[UNITED STATES]{.underline}

[NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD]{.underline}

[SPRING 2002 BOARD MEETING]{.underline}

[May 8, 2002]{.underline}

[Washington Marriott Hotel]{.underline}

[1221 22nd Street N.W.]{.underline}

[Washington, D.C.]{.underline}

[NWTRB BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT]{.underline}

Dr. Daniel B. Bullen, Afternoon Session Chair

Dr. Norman Christensen

Dr. Jared L. Cohon, Chair, NWTRB

Dr. Paul P. Craig

Dr. Debra S. Knopman

Dr. Priscilla P. Nelson

Dr. Richard R. Parizek, Afternoon Session Chair

Dr. Donald Runnells

Dr. Alberto A. Sagüés

Dr. Jeffrey J. Wong

[SENIOR PROFESSIONAL STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. Carl Di Bella

Dr. Daniel Fehringer

Dr. Daniel Metlay

Dr. Leon Reiter

Dr. David Diodato

Dr. John Pye

[CONSULTANTS]{.underline}

Dr. Charles McCombie, Independent Consultant

[NWTRB STAFF]{.underline}

Dr. William D. Barnard, Executive Director

Joyce Dory, Director of Administration

Karyn Severson, Director, External Affairs

Linda Hiatt, Management Analyst

Linda Coultry, Staff Assistant

[I N D E X]{.underline}

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Introductory Statements**

Jared Cohon, Chairman

Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board . . . . . . . 1

**Staged Repository Development,**

**Concepts, and Plans**

Debra Knopman, Session Chair (NWTRB) . . . . . . . 1

**International View on Staged**

**Repository Development**

Charles McCombie, Independent Consultant . . . . . 2

**DOE Views on Staged Repository**

Jeff Williams (DOE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

**State of Nevada Views on Staged**

**Repository Development**

Steve Frishman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

**Repository Design**

Dan Bullen, Session Chair (NWTRB) . . . . . . . . 82

**Flexible Repository Design and**

**Thermal Operating Conditions**

Elwood Stroupe (BSC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

**Nye County Ventilated Repository Concept**

Parviz Montazer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

**Status on Repository Design -**

**Geotechnical Considerations**

Mark Board (BSC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

**Performance Confirmation and R&D Testing**

Priscilla Nelson, Session Chair (NWTRB). . . . . . 169

**The Role of Long Term R&D and**

**Performance Confirmation**

John Kessler (EPRI). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

[I N D E X]{.underline}

(Cont.)

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**Project Plans FY 02-03 Performance**

**Assessment and Testing Priorities**

Peter Swift (BSC/SNL) and Larry Trautner (BSC) . . 201

**Repository Design Project**

Larry Trautner(BSC). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

**Performance Assessment Project**

Peter Swift (BSC/SNL). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

**Enhancing Confidence, Technology, and**

**Efficiency for Radioactive Waste Management**

Steven Brocoum, Senior Policy Advisor (DOE/YMP). . 264

**Public Comment Period**. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

**Adjournment** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

**APPENDIX (Plastic covers)**

Letter from Brian O\'Connell to NWTRB, February 21, 2002

Paper by Zhuang Sun and J. Donald Rimstidt

Public Comments by George Danko, Ph.D.

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

COHON: Could I ask you to take your seats, please. Thank you very much.
It is my pleasure to welcome you to this second day of our meeting.
Yesterday was very interesting and engaging. We look forward to another
good day today. We will be turning to some other topics, all very
important to where the program is right now and where it\'s headed in
the future.

I want to announce a change in the order of speakers for the last
session planned for today. This is the session that will start at 1:15,
the session focused on performance confirmation. The major change is
that Steve Brocoum, who was going to speak at 1:20, will now be the last
speaker in that order. Everything else stays the same in terms of order;
however, Nancy Williams\--do I have that wrong? Okay. However, an
additional change is that Nancy Williams who was scheduled to be part of
the originally scheduled 3:05 talk is not able to be with us. But her
colleagues, Peter Swift and Larry Trautner will cover together what she
would have covered. So the major change here in order is Steve Brocoum
goes at the end of that session.

With that then, we start our day with a session on Staged Repository
Development, and Debra Knopman, Board Member, will chair the session.
Debra?

KNOPMAN: Good morning. We\'re going to pick up in this session the same
pattern we established in a couple of our sessions yesterday, which is
to first introduce an international perspective on, in this case, the
notion of Staged Repository Development, move from there to the DOE
view, and then conclude with some comments by Steve Frishman on the
Nevada perspective.

Our first presenter is Charles McCombie, who some of you met yesterday.
Let me just properly introduce him. Dr. McCombie is currently an
independent international consultant in radioactive waste management and
since in this year he\'s become Executive Director of something called
ARIUS, which is the Association for Regional and International
Underground Storage. For almost 20 years, up to 1998, he was Director of
Science and Technology at National Cooperative for the Disposal of
Radioactive Waste in Switzerland. And subsequently, he has spent most of
his time working on projects toward international or regional
repositories. Let\'s see, he was also a member of the National Academies
Science, Chair of Committee that looked at long-term waste options. And
he\'s a member of the Nuclear Research Advisory Committee of the Swiss
National Paul Share Research Institute. He\'s got a Ph.D in physics from
the University of Bristol.

MCCOMBIE: Thank you, Debra.

First of all, I\'d like to thank the TRB for the invitation to talk on
this pretty topical issue here. It is nice to be in D.C. again. I happen
to be here a lot right now. In fact, when I look out at the audience I
see so many familiar faces, I think I can probably forego my usual stuff
where I talk when I explain why a Swiss citizen like myself has such a
peculiar accent. Those who probably looks like Andrew Carnegie.

The talk I\'m going to give today is split into two parts. The first
part is based on the work which I\'m doing with the National Research
Council now on a committee and set up at the request of DOE, and our
report on that committee work in the first part of the presentation.

The second part is my own personal opinions about how different programs
around the world are actually using the concept of staging. And the
reason I appear under my own title is that I don\'t want to stress any
of my committee colleagues with some of my own opinions which might come
at the end.

So the first on the committee, and this is a committee on the principals
and operational\--important word\--strategies for staged repository
system still to come by the time of the final report, which is scheduled
for\-- around like November of this year. Well, the study itself on the
staging, we were asked to address\--this is the statement of task, which
you are familiar with the NRC and the original NRC and method of doing
these things. So we\'re supposed to look at the objectives and risks
associated with staging, and in a very wide spectrum from technical to
societal. We\'re supposed to look at the impacts of staging on these
issues mentioned here like safety and security, costs and so on. We\'re
supposed to look at how staged strategies might actually be in the
operational phase, was the original statement of task. We were also
asked to identify knowledge gaps. What do we have to know to do staging
better, to do staging correctly, do staging at all. And then very
importantly, we were asked, and we\'ll come to this I\'m sure, to look
at the potential incompatibilities of staging with licensing procedures.

There\'s some very important caveats in addition to this statement of
tasks which have got to come on. First, as the title was, the emphasis
is on operational aspects. And at the beginning we agreed with Lake and
his colleagues that we couldn\'t just do that staging. It\'s for a whole
process. So we really have to take some position on things like siting
and so on. But the report is focused on operational phase.

Also important is it\'s meant to be generic report first of all. It\'s
for a waste repository somewhere. Not for any specific waste repository
anywhere, but as an important rider, with applications to Yucca Mountain
for a possible. But on the specific questions that\'s in the room today
and all the time and\--back in 1990 in the well known rethinking report
done by the National Research Council, again there were indications that
that a staged or gradual approach was a more sensible way to go in some
kind of projects. And I\'ll try to define the kind of projects
afterwards. So again, the idea was that you can change things in
response to new information that comes in.

The most recent enunciation of this principal was in the last year\'s
report, again produced by the National Research Council under the
chairmanship of this committee, of Warner North (phonetic), and I was
lucky enough to be the vice-chairman of this committee, and for my sins
was penalized by the chairman of the committee.

And, again, in this report we pointed out that a step-wise process was
appropriate and very importantly for making, decision-making under
uncertainties and the two was important, technical and social or
societal uncertainties. So this report placed a lot of emphasis on the
fact that we have been underestimating the societal challenges in this
waste management business for too long. So that was the lead-up.

When the committee started, of course, we got into the usual thing of
definitions. Our waste management community has a real gift of taking
words, trying to add clarity and making total confusion out of it. We
had a good example of that yesterday with the safety case. We put so
many words around these things that it\'s nice because it becomes a
selective process. Everybody can choose his own or her own meaning. I
forgot I was in the States. And what has happened with safety cases also
happened with validation. It has also happened with state cooled, it has
also happened with robustness. You know, the words are nice and we\--but
then meanings diverge, and I fear this might happen here as well.

And staging of course is nothing you\--every major project is staged.
You can\'t do a big project like that. It has to be staged. So what is
new about staging?

Now, we looked at different kinds of things, before I come to what\'s on
the screen now. We tried to differentiate and we looked at conventional,
traditional project management type staging which we called linear
staging. Linear staging means you are at A and you want to get to B.
Everybody knows where B is, everybody knows what you\'re after, A, but
to make sure you get there in a cost-effective and, I don\'t know what
it was that Burt called these yesterday, a whole string of words like
that. You chop it into stages and you put milestones, but the milestones
are there primarily to check that you\'re getting to where you know you
are going, to check that the costs are still in control, to check
everything. So this is a linear process. And that\'s been tried in many
programs. And I\'ll come back to this. It has failed in many programs as
well.

When we looked around, and using the input from some of our other people
on the committee, and we looked at a newer concept for management. Not
project management like technical people are used to, but what\'s called
adaptive management, which I\'m also learning about. And this mainly
came from the econological sciences. And adaptive management is
something different. Adaptive management is more suitable when you
don\'t quite know what the end phase is going to be, where you don\'t
quite have agreement of what the end phase is going to be. And so we
co-opted or took over this sort of adaptive and tried to put adaptive
onto our staging to try to differentiate adaptive staging from other
kinds of staging. So when I say staging in the future here I\'m going to
mean adaptive staging. And the attributes of adaptive staging that are
given here at every stage, you don\'t just say, oop, take it off, let\'s
move on. You stop me and say what did I allow in the last stage. Should
I be just moving on in this linear way? Have I got new information that
came in? And that\'s not normal in what I\'ve called linear staging
there. So that\'s really important.

The next thing that comes with it is the next step, which I thought in
the beginning was the right step. Is it still the right step? Do I have
other options? And you want to have other options, including
reversibility. It\'s much easier if you take any decision for society in
general and for technical people who actually belong to society as well.
It\'s easy to take decisions, and if you know that they are not
irreversible. So reversibility becomes very important now.

Now, we have another point in our adaptive thing that we should evaluate
and update the safety case. I don\'t want again these complicated
definitions of safety case. For me the safety case is the numerical
stuff plus all the other stuff that makes the numerical stuff
believable. That\'s a really bad definition with \"stuff\" three times
in the word, but I\'m sure that you can get about as much out of it as
you can get out of yesterday\'s discussion.

We said that you should update the safety case. Has something radical
changed? If it has do I have buy-in to the radical changes that have
happened? Now, am I taking the whole community that\'s involved with me?
So that\'s important. And then, not as trivial as it appears, decide on
the next stage so the decision process itself becomes part of the
staging process so that you have to see how the decision was made, what
went into it.

All of these things become how we would envision adaptive staging
happening and the blue part at the bottom is important. We originally
had a bullet that says interaction and so on, and the more we thought,
the more we realized that it\'s so over-arching. This is all what
happened with interaction. And it\'s especially spelled out with input
from and also feedback to the stakeholders. And if you don\'t like that
word the interest and effect is far reaching, which I think is nicer as
well. But, you know, they have to know when you move ahead that the
views that were taking into and if they are not working on, they should
know that you haven\'t taken them in. You should know why you haven\'t
taken them into occurrence, so this input/output. So that was the kind
of broad definition type approach for adaptive staging.

Then we tried to be a little bit more specific and formulate this in
terms of what we call the essential attributes of adaptive staging. We
put these up here and the top one I think is the most important, is the
commitment to systematic learning. These are chosen words. You know,
this is just not how I learned anything. This is the intention to learn
something. When you start out on this stage don\'t just think where I\'m
going to get. Think what can I learn along the way. So even if you have
to stage because of budgetary conditions than anything else, use the
occasion. Think about it. I can use this. What can I learn in this
stage? How can I challenge the things I saw in you and so on? So this
commitment to systematic learning is a very important point.

The flexibility kind of came in the previous slide, but this is
flexibility\--it has to be flexible, it has to include this
reversibility attribute for as long as you can, although I think choices
get narrowed with time, of course.

It has to be auditable. And by that we mean a complete record. And
that\'s not just a complete record of what data came from where and how
they are. This is a record of how the decisions were made, who took part
in the decisions, how did it happen and so on. So auditable is
important.

Transparent means that this complete record has to be available, has to
be open, has to be available for anybody who cares to look at it.

The last part, the second to last part, the integrity part is important.
By integrity, some of the issues in there is that all evidence\--you
don\'t just look at the bit that you people got. You look at all of the
evidence. Yes.

Yes. John will bring me a\--someone bring me a cup of coffee from the
corner there.

SPEAKER: Coffee or water?

McCOMBIE: No, coffee is better. It\'s got drugs in it. I am suspicious.
After hearing the talk yesterday about all the stuff that\'s in the
water at Yucca Mountain it has put me off water forever.

So the integrity means look at all of the evidence and so on. It also
means\--integrity means keeping trust, and I\'ll come back to this
afterwards. This trust issue is tightly bound into what we\'re calling
adaptive staging here.

And the last issue there is responsiveness. Responsiveness means if you
make stages, it\'s kind of\--it\'s an optimization, to use a horrible
word, at least as a choice in how big the stages should be, yeah? You
want them to be small enough that you can correct, yeah? But you want
them to be big enough so that you\'ve learned something in between, and
then where are the right sizes. I mean two examples, jumping ahead a
little bit, 90 days is always too short for a stage which is supposed to
get you from site suitability determination to a license. And that\'s
already feeding into your system. Everybody has recognized it\'s too
short and it won\'t be done.

On the other hand, maybe 100 to 300 years between the stages we saw
yesterday, from first acceptance of waste to closure of the facility as
one stage, maybe that\'s too long. So somewhere in between these, each
one, there will be a right length of staged if subjective judgement goes
into it.

So these are the kind of essential attributes. You should remember these
exactly because I\'m going to do a test afterwards. I\'m going to go
through all the programs in the world and look and see how they fit to
some of these attributes later in the talk.

Before I do that there\'s an input which is not in our interim report
yet, but did come from one of the committee members, Todd LaPorte, who
has done lots of really good work on organizational systems and
institutional systems. And Todd made us a sort of checklist which I have
kind of used on the next overhead here. When do I use the linear and
command and control strict project management staging approach? When do
I use adaptive staging? If you look at this list here you can see that,
if you have agreement on all these, if you answer yes to all of these,
then maybe you don\'t need adaptive staging. And you\'ve taken the
problems out. If you all agree on a single program goal, then that\'s a
big step forward. In Sweden they all agreed they wanted the repository.
In many countries they don\'t even agree they want any repository. They
don\'t want any repository at Site X. So if you\'re in agreement on the
goals, if you\'re in agreement on the ways to get there, if you got lots
of financial and other resources, it\'s good. If there\'s not a huge
perceived\--perceived as an important work, perceived hazards\--it\'s
not the actual hazards that counts because of the interaction, the
societal and technical issues are perceived however. If it\'s not huge,
if you can get fast feedback, if it\'s an emergency situation, adaptive
staging would never be used in a war. You can\'t do it. You can\'t run
an army like that. That\'s why command and control is the other extreme.
And some of these, I mean some of the arguments which came up for Yucca
Mountain recently and some of the arguments which have been used in the
U.K. for example, we have to get this stuff on the ground now, or backed
off from the 9-11 thing, and that would kind of come into that category.
That suddenly increased that far. Why not? You\'ve got to jump some
things. If you got confidence and implement those you can do it and
that\'s really important. Again, jumping ahead with examples.

In Finland, the chosen site that you all know about, the people at that
site, there\'s been no underground work done now. But they all know that
when the work starts, if any show stoppers come up, despite the fact
it\'s the agreed site, they all know that their safety authority, their
regulator, under-implementor will stop the project. It\'s not a
question. It\'s not even an issue. And you can compare that with some
other places where the social confidence is less high. A stable
environmental part is also\--so if you look at all of this you can maybe
make it more transparent or imaginable to think of other projects.
Yesterday the man in the moon was mentioned. The man in the moon would
pick yes almost all the way down here, you know. Let\'s get somebody on
the moon. When Kennedy said it, nobody stood up and said, \"Oh, a
rubbish idea\", you know. It was\--it really fits in pretty well here.
When they tried to use the same techniques later to a space station, for
example, it started crash and ready to talk. Some people said we don\'t
need a space station.

It\'s not the right way to go and so on. So the history of the space
station, for example, is a lot more checkered than the history of the
man in the moon. So to give you some kind of examples. So these are the
examples that we\'ve been using to focus our thinking.

In the interim report I mentioned we then go on to list the pluses and
minuses, the pros and the cons of an adaptive staging in the way that we
envision it could happen. I won\'t go through all of the pros and all of
the cons, but I\'ve got some examples here in each of the areas.
Programmatic area, it\'s good because it keeps options open as long as
possible, but it can make things longer lots of times. It could also
make things more expensive. As a counter argument it could make things
cheaper if it leads to disclosure of real problems.

In the technical areas, the pluses that you can maybe avoid surprises.
By keeping the stages short you can avoid surprises. You can therefore
perhaps save costs, you can therefore, much more important, have a safer
system perhaps or a more demonstratively safe system which I think is
probably more important. The down side as well as on the technical side,
if you stage it in the way that many programs are now doing, so let\'s
keep the waste open and available for a long time. You have to realize
if you do that some people will get real radiation doses when that\'s
happening. You know, it\'s no use keeping it open if nobody looks at it.
There\'s no use keeping it open if it\'s not accessible. Accessible
means people can go there. So you have, if you\'re being logical about
it, you have decades or maybe hundreds of years where people will go
near the stuff all the time. And if you were really logical you would
integrate the doses these people are going to get and compare it with
the hypothetical doses of 10 millirum or 100 millirum 100,000 years in
the future. So there is a down side, a potential down side, and it has
to be accepted if you\'re going to go down this path.

In the regulatory area, there\'s an up side and I think from some of the
stuff Steve said yesterday we will come under this regulatory thing
today. The up side is the regulator gets more input. I talked about the
100 to 300-year thing and so the regulator should think about how he\'s
going to get input in that stage, and if the regulator works instead as
a champion of the public, then that\'s a good thing.

And there\'s also a down side, of course. If you get more regulator
steps in you can also have delays, especially in litigative countries
which you can find around the world without going for specific examples.

And institutionally there\'s a really important nice part here.
Institutionally there\'s an up side to adaptive staging where you
actually look at each stage, is that it gives the implementator a chance
to prove that she is trustworthy. And Margaret Chu mentioned that a
different way yesterday. She made this commitment to you guys that in
September she would do something. And she knows you\'re going to measure
her on her ability to deliver that. If you multiply that through all the
stages in the system, what you learned, if you look at there\'s a
positive chance, it gives you a positive chance to demonstrate over and
over and over again that you are trustable, so each stage you see what
it\'s going to do, and if at the end all of the other parties see that
you have done what you said you would do then it\'s to watch out for it.
It\'s a little job. A person is not up for it. And we all know about
this slow rise in trust in the job foal (phonetic) if one time you
don\'t deliver. So that\'s an important issue there.

The down side\--and this is a really important down side\--societally is
that it can easily be represented as a, what I always call a salami
tactic, you know. They don\'t like sausages. Slice it thin enough and
they will have eaten the whole lot before they even realize it, yeah? So
that\'s a real down side, so you have to be careful that\'s not what
your doing; that you\'re not just chopping it up into bites that people
can swallow easier. And that needs to be carefully explained and thought
through and justified.

The last part is fairly straightforward. Societally, of course, this
adaptive staging was a really marked decision process at the end or
beginning of each stage. Gives you much increased opportunities for
public participation, yeah, which is the positive side. Again, in some
countries, in some places, and this is not the U. S. referred to\--also
gives increased opportunities for what you might term disruption if
people are not in agreement with the broad goals.

So we looked at these pluses and minuses in our report and we came to
the conclusion very cautiously that we think adaptive staging and
throughout the whole waste management program and also in the
operational phase, stage, and in trying the good approach. It was
cautiously framed because most of it was based on the observation that
the other approach has not proven to be so good, this linear command and
control don\'t include people approach. So that\'s about as far as we
got in our interim report. It was short on Yucca Mountain material for
two reasons. One is that it was early in the proceedings, and two is
that, although we were agnostic on Yucca Mountain, it\'s difficult to
say anything about Yucca Mountain in the current climate of course. So
that we really were very restrictive in what we said about the Yucca
Mountain interim report, and that\'s one of the big areas we have to
work on between now and November to try to make appropriate suggestions,
conclusions, recommendations there. Okay, so that\'s what we\'ve done in
the committee up until now.

If I move on now to a wider view, I looked at the phases, deliberately
using a different word here. Phases or of temporal type issues, and all
programs can be divided into phases in different ways. This is a pretty
standard way to do it on the left here. On the right I have a list of
the countries that have been very active, most active. Not all of them.
And the countries I happen to know pretty well because I\'ve worked in
most of them at different times. And afterwards I\'m going to try with a
color code to say the ones that perfect some positive aspects of
adaptive staging and some which reflect less positive aspects because
you\'re not allowed to use the word negative.

The way I\'ve done it is to try to measure them against these essential
attributes that you saw earlier. I\'ve got the U.S. here on the list as
well, but I\'ll kind of go low key on the U.S.A. because I\'ve got one
overhead at the end which tries to pick out some specific issues to do
with the Yucca Mountain program. Again, my own opinions on it, because
that\'s the part we haven\'t done in the committee.

So if you look at some of these national examples and start off with
commitment to systematic learning, whose fault was that? Who brought
that into the program early? Well, there\'s different ways you can do
that. There\'s different examples of it. The ones I\'ve used here are
underground rock laboratories. There are key learning phases in many
programs, and the ones mentioned here, Sweden was the very first,
Switzerland was pretty early, maybe second. The Belgians have an
excellent underground facility in clay for many years, learning lots of
things and so on.

The U.S.A. gets red here in a way, not because you don\'t have
underground facilities now, but because it took a very long time a very
long time to do it and it only came at the actual site with a hugely
important exception of course, the Climax facility which for reasons
that are not very explicable to me, disappeared. Maybe it was before its
time or something like that, but I thought you were up front with some
very demonstration type experiments, but Climax went off the scale
early.

The next one is a pilot phase. A pilot phase is a conventional way to
learn when you start any big project. And then what\'s in waste
management and waste disposal in fact, then a few people did it. The
Swedes were the earliest, back in the 90s, where they said we will
dispose 10 percent of the waste, and originally\--I think they are
slacking off a little bit on this\--but originally it was, and if you
don\'t like it we\'ll take it out again. Not if it\'s not safe, no. If
you don\'t like it we\'ll take it out again. That sounded awful to the
community, yeah? Because they felt so confident of what they were doing.
So the Swedes early had the pilot facility.

Switzerland, we didn\'t have it explicitly. I say we because I worked in
the program in the intensabilities phase. But very recently with the new
EKRA group, which is viewed in Switzerland, we have proposals for a
pilot phase and also a demonstration facility, which would actually have
the waste in its final configuration, back-filled and all, for all of
the decades of the operational phase so you have a really long-term
demonstration at the time you need it, which is when you start looking
at closure decisions. So pilot phases\--and the U.S.A. was negative, and
that\'s proven positive. We\'re going to hear more about that today for
there\'s much more talk now, about, you know, don\'t build the 70,000
tons in capacity all at once.

And the last point here is the use of performance assessment, or safety
assessment as I would call it with my background. It\'s the systematic
use of it to try to gauge a knowledge process. That is kind of weird. I
mean again this same group of countries which got close contact is the
Swiss, the Swedes, the Fins, started really early using interactive
assessments to try to learn something. The states started later than
many of you people here think, in fact, yeah? But when you did start you
did it like Americans do. You did it really intensively. So you lined it
up with very interactive TSPAs and thought maybe even too intensively,
and had some of the criticism of there was too much weight and what not
on the end, but using performance assessment or modern terminology,
using an interactive safety case is definitely a good learning
mechanism. And some countries didn\'t use it and have suffered from not
using it, and the examples are the French program, which is very diverse
and hasn\'t used it quite like that. And the U.K. program which has been
pretty chaotic in terms of decision courses and in many ways including
this.

Look at the next example on these essential attributes. I\'ve lumped
together\--oops, I missed one. Flexibility. Yeah, this is another one
where important points to be made. The concept choice, when I say all in
red there, I mean that every single national waste program decided at
the technocratic level that disposal was the right thing to do. We
didn\'t put a concept up for public discussion, yeah? Now, I am one of
the guilty people here. I still think it\'s the right thing to do in
some ways. It\'s just\--it\'s noticeable it wasn\'t put up for public
discussion at that stage. And it came much later, hadn\'t been the
buy-in to this is the only way to go. We said it, but we didn\'t get
enough of a buy-in there. And that, in fact, I\'ve got them gritting my
teeth. I have these three countries green because what\'s happened there
is that when they got further down the road they found that we did not
have buy-in even at that level. So the French already in 1990 said we
have a three-pronged program. We\'ve got partitioning in transportation,
we\'ve got long-term storage, and we\'ve got disposal, and we are not
making any decision on which is the right one to do, and for the next 15
years then in the\--and Canada came next and the Canadian report was
total disaster when they found there was not enough so that one of the
best programs in the world collapsed in a short time because this had
been neglected. And in the U.K. the same thing happened, back to square
one, in fact back to square zero or minus one. You know, let\'s think
what we really want to do. So that this concept choice, I think all
programs were kind of guilty of doing it too early.

The other ones, the flexibility, I think I\'ll jump these actually so I
can get on to the more important ones. The next overhead lumps the
auditability, transparency and integrity. And then I think I want to
show this one because this is where the states comes out top of the
heap. You people have the most open system there is. You have, if you
look at your public consultation processes, they are extremely open in
many different areas. You can look at today for example. No other
country that I know has quite the openness and accessibility of the
states. Other countries have it to some extent, and some countries, like
in the original\--in Germany and in the U.K. they had so little of it
that they had major crashes, and they are now re-starting with this
public consultation almost\--well, in the German case, they have a new
AKEND, A-K-E-N-D group, which is really trying to do siting from square
one again, with public consultation. In the U.K., I\'ve said this was
personal opinions, they\'ve gone almost too far. They are producing
documents which say, paraphrase slightly. They go to the public and say
tell us how we should consult the public about how the best way to
consult the public is for consulting about waste management, yeah? Like
three steps back. And seven years from now\--this is not a joke. This
sounds like the best joke on me yet, but it\'s not a joke. Seven years
from making this diffuse set of questions we\'ll actually decide on what
we\'re doing. And that\'s why, and there\'s been recent moves in the
U.K. to try to pull that system back in line somewhat more. The openness
again, the U.S. system is top of the pile there.

Responsiveness was the last one. And I think I\'ll jump the
responsiveness totally. You can see it\'s to do with siting. Do I change
when I get input even if I didn\'t want the input that came, I didn\'t
like the input that came, how responsive am I with my site and with my
design?

The one that\'s important here, let\'s try to wrap up on one side.
Let\'s then be specific, me personally, Charles McCombie and not my
committee, again. What about here in the States? Well, the siting
process actually fitted pretty well to our adaptive staging thing all
the way down until you had three sites at least, yeah? At the three site
stage it diverged, and it kind of diverged\--it\'s a policy decision.
I\'m in no way criticizing policy makers who decide, but one issue was
taking them narrowed in from three to one. It crashed against many of
the attributes which we\'ve defined as adaptive staging. And it was done
presumably with the justification that some of the parameters in my list
from Todd LaPorte were fulfilled to a greater extent. So that when it
narrowed down to the three to one it was not transparent now. It was
done in the bigger sense.

And then a really big point is that there\'s no options. This makes me
nervous every time I hear it. And it\'s repeated and it\'s DOE-ese,
DOE\'s language now. As well we have no other options and so on. I have
trouble getting around this because you talked way back about second
repositories. You talked about alternative options. You decided in the
States about a second repository program. Why? Not because you thought
the first repository was going to be too small, but because you had this
concept of geographical equity. Really nice. The States is the only
country which has got enough waste and enough resources to actually do
that. And a commitment was made to do that and then people backed off
from it in a very big way. So that\'s a shame. I think the whole
intensity of the debate might well have been weakened, rediced, if there
were other options, and this keeping options open. Again, personal
opinion.

In the programmatic area I\'ve already talked, I was demonstrating
there\'s really no underground labs or pilot stages that have been
introduced since. In the program arctic air is also another points of
introducing stages. The VA\--I\'m getting real American here, using all
the acronyms\--but the viability assessment and the siting
recommendation were introduced as new milestones, which is good. The
modular approach is also good, and we have, and it was originally
thought of just to levelize costs and we in our committees were all
going back to that thing. That\'s not the best justification. It might
be a reason, but it\'s certainly not the only and not the best.

In the safety case, it was a two-way stop and it tended to get too
narrow a focus into the TSPA. One important point is that my decision
process, my perception, personal perception, is that in the safety case
evolution in the DOE program, in the Yucca Mountain program, what lacked
was major changes were made in the safety case and they weren\'t put on
the table nearly as openly for discussion as they could have been.
That\'s not just with the general shift from engineer to engineered
barriers, from geological barriers. It\'s also things like dip shields
suddenly appear, you know, and they come like if you\'re looking at the
program from outside and I\'m probably looking closer than most
Americans, they appear to come out of the blue. And so they\--and
there\'s a major change in your safety concept there. There are also
things like clodding (phonetic). The whole world never used clodding and
allowances as part of its safety case, yeah? Including the States. And
then suddenly the States had clodding. A huge safety factor, you know.
It was a very long-life thing. I\'m not saying that\'s wrong. I\'m not
saying it\'s technically wrong or anywhere. I\'m just saying that these
things appear as they are out of the blue, and they are not put on the
table as we have made a major change in our whole safety concept. And
that\'s what I would be criticizing there.

All of that is improving a lot. We\'ve had, and in the water\--I\'ve
been doing in the States with my colleagues who know much more about it
than I do. We\'re noticing lots of improvements in the way
we\'re\--we\'ve had very good interaction with all of the DOE people,
and Lake Barrett in particular. And we\'re pleased to see that the
messages that we\'ve been trying to bring we think are being taken on
board, and I look forward to hearing later talks to see how well that
has been done.

Thank you.

KNOPMAN: Thank you, Charles.

Questions from the Board? Norm Christensen.

CHRISTENSEN: Let me say, Charles, I thought that was terrific, a really
nice discussion, particularly the initial discussion about adaptive
management and very much appreciated your analysis at the end.

I wanted to make maybe two observations and get your reactions.

If one looks across a variety of different situations, not just in waste
management, but natural resource management, other complex systems,
it\'s hard to find institutions, or situations that have behaved just
the way you described. It\'s an ideal and yet it has been poor to
realize. And it seems to me that there are two problems that are worth
thinking about, particularly in our context about how we actually
implement these. They relate to the institutional issue that you raised
and also the societal issue. So I want to propose that there is in
institutions something equivalent to a second law of thermodynamics that
goes something like this: At every stage of decisions, vested interest
increases, and incentives for critical analysis diminish in proportion.
And that\'s a natural process. This isn\'t the critical statement. It\'s
simply that something that happens. We move down a road and which
suggests that perhaps there needs to be within an institutional
structure some way of enforcing critical thinking from the outside
because institutions are not going to be naturally prone to do it.

My second point is about society. And that is that I think societal
expectations are run counter to the notion of adaptive management, even
though people may see it as being incredibly logical. And again, my
assertion here is that society expects that agencies manage complex
systems in ways in which they know or ought to know what the heck they
are doing and are very intolerant of\--now it\'s very difficult in a
societal situation for an agency to say, well, we\'re doing the best we
can with the knowledge we have other than to say we\'re doing the best
that can be done, and they are very different situations. So I\'d like
you to comment on that and particularly maybe think about this in terms
of, as we move into, or potentially move into a stage situation, how do
we deal with these particular problems?

McCOMBIE: Both good points, and as an old-school dinosaur technical
person I have to be very careful what I say here, but we\'ve looked at
both of these aspects and the points you mention is really institutional
culture. The question has been put in the room, you know, if this
adaptive staging approach, can you do it in any institution. And the
answer is no. The institution itself has got to have a certain kind of
culture. If it doesn\'t have it it\'s got to be willing to try to get
there. As I said, you can\'t have adaptive staging in this way in a
military system. You know, if the high officer says jump, you have to
have somebody to jump immediately or the system won\'t work when you
come to stress it and test it, yeah? So that\--and the question has been
raised, and it\'s no surprise to the\--for the DOE itself has in its
culture the ability to do this institutional management, to take on
board, to try to explain it to the public. Combine\--that\'s connected,
it\'s very closely to your second point. I\'m not so sure I agree with
you any more. The public expects agencies to do things and do them
right, you know, if I look across the whole world, you know. Nowadays
the public has been increasingly skeptical of the ability of agencies to
do things right in many countries, and I\'m not talking just about the
States here. So\--and that\'s why you learn that with this complex, very
difficult efforts, what do you do in this case? You know, do you
convince them that the agency can in fact do it right? That\'s a nice
way to do it. That\'s the Scandinavian way that I mentioned, you know.
But in Sweden on a public opinion polling, if you ask the public where
do you get the most reliable information on waste management, then SKB,
that\'s the implementor, that\'s the nuclear industry is top marks by
far, yeah? So there they have got confidence or not. If you ask in other
places, I know in the U.K. for example, well, you know, then any of the
government agencies would be at the bottom. You know more about the U.S.
system than I do. But\--and so this, other agencies are expected to do
it and can do it. It would be nice, but it\'s crumbling, I think. And
that it\'s crumbling partly because we haven\'t fulfilled trust often
enough\--we, being, speaking as a technical person if you like now. And
also we\'ve pushed the whole issue up. The kind of example I quite often
use is that any\--now, we\'ve kind of got ourselves in a situation where
any house man or house wife, and is kind of expected to know about
things nuclear and so on. And the whole world is full of other things
where they are not expected.

And I happen to live near the biggest chemical complex in the world, New
Basel in Switzerland, yeah? And I drive past these chemical factories
every day. And they are complicated. They look like oil refineries but
they\'ve got other things, and nobody asks. We don\'t expect them and
there\'s not expectation. If you ask your neighbor, you know, do you
know how these things work, they all say no, unashamedly, yeah? If you
ask them about waste disposal or nuclear things in general, we\'ve
managed to kind of give an air of that into it. So I think that we
technical people are part of the problem here and it would be rather
nice if we could become part of the solution. So does that answer your
question?

CHRISTENSEN: Yes.

KNOPMAN: Dan Bullen.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Charles, thank you very much for the
international perspective because it brings out a lot of benefit to our
program and to the Board\'s understanding.

I\'d like to actually talk a little bit about your international
perspective on an issue that\'s on the U. S. National Resource Council
2001 report where they basically say that demonstrated reversibility of
actions in general, and retrievability of waste in particular are highly
desirable. As you go through your adaptive approach, what kind of
criteria do you see either generally, generically or maybe in another
international program that would warrant retrieval? What type\--I mean
how would you make that decision? And then I guess the other question is
do the citizenry actually trust the implementor or the government to
actually do the retrieval if they determine it to be necessary?

MCCOMBIE: Yeah, these are two questions. The second one is so hard I\'m
not even going to get there. The first one, let\'s try, on my\--I
didn\'t get into the details, but on retrievable issues, that\'s another
issue where the technical people thought that it was two things: Either
it was so unlikely that we would ever need it, you know, that why bother
about it. And then secondly, and without really spelling it out, that if
you did have to retrieve then you could always retrieve anyway. So these
are the two things that we kind of, we knew inside us, and what we
realized in the end, there wasn\'t, again, buy-in at a wide enough level
to either of these, and to possibilities, yeah? So the demand for
reversibility really came from a societal thing, very much so. And then
the reactions have been actually all over the world I think have been
good. The technical community has responded to that, built in the option
of retrievability. It has to be explained a lot more to them and
technically of course, it\'s easy still. I still think technically it\'s
easy for\--we have to make a case for that and show people that it
should be easy. We have to do things that we might not think are really
necessary as technical people. But, so that at every stage you have to
assure them that it could reverse, yeah, and it\'s easy all the way down
to the siting phase. You\'ve got back in the same corner again here. You
know, if you really came down and you said that the reason we want to
reverse is because the site is not good enough, yeah? And when you
reverse\--reversing to\--it\'s stated in our interim report\--reversing
to a situation where it\'s a dead end anyway, you don\'t know where else
to go. And so if you reverse from that, then it\'s not the end of
geologic disposal. I think it means that that particular site wasn\'t
the right site. But that can be done as well. Russ mentioned it
yesterday, so there\--the whole issue of it\'s not irreversible. It has
not even very expensive to keep reversibility in there for much longer
than we thought. And it\'s not expensive in financial terms and it\'s
not expensive even in safety terms. We were always very worried it would
kind of destroy the safety concept, but we\'ve looked at that in a lot
of detail and it doesn\'t, you know, not for the times we\'re talking
about. So I think all you can do is persuade people it\'s possible and
so on and demonstrate that it\'s possible and so on.

And then the next part is the whole thing about who decides. Who pays is
another issue, but who decides. The only way I think you\'ll get that is
by having really independent stuff. If I were in Nevada now, I\'d set up
my own body and troupe that would do that for the next 50 years or
something like that, build up, educate your own kids to do it, have your
own special way to do it, get some kind of organization that you trust
to do it. You know, I even made\--in our world you either need trust or
else you need control. You can compass in for lack of trust by increase
of control and that\'s one of the ways you can do it. Not a very good
answer, I\'m afraid, but I\'m a technical guy.

BULLEN: Thank you.

KNOPMAN: Jerry?

COHON: Thank you. I want to concur with Norm Christensen about what a
wonderful presentation this was and very thought-provoking, and I think
very useful.

Just a thought. Listening to the exchange you had with Norm and thinking
about some of the scoring you did of various national programs, I
realized that what we really have to look at is the entire process, not
just the DOE. But everything around the DOE. So that one can\--and one
example actually is, I was struck by the fact that you colored the U.K.
green with regard to flexibility on concept choice. It was that
flexibility happened to them. They weren\'t flexible. The same idea that
adaptive management could be forced on or could be built into the
overall system, even if the lead agency is itself not flexible, or not
performing in an adaptive way. Being very self-centered about this I
would say that the Congress showed great wisdom in creating this Board
in 1987 as a part of the process, the system that includes the DOE. And
I think it has helped the DOE to learn and to adjust and be flexible,
where they may not have been otherwise without that external stimulus.
And your comment on that would be welcome, but I actually have a
specific question.

Under commitment to systematic learning you listed systematic use of PA,
which certainly makes a lot of sense. You made a passing comment that it
can go the other way. That is you can become over-reliant on that
mathematical tool and it could actually frustrate learning, I think. And
your\--if you would expand on that point I\'d be very interested in
hearing what you have to say about it.

MCCOMBIE: Okay, and a short remark, I did mention with the green for the
U.K. was through gritted teeth.

COHON: Yes.

MCCOMBIE: You know. And it\'s right. It was forced upon them, but the
fact is they did do it and they go back. Your associated point about
bodies like your own is very good. I think bodies like that are very
good. The U.K. does have a body and remark which was kind of ignored in
this thing anyway. It has been, I think, rather marginalized in the most
recent debate and so on now. So that\--and it\'s\--I may be hitting on
the U.K. a lot, you know, but I have two passports and one of them is a
U.K. passport so I feel entitled.

So the other part about the PA is right, you know. It\'s dangerous to
overdo it and I\--when I was running a small but integrated program, we
always consciously\--we didn\'t use the words because we always invent
new ones\--but we always consciously thought that. What input do we need
to drive the PA and models that we\'ve got, was always one of the things
looking at something like a site characterization program or a science
program in a broader sense. But we always stopped after that and then we
said and what else do we have to do, you know? One to make the
credibility of this whole approach, to make the believability of this
data better, yeah? And what else do we have to do or what else do we
have to do just to increase our scientific credibility?

And I think being maybe immodest, if you like, but with praise for my
Swiss colleagues, when we started this program back in the beginning of
the 80s, there was almost nobody in it. It had a very bad reputation, it
had a PR budget which was 10 times its technical budget, yeah, which was
all small numbers like, yeah? And we spent the first 10 years
effectively building up scientific credibility. Very deliberately, we
told our publications to do that, we introduced a publications series
which the cost volume might be\--our idea was scientific American. And
all the insets said for people who knew Europe, yeah? But, you know,
words like scientified American, if you read things outside your own
specialty, well, maybe I\'m more stupid than average, but if I read
things I don\'t know in my specialty, I don\'t understand most of it. So
it\'s a high level. So we introduced that and we set out to tell people
also to international programs over a period of 10 years, and so on. And
it was all meant to increase the scientific credibility as a balance for
this hard, if you like, use of performance assessment. It\'s really
dangerous. And all modeling\--I used to be way back the modeler for
reactor physics experiments, and every two or three years I would stop
and try to do a self check and get this horrible thing, gee, I\'m
stunned to believe these models I\'m using, you know. You start using
the model, you use them, and for example, this is a typical case, you
use the models in an intercomparative mode so that\'s not so stressy,
you know. Instead of using them to give you absolute volume you use them
to compare things. And then you do that, but you find out if you keep
using the models and the models do this all the time, you use them every
day and every day you get comfortable, you get familiar with it, you
know, it\'s like quantum mechanics. Nobody really understands it, but
lots of people get familiar with the word, sure, and you get further
down the line, you know. Suddenly one day you find you\'re using it in
an absolute mode. And that happens in all programs.

KNOPMAN: Priscilla Nelson.

NELSON: Nelson, Board. I was sort of surprised that there wasn\'t more
in your comments about, relating to, let\'s say education about
uncertainty by the public and by the decision makers because of the
context that we\'re in it seems a case of much more flux and
availability of information. And maybe being\--having prior judgements
calibrated on some sense to terministic approaches and now having to
think differently about how you reach a judgement. It seems that, to me,
that dealing with complex adaptive systems and adaptive management
really requires a certain kind of education of the decision-maker and
the public. And I\'m wondering if you think that that\'s true and if
there are in particular some countries that really have developed maybe
a change or a new capability in the public\'s ability to understand the
questions that are being asked as you go through management scheme.

MCCOMBIE: That\'s the hardest question yet, I think. And the whole thing
is framed in the context of uncertainty. You know, we talked about the
technical uncertainty, but also the societal uncertainty and the whole
justification for the approach is really meant to be within that
framework. But to be more explicit about how you raise the level of
understanding for uncertainty is very difficult. And I think this is
something we should build in here, and you give me a good hint for\--be
more explicit about. But then it\'s kind of in there in our decision
process type thing, you know, so that as the decision process is made,
because that decision process is a multi-disciplinary decision process,
and that\'s where you have to accept the uncertainties that come in.
It\'s not spelled out enough in what I said and it\'s not spelled out
enough in what we\'ve written actually now, but I think that\'s a very
good point. And all you can do is make it as transparent as possible and
avoid promising certainty. That\'s what we\'ve done too much in the
past. And not always deliberately, but certainly and unintentionally
we\'ve promised a degree of certainty which we can\'t deliver, but which
nobody else can deliver either. We\'ve set up a measure, a yard stick
for ourselves which is very often not fulfillable, but we set it up
ourselves to a large extent, and to come back from that and get
ourselves to be run-of-the-mill and normal would be one of the
objectives, but not an easy one. So I don\'t really have a very good
answer, Priscilla.

KNOPMAN: Paul Craig.

CRAIG: Charles, I enjoyed that very, very much. Fascinating and
important and for all nations and many technologies. I kept think
genetically engineered foods as you were talking.

And then you provided us with a sobering list of countries that got into
really big trouble like Canada, Great Britain and Germany. And I wonder
if you have any suggestions or if the committee has any suggestions for
rebuilding institutions that have fallen apart or have lost public
trust.

MCCOMBIE: I take back what I said that it was the most difficult
question. No, I think that\'s too much to even start addressing now, but
then that\'s right. They have crashed these things. And the only thing I
worry about, we contribute, you contribute to it as well, This choice of
words, for example. And I can criticize you guys since you\'re giving me
a hard time, you know. And what are these three words\--weak, moderate
and the one that\'s not used? What\'s this\--

CRAIG: Strong.

MCCOMBIE: Two of the scale?

CRAIG: Strong, strong.

MCCOMBIE: Strong. Yeah, weak, moderate and strong. You\'re out in the
real world and weak to moderate means something, I suspect, different
than what I hope you guys meant when you said weak to moderate. Maybe
you did mean that, yeah? But we do it over and over again, and\--so that
to spread the creases around in the NEA, IAEA report, which has also
been vastly courted, again, the trace of words is really important. You
know, and I\'m not saying you should mince words and I\'m not saying you
should make things look better and so on, but very often we rush into
words and without having a full really appreciation for what the echoes
are going to be like when they come back. So we\'ve done some of that,
you know, a lot of the time. You know, in the kind of terminology we\'ve
used. So\--and that happened also in the Canadian system, which was
heavily biased incidentally on the non-technical side. The Canadian
panel produced its report at the end, has been praised up in different
places as being very inter-disciplinary, but measured in most panels
around the world it was a very much\--there were only two people in it,
I think, with three technical backgrounds than the other six or seven
came from, and so it was differently weighted from other panels. Or
it\'s too difficult for\--

KNOPMAN: We\'re running out of time, but I know Dan Metlay has one very
quick question for you.

METLAY: Charles, Stan Metlay, Board Staff. I\'d like to take a half a
second and say I really enjoyed reading your report. I was particularly
pleased to see the emphasis on reversibility, and I think some of the
questions you got had to do with that. And you raise it as a sort of
necessary and essential element. So I was really puzzled with the
footnote in your report in which you say this discussion of
reversibility should not be interpreted as a recommendation for Yucca
Mountain. In the few seconds you have left can you talk about the vision
of stage\--adaptive staging without reversibility?

MCCOMBIE: No, reversibility, I think that was just part of the general
disclaimer. We were very sensitive and correctly so when we were writing
that anything we wrote would be interpreted by somebody on some side of
the fence as being specifically for Yucca Mountain. So any time we
thought we might immediately get pinned down by that, then there was a
tendency to put in disclaimers. I think that\'s really all there is to
read into that.

KNOPMAN: Okay, thank you very much, Charles. It was excellent.

Our next speaker is Jeff Williams from the Department of Energy. Jeff is
currently Director of the Systems Engineering International Division,
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. He has been with the
federal government for 21 years and with the Department of Energy in
OCRWM for 16 years. And during those 16 years he has worked on and
managed several aspects of the Waste Management Program including
environmental assessments and site characterization plans for potential
repository sites.

WILLIAMS: That might have been last year\'s resume. I think it\'s 23
years or something like that now, but anyway.

Yeah, this is the first time\--I\'ve known Charles for a long time.
It\'s the first time I\'ve had the chance to follow him and I don\'t
have any opening jokes, so I don\'t know that I can live up to his high
standards.

I did want to comment on two things that Charles said. First of all was
he seemed to indicate that the public discussion with respect to the
choice of geologic disposal in this country just appeared. Just want to
remind everybody that that was suggested by the USGS in 1957 and it
wasn\'t until 1982 when the Act was passed through much, much public
discussion, including an EIS.

And the other one was the no options alternative. And the discussion
about geographical equity. I guess what I would like to say is that if
we don\'t have Yucca Mountain we\'ve got the ultimate geographical
equity through storage at 131 sites in 39 states. Anyway\--

When we go on to the first one, I\'d like to just start with, first
discussing our recent consultation with the National Research Council.
And I don\'t use that acronym, NRC, to confuse everybody, but it\'s the
National Research Council. Many people refer to them as the National
Academy of Sciences, related to repository staging.

In November of 1999, DOE helped to sponsor, along with several other
countries, a workshop\--maybe many of you attended it\--on geologic
disposal. As a result of that workshop, in June of 2001, the final
report came out, and one of the recommendations among many was that for
technical and societal reasons, that geologic repository programs should
proceed in a step-wise manner. DOE separately requested advice from the
National Research Council on design and operational strategies for
repository staging. In our initial letter we suggested that the study
may help to shed light on establishing measurements, analysis and
criteria for permanent closure to help us guide our performance
confirmation program that was set up. The interim report was released,
as Charles said, in March and in that report they coined the term
\"adaptive staging\". And then they defined that. The final report is
due at the end of the year and it should be more specific to Yucca
Mountain, and we look forward to reading that report and reading their
conclusions and recommendations.

The objectives of what I would like to do today is basically talk about
our modular approach, our modular construction approach and its relation
to staging, and then also describe the staging that\'s already embodied
under the current repository program through the federal law, through
NRC regulations, DOE requirements.

I\'d just like to quickly jump to the conclusion right now, to not hold
you in suspense. And basically, this is, I believe, my opinion is that
DOE repository program is an adaptive stage program and it\'s a
continually evolving program. And it\'s an adaptive program. As new
information is obtained, we\'ll continue to improve our designs and our
operating concepts.

One other thing that doesn\'t seem to be given a lot of credit that our
program is quite a bit different than Finland and Sweden and so forth in
that every year on a yearly basis our program is essentially reviewed by
Congress when we get our budget. And we are often directed to do
different things. If you remember, in 1996, we got what they called a
250 declining budget, a mark out of the house, which was debated and so
forth.

Anyway, and in addition to that we often get authorization bills through
Congress, and Congress represents the public, the American people, and
speaks for them with the knowledge of input that they receive from the
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.

The U.S. program is a step-wise program. And I think Margaret described
yesterday, as we continue to move forward, we continue to gather
science. The real point of this slide\--maybe some of it is hard to
read, especially the science and technology that\'s ongoing. But this
shows the various steps, and I think Charles pointed out when the law
was passed in 1982 we\'ve already had three things that have changed the
direction of the program somewhat. We had the Nuclear Waste Policy
Amendments Act which changed it a great deal, the Energy Policy Act in
1996, the Viability Assessment was included in the authorization bill.
And then we have various steps, moving on, that are defined now, and I
think he also pointed out from the 2010 time frame, if we receive a
license to receive and possess through 2000, through closure, there have
not been any prescribed steps; however, we fully anticipate that things
will happen during this time, informed by the science and technology
that is ongoing through the process.

This one, again, just shows in more detail some of the steps that are
taking place. And the off ramps that can happen. This is in the near
term where we are right now, and basically there\'s many off ramps or
opportunities to reverse our process and decisions to be made. And we
can consider alternatives as well.

After emplacement begins, Congress could further change our program
through our authorization process or also through legislation based on
any new information, based on results they get from their constituents,
if the country no longer believes that this is the correct concept.

Okay, repository construction concepts. We\'ve mentioned the possibility
of constructing a repository in a modular fashion. Basically this is
something that could facilitate a staged process, but it\'s not really
required. Constructing in a phased process would enhance our
capabilities to begin waste receipt and emplacement in 2010. It will
improve our cross schedule and constructability, and it will also
enhance our opportunity to learn to implement lessons learned through
modular construction. For example, in underground we could construct,
after beginning construction, we could put in certain type of ground
support and we could learn and change to a different type of ground
support. Surface facilities, we could figure out how to handle waste
better, we could figure out how to weld better once we had started.

The DOE studies that we have done so far are really assessing
construction approaches that would facilitate staging, not evaluating
staging options.

This is a conceptual approach of how the repository could be constructed
in various phases. Really, the only difference in this is that in the
current concept of construction is, basically you build what they call
the perimeter drift around the whole facility before you begin
operations. And there has never been any idea to construct all the
drifts necessary to hold 70,000 tons before we begin waste emplacement.
There has always been a concept of doing the perimeter drift along with
the ventilation to support that, and then the initial drifts that would
support initial operations. In this concept we basically just divided it
up where we wouldn\'t\--this right here is the exploratory shaft or
exploratory tunnel with one module in the initial module which could
hold 5,000 to 7,000 tons of waste, and it could be built in a shorter
period of time. We could get operational earlier, and we could learn
from what we\'re doing in this one and apply it to the second phase.

It\'s also possible that in the, in the NAS report they really haven\'t
specified operational concepts, but you could, for example, with certain
costs involved, delay beginning the second and third one at a lesser
cost than we have in our current concept.

This is the surface design here, basically. And this design or this
operational or construction concepts we\'ve basically taken the same
function and just shown how they could be built in various phases to
facilitate the opening earlier, they could facilitate\--what you learn
after constructing and beginning to operate facility No. 1 could be
applied to No. 2 and to No. 3. And so we basically lay that out.

Just to remind you, Charles just went through this. This is what\'s in
the National Research Council\'s adaptive staging concept. Basically
it\'s the repository development is divided into stages separated by
explicit decision points. It provides opportunity to evaluate and obtain
results and to decide whether and how to proceed to the next phase.

Reversibility is an option at each stage. It allows for program
implementation, improvement in safety cost schedules, etcetera. The
object is to increase repository safety, reduce uncertainties through
systematic incremental learning. And that the safety case is at the
heart of adaptive staging and the safety case is evaluated and updated
at each decision point. And it drives the identification and choices of
options.

I went through those rather fast because that is what Charles\'
presentation was really about.

This is the result of the Council\'s adaptive staging. And one thing
that\'s very important that I noticed as I was looking through this
that\'s left off of this is the public input in the transparency, which
Charles had in bold at the bottom of his. And it was simply a mistake,
an oversight here, but that is very important.

One thing that doesn\'t come out of the National Research Council\'s
report is the operational aspects, the specifics. They don\'t describe
them in specific.

I\'d like to just turn to the NRC licensing process and basically state
that we believe that this process is a staged process and allows us to
proceed in a staged manner the way it\'s currently written. NRC\'s
regulations embodies the three-stage decision process that is mandated
by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. We talked about this in the past.
There\'s the construction authorization that would occur after the
review of the license application. Then following a license amendment in
which NRC would be informed by new information, would be granted to
receive and possess nuclear waste prior to emplacement. And then
finally, through the years and years of learning during emplacement
operations and monitoring, there would be an authorization to close and
decommission, which is a separate sub-step in the 10 CFR 63 process.

As Charles mentioned, there is no explicit immediate regulatory decision
points between the license to receive and possess and close. However,
continuous performance confirmation is required. DOE would report any
significant deviations from the expected conditions and recommended
actions. The retrieval option must be preserved for up to 50 years after
initiation of waste emplacement. And a license amendment is needed for
any substantial design changes. One specific example, I mean we\'ve
talked over and over and over about the drip shields and that this is a
very long-term process. The drip shields wouldn\'t be put on for
possibly 100 years, maybe even longer. During that time, through
material science maybe there will be a plastic that they sell at Home
Depot for \$5.50 that we could use that\'s better and cheaper.

Reversibility\--the next slide. You\'re right, you\'re right. The 10 CFR
63 process appears to be compatible with staged development. DOE can
seek a license to receive and possess once the facilities are needed for
initial emplacement are completed. We already plan to begin operations
only after a portion of the underground facilities have been
constructed. I mentioned that before. There has never been an idea to
construct the whole repository with all the drifts to hold the 70,000
tons. And that emplacement of waste would occur simultaneously with
construction. The studies that have been done on construction approaches
are really looking at ways to reduce our underground construction needed
for initial operations. And as I mentioned before, the modular
construction is under investigation.

NRC can add at any time, indeed we can commit to, conditions and
specifications to the license to require additional check points.
Reversibility is a key to the adaptive stage process, as Charles
mentioned. And we think that\--well, Yucca Mountain is the unique site
in relation-ship to many of the other programs around the world. It\'s
the only site that has an unsaturated zone. None of the other countries
have the particular unsaturated zone repository, which was a luxury for
this country to be able to pick from those types of geologies.

Part 63, as I mentioned before, requires retrievability up to 50 years
after the start of emplace-ment. The thick unsaturated zone helps us to
be able to do that more easily. The license application must include
plans for storage of retrieved waste. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act
requires retrievability for spent fuel for period specified by DOE. Our
own requirements documents, we\'ve gone beyond the NRC requirements and
have a requirement that says the design shall allow the repository to
remain open for 300 years. And as I said before, the sub-surface
conditions facilitate the extended retrievability period. Our current
operating concept that we cost out is actually 100 years.

Many people have asked about, this seems to be a phased license
approach. Well, I don\'t think there\'s any intent to have a phased
licensing approach right now. If there were to be modular construction,
for example, the way the license would be laid out would be that we
would describe the entire system as it would be with all of the modules
constructed. We would present the safety case for the full inventory
allowed by the regulations, which is right now 70,000 tons. And we would
describe the planned sequence for constructing the modules and loading
the repository. And we would seek permission to proceed with the
described sequence. This is the staged construction approach of a
licensed full-scale repository rather than a staged licensing process.
This approach does not involve deferring any major decisions until
later.

Stages in the decision, the DOE decision process. A modular design and
construction approach, these are basically internal things that happen
in the DOE project management view. Basically the way it would be set up
internally is that prior to construction of one certain module, we would
have to go back within DOE and have our whole program reviewed and
approved. And OMB and Congress have to approve the funding for
constructing new facilities. And there\'s opportunities to reverse the
previous program decisions and directions. Through reversibility we
could switch to smaller waste packages, bigger waste packages, different
materials if we learn, if it showed an improvement that NRC felt was an
improvement. And as I said before, this is a very key point. This is
quite a bit different than the other national programs that are run
basically by the industry, SKB, and at Sweden, for example. But the
Congress reviews our program annually through the budget process. And
the decision-makers will consider results of the repository operation,
performance confirmation, and stakeholder inputs in deciding whether to
approve the next stage.

As we construct the repository there\'s also time to review new
information. It\'s inherent in the construction process whether you go
slow, whether you build one stage and then wait a while and build
another stage. Or whether you do it continuously. Basically, the
underground drift construction schedule provides time to review the
results of new construction before loading new areas. From the time you
start construction to the time you start to emplace waste, it could be
as long as a year. Before you put in the ground support, you come back
in and you put in the necessary pallets for the waste. And during that
time you learn a lot about the geology that you\'ve opened up. The
construction of each underground panel would provide an initial learning
stage as the main perimeter drift is constructed before emplacement of
the drifts begin. This would be true for whether we did it in a phased
construction manner or the way it\'s currently laid out. The
construction of each emplacement drift provides additional information
before emplacement begins, and we\'ll evaluate any new information to
determine whether changes are warranted.

In concluding, basically I believe that the current regulatory and DOE
decision processes are compatible with staged development, and already
allow for many of the features that are identified in the National
Research Council\'s report as part of adaptive staging. As I said
before, the specifics of what they believe is adaptive staging in terms
of concept of operations haven\'t been laid out yet. The DOE development
process, whether it\'s module or not, is basically a staged process. And
we are really looking forward to the final report that will be out in,
hopefully, the Fall, to give us further advice on our design and concept
of operations.

That\'s all.

KNOPMAN: Thank you, Jeff. Question from the Board? Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Yes. Thank you. That\'s a very helpful presentation for me to
understand the staged approach.

I wanted to ask about your map which is Slide No. 7. Now, that
particular layout, is that the layout that would be carried forward into
license application?

WILLIAMS: There hasn\'t been any decision made on that. The current map
is the map that\'s in the EIS, that\'s in the SR. This is just a
potential concept of how a staged repository could potentially be\--I
mean how you could do that same layout in a phased manner, in a phased
construction manner. Okay? So it\'s not the current concept, but it\'s a
concept where we could construct it in a different manner. Hasn\'t been
adopted yet.

RUNNELLS: Let me ask about the high temperature versus the lower
temperature operating modes. Does this tie to that in some way?

WILLIAMS: Well, my understanding is the way this is laid out it\'s not
really tied to it, but my understanding is the way it\'s laid out is if
you needed\--for the low temperature operating mode you would need maybe
five panels for the high temperature operating mode you may only need
three and a half. Probably maybe somebody else here could address that
in a little more detail, someone who is doing the underground design.
But it\'s not really tied to that.

RUNNELLS: Okay, but your understanding though is that this would
encompass that?

WILLIAMS: Right. Yes.

RUNNELLS: Perhaps in Section 5.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, right. That\'s my understanding.

KNOPMAN: Would you use the microphone and introduce yourself?

BOARD: My name is Mark Board and I work for Bechtel. And the low
temperature mode would encompass the first four panels. The fifth panel
is essentially an additional area that could be utilized if needed. And
the high temperature mode, as Jeff said, would require the first three
panels plus a portion of the fourth one. Yes.

RUNNELLS: Okay, thank you.

KNOPMAN: Alberto.

SAGüÉS: Can you quickly\--

KNOPMAN: Alberto, would you use the microphone and\--

SAGüÉS: It\'s my turn for the whole\--

KNOPMAN: It\'s your turn.

SAGüÉS: Okay, thank you. Since you have that in there, please, can you
delineate where is the present year phase in there?

WILLIAMS: Well, it\'s a little bit complicated because they are on a
little bit different levels. Maybe Mark can do it better.

SAGüÉS: Yeah, maybe can you use a pointer or something?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, he\'s got it. I gave it to him.

BOARD: The present ESF facility, is that what you asked?

SAGüÉS: Yes.

BOARD: This is the north portal and this is the south portal here. And
so this concept is on exactly the same horizons as the current SR
concept. These areas are on the upper primary block horizon. And this is
on the horizon of what was termed the lower block in the site
recommendation report.

SAGüÉS: And the present\--and the footprint of the SR version of the
repository would be which one? Number 5?

BOARD: Well, no, it would be right about like this. And then that lower
block area would be down in here which is eliminated in this concept.

SAGüÉS: Oh, okay. Thank you. Now, my questions actually has to do with
something else. And that is has the project evaluated or is it
evaluating the likelihood of the need for a major retrofit sometime
during emplacement period. And by that I mean following. Look at the
asbestos nightmare and suppose that you are so many years into the
project and then something is found. Maybe the waste package design has
some newly found weakness whereby people say, gee, this external alloy
just doesn\'t make it. We\'re going to have to go in and put a cylinder
of some material around each one of the 3,000 or 4,000 packages that we
have put in place. Has the likelihood of that been evaluated or is it
assumed that that is just not going to happen. If it happens it\'s going
to be an unexpected disaster.

WILLIAMS: I think the point I was trying to make is the likelihood of
that hasn\'t really been evaluated in any detail. However, our
repository concept could more easily than some other kind of repository
concept, facilitate that. We have the requirement for retrievability. We
have a longer retrievability period built into our program. We could go
back and retrieve rather easily and retrofit, although we haven\'t
developed detailed designs to do that, but the thinking is that this
repository concept could facilitate that should something like that
occur. Or, for example, if, as they mentioned yesterday, transmutation
was decided to be the way to go.

SAGüÉS: Right, but the\--what I mean is that would be, for example, a
retrofit of the purpose mentioned. It would be a very costly thing

WILLIAMS: Right. Right.

SAGüÉS: Okay, all of a sudden you may be out \$10,000,000 to do that.
Now, there is no provision for that right now in the present\--there is
no set-aside by saying look, there is a 30 percent chance that we\'re
going to need a major retrofit so really, we have to consider this as
the reality of long-term projects. That\'s not being considered right
now, right?

WILLIAMS: I would say that\'s not specifically considered; however, I
would like to say that what we have to do is we have to redevelop a
total system cost for the program and then we do on an annual basis a
fee adequacy report to determine whether the money that we receive is
adequate to pay for this. And in that we add substantial contingencies
and we add contingencies on top of contingencies to determine whether
it\'s adequate. And the current fee adequacy report has substantial
monies available for those sorts of things if the current economic
conditions prevail that are predicted in the last year.

SAGüÉS: Okay. And finally, at the design level, is there plans to make
the design such, for example, supposed to make now something, clearance
between drip shield and the top of the waste package? Are the designers
considering making the clearance more than what is absolutely needed by
present needs? Are those kind of flexibilities being built into the
design as well?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. I think that\'s something that Mark could better address
this afternoon when he does his presentation. Is that right, Mark?

BOARD: I\'m not going to talk about that.

WILLIAMS: He says he\'s not going to talk about that. Do you want to
answer right now, or try to? Larry. Larry is here. He can probably best
address that.

TRAUTNER: Larry Trautner, Repository Design Manager. Yeah, those kind of
options are being looked at as part of our value engineering studies,
and I will be touching on that just this afternoon. But we are currently
doing, performing several different option studies, where we might go in
the future for our repository designs, so those kind of things would be
considered.

SAGüÉS: Thank you.

KNOPMAN: Norm?

CHRISTENSEN: Christensen, Board. Maybe want you to comment on, again, a
kind of a general issue about staging, a little different one than I
mentioned in the earlier talk. And that is a sense, and I\'ll make this
as an assertion, that staged processes or evolutionary processes don\'t
necessarily produce optimal solutions. At each decision stage options or
decisions are made and future options are constrained, and that\'s
almost a necessary process. I think one of the consequences of that is
that innovation is often difficult in that kind of process because of
that kind of constraint and your notion about going to Home Depot and
finding that remarkable material, or whatever. So I\'d like you to
comment on a staging, how a staging process could be developed in a way,
and you know, I think this footprint is an interesting, maybe, example,
that avoids that particular trap. Is you don\'t find yourself by virtue
of the process that you enter into, however well-intended, so
constrained downstream that innovation, true innovation is in fact not
really possible.

WILLIAMS: Well, again, I\'ll use Charles\' line. That\'s a very tough
question. But, you know, I think the best advantage of the type of
repository that we have to allow those sort of things\--and it would be
costly for any type of change. Well, depending on what the change is.
Some changes could be more cost efficient. You know, after we went
through and we drilled the first drifts and we figured out a better way
to do rock support, that probably won\'t be one that could be
implemented very easily. If, for example, we needed a different type of
waste package that required a whole retrofit of the facilities to handle
the waste on the ground, you\'d have to weigh that as to whether it\'s
more cost effective to implement that new thought or not. So, you know,
I don\'t know how to give you a good answer on that. And maybe I\'m not
the best one to do that, but\--

CHRISTENSEN: Let me just follow with just a comment on that because I
think it\'s really critical to the transparency and acceptability of the
staged process. I think, to some extent, it\'s got to be very clear at
the outset what it is that DOE wishes to optimize in this process. And
three things are foremost\--your performance, confidence and cost. And
you talked about the cost issue, but I think that the, you know, these
other two issues in the public\'s mind are going to be paramount.

And I think the other thing is, in outlining the staged process, is in
fact a clear road map that deals really explicitly with not just the
escape routes which you put onto the thing, but also a map that thinks
explicitly about the avoiding these constraints.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, and I think that\'s\--

CHRISTENSEN: I think it has been a concern of the board regarding the
issue of design and perhaps that we locked ourselves into a design at an
early stage that we\'ve now kind of tried to change at the margins,
rather than being able to step back from that design and maybe come up
with something that is wholly different, but a decision process that has
led us and constrained us in that way.

WILLIAMS: You know, you have to weigh competing interests and you have
to weigh the need to move forward with the repository now versus
gathering science for 20, 40, 50 more years to reach the optimum design,
while at the same time you have other things going on in the nuclear
industry that are not optimum. You have people building duel purpose
canisters that can\'t fit into our system because we\'re not moving
forward with those. All sorts of different things like this. I think the
science program that Bob Card and Margaret laid out yesterday, I think
will help to inform us as we move forward to better optimize in terms of
performance. We can be better informed. Let\'s say, for example,
there\'s uncertainty one\--I use neptunium solubility because I think
there was some wide variety of that a year or so ago. And we already
meet the EPA standards with the design that we\'ve laid out. We can
continue science, and if we predict 30 millirums at 400,000 years, if we
continue the science and show, well the neptunium solubility is really
down here, then we can, with better confidence, say, well, our
prediction of 30 millirums at 300,000 years is really two millirums at a
million and a half years. I think those are the sort of things that need
to be done. But you need to weigh where we are in the program, where the
industry is and the country as a whole and whether you move forward now
with the knowledge that we have or not.

KNOPMAN: Jerry?

COHON: Thank you. Just for the record, your response to Norm\'s question
and his key point about design I think missed his point. But we don\'t
have to traverse that. I just want to make sure that we\'re clear about
that. Well, not for your benefit, Norm, but for everybody else\'s.

CHRISTENSEN: Yeah.

COHON: I want to pick up on a point that Norm made earlier in his
comments about being clear on what it is we\'re trying to achieve. I
think one of the concerns, one of the things that DOE is going to have
to try to resist, is that, once you get a license to construct, the
focus of very much of the program will be to build the repository. Your
goal that\--the mission of the department will be to build the
repository. That\'s not your mission. Your mission is to isolate nuclear
waste from the accessible environment.

WILLIAMS: Right.

COHON: So it\'s, you know, like the buggy whip manufacturer in
transportation, forgetting what your real purpose is. That\'s why I
think it\'s extremely important to have an adaptive management process
using the very key characteristics that Charles laid out before, laid
out

in advance. Otherwise it\'s very easy to lose sight of that because of
the strong push to build the repository, make

it cheaper, make it, etcetera. I think that the character-istics that
Charles gave us, essential characteristics, are extremely important to
look at and very valuable in sort of testing ourselves against what is
necessary. One thing I wanted to focus on is the responsiveness
requirement. And as Charles talked about that and expanded on it, he
said you have to have step sizes or staged sizes small enough where you
can actually adjust, but big enough where we\'re actually learning
something useful. And, as he pointed out, 300 years is probably too long
as a step size, and that\'s obvious. Which also means that to say that
don\'t worry about the post-emplacement phase because we\'re going to
have continuous monitoring and performance assessment. That\'s not\--you
need more discrete decision points. We\'re going to do this, we\'re
going to look at that. And then based on what we figure out, we\'re
going to do this or that. And I think, and I know the department has
been very resistive of this\--I think that has to include clear guidance
on when you would remove waste. You know, if we found this we will
retrieve. Instead of saying it\'s retrievable, you got to lay out why
you retrieve. Could we go to Slide 14?

WILLIAMS: Just wanted to comment real quickly. I think those are all
real good points that you just made, and I think that there just hasn\'t
been quite enough thought about that phase of the program yet.

COHON: The last bullet there. You referred to decision-makers. Who do
you have in mind?

WILLIAMS: Well, it\'s a whole range of decision-makers. But, as I said
before, the ultimate decision-maker is Congress as they decide whether
to fund us to continue on with our program or not, informed by all the
various stakeholders. Not stakeholders, interested public and affected
parties. But, you know, they are the ultimate decision-maker and you can
look throughout history of all the programs that they\'ve terminated
once they\'ve begun as they\'ve provided different direction, and, you
know, the country\'s views have changed. But they are the ultimate
decision-makers.

CHRISTENSEN: That being the case I think you\'re going to have to give a
lot of thought to what information it is that you\'re generating for
Congress and what decision you expect them to make. I mean if you think
about it right now, they probably know more about Yucca Mountain at this
instant than they ever have before and they are ever likely to know, you
know, in the next several years. And I don\'t think they know very much
at all. And it\'s, you know, no fault of theirs. I would blame DOE to
some extent for the information they\'ve been given, but it\'s a very
hard thing for them to know. It\'s very complicated.

WILLIAMS: Right.

COHON: The information one needs to know to make the kinds of decision
like, gee, we ought to close this down or retrieve waste or we ought to
expand. I\'m not very confident about Congress playing that role. So the
key is thinking about the information they need. And I don\'t think
you\'ve done that.

WILLIAMS: I think that\'s why they established your Board, to help them.

KNOPMAN: Jeff, thank you very much. We\'re going to move on here just so
we can have a little bit more of a break than what you see in the
schedule, which at least in my version of it has negative five minutes
because of the\--

BULLEN: I thought that was just an implication that I could start early.
I\'ll be talking during the break, so\--

KNOPMAN: Oh. But we all knew that\--new information.

Okay, Steve Frishman will provide us now with the State of Nevada views
on staged repository development. Steve is a Nuclear Waste Programs
Consultant for the State. He has been serving in this role since 1987.
He\'s the Technical Policy Coordinator for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear
Projects.

FRISHMAN: After the last talk I have to sort of rethink where we are
here, because I didn\'t think about staging in the way that Jeff just
thought about it because I think what he was talking about was a much
more of a design options issue than the bigger question of staging that
has been out there. And once again, it\'s a way to piggy-back on the
meaning of another word. And I\'ve been watching the concept of staging
development mostly in Europe for as long as it has been developing. And
there are some very interesting aspects to it, none of which I think are
really applicable to the last talk that you heard. The last talk was
just, you know, how do you do business once you\'ve decided you\'re
going to do business? So I think we need to get back to what Charles was
talking about and the ideas that are involved in staging with some of
the pitfalls, and also I think I need to start out just by saying that
if the staged repository program is to be accomplished in any publicly
acceptable manner there needs to be a commitment to the process before
the process begins. And from this I could probably just end my talk
right now by saying as it relates to Yucca Mountain staging, a decision
for staging at this point is totally inappropriate because we\'re too
far into a process that nobody bought into except those who perpetrated
the process.

So now I guess we can look at the way staging might yet try to be
applied to this program. And the first one is one that I got partially
into yesterday having to do with the idea of staged or phased licensing.
And that would be\--well, first, as I said yesterday, it would represent
a real philosophical change in the existing regulatory approach, and the
departure would result in essentially a pilot or experimental repository
development approach that relies on future findings to bolster an
initial safety case. And I think I went through that to some extent
yesterday.

It\'s just as likely, though, that the future findings won\'t bolster
the case. But then as is sort of being stepped towards today, one of the
concepts that, as Charles pointed out, is deep in the staging is
reversibility. So, missing from the reality in this program is
reversibility, as I answered that question yesterday and as you have now
begun asking, based on things that you\'ve said over the past few
months, where is the exit strategy and what is required to trigger it?
And there are some realities that go well beyond what we\'re really all
about here, which is safety and the realities would mitigate safety
concerns to the extent that maybe safety would actually be sacrificed.
And the reason that, with a phased licensing approach, we\'re concerned
about maintaining safety as the, you know, as the actual goal in the
whole system because ultimately what you end up with is a safety case,
meaning, as I said yesterday, a safety analysis report for regulatory
compliance determination would not really be known until the waste has
been emplaced in the repository and waste isolation performance would be
ultimately whatever the repository system turned out to be capable of
providing. So if you go through this phased licensing approach where you
don\'t make the final decision until all the waste is in, what you end
up with is a case where necessarily the site creates its own standard.
And the site will be whatever it is. And this certainly does not promote
the ideals of safety that we put out there at first, which is we want to
have some publicly acceptable goal of safety and then a site that is
being reviewed, you know, it either meets that goal or it doesn\'t. And
we remember well that we\'ve already been through the sort of round of
the Yucca Mountain site making its own standard. And we see that in
things that, in the newly revised standards from the EPA, from the NRC,
and from DOE. And we see it most dramatically, I think, in the EPA\'s
definition of the boundary of the control area. And what that does is,
and in this lawsuit that we filed against EPA just after the rule came
out, but in a filing that we made just last week what we did was we
attempted to draw what the controlled area might look like. And if
you\'ll remember the constraint is that the boundary of the controlled
area or the accessible environment on the outside is five kilometers
from the boundary of the emplacement except in the direction of ground
water flow where it goes as far south as the latitude definition of the
southern boundary of the Nevada Test Site, which is 18 kilometers south
of the waste emplacement area. So you end up with something that looks
sort of like a big nine. And the extension area is the area that allows
for dilution of the waste and allows for major extrafusion and all the
rest. So, you know, here we have a case where the site made the
standard. And there\'s no\--as we point out in our filing there is no
really good rationale for it being a 9 instead of a zero. So, but this
is what happens when you do an intentional phased program where you\'re
actually operating with what you find about the site and depending on
new things that you find about the site.

So one of the real principles that has to be, I think, held very high on
the list of things you think about when you think about phased licensing
is that in no event should staged or phased licensing be justified by
the expectation that future findings or technological advances will
enhance competence in the safety case prior to repository closure. This,
I think, has to be the real guiding principle. You can\'t depend on
finding something, as Jeff just was trying to suggest, that we will find
better things, and, you know, to me it\'s not a laughable, it\'s tragic
that he suggested that they might find a plastic that\'s better than
titanium. Really.

All right, so the phased licensing approach, at least in our view, does
not promote safety and in fact it\'s detrimental to safety because it
says ultimately you take what you get. The site is going to be what
it\'s going to be. You\'ve loaded it up with the waste and there isn\'t
anything you can do about it at that point because retrievability is
probably on the paper but not on the table.

Now, another opportunity for staging would be in the area of staged
operations. And then again you\'re looking, if you think why would we
stage operations? Well, the department pretty clearly would stage
operations because of the undependability in the cash flow. But if you
start thinking about safety reasons for staging operation, that comes
back to mostly the question of how do you want to deal with thermal
design. And do you want to go through the machinations that are going on
right now about hot versus cold, by having to greatly expand the
underground area or argue that you don\'t need to do it and get into the
either continual argument that\'s going to be there about what is your
real design basis and what\'s the rationale for that. But staging
operations could be a way of eliminating the question.

You know, if you did as the Netherlands staged repository, or staged
disposal program goes, this wouldn\'t be an issue because Stage 1 of the
Netherlands program is stored above ground for 100 years. And if you
store it above ground for 100 years, the above boiling repository
becomes not an easy option to accomplish, if you could even accomplish
it. What you\'ve done is you\'ve let the waste decay for a period of
time to where above boiling is not the issue. The issue is back to how
does the site perform. And how does the site perform without being
artificially disturbed by a thermal pulse. Sure, it will be a little bit
warmer, but it doesn\'t have to be boiling. So if there were decisions
about staging for staged operations, then there might be some room to,
you know, to have some discussion about what do we\--what is the safest
way to proceed if we\'re, you know, if we are predicating all of this on
my belief that it isn\'t going to proceed anyway. But what is the safest
way to proceed and a way that, while safety is most important, also has
an understandable rationale. And that understandable rationale being
that it\'s safer and easier to deal with 100 year out-of-reactor fuel
than it is with 10 or 15 or 20 year out-of-reactor fuel. It\'s safer to
handle, easier to handle, and it\'s a decision that, were we in an
atmosphere that allowed for a real public discussion or debate of
elements of staging a repository, this would be one of the things that
could be a candidate for that discussion because it represents a real
policy decision about how a, you know, a very risky process goes
forward. But I don\'t see any willingness on the part of the department
to discuss that at all. They throw out other options and just sort of a
means of getting by one of the few places where they have to actually
put something out there for the public to talk back to, like an
environmental impact statement draft. So they also talked about other
things such as maybe a long-term storage facility at the Yucca Mountain
Site, holding up to 40,000 tons. It looks an awful lot like PFS that is
used in Utah to me. But then they talk about other things for thermal
management, for purposes of blending they are talking about building a
5000-ton pool at the surface facility. Well, if you start looking at
receipt rates and 5,000 tons, then you have to start thinking, well, how
do you get that 5,000 tons in there?

Well, that leads to another idea that has sort of come out and that\'s
de-linking disposal or emplacement from receipt\--from the reactors. So
you can put lags in there. The ultimate lag was when Congress,
fortunately, failed to pass the interim storage bill. That would be the
ultimate lag. Get as much as you can in there, but their purpose was not
to let it age. Their purpose was to let the idea of a Yucca Mountain
repository mature with the regulators. But that would be the ultimate.
And you could design other ways, but now if you start thinking about
safety, this 5,000-ton pool at the surface facility, to me, has some
real safety questions about it.

You know, the seismicity in the area is such that you probably would
have a very difficult time, if not impossible time, licensing a reactor
there, partly because of seismic risk to the pool. And so now we\'re
talking about maybe the biggest pool in the country sitting in an area
that we know is seismically active and the only reason it\'s really
sitting there is because a thermal decision is a hard one to make for
the department. It doesn\'t have to be there or it doesn\'t have to be
that big, it doesn\'t have to be a storage pool. It can be a transfer
pool. If you just made up your mind how much\--what level of safety you
want to attribute to thermal management.

So I guess what I\'m sort of getting to is that, while staging as it is
being discussed by Charles and as it is being discussed by other people
around the world, doesn\'t really fit this program because it violated
the first premise and that\'s that nobody bought into it before anything
started. But there are other considerations, and they should all be
driven by safety first, and then they can be driven by other factors
such as logic. So what I\'m hoping is that Charles\' panel will take a
look at the Yucca Mountain project at least similar to the way we are
and rather than try to piggy-back on a one-word notion that they have
redefined for themselves, that DOE has redefined for themselves, to sort
of make it look like they are keeping up with the world. Rather, I would
suggest looking at staging with the Yucca Mountain project where, is
there anything that can be done that would be a clear obvious benefit to
safety if there were some stages involved in DOE\'s and everyone else\'s
decision. And I agree that Congress is not going to be any more informed
about decisions in the future on Yucca Mountain than they are now. And
in fact, they are going to, within a couple hours they are probably
going to demonstrate their level of information in the House. So I guess
my point is to be talking with you and to Charles about being extremely,
extremely cautious in terms of not sort of misunderstanding where the
U.S.A. program is and attribute some benefits of staging that might be
there if everybody had bought into the idea first and trying to marry
them to a program that has already failed in terms of anybody having
bought into anything.

So then I guess the final point is that if staging leads to this 100 to
300 years which my guess is is sort of integral to the Department\'s
thinking because they are still, as I said yesterday, trying to escape
the disposal decision, if it goes out to 300 years then it is not an
improvement in safety. I think you asked the question a couple times
what can you learn in 100 to 300 years that has any meaning to really to
post-closure safety, because the post-closure repository is not the one
that you would be looking at for 100 to 300 years if you keep it open or
ventilated. So then the question becomes, well, what does it mean to
safety? What it means to safety is that anything you found, once again,
essentially becomes the standard. The repository is the standard because
we have absolutely no faith or trust that decisions made 300 years from
now will be anywhere at all faithful to decisions that were made when
the license was issued in the first place. The decisions at that time
are going to be whatever the practical decision is and at that point
there\'s essentially no practical decision other than to just close it,
regardless of what it is.

So that\'s my message after being sort of puzzled by Jeff\'s
presentation of staging that is not staging in the language, that at
least some of us have been speaking lately. And it\'s very disturbing to
me to see that, once again, just as I pointed out yesterday was safety
case. Once again, we now have the Department piggy-backing on a word
that they think carries a good connotation, but then writing their own
definition of the word.

Thank you.

KNOPMAN: Thank you, Steve. Questions from the Board? Jerry?

COHON: Just a couple of very brief comments. First of all, one\'s
attitude towards DOE\'s approach to staging certainly is colored by what
one believes their intentions are. Now, it strikes me as completely
prudent, in fact, I\'d be concerned if they were not thinking about
technological developments in the future, over decades. You can
interpret that as a hunt for a silver bullet to bail what you think is a
flawed program. But I believe that DOE believes that they are proceeding
with what is basically a safe repository and they want to make it even
safer.

The other point is, the Board is on record as saying that above ground
storage is an essential component of a well-managed nuclear waste
repository. So if Yucca Mountain proceeds, it most certainly has to have
above-ground storage. And I\'m not, I didn\'t quite get your point about
that, but I\'m not sure that it\'s important that I do.

FRISHMAN: The reason I mentioned the large above-ground storage is that
for the Yucca Mountain Site especially it has vulnerabilities. And just
as the waste handling building has vulnerabilities.

KNOPMAN: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Just a quick question, maybe to differentiate
between staged operations versus, or phased licensing versus a staged
repository, and I guess I want to harken back to what Jeff Williams
showed in that five-panel map that we saw in the last presentation. And
I guess I was a little bit surprised by his representation that it was
Congress that was going to make the decision at each phase. I thought
maybe the regulator would have provided some input or\--and they also
mentioned stakeholders. Could you comment basically on how you feel
input should be provided from the stakeholders like the State in a
repository design like that where there are phases or stages that are
going to be developed? I know that\'s predicated on the fact that they
are actually building a repository, but I\'m trying to ask about how you
think you got to have continued input.

FRISHMAN: Well, first of all, unlike anything that we\'ve seen before,
it would have to be a proposal that DOE says this is our proposal. Now,
what needs to be considered? Not one where next week this is a
modification to our proposal and the week after that this is the new
modification to the modification to our proposal. They\'ve got to have
something that they put out there and they say that this is fixed for
six months until we get the review. We\'re not going to piddle with it,
schedule pressures aside. This is what we are proposing. Now what do you
think? And in that case, what we would do is we would do a serious
design review on it and look at it from all of the aspects that we think
are important to look at, but with the expectation that when we provided
our comment, it would be seriously reviewed and it would actually have
the capability of affecting something. We\'re tired of reviewing stuff
just because they are trying to keep us busy. And we\'re tired of seeing
things change only because we talked about them and they didn\'t want to
have to talk about them any more. So if they are serious, we\'re in a
position where we will be serious, but at this point, you know, we\'ve
had literally everything that we\'ve reviewed pulled out from under and
replaced, sometimes even before the review is done.

KNOPMAN: Thank you, Steve. Thank you also to Charles McCombie and Jeff
Williams for good presentations.

We\'re going to break now and reconvene at 10:15. That means we\'ve just
got 10 minutes here.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. That means I start speaking at 10:10 then; is
that right, Debra?

KNOPMAN: Yes. You\--

(Whereupon, a recess was taken.)

BULLEN: I\'m going to chair this session and I\'d like to point out a
couple of things that we have a daunting schedule ahead of us. We have
three presentations between now and about a quarter after 12:00. I\'ll
also point out that yesterday the only session that went over time was
the one that I chaired. So I think one of the reasons that Jeff Long
gave me this stop watch this morning is because of that. Maybe it\'s
also because of the fact that this is the session prior to lunch and I
know Jeff has dietary needs, just as we all do.

Today\'s session is going to change gears a little bit and we\'re going
to talk about repository design. We\'re actually going to begin with an
overview of thermal design that\'s going to be given by Woody Stroupe
and actually, I got the opportunity to look at Woody\'s little bio here
and I didn\'t realize that he was actually an attorney. So I have to be
careful with what I say to Woody from now on. His training is actually
in chemical engineering and he has had a long career in the management
of nuclear waste at various operations like Lockheed and Yucca Mountain
Project.

After Woody talks we\'re going to have a presentation from Nye County by
Parvis Montazer. I first met Parvis in 1997, I think, when we did a
repository ventilation workshop that the Nye County people put in and
Parvis is going to give us an update on some of the recent development
work that they\'ve done.

And our final presentation is going to be by Mark Board. Mark is
actually a rocks mechanic and mining engineer by training with 18 years
experience. And he is going to give us an update on design from that
perspective. So, let me see, do I have a quorum called? That was with
Mr. Hanour (phonetic), Doc Hanour, one, two, three, four, five, six. I
have seven. Is that close enough?

So with that I\'ll ask Woody Stroupe to come up and we\'ll hear about
Thermal Design and Repository. Woody?

STROUPE: First of all, I would like to encourage anyone who did not pick
up a copy of the presentation\-- It\'s the only colored one back
there\--you are going to need this because we have some eye test charts
that I guarantee you that nobody in the room will be able to read other
than the panel, and they may not be able to read them on the screen. So
you definitely need to pick this up when we get to the charts. I want to
apologize for those charts because I tried to take those and make those
charts, put them in word slides and it just did not convey the message
and so I put it in charts and we\'ll discuss those.

The second thing I want to do is thank the Board. I think the timing of
this talk is very good because it follows the staging discussions and I
think it fits in very well with the staging discussions and what we mean
by a flexible repository and the thermal operating conditions.

One thing I would like everyone to think, I have used sort of a
shorthand in saying flexible design. Would you think if I misused that
word and say flexible design, what I am really saying is a design which
allows flexible operation because that\'s where we\'re headed, is
looking towards flexible operation.

On the next chart, the outline of the talk is I\'ll talk about the need
for operational flexibility, I\'ll talk about the design approach that
allows flexible operation, the approach to addressing thermal operating
conditions, and then of course, just a very brief summary of what I\'ve
gone over and what I think the advantages are of proceeding in this
manner.

The need for flexible operation, the next slide, please. Flexibility is
needed to prepare for several things. One, we have a variable incoming
waste stream. It\'s uncertain as to exactly what we\'re going to get
when. We know what\'s out there, but when it gets sent to us and how
much of it is coming in, that, as of today, is variable. The talk is
about selection of the thermal operating load. Lake Barrett, I would
like to say, had it exactly correct yesterday in what he said. We were
able to get three sort of different issues where we talk about thermal
load. The first one is do we need a limit on the surface of the waste
package. That\'s the first one. And if we need that limit, what is it?

The second one is coupled processes and what that results in as a limit
that says no boiling at the drift wall. And the third, the higher
temperature of all, is one which refers to pre-draining of water through
the pillars between the drifts. Free drainage right now is being
translated as the 50 percent of the drifts below boiling. We have
variability and uncertainty of the natural system processes. We will be
doing testing in the lithophysing, we will be doing more thermal
conductivity tests for the repository to reduce the uncertainties in
those values. Then of course we have the variability in the funding
profiles.

A flexible repository design approach. First, the first thing we will
fix certain engineering parameters, such as the drift spacing and the
drift diameter. We will, of course, finalize the thermal design
criteria, and then we have variable operating conditions that actually
provide us quite a bit of flexibility. Those conditions are the
ventilation duration, the ventilation flow rate, the waste package
spacing, the waste package loading, which is very much like waste
package spacing. It has the same effect of reducing or increasing the
kilowatts per foot of emplaced heat into the mountain. And then the
aging the fuel either the varying of the amount we age or varying of
quantity we age. And aging the fuel provides two benefits. One is that
while it\'s aged on the surface it\'s rejecting heat to the atmosphere
and that heat is not heating the mountain.

The second thing it does, as the fuel gets older the amount of heat it
generates reduces. So when we place it in the mountain it has a less of
an impact or less heat load being emplaced into the mountain.

Now, we achieve the repository flexibility by varying these operating
parameters.

The approach to addressing our thermal operating conditions. We
initially select the operating parameters assuming that the TSPA for
license application will analyze the higher temperature repository. It
is very important to note that with the flexible operation, this
approach does not preclude the cold operating mode by adjusting only the
amount of fuel aged, the aging duration and/or the ventilation duration
or possibly the rate. While we have this flexibility we gain time so
that our subsequent decisions can be well informed by the results of
ongoing tests, additional analysis and refinement in the moss models
where we find that is necessary.

Okay, to the first eye chart, and if you don\'t have a copy in front of
you, you\'re in trouble. When I first was asked to look at how do we fit
the testing in to what events are occurring in the life of a program, I
spent a lot of hours figuring out how do I first understand it and then
how do I display it. I had a lot of help in this, so to the point that
it clarifies it\'s probably thanks to the help, as confusing as\--and
that\'s my responsibility. But I looked at the events where they could
be decision points for making decisions about the thermal operating
modes. And if I look, do join me in looking at the decision that we have
to make in the left-hand column, we\'re looking at thermal operating
mode where it is hot, cold, somewhere intermediate. The engineering
parameters of that I talked about, the drift spacing and diameter, the
operating parameters of waste package spacing and when we speak of a
specific spacing\--thank you. When we speak of a specific spacing,
we\'re talking about an average spacing because it definitely will vary
between cold packages and hot packages. The ventilation rate and the
ventilation duration and the aging duration and amount are those items
that we will vary to the point of meeting the thermal operating mode
that we have decided upon.

Across the top row I have identified various events that are going to
occur in the life of the program. Of course, starting with the license
application, going through receive and possess and going through the
timing for closure.

Now, along this line there are also licensing events there, but once we
sent the first application I really wanted to look at things that had to
do with construction and operating because that\'s where we start to
commit money. When we start construction, when we start operating,
that\'s where the expenditures get much greater. My key here, first of
all, the design that I have noted here is a preliminary design. As no
one points out, it\'s subject to change when conceptual studies are
complete, as looking at it, 81 meter drift spacing, a five and a half
feet diameter drift, about a two meter average waste package spacing, 15
cubic meters per second ventilation flow rate, and again, we would vary
the aging and the ventilation to meet the target thermal operating mode
that was decided.

The blue areas indicate about those various parameters. Where it is blue
you can make a decision, but that decision does not affect construction
or operation. If you want to make a decision, if we find out some
information that drives us to make a decision one way or the other, you
can make a decision, but you don\'t have to. Where it\'s yellow, the
decision has to be made because you\'re going to construct something,
you\'re going to load the fuel, you\'re going to operate it. So there
you have to make a decision because if you don\'t, when you get to the
red point you\'ve made the decision by default. You don\'t consciously
make something and you start to instruct the panels, the emplacement
drifts, you evaded the decision by default about where you are.

And then as I looked through here I said, okay, where do we really first
have to make a decision, and these two columns possibly could be
interchanged, or should be interchanged. But it\'s receive and possess.
When we receive and possess that first fuel we\'re going to have to
decide do we place it on an aging pad or can it go directly into the
valve. So we will have to make a decision at that point. And the thermal
operating mode that we have selected at that point will help us
determine which we have to do. In fact, it will be probably be the key
driver. So that\'s one point.

Now, I have\--now to indicate that I have assumed, and even with the hot
design we will have to age some fuel. We get some very young, very hot
fuel we will probably have to age it. So I think we will have to have
some aging anyway. But when we go beyond that initial pad and decide we
have to have a larger or need to decide whether it\'s a larger aging
area, then we construct that second pad or the third pad, or the fourth
pad, again, we have to make a decision of, if we don\'t make a decision,
we won\'t make a decision by default.

The emplacement into Panel 1. Panel 1 is the panel which will include
our post-closure simulation test. And when we decide how we load that
post-closure simulation test, we will decide\--we will make the
decision. Do we want to have a post-closure simulation where I simulate
both hot or cold, do I want to just have one or the other, or both. And
if I have both I need to remain flexible. As we move down, each time we
start to emplace, again, we make that decision.

Now, there\'s a keynote here. Note 4 that is on the last column, the
timing for closure. As we are loading this repository, we could load it
such that it maintains flexibility and by maintain flexibility I am
meaning what we do. We would load it so that the ventilation rate is the
thing at the end of the ventilation duration or the thing that we can
vary at the end and decide whether it\'s hot or cold. We can load it as
such up until the time we turn off ventilation. We still have that
option open to us.

Now, if you load it such that it\'s hot, you put in the fuel, you space
it close together. I don\'t believe we can get a cold operation in a
reasonable time frame. And by reasonable time frame I am saying the
ventilation would be more than 300 years. So to keep flexibility we\'ve
got to load the repository as though it\'s going to be operating cold
and then we can either decide approximately 50 years after the last
emplacement that we could shut off the ventilation and operate hot or we
could continue to ventilate so that when we do close, shut off the
ventilation and it will operate in a cold mode.

If we go to the next chart we\'ll start to see how this ties into
testing. This chart is just a list of the tests that will be ongoing
from the drift scale test, which we know is in the cool-down phase right
now, down to our long term waste package corrosion test, and our
post-closure simulation test.

Let\'s move on to the next chart. This chart tries to tie the tests
together with the time frame I talked about on construction. Across the
top of the chart, again, I have the various events that occur as we move
through the life of the repository. I tried to use below that some
colored bars that show in the time frame where we are in the licensing
area before we start construction. The only cost we incur for carrying a
flexible design are the costs of tasks that help us decide the flexible
design, the operating mode, excuse me\--and calls for the analysis we
have to run.

Now, actually, I should have extended that green bar out to where it
ended with the construction because the design that I have pointed out
there that is preliminary where everything is spacing two meters, where
the average waste package spacing is two meters, the construction is the
same for the low temperature operating mode and a high temperature
operating. So there\'s no difference in the construction costs in those
time frames.

And again, the red indicates, as I said earlier, when we start emplacing
then we are impacting construction. Staging is the reason it impacts
surface construction. So those things are where we really start
incurring large costs for deciding between one or the other. But that
gives a large time frame, that also in that time frame when we receive
waste we make a decision on our post-closure simulation test.

Now, the left-hand column I\'ve shown the tests that I showed on the
previous page. The triangles indicate the type of information we will be
gathering from each test, whether it has to do with coupled processes,
whether it has to do with the waste package environment or waste package
corrosion. You can see at about the time of construction authorization
we will have additional information relative to coupled processes.
Again, it\'s a time where we can make a decision, but at that time of
construction authorization we don\'t have to make a decision, but if we
find out something that would drive us one way or the other, we could
make the decision.

Across the bottom of the chart I think is also very important. We have
the ongoing waste package corrosion and environmental test that you see
that those extend out through closure. And then also starting at the
time we receive waste and going through closure, we have the
post-closure simulation test, which will be feeding us information on
these processes we\'re interested in. If we find some surprises, if the
regulator finds something that it does not like, wants us to change what
we\'re doing, we have the opportunities to do it all during these time
frames.

I would also like to repeat what was said earlier. Truly, it is
reversible, it\'s required to be reversible during this time frame so if
we would find a significant surprise that said we had to take it out and
keep it on the surface for a while and try something else, we have the
opportunity to do so as we\'re gathering the information to provide us
data that would either confirm what we are doing or would say we found a
surprise and we have to change what we\'re doing.

The next slide, please. This just tells a little bit more about the
tests that we will have. We will receive data from the final cool-down
of the drift scale test. We will be conducting the natural convection
test to help us understand the environment of the waste package more
thoroughly. And then we will be doing the geotechnical testing to the
lithophysal rocks. So those are some tests that are going on.

The next page also lists a few tests. Low thermal load testing which is
going on right now. We will be looking at our 85-degree threshold on
localized corrosion and looking at that as a probability on the
temperature range and the waste package environment to give us a better
understanding of where that threshold is.

The waste package environment test. Yesterday there was a lot of talk
about how important this is. We agree with that, that those tests were
ongoing. And then we have the waste package corrosion tests which are
long-term and which will carry on through the end of closure.

So we have quite a bit of testing going on. We have a long time frame to
gather this information, and this information will give us a lot more
confidence in what we\'re doing. And if we find surprises we have
opportunities to reverse decisions.

The summary chart, the repository design allows for flexible operation.
This approach preserves the ability to improve both the operation and
design as we get new information and new technology. The approach also
provides the opportunity to make informed decisions on post-closure
thermal conditions at appropriate times during pre-closure operations.

I think this is, it provides the chance for continuous improvement,
systematic loading. It helps us reduce uncertainty as we move forward,
and we believe that it will help assure that we have a safe repository
upon closure.

BULLEN: Thank you very much, Woody. Questions from the Board? Dr.
Nelson?

NELSON: Good morning, Woody, how you doing?

STROUPE: Just fine. How are you?

NELSON: Good, thanks. I\'d like to ask a question about the decision on
low or high temperature operating modes. And in particular, if the HTOM
mode were chosen early, would there be any additional work on
ventilation or on aging? I mean are they linked to, solely to the
decision about operating mode?

STROUPE: First I want to make an assumption about what you mean by work.
Would we continue to do some ventilation testing to assure that we
understand what happens after closure on the natural convection? And the
answer is yes. Those tests are not dependent on whether a licensed
application goes in hot or cold. Those tests are planned. In fact, they
are under way right now.

On aging, the work there is really do I build the pad or not? You know,
how large a pad do I build to age material? We know what aging does. I
don\'t think we have to do any tests on that, so it just becomes a
decision point at the time when we start to construct surface
facilities.

NELSON: Just one quick follow-up on convection testing and heat removal.
Just the ventilation aspects. Are the only tests that are being run both
related to natural convection?

STROUPE: We\'ve already run some tests at Losey

Road (phonetic) in forced convection. And the tests that are ongoing
right now are the natural convection, and if I get this wrong, Mark
Peters will pop up and say, \"Woody, you got it wrong.\" And I don\'t
believe any additional forced ventilation tests are planned at Losey
Road.

NELSON: Thank you.

BULLEN: Dr. Knopman?

KNOPMAN: Woody, I appreciate that you\'re talking about the design
flexibility, but you know how much the board loves natural analogs, and
to some extent, decision-making process on thermal operating mode is
something of a natural analog we have as to the program\'s ability to
alter its course. And I guess it would be interesting to know in the
process that you outlined, you show in theory where you could make these
kinds of changes if you were going to change the operating mode. We\'re
not even in construction now, or not even in license application now,
and there has been, in part, because of the regulatory apparatus, an in-
ability to make that change if that were warranted. And I guess this is
partly a question for you. It\'s partly a question for others here from
DOE as you\'re trying to establish that you in fact have this
flexibility to make changes as new information is learned. How do you
explain what has gone on so far with selection of the operating mode
with what you\'re telling us we\'ll see in the future in terms of your
ability to make changes as new information becomes available?

STROUPE: If I may start back at the VA design. We have come quite a ways
from that very hot operating mode to what we now call an operating mode.
So the project has shown an ability to change. It\'s viability
assessment, design, we drop down from where it was basically boring a
hole in the mountain to the free draining concept. We are continuing to
look at thermal couple processes. We are continuing to look at laser
package corrosion. And those decision points I believe are theoretical
decision points. We have not found a driving reason yet to go to a lower
mode. If a driving reason does occur, and I know this is a matter of
judgement, but if a driving reason does occur, we have set this up so
that we would have to re-start emplacement at the average two meter
spacing. We could age the fuel so what we preserve the oxygen to be
flexible. We have fifty, maybe 100 years, possibly longer, to decide is
there a driver there that would cause us to change. I think one of the
speakers yesterday said it\'s not a slam dunk decision either way. And
when we find the information that would drive us to a colder design, if
we can find what the project believes is a good reason to do that, we
will change when we can change. We don\'t see that driving reason yet.

KNOPMAN: Would increased confidence be a sufficient driver?

STROUPE: I am not the policy maker. And I think increased confidence is
certainly one of the factors that would be considered.

BULLEN: Dr. Sagüés?

CHU: I just want to make a comment.

BULLEN: You have to use the mike. Margaret Chu. Go ahead.

CHU: Well, I thank you very much for the comment. Something that is on
my own agenda so I understand how decisions will be made, so I don\'t
have an answer yet, but I hope it will become clearer and clearer for
all of us down the road because this is something I will be working on
personally. Say when is a decision made, why? Who makes that decision?
And then what are the criteria when we make a decision? I will be
working on that. Okay, thanks.

BULLEN: Dr. Sagüés?

SAGüÉS: Yeah, I just wanted some clarification on your, if you go to No.
7, you refer to a closed drift thermal test, and then further down there
is waste package corrosion and environmental tests. I\'m just wondering
if that testing would involve like full size or near full size waste
packages with an actual closure weld, and all its opportunities for
surprises in corrosion behavior of the closure welds which would be
evaluated somewhere else. What is\--would there be like near, say
half-size or full size waste packages placed in the closed drift and
someone would intend to evaluate corrosion behavior in the real finished
product?

STROUPE: At the cross-drift, the answer, again, Mark or somebody,
correct me if I\'m wrong\--no, we will not be putting full size waste
packages in the cross drift. The cross drift test is more near term than
we will have a full size waste package to place in it. We will do full
size mock-ups and testing on the actual welding processes. Those are
being studied right now in Larry Trautner\'s organization, repository
design. Now, remember, the performance confirmation program, which runs
for the length of the full length of the emplacement period and the
ventilation time thereafter, we will have full size waste packages
emplaced in the actual conditions. All the testing it will do during
that post-closure period is not yet decided. But those are the types of
things that the people who are designing that test, who won\'t be
designing the test will look at. What are the key things that we need to
know out of that test to help us make an informed decision on is this
repository operating the way we expect it to?

SAGüÉS: And if we go to the next one, to No. 8, when you have the time
goals that say that with package corrosion that by that I guess the
early triangles, you mean continuation of the tests of the, for example,
of the long-term corrosion test with corrosion couples and the like.
That\'s what you mean when you say waste package corrosion, right? You
don\'t mean corrosion of the natural waste package?

STROUPE: And I meant to mention that during the talk. Yeah, we have two
things going on here. One, we have the coupon testing, and then also in
the post-closure we will have the actual, in the post-closure we will
have the simulation, we will have the full size waste packaging
simulating the post-closure conditions, and looking at those. So we will
have both, but that\'s exactly right. These early ones are Q Pod
(phonetic) testing.

SAGüÉS: So there will be somewhat in between. It would be something
approaching a full size package or maybe half size or something like
that? Is that the idea?

STROUPE: I do not know the answer to that question. Whether we have any
half-size corrosion test on weld material planned or not. And I don\'t
even know if we have looked at that portion of the testing program to
make a selection.

SAGüÉS: Okay. Thank you.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. And then the last question will go to Richard
Parizek.

Can we go back to Figure 6, please, first? I\'m actually intrigued by a
number of things here and maybe you can clarify stuff. I realize that
this wasn\'t meant to be all-inclusive, but you go from blue to red to
blue. And I\'m assuming that\'s just because it\'s red for that panel
only as opposed to being red for, you know, the emplacement Panel 1,
basically engineered parameters are done because you built it.

STROUPE: Exactly.

BULLEN: Okay. So that explains it.

Now, I wanted to come back to your item, Footnote 4, which says that
physically loading hot precludes reasonable cold operations. I
understand that completely. But by that you mean physically loading it
to, say a 10-centimeter spacing, which was the TSPA-SR base case, and
LTOM base cases?

STROUPE: That is one way to get to a hot design. I\'m sure we could find
others, but that is one way, is to load them to not age as much and then
loading them close together would get you to a hotter design.

BULLEN: But the current plan is now to go two meters? Is that\--that\'s
what I\'m looking at here is the grade panel in license application is
going to be a two-meter panel?

STROUPE: I don\'t have\--I can\'t make it bold and I can\'t make it
large letters. Please, that word is \"preliminary.\"

BULLEN: Okay, that\'s fine.

STROUPE: And the design is being studied right now to determine if there
are ways, if there are things we can do to improve it as we move to LA.
But until those conceptual design studies are complete, this is a
preliminary design.

BULLEN: Great. Now, that actually leads me to the other question because
we saw the nice five panel layout and I understand that for FEIS and
license application and all sorts of things, you have that panel that
you\'re going to say, well this is what the whole footprint looks like.
But you fixed the drift spacing and drift diameter both. And yet there
are blue boxes that say you may be able to reevaluate that. Is there a
possibility that between Panel 1 and Panel 2 and Panel 3 that drift
spacing may change from 81 meters to something less or something more
based on what you find out?

STROUPE: Well, yes. It certainly is possible. Now, the reason the 5-1/2
meter space which has been looked at recently in some conceptual studies
and I believe the results of those studies said simply to fit everything
in to replace the waste package, to replace the drift shields, you\'ve
got to stay about 5-1/2 meters. The 81 meters I believe that stayed the
same because there\'s not much of a driver to move it either way. You
can gauge some, but if you move it closer together your waste packages
are going to get hotter, so we really don\'t want to move it closer
together. You could move it further apart. The waste package, for to
give it spacing, would get a little cooler. Not a big driver, but it is
something that could change if we determined there was a driver.

BULLEN: Thank you. Now, can we go to Figure 8, please? I\'d like to
compliment you on the fact that you finally laid out all the experiments
and you tell us where the data is going to come, and you tell us how it
might be impacted or it might have the effect of impacting the schedule
or the design. I guess the key question, and maybe you\'re not the right
person to ask this, is how do you tie the results of the experiment back
into the design process and the operating mode and all the
decision-making that\'s going to be necessary. And if you want to dodge
that one you can say you\'re right, that\'s something that we ought to
consider, but I want to compliment you first on laying this out because
I think it\'s great. But I guess I want to sort of ask for the next
step, which is, okay, how am I going to use the results?

STROUPE: Well, I\'ll choose the waste package corrosion because,
although I\'m not a corrosion engineer, at least I\'m an engineer. And
I\'m not a scientist, okay, so I can\'t comment on what we find in
coupled process. But if we would find that the passive film would not
perform as we expected, then clearly, there would be a pause in the
program and we would have to say, \"Now what do we do\"? If it\'s
affected temperature, then we could go to a lower temperature. If it\'s
some other effect that we didn\'t expect, we would have to make the
changes. But anything we find along there we see these right now as
tests that will confirm our design because we think we have a good
design. But they are also there to test that design and find out, well,
did we miss something? And so if we find a surprise, we find something
we don\'t expect, then that will very quickly feed back into the program
and we will be working with the NRC to say, okay, what do we do now to
correct this problem to give us a safe repository to continue on with
the design and licensing of the repository.

BULLEN: Last question for me, and that deals with the post-closure test
simulation that you have. Is the plan to put in, I mean fully loaded
waste packages I understand, but is there an effort to put in a de-rated
waste package and they have lower power output to look like a
thousand-year-old waste package, or potentially a degraded waste package
with maybe a thinner wall that would say, you know, we want to look at
the corrosion characteristics or something that may have thinned by half
of the wall thickness?

STROUPE: Okay, I will now take off my project hat and put on my personal
hat.

BULLEN: Okay. The Woody Stroupe opinion is?

STROUPE: This is the Woody Stroupe opinion. But if we\'re going to
simulate post-closure, we cannot put in fully loaded hot waste packages
because that would then not simulate the closure at the time that it\'s
closed. So we\'re going to have to find a compromise between how do we
simulate that postclosure condition to be a lower waste package, a
power, a waste package power that\'s 100 years, 50 years from now. We
will also have to find a compromise of how long do we ventilate to
simulate the dry-out period of the drift? And those are the things that
our scientists, that our engineers are going to have sit down and say
our objective of these tests are to determine the following dozen things
and how do we best do that? And I know there will have to be some
compromises. But I think one of those we very definitely will have to
use de-rated waste packages, we\'ll have to use a very low power fuel or
somehow to simulate the corrosion conditions.

BULLEN: Thank you. The Dan Bullen opinion is that he hopes that the
project listens to the Woody Stroupe opinion. Last question from Richard
Parizek.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. With regard to both Figures 6 and 8, you show
more or less an orderly progression from left to right on assumption
everything proceeds in an orderly manner, but you do show you could make
adjustments in case you find something from the testing that justifies
adjustments. What I don\'t notice here is the loop on the decision to
retrieve. Suppose the decision is that we do need to retrieve, and going
to Jeff Williams\' slide 12, he says, you know, LA must include plans
for storage and retrievable material up to the full amount that has been
emplaced which might be close to the day when the last shoe packages are
going on. Is that part of your responsibility to think about where
you\'d go with these wastes? I mean to pull it all back out where would
you put it? And is that part of this thought process, the loop to have
to retrieve? You\'ve done adjustments, but now all of a sudden decision
is made, retrieve. Who does that?

STROUPE: The law requires that the project make sure we have a design
for retrieval and make sure that we have emplacing to put the waste if
we have to retrieve it. Again, I\'ll put on my Woody Stroupe hat and not
my project hat. Obviously, if we\'re going to pull this out, it\'s going
to take us a while to pull it out, so we won\'t have to have the entire
retrieval storage area available on the day 1 of when we would start
pulling out, so you can construct that or most of that as you\'d need
it. If we do have some aging pads, those could remain there to be reused
if we had to put it out. But out of this time frame, the post-closure
simulation test is really to look at, is the repository, is that test
telling us that the repository is going to operate the way we believe.
If we find a surprise there, depending on the size of that surprise,
it\'s either going back to the NRC with a re-analysis or if the surprise
was big enough it would be retrieval, pulling it out and rethinking. And
that wouldn\'t go into a pool. Steve Frishman talks about this huge
pool. This should be maybe that pool plus dry cast storage on site
or\--out of this time frame that fuel is\--it\'s going to be very close
to 100 years old, so\--

PARIZEK: It\'s cool, so it just\--

STROUPE: It\'s just stored in the desert. It\'s relatively cool, so\--a
whole lot cooler than it was when it came out of the reactor. It could
be stored in dry storage, easily.

BULLEN: Thank you, Woody. In the interests of time we\'re going to have
to move on. We appreciate your candor and your talk to day.

Our next speaker is from Nye County, talking about the Nye County
Ventilated Repository Concept. It\'s Dr. Parvis Montazer, and I note
that in this great pile of paper that he gave us, he gave us a nice
report, and an entire volume of slides. I\'m hoping that he will keep to
his 25-minute time limit. And I\'ll start the clock anew here and hope
he can get through his 37 slides in 25 minutes, okay? Parvis, it\'s all
yours.

MONTAZER: Thank you. And can everyone hear me?

BULLEN: Put that on your tie, will you?

MONTAZER: Can you hear me now? Better?

BULLEN: Yeah.

MONTAZER: All right, it\'s a pleasure to address the Board on Nye
County\'s part, and this is an important aspect of the potential
repository at Yucca Mountain. As the Board is aware, this subject has
been close to the heart of Nye County, whose prime goal is the safety of
its residents. I greatly appreciate the support of Nye County,
especially Dr. Dale Hammermeister who has made significant suggestions
for improvement in this regard. Also, I would like to acknowledge Dr.
John Walton who is in the audience, who has provided many useful
suggestions and comments.

It is also important to note that the Department of Energy\'s support
and receptiveness of new concepts and ideas in this regard has been
appreciated. DOE recently invited Nye County to present this concept. We
received many useful suggestions and appreciate the opportunity to to
share these thoughts with the Department of Energy and its contractors.

Dr. John Bredehoeft of Inyo County has been instrumental in providing
critical reviews of the concepts and modeling results. Most significant
for me, his encouragement and support has been extremely valuable.

The purpose of this presentation are to briefly describe the objectives
of the conceptual design, assumptions used to arrive at the preliminary
design, and major features of the design. In support of the feasibility
of the design, numerical analyses have been conducted and a summary of
the results will be presented.

Also, a brief description of the activities undertaken to prove the
analytical tools will be presented. Nye County recognizes that more work
is needed to address many questions that are still unanswered.
Therefore, future modeling are planned to provide answers to some of
these important questions. Nye County also recognizes that without
in-situ and experimental data, the results of the analysis will remain
questionable. Suggestions for some in-situ testing will be presented.
Backup slides provide more information. And we\'ve provided copies of a
preliminary report that was released in February for your information,
and additional copies, of course, can be obtained from Nye County.

Early recognition of the benefits of keeping the repository cool and dry
using natural ventilation has significant impacts on the direction of
site characterization, overall design of the repository, and ultimately
the safety of the potential repository. Nye County has proposed natural
ventilation design in several occasions from 1996 to 1998. In the past
few months, Nye County has been studying a new concept that is expected
to offer the advantages of the original naturally ventilated repository,
as well as a securely closed repository. The objectives of this are
listed in this slide.

We evaluated numerous configurations of the waste emplacement boreholes,
ventilation drifts in heat loading scenarios. I will be abbreviating
waste emplacement boreholes in many of my slides as well.

The most favorable results that were obtained with two waste emplacement
boreholes between ventilation drifts and assuming that the heat load is
removed by ventilation during the first 250 years. This configuration is
referred to as Configuration B as shown in this slide. It\'s really a
depiction of a typical arrangement of ventilation drifts and waste
emplacement are shown here. In this we have two ventilation drifts and
in between there are two waste emplacement boreholes that are shown in
red. And this is just one of the many configurations that we have
tested. The diameter of the waste emplacement boreholes is preliminary,
just, this is\--just for conservatism. A hybrid design in which
ventilation air is allowed to flow through the waste emplacement
boreholes may potentially improve the performance of the repository, but
has not been analyzed yet and will not be discussed in this
presentation.

This slide shows a conceptual arrangement of all the proposed 97,000 MTU
placed in 60 waste emplacement boreholes. Each waste emplacement
borehole is 2000 meters long. This configuration provides about 50
percent of heat loading. The weight we have is by one canister and the
one gap as it\'s shown in this enlarged view. This configuration
occupies about 445 acres

This is a portion of the east-west cross section of Yucca Mountain on
the western part. Some details of the construction of the chimney is
shown. We just received some comments from Jim Blink of Livermore who
suggested an auxiliary shaft may be a better idea, and we put that in
there just recently. We realize that we have not considered many
details; however, at this point our main goal is to verify and validate
that this concept can help remove heat and moisture substantially enough
to justify further detailed study of other components. Therefore, please
remember that many of the intricate details are just thought models, I
call them, and need many analyses to support, reject or modify them. On
the average, the chimney will allow a differential elevation of 1,000
meters\--I\'m going to show in the next slide more details of this\--an
overall view. This is a cartoon of the whole cross section of the Yucca
Mountain. Basically it is intended that the air enter somewhere in the
broken part of the Tiva Canyon (phonetic) and this does not have to be
exposed and it makes through a certain series of ventilation drifts that
come through the repository area. And these gray lines, the cylinders,
they are the ventilation drifts, and in between them they are going to
be the waste emplacement boreholes. And then the hot air basically goes
up because its density reduces by the heat and makes its way to the
chimneys and out, and this we believe is going to provide a considerable
amount of flow and cooling, as I will discuss in the following.

Today I will not be talking about several components like the drainage
system and the chimney so I\'ll just focus on the repository area. And
once we have gotten a better understanding we can continue on other
aspects of the system.

In this section I will describe some of the simulations that I have made
in support of the conceptual design. We first used the original A-TOUGH2
to, one, conduct a preliminary evaluation of several permanently
ventilated repository configurations. I\'ll be referring to it as PVR.
We model a two-dimensional slice through the waste emplacement boreholes
and ventilation drifts, and a standard preliminary estimate of potential
cooling that can be attained.

Here is a simple course mesh used in Phase 1 Configuration B analysis.
The inset in the lower right shows where the cross section is. I\'m not
sure if you can see it in back of the room. The mesh is two meters thick
in the east-west direction to the plane of the slide. Only one third of
the waste emplacement boreholes are simulated in this particular case. I
only have 20 waste emplacement boreholes in this case. There are 20, and
11 ventilation drifts for this configuration. The ventilation drift
elements are practically set to constant temperature, pressure, and
relative humidity. The transfer of moisture and heat between the rock
and ventilation elements are simulated by constant eddy mass and eddy
thermal diffusivities. Back-up slides provide some more detailed
description of what these parameters are. Only from the top of PTN to
the upper 45 meters of the Calico Hills is simulated here. A percolation
of 10.1 millimeter per year specified by the Yucca Mountain project as a
maximum was used in this case.

This just shows the heat loading history for this particular
application. As you can see, we\'ve assumed that the first 200 years or
250 years, the ventilation cools the system, and after about 250 years
have used the decay curb provided by the Yucca Mountain project, the DOE
project, and applied that indefinitely. That\'s a conservative
assumption. And we\'ve used that basically for simplification of the
assumption. It\'s not a limitation of what we can do.

Here are the results and after the 527 years I\'m showing in 725 years,
you can see that the temperature maximum is about 55 degrees in this
case.

Here, this slide shows variation of temperature along selected profiles.
Profile No. 1 goes through the ventilation drift, and No. 2 through a
heater, and No. 3 through\--somewhere in the middle. The main thing is
that the geothermal gradient changes substantially and you can see that
as we go inside the array, the temperatures get hotter.

In conclusion of Phase 1 study, the assumption of the no heat load
during the first 250 years is very important. Substantial cooling is
calculated as a result of the presence of the ventilation drifts. It
appears that by applying 50 percent of the heat load the host rock may
be kept below 60 degrees centigrade. The Configuration B only requires
about 445 acres of footprint area.

In the original A-TOUGH2, the eddy mass and thermal diffusivities were
input parameters. A-TOUGH2 was revised to enable internal calculation of
eddy diffusivity from velocity profiles. In order to compare the results
with the original A-TOUGH2, some simulations were repeated. A wider mesh
was used to incorporate all the 60 waste emplacement boreholes. And some
finer meshes were used to understand the near-field conditions.

Here is the mesh that has all the 60 boreholes. I have spaced them
purposely to incorporate some gaps to see if there\'s any temperature
benefits from that. And the next\--basically it\'s equivalent in size
and everything to the previous mesh. It\'s just the results have been
used, and we use the same exact temperature history or heat loading
history and results are shown in this slide. And as we can see,
basically, the results are almost identical to the Phase 1, with the
original A-TOUGH simulation.

Here is the 2000 years and we can see that there\'s a little bit of
increase in the temperature, in this case, getting ground water warmed
up near the saturated zone getting warmed up.

In conclusion, Phase 2 modeling with revised

A-TOUGH2 provides results very similar to the Phase 1 study. As part of
the testing capabilities of the revised A-TOUGH2 and to answer some of
the questions raised, additional experimental simulations were
conducted. One of these questions were related to the potential for
cooling effect of direct ventilation of the waste emplacement boreholes
during the first 250 or 300 years. For this case the near-field
environment had to be discretized more finally so that the temperature
and humidity variations could be examined. Numerous cases were tested. I
will only discuss the following two cases. A two dimensional case with
detailed mesh and rock properties, and a simple three-dimensional case.

First, the two-dimensional detailed mesh case. This mesh is 15 elements
wide and 75 elements deep. Element dimensions vary from .1 to 2 meters.
The area of flow used for the drift was equivalent to a 5.5 meter
diameter drift in this case. In this particular case, full heat loading
was used. That is, there\'s no gap assumed in between the canisters.

On the left-hand side of this slide the simplified depiction of the mesh
is shown. The actual mesh is too complicated to show for presentation.
On the right-hand side the graph of the temperature variation is shown.
This square with the circle inside basically represents the stimulation
area here. And I\'m showing the temperatures in the rock at the top and
the bottom, as you can see in this slide. What basically shows is that
there\'s a significant cooling over the 300 years like this, this
scheme.

I\'m going to skip this slide\--basically shows similar results.

In conclusion, a significant cooling is achieved during operation of the
repository if one can supply at least one meter per second of
ventilation air, either through the open or retrofilled drifts. In this
case I have used an open drift. Therefore, in our Phase 1 and Phase 2
dimensional\--the two-dimensional simulation cases the assumption of no
heat load during the first 250 years seem to be justified, at least from
a modeling perspective.

So far, I have been talking about two-dimensional results. When a slice
is used a cumulative effect of heat buildup down the drifts is not
considered and lower temperatures are calculated. We have examined what
happens along the length of the drift in the near-field environment. I
should note that we realize that this data need to be validated and
verified by actual in-situ observations. A simple mesh like the one I\'m
going to use can be very useful in these kind of validations/
verifications. Also, I\'ve only analyzed a 5.5 and a 8.5 meter diameter
drift. This mesh can serve to accommodate simulations of various size
drifts in the future.

The mesh has 10 by 10 elements. The bizarre dimension of 1.88 meter
happens to conveniently provide an almost exact area of an 8.5 meter
diameter drift when 16 such elements are fit into a square. Again, full
heating loading was considered in this case. No gap between the
canisters.

Let\'s look at the mesh in a three-dimensional depiction as shown in
this slide. The pink squares represent the drift area. There are two red
prisms if you view this 3-D, of basically the canisters. And the rock
here is just Topopah Springs Welded Unit properties.

Here are the results. The average relative humidity variation with time
for all elements in the drift is shown in the graph above. This humidity
over time. And down here we have the canister surface temperature, .9
meters into the wall. It happens to fall right on the drift. There\'s
about, less than a degree difference between .9 and drift in this
particular case.

These charts are a different way of looking at the simulation data. In
this slide, variation of temperature and relative humidity are plotted
along the length of the drift. Each point represents the average of the
parameters of all the elements in one cross section. Please ignore the
beginning and end of the\--the end points which are controlled by the
boundary. Against, as the temperature rises relative humidity increases
and as it cools the relative humidity tends to approach that of the air
stream.

The results of the Phase II simple 3-D simulation corroborates those of
the detailed mesh results. That is there is significant cooling achieved
during the first 300 years. Also, this cooling occurs throughout the
entire 600 meter length of the simulated drift. However, we\'re not
certain whether the temperature along the 2000 meter length of the waste
emplacement boreholes in Configuration B can be kept below a reasonable
threshold. Currently simulations are under way to answer these questions
at least by numerical experimentation.

There are other questions that need to be examined such as the
sensitivity of the results of the size of the grid and can natural
ventilation really create air flow rates that are assumed in these
simulations? Future Phase III modeling is planned to attempt to provide
some insight into these questions. Nye County recognizes the fact that
numerical models only provide educated guesses and need to be validated
and verified with experimental data. These data need to be obtained from
in-situ experiments.

Three-dimensional modeling of the configuration B is needed to improve
our understanding of the full scale repository heat loading. Nye County
has collected a substantial amount of data from ESF and ECRB in previous
ventilation experiments. Those data and what is available from Yucca
Mountain Projects should be analyzed and compared with the results of
simulations to increase our confidence in the simulation results.
However, only data from ambient temperatures are available at this time.

Higher temperature data are required to fully characterize parameters
needed for modeling. In this slide some of the most important parameters
as far as ventilated drifts are concerned are listed. The momentum flux
determines the eddy thermal and mass diffusivities. In rubble-filled
drifts, if the are proved to be practical, turbulent flow
characteristics and permeability and porosity variations are essential
in any long-term predictions.

Nye County has proposed a series of tests and data collection activities
to be conducted in conjunction with Alcove 5 heater tests. Nye County
also has some preliminary plans to conduct low temperature experiments
in some readily accessible locations to be determined within the ESF and
ECRB complex.

In summary, the realism of the permanently ventilated repository
modeling results can only be validated by in-situ data collected
somewhere in the repository horizon. If we have such a great option,
does it save significant amount of money? Nye County is in the process
of developing a cost estimate for some preliminary options.

I would like to end this presentation with an introduction to the backup
slides which are organized according to the listed subjects. I would be
glad to go over these topics during this meeting formally or informally
or in another time and place, as appropriate.

Thank you very much for your attention and I will entertain any
questions you might have.

BULLEN: Thank you, Parvis. That was perfect timing. You did a great job
in getting through a lot of information and we appreciate it. I think
maybe in a previous life you were a professor, right, because a
professor just talks faster. They don\'t have to worry about whether or
not they get it all in in time or not.

Dr. Sagüés is going to start, and any other questions from Board
members?

SAGüÉS: Maybe you can clarify things for me and the other Board members.
You are addressing the permanent ventilation as opposed to the concept
of a passive ventilation based on natural convection and the like.

MONTAZER: Yes, sir.

SAGüÉS: There is a couple of things that we don\'t understand. If that
is the case what is the meaning of that transparency that you have where
you show what appears to be a transition from\--in ventilation mode.
That\'s 17 I believe is the one. What happens at 200 years?

MONTAZER: Okay, this is for simulation convenience. Here actually this,
at 200 years I have linerally wrapped this up for convergence.

SAGüÉS: For what?

MONTAZER: For convergence. It makes the model converge easier. There\'s
really no real meaning to this from 200 to 250 years. There\'s no
physical attachment to that.

SAGüÉS: Okay, so this is some sort of a computation, a test of your
procedures?

MONTAZER: This is my decision as an input. I can do it as close to 250.
I have to input these incrementally.

SAGüÉS: Okay, but isn\'t it like\--does it represent\--when do the
packages go into repository? At what time in that scale?

MONTAZER: At time zero.

SAGüÉS: At time zero? So\--

MONTAZER: During this time\--

SAGüÉS: Yes.

MONTAZER: \--the repository is ventilated any which way possible. That
is the canisters are being kept cool.

SAGüÉS: By some kind of a forced ventilation?

MONTAZER: Either forced or natural, whatever way the project determines
that it\'s workable. It\'s after this point that the effect of the
rubble-filled drifts come into play.

SAGüÉS: Okay, so you fill the drifts with rubble at year 200? Is that
right?

MONTAZER: They can be\--okay, can we go back to 7, No. 7? This portion
of it can be filled at any time. Actually this portion of it can be
constructed by rubbleized mining techniques initially. They don\'t have
to spend too much money on fancying this up. But this part is going to
have to be open at least during part that they are going to do the
emplacement. So some sort of ventilation system is going to be operating
while they are operating. Whether they can piggy-back on natural and
forced, that\'s something that the engineer is going to have to decide.
And again, this part of it also can be constructed and filled in almost
at the very beginning. After the closure, and we haven\'t really come up
with what is the best time for closure. There are other alternatives
that we have looked at. The optimum one with the lowest temperature is
the one I just presented. There are many, many, many options we\'ve
looked at. We can close it at 50, we can close it at 100. We\'ve looked
at different times that we close and let the natural ventilation take
over. And the bottom line is that\--can we go to 12?

And there is no magic in this simulation. You can calculate, you can do
these calculations by analytical thermoconduction. And the basic thing
is that these blue spots, those are the ventilation spots. They are
going to keep the temperature down. Basically we\'re providing a
boundary condition.

SAGüÉS: Okay. I don\'t want to\--but let me just tell you what I think
it is and then we can\--I think that we are talking is a repository that
is open to the outside air by some means for a couple hundred years, and
then you close that and there is some kind of internal circulation of
air, no? Okay, well in that case, what are you leaving open to the air?

MONTAZER: Continually open to the air. Okay, that will get\--

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, the current way we talked about
previously was just his way to deal with the step function. So all he
did was, he had another heat input that he had to add. Dr. Craig, next?

CRAIG: Paul Craig. Parvis, you\'ve been talking about this kind of
concept for some while and now you\'re getting into the kind of
calculations that are needed so you\'re really making a lot of progress.
Yesterday, Margaret Chu talked about thinking outside of the box. Not my
favorite terminology, but everybody uses it so I will, too. And she did.
And this is an example of that kind of thing. There\'s a timing issue.
DOE is coming up on a license application. If this concept is going to
make a difference, time is running out, and I\'d like you to talk about
your interactions with DOE and the kind of process that you think might
be necessary if your ideas really are going to affect what actually gets
built.

MONTAZER: We are constantly communicating with the Department of Energy
as far as what we think and as soon as we feel comfortable about
presenting\--and it\'s usually me who is holding things back because I
don\'t feel comfortable exposing some of the calculations that I\'m not
comfortable with. But Nye County is very open, has been open. And DOE
has been showing interest, as you have seen, over the past, since
1995/96. And it\'s very, in thinking out of the box has been very useful
from my perspective to the project because I think DOE has been at least
taking Nye County seriously in looking at the changes, etcetera. We
cannot do\--Nye County, we cannot really figure out what Department of
Energy is going to put in the licensing. The main thing that we\'re
going to be able to do is we say, okay, we have these ideas and it looks
good, but then DOE has to go and put it in their whole big picture
because there are so many different things to look at. And they come
out\--we don\'t have the resources to, and it\'s not really Nye
County\'s position to do so. We just come up with an idea and DOE takes
it and runs with it, and it has been working fine I think.

BULLEN: Dr. Parizek, a quick question and then a quick question by
Nelson gets the last one.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. A board member is shaking his head. You opened
the door downstairs, you heat the house, you open a window upstairs and
the house ventilates itself. That\'s sort of what this mountain would do
by this mechanism, to give you an analogy. What I\'m interested in is
not the fact that you get rid of the heat. It\'s the water that goes
with the heat and the fact that then keeps that mountain dry and there
should be no free water dripping anywhere so you get rid of the water,
the corrosion goes away, and we\'re happy. And so you might then save
big bucks in terms of getting rid of some of the drip shields and other
things by this technique, right?

MONTAZER: That\'s exactly\--

PARIZEK: Well, okay, so the moisture has got to keep going out whether
you put rubble in doorways or not. That\'s another matter. But the heat
keeps going out, the air keeps going out, the moisture keeps going out,
the thing is self-perpetuating. Then it gets cold and then the pluvials
come and it\'s raining and then the humidity goes up in the desert and
now you\'re bringing in more moist air than what you started with when
you did this in 2010, or whatever. Wouldn\'t there be moisture
condensing in the repository? Have you thought about the reverse
problem, bringing in humidity and then wish to hell you had shut the
door after all?

MONTAZER: Actually, John Walton beat me up by a lot just not too long
ago, and\--thanks, John. We, not as part of this, but that part of it is
not complete, but in previous more simplified calculations that I did
several years ago, I did some calculations and I think I presented it to
the Board. However long it takes for us to do the ventilation, it takes
twice as long for the moisture to return to its previous condition. That
is to its ambient condition, pre-heated condition. That is if I
dry\--and in my older calculation if I just had one ventilated drift, I
could dry about a 50-meter radius away. And it would take, and it took,
like if it took 1,000 years for that 50-meter radius to dry then it\'s
bone dry. Those calculations it shows that we go to single phase based
on the model. Model predicts that if about 50 meters away from that hole
goes into a single phase. And when things go back to the normal, what
happens is that the potential difference is not the way, and is not as
strong as when you dry it. The potential gradient is much, much smaller
so it takes much longer for the water to come back. What I\'m getting at
is moisture comes in, it comes through the rubble-filled drifts,
humidity comes through rubble-filled drifts. It\'s going to take it a
long time to get to the canisters, even though they are 10 meters away.
It\'s going to take hundreds if not thousands of years for it to get the
rock back to 80 percent saturation that it is now.

PARIZEK: Yeah, but the other point is just more humid air coming in
contact with say a cool waste package and then it condenses right on the
spot and bypasses the need to resaturate or remoisten the rock mass.

MONTAZER: In this design there\'s no\--well, I shouldn\'t say no, but
there\'s no direct contact of the air with the waste package. The waste
package is isolated in the rock.

PARIZEK: Okay, so that was your 2.5 meter drill hole. And I didn\'t
quite know whether you were going to bore them and just stuff the
packages in there, or are these really emplacement drifts with rails?
Are you just poking them in there?

MONTAZER: Can we\--

PARIZEK: That\'s Slide No. 2.

MONTAZER: No, the better one is Slide No. 45, please. It\'s a backup
slide. This is conceptually, basically you drill a hole 2.5 meter
diameter, you case it with appropriate material, and you can slide the
waste packages into the hole. When you\'re ready to close it, you cap
it, actually in the report we refer to filling this casing with a
natural gas, basically to totally dry the system. That will buy some
time. We don\'t know how long. If you seal this completely and then we
have a heat sink, this then is going to be exposed in one of the
ventilation drifts. Removing at least some heat in the axial direction.
We believe this helps, but we\'re not taking any credit. We haven\'t
done any calculations on this. But the ventilation drift is somewhere
out in here. It is going to\--the moisture that comes through the rubble
is going to come through here and it\'s going to require to saturate
this before it gets to the waste package.

PARIZEK: The air does not see that yellow casing? That\'s C-22 or
titanium or just old junky iron?

MONTAZER: Leave that to DOE, but\--

PARIZEK: No specialty.

BULLEN: I\'ll cut Mr. Parizek off and ask for Dr. Nelson. You have a
quick question? Just one short one.

NELSON: This is just a yes or no question. Nelson, Board. One, suppose
these boreholes, WEB emplacement boreholes collapse at various places.
Does that stop effective heating for your model? And the second part is,
you recommend some testing or some properties being needed. Are those
properties not produced by the project now? Or are they unusual
properties needed for your model only?

MONTAZER: They are standard. Okay, can this be answered, the last one
first. The properties are standard properties that\'s been in use for
decades. It\'s not my invention.

NELSON: So have you\--can you get those properties from the project or
are they not being produced by the project?

MONTAZER: No, the project is not producing presently. We have produced
some as part of our testing, but project is not currently producing
those. But they are using an equivalent corfice which we believe is very
conservative in the sense of what I\'m calculating is 10 times more
efficient\--I\'m sorry, five times more efficient than the heat transfer
corfice than the project is assuming. And we see a lot of differences in
the predictions and we are\--we have talked to\--we\'ve made two
presentations recently. One of them was specifically about the testing
program that we proposed. And it\'s in the backup slides. I can show
briefly, but I don\'t want to take time. I want to answer your other
question.

As far as the collapsing of the borehole, the collapsing of the borehole
does not affect the temperature. It does effect the\--how this borehole
is basically isolated by the rock from the ventilation system. If any
collapse or anything happens here as far as heat removal, there\'s not
much that is going to be affected. Of course, if this casing collapses
and becomes exposed earlier then there\'s\--when and if the moisture
gets there, then there\'s earlier corrosion, etcetera, going to start.

BULLEN: Thank you, Parvis. We really appreciate it and appreciate the
Board\'s patience in letting us go a little bit longer. \--Geotechnical
considerations of the repository design. And I want to point out to the
audience that we\'re going to have one public comment prior to lunch.
Those of you who were here yesterday know that Dr. George Danko from the
University of Nevada, Reno, asked for a comment today and we\'re going
to allow him five minutes. And so that will be right before the lunch
break.

Mark, you\'re on.

BOARD: Thank you. Well, I\'m going to talk to you today about the status
of the geotechnical considerations of the repository design.

The outline of the talk that I\'d like to give is in three areas. First
I\'d like to go over the issues that are currently outstanding for our
license application in the geotechnical area. I\'d like to talk about
our strategy for resolution of these issues, and I\'ll work in our
current work effort. We have quite a substantial amount of work that\'s
currently ongoing, and give you a summary.

I\'ve tried to boil down the issues that are outstanding in the
geotechnical area into three primary areas here that I\'ve listed. And
the first area is in the thermomechanical properties of lithophysal
rocks. As most of you are aware, about 80 percent of the repository
layout is in the lower lithophysal zone. And about 20 percent is in
non-lithophysal rocks. And the primary difference between those two that
I\'m sure you\'re aware, is that the lithophysal rocks contain cavities
that range in size from a few centimeters up to, at the maximum, they
are about a meter, but in general they are up to maximum size of around
football, basketball size.

Our main, as I\'ll point out in a minute, we have a large database of
information on the non-lithophysal rocks. Our main areas right now that
we\'re doing work in is beefing up our information on lithophysal rocks.
In particular, the areas that are needed right now are additional
measurements of thermal conductivity and expansion, strength and
deformability on mechanical measurements, and a better idea of the
thermal and mechanical coupling behavior and long-term strength
degradation, particularly in lithophysal rocks. And also the impact of
variability of geologic structure. And by structure here I mean the
structure of the lithophysiae themselves on their rock mass properties
that we\'re using in design and performance assessment.

So that first item is an understanding of the properties of lithophysal
rock. The other two areas are in pre-closure ground support
specification, is an issue that we\'re dealing with now and also
post-closure drift degradation and rockfall. Okay.

If you look at those three primary issues that I just talked about, we
have a number of testing needs or\--sorry, this thing is at an angle and
everything wants to fall off here. Okay, there we go.

We have a number of testing needs to feed those information or issues
that I just talked about. First of all, I wanted to point out that in
terms of the nonlithophysal rocks we have an extensive database that
currently exist. Over the past, oh, 20 or so years, just about, most of
the testing has been centered on these nonlithophysal rocks. And
there\'s an extensive database of mechanical and thermal testing, and
also fracture mapping. All the fractures in the ESF drift were all
fractures greater than a meter in length were mapped and there\'s a
database in excess of 35,000 measurements of fracture geometry and
aperture and things like this. Our main\--and we think that we have
sufficient data in that area. Our main requirement now is what we\'re
currently doing and that\'s developing additional database through
laboratory and field testing in these areas of thermomechanical
properties of lithophysal rocks. I\'ll mention in a second what type of
tests we\'re currently doing, but I wanted to point out one thing
that\'s very important in the testing program in the sort of logic of
how we\'re approaching this problem. Is that the properties of these
rocks are porosity-dependent and size-dependent. It\'s very clear that
we need to do mechanical tests, for example, on these rocks that
there\'s a heavy influence of porosity in strength and deformability.
And there\'s also a size effect. In other words, if I have an area that
has lithophysae that are a few centimeters in diameter, it\'s a whole
other matter to test something that has lithophysae that size than it is
lithophysae that are the size of basketballs. As you can imagine doing
mechanical tests become a bit problematic in trying to capture the
essence of the mechanical behavior of the large scale sample.

The other thing that I wanted to point out is the evaluation of
geometric properties of joints and lithophysae and their variability, is
something that we\'re doing in addition to physical property testing.
And that is that we are using the data that has already been gathered by
the geologists on the site to try and get our best picture of how these
lithophysae vary throughout the site. The basic goal that we have here
is to insure that our models that we\'re developing, our numerical
modeling capability is based on site-specific geology. In other words,
we want to make sure that the models reasonably reflect the actual
situation under ground.

Charles commented this morning about modeling. I definitely share his
opinion and that is that I\'m very skeptical about the use of numerical
models unless they are adequately examined and calibrated, in that I can
see a direct correspondence between the geology that we see under ground
and the observations that we can make, just very practical observations
with what the model predicts.

Finally, the other area of work that we\'re doing right now is looking
at time related degradation effects and in\--that\'s termed static
fatigue on both lithophysal and non-lithophysal rocks. Obviously, this
is an area that people haven\'t looked a whole lot in the field of rock
mechanics, that we\'re trying to deal with understanding how the
mechanical and thermal characteristics of the rock will behave as a
function of time.

Finally, the area that we\'re also working on right now is developing
post-closure site-specific ground motions for use in our rockfall
calculations. Okay.

I\'m sorry about this slide. It looked very brilliant when I made it and
unfortunately it doesn\'t show up very well when you convert it to this
thing. But let me walk you through our strategy for how we\'re trying to
resolve these issues and incorporating them in design.

We\'re trying to take a step-wise approach to this problem to make
certain that at the end of the day when we use these models for
sensitivity studies and design, which are actually currently going on
and will continue on until the license application, that we have
confidence that we understand the behavior of this rock mass. And that
we have done everything we can to reduce the level of uncertainty that
we have in its mechanical and thermal behavior.

The step-wise program that we\'re using is first starting off with field
geologic characterization work and although it\'s a bit difficult to
read there, this is work that we\'ve\--that has been done and we\'re
continuing to re-evaluate the variability of the rock mass, in
particular the type of structure of the rock mass. That includes its
lithophysal content and the jointing in the middle along with the
lithophysal unit which are the primary controllers for mechanical
behavior.

In the backup slides I put in some slides of some of the work that
we\'re currently doing here to identify, for example, the lithophysal
rocks, how the size and shape of the lithophysae vary, how the porosity
varies as a function of distance up the ECRB and then also extrapolated
across the repository block.

The next thing we\'re doing is moving up in a series of testing scales
where our goal here is to understand the basic mechanisms of how this
rock behaves, particularly the lithophysal rock, which is a bit new to
the field of rock mechanics. There isn\'t a lot of excavations in this
type of rock that exists. What we\'re doing is we\'re right now
conducting a fairly extensive laboratory testing program to supplement
the data that we currently have. This is being done at Sandia labs and
also at the US Bureau of Reclamation in Denver. What we\'re doing is
collecting large diameter core samples which are 12-inch diameter which
is about the biggest that we can practically handle. And we\'re doing
mechanical and thermal testing on those rocks and we\'re also doing
static fatigue tests which are long-term creep tests, if you\'d like to
call them that. And as I mentioned earlier, it\'s because of the size
effect that we have these large scale samples, or the large lithophysae.
It\'s very difficult for us to sample sufficiently large samples and
take them to the laboratory. So that\'s the reason, if we go on to the
next step, which is in-situ testing, an in-situ testing level and
conformation of our models, here and in fact right today we\'re
conducting in the ESF meter, one meter plus scale compression tests on
lithophysal rocks. We\'re\--our first test that we\'re doing right now
is just to determine the mechanical constitutive behavior, but in future
we\'re going to conduct two more tests over the summer where we\'re
going to heat that and conduct long-term loading tests on meter plus
scale sample sizes of material from the lower lithophysal zone, and the
upper lithophysal zone.

But even after doing all this testing, of course, it\'s still a limited
database that we have. And we feel that we need a methodology for
extrapolating that behavior to a larger size scale over the variability
of the lithophysal rock. In other words, with the access that we have,
which is in to the lower lithophysal zone, it\'s essentially through one
drift, it\'s the ECRB. And we feel that it\'s necessary for us to be
able to have a tool that we can say, what if the lithophysae change the
size distribution and porosity over a range that we expect to have for
the whole repository? How will that impact the output design properties
that we need to use for design performance assessment?

So what we\'re doing is we\'re doing what I would term sort of an
intimate coupling of the numerical model with our testing program, and
I\'ll show you an example of this in the next slide. We\'re using a
computer program called the Particle Flow Code, which was developed by a
company called Itasca Consulting Group who is helping us on this work.
They are out of Minneapolis. And we felt we needed a model that actually
represented the physics of how this material behaves, that actually,
physically had holes in it and so that we could use it as sort of a
sounding board, a test bed, if you like, so that we could understand the
mechanics of how the material behaves. Because we think it\'s necessary
for us to come before NRC and before you and be able to justify the
properties that we\'re putting in these models and the ranges that those
properties have. So we\'re doing a calibration of this model against the
lab and field testing scale to assure ourselves that it can reasonably
reproduce the basic mechanisms of the behavior.

Then the next step is we are going to use that model then as a test bed
or extrapolation tool to try and set ranges of design properties so that
it gives us a higher level of confidence that if the lithophysae change
across the site by a certain percentage that we can understand how
that\'s going to impact the design behavior.

Finally, these design properties are going into a numerical models that
we\'re using for calculation of drift stability and ground support
loading.

Okay, next slide. I thought it might be interesting for you to see an
example of what it is that we are doing. I know this process may sound a
little different or strange, but I wanted to show you the kind of thing
that we are doing in calibrating this model. This is a calibration, one
of our calibrations against the testing that\'s being done at Sandia.
And this is a simulation of a laboratory sample here that\'s being
subjected to uniaxial compression by an axial stress. And the model that
we\'re using is this Particle Flow Code it\'s called, which is actually
a micromechanical model in which the rock is represented as a series of
spherical particles that are bonded together at the contact points. Now,
this model was originally developed to examine problems in rock
mechanics, and has been used extensively by the oil industry to look at
things like hydraulic fracturing and blasting and pillar failure and
things like that. But it has now found its way into great use in the
powder compaction industry and rock fracture mechanics, and granular
flow.

Essentially, the power of this model is it has very simple input
properties. It\'s just simply the sheer and tensile strength of those
contacts, and once it is broken it assumes there\'s a frictional contact
exists.

But yet it\'s able to provide very complex behavior because it
reasonably represents the way that rock fractures. And what I\'ve shown
here is just simply a simulation of one of our uniaxial compression
tests where this is the stress strain curve that\'s produced by the
model itself, and the slope of this line is Young\'s Modulus, and
that\'s the peak strength of the material.

And we can actually calibrate the model very simply by adjusting the
contact properties to reproduce the behavior of the sample. And then we
can compare the actual way it does fail in the laboratory as a back
example, and in this case it\'s showing a typical sort of shear failure
mechanism that you get in a hard rock in which you get extensional
fractures here which are in red, at graying context which coalesce to
form major shear fractures through the material. Okay.

What I wanted to show you is that at first blush you look at this
lithophysal material and you think, gees, that must be very complex
material to represent mechanically. It\'s full of holes and it\'s got
solid matrix between it. But in actual fact, what our results are
showing is actually it\'s really not so complicated at all I think. Here
what we\'ve done is take exactly the same sample I showed you in the
previous slide, with exactly the same material properties for the matrix
material. And we have always made the assumption, I guess, or the
project has, that the matrix material is the same whether it\'s in the
middle lithophysal unit or the lower lithophysal unit, that
mineralogically it\'s the same and mechanically we felt it was probably
the same as well. And tests do tend to show that compression tests on
small samples. But, merely by adding in, in this case, a distributed
porosity of 20 percent, which is what this particular rock has right
here from Sandia where the testing was happening, we use exactly the
same properties only we had holes in it and did the same test as we did
before. The interesting part is now we\'ve dramatically changed the
deformability of the material and its peak strength which is now dropped
to about one-fifth of the strength of the middle non-lithophysal unit.
And now the failure mechanism which we can see which was exactly the way
it occurs in the laboratory is we get extensional splitting between
lithophysae and forming major shear fracture through the material. And I
show here a comparison with the actual laboratory data from this
particular test here. This is acoustic emission data that we\'re using
to also help us to understand what failure mechanism is occurring
between the lithophysae. But here we can, with no fudging of data or
anything, we can reproduce approximately the behavior of the sample, its
peak strength and also the strain of failure. So this approach that
we\'re using in calibrating this model is to try and gain a greater
level of confidence as we go along and a greater level of understanding.
And right now what we\'re doing is we\'re modeling our in-situ tests
ahead of time using our model which we\'ve calibrated the properties
against, and now we\'ll be comparing it to these data that we are
getting from the field. Okay? Next slide.

The objective that we have is that by the end of having run these
in-situ tests we are hoping to have, be able to confirm the mechanism of
how this material behaves mechanically. And also going to be able to use
that with some confidence for extrapolation of the \"what-if\" cases
that I mentioned.

This shows\--I tried to show an example of that process here that we\'re
going through. I show a plot here of the compressive strength of all the
Yucca Mountain Tuffs, not just the Topopah Springs, but all the Yucca
Mountain Tuffs as a function of effective porosity. And you can see that
there\'s a heavy dependence of strength on porosity. And I show here the
addition of our field tests that we\'re doing to supplement this data.

Now what we\'re doing with our numerical model is extrapolating from
this as we\'re trying to set the upper and lower bounds of what the
lithophysal material is expected to behave, and from this we can get our
material properties. Okay.

All right, the next topic then outside of the material properties is our
ongoing work on looking at evaluation of ground support, and what I
wanted to point out first is that the modeling that has been done today,
especially in the lithophysal zone has used conservative properties to
estimate what the deformations and loading of the ground support should
be, and I just wanted to point out that, under the various thermal
operating modes that have been examined, the deformations and support
loads that the ground support must maintain over the pre-closure period
are relatively small. They are certainly within the realm of standard
mining type situations with standard support methods. The one area that
we are currently looking at is time-dependent degradation of the
material from thermal loading, which will potentially be a major source
of yielding of the rock mass around the excavations. The estimated
support function, and I put here \"function\" meaning that what the
support has to do in these different rock types in the pre-closure
period is as follows: In the lithophysal rock we think that the primary
way that that material will actually yield is to yield on small scale
fractures between the lithophysae, and it will have a form of what I
would term a raveling type rock behavior in which if it\--as it yields
it will form small size particles that will detach from the surrounding
rock mass. And that those particles have to be retained in some way. And
I term a membrane type support here is well suited for that purpose.
Membrane meaning that it provides some form of continued support around
the excavation.

In the middle non-lithophysal unit which is a jointed hard rock mass,
support of so-called keyblocks or blocks that are wedges that are formed
by these joints, we feel is probably the primary support mode that we
have to maintain. And that some potential to maintain surface spalling
is also necessary. Again, a membrane type support with standard methods
is\--it can be used here.

For the license application design that\'s currently going on, we\'re
looking at all types of ground support. I mean nothing has been
eliminated right now. And that includes methods including rock bolts and
wire mesh steel sets and shotcrete which is a sprayed-on cementatious
lining material. Nothing has been ruled out although of course, you\'re
probably aware of a lot of discussions in these areas in the past.

Some of the main issues that we\'re looking at right now are longevity
of the steel supports and also the impact of ventilation air as it
passes through on drying out. The rock and how that\'s going to impact
corrosion of these different steel support members. And also the impact
of thin layers of shotcrete on cement carbonation and water chemistry.
Shotcrete has many advantages from a ground support standpoint. My
background comes from the mining industry and from just practical
support specification. It has many advantages, especially in lithophysal
type materials, but it also potentially has disadvantages on impacting
water chemistries. And that\'s something that we\'re going to be trying
to tie down here in the next little while before making a final decision
on the support type.

We\'re also looking at our approach for observing and maintaining the
support over the pre-closure period. There are different ideas that are
being currently developed in that area. Okay, next slide.

The final thing that I wanted to mention to you today is our work in
post-closure rockfall and drift degradation analysis. We\'re currently
working on several different areas right now. The first is development
of site-specific ground motions from the Probablistic Seismic Hazard
Analysis that\'s currently ongoing and this is being done primarily by
Walter Silva, a seismologist out of Oakland, but with assistance from
Carl Stepp and Allin Cornell. These ground motions are, like I say,
currently being developed and they will all be completed over the
summer.

We\'ve made a change in the approach that we\'re doing to analyze
seismically induced rockfall and that is that we\'ve gone away from
maybe what you\'ve heard in the past on this so-called keyblock type
analysis method. We feel it\'s necessary to get a good understanding of
what range in size of particles that we will actually be producing that
we actually use a true dynamic, three-dimensional modeling approach.
It\'s not what I would prefer to do, but I think in this case it\'s
something that we need to do. And we\'re using what\'s termed a
discontinuum method. The program is called 3DEC, and this program allows
site-specific joint geometries, input of site specific geometries. We
apply site-specific ground motions and determine the kind of rockfall
that we get. We\'re doing this in combination with this Itasca
Consulting Group and the U. S. Geological Survey with the joint geometry
specifications.

Our goal here is to develop probablistic output of rockfall mass that is
consistent with the TSPA model that\'s being produced. And what that
rockfall masses and velocity is based on many discrete simulations or
deterministic simulations. It\'s a large job to do that and we embarked
on that now and we\'re under way. Okay.

This slide, which is my last slide, other than the summary, shows the
approach that we\'re taking. We have many parameters here. In the middle
non-lithophysal unit it\'s primarily the joint geometry parameters and
the lithophysal geometry in the lithophysal unit as well as properties.
These are all\--have been examined in terms of cast and
statistically-based input. It\'s a very, very large database, as you can
imagine. And as we\'re getting into this calculation we\'re getting
smart very quickly as to what range of these parameters actually have an
impact on it. So what I\'m not proposing here is we\'re going to be
doing five million simulations with this model. We\'re seeing what
important parameters we have very quickly and narrowing down to that.

We have input ground motions from the hazard assessment, essentially we
have site-specific time histories that are being developed right now for
Yucca Mountain. These then feed into this discontinuum modeling, which
is, as I mentioned, a deterministic program. We essentially run cases
where we shake the model here with the time history that some given
exceedence, annual exceedence value which corresponds to a peak ground
acceleration or peak ground velocity. And I\'ve shown an example of what
we do for one of these. Let\'s say it\'s 10 to the minus 6 annual
exceedence frequency. We generate a series of runs and this series of
runs here may be around 100 simulations or something on that order, in
which these parameters have been varied as well as the actual frequency
content of the input wave form. And we actually determine a probability
density function of what the rockfall looks like at that given peak
ground acceleration. And this is being done for both the middle model
lithophysal unit and the lithophysal unit is set because they require
separate analysis methods. So we\'re actually calculating the tons of
material that is released, the size of the largest block, and also the
kinetic energy of the material because as it impacts the drip shield and
this other thing, what\'s important is not just the mass, but what a
velocity it has when it\'s released. This material we\'re generating
right now and we\'re feeding it incrementally into an analysis that\'s a
similar type analysis of the drip shield which is a structural analysis
to determine if that structure is sufficiently stout, essentially, to
handle this given rockfall. We\'ve embarked on this process. We\'re in
the middle of it right now, and as far as the time frame goes, we\'re
hoping to have these calculations completed by December of this year and
to have completely entered into the analysis of the drip shield at that
time. Okay.

So my final slide and summary is that the major geomechanical issues
here are specification of the pre-closure ground support, estimation of
the seismic stability of the post-closure time, and to increase our
database of thermomechanical properties, primarily those of the
lithophysal rocks, and to assess their variability.

We\'re trying to\--we\'re doing this project through a series of new
tests that are being completed and analysis of existing data. We\'re
doing additional lab and field testing of the lithophysal rocks, as I
mentioned. We are incorporating site-specific geology into our numerical
model development. We\'re continuing to do validation of these models
against lab and field data and we\'re going to use those for
extrapolation of the behavior to varying geologic conditions. The ground
support studies need to be completed, and this includes calculations of
loading and deformations of the openings to make certain that the
support can actually function under those conditions, as well as
longevity estimates.

And finally, we\'re doing discontinuum analysis of rockfall. Okay.

BULLEN: Thank you, Mark.

BOARD: Yes.

BULLEN: Questions from the Board? Dr. Nelson?

NELSON: Hi, Mark. Welcome to the project.

BOARD: Thank you.

NELSON: Very happy that you\'ve joined the project. And I really enjoyed
the approach that you\'re taking, and look forward to hearing a lot more
about the progress as it goes on.

I think there are just two questions. Seems in evaluating some of the
longer term response a lot of the focus has been on the thermal pulse,
and along with the thermal pulse is also the pulse that changes the
water content. And we\'ve asked in the past about water content
sensitivity, not just a porosity dependence, but also water content
dependence, and the fact that although you may be sure that you have
only one thermal pulse, you may not necessarily be sure that you only
have one pulse of water content change through the life of the
repository. So can you separate those two effects at all and give us an
idea of whether there is a water content effect?

BOARD: Yeah, it is a little difficult to do that, although we\--all the
tests that I mentioned here we\'re conducting at different saturation
levels. So we are conducting saturated or dry essentially because it\'s
very difficult to control, you know, saturation at some in-between
point. And so we\'re trying to separate that impact out by looking
separately at thermal effects only as opposed to saturated effects only.
So we\'re varying saturation and temperature both. That\'s how we\'re
trying to get at it. This is through the laboratory testing. Of course,
the field testing, we\'re just taking what we have that exists at the
location.

NELSON: Okay, let me just follow up on that because it\'s not only how
it affects the properties, but whether there\'s a water content change
affecting deterioration. Is the rock sensitive to that?

BOARD: Yeah. That\'s a good point, and that could be an impact in a
lithophysal material in particular because there is a degree of
fracturing that exists between lithophysae and the lower lithophysal
unit. Those are generally clean fractures with very little alteration on
them, but at any rate, there could be some impact. And what we\'re doing
in that regard is, on our strength data fatigue tests that are being
done at Bureau of Reclamation, we\'re trying to keep, do the same
thing\--saturated and unsaturated conditions. How we\'re going to get
down to the mechanism of that I\'m not exactly sure yet. If you\'ve got
ideas you can throw them out. I mean we\'re trying to do our best when
we do these lab tests of essentially taking the sample apart both before
and after we test it to make certain that we\'re taking thin sections
through the material to study how it actually yielded, you know, what
mechanism. And perhaps that will lend some picture about grain to grain
boundary and joint alterations of water, but it is an issue.

NELSON: I\'ll finish so the others can comment, but I really look
forward to hearing you saying more about the effects of heterogeneity in
the rock mass on the performance. You hinted at it in a couple of ways
and I think we\'ll learn more about it, particularly regarding rockfall.

BOARD: Yeah, it\'s a very important issue and we\'re really trying to
get at that, like a goal that I have is to make certain, as I said, that
these models accurately reflect or\--I shouldn\'t use the term accurate.
That\'s a bad one. But that it reasonably reflects the variability of
the rock mass. And because we are faced with this issue of having a
limited database of information because we can\'t obviously do, you
know, a huge number of large scale tests, that\'s why we\'re trying this
extrapolation. We figure that the only way you\'re going to believe us
in detail is if we show you that we understand the basic mechanisms of
how it behaves and start from that basis and work our way up. And so the
whole goal of using this test bed particle code is so that we can
demonstrate we understand that, and then use that as a launching pad
then to say if I change conditions in lithophysae like this, this is how
it\'s going to change my output response. And properties probably isn\'t
a good term to use there, I prefer to say how it changes the
constitutive response of the material. So that\'s where we\'re trying to
head for anyway, so.

NELSON: Thanks.

BULLEN: Dr. Craig?

CRAIG: Paul Craig. Greetings. That was a very clear report, but I am
confused, which is probably not your fault. I\'m neither a geologist nor
an engineer. I\'m probably on this whole board because I don\'t know
anything about any of this stuff and therefore somebody wanted somebody
to ask dumb questions. But what I\'m hearing from you is that the lith
is enormously inhomogeneous.

BOARD: No, I didn\'t say that.

CRAIG: Let me go\--I\'m probably misinterpreting you a bunch. I\'m
expressing this because I want you to clarify things.

BOARD: Okay.

CRAIG: I\'m honestly confused. And what I\'m getting out of this is a
potential concern for the low temperature operating mode because if you
have inhomogeneities and the possibility of tunnel collapse and if you
have to use new materials like shotcrete, with which there is not long
historical experience, and they have to hold up for hundreds of years
during the ventilation period, then you have the potentiality for having
big chunks of the repository exceed the temperature bounds.

BOARD: Right.

CRAIG: And if the inhomogeneity is large that could be a big issue. If
the inhomogeneity is small enough that it\'s not a big issue, and so the
inhomogeneity is right at the heart of my question.

BOARD: Okay. Yeah, that\'s a very good question. I\'m sorry I
didn\'t\--I guess I\'m speaking more to specialists in my area than to
everybody. But the material is not inhomogeneous on, essentially on a
lateral basis. If you take the lower lithophysal horizon for example,
there is somewhat of a variability in lithophysal content in the top 10
meters or so of the flow itself where the lithophysae tend to be larger.
When you get down below that level which is by far and away the bulk of
the repository, is in that area beneath that and we\'ve put it there
specifically for that purpose. The lithophysal content is relatively
regular and the porosity is quite regular. The porosity, we\'ve done
studies going up this ECRB where we\'ve taken one-meter by three-meter
panel maps and mapped every lithophysae in great detail and done this
marching our way up and determined how the porosity and size variability
changes. And the porosity is almost right around\--almost on 20 percent,
almost all the way up through the flow like that, even though the size
may change slightly within that. So I wouldn\'t call the material
inhomogeneous. It\'s actually, I believe, in its mechanical and thermal
behavior is probably quite, actually quite homogeneous, in that you can
represent it as a averaged material. That\'s what my guess is or my
feeling is once we finish all this testing we\'re\--as far as the type
of ground support for use in this material, obviously, it\'s my feeling
and I\'ll tell you straight out that I don\'t believe that there is a
collapse problem in the pre-closure period at all. I mean this material
is quite good construction material. It is very lightly supported right
now with only occasional rock bolts in it with some wire mesh. So it\'s
actually a very good\--I mean like I told you, I came from the mining
industry and we would have killed to have rock like that to construct
in. So I think the main issue with the ground support is just maintain
any loose material that might ravel free from that over the retrieval
period. Whether that\'s shotcrete or another common thing like raw bolt
and mesh remains to be seen. But I don\'t see it as an overwhelming
issue that we have to deal with, and here I mean it\'s something that we
can engineer around I guess is my feeling. And, obviously we\'re going
to have to maintain the support over time, which means we\'ll have to
observe and have a plan for how we\'re going to maintain it if necessary
because, you know, it depends on the length of time, if it\'s 100 or 300
years. As you said, these are unprecedented times when it comes from a
ground support standpoint, so we\'ll have to have that option.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. You don\'t want to go there because then I\'ll
start talking about associative packages, so\--

CRIAG: No, no, I just wanted to\--thank you. That was a clear answer and
I feel much more at east.

BULLEN: Last question. Very short question, very short answer. Dr.
Runnells?

RUNNELLS: You may have been on the project a short time, but you are
absolutely correct in saying that the Board will not believe you unless
you demonstrate some understanding of the system. Absolutely true.

BOARD: I should be on the Board. I feel the same way.

RUNNELLS: Demonstrates you came from the mining industry. Slide 11,
please. Second bullet. As you were talking you said something that
really caught my ear. You said we\'re going away from the keyrock or
keystone, keyfall, whatever you call it.

BOARD: Yeah. Yes.

RUNNELLS: Model to\--and I know nothing about this field so I feel
completely free to ask this question. To this model\--

BOARD: Yes.

RUNNELLS: \--which is not your preference. That\'s what you said, is not
your preference. And then you went to the third bullet and talked about
how it was going to fit into TSPA.

BOARD: Yes.

RUNNELLS: Why isn\'t it your preference and are you being forced into
something that\'s not your preference because of TSPA?

BOARD: No. That\'s not it. I was being somewhat facetious there. My
background, the work I did before I came here was primarily in assessing
seismic stability of underground mines and damage assessment of
underground mining operations. And what I would prefer that we could do
would be to simply argue from an empirical database whether there was an
issue here or not. And that\'s what I was referring to, is that based on
experience from the mining industry, I wish that we didn\'t have to go
through an elaborate calculation procedure. But I feel in this case that
we do because the ground motions are sufficiently different with an
earthquake type ground motion and you get with a typical underground
seismic event, which tends to be higher frequency, short duration. So
what I really meant by that comment was I wish that there were a bit
simpler way to attack the problem without having to do a very large
number of three-dimensional calculations using a discontinuum model
which actually represents rock as blocks of material that contact one
another across joint surfaces. It\'s really not that much different than
what the auto industry uses for examining the impact of, you know,
automobiles or something like that. It\'s, I\'ll call it a large
deformation program. It takes very long to make these runs. So
consequently, what we\'re doing in this second bullet is is we\'re
utilizing many computers to make these discrete runs that we\'re trying
to cast into a more probablistic framework that is usable with the same
framework that the TSPA model has in place. So I mean I\'m happy to do
this work. It\'s very interesting just from a scientific standpoint, but
as far as the\--I would rather be able to just simply say based on
mining experience we can ignore the problem, but I don\'t think that we
can do that in this case.

BULLEN: Thank you, Mark. I think you\'re correct. We can\'t ignore it.
And we actually look forward to seeing the results of these calculations
at a future meeting.

BOARD: Sure.

BULLEN: With that I\'ll call the session to a close, but open the public
comment session for one individual who is Dr. George Danko and I
promised him five minutes and 30 seconds. So we have five minutes and 30
seconds, Dr. Danko. You are there getting the microphone, okay. That\'s
great.

DANKO: Thank you very much. I would like to thank the Board for their
permitting me to do this public comment before I have to run for my
return trip to Reno.

BULLEN: Okay, go right ahead.

DANKO: And I want to thank you for the audience to stay here an extra
five minutes into the program before the lunch break. I would like to
make my public comment on ventilation simulation results and modeling.
And would like to give the Board a copy of my comments for consideration
for including in the public report.

I based my comment on past and present ventilation results and 10 years
of involvement in ventilation calculations, which included hot and cold
repository concepts, design options that probably have to come to the
point that we have a ventilated option in today\'s considerations.

And during this 10 years of work we developed the MULTIFLUX, which is a
hydrothermal ventilation code based on\--modeling the rock processes
with heat and moisture transport. The current studies are in the AMR
Revision 01 report. And we participated in this with MULTIFLUX, the
report compared MULTIFLUX modeling with ANSYS based model done by BSC.
This ANSYS-based model is a simplified model using only line load and
cold and dry heat conduction in the rock. And it has a spreadsheet and a
calculation in it so I will reference it as ABVS, ANSYS-based
Spreadsheet Ventilation Model.

The recommendations and questions are based on the simplifications,
which I used in the ANSYS-based model. The first question, how does EBS
compare with MULTIFLUX if the heat load is point-like with large gaps
between waste packages? Woody Stroupe showed us a two-meter distance
between waste packages, and then the waste package will be varying in
heat load so it will not be resembling an average line load. I would
like to assure you the agreement between ABVS and MULTIFLUX in my report
is very good because of the task level and very low simple model
configuration. Where we see differences which are not addressed in this
report, and then of course in the future, the applications that will be
different. And then I would like to comment on this, that there is time
to use model which can account for those variations.

The second question is how does ABVS compare with the MULTIFLUX\--within
that in fact is included. In that is on the bottom of the brief time
that it uses and then has\--it had to be left out in the Revision 01
report because it caused differences between ANSYS model and the
MULTIFLUX. If rock grind is used you can consider, the grind effect will
increase temperature because it is drying and then the drying will
reduce the conductivity from 2 to 1.2 or 1.2 that the dry rock is
conductivity. So the drying effect may increase temperatures through
rock drying. The drying effect may increase temperature through the
decreasing conductivity, but it would also decrease temperatures through
the latency defect. And these two are competing against each other and
has to be modeled. It\'s very difficult to factor these two factors into
this. So I argue that a\--ventilation has to be in the future.

The third question is how is rock drying going to affect the second
thermal cycle and then this is an example showing these two cycles which
we are expecting. One is during pre-closure. That\'s a small and almost
insignificant cycle and under the control of the thermal management. The
second cycle is spontaneous on, not under our control any more, but
it\'s affected by the output of the first cycle so if the rock drying is
in use and then you know it is by ventilation it will affect through the
conductivity the peak of the second cycle. And then that needs has to be
addressed in future ventilation calculations. So a hydrothermal model
has to be.

And that brings me to my fourth group of questions. How will the
ventilation software and models be refined and qualified? I believe that
there will be so much work to be done in the future that the ventilation
models as a subtask will not be handled unless it\'s cleared out really
quickly and then qualified and then the right models used. There is no
need for too many modeling and in past ventilation models which\--two
minutes because we have time enough to do the job well, but we need to
qualify these models, not put it on hold and then clear out the way for
the real studies. These models have to be\--it\'s time to move from
the\--to computation of fluid dynamic model, decide just like what
MULTIFLUX use is and then the results has to be pitted against the DOE
test facility for ventilation, test facility to check these models and
then it\'s time to move on.

Thank you very much.

BULLEN: Thank you, Dr. Danko. Could you leave a copy of your paper and
if possible a copy of your overheads for the record.

DANKO: Yes.

BULLEN: This session is now adjourned. We will reconvene at exactly
1:30. 1:30. Thank you very much. I would like to thank all the speakers,
too.

(Whereupon, the session recessed.)

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DR. COHON: I congratulate those who made it back from lunch on time, we
appreciate that. And to those Board members who didn\'t make it, shame
on you.

Our session this afternoon is focused on performance confirmation and R
and D testing, and Priscilla Nelson will serve as chair.

Priscilla.

DR. NELSON: Thanks, Jerry.

What we\'re going to do, as indicated earlier this morning, is have a
little change in the schedule. We will first of all have a 25-minute
presentation from John Kessler. If you\'re talking, then you have to
stop talking so you can hear me. We\'re going to have a 25-minute
presentation from John Kessler of EPRI, and then a 15-minute Q and A
period. Following that, we will have the start of the presentation from
the BSC team. Peter Swift will take on Nancy Williams\' introduction,
because Nancy\'s not here, and he will be followed by Larry Trautner,
who will do the design aspects presentation.

I ask after each of those two presentations that direct questions that
really are needed for clarification in your mind, fellow Board members,
be the ones that are asked, because we will take a break at that
juncture for 10 to 15 minutes, and we\'ll set the time at that point.
And then we will reconvene and Peter Swift will go into the performance
assessment and testing priorities on the part of BSC. We\'ll follow his
presentation with a Q and A period in which either he or Larry Trautner
could be addressed for Q and A.

At the conclusion of that we will hear from Steve Brocoum and a Q and A
will follow that. And at that point I will hand control of the
proceedings over to Jerry Cohon for public commentary period.

So, we are set to start, and I would like to introduce and ask to come
up John Kessler. John is the manager of Spent Fuel Storage,
Transportation and Disposal Program at EPRI. He has a background that
began at the University of Illinois academically and culminated at the
University of California at Berkeley, where he did work with hydrology
and hydrogeology. So we\'d like to welcome John to talk about a
performance confirmation exercise that EPRI established, managed, and
that a few of the Board members and staff were fortunate enough to be
able to attend. Thanks, John.

MR. KESSLER: Thank you, Priscilla.

I\'d like to start with a few seconds of shameless advertising for an
upcoming conference. The International High-Level Radioactive Waste
Management Conference is now scheduled for March 29th to April 3rd of
2003 in Las Vegas. The calls for papers is literally hot off the press,
I got it this morning and put out some copies in the back for those of
you that may be interested in contributing papers.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Who\'s the technical chair of that, John?

MR. KESSLER: Right. Okay, quickly what I want to talk about here is a
couple things that lead into performance confirmation long-term R and D
activities, starting by decision making in the face of uncertainty.
After all, performance confirmation is part of that concern. Then I will
talk about the EPRI Performance Confirmation Panel, the recommendations
that that Panel made after the workshop last year. I\'ll talk about
DOE\'s eight-step process. Actually, I should have taken this off
because there isn\'t time to go through a container corrosion example.
This is DOE\'s eight-step process on how to identify a winning
performance confirmation program element, so to speak. And then I\'ll
end with an analogy to reactor licensing in terms of\--well, I guess it
has some relationship to staging, so to speak, and how performance
confirmation activities would fit in that.

So starting with some background, decisions, as we\'ve been talking
about or heard a lot about the past day and a half, are iterative.
Certainly the SR that I understand is being debated on the House floor
as we speak is the first required by law, but it\'s based on nearly 20
years of study now. So it\'s not without some basis that the SR was
made.

Just some lists of future decisions assuming the SR is approved by
Congress. Some NRC decisions are the license to construct, receive and
possess, close, and the amendments, which I understand some of those
are. And then just a few of the many DOE decisions, some of which
you\'ve talked about in the past day and a half. The license
applications/amendments themselves, DOE has to decide whether they\'re
ready to proceed with those. The transportation issues, the how, where,
when, has all got to be decided sometime in the future that hasn\'t been
decided yet, and the repository design you just heard about in terms of
the decisions that are planned for that.

I suppose a comforting thing, or however you want to look at it, is that
the relative importance of the decision increases as the knowledge
increases. So really, until the waste starts moving to Yucca Mountain,
the risk here is mostly institutional to DOE and economic to the Waste
Fund. The health risk to the public hasn\'t really begun yet. The public
health and safety doesn\'t come in until\--in terms of radiological risk
isn\'t incurred until the waste starts moving. Well, that\'s not going
to happen until the second license decision. Transportation and surface
operations come first, and the post-closure risk is decades to centuries
away. So there\'s still time to gain a lot more information before real
risk to the public begins.

Well, we all know that uncertainty is unavoidable, so how is it being
managed? There was some discussion about that in the past day and a
half. There are regulatory approaches that NRC themselves are applying
to deal with uncertainty in a sense that they\'ve got a dose to a
\"reasonably maximally exposed individual\", the RMEI. The RMEI dose
limit is a fraction of natural background. NRC requires multiple
barriers. They also are insisting that the waste is retrievable. We
don\'t have to take DOE on faith or trust, we\'ve got also NRC that is
requiring waste to be retrievable and that NRC is going to want to see a
real retrievability plan that actually has some meat to it. And it\'s
not just a matter of taking DOE on faith that they\'re going to keep
things retrievable. And I consider that a very important part of
developing confidence, is maintaining the retrievability option. Then
there\'s longer term R and D that NRC requires. The \"Safety Questions\"
provision in the NRC review plan is always there, and then there\'s the
performance confirmation program, which I\'m going to talk a bit more
about.

Then there\'s additional DOE approaches. They can reduce uncertainties
with design modifications. We\'ve already talked about what some of
those are. I would argue that the analyses are conservative on the
whole. That\'s another way to manage uncertainties. And at present they
have \"margin\", meaning that they\'re below, not right at the limit,
not at the 14.99 but well below that. So these are all ways to manage
uncertainty that I think DOE is already using. And in addition, they\'ve
got long-term R and D and a performance confirmation program that helps
them manage those uncertainties.

So the question is, you know, for us at EPRI, which was why should we
look at this issue now, how do we view it in terms of where the whole
Yucca Mountain process is? And we felt it was useful for the Site
Recommendation decision makers to know that this isn\'t the end of the
road on data, that DOE is going to continue to do R and D and monitoring
for a whole lot longer, and as TRB rightly pointed out in your letter of
last January, \"Confidence in DOE\'s projections can be increased.\"
Certainly the SR decision makers need to know that, and that there\'s a
way to do that. And a decision to proceed is just the next step.
Licensing is going to follow, NRC will thoroughly evaluate, and the TRB
will very much be part of the process of continuing to question and
challenge the project as they proceed.

So the EPRI \"motive\", in a sense, was to identify \"meaningful\"
long-term R and D/performance confirmation bases as Site Recommendation
input and a key licensing tool. Really, one of our concerns was, are we
relying too much on performance confirmation? Do we just say, \"Oh,
well, it will get answered in performance confirmation\"? Maybe it will,
maybe it won\'t. And we wanted to explore in a bit more detail about,
you know, what is it that makes a good performance confirmation program?
What questions can they answer? And if they can\'t answer important
questions, what else is there?

So our performance confirmation activities\--I\'m probably going to
switch into PC lingo here, so forgive me if I do\--is we reviewed the
DOE draft Performance Confirmation Plan and we focused that review on
DOE\'s proposed eight-step process, which I\'ll talk more about later in
the talk. We hosted a workshop last November where we had
representatives from DOE, NRC, as Priscilla mentioned, Board members and
Board staff there, and local representatives, government
representatives, were present. We instituted a Performance Confirmation
Panel to make observations, recommendations. They participated in the
workshop. We identified a few examples of potential performance
confirmation activities and perhaps how one might better exercise all
eight of these steps that I\'ll talk about. And it\'s all in the EPRI
report that I believe we\'ve sent copies to the Board that came out at
the end of last year.

So one of the things that came up in the discussions during the workshop
is what\'s the distinction between long-term R and D and performance
confirmation? And it seems that they\'re sort of\--there\'s this
regulatory definition, or at least the understanding of a regulatory
definition and performance confirmation, which are those activities that
are specifically designed to evaluate the technical bases for the
licensing decision. What do you need to do to support the assertions
that were made that NRC may choose to use to make a licensing decision?

Then there\'s long-term R and D, of which performance confirmation is
just a part. It might be any other activity not specifically directed
toward evaluating licensing bases. Remember Robert Card talking about,
gee, you know, he would be doing R and D if for no other reason than to
reduce costs. Claudio Pescatore and others talked about confidence
building as other things you might do that aren\'t directly geared at
the components of the case that was made upon which a licensing decision
might be made.

A detailed performance confirmation plan doesn\'t have to be available
right now to proceed in. The final performance confirmation plan must be
based on the completed licensing basis, and that\'s not going to be
developed\--isn\'t developed today, but the plan is, as you know, it\'s
going to be developed over the next few years. And NRC may require
additional performance confirmation work.

So the intent right now is that we should explore the role of both
long-term R and D and performance confirmation to support the Site
Recommendation decision and perhaps \"stepwise\" license application, or
at least in terms of there\'s first construction then loading then
closure, and the amendments if the SR is approved.

I\'m going to switch and talk now a bit about the particular
recommendations that the EPRI Performance Confirmation Panel made. I\'ll
quickly go through, here are the members of the Panel. We have some that
were from National Academy of Sciences. Matt Eyre, Rod McCullum and Al
Ross have licensing experience. Barry Gordon has experience dealing with
container corrosion issues. Bill Miller has dealt with the performance
confirmation issues outside the U.S. Alice Shorett has been involved
with stakeholder interactions and was involved with getting input from
stakeholders at the Hanford Reservation in terms of what they wanted to
see for how the site was cleaned up there.

This is the overview comments, and I\'ll get into a few details on some
of these. Performance confirmation and other long-term R and D is useful
and appropriate. Big surprise. We\'ll talk about, you know, how they
felt it was useful and appropriate in the next viewgraph. There are many
interested parties in performance confirmation. The obvious ones, NRC,
the Board, members of the public that might want to see certain
monitoring or performance confirmation activities or other long-term R
and D happening. And the idea there is to keep all of them informed and
provide them with some sort of input into how these things are being
developed.

NRC and DOE need to start now in developing a shared understanding of
how long-term R and D and performance confirmation will be carried out.
It was clear at the end of the workshop that they weren\'t quite on the
same page in terms of what long-term R and D and performance
confirmation were. And it\'s more than just understanding, you know,
what\'s in and what\'s out of the formal performance confirmation for
licensing but how do you implement that. And so the recommendation is
that the two parties need to sit down early and start hammering that
out.

Certainly the commitments that might be identified for performance
confirmation and license application in any near-term amendments have to
be hammered out and a common understanding is critical to that.

A flexible adaptive plan is needed. Yes, Charles, we\--they came up with
the \"adaptive\" word all by themselves in terms of how performance
confirmation, at least, should be carried out.

Another important one was prioritize performance confirmation and other
long-term R and D activities now using risk-informed judgment and clear
criteria for prioritization. And I\'ll get into a bit more about what
that means, as well as avoiding certain traps in defining a performance
confirmation program that I\'ll also talk about.

Why long-term R and D and PC is appropriate facilitates \"stepwise\"
repository development, and that would be performance confirmation.
It\'s a regulatory requirement. Society is going to demand pre-closure
monitoring. It can help reduce uncertainties. And then the other R and D
things would be like investigate opportunities for design improvement
that you\'ve heard a bit about in the past day and a half, as well as
make use of technology advances as appropriate.

In terms of what NRC and DOE need to do in terms of getting a shared
understanding, I mentioned that the commitments are going to be defined
in the licensing process, even those not starting much later. So please
start now, NRC and DOE, is the recommendation from the Panel.

NRC and DOE have made a commendable start. The final regulation has
quite a good deal of useful information, as does the standard review
plan in terms of helping to identify that. But that\'s not good enough.
Some sort of Appendix 7 technical exchange on what is meant is really
needed.

DOE\'s draft performance confirmation and their long-term R and D plans
are really quite good. They\'ve got a good start at defining what\'s in
there and what the program should be.

Differences between the two approaches need to be resolved. DOE, at
least as of last year\--and I know that DOE is working on incorporating
the final guidance from Part 63\--at least last year DOE was at the
overall performance objectives are achieved, that\'s the goal of their
performance confirmation program. Whereas NRC\'s thinking is more broad,
that, as we heard from Tim yesterday, natural and engineered barriers
are functioning as intended and anticipated. That has some implications
in terms of what is\--needs to be included in performance confirmation
activities.

Another recommendation from the Panel was that the scope of the
long-term R and D and performance confirmation activities should be
quite broad. Challenge assumptions, data, models, expert judgment that
support elimination of FEP\'s. I think that also addresses the
confidence issue that Claudio Pescatore mentioned a bit yesterday.
Identify alternative conceptual models, challenge the technical basis
for an NRC regulatory position\--so here\'s one for NRC as much as for
DOE\--and build confidence with local communities, are all things that
the Panel recommended.

In terms of using risk-informed judgment and clear criteria for
prioritization, now. The sooner these criteria are developed, the sooner
a performance confirmation program can be developed.

Some potential criteria that was offered by the Panel: the relative
\"value\" of information is certainly high on the list, i.e., stay
risk-informed in terms of what you\'re going to go after; the timing of
the need for specific information; cost of conducting it; interference
with other activities; agreements with stakeholders; concerns of
stakeholders; potential health effects to workers and the local
population of actually conducting the performance confirmation activity
itself; and the ability to define sufficiently the activity such that
\"confidence\" is truly enhanced in a reasonable amount of time, i.e.,
don\'t start an activity if you\'re not going to get there. \"There\"
being whatever level of confidence or corroboration of a model you\'re
looking for in that particular activity.

Some traps in terms of what to avoid in defining a long-term R and D
program: NRC, DOE, don\'t agree to things that can\'t be done; agreeing
to measure parameters that do not affect performance; monitoring of too
limited duration or extent; requiring unnecessary accuracy or precision
in measurements. Sometimes you just can\'t get there. You may think you
need to know a lot of accuracy, keep it in perspective, keep it
risk-informed.

Satisfying parochial interests. Don\'t do something because\--I guess we
call this the \"rice bowl issue\". Keep your eyes on the prize, which is
when in doubt, look at these top requirements in terms of prioritizing.

Assigning excessive levels of conservatism on bounds because it\'s easy
in the sense that, \"Well, we can get away with this because we
can\--you know, we\'ve got that much play.\" That kind of thinking
\"eats\" margin, and margin is an important part of managing
uncertainty. Don\'t throw it away too easily or too quickly.

And neglecting institutional aspects. You\'ve got to maintain in terms
of this is a long haul to get through all these performance
confirmation. You know, decades to potentially centuries depending on
the approach taken. You\'ve got to maintain technical capabilities over
decades, no matter what happens with the rest of the nuclear industry.
There\'s got to be something like periodic \"report cards\". And I think
that the NRC requirement for two-year intervals of updates of data is an
excellent device in terms of report cards.

I\'m going to shift to DOE\'s Eight Steps in defining performance
confirmation activity. And just for you, Priscilla, I put a star after
\"Steps\" to note that those steps can be iterative, because this was a
comment that Priscilla made during the workshop.

Well, it makes sense the first time through to perhaps think of them in
this order as you try to define a performance confirmation activity. As
you learn things and you get down here, there\'s going to be times when
you want to cycle perhaps all the way back to the beginning of these
steps to redefine a program. I think the general consensus, even of the
entire workshop, but certainly within the Panel, was that we really like
these eight steps that DOE proposed in their draft performance
confirmation report.

Quickly going through them, you start by identifying what it is you\'re
trying to measure\--that is, the key performance factors; define the
data base and predict performance; establish tolerance and predictive
limits or deviations from predicted values; identify completion criteria
and guidelines; conduct the planning; monitor the performance; analyze
the data; and recommend and implement appropriate actions if there are
deviations.

The ones in red here, especially 2, 3 and 4, we spend quite a bit of
time discussing in the workshop. These are not easy issues, especially
establishing tolerance bands, and I\'ve already heard you asking
questions about \"Well, how do you take action if the data you collect
suggests that you need to revise your understanding?\" to put it mildly.

Okay. I\'m going to cut out some of this detail because I want to get to
the end here.

In terms of Step 2, defining the database and predicting performance,
you\'ve got to think about what your \"baseline\" data are and keep
those needs separate from other modeling desires. In terms of prediction
concerns, the licensing basis model has to be optimized for very
long-term projections. And if you can do performance confirmation
projections for 50 to 300 years, are you going to use the same model
that you\'re using for 10,000 years? Maybe not. How do you get those two
to link up?

Okay, I\'m going to skip a few in the interest of time, Priscilla, and
talk a bit\--ah, I\'ve got to talk about tolerances, that\'s certainly
one of the group\'s favorite subjects. Tolerances, what is it that
you\'re measuring, how do you know whether you\'re confirming
performance when you\'re trying to do a shorter term test and project it
over 10,000 years is a toughie. It\'s a key step in a successful
performance confirmation activity. You\'ve got to combine baseline data
with projection, and be warned that it may become a license condition,
\"If\...then,\" \"If not\...\" specifications.

I\'m going to skip the next one.

Some options for establishing tolerances. It\'s not\--the group was
thinking more than just what I would say is the NRC basis, avoiding
exceeding particular parameter range value is the, you know, anticipated
and projected. But there\'s maybe other alternatives that I think DOE
was trying to keep in mind by staying risk-informed here. It may be
okay, for example, to avoid\--if your real objective is to avoid
exceeding regulatory criteria, it may be okay for parameter to be
outside the range if the criteria are still met. You may want to support
the refinement of an engineered system with a particular test, and you
may want to avoid needing to re-engineer something, even within the
regulatory criteria.

Certainly in terms\--I\'m going to skip some now.

For Step 8, recommend and implement appropriate actions. They\'ve got to
think of everything. No action, limited testing, more testing,
modification of original license bases, all the way through temporary
halt of emplacement while they figure out where they\'re at to
potentially retrieval and abandonment of the site. All of those are
legitimate options.

Other long-term R and D that\'s not performance confirmation would be
the alternative engineering designs, the impact of technology
improvements, and testing and monitoring to ensure retrieval capability
were things that at the time we felt were potentially outside
performance confirmation. I think NRC has a different view of that now
in some cases.

Okay, I\'m going to try to wrap up here and talk quickly about, you
know, how does performance confirmation fit into what we term
\"Step-wise\" licensing. This idea\--you\'ve seen this now from several
of us in the past day and a half\--is that maybe over time what we\'re
after is greater confidence, whatever that confidence is, and that while
we\'re here at Site Recommendation\--and I wanted to make sure I put in
that, well, I\'ve got the axes this particular way\--confidence is a
whole lot greater than 0 at where we\'re at today.

And there are analogies to reactors here that, for example, we\'ve got
the construction, start up testing, low capacity testing, and full
capacity testing with normal operation analogy out here after closure.
So this isn\'t a totally uncharted territory, this idea of step-wise
development. There\'s a lot of analogies here to what happens already in
the reactor industry and how you have risk that increases in terms of
the public later on and the amount of information that a reactor needs
to provide as they move into actually receipt of fuel and initiating the
reactions.

So performance confirmation is similar to the \"Tech Spec\" surveillance
program for reactors. In that case they verify equipment is operable,
they have what are called \"Limiting Conditions of Operation\", what
equipment must be operable and, if not, what actions to be taken. So
repositories, there\'s likely to be differing degrees of inoperability,
so the analogy has to be changed a bit there, and the timing in terms
of, you know, how much time do you have to react here. It could be
decades before operability needs to be restored or alternative action
taken. For example, if something doesn\'t look good about the casks and
you may want to do something like Alberto was asking about this morning,
you don\'t have to do it like tomorrow, you may have mitigating things
you can do and take quite a bit of time to think about it.

Last viewgraph. So the keys to the next stage for Yucca Mountain,
assuming the SR is approved, is that we feel that there is sufficient
confidence now for societal decision to proceed to licensing. Long-term
R and D and performance confirmation is part of that confidence, in
addition to the 20ish or so years of work that\'s already gone into
understanding the mountain. There also needs to be a strong vision for
what the license should look like, and I think that NRC and DOE together
are thinking about what that\--well, together or separately are thinking
about what that should look like. There\'s certainly the need to further
improve confidence. In response to your letter from last January and for
licensing, there needs to be an improvement in confidence. Clearly
identified approaches to enhancing confidence in important FEPs through
successive stages of licensing. Performance confirmation is one part,
conservatisms, analogues, all of those things address that. Maintain a
viable plan to adjust or reverse course. That\'s really an important
part of the program. If nothing else, that element of confidence always
needs to be there. And monitoring to establish broader confidence.

One that I think I skipped over in time is this idea of not everything
is going to be amenable to performance confirmation testing. You can\'t
get there in 10 or 20 years. A plan has to be developed real soon on how
to deal with those FEPs that are important to performance that are not
unamenable to performance confirmation testing.

Thank you.

DR. NELSON: Thanks very much, John, very well done.

Questions from the Board? Dr. Craig?

DR. CRAIG: Paul Craig. Yeah, a very interesting report. I\'d like to
explore with you a moment the issue of how much R and D is enough. And
many years ago, back when I was working for the Science Advisory
Establishment here in Washington, we spent a lot of time asking how much
is enough. And dollar figure is a great\--you need to have some
reference points and there can be such a thing as too much, but
confidence is lost if it drops too low. And I\'m wondering if your
committee gave some thought to establishing some criteria as to what is
the right amount. It seems to be particularly important now as we\'re
getting signals that the science part of the DOE budget is starting to
crush.

MR. KESSLER: We did not address how much is enough. Again, speaking
personally, it\'s more of an issue of\--it goes beyond just the
performance confirmation program itself. From a licensing standpoint,
NRC is going to be satisfied that the key licensing issues are addressed
by whatever that R and D is. Before even DOE makes its case to NRC, DOE
itself has to be satisfied that they\'re confident. We just talked about
this at lunch, a few of us, this idea that DOE has to have confidence
that they have made the right case internally, then they can work on it
outside. But we did not talk about how much is enough. That\'s clearly a
subjective decision in part.

DR. CRAIG: Well, it\'s subjective and people will make judgments, and
who makes the judgments matter and the kind of input that they have
matters and whether it\'s a parochial viewpoint or whether it\'s a
broader viewpoint\--

MR. KESSLER: Right.

DR. CRAIG: \--international viewpoint, whether stakeholders are
involved, all of these things matter. So it would be possible to put
together a criteria discussion that would allow one to run this
conversation at a high level, and it seems to me that\'s important right
now.

MR. KESSLER: You could develop some criteria, perhaps, up front, but
others will depend on what information you\'re getting as you run along.
I mean you may think you need so much information, but what if you find
out that something looks a whole lot better or a whole lot worse? You
may change the amount of information you think you need as you go along.

DR. CRAIG: Absolutely. Adaptive management, right.

DR. NELSON: Okay, just a warning to the Board, I have Jerry, Dan, Debra,
Norm and Jeff, that\'s five people. Please keep that in mind as you
bring your questions. Jerry?

DR. COHON: I\'ll be very brief. If I can only remember what I was going
to ask. Oh, the diagram showing confidence going up?

MR. KESSLER: Yes.

DR. COHON: I\'m sure that when you drew that you just wanted to make it
as general as possible, but there\'s actually\--

MR. KESSLER: Right.

DR. COHON: \--a point that you show confidence going down.

MR. KESSLER: Absolutely, we wanted to make sure that was there.

DR. COHON: Have you thought about a situation where we might see
confidence go down as we go out in time?

MR. KESSLER: It\'s one of those unknown unknowns. We\'re going to expect
surprises. Some of them will be pleasant, some of them will be
unpleasant, so we\'ll get some dips in confidence. If that dip, for
example, in licensing speak, is a new unreviewed safety question, at
that point NRC is going to come in and make sure that that question gets
answered. And, you know, there are plenty of cases where the applicant
never got there, and the applicant, after receiving a barrage of
unanswerable questions, backed out. Assuming DOE can put together a plan
and move past that, they will. But this is, you know, in licensing
speak, sort of a new discovery that\'s something that NRC hadn\'t
considered before in making their licensing case. This may cause a halt
of redo, reengineering. But I can\'t be specific about what I see that
being, Jerry.

DR. COHON: Okay. Just one thought for your consideration. On your list
of traps, another trap, not specific to this situation, is equating
measurability with significance. That is, we can only measure what we
can measure, but that doesn\'t mean that the things that we leave
unmeasured are not significant.

MR. KESSLER: Exactly. Right. That\'s what I was trying to say with that
extemporaneous comment right at the end, is that there are some things
that just aren\'t amenable to performance confirmation program, and
natural analogues or whatever are going to have to be used to deal with
those issues.

DR. NELSON: So in follow up, do you consider analogue studies to be an
important part of performance confirmation?

MR. KESSLER: Yes.

DR. NELSON: Okay. All right, Dan.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Could you put up the one you didn\'t show?

MR. KESSLER: Okay.

DR. BULLEN: Because actually I had a question about that one.

MR. KESSLER: Sorry about that.

DR. BULLEN: You talked about the\--

MR. KESSLER: Which number is that, Dan?

DR. BULLEN: It\'s the one that\'s\--20, Number 20.

MR. KESSLER: Okay, thank you. Got it. All right.

DR. BULLEN: If you talk about the things that are operating as intended
and anticipated, there are a couple of things. If you take a look at the
example\--and this is out of a DOE document, I understand\--

MR. KESSLER: Right.

DR. BULLEN: \--and it shows the predicted bounds of operation and, you
know, one of the discussions, I was very fortunate to be at the
meeting\--and actually, thank you for inviting Board members to
come\--we talked about the fact that what if it doesn\'t fall within the
predicted bounds? Then I could see it as a case that Jerry mentioned
where, you know, your confidence goes down because your model said this
is supposed to go up.

MR. KESSLER: Absolutely.

DR. BULLEN: It\'s not bad that it didn\'t go up because it\'s actually
performing better, but if it didn\'t fall within the predicted bounds,
then maybe you don\'t understand the fundamental mechanisms. And so how
did your panel address those kinds of issues?

MR. KESSLER: Well, we talked about it may not fall within the bounds
because you set the bounds based on a conservative model, and you
wouldn\'t expect it to fall within those bounds in terms of when you
really do a measurement. Other cases they may have gotten it wrong and
they would have expected it to fall in those bounds and for whatever
reason it doesn\'t. If it doesn\'t, they\'re going to have to go back
and rethink, and I would imagine this is going to be something that
resembles an unreviewed safety question in terms of licensing space. But
in any case, whatever it\'s called, they\'re going to need to go back
and look at that and assess from, you know, the global perspective as
well as everything else, maybe this is important to one barrier and
maybe their defense of that barrier now becomes shaky. They\'re going to
have to go back perhaps all the way back to the beginning of those eight
steps and rethink, or even ahead of that.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. One last question, then I\'ll be done. We
heard this morning from Woody Stroupe that there was going to be a panel
that will have\--a first emplacement panel that will have the
performance confirmation tests in it. Any dream tests that the EPRI or
the industry would like to see in there? I mean I asked mine about a
degraded waste package already, I was just wondering if there\'s any
kind of input that you think you\'d like to see thought about as they
develop those types of panels.

MR. KESSLER: Yes. It\'s not a test, it\'s a methodology for defending a
test. I\'d like to see a methodology developed such that \"Here\'s why
we\'re going to do this, here\'s why we\'re going to get there, here\'s
what we think we\'re going to measure, and here\'s what it addresses.\"
That\'s the wish list.

DR. BULLEN: Thank you.

DR. NELSON: Okay, Debra.

DR. KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board. John, on your last slide, the second to the
last bullet said, \"Maintain a viable plan to adjust or reverse
course.\"

MR. KESSLER: Yes.

DR. KNOPMAN: And then your Slide 23 had what I guess you were filling
out from DOE\'s Step 8 about potential options.

MR. KESSLER: Yes.

DR. KNOPMAN: The missing link has been brought out before, is what are
the decision rules, the trigger points, that would put you into any one
of these options? Or put another way, how do you make a plan viable? And
it seems to me you make it viable by laying out in advance what those
triggers are for any one of those options. What\'s your panel have to
say about that, or what do you have to say about that?

MR. KESSLER: The panel only\--I\'m not sure we really addressed that in
any detail. In terms of options, it\'s going to\--I hate to even say it,
but it depends, it really does. I mean, what is it that\'s not working?
How important is that? Is there a fix in terms of more data, a different
design? Is this a critical component to the whole repository such that
if you don\'t have it you\'ll never get NRC confidence of that key
barrier? Maybe the confidence will increase that they can\'t meet the
limits. That\'s a different kind of confidence. So I\'m sorry, I can\'t
answer in advance.

DR. KNOPMAN: Well, no, you actually have answered to some extent that
you\'d follow some kind of fault tree type of\--

MR. KESSLER: Yes.

DR. KNOPMAN: \--progression of questions, and if you got to the end and
weren\'t able to get off that, you\'d probably be down at the bottom
with abandoning\--

MR. KESSLER: Exactly. That\'s why I brought up\--

DR. KNOPMAN: But the point is, you know, has anyone actually stepped
through that progression of questions, that sequencing or branching
through a set of questions?

MR. KESSLER: Not to my knowledge. There was some general discussion in
the draft DOE performance confirmation plan, a little bit in the
long-term R and D plan, but not in any detail to my recollection.

DR. NELSON: Okay, Jeff, Norm has yielded because Jerry stole his
thunder, so you\'re next.

DR. WONG: Jeff Wong, Board. Thanks for the extra time there, Norm. Slide
26. You talk about performance confirmation increasing confidence, and I
think of two kinds of confidence. One is technical confidence, which it
looks like your efforts or your presentation is directed toward
increasing the confidence on the part of the regulator, and your last
slide talks about moving toward a societal decision. Do you think that
the confidence or the slope is going to increase as sharply for those or
not\--

MR. KESSLER: It\'s a cartoon, Jeff, a cartoon. And all we\'ve\--

DR. WONG: We have other stakeholders out there.

MR. KESSLER: Sure. I mean one would think that it\'s sort of the classic
learning curve, and we probably should have had this inflect the other
way, but be it as it may, all I wanted to do was make sure we had one of
those in there. There is definitely going to be some point, or many
points, along the way where confidence will go down to whatever
magnitude you want to think about it. Now I understand your \--that was
the technical part, and where is the broader confidence issues in here?
Well, I look forward to hearing what Steve Brocoum has to say in terms
of dealing with other long-term R and D, how might they get challenging
models, how might public input be addressed in terms\--this isn\'t what
Steve is going to address, but certainly performance confirmation needs
to address what monitoring is going to be done. There will be some
monitoring. For example, the Nye County Wells, they were put in there
for monitoring and for confidence of Nye County. There\'s going to be
other things that will be put in to build that kind of confidence. I
think NRC\'s already alluded to some things that to me look like
they\'re more public confidence building necessarily than technical
confidence building, but that\'s my personal opinion on that one.

DR. WONG: Yeah, I mean if you have an institution in which the public
has low confidence, I mean, does the Panel believe that this particular
process is going to be sufficient to overcome the threshold and that
their confidence will grow or they\'ll just keep flatline with no
confidence in the institution?

MR. KESSLER: We only got in a bit to institutional confidence. The big
concern there that was discussed among the panelists was maintaining the
sufficient knowledge about what\'s going on. I think Steve Frishman even
mentioned it in his last remarks, this idea that it\'s a long haul and
the institutions need to be maintained to keep the information and keep
informed decision makers as we go along, and the public will change as
things go along. And that all needs to be considered. I think that\'s
about as far as we got along those lines, Jeff, in terms of the panel
recommendations.

DR. WONG: Okay, thank you.

DR. NELSON: Okay, last question, Richard.

DR. PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. That kink could have had after operating
license was issued? You had that downturn. That could be really after
operating license?

MR. KESSLER: It could be, sure. I mean the point is, is that performance
confirmation testing will go at least to the time of closure, and now
there\'s discussion about potentially after that.

DR. PARIZEK: Not just\--

MR. KESSLER: Yes, it\'s just\--

DR. PARIZEK: \--you can put one in, but it can be anywhere.

MR. KESSLER: It\'s just a cartoon, put it in there somewhere so we could
talk about it because I knew you\'d ask questions about it.

DR. PARIZEK: Yes. Well, we\'re going to also ask about research and
development, the long-term kind of studies, the short-term studies to
support LA.

MR. KESSLER: Yes.

DR. PARIZEK: There\'s any number of these points.

MR. KESSLER: Right.

DR. PARIZEK: And I guess the program will give us some highlights on
that shortly. But from an EPRI point of view, you\'ve done a lot to help
facilitate this whole process, showing the way, how to make these
analyses, you did one-on analyses one-off analyses, you did things that
are very helpful. What research and development does EPRI plan to do
from now on in order to help with these sorts of understandings in order
to facilitate all of this? I mean you must have some goals and some
plans of your own.

MR. KESSLER: Well, I was really depending on Jerry to ask me the same
question he asked Bob Loux, which was do I have a big enough budget, but
well, my boss is in the audience, so I\--

DR. PARIZEK: Well, do you have a big enough budget?

MR. KESSLER: No, seriously, our goal for this year is to do our own
evaluation of the KTI agreements. We want to understand what we think is
most important about them. You know, we\'re transitioning into thinking
about licensing, assuming that SR gets approved, and we want to
basically question, well, are they all the right ones, are they the
right priority, what\'s the timing for them? We want to have our own
understanding of that. So that\'s our next goal, and we view this
initial performance confirmation activity as a basis by which to help us
understand and potentially prioritize things like the KTI agreements, as
one example.

DR. PARIZEK: Yes. And then according to what one\'s fallout is being
difficult to deal with, you might then do some research on those
specifically technical in nature and so on.

MR. KESSLER: Right, right.

DR. PARIZEK: Other than administrative review.

MR. KESSLER: Right. And in terms of what EPRI specifically will do about
them, all we can\--our plans, at least for this year, are to highlight
our understanding and our methodology and how we develop criteria for
which ones come first or which ones are well supported.

DR. PARIZEK: How about next year? I mean, you must plan at least two
years in advance.

MR. KESSLER: I\'d love to. In terms of next year, I haven\'t really
gotten there other than it\'s going to be\--we always look for
opportunities to tell a different story, fill in a hole where for
whatever reason we think we saw a hole. And at that point it hasn\'t
been identified. The project is moving fast.

DR. PARIZEK: So your vision is just kind of keep an eye open for where
you can be both most useful it seems like.

MR. KESSLER: Right, right.

DR. PARIZEK: Thanks.

DR. NELSON: Thank you very much, John.

MR. KESSLER: Well, transportation certainly is something we\'re getting
into, that\'s a new one for us.

DR. NELSON: Good. Okay, thanks, John.

MR. KESSLER: Okay.

DR. NELSON: We will move on into a suite of three presentations. The
first one is going to be given by Peter Swift. You want to come up,
Peter? And he will be making the presentation that had been prepared to
be presented by Nancy Williams. Peter has degrees through doctorate in
geosciences. He worked at WIP for nine years before coming to the
project, and I think he\'s been here since, when, \'97?

MR. SWIFT: \'98.

DR. NELSON: \'98. And Peter is going to tell us the story of where
science is in this project and how science and engineering testing
within the PA work interfaces with science and technology project and
activities generated out of the office of the chief scientist. Please.

MR. SWIFT: Thank you. Is the microphone okay, you can hear me?

DR. NELSON: Beautiful.

MR. SWIFT: I want to start off by apologizing for not being Nancy
Williams. She couldn\'t be here, she apologizes for that, so I offered
to do this. The first portion she\'ll present\--I\'ll present\--is just
an introduction to talks by Larry Trautner over here on design, and then
again by myself on performance assessment science and testing. And I\'ll
speak on my own behalf following the break.

This is a little bit of a switch from what John just talked about with
performance confirmation. We\'re talking rather about the R and D work
that is in our plan heading forward in the next two years. This is
basically what\'s in our license application plan. And then Steve
Brocoum will talk about science that goes beyond license application
plan.

Can I have the next slide, please?

The overall planning goal that BSC took here is to be able to submit a
license application, should that be appropriate and should the DOE ask
us to do so, by December of 2004. We didn\'t go into this with that as a
given date, we went into it with a target date, can we do it, and the
work that we\'ll talk about here in the next hour was designed to
evaluate whether or not that was an achievable date.

The work falls into three general areas, which we call performance
assessment now within the project\--I\'ll say more about that in a
second\--design, and LA\--that\'s an abbreviation for \"license
application\". Performance assessment here, the project has reorganized,
and I\'ll do something that may be a bit unusual for a presentation to
this Board, but I\'ll go through some organizational charts from BSC. I
think they are relevant just to see how we\'ve chosen to reorganize the
work. Performance assessment now incorporates the science programs that
I\'ve been familiar with for many years and the testing programs, the
postclosure testing.

And the greatest challenge we felt was within the performance assessment
scope, testing, modeling, analysis. This would be where it was most
difficult to\--where the questions were hardest, we felt, as to whether
or not we could achieve a license application in December of 2004. The
emphasis was on making sure we had a sound technical basis, and yes, we
made organizational changes.

Next slide, please.

The two other parts of the three key paths to a license application:
design\--and I\'ll really just defer here to Larry Trautner, the manager
of the design project, and he will talk next; and development of the
license application documentation and the licensing strategy, how will
we actually document our case for the NRC, based on, for example, what
the NRC has given us recently in the review plan, the key technical
issue agreements that we have made with the NRC, and of course the
ongoing work.

May I have the next slide?

I apologize for the eye test. I also apologize for showing an
organizational chart, but I really do think it\'s relevant here. First,
Nancy Williams here (indicating). I\'m not her. You won\'t actually find
me on the org. chart, I\'m off the bottom down here (indicating). I\'ll
start at the bottom here other than to know that Nancy\'s at the top.
Across the bottom here are four projects\--they\'re called \"projects
within the BSC projects\". It\'s the way we\'ve organized the work. The
four projects across the bottom are familiar terms we all should
recognize. The Site Recommendation Project, Jerry King\'s work. This is
the group that put together the documentation that supported the site
recommendation. This group is still active but is obviously winding its
work down. The Repository Design Project led by Larry Trautner. The
Performance Assessment Project, which as I mentioned now includes all of
the familiar science and postclosure testing programs, and the License
Application Project led by Steve Cereghino.

Two other points I want to make. I\'m not going through the whole thing,
but one of them here, this box here, the Science and Technology Project,
this is brand-new as of the last two or three weeks. This org. chart is
still very much in flux. This has Mark Peters in it, who\'s familiar to
the Board, I\'m sure, from having managed the testing program for many
years. Mark will be moving into a new project, a direct report to Nancy
Williams, to be the interface with the group that Margaret Chu described
to you yesterday. This would be the new science and technology team
forming within the DOE. This is new work. This is a job still in
transition. Mark is here in the audience, and he can probably offer you
more opinions on how that job will evolve through time.

The other thing I want to mention here while I\'ve got this up is this
thing called the Project Oversight Board over here on the far left
(indicating). This is an advisory group that reports directly to Nancy
Williams. She is the chair of it, and this group has meet quite a few
times during the course of the winter to advise her on important
decisions related to science and testing. And the membership of this
group, just to go down quickly through who\'s on it there. The names
should be familiar. They\'re representatives from the licensing and
strategy groups, Don Beckman and Jack Bailey; from the project\'s Chief
Science Office, Jean Younker; from the National Laboratories, Andrew
Orrell, Bo Bodvarsson, Joe Farmer; Tom Cotton with licensing experience;
and Zell Peterman from the USGS.

The attempt here was to give Nancy a group of people who had a broad
perspective on the project, understood the science, understood the
licensing strategies and the implications. This is essentially the final
court of appeals within the project for decisions about what work does
and does not get done. And I will have an example here when I give my
own talk of how that group actually functioned.

Can I have the next slide, please?

Within Bob Andrews\' Performance Assessment Project, we\'ve reorganized
here basically to provide Bob more management support and a better focus
of the science programs reporting to him. Down across the bottom here
first: Testing Project, Engineered Systems, and Natural Systems.

Within the Engineered Systems\--these are called subprojects\--within
the Engineered Systems Subproject you\'ll find the familiar science
departments formerly, and still, called Waste Form, Waste Package
Performance, Engineered Barrier System Performance, and so on. Those
groups are managed by essentially the same people we\'ve known for years
and report through Tom Doering.

Natural Systems would be the unsaturated zone, saturated zone, the
biosphere, and disruptive events.

And a new subproject created, Performance Assessment Strategy and Scope.
This subproject has two groups in it. One of them is Total System
Performance Assessment\--that would be Jerry McNeish\'s team, which has
run the calculations for years, built the TSPA model. The other is a
group with did the work, which I\'ll describe in my talk, that provided
the decision analysis support. And \"support\" is the key word. We
didn\'t make the decision out of this group, we provided the information
to support a decision by the project oversight board on what work would
be done. So that\'s the strategy and scope part of the title of that
subproject.

Can I have the next slide, please?

And this just\--mostly it\'s in the handout here to make sure you have a
copy of it available here\--lays out some of the key milestones that we
believe at a very high level will need to be met to make a December \'04
license application submittal. And I\'m not going to walk through them,
I think they\'re there. You can ask me questions or I\'ll defer
questions to others in the audience if I don\'t have the answers for
them. We are now somewhere just past April \'02, we\'re in there. So
things on the left-hand side of it should already have happened, indeed
they have, and the rest of it is laid out to the right of us there.

And I\'m actually going to stop at this point. I\'ll field short
questions, I think that\'s appropriate. And then Larry Trautner will
speak, and he will talk primarily about the design paths to license
application. I will then come back after the break and talk about the
strategic work we did this winter and the performance assessment and
modeling work on the path out to LA.

DR. NELSON: Thanks. Can I ask you to go to 4, Slide 4? It\'s the org.
chart.

MR. SWIFT: Sure.

DR. NELSON: And I took one of these before, but there was another box on
there. Can you just show me where that Office of the Chief Scientist is,
Mike Voegele is?

MR. SWIFT: I\'m sorry, I don\'t have that organizational chart, it\'s
one up from Nancy Williams.

DR. NELSON: They\'re up.

MR. SWIFT: What you need is the top level org. chart for BSC, which
starts with Ken Hess, who is here in the audience, and Don Peerman
(phonetic), his deputy general manager. And then the direct reports at
that level include a Chief Science Office, a Chief Engineer\'s Office,
an Office of Projects\--that would be Nancy Williams. That\'s the office
through which work is actually implemented. And you\'d also find the
various essentially the support functions of the organization at that
level as well.

DR. NELSON: Okay. Thank you. Any other clarifying questions? Yes, Dan?

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Go ahead to Number 6, please. Just a quick
question. We saw a new\--or we saw a different repository layout today
that had another tunnel going in and saw five panels and the like, and
we were told that that\'s just a conceptual design, it\'s not the final
one, the TSPA-SR design is still what it is. But where would a design
like that have to be frozen or changed, at what time frame in here in
the design box that\'s blue? I see April \'02 has \"Conceptual design
evaluations complete and requirements established,\" and then
\"Conceptual baseline update\" by September. So somewhere in there I\'m
assuming there has to be we\'re making five panels, the first one\'s
going to have the performance confirmation drift in it and all that.

MR. SWIFT: I think that\'s\--

DR. BULLEN: So it hasn\'t been done yet, but that\'s the time frame
should you be told to go forward? Is that kind of you\'re sort of
waiting to do that?

MR. SWIFT: Um-hum.

DR. BULLEN: Okay. Thank you.

DR. NELSON: One more clarifying question.

DR. SAGÜÉS: Yes, Number 4 again.

DR. NELSON: This is Sagüés.

DR. SAGÜÉS: Sorry. In Number 4, again, of the Science and Technology
Project, what does that box do?

MR. SWIFT: Well, as I say, that box\'s function is essentially waiting
to see how the science program that Margaret Chu outlined briefly
yesterday morning, to see how that evolves, to make sure that we at BSC
are ready to implement it when DOE gives us direction.

So at the moment, Mark, would you like me to call you up here to comment
further on that? I\'m going to do it anyway.

This is Mark Peters, he is in that box and on the spot.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. It wouldn\'t have been an official Board
meeting if Mark didn\'t talk anyway, because he\'s spoken to us the last
nine times. So, Mark, we\'re glad you\'re here.

MR. PETERS: Thanks, Dan. Mark Peters, Los Alamos. As Peter already
mentioned, it will be an interface with the function that you\'re going
to hear from Steve Brocoum here shortly, so there will be some component
of the out-of-the-box kind of thinking. But the other part of what I
want to be focusing on, is Peter\'s going to tell you in the next
session about testing that supports the LA. Part of my role is going to
be to think about the testing and analysis that takes us out to, say,
the 2010 time frame and work with people like Woody on some of the
concepts that he presented this morning as well. That\'s about as best
as I can go from here, it\'s a brand-new job.

DR. NELSON: Yes. Well, that\'s going to be a question that\'s going to
come up again. If you don\'t understand it, raise it with Steve Brocoum,
because the issue about what constitutes long-term R and D or scientific
work beyond the time that LA application is filed is a question.

Okay, thanks very much. We will ask Larry Trautner to come up right now
and make his presentation. Larry has had a 31-year career thus far with
Bechtel, and he, too, did some service down at WIP and also at the
Hanford Waste Site and the Nevada Test Site in earlier days, prior
lives. Larry\'s job now is to manage the Repository Design Project,
which you saw in the org. chart, and he will be talking about those
plans to get the LA design set, maybe.

MR. TRAUTNER: Thank you, Priscilla. Can everybody hear me all right?

I will summarize the Repository Design Project\'s work plans for this
fiscal year next and also try to describe how we\'re going to manage the
key interfaces between engineering and science or performance assessment
within those work plans.

Our first viewgraph?

The scope for Repository Design Project is fairly straightforward.
We\'re going to design the waste package, and read into that a broader
term, the engineered barrier systems, not just the waste package. And of
course the subsurface and surface facilities that would go along to
support the repository.

The overall percent complete we\'d expect for the cut off for the
license application would be about 30 percent complete. We\'d expect the
waste package design to be brought beyond that, the subsurface to be
less than, you know, the waste package, and the surface facilities to be
less than that. So it\'s not going to be a consistent level of detail,
and I\'ll talk more about the level of detail.

Next viewgraph.

There are several goals, or you might call them guidelines, that were
driving our scope for this work plan. The first and probably one of the
foremost is to have sufficient work done to support the License
Application. How are we defining \"sufficient\"? Well, that\'s does it
comply with 10 CFR 63, and of course the Yucca Mountain Review Plan,
which has quite a bit of detail in that. And, you know, John mentioned
before me, and several other people have mentioned this, this design not
only includes the design construction operation but
retrievability/reversibility. So we will be providing in that License
Application a design for retrieval of the waste packages and reversal of
the process, so that is part of the requirement.

Consistent with that Yucca Mountain Review Plan would be a graded
approach toward a level of detail or the level of design detail we go
into for the different system structures and components. And that graded
approach will be dependent upon the relative importance to safety of
each of the systems, structures and components that we\'ll be designing.
And that\'s driven, of course, by the performance assessment in terms of
postclosure and by the Preclosure Safety Assessment in terms of
Preclosure. So our design detail will be driven directly by the
risk-informed performance-based processes that the safety analysis
people go through. So we\'re providing a lot more detail for those
systems important to safety than, say, for warehouses and admin
billings.

A third area that\'s very important, of course, is to address the
outstanding technical issues. Peter\'s going to address that in more
detail about how we went through and prioritized that work, but about 10
percent of the outstanding technical issues are engineering based. In
other words, they\'re designed at the waste package and a lot of the
rotten mechanics things you heard Mark Board talk about earlier. So say
about 10 percent of our effort\--10 percent of the KTI effort is in
engineering, and we\'ll be providing that and supporting that and making
sure that those issues are addressed before the License Application is
submitted.

And finally, an important point that Russ mentioned yesterday, is the
support at the procurement acquisition process within DOE. DOE orders as
well as the Yucca Mountain Review Plan require us to lay out detailed
plans on how we\'re going to buy special equipment, how we\'ll construct
the repository, and of course there will be things also tied into
reversibility in that stage.

When you add all this up, what does this mean? Well, we\'ll have over
900 design documents, drawings, specifications, calculations, to support
that, and other support documents, like a design analyses and studies
and so on. That will be part of this License Application design effort
in the next two years.

Another point worth mentioning is over 70 percent of those will be tied
into the safety-related systems. So we\'ll still have some information
there on the site plans and things like the interface control documents
that aren\'t really tied directly into design but do have a lot of other
types of documents in there. But nearly 1,000 documents will be prepared
in those two years.

Next viewgraph. Our priorities.

Clearly the design is a performance-based, performance-driven design. If
there ever was a facility or ever was a project where performance drives
design, this is it. So clearly TSPA and, secondarily, but to the NRC
just as important, the preclosure safety analysis are going to drive our
ultimate designs. And we will be focusing during this period on ways to
support PA and TSPA, especially where we can enhance confidence. You
know, we\'ve heard a lot about enhancing confidence.

One example here, you saw this new layout that we\'re pursuing. We
haven\'t it adopted it yet. But one of the elements of that would be to
drop the northern and southern extensions that are now in the layout in
the SR because there were some issues there about water rise in the
north and fractured rock in the south. So one way to improve confidence,
enhance confidence, and not affect the ultimate result of the design,
because it still is going to meet 15 mrem, would be to maybe look at not
using that space for the repository.

Close integration with science. I\'ll have several viewgraphs that talk
about this in a few minutes.

Provide flexibility. Woody talked about that this morning. Our design,
our goal and our priority is not to provide a design that will prohibit
or prevent or preclude any certain design options. Our goal is not to
have certain options that are actually precluded because it was designed
to perform, so that\'s why we want to have a design that can go hot or
cold, we want to have a design that can handle different waste streams,
variable waste streams.

Now, there\'s a lot of other variabilities involved that we need to be
able to take that into consideration. So our goal here is to give the
decision makers in the Department of Energy the maximum time available
to allow them to be able to go and make these decisions, get the maximum
amount of information they can. Again, you saw Woody\'s presentation
this morning where you lay out timelines for that. Let\'s not let this
design preclude some of those options in the future.

And last, certainly but not least, is to reduce cost. In the near term
we\'re going to be looking at only providing a level of detail that\'s
absolutely necessary to satisfy the requirements in the Yucca Mountain
Review Plan and the 10 CFR 63, and of course to support science and the
performance assessment.

In the long term, though, we\'ll be doing a lot of value engineering
studies. We\'re undergoing some now. You saw Jeff talking about a couple
of them this morning in terms of the layouts, the modularization, that
kind of a concept. We\'ll be looking at materials as a result of the
Waste Package Peer Review. They questioned the titanium in the drip
shields. We\'ll be evaluating and taking another look at that and
whether titanium is the right material or not. Always taking and
leveraging on the SR design. Not necessarily changing it for the sake of
change, but only if we can improve it somehow.

Next viewgraph. The integration.

I mentioned how important what we do is with integrating with science. A
couple of the things, major things, that we\'ve done, a reorganization.
Peter described that briefly, the new organization that we have. You saw
Tom Doering\'s name in the EBS Performance Assessment box. For those of
you that know Tom, well, Tom was design manager for me for Waste Package
and EBS Systems three, four months ago. Nancy and I and Bob Andrews
agreed that we need to have better integration within the Waste Package
EBS Systems and said one way to make that happen is let\'s take the
design manager, put him in charge of the performance assessment effort.
And you know, Tom is very capable of qualified to do that. He brought
several of his good analysts over with him, and so we\'re driving
integration that way, is one example.

Another example is the schedule. Bob and I spent hours and hours putting
together a very detailed integrated work plan for Plan B to get us to
License Application. That plan has 6,000 line items in it and over
several hundred logic ties between science and engineering. So we\'ve
spent a lot of time doing the planning. You know, the concept in good
project management is plan the work, then work the plan. Well, we did a
good job, I think, of planning the work.

Now we\'ve got the work plan, what do we do? Well, we\'ve managed that
also. Bob and I meet several times a week. Two of the important meetings
we have each week, I\'ll highlight one, is we sit down with Nancy and
Bob and I\'s direct reports and subordinates and analyze that detailed
critical paths schedule. We do a 60-day look ahead and say, \"Okay, what
key activities on critical path or near critical paths are going to
occur over the next 60 days?\" and \"If I\'m giving something to science
or vice versa, or to performance assessment, what does that do to the
schedule, and how can we have work-arounds to recover from that?\"

Another area that we meet once a week is I call Management Interface
Meeting, where Bob and I meet and we invite Priscilla, the CSO, you
know, Mike Voegele, or Jean Younkers if Mike\'s not available, and the
engineering functional manager. The four of us sit down and talk about,
you know, major top-level issues, like key staffing positions, you know,
the kind of thing we talked about with Tom Doering, we talk about other
top technical issues, possibly, whether it\'s seismic or whatever topic
of the week it happens to be that\'s critical.

Okay, and also, one other thing we talk about in these meetings are
information exchange drawings, and I will get into that in the next
couple of viewgraphs from now and talk about what those are.

Next viewgraph would kind of highlight some of the logic ties. What
I\'ve done here is go into that 6,000 line item and pull out of there
about 15 or 20 top key logic ties between science and engineering. Bob
and I use this as a tool to look at these interactions on a weekly
basis. And I\'m not going to go through all of these, but let me just
highlight three or four of them.

If you look under \"Subsurface,\" the fifth item there, \"Geotechnical
rock parameters data\". Well, Mark Board talked about that this morning.
Very important element that we understand and we get good data, rock
mechanics data, from the current testing that\'s ongoing out there. And
Mark in this sense is working for both Bob Andrews and I to solve this
problem, to develop this data, have the program, the testing program,
generate that data and provide it to design so we can design our rock
bolts and so on.

Another example of a different kind of interface, if you\'ll look at the
third item under \"Waste Package,\" the corrosion samples, or any
testing that science is doing, performance assessment is doing on these
material samples. Well, we procure those material samples. We\'ll go
out, write a specification, buy those materials, and send them to
science to do the testing on. So we work that way. That\'s another
example of a logic tie that we have in that schedule.

A third example, and maybe a little different kind, if you look under
\"Surfaces,\" where seismic design is a soils layer engineering data.
Well, you know, when we get into doing detailed design on the waste
surface facilities, we have to do a seismic analysis which says, you
know, what\'s your soil structure interaction look like? And so we need
to have certain engineering parameters in that soils data. We didn\'t
need to know that for Site Recommendation, but clearly we need to know
it for License Application, licensing the facility.

So those are just three examples of the kinds of interfaces and logic
ties that Bob and I review weekly.

And the last viewgraph I have here is another version of interactions
between Bob and I. Well, we agreed early on that the way we want to
document that data, that information that is flowing between science and
engineering, how do we document that besides putting it in a memo and
then it sits on a shelf and maybe grows dust and people can\'t find it
later is that we agreed that we would generate a set of schematics that
are drawings that actually have the key parameters listed on them. This
is an example of, say, an in drift configuration schematic that would
list things like drift diameter, drift\--I guess the drift diameter must
be on here somewhere\--the drift diameter, you see the maximum wall
temperature. That would be a key parameter that either he would want me
or I\'d need from him in this case of, you know, what is the actual
maximum wall temperature in the drift that they\'re going to allow for
design.

Other examples would be ventilation. We have to give the range of the
ventilations rate that we provide to cool the waste packages. Another
example would be in-drift materials and what are we going to use for the
invert ballast and what are the actual material specs on those things so
that Science can incorporate that into their TSPA and their chemical
analysis in the drift degradation models.

So this is an example where we work together, define the information,
make sure it comes across at the right time, and then we document it in
these drawings that go under configuration control. So that if I want to
change a drift diameter, I have to go through, modify this drawing, Bob
has to agree to it, so there\'s total configuration control, that I
won\'t go off and wander off and do something that\'s out of synch with
what Science is up to, or vice versa, with performance assessment.

Okay, so that\'s pretty much my presentation. If I can leave you with
just two points. One, Science and Engineering have worked together
jointly to develop a very detailed work plan for the License
Application. And that work plan includes logic tied integrated
schedules. And Peter will go into more detail in his presentation, but
we believe that this plan does address all of the outstanding technical
issues.

The second point I want to leave with you is that we develop processes
and tools to manage the interfaces within that plan. So the key
interfaces between engineering and science, whether it\'s through
drawings or through these routine meetings or through the detailed
schedules, we have those processes in place to manage those interfaces.

Any questions?

DR. NELSON: Thanks, Larry. Let me just ask one. If you are considering
design changes that really precipitate things that ought to be included
in performance confirmation, who identifies that, and how is that
information conveyed to Ziegler, I guess, who\'s in charge of the LA?

MR. TRAUTNER: Well, the LA will have a performance confirmation program
in that, and I presume that information will be transmitted to whoever
is managing the performance confirmation program.

DR. NELSON: Right, but how does it get over there? Do you identify, is
that one of your jobs, is to identify design aspects that there needs to
be work included in PC?

MR. TRAUTNER: I don\'t know if we\'ve got a process for defining what
exactly is going to go into the performance confirmation program. I know
John made a good presentation on that. Steve Brocoum is going to be
working that in more detail, as is Mark Peters. Right now, Mark Peters
is responsible for that performance confirmation program, or was until
two weeks ago, and now Doug is.

You want to say something, Jack? Anyway.

DR. NELSON: Only if you tell us who you are.

MR. BAILEY: I\'m Jack Bailey with BSC. Yes, we have a performance
confirmation department that works on what are the needs for performance
confirmation. They provide those needs to Larry, and he engineers in
whatever it is they need in order to do the testing. And if Larry has
things which he believes he needs to do for testing, that interaction
occurs.

DR. NELSON: When you say \"we\" have one of those departments\--

MR. BAILEY: The Project has such an organization.

DR. NELSON: It\'s under you in Projects?

MR. BAILEY: No, no, it\'s underneath\--

MR. TRAUTNER: It\'s under Doug Weaver now.

MR. BAILEY: Yes, it\'s with Doug Weaver now.

MR. TRAUTNER: Yes. It was with Mark Peters before.

DR. NELSON: Doug Weaver is part of the Science and Engineering Testing
Project, right?

MR. PETERS: Hold on a second, I can maybe help.

DR. NELSON: Okay, Mark.

MR. PETERS: Mark Peters, Los Alamos. In the old organization, where I
ran testing, I owned the Performance Confirmation Plan and the Test
Evaluation Plan. With me moving over to a new job, the PC Plan is now
going to be owned by Peter Swift in PA\'s space, because really, the PC
Plan is driven by PA in the safety case.

DR. NELSON: Okay, we can hear about that from Peter after our break,
when Peter comes up and gives a talk. Shall we do that, Peter? Is that
okay?

MR. SWIFT: Sure.

DR. NELSON: A very fast one. Dan Bullen.

MR. TRAUTNER: Well, before we do that, let me answer your question,
because I don\'t think we answered that.

DR. NELSON: Please. Thank you.

MR. TRAUTNER: If you go back to my Viewgraph Number\--is it 5? Let me
see here\--yeah, 5. I didn\'t mention Production Teams Interface
Meeting. Once a week the Science Organization and Engineering
Organization production teams meet, and that includes the performance
confirmation people, and we discuss all the main interfaces. The kind of
thing you brought up, saying if something comes out of design that might
impact performance confirmation, if it\'s not important enough to be on
these interface drawings, then the first attempt would be, or the first,
I guess, time it would show up would be in one of these meetings.

Second, we\'re going to have a performance confirmation information
exchange drawing. So that also would be whatever is needed by us for
performance confirmation, whatever performance confirmation needs from
us will all be documented on these sets of drawings. So that would be
another way to formalize anything that occurs in these meetings.

DR. NELSON: Okay. I guess just to close it, what triggered this all was
you were charged to do some value engineering considerations. One of the
things that\'s precipitated in that cost benefit trade-off is in some
cases you need to do performance confirmation for certain aspects of a
design change. And so to make sure that that gets considered right there
as part of the value engineering would seem useful.

MR. TRAUTNER: Right.

DR. NELSON: Okay, my watch says 7 minutes before 3; does anybody have
another time? That\'s close enough.

DR. BULLEN: You promised the Bullen Board one more little one, but that
would be hard?

DR. NELSON: Okay.

DR. BULLEN: Actually, this may not be the key time.

DR. NELSON: Bullen, Board.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board, quick question. You mentioned that only 30
percent of the design in the ballpark is going to be done. Is that the
time that it\'s docketed, or is that now?

MR. TRAUTNER: That would be at the time that we had the cutoff for
License Application, which would be about January \'04.

DR. BULLEN: Okay.

MR. TRAUTNER: But it\'s almost 11 months before docket.

DR. BULLEN: Right. So the question then arises is that we need to know
what the design is actually going to look like, and so I\'m guessing
it\'s going to look a lot like what Woody presented this morning; is
that not correct?

MR. TRAUTNER: Woody presented it\--

DR. BULLEN: Woody presented a 2-meter\--

MR. TRAUTNER: Yes, oh, that\--

DR. BULLEN: \--spacing, 81-meter drifts, 5 1/2 meters in diameter.

MR. TRAUTNER: We\'re still studying that. You know, is it going to look
like that?

DR. BULLEN: Okay. Because I guess at least\--

MR. TRAUTNER: I\'m not very ready to say that yet.

DR. BULLEN: The final question with respect to that 30 percent is that
would I expect to see the whole footprint laid out or would I expect to
see a detailed design of Panel 1 or\--I guess I\'m trying to get a fix
on what that 30 percent is going to be.

MR. TRAUTNER: You would see the whole footprint laid out. Not to a
detailed design level, but to a\--

DR. BULLEN: No.

MR. TRAUTNER: \--level enough that the NRC can be comfortable with the
total project. I think one of the presentations this morning, I forget
whose it was\--or was it Joe\'s?\--said we\'re going to license 100
percent of the facility.

DR. BULLEN: Right.

MR. TRAUTNER: So all of the panels will be licensed as part of the
submittal for the License Application. All of the surface facilities
will be licensed, and they\'ll all be in that same degree of completion.

DR. BULLEN: Okay.

MR. TRAUTNER: Even though we\'ll build them in a sequence, we\'re going
to submit the 70,000 metric ton facility as part of the License
Application.

DR. BULLEN: Okay. Now I\'ll also see a detailed waste package design.
Will I see a detailed drip shield design with emplacement? Even though
you don\'t have to build that for 50 years at the earliest, will I see
that as part of the License Application since it\'s a key part of the
safety case?

MR. TRAUTNER: Yes. And I say yes hesitantly because \"detailed\" is a
very general term. Yes, there will be details in there for the drip
shield. Will it be the same level of detail as the waste package? Maybe
not, but there will be enough information, again, for NRC to be able to
assess the performance of the drip shield.

DR. BULLEN: Thank you.

DR. NELSON: Okay, thank you very much, Larry.

Larry will come back and make himself available for Q and A after
Peter\'s talk, which will take place after the break. Let us adjourn now
and come back by 3:06.

(Whereupon, a break was taken.)

DR. NELSON: Okay, let us begin the next and final session, at which we
will hear from Peter Swift and then from Steve Brocoum. I introduced
Peter before, and he is the manager of the Performance Assessment
Strategy and Scope Subproject. And now we know what that means because
we\'ve seen the org. chart. And Peter\'s going to introduce us to a
couple of fairly complicated concepts here, so pay attention.

MR. SWIFT: Okay, actually, I should probably start off by just answering
the question about performance confirmation and the org. chart because
that probably won\'t come up otherwise in my talk.

First of all, the org. charts, they\'re actually a formal management
tool within BSC. They have to be signed off, they have to be approved by
management. And we\'re right in the middle of rearranging them right
now, which is why there\'s some confusion as to we didn\'t want to put
ourselves in a position where we were making an org. chart here in
public, we do things in internal management decisions.

The plan, indeed, is to have the PC, Performance Confirmation Plan, move
into my subproject, however, that has not yet officially happened.
That\'s why Mark and I were struggling a little bit. It is still in
testing. We wanted to have it in my subproject because we wanted it
closely linked to the licensing strategy, the licensing people, and
Steve Cereghino\'s department, and we wanted it well informed by
performance assessment. We\'re looking at PC Plan, the Performance
Confirmation Plan, as something distinct from the larger Science and
Technology Program. The PC Plan is a regulatory document, it\'s part of
what we\'re going to docket with the NRC. It will meet the requirements
of the PC portion of Part 63. So that\'s basically our strategy, is to
make sure that that scope of work defined by the regulation is closely
tied to the performance assessment and to the licensing group, and
therefore we think it\'s going to stay in my subproject while the rest
of the long-term science program goes into Mark Peters\' group.

All right, actually, can I back up to the first slide? I\'m sorry. The
title slide. I wanted to just give a little credit here. Rob Howard, the
deputy subproject manager of this group, did a whole lot of the work
that I\'m about to present, and a lot of conceptual design for it came
from Karen Jenny (phonetic) at Geomatrix, and a great deal of
the\--well, you\'ll see the work done by Tim Neiman (phonetic), also
with Geomatrix. I just wanted to make sure that they got due credit for
this.

Next slide. I\'m going to attempt here to give an overview of the
planning for the next two years in the Performance Assessment Project.
Mostly I\'m going to be talking about the process by which we got there.
I will say something about what\'s in it, but most of what I\'m saying
is the process, and you\'ll see when we get to the end here, I\'m not
the expert on every single thing that\'s in it, so I\'ll have to rely on
others in the audience to help on that.

A little review here from the previous one. The PA Project includes
natural systems, engineered systems, testing, and TSPA and this strategy
and scope group that I manage. We went through a risk-informed
prioritization, and that was the basis for the planning\--a basis for
the planning. That\'s much of what I\'m going to talk about. And
obviously our goal here was a defensible and sound basis for a License
Application in December 2004.

Next slide, please.

Again, 2004 was not necessarily a given going in, but it was a target.

Our job was within the prioritization process, evaluate and prioritize
work in performance assessment and science; focusing on necessary
License Application work scope; identify and\--it says \"select\" here,
actually within my group our job was to recommend, not to select, select
is a management decision, the overall scope of work balancing project
management risks. Risk-informed here is more than just risk in terms of
hypothetical dose to humans in the far future, it\'s risk to the project
in a management sense. Are we spending our money wisely? Will we get
what we need to get from it? Document that basis and ultimately submit
it to the DOE.

The management decisions that we made needed input from the technical
staff and the technical line management, from the Total System
Performance Assessment team, from senior project management, and from
the Project Control Office. These are the budget trackers, the people
who manage that massive schedule that Larry Trautner described, which is
really a remarkable thing. And all those groups had to help inform the
decision.

Next slide, please. We asked the department managers\--and here I mean
the Technical Department managers, people the Board is very familiar
with, the people managing the Saturated Zone, Unsaturated Zone, Waste
Package, and so on, Departments\--to redefine their work scope,
organizing it by TSPA model components. The reason for choosing the TSPA
model components, that is where we can get the most insight from the
existing TSPA models. For each work area, each work component, we asked
them to define three alternative work scopes, Levels 1, 2 and 3. You
know, basically what we\'re headed for here is a utility analysis where
we\'re going to decide which level of scope of work we need to do.

Level 1, the lowest level, we presumed but did not insist that it also
have the lowest cost, would be the work required to meet our own
internal quality assurance requirements and model validation as defined
by our own internal reviews. And this would have been for the models we
used in the Supplementary Science Performance Analyses last spring, the
SSPA, and in the Final Environmental Impact Analyses done in the fall.
So what we\'re doing here is bringing our current TSPA models up to a QA
level where they could be used during application.

Level 2 Scope, assumed to be a larger scope of work, didn\'t have to be,
though, the goal here was to take a risk-informed path to resolving
particularly the key technical issue agreements with the NRC but also
other outstanding concerns. By risk-informed, I mean taking into account
the importance of that area overall on repository performance. So if it
was an important area, more work might be required. If not, less work
might be acceptable.

Level 3 Scope would be adding the additional technical basis. This
essentially could be looked at as doing all the science without looking
to see which mattered with respect to importance on performance. \"All\"
was too strong a word, but Level 3, anyway, was a larger body of science
than that proposed for Level 2.

We identified attributes. We\'re going to end up here doing a
multi-attribute utility analysis. We identified the attributes against
which we wanted to evaluate each of these work scopes.

And we wanted the technical staff to provide primary input. Not the TSPA
staff at first and certainly not the management at first, because the
people who are the experts on the technical work are the ones doing it.
So we sent out a questionnaire.

Next slide, please. Oh, I forgotten this one was in here. This is simply
a list of the model components that we broke the work up into. And
actually, that list, I realized going over it on the airplane, is
missing a couple. There was a UZ climate change and a waste form colloid
one that\'s missing from that list.

Next slide, please. Here are the attributes that were in our
questionnaire that we asked each of the Science Department managers to
work with their staff to evaluate their work components against these.
And I\'ll say more about what that means in a second here.

First, they can be grouped qualitatively into three main groups here.
Russ Dyer mentioned these Monday morning. In fact, they aren\'t grouped,
this is a 16-dimensional utility analysis, but conceptually it does help
to group them that way. Some of them relate to the quantitative
performance measures, the things you can actually calculate and compare
to a firm standard. There are only three of them: change in 10,000-year
mean annual dose\--that\'s total mean annual dose that is driven by the
probability of weighted volcanic dose; change in groundwater
concentration\--that\'s for undisturbed performance, that does not
include the volcanic disruption; and change in the human intrusion
scenario.

Then a group related to regulatory defensibility and acceptability with
respect to the docketing of a license application; inclusion of credible
FEP\'s and exclusion of those FEP\'s that can be excluded; multiple
barriers, can we identify and describe the capability of our multiple
barriers and can we meet our KTI, Key Technical Issue Agreements\--I\'ll
come back to those in a second.

Over here a long list of qualitative acceptability and internal/external
defensibility things. These are things we know matter. And I think, Dan
Bullen, I think you asked how do we quantify external acceptability.
Well, we can\'t. We can\'t quantify whether or not you will accept our
work. As a proxy, we can estimate what we think is likely to lead to
acceptability, but ultimately acceptability is in the eyes of the NRC
and the Board, other external\--you know, we can\'t actually determine
external defensibility, we can only estimate it.

Now some things here that matter, then, in this column. Impact on
confidence of internal reviewers, external reviewers. We wanted to catch
the internal reviewers. That\'s an important point. If we haven\'t got
the buy-in from our own side, we\'re not there.

Quantitative metrics that we can calculate using the TSPA tools but
which are not required by the regulation: change in the time that we
first start to show 15 mrems per year\--that needs a \"per year\" on
it\--sort of when does the steep climb in dose start to occur for
undisturbed performance; change in uncertainty in the system
performance, what\'s the range of results we\'re getting around the mean
that is a regulatory limit; 10,000-year dose, if we condition it on
early waste package failures and take out the volcano; change in peak
dose out at several hundred thousand years; consequences associated with
the conditional igneous\--that should say disruption, not intrusion,
it\'s both eruption and intrusion. And it\'s conditional is the point
we\'re trying to get at there. If it happens, what effect does it have
on that.

And two here which actually can be tied to the regulation, uncertainty
in the parameters used in the model, and uncertainty in conceptual
models.

Go on to the next slide. Thank you.

So for each of these attributes we need to get information from various
different people. The information is necessarily qualitative. I mean you
can call it semi-quantitative if you want, because we did try to
quantify it, but these are subjective human judgments with a very few
that can actually be calculated by the TSPA models. Most of what we\'re
talking about here is human judgment from hopefully the right people.

First question, how likely is it that this scope of work\--i.e. your
Level 1, 2 or 3 work, let\'s say you\'re the Waste Package Department
manager and you\'re being asked about your degradation testing
program\--how likely is it that this scope of work will result in a
change with respect to whatever attribute it is you\'re evaluating here?
If you do this work, is it likely to change understanding of, let\'s
say, peak dose, is it likely to change the likelihood that this will be
acceptable to external reviewers? Is it likely to lead to resolution of
KTI Agreements? And so on. And the possible answers there were: very
unlikely, unlikely, neutral, likely, and very likely, which translate to
I think \--I\'ll try to convert it into percentages\--5 percent, 25
percent, 50 percent, 75 percent. I think that was how it went.

Then after we had that elicited from the technical staff who knew their
own work best, we went to the TSPA Department and said, \"All right,
here\'s what they want to do in this scope of work, is it going to
change\--in this case it\'s the ones that are quantified\--but will it
change dose, will it change peak dose, and so on?\" And so responding to
this question would be the TSPA modelers.

These first two we actually did in a cooperative workshop with all the
right people in the room at once, so that there was no secrets, the TSPA
team knew what the science groups were saying, and vice versa. And it
was about as close to a consensus of opinion as I\'ve seen on the
Project.

The bottom two are independent, and this is important. These are
management decisions down here, and you don\'t want technical staff
making this sort of decision. What weight does the project assign to the
attribute, i.e. how important is it? Is this a strategic decision? Does
the Department want to put all of its eggs in the basket of simply
meeting the quantitative requirements? We can do that, assign a weight
of 1 to total dose, give everything else a 0. We didn\'t do that,
obviously, but that is a management decision that\'s separate from the
technical staff\'s understanding of what the work actually does.

And value, what value does the project assign to possible impacts? This
again only applies to those things which had quantitative TSPA possible
answers. But would the project be more interested if a result caused
dose to go up or dose to go down?

So these last two things were elicited from the management team. I\'ll
say more about that in a minute if I need to.

This is an example of a spreadsheet. During our interactive workshop
with the science departments, this was up on the screen the whole time.
Here are the questions down on the left, and the possible answers. And
ignore the cost numbers there, those were preliminary, but you know,
they\'re real, we\'re thinking of cost. I\'m not going to try and walk
through that, just to show you the example of what we had there, that we
worked through every single possible answer for each of the work scopes
at three different levels.

Next slide, please. And now what\'s a multi-attribute utility analysis?
Well, those were the attributes, the 16 things a few slides back, or on
the questionnaire there. The utility that we\'re interested in is simply
the sum of three terms here, the likelihood that it will change our
scoring with respect to the attribute\--this is the number that the
scientists provide, if you want to think of it that way\--the impact,
and the weight\--these are the management numbers.

So the technical staff define the likelihood of an impact, they
define\--I\'m sorry, I said that wrong. The technical staff, i.e. the
TSPA staff, define the magnitude of the impact, management assigns a
weight to that magnitude and a weight to the entire attribute, and you
multiply and sum.

Next slide, please. For each work package you end up with a summed total
utility. It\'s a dimensionalist number. What it means, basically, is how
much is each thing you\'re measuring, the work scope, how much does it
contribute in sum to weighted value for each of the attributes. The
weight comes from management, the value comes from the technical staff.

There\'s nothing particularly unusual in this technique here of a
multi-attribute utility analysis, I think it\'s a fairly straightforward
thing. It\'s important to realize, though, that it does use informed
subjective human judgment. Ask the right people the right questions, get
the technical staff describing the technical value of their work, get
the management team thinking hard about what work is it we really need.

Can we go on to the next slide? Get results that look like this for
engineered barrier system flow and transport. The column here
(indicating) shows total utility for three different levels of work. And
the first thing that at least jumps out at my eye off this is that if
you go from Level 2 to Level 3 you get no more total utility. As a
decision maker, since you already know that Level 3 costs more than
Level 2 and takes longer, it\'s not buying you anything more in respect
to the 16 things shown here in that column.

You can also take this graph apart in more detail if you had it in
color. I don\'t think you do. Each one of these colors maps over here
(indicating), you can see what it is that\'s doing things. For example,
the big blue one here is \"Resolution and closure of KTI\'s,\" I
believe. Obviously somebody felt that\--the EBS technical experts felt
that they had to go to the Level 2 scope to achieve a greater level of
confidence that they would satisfy the KTI agreements.

Next slide. Just a different example. This is unsaturated zone flow. And
again, each one of these scopes of work has a written description, many
pages written describing what work would be done in Level 1, what work
would be done in Level 2, Level 3. And these are the weighted scores
associated with how well that work would address each of these
attributes, what impact it would have on each of these attributes.

Next slide, please. This is an example, then\--this is all done in an
Excel spreadsheet that was built by Tim Neiman from Geomatrix, and we
ran it in real-time for both staff audiences and for management
audiences\--this is just one example of the sort of result you can get
out of it. Incremental utility here.

Can we just back up one slide?

Incremental utility is the difference between one level and the next.
Next slide. In this case, this is the incremental utility that you get
from going from Level 1 to Level 2 ranked from those work packages that
essentially bought us the most utility to those that bought us the
least. Don\'t pay a lot of attention here because this is only an
example, but it\'s a good one. Doing extra work in this example in
igneous activity showed the highest utility. It\'s dimensionalist
number, it\'s only valuable relative to each other.

We actually had a negative utility because our cladding team boldly
said, \"Well, if you really want the cheapest, simplest expert cladding,
stop taking credit for it and you don\'t have to pay us.\" And so we had
a negative utility for Level 2 in cladding. We actually got less benefit
out of it, but it was cheap.

Next slide, please. Now, how do we use this information in forming the
management review and decisions? First of all, we put together many
charts of incremental utility values, like the one you just saw, from
Level 1 to Level 2, Level 2 to Level 3, and so on. We looked at the
sensitivity of our utility values to the management weighting, and we
did this by we actually elicited a different set of weights from that
oversight board I described a little while ago. We got them in the room,
we explained the whole process to them, it took half a day, we went
through a semiformal elicitation where they indicated what attributes
they thought were important, we put their weights in, combined with the
technical staff\'s value judgments, and we were able to show our own
management team that actually their weightings weren\'t that different
from the weightings that we had already presented to them. Which, for
example, on the previous slide, the management weightings were on
average Bob Andrews and myself. Well, we compared that to management
weightings from those names in Nancy\'s Oversight Board that I went
through earlier.

And then we put cost into the function, we showed the board utility cost
ratios, which of course if you\'re doing a formal cost benefit analysis,
cost is a big factor here. And we do want to look at cost, that\'s one
of the things as a\--we want to be responsible here about how we spend
the DOE\'s money. The goal was not to simply spend it all until it\'s
gone, the goal is to use it wisely.

So my team presented an initial prioritization, our recommendation based
on this sort of information, to the Management Oversight Board in
January, and we had then a three-day meeting with that Oversight Board
where they took our work and reviewed it in great detail and tore it up
and informed themselves.

Next slide, please. All right, we then brought our recommendation and
our spreadsheet and all of our insights gained from this process to the
Project Oversight Board. That was, you saw the names there, Licensing,
National Laboratories, USGS, and Project Management itself in the form
of Nancy Williams, Jack Bailey, Don Beckman. And that group spent
probably two full days going through the work scope descriptions in
detail and adjusting the recommendation we had made to them, adjusting
the work scope descriptions themselves, calling in the department
managers who had made them, and eventually the board came out with a
decision that was based on utility, as we\'d done the utility analysis,
and yes, it was based on cost\--I\'ll say a little more about that in a
second\--and it was based on schedule. We didn\'t go in predetermining
we could make the schedule. We wanted to see if we could make a schedule
with a defensible product and the cost that we had available. We
concluded we did.

One of the things that the Oversight Board was able to do was use an
informed management that we had not put into the analysis.
Basically\--and here\'s the best example\--the Oversight Board
immediately placed a high value on continuing ongoing testing. This was
not something we could score ourselves going in. The management team
looked at it and said, \"There\'s got to be some value attached to
continuing work already in progress, you don\'t just shut things off.\"

Cost, I just want to\--we\'ve had I guess twice now the concern that the
budget\--one of the outcomes of this was a drastic cut in the science
budget. That\'s actually not true. The budget that we actually submitted
to the DOE and the DOE has now accepted\--we submitted it March
1st\--has essentially the same amount of money for FY02 in Bob Andrews\'
performance assessment project as we did going in. We didn\'t come in
here planning to talk money, but\--and it\'s within \$500,000 of where
it was going in. Things have been rearranged considerably. That\'s to be
expected. Certainly it is absolutely true that the management team would
have been pleased if we\'d discovered we could get on schedule to 2004
for less money, that would have been a great outcome. We didn\'t do it.
The recommendation that my team made would have produced considerable
savings, but when we looked at things like this, the decision was to go
ahead and spend the money.

So, next slide. This is, yes, management decisions. Generally, the Level
1 work scope, that minimum level, is what we came up with as being
sufficient to support a docketable LA. That was our goal. And that puts
the emphasis on validating the models that are already available.
However, we then\--and this is where we end up spending essentially the
same amount of money we had coming in\--we took specific activities out
of the Level 2 and Level 3 work scope and brought them back into the
planning portfolio on a case-by-case basis. The Oversight Board went
directly into the work scope descriptions from where the department
managers had described their Level 2 and Level 3 work scope and said,
\"This activity has got to be done, got to be in the package, this one
can be deferred.\"

So what we ended up with, basically a bias towards continuing ongoing
testing and validation studies, regardless of where in the
prioritization process they fell. And there were several activities that
we also felt we could move forward to accelerate them, literally put
more money into them, from where they had been planned originally in
order to make the \'04 date.

For example, on the work in the igneous disruption consequence area,
basically the work will be done even more rapidly than it had been
proposed, and that adds a cost.

DR. NELSON: Peter?

MR. SWIFT: Yes? Oh, you want me to wrap up here?

DR. NELSON: Five minutes.

MR. SWIFT: Thank you. Next slide, please. March 1st, BSC, we gave
detailed work packages to the DOE. DOE has accepted that proposal and
the plan is being implemented. Obviously there are\--oh, there\'s a lot
of activities behind those simple words, \"being implemented\".

All right, and now this is perhaps what the Board was really interested
in. I\'m sorry if it came out in the last five minutes. How does this
planned scope of work address uncertainties?

First point here is that the DOE is committed to supporting a license
application that meets the NRC requirements. This shouldn\'t have to be
said, but it is being said. We will meet the NRC\'s requirements
regarding uncertainty, and here are some key ones from the rule: the DOE
will not exclude important parameters simply because they\'re difficult
to quantify. DOE will focus on the full range of defensible and
reasonable parameter distributions. DOE will consider alternative
conceptual models consistent with available information. And we will
document the impact of that uncertainty in the LA.

Next, please.

That is not necessarily the same as committing to reduce uncertainty,
that\'s documenting the impact of it, which is what the requirement was
for.

So our testing and research focuses, then\--and actually there\'s a
bullet missing here\--first it focuses on validating the models we\'re
going forward with, that should have been said\--but quantifying the
uncertainty in those models and the input parameters in them, evaluating
the impact of that uncertainty on system performance, and identifying
those areas where the existing uncertainty has a large impact from a
licensing perspective. And those are the areas where focus from a
licensing point of view needs to be on reducing uncertainty.

Performance confirmation work, which I described briefly as we\'re
defining it as the scope of work that meets the regulatory requirements
for performance confirmation, and other long-term research and
development, science and technology work will further reduce that
uncertainty. That\'s a confidence building exercise that Steve will talk
about and which is not on the\--deliberately not tied for the critical
path for license application except indeed to make sure that we have a
plan for performance confirmation as required.

Three or four slides here, just to give you a sense of what types of
things are in the plan. I mean, the Board is just concerned about
what\'s in the plan, what are we doing. There isn\'t time to go through
all of these, I knew this going in there wouldn\'t be, and I\'m not
disappointed by that. We could have spent an hour on each one of these
productively if that were the intent, but the intent here, rather, is
just to give the Board a feel for hopefully some sense of comfort that
in fact the work selected for the License Application plan is a good
comprehensive piece of work.

I\'ll run through these slides because I\'ve got them here, but within
the Unsaturated Zone, testing in Alcove 8/Niche 3 as validation work for
the active fracture model, Niche 5 seepage testing, the Cross Drift
bulkhead testing, drift scale test, Chlorine 36 work is continuing,
field studies at Peña Blanca are continuing.

Then the Engineered Barrier System here. I could read them.

The next slide, please.

If we have questions on specifics here, this would be an appropriate
time to ask during, you know, the Q and A. Again, I\'m not going to try
and walk through them all because I can\'t do them all justice.

Next slide, please. One point here from the Saturated Zone, a point
worth making which I think is probably not news to this group, the
Alluvial Testing Complex here, we had hoped for multi-well testing there
also. That is on hold indefinitely right now due to permitting issues
with the state. Therefore, we are looking at\--this is work going on in
real-time back in Las Vegas\--looking at alternative ways to gather
information to help support the Saturated Zone flow and transport
models.

Igneous activity, a point worth making here that we will be conducting
an independent peer review starting up in just a few weeks on that. That
is one of the ways that we believe we can accelerate the schedule in
igneous activity. And Mark Board I think had already talked some about
seismic activity.

So a summary here. Planning decisions were informed by the
multi-attribute utility analysis and utility/cost schedule. Cost, as I
said, definitely it was a factor, it\'s a responsible thing to do, but
in fact there has not been a catastrophic cut in funding for science.
There has been money moved around from one activity to another.

And our emphasis here, then, is on qualification and validation of
current models, treatment of uncertainty for license application, and we
have knowingly and deliberately biased the outcome in favor of
continuing ongoing testing.

DR. NELSON: Great. Okay, thanks, Peter.

In deference, I will let Dan Bullen say something if he wants to. Do you
have any questions, Dan? Since I slighted you in the past.

DR. BULLEN: Point of order, Madam Chairwoman, are we allowed to ask
questions of any of the speakers, including Mr. Trautner, who is sitting
in the audience, or\--

DR. NELSON: That\'s wonderful. Larry, would you join us, maybe, up here.
Maybe you could take the podium in case you need to chime in.

DR. BULLEN: My question is specifically for Larry because you were doing
the value engineering, the cost studies, and I guess Carl Di Bella
pointed out to me that I\'ve been dancing around the issue the entire
day, and I raised it with respect to the 2-meter waste package spacing
and Jeff Wong actually asked me the question about the 81-meter drift
spacing. And the question that I have here is that if you\'re doing a
cost analysis and you don\'t change the 81-meter drift spacing, doesn\'t
that unfairly bias your analysis against the low-temperature design?
Because you don\'t have to go 81 meters apart for low temperature.

MR. TRAUTNER: The 81 meters, I don\'t believe that would be the case
because the drift\--you\'re talking about the actual 81-meter spacing\--

DR. BULLEN: Right, because I\'d have to drill a lot less perimeter
drifts, right?

MR. TRAUTNER: That\'s all you do is drill less perimeter drifts, that\'s
correct. That wouldn\'t be a significant factor compared to the overall
cost.

DR. BULLEN: But that\'s the whole reason that you get mad at the
low-temperature design, because you have to drill those extra drifts,
and then you have to drill more drifts because they\'re spaced farther
apart. Is there not a trade-off there in that I gain a couple meters
every time? I mean this would make it look more like a wash to me.

MR. TRAUTNER: I\'m not sure what you say when you say \"get mad at the
low temperature\".

DR. BULLEN: I know, I know. It\'s been a long meeting and\-- But I guess
the question is, I would sure like to see you do that analysis where you
take a look at the 81-meter drift spacing as it reflects the true value
of what the changes might be and justify why you can\'t or can change
that spacing for the low-temperature design.

MR. TRAUTNER: We could change that spacing for the low-temperature
design, however, that would violate our goal of being flexible. We could
not go back and do the hot-temperature design, as I understand it,
because 81 meters was essentially the minimum spacing that we\'ve
concluded that you go for the hot temperature to keep 50 percent of the
drift in between to be below boiling. So if at this point we make the
decision to move the drifts closer together and we went and constructed
that way, we would not be able to go back and go to a hot temperature
operating mode.

Is that fairly stated, Mark?

DR. BULLEN: Fair enough. That\'s probably true.

MR. TRAUTNER: Woody, you still here to help me? I think that\'s where
we\'re going.

DR. BULLEN: That\'s fair enough, that you couldn\'t\--you couldn\'t make
it hot\--

MR. TRAUTNER: Couldn\'t make it hot.

DR. BULLEN: \--unless you made the waste packages bigger or changed
something else.

MR. TRAUTNER: Right.

DR. BULLEN: I mean, in the static case that you have, I mean you could
make it hot, I mean we could figure out a way to do that if they were
closer together, but you couldn\'t let it shed or\--

MR. TRAUTNER: I think it would be difficult to make it hot if you went
closer together because you would have difficulty. Some of our waste
packages are hot, but, you know, not all of them. We\'re going to have
some cold waste.

DR. BULLEN: Right. Thank you, Madam Chairman, that\'s all I had.

DR. NELSON: My pleasure, Dr. Bullen.

Debra Knopman.

DR. KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board. Peter, this was really interesting to see
how you organized your kind of a systematic view of what needed to be
done, and I think your team should be commended for working their way
through it. That\'s the good news, it\'s really interesting how you went
about it. Love to see the weights and will hope that you provide the
Board with the various weights. You don\'t have to put names on the
weighting, but\--

MR. SWIFT: We had a session with some Board members in March in Las
Vegas, and I think we actually did put the names up on the screen for
you, didn\'t we, so you could see who said what?

DR. KNOPMAN: Okay, well, I didn\'t see that. But what I thought was so
interesting was where you ended up. And if we go to Slide 16, after all
the work that you did, you essentially came back to the status quo, or
so it seems. That is, you\'re working with those models that you\'ve got
already available as opposed to reaching out to something else if there
was justification for that, I don\'t know. You know, the continuation of
the ongoing, at least selected ongoing testing. So, you know, it would
be interesting to know, I think, where there were significant
substantive differences in what your team had gone in recommending and
where you ended up. And I think it would be revealing to us. First of
all, it just shows this is what happens with multi-attribute utility
analysis, it all comes down to the subjective weighting after you\'ve
done all the work on the technical analysis and you can trigger the
numbers however you want. So that\'s sort of Question Number 1.

If I can just put on the table a second question. The organizational
chart as well as the way you\'ve described this whole analysis and
exercise all is PA oriented so that it is sort of self-referential. If
something shows up as significant in PA, then it kind of keeps going in
the process. If something in PA itself is not sensitive to a particular
phenomenon, oh, let\'s just say thermal processes or hydrothermal
processes, it\'s not going to show up as a particularly significant
feature in this kind of analysis.

And then the next step with that is all of this is PA-oriented, what
about the rest of the safety case that the NRC is asking you for that
has to do with multiple lines of evidence and everything else? So it
seems like you took a very narrow view in the end, even though you sort
of started off with the structure of doing a much more expansive, in
some ways clean slate look at what you needed to do, you kind of didn\'t
end up there.

MR. SWIFT: Let me start with how I thought I was going to answer the
first question. There\'s a report that\--relatively thin report, 50 or
60 pages, that summarizes the exercise that has at the end of it\--well,
as you work your way through it, you\'ll find the recommendations that
my team made to the Project Oversight Board, and then you will also find
in an appendix at the end a line-by-line description of what ultimately
was in, what was out. And the listings of what is out will be very, I
think, useful for you to see what activities were not carried forward.
And I think that would show you that we didn\'t simply end up with a
status quo, we actually ended up with a realignment of work that
supports a common goal.

Now, yes, the decision that will go forward to licensing with the models
that we used in the work you saw last summer, that is correct, to that
extent that does look like the status quo. We felt that was the best
strategy we had for the License Application that was defensible in 2004.

With respect to the question of it being too narrowly focused on
performance assessment, there is some confusion over the term, or the
words, \"performance assessment\" as distinct from TSPA. And I mean I
caught some of that in Claudio\'s talk yesterday, for example, where he
uses performance assessment in a broader sense, I believe anyway, that
it almost is synonymous with the safety case.

From the NRC\'s point of view, things like multiple barriers are a part
of the performance assessment. The TSPA, the calculation, is the
quantitative part. But I do consider things like demonstration in
multiple barriers and their capabilities to be part of the performance
assessment. And that was the intent in renaming the Science and Analyses
Project Performance Assessment Project. It wasn\'t to exclude science
from performance assessment, it was to bring them together, rather than
apart.

The way the multi-attribute utility analysis was set up, no, it was not
biased against things that PA was\--TSPA, sorry, was insensitive to, and
there were things that\--because we had attributes that spanned the
qualitative and external defensibility confidence types of, well,
attributes, activities that would have no impact, I believe, on
calculated dose. Things like a criticality event, for example, I have a
darned hard time seeing how that\'s going to affect dose. And yet it
certainly affects external reviewer confidence, it affects\--we have KTI
agreements with the NRC over it. Criticality issues scored relatively
well in this analysis despite the fact that they aren\'t going to change
dose. You know, no one felt that was a likely outcome. So there was less
of a narrow TSPA bias in this, I think, than you perceive, much less.

DR. NELSON: Dr. Cohon.

DR. COHON: Thank you. Could we look at Number 19 for just a second? You
talked about, and as the slide shows, quantifying uncertainty and
evaluating the impact of uncertainty on system performance. Now if we go
to Number 6. I was struck by the fact\--and even more so in light of
Number 19\--that none of the potential quantifiers of uncertainty, or
estimates of uncertainty, or criteria associated with uncertainty, are
part of quantitative performance. They\'re all part of acceptability and
defensibility. And as the exercise was intended, everything that\'s not
under quantitative performance is specifically not quantitative, right,
it was not intended to be. So isn\'t this a disconnect\--

MR. SWIFT: No. I\'m sorry, I interrupted you.

DR. COHON: No, if you\'re ready to answer, go right ahead.

MR. SWIFT: The quantitative performance was limited to those things for
which there is a quantitative limit in NRC\'s rule. These are things
over here that can be quantified but cannot be compared to\--some of
them can be quantified\--but they can\'t be compared to a regulatory
limit. So that was\--grouping this group over here (indicating)
highlights the idea\--and it\'s a wrong idea\--that one way to approach
the problem would be simply to keep the doses below that 15 mrem per
year limit, and if we did that, we\'d be done. Keep the average doses.
That\'s the first one there.

The impact on representation of uncertainty at the parameter level is
something that needs to be quantified. This is the step at which on that
Slide 19 or 18 we were just on, where we need to make sure that we\'ve
got uncertainty quantified in a way that can be promulgated through our
models.

DR. COHON: What\'s the purpose of quantifying uncertainty, why does it
need to be quantified?

MR. SWIFT: Well, one answer is that the regulation actually does call
for it.

DR. COHON: Well, let me interrupt you.

MR. SWIFT: Yes?

DR. COHON: You just said that you only made it to the quantitative
performance group if there was some regulatory standard or limit to
which you could compare the number. So you just said the regulation
requires you to quantify.

MR. SWIFT: The regulation requires many things that are qualitative, not
quantitative.

DR. COHON: But you just said\--we were just talking about quantifying.
My question was, why would you quantify uncertainties, and you said
because the regulation says we have to.

MR. SWIFT: It says we have to, but it doesn\'t set a limit on it.

DR. COHON: So there\'s nothing to compare it to, and that\'s why it
doesn\'t make it to that category?

MR. SWIFT: Yes.

DR. COHON: What do you intend to do with quantified uncertainty? I mean
is there some internal sort of house limit on\--

MR. SWIFT: No.

DR. COHON: \--quantified uncertainty?

MR. SWIFT: No. The uncertainty that I think we want to make sure that
decision makers\--in this case, decision makers would be, in the context
of a license application, it would be a licensing board\--we want to
make sure that they have access to our best estimate of the uncertainty
associated with our results. We show them\--let\'s say, a .01 average
mean annual mrem per year dose, and we have some uncertainty band around
that. We need to show them that as information that they need in their
decision-making process. That\'s our job, we must show them that, and
this Board also.

DR. COHON: I\'m really pleased to hear you say that, because you sure
didn\'t do it for the SR. The Secretary\'s Report not only doesn\'t
communicate the quantification of uncertainty, it does just the opposite
in my view.

With regard to external defensibility, did you reject the idea of asking
external bodies for their views on attributes, their subjective
evaluation, etc.?

MR. SWIFT: We actually considered it for weighting, although not for
scoring. And we actually asked a couple members of this Board if they\'d
be willing to participate in a weighting exercise, and I believe they
wisely said no. But for the scoring, basically the technical input from
our own experts, no. We relied on the people most familiar with the very
specific piece of work and we believed they were the people doing it.

DR. COHON: Thank you.

DR. NELSON: Okay, Don Runnells.

DR. RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board. I\'m curious, Peter, about linkages among
these various topics. Let\'s see, what\'s the word we use for\--let\'s
go to Slide 13, that\'s a better way to ask the question. I\'m curious
about the linkages among the listed items up there. What do you call
those things?

MR. SWIFT: We call them components.

DR. RUNNELLS: Components. If I look at the components there, I see four
that are UZ related: UZ Coupled Effects, UZ Flow, UZ radionuclide
Transport, and UZ Seepage. And in my mind at least, those are physically
and chemically very closely related to each other. They\'re not
independent, they are coupled. How was that handled in terms of
independence of components, or interdependence of components? And then
the second part of that question is\--hopefully the answer is
no\--hopefully these do not correspond to project titles managed by
individuals. I mean\--okay, I\'ll stop.

MR. SWIFT: Some of them do, in answer to your second question.

DR. RUNNELLS: But only some, okay?

MR. SWIFT: Only some.

DR. RUNNELLS: All right.

MR. SWIFT: The rearranging of work scope by model component, or system
component, did break some institutional barriers and reinforced others.
In answer to your first question, the important one, is we did not have
a systematic way to ensure that linkages were properly captured going
in, and we saw this when we went through the workshop in early January
with all the science department managers present with our team. And our
defense here is that we fixed them on the spot when we found them. We
sort of called our managers on it, we said, \"Look, over here let\'s
take a hypothetical example in UZ flow and seepage over here. You said
this piece of work was absolutely needed over at Level 2 in flow, but
you can\'t do Level 1 work in seepage unless you did Level 2 work in
flow. What\'s wrong here?\" You know, moving back left to right so that
they\'re aligned properly.

This piece of work was done in two months. I think it\'s a good piece of
work for and it\'s appropriate level of effort for the value we\'re
getting from it. But a systematic elimination of that type of linkage
problems would have had to have been built in from the front, and we
didn\'t do it.

DR. RUNNELLS: I\'m wondering, though, if a different choice of
components had been made that recognize that linkage, if the bang for
the buck would have been greater. If you see what I mean.

MR. SWIFT: Yes.

DR. RUNNELLS: If I were to link, for example, UZ Flow and UZ
Radionuclide Transport under some other name, I\'m wondering if my
incremental utility would have been significantly greater. I think it
might have.

MR. SWIFT: Yes. And in other presentations I\'ve made on this we\'ve had
a list of caveats that we certainly were very careful to inform our
management team about. Yes. Less than the linkage problem, we had a
problem with defining the \--particularly when we got to the
utility/cost ratios, people who coarsely aggregated their work had a
large cost associated with a single utility. People who finely divided
it\--you\'ll notice that the waste form people broke there\'s up in as
fine a set of components as they could\--they got very small costs
associated with their things, so utility/cost ratios went up. That was
the sort of thing we had to filter back out using human judgment
afterwards.

DR. RUNNELLS: Okay, thank you.

DR. NELSON: One last question from Paul Craig.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, Number 10 first of all, please. I believe we\'ve talked
about the various publics at various points, and this utility approach
that you\'ve got here really does look like the sort of thing that would
be very interesting to a lot of publics. It might be quite interesting,
I\'d be intrigued, for example, how Steve Frishman would fill out such a
thing, or how the folks from Nye County would do it. And you have the
potential for a tool here that could be quite interesting.

Your focus is clearly on regulatory compliance, and maybe that\'s why if
you go to Number 13 and I look down the list there, there\'s nothing
about corrosion of C22 in there on the list that I could see, although
maybe I\'m not reading it properly. There is something on waste package
drip shield performance for some reason. And I guess from your\--

MR. SWIFT: I sure hope there\'s a waste package degradation.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: It says, \"Waste Package Performance\".

MR. SWIFT: Yes. I\'m sure it was up there.

DR. CRAIG: What?

MR. SWIFT: There is a Waste Package Performance box there.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, there is? Okay.

MR. SWIFT: Yes.

DR. CRAIG: Okay. I missed that one. But anyway, the way in which you
would place your weight on these things might very well differ a lot if
you were interested in regulatory compliance versus whether you\'re
interested in how the thing would hold up over the long haul and whether
you might expect surprises and want to do something about surprises. And
the type of questions that you might ask could be quite different, and I
suspect in many cases would be quite different. So it seems to me that
you\--that you have a potential for a nice tool but you\'ve exercised it
very narrowly, and perhaps this is the reason why you\'re coming up with
the kind of answers that Debra referred to rather than answers that
might broaden the discourse a bit.

MR. SWIFT: I accept the comment. One of the things that, when we asked
Karen Jenny, who advised us in putting us together, one of the first
points she raised was that before you design the analysis, know what
question it is, what decision is it you\'re trying to inform, where are
you headed with this, what is it you\'re trying to support. And in this
case, the decision of our team going in was that we were trying to
inform our management team on scope of work necessary to support a
docketable License Application. So, yes, you know, go back to the first
slide. If instead our goal had been broader and longer, the questions we
asked might have been somewhat different, and also the weights that the
management team applied to different things might have been different.

DR. NELSON: Okay, thank you very much, Larry and Peter, thanks for being
willing to reorganize the schedule and to help us.

And our final speaker for the day is Stephan Brocoum. We\'ve known Steve
for a long time, it seems. His title is Senior Policy Advisor, and his
background is in geology, ultimately with a PhD from earth sciences at
Columbia University. And he\'s been involved in licensing and regulatory
activities for much of his professional life. He\'s going to speak to us
on the subject of \"Enhancing Confidence, Technology, and Efficiency for
Radioactive Waste Management\".

MR. BROCOUM: That\'s correct. Next viewgraph. We\'re going to present an
overview of the proposed science and technology program, we\'re going to
talk about the relation between the proposed science and technology
program and performance confirmation. They are separate. This is a task
force, so we\'re going to talk about the task force scope of work,
we\'re going to talk about some examples at a very conceptual level, and
a summary.

Next viewgraph. The top bullet, basically, is what we\'ve been talking
about up to now. Peter went into a lot of detail of how we developed our
detailed work plan to get us to potential License Application in 2004.
And you heard yesterday Under Secretary Card and you heard Margaret Chu
give their vision of what continued scientific investigations would be
and how the Department might go about doing them. You heard Russ Dyer
state that he\'s set up a task force and he asked you to head that task
force to actually implement this continued scientific\--or come up with
a plan to implement this to continue scientific investigations.

So I want to tell you who\'s on the task force. I\'m on the task force,
Dennis Williams is on the task force, April Gill, we\'re all detail to
the Project Manager\'s Office. In addition, we have Steve Hanauer and
Abe Van Luik. We interface with BSC through Mark Peters and through the
Chief Science Office, Mike Voegele and Jean Younker. We\'ve also been
helped with a little bit of work we\'ve done to date by Claudia Newberry
and Bill Boyle. The task force is actually official on April 21st, so
it\'s a relatively new task force.

Basically, consistent with DOE\'s objective of long-term stewardship,
we\'ve set up the task force to develop this proposed science technology
program with the intent of increasing confidence in projections of
performance and understanding the repository system, improving existing
technologies used in the waste management system, and perhaps promoting
efficiencies in the long range in the repository system since it\'s such
a long program that goes for perhaps hundreds of years.

We plan to make recommendations to our management on the possible
science and technology strategies and work scope. Margaret committed to
the Board to have to come back in September, so I guess we have to make
our recommendations to Margaret and Russ Dyer in the August time frame,
and we\'re going to work to that.

It\'s very important, and Under Secretary Card made this point, that,
you know, the main focus and objective of this program is a successful
or viable License Application. He said that the first book that will be
full by money is that LA line. And so these activities that we are
planning supplement but are not on critical path. They\'re not in line,
or on the line, going to License Application. So we will not impact the
resources necessary to complete the LA.

Now a couple of words about performance confirmation since this is a
performance confirmation session. You know, performance confirmation is
required by the NRC, 10 CFR 63, Subpart F. Now, I really like the
definition that John Kessler used today on his Slide/Viewgraph Number 8,
\"Activities are specifically designed to evaluate the technical basis
for the license position.\"

Those are truly part of the critical\--you know, defining the
performance confirmation is truly part of the critical path to getting
to an LA. And those would be developed by the licensing group here under
Joe Ziegler.

The PC Plan that we develop will be part of the LA, and the current plan
will be revised to reflect the current and final 10 CFR 63.

The science and technology program will be broader than the PC program.
It will look at it in holistic approach towards all the issues related
to geologic disposal. It will address issues and alternatives beyond the
basis, direct basis, for the safety case.

Finally, the last point is, you know, once site characterization was
over\--it\'s essentially over\--the PC program began collecting
information and many of the ongoing tests now could be considered part
of the PC program.

Our scope of work. Well, we\'re going to identify potential work that
will contribute to our long-term objectives and goals, our long-term
stewardship. That\'s basically to increase our understanding of a
natural engineered systems and the projection of long-term performance.

We\'ve already started to assemble comments that have been made by the
Board, by the Waste Package Peer Review, by the IAEA, the Peer Review on
the TSPA, by the Biosphere Peer Review. We want to make sure as we
develop this plan that we\'re informed by the comments the external
oversight bodies made. So we\'re going to very carefully pull together
all the comments when we\'re doing that and make sure we can see if we
can address them all in coming up with this recommendations to
management.

Also, we\'re going to coordinate with other DOE offices\--this is, you
know, other offices in DOE\--universities, international programs, and
other scientific organizations. I mean, science, in a sense, can be done
in three places. It can be done within the program based on resources we
have, it can be done through the university system\--we\'re already
spending about \$10 million a year on the University of Nevada system
through the cooperative program\--and it can be done through
international cooperation, international programs.

We had a major international program from \'89 to about \'95. It was cut
back at that time, but I think Margaret has made several comments she
would like to have a stronger international program, and that will be
part of the mix of doing the science. So it will have at least those
three components.

So we will identify plans and tests and develop models, and perhaps
perform analyses to contribute to our understanding. Those can be done,
again, in the program, perhaps in international program. For example,
Dennis Williams is going to Switzerland on May 20th to discuss with the
Swiss the potential use of our non-radionuclide tracers in one of their
experiments so we can see how they correlate to radionuclide tracers.

Next viewgraph. Even though we\'re not on critical path for License
Application, we still need to have milestones and, you know, have to be
able to report progress. Another goal is to foster excellence in the
Project by encouraging publication in peer-reviewed journals. We are
updating our policy on publication to encourage our people to publish.
And very important point that Margaret has made, and Card, is that look
at new \"out-of-the-box\" concepts and emerging technologies to see how
they can improve the waste management system. And I fought with the
third one today from the State of Nevada on having a low-temperature
repository.

Now, some examples. You heard Peter spent quite a bit of time on how we
developed our plan. And on his Viewgraph Number 4, he had the three
scopes showed, and the Level 3 Scope was the most scope of work, largest
scope of work, and had some additional technical basis. You know, we
want to start with what Peter has done, and his group has done, and
build from that. So we will be looking at these Level 3 activities and
see which would be appropriate to bring in the Program or to do as
long-term research and development. Then, you know, Margaret went over
this yesterday. She\'s very interested in technical issues, comments on
all repository programs, and these kinds of issues might be very
amenable to an instance they are common with other repository programs,
be amenable to the international program, for example.

So in summary, you know, we are developing a program, and it\'s actually
a plan for management to consider, we will get out the proposal in the
August time frame to Russ and Margaret for their consideration. That
plan will not only consider work that the Project can do but work that
can be done in the international community and work that can be done in
university system. And we encourage\--we would like to somehow interface
with the Board as we develop this plan. Right now it\'s very conceptual,
we\'ve just started thinking about it, but as we progress, we would like
to interface with the Board and get your input as we develop a plan. So
if we have a plan developed, the Board will have had chance to give us
comments before we finalize it.

Thank you.

DR. NELSON: Thanks, Steve.

Since the task force was created, what, three weeks ago?

MR. BROCOUM: Yes.

DR. NELSON: What was the first step?

MR. BROCOUM: Start assembling information. For example, we pull together
all the comments that I said that you have made and various peer reviews
have made, and so on.

Second thing is, we try to pull together all the activities that Peter
talked about that didn\'t get put in the program. We call them \"on the
cutting room floor\". There\'s about 70 of those activities, and we have
those pull together. And we also start thinking how we could build on
Peter\'s process to kind of screen ideas that people come up with and
decide, you know, how to weight them, how to put them in the program.
And we\'ve done a lot of brainstorming, because the \"out-of-the-box\"
is where we haven\'t really thought enough yet, and we need to do some
thinking there.

DR. NELSON: Are you going to do this both from an experimental and
analytical perspective so if you start thinking about developing new
models, different kinds of models, in addition to the experimental?

MR. BROCOUM: I wouldn\'t exclude that, that\'s possible. We\'re trying
not\--I mean I\'ve heard some very good comments today about the process
that Peter Swift and his people use, and we\'ll take those to heart. We
took some notes as questions were being asked.

DR. NELSON: Okay. Bullen.

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, this is a good viewgraph to start
with, because I would hope, and I probably should have asked Under
Secretary Card this question yesterday, but he didn\'t have a viewgraph
that said it, although I\'m pretty sure he did say it in his
presentation to us, that he wanted the development of technologies to
improve long-term performance and reduce repository costs. Sure would
like a semantic change in there that says \"and/or reduce repository
costs,\" because I\'d love to be able to see you develop\--this is the
diamond underneath of the first indent there.

MR. BROCOUM: Oh, okay, I see, yes.

DR. BULLEN: And so if you have \"and/or\" there, that means you could
develop something that would improve long-term performance\--

MR. BROCOUM: Yes.

DR. BULLEN: \--whether or not it reduced cost\--

MR. BROCOUM: That\'s correct.

DR. BULLEN: \--or it could reduce cost and not improve performance. I
mean those are the things that would all tie in together. So it doesn\'t
necessarily have to do both of those things to identify as an attribute
that the Science Program would want to carry on.

MR. BROCOUM: No, I think on my earlier viewgraph there were three. Those
were separate things.

DR. BULLEN: Oh, okay.

MR. BROCOUM: Okay? So\--

DR. BULLEN: Okay. Actually, I kind of wanted to go back to I think it\'s
10, you want to go back to the previous one there? Whoop, almost.

MR. BROCOUM: 10?

DR. BULLEN: Yes. I\'m sorry, 10, not 2. Back one.

MR. BROCOUM: Yes.

DR. BULLEN: Let\'s see, and what was I going to\--this may not be it.
The one that was basically going to\--oh, \"Reduce toxicity and waste
volume\". I guess the question I have there is, when you\'re thinking
out of the box, and you\'re thinking of what\'s required by law to go to
Yucca Mountain\--and the one thing that jumps off the page at you is the
greater than Class C waste that\'s like, wow, you have to put those in
expensive cans and bury it\--is it your group\'s purview to take a look
at the science that maybe does a cost analysis and says, \"Look, we\'re
paying a whole lot of money to take this greater than Class C waste,\"
which just doesn\'t qualify under Part 61 as low-level waste that can be
disposed of, or is that\--I mean is this not quite the avenue to do
that?

MR. BROCOUM: Well, this is kind of\--you know, it\'s always been hanging
out here and never a clear position about where it was going to go, and
I think it\'s something we have to discuss internally within the
Department as well as with external parties. I don\'t have an answer for
you. But it\'s always been something on the side here. So that\'s all I
can say right now.

DR. BULLEN: Okay. Just one last comment, is that I am very heartened by
Margaret Chu\'s comment that she wants to get a fraction of the budget
to stay for science, and I wish you all the best of luck in maintaining
that fraction, whatever the budget profile might be. And I think the
Board has always been in favor of a very strong and consistent science
program in support of all the licensing activities. So I just want to go
on record, at least as Bullen, Board, as saying that I think that this
is a good program to continue.

MR. BROCOUM: Okay. Thank you.

DR. NELSON: Any other questions or comments? Dave Diodato.

DR. DIODATO: Diodato, Staff. Steve, on your Slide 6, just on performance
confirmation there, kind of the last bullet makes a statement that the
\"completion of site characterization\" is the concluding phrase there.
So what does that mean, is site characterization complete at this point?
Do we know everything we need to know about the site? Is it all
understood?

MR. BROCOUM: If you look in the Nuclear Waste Policies Act, it says,
\"Upon completion of site characterization, the Secretary will\--\" So,
you know, the Act says the Secretary could recommend after the
completion, so one could argue that site characterization is completed.
I think our lawyers have taken a position site characterization goes on
until the site is designated. That\'s why I was a little vague as to
whether site characterization is completed.

Also, Part 63 requires performance confirmation program to start during
site characterization, so that\'s why I said some of the ongoing tests
today, as site characterization completes, will become\--for example,
the large scale heater test, you know, that will go on for four more
years or whatever, so that will\--obviously performance confirmation,
assuming the site\'s designated.

DR. DIODATO: Thank you.

DR. NELSON: Okay, thanks, Steve.

I think we have a question, since we have a little bit of time, Dr.
Parizek would like to ask a question that Peter might be the one to
respond to.

DR. PARIZEK: Parizek, Board. I was looking at prioritization, and it\'s
Revision 1, it\'s March 2002, and there are certain activities that are
listed under just a variety of areas of scope reductions at work for
certain work periods, like natural analogues and other categories. And I
didn\'t know if some of these are the ones that dropped out based on the
screening process that was used that you described for us. And then I
was just wondering if that\'s something that Steve\'s program would then
pick up and put in his list of things to worry about for the future.
Because there\'s quite a number of things on this list that would seem
to be important to performance.

MR. SWIFT: Peter Swift, BSC, Sandia National Labs. You\'re looking at
this report here (indicating)?

DR. PARIZEK: I believe. It\'s Revision 1, March 2002. It\'s PA 6.4,
Section 6.4, PA Prioritization.

DR. NELSON: It lists Plan B scope activities and indicates which ones
are scope reductions.

MR. SWIFT: The short answer to your question is that, yes, if that\'s
the document that I\'ve got here, those are, as listed, the ones that
were not carried forward into the current plan. And yes, those are
candidates for Steve Brocoum\'s group.

DR. PARIZEK: And Plan B really is what you had for December 2004
activities.

MR. SWIFT: Yes.

DR. PARIZEK: I mean, you didn\'t actually identify it in your Slide 2,
so it was a little hard to know where that came from. Okay, thank you.

DR. NELSON: Thank you. Well, I\"d like to thank all of our speakers this
afternoon for making such clear presentations. I\'d also like to extend
a thanks to John Pye, who\'s been spending the last couple weeks, months
organizing this meeting and has done a super job.

And since there are no more questions at the moment, I turn it back over
to Dr. Cohon.

DR. COHON: Dr. Chu has something she\'d like to say.

DR. CHU: I just want to make a small announcement. The House just voted
on Yucca Mountain, it\'s 306 counts to 117.

DR. COHON: Thank you.

DR. CHU: Thought I\'d let you know.

DR. COHON: We also received word that the party affiliation breakdown is
also interesting. Republicans voted 203 yes, 13 no; and Democrats voted
102 yes, 103 no; and there\'s 1 independent, who voted no.

I want to add my thanks to all of the speakers today, and certainly to
John Pye for organizing this meeting, and to our wonderful
administrative staff for pulling if off so well.

We have three people who have signed up for public comment, but I
believe George Danko has already departed. George, are you still here?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: He\'s on an airplane.

DR. COHON: He\'s on an airplane. So we have Don Shettel. Don, would you
like to go first? Is he still here? There he is.

MR. SHETTEL: I\'m going to yield my place in the queue to Judy Treichel.
I have to catch a plane.

DR. COHON: Okay. Judy Treichel.

MS. TREICHEL: Well, thank you. Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task
Force. I have to say something about the staging, and I don\'t have a
copy of Charles\' presentation, so I\'ll pick it up on the way out. But
one of the slides that he had was one that took Todd Laporte\'s
criterion for a staging program, and the first things were to everybody
buy in on a concept and to get public approval for that. And there were
a couple of things that are completely off the scope and could never
happen here. But one of the things that was very clear when Charles was
talking about what staging actually is, and what we see staging in other
countries, is that you get to a certain point, everything gets
evaluated, everybody likes what\'s there, and then it goes on from
there.

This is being done, or it\'s being fit in, in exactly the opposite way,
where you sort of agree to go into Never Never Land and do a stage that
is supposed to have been done already or that you would give some sort
of confidence to. And it really just doesn\'t work that way. It\'s sort
of in Las Vegas it would be called \"betting on the come\". And that\'s
not the way a stage repository, in anybody\'s mind, I don\'t think, was
supposed to work. So I hope that the Department of Energy isn\'t allowed
to just fit themselves in and use the word \"staging\".

I think it\'s also incredible what we\'ve seen today about the fact that
there\'s a reorganization going on, there is a brand-new repository
footprint that none of us have ever seen today, the EIS is already out
with another design, those people who just voted on Capitol Hill hadn\'t
seen what they probably were voting on. So it\'s very weird that you
would have\--one of the reasons that you lack confidence is that
everything changes all the time. And if you had\--another thing you\'d
need for staging would be that that stage that you had just finished
stayed the same and it was there, whereas this keeps changing all the
time. And so everything that you\'ve done before is sort of out the door
and not being built upon.

I kept thinking as I was sitting there, particularly during Peter\'s
presentation, I would love to have you bring the finished program, the
entire program, here because they could sit in two rows right there, and
they\'re dealing with exactly the same stuff. And either it\'s going to
be really dangerous and kill a whole lot of people, but it doesn\'t seem
like that\'s the case, because as Claudio was saying, there was
tremendous confidence and that people were going along with this. But
when you see the sort of structure and this craziness and the teams here
and the teams there and the number of levels to do essentially the same
thing, unless I\'m really missing something here, it would be really
interesting to see what this program would look like on the finished
model. And maybe then it would have some confidence because you\'d
really know what it was, and so would\--you wouldn\'t have to each time
you had a question get the different person up because he was talking
about the people were even interchangeable and they even knew the whole
program, like you\'re being expected to do. So I think that\'s a very
interesting thing.

Just to finish up, there was a lot said today about reversibility, and
many times that\'s interchangeable with retrievability. And that\'s
going to be the big trust item, because it\'s so easily thrown out,
\"Oh, yeah, well, we just go back in and get it.\" And there\'s an awful
lot of people, and I\'m one of them, that just doesn\'t think that can
happen like that, or that if you had a real problem you could just stash
it out there on the desert, or get it out at all.

So thank you.

DR. COHON: Thank you, Judy.

Are there any other people who wish to comment? Don, do you want to
comment now?

MR. SHETTEL: Don Shettel of GMI for the State of Nevada. Today my
comments will be limited to ventilation modeling.

A lot of computer horsepower has been applied to some of the ventilation
models that we\'ve seen today, some more than others, especially the
MULTIFLUX\'s run on the Cray. These models partially rely on evaporative
cooling of water to dry the mountain and to dry out the mountain. And
however, and you knew this was coming, a fairly simple phenomena has
been overlooked or ignored in these models. And that is, when you
evaporate water, you precipitate salts and minerals and leave those
behind.

An analogy, for those of you that live in the west and have some
experience with a swamp cooler, or evaporative cooler, you know that the
efficiency over time of that\--it\'s essentially an air conditioner but
uses humid air\--but the efficiency goes down over time because the salt
builds up on the pads and the solution in the bottom of the pan gets
very salty and briny and eventually you have to change out everything.

However, in this case, in the case of Yucca Mountain, the precipitates
will build up in the fractures, initially a few meters into the wall
rack, and I suppose this has something to do with the influx of water
coming towards the drift as ventilation proceeds versus the diffusion of
gas vapor actually into the drift. These precipitates will greatly
reduce, if not eliminate, the evaporation of water and flow of air into
the ventilation drifts, and this renders the modeling essentially
nonconservative.

By selection of reasonable values of parameters, such as fracture
porosity, infiltration, skin thickness in the wall rock, water
compositions, etc., I have calculated that this plugging might occur in
the order of a few years, if not less, depending on ranges of parameters
that you might select as being reasonable. We don\'t know exactly what
these might be yet during ventilation.

I\'m preparing a manuscript on this that should be finished in a few
weeks. I will forward that to the Board.

But there\'s another disturbing aspect to this, and that\'s that some of
these models are going to be used by people to validate against each
other, and if they both are essentially incorrect by ignoring
evaporation and precipitation of salts, they may both validate each
other, but they are conceptually wrong.

Thank you.

DR. COHON: Thank you. Is there anybody else who would care to comment or
to ask a question? Yes, Englebrecht, please\--Parvis, you
can\--actually, Parvis, you\'re probably going to talk about
ventilation, yes? Englebrecht, if you don\'t mind, could we have Parvis
next? Thank you. Since it\'s obviously relevant to Don\'s\--

MR. MONTAZER: I just wanted to make a quick comment. In none of my
simulations did I take credit for fractual flow. In all the simulations
that are presented today, it\'s all matrix flow, there\'s no fracture
involved in any of them.

DR. COHON: Don, Don, Don, to the mike. Don\'t go too far away, Parvis.

MR. SHETTEL: You\'re still taking credit for the evaporation of water
going from liquid phase to the vapor phase, and that imparts endothermic
reaction and uses up heat and cools.

MR. MONTAZER: In the first place simulations on the overall simulation
of the waste emplacement boreholes, that does not affect, because I\'m
not taking credit for the evaporation in that particular case. In the
case of when I have the 20 or the 60 different waste emplacement
boreholes. In the case of\--in the other two cases when I\'m trying to
show the first 300-year cooling effect, I do take credit for some of the
evaporation. But in the matrix flow, if you consider the amount of
solids that could be possibly deposited is just inconsequential as far
as the evaporation is concerned. If you include the fractures, yes, you
get a tremendous amount of extra cooling. But in none of these
simulations am I taking credit for that.

DR. COHON: You want the last word, Don?

MR. SHETTEL: It\'s an unrealistic model to use a matrix flow for
ventilation. The fracture flow is the most important thing we\'ve seen
from infiltration studies, and to say that that\'s not going to be
important in ventilation I think is a mistake.

DR. COHON: Thank you. Englebrecht. Sorry about that before. And please
identify yourself for our recorder.

MR. VON TIESENHAUSEN: Englebrecht Von Tiesenhausen, I\'m with Clark
County, and I\'m happy to say my comments do not concern ventilation. I
want to address performance confirmation just very shortly, more as a
parking lot issue, because there are no finite plans to assess. The
container lifetime and corrosion processes are probably the most
critical issues under the current performance assessment regime, and I
have serious concerns that any critical data will be obtained on those
issues during performance confirmation, especially if the time period
ends at time of closure. Using waste packages and some other issues like
that would probably help, but it fails to address cumulative issues that
could happen in a real waste package. So even though the ideology of
geologic disposal is you seal it and you forget it, I would opt for the
fact that maybe some postclosure monitoring could be considered and that
be made part of a License Application.

Thank you.

DR. COHON: Thank you. Any other comments or questions? Yes, Dr.
McCombie.

DR. MCCOMBIE: Charles McCombie, Switzerland. I just wanted to come back
to the issue of the science program that was mentioned from the very
beginning to the very end, I think it was the first and last thing.
Because it\'s very good that it\'s going to happen and I like the
elements in it, and so on. The point that kind of disturbed me was the
assumption, or even the suggestion that the scale of the program should
somehow be directly correlated, proportional to the project costs. I
think there\'s no rationale for that. It\'s not just a good thing. If
the project has a low, than a long-term program doesn\'t want to suffer
from that. If the project has a high, if you suddenly start building
massive engineering things and the costs go up, there\'s no good
scientific reason to have the scientific program scale with it.

So I think the real thing is to get a reasonably dimensioned, in an
absolute scale and scientific program. Bob Card mentioned a few tens of
millions, I think, and I was a little bit perturbed at the assumption
that seemed to go around the table in particular from Don that ought to
be a scale factor. I think that\'s scientifically not a justifiable
approach.

DR. COHON: Thank you. Dan?

DR. BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Actually, Charles, I agree completely. What I
was hoping for was that minimum threshold, that it never went away. And
our concern was that, you know, basically we\'ve seen in the case of the
cut down to \$250 million from 400 million, a lot of things absolutely
stopped. And so our Board has always considered the long-term and, you
know, the long horizon. And so a minimum is exactly\--I completely agree
with you, let me put it that way.

DR. COHON: Tim?

MR. MCCARTIN: Tim McCartin, NRC. Englebrecht, the regulations do require
a program for post permanent closure monitoring. It\'s not elaborated
on, because obviously that\'s something if the decision is to move
forward, it\'s maybe as much as 100 years from now. But 63.51, the
amendment for permanent closure, does require a program for post
permanent monitoring.

DR. COHON: Thank you. Any other comments or questions?

(No response.)

DR. COHON: Thank you again. We hope you\'ll join us at our next meeting,
which is scheduled for September 10th at 11 in Las Vegas. We are
adjourned.

(Whereupon, at 4:39 p.m., the meeting was adjourned.)