate of performance assessment also,
where we may be able to use other estimates of infiltration. So, if
somebody thinks that there are conservatisms that in the fullness of
time, we would be able to remove and can make a defensible case for
that, we could take other numbers into that performance assessment
estimate.

HORNBERGER: And, finally, as I recall, and I may not be recalling
exactly correctly, but it was a pre-integrated decision as to net
infiltration, which relied at least in part on the use of the three
dimensional mountain scale unsaturated flow model, which was then more
or less finally tuned to the\--

DYER: Right.

HORNBERGER: \--the 4 millimeters per year, and the Chlorine-36, and what
not. So, going to 14 millimeters per year, you said okay, the downstream
effects are now the unsaturated zone model has to be adjusted. Do you
have any indication that those adjustments are going to make sense?

DYER: Well, I mean, that\'s one of the challenges of the Berkeley team.
I know Bo was intimately involved in this, but his team has picked it
up. And, making sense of this change in the infiltration and propagating
it through UZ is something that\'s in progress now.

GARRICK: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

Slide 4, please. And, this really refers to 4 and 5, but, we don\'t have
to see 5 as well. You\'ve given the Board about ten years worth of work
in these two slides, just to review some of this data, and presumably,
it\'s all going to be to support LA. Can you, and not necessarily today,
but can you provide us with a time table as to when these\--I mean,
there are about ten items here that are presumably going to change in
your TSPA models. Can you give us some indication of when those reports
will be ready, and when they can be reviewed by the Board?

DYER: Yes. I\'ll have to go back and look at it, but Ward talked about
the schedule. Every one of these is scheduled and resource loaded on
that schedule.

DUQUETTE: And, you\'ll, if you haven\'t already, and maybe you have,
you\'ll provide us with those dates when we might expect to see those?

DYER: We can do that.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

GARRICK: I think Mark, were you\--you were next.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Russ, I\'m going to\--my usual perch, which is somewhere between 30 and
50,000 feet, and want to try to tie together your role in the senior
management team as it was defined by Ward. And, I\'ve got three sort of
big picture questions that I\'m trying to continue to monitor.

The first one is who owns this Preclosure Safety Analysis?

DYER: Preclosure Safety Analysis is owned by the Office of the Chief
Engineer. That\'s Paul Harrington.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. So, questions we have about work going on in that area,
we will be able to defer until that presentation?

DYER: Correct.

ABKOWITZ: Is there a collaboration going on between your office and that
office, since the issues are integrated?

DYER: Yes. There are some areas that are of common interest to us,
seismic for instance. We take a common data base, and then it\'s used by
both the preclosure and the postclosure. So, there are areas of common
interest where we have a lot of exchange.

ABKOWITZ: Is thermal management an area of common interest?

DYER: Yes, it is.

ABKOWITZ: And, how is that being discussed? My impression is that in the
license application work, the TSPA-LA has pretty much stuck to a thermal
management strategy, if it can be defined as one, from many, many years
ago, and all this additional work that has been shown to us, including
today, are really just manifestations of what can be expected based on
that thermal management strategy being the way in which the repository
will be designed and operated. Is that correct?

DYER: What we have tried to do is to expand what I\'ll call the analyzed
range, if you will, to give us much more flexibility, what we might wish
to do eventually. So, instead of just having a point solution, expanding
the range through sensitivity studies, or additional analyses, to give
us a much broader range.

ABKOWITZ: But, it\'s my understanding that the sensitivity analyses are
being done around different expectations of behavior in the mountain,
based on a single point thermal management strategy. Is that an
appropriate understanding of what\'s happening?

DYER: I\'m going to have to get back to you\--

ABKOWITZ: By thermal management strategy, I\'m talking about the
constraints on the heat in the package and the WINE load, how it affects
the drift separation and all the things that relate to thermal aspects
that govern the design of the repository, and the package, and those
interactions.

DYER: I was of the impression that we were trying to move the point
where we could be much broader, I mean, to expand our options and the
flexibility in the operational side of the repository.

ABKOWITZ: Who would I address the thermal management question to then?

DYER: Well, you can address it to me, but I\'m going to have to do some
homework and get back to you. And, you could ask Paul whenever he gets
up here, too.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you. One final question. Some time ago, the Board
came to understand that DOE was going to develop some supplementary
tools besides TSPA in developing its safety case. And, I believe that it
had\--there were sort of four offspring, and I can\'t remember the names
exactly. I think there was a supplemental model, there was a realistic
model, margin analysis. There were\--I have it in my notes somewhere.
Can you tell us the current status of those efforts?

DYER: Yes. They\'re different names for the same thing. It is a\--it\'s
gone by a number of different names, and that\'s the one that I
couldn\'t remember the name for. I think the current name is the
performance margin analysis. Can somebody\--yes, okay. People are
shaking their heads. That\'s going to be part of the validation effort
for TSPA, and this will be one where you\'re not necessarily constrained
by what can be documented to the nth degree, but really what is the,
I\'ll it the best estimate for the individual investigators as to how a
particular process would work, and what would be the expected range of a
set of parameters. And, we are proceeding with that.

Now, there is another effort on TSPA that is a\--the Total System
Performance Assessment that we have now grew over time, and it
essentially grew as an amalgamation of bottoms up things, and there\'s a
need to step back and develop a tool that really from the tops down,
that\'s more of a system tool, and Sandia is charged with developing
that. But, that\'s not a near-term thing. That\'s going to take us years
to do that.

ABKOWITZ: Thank you.

GARRICK: All right, I have Ali, Howard, and then Thure, and then I have
a question from the audience, and I think Andy.

MOSLEH: So, the things such as waste package early failure models, and
seismic\--you\'re developing seismic hazard curves for the surface
facility.

DYER: Correct.

MOSLEH: Will you also be working on, or are you working on the
corresponding fragility curves for facilities?

DYER: Correct.

MOSLEH: That\'s part of the\--

DYER: Yes.

MOSLEH: I see. Okay. And, then, you\'re also doing something about the
early failure estimates, the waste package early failure?

DYER: In what way?

MOSLEH: In the estimate of a fraction of those that would be defective.

DYER: Well, yeah, we\'re trying to better document and justify the
components of the model now, and that is a component of\--early waste
package failure is a component of the waste package behavior model.

MOSLEH: Well, what I remember from maybe some discussions in the context
of TSPA was that those were basically best estimates, best guesses, but
we were never presented with information\--a basis for those estimates.
So, I was wondering if that\'s an agenda item in your office.

DYER: I know there\'s a basis, but I must admit I haven\'t followed it
that closely to know where the mis-match might be between what we\'ve
documented and what the Board\'s understanding might be.

KNOWLES: If I might add? We do have the early failure analysis.

GARRICK: Would you identify yourself, please?

KNOWLES: Oh, I\'m sorry. This is Kathryn Knowles. I\'m with Sandia. We
do have the early failure analysis AMR, which is in process. It uses a
fault tree analysis to develop the number of waste packages that might
fail through early failure mechanisms. And, that is on schedule to be
completed I believe by summer.

MOSLEH: Okay, thank you. And, then, is it correct then to assume overall
on the list of things that you have identified, in terms of enhancements
and models, that most of these would not be part of the license
application\--I mean, TSPA-LA, but would be supporting documents?

DYER: That\'s correct. I mean, they\'re part of the technical basis that
underlies TSPA, but they provide critical feeds to TSPA.

MOSLEH: Okay. And, then, in time, the idea that these would be merged
and incorporated into the performance margin study\--

DYER: Well, the performance margin analysis is a parallel analysis, but
it\'s analysis that takes a slightly different approach than TSPA. And,
if you\'ll remember, there\'s been questions about TSPA, about the
conservatisms in TSPA, and it\'s an approach that tries to mitigate some
of those conservatisms. And, if we run TSPA and we run a performance
margin analysis, what differences do we get and what contributes to
those differences. That\'s what we\'re trying to understand.

MOSLEH: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: I think I\'m going to wedge in a question from the audience
here just to make sure we get it.

I have a question given to me by Michael King, the hydrology consultant
to Inyo County. He has really three questions. The first one is could
you briefly explain what organization is doing the regional groundwater
flow model for the program, or what model is being employed?

DYER: The regional model, if I remember right, was done by a consortium
that was mostly headed up by the U.S. Geological Survey. We were a
participant in that consortium, and we might have been the primary
financial benefactor for it, but it was a consortium of the Nevada State
Engineer, the various federal agencies, DOE, I believe the Nevada Test
Site was involved in that, so it was really a consortium or task force
that produced that product, which was documented a year or two ago in a
USGS report. I can\'t remember whether it was an open file, or what kind
of report it was.

GARRICK: He also asked how far south of the repository does this model
cover?

DYER: The regional model?

GARRICK: Yes.

DYER: I don\'t know. Drew, or somebody, can you\--Claudia?

NEWBURY: This is Claudia Newbury, DOE.

The Death Valley Regional Flow Model takes into account the whole Death
Valley region, so, it actually goes south of Death Valley into Grape
Vine Mountains on the south side. It covers\--

DYER: It goes down to Franklin Lake playa, I\'m pretty sure.

NEWBURY: It goes past there.

DYER: Yes.

NEWBURY: It includes Death Valley. So, it includes parts of Nye County
and Inyo County, goes far north of the Test Site, and large areas on
both sides.

GARRICK: His final question was will this new information be in the
draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, and will it go out
for public comment?

DYER: Well, the information is publicly available. The report was
published a year or two ago, I believe, and the onus is on us to
acknowledge the existence of that information in the EIS. It should
inform the analysis in the EIS.

GARRICK: Okay. Howard, I think you\'re next.

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

I, too, was interested in the early failures. If you go to Slide 5, you
do cover it, in answer to Ali\'s question, that third bullet there does
talk about it. My question relates to Slide 13. Why all of a sudden in
the second picture, the entire inside of the waste package is slumped
down to a pile of rubble?

DYER: Well, there would be some continuum, and what we\'ve done is to
take just snap shots in time, but it\'s not a linear time step. If I can
put some times on these, this is probably the state in the underground
from time of emplacement to maybe 50,000 years. This might be 50 to
400,000 years. So, hundreds of thousands of years. This is somewhere
between 100,000 years to almost a million, and this is from about
three-quarters of a million, on out. So, we\'re talking fairly long time
frames here.

ARNOLD: As I heard from Sandia, you\'re redoing this whole subject.

DYER: Yes.

ARNOLD: Yes, okay.

GARRICK: Thure?

CERLING: Cerling, Board.

I have two questions back to infiltration because that affects
everything, including, it seems like, the seismic studies. And, one,
getting back to the issue of revised upper estimates of infiltration,
are these\--and, you said that they were conservative estimates, and,
so, I\'m wondering if part of the difference between the new and the
old, is that a difference in the definition of the way that one does
conservatisms, or is it the exact same analysis done\--or the same
definitions of conservatism with a different analysis? I\'m just trying
to understand part of these differences.

DYER: I think the people that did this work would say these are more
realistic.

CERLING: But, still a conservative estimate?

DYER: Yes.

CERLING: Well, then, my follow-on question is I think on Slide 4, you
say that there will be new infiltration studies, and these include
studies that will be collecting actually what one of my colleagues in
modelling calls real data, or are the new infiltration studies going to
be additional modelling, or are there, in fact, some new studies planned
to collect data to distinguish between these estimates?

DYER: Well, this is what exists now. There have been new infiltration
studies. Most of them have been either gathering information out of the
literature, there\'s been a little bit of field work, but not much, and
these are some of the things that have been downstream impacts, if you
will, from that.

Now, there are a number of programs associated with infiltration that
have elements for future study, but what we\'re going to have to look at
is where is the uncertainty, and from a systems approach, what are the
important, the most important things we need to look at. And, right now,
we have very little work going on at the site.

GARRICK: Let\'s see, we have Andy, and then Bill.

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

I\'d like to ask about the seismic and the volcanic hazard analysis. As
I understand it, the site has a seismic criteria of 10^-6^; is that
right?

DYER: I think that\'s right, but I\'m going to call on Jon Ake. Well, is
that your question or\--

KADAK: Well, that\'s my opening question.

DYER: Okay. Let me get my seismic guy up here. This is Jon Ake.

AKE: Jon Ake, DOE. For preclosure safety analysis, we needed to have a
hazard curve for the surface facilities area that extends down to at
least 10^-6^. Actually, a little bit below that.

KADAK: And, the reason for that is why?

AKE: In keeping with the, and responding to the interim staff guidance,
that I\'m sure you are all aware of, of last year, to do the performance
assessment and show that we comply with 63.111.(b)(2), I believe, is the
subsection, you know, it requires us to be able to do the convolution of
the component fragilities with the hazard curve, down to at least
10^-6^.

KADAK: I guess that\'s really where I\'m going with my question. The
lifetime of these surface facilities is how many years?

AKE: Nominally, a hundred years, 50 to 100 years.

KADAK: And, why is it that you need the 10^-6^ standard?

AKE: To be able to show, given the criteria spelled out in Part 63, that
we have no more than one chance in 10,000 over 100 years, if you will,
or 50 years, whatever the lifespan of the facilities are, that we have
no event sequences that violate our dose limits in that time period.

KADAK: Okay. Well, go to the below grade. What\'s the below grade
standard? In other words, postclosure?

AKE: Postclosure is the same thing. It\'s one part in 10,000 over the
repository performance period, which used to be 10,000 years.

KADAK: So, what\'s that number now?

AKE: Essentially, we\'re doing it by\--well, in\--that\'s a difficult
question to answer.

KADAK: I guess the point I\'m trying to make is when do you start
believing your numbers?

AKE: When do you start believing, or stop believing?

KADAK: You mentioned 10^-8^ is a criteria for FEPing out, I guess is the
word for these things, and I\'m just wondering when you get out to
numbers that are so low, and the recurrent frequency of seismic events
or volcanic events is so long, you have to include events that are way
beyond even experience, and are you going to be designing a facility for
something that you can\'t even say can possibly even occur? Which,
obviously, is going to affect how you design the facility.

DYER: Yes.

AKE: I\'m going to say no comment.

KADAK: I didn\'t mean it as a joke. I meant it as a real good scientific
question for people to try to think about when they establish standards.
And, this includes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and whatever reg
guide you refer to. And, if those of you who have heard McGaffigan\'s
text of the talk that he gave a couple of days ago, he pretty much says
the million year standard has no science to it. And, at some point,
someone is going to have to call it.

AKE: I appreciate your comments, but I think it\'s outside of my area of
responsibility to comment on.

KADAK: I didn\'t address it to you, but to the group. And, my
final\--sorry, John?

GARRICK: It has to be final.

KADAK: Is this sort of combination of conservatisms, where each group
makes some conservatism, and then tries to pass that on to the next
group, who also makes its level of conservatism, which then results in
who knows what you have as a level of conservatism, is there anybody on
the project tracking the complexity and combination of conservatisms to
be able to say we have lost it, in terms of understanding how much
conservatism we have really applied?

DYER: Well, we have made a concerted effort to look at the propagation
of uncertainty, where it\'s coming from, what is aleatory, what\'s
epistemic, how it\'s being treated, and there is a pretty robust program
looking at trying to reduce that, tracking that uncertainty and managing
that uncertainty.

KADAK: I didn\'t say uncertainty. I said conservatism. We have an
example here of infiltration, where you\'ve quadrupled in some cases the
water flow into the repository.

DYER: right. And, I think the argument that the authors of that paper
will make is that that result has less uncertainty associated with it.

KADAK: Okay.

DYER: You may think it\'s more conservative, but it has less
uncertainty.

GARRICK: Moving right along, Bill, a quick question.

MURPHY: I have two very specific quick questions, but first of all, I\'d
like to thank you for addressing the questions I posed to Ward.

The first is with reference to the Nevada data for Technetium 99 and
Chlorine-36, I haven\'t seen these results before, but on the face of
it, an interpretation could be that the Chlorine-36 pulse has already
passed through, but that the Technetium 99 pulse is still hung up in the
mountain. Has that possible interpretation been explored?

DYER: Not really. That\'s obviously a possible interpretation, but we
haven\'t taken it very far.

MURPHY: My other specific question has to do with the statement that
sensitivity analyses indicate that fast and transient flow paths carry
about 1 percent of the water. And, I\'m concerned, or I wonder if that
sensitivity is appropriate to other climatic regimes? Would that be the
same case for the glacial transition climate?

DYER: I\'m trying to remember. Yeah, whenever you look at other data
sets, like some of Zell\'s data, which is more of a cumulative
measure\--I don\'t know. I don\'t know.

MURPHY: Neither do I.

GARRICK: Okay. David Diodato, did you have a quick one?

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff.

Russ, this is about the PVHA, and it\'s a question\-- more of a
statement. On Slide 18, at the bottom, it shows a June 2007 roughly
deliverable for the final hazard calculations. Now, the Department of
Energy has been\--is to be commended for their efforts in terms of
supporting really a state of the art investigation of volcanic hazard at
Yucca Mountain. It\'s put together a solid team, and Kevin Coppersmith
is in the audience. So, I wanted to look at that June date, and then
back up to the bullet on Slide 15, where you say the PVHA update will
confirm the licensing basis for. I think a lot of the scientists
participating in this effort will be surprised to find out, I mean, do
you know the answer already of what they\'re going to find? There\'s a
risk here that you\'re undermining a little bit in terms of the
credibility.

DYER: I agree. This is a presumptive statement.

DIODATO: Yeah. Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: All right, I think we\'re going to take our break now. We\'re
about six minutes behind schedule, so, let\'s reconvene at 10:36.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

GARRICK: All right, our next presentation will be by John Wengle, and
he\'s going to talk to us about the Science and Technology activities.
John?

WENGLE: Thank you.

First of all, I\'d like to begin by saying that I appreciate the
opportunity to present the program to everyone. And, I also, of course,
want to thank the Board for their continued interest in the program, as
well as their strong support of it.

As you probably realize, the program has faced many challenges in the
past, and that undoubtedly, it\'s going to face other challenges in the
future. But, with that said, we think we\'ve put together a pretty
impressive body of work, and we\'re really pretty excited to tell you
about it again today.

Next slide, please. In preparing for this presentation, what I did was I
re-read all the previous S&T presentations, and paid particular
attention to the Board\'s comments and concerns about the program. And,
if you do that, I think you find that essentially, the Board\'s interest
in the program, concerns about the program, break down into three broad
areas. The first area is simply stated Resources. How much money do we
have? Where are we sending it? How are we allocating it? How do we
handle that whole process? Do we have sufficient funds to accomplish
what we need to do?

The second area of interest revolves around what I call the success
metrics of the program. And, here, I\'m really thinking of sort of a
two-level metric. One, are you in fact doing world-class science, and
are you publicly disseminating it? Are you getting the information out
there to a broad audience? And, two, the Board has sometimes referred to
this as I guess the degree of integration between the science and
technology program, and the baseline science program. In other words, to
what extent are your results actually going to be used either in the
technical basis for the license, or, more broadly, to inform the safety
case for the license? And, we\'ll cover that under the\--those three
areas.

Finally, the Board is obviously interested in the technical work we do,
and I would emphasize that my presentation today will not be an
exhaustive discussion of our technical work, and that\'s primarily for
two reasons. One, several months ago, Mark Peters was here. He did spend
a rather lengthy time updating the Board technically on where we stand,
and that, frankly, coupled with the what I now call the ever continuing
resolution, there\'s no question that that has had a substantial impact
on our work, on our technical work. And, while if I can employ maybe a
maritime analogy, as you\'re pulling into a dock, you see all the signs
that always say slow speed, no wake, we\'re not throwing much of a wake
at the moment. So, that\'s, again, a reason I won\'t go into exhaustive
detail about our technical program.

And, finally, we\'ll summarize a bit.

Okay, first of all, the historical S&T Program funding. The program
actually began in late fiscal year 2002, received a first increment of
funding in \'03, rather small, modest amount, \$2 million. Then, rather
abruptly in \'04, we see that the funding increases fairly dramatically,
\$17 million. And, what that really reflects is at the end of \'03,
there was a competitive call for proposals issued. You may remember we
received something on the order of 210 proposals, and we elected to fund
about 40 of them, and that\'s primarily\--you see the jump up there.

In 2005, we bumped up to about \$19 million. And, again, that really
reflect two things. One was a formal call within the source term and
natural barriers arenas for new proposals. We received about 120
proposals, competitively scored them, resulted in the award of about 15
new efforts.

As well in \'05, the Advanced Technologies thrust began in earnest, and,
of course, that accounts for some of that kick-up.

In fiscal year \'06, this is rather interesting, although our total
budget was a little over \$21 million, we actually started the year at
\$13 million, and we did file two requests for additional funding, one
for \$8 million for our Advanced Technology Program, one for \$6 million
for our Science Programs. Both were approved. The \$8 million for
Advanced Technology was funded, and actually, almost unbelievably, two
days before we were due to release the Science money, Congress announced
a rescission and we lost the money. So, that effectively takes us up to
the present day.

Next slide, please. This shows historical funding by thrust, and really,
I\'ll concentrate here pretty much from the 2006 period. You can see
essentially the Science Programs, the Source Term, the Natural Barriers
Program, Materials Performance Program were funded at about \$2 1/2
million a piece. This was certainly below what they needed, but we were
able to partially mitigate the funding decrease here by the fact that
the \'05 funding to these programs had been delivered, again because of
a continuing resolution, relatively late in the year. So, by using the
carry-over funding from \'05, we were able to mitigate the worst impacts
as we moved into \'06.

The Advanced Technologies Program, of course, jumps out, a little over
13, \$13 1/2 million. And, really, that was for two primary reasons. The
way we\'ve set up our Advanced Technologies Program, the projects are
phased, so that as we moved beyond the feasibility stage, we actually
begin to do what I would describe as technology prototyping, or
technology demonstrations. They cost a lot of money. And, in
\'06\--we\'ll talk a little bit more about this when we get to the
Advanced Technologies Program\--but, we did begin to demonstrate our
reduced pressure electron beam welding technology at half scale, and we
also coded six half scale simulated waste packages in our structurally
amorphous metals program. So, certainly, that accounted for an increase
in funding there.

Now, obviously, the Board is interested that, you know, there appears to
be something missing on this chart, namely, the fiscal year \'07 budget.
That\'s not been formalized yet. Obviously, the project is struggling
through the impact of the continuing resolution. We do expect that that
will be narrowed down within a fairly short time now. Will it be at \$21
million? Realistically, no, it won\'t be.

We know with the pressures, the funding shortfalls due to the continuing
resolution, the pressure from the licensing side of the House, we know
it\'s not going to be at \$21 million. But, will it be sufficient to
maintain a fairly robust Science and Technology Program? I think so.
And, that\'s what we\'re going to aim to do.

Next slide, please. You\'ve probably heard a number of people mention
the importance in the Science and Technology Program about bringing new
blood into the program. And, this is not just because quite frankly we
get sick of looking at the same old faces. It\'s not because, as I\'ve
heard the rumor, that I have a bias against the national laboratories.
In fact, quite the contrary. The national laboratories clearly have some
of the very best people in these fields working. But they only have some
of them, they don\'t have all the very best. And, some of those other
people are out in academia, they\'re out in the private sector, and if
you care to, you know, if you really want to walk through and do the
totals, you\'ll find that this reflects somewhere in excess of 50
organizations, nine of which are commercial entities, 31 universities,
eight national labs, and five what I would describe as other
organizations, could be the USGS, could be the Atomic Energy of Canada,
that sort of thing.

And, I\'d emphasize, by the way, that this is already out of date. Every
time I look at this, I think of and remember the other organizations
that aren\'t mentioned on here. For example, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency. Most of our international collaborations, with
one exception, are not mentioned on here. We have collaborations ongoing
with SKB, with the Institute for Transuranium Elements in Germany. We
have work with CEA. We have work with En Risa (phonetic) in Spain,
Subitech in France. So, the list goes on and on. I suppose if you total
all that up, we\'re probably looking at an organization of 60 plus, 60
plus entities.

And, again, this I think is particularly important because it enables us
to, again, to play off a theme of Russ and Ward, intellectual continuity
of the program. We do want to attract the very best, and in order to do
that, we have to reach out to as broad an audience as we possibly can.
So, this gives you some idea of essentially where our money is going.

Next slide, please. Believe me, I\'m not going to subject you to this
slide for very long. I think everybody on the Board probably knows the
mission and vision statements of this program at least as well as I do,
if not better. And, I don\'t particularly care about that aspect of this
particular slide. But, what I do care about is that you pay attention to
the drivers of the program. And, I\'d ask you to note for the first time
the addition of a fourth driver for the program, which is to enhance
safety within the repository.

Why is that important to me? Well, aside from obvious, you know, the
obvious reasons it\'s important, it\'s also important because I believe
at some level, it evidences the larger project\'s move and embracing of
an organizational commitment to continuous improvement. That\'s the
culture. And, that is very important from a Science and Technology
Program perspective.

Frankly, we can proceduralize the interaction between this program and
the baseline program. We can do that in minute detail. But, until people
sort of feel in their guts the importance of continuous improvement for
the project as a whole, we are not going to be able to realize our
ultimate goal, which is, where applicable, to incorporate the data from
the Science and Technology Program into the safety case, for example,
for the license. So, I think that\'s a very significant, really, a very
significant addition to that list of drivers.

Next slide, please. How do you improve the culture? Ward spoke about
this briefly. But, what we have on here at the moment is actually one of
his particular initiatives on this line, and what he\'s actually done,
he\'s developed a list of what he calls cultural behavioral attributes
that he wants to essentially see inculcated within the project.

And, he\'s gone a step farther, and he\'s actually taken these things
and he\'s literally imported them, or exported them, I guess you\'d say,
into the performance appraisals of everyone on the project, so that in a
very real sense, people will be, if you will, financially incentivized
to show this\--to essentially show this kind of behavior. And, again,
that\'s very important to us for the reason we state on there. We want
to move from a situation where perhaps the Science and Technology
Program has not been wholly embraced, to one where\--to an organization
that in fact welcomes technical challenges to the baseline, and is
actively seeking to inform the safety case in the license with our work.

Next slide, please. We have always placed a great premium on wide
dissemination of our products, and this is really for three reasons.
Once again, returning to the theme of intellectual continuity, we want
to attract the best and brightest. In order to do that, we sort of have
to be\--we have to be competitive in the marketplace. We need to create
a buzz in academia and in the private sector and in the national
laboratories that our program is worth participating in. So then,
obviously, in order to do that, we need to get our work out there where
it can be openly discussed.

The second reason that product dissemination is important to us is
credibility. We actually believe, and it\'s, if I can say it, a plank of
the Science and Technology Program that we abhor dark smokey back rooms.
We do our best work out in the sunshine, and what we\'re really trying
to do here is enjoin a serious intellectual scientific debate about the
repository, and we want to do that in the open literature. And, we
believe by doing that, that in the long run, we\'re going to enhance the
credibility of the overall program.

And, finally, the third reason. The third reason is a little bit more
difficult and, frankly, I\'m still working through it. But, I do believe
that even if not one iota of our work is ever actually incorporated
into, for example, the technical basis for the license, I still believe
that we can have an influence on the overall process, because we can
inform the intellectual debate, we can change the context within which
this whole discussion is about to take place. And, I\'ll cite an example
of that a bit later when I get to the Materials Performance thrust area,
because I think there\'s a particularly, at least a potentially very
good example of that there.

Again, if you care about numbers, to date, we have published some 90
technical papers, a simple, and actually beyond a simple majority of
which have appeared in peer- reviewed journals. We\'ve got 81
presentations, 41 abstracts, all of which are available on the Science
and Technology website.

And, again, what we\'re looking at doing here with these products, our
role is essentially to produce world-class science, conduct the
research, produce the products, and then we need to hand them to
particular entities within the project for formal evaluation, namely the
lead laboratory and the design authority.

Next slide, please. And, I would emphasize about this slide that we are
not yet\--we have not yet instituted this process, and it\'s certainly
fairly early in our thinking about it. But, we do want to formalize the
process by which our data, our results are actually evaluated by the
lead laboratory and by the design authority.

And, essentially what this requires, the very first thing it requires is
that our pre and postclosure managers have to have a real time
familiarity with the results of our program. They have to have a real
time familiarity with our research directions, what we\'re doing and
why. And, actually, I\'m not terribly worried about that, because to
date, our informal interactions with the baseline program have really
been very robust.

As most of you know, we conduct mid-year reviews of all of our programs,
and certainly we\'ve had plenty of folks there from, you know, the TSPA
folks, the baseline science folks, so certainly there is a general
interest in and familiarity with what we do.

But, what we are doing in this is we\'re looking to actually formalize
that, where we envision a formal review taking place, probably on an
annual basis, with members of the lead lab, and the design authority
organization, and we will work very systematically through our projects,
and of course as well as individual project, the collection of projects,
because often our impact won\'t necessarily be from an individual
project, but will be from within essentially the collection, if you
will, the synergistic effects of projects on each other. And, we
envision that out of that will come a formal report prepared by the lead
lab and the design authority that will actually document the potential
impacts of the new information that we\'re offering. And, I envision
that to be essentially a public report, and it would be, to a certain
extent, almost an accompaniment to the S&T annual report.

So, on the one hand, you\'d have what we\'re doing, and on the other
hand, you\'d have a report from the people that essentially are our
customers that we\'re doing the work for, as far as what they believe
the impact of that work to be.

Next slide, please. This is essentially a very similar, certainly the
top part is very similar in the kinds of things that the lead lab or the
design authority would be looking at. The bottom part adds a little
different twist to it, though. And, that is the fact that there is a
second formal mechanism within the OCRWM program to document situations
where we see data, we see results that appear to be at variance, you
know, with our current understanding, with our current models, and
that\'s the Corrective Action Program.

Now, as Ward pointed out, it may be that the CAP program needs some fine
tuning, and needs a bit of work. But, nevertheless, there does exist a
formal mechanism through which changed information can be resolved. And,
effectively, what happens is a condition report is filed, or generated,
is classified as to importance, and then a group is brought together,
and either a root cause analysis or a causal analysis is done, depending
on the level of significance, and ultimately, corrective action is put
in place to resolve it.

And, I guess what I would emphasize here is depending on the impact,
that corrective action could run all the way up to and include an
amendment to the license.

Next slide, please. I put this slide up to show that the interfaces
between the S&T Program and the lead lab have been formalized. This is
something that Peter Swift and I had talked about fairly early. We
wanted to make very certain that there was single point accountability
as we interacted.

So, for example, within the Natural Barriers arena, Yvonne or Doug
Duncan or myself will know that the person we need to deal with is
Stephanie. So, we have, again, single point accountability. Just to
anticipate, there was another column originally on this chart devoted to
the design authority, because we have those same connections drawn out
there, but, frankly, it became too much of an eye chart and I removed
it. But, again, we do have that level of integration with the design
authority as well.

SPEAKER: What\'s the other column again\--

WENGLE: Oh, it\'s the Regulatory Science and Integration Group.
Essentially, it\'s the Baseline Science Program under the Office of the
Chief Scientist. It\'s the group that Claudia Newbury manages.

Next slide, please. Now, we\'ll move into a bit of the technical work
that we\'re doing, and, once again, this will be at a fairly high level.
But, within our Source Term Program, there are really three reasons that
we\'re working in the Source Term Program.

First, essentially all the radioactivity that we\'re concerned with is
tied up in spent nuclear fuel and the borosilicate glass logs. So, the
first barrier to radionuclide release at the repository is going to be
the source term.

Secondly, over very long time frames, the final evolved state of the
source term will also be the primary barrier to radionuclide release.
So, we again want to understand what that final evolved state is.

And, finally, the third reason, if I can return once again to the theme
of intellectual continuity, within the United States, OCRWM is perhaps
the only organization that has a real need to understand the corrosion
of spent nuclear fuel in borosilicate glass. I know that NSF funds a few
bits of isolated work here and there, DOE\'s Office of Basic Energy
Sciences funds a project here or there, but, to my knowledge, no one has
quite the concentrated focus or the need for a concentrated focus as we
do.

So, again, from the point of view of sustaining an intellectual
community of scientists, and obviously potentially people to contribute
to this program, I think we are in somewhat of a unique position there.

We also know that many factors are going to affect the release of
radionuclides from the source term, temperature, radiation field, redox
conditions, pH, near-field materials, it\'s a terribly complex process,
and obviously, no one on the Board needs to be told that. But, we do
believe that we have identified at least three very important process
areas that we\'re looking at, the kinetics of waste form corrosion, the
potential incorporation of radionuclides of interest into all duration
products, and, of course, the interaction of waste form and waste
package interactions.

And, also, if I can borrow perhaps out of context, an idea of William
James, we also join to put some water into this blooming, buzzing
confusion, and that\'s our fourth area, which is essentially a model
building effort.

Next page, please. On this particular page, what I particularly want to
point out, the source term has been very active internationally in terms
of establishing collaborations. We are, for example, a member of the
MUCADO project, Model Uncertainty for the Dissolution of Spent Fuel.
This is a European commission program. We\'re also a member of the NF
Pro. This is, again, a group of 40 waste management organizations within
the European Union devoted to enhancing the understanding of the
near-field. We have ongoing work at a number of universities, including
Manchester University in the United Kingdom.

We have collaboration agreements with Subitech in France, CEA in France,
En Risa in Spain, the Russian Academy of Sciences. So, again, we\'re
trying to leverage limited resources in the best manner we can,
obviously, recognizing that there are some limitations here. The
situation, obviously, the environment of concern typically in other
repositories is not quite the same as ours. We are unique in looking at
saturated, or unsaturated oxidizing conditions. So, obviously, that
bounds to some degree the extent to which we can benefit from the
international collaborations.

As far as work to date within the source term that I find particularly
exciting, and please, let me emphasize here that I\'m not intending to
denigrate other work we have ongoing in the source term arena, but
particular projects that strike me as of great import, I think here of
Pat Brady\'s work on the potential uptake of technetium onto iron
oxyhydroxides. I think I also couple that work with the structural, or
crystal chemistry work of Peter Burns at Notre Dame, where he\'s
actually looking at the incorporation mechanisms for neptunium into ural
(phonetic) minerals.

And, I think, in turn, if you couple that with Udo Becker\'s work at the
University of Michigan where he\'s actually looking at the quantum
mechanical energetics of that incorporation, that begins to give you, I
think, potentially a very profound understanding of how this process may
actually take place and when it may actually take place and how
frequently it may take place in repository relevant conditions.

But, with that said, I also want to emphasize that this work is not
perhaps ripe yet. You will note some of the deliverables we\'ve
identified here in Fiscal Year \'07 and \'08, and I would now probably
push those out to \'08. I want to emphasize that we think of those in
terms of phasing. We\'re not going to have completely determined all the
processes of spent nuclear fuel dissolution in a year, but we will have
a, if you will, a block of understanding that we\'ve achieved to that
point, which we will bring forward. Obviously, these are going to be
much longer, much longer time to complete our understanding of them.

Next slide, please. If we move to the Materials Performance Thrust,
obviously, the engineered barrier system is a critical component of our
defense in depth strategy, and clearly, the performance of the materials
used in the engineered barrier system are obviously critical to
performance of the repository.

We know that corrosion is going to be the primary determinant of the
performance of the waste package, and we know ultimately that corrosion
processes will determine when our packages will be penetrated, and the
shape, size and distribution of those penetrations. Obviously, very
important questions.

We also know that we\'re looking at a very complex, much like the source
term, a very complex corrosion environment. We\'ve got a situation where
our packages may be covered in dust. The dust may be wet. We\'re going
to be likely looking at humid air conditions, we\'re going to be
thermally and radioactively hot, we\'re going to have periodic wetting
and drying, we\'re going to have natural convection effects, we\'re
going to have salts deliquescing on the packages, potentially at bulk
boiling temperatures. That\'s a very challenging corrosion environment
to completely untangle and to understand, and what we\'re doing is
targeting three areas within that.

We know, for example, that passive metals, in terms of their general
corrosion rate, it\'s a state passive. They will\--the corrosion rates
are very low. They\'ll be around for a long, long time. And, I\'m
thinking here in particular of work we\'re doing out at Berkeley. Tom
Divine, he\'s put together sort of an in situ raman experiment, and
he\'s actually effectively, I think, watching the evolution of the
passive film over time.

And, while again, that\'s far from a complete understanding of what\'s
going to happen over the time periods we\'re interested in, I think it
is an important first step toward enhancing our understanding of that
process.

Damage evolution by localized corrosion, or crevice corrosion. We know
that there is an absolutely deep and robust literature on the initiation
and propagation of crevice corrosion. However, the literature on
potential stifling and arrest mechanisms is considerably thinner. In
fact, you could argue that I suppose our program is potentially a leader
in that area. I\'m thinking here in particular of the work of Joe Payer
and Rob Kelly, where they have actually looked at the potential for a
crevice to open up as it evolves, and, thus, exposing the, if you will,
the critical corrosion chemistry to the wider environment, essentially
stifling or even shutting the process down.

Now, in citing that work, I do want to mention that we have recently
received the Board\'s letter in response to the Corrosion workshop, and
I, you know, certainly will take that very seriously. In particular,
your concern that this corrosion work, particularly the stifling and
arrest work, may in fact be more an artifact of a particular laboratory
experiment, rather than actually representative of conditions in the
repository. And, that is something that Joe and I will think, you know,
very seriously about, and certainly respond to you in a fairly careful
manner about that.

And, finally, and our last area, we know that corrosion performance of
any metal is due to a combination really of a couple of factors. One,
the inherent corrosion resistance of the metal, coupled with the actual
environment. And this particular area actually looks at, in particular,
the evolution of the moisture in contact with the metal surfaces of the
waste package. We need to enhance our understanding of that.

Next slide, please. Really, what I want to point out here, once again,
back to the theme of intellectual continuity, we currently support 20
graduate students in this program. If you couple this with the work that
we support in our other areas, we\'ve probably got support out for 40 to
50 graduate students in our program. I think that\'s a pretty
significant intellectual community working on problems of interest to
this program, again, in terms of thinking about how we\'ll maintain
this.

I think that\'s all I really want to do with that slide. Next one,
please.

Our Natural Barriers Thrust area. We currently have, depending on how
you look at it, four or five major research areas. We are looking at
seepage processes, particularly emphasizing the development of coupled
models to better understand that. And, here, I\'m thinking in particular
of two projects we\'ve got going on.

One is George Danko\'s work at the University of Nevada at Reno, and
George is looking at essentially developing a new thermal hydrological
near-field model, which will account for the impact of natural
convection on seepage. Among other things, George believes there may
actually be reduction in seepage due to evaporative effects, the axial
movement, if you will, of vapor along the drift. And, that, I think, is
potentially very, very exciting work, although it\'s, in terms of
timing, it is still probably at least a year to two away from fruition.

The second project in the seepage area that I think is particularly
interesting is Derrick Ellsworth\'s (phonetic) work at Penn State. This
is a\--it\'s a rather complex experimental and modelling effort, but
essentially what he\'s working on developing is an integrated, fully
coupled thermal hydrological mechanical chemical model, in which, among
other things, some of the early results seem to indicate that we may see
the drifts\--essentially the fracture pattern around the drifts may be
healing, due to mineral precipitation coming out of the drifts. It\'s a
very interesting, again, very difficult piece of work, and again, we are
only about\--only a little over a year into that work, so we have at
least a year to two before that work will bear fruition.

Within the drift shadow arena, we have three projects ongoing there.
And, in the UZ and SZ transport, we have a number of different projects
going on there. Jim Seasdale (phonetic) at the University of Nevada at
Las Vegas is looking, for example, at redox conditions in the
groundwater to effect fine examples of reducing environments rather than
oxidizing. To date, he\'s not, although that\'s still in the early
phases as well.

Next page, please. The program has been I think particularly productive
in terms of, again, in terms of its papers published. I would note that
the last bullet is rather ambitious, I believe, based on the funding
that we provided to them in Fiscal Year \'06. I actually think the
majority of work here will not complete until Fiscal Year \'08, likely
early in Fiscal Year \'08, but nevertheless, critical because we\'ll
want to begin to think about new starts in that arena.

The next page, please. Our Advanced Technologies Thrust. We\'re
currently looking at five projects, currently performing five projects
within this thrust. I guess the first one we would start with is our
structurally amorphous metals project.

Currently, as I think I have mentioned, we\'ve coated six, what we call
half-scale simulated waste packages. This is not a bells and whistles
waste package. This is essentially a steal sewer pipe with a welded
cover. They\'re about eight feet long, and they\'re probably, oh, a
couple, three feet in diameter. And, essentially, we have coated them
with a thin layer of SAM, either two by five formulation, or 1651. And,
we have used three separate spray houses to do that. Frankly, we wanted
to understand the robustness of the application process for this
material, so we went to Caterpillar, we went to Plasma Tech, and we went
to Sandia, each of whom maintain spray houses.

Currently, the packages themselves, the half-scale packages, have been
through salt bog testing, came through rather well. They\'re now out at
Livermore, where they are generally being torn apart, either to do
mechanical testing, measuring the strength of the bond, drop testing, a
whole series of damage tolerance testing. That work is all ongoing. Our
long-term corrosion studies on structurally amorphous metal are also
continuing, as well as our nuclear criticality experiments.

And, I think\--at least, I suspect in Fiscal Year \'07, what we\'re
likely to do with SAM is to a certain extent, take a breather. We\'ve
pumped quite a lot of money into this project in Fiscal Year \'06, in an
attempt to really drive it, and to figure out whether we had something.
I think what we need to do this year is to sort of marshal our data,
review that data very carefully, and obviously as publicly as we can,
we\'re thinking through it now, how we might want to conduct, if you
will, a peer review of this data, and then take it to the project
probably late in the fiscal year to essentially determine interest in
moving forward, and in what areas they might be particularly interested
in moving forward on.

Reduced pressure electron beam welding. We\'ve entered phase two of that
work. Phase two is essentially the development of a half-scale size
unit, where we will look to essentially do four simulated closure welds.
Two will be with stainless steel. Two will be with Alloy 22. That work
is due to complete probably, again, around the August time frame. At
that point, we\'ll consolidate the information, take it to the project.

At this point, I am probably leaning against recommending that we go to
a full-scale development for this work. I don\'t think we will need to.
I think we\'ll have the data that we need as far as being, you know,
able to make a decision what we want to do with this. And, frankly, a
full-scale development of a reduced pressure electron beam system will
run to the tune of \$5 to \$7 million, and that\'s probably a bit beyond
our resource availability in the near future. But, the work has proven
to be very, very promising.

In terms of subsurface operations, we are looking at the possible use of
silica-based cements in the repository. Most of you know we can\'t use
ordinary Portland cement in the repository. It causes pH problems,
mobilizes plumes of radionuclides. So, we are looking at, again,
silica-based cements. We have selected a formulation. We are moving
forward with leachate tests, actually, we\'re well into leachate tests.
We\'re also moving to design essentially a process model to help us
better understand the long-term behavior of this material in the
repository.

That work is ongoing, although, again, at a fairly reduced rate at the
moment. But, we are targeting the Third International Use of Cements in
Geologic Repositories Conference as a venue to get this out. That will
be, it\'s an international conference in France later this summer, and
we are particularly anxious to be there, because we do want to get
access to much of the information that the French have.

The French have done quite a lot of work in this arena, but haven\'t
published very much of it. So, we do need to I think get access to that.
Again, very promising work.

Engineered backfill. We did a feasibility study, oh, about a year ago,
looking at the possibility of using engineered backfill to mitigate
potential seismic and igneous intrusion scenarios in the repository. At
this point, that work is largely completely. We had Sandia Lab do
essentially an experimental look at thermal conductivity. We wanted to
make sure that as we put backfill around, we didn\'t essentially create
a thermal blanket around the package.

Obviously, if you use very fine grain material, you will do that. We
found, however, that by using a coarser grain material, cobble sized,
say one to two centimeters, we find we don\'t have a particular problem
with thermal conductivity, with generating too much heat inside the
package.

We would have, if this project ultimately moves forward, we would
obviously have to look at environmental impacts, or potential
environmental impacts, in terms of corrosion performance on the package,
associated with backfill. But, at least at this point, we\'re looking at
wrapping that project up and putting it on hold at least for now.

And, finally, our seismic hazard program. It\'s a little bit odd in a
way that this is in the Advanced Technologies Program, but it started
off initially as a potential way to reduce the cost of some of our
facilities construction out there. If you don\'t need to have a six foot
thick wall, it obviously, you know, you can put a building up for a bit
less money.

This is run out of the Pacific Gas and Electric Utility. They, in turn,
have subcontracted out most of the work to SCEC and PERF. If I remember
correctly, the Southern California Earthquake Consortium. And, PERF, I
believe is the Pacific Earthquake Research Foundation, essentially
Northern and Southern California, split between them.

We\'re looking here particularly, I think John spoke to this earlier and
Russ spoke to it earlier, we\'re looking particularly at the tails of
our seismic analysis, the very low probability, very high consequence,
really extreme ground motions you get when you carry these studies out
to a million years, and beyond. And, I think it\'s probably fair to say
that most seismologists consider that level of ground motion to
essentially be physically unrealizable. And, this work is essentially
going after that, to see if we can bring enough data forth to develop
enough of a scientific basis to make that strong argument.

Next slide. Finally, in summary, I think the first couple bullets are
somewhat self-explanatory, and I don\'t really feel the need to, you
know, spend a lot of time going through those. I think we have generated
additional insight, and I think our technology work has generated
certainly several potential technology enhancements.

We continue to value the diversity and quality of our program
participants. As you have seen, we really have, I think, a pretty
extensive reach, given the relatively modest resources that we put to
this program. I do think, however, as we enter into Fiscal Year \'08,
that it\'s going to become particularly critical if we can figure out a
way to do it, to issue calls for new proposals.

Once again, as I mentioned, it\'s a competitive marketplace out there.
If you want to keep the buzz about the program alive, you\'ve got to be
able to offer real funding to both graduate students and established
investigators. And, that is something we are going to look very, very
actively over the next few months, figure out our cash flow analyses,
and that sort of thing, because we\'re very anxious to put together new
starts in \'08, if we can do it.

Finally, the last point I wanted to make. It\'s an impressive point. In
terms of intellectual continuity, I may have seemed at times almost
obsessed with that theme in my presentation, but to be perfectly frank
with you on both a personal and professional level, the tragic death of
Bo certainly affected me very deeply, and it really got me thinking very
strongly about this issue. I do believe that the Science and Technology
Program is going to be a principal source, it\'s going to be a principal
pool of those candidates, those scientists and engineers that we\'re
ultimately going to need to recruit onto this program.

And, I know HR people refer to\--they use the dry term of succession
planning, and I don\'t want to say that replacing Bo is going to be
easy. It\'s, in fact, going to be impossible. But, with that said, when
I look to do succession planning, it presumes that I have a pool of
qualified candidates available. If they\'re not there, then succession
planning, by definition, becomes impossible. And, I think from that
standpoint, that the Science and Technology Program, again, given the
diversity and quality of its program participants, is absolutely a ready
pool.

We\'ve got 50 graduate students out there doing not simply master\'s
work, not simply Ph.D. work, but work that actually means a difference
from the point of view of the energy security of the country. And, I
think that\'s the kind of hook that I think we can use to attract those
people and bring them into the program.

And, with that, I\'m done.

GARRICK: Thank you, John. David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

This is more of a recommendation than it is a question. As you know, the
Board has been pretty supportive of the S&T Program over the years,
pretty much from the beginning, and several of us in this room were on
the Board when it was initiated. If you put up Slide Number 8, please,
there are several product dissemination things that occur, one of those
being your annual science review program, and so on and so forth, the
peer review journals, and so on and so forth.

WENGLE: Yes.

DUQUETTE: Last year, we forced ourselves an invitation to attend your
meeting on the amorphous metals.

WENGLE: Yes.

DUQUETTE: That invitation didn\'t come back this year, nor are we
normally advised of those program reviews. I think it might be wise from
your point of view, as well as from ours, since we\'re supposed to be
the Technical Review Board for the program, if you would apprise us of
those, and issue invitations. We probably can\'t always attend, but I
think it would make sense.

Likewise, we can\'t monitor every journal that your PIs publish in, and
it would be a courtesy, I think, to the Board to send to the Board
Headquarters in Washington reprints of papers that are published that
are supported by the program.

WENGLE: Absolutely. We have no problem at all accommodating that. I
think that makes a great deal of sense.

GARRICK: Ron?

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Let\'s go to Number 18, just as a backdrop for this question. You
mentioned that in terms of the structurally amorphous metals program,
you may just take a breather in 2007, and regroup a bit, examine data,
and so on. But, John, I\'ve always been concerned that the data I have
seen on corrosion related testing has been performed in what I would
characterize as non-representative, environments that are not
representative of the repository. Has that changed? Because, frankly,
there\'s no assurance whatever that the corrosion behavior you see in
Environment A is going to be anything like what you might expect with
deliquescent dusts or seepage water. You know, we really need to do
that.

WENGLE: Yes. And, I will say one of the things that we have done toward
that end, and certainly Joe Payer can add to this, but we\'ve asked Joe
within his corrosion co-op to take a careful look, if you will, at the
fundamental bases of the performance of structurally amorphous metal
vis-a-vis corrosion. And, that is certainly a shortcoming, I think, at
least to this point in our understanding of the material. No question
about it. Joe?

GARRICK: Let\'s see, Mark is next, and then\--

PAYER: Excuse me, may I just respond? I\'m sorry. Joe Payer, Case
Western Reserve.

Ron, there has been a significant broader, I think you\'re referring to
most of the\--many of the early tests were done in calcium chloride, and
so forth, and, so, there\'s been a significant amount of tests done in a
much broader range of chloride solutions, and looking at a broader range
of industrial type environments, to put these alloys so that the typical
material selection folks can say okay, that acts like this material, or
it acts like butter. And, I can assure you they\'re acting more like
nickel chrome poly alloys.

LATANISION: Just to respond to that. Latanision, Board. I think Dave
Duquette\'s comment is the operative one. We haven\'t seen that data,
and, you know, I think Dave and I were both very impressed by what we
did see at a briefing that was held at the Board\'s offices in
Washington some time back. But, that, frankly, has been the last contact
we have had on this of any real substance. And, I think it would just be
useful for us, given what Joe just described, and what seems to be
emerging, it would be useful for us to be aware of that. It might
actually make a very good presentation at one of these meetings.

WENGLE: Yes. And, again, I will take certainly that comment very
seriously. We do need to, and, Dave, your comment, we do need to make
sure that we\--our liaison with the Board needs to be a bit more robust
than it\'s been. No question.

PAYER: Joe Payer, just one last, along those lines also, there\'s a
special symposium being sponsored at the MS&T meeting this fall in
Detroit. There\'s going to be some talks at NACE. So, we\'re at a stage
where some of these results now are mature enough to get them out into
the literature, and, Dave, your suggestion about getting those to the
Board makes a lot of sense.

WENGLE: And, particularly with the structurally amorphous metal program
as well, we have overcome some of our hurdles associated with
intellectual property, and we are a bit freer now to get that work out
and talk about it.

GARRICK: All right. Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

John, thank you for the presentation, and, clearly, your passion for
this program is coming through loud and clear, and I appreciate your
review of all the different pieces of work that are going on.

And, yet, at the same time, the S&T Program always seems to be at risk.
And, so, my question I guess is that in the absence of what the Board
has seen as a well articulated performance confirmation program to date,
and given the nature of the work that appears to be going on in the
Science and Technology Program, has there been any discussion about
making S&T a mainstream element of a performance confirmation program?
In which case, not only is there a more stable role for this program,
but it actually feeds directly into answering questions that the
performance confirmation program is supposed to answer.

WENGLE: That is an interesting question. The short answer is that there
has been thought, but I think the decision has essentially been made to
keep us separate from the performance confirmation program. Now, I will
say it\'s a fairly dynamic environment at the moment. I\'ve begun to
interact pretty extensively with Frank Hansen at Sandia, who is their
performance confirmation manager, as well as with Debbie Barr, who is
the PC manager within Russ\'s office. So, I think this is a\--I think
it\'s still a fairly dynamic area, to be frank with you. Clearly, there
are some obvious ties between the two programs.

We know, for example, within performance confirmation, as I actually sit
down and begin to develop their detailed needs, for example, for
censoring and monitoring technologies, that\'s going to be an
extraordinarily difficult task. They\'ve got a lot of monitoring to do,
heterogeneous types, in rather different environments.

There are going to be certainly technical challenges associated with
that that S&T can help with. Just as I suspect your larger point, a good
bit of our technical work, particularly our science-based work, can
change the context within which the performance confirmation program
functions. So, I do agree with you that we absolutely have to have
tighter links between those two programs. Absolutely. That\'s an area
that we\'ve got to think a lot harder about.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: You made a comment that you didn\'t think that\--Kadak, Board.
Sorry. You made a comment that you didn\'t think the S&T program was
going to be needed for the license application. I would like to suggest
that perhaps you rethink that assumption. And, in line with that
possibility, the QA requirements\--

WENGLE: Yes.

KADAK: \--for university work, which is a little different than NRC
licensing work, as is typical laboratory R&D work. So, if there are
things that you believe programmatically might help, and I\'ve seen
several, you might want to think about applying a more rigorous QA
program to the data collection and analysis. And, in particular, I would
think\--I\'m not sure what the nuclear critical experiments are, but\--

WENGLE: Essentially, what those experiments are, we\'re looking at the
possible application of structurally amorphous metals, again, the
formulation two by five, which has a fairly high boron content. We\'re
essentially looking at spraying that over borated stainless steel.

KADAK: Okay. I also see some opportunities in the silica-based cements.
Things get complicated. And, a number of other ones that would suggest
that you have some real opportunities. And, I think the last time you
reported, or somebody reported on studies of in-drift vapor transport.

WENGLE: Yes, George Danko\'s work.

KADAK: Right. And, I think that\'s going to be very important in the
license application.

Final question. Relative to the silica-based cements, are you working
with Oak Ridge on this, or are they part of your program?

WENGLE: Oak Ridge is our lead lab on this. Les Dole is our lead PI.

KADAK: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you. Any comments from the Staff?

(No response.)

GARRICK: We\'re in excellent shape. We\'re back on schedule. Any other
comments? We can take a question from the audience at this point. Yes,
Judy?

TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nuclear Waste Task Force.

The question I sent up about the EIS was that the title of Russ\'s
presentation was Ongoing and Planned Activities, and things that could
change, results that have previously been done. And, I wanted to know if
the new and changing information that Russ was talking about would be
incorporated into the draft EIS, Supplemental EIS that\'s going out for
public comment, and would people be able to see and be able to comment
on the new and changing stuff?

DYER: Russ Dyer, Department of Energy.

Yes, there will be a number of what I\'ll call technical basis documents
that become available or have been updated. Those will be accommodated
in the EIS. The technical information will be there. And, the documents
themselves, those that DOE produced, will be made available. For the
example that I think you\'re talking about, the regional groundwater
model, was not a DOE document. That has been developed and published by
the U.S. Geological Survey. But, our models, our analysis will
incorporate that new state of knowledge, if you will.

GARRICK: I do have a question, another question from Mike King, who is
the hydrogeology consultant to Inyo County. But, I think it\'s probably
a question that should be addressed to somebody else, perhaps Russ. It
says, \"Does DOE recognize the upward gradient in the lower carbonate
aquifer at Yucca Mountain as a barrier to radionuclide transport? And,
if so, what is the plan to preserve that natural barrier?\" I think,
Russ, you\'re probably the gentleman to answer that.

DYER: Yes. Russ Dyer, DOE.

Certainly, we\'re aware that one borehole that penetrates the paleozoic
tertiary interface there shows an over-pressured zone in the paleozoic.
That\'s consistent with both the regional and the site model. Whether we
consider it a barrier\--I\'m sorry? Okay. We\'re aware that it\'s
over-pressured, but the\--all of the flow that comes out is all, as
Claudia said, is in the tertiary aquifer coming down. So, at least as
far as we take the modelling, we\'re only dealing with the tertiary
aquifer.

HORNBERGER: Russ, before you leave, though, I think the context of the
question is that if you live in Inyo County, you might be worried about
contamination of the carbonate aquifer. And, so, you want to preserve
that upward gradient. And, just because you\'re modelling the tertiary
aquifer, doesn\'t mean that the question isn\'t valid on its own.

DYER: Okay. I\'m scratching my head trying to think of what we might do
that would jeopardize the carbonate aquifer. And, aside from boreholes
that have been drilled into the aquifer that go from the tertiary to the
paleozoic units, and when you plug and abandon the hole, you\'ve got to
seal that up. So, I believe that\'s accommodated already, and we
certainly have no plans to get down that far associated with the
repository.

GARRICK: All right. Well, thank you very much. We\'ve had a very good
morning. We\'re right on schedule, and we\'ll recess until 1 o\'clock.

(Whereupon, the lunch recess was taken.)

[AFTERNOON SESSION]{.underline}

GARRICK: Okay, I wonder if we could come to order, please?

Our first presentation this afternoon is going to be given by Paul
Harrington. He\'s going to talk to us about the ongoing and planned
activities of his office. Paul?

HARRINGTON: Good afternoon. Since I\'ve last talked to you, we have
actually made some very significant changes in the repository design. As
you\'ve heard before, we\'ve shifted to a canister based approach as
opposed to handling primarily bare fuel assemblies, and we\'ve changed
the facilities to suit. That also requires then a change to the safety
analysis to address that.

Next, please? I\'ll go through a summary of the design changes, include
graphics on the layout of the site, the waste handling process and
facilities. The changes to the packages and canisters themselves, we\'ve
actually removed, eliminated several of the older waste package designs
that were based on bare fuel assemblies. And, then, talk about the
subsurface facilities. There are very few changes there really. A status
of where we are with the design. I\'ll also touch on the preclosure
safety analysis relationship to the design, and then the summary.

Next, please? A series of acronyms. They are in your sheets there. The
main ones that will be of interest are the new buildings, the initial
handling facility, IHF, the canister receipt and closure facility, CRCF,
the wet handling facility, WHF, and the receipt facility, RF. You
haven\'t heard of those before.

Next, please? We\'ll use transport, aging and disposal canisters. Those
will obviously reduce the handling of individual fuel assemblies at the
repository. Our operational goal is to have 90 percent of the commercial
waste received at the repository in these TADs. These are disposable, so
the repository operation would consist essentially of removing that TAD
from the transportation cask, putting it into a waste package if it
meets the thermal emplacement criteria, or if it does not, put it into
an aging overpack to send out to the aging pads to cool until it does
meet the criteria. But, the handling of bare fuel assemblies are
primarily eliminated.

There\'s a recognition, though, that it cannot be fully eliminated. Some
facilities simply won\'t have the capabilities to load TADs. There may
be other reasons to expect that we will receive individual fuel
assemblies, either in transportation casks as bare fuel assemblies, and
we have designed the facility to also be able to receive and unload
non-disposable canisters.

Because of that, we\'ve reconfigured the waste handling process and the
facilities to suit, and changed the suite of waste packages. And, we
added the IHF as a facility to accommodate the Naval high level waste,
or SNF, and high level waste receipt, and I\'ll talk about that. That
has some unique characteristics, specifically, we, because of the waste
streams that we run through there, do not need to credit ventilation
systems. Obviously, we\'ll have ventilation systems, we\'ll have HEPA
filtrations, but because of the nature of the waste in those buildings,
those will not end up being classified as important to safety.

Next, please? The site layout. This is the north portal. We have always
clustered the emplacement structures around that north portal. We still
are. The aging pads are essentially unchanged, but we have revised the
layout of the facilities at the north portal.

Next, please? Okay, there are a series of three CRCFs, one receipt
facility, one initial handling facility, and one wet handling facility.
The placement of those is to support a staged operations and bringing on
line\--or staged construction, rather, and bringing on line in
operational phases.

Next, please? Same general location for the waste receipt, handling,
aging, support facilities. The IHF location down near the portal allows
early construction of that without interfering with subsequent
construction of other facilities. Now, we\'re reassessing some of the
schedules for construction of the individual facilities. We\'re looking
now at construction of IHF, the first CRCF, and the WHF, the wet
handling facility, simultaneously. We\'ll continue to evolve that
schedule.

The CRCFs, canister receipt and closure facilities, handle all of the
canisterized waste except for the Naval SNF. There is a relatively few
number of Naval canisters. One of the changes since we\'ve last spoken
is that the Navy is going to slightly change how they treat their fuel
prior to shipment down to the repository. So, whereas, in the past,
we\'ve talked about having 300 Naval canisters, now it may be as many as
400, but it\'s still a relatively small amount compared to the others.

The Navy is also going to use a much heavier and longer transportation
cask for shipment of those canisters. So, one of the features of the
IHF, dedicating that to Naval, as well as the high level waste glass
logs, is that we will have to have that capability for a heavier, longer
cask, in only one building, instead of spreading it across several.

The receipt facility takes transportation conveyances and pulls the
canisters from them and puts them directly out onto the aging pads. We
have an expectation that many of the canisters that we receive will be
hotter than our current emplacement scenario would allow for. So, the
aging pad is to accommodate that. So, rather than running those hotter
canisters through the CRCF and tying it up and preventing that facility
from being used at that time for emplacement operations, the receipt
facility will allow the hotter canisters to come into a facility where
they can be off loaded and sent out to aging without tying up, using up
the operational capability of the CRCFs.

The wet handling facility takes uncanisterized fuel, either coming in as
individual assemblies in a transportation cask, or in non-disposable
canisters, if we do receive those. That has the capability to unload
those canisters, transfer them\--or, unload the canisters, transfer the
fuel assemblies to the TAD, disposable canister, which would then be
taken over to the CRCF for placement into a waste package.

The new emergency diesel generator facility and low level waste
facilities round out the suite of main surface facilities. Certainly,
there are the other support facilities, as we have had in the past, but
these are the waste handling associated facilities.

Next, please? Again. As I said, the TAD canister eliminates the majority
of the SNF handling. The remaining bare fuel assembly handling that has
to be done is now to be done in a pool in the wet handling facility.

Next? A discussion of which waste forms go through which facilities
ultimately to emplacement. Naval SNF, as I mentioned, goes through the
initial handling facility, and to emplacement. There won\'t be a need
for any sort of staging or aging of that. It will be straight through.

High level waste glass logs can go either through the IHF or through the
canister receipt and closure facility, and then to emplacement. The DOE
spent nuclear fuel will go through the CRCF and then to emplacement.
Commercial spent nuclear fuel in TADs can go to the receipt facility, if
it\'s too hot for emplacement, out to aging, and then back to the CRCF,
or if it\'s cool enough to support direct emplacement, to the CRCF, and
then underground. CSNF that\'s not in disposable canisters will go to
the wet handling facility, and then if we load a TAD that exceeds the
thermal emplacement criteria, it will go to aging. Or if not, over to
the CRCF, then for emplacement.

Next, please? One of the requests was for capacities of the facilities.
This is metric tons heavy metal, annual capacity for each of them. The
IHF, primarily Navy and high level waste, is about 40 MTHM per year
receipt and emplacement. Most of that is driven by the high level waste.
The Naval fuel, there\'s only 65 metric tons of it spread across almost
400 canisters. So, the loading per canister is really relatively low.
The remainder of that is high level waste, about 4 of that 40 is actual
Naval fuel.

The CRCF, about 1200 MTHM per year, both receipt and emplacement
capability. Wet handling facility, that\'s the unloading of the
canisters, or transportation casks in there, about 340 MTHM per year. It
does not have, again, an emplacement capability. It loads TADs that then
go to CRCF for placement into the waste package, and ultimately
emplacement. Likewise, receipt facility can receive about 2300 MTHM per
year in transportation casks, but again, it does not have a direct
emplacement route. It goes out to aging for the canisters that exceed
thermal criteria, or underground, or over to the CRCF, rather, for waste
package loading for those that don\'t.

Next, please? Again. Okay, this is the initial handling facility. The
dimensions of this building, the main part of it, are about 160 by 170
feet, just to give you a sense of scale. The operations, a
transportation cask on a rail system, or truck, can come in through
here. There\'s an overhead crane that will pick it off the
transportation conveyance, up-end it, and put it into a cask transfer
trolley. That\'s the word I don\'t remember.

Okay, that transfer trolley takes it in a vertical orientation, it\'s an
air pallet mechanism, and moves it over to a transfer cell. Above this
area, there\'s the canister transfer machine that\'s very similar to
existing technology for transfer of canisters. It will, that canister
transfer machine, will translate over above the transportation cask,
open a couple of shutters, shielding gates, grapple down on top of the
canister, pull the canister up into that shielded canister transfer
machine. The gates close.

Then, that canister transfer machine translates over above an empty
waste package that\'s been loaded into the waste package transfer
trolley. Shutter gates will open. The canister transfer machine will
lower that canister down into the waiting waste package. Shutter gates
will close. A lid gets put on that waste package transfer trolley at
that point.

Then, that trolley moves over to this station. This is where closure of
the waste package is done. The lids are installed there. The welding is
performed. The non-obstructive examination is performed. The stress
relief is performed.

When that\'s ready, then it comes over to this point. The cask is
rotated from a vertical orientation down to a horizontal orientation,
and a tongue within the shielded device is moved out, it\'s a movable
bed plate, exposing then the waste package on its support pallet to be
picked up then by the new emplacement vehicle.

We have also changed that. We now have a single vehicle that will
receive the waste packages in the surface facilities, and take them
clear to their emplacement point. It\'s called a transport and
emplacement vehicle, TEV.

You may remember the previous design, we had two vehicles, one was the
waste package transporter that took it underground to the mouth of the
emplacement drifts, and then there was a transfer of that to the
emplacement gantry that took it down the drift, and then put it in
place.

The whole theme through this redesign has really been simplification. We
have reduced the number of lifts wherever possible. We have simplified
the grappling. We have provided more positive control to minimize the
potential for slap-downs, anything other than a vertical orientation
drop. We have provided shielding during the waste transfer process,
almost exclusively. The only place where the waste package is exposed at
any point is the transfer from the waste package trolley to the TEV.
There is a gap in between those two components, so that we can do
inspection of the waste package surface as it\'s moved from one to the
other to make sure that we meet the criteria that are being established
for waste package allowable surface imperfections.

We also, and this is a change from before, keep the transportation cask
in its Part 71 license configuration with impact limiters on until it
gets inside of the buildings. This building, we\'re not relying on
accredited ITS ventilation system, because of the nature of the material
that\'s run through there, it\'s very robust. If we have a drop and
breach of a package, we will not exceed the Category 2 dose criteria.

The other facilities, where we run the commercial fuel through, I\'ll
discuss this in a moment when we get to them, we do need to credit the
ventilation systems, the HEPA filtration. So, we keep the transportation
cask in its Part 71 license configuration until we bring it inside the
building. In the previous design, we had removed impact limiters in an
area outside of that confined space.

Next, please. The cross-section through there. This is the canister
transfer machine, picking a canister out of the transportation cask in
its trolley. It will suck it up into that, translate over, and then
lower it down. Suck it up is not a good term. It grapples and hoists.
This is the closure area for the waste package. Then, the rotation from
the vertical orientation down to a horizontal orientation. The
translation, the tongue, as I referred to it, moves in and out of the
shielded part of this, and then movement into the transport and
emplacement vehicle. This vehicle actually comes over, grapples, lifts,
and moves this out. This vehicle is shielded on all areas, including a
movable shield underneath it.

The point of doing this was to facilitate recovery from equipment
failure. Now, most of the operations in the previous set of buildings
were done in hot cells. We would have to have used remote tooling to try
and recover from those. The intent here was to simplify equipment
failure recovery.

GARRICK: Paul?

HARRINGTON: Yes.

GARRICK: You made the point about simplification being an important
guideline here.

HARRINGTON: Yes.

GARRICK: Meantime, of course, you\'ve got the seismic criteria that
prevents you from being as simple as maybe you\'d like to be. Can you
say something as you describe these facilities about what is a direct
result of the seismic criteria? What kind of\--can you summarize the
impact that the current seismic requirements have on the design?

HARRINGTON: Okay.

GARRICK: Those walls are very thick, and very reinforced.

HARRINGTON: Yes, they are. And, that would be the primary effect, I
think, of the seismic criteria. We have three design basis ground
motions. Design basis ground motion one is a 1,000 year return period.
Design basis ground motion two, DBGM 2, is a 2,000 year return period.
Those, we are designing to code allowable stresses. We will evaluate the
facility to a beyond design basis ground motion.

What we\'re using as the design basis for facility design for all of
these is the DBGM 2 level. It\'s the higher level. It\'s a little under
.6 G horizontal and vertical. Development of that number is done by the
science side of the organization. We will implement it. But, yeah, it
has led to robust walls. We also get to make use of that, though, in
terms of shielding.

We have looked at the potential for introducing issues and component
qualification, only get to equipment qualification, for environmental
concerns. And, the DBGM 2 value that we\'ll have to qualify equipment to
is actually a little bit less than has already been used in some of the
commercial nuclear facilities. So, I don\'t see that as likely being a
problem for us in the future. The relatively high ground motions are
primarily driving us to thicker walls.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

Are you saying that some\--I just heard that perhaps the vertical motion
was greater than 1 G? Is that just a\--

HARRINGTON: No, I didn\'t say that. What I said was horizontal and
vertical are slightly less than six-tenths of a G now. That\'s the DBGM
2 value that we\'re designing the structure for.

KADAK: And, what\'s the one that is beyond design basis?

HARRINGTON: That right now is about 1.3 G. And, that\'s the subject of
ongoing discussions with NRC. We\'re not done with that.

KADAK: I heard about that number, and I\'m just wondering how you got to
that number?

HARRINGTON: That\'s in evaluation of a 10,000 year return period, but
because that\'s still the subject of ongoing discussions with NRC, it
may change some.

KADAK: Hopefully.

HARRINGTON: Okay. Next, please. This is a layout of the wet handling
facility. Within the wet handling facility, we do the transfer from
either transportation casks with individual fuel assemblies, or if we do
receive non-disposable canisters, that happens in the pool here. The
transportation cask comes in here. It\'s up-ended, put into a prep
station, one for rail, one for truck casks. Those casks, if it\'s a cask
that has bare fuel assembly in it, then it would go into the pool for
unloading. If it\'s one that has a canister, then the canister would be
put into the pool for unloading. We would put an empty TAD canister into
the pool, and then transfer from the transportation cask or the
non-disposable canister into the TAD.

There are aging racks with a capacity of around 80 PWR, and 120 BWR
elements, because there will not be a one for one correspondence between
transportation cask capacity and TAD capacity. The TAD, after it gets
loaded, gets moved out. The water level is dropped. It\'s welded closed.
Handling of it is generally done inside a shielded transfer cask.
That\'s how we move that TAD around in that building. There are no
trunions or grapple points, or anything like that on the TADs
themselves.

After the TAD is loaded, sealed, it\'s been dried, it\'s then taken in
that shielded transfer cask either out to the aging pad if it exceeds
the thermal emplacement criteria, or over to the CRCF for placement into
the waste package if it does not. The size of this is roughly 270 by 210
feet.

Next, please. This is the main production building, the canister receipt
and closure facility. Transportation casks come in here, either rail or
truck. A transportation cask is up-ended by crane. The front end of this
is very similar to the IHF. It\'s put into the cask transfer trolley,
that\'s moved over to an unloading port. This facility has two parallel
lines. The canister transfer machine operating above this area transfers
the canister from the cask over to an empty waste package, again in a
waste package transfer cart. It\'s taken over to a closure cell. The
waste package is closed, inspected, taken over, down-ended, and picked
up by the TEV.

This also has the capability of sending aging canisters\--or sending
TADs out to the aging pad, but we really expect to primarily do that in
the receipt facility so as not to tie up throughput capability of this.
This is on the order of 330 feet by 262 feet.

Next, please? Cross-section through there. It\'s essentially the same as
the IHF. Cask receipt, transfer to the trolley, transfer of the canister
by the canister transfer machine to the waste package. Closure of the
waste package, down-ending, and out.

You will see a much reduced number of lifts of handling from the designs
that you\'ve seen in the past. We actually borrowed this design from
large positioning tables that are used for fabrication of heavy
weldments. We had looked in the past at doing this rotation from
vertical to horizontal, first by a crane, then by some hydraulic rams.
This is a component that manufacturer uses for movement of very large
components during fabrication, like Caterpillar, tractor frames, heavy
stamps and mills. So, we\'ll borrow that sort of technology. It\'s a
geared movement around the pivot point.

Waste packages in TAD canisters, a couple of slides\--I\'m sorry\--I
skipped the receipt facility. This is also similar to part of the front
end of the CRCF. Receipt of waste packages, transfer into aging
overpacks, and then movement over those aging overpacks out to the aging
pads. That is a very similar technology to existing commercial. This is
on the order of 280 feet by 240 feet.

Let\'s go on over. I realize I\'m a little past 1:30. I\'ll try and go
quickly. TADs for the majority. This reduces the waste packages from 10
down to 6. There\'s a graphic on that in a moment. We added shield plugs
to the TADs to simplify the closure operations. The Naval canisters have
always had shield plugs in them that reduces the rad field for their
canister closure operations. We wanted to learn from that, and do that
across the board. So, we\'ve added shield plugs in our TADs, but there
are some waste packages that will have a series of small diameter
canisters in them, specifically the DOE high level waste, and spent
nuclear fuel ones, so we\'ll, for those, include a shield plug inside of
the waste package above the individual canisters.

The point of all of that is to reduce the rad field at the waste package
closure station, so that while we don\'t intend to have to have manual
operations, if we do have to have some manual operations to get in to do
a weld repair, or something like that, on waste package closure welds,
it will facilitate that. That\'s on the order of an 800 MR per hour
field at that closure station.

Next, please? The majority of the TADs will get loaded at the utilities.
Some of them will be loaded at the repository, i.e. those that we load
in the wet handling facility, that\'s into TADs. We\'ve already said
these things before. Can\'t over-emphasize our intent of simplifying
repository operations. Shield plug, I already addressed.

Next, please? These are as before, with the addition of the shield plug
to the waste package on top of the individual canisters. This replaces
the previous sets of waste package designs that had individual baskets
for the 21 PWR or 44 BWR.

Next, please? Subsurface. No major changes.

Next? What we did primarily was took this Panel 1, and shifted it a
little bit to the south to improve the access coming in the north ramp
from the emplacement\--from the loading areas into the first drift in
this Panel 1. Earlier, the way this was configured, it didn\'t flow from
one end to the other. You would have had to have backed up a little bit.
So, all we\'ve really done is shift that Panel 1 a little bit to the
south. The rest of it, the basic ventilation scheme, the amount of
tunnelling, all of that is really unchanged from before.

Next, please? We have\--where are we with this? Okay, there is a lot of
work to do and not very much time to do it. I fully recognize that. We
have completed the basic facility layouts. What I put up there are
certainly not general arrangement level drawings yet with completed wall
thicknesses, for example. We have chosen wall thicknesses based on
precedent for design of these sorts of facilities, with these sorts of
seismic loadings. We\'re currently doing evaluations of those structures
to make sure that they meet the stress allowables under the codes.
We\'ll be using ACI 349 for the concrete structures, for example.

The material flow through the buildings are done, so we have completed
for CRCF the first phase of that structural analysis. It\'s a lumped
mass stick model. The other facilities are in process now. We\'ll do the
structural analysis in two phases. What we\'re referring to is Tier 1,
is this lump mass model, and then we\'ll do a Tier 2, finite element
analysis model.

Now that we have the basic building layouts done, we\'re doing the rest
of the structural layout, the systems design, the ventilation systems.
That will drive the electrical systems, the other utilities. We\'re
working hard to do the mechanical handling.

Now, our intent for this is to provide enough design of this facility
and its components to support a preclosure safety analysis. The
requirements for the preclosure safety analysis\--oh, we are going to be
doing a much more detailed PCSA than we had intended a year and a half
ago. Specifically, we\'ll need to do evaluations of the probability of
failures of these components, not just of the active components, the
cranes, the trolleys, the transfer machines, the EGEN, the emergency
generator facility, but also even the structure itself, the concrete
structure.

So, to support that, the design organization is doing more complete
design work to then feed to the preclosure safety analysis group to do
fault trees, some FMEAs for the structures themselves, for example,
instead of simply providing a general arrangement of the structure, and
committing to design and construction in accordance with ACI 349. We\'ll
need to do the structural analysis of that to support development of a
fragility analysis. We\'ll have to convolve that with the seismic
hazards analysis to demonstrate a reliability of that structure.

So, as you can see, this is quite a bit more detailed than I had spoken
to you would in the past. That\'s where we are now.

So, I\'d be happy to take questions.

GARRICK: Well, you were certainly correct in that you were going to give
us some new and different information. We appreciate that. Okay, Henry?

PETROSKI: Thank you. It\'s good to hear that you\'re incorporating so
much known technology, as much as possible. What are you going to do
about unique technology in these facilities?

HARRINGTON: We are really trying to stay away from having any unique
technology. We will certainly have unique implementation of technology.
But, probably the most unique component might be the transport and
emplacement vehicle. Nobody has built one of those before, let alone
licensed it. But, it is nothing more than a large weldment with a lot of
standard commercial components in it. So, as we develop our design and
PCSA analysis of that, we\'ll have to look down at the component level,
the reliability of the drive motors, of the shafts, bearings, those
sorts of things, of the controls on it. That is existing technology.
Ours will just be some unique implementation of it. But, the, for
example, fuel assembly transfer in the pool, we\'ll just go buy an
existing design for that.

PETROSKI: Are you going to go through a demonstration for the
implementation of the technology that you addressed?

HARRINGTON: We are doing already some prototyping. There\'s a prototype
waste package that\'s already been fabricated. We intend on prototyping
some of these other non-standard type components. We had had a plan for
previous, and now that we have shifted to this design, we\'re
reassessing what and when.

PETROSKI: One more question. You talked about 90 percent of goal, of
having\--

HARRINGTON: Yes.

PETROSKI: How realistic is that goal? And, on what basis do you reach a
90 percent goal?

HARRINGTON: We recognize that there are dry casks out there, and the
total inventory of that, if utilities, based on what they have today and
where they may be going in the near future, may exceed that, this
facility will have the capability for receiving and disposing of DPCs.
The 10 percent value was chosen as an expectation of what we reasonably
may be able to accommodate. But, the thing I would want to stress is the
flexibility. Okay? I\'ve talked about three CRCFs, and one WHF. If we
find over time that the proportion is appreciably different, and running
one WHF potentially over a longer period than we\'re planning on now,
still wouldn\'t accommodate what we might need to, then we certainly can
add another WHF. That\'s a decision that can happen in the future.
We\'re providing the design to be able to accommodate that, whichever
way it goes.

PETROSKI: Thank you.

GARRICK: Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Paul, thank you for the updated information. It\'s certainly helping
better understand where the surface facility design is going from the
standpoint of the details you\'ve provided today. I just had two
questions. The first one is you made reference in one of your last
slides about the preclosure safety analysis, and I guess my question is
is that being confined to the surface facility only?

HARRINGTON: Oh, no, no. The preclosure safety analysis is described in
63.112, and in there, we have to look at the entire facility. So, that
gets out to the aging facility. It gets to the underground. It is the
entire facility.

ABKOWITZ: Does it get to the transportation system and the waste
acceptance at the utility sites?

HARRINGTON: No. Let me explain why. 63.112.63 is for the repository. The
transportation system proper is not part of the repository. What I do
have to do is in my system, evaluate what comes into the repository
under Part 63. So, yes, I do have to do evaluations of materials as it
comes onto the repository, but the waste acceptance at the utilities,
that will be done outside of the PCSA. One of the things that we do have
to address is the potential for a misload, potential for a mistake, so
we\'ve had those sorts of discussions with NRC.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

So, then, in essence, the more that you can transfer the handling risk
to the utilities, the more the risk of your facility evaporates, but the
risk to the entire system may still be present, just transferred
somewhere else; is that correct?

HARRINGTON: I would not have worded it that way. I think there\'s an
overall reduction in the risk. Implicit in your question, I think, was
the statement that the risk stays the same, it\'s just transferred away
from DOE. In the system before, utilities would have a certain risk
associated with loading the transportation casks. At the repository, we
would also have a much larger risk associated with unloading those
transportation casks and transferring to the waste package. In this
system, the utility action of loading a waste package\--of loading a
TAD, rather, is I think a little different than the risk associated with
loading a transportation cask. Our risk at the repository is much
reduced because I\'ve eliminated a significant amount of risk associated
with handling a quarter million individual fuel assemblies. So, overall
system risk I think is really reduced.

ABKOWITZ: Okay. Well, let me just, I might try to phrase my question
slightly differently then.

HARRINGTON: Okay.

ABKOWITZ: If you can demonstrate\--if it turns out the overall system
risk is reduced, say, by 50 percent, but risk at the repository is
reduced by 80 percent, that\'s okay with you?

HARRINGTON: That would be okay with me.

ABKOWITZ: Even though it means the risk somewhere else in the system may
have increased?

HARRINGTON: Well, if\--I\'ve gone probably as far as I ought to with
that.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, let me change to my second question then. Could you
comment on how the surface facility design might change if there is no
rail spur to Yucca Mountain, or if the construction of such a spur is
delayed significantly, such as five to ten years?

HARRINGTON: If there were no rail spur ever, we\'d obviously have to use
truckable casks. So, the capacity per TAD would be much smaller, there
would be a much greater number of them. If the rail spur were delayed by
five or ten years, that\'s a decision we would have to make as to
whether or not to change the system to accommodate a truck based system
for a relatively short period, or simply delay some part of the
operations to wait for that. I know what my preference would be, but
that would be a much more global discussion.

ABKOWITZ: What would your preference be?

HARRINGTON: Oh, mine would be to delay. If we tried to develop a very
short-term appreciably different solution, there\'s a lot of time
associated with that in and of itself.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Did you want to clarify something?

MC CULLUM: Yeah, I just wanted to address the previous question from
the\--

GARRICK: What\'s your name, who you\--

MC CULLUM: Oh, my name is Rod McCullum, Nuclear Energy Institute, and I
just wanted to address the previous question from the utility
standpoint. We\'ve had significant interactions with the Department of
Energy and there are several utility vendors that are working on
designing TADs now. Those TADs will be operated, loaded, under the same
requirements that the existing DPC or transport package would. We do not
see any appreciable additional risk of loading TADs at our facilities,
as we would loading what we\'re loading now.

ABKOWITZ: Thanks.

KADAK: Kadak. Do you think you could meet the 90 percent target that
they\'re assuming here?

MC CULLUM: Well, that\'s a different question, and I guess I would just
prefer we cross that bridge when we get to it. Right now, it is true
that, and as I have spoken to the Board before, we\'re up to about 15
percent of our fuel is in non-TAD canisters right now. That might go as
high as 20 percent when they get to having TADs on the market. How we
deal with that 10 percent difference, I don\'t know. You know, again,
we\'ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I know Mr. Sproat alluded
to that\'s something the Department is considering. That\'s also
something that has to be discussed between the utilities and the
Department that I can\'t discuss on an industry-wide basis. But, we do
not see that as a barrier. Again, you know, if they can take 90 percent
of our fuel, and it\'s just that 10 percent we\'ve got to argue about,
that\'s a heck of a lot better off than where we are today.

KADAK: And, just as a follow-up. Relative to the TAD loading criteria,
there\'s a certain number of assumptions made as well about how much has
to go to the storage pads. Has the industry taken a look at those
assumptions relative to thermal loading to see is the much reduced
capacity of the aging pad the correct assumption?

MC CULLUM: We haven\'t specifically looked at that. Again, what really
is limiting on the loading and the shipping of the TADs is, especially
with the high burnup fuel, are the transportation restrictions. TADs
will be easier to transport because they have reduced capacity. You look
at the throughput rates that are established by, you know, DOE\'s
schedule, assuming they do a good job of getting their facilities on
line, we have done some studies, I think we talked about some of that
when I went before the Board last May, in terms of aging, we haven\'t
specifically looked at this latest capacity, but again, that\'s a bridge
we\'ll cross when we get to it. We see sufficient capacity to get
started and get well along our way here, and that\'s what we\'d like to
see happen.

GARRICK: Howard?

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

Paul, have you wrestled again with the issue of a surface specification,
or surface finish spec on the waste package itself? And, not only the
clean new one, but also whether\--what gouges are allowed, and so forth?

HARRINGTON: We are wrestling with that now. That has been identified as
an issue that we need to close on. We haven\'t yet closed on that.

GARRICK: Ali?

MOSLEH: I\'m not sure how this safety analysis, what the form or shape
it is in, but judging from the words you\'re using, you know, they use
equipment reliability. I gather it has some probabilistic flavor to it.
If that\'s the case, are you also considering including or incorporating
process model and possibility of human error?

HARRINGTON: We have. Human error is one of the areas that NRC is
particularly interested in. So, whereas earlier, we had, for example, on
the crane drops, taken the NRC values, which were 10^-5th^ probability
per lift, that was not broken out to separate what part of that came
from human error versus equipment failure. NRC clearly wants to see the
human error contribution to the probability values for event sequences.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

Have you had your plans for your above ground facilities, on surface
facilities, reviewed by utilities who do a lot of fuel handling now, and
perhaps others who have had to handle heavy objects, such as radiated
casks, see whether the system that you\'ve identified can work? That was
question number one.

Question number two is what\'s your throughput from the time you receive
a cask, or to the time it\'s either going into the hole, and the storage
pad?

HARRINGTON: We have not had utilities review the facility design. But,
we have gone to some specialty companies to look at specific parts of
this. The closure, the weld closure system, for example, the down-ending
system, the trolleys, we have gone to organizations to have them provide
input to us. Some of them are more willing to do that than others. One
of the things we\'re actually finding is a reluctance of some
organizations to want to get involved at this stage of the project, and
potentially preclude themselves from other work later on. We also have
on staff people who have had a lot of that experience in commercial nuc.
utilities, or heavy industry elsewhere.

The second part was throughput, how long does it take to come in. If a
canister or TAD were coming in the front end of the CRCF, and then going
to disposal in a waste package out the back end, I think that\'s on the
order of about four days. Is that right? Okay, thanks. Two to three
days. And, the receipt facility, that\'s much less. There\'s no waste
package closure associated with that, it\'s simply a transfer, so that
would happen in less than a day.

KADAK: And, in the metric tons of heavy metal you talked about
processing per year, I added up and may have added it up wrong, but
it\'s 3800 per year, and I\'m not sure, is that consistent with your
contract expectations or obligations for consistency of acceptance?

KOUTS: This is Chris Kouts of DOE. There are no specifics in the
contract related to the acceptance rate that the Department has to take.
And, that\'s the subject of litigation at this time.

HARRINGTON: I would answer it as these are facility capacities. We want
to make sure that the facilities are large enough to take what we need
to take, irrespective of the ongoing work that Chris referred to.

KADAK: Okay. As you look at that table, Chris said there was no
requirement to accept it at any rate. Is that understood from what you
said?

HARRINGTON: Sure.

KADAK: And, I can\'t remember 1900, then escalating to 3100; is
that\--maybe Rod, can you clarify that?

KOUTS: Chris Kouts again, DOE. There is no provision in the standard
contract addressing rates at which the Department has to receive fuel.
What you\'re referring to were probably program documents from the past,
but those are not requirements in the contract. And, believe me, that\'s
not only my opinion, but that\'s every judge who has ever read the
contract also.

KADAK: I\'m just trying to figure out what your design objectives are
here, and I don\'t understand what they are then.

KOUTS: The design objectives, Chris Kouts again, DOE, we have apparent
systems requirement document that\'s controlled by the Director of the
Program. We have basically a five year ramp up to 3000 tons, state
acceptance rate, in the system. So, what Paul was referring to in terms
of the maximum capability of the facilities is certainly consistent and
it meets our systems requirements document that currently exists.

GARRICK: Okay. I just have a couple of questions. Have there been any
operation simulation studies made on this new layout?

HARRINGTON: Yes. Chris is going to talk about that in his total system
model when he gets up next. That comes from addressing how long
operations take throughout.

GARRICK: And, then, a little different spin on an earlier question by
Andy. How different would the facilities be if the thermal criteria
would change such that it was essentially\--that it essentially
eliminated the need for aging?

HARRINGTON: The facility itself would probably not change much. What
would change would be an elimination of a need for a receipt facility if
you really didn\'t have to send canisters out to the aging pad. That\'s
the point of the RF. But, the other facilities, the basic transfer of a
canister from a transportation cask to a waste package, I wouldn\'t
change that. The wet handling facility, we\'re still going to need the
capability for that. That would stay the same.

GARRICK: You mentioned earlier that you thought that the risk, depending
on where you established the interfaces, would be reduced with this
layout over the other one. Does the same thought extend to the\--you
expect the safety analysis, the updated safety analysis to be more
favorable?

HARRINGTON: Yes. The preliminary work that we\'ve done shows that the
previous event sequences that we have that were Category 1, which was
driven by the large number of individual fuel assemblies that we\'ve
had, we don\'t have those any longer, because we don\'t have that large
number of individual fuel assemblies. So, we don\'t believe that we will
end up with any Category 1 event sequences. We\'ll have some Category 2s
certainly, but it doesn\'t look at this point as if we will have any
Category 1s.

GARRICK: Okay, thank you very much. Are there any other questions?
Questions from the Staff? Yes, Carl?

DI BELLA: Carl DiBella. On your Slide 11, in an early part of your talk,
you said you were going to have to build three facilities simultaneously
at the beginning, and I caught IHF, but I didn\'t catch what the other
two were going to be.

HARRINGTON: Oh, IHF, wet handling facility, and the first one of the
CRCFs.

DI BELLA: Can you give a ballpark cost for those facilities?

HARRINGTON: I cannot. Rather than hazarding a guess, I mean, I have seen
estimates on the old set, I haven\'t seen a cost estimate for the new
buildings. So, I can get that to you, but I don\'t have it here with me.

DI BELLA: Can you give a ballpark cost for what the old facilities would
have cost?

HARRINGTON: I don\'t remember, Carl. It\'s been a year and a half, and
I\'m sorry, I just don\'t remember.

DI BELLA: Are we talking billions?

HARRINGTON: It was like 300 million, 400 million, 600 million. Those are
the numbers that we were I think rattling around with. But, I don\'t
want to hazard a guess for these. I need to just get that and give it to
you.

GARRICK: Okay, any other questions? All right, I think we\'ll move onto
our next presentation, which will be from Chris Kouts, talking about the
waste management planning, and integration.

KOUTS: Thank you very much. It\'s good to be back here in front of the
Board. I think the last time I was in front of you was in May of last
year. So, I\'ll give you an update of where we are with TADs, as soon as
we get the presentation up.

Some of the questions that were asked earlier, I\'m going to try to
address in my talk. Dr. Abkowitz\'s question about risk, and any other
throughput questions, and so forth, I\'ll try to address, some of the
things that we\'ve evaluated in our total systems model. I\'m getting
pings, but no\--here we go.

All right, the Board asked for an update on where we were with TADs,
also operational integration from receipt to emplacement, and the total
system model analysis that is ongoing, and will continue.

Moving right along with TAD background. In October of 2005, as you may
remember, the Department announced its decision to move to a primarily
canister based approach for the acceptance of commercial spent fuel, the
variety of benefits that that brings to certainly DOE facilities, and I
would argue also the utilities. We talked about risk. I think we have to
quantity what risk is, but in terms of the development of the TAD, we
made sure that anything that we would ask the utilities to do is not
inconsistent with what they\'re doing today. So, we\'re not asking the
utilities to undertake any new operations at their facilities.

But, essentially, what the TAD does is it certainly supports the
standardization of the handling of spent fuel from the reactors through
the transportation system through the repository, and into the
repository. It lets us utilize the fuel handling experience that exists
at nuclear utilities today. It simplifies certainly our operations and
our facilities, as you\'ve heard Paul talk about. It reduces our
low-level waste production and worker exposure, and it reduces the
complexity and the cost of our facilities.

I\'d want to emphasize this, that when you talk about integration within
this program, certainly the TAD in and of itself will do a tremendous
amount of integration within the utility industry, and within the
Department\'s development of facilities, and it\'s going to be a very
key interface point that will be important to the handling of fuel on
site, through the transportation system, and at the repository.

In order to do this, we have to make sure that the TAD complies with all
applicable requirements. The TAD is going to have to be certifiable, if
you will, under Part 71 for transport, Part 72 for storage at reactor
sites, and certainly under Part 63 at the repository.

Our development approach has been to use industry experience to the
maximum extent feasible, which we\'re in the process of doing. And, I
might emphasize this fact. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act also directs the
Department for all transportation activities, related activities, to
utilize to the maximum extent we can, private industry.

So, looking at how we tried to implement out canister based approach in
the Nineties, in the mid-Nineties, and some of you may remember that we
had a different acronym for a multi-purpose canister. We called it an
MPC back then. Today, we call it a TAD. Some people think it\'s a tad
better than what we did before. But, when I was given the opportunity,
if you will, to implement the TAD concept, I looked very hard at what
our experiences were in the past.

And, one of the reasons I think\--there were a variety of reasons why
the MPC effort failed, one of which I think it was premature. I don\'t
think we understood very much at that time what the underground
requirements for Yucca Mountain were. We were guessing at that point.
Today, I think we have a much better understanding of what our waste
package needs to look like, and we built those into a performance
specification which we issued last year.

And, why the development of a performance specification was key is that
back in the mid-Nineties, we decided to go with essentially one
corporation to do the design. That was not met with riotous applause by
the other organizations in the industry that also felt that they had a
share of the market. So, what we wanted to do this time, besides
encourage competition, was to give everyone an opportunity who was, in
our opinion, qualified, to try to have an opportunity to design TAD. So,
we developed a performance specification, which we issued on November
29th on our website. And, that performance specification essentially,
and I\'ll talk about that in detail later, encompassed all the what we
feel are specifications that we need, not only for long-term disposal,
but also for handling this device on our sites.

We prequalified essentially the industry. Prequalification in our mind
was essentially that they had to have an active certificate under Part
71 and Part 72, and there are actually five vendors that are at work
here. One of the other vendors has teamed with one of the groups here.
But, these are the four that we currently have under contract developing
proof of concept designs.

What\'s proof of concept? Proof of concept is basically by early March,
we will know how just the specification works. We\'ll get a sense from
these four vendors as to whether or not all the specifications that we
want to put into the TAD, does it all work with the transportation, does
it all work with the storage device that can be used at Yucca Mountain,
and a storage device that can be used at utility sites. So, we are
anxiously awaiting that opportunity to review those reports when they
come in.

And, based on that, assuming the vendors are successful, we will begin
to move forward and energize those vendors to take this to a safety
analysis report to be submitted to the NRC before we submit an
application to the NRC for Yucca Mountain, which would be no later than
June of next year. So, this is on track, and I should also say
that\--and I went over this with the Board earlier last year\--but,
prior to the time that the vendors actually go in to the NRC, we will
review their designs, we will make sure they\'re consistent with our
specifications before they submit it, and the Department will maintain
that involvement in their designs throughout the certification process,
and even through the fabrication and deployment process that utilities
may choose, if utilities choose to utilize these on their sites.

I\'ve already covered that. We\'ll monitor the review process. This just
goes on to say that if there are changes during the NRC review process,
then we\'ll have to review those changes, and make sure still that the
canister itself is consistent with our specification. And, that will
also, again, apply through the fabrication and deployment process.

Now, let\'s talk a little bit about the specification itself, since
that\'s somewhat new since I briefed the Board last year, since we
issued it in November.

As the slide indicates, it delineates the requirements that DOE will
rely on in the license application for compliance with both Part 63,
under Part 63 for both postclosure and preclosure. And, in order to also
facilitate handling at the repository, there are a variety of other
parts of the specification that we use also to make our life easier at
the repository from a preclosure handling standpoint.

For instance, consistent handling device that all the canisters will
have, and that\'s something that we\'re building in, and that was, if
you review the specification on our website, you will also see that.

Let\'s talk a little bit about the specifics of the specification
itself. It\'s 21 PWRs, 44 BWRs. That\'s totally consistent with our
waste package design that we\'ve had in the past. This is typically a
lower capacity device than the utilities typically use for storage on
their sites. Nonetheless, this is what works in the mountain, so this is
what we\'re going with. That\'s not to say that at some point in the
future, as we learn more, that we can go through several generations of
this, where we can go to a higher capacity TAD, but this is our first
shot, and we think this will work because it again, is based on what we
are going to have in our license application.

The length is 212 inches. Diameter, 66 1/2 inches. About 54 tons in
weight. Maximum dose at the top of the TAD will be no more than 800
millirems. That\'s an average dose rate, excuse me. And, that\'s
essentially due to the fact that both the utility sites and at our
facilities, there may have to be human intervention on the top of the
lid, and we want to keep that radiation field down to a minimum, which
is why we went to an 800 MR exposure. And, we had a variety of
discussions with private industry about this, with the utility industry,
but this is essentially what we came up with.

Borated stainless steel, let me talk about this for a moment, because I
think historically up to this point at least, most of you who followed
our waste package design might remember that our criticality control for
long-term in the waste package was nickel gadolinium. And, you\'re
probably asking yourself, well, why did this change. And, I think this
is a really good case study about how interrelated preclosure and
postclosure has to be for especially something as the TAD.

In the original waste package, we had carbon steel, and carbon steel was
in there for essentially cost production aspects, and in addition, it
gave us some long-term radionuclide retardation based on the oxides that
came out. And, I see our chief scientist nodding his head there. When we
initially looked at this, putting carbon steel in the TAD, we heard very
loud and strong from industry and the utility industry that we can\'t
put this in our poor because it doesn\'t work with our pool chemistries,
and it creates major problems.

So, we had to remove the carbon steel. When we removed the carbon steel,
we had to then look at okay, what does that do? Well, that changed the
in-package chemistry for the waste package. It basically gave it a
slightly higher pH, which meant that we didn\'t have quite a hostile
environment where we had to go to such an exotic poison as nickel
gadolinium. So, that\'s why we were allowed to go to a borated stainless
steel, which is more of a conventional poison that\'s typically used
today.

Now, this is important because, as you know, nickel gadolinium,
basically, the largest source of that is in Mongolia, and I don\'t think
we wanted to be trekking over to Mongolia in order to get nickel gad
into our waste packages. So, besides stopping our trips to Mongolia,
this was also somewhat of a cost reduction for us, that actually the TAD
brought about.

But, again, the interrelationships, and we had a lot of discussions
within the program about the specification, both from a preclosure and
postclosure standpoint, and this was one of the major changes that was
made.

Canisters are going to be seal welded. We toyed with the idea of having
bolted closures, but basically, seal welding I think is the best way to
go. We have a common lifting fixture that I mentioned earlier, and if
you want to review our specification, you can see the aspects of that.
And, handling and aging at the repository will be in a vertical
orientation. And, organic, pyrophoric, and any RCRA materials are
prohibited. So, that gives you a sense of that, of what\'s in the TAD
spec, and I do commend that to your review if you haven\'t looked at it
already.

Now, it\'s marked as preliminary. If you go to our website, you will see
it\'s preliminary. When we get the proof of concept designs from the
vendors, we may have another round and make some revisions to it. But,
after that point, when they are marching on towards developing SARS to
submit to the NRC under 71 and 72, we will consider that to be fairly
final.

Yes, doctor?

KADAK: Just a quick question. On the specifications, how different is
that specification from what you might consider a typical storage task
internals?

KOUTS: Well, certainly the size of it is different, 32/68, but 32 PWR,
68 BWR is typically the sizes that are used in the industry. We can\'t
have organic, so, therefore, in terms of the\--there\'s not a neutron
shield that basically is an organic neutron shield which many of the
utilities use. That\'s different for us. Besides that, I don\'t
think\--I mean, certainly, the size and weight are different, given the
capacities, but I don\'t think there are that many other differences
besides that. Those are the ones that come to mind.

We had, just to highlight this point, we had four meetings with vendors
and utility industry. I want to go back to a comment made about our
inability to interact with utilities or the industry based on the
litigation.

Based on my experience in the program, there was no problem holding
these meetings. Yes, we have to make sure that we\--we are going to
touch on issues that are not related to the litigation, but any
technical issue that we have, there\'s been absolutely no problem
getting technical information from the industry, and I don\'t see that
as a problem. And, that\'s been going on for the last ten years. So, I
know the Board harbors this view that somehow we\'re inhibited from
getting the information we need to implement the repository. I have not
experienced that personally, and I don\'t think anyone on the program
that I\'ve talked to has. So, I\'d be interested in hearing where you
are hearing that, because quite honestly, I don\'t see that problem.

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

Let me say that we heard it from this\--in our meetings with the project
staff. So, we\'re not making it up, Chris, it\'s\--

KOUTS: Well, I\'ll tell you, I have not seen it. What we do try to do
within the program, and maybe this is the source of confusion and why
that comment is generated, but we like to know what interactions are
transpiring, so we know who\'s talking to who. Okay. Because I will tell
you, quite frankly, that the experience, due to the litigation, is that
they will have lawyers, they will have people, consultants, who are
testifying in court attend these meetings, and try to get comments out
of the project, or project people, and use that against the government
in court. But, these aren\'t issues related to the litigation. It\'s not
issues, technical issues related to the implementation of Yucca
Mountain.

LATANISION: Latanision. Well, that\'s good news. I hope that that is the
case, and it will remain the case, and far better than we expected.

KOUTS: But, I do think that what you\'re hearing is that oh, my gosh,
no, it\'s such a problem to set up the meetings. The issue is more we
need to know what the meetings are about, if they\'re technical
meetings, they can go on, and they have gone on. It\'s only when in
certain instances where there will be certain individuals in the room
who we know are testifying against the government in lawsuits, and their
purpose at those meetings is not for the purpose of exchanging technical
information. It\'s to try to gather information against the U.S.
Government in the prosecution of these lawsuits.

So, to the extent that any technical issue is involved, that\'s not
a\--there is no problem with interacting with the industry on that. When
it gets to issues associated with the litigation, absolutely, and the
Justice Department has to be involved. But, we\--this should not inhibit
in any way, you know, the interaction, the technical interaction that we
have with the industry.

Dr. Kadak, did you have a comment on this?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

Just a clarification. The reason, about two years ago, we started
meeting and tried to organize meetings with the industry and DOE in the
same room, and prior to that, there was very, very little communication.
But, since that time, and people have been communicating, as you
suggested. But, the excuse was used by the DOE, and also by the
industry, they don\'t want to talk because of the litigation, and we
tried to break that down about two years ago, and if that was
successful, that\'s terrific.

KOUTS: Well, again, if it\'s a technical interaction, absolutely. But,
sometimes, quite honestly, they\'re not just technical interactions, and
we just have to screen that and make sure that that\'s right, and those
interactions can occur.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

I can\'t let this moment pass. Is it then possible in your mind for the
utilities and the DOE to discuss variations in waste acceptance
strategy, such as who is in the que and what\--how old the fuel is that
they\'ll package, and in what order?

KOUTS: Well, that\'s very interesting, because that is a contractual
issue.

ABKOWITZ: It\'s also a technical question.

KOUTS: Well, and I\'m going to get to that, because I think the total
systems model has\--gives us a lot of insight into that, and I think
what we\'re finding with some evolution in our thermal requirement is
that essentially we have a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of
what\'s at the pools, and the order that we need to take it under the
standard contract.

And, for those of you in the audience, and for those of you on the Board
who don\'t understand that, the contract is very, very specific about
the order in which a right is given to accept fuel into the system. And,
that has to do with the oldest fuel first priority, and in the
development of the standard contract, although I wasn\'t there at the
time, it\'s hard to believe that it predated my involvement in the
program, that was a significant point of agreement within the industry
about how that ought to be allocated. And, it\'s basically, if you\'re
going to change that, that has to be a group discussion with the entire
industry, because if you\'re going to jump in front of somebody else,
you\'re taking somebody else\'s rights, that has that other person
involved.

So, I think that what I think the Department has to look at is meeting
its obligations to the extent that there are other options, there are
always other options, but that\'s a group discussion with all the
utilities, and I think that\'s a rather premature discussion at this
point in time. But, I think we\'re going to get to at least some of the
analyses in the total systems model that I think are very promising,
that basically indicate that the que is fine in terms of our ability to
accept fuel and meet our thermal goals.

Okay, moving right along, I know the Board wanted to hear about
integration from reactors to emplacement, and I think as I mentioned, I
think the TAD is bringing that about, and I think we\'re learning a
great deal in terms of the development of the specification, interaction
with the utilities on this, and with the vendors, and I think it is
going to bring the integration that the Board wants, and that the
Department wants.

And, I think the beauty of the TAD is that it\'s gotten the program
together to address all the different areas that we have to address,
which cut across preclosure, postclosure, transportation, and dealing
with the reactor sites. So, from that standpoint, I think it\'s been
successful.

Thermal size and handling requirements are in the TAD. That all came
from, again, our preclosure and our postclosure needs. Our
transportation planning will be all based on TAD procurements, to the
extent that we understand the percentage that we\'re going to be
bringing into the system. And, let me get into the TSM analyses that
we\'ve done historically and that we\'re doing today.

Most of you, since I\'ve given a couple of presentations on the total
systems model, I won\'t belabor this slide, other than the total systems
model is a unique tool. It gives us an ability to understand essentially
how one part of the system affects the other part of the system. If
there are issues at the repository, how that propagates back through the
waste acceptance que, and also how different waste acceptance may come
through and affect the repository in terms of whatever fuel that we
select at the site. So, it\'s a very useful tool.

I think one highlight from this slide is that our understanding of the
thermal needs of our postclosure have evolved, and it\'s not my
understanding, but it\'s basically the underground understanding, and I
think we have learned a lot more about ventilation in the drifts, and
how much heat that\'s going to be taken off the waste packages. I think
we have learned a lot about end effects, the possibility, if you will,
that we can put hotter packages at the ends of the drifts because you
have a lot more mass, if you will, that\'s absorbing the heat.

And, I think we can move away from the historical seven package segment
that we\'ve looked at in the past, and have different emplacement
strategies that allow us a lot more flexibility, and basically can have
the potential impact on reducing our need for storage in the future.

Let\'s kind of go through the history lesson here about what we did in
2005, what we did in 2006, and what we\'re doing in 2007 with the total
systems model.

In 2005, you might remember that we were just making the decision at
that point on TADs, and we did kind of a feasibility analysis that, you
know, can we achieve our acceptance rates? Will we exceed our 21K aging
capacity, based on very early concepts of 1.45 kilowatts per meter, and
11.8 per waste package, and can we get it all done within 50 years? I
mean, those were kind of the big issues. Can it work? And, I think the
TSM said yeah, it can work.

And, then, in 2006, we supported the CD-1 process, where we began to
look at different facility configurations about how best to deploy this.
We looked at capabilities of wet and canister handling facilities, and
what kind of configuration should we look at? And, the total systems
model was very much involved in that analysis. We also were instrumental
in helping make the decision about how many closure cells we need, which
is basically about six to support our emplacement rate.

And, Dr. Kadak was asking about the 90 percent goal that we have,
whether or not we can meet that. And, that gets all into when you look
at a 70,000 ton repository, which is 63,000 tons of commercial fuel, and
7,000 tons of DOE spent fuel and high level waste, you can get to a
90/10 split, but you\'re basically taking the materials from the pools.
You know, I won\'t get into the contractual issues associated with
accepting the other devices that are out there, which is the subject of
litigation.

However, whatever happens with DPCs in the future, assuming that they do
come in the system, we\'ll probably take those at our own rate. So, to
the extent that we\'re taking fuel from the utilities, we\'ll be taking
it from the pools. So, from my perspective, when we analyze this with
the total systems model for the 70,000 ton case, the 90 percent
feasibility goal is very achievable. But, that also gets back to heat
loads and the kind of heat requirements, and how much aging we have on
site.

And, let\'s talk a little bit about that in the next slide. First of
all, I just want to throw a plug here in, again, for the total systems
model, because the tool does give us the flexibility. Instead of looking
at a box or a TAD facility, we can get down to process lines, and then
how you want to group those process lines is all dependent on how many
facilities you want to build, and it gives you the ability to kind of
mix and match the kind of facilities that you need on site. So, that\'s
why this is a very powerful tool.

Now, let\'s talk about thermal. One of the things that we\'re doing this
year with the total systems model, and we have some of this work
underway\--I think the Board has expressed in the past that we\'re too
locked into the 11.8 and the 1.45 kilowatts per meter. And, by the way,
that\'s not a point solution, that\'s a not to exceed amount. So, it\'s
anything under that works for us. But, I think what we\'re trying to
look at this, and we have\--the repository, as I said, has evolved in
their understanding of ventilation underground, and also end effects.
So, we can look at different configurations, if you will.

And, so, now the algorithm is not necessarily 11.8 and 1.45, it\'s more
what do we need to get a 96 degree mid-pillar temperature? Okay, what do
we need to get a 200 degree drift wall temperature? What do we need to
maintain 350 degree C. cladding? And, those are the parameters, if you
will, that we\'re trying to work around, which gives us a lot more
flexibility in terms of operationally about what we can put into the
mountain, and our flexibility, if you will, to actually pick a waste
package, or pick a TAD out of the storage fuel, and use that as the
blending device, if you will, in the repository as we emplace.

So, Dr. Kadak, you had a question?

KADAK: That was a huge change, what you just said.

KOUTS: Yes. And, those analyses are currently underway. I haven\'t seen
the results. I think they have a lot of potential, if you will, to
affect our understanding and our ability to emplace perhaps a lot faster
than we thought we could in the past, and perhaps keep the size of our
storage fuel down. But, again, I haven\'t seen the information, and I
don\'t want to be admonished by the Board staff about I\'m not going to
put up a slide here that says, you know, Valhalla, we\'ve reached it. I
don\'t know. I haven\'t seen the data yet.

But, I think we\'re looking at different parameters, and I think we\'re
trying to remain flexible, but we\'re not leading the effort, we\'re
essentially trying to\--we\'re following through with what is being done
and the thermal understanding of the site, and I think the model helps
us understand how that propagates through the system.

So, with that, we\'re continuing to use the systems model to do a
variety of things for us. I think it\'s, again, a useful tool, and I\'ll
go right to my summary, which is TAD design development is underway. The
spec is out there. The proof of concept phase will be done at the end
of\--in the March time frame, end of February, early March. It\'s
certainly being incorporated into the license application, as you heard.
And, the TSM continues to be a key tool in helping us understand how the
system will operate in the future.

I\'ll be happy to answer any questions.

GARRICK: Thank you. Thank you. You not only met your schedule, you
brought us back into schedule. So, you did a fine job. All right, Ron?

LATANISION: Latanision, Board.

We haven\'t heard anything much about waste package closure in terms of
welding and thermal stress relief handling. Howard asked a little while
ago about surface finish, et cetera. Those are the kinds of practical
implementation level questions that a metallurgist would be concerned
about. Can you tell me where we\'re at with all that?

KOUTS: That\'s, I think waste package closure is a Paul Harrington
question. I mean, I can\--that\'s beyond my depth. I think that\'s
really a Paul question.

LATANISION: That\'s a preclosure issue.

KOUTS: I don\'t know if he\'s in the room. Is there anyone that\--and I
think Kurt Lockman (phonetic) has also left. But, I think they\'re the
best people to answer that question for you.

DYER: This is Russ Dyer, DOE.

It\'s actually both a preclosure and a postclosure issue. And, I know in
the postclosure side, we have an analysis and modelling report looking
at how we model and we treat that in the postclosure performance
assessment, and that\'s work that\'s underway. We don\'t have the
results of it yet. But, it will be complete here fairly shortly. But,
it\'s not just one entity that\'s concerned with this. I mean, it goes
across the program.

I was just asked to talk about something that I know nothing about. Up
at Idaho National Laboratory, we\'re doing a prototype on the waste
package, and there will be lessons learned that come out of that, and
that\'s about as far as I can take that discussion.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

First, let me just summarize what I think you said that I heard was very
positive. One was that the loading of the TADs will be such that you\'re
not going to limit the loading requirements to 11.8 kilowatts.

KOUTS: That\'s correct. The only limitation right now on the TAD is what
could be transported, which would be essentially 22 kilowatts.

KADAK: 22 kilowatts. So, that gives the utility a lot of flexibility in
blending, and you might be able to find sufficient so-called fresh fuel
within the spent fuel to pools to be put into that canister, which is
good.

KOUTS: And, I will state that the 22 kilowatt limit is what\'s been
licensed today. I mean, that\'s not to say that that limit couldn\'t go
up with new designs that have different, you know, heat requirements.

KADAK: And, the\--once you get to the repository, you will be blending
the canisters in such a way to meet the old 11.8, or am I to assume that
you\'re going to blend them in such a way so that you don\'t reach your
peak limits, whether it be waste package temperature or fuel temperature
or drift wall temperature?

KOUTS: Right. We\'re looking at trying to maintain what we absolutely
need for postclosure, which is the 96 degree mid-pillar temperature in
the pillar, if you will, the 200 degree drift wall temperature, 200
centimeters, and not to exceed the 350 degrees C. limit for clad
integrity. So, we\'re still maintaining what we need in the postclosure,
but we\'re looking at it from a different perspective. How can we
maintain those parameters, which are ultimately what we need, for our
safety case, if you will, as opposed to the 11.8, not to exceed 11.8,
and the 1.45.

KADAK: So, those are sort of there, but not there?

KOUTS: Right. But, again, it comes from a better understanding of our
ventilation model, and the amount of heat that can be taken away from
the packages, and also the end effects. The end effects are a big deal,
because you have the capability to put the hotter packages at the end of
the drifts, and, therefore, you can emplace hotter materials because the
heat is being taken away faster because you\'ve got more rock mass. But,
again, this is\--you know, we\'re modelling essentially what the
underground people\--I shouldn\'t say that\--the postclosure people are
developing in their further understanding of thermal response in the
mountain.

KADAK: And, when do you think the first TADs might be available for use
in number?

KOUTS: The earliest that we feel that they could be available
commercially in the industry is about 2011. And, if you look at the
numbers, and I happen to have them here, roughly in 2011, there will be
a little over 14,000 tons in dry storage in some devices. By 2017, it
will be more like a little over 24,000. So, assuming that we can
penetrate the market, and assuming utilities, that we can incentivize
utilities to use these, as opposed to the DPCs, we have a potential to
impact that 10,000 metric tons, if you will, that will be deployed
between\--at the utility sites between 2011 and 2017.

KADAK: If I can, Mr. Chairman, one final question?

GARRICK: Sure.

KADAK: If the utility had, say, a multiple purpose, or dual purpose
container, you\'re saying that is not your choice of acceptance. But,
let\'s just say hypothetically that it could fit into your waste
package, and it could meet your thermal loads, would you\--I mean, would
you put it in the waste package?

KOUTS: Well, that\'s an interesting question, because our director has
requested that I specifically look at existing DPCs and their potential
for disposability. My sense is near-term, probably not, but again, this
program will be in existence hopefully for a very long period of time.

KADAK: Well, why would you say near-term, not, because near-term,
they\'re available to go?

KOUTS: Well, yes, near-term, they\'re available to go, but they don\'t
meet our requirements right now for the TAD spec. They\'re not 2144s.
They don\'t necessarily have the same criticality configuration we have,
which is 11 millimeters of borated stainless steel around\--and, it\'s
not configured. Some of them have organic material in them. That, again,
is unacceptable from a postclosure standpoint.

KADAK: Let\'s say we get rid of all those\--

KOUTS: I know, you say to get rid of those, but they exist. So, that\'s
not to say at some point in the future, we can\'t look at that, perhaps
we can analyze our way through that and demonstrate that. But, the time
being, I don\'t see any of those, first of all, fitting within our
envelope that we currently have, in our current waste package envelope.
It\'s certainly not covered in our TSPA, so, anything you\'re talking
about is probably a longer term issue. We\'ll get the repository
operational, we will revisit the issue, assuming all the contractual
issues are worked out, and we\'ll see if we can do it. I don\'t know.

You know, we may learn a lot more. We may have, you know, gained better
understanding. We may have better analytical tools. But, at this point
in time, we\'re going to look at that, but as I look at these, at the
existing devices, none of them certainly meet our TAD spec, and, you
know, we\'ll have to look again how far off they are and what the issues
are associated with them, and also whether or not they fit our handling
envelope.

GARRICK: All right, I have Mark, Howard and David. So, Mark?

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

Chris, I wanted to echo the sentiments that my colleague over here,
Andy, has mentioned about what looks to be some very positive
developments. As you know, the Board\'s been pushing system oriented
tools and, this looks like a good one. We hope the TSM has kind of
reached a certain culture of acceptance within the organization, and
that the kind of work you\'re talking about is going on.

The first question I had for you had to do with the work that\'s
starting to go on in thermal. Let\'s suppose that use of this model,
when you bring the thermal side of it into it, demonstrates that
there\'s some things that could be done very differently that would be
beneficial to the project, either in terms of safety, costs, or some
combination thereof. Won\'t it be too late to incorporate that knowledge
in the way in which you\'re proposing this repository to in the license?

KOUTS: No, I don\'t think it will be too late at all, because I think
that as we gain further knowledge about how we\'re going to operate
operationally within\--this is really an operational issue. It\'s still
meeting our thermal goals, if you will, but it\'s achieving them without
holding certain other parameters constant. I mean, again, we\'re an
evolving program as we learn and go forward. I\'ve said this many times,
you know, how we operate the repository on day one is different than how
we\'re going to operate in year 20 or year 10. We\'ll learn and we\'ll
go through a normal evolution process with the NRC, because that\'s what
the whole license amendment process, or the adjustments to the
operations of the facility will be. So, I don\'t see this\--I see this
as very encouraging that we\'re discovering this now, and I think it
will inform us as we go through the process, and help us operate the
repository in a more efficient and effective manner.

ABKOWITZ: Let me move on to one other question I have. Let\'s just
assume that the vendors come up with some satisfactory designs and we go
through this whole process. I think it\'s pretty much assumed that
relative to other containers, that this is going to be an expensive
storage device for the utilities, and will hold less capacity. So, you
mentioned that because you don\'t have any regulatory control over how
they, whether they use TADs, you mentioned incentivizing, I was
wondering to what extent there has been discussion with the utilities in
terms of that question? And, also, to what extent there are limitations
in using TADs at a lot of sites, because of the crane requirements?

KOUTS: Let me answer the first question. In terms of incentivizing the
utilities, those discussions are ongoing within the Department right
now, and I think that we will address that in the near term, in terms of
how we will view TADs. And, I don\'t want to get ahead of the way the
Department is, but those discussions are underway, and when we reach
that point, we\'ll certainly brief the Board on that.

In terms of handling the TADs on site, the TADs I think there are very
few sites that I don\'t believe will be able to handle TADs. And, of
course, we have to see the proof of concept designs, and we have to get
some feedback from the vendors, but our goal is to try to make these as
universally acceptable as we can. So, to the extent that there may be
some avocations in the final spec before we go forward, hopefully, it
will address any interface issues that we have. But, we\'ll be informed
by that when the vendors come in with their design reports toward the
end of February, early March.

GARRICK: Howard? David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

I think Mark had most of it. But, the\--that\'s underway, do you have a
contract with anyone yet to try to build one of these, a model of one,
or a dummy?

KOUTS: Are you talking about the TADs themselves? We have existing
contracts with the four vendors that I put upon the screen before. So,
yes, we do have people underway right now. They\'re certainly not
building demos of them. We\'re thinking about we\'d certainly like them
to partner with the utility, the member of the utility industry, as we
go forward, and that\'s something that we\'re looking at. But, I think
by the next time I brief the Board, I may have more information to
impart to you on that subject.

DUQUETTE: Do you have any feeling for when the first demonstration TAD
might be built?

KOUTS: Well, I\'d like to think that we don\'t have to go through a
demonstration phase. I would say that I\'d like to see these
commercially deployed in the 2011 time frame. That\'s what we see as,
assuming we energize the vendors to move forward, they submit their
SARs, their safety analysis reports, on 71 and 72 early next year, then
you look at the time that it typically takes to be certified by the NRC,
and then again to get this deployed at a reactor site, we\'re looking at
approximately four years. And, that\'s, you know, we\'d like to see them
deployed at that time frame. So, I don\'t see us going through a
demonstration phase. We\'d like to see them commercially deployable, and
that\'s why we are working directly with the vendors who work with the
utility industry to hopefully expedite that process and get them
available as quickly as possible.

DUQUETTE: And, a more technical questions, but a very specific one. Do
you anticipate doing the seal welding and inspection of the seal welds
on site at the utilities before transportation occurs?

KOUTS: The seal welding will be done for the purposes of the TAD at the
reactor sites. The seal welding for the waste package will be done at
the repository.

DUQUETTE: I understand that.

KOUTS: And, in terms of our need to inspect or be there to do that, we
have, as I said before, we have no regulatory authority over the utility
industry in any manner. I think that that\'s overseen by the NRC. All of
them have qualified QA programs. But, that\'s an issue that we\'re going
to have to address as we move forward. But, I left off a variety of
slides which I already went through with the Board the last time, but
before we receive a TAD from a utility site, they\'re going to have to
certify to us that they have loaded it according to our needs and our
procedures and our specifications, and in accordance with their QA
program, which has been NRC approved. So, there will be, you know, that
will be a significant certification on the part of the utility to
indicate to us that they have met our requirements, and we\'re going to
have to make sure before we accept that TAD for transport to the
repository that it does meet all our requirements. You know, that
certification, again, hasn\'t been determined exactly how we\'re going
to do that, but that\'s something that we\'re going to require before we
accept these things.

DUQUETTE: Right. Well, that goes to incentivizing again. I don\'t know
who would provide the utility with automated welding capabilities for
sealing the TADs, and then also the automated, presumably automated,
inspection capabilities. Would that, I mean, I presume that DOE or
someone is going to have to pay for that.

KOUTS: No, they already do that on site. There are firms that go around
from facility to facility that actually conduct this, and there are
trained crews at utility sites that actually travel from site to site
who have this experience to do this. So, the industry\--I want to
emphasize again that we\'re not asking the reactor sites to do anything
differently than they normally do, because the ones that\--typically,
the devices that exist today are also seal welded. So, there\'s
no\--they\'re inerted and seal welded, which is exactly what we\'re
going to require.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

GARRICK: Okay. Any questions from the Staff?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Good. We\'re moving right along. The Board would not object to
completing our day a little early because of some tight travel
arrangements that some of us have.

All right, I think we\'ll take a 15 minute break, and resume with our
next presentation by Gary Lanthrum.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

LANTHRUM: We\'ll jump right into the presentation here, because I heard
Dr. Garrick\'s comment about challenging schedules, and we\'ll see if we
can get into this and get to your questions.

The outline of the things I was asked to talk about was the structure
and status of the project, schedules for transportation, where we are on
the route planning, both within the State of Nevada and outside the
State of Nevada, and where we are with the collaborative planning with
stakeholders. And, I\'ll go through each of those topics.

As we\'ve talked about before, the basic approach for developing the
infrastructure, the hard assets for the transportation system, has been
carried out through the implementation of two major systems projects in
DOE. There\'s a National Transportation project, which includes the
casks, rolling stock, and support facilities. And, the Nevada
Transportation project, which is focused extensively on the railroad.
Both of those are adhering to the original CD-1 approval, which is the
Critical Decision-1, which has basically the alternative that we had
proposed, was still the alternative we\'re pursuing within Nevada for
the Nevada Transportation project.

We\'re still looking at conducting the repository to mainline track in
Nevada by building a railroad. And, Nationally, we\'re still looking at
buying a bunch of casks and a bunch of rail cars, and building a support
facility.

Some changes about how those would be implemented have been going on,
and that\'s what we\'ll cover a little bit here.

On the cask project, Chris talked extensively about where we are with
the TADs and the TAD development. What I\'ve done in this graph is to
show basically in project parlance the late start, late finish for a
couple of options for actually buying TADs. Chris is responsible for
getting all the casks designed to meet our needs. I\'m responsible
ultimately for buying the casks and then maintaining those under the
certificate of compliance issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

And, the longest lead time here on this line is for a brand new type of
cask, one that does not exist. You have a fairly lengthy period of
design, developing the specifications for procurement, and then the
actual procurement process to get the quantity needed for initial
operations. And, I show the late date for having that process started is
2010. That would be if there was no desire to have these made available
for the utilities to use between now and the time that we start
deploying them.

Chris has started the process early, as he indicated, because there is a
desire to have them available for utilities to use for their own dry
storage systems between now and the time that we would be ready to pick
up bare fuel.

And, there\'s a range of other things that\--in terms of schedule. If
you\'re buying existing casks, which we\'re hoping that the TADs will be
by the time it\'s time for us to actually buy units to pick up bare fuel
in, we wouldn\'t have to do that based on the current lead time for
procurements until 2013. We\'re actually looking at our current schedule
for procurements. Our initial procurement is in the 2011 time frame.
It\'s about a three year lead time for procurements based on the
challenge with fabricating facilities and the availability of
construction capability.

But, we also have a desire to do a fairly lengthy start-up set of dry
runs, using the casks and exposing folks along the routes to how this
system is going to work long before we actually have spent fuel in them
being transported. And, so, we\'re looking at trying to have the system
operational in the 2015 time frame as part of our ongoing start-up
operations.

Our rolling stock, we\'ve made the commitment before, which has not
changed, to procure rail cars that meet the Association of American
Railroads Standards 2043. The 2043 standard basically has some active
monitoring to give added assurance that these rail cars are performing
as expected while you\'re making your shipments.

In addition, they use state of the art suspension systems, what\'s
called trucks, in rail parlance, and the trucks just have a\--the
suspension system requirements for these rail cars give them the lowest
probability of derailment type accidents of any of the rail fleets that
are out there.

We\'ve done a fair amount of work since the last time we got together
and I presented to you, without actually buying any actual hardware.
What we\'ve done is we\'ve done a more detailed analysis of the weight
of the cask cars with all of the active monitoring systems, and with the
performance criteria that we have. We have looked at that in the context
of the TAD. We believe that the TAD weight range, when it\'s in its
transport overpack with impact limiters, will be very close to the
weight range for existing dual purpose casks, somewhere in the range of
115 to 125 tons. The actual numbers are going to vary based on what kind
of proposals we get in from the vendors when those start coming in.

We have done analysis of the ISO type attachments that could be used to
lock the transport skid that the casks will be mounted to to either the
rail cars or to trucks. We\'re participating on the ANC N-14 standard
for tie downs for spent nuclear fuel shipments. So, there\'s a lot of
things that have been going on in the background that will contribute to
the ultimate procurement of rail cars to support this operation.

We have also developed the risk matrix for our rolling stock, and
similar to the slide I showed earlier on the procurement of casks, the
procurement of these rail cars we actually have started now. In reality,
the start time would be more aligned with the start time for casks, but
we\'re partnering with Naval reactors on development of an escort car
right now. Naval reactors has a need for an escort car in the 2013 time
frame, which means earlier development. The same rail car at the same
standards will be used by both Naval reactors and by the RW program. So,
it makes very good sense for us to partner on that. We\'re doing that
now, and then at some time in the 2009 time frame, we\'re hoping to get
involved heavily in development of the cask car and the buffer cars.

The standard does not apply to locomotives, and we\'re not right now
expecting to have any procurements of locomotives to anything other than
off the shelf requirements. If there were a need to develop off the
shelf rail cars, that could proceed at a much later date, development of
a procurement in the 2012 time frame would support the 2017 shipment
date that we\'re talking about right now.

On support facilities, this is an area where nothing has changed since
the last time we got together. We still have the requirement to have
some facility to maintain the casks and the rail cars, the casks in
particular to the requirements of their certificates of compliance from
the NRC. There\'s an annual maintenance requirement. There will be
ongoing, just preventive maintenance that\'s done. A number of the casks
will require soft good replacements after each use, gasket replacements,
those type of things, and just overall management of the fleet.

A facility right now is part of what we\'re considering in the rail
alignment EIS. We\'re looking at a couple different locations for
possibly locating the facility, and we\'re also studying the regulatory
framework that the facility would operate under, looking at a range of
facility requirements, both for bare fuel casks and for casks that would
be carrying TADs, the canister content.

On Nevada Transportation, the last time I talked to you, I believe we
had started the rail alignment environmental impact statement to look at
alignments within the Caliente corridor. We had selected Caliente as the
corridor for implementing that connection between the repository and
existing mainline track.

Since that time, we had a letter we received from the Walker River
Paiute Tribe. The Walker River Paiutes, in fact, I\'ll catch that
probably in the next slide. We\'ll hold off a little bit here.

We\'ll catch the map. The Caliente corridor starts from the town of
Caliente and wraps around the top of the Nevada Test and Training Range,
and I gave each of the Board members a map that has a detailed look at
the alignments within\--the corridors within the State of Nevada that
could have been selected. We avoided selecting the corridors that came
from the south, either the Valley modified or the Jean. There was a
modification of the Caliente corridor that came about to this point, and
then crossed the Nevada Test and Training Range. We formally dropped
that from further consideration based on discussions we had with the
Department of Defense that said you\'re never going to cross this land.
Stop thinking about it. And, so, that\'s not even on the map now.

What is on the map, since this is an extract from the repository EIS,
there are a couple of small options for alignments that do cross the
Test and Training Range. We formally also dropped those from detailed
consideration, and, so, they\'re not part of our ongoing EIS.

There\'s a Carlin corridor that was up here, and what I have added is
the Mina route, which essentially starts up around the town of Schurz,
comes down an existing track that is owned by the Department of Defense,
to the town of Hawthorne, where the Hawthorne Army Depot is. There is an
old rail bed that extends from there down to the town of Goldfield. The
track is gone and the ties are gone, but the old rail bed is there, and
there are a number of alignment options that we have looked at to
connect from the town of Hawthorne, down actually to the repository, and
we have added that formally to the EIS.

We sent out a notice of intent to expand the scope of our EIS in
October. We are actively engaged in collecting the technical data to do
that. And, what we are doing now is carrying forward two options for a
study in the EIS, both the Mina route and the Caliente corridor. Both
will be in the draft EIS when it comes out. We\'re hoping to have a
preferred alternative from all the options that are presented from that
range. The schedule for the draft right now, I believe that\'s on the
next slide, is 2007.

We are looking at the September time frame for the draft, repository
EIS, and the rail alignment EIS. The two are very closely tied together
because the subject matter and the transportation, since it\'s in both
of them.

We\'re looking at a 2008 time frame for the final EIS, and the design of
facilities in the 2008 and \'07 time frame, and start of rail
construction has been announced in the October time frame of 2009, with
the rail line being available for actual operations in 2014, which is
well before the repository is scheduled to be operational, and yet the
rail line could be a very significant contributor to ongoing
construction activities at the site.

We are also working on a National Transportation Plan. It\'s one of the
things that the Director has talked about in a number of his public
engagements. There are a lot of very good products that the
transportation organization has been working on, the project plans for
rail, for casks, for rolling stock. We\'ve been working with routing
issues. We\'ve been working with the Outreach for Technical Assistance
and Funding for Emergency Preparedness Training on corridor states.

Each of those individual parts has been developed fairly well, but they
are not combined into a cohesive whole that allows anybody to sit down
with a single document and look at how all the pieces fit together. And,
we\'re putting together a National Transportation Plan that does just
that. We\'re doing that in conjunction with our stakeholders. We expect
to have the first iteration out for broader public review and approval
in the September time frame this year. But, there will be bits and
pieces that we will be working with through our transportation external
coordination working group, and others, between now and then.

The elements of the plan include, again, as I said, all the individual
elements required to build a transportation system. It will capture a
high level discussion of the requirements. Those requirements flow down
into our plans for infrastructure development. The timing and the basis
for those specific projects that are part of the infrastructure
development. The level and extent of the institutional outreach that we
will have, including the requirements under 180C of the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act for the emergency preparedness training. And, then, there
will be some discussion about operations.

Obviously, just as Chris has talked about things changing over time in
the way the repository would operate, the level of knowledge we have
about how the transportation system will operate is going to evolve.
And, so, this is going to be a living document that will be updated.
Ultimately, I would expect to see actual campaign plans that will be
part of our actual day to day operations to be embedded into this as
subsequent add-ons. But, initially, we can talk a lot about how the
operations would be conducted, if not where and when they would be
conducted. And, I think that\'s a useful bit of additional information
that, again, helps our interactions with our stakeholders.

On the routing process, Dr. Abkowitz was with us in Minnesota\--in
Michigan, pardon me\--Wisconsin. One of those cold states, one of those
cold, foggy states, last September. We had the meetings on the Oneida
Reservation there, and one of the issues that was talked about fairly
extensively was our plans for developing routes nationally.

In the repository final EIS, there were representative routes, but that
was all of the routes that met the requirements both of DOT for highway
shipments, and the Railroad Standard Operating Practice for rail
shipments. We needed to down select from that to give a little more
focused view about how we would implement YBC (phonetic) and other
activities we\'re responsible for. And, the routing topic group is the
way of doing that.

We have our next formal meeting in, I guess it\'s next week in Atlanta,
I\'m sure that that place and time is right, on Wednesday and Thursday
of next week, and we\'ll be tackling the issue of how we develop both
the criteria and the methodology for routes with our stakeholders in
that meeting.

Interestingly enough, one of the special projects we funded with one of
our state regional groups, with the Midwestern Conference of the Council
of State Governments, was they wanted to do their own route development
exercise, and, so, we said have at it. Here\'s a bit of seed money, go
off and develop your own criteria and methodology and come back and say
what you learned from the process. And, we got a lot of good feedback
from them. That was part of what was presented at the Wisconsin meeting
of the TEC back last September.

A couple recommendations were things that would be helpful for the
overall process to move forward, some updates to the TRAGIS (phonetic)
model, which is used for actually collecting information that affected
the routing decisions, and for some of the modelling activities that the
states\--we\'re actually conducting training exercises for the states in
the use of that model.

We do have a collaborative approach. We have a very wide spectrum of
both industry and public stakeholders, folks with a responsibility and a
role in public health and safety. They\'re going to be involved in the
process.

Towards the end, I guess I\'ve got a discussion that talks a little bit
about the schedule. What we\'re looking at is to have the criteria
nationally and the methodology established by June of this year.

This is a slide that describes, and I\'ve got a larger version over here
against the wall that makes it a little bit easier to see, without you
having to try and interpret it, let me tell you what it says. There\'s
been a lot of questions about the impact that the selection of Mina
versus Caliente would have on the national routing system. This is data
that\'s in the repository EIS. It\'s being updated to include analysis
of Mina, but it shows the number of cask shipments that would go through
each state if in fact any of the four alternatives that were in the
repository are chosen.

And, for purposes of this, Caliente and Chalk Mountain are in fact the
same alternative, because the starting point is the same. And, so, the
data for Caliente is the same as it would have been for Chalk Mountain.
So, we\'ve got basically the portrayal of the five options that were in
the repository EIS.

The most important sound bite to come out of all of this is whether you
select Jean or Valley Modified or Caliente or Carlin doesn\'t really
make much difference nationally on the number of cask shipments each
state would see. And, even though we haven\'t completed the analysis of
Mina yet, the approach to Mina is the same as the approach to Carlin.
I\'m expecting that the number of shipments by state if a Mina corridor
were selected in the final EIS process would be the same as the number
of shipments for Carlin. But, we\'ll have that data as part of the EIS
that we\'re working on now.

That\'s right, we\'re still doing the analysis for Mina, and the
information that feeds us will be in the EIS updates.

KADAK: You would think California would see a lot more.

LANTHRUM: Actually, I don\'t believe that, and let me run back real
quickly and explain why. The existing rail infrastructure in Nevada,
there is a rail line that\'s a UP line that runs from the Salt Lake City
area down through Utah, and enters Nevada right around the town of
Caliente, and runs northeast, southwest down through Las Vegas.

There is also a line that runs across the top of the state that\'s shown
on the map that I left for each of you that is a joint use by UP and
Burlington Northern. It actually comes around down this way. And,
that\'s the line that we\'d tie into, but that line up there is the same
line that the Carlin route attaches to. And, so, for all the shipments
that are east of Nevada, I would expect the approach would be on this
line, and, so, the numbers would be almost identical to what we see for
Carlin.

And, so, I really do not expect to see any difference, and that\'s one
of the reasons I wanted to bring these slides for you, because I know
that the state of Nevada has been saying oh, thousands of new cask
shipments are going to be going through California. And, the implication
is on the national map, that all of the shipping sites in the Southeast
portion of the country would flow across\--there is actually a rail line
that goes across the Southern part of the country into California, and
then doubles back, and what they\'re saying is that all those shipments
would proceed across that line. But, if you use standard rail routing
criteria, that just doesn\'t happen.

And, again, we will have the detail analysis that specifically addresses
Mina in the EIS when it comes out. But, based on the way that you get to
Mina, I\'m not expecting major changes.

Now, there will be subtle adjustments for the shipments out of Oregon
and Washington. Looking at shipments to the approach in Caliente, some
of the shipments from the Hanford site, from the Trojan plant probably
would have gone through Idaho and dropped down through the Salt Lake
corridor to get into that access to the Caliente corridor. They might
shift\--a small number of those shipments might shift to come into
California and across the enter in through the Reno approach. But,
overall, nationally, the impact is going to be very small, and I think
that\'s a very key point to take away.

Again, this is the schedule for our routing process and our work with
the states. And, again, we\'re looking at both rail and truck routes. A
lot of our focus has been talking about the infrastructure needed for
rail because there\'s a huge investment required for rail
infrastructure. We\'re not anticipating a large investment if we have a
truck infrastructure that has to be pursued.

We\'re not looking seriously at heavy haul across the nation. We\'re
looking at heavy haul from the 24 sites that don\'t currently have rail
access to get to a rail head, and then using rail the rest of the way.

For truck shipments across the country, you\'re looking at legal weight,
or over weight truck, and those are small casks. The existing trailer
fleet can support shipment of those casks, and, so, it\'s not a major
investment that we have to plan for way in advance, the way that we do
with rail, where there\'s a lot of infrastructure that we have to
develop.

Section 180(c) implementation. We worked for an extended period of time
with our stakeholders, again, very broadly. We have changed the approach
to funding emergency preparedness training from one focused on what was
originally called a needs based requirement, to a formula based
requirement. We got consensus from the participants in the group, and
we\'re hoping to have the revised draft policy published sometime early
this year. The final version of the new draft is going through the
internal review process, and, again, I\'m confident that we\'ll have
that published, both the new policy for implementation, and the
implementation of the grants for that policy will be published.

And, there\'s an important nexus between the 180(c) planning and the
route planning, because even though the initial shipments won\'t be
until 2017, we have a desire to do a lot more outreach between now and
the 2017 time frame. Knowing where the routes are gives us an idea of
where we\'d have to apply the emergency response training, and where the
technical assistance would have to be deployed.

And, those are also the alignments upon which we would look at doing
pilot projects, and we have a whole suite of pilot projects in our hip
pocket that we\'re anxious to get out there and start engaging with our
stakeholders on to get the confidence level raised, both from emergency
responders and from just ordinary citizens, that these shipments can be
conducted safely and securely.

And, overall, the conclusions are basically the conclusions that I
presented to you before, is that I believe that these shipments can be
done safely and securely. I believe we\'ve got a plan that you\'ll see
when the National Transportation Plan comes out later in the year that
addresses all these individual elements in the holistic context. You can
see how all the pieces fit together.

And, we would expect to be then deploying that plan to a broader set of
stakeholders than the ones that participate with us through either the
transportation and external coordinating group or the state regional
groups, or other specialized bodies, to have a much broader public bit
of education that we would pursue to talk about how all the pieces fit
together, and how people would be affected by these operations.

With that, I\'m open to questions.

GARRICK: Thank you. Thank you. I think we\'ll allow our technical lead
on transportation, if he has any questions, to go first, and then we\'ll
take David and Andy.

ABKOWITZ: Okay, thank you. I was hoping that one of them would warm up
the topic. Abkowitz, Board.

Thank you, Gary. It certainly seems like you\'ve figured out there\'s a
lot of balls to juggle and they seem to be landing and getting thrown
back up in the right order. So, that\'s good news.

I\'d like to go to Slide 13, and share with you some information that
you may or may not know about. There are two initiatives going on right
now. One with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, and the
other with the Federal Railroad Administration. The first one has to do
with modifications they\'re currently making to their routing
guidelines. They\'re expected to be out in the fall of \'07, and they
are going to be incorporating security criteria, routing security
criteria, in conjunction with safety criteria, and they will be
applicable to route control quantities, which would then mean that
everything under the Yucca Program would be subject to that.

LANTHRUM: Right.

ABKOWITZ: So, I would certainly advise that if you are going to keep the
schedule you have up here, that you be very close to the way in which
those criteria are being developed. And, I know enough about that
project to know that that information is not available yet.

LANTHRUM: In addition to that, there are two notices for proposed
rulemaking that are out, one from DOT and one from DHS, that talk about
routing of hazardous materials, high hazard materials.

ABKOWITZ: Right.

LANTHRUM: And, they essentially lean on the industry as being
responsible for the routing process. That\'s something we\'re taking a
close look at, and we will very clearly be commenting on as the
process\--

ABKOWITZ: Right, that\'s the other one I was alluding to, which is on
the rail side, which is kind of a first of a kind rail rulemaking. And,
there\'s going to be, I\'ve seen some early stages of that language, as
you may have. It\'s going to be left up to the industry to demonstrate
that they\'ve performed route risk assessments, using the guidelines in
the rulemaking, and they\'re also taking into considering quite a number
of different criteria. And, the industry as a whole is actually kind of
working on kind of a standardized way of doing that.

So, that\'s another thing to be mindful of, because I would hate to see
the effort that you have laid out here, you know, reaching a conclusion,
only to find that it\'s somewhat inconsistent with the thinking that\'s
coming out in those two pieces of legislation.

LANTHRUM: We\'re paying close attention to the changes that are coming.
I don\'t anticipate major shifts. As you are fully aware, the states can
designate alternative routes as opposed to the DOT standard highway
routing practices, but if they propose alternative routes that don\'t
use the interstate system, there is already a requirement for doing what
basically is a hazards analysis, or a risk analysis, to say whether they
are compliant with the expectations that DOT has established.

ABKOWITZ: Abkowitz, Board.

I agree with that. I think that the major new consideration is going to
be I guess what I would refer to a iconic structures, and how close the
transportation system gets to those structures. And, in some cases,
whether the detonation of a shipment while on route, or whether there\'s
the theft and diversion of it. So, there will be kind of a new element
that addresses critical infrastructure and ways that are very different
from any criteria we\'ve seen up to now.

LANTHRUM: Fortunately, as I indicated, we\'re expecting this to be a
living document, and even though there\'s changes that may be coming up
in the somewhat near-term, I would expect even more changes over the
long-term with the 20 plus year shipping horizon that\'s being expected.

GARRICK: David?

DUQUETTE: Duquette, Board.

You mentioned in your presentation that it was going to be possible that
you would have to do some truck shipments to rail heads, and then
transfer the casks at the rail heads. I have two questions that go with
that. They\'re not really technical questions. They\'re more from an
informed citizen type of questions.

One of them is will you require some kind of permission, authorization,
or whatever, from the communities at the rail heads? And, number two,
will the transfer facilities at the rail heads have to be licensed?

LANTHRUM: There would be a fair amount of planning. I don\'t know that
there\'s any prerequisite for approval for local communities, but there
would be lots of community involvement. In fact, the construct of the
shipments out of each of the shipping sites, whether it\'s a DOE site or
a commercial site, is something that there\'s a fair amount of latitude
in the site in specifying how they want to ship. And, so, there will be
a lot of discussions, both with the site and with the communities as
part of our ongoing routing process.

There are heavy haul transfers done in many places currently, and most
places that have rail heads have the capability of transferring heavy
loads from heavy haul trailers, which are very different from legal
weight or over weight trailers, onto the rail conveyances. And, I would
not anticipate any additional requirements just because of what is in
our contents, as long as the infrastructure has the weight bearing
capability, I\'m not aware of any additional constraints on licensing
for those operations.

DUQUETTE: Thank you.

GARRICK: Andy?

KADAK: Kadak, Board.

In terms of your rolling stock, are you doing any kind of work with PFS
to see if you can use some of their already, I believe, some tested,
capabilities of some of their rail cars?

LANTHRUM: Actually, the work that was done for PFS, I believe was
Colorado Rail Car did the development of the prototype car for their
cask, which is a depressed center car, which is very long. And, it was
tested at TTCI, the Transportation Technology Center, out in Pueblo,
Colorado. We\'re linked very closely with TTCI. In fact, the modelling I
indicated we have done about the performance and suspension systems was
done at TTCI. Colorado Rail developed that car is one of the companies
that\'s being looked at for\--and, was involved in the discussions we
had when we invited the industry to come in and talk to us. And, so, we
will benefit from that knowledge, but we haven\'t committed to using any
particular vendor yet. But, the vendors that provided that car for PFS
are on our prospectus for folks that will be involved in the
procurements we ultimately do.

KADAK: It would seem that, you know, I don\'t know how their project is
going to progress or not, but they\'ve already done the bulk of the
work, and I don\'t know, you probably want to\--

LANTHRUM: We\'re aware of that. They\'ve only done work on again the
cask car. They\'ve done no work on an escort car. They did no work on
bumper cars. And, it\'s a depressed center car, which is very long. One
of the things we\'re looking at is that is there a possibility of having
a flat bed car, which would shorten the car significantly, which gives
us a lot more flexibility in terms of routing. And, if we wound up going
that way because of the improved flexibility overall, if we can get the
performance, the actual in-transit performance out of a flat bed that
you can\'t out of a depressed center car, there would be a lot of
reasons for doing that.

KADAK: Okay. In terms of the railroads, and we met with them, I guess
the best thing to say about it is they weren\'t really enthusiastic
about this business, because they were making much more money shipping
coal and other things.

LANTHRUM: We\'re not a prime customer.

KADAK: How much of this has been worked with the railroad companies?

LANTHRUM: We\'ve had ongoing discussions with the railroads through both
the FRA, in terms of our commitment to use dedicated trains, which is
one of the things the railroads wanted very much, because it simplifies
the flow through their systems, and greatly simplifies moving our trains
through their system. And, also, through the AAR, the Association of
American Railroads, and we had a meeting just last summer with four
railroads with the AAR, talking about routing issues, because they have
very different concerns than other stakeholders do about how the routing
system would be used.

We\'re not a prime customer. We\'re not going to be a huge money maker
for them. It would be easier for them if we went away. They know we\'re
not going to go away. And, so, they\'re engaged in having discussions
with us about how the system is going to work, and so far, we\'ve made
the decisions that will make our shipments, will make them as easy to
deal with as possible. And, the decision we made about a year ago to use
dedicated trains is one of the things they were pushing for.

KADAK: Okay. In terms of routing decisions, you say you\'re going to
finalize routing criteria by 2007. Now, this map that you also passed
out is very helpful, and I\'m not a space scientist, but I\'m looking at
very few options.

LANTHRUM: That\'s true.

KADAK: And, the process of establishing criteria is, I think,
interesting. But, if I\'m a Trojan, I\'ve got two options.

LANTHRUM: Right.

KADAK: And, wouldn\'t it be good to kind of look at each one of those
with the railroad companies, really understand railroad safety, and say
this is a better route than the other, to get to your point here?

LANTHRUM: There are some shipping sites that have significantly fewer
options than others. As you go further east, that map is mostly Class 1
railroads. As you go further east, there is an increasing density of
short lines and branch line tracks, and a whole range of other options
that are not illustrated on that map. That was in the repository EIS for
illustration purposes.

And, so, as you move further east, the question of what your routing
options are becomes significantly more complicated. There will be some
sites for which the discussion about routing is going to be very simple.

KADAK: Okay. But, I\'m really trying to address the process of actually
selecting routes. Clearly, you\'re not going to\--you may have to ship
some of the heavy materials on routes that are not what you call Class 1
routes, because there\'s no other way to get to them.

LANTHRUM: Right.

KADAK: But the Class 1 route. But, it would seem to me that if you were
able to work with the communities and the railroads, and as you said,
sit around a table and put yourself here at Yucca Mountain, and work
out, and begin to understand what options there are, and obviously, you
have to look at criteria, but you\'re not going to build new rail lines.

LANTHRUM: No.

KADAK: And, so, the variables are greatly reduced.

LANTHRUM: For sites like Trojan, the discussion is a short discussion.
For sites as you move further east, the discussion becomes much more
complicated, and the idea of developing the criteria and the methodology
before you discuss specific routes becomes much more helpful. We do have
both the states and the tribes to the extent they would be affected, and
the industry at the table with us having these discussions. And, what we
have indicated is the decision on routes will be a Department decision.
We\'re looking for lots of input from people and we\'ll consider it to
the extent that we can. But, it ultimately will be a Department
decision.

KADAK: Are you not already rail routes that are qualified for nuclear or
perhaps other types of similar materials?

LANTHRUM: There is no specific nuclear qualification for a rail route.
What there are is Class 1 railroads. And, Class 1 railroads are
equivalent to the interstate system on the highway side of the equation.
And, what the railroad routing, since DOT requirements don\'t directly
apply to railroads, because railroad shipments are done all on private
land, the railroads own the land under their track, but the criteria
that the railroad use for the normal operating practices are very
similar to the criteria that DOT uses for highway shipments. It\'s
minimize the number of interchanges, maximize the use of Class 1 track,
minimize the time in transit, and how those all come together is
something that we\'ll have ongoing discussions about. But, there are
criteria out there that are very similar in practice to what DOT has for
the highway shipments.

KADAK: So, what I was really trying to get at was emergency planning
around some of these routes. I was led to believe that there were
already some routes that have implemented emergency preparedness for
shipments.

LANTHRUM: There probably are. In fact, we\'re not responsible for
creating an emergency preparedness infrastructure. We\'re required to
take the existing emergency preparedness infrastructure and raise it up
the level it\'s needed to be aware of what the interaction would be for
our shipments specifically. But, all the states have emergency
preparedness, because there\'s a lot of hazardous materials that are
moved currently.

KADAK: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Any other questions?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Questions from the Staff?

(No response.)

GARRICK: I didn\'t mean to scare you with my closing comment before.
Please, if you have a question, feel free to ask it. Any questions from
the room?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Okay, well, thank you very much.

LANTHRUM: Thank you.

GARRICK: I guess we\'ll hear our final presentation for the day from
Scott Wade on Yucca Mountain Site Operations.

WADE: Good afternoon. My name is Scott Wade. I\'m the Acting Director
for the Yucca Mountain Site Operations Office for the Office of Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management.

A little orientation of who I am and what I do within the project. I\'m
currently in charge of all field activities for Yucca Mountain. I was
asked by Ward Sproat to step in when John Arthur fell ill in early
December, and continued in that role until they ultimately fill the
position.

Prior to the May 2006 reorganization of OCRWM, I was the Director of the
Office of Facility Operations. I was also in charge of the site. So, I
have a little bit of background on the site operations, and I\'d like to
share that with you today.

What I\'d like to talk to you about is what are those site facilities
and infrastructure that we manage at the Yucca Mountain site, give you
some background and some history on their construction, some of the
issues we ran into as we constructed them, and some of those issues we
are managing today. Talk about the Exploratory Studies Facility and its
condition. Talk about the underground systems, in particular, the
special unique issues they provide us in managing the safe operations of
the ESF underground, and, finally, talk about the support utilities of
the Yucca Mountain site, some of them we share with the National Nuclear
Security Administration, because they administer the Nevada Test Site.

Next slide, please. Now, what are those site facilities and
infrastructure? That includes eight miles of tunnel at the Exploratory
Studies Facility that we excavated in the Nineties, and the support
utilities that allow us to operate it. This includes ventilation, power,
water system, waste water systems, fire alarm and detection system, and
our underground rail system. We have facilities at both the north and
south portal of the ESF.

Now, on top of these, we have the overarching utilities that we require
just to occupy that site. These include water, power and roads. We share
some facilities that go back to the 1960s that were developed at a
previous project on the Nevada Test Site at a location called the
central support area. You pass it as you enter the Nevada Test Site en
route to Yucca Mountain. And, finally, the boreholes, trenches and test
facilities that we monitor and administer at Yucca Mountain.

The tunnel itself was excavated from 1993 to 1998. It\'s over five miles
in length, and consists of a 25 foot diameter tunnel excavated by a
tunnel boring machine. When we excavated it, we had anticipated use for
that for site characterization of five to ten years. As such, we made
some decisions in the Nineties to align an as constructed configuration
instead of installing some permanent utilities within it.

For example, instead of running power utilities within conduit, we ran
them with durable cable that we strung along the invert wall. We also
utilized the existing Nevada Test Site utilities, water and power. Some
of these go back to the 1960s, and I will elaborate on them a little bit
later.

Next slide, please. The Exploratory Studies Facility, as I mentioned, is
a five mile tunnel, 25 foot diameter for the main tunnel. It starts with
the north ramp on the left-hand side of the slide here, to what we call
the main drift, then to the south ramp. We also excavated in 1998 a two
mile cross-drift. It\'s a smaller diameter tunnel.

Now, as we excavated the ESF, it gave us access to geologic features
that we wanted to study closer. That\'s why we excavated test alcoves.
We have a total of eight alcoves, seven in the main tunnel, one in the
cross-drift. And, we also have a series of niches. These are really
smaller tunnels that also gave us access to the features we wanted to
study.

The current outlook, though, the current site mission is safe and
reliable operations, and we plan to extend that for another, at least
another five years. This presents us a unique challenge, because if you
go back to the initial excavation of the ESF in the Nineties, this could
be over 15 plus years. This creates degradation within some of the
systems, just from use alone, and I\'ll talk about some of those systems
and their degradation.

It also presents us a challenge, because our documentation of these
systems in their as-constructed configuration varies. We have a lot more
detail, for example, in ground support. We have less detail on some of
the other systems. But, we are committed to safe operations of the
facility. So, with everything we have, we have a risk management
approach to understand what the risks are for our operations, and
mitigate those risks.

We did this by first making sure that we firmly understand the extent of
some of the issues we\'re managing, so we conducted a series of
assessments in 2004 and in 2005. We have established both routine and
preventative maintenance for all of our underground systems and surface
systems, and for those systems where we are not in a condition that we
would call preferable, we have established additional safety mitigations
to give us an additional envelope of safe operational limitations.

In this slide, it shows three pictures of the north portal area of the
ESF, and I would like to turn and talk a little bit about the surface
facilities for a few moments. What you see in the north portal here is a
shot that shows both the muck pile, the purple area, it\'s part of the
picture, and some of the temporary structures that we deployed as part
of site characterization. These include the muck pile here, over 600,000
cubic yards of muck. This is mined rock that was excavated from the ESF,
the tunnel boring operations.

You have the conveyor belt system that brought the muck to the surface.
You have the various support structures that include trailers, tent
structures, these are rigid frame tent structures that we have both
warehousing and craft fabrication activities in, and what we call our
Carnack Shops. These are basically sealing containers that are used for
our craft fabrication. And, we have two permanent structures, the change
house located here, as well as our switch gear building. The change
house allows our craft crew at the end of shift to prepare for the bus
ride home, as well as our switch gear building, which we have a 4000
volt switch located inside, and last year, we completed half of it as a
site information center. It was originally sized for four\--actually,
three 4000 volt switches. When we anticipated multiple tunnel boring
machine operations, not having a need for that volume of electrical
components, we were able to utilize the existing space for both site
information center and our mine rescue center.

Shown in the lower pictures are close-ups of some of those facilities.
This is, again, what we call Tent 2, and this is one of our trailers.
Now, the condition of these facilities, again, they present us different
problems. This tent, and the tent that adjoins it, were deployed in
1995. Again, they weren\'t intended for long-term operation, exposed to
the environment, so we actually have degradation of the tent lining
structure.

This trailer here is what we call our construction management trailer.
It\'s one of two of them that we have located at the north portal, and
they actually came from the Nevada Test Site. They have an early
Eighties vintage. They were originally located in Area 3 of the Nevada
Test Site. We relocated them out to the north portal in the early
Nineties. So, even though you see all this surface structure, not all of
them are of recent vintage.

Supporting this is 185 full-time employees, both craft and exempt staff.

Some more pictures of some of the current activities and conditions we
have. Now, the craft workers, as they do their activities to maintain
the ESF, and, again, this supports the safe maintenance of the tunnel,
have to do a lot of their work in less than desirable conditions.

For example, this is our electrical fabrication area. Craft workers here
do most of their fabrication outdoors underneath this awning. I have
been out there at times when it is in really, really difficult
conditions, you know, in the middle of winter, in the middle of summer,
it\'s less than desirable.

This is our heavy equipment maintenance shop area. These are, again,
part of our row of Carnack shops. This is adjacent to the change house.
Plumbers and pipe fitters shop area is right here. This area is
interesting, too, because just adjacent to it, we had a fire in February
of 2006 over a weekend, one of the trailers heaters caught fire. It
actually burned down two trailers, one Carnack shop, and took out part
of the electrical system that was associated right next to it. So, since
February of 2006, we\'ve had limited ability to do heavy equipment
maintenance out there. Everything is done off of generators. So, it has
given us really special challenges.

One other component, and since I mentioned the fire of 2006, fire
response comes from the Nevada Test Site, from a location either in
Mercury, which is in Area 23, or what they call Central Control Point,
which is in Area 6. Both of those points are origins for fire response.
We\'re about 45 minutes away. So, even if we engaged the fire alarm at
the site, usually by the time something would get out there, most of
these trailers and shops would be fully consumed. So, our standard
policy, going back to mitigations earlier, is if there\'s a fire, it\'s
in incipient stage, we train our staff to fight it. If not, we ask them
to safely egress the area, and we wait for trained fire fighters to
respond.

This is an aerial shot of the ESF. I\'ll just hit some of those key
facilities. Again, there\'s the muck pile. Now, as we were looking at a
range of options to deal with these conditions, we looked at options
both constructing new facilities, or replacement facilities in the north
portal pad, or we looked at adjacent sites. And, both of those provide
special problems. Either of them have advantages or disadvantages.

If we were to construct it on the north portal pad, one of the things
that we did not do is complete the north portal pad to its original
designed drainage. This goes back to that electrical carnage that I
pointed out a little bit earlier. Other times when I\'ve been out there,
because the lack of drainage control, you can see site workers standing
in puddles of water. They\'re safe\--unfortunately, again, that\'s far
from ideal conditions for our workers to be within.

So, actually, constructing activities and replacements to the north
portal pad do not seem desirable. So, what we look at is in proximity to
the north portal for a location that we could replace these facilities.

Adjacent to the north portal pad is what we call the lower muck yard.
This was grubbed and graded back in the Nineties when we originally
intended to extend our conveyor belt system for storage of the muck
piles. Originally, this 600,000 cubic yards of muck was going to be put
in piles here because we were going to extend the conveyor belt system
down this alignment. We didn\'t end up extending the conveyor belt
system, instead stockpiled the muck here, but had this as a grubbed and
graded area.

What we proposed in an environmental assessment that we released in July
of 2006 is to relocate all of our facilities to this lower muck yard
location. This was constructing a new fire station, so we would have
on-site fire response capability, as well as craft maintenance areas,
heavy equipment maintenance areas to replace the area that burned within
the fire, warehousing to replace the tent that\'s failing, as well as
administrative facilities.

This draft environmental assessment was released in July. We got a lot
of public comments, and we have addressed those comments and are looking
to make a decision shortly on it.

Next slide, please. I\'d like to turn to the underground systems within
the ESF. One of the main systems we have is the underground rail system.
It was, again, installed between 1993 and 1998. The condition of the
rail is basically a floating gauge. In essence, there\'s a TBM advanced,
you needed to put in a rail system so you could bring more materials to
the tunnel boring machine to support its continued excavation. So, you
needed a rail system.

For expediency purposes, what they did is went ahead and on top of the
concrete invert, overlaid the rail system and secured it with bolt clips
and bolts actually drilled into the concrete invert. Now, as a temporary
feature, this is just fine. But, with years of use, considering the
vibration of the trains, the actual loads of the trains, this causes the
gauge to wander, and it creates continued maintenance challenges for us.

One of the issues we\'ve had most recently, in November, we had actually
a rail break. Now, when we talk about a rail break, we were doing our
routine starter shift maintenance walk-down, we found this rail, we
locked out the rail system and did not utilize it, and we replaced it.
But, in order to support this in as-constructed condition requires a
great deal of maintenance activities.

However, to make sure that we\'re managing this for safe operations,
we\'ve established these maintenance activities. We\'ve established a
full training and qualification program for our craft that are doing the
maintenance on both our rail, as well as our rolling stock, and we\'ve
implemented an additional mitigation, keeping the rail speed slower.
That\'s the current condition of the rail.

Next slide. Within the ESF, as the tunnel boring machine advanced, you
needed high voltage power system, and it\'s primarily a 12,000 volt
power line. In fact, you can see 12,000 volt cabling. As you\'ve been in
the tunnel, you\'ll see this strung on the right rib of the tunnel. And,
this is strung behind the TBM as it advanced. In order to keep the
voltage up at consistent levels for tunnel boring machine operation,
they deployed at that time what we call mine power centers, or MPCs.
These bump up the voltage. These also provide switches and disconnect
systems. They\'re on the right rib of the tunnel.

Now, again, this provided us certain problems. As they advanced, they
didn\'t put these down flat on the rail because of space limitations.
However, there\'s code requirements that our electricians need to be
able to respond quickly for maintenance and emergency conditions on the
electrical system, so we put on these racks that you see here. But, this
creates clearance tolerance issues for our real operations. In fact,
some locations within the ESF, you\'ve got less than 12 inches of
clearance between the rail and these platforms. What we do, again, is
we\'ve emplaced some mitigation to slow the speed of the trains.

Other alternatives would be, of course, to excavate an alcove, but for
right now, this provides us proportionate with our current mission, an
acceptable mitigation for sake of operations.

One of the things that is new within the tunnel arose from a 2004 fire
hazards analysis. Now, annually, we do a fire hazard analysis update of
both our subsurface as well as all of our surface features. This fire
hazard analysis, against the code requirements of the National Fire
Protection Association, found that we really needed to have some
systematic means of detecting any fire event within the tunnel. We made
a decision then last year to go ahead and start deploying a fire
detection alarm system within the ESF.

We have currently deployed it all the way down the north ramp,
throughout the ECRB, throughout the cross-drift, and in Alcove 5. We
anticipate extending this throughout the remaining parts of the tunnel,
but it is currently operational today, so if you were to have a fire
event, it triggers through a panel on the surface, which is then also
remotely monitored by the fire station in Mercury. So, if there were an
event, we\'d be aware of it and would be notified.

This shows actually a picture of the rail I mentioned earlier, but
looking back down the north portal. This is actually the turnout for the
cross-drift. What this shows is a couple of neat things. Let me talk for
a moment about lighting, and then come back to rail.

Lighting system. We have lighting features strung along the entire
length of the tunnel. One of the things that we had is recommendations
from the craft workers that they didn\'t like the configuration of the
lighting fixtures. They felt that they were very, very difficult to
maintain. They were more subject to failure. We listened to them and we
authorized the rework of the lighting system to give more space to the
internal configuration of it.

So, as we deployed a fire detection and alarm system down the north
ramp, we\'ve also gone back and reconfigured the lighting system, and
intend to also continue that throughout the rest of the tunnel.

Now, shown here is actually a really nice section of the tunnel. We
completely reworked this switch as part of the rail system last year to
give us better confidence in its operation. This is a tight turnout for
a switch. Looking back down the north ramp, you also get a sense of what
I was talking about on a real configuration. It is a floating gauge,
just mounted to this concrete invert that you see attached there.

Ventilation system. In order to go underground, you\'ve got to have a
certain required amount of fresh air supply. So, we have a series of
ventilation fans, two primary ventilation fans at the south portal that
bring approximately 300,000 cubic feet per minute of ventilation through
the tunnel. We also have separate ventilation systems for our visitors
alcove, Alcove 2, as well as the cross-drift. I believe this is Fan 3 in
the north ramp.

One of the things we did, again, as part of assessments in 2004, we
brought in a panel of experts, including experts from NIOSH, to look at
our underground operations, to look at our ventilation system, and make
some recommendations to us that would give us better operations. And,
they strongly recommended that we needed to have a predictive means for
fan failure. Now, fan failure doesn\'t mean fan explosion, fan fallout,
or anything. It could just mean breaking of the fan, failure to start
up. So, we installed temperature and vibration monitors with all the
ventilation fans in 2005 and 2006. We are also looking to potentially
replace Fans 10 and 11 at the south portal to give us new fans with
lower noise profile, as well as optimal monitoring capability. We\'ll
actually be able to monitor and control those fans from the north
portal.

Ground support system. The ground support system is one of our best
systems we have out there. It was completed according to its engineering
design, with a couple of minor differences that I\'ll elaborate upon.
What you see in the top picture is ground support in areas of really
good competent rock, what you would normally find, again, is the ring
lagging in a wire mesh across the crown of the tunnel, primarily for
safety reasons. In other areas of the tunnel, particularly as you get
near the surface, you have less ground control conditions, so we had
more steel lagging, as well as cross-lagging. And, behind here, we had
quite a bit of timbering.

We did, as we came out and had assessment again in 2004 that completely
looked at all of the ground support components within the tunnel. It
provided us some recommendations on some additional ground control we
wanted to do, mostly to avoid some maintenance costs. We had 278
Williams rock bolts in the north ramp that were installed in the
Nineties that weren\'t completely grouted in. It wasn\'t a ground
control risk, it just became an operational and maintenance cost because
we had to send a work crew out to torsion down a restraining bolt on a
frequent basis. So, we took care of those problems.

But, we still have those, what we call eight 3.01X series. One of our
ground control specifications was Section 3.01X. This allowed the
constructor to use alternate ground control techniques if they ran into
bad ground conditions, again, as you\'re right near the surface of the
tunnel, you\'re more likely to run into these types of conditions. This
allowed them to use timbering, grout, various other things to go ahead
and secure the ground. What you don\'t want to lose is contact of the
TBM grippers with the surrounding rock wall. So, they needed to take
quick action, so they installed various ground control conditions behind
this lagging.

Now, it\'s not a ground control issue, but if you put a lot of timbering
in there, if you put hay, if you put excelsior in there for ground
contact, it creates a fire load. So, one of the issues that we\'re
ultimately looking to address is lowering the fire load within the
tunnel, and this is one of the larger fire load issues if you were to
have a fire that would consume part of temporary ground support within a
3.01X area. Again, we have mitigations in place. We have a very, very
controlled hot work permit process, such that we don\'t allow hot work
within these areas without a fire watch, and under only certain
conditions.

This is a nice picture of the north portal of the ESF looking towards
the north portal itself. This is the conveyor belt system that we
brought the muck from TBM operations out. Again, that same 2004
assessment pointed out that the conveyor belt system, while fire
retardant, was not inflammable. Therefore, it would burn. To lower the
fire load, we have been systematically removing the muck conveyor system
within the underground. We have removed all of this conveyor belt system
that you see here. We have removed some of it going down the north
portal, but we\'ve removed the belt all the way down through the north
ramp and in the cross-drift, and intend to continue removing both the
belt and support structures.

I\'d like to turn to the surface utilities and surface features that
support Yucca Mountain operations. One of them is a water well system.
Now, Yucca Mountain gets its water from two water wells that were
drilled in 1960 supporting the Space Nuclear Propulsion Agency project
that was performing in Area 25 of the test site. These are wells J-12
and J-13. The NTS utilizes these same wells. We actually have a line
that comes off of the wells and heads up to the north portal supply of
potable and non-potable water system.

Some of the challenges that we\'re facing, though, is these wells were
drilled in the Sixties, and they are subject to the wear and tear and
aging, as with all water wells of that age. Particular here, just
recently, Well J-13 submersible pump failed again after less than a
hundred hours of operation. Now, we don\'t have to pump a lot of water
under our current conditions, but that\'s not very much of an
operational duration. And, part of it is because the well itself, its
casing is failing. Well J-12 is somewhat better, because it has been
less used, however, its condition is not optimal, and the transfer pump
going from J-12 to J-13 is also failing, as well as some of the pipeage.

Now, we have a maintenance agreement with the Nevada Test Site, and they
perform all these maintenance activities. But, we need to make sure that
we have a reliable water source to meet our current activities. And,
this has presented a special challenges that we\'re looking at. One of
the things that we may do is working with the NTS, seek to replace one
of the wells with a new water well immediately adjacent, very common
within well systems, that you can redrill a new well within 50 or 100
feet of your existing well.

Now, concerning our water use and water rights condition, as you may be
aware, in 2002 our temporary water right permits expired for the Yucca
Mountain project. We had filed for permanent water rights in the
Nineties, gone through hearings with the state engineer, had been denied
by the state engineer, and we continue litigation on those permits. But,
because of both agreements with district court, as well as with the
state engineer\'s office, we were authorized for a certain amount of
water to support status quo. That amounts to 420,000 gallons of potable
water per year. Now, this is the amount of water we were able to
demonstrate to the court needed for crafts, for their end of day
showers, for facilities at the north portal, and 1.78 million gallons
for routine dust control and other surface related activities. We have a
network of unpaved roads out there. After storm events, we have to go
ahead and regrade those. We need the water for dust control purposes, as
required under our air quality permit from the state of Nevada. So,
that\'s the status of our current activities with water.

Coming out of the Nevada Test Site, we go through Gate 510. I\'m going
to talk in a few minutes about the road systems on the Test Site. This
is the guard station at Gate 510. It\'s a ten by ten foot bullet proof
enclosure that is manned by Wackenhut security, the NTS\'s protective
force. We bring all of our work crew through this gate for a couple
reasons. One of it is to economize their time in transit. If we were to
bring them in through other gates and other routes, it would give them a
much longer work day. Secondly, is to economize our maintenance dollars.

I mentioned earlier that we work with the Nevada Test Site on shared
assets and utilities on the test site, and one of the features that we
have to bear a burden of funding is roads and basic utilities. So, what
we try to do is bring all of our access through the Lathrop Wells gate,
but this gate does not have much in the way of functionalities. If you
go out through this gate, you already have to have a DOE credential, or
be on one of our site access lists. If you forgot your badge, even if
you\'re a site worker and you forgot your badge, you can\'t go through
the gate here. You\'d have to go back to Gate 100 in Mercury, which is
probably about another 45 miles\--45 minutes away by road, about 30
miles as the crow flies.

So, this provided us with a problem. What we\'ve got then, with the next
one, if we look at a couple options, including creating additional
functionalities at Gate 510. Now, some of the things I didn\'t mention
that were problems for us at Gate 510 is positive site access control.
If you\'ve been out to the Nevada Test Site, it\'s very easy to take a
wrong turn and suddenly find yourself in one of the forward areas of the
test site wondering which way to turn.

I worked on the Test Site for about five years before coming to work for
the Department of Energy, and it\'s very easy to do. In fact, over the
last few years, we\'ve had several occurrences of this, where we\'ve had
site workers, visitors, or even Fed. Ex. deliveries that have come out
to the site, gotten lost, and we\'ll get a call from Wackenhut or others
saying that they are 35 or 40 miles away on the Test Site wondering
where the Yucca Mountain facilities are. So, we want to have positive
access control for emergency management egress. We also want to have
those badging and security functionalities.

What we propose, and we studied last year, is to put in a new structure
out at Gate 510, giving us some of the functionalities that we desire
for safe operations. What we conceptualize now is approximately 9,000
square foot facility located at Gate 510. What you see would be existing
guard shack about the location of Gate 510 that we would anticipate,
supported by a structure. Again, this is proportionate with current site
mission. This is not a repository asset. This is, again, just to allow
us to track out workers, our load, equipment that arrive at Yucca
Mountain in a much better manner. It also allows us to have some better
functionalities, including function as a backup emergency operation
center.

We\'ve gone out for a DOE direct contract on this, and are currently
evaluating proposals on this. So, we\'ll make some decisions on this
shortly.

Speaking of the roads on the Test Site, this is a picture of the Jackass
Flats Road that comes from Mercury towards Area 25. It\'s what I would
call, you know, your traditional hill and dale construction technology.
In other words, they grubbed it, graded it, they did not put much
sub-base on the road, and paved it. And, what you see is the degradation
because of wash-out over the road over years. In order to manage this,
the NTS has continued to drop the speed limits. In fact, this section of
road right here varies in speeds anywhere from 45 to 35 or less,
depending upon exactly how many potholes have arisen.

What we did back in, again, in 2005, we studied all of the roads leading
to Yucca Mountain. We had a road engineer come in, look at Jackass Flats
Road, Lathrop Wells Road, what we call the Cane Springs Road as well,
and the final connection roads going up to the Exploratory Studies
Facility, and gave us some recommendations on prioritized maintenance,
as well as safety recommendations on the current condition. And, the
road engineer was very, very concerned about this road here, so we
immediately took steps to move our work force off of this road. We sent
them in through another gate immediately, and no longer routinely
utilize this road.

But, this road is not terribly different than even some of the existing
roads we\'re using. All were approximately 1960\'s vintage in
construction, and all are suffering from various states of degradation.
So, what that environmental assessment proposed in 2006 was a couple of
options, including a no-action alternative, but a couple of options for
giving us safe and reliable roads.

One option, this was prospective here, this is the edge of the Nevada
Test Site, it comes over here. This is U.S. 95. This is the Amargosa
Desert area, and the old Lathrop Wells township area. This is the road
that comes into that Gate 510 bulletproof enclosure I mentioned earlier.
The draft environmental assessment looked at two options, both
completely reconstructing the road all the way around its existing line
up to the Exploratory Studies Facility. So, right now, as we bring our
work crew in, we bring them around this way. Or developing a new direct
route coming towards the ESF.

There\'s advantages and disadvantages with each of these. The indirect
route, I remind folks a great deal of the year, including this time of
the year, our work force arrives and departs the site in the dark. By
the end of their shift, it\'s dark, and there\'s very little lighting
out on this road system. So, an indirect route has unique hazards
because of its condition. A direct route would be preferable. So, the
environmental assessment looks at both of those options.

On roads I mentioned that we have a series of dirt roads, if you\'ve
been up on the Yucca Mountain crest, what you would see is a road that
comes around here, and comes along this alignment up to the Yucca
Mountain crest. This section right here, as an example, has grades that
are extremely large, anywhere from 20 to 23 percent grades. But, we
still have a responsibility to both maintain this road, to grade this
road. We have various scientific activities we perform along this ridge
crest. We also have a series of boreholes we\'re required to monitor.

So, we looked at a couple options to get our work crews up to the crest
in a safer manner. We looked could we reconstruct this road here, and
there\'s no way with the topography around it could we get it to the
preferable approximately 8 percent grade we would desire. So, what we
found is if you take the existing H Road, now this is the Exploratory
Studies Facility right there, this is what we call H Road that you
approach the ESF on, the pavement ends about there, it is so graded up
to a point of about there, if we added a 1.3 mile section, we could get
a new connection to the crest with an 8 percent grade. There\'s a
significant amount of dirt work that you would have to do with this, but
there are some distinct advantages for lowering the grade.

Right now, for example, and I\'ll talk about it in a few minutes, we are
putting up some new communication towers to improve our communication
capability with the ESF. And, I\'ve been having aggregate brought up
this crest road, and it has been a real challenge for these trucks to
get up this road because of this grade, also because of some tight turns
right here in this location.

So, a direct route to the crest was studied in the environmental
assessment. What we\'d do would excavate, pave this new section here, as
well as chipseal along the crest. One other advantage we would have here
is this would also give us a potential second egress from the Yucca
Mountain site, because it could connect down with Solitario Canyon. So,
if we needed to, we would have ability to egress to the west of Yucca
Mountain.

Power system. This is a substation immediately adjacent to the
Exploratory Studies Facility. A couple of challenges with that, as well.
The NTS power grid, similar to its water system and road, was primarily
installed several decades ago. Now, the NTS has, in a prioritized
manner, gone through and upgraded all those sections on the Test Site,
with the exception of the one that connects to Yucca Mountain. They
brought all the voltage up to 138,000 volts, leaving one 69,000 volt
section associated with the ESF. This then leaves us with a 69 to 1247
transformer that then transforms the power, and we utilize it for the
transformer for operations in the ESF.

A couple of problems this presents us with. We have routine power
outages. On a quarterly basis, we have three to four power outages. Some
of these are milliseconds, some of these can be multiple hours. This
transformer is a single point failure for us. If this transformer fails
and the voltage is unique enough from 69k to 1247, we would have to have
a new transformer wound. It would be an almost 42 week replacement
period. So, our power would be down for 42 weeks.

We\'re also limited to no more than 10 megawatts of total power. We
average around 2 1/2 to 3 megawatts of power, but it provides us a
limitation. There\'s also some cost efficiencies we would like to
explore. We currently buy our power through the Nevada Test Site. We
would certainly like to get more competitive rates.

So, what that environmental assessment looked at is going to the nearest
power provider, Valley Electric. A couple of options are bringing power
up to the north portal. Again, for perspective, here is the north portal
here. Here is an existing 230,000\--I\'m sorry\--existing 138,000 volt
system that runs just along the NTS border, and there is a switch that
Valley Electric owns just outside the NTS called Lathrop Wells switch.

We looked at two options. One would bring power along an existing
alignment up to the north portal. The other would parallel with site
access road option to the north portal. What this would allow us to do
is go to Valley Electric, negotiate the utility purchase agreement that
would allow them to go and construct that power connection, contingent
on certain service agreements, we would have to agree to a multi-year.

Additionally, it would allow us to solve other problem I have. Now, I
mentioned the ventilation fans at the south portal. The south portal
ventilation fans are supplied by power that we take all the way through
the tunnel. So, every time we want to do maintenance on one of those
mine powers, and there\'s one of those big yellow boxes I showed you
earlier, we have to actually shut off all the power in the tunnel, and
run the ventilation off of generators. Okay, those generators are
constrained by Air Quality Permit limitations by the State of Nevada,
which provides us challenges in trying to maintain all of those 13 mine
power centers and associated other power equipment. So, a permanent
surface power connection in the south portal would also be negotiated in
this agreement.

Communication system. What this shows you is in the lower picture, is
the muck pile right here. This structure that you see here is shown up
in close-up there. This is an analog microwave system that was employed
during site characterization. That is actually a notch that we had to
cut out in the muck pile, because as we were stacking muck, we actually
covered the line of sight line coming from here up to its repeater on
Big Skull Mountain.

This has presented a real problem for us. If you go out there and you
try to work on your computers, it takes about 30 minutes for your
computer to log on. Internet and even Lotus Notes connectivity is
extremely slow. We cannot transmit large documents, design documents,
over the system, all because of a 1 megabyte operating rig. In fact, we
are even maxed out for phone deployments out there. We have a voice-over
IP phone approach. We can\'t even put new voice-over IP phones out
there. And, again, it\'s a single point failure. If this goes down going
up to the Big Skull Mountain, we have no means of communication with the
site other than two satellite phones that we keep out there for
emergency conditions.

So, what we\'re doing, and we\'re actually constructing this right now,
is deploying three new communication towers. Okay, here\'s the north
portal area. We\'re putting a new communication tower on top of Exile
Hill, one on the Crest, and another one that goes down to Gate 510. What
this will be is a digital microwave transmitter system. We\'re operating
at 40 megabyte transfer rate. We have currently completed both this
tower, physical construction, and we\'re beginning to wire this tower.
We\'ve completed almost all of the towers construction at Gate 510, and
have just begun pad construction on the Crest tower here.

I mentioned earlier some of the challenges. This has been a real bear to
construct, simply because of its location. We anticipate completing this
in March of 2007, and I can guarantee you that the site work force will
sigh a big sigh of relief when they have this in place.

The last item I wanted to share with you is some of those things in the
central support area that we occupy. This is our sample management
facility. These are two approximately 20,000 square foot warehouses that
were constructed, again, during the Space Nuclear Propulsion Agency
activities in the 1960\'s. We rehabilitated these warehouses in the
Eighties, and we currently store all of our core from our activities at
the Yucca Mountain site.

We\'ve had problems because of degradation of these structures. Now, we
occupy these under agreement with the Nevada Test Site, but we do all
the maintenance on them. For example, on the roof here as we go in to do
maintenance on the HVAC systems on the roof, because of roof
degradation, we now have to put men in baskets off of cranes as we haul
them onto the roof to maintain the HVAC system. So, we\'re looking at a
couple options to replace these. Now, I\'m a big believer that you only
construct that what you need for your mission, if you could come up with
viable other options, pursue those. So, we\'re looking at potentially
leasing an off-site facility to locate our core storage, but, still
keeping it within proximity to the Yucca Mountain site to meet our
needs.

In summary, we\'re committed to the safe and reliable operation of the
Yucca Mountain site. There\'s a lot of challenges, but I guarantee, with
every one of those challenges, we have analyzed our problems and come up
with a mitigation. If it was not safe at the Yucca Mountain site, we
would not allow it to continue to operate.

We completed a draft environmental assessment that allows us to get into
a better configuration for our surface facilities and associated surface
utilities, and we\'re looking to make those improvements dependent upon
final agency decision on that environmental assessment.

That really completes all of my presentation. I\'d be glad to answer any
of your questions.

GARRICK: Howard?

ARNOLD: Arnold, Board.

I used to work on that Space Nuclear Propulsion program, and you really
make me sad with a lot of your comments. I used to drive that road a
lot. The only thing you\'re missing is occasional herd of tarantulas
that would come roaring across that road and make things exciting.

WADE: One of the things that you probably had to run into as well at the
time is just the arid conditions out there, whether it be the
tarantulas, I have almost stepped on rattle snakes a couple of times, so
there\'s a number of things that remind me it isn\'t anything but a
desert arid condition.

GARRICK: Given that the Exploratory Facility was supposed to have a role
in the construction operations, construction activity, why would it not
have a longer shelf life than you\'re implying by your description of
how things have deteriorated?

WADE: I don\'t want to leave you with the idea that everything is bad,
nor that all of the systems are unworkable. They actually create, first
and foremost, a maintenance cost because of the degradation of the
system. We do have good documentation of ground support. We have
differing levels of documentation of the other systems. Ground support
would be the most critical one for repository construction activities.
We would need to know exactly the ground conditions when we excavated
it. The rest of the systems would have limited functionality
post-repository construction authorization, would be replaced with new
systems.

GARRICK: So, that was the plan all along?

WADE: Yes.

GARRICK: Any other questions from the Board?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Well, thank you very much. How about Staff? Yes?

BARNARD: Bill Barnard, Board Staff.

Scott, if you made all these improvements, how much would it cost?

WADE: I had that same question a few months ago. The estimates, the
range, of course, based on local market conditions, one of the things
I\'ve really understood quite a bit is the unique costs because of
having to compete with the burgeoning construction areas of Las Vegas.
So, the estimates for doing all of those maintenance upgrades,
completing all those facilities that I mentioned, new site access road,
new electrical system, could range around \$60 million.

BARNARD: And, then, what happens if you don\'t get the money to make
these improvements, especially the ones in the ESF.

WADE: The high dollar ones, of course, are the surface related items.
The ones in the underground, we\'re still continuing to prioritize with
our funding because of the special hazards. In fact, I should have
mentioned as I went through my presentation, after the Sato Mine
disaster, one of the first things we get is go back and re-examine
things to make sure that we were optimizing our underground activities,
and we\'re looking at options including potentially new deployment of
refuge chambers, as well as new communication underground, but, the
underground items are prioritized for funding, compared to the surface
ones. The underground ones in the neighborhoods of multiple millions,
not tens of millions.

BARNARD: Okay, thank you.

GARRICK: Yes, David?

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff.

Scott, thanks for your presentation. In terms of the ESF, you talked
about the problems with the infrastructure there, and the rail gauge
wandering back and forth, getting skinnier and wider, and then also, you
alluded to chunks of track that will be missing that have to be replaced
over time as the fracturing and cracking of the tracks occurs. Right
now, how many experiments are ongoing underground that you\'re aware of?
And, can you identify them?

WADE: That might be a question better answered by Dr. Dyer. There is a
couple of ongoing monitoring equipment, both the laser string gauge in
the south ramp, some seismic monitors in Alcove 5. Claudia or Russ, is
there others you\'d like to identify?

NEWBURY: In addition to the seismic work and the laser string meter,
there is still work going on with the drift scale thermal test. We are
still finishing up that work. That\'s about it that\'s really going on
underground right now.

DIODATO: So, the opportunity that other underground experiments would be
proposed, is there an impediment to those going forth?

WADE: What we do, though, is we look at\--you know, I consider the
Office of Chief Scientist, Russ and Claudia, as users of the\--they\'re
the customers, I\'m trying to meet their expectations. So, they come
forward with their requests for activities in the underground. We then
balance them off a plan maintenance activities, and try to be as
economical as possible.

Going back to the rail issue, we can operate the rail system, but
there\'s other alternatives we could look at, including going to rubber
tired vehicles to allow us to complete anything that they\'re trying to
plan.

NEWBURY: I just wanted to add that there\'s close operation between the
site activities and Office of Chief Scientist. Drew Coleman, who was
here earlier, actually was in both organizations for a while. He wore
two hats. But, he does work very closely, he\'s the test coordination
person. So, we make sure that we all are talking to each other when it
comes time to deploy tests.

DIODATO: Okay. So, one more experiment question. Is there any risk of
missing data or is there anything that high risk experiments that are
ongoing now where you\'d like to get in and collect data, where you see
there could be some possibility you won\'t be able to get in there to
get the data from the drift scale test, for example? Or is that going to
be a timely thing that just keeps going?

NEWBURY: This is a personal thing, my personal opinion, and that is that
I think it\'s really important to finish the drift scale test. We\'re in
the cool-down phase now. We\'re in the phase when we were going to do
the mine-back, and look at mineral in-fills in fractures, and where the
water went when we actually heated up the drift. And, I think it\'s very
important that we finish that particular piece of work.

DIODATO: And, has that been scheduled? Do you envision\--

NEWBURY: It\'s on the schedule, but it\'s going to depend on Scott
making the underground available to us, and we have to do it safely.

DIODATO: Understood. Okay, thanks. Then, just one question about the
water, if it\'s okay. I know it\'s the end of the day here, but I
appreciate your patience and perseverance.

You talked about, you know, 2.2 million gallons per year for operations
and non-potable and drinking water both. So, it\'s, you know, less than
100 acre feet per year of water you\'ve got a permit for. Now, that\'s
this present time. But, in the future, if you get a license to construct
Yucca Mountain, the water requirements might be greater. Do you have an
estimate of what those requirements would be? For example, the EIS
number?

WADE: The final environmental impact statement looked at a range of
water use, estimates based on various construction, durations as well as
thermal operating loads for the ESF, and they ranged in the several
hundred acre feet per year. Now, we applied for 430 acre feet per year
back in the late Nineties, and we still feel that that balanced our
operational needs.

DIODATO: Thank you very much.

GARRICK: Any other questions from the Staff or the Board?

(No response.)

GARRICK: Any questions from the audience?

ELZEFTAWY: Yes, I have a question. Hi, Scott. Atef Elzeftawy from the
public.

How does the state engineer monitor the consumption of the water? Does
it come with land, do you give them a number, or what do you do?

WADE: As part of agreements we made through both the district court, as
well as with the state engineer, we send both\--we send a monthly water
use report to the state engineer\'s office. We also send a quarterly
water use report to the state engineer\'s office.

ELZEFTAWY: Who verifies it? Under your signature, or somebody else\'s
signature, or the state comes and sees your meter? Who verifies that you
have 10 or 5 or whatever?

WADE: Good question. One thing I wanted to explain, though, is the water
that comes up to the Yucca Mountain site comes through a meter, so we
have metering measurements. The state has come out and inspected this
meter repeatedly. In fact, there is a state inspection of Yucca Mountain
site water system tomorrow.

ELZEFTAWY: Okay, one other question. J-13 and J-12 wells have been in
operation since I saw them the first time in 1979. Have you done
anything with a structure as far as new pumps, new things been going on,
or was that just their goal?

WADE: The NTS still maintains the water wells themselves. The four big
tanks, booster pump stations immediately adjacent to the wells, they
probably have upgraded those over the years. I couldn\'t speak to what
they\'ve invested. We put in two booster pumps in the late\--actually,
in the early Nineties, to supply the water going up to the ESF. So,
that\'s, again, a substantive upgrade we made for our support of our
activities.

ELZEFTAWY: Thanks.

GARRICK: Okay, any other questions?

(No response.)

GARRICK: That brings us to a very important part\--well, thank you,
thank you very much\--of our meeting, namely, the public comment period.
But, before we enter into that phase, I want to thank all of the
presenters for an excellent job of complying with the 50/50 rule, half
time for presentation, and a half time for discussion. Everybody did an
excellent job, and we appreciate that a great deal. Sometimes we don\'t
take our share of the bargain, and use up all the time. But, we
appreciate having the opportunity to do that.

All right, now, we want to move into the public comment phase. I have
been given three names that would like to make comments, and I think
we\'ll just take them in the order, and the first one is Dr. Elzeftawy.

ELZEFTAWY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On behalf of the Las Vegas Paiute
Tribe, we welcome you here in Las Vegas, the Board, the Chairman, and
the Staff, and we understand that for those who travel from far east, it
takes a long time to travel, and you guys spent here one day, and then
you travel back. So, that\'s sort of messes up your biological system a
little bit, but if you\'re lucky, like your Chairman, who lives either
in St. George, or maybe\--then you can have a one hour flight, or maybe
a couple hour drive. But, welcome here. I think I\'d like to leave that
with you.

One other comment on behalf of the tribe is that they would like to
suggest to the Board that you start to reach out for the local tribes in
the Southwest for just a meeting with the tribal members, maybe the
Chair people, something like that. That would be beneficial to them, and
I think it would be beneficial mostly to you.

The reason I said that is because I witnessed the tribe councils of a
couple tribes here in the Southwest who are concerned with the Yucca
Mountain meeting with the Chairman of the NRC and a few of the
commissioners, and that was a very, very productive meeting. And, I also
know that they meet once in a while with Russ Dyer and the DOE. They
have not had any meeting with EPA, either the administrator or any of
their staff. They have not had any meeting with you guys, so I think
after 20 years of you being here, almost 20 years, 20 years and maybe a
couple months, I think that Congress created this Board, it would be
nice for you to reach out for the tribal members. They are intelligent
people. They are part of this culture, and it\'s about time for you to
do that.

And, I feel very, very, very strongly that at least the Chair would come
and see and meet the Chair persons of at least five, six tribes. And, I
think that\'s very, very, very important.

On a personal note, that\'s my personal questions after 20 years of
watching you guys here, I wonder are we doing the same thing as the
Board, like our President is doing in the middle east? I have seen the
Board meetings, I\'ve read the transcript. I am proud of what I have
seen lately. You guys have done a very reasonable job. That was my
expectation as a technical person 20 years ago, but I have seen the
Board up and down, up and down, and it\'s hard to get the consensus of
all the hot headed egos of all, the professors and all the Ph.D\'s, and
it\'s not easy to really get together and provide a beautiful letter
like we see lately.

But, I think I give credit to all of you. Thank you for coming, and I
give credit especially to the Chair, who thinks that everything about
chemistry, I disagree, I think everything is about physics. So, thank
you again for coming. That\'s a personal joke, so thank you for coming,
and we appreciate all your effort, and thank you for making it easy.

Again, please come and try to meet the tribal Chair people or the
council members at least, and that would be good for you. If you don\'t
have the money, we\'ll be glad to talk to our Senator Reid on behalf of
our tribe. Now, he\'s in, quote unquote, control a little bit, maybe he
will see some idea of getting you some money from the side.

So, thanks again, and good luck to you, and have a good safe trip to
your home, and we appreciate your hard work.

GARRICK: Thank you very much, Atef, and we certainly will take your
recommendation seriously.

All right, the next name I have is Kirk Lockman. Okay, well, he can\'t
get out of it now. He\'s got to make\--okay. Okay, how about Michael
King? Please give your name, and affiliation, et cetera.

KING: My name is Mike King. I\'m a consultant with Inyo County. Been
working on Yucca Mountain since \'97.

I\'m responding based on the answer to the question I presented this
morning on the upper gradient in the lower carbonate aquifer. Based on
that, I\'d like to present the following comments on this.

I assume the license application is going to highlight the value of the
natural barriers and engineered barriers to the effectiveness of this
repository to work. But, once you pick a site, the natural barriers are
pretty well fixed, short of some catastrophic geological event that
would change those. But, the one barrier that you do have control over
is the gradients in the aquifer or groundwater system.

So, what\'s the statement, or the problem is, well, you\'ve
got\--there\'s people coming, they\'re coming in hoards and they\'re
coming\--the repository near you. They\'re all thirsty and this area has
been allocated, or at least there\'s a trend towards development of the
Amargosa for development. Potential water resources for that
development, of course, there\'s the shallow aquifer system, which is in
the model that you\'re looking at.

There\'s also the development of the lower carbonate aquifer, which is
an incredibly prolific aquifer system, and can provide an adequate
source. But, that development has a certain potential of reducing the
gradient or reversing the gradients into that system, which we think
would then compromise one of the natural barrier, which you\'re actually
trying to license on. The upper gradient in the lower carbonate does
provide a barrier to radionuclide transport. The water is moving up,
it\'s unlikely that radio particles will be moving down into that
system.

So, that is the one area that DOE can work on. Now, we\'ve got
experience with this in the LA County Water District where they\'ve got
a line of wells that they\'re pumping water in the ground to prevent
salt water intrusion from impacting their water development wells. So,
there, they\'ve reversed the gradient through mechanical means, in a
natural barrier system, to prevent contamination of their water supply.
They\'ve also put up buffers, and this type of thing. This is just an
example that there are things that DOE can do.

So, what\'s the point? Well, if I ask the question about a TAD here, I
could probably get a stack of papers up to the ceiling with studies and
reports on TADs, on how effective they are. I don\'t feel that we got a
very robust response from DOE in regards to this natural barrier, and I
don\'t think there\'s a lot of studies that support any investigation as
to if there is development, or if there\'s some impact on the gradient
in that system.

What is that doing to the Total System Performance of this repository?
Can you actually do something to protect that barrier? In that regard,
then you need to look at what are possible mitigations? Do the studies
to show that, well, if you develop\--then this would be the size of the
buffer, the distance you need to protect that barrier.

And, the same token with the Board. We\'d like to highlight that. Next
week, we\'re spending quite a bit of DOE\'s money to drill wells in the
lower carbonate in the Death Valley region, and you\'re welcome to come,
but we\'d also like you to take up this issue and treat it with the same
responsibility of a TAD or any other activities. This is a natural
barrier. We think it should be protected. We think that it has value to
the project in supporting the license actually.

And, so, we\'re welcome to show our modelling data and our results to
the Board. Dr. Bruderhoff, my partner, has just done a model where he
took the regional model of the USGS, isolated the lower carbonate
aquifer, and then did the transport model through that. Groundwater
velocities to that system from Yucca Mountain to Death Valley were 50 to
500 year range, depending on some assumptions in the model. We think we
should look at that and have some open discussion about those results
and see how that fits into the Total System Performance.

Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you very much, Michael, for your comment. And, I
apologize for mispronouncing your name. I read the \"g\" as an \"s\".

Okay, we have one more. Ed Mueller?

MUELLER: My name is Ed Mueller, Esmeralda County, Repository Oversight
Program Director. And, just for the record, realizing that\--this is in
regards to transportation, the rail route\--realizing that Caliente is
still the main corridor as far as DOE\'s decisions go, but there\'s a
possibility that there will be a record of decision to include the Mina
Route, and we know that we have the scoping meetings for the Mina Route,
and the preliminary EIS work that\'s going on, but Esmeralda County has
gone on record as if the Mina Route was to come through Esmeralda
County, come down from Northern Nevada, that it should be a through
north/south rail route, and we really want to get that on the record. We
feel that that\'s important. And, also, it must be a shared use
railroad.

As far as putting a dead end railroad to Yucca Mountain from the north
through rural Nevada, you don\'t have much support at all in the rural
Nevada areas and the other counties. So, I think it\'s important that we
consider that, that you know that.

And, with that said, when you look at the graphic that Gary had up
there, the graphic indication, national routing implications of corridor
selection, and he says that the Carlin Route would be equal to the Mina
Route. Well, I think if you take this chart and you show it as a through
route where you could either come from the south or the north, that this
whole chart would completely change, and it would have an enormous
amount of change on some of these cities and other places.

So, I think that should be considered also in the planning for the Mina
Route, to show it as a through north/south route, and see what that
would do with this chart.

I just wanted to share that with you and hope that you will consider
that in your future. Thank you.

GARRICK: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Any other comments?

(No response.)

GARRICK: I have a logistics announcement to make to the Board with
respect to how you\'re going to get to the airport. I am told that the
hotel has agreed to make two trips in our behalf, beginning at 6:00
p.m., and that you should be in the lobby and ready to go at\--no?
Pardon?

BARNARD: She\'s trying to change the time to 5:15.

GARRICK: Oh, I\'m not up to date. Okay, 5:15 then. So, if it\'s going to
leave at 5:15, they should be there about 5:10; is that what you\'re
saying? All right, and there will be arrangements made for two trips, so
that everybody will be sure to get there on time.

So, if there\'s no further matters, or business to be taken up, I
declare the meeting adjourned. And, thank you very much.

(Whereupon, the meeting was concluded.)