UNITED STATES

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

SPRING 2002 BOARD MEETING

May 7, 2002

Washington Marriott Hotel

1221 22nd Street N.W.

Washington, D.C.

[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}.

**Call to Order and Introductory Statements**

Jared Cohon, Chairman

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

**State of Nevada, Agency for Nuclear Projects**

Robert Loux, Executive Director . . . . . . . . . 19

**Overview of the Program**

Margaret Chu, Director

Office of Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) . . 34

**Overview of the Project**

Russ Dyer (DOE/YMP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

**Robert Card**

Under Secretary of Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

**Public Comment Period** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

**Status on Corrosion Studies**

Dan Bullen, Session Chair (NWTRB) . . . . . . . . 123

**DOE Waste Package Performance Peer Review**

Joe Payer, Case Western Reserve University . . . . 123

**Near-Field Corrosion Processes**

**Evaluation for the State of Nevada**

Maury Morgenstein

Geosciences Management Institute . . . . . . . . . 151

**Safety Case/Strategy, Confidence**

**Building, and Uncertainty**

Richard Parizek, Session Chair (NWTRB) . . . . . . 166

**International Perspective on a**

**Safety Case/Strategy**

Claudio Pescatore (OEAD/NEA) . . . . . . . . . . . 166

**Nuclear Regulatory Commission View of**

**Safety Case/Strategy**

Tim McCartin (NRC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

[I N D E X]{.underline}

(Cont.)

[PAGE NO]{.underline}.

**DOE Safety Case/Strategy**

Joe Ziegler (DOE/YMP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

**State of Nevada - Views on a Safety**

**Case/Strategy**

Steve Frishman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

**Public Comment Period** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

**Adjournment**

Jared Cohon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

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

8:00 a.m.

COHON: Good morning. My name is Jared Cohon. I\'m the Chairman of the
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. It\'s my pleasure to welcome you
here to this second meeting of the calendar year of our Board. Our Board
generally meets three to four times a year, usually in Nevada, but we
try to meet at least once a year here in Washington, and here we are.
And we\'re very glad to be here.

We know many of you travelled a long distance to be at the meeting, and
we appreciate your efforts to be here, and we hope we will reward you
with an interesting and important meeting. I think we will.

We find ourselves at an important and very interesting time in the life
of the Yucca Mountain Project. As you no doubt all know, Secretary
Spencer Abraham and then the President both recommended the Yucca
Mountain site as the site for a permanent high level waste repository.
And on April 8th, Governor Kenny Guinn of Nevada notified Congress of
the State\'s disapproval of the President\'s recommendation. It\'s now
up to Congress to decide within 90 \"legislative days\" of the
Governor\'s notice of disapproval whether or not to override it or let
stand the State\'s veto of the site.

This Board\'s role in the site-recommendation process is to assess the
scientific and technical basis for the recommendation, and to
communicate its evaluation to decision-makers in a way that is both
understandable and useful. To accomplish that, we wrote a letter that
was sent to the Secretary and to Congress in January of this year. And
in that letter, the Board presented its conclusions that, taken as a
whole, the technical basis supporting DOE\'s repository performance
estimates is weak to moderate at this time. The Board made no judgment
on whether the Yucca Mountain site should be approved for possible
repository development. We view that as a decision for policy-makers.

I outlined the major points from the Board\'s letter in testimony before
a House subcommittee on April 18th. A resolution of approval, which
would, in effect, override Nevada\'s veto, has since passed the full
House committee, and a vote on the House floor is expected soon. We
understand that the Senate will begin holding hearings within the next
several days. If you\'re interested and if you haven\'t seen it, both
the Board\'s January letter and our House testimony are available at the
documents on the table, which I think is outside. Yes? Please, someone
nod their head, or either tell me I\'m wrong.

Back of the room. You all know. Okay. Just so you know. That\'s the
important thing. I\'ve seen it.

Let me now give you some brief background on the Board itself. Our Board
was created in the 1987 amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
Congress established the Board as an independent federal agency to
evaluate the technical and scientific validity of activities of the
Secretary of DOE related to nuclear waste disposal. The Board is
required to report its findings and recommendations twice a year to
Congress and to the Secretary.

The president appoints Board members from a list of nominees submitted
by the National Academy of Sciences. The Board is, by law and design, a
multi-disciplinary group composed of eleven members with expertise
covering a wide-range of issues related to nuclear waste management.

Let me now introduce the members of our Board to you. In the past, in
fact at all meetings I\'ve chaired up until this one, I would have
started by introducing John Arendt. Sadly, John passed away just two and
a half weeks ago on April 21st. John joined the Board in 1995, and was
known for his firm and consistent views. When John spoke, we listened.

John was a graduate of Marquette University. During World War II, he was
employed by the University of Chicago on the Manhattan project. In 1947,
John moved to Oak Ridge, where he worked in the Oak Ridge Gaseous
Diffusion Plant. He held numerous management positions there until his
retirement in 1984. He continued working as a private consultant with
his son Steve at JBF Associates in West Knoxville, Tennessee for several
years after that.

John was a champion of the highest standards of public service, both for
himself and for our Board. He cared deeply about the Board and its work,
keeping us on task and focused on the Board\'s Congressional mandate. He
was a wonderful person and near and dear to the hearts of all of the
Board members and our staff. We will miss John and cherish our memories
of him.

Please join me in a moment of silence in John Arendt\'s memory.

(Moment of silence.)

COHON: Thank you. As I introduce the rest of the Board members, let me
remind you that we all serve in a part-time capacity. In my case, I\'m
President of\--well, it is part-time. It just seems like full-time. In
my case, I\'m President of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. My
technical expertise is in environmental and water resources systems
analysis.

Daniel Bullen is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa
State University. His areas of expertise include performance assessment
modeling and materials science. Dan chairs both our Panel on Performance
Assessment and the Panel on the Repository.

Norman Christensen is Professor of Ecology and former Dean of the
Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. His areas of
expertise include biology, ecology, and ecosystem management.

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

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

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

Richard Parizek is Professor of Geology and Geoenvironmental Engineering
at the Pennsylvania State University, and he\'s President also of
Richard Parizek and Associates, consulting hydrogeologists and
environmental geologists. His areas of expertise include hydrogeology
and environmental geology.

Donald Runnells is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geological
Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He also is a
technical consultant to Shepherd Miller, environmental and engineering
consultants. His areas of expertise include geochemistry,
hydrochemistry, and mineral deposits.

Alberto Sagüés is Distinguished University Professor in the Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South
Florida. His areas of expertise include corrosion and materials
engineering, physical metallurgy, and scientific instrumentation.

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

We are supported by a wonderful staff, led by Executive Director Bill
Barnard, who just walked\--oh, is standing in the back. There he is. And
the rest of the staff are displayed impressively there along the wall.

Let me turn now to our meeting agenda. I\'ll be as brief as possible,
but I have to warn you we have a very ambitious agenda and a lot of
ground to cover, both in the meeting itself and in this overview.

Today, right after I\'m done, we\'ll start with Bob Loux, Executive
Director of the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who will
present the views of the State related to the potential siting of a
repository at Yucca Mountain. Mr. Loux is responsible for the staffing,
organization, and direction of the State Nuclear Projects Office.

We will then have an overview of the current activities of the Office of
Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, or OCRWM, by Dr. Margaret Chu,
who is the new Director of OCRWM. Dr. Chu, who will be participating in
her first Board meeting, has had over 20 years of experience primarily
at Sandia National Laboratory, ranging from research and development to
program management. And I understand she was actively involved in the
WIPP project.

She\'s an expert in many aspects of nuclear waste, both technical and
policy issues, and on behalf of the Board, Dr. Chu, congratulations on
your appointment, not condolences, congratulations, and welcome to our
meeting, your first meeting. We look forward to your participation
today, and in many meetings in the future.

I want to now take a moment to recognize the efforts of Lake Barrett who
has on many occasions addressed the Board at our meetings. It was Lake
who five years ago, among many other things, suggested that the DOE,
OCRWM and the Board should work to improve communications on technical
issues between the program and the Board. And in our view, the resulting
open technical exchanges have been very beneficial, both to the program
and to the Board. This will be Lake\'s last attendance at a Board
meeting in his current capacity, and we appreciate, Lake, all that
you\'ve done in improving Board and DOE technical interactions, and for
your active participation in our meetings over the years, and we wish
you well in your retirement.

Lake, thank you very much.

Back to our agenda, after Dr. Chu\'s presentation, Russ Dyer, the Yucca
Mountain Project Manager, will present an overview of project
activities, including long-range plans and project priorities for
science and engineering activities. Dr. Dyer has overall responsibility
for the study of Yucca Mountain as a potential repository site.

The morning session will conclude with a presentation by Under Secretary
Robert Card. This will be the first time that the Under Secretary has
addressed the Board, and we look forward to his comments on the current
status of the site recommendation process.

Mr. Card has responsibility for DOE operations related to energy,
science, and environment. We\'ve timed his presentation to give him the
opportunity to respond to questions during the public comment period, if
that becomes appropriate.

After our lunch break, we\'ll begin the afternoon session with a status
report on corrosion studies. Due to scheduling constraints, both
presentations that we had originally scheduled for tomorrow were moved
to this afternoon.

First, Dr. Joe Payer, Chair of the DOE\'s Waste Package Materials
Performance Peer Review Panel, will summarize the Peer Review Panel\'s
Report and its key recommendations. Dr. Payer is Professor of Materials
Science and Engineering and Director of the Yeager Center for
Electrochemical Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.

Following Dr. Payer\'s presentation, Maury Morgenstein of Geoscience
Management Institute will present an evaluation on near-field corrosion
processes on behalf of the State of Nevada. Dr. Morgenstein is President
of Geoscience Management Institute, Inc. He spent 18 years as a
consultant with the Yucca Mountain Project supporting the State of
Nevada. He directs the State of Nevada\'s engineering barrier and
near-field assessment program.

In mid-afternoon, we will turn our attention to the Yucca Mountain
safety case, confidence building, and the reduction of uncertainty.

Claudio Pescatore of the Nuclear Energy Agency will lead off by giving
us an international perspective on these issues. Dr. Pescatore is
currently a principal administrator for radioactive waste management
with the NEA. In this capacity, he\'s the technical secretariat to
several international committees for the NEA.

Tim McCartin will follow with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission\'s
current views on the same topic. Mr. McCartin is senior advisor for
performance assessment in the Division of Waste Management, Office of
Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards at NRC.

Joe Ziegler will present the Yucca Mountain Project\'s view. Mr. Ziegler
is currently acting manager of the Office of Licensing and Regulatory
Compliance.

The session will conclude with a presentation by Steve Frishman on the
State of Nevada\'s views on the safety case. Mr. Frishman is a nuclear
waste program consultant who has since 1987 served as a technical policy
coordinator for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Let me now turn to tomorrow\'s agenda. The first session tomorrow
morning will focus on staged repository development, concepts and plans.
Charles McCombie will provide his views on staged repository
development, and is especially well suited to do so. Dr. McCombie is an
independent and international consultant in radioactive waste
management. He\'s also Vice-Chair of the National Academy\'s Board on
Radioactive Waste Management, and Chair of the National Research
Council\'s Committee on Principles and Operational Strategies for Staged
Repository Systems. He recently became executive director of the
Association for Regional and International Underground Storage.

Following Dr. McCombie\'s presentation, Jeff Williams of the DOE will
outline the Department\'s current views on staged repository
development. Mr. Williams is currently OCRWM\'s Director of the Systems
Engineering and International Division.

That session will conclude with comments by Steve Frishman on the State
of Nevada\'s views on staged repository development.

In the late morning, the discussion will turn to repository design.

Elwood Stroupe will discuss the Project\'s concepts of flexible
repository design and thermal operating conditions. Mr. Stroupe is
currently the manager of special projects for Bechtel SAIC.

After him, Parviz Montazer representing Nye County, Nevada will present
a ventilated repository concept. It\'s always a pleasure to have Nye
County participate in our meetings, and we\'ll be happy to welcome Dr.
Montazer back to the meeting tomorrow.

Mark Board of BSC will provide an update on repository design; current
geotechnical considerations, and specifically thermal mechanical
properties, and ground support. Dr. Board is a senior engineer with BSC,
and prior to joining the Project, he worked for 18 years as a consulting
rock mechanic and mining engineer.

The afternoon will begin with two presentations on performance
confirmation and research and development.

Steve Brocoum will outline Project testing and R&D activities. Dr.
Brocoum, who has made numerous presentations to the Board in the past,
is senior policy advisor for the Yucca Mountain Project Office.

John Kessler will conclude this session with a presentation on the role
of long-term R&D and performance confirmation. Dr. Kessler is currently
EPRI project manager and was responsible for organizing and hosting the
EPRI workshop on performance confirmation and R&D last November.

We\'ll conclude the meeting with presentations on Project plans for
performance assessment and design, as well as Project priorities for
Fiscal Year 02-03.

Nancy Williams from BSC will lead off with an overview of project plans.
Ms. Williams is manager of projects and has responsibility for
repository design, performance assessment, including scientific
investigations, site-characterization, and licensing for BSC. Though I
haven\'t mentioned the affiliations of other people, I\'m proud to point
out that Nancy Williams is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University and
has 24 years experience in management of commercial nuclear facilities
and large complex engineering, procurement, and construction projects.

After her overview, Peter Swift, Manager of Performance Assessment
Strategy and Scope, will outline the prioritization process and priority
activities for performance assessment and science.

And we\'ll wrap up with Larry Trautner, Repository Design Manager.
He\'ll discuss design priorities planned for the coming fiscal year.

And that brings us finally to the close of our two-day agenda. I told
you it\'s ambitious.

Let me just say a few words and wrap up about public comment and the
ground rules of our meetings.

We provided three public comment periods during the course of the next
two days, one following Under Secretary Card\'s presentation, as I
mentioned before, another at the end of today\'s session, and a final
one tomorrow at the end of the meeting in late afternoon. Those wanting
to comment should sign the Public Comment Register at the check-in table
in the back where Linda Hiatt and Linda Coultry are seated, and they
will be happy to assist you.

To keep the meeting as close to schedule as possible, we\'ll encourage
those of you who can hold your comments until the later comment period,
to do so, saving as much time as we can during the day. If someone wants
to comment tomorrow and absolutely cannot stay until the comment period
at the end of the meeting tomorrow, let us know and we\'ll try to
accommodate you during the meeting tomorrow.

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

As always, we welcome written comments to the Board for the record.
Those of you who prefer not to make oral comments or ask questions
during the meeting, may choose the written route at any time. And we
especially encourage written comments when they\'re more extensive than
our meeting time allows.

Finally, I have to offer our usual disclaimer for the record so that
everybody is clear on the conduct of our meeting and what you\'re
hearing and the significance of what you\'re hearing.

Our meetings are spontaneous by design. Though I\'m scripted, everything
else about the meeting is not. Those of you who have attended our
meetings before know that the members do not hesitate to speak their
minds. But I have to emphasize that that\'s precisely what they\'re
doing when they\'re speaking. They\'re speaking on behalf of themselves,
not on behalf of the Board. When we are articulating a Board position,
we\'ll be sure to let you know.

Well, with that, let me now then start the meeting itself by introducing
Bob Loux, Executive Director of the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear
Projects. He will present the views of the State related to the
potential siting of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

Bob?

LOUX: Good morning, and thank you for your invitation to be here today.
I apologize to the Board for the last meeting you had in Las Vegas, or I
guess Amargosa Valley, where I was scheduled to appear, and I think, as
Steve Frishman may have told you, the logistics of getting out of Carson
City that day became very difficult, and made it virtually impossible to
get there. But I appreciate your indulgence and wanting to have me back
again. I appreciate again the opportunity to be here.

I think we\'re all highly complimentary of the Board\'s work and the
tireless work of the staff over the years. You really should be
complimented for this work. It\'s really well done, and I know in
reading the last report on the way on the plane out here, I\'m really
impressed by the body of work that\'s occurred over the number of years
in looking at the history of meetings and notes and correspondence, and
it\'s quite an impressive record that you all have put together. And I
know many of us, especially in Nevada, are highly appreciative of the
work that\'s gone on.

Well, as the Chairman indicated, it\'s certainly an important time in
this particular stage of the process. As he indicated, and you all know,
that we\'re now in sort of a preliminary stage relative to site
suitability, and ultimately if the site will turn out to be a
repository. You know there\'s a heck of a long way to go, and in talking
with Dr. Chu a moment ago, I welcomed her and met her for the first
time, look forward to working with her, and of course had a very
enjoyable time working with Lake Barrett over the years. I understand
that he is going to be taking up golf and a number of other activities
very shortly. So, I wish him well, and if you get to be quite good at
this, maybe you can offer some lessons, Lake, and we can get together
and go hit them.

I think most of us in Nevada, and I think throughout the country, are
probably not surprised by the decision by the Secretary and the
President to recommend the site, although I think we\'re probably
surprised a little bit about the speed and timing of the decision, which
I think is a concern not only to us, but the majority of the scientific
community as we hear from them over time.

I don\'t think that anyone really expected a different decision from the
Secretary or the President relative to Yucca Mountain. Again, I just
think that we were surprised by the speed and timing of it, and
concerned about the database that\'s out there, and the record that\'s
been established to try and make these decisions.

Given sort of the nature of where we are now, it really I think can be
characterized mostly as a political decision, given the fact that the
Secretary and the President, and certainly the Governor, are all
creatures of the political world, and certainly the activities of
Congress here that\'s going on are taking place in a political
environment and not necessarily a scientific one.

The tough road ahead for the project for DOE is going to come in the
next two stages, which is going to be the legal arena and the scientific
arena, assuming it proceeds that far. And those issues are going to be
exceedingly more difficult as we go along. I think we were talking
earlier that these last 15 or 20 years have sort of been the easy part,
and now it only gets more difficult from here on out.

For us in Nevada, it\'s sort of the first time that DOE has actually
made a decision that we can hold them accountable for, the scientific
community and others can hold them accountable for. As you all know, all
of the decisions of the program to date, whether it has been the
promulgation of site suitability guidelines or recommendation decision,
have all been done in the last year or so. And as a result, no surprise
to you that the State has filed a number of legal actions against all
three of the agencies that have a role to play in this process, the DOE
and of course the EPA standards, and more recently, against the NRC for
their licensing role, and we understand that those schedules are going
forward, and some of those cases are going to begin being heard shortly
after the 1st of the year. And we anticipate at least some decisions in
those cases perhaps as early as next summer, as the case may be.

The one that we have not filed as of yet is the one challenging the
actual environmental impact statement. I have to caution our legal team
to begin trying to draw this to a close because of the number of
defects, both procedurally and substantively, that they have found in
the document, are just very long and very numerous, so having to
actually try to bring those to a close so we can actually get the case
filed.

I think one of the more disturbing or a largest concern the State has
with the project at this point in time is this continual decision to
postpone and push to the future all sorts of future decisions. When
various objections are raised in the program here and on the Hill over
here, all these things will be decided in the future. You can go ahead
and punt this off to the NRC in the future. You can go punt all of these
issues off to the future. Just let us make this decision and move on in
the process.

Given the track record of the agency and their virtual inability to
really successfully complete projects, that becomes a very disturbing
point in our view relative to the project. It almost is as if the
database of course is not there, and the decision to postpone the
decision to the future simply is an excuse for lack of data and a lack
of information about the project.

I\'ve even remarked about the Secretary\'s recent Op-Ed in the
Washington Post and the New York Times that the scientific inquiry will
be finished as we go over the next 100 to 300 years. And we believe that
that sort of accountability needs to be brought to a head now, and not
postponed to the future, regardless of what the state of the decision
making is at this point and the database. DOE is simply going to have to
live with the record they\'ve established to date, and be accountable
for it, and not to some decision in the future.

We kind of view the same process, and I know you\'ll hear from Steve
later on about it, but that kind of summarizes most of our view also
about the staged repository licensing approach. It simply is an excuse
for lack of information and data at this point in time, and not one that
we think is attributing to building public confidence in the project as
been advertised.

In 1982, Nevada believes that Congress made a compact with the nation
and with the citizens of the State that any decisions about Yucca
Mountain, recommendation decisions, would be based on a very complete
scientific database, and that data would be complete and in hand prior
to any decision, and that any recommendation for a site would be made
primarily upon the geologic characteristics of the site, and not
necessarily this total system performance and substitution of engineered
barriers to mask or hide deficiencies in the geologic system.

As I think we\'ve all seen, and our data is suggesting, and I know that
John Bartlett presented this to you at your last meeting, that our view
now is that the engineered barrier system comprises nearly 99 per cent
of the overall performance at the site, with the natural system
providing relatively little.

Therefore, the constant phrase we hear that there\'s no show stoppers at
the site can actually have some validity in this case, in the sense that
the site really contributes nothing to waste isolation, in our view,
and, therefore, there are no show stoppers, obviously.

Our view is that DOE has not fulfilled the compact that Congress made
with the nation and to Nevada and the others. That commitment I don\'t
think anyone really believes has been filled.

As I think many of you know, we petitioned the Secretary in 1989 to have
the site disqualified under the siting guidelines, and were told that
that was premature. The site characterization was ongoing. We petitioned
them again in 1999, same reasons, and were told that site
characterization isn\'t over, and will be shortly. And now that we\'ve
had recommendation and site characterization complete, we\'re told that
science is somehow going to have to catch up to this decision.

The Governor recently remarked in I believe a hearing, which event it
was is kind of hard to remember, it\'s like giving someone a license to
practice medicine, and then requiring them to go to medical school
sometime in the future. It\'s not the kind of person you probably would
like to be operating on your kids.

In any event, the State of Nevada intends through the legal process and
through every other process we can find to ensure that the process is
followed meticulously, and in fact that the national policy is upheld.
And as I mentioned, those are many of the issues that we\'ve filed cases
over and will continue to argue them.

As we all know, the Secretary, in recommending the site, primarily said
there are two reasons for the decision. One was that there was sound
science in hand, and also that the national security concerns relative
to terrorists and other sorts of activities going on in that community.
In our view, neither of those reasons are valid, have much validity to
them.

Certainly, the national security issue is one that is difficult to talk
about, given the current construct of where we are with the current
state of the affairs in the world. But, clearly, as long as nuclear
power plants continue to operate, there is going to be high-level waste
stored at those sites. I think the Governor indicated that the end of
the Yucca Mountain period, if it should go forward, the shipping period,
if it should go forward and reaches its legal capacity, would then be
somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 to 50,000 metric tons of waste
still at these reactor sites needing disposal. So, removing them to
Yucca Mountain does not solve that problem.

In fact, creating the site at Yucca Mountain probably creates one more
additional site in the entire inventory of potential targets, to say
nothing of the thousands of shipment of waste over a number of years it
would take to get to the site.

In the science arena, we have not found a single scientific entity or
believe there\'s one outside of DOE that supports the decision at this
time. I just don\'t know that anyone really believes that that
information is in hand to support a recommendation decision. And clearly
no one in the scientific community believes that you can apply the
engineered barriers in the way that DOE has to mask or hide the geologic
deficiencies at the site.

All of the entities who have been reviewing the project, and you know
the entity, the Board itself, the ACNW, the NRC, the GAO, virtually all
these groups are of the belief that there\'s gaping holes in the science
still at Yucca Mountain.

And I guess the more astounding part is looking at the entities that DOE
has actually contracted with. It\'s maybe one thing to look at these
external entities and describe their comments, but the comments that I
reviewed, and as I understand, the Waste Package Peer Review Board, and
I know you\'re going to hear more about it later, has recommended that
Titanium 7 as a drip shield ought to be discarded, something that both
the State and the NRC, the Center has cautioned DOE about over the last
couple years. We think probably that Alloy 22 is going to have to follow
the same path eventually. We see the problems there as well.

I think the most important thing that we saw was the comments from the
IEAE and the NEA, their peer review of the DOE program, and made some
rather extraordinary comments about the state of the project in their
comments to DOE, comments such as that DOE does not even know enough
about the hydrogeologic system to create a model, let alone run one with
some validity. And I don\'t want to belabor the point by reading all
those comments, although I have them prepared here, but it seems to me
at this point in time, that if every other entity who\'s out here
looking at the project is making the same comments, including those
contracted by DOE for their comments, it seems very difficult to believe
that there can be any public confidence in the decision that we have in
hand.

I know that in Nevada, of course, the public is very, very concerned.
But it seems to me that if we\'re about building public confidence, that
postponing a recommendation decision until we have this information in
hand and be confident of it would have been the smart way to go. But
apparently we\'re alone in that view, at least outside of DOE.

So, in sum, it seems to us that the national policy is in conflict with
the science. It isn\'t complete. It seems to us that this is a political
decision, primarily made for political reasons. And as I mentioned at
the outset, the difficult steps are still ahead and, again, we intend to
enforce them legally and in the licensing arena, assuming it gets that
far.

In conclusion, let me just reiterate that as far as the Board is
concerned, I guess the State and everyone else has been highly
supportive and complimentary to the work. We agree with the major
recommendations of the Board, and urge their continuation to urge DOE to
complete work on the waste package and the EBS system, although parts of
that seem to be maybe back at square one.

We certainly think that reducing uncertainties, both in the model and
the data, are critical. The four to six orders of magnitude uncertainty
in numbers are simply unacceptable, not to us, but probably are to the
NRC and licensing, I would imagine. And yet we\'re being told by DOE
that maybe these uncertainties cannot be reduced any further, that we
may have to live with this level of uncertainty down the road, something
that we find unacceptable, and I\'m sure many others do as well.

And we certainly support the view from the Board that there needs to be
a separate independent line of evidence for site suitability. I think
this is going to be a very difficult task for DOE to do, simply because
of the way they\'ve approached the project and the way they\'ve looked
at total system performance.

And we think that the one-on analysis for understanding contribution of
barriers continues to be a very important piece to be looking at,
because it\'s clear that the role of the engineered barrier is very
important in the overall performance of the site, and I think that we
need to understand that and learn how they should interact with each
other.

And, lastly, I guess for the future, it seems to us that there might be
a role for the Board to play, and we recommend that the Board look at
the question of the scientific validity of this postponement, or leaving
the repository open for the next 300 years, to understand whether
there\'s truly any scientific validity in that proposal, or whether
it\'s really sort of a time just to bide time to collect and look at
more data.

Since most of the science questions are still unanswered at Yucca
Mountain, I think the Board needs to continue its strong independent
role of overseeing the project, and resist falling victim to the DOE
proposal being made to state and local governments that somehow we kind
of join in now in some sort of cooperative process, and begin working
together to make this thing work. I think that it\'s only a matter of
time probably before the Board receives this kind of proposal, and we
would urge you to resist that as well. I know that state and local
governments certainly intend to do that.

Well, with that, I\'d like to conclude. I hope that Steve Frishman and
the others on my technical staff have been helpful to you in your
deliberations, and look forward to working with you all, as well as the
Department of Energy, as we proceed down the road.

Thank you for your time.

COHON: Thank you, Bob. Questions from the Board? Dan Bullen.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Bob, I had a quick question about the litigation. You mentioned that you
had filed suits against the parties, NRC, DOE, and EPA, and that you
expected those cases to actually\--do you expect them to be resolved, or
just basically to start, prior to the license application timeline,
which looks like it\'s going to be sort of late \'04? Can you give a
little bit more information on what the timeline might be?

LOUX: In the initial case that we filed, at least in time, was the
challenge to the EPA standards, and that case, as I understand it, has
been scheduled for oral argument here before the courts of appeal in
D.C. in February of next year. And our experience, at least with the
courts of appeal in the past, has been that a decision from the Court
usually follows in the next three to five months generally thereafter.

So, it seems likely we could see some decision on the standards as early
as sometime in the summer. I suspect we\'re going to see a briefing and
hearing schedule in the other cases as well fairly soon.

We, and I know the Justice Department, both asked for sort of an
expedited process. It\'s remarkable how long it really takes to move
things along in these venues. And then, of course, it really remains to
be seen whether those decisions would end up being appealed at the
Supreme Court or not. But I think next summer, we\'ll begin seeing
decisions out of the court.

BULLEN: Bullen. Just a quick followup question.

Then the FEIS case that has yet to be filed, do you think will also be
resolved in that time frame, or do you think it\'s going to drag on
longer?

LOUX: My guess would be perhaps a bit longer. There may be a move to
consolidate some of these cases and try to get them all moved forward. I
know that we, and I think the Justice Department as well, would like to
see these things moved along. And if we can collectively persuade the
court, I think it would be to everyone\'s benefit.

BULLEN: Thank you.

COHON: Bob, is the funding for your office sufficient for what you need
to do?

LOUX: Well, it\'s never sufficient, as you well know. We could spend any
amount of money that was given to us. Right now, we are spending the
bulk of our resources on the corrosion work, as you know, since it
appears that the package and the EBS is the primary component of the
system at this point.

But, yeah, we could actually obviously use additional funds. Right now,
the annual appropriation, as you know, is about \$2 1/2 million. DOE
has, at least at this point in time, only agreed to provide us with
about 1.8 of that, withholding parts of it for some reasons that we
don\'t understand yet, that we\'re yet to work out with them. But, we
could use some additional funding, without question, although we\'ll do
quite well with the funding that we do have.

COHON: Other questions?

(No response.)

COHON: Thank you very much, Bob.

LOUX: Thank you.

COHON: To introduce Dr. Chu, I call on Lake Barrett, who we\'re always
happy to welcome to the podium, even if it\'s maybe, likely, for the
last time.

BARRETT: This will be the last time.

COHON: You\'ve said that before.

BARRETT: No, I didn\'t say it. I said it might have been. But, thank you
very much, and thank you very much for the kind words that you said
earlier and the last meeting.

It is my privilege and honor to introduce to you today Dr. Margaret Chu,
who is the Director, and is taking on the program. And I\'d like to make
a comment regarding the Board\'s views over the many years.

I compliment the Board, this Board and previous Board\'s, for making
this a much better program than if you had not existed. You really have
enlightened us. You have challenged us and pushed us to greater levels.
I\'ve learned a lot. The program has learned a lot. I think the pushes
that you have done, and the fundamental understanding to improve the
understandings and the scientific work, has taken seed much more than it
was before.

I think our good program will be a much, much better program. You\'ll
hear from Bob later this morning, but with Bob and with Margaret and
their views, is going to take this a quantum leap up. I believe we have
an adequate scientific knowledge for the state we\'re at to go to the
next step in this. We\'ll have to wait to go to Congress to see if we go
back, or if we go forward. But if it is to go forward, what Margaret is
going to explain to you now, and also what Bob will reinforce later
today, I think you should be pleased of the fruits of your labor and the
service that you\'ve done for this country and the international
community as well.

So, I thank you for your service, and thank you for your help that you
will provide Margaret, much more than you have for myself. So, thank you
very much.

And, Margaret Chu?

COHON: Thank you, Lake. Dr. Chu?

CHU: Thank you. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank
Lake. Where\'s Lake? Okay. He\'s been extremely helpful to me in the
past several weeks, and gave me a tremendous data dump every day, and
made my life from impossible to very difficult. Thank you.

After having said that, all the hard questions go to Lake later.

I really want to thank the Board for giving me this opportunity to talk
to you today. I\'m very honored to be nominated by the President to take
on this job. And, frankly, I\'m quite humbled to take on the job of this
work.

You know, like I said, this is my seventh week on the job. Before I came
on board, I thought that my 20 year involvement in nuclear waste
disposal will well prepare me for this job. But I find myself facing the
challenge of my life, my career.

I remember on the day of my Senate confirmation, one of the Senators
came over and shook my hand and said, \"Margaret, you\'re one brave
lady.\" I think he knows more than I did at the time.

First, I want to introduce myself a little bit, I know Dr. Cohon
already, introduce me a little bit. My academic background is in
chemistry. I have a Bachelor\'s Degree in Chemistry from Purdue
University, and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of
Minnesota.

Actually, my Ph.D. was more physics than chemistry. Lake, I like your
word \"quantum jump\" actually. My Ph.D. thesis was quantum mechanics.

You know, except for three years of post-doc work early on, I\'ve spent
my entire career at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, and then I would say almost entirely in nuclear related
projects. I have done quite a bit of work in the risk assessment area
when I was a technical person way back.

What I want to share with you is early in my career, it was the early
1980s, I was part of a technical team at Sandia which was I would say
the first technical group in the country that was supporting the
Environmental Protection Agency in formulating the early stage of the
waste disposal regulations, 40 CFR 191. Also, we worked with NRC in
developing their early regulations.

And I still remember we used to debate late into the night on the
balance between what the current generation\'s needs are in terms of
waste disposal, against the legacy we may leave behind for our future
generations. And these early days set a foundation for myself in my
understanding that waste disposal is a multi-faceted problem, and that
ever since it has given me a perspective that nuclear waste disposal,
it\'s not just a technical issue, not just regulatory issues, or
engineering issues, and it gave me an appreciation that it also serves
society\'s needs.

Before I go on, actually I did forget something very important. In my
almost 22 year career, I would say the highlight of my career was during
the Nineties when I was the Deputy Manager for the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plan program, that\'s the WIPP program, in New Mexico, and then its been
called the other, less-known repository program. It\'s also a deep
geological repository program. And my main role in the program was to
integrate 20 years of scientific work and present it to the
Environmental Protection Agency for its certification of the repository.
And, of course, the WIPP program did not have the NRC as its regulator.
We had the EPA as the regulator. And in my opinion, the scientific rigor
is comparable to this program.

And then it was a very rewarding experience for me, and then also I want
to point out that at the time, we had the National Academy of Sciences
WIPP Panel as our oversight group, which is quite similar to this Board
here.

Let me repeat some of the things Dr. Cohon already mentioned is the
current status of the Yucca Mountain program. You all know that the
State of Nevada has disapproved the President\'s recommendation on April
the 8th of this year, and then there are 90 days of continuous
legislative session days for the Congress to veto that disapproval.

And I never could figure out what that 90 days was until about a month
ago, I was reading the New York Times that says it\'s July the 26th. So,
I believe that\'s probably a petty accurate date for 90 days.

And the important thing I want to point out is according to the Nuclear
Waste Policy Act, both the House and the Senate will have to vote with a
simple majority vote, and I believe the House might vote this week.
That\'s what we hear. And then we\'re not sure when the Senate will do
it. But the important thing is if the Congress votes and does not veto
Nevada\'s disapproval, or it does not take action, that means there\'s
no vote, then the Yucca Mountain project will no longer exist. So, we
are waiting for the outcome from the Congress.

Now, if the site is designated and gets approved by the Congress, these
are the big future milestones in the program. License application,
we\'re planning to submit the application around the end of 2004. And
then we\'re hoping to get a construction authorization sometime around
2007, and then we\'re hoping to open the repository and start waste
receipt in 2010. And then it takes, here I say about 100 years, but
really it could be as short as 50 years, because of the retrievability
requirements of NRC, it could as long as 300 years to close the
repository.

What I want to point out with these milestones is it\'s a long, long
time before the repository program is totally complete.

Now, I want to show you some of the next steps, and then also share with
you how they map into the big milestones that I have just shared with
you. Of course, the first thing we are focusing on right now is
preparation for license application. There are a few key things in
there, the quality assurance program, which is a very important part of
the license application, and then there are still a lot of technical
issues that need to be addressed, and there are license application
related design decisions that have to be made. And actually, the day and
a half, you\'re going to hear mostly on the license application portion.

But I also want to tell you that in the past, the focus of the program
has been preparation for site recommendation, and so we have not done a
lot of work on the transportation program recently. Given the 2010
repository opening date, we are ramping up very quickly on the
transportation program. I\'ll talk a little bit about that.

Also, the next thing we have to address is the waste receipt issues. My
understanding is there are like 70 individual contracts with utilities,
with over probably 50 utility companies, but there are like over 70
individual contracts. So there are very convoluted and complicated waste
receipt schemes in these contracts. And in reality, we also have to
consider the relation of waste receipt with design, with waste
emplacement requirements, and transportation requirements.

So, we\'re hoping to address all these issues so we have\--I hate to use
the word optimize, but really that\'s what I\'m thinking, you know, have
an optimized scheme that still satisfies all the contractual agreements
so we\'ll be ready to receive waste in 2010.

And then the last thing is I would like to implement and enhance the
science and technology program. I\'m going to spend most of the time
talking about that in a little bit.

Before I do that, I just want to say a few words about the
transportation program. The transportation program, there\'s a lot of
logistics involved with it, in addition to demonstrating the safety of
transportation. We are in the process of planning on the equipment and
operation needs that includes cast and fleet acquisition, and route and
mode designations.

DOE has made a position on its preference for rail shipment, and so in
the State of Nevada, rail development becomes a very important part of
the transportation program. And then associated with that will be a lot
of preparation type work, for example, possible environmental impact
statement, records of decisions, and all of these things. And then the
Department\'s position is to work closely with the State and the local
government, and also the tribes, in identifying what are the preferred
routes.

And I\'m going to weave in the knowledge from the experience that WIPP
has used in their transportation program. It was a very successful
transportation program for WIPP, because they worked very closely with
the local government, and we\'re going to continue doing that.

Now, I\'m going to go on to the science and technology program. What is
my vision in this area? I\'d like to ensure the best science and
technology are utilized in the planning, the development, and the
implementation of the repository program, so a safe and cost-effective
repository can be developed, and then also we can, at the same time,
enhance public confidence.

I want to point out that safety and public confidence both derive from a
robust scientific program. And in my opinion, a robust scientific
program, its key element is not just merely technical content. Most
importantly, it comes from the integrity that\'s coming from scientific
inquiry. That\'s what\'s going to give you the public confidence, and
then that\'s going to be my personal guidance in this program.

And what do I mean by the science and technology program? I have to
confess these are my personal initial thoughts, and what I\'m thinking
of, it could include a whole spectrum of activities. One of the first
is, of course, activities that can reduce uncertainties through
continuous improvement in scientific understanding of the Yucca Mountain
program system. We all know what that means.

But I\'m also thinking of a couple other things. Another thing is I\'d
like to see some new ideas coming on board in this program. I\'m talking
about new ideas, potential breakthroughs for waste disposal.

You know, when we were at Sandia Labs, advanced materials development is
a huge thing there. And then once in a while, we\'ll go over and talk to
these people. We were just amazed by the kind of things they can do. So,
sometimes I wonder can we use the advanced materials concept, and then
start making backfill materials that can retard negatively charged ions.
That\'s a problem that\'s been prevalent for decades and decades in this
area.

And another example, I\'m going to use the WIPP example, when we were
working\--actually, it was the final stage of the science program at
WIPP, we realized that we could not discount the possibility of
microbial degradations in the repository in the postclosure stage. As a
result of that, the pH environment around the waste, the uncertainty was
like huge, as a result the solubility was like six or seven orders of
magnitude of uncertainty, and that kind of uncertainty we just could not
take.

And what we ended up doing was we decided to put in magnesium oxide
material as a backfill, which is a chemical buffer material, actually it
buffered the chemical environment, so the pH of the environment was
reduced, the uncertainty was reduced to just from pH 7 to 9 instead of
from 4 to 12. As a result, the solubility became much, much less. It was
well controlled in our opinion. And then also we actually got some
natural analog data to support the long-term behavior of the magnesium
oxide, so we know that it will work the way we intended it to work.

And I would like to see more of that kind of concept. It\'s really
outside of the box concept for the program, in addition to continuous
understanding of the basic science phenomena. And for those of us who
have worked for a long time in the program and have interfaced with
other countries, would know that there are generic common technical
issues that are facing the global waste disposal programs.

For example, fracture flow problems. Another example is long-term
prediction of climate change. You can go on and on. And another thing is
the migration of anions, how do we control that. These are generic
problems. And then I think if we can tackle some of these basic
technical issues, it would not only benefit Yucca Mountain, it would
also benefit other countries who are facing the same issues.

Another thing is I would like to see the scope of this program not only
address the long-term postclosure phases, also I\'d like it to address
some of the preclosure phases. I\'m a scientist, but I also have a
business in mind in my heart. I would like to see how to reduce the life
cycle costs of the repository program, because it kept going up, and
then I\'m not sure what the end number would be. It would be nice if we
come up with a robust, very cost effective repository by the time we\'re
closer.

I\'m going to say a few words about the implementation of the science
and technology program. I\'d like to develop a sustained program with
continuous funding, and then I truly believe we can do that. What I
would like to do is\--Lake, tell me one last thing correctly\--I would
like to put together a program that has a minimum amount always, and
then it\'s always proportional to the size of the overall program. Can I
do that, Lake? Okay.

A lot of the things I don\'t know whether I\'m allowed or not, but this
is really what I would like to do.

So, basically, there will be a chunk always there, and then if the
program gets more funding, I would like to increase that in some kind of
proportion.

And another thing in implementing this program, I do not like a laundry
list of activities. What I would like to see, we can identify some
important main themes for the program that are important to Yucca
Mountain. And another thing is, like I mentioned on the international
program, I believe lots of the science and research globally, and then I
would like to tap into that whole pool of talents, and then I would like
to tap into the university system, the academics, and the national labs,
the USGS.

And along with this program, I have a vision of putting together a good
international program, international deep geologic repository
international program under OCRWM. And, again, I hope it\'s a sustained
long-term program. I think we can leverage a lot out of a system like
this.

And then I do want to emphasize this work, there will be a lot of
scientific investigation as part of the LA application, so this work
would go concurrent and congruent with the LA scientific investigation.
And more importantly, how I envision this goes, if there is good science
and information and data coming out of this program, they will be
incorporated into license application, license review, later on, the
development, maybe supplemental license application. So it will be part
of the main stream, and it will really get used.

And then I want to say a few concluding remarks. I\'m really looking
forward to the continuous valuable input from the Board members, not
only the license application, but in the repository development, and
I\'m hoping I\'ll get valuable input from you on the transportation
program as well.

And, personally, I\'m really seeking help and input from the Board in
helping me to implement my vision of this long-term sustained science
and technology program.

And then also, the last point is from my experience at WIPP, you know, I
mentioned that we had the National Academy of Science WIPP Panel. It was
such a rewarding, satisfying experience for all of us. And I noticed
that the difference, the small differences between this and that board
was we had, in addition to formal interactions, we also had a lot of
infrequent, informal, very technical interactions between the technical
folks and the panel at the time. And then these were very informal, but
real time interactions, small group, and then if I\'m allowed, I really
would like to see more of those technical interactions that are more
topical oriented, and smaller groups.

And this is all I have to say, and I want to thank you again, and I\'ll
be more than happy to take easy questions. The hard questions, like I
say, go to Lake.

COHON: Thank you very much, Dr. Chu. Questions? Debra?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

Thank you, Margaret, for a very good presentation, and it\'s good to see
your vision laid out as you have. It\'s very helpful to us.

Let me just try to get a little bit more detail in this vision,
particularly as it pertains to science and technology goals within the
license application time frame. You talk about what you want to
accomplish over a very long term, including operations, and you talked
also about the importance of building public confidence. How does that
translate into specific targets of improved understanding that you would
like to see in this program within an LA time frame?

CHU: You know, I think tomorrow, you\'re going to hear a presentation
from Peter Swift, who is the performance assessment manager. I believe,
Peter, that\'s your title now? He\'s going to share with you there\'s a
new approach on how to prioritize the scientific work, and that should
go into the core program of license application. They have Level 1,
Level 2, Level 3, and there\'s different criteria of what\'s required,
what\'s desired. And there\'s some of them, for a variety of reasons,
some of them are just timing, and some are just more qualitative, less
quantifiable reasons, that will not be able to incorporate as part of
LA, and may or may not be important. We hope it\'s not a vital part of
the LA.

But what we were thinking was picking up some of those things as part of
the science program. And then I don\'t know how to answer you right now,
but from my prior experience, what I would like to see is what we used
to do is get together a small group, we would handpick the best in the
world, and have them look at the issue very quickly and get a scoping
sense, like what that means, and then we usually sort of proceed,
depending on what those people\'s recommendations, like, you know, in
the saturated zone, I can probably handpick people right now. And
sometimes, you know, these are the people who are working on it for
years and years and years, and have a very good understanding of certain
features, and then we use that as sort of the jumping point for the
decision.

So, it\'s hard for me to verbalize it to you right now, but my vague
idea is if it turns out that it\'s something we believe is vital to
license application, we might be able to put it in as part of the
license application right away. If it\'s something, it\'s a more
continuous understanding and enhancing the confidence, we may just go in
parallel. So, I don\'t know if I\'m answering your question.

KNOPMAN: In part. If I could just quickly\--

COHON: Very briefly.

KNOPMAN: Okay. You cited an example for WIPP where you thought there was
a very large uncertainty, in particular, in your near-field environment
there and the buffering capacity, and you talked about narrowing that
from five or six orders of magnitude to about two, or something along
those lines.

Is there something comparable in this program right now that just comes
to mind where you see such large uncertainty that you\'d really like to
have it as an LA priority to bring that uncertainty down?

CHU: I have a personal bias. I believe the natural system, there are a
lot more credits we can take in the natural system, especially in the
saturated zone. That\'s my opinion. So, one of the things that I would
like to do is have people quickly take a look at it and say are we way
conservative in the saturated zone. My gut feeling is we are. I used to
work on similar things, and when I look at some of the technical things,
I know the behavior is much more than what we are taking credit for.

So, in this case, it\'s not reducing the uncertainty, but it\'s
basically saying do we do enough to say, you know, it\'s going to retard
things a lot more than we\'re claiming. And this is one type of example.

Another example is the near-field chemistry, and being a chemist, I\'m
very interested in this, have we thought through all the things we\'ll
be able to do, the chemical things we can do? You know, all these things
I think can be looked at in a very creative way. Like, you know, the
magnesium oxide example for WIPP, at the time, we had no idea how it\'s
going to come out. But as soon as we saw that, we geared up that
program, and then actually it got used in the license, the certification
application.

So, I\'m hoping for some kind of a flexibility we can use in the
program, so where we see important things, we will put it in if the time
allows. And then I believe there are a lot of things we can do if we
open up all these concepts, and then we tap into the best people, and
then I get help from you guys. You can help us very much in how to march
on in this area.

COHON: Before I call on Dan Bullen, let me just, without wanting to put
too much of a fine point on Debra\'s points, but nevertheless to
elaborate a little bit, and I think it\'s especially timely, given where
you are in your tenure in the program, when you\'re thinking about big
issues and philosophical issues related to science and technology as it
relates to the program. There are many reasons why one might pursue a
particular scientific or technical project at this point.

Certainly LA, because of time pressure, and because of the importance of
that step, will drive much of what you do. But when you think about why
you\'re doing it, what you do to reduce uncertainty, but that means just
that, trying to reduce the uncertainty from six orders of magnitude in
pH to two. But that may not contribute directly to performance in the
sense of increase mean performance. It\'s just reducing the uncertainty.

There\'s also research you could do to increase confidence that may or
may not do anything to quantitative estimates of uncertainty. So, for
example, doing research to challenge assumptions about basic process
models, which might result, one would hope, in confirming your first
assumptions about process models, but it may not. That may or may not
reduce uncertainty, but it would certainly contribute to confidence,
confidence building.

CHU: Right.

COHON: So, there are a lot of reasons why one might undertaken research
at this stage. But I think that keeping in mind the reason for it is
very important, because one of the\--I think one of the challenges for
the program is the distinction between showing compliance and developing
basic understanding in the underlying processes. And that\'s an issue
that the program has been hearing a lot about from this Board, from peer
review groups, and I think is a very key one, and it\'s very easy to get
caught up in demonstrating performance, because that\'s what LA is all
about. But we hope you\'ll go beyond that.

CHU: Thank you. Thank you for your comment.

COHON: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Actually, I\'d like to thank you for your presentation, and compliment
you on your forward thinking. And now that the compliment is over, here
come the hard questions, I guess.

You mentioned the KTIs, the key technical issues that have to be
resolved before license application. I guess the bottom line question is
will they be resolved, and how do you expect them to be resolved prior
to December of 2004?

CHU: My understanding\--I\'m looking to Lake again\--my understanding is
they will be addressed as well as we could. But the point is if they\'re
not resolved in NRC\'s mind, we will not get a license. Right, Lake?
Yeah.

So, I think, yes, I think the project will resolve them before. In our
mind, this is our resolution, and it will be part of the license
application, and then it\'s really up to NRC to decide is it good enough
for me to grant you license application.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Some of those data, or some of that information will require data that
you get prior to the LA, and some of it will be ongoing tests and
research. Is it the agreements that you will make with NRC to basically
commit to the completion of those tests and that amount of research
that\'s going to be the resolution?

CHU: Is that true, Lake? I\'m not sure what the answer is.

BARRETT: Barrett, DOE.

Those will be incorporated into the performance confirmation aspects,
which is part of the license application. So, that will all be in the
license on the docket, and worked out between us and the NRC.

BULLEN: Thank you.

Now I want to change gears just a little bit, and maybe transportation
is the way to change gears. I had a question because you mentioned that
you were going to gear up or ramp up in transportation, and maybe a
couple years ago, DOE was actually going to try and privatize the actual
shipment of waste. Is that the case, or is the transportation going to
be done by DOE itself?

CHU: Lake, again, please. I think it\'s sort of yes and sort of no.

BARRETT: Barrett, DOE.

The statute says use private industry to the maximum extent practicable.
We still want to use the private industry capabilities, but as we look
and we find the RFP that\'s on our website, and it\'s been there now for
almost five years, we need to look at that, learning what\'s happened at
the other DOE complex, and the risks involved, and charges for risk. Our
steady state goal, say 20 years out, would basically be, you know, pure
private, but we probably are going to need to do some government aspects
to basically start that up.

But, we do want to use both the advantages of the government system, as
well as the private system in this country, and it\'s also worldwide as
well.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Just a brief followup before you leave, Lake. This one actually deals
with the fact that Margaret mentioned you wanted to interface with the
utilities and talk about the receipt schedule, and the like. But one of
the disconnects in the transportation system right now is the fact that
the dual purpose or storable transportable casks don\'t interface well
with the repository because they\'re too big. They have too much fuel in
them. They\'re not 21 pwr assemblies, they\'re 24, or they\'re larger.

And, so, is there going to be an effort by DOE to basically talk to the
utilities and say, you know, look, we understand it\'s economical to
store these in, you know, larger containers on site, but there should be
a nice interface so you don\'t have to handle that fuel again, and are
you looking at those kinds of options with respect to the integration of
the transportation system?

BARRETT: Yes, we will. Those are exactly the items that Margaret had
that we need to work out with the utilities. It\'s a very complex
arrangement because we\'re in litigation with most of those utilities
over the exact same issues under the contract.

So, yes, we will. The multi-purpose canister concept is in the RFP. We
intend to keep that on a privatized basis with the value engineering
refund back to the utilities. But these are complicated matters and
we\'ll work these all out in the design evolution optimization, or as
close to optimization as we can, as Margaret said earlier. So, all of
these issues will be accelerated over the next months.

BULLEN: Thank you, Lake.

Now, back to Margaret, just a question. You mentioned you were looking
for breakthrough science. And I guess I was very interested in the
breakthrough aspects of what you\'re looking at, and if you expand it
even farther, you know, somebody from outside the program may look at
that and say are you looking at breakthroughs for things like waste
treatment. Do you limit it to just basically disposal, or do you want to
open up those breakthroughs to treatment also? And then now you\'re
going to have the Senator, or the distinguished Senator from your home
state asking about some accelerated usage. And, so, I just want to know
if you want to go quite that far, or if you want to just basically talk
about breakthrough\--

CHU: I\'m very open minded. I will go as far as that. I will go very
far. If there are advanced nuclear technologies that would reduce
toxicity, would reduce volume for the program, I would be more than
happy to take those technologies.

BULLEN: One last question. Promise.

Could you elaborate a little bit about the difference between licensing
and certification? You mentioned your WIPP experience, and that is,
again, an EPA certification versus an NRC licensing. So, could you just
give us a little bit of your perspective on that?

CHU: Well, the certification process was not as legally intensive as
NRC. An example, for example, we would not be required to give
depositions. It\'s not our job. But we did have a very similar QA
program, the same QA-1 and the same scientific rigor, in my opinion, but
the legal framework was much, much less. But I think that the contents
are very comparable, if you look through, actually look through the
certification application, which would stand up taller than me, we
didn\'t do it electronically, and it was very heavy duty.

BULLEN: Thank you.

COHON: Thank you, Dan.

Just to check the line-up, I have five people waiting to ask questions,
in the order of Don, Paul, Jeff, Dave Diodato, and Priscilla, and then
Richard, and then that will be it. Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

Margaret, I wanted to address your vision for the future, and you had
two items on your overhead. One was safe and cost effective repository.
The other was enhanced public confidence. And it\'s the enhanced public
confidence that I\'d like to talk with you about.

You made the point that perhaps the most important aspect of enhanced
public confidence is integrity within the program. And nobody is going
to disagree with that. But it seems to me that something that you did
not mention, and has not really been addressed in the program as
effectively as it might, is communication with the public.

If there\'s anything that we\'ve learned from the international
programs, it is how important transparency is. International programs
have to have integrity, and they have learned, sometimes very painfully,
that they have to communicate with the public, almost a bottoms up
approach, starting with the public and going up to the decisions.

I have a strong impression, talking to educated people, to the lay
public, Nevadans, people who live around Nevada, that there\'s precious
little known in the public about Yucca Mountain. What most people know
or believe they know is that they\'re going to dump\--the word dump is
always used\--dump a bunch of nuclear waste in a mountain in Nevada.
That comes from people who are highly educated in other fields, and I
would urge you to think hard in your vision for the future about other
ways, better ways, more ways to communicate the integrity of the program
that you\'re intent on building to the public, and to let the public
communicate to you what their concerns are, so that this mistrust
that\'s there, rightly or wrongly, I\'m not judging whether or not the
public should or should not trust you, whether or not that\'s the case,
but at least the communications lines would be there.

Now, DOE has made strong efforts to improve the communication, their web
page, their public meetings, and so on and so forth, but my impression
is it has not been adequate.

Could you just\--you didn\'t mention communication in your presentation.

CHU: I agree. I forgot to mention that. Actually, I totally agree with
you, and that again using WIPP as an example, I think part of the reason
it was successful was because the open, very open communication in that
program. And then gradually in the 20 years, we got a lot of public
support. And this is actually Lake and I, we have talked internally
recently a lot how to improve that, and I personally believe it\'s
something you really have to work on. You have to earn your trust from
people.

So, I\'m not sure exactly how to do it, what\'s the first step. But what
I would like to do is build credibility one by one slowly, for example,
to me, this is the first step with the Board. I would like to establish
credibility with the Board. I would like to establish trust. So, when I
say I\'m committed to have continuous funding, that\'s the first test on
me, and then whether you\'re going to trust me in September or October
or not is whether I can deliver that promise. To me, that\'s the first
step.

Yes, I think gradually, I want to do it with the public also, and have
more communication programs. And we are still in the formulating stage
right now, how to do that, especially the State of Nevada, which is of
course is very difficult, all of you know that. But I think we can work
on that. And, to me, you have to work on it. Otherwise, you never get
there. And I really appreciate your comment, yes.

RUNNELLS: And I\'m delighted to hear that you and Lake have been talking
about it. It\'s very important. But it goes way beyond Nevada, because
the transportation issue covers the United States, and people who are
not informed, who do not trust the program, live in all of the states.
And it\'s the whole public that must receive the communication, and be
allowed to give communication back to the DOE.

Thank you.

CHU: We very appreciate your comment, because it\'s going to be a very
important part of our program.

COHON: Let me just add as a footnote that in my view, the Secretary\'s
recommendation was very weak in its communication about the uncertainty
associated with performance predictions. That\'s something the Board has
been on record about, but we have not had a meeting since the Secretary
issued his recommendation document. It was very weak in that regard.

Paul Craig?

CRAIG: Greetings. I am Paul Craig from the University of California at
Davis, but with a long tradition of starting out at Los Alamos and
Brookhaven and a little work with Livermore and a lot of work with
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a little with Sandia indirectly. So, I\'m
very, very pleased that you, with your, one, scientific background and,
second, national laboratory background, are running the program. That\'s
needed. That\'s really good, and I just love the philosophy that you
were talking about.

Back in the early days of Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer set the
place up, and he always had a sound science program, and he believed
that it was important to do that, and there were a whole bunch of
reasons for it, not the least of which was he didn\'t want to be
blindsided. If something new came along, he wanted to know about it
first. He wanted to know about it credibly. He wanted his people to pick
up on those ideas and run with them.

What concerns me is that the program, as it\'s moving into licensing, is
cutting the science program, and our preliminary staff analysis suggests
that this year, it may be cut as much as 30 per cent. That\'s a big hit.
Now, I don\'t know what the right balance is. I don\'t know what the
right balance is between the science and the other stuff, and it\'s a
very difficult question.

But I do observe that in the Board report, we talked about the
uncertainty in the mountain and the uncertainty in the metals, and you
have the very bad luck that the uncertainty range brackets the range of
interest. Our report says for both of those, from a few thousand years
up to tens of thousands of years, if the standard had been a thousand
years, you would have been home free. If it\'s 100,000 years, you would
have been finished. So, it\'s right at that critical range, which means
that bracketing the uncertainty can do everything to how the repository
works, and yet the science looks like it\'s being cut just at a time
when the understanding of these issues is on the horizon. So, I express
that concern.

The transportation issue hasn\'t been looked at very much. That happens
to be the area when we go around to the environmental impact hearings,
that\'s the place where the public is really, really concerned, and
there\'s very little science going on in that area. It has not been high
priority, for perfectly understandable reasons, but it may be important
that it become high priority.

So, welcome aboard.

CHU: Thank you very much.

CRAIG: We\'re very, very happy to have you.

CHU: I appreciate your comments. Thank you.

COHON: Thank you, Paul. Jeff Wong?

WONG: Jeff Wong of the Board.

I, too, would like to wish you welcome.

CHU: Thank you.

WONG: And compared to Dr. Bullen, I have four easy questions to ask for
your comments on.

On transportation, you said that DOE has a stated preference for rail
shipment, and that it requires rail development in Nevada, and I\'d like
your comments on the condition of the rail system outside of Nevada and
what will have to be done for transport of fuel to Nevada.

Second, is this preference for dedicated train shipment and against
heavy haul truck?

And the last question is that you\'d mentioned that you will work with
the states through cooperative agreements, and I\'d like to hear some
comments about any intent or the ideas with those cooperative
agreements.

Thanks.

CHU: I don\'t know whether I should point to Lake again. There\'s so
much history with the transportation program.

BARRETT: Let\'s see if I can remember the questions.

Regarding the national rail infrastructure, we believe the national rail
infrastructure can easily handle the kind of loads that we\'re talking
about here. They routinely do it, thousands and thousands of shipments
every day in the United States. So, as far as national infrastructure,
we don\'t see an issue there.

Within the State of Nevada, we need to develop the capability to move
nominal 150 ton loads, which is common on rail, to Yucca Mountain. There
is no rail line there today. We looked at five different options in the
FEIS, and we want to work with Nevada to develop the appropriate method
for that, and that offer stands to the Nevadans. We\'ll have to wait to
see if this program goes forward or not.

Regarding routing, which was one of your questions, is a major issue,
certainly within Nevada, and how we get there. But once you establish
that, what route it goes nationwide, that we want to work with the
states, and with the Indian nations, and through cooperative agreements
to determine what are the best routes that we all can use, similar to
what EAM did with WIPP, where a lot of work went, Governors had the
right on highway shipments, et cetera.

And I think there was another one on rail, and I don\'t know what the\--

COHON: Heavy haul truck versus dedicated train.

BARRETT: Heavy haul is either rail or heavy haul. We left that option
open if the Nevadans would prefer to use heavy haul. The Nevadans don\'t
really want to deal with this now until national decisions are made.
But, say, in France in COGEMA, the local people wanted heavy haul from
rail to LaHogue, and that\'s what they wanted. The farmers could use it.
So, we left that option open. So, that\'s really an issue to Nevadans to
decide.

Regarding dedicated train or, you know, regular train, we left that
option open, certainly for national debate. If there is a common wish
nationally for dedicated train, we certainly could use dedicated trains.
That\'s the way most shipments are done. For example, the Carolina Power
and Light shipments are done, Navy is done, and we certainly could do
that as well.

WONG: Okay. And the last question\--well, actually, I have two now.
Comment on what are the nature of the cooperative agreements. The other
thing that comes to mind is it\'s true that there are a lot of miles of
safe shipment of material on rail. But how will you deal with lack of
public confidence in rail when you have in the news spectacular train
accidents occurring?

BARRETT: The first question was cooperative agreements. Back in the
Eighties, we had cooperative agreements in the southeast, midwest,
western states, so those type of cooperative agreements. We had to
discontinue those due to budget cuts. But WIPP had great success with
working with the Western Governors Association on determining the
routes. That\'s the model we wish to follow. We want to build on the
WIPP experience, and take it to the next level up. So, we would like to
emulate what was done a little bit back that we started in the Eighties
and unfortunately had to curtail, and then build on the WIPP.

Regarding the public confidence on transportation, that\'s an issue
earlier that Don mentioned about how do we communicate. We need to do a
lot more of that. I believe the scientific risk of nuclear
transportation is relatively low. However, the public perception is
considerably higher, and this is going to be a major thing that we\'re
going to need to work on, you know, over the next years if this goes
forward.

WONG: Thank you.

CHU: Maybe you should stay longer and see if there are any more
transportation questions.

COHON: For the remaining questioners, I have to ask you to be brief and
to the point. Time is disappearing on us.

David Diodato from the Staff, who\'s way back there, Margaret.

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff.

Dr. Chu, welcome, and thank you for the presentation this morning.

CHU: Thank you.

DIODATO: Tomorrow afternoon, there\'s going to be a session that Dr.
Nelson is running on performance confirmation and R&D testing. I was
interested in your example from WIPP about using magnesium oxide to
buffer the pH. And what I\'m wondering, and I would understand if
you\'ve been away from that program for some time, but were there
systems in place to evaluate the effectiveness of that buffer
subsequently into the data, and what would that show, because we\'re
thinking about similar things.

CHU: Yes, there were continuing programs to evaluate it, yes.

DIODATO: So, how did that work out?

CHU: Last I heard, everything works well, as anticipated. Also, I
mentioned that we actually also used the natural analog data from
Australia to validate the real long term, the mineral changes from
magnesium oxide, and to make sure that eventually, it gets to a state
that is truly a stable state that still works. And, so, we have, yes,
experimental work ongoing all the time, plus, using analog data, yes.

DIODATO: Thank you.

COHON: Priscilla Nelson?

NELSON: Nelson, Board.

Thanks for coming here today. I\'ve got one quick question, and
generally a plea.

You indicated that you wish to seek to reduce life cycle costs. And I
guess maybe reduce\--I\'m not sure about the word reducing. Maybe
that\'s part of the focus. In order to reduce or increase life cycle
costs, they must be understood, and the tool to understand them is one
that I\'m not sure we have on board right now. And understanding the
trade-offs for changes in design associated with cost, and impact on
expected performance of the safety case or uncertainty is an extreme
complication.

As the project moves into this kind of a consideration, the Board would
be extremely interested I\'m sure in tracking this from the start of
that kind of development of an understanding. So, that\'s a comment.

The quick question is looking at the overall project, are there any
particularly interesting parts of the design of the project that you
think would benefit from life cycle cost analysis that could result in
reduction of costs?

CHU: These are just very personal opinions. I think some of the
engineering features are very, very costly, like the drip shield, the
waste package design, are extremely costly. And then, so, if you think
creatively, say down the road, suppose, you know, I can have other
means, and then all of a sudden, you know, maybe the natural system\'s
behavior is different from what we realize, or the uncertainty of
certain things are much smaller, I can afford a broader uncertainty in
the engineering part, maybe I can save \$12 million. These are very, you
know, personal opinions.

If I were working on the program personally as a technical program, I
would use some of those as a goal, say are there things we can still do
down the road. And that\'s why I want to show you the future milestone.
When you think about the long time, you know, by the time you actually
start putting things in, we still have quite a long time in there. So,
my personal opinion is whatever will help the program, would take, the
best science, the best engineering things, whatever would reduce cost, I
think we should continually improve in that direction.

COHON: Richard Parizek?

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board.

Thank you for your vision statement, which we appreciate. Some of the
points I had have been answered from other questioners. But first you
have an outside the box concept. You invite this. The question is how
will you go about doing that? Are you going to have a conference
inviting international, national people, beyond DOE people to give you
suggestions on what are the out of the box possibilities for Yucca
Mountain? Because there are many suggestions on how to control moisture
movement in the mountain that are never mentioned, and these could be
thought of as being out of the box.

And then having invited this input, you now have a litany or shopping
list which you don\'t like, and how do you narrow down the out of the
box ideas that might be worth pursuing, in view of the need to do the
necessary research to show that these are viable?

CHU: Again, these are very preliminary thoughts. The first thing that I
think we ought to do is identify those main themes that we want to
tackle. And then I need help from you guys, and probably we\'ll tap into
other resources. Once we have a few main themes, I think then we can tap
into a smaller set of people in helping us further. And, like I said, I
would like to tap into the international arena, not just domestic people
in defining. So, it\'s going to take a little while.

And then I\'m going to make another bold commitment here. I\'m hoping
the next meeting here, I believe it\'s in September, I\'m hoping to give
you something much more concrete on what this program might entail. You
will give me some pressure to really work on it, because I know I have a
September time frame to try to give you as much as I can.

So, I\'m sorry I can\'t answer a lot of things, but I think it\'s
identifying what those potential big payoff, main points are, and then
try to find the right people to help me formulate how to get there.

PARIZEK: I appreciate the comments on the rocks matter, or at least try
to get more out of the rocks, but then again to take away the waste
package and to take away the drip shield, I mean, be careful what you
remove without creating other problems.

CHU: That\'s why I say just, you know, these are just\--I\'m not saying
taking away them.

PARIZEK: I\'ll wait for September.

COHON: Thank you. Just to wrap up, Dr. Chu, I feel it important to say
the following for the record, though I don\'t think you need
clarification on this.

The Board is pleased to play the role that it does in critiquing what
the program does, making suggestions where we think they\'re warranted.
The Board, however, is not DOE\'s partner in this. The DOE, it\'s very
clear in the law that we stand alone, and we are not of DOE, we are not
connected to DOE in that sense. And I know you know that. We don\'t
certainly want to disabuse you of the attitude of partnership. I think
that\'s very good. And we will come with the same attitude, but we are
very cognizant of our Congressional mandate of providing objective,
neutral advice.

CHU: I understand.

COHON: We thank you again for your excellent presentation, and
especially for your open and candid and substantive response to our
questions, and we look forward to many more opportunities to interact in
the future.

Congratulations, and welcome again.

CHU: Thank you.

COHON: Thank you. We turn now to Russ Dyer, Director of the Yucca
Mountain Project. Dr. Dyer, welcome back.

I wonder if we can dim these lights, or that light in particular, if
someone can figure out how to do that? Thank you.

DYER: While we\'re getting the lights in order, I want to get a mike
check. Can you hear me okay in the back? And I\'ll apologize ahead of
time. I made a mistake last night. After dinner, I took advantage of the
great weather and took a stroll around the block, and I\'d forgotten
what blooming plants do. And I\'m just really clogged up today.

COHON: That\'s why you\'re a geologist and not an ecologist.

DYER: In Nevada.

COHON: Consult with Norm Christensen before you do that next time.

DYER: All right. Next slide, please.

I\'ve got five general topics I want to go over here, and some of them
we\'ll be hearing in more detail from presenters either this afternoon
or tomorrow. Just a general project status; talk about the site
recommendation status, although I think we\'ve covered most of this
already in discussion this morning; talk a little bit about the detailed
work plan through license application and the development of that,
although that\'s going to be covered in considerably more detail later;
talk about some of the key testing and design activities; talk about
some management actions that have taken place at the project.

Project status. Well, the project, like all of us, is awaiting the
Congressional national policy decision on the radioactive waste
management. In anticipation of what that direction might be, and as
prudent managers, we are planning for the licensing phase of the
project. A multi-year plan through license application is being
prepared. We have a general outline that has been endorsed by the
project. We\'re putting more details in place through time to complement
and supplement that.

The primary multi-year objective is a viable license application with
the primary focus on, first, NRC issues and compliance with NRC
regulations, but also clearly articulating uncertainties and plans to
address them.

The transition from site characterization to licensing will require a
lot of change, changes in paradigm, organizational change, and also
cultural change.

The site recommendation process, we\'re all aware we\'re here in this
particular block awaiting the Congressional action, and Dr. Cohon talked
about this. Bob Loux talked about it. Margaret talked about it. I\'m not
going to take too much more time on it, except to say that this is the
box at the end of this process, and here we are now.

If one looks at a timeline of what has happened in the past and things
that may come, we\'re sitting right here at a pivotal point. The site
designation is the action here that is really everything post the 2002
box from license application on through waste acceptance, et cetera, is
all predicated on an action on site designation, which lies in
Congress\'s hand now.

I\'ll talk a little bit about the detailed work plan through license
application. The project endorsed a detailed work plan that describes
the necessary work scope for submittal of an application to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission by late 2004 for the authorization to construct a
repository.

The scientific and performance assessment work scope in this detailed
work plan was prioritized on the basis of a risk informed, performance
based approach that considered three general performance criteria. And
you\'ll hear a lot more about this tomorrow, I think it\'s tomorrow
afternoon from Peter Swift. But the three general criteria were the
performance related to dose, regulatory defensibility, and external
acceptance. So, it\'s not what one would call a strictly compliance
based criteria here.

To continue the discussion about what\'s in the detailed work plan, the
design detail in the license application will provide sufficient
information for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission review and evaluation
of safety. The design will provide a basis for the eventual development
of facility designs to support procurement and construction.

The detailed work plan also includes development of a licensing strategy
that will define an approach for preparation of an LA that satisfies NRC
regulations and guidance, the safety strategies for development of
preclosure and postclosure safety cases, and an approach for
communicating safety cases to oversight organizations, stakeholders and
the public. And this, in part, points back to a point made by Dr.
Runnells a little earlier.

You\'ll be hearing more about these a little later. Mark Board will be
talking tomorrow morning about the design part of this, and Joe Ziegler
will be talking this afternoon about the licensing strategy.

The LA will build on the technical basis that was used for the site
recommendation. But it includes, this is not all encompassing, but it
includes work activities to address a couple of things laid out here. Of
course, the NRC requirements in 10 CFR Part 63 and 10 CFR 2, including
pre and postclosure safety analysis, design description and basis,
quality assurance, licensing support network, the computerized discovery
assistance system, if you will.

It also must address NRC/DOE key technical issue agreements. We talked
about that a little bit earlier. Comments raised by the Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board and other oversight groups, and the work
activities will also address updating the process models, development of
a TSPA for license application.

The guidance in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission\'s draft Yucca
Mountain Review Plan will be incorporation into the detailed work plan.
Of course, comments are due on the review plan, but the draft is the
operative document out in the public arena right now.

Let me move now to key testing and design activities. We\'re looking at
model evolution inputs for inclusion in the LA. Some of these include,
first, the evaluation of volcanism consequence scenarios, looking at
dike propagation and drift interaction analyses, seismic design inputs
pre and postclosure, look at flow and transport in the unsaturated zone
and saturated zone testing and analysis, look at coupled processes
testing and analysis, waste package material corrosion and environment
testing and analysis.

You\'ll hear a little bit more about some of this a little bit later,
specifically down here, refinement of repository design for LA, a
continued emphasis on flexibility and constructability, and a
consideration of modular construction. You\'ll hear some of this from
Jeff Williams a little later, as we talk about a phased kind of program.
Improvement of the technical basis for selecting postclosure thermal
conditions, Woody Stroupe will be talking about that tomorrow morning,
talking about things that can support both the low temperature operating
mode and high temperature operating mode decision.

Of course, the end of site characterization does not mean the end of the
scientific and technical program. We have had a robust program. We will
continue to have a robust program. There are a lot of activities that
are in process that we will continue to monitor, continue the programs.
The drift scale thermal test of course we still have over three years of
data we intend to acquire from that as we go through the cool-down phase
on that. There are a lot of laboratory tests underway and that will be
put in place. Similarly, you heard Dr. Chu talk about some of the
saturated zone programs. There are tests that are planned in that
endeavor.

The natural analog program, we will continue that. I have hopeful that
we finally got a drill rig across the border to get down to Pena Blanca
recently. It was stuck there for a prolonged period of time.

Finally, let me talk about management actions. You heard from Dr. Chu
some of her main idea and goals, visions. There\'s a couple of things
that we have done in support of her vision. We have taken or are taking
some management actions to meet our primary objective of a viable
license application, and to ensure the success of the paradigm shift to
the licensing phase.

Although the project is transitioning from the site characterization
phase, as I said earlier, scientific investigations will continue to
increase our understanding of natural and engineered system performance,
and enhance confidence in the waste management system.

In my view, the scientific program must be robust enough to challenge
the models that are the basis for the performance, the performance
assessments, the performance evaluations. That\'s not a one time thing.
That is a continuing challenge that we have.

The project, you heard Dr. Chu spend a lot of time talking about her
visions for the science side, and to support this, the project has
established a separate task force to focus on long-term scientific
activities that could either enhance confidence, improve technology or
promote cost efficiencies in the repository program. And we\'ve made
some management changes in the program to accommodate that.

Dr. Steve Brocoum has been moved to head up this task force, and Steve
will talk to you I believe tomorrow afternoon, yes, he\'ll talk to you
tomorrow about some of the things that are on the plate for this
program. To backfill for Steve in the Office of Licensing and Regulatory
Compliance, we\'ve moved Joe Ziegler in as the acting assistant manager
in Licensing and Regulatory Compliance.

In summary, in anticipation of a possible site designation, the project
is in the process of transitioning from a site characterization to a
licensing focus. We have completed a detailed work plan that describes
work scope to support submittal of a successful license application by
late 2004. The testing, analysis, and design activities in this detailed
work plan are focused on preparation of a timely and defensible LA,
although as Dr. Chu said, there are other things that can complement,
augment and supplement this.

We\'re committed to the continuation of scientific investigations at
Yucca Mountain to enhance our confidence in projections of long-term
performance.

As I said earlier, management actions have been taken to ensure the
successful transition from the site characterization phase to the
licensing phase, and to enhance project performance in effectively
meeting its objectives.

And if I could go to the last slide, please? Oh, that was the last
slide. I\'m sorry. It\'s broken out a little differently on my talking
points.

With that, sir, could I answer any questions from the Board?

COHON: Thank you, Russ.

Questions from the Board? Alberto Sagüés?

SAGÜÉS: Yes, thank you for your presentation.

If we look at the last transparency, your summary transparency, Number
12, I\'m very glad to see the inclusion of the third bullet as an
assurance of the intent. Now, can you give an indication of what
fraction of the resources in the future, should the repository proceed,
what fraction of the effort would go into that third bullet, the
commitment to a continuation of the scientific investigations to enhance
confidence, to indeed probe the models that are being used, the
assumptions of the models, and so on, that you so well mentioned, as
opposed to effort devoted to obtain parameter information to bring to
the models, which would be, I presume, a very strong, very large
fraction of the future efforts, should the repository proceed? But, what
fraction of the effort? Half of the effort? 5 per cent, 1 per cent?

DYER: That\'s a difficult one to answer. Because of the way we bucket
things, if one were looking at something that supports licensing, I
think I would probably categorize it under licensing rather than under
science, even though it may give rise to some fundamental understanding
in the science arena.

I\'ll give you a gut feeling, and I have no numbers to support this.
Probably on the order of 3 to 5 per cent would be my gut feeling.
That\'s kind of what one might call a fundamental R&D budget.

SAGÜÉS: Thank you. That was my question.

COHON: Priscilla Nelson?

NELSON: Nelson, Board.

I, too, have picked up whatever this malady is, Russ. So, my voice is
getting lower.

You talked about cost efficiencies, and in the context of the long-term
scientific activities that could support an understanding of those cost
efficiencies, what I\'d like to get from you is an idea to what extent
will costing exercises, life cycle costing exercises, be conducted to
inform LA, and to what extent are you viewing them as being longer term
after LA?

DYER: Well, the way the DOE system is set up, it takes you out through
the entire life cycle of a project or program. So, there would be one
set of considerations for LA. There would be another phase of the
program that you would also have to look at. So, the idea is you don\'t
get yourself in a situation where you make a set of decisions, but you
really don\'t have an understanding of what comes after it.

Now, one of the other things I would point out is that when we talk
about cost efficiencies, you can be myopic and look at optimizing the
repository program, looking from a broader DOE perspective. There may be
things that you can do system wide that are more expensive, marginally
more expensive for the repository program, but reap great benefits
system wide.

Earlier, somebody mentioned treatment of waste, for instance, or not
treatment of waste. There\'s some system looks, and this is one of the
things that Dr. Brocoum is charged at looking at, is interfacing with
other parts of DOE, to make sure that we\'re not narrowing our focus too
much so that we miss some of the broader opportunities to look at the
broader system.

NELSON: Okay. So, does that mean that most of that focus will actually
occur after LA? Or do you expect significant focus on this in the
context of the LA time frame work through December of \'04?

DYER: There will be some between now and LA. I would expect the bulk of
it to happen sometime between the licensing proceedings and later,
before the operational phase.

NELSON: Can you give me an example of where focus might be before LA for
these exercises?

DYER: Well, trying to narrow down what the waste stream is, for
instance. There are a multitude of waste forms in the DOE inventory.
Now, do all of those need to be considered for the initial LA? Does all
the information have to be developed as to waste form characteristics
prior to LA submittal? Because some of those things, there\'s not too
much known about them right now. Or do you want to take some subset of
the inventory, concentrate on that, and then develop information over
time to augment and amend the license?

NELSON: Thank you.

COHON: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Could we go to Slide 6, please? I was interested in your prioritization
efforts and your evaluation of the detailed work plan through LA, and I
can understand how you could prioritize with respect to performance
relative to dose, and I can even understand how you\'d do it with
respect to regulatory defensibility. But how did you quantify or
prioritize or what was your ranking or methodology for the external
acceptance? That\'s a tough one for me to get my arms around. I just
wondered how you guys did it.

DYER: You\'ll have to wait to hear Peter tomorrow. In the past, we\'ve
done this in a multi-attribute utility analysis kind of approach. I
believe that\'s what they used as a framework here. And it can be a
quasi subjective metric low, medium, high.

BULLEN: Okay. Same type of attributes or parameters with respect to
relative dose, or did you actually quantify those in some way?

DYER: That\'s one for Peter.

BULLEN: Okay. I\'ll wait until tomorrow.

DYER: I believe that was much more quantified.

BULLEN: Okay. Thank you.

COHON: Good. We have something that will bring you back tomorrow.
Richard Parizek?

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board.

I had a similar question on Slide 6, but that\'s been answered.

On 8, Slide 8, it\'s updated process models. It seems like it\'s hard to
have a cutoff period that takes advantage of the ongoing science and
engineering studies in order to build them into the process model
updates. And, for instance, the saturated zone modeling effort, it seems
like the site scale model hasn\'t yet taken advantage of the updated
regional scale model, and as a result, there may be some constraints
there that the site scale model will have, and there\'s some errors that
are propagated because of that.

It looks like the year 2004, you know, seems just\--on the other hand,
the cutoff period to include new data, and updated understandings, seems
to be almost this year in order to be able to update the models for the
LA.

How do you deal with that? I\'m sure that it\'s an ongoing process after
maybe license has been submitted, you continue the work, and you have
this as backup information. But how best to handle these, not deferred
things, but things that take time. And then it\'s always this need to
shut down the incorporation of new findings. There may be faults that
come out of the drilling program that are characterized from the Nye
County people, for instance, that some of us ask about, but now you have
some data. When will that get put in, and how do you use it?

DYER: Excellent question. It is an enormous challenge in a program of
this size and complexity to try to schedule out, plan out the data
feeds. And, of course, experiments don\'t always work the way you plan
them to happen. We try to schedule our major products around when we
think the test will provide meaningful information into the system. And
then, of course, the rest of the planning process is how long does it
take to analyze, evaluate and document the results.

It is a juggling operation. Sometimes you don\'t get the results that
you hope for on quite the schedule, and you work at mitigating that
somehow. The idea is to continually bring information into the program,
though, evaluate your understanding of the system against what this new
information provides you, and see whether there\'s anything about your
understanding that would change, anything about your assessment of the
system performance that would change based on this new information.

So, that\'s one way that you get it in. You rightly hit on a technique.
In licensing space, one can go in and bring new information into the
program continually, and if need be, you can amend the basis for the
license application if need be.

COHON: We find ourselves with extra time. And because we do, I invite
members of the audience to pose questions to any of the speakers who are
still here. If you have them, just raise your hand and I\'ll recognize
you.

Please, if you\'d come to the microphone over there, and identify
yourself for the record, and then ask your question. And I\'m sure Dr.
Dyer, Dr. Chu, Lake, Bob Loux, if he\'s still here, will be happy to
answer them.

FITZPATRICK: My name is Charles Fitzpatrick. I\'m with Egan and
Associates here in Washington.

I guess it\'s sort of a two-part question, one for probably Mr. Cohon or
someone on the board, and then perhaps the followup to that by Mr.
Barrett.

I\'ve read numerous NWTRB meeting minutes over the years, and it seems a
repetitive theme right up until the present, or right up until your last
meeting, is that there were certain things that you considered to be
essential prior to the time that the DOE made a site recommendation. For
instance, a thorough knowledge of flow in the unsaturated and saturated
zones, transport of radionuclides, knowledge of container corrosion.

You also wanted multiple lines of evidence beyond just the TSPA in
support of the TSPA. And perhaps, I think Mr. Cohon addressed, you felt
that although it was a policy decision whether to\--when and whether to
recommend the site, that because of the degree of uncertainties, it was
essential that if the site were recommended, that there be a clear
communication by DOE or the Secretary to the policy makers, such as
Congress right now, of the level of uncertainties with which the
recommendation was made.

So, I guess my question is to Mr. Cohon, do you believe any of those
objectives were successfully achieved in those areas, and particularly
with respect to the transparency, I guess is your word, of the
uncertainties as they were conveyed to Congressional policy makers?

COHON: Thank you. Of course I intended that you ask questions of Dr. Chu
or Dr. Dyer, but we are fair game since it\'s our meeting.

First, let me say I thank you and congratulate you on your I think
completely correct characterization of what the Board has said at prior
meetings, and what it communicated in various reports that we\'ve made,
including letter reports, over the last couple of years. I can elaborate
on other Board priorities, but you\'ve certainly captured the main
point.

It was exactly for the reasons one could infer from what you said that
the Board characterized the technical basis as weak to moderate, and it
was exactly for those reasons that the Board said it had limited
confidence in the result of TSPA.

So, you\'re right. You asked the key point, though, about transparency,
or I prefer the phrase communication of uncertainty. As I said sort of
as a footnote during Dr. Chu\'s presentation, I felt that in that
regard, DOE did not convey clearly or transparently what the
uncertainties are associated with their estimates of Yucca Mountain
performance.

So, there you are. Thank you for asking.

Other questions?

(No response.)

COHON: Well, this is unprecedented, and just remember for future
meetings when we only give you a five minute break, that on this day in
2002, you were given a 40 minute break. Now, we will convene at 11:00.
But if Under Secretary Card arrives early, we may start early. So, if
you\'re really interested in that presentation, I urge you not to stray
too far.

We are adjourned for the moment. Thank you all.

(Whereupon, a recess was taken.)

COHON: We have now been joined by the Under Secretary of DOE Robert
Card.

Before I introduce him, I have a very important housekeeping item.
Apparently, it turns out we\'ve been stealing coffee, and this is
something that the Board takes very seriously. Our coffee is in the back
of the room. The coffee outside is not ours. So, if you\'ve actually
imbibed some of that coffee, please give it back.

I\'m glad you interpreted that the way I meant it.

Prior to his selection as the Under Secretary, Robert Card was President
and CEO of Kaiser-Hill Company. In that role, he was responsible for the
\$7 billion, 5,000 person cleanup and closure of the DOE\'s Rocky Flats
site in the Denver, Colorado area.

After assuming responsibility for the Rocky Flats project in 1995, Mr.
Card restructured site operations and the closure strategy, and he
advanced the planned closure date from 2065 to 2006, quite a gain, and
reduced the cost of closure from an estimated \$37 billion to
approximately \$7 billion.

He also served as Director and Senior Vice-President at CH2M Hill, which
had revenues of about \$2 billion, and of course is known as one of the
world\'s larger science, engineering, construction and operations firms.

Mr. Card received a Bachelor\'s Degree in Civil Engineering from the
University of Washington, and a Master\'s of Science in Environmental
Engineering from Stanford, and also completed the Program for Management
Development at Harvard Business School.

It\'s our pleasure to welcome Robert Card. Bob?

CARD: Thank you. I\'m not used to being trapped behind a podium.

COHON: I just want you to know something, Bob. They have never applauded
for me, in my six years on this board.

CARD: Well, I\'ve never been applauded about anything like Yucca
Mountain before.

COHON: Don\'t get used to it.

CARD: I\'m not planning on it. Anyway, it\'s a real pleasure to be here,
and I apologize I haven\'t been in front of the Board previously, but
you\'ve been hosting your meetings in garden spots across the country,
and I think this is the first time that you\'ve lined up in Washington,
D.C. since I\'ve been here. So, it\'s a pleasure to be able to get
together, and hopefully we\'ll have time than in your next garden spot,
I can follow you there as well.

I want to just say a few things, and then I would be, you know, dialogue
would be best from my standpoint. But, first of all, I want to say that
we at DOE really appreciate the Board\'s work. And even though it may
not look like we\'re always in alignment, you know, I think in general,
it\'s in the 90 percentile range of our thinking. And I could explain
whatever differences appear to be more one of timing than substance.

So, I encourage the Board, not that they need it, to continue doing what
they\'ve been doing, and we look forward to a long productive
relationship together.

And I just want to say, for example, with the exception of just a few
words in your January report, we really find ourselves very much in
agreement with it. And it, frankly, parallels the IAEA report quite
substantially.

So, I think you heard from Marvin and others that we plan to take that
seriously, so I thought I\'d sort of lay out some thinking about the
project from here, and then be glad to, you know, respond to questions
so somebody gives me the hook.

So, just as a stage setter, as far as the administration is concerned,
siting issues behind us, it\'s in the hands of our elected
representatives at this point. So, we are moving on, waiting for that
decision, pressing forward with the project as if that\'s done.

We know that Congress has really only given itself two choices at this
point, and I emphasize Congress has given itself. One, they can allow
the process to proceed to an NRC licensing phase; or, two, we
discontinue the project completely, unambiguously completely. And I
would note that there are no other active alternative permanent disposal
options authorized or funded. So, that would be up to them to decide if
things should just proceed as they would naturally evolve, or we should
have some sort of other program. But, at DOE, we\'re not engaged in a
debate of is this the right time at this point. That\'s over, and
Congress will decide that.

But with respect to moving on, I wanted to make a couple points about
the way I think, and I think my team sees this moving forward. And,
really, I view the project as partitioned into about four parts, but
it\'s not a hard partition. One of them is is the licensing activity,
which has a very structured process that the NRC runs. And that\'s what
I call the core project piece. So, I intend to instill our greatest
project management, discipline and focus to that process, meaning
that\'s got to be just a riveting focus on what is required and
necessary and sufficient for the licensing activity. And we have our
work cut out for us there that goes well beyond science issues.

Then, and real importantly and along the lines of your letter, is what I
call an ongoing science activity. Let me just back up to licensing.
Also, I\'ve told my team, based on my experience at WIPP, and
Margaret\'s and others, that the licensing activity will not end in my
lifetime. It will simply be a series of steps, because we will continue
to optimize and learn about this repository. Again, all my statements
are assuming that Congress makes a favorable decision to us on this.
And, so, we will be continuing to look at the licensing criteria and our
strategies, and putting those in line with each other through ongoing
activities.

Then the other issue, one of the other ones along the lines of your
letter, is I think one of the core issues the Board has been concerned
about is that DOE has been focused on compliance, and whereas we really
should be focused on sort of a holistic systems understanding. And I
want you to know I buy into that, and plead guilty in that the law was
very clear how we were to make the siting decision. It\'s a compliance
based decision. But this repository, should it be approved, is an
international treasure. We can\'t allow anything to cause its failure,
any surprise, anything.

So, we intend to take advantage of the decades and centuries of its
operation to have a forever study program. And, so, I\'ve instructed my
staff to work with you and other people like the Academies to design
this ongoing science program, using, frankly, your letter and the IAEA
report as the starting point of what do we need to do that is not
required for the licensing process to continue to understand the system,
not in a compliance mode, but in a systems understanding mode. So, I see
a major enduring role for the Board in helping us through those issues.

That includes, and the other issue that I\'ve mentioned to some of you
is that the project has been overwhelming focused on the siting
decision, which has caused a lot of narrow thinking, in my opinion. So,
I\'ve asked the project to broaden their thinking, and while the
licensing process is moving ahead on a riveting focus towards what we
have in mind, that we should keep things such as the following in mind.

First of all, I am committed to maintaining a cold option until it is
either selected or no longer important, one of the two. And we have done
layouts for that option, and I challenge the Board that if you find us
moving towards a hot design which does not readily adapt to a cold
design, that you should call foul and call me and say hey, wait a
minute, you know, you can\'t move those casks around very easily if you
were to switch to a cold design. So, I\'m not committing that we will
license a cold design, but I\'m committing that we will cause no harm in
a hot design towards moving to a cold design, until, again, we resolve
the technical question one way or the other. And we have already
developed a footprint for the cold design that is within the study area,
and we intend to invest in that. And that was a personal commitment I
made to you, Jerry, and it will be carried out.

The other thing that I will suggest opening up for question at this
point, now the siting decision is behind us anyway, is the waste form.
And, you know, if transmutation is technically feasible and will reduce
the toxicity of the waste to a point that makes it technically and
economically justified, then I think we\'re wide open to any issue here
in fiddling with the entire system, because the system I view is from
the time that waste leaves a nuclear power plant or a DOE site, you
know, for the next greater, in this context, greater than 10,000 years,
because, again, this is not a compliance based look at things.

So, I would encourage the Board to expand their horizons about things
that it might consider in advising us technically what to do here, and
think of the givens and assumptions that have been put in place over the
two decades of trying to get to a siting decision, and rethink whether
the right givens and assumptions are in place based on what we know
today if this project were to move forward.

And then importantly, the other activity is it\'s time to begin an
earnest transportation plan. We feel quite confident that we can arrive
at a successful transportation plan, based on the amount of material
that we\'ve moved in history and we continue to move right this day.
There\'s really hardly a week that goes by that spent fuel or high level
waste isn\'t being moved in this country, even coming in from overseas.

So, really, all forms of transportation are deployed, and we really
have, in my opinion, because I was intimately personally involved in it,
a fairly successful stakeholder system developed for WIPP. And I would
see us modeling, and Margaret of course is quite familiar with that,
modeling this system, you know, starting from that successful platform
and working from there on how do we include states, communities, other
interested stakeholders, and then of course how do we resolve any
technical issues that are there. And, again, I would say, well, we
will\--NRC is the safety decider. The science program, should it be
appropriate, can look at new designs for systems that might be more
resistant to whatever we\'re concerned about.

So, with that backdrop, Jerry, I\'ll stop there, and why don\'t we just
take some questions until you decide it\'s been long enough.

COHON: Great. Bob, just so you\'re aware of it, we\'re going to invite
questions from the Board until\--well, for up to about 15 minutes, and
then we\'re going to move into a public comment period, which we chose
specifically in terms of timing so that you\'d be here.

CARD: Okay.

COHON: Questions from the Board? Debra?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

I appreciate your comments, Bob. Let me tell you how it sounds, and then
you can correct my impression.

It sounds like we\'ve got parallel universes here. It sound like there
is the focus on the compliance that\'s necessary to gain the NRC
approval, and then there is this other realm of interest in improved
understanding in maintaining other design options, and the like. And I
don\'t see the connection, and maybe you can walk us through how these
concepts actually connect with one another.

CARD: Okay. Well, an example connection is, let\'s say we started off to
further explore Vadose zone water transport, or something like that,
pick a technical area. I would expect, and my anticipation is those
technical areas will be selected with concurrence or input from you all,
based on perceived risk/benefit to the project of understanding that
issue.

Should we find something that would materially benefit the project in
that, you know, we should modify some part of our design, more or less,
it could be either way. Then that would feed into the design process and
become incorporated at the appropriate time into the licensing process.

Now, when it would be incorporated would be dependent on the right time
from a project management perspective, because, frankly, I have not
heard a bunch of concern about the operating period safety. We\'re
relatively familiar with how to handle spent fuel. It\'s the long-term
issues. So, I think one difference between at least me or us and the
Board is that we view we have the operating period to fully resolve
anything that we might want to resolve together, and that\'s a long
time. And it\'s particularly long in the scale of time that we know
about this material, plutonium and other elements that have only been
around 50 years, and Alloy 20 and other things like that that have only
been around 20 years.

So, we\'ll easily double the experience we have with these materials
during this period of time, and perhaps much more, because 300 years is
sort of the kind of time frame that we\'re thinking of to do this.

So, you know, the question that I posed to my folks is when, if we\'re
on this discovery path, licensing path and discovery path, where do we
learn things where we must make a change now for near-term safety
issues. If we find those, then we\'re going to make a change
immediately. It it\'s, well, that would be really important for the
closure period, then we may say, well, we don\'t need to have made that
change yet. We can go ahead with the license the way that it is, or some
other way of proceeding ahead, and we\'ll determine what the appropriate
time, depending on a whole bunch of different variables might be for
incorporating and modification of the design, or maybe the discovery
simply improves our understanding about things, which is useful in and
of itself.

I don\'t know if that helps, Debra, but that\'s kind of the way I see
it.

KNOPMAN: Well, it helps. I guess what I\'m still curious about is what
you\'re driving at in terms of improvements and understanding in an LA
compliance context, that is, do you have targets? One can embark on a
100 year research program, but not be all that focused on driving
towards some particular goal of either improving understanding of a
process, reducing uncertainty about a process we actually understand but
don\'t have data on. And that\'s where I guess the disconnect is for me.
What are you driving toward in the nearer term that you\'d want to get
out of the science program? Where do you feel you need more information
going into licensing?

CARD: Well, recognizing there are no personal opinions here, but I\'ll
give you one anyway, it will be great if we could find a way to
substantially reduce the uncertainty of a significant down side through
some surprise in the 10,000 year out time frame.

So, if somebody could say hey, I can get rid of those long half-life
highly mobile actinides, or I can absorb them, or I can do something
that substantially changes, so that if we imagine\--what I\'ve
challenged my people to is let\'s just assume that all this waste gets
put in there on a Friday afternoon with\--it just gets tossed in, no
containment, no nothing, what happens. You know, let\'s look at the
worst case scenario here, what happens?

I think, while I can\'t imagine that actually happening, you know, to me
in my nuclear experience, working on worst case scenarios is a good
thing to do. And, so, the more protective we can make this system, the
better.

Now, there\'s a lot of protectives you can do that are way outside of
the compliance envelope. That\'s why I put these in separate paths. For
one thing, if you insist on knowing everything about everything, you
will never get\--no complicated project would be built in this country.
We wouldn\'t have a man on the moon. The Golden Gate Bridge wouldn\'t be
built yet. And at some point, there are systems design for what\'s safe
enough, and we move forward with that.

But, in certain cases where you have these very long times that we\'re
talking about, 10,000 plus years, it\'s appropriate to continue to
study. Whereas, in the Golden Gate Bridge, we\'re sort of studying it as
we drive over it every day.

COHON: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

I was particularly interested in your carrying along the cold option
until it\'s either selected or it\'s no longer important. And I guess
the question that I have is that why did you take that approach rather
than start with the cold option and then decide that you had enough data
to support the decision to go hot?

And I kind of want to ask a question maybe with respect to timing. The
cold option, if you keep it, basically is decided the day you put the
first two waste packages next to each other. If they\'re 10 centimeters
apart, then you\'ve got a hot design, even if you ventilate, because you
can\'t remove all the heat. If there\'s a couple meters apart, you have
a chance that maybe you can go cold.

And, so, I guess the question arises when will you make that decision?
You told us you\'re going to have a license application that\'s hot, but
the final decision actually occurs in whatever date you put two waste
packages next to each other, and that actually has to be precluded by a
determination by the NRC in all the public hearings that that\'s,
indeed, the design that you want. So, I\'m trying to pin you down on
when are you going to decide as opposed to keeping this hot versus cold
flexibility open?

CARD: Well, first of all, we believe we have the technical wherewithal
to license a hot design now. And the cold is an optimization on that,
potentially by certain people who believe, for good reason, you know,
that cold may have some attractive features to it.

You know, the principle I would operate on is that we would make every
effort to avoid going hot, and I\'d want to talk to my folks a little
bit more about that before we made that decision. So, if in your opinion
the first two packages put us in a hot configuration, then I\'d want to
check that out before we made that decision. I don\'t know that we have
universal agreement that the first two packages puts us in a hot
configuration. But, if you have reason to believe that it does, then we
would view that as a major decision.

BULLEN: Thank you. And actually that was an extreme example. I mean,
basically, the removal of the heat from the mountain is the key issue,
and I\'m sure you can argue how you\'d do that.

CARD: Yes.

BULLEN: I\'d like to change gears just for a second here, because you
brought up something that I think Dr. Chu mentioned earlier this morning
about her basic science program and thinking out of the box, and you
talked about potential treatment options, which include transmutation.
And then as soon as you think of transmutation, then the next thing you
think of is maybe actinide burning. And then as soon as you think of
actinide burning, then the next thing you think of is the word called
reprocessing.

And, so, are you actually proposing that we close the fuel cycle?

CARD: I didn\'t propose anything.

BULLEN: I know. I\'m just inferring. I mean, this is the logical thought
process that when someone opens the door to transmutation, which
personal opinion here, not a Board opinion, I think it\'s a great idea
because it does the things that you want to do about reducing the
longevity of the waste, and the like.

But I guess I just wanted to have you elaborate a little bit more about
your thought processes there, keeping in mind that the Senator from New
Mexico is down the street and would love to build accelerators.

CARD: Sure. And we\'re aware of that.

Let me first say that the administration is on record in the NEP of
being willing to reopen the reprocessing issue. The important thing to
understand, and please quote me on this, there is no known technology
which eliminates all actinides yet, and, therefore, would eliminate the
need for this repository. So, it doesn\'t matter right now which of
those you choose. The repository need is the same either way. Plus, we
have a bunch of glass waste, another thing that has to go in there. So,
we view the issues about waste management and the need for a repository
completely decoupled.

Having said that, I don\'t think there\'s any issue that this
administration said is not on the table. And you can think of it in two
ways. One is sort of a good for humanity and science way, or other, just
a cold calculating business way. If we\'re going to spend \$50 billion
on a repository, we should be looking at science and technology methods
to reduce that cost.

And in a discussion with Jerry a while back, I pointed out that just
good business sense calls for a long-term science program. You don\'t
have to be dedicated to science. In fact, if I were to somehow gain
title to this and the cash, I\'d be investing a lot of science, because
I think we can pretty dramatically reduce the cost of this facility
through it.

So, there\'s a bunch of drivers for moving on with that, but on that
test, though, would say how much does transmutation and reprocessing
cost. I think the interests of Nevada at the end of the day in these
issues will be very important. Assuming the repository is sited there,
Nevada could either take the position I don\'t want anything done in my
state. If you\'re going to force this, just put it in there. Or, hey,
I\'d really like to have this extra work. I mean, those will be
important issues when that time comes. There, by the way, is no dialogue
going on, obviously, with the State on those issues now. Or some other
state may want to host this. We\'re aware of a couple. But I think those
will be decided on economical issues, and they may include broader ones
than just Yucca Mountain, or safety issues if we can dramatically reduce
the waste load in the mountain.

COHON: Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

Bob, in looking at the resume and hearing the introduction that Jerry
gave, I\'m impressed with your ability at Rocky Flats to save 59 years
and \$30 billion. I\'d be fascinated to know how you did that, but this
isn\'t the time for that.

Have you identified at the Yucca Mountain project, any big issues that
you feel could substantially save money, or substantially save time?

CARD: I guess I\'m not prepared to\--well, the answer is no. But it\'s
not that I haven\'t thought about them. But I don\'t think we\'re there
yet in our understanding. I mean, I\'ll just give you some ideas. Many
of the scientists that worked on this are disappointed that we haven\'t
taken more credit for the natural systems, and they would argue that the
criticism that this project became an engineering project and not a
science project by simply designing a waste package that we could put in
a Safeway parking lot was largely due to our conservatism in making sure
that we didn\'t leave anything uncovered in here, and that in fact, you
know, there\'s a lot of credit that could be taken for the natural
systems there that hasn\'t been taken.

In fact, if you really look at it, my opinion is we could come up with a
less conservative design with surface storage at Yucca Mountain than
under the mountain. You know, the mountain, you know, has created
actually in the thinking a problem for us rather than a benefit, which
it shouldn\'t be, because we\'ve assumed the worst of everything going
through the mountain.

So, that would certainly be an area I\'m interested in looking at, is
what do we need to know about what\'s above and below the drifts, and
how the drifts perform, so that we could make an informed, safe decision
about the natural system there, and take more credit for that. But,
right now, there\'s very little taken. So, if I were investing, that
would be an area I would look at, as an example.

COHON: Richard Parizek?

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board.

Secretary Card, Las Vegas is great for PR. I mean, they do things that
many cities could not do. Could you expand on why you think Yucca
Mountain is a national treasure? I mean, I don\'t think Bob Loux would
agree with this characterization of this gift of the nation out there.
Now, I know from an international perspective, many people say, you
know, you license a repository, that\'s going to really help the
international problem of dealing with radioactive waste, because
everybody is really suffering with this same sort of issue. So, from
that point of view, there\'s an international value to this. But please
expand on the national treasure characterization of it, because I think
this is important to understand the logic of this.

CARD: Well, and bear in mind I\'m obviously not trying to represent any
perspectives of the State of Nevada. They\'re well represented, and
you\'ll hear that from them. But stepping out into the broader context,
first, I would refer everybody back to the Secretary\'s letter and
decision document, which lays out the core issues. And those documents
were not something that were ginned up a few hours before they went out.
They were very seriously thought through, the words that went in there.

But just as one example, I think all of us feel that nuclear waste needs
to be managed and dealt with appropriately. If the country that has the
most need and the most financial resources and a lot of landscape can\'t
get there, how do we expect anybody else to do this. And I think, you
know, particularly in the area of dirty bombs, and other issues, I think
all of us would rather have relatively more of this waste in a secure
location than not.

So, this is a very important signal, because this issue is no less
contentious in any other country that has nuclear waste, either through
their defense activities, their nuclear navy, or the power industry. So,
they\'re anxiously looking for this so they can say to their citizens,
look, the United States is doing this. We should do it, too.

Furthermore, for the reasons listed in the Secretary\'s letter and
decision document, this is a very important move just for the United
States. And I\'ll just share a personal experience with you that I had,
is we were the first out of state site to ship to WIPP. New Mexico, Los
Alamos made the first shipment. We made the next many from Rocky Flats.
And my deputy, or COO, used the term national treasure for WIPP, because
we were grumping over all the stuff that was not safety related that was
costing us a fortune in the WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria that Margaret
put in there. So, I brought her here to get even with her.

And it instilled in our people this culture that absolute compliance
with the WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria was critical for the national
interest, whether we thought there was a safety case or not, and it
really focused our people on just how important every step, following
rigorously even step of that, no matter how strange it seemed was,
because we had to protect WIPP\'s existence. And shipping the wrong
thing there was a good way to cause serious problems.

And certainly looking at it in hindsight, you know, WIPP is of critical
importance for the environment and safety of our country, and I think
Yucca Mountain is, too. And, so, the way I view that personally is in
addition to just getting this through the process of, you know, NRC
deciding it\'s safe and blah, blah, blah, that we have a stewardship
responsibility for this facility that really extends beyond that. And
that\'s what\'s, frankly, my personal driver for wanting to continue
this exploration.

Does that help?

COHON: Priscilla Nelson?

NELSON: Nelson, Board.

Not to overly belabor what Debra started thinking about, it\'s clear
that you have a belief in ability to license a hot design. And,
therefore, it\'s really not clear, it\'s still not clear to me what is
the main driver for the scientific investigations and what scientific
investigations are going to go on, particularly relating to things like
ventilation, issues relating to aging and surface storage aspects.

You said stewardship right at the tail end of your previous comment. A
stewardship of what aspect? I mean, in what part of the overall project
is such stewardship needed? Is it a reducing cost sort of stewardship?
Is there insufficient certainty? What aspect is this stewardship
directed towards?

CARD: When I used the word stewardship, I would say business-ship is the
reducing cost piece. Stewardship is really expanding one\'s horizons
beyond compliance, as an extra precaution to make sure we haven\'t left
something on the table that should have been discovered or factored in.

I think if you look at the history of complex things, the space program,
whatever you\'re talking about, I think there\'s a case to be made that
you never have as much as would be nice to have. And at this point, we
could make the decision we have enough to license this facility and we
think we do, so let\'s just shut down the science program and move on.
But I don\'t think that\'s the right answer for the country, because
there may be a .000000\--add as many as you want\--1 probability that
there\'s something interesting that we might have found out over the
next decades that would have affected how we approach this project. And
I think it\'s important enough that I\'m willing to spend money to chase
after that in the event that we might find it and be able to deal with
it in real time.

It\'s science. I mean, as my scientists tell me, if you know what
you\'re doing, it\'s not science, or if you know where you\'re going,
it\'s not science. And, so, I\'m willing to invest in science for its
own sake.

COHON: One of the issues always for the program, like any program, is
funding. Margaret Chu, when she was speaking earlier, made a commitment
to identifying some minimal level of funding for science, both as a
threshold in absolute terms, and as a percentage of total program
support, which is great, and we look forward to hearing more about that.

But, nevertheless, you don\'t fully control your budget, and to a large
extent, are completely dependent on what Congress provides.

Have you or your colleagues considered a funding stream going on into
the future? What I\'m trying to get at is whether there\'s some minimum
level which, if you fall, science is really in trouble as a part of the
program? I\'ll leave it at that.

CARD: Okay.

COHON: Can you respond to that?

CARD: Well, let me sort of lay out the priorities. But, first, there\'s
a bit of a backdrop. I am not aware of any other program in the U.S.
Government, that under Democratic and Republican administrations,
routinely requests more for it than is appropriated. So, I\'m hoping if
we get by this, that we come into alignment on that, because our, while
we have a commitment to science and plenty of support within OMB and the
administration for it, you know, our priority and the national interest
has to be the licensing process.

So, the licensing process bucket is going to get filled first. And
there\'s a lot of science tied up in that as well, but that\'s what\'s
going to get filled first, because right now, we have this material in
the wrong place. That\'s the fundamental premise here. And the greatest
risk that we have as a nation is delaying the repositioning of that
material. So, that\'s the primary risk that we\'re trying to deal with.

The science risks right now, to our knowledge, are orders and orders of
magnitude less than that, because there\'s a long time horizon to
address those.

Now, we sincerely hope for a tens of millions of dollars per year open
ended science program, and the core issue will be there will probably be
enough to do all the things simultaneously. What we\'ll be looking for
your advice is fees first in this way looks like the optimum in flow of
important policy information into the project over the next many years.
And that\'s what we want, you know, yours and the Academy\'s and the
public\'s input, you know, those are the areas we want to focus on.

So, my commitment is we will work hard to make sure the request gets
made, and it will be up to the appropriators to decide how important it
is. And I can tell you in every other program of DOE, the appropriators
usually you haven\'t asked for enough. Have some more. But not in this
case.

COHON: We\'re going to move now to the public comment period. Bob,
because it\'s an open public comment period, and the questions may or
may not be for you, I would ask if you could just take a seat, but stay
miked.

CARD: Okay.

COHON: But be aware that you\'re live. So, maybe you should turn it off,
yeah. But be available for response in case people have questions for
you.

We have three people signed up, Charles Fitzpatrick, Judy Treichel and
George Danko.

Charles, do you want to ask again, or do you have more? That\'s fine.
You can even ask the same one if you want. Please identify yourself
again for the record.

FITZPATRICK: My name is Charles Fitzpatrick, and I\'m with Egan and
Associates here in Washington, D.C.

I guess I had a general question, and a specific question, probably for
Mr. Card, or anyone, Mr. Barrett or anyone who\'d you like to designate.

Given the last question before the break wherein it was discussed that
there were four or five very important prerequisites, at least in the
NWTRB\'s mind, that DOE ought to have completed prior to site selection,
but did not, I guess my question is the Nuclear Waste\--the NWPA\--the
Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires that DOE submit its license
application within 90 days after the site is selected. Should Congress
override the Nevada veto, that would be sometime this summer. DOE now
estimates it will be at least 90 days, plus two years or more, before
they\'re ready to do a license application.

Wouldn\'t it have been prudent for DOE to have waited until
approximately 90 days before they were ready to do a license
application, since much of the scientific work for site selection and
license application are similar, and made the selection in the summer
of, say, 2004 and then the license application in December 2004? That\'s
the general question.

COHON: Who would like to respond? Bob?

CARD: Well, let me just say we view the schedule provisions in the Act
as intending to drive forward, not backward. So, first of all, we
categorically reject the 90 days was designed to make people wait. It
was designed to make sure that the system didn\'t tally. There\'s a
whole number of reasons why normally, I mean, there\'s no other nuclear
process where you would basically be done with the license application
before making a siting decision. Bear in mind that law was written in
1982, when the NRC process was somewhat different than it is today.

So, you know, I don\'t know what else I could say to respond to that
argument other than that we don\'t think it was intended, and we would
like the people who are as concerned about that schedule, to be equally
concerned about 1998, which appears to have already been missed. So,
that\'s all I would say.

FITZPATRICK: I guess since this is a comment period as well as a
question period, my comment in response would simply be that perhaps the
framers of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act had in mind that the site would
truly be analyzed for its suitability prior to the time of the license
application.

The second, and more specific, question is Mr. Card had indicated that
he believes that high temperature design is already licensable. Two
months ago, this Board stated in a letter to DOE and the Congress,
\"Data on aqueous corrosion for Alloy 22 above 120 degree centigrade,
under conditions relevant to Yucca Mountain, are essentially
non-existence, creating a serious data gap. Consequently, there is great
uncertainty about the performance of Alloy 22 under high temperature
conditions. Because of this uncertainty, it is difficult to be confident
that waste packages would last for 10,000 years.\"

So, I guess my question is have we discovered something new between
January and now, or is there an issue there with the high temperature
design?

COHON: Well, actually, let me not respond directly to that, but just
point out, again as another way to promote our meetings and make sure
you come back, we\'ll be hearing from Joe Payer, the Chair of the
Corrosion Review Task Force, whatever it\'s called\--Waste Package Peer
Review, and I believe his comments on behalf of that group will be
certainly material to that question. Right, Joe?

Joe Payer said yes, sir. One could only note it was said halfheartedly,
but he said it. In any event, it will certainly be relevant to this
question about what we know and what we need to know.

Mr. Fitzpatrick, I just want to reiterate something you mentioned during
the comment you made before the break, that Egan and Associates I
believe is working for the State of Nevada.

FITZPATRICK: That\'s correct.

COHON: On the Yucca Mountain project. Good. Thank you.

Judy Treichel? Judy, do you want up here, or is that okay?

TREICHEL: Oh, I\'ll be fine.

COHON: Okay.

TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.

First, I would like to say both personally and on behalf of the Task
Force, that I share in your sentiments that were expressed about John
Arendt. He was a very respectable person, and even though we probably
didn\'t agree at all regarding nuclear technology, I totally respected
his style of doing business and his commitment to fairness, which is one
of the most important things that the public has gotten, and has gotten
more of it from the Board.

COHON: Thank you, Judy.

TREICHEL: That being said, now I can launch into the usual attitude that
I have. But I think it was necessary to say that.

All of a sudden at this meeting, it appears that everything has changed,
but at the same time, nothing has changed. There is suddenly this brand
new attitude and a new focus, and everything becomes new, but it\'s the
same old mountain. And I find it very interesting that the new Director
has said that it\'s in the formulation stage, or just sort of forming
up. And that\'s pretty interesting now that we\'ve already had a site
recommendation.

And I think it should go on the record that Yucca Mountain is never
going to turn into WIPP. There are tremendous differences between the
two places, both scientifically and publicly and politically and in
every single way. So, it\'s just going to fit.

The people in Nevada, as far as the people that I work with and
certainly the State officials and the others, are not going to join Team
Yucca, and I was glad that you made the statement that the Board didn\'t
feel it was appropriate for that to happen. And I certainly hope that
the NRC feels that they need not get further on board than they already
are.

It was mentioned before that Nevada believes that it\'s being dumped on,
and that\'s absolutely true, and that\'s not changing, and it\'s
unlikely that it would change. I don\'t know. There was a lot of talk,
and there always is a lot of talk about enhancing communication, and
there\'s all sorts of fancy words used. And I found it was interesting
in the presentations this morning, there\'s still sort of a question in
everybody\'s mind about what a stakeholder is and who a stakeholder is,
and I think one of the things that Dr. Chu should add to her learning
curve is to get rid of that word. It doesn\'t work, and it\'s a bad
word.

It appears that the program is still looking for a silver bullet, and
that certainly it\'s obvious that the public in Nevada doesn\'t think
there should have been a site recommendation, and certainly doesn\'t
think that a license should be issued. But to go on and on and on and
talk about looking for this silver bullet, or for better ideas as the
thing just kind of keeps rolling along, I found it really interesting
when Mr. Card was talking about the man on the moon and the Golden Gate
project, or the Gold Gate Bridge.

We all sort of\--it was kind of understood in this country that we
wanted both of those things, and certainly the man wanted to go to the
moon, you know, that did. But this is an entirely different deal. This
isn\'t an overwhelming public supported thing. This is very different,
and can\'t be approached in the same way, and those two projects, we
didn\'t send the guy to the moon and then spend some time to figure out
how to get him back. That\'s sort of the attitude that\'s being employed
here. And you didn\'t put that bridge out there and see how many cars we
had. You know, it wasn\'t a work in progress. There was pretty good
evidence. So, I think descriptions like that just aren\'t appropriate.

And I guess finally, I think everything is in place and we are in the
formulating stage, and it might work out great, and it could be a
national treasure if you turned Yucca Mountain into a laboratory that
did not contain radioactive material, but that led you to know more
about geology and led you to know more about the things you needed to
know before you finally did make any sort of permanent decisions on the
repository.

Thank you.

COHON: George Danko?

DANKO: George Danko, University of Nevada, Reno.

I would like to spare my public comment for the tomorrow session on the
repository design, and use this part to ask two questions to Secretary
Card.

One question I would like to ask is how do you define the cold
repository option? And the second question is what are the key technical
issues related to the cold option?

COHON: Just for the record, and for the benefit of Under Secretary Card,
Professor Danko is at the University of Nevada, Reno. So, the two
questions were how do we define the cold design, and what are the KTIs
associated with cold design. Lake is going to respond. We\'re going to
do a tag team.

BARRETT: The cold design as the Board has defined it is less than 96
degrees celsius on the metal. We\'ve also looked at a range of
temperatures. We looked at the wall temperature being less than 96
degrees at a two phase flow, and some of those uncertainties. So,
there\'s different definitions. But the Board has been 96 on the metal.

Regarding the KTIs, Russ?

DYER: In the KTI arena, looking at the thermally dependent KTIs, there
would be one subset that would be in the metal behavior arena, and then
another subset that would be in the coupled process in the natural
system arena. Those are the two general arenas. I can\'t tell you how
they break out with each of the sub-arenas exactly.

DANKO: Thank you very much. And then the other question was what are the
key technical issues related to the feasibility or the licensability of
a cold repository? So, what\'s the issue? I believe it\'s not the issue
of keeping the temperature below 96 degrees C. on the wall of an
emplacement drift, because that\'s in the literature in several
published papers, that you can keep this temperature below 96, or you
can keep it below 80 degrees, or you can keep it below 60 degrees. It
just depends on how far you are spacing the waste packages, and how much
air you are blowing over the emplacement drifts. So, that can be kept.

So, what\'s the key issue? We have enough air. We have fans and we can
power this and then cool it down as much as we want. And then I heard
the period of consideration for preclosure ventilation to be somewhere
between a few decades to up to 300 years.

DYER: I must have misunderstood your question.

DANKO: What are the key issues? What are the key technical issues of
licensability of the cold repository option?

DYER: If you look at the KTI agreements, those that are thermally
dependent, generally fall in two categories, those that are associated
with material processes, material behaviors, and those that are
associated with coupled processes, between the natural and the
engineered system. Those are the main areas.

Now, I don\'t know exactly what the sub-agreements are, but those are
the two main categories.

DANKO: So, what needs to be done to be able to check out if it\'s
licensable? So, what\'s the road to get to the point that the decision
can be made whether or not a cold option is licensable? So, what is the
roadmap to that?

DYER: For each of the sub-agreements, there\'s a roadmap that is
currently agreed upon between the DOE and the NRC as to a proposed path
forward.

Now, there are a number of those. Are you looking for detail as to
exactly what those are?

DANKO: Well, the performance assessment results which haven\'t been
investigated?

DYER: Some are performance assessment. Some are material behavior,
short-term, long-term. Some involve very long-term tests. Some involve
analysis and documentation of the analysis.

COHON: Russ, let me jump in. I think I might have created sort of a
miscommunication link here.

Professor Danko used the phrase key technical issues. I then abbreviated
it to KTI, which has its own special meaning. I think another dimension
of what he\'s getting at is why not adopt a cold design? I mean, what
are the issues in deciding whether or not you should go with a cold
design?

Is that what you were getting at Professor Danko. also, or no?

DANKO: I\'m just rephrasing my question, that what I heard from
Secretary Card was that when the key issues, key technical issues of
licensability will be decided for the low temperature option, then the
decision will be made whether to go to the hot option. And then that was
my question. What are those key issues? And now we get into very
detailed plans, and then I just don\'t know what those issues are, and
that was my question.

COHON: I just wanted to\--well, Bob, go ahead.

CARD: I was told that that will be addressed tomorrow in Woody
Stroupe\'s presentation.

COHON: Thank you. Debra?

Excuse us. We\'re having a little private communication.

(Pause.)

COHON: There are no others prepared to make public comment at this time
so, therefore, we\'re going to bring this to a close.

In doing so, let me thank again all of our speakers, especially Robert
Card, the Under Secretary of DOE, for joining us today, and Dr. Chu, and
welcome her to her first meeting and to her new job, and to Lake for
participating in what evidently will be his last meeting in his current
position.

We\'re adjourned now until 1:10. See you then.

(Whereupon, the lunch recess was taken.)

[AFTERNOON SESSION]{.underline}

COHON: I ask you to take your seats, and I invite anybody outside to
come in. We had a nice lunch, not too rushed, and we\'re refreshed and
restored and ready to go for the afternoon session.

We start with a session on the status of corrosion studies, and Member
Dan Bullen will serve as Chair of this session. Dan?

BULLEN: Thank you, Jerry.

Well, actually, I can keep us on schedule because I don\'t have any
opening remarks that are prepared.

This session is actually presentations by Joe Payer and by Maury
Morgenstein essentially dealing with the corrosion processes as they
have been developed over the course of the last few months.

Joe is going to talk to us about the Waste Package Performance Peer
Review. And with that, I\'ll just turn it over to Professor Payer from
Case Western Reserve University.

Joe?

PAYER: Thank you, Dan.

My plan here today is to give you folks a synopsis of the DOE Peer Panel
on Waste Package Materials Performance that I was the Chair of that
panel. It\'s a large report. It\'s got a lot of information in it. It\'s
got a lot of detailed information in it as you get back into the
chapters of it, and it\'s certainly not my intent here today to try to,
you know, summarize all that for you.

So, what I\'m going to try to do is give you some of the overall
findings, and also take the opportunity to, as a panel, we tried to put
some of the performance of waste packages in a Yucca Mountain type of a
facility into perspective, as to how that is similar to and how it\'s
different from a lot of other engineering applications where people are
chosen to do material selection and design, and some sort of life
assessment prediction on how they\'re going to perform. So, that\'s the
plan.

A little background on what got us started with this activity. The Peer
Panel, the Peer Review was put in place by a request from DOE to Bechtel
SAIC, for Bechtel SAIC, the contractor, to carry out a consensus peer
review. And that\'s under the formal parlance of Peer Review as it\'s
specified.

The topic was the prediction of long-term performance of waste package
materials. And, so, our role and our job scope within this Peer Panel
was not to evaluate the overall performance of the combination of the
waste packages and the barrier systems and the mountain, and all that
sort of thing, it wasn\'t to predict that long-term behavior, but it was
very focused on what\'s the long-term performance, what\'s the technical
basis for that long-term performance, assess the experimental and
modeling programs, and focus primarily on Alloy 22 and Titanium, Grade
7, the two primary specified materials of construction.

We carried out that process over about one calendar year. We started
back in the March time frame of \'01, and we delivered to Bechtel/DOE on
February of this year a final report.

For any of you that have not seen that, or care to go back to it, it is
posted on the Yucca Mountain site.

In sync with the scope of the program, and the directions and the
objectives of the Peer Panel, it was staffed by people that have
expertise in materials science and engineering, corrosion, and people
that deal with, have dealt with professionally for significant amounts
of time predictions of performance of materials.

I Chaired the panel, and in my real life, I\'m a professor at Case
Western Reserve University. John Beavers is a Vice-President of CC
Technologies, a small business just outside of the Columbus area, and CC
Technologies specializes in corrosion work, both experimental and
project management type work, materials performance and life assessment
type issues.

Tom Devine is professor and chairman of Materials Science and
Engineering at Berkeley. Jerry Frankel is professor and Director of the
Fontana Corrosion Center at Ohio State University. Russ Jones is a
senior scientist and group leader at Pacific Northwest Labs,
Batelle-Northwest, and again has expertise in the area of corrosion,
materials behavior, alloy stability.

Rob Kelly is a professor at the University of Virginia in the area of
corrosion, corrosion science. And Ron Latanision is a professor and
director of the Uleg Laboratory at MIT.

So, these people all have background that\'s relevant to dealing with
these issues.

In addition to the Panel, and the report is the final work product of
the panel, it\'s a consensus peer review, meaning that we all signed off
on it. We all accept what\'s in between the covers of that. It doesn\'t
mean we didn\'t have a lot of dialogue, a lot of discussion, but we came
to a document that we all agreed upon.

In addition to that, we had on the order of 15 people that helped us
with this that we called subject matter experts. These were
international and North American folks that have expertise in particular
areas that we were interested in. So, for example, we had Roger Newman
write up his experience and coupling the literature on the effect of
mixed anions on localized corrosion. So these are very specific issues
typically. These people prepared those reports in hydrogeology, physical
metallurgy, and some of the fabrication processes, and they were input
to the panel. These folks did not participate in the overall report.
They provided input and information for the panel.

Just a quick overview of the content of the report. It has an executive
summary and an introduction. There\'s an overview sections, Section 2
and Section 3. Section 2 presents overall findings and the technical
issues to be resolved identified by the panel. Section 3 reports a
summary of findings in each of the specific degradation modes, localized
corrosion, stress corrosion, uniform corrosion, the specific forms of
materials degradation in contact with a wet environment.

Then there are detailed section on each of those degradation modes, and
then Section 11 is a summary of abstract of some of those special topic
reports. The compilation of special topic reports is due to be issued
yet this month, sometime in May is my understanding.

Okay, more to what did we find and conclude. The overall finding is that
the panel concludes that based on the body of technical in formation
available, that Alloy 22 is a suitable material of construction for the
outer barrier of waste packages. Nevertheless, there\'s significant
technical issues that remain unsettled and that are amenable to study.

The technical basis supporting the behavior of Alloy 22 is substantial
and growing, and we did not restrict ourselves only to project data to
support this, but we looked specifically at project data, and then we
looked at the general information on Alloy 22 and the type of nickel
alloys, highly corrosion resistant alloys, of that family to support
this conclusion.

We made the observation that there\'s always going to be uncertainty,
particularly when you\'re dealing with such a long time frame of
exposure. So, it\'s primarily this extremely long life that makes this
problem somewhat different than typical problems that we deal with from
an engineering standpoint.

The other important observation, I think, and it comes up throughout our
report, is that this area in particular, the long-term performance of
metals in corrosive and potentially corrosive environments is an area
that\'s amenable to experiments and modeling with current state of the
art technology, techniques and procedures. So, it is an area where
uncertainty can be reduced, and confidence can be raised by experimental
and modeling programs.

Let me just spend a little bit of time putting the Yucca Mountain in
perspective, from the perspective that somebody that looks at this from
a materials standpoint, will this metal package have\--what\'s its
likely behavior, what the odds are, what\'s the chances are that you
could design, fabricate, build and install a number of metal packages in
this mountain and expect them to perform for 10,000 years.

And, so, this is all stuff that hopefully will get us off, give you a
little bit of insight into our way of looking at these types of
problems.

The repository level is some 300 meters below the desert surface. The
waste packages would be put in a number of drifts at this level. The
water table is down another plus or minus 300 meters. So, the packages
sit in what\'s referred to as an unsaturated zone. There\'s moisture
present in the rock. Water does fall and precipitate and build up on the
surface. Some of that water evaporates. Some of it runs off. Some of the
water moves down through the mountain to the water table. But the area
where the packages sit is in the unsaturated zone. So, they\'re not
fully emersed in water.

Well, what makes this situation different than some of the others we
deal with? The particularly challenging thing is this extraordinarily
long time period. There\'s an operational phase of 50 years or so during
the emplacement. There\'s a monitoring phase that will stretch out to on
the order of 300 years. And then the closure phase goes on and the
design goal, or the thought process that we\'re going through of how are
these packages going to perform over thousands of years, and up to
10,000 years and beyond.

It\'s important to consider I think one of the quick things we do in our
head, is we say okay, if we\'ve got a waste package that\'s 2
centimeters thick, and it has to last for 10,000 years, what penetration
rate can we accept to get to a given level of penetration. But one of
the things that you assume in that, either knowingly or you just take on
as a given, is you\'re assuming that that process, if it\'s a cracking
process or a thinning process, a corrosion process, starts at time zero
and goes continuously at that rate over 10,000 years.

That\'s highly unlikely. The conditions change within the mountain. The
conditions change from package to package. They may be moist, they may
not be moist at any given time. So, one of the things that\'s important
to consider, and this may be good news, it may be bad news, but it\'s
the way it is, is the potential degradation modes. If you\'re thinking
about uniform corrosion, or some cracking penetration, it\'s important
to consider not only the conditions that would initiate that particular
form of damage and arrive at that rate, but also how do those conditions
change over the time period. Would those conditions persist? Would they
get more severe and increase the rate? Or, if things dry out, would the
processes stop for a while, and then perhaps restart? So, it\'s
important to consider that there\'s very likely a starting and stopping
situation.

If you look at this from a corrosion, design, material selection, there
are several things about this application that are favorable. The waste
packages are exposed to one, long, slow temperature cycle. That\'s
different than designing a rotating piece of equipment or a piece of
equipment that is ramped up in temperature and down in temperature on a
daily or weekly basis. Much more severe conditions when you have large
fluctuations, either mechanically or chemically.

There\'s no moving parts in these. So, we don\'t have wear and abrasion
and those types of typical degradation processes that you might have in
rotating equipment or moving equipment. It\'s basically the ultimate
static exposure. The waste packages are loaded up. There\'s the
mechanical loads on them. There\'s the residual stresses that might be
involved from the fabrication processes. They\'re emplaced and they sit
there in a static exposure.

The heat fluxes we\'re talking about, while they\'re significant and
while they\'re of interest and while they have to be considered, the
heat fluxes are very low. There\'s a very slow heating cycle, and then
even a slower cooling cycle in this application. And in the higher
temperature mode, one of the things to consider is that the packages
would be dry for a period when the moisture has been driven away from
the surrounding rock.

The waste material gives off heat and radiation at a rate that decreases
with time. The thermal effects diminish over several thousands of years.
The radiation effects diminish over a few hundred years. So, times out
beyond that need to consider that.

At the repository level, I mentioned earlier the packages are beneath
some 300 meters of rock, and it\'s another several hundred meters to the
water table. The packages sit in basically an ambient air condition.
They sit up on support pallets that hold the packages up off the drift
flow. They\'re in ambient air that is essentially saturated with
moisture. The moisture is in the rock and it saturates that local air
during the closure period.

And while the amounts of moisture that can form on those packages is
likely to be small, it is sufficient moisture to start, initiate and
control corrosion processes. So, it\'s critical. It\'s crucial to
understand corrosion resistant materials. Even though this is in a moist
air environment, there are certainly conditions that can result in
moisture on the waste package surfaces.

It\'s broadly accepted that when the packages are dry, they will not
deteriorate by corrosion processes. No significant metal loss is going
to occur during those dry periods. When the metal surfaces are wet,
there\'s a potential for corrosion resistance, and that\'s why you\'ve
seen a lot of emphasis being placed on the time of wetness, what\'s the
composition of that moisture that\'s on the surface, how does that
moisture interact with the metal structures of the waste package and/or
the drip shield. And from a corrosion science and technology standpoint,
that emphasis is well placed.

Moisture can be present on the surfaces. It\'s highly unlikely that
these waste packages will ever be in a fully emersed metal in a tea cup
sort of a scenario. What will happen is two significant sources of
water. One is condensation. As the waste package in a high temperature
operating mode, and I\'ll have some comments on that a little bit later
in this, but in a high temperature operating mode, the waste packages
are put into the drift. During the ventilation, the temperatures are
down. They\'re fairly dry. When that particular drift is closed, the
temperature rises, the moisture comes back up. But as the temperature
goes up, they stay dry because of the elevated temperature. Then during
this cool-down cycle, you eventually get to a point where you go below
the dew point in that particular area, and moisture will condense onto
metal surfaces during that cooling cycle. That will be condensation.

In Washington, D.C. you all appreciate condensation. I mean, you just
walk out and you get this moisture.

There\'s also the possibility and likelihood in some areas of seepage.
And, so, water will come through the rock in sufficient magnitude that
it will form droplets, and those droplets can go onto the waste
packages.

So, the two forms of moisture we\'re mostly concerned with, or we are
concerned with, are this condensation mode, and the seepage mode.

The finding of the Peer Panel with respect to uniform corrosion, this is
a damage where on a metal structure, you get a uniform penetration in
metal, it wastes away. These have very low corrosion rates. Failure of
the waste package during the design life by uniform corrosion is
unlikely. These highly resistant corrosion resistant materials have low
corrosion rates.

It\'s highly likely that the passive film\--these alloys are inherently
reactive, but in their interaction with moisture in the air, they
develop a very thin oxide layer on their surface. And it\'s that oxide
layer that\'s protected. And in the benign environment, if you break
that oxide mechanically, scrape, it reforms. And, so, the overall
corrosion rate and the reprotection, the repassivation rate, occurs such
that the penetration is very low.

That passive film in that condition is likely to remain stable and the
uniform corrosion rates remain very low.

There were two phenomena identified by the panel that could compromise
this. One would be if there was a segregation of sulfur to that surface,
that could potentially de-stabilize the film, and also there\'s this
issue of transpassive corrosion. Both of these issues get pretty highly
technical, but we deem them worthy of study. Two potential areas that
could de-stabilize that passive film and should be looked at.

The panel again concludes that there is a substantial and growing
technical basis for the evaluation of long-term performance, and these
types of technical issues, and some others we identified, we believe are
worthy of study to either reduce uncertainty or to raise confidence in
the behavior.

Again, this is just sort of in the background area. The waste packages
in this environment sitting on their supports in air in the drifts, the
behavior of the environment that they\'re in contact with, the moisture
that forms on their surface, is a function of both the engineering
processes, what sort of waste packages, what kind of fuel you put into
the waste packages, the age of that, how close they\'re spaced, how
widely they\'re separated, the amount of ventilation, so, there are
engineering processes that are controllable that will impact on the
environments, and there\'s also natural processes, such as the amount of
precipitation in a given area, and so forth.

Of particular importance is the temperature of the waste package surface
and the chemical composition of the environment in contact with them at
that temperature. So, all the emphasis that you\'ve seen and heard about
in the detailed studies that are going on by project folks and other
folks on this, a major portion of that has been focused at what is the
water composition, and what is the temperature range of interest.

There\'s a typo in a couple places in our report. It\'s not a typo;
it\'s a word. But there was a mixture of words here, and I\'ll
talk\--well, let me just talk about it now. Let me get down to it.

Just a couple comments on the higher temperature versus lower
temperature operating modes, and I guess the terminology has been picked
up operating modes, because with the same sort of drift spacing and
drifts, you can control the temperature profiles by spacing and loading
and ventilation and things of that sort.

In the high temperature operating mode, we\'re talking about a situation
where the waste package surface wouldn\'t get higher than 180
centigrade. In a lower temperature operating mode, the waste package
surface would be controlled to on the order of 85 centigrade.

There\'s no question that there are incentives for a lower operating
mode. Corrosion is an electrochemical process. As all activation
controlled processes go, if you lower the temperature, the rate goes
down. So, lower temperature means reduced corrosion rates.

Certainly, the likelihood of localized corrosion, detrimental
metallurgical aging, the stability of the alloy itself, those again are
thermally driven processes. Lower temperatures are beneficial.

This should say less opportunity for evaporative concentration, not
condensation. And we can thank Carl DiBella for finding that. 6,000 eyes
looked at this report and never saw that, and I got an e-mail last week
from Carl saying, \"Did you mean condensation or concentration?\" And
seven out of twelve places in the report, we said concentration. But as
it got moved forward, someplace along the line, and I don\'t know how
this happened, it got turned to condensation.

The idea is this. If you have water on a surface, just put water in a
tea cup, and that water has a dilute amount of soluble ions in it, put a
little salt in it, put a little sulfates and chlorides and calcium and
nitrogen, and so on and so forth, as you drive the water off, that
becomes a more concentrated solution. That\'s what we mean by
evaporative concentration, and that\'s the process we were talking about
that\'s of interest on a hot metal surface.

So, if a drop of water forms onto a hot metal surface, or if there\'s
some particulate on the surface and water condenses there, it might be a
very dilute solution to start with, but as you drive the water off, it
could become more concentrated. And which way it goes in that
concentration is a very important issue.

Well, if you went to a lower temperature operating condition, you have
less time and less driving force for that evaporative concentration.
That\'s what that point is about. And it\'s not all necessarily slam
dunk good new, though. There could be some disincentives.

You expose the waste packages to wet conditions sooner if you go to the
low temperature operation. And by exposing them sooner, they\'re going
to get wet when the radiation field is somewhat higher. There\'s a lot
of evidence and a lot of analysis that says the radiation field doesn\'t
matter anyway. And if that\'s true, it doesn\'t matter anyway. But if
that\'s the only issue you look at, you are exposing them to wet
conditions perhaps in the radiation fields.

There\'s increased costs and risks associated with longer ventilation,
and I mean risks from a technological operational standpoint. If you
have to actively do something, and in the other case you\'re not doing
anything, there\'s a greater risk that you\'re going to be able to
continue doing that, and there\'s not going to be any breakdowns, or
that sort of thing. And, also, for a given amount of waste, you need a
larger footprint to go to the lower temperature.

So, our opinion on this is we didn\'t vote higher temperature/lower
temperature. We understand the incentives and the driving force for
lower temperatures. We point out perhaps some of the maybe trade-offs,
and we say like any other design and operating decision, it is clearly a
trade-off. It\'s not a slam dunk, let\'s go this way.

If the technical case is sufficient that the higher operating condition
is okay, then why accept additional costs and that sort of thing to go
to the lower case. If you can\'t make that case, or for confidence, now
you\'re getting into, I think again into the policy decision arena, not
necessarily the technical decision.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Joe, I know we professors are all programmed for 50 minutes, but you\'ve
got about five left and I want to make sure that we can get some
questions in, too.

PAYER: That\'s five with questions?

BULLEN: Well, I\'ll give you five with questions, and then I\'ll bite
into some of Richard Parizek\'s time later.

PAYER: I\'ll talk faster.

In the handout and in the report and all, and these are just taken from
project data, but it compares the high temperature and low temperature
behavior. And the red curve here is for higher temperature, because
it\'s hotter, and the blue is for low temperature, because blue is
colder. See, there\'s a psychological tie there.

In the high temperature operating mode, the waste packages during the
ventilation period are cool. When you close, they raise in temperature.
And then over a long period of time, they cool down. This is 80
centigrade, 60 centigrade, and so forth. 1,000 years, 10,000 years,
100,000 years, so this is a long cool-down period. This is a function of
where the packages are geographically in the waste site, and these are
the types of packages. But they tell the same story.

In the high temperature operating mode, they get a lot hotter, and then
they cool down over a long period of time. There\'s a 300 year
ventilation period for the cool temperatures, so you follow that sort of
profile.

There\'s similar data for the relative humidity. And this is for the
same conditions, and it shows the relative humidity, 100 per cent is
moisture, a lot of condensation. 20 per cent is low relative humidity
and dry. And at relative humidities in between, say, pick a number, 20
to 80, it depends upon the composition of the dust that\'s there, and
the types of conditions if one is going to have moisture or not.

So, these packages, higher than 80 per cent relative humidity, it would
be a good bet to say they\'re moist, they\'ve got moisture on them.
Packages down here are dry, and packages in here, you need more
information.

One of the interesting things you can do with that data is you can make
a set and say okay, for the high temperature operating mode and the low
temperature operating mode, when will packages get to 120 centigrade.
Under the high operating mode, that\'s after about 500 years. You get to
100 centigrade after about 1,000 years. That\'s not applicable. The low
temperature never was there. 80 centigrade after about 3,000 years high
temperature, and then it\'s at closure with the low temperature, and
then they start catching up with each other. So, after long times,
they\'re cool here.

This is not the full information on that. But the point is that it\'s
important to consider both the temperature and relative humidity when
you\'re thinking about these processes.

Condensation occurs at sufficiently high temperatures. At sufficiently
high temperatures, there won\'t be any condensation. As the package
cools, it can get wet. The seepage on the drifts depends upon the amount
of water in the area. Even though the moisture levels are going to be
small in this, corrosion and the chemical composition of that water has
to be determined.

What do we know about some of that water current, based on project
findings? The water compositions coming from the rock onto hot metal
surfaces will typically drive to an alkaline solution, pH 11 or 12, it
will contain sulfate, carbonate, nitrate, chloride. All of these things
have implications on corrosion processes. Or it will drive to a near
neutral, pH 6 type of environment. And once that water drops onto the
surface, then we can get this evaporative concentration and other
processes going on.

In the report, the panel identified several technical issues that we
suggest to be resolved. The current waste package is likely to meet the
desired performance. These technical issues present potential areas that
could cause a change of design or material, and comprehensive analysis
and testing could resolve these issues. So, we think they\'re
resolvable.

The other main point here, you can read all that, the other main point
here is that this area is particularly amenable to study by experimental
and modeling by current available corrosion science and technology.

Final slide, control of corrosion is essential. The project staff
approach to that is sound. It\'s following corrosion science and
engineering principles. Although the nominal waters at Yucca Mountain
are fairly benign and not corrosive, the composition can change over
time with temperature, and so it\'s important to identify where that
occurs.

The panel recommends that a task group of project technical experts be
put together to address and resolve that issue.

The corrosion and mechanical behavior of waste packages has to be
considered. And the panel, very importantly, and throughout the report,
the panel believes it\'s time to balance the materials and corrosion
science with engineering, fabrication and manufacturing processes. That
doesn\'t mean that the same scientists and the same experiments, same
models are not appropriate. But, it\'s really time to focus on welding
issues, fabrication issues. How are you going to make these metal cans?

Thank you very much.

BULLEN: Thank you, Joe. I appreciate that.

Questions from the Board? Alberto Sagüés?

SAGÜÉS: Actually I have reserved this first spot here, and I was going
to make a prepared statement and ask you two questions, Joe. But because
we\'re behind in time, I\'m going to make an unprepared statement and
ask you one question.

The unprepared statement is a good job. You all did this on time, and
thoroughly, and the Department is to be commended for commissioning this
work, and we thank them for setting up its execution.

PAYER: Thank you.

SAGÜÉS: You\'re more than welcome. And the one question that I wanted to
ask is something I didn\'t see in the report, and that is there seems to
be little or no reference to analogues, either natural or man made
analogues, and so on.

As you know very well, the materials, the main waste package material
would rely on passivity for its long-term performance, and there seems
to be no well documented examples of something that has stayed passive
for thousands of years in an environment that would be useful. And why
was that issue not addressed? Is that because of just one of many other
things, or do you have some\--

PAYER: Well, I think it wasn\'t addressed because of just what you said.
To date, there has not been any large number of natural analogues. When,
you know, they excavate the tombs and that, we don\'t find mummies with
an Alloy 22 nose, or something. It would be kind of neat if we did.

So, I think it\'s not that we don\'t think they\'re a good idea. There
weren\'t a lot available to analyze. I agree with the sentiment. It
would be great to find them. And we would certainly vote to continue
looking. So, we\'re not saying it\'s a bad idea. We just didn\'t have
many to analyze.

SAGÜÉS: Because the main thing is I understand that based on the present
knowledge, it is highly unlikely that there would be a certain amount of
failure on the material, but it is a brand new material in a historical
sense, and on a time scale sense, and we have a huge extrapolation gap.

PAYER: Well, I understand, and, you know, I could give your talk and you
could give mine along those lines. But, no, you all organized an
outstanding international conference, looking at long-term passivity.
It\'s something we addressed in a lot of detail, and the consensus of
the corrosion science in that is if the environment doesn\'t chemically
get into some condition to de-stabilize the film, that the passive films
themselves, what we know about them on Alloy 22 and others, is we could
not come up with any plausible mechanism known today, and those are the
only ones we can deal with, I think, that would de-stabilize that film.

SAGÜÉS: Thank you.

BULLEN: Paul Craig?

CRAIG: Paul Craig. I have a few questions here.

You commented on the sound approach. Does that mean that the science
done to date is sound, or that DOE\'s future proposed work is sound, or
both?

PAYER: I think we didn\'t split it into that sort of thinking, Paul, but
I think what that means is that when we look at the types of
experiments, the types of techniques, the types of analysis that the
project is using to address these corrosion related issues, that it\'s
the way another group of corrosion scientists would do that as well.

So, they\'re consistent. They\'re not doing something that\'s way out of
line from the standpoint of what would be typically done by any other
group of corrosion scientists.

CRAIG: You identified a research program. Can you assess the risks if
that research program is not undertaken?

PAYER: Not quantitatively. Certainly, I think we\'re in a mode where, to
borrow, you know, the phrase from the Board, you really get into a
policy making decision, not necessarily a technical issue. As a
scientist and an engineer, I want as much data as I can possibly have,
balanced with how much time I have and money.

So, it\'s a matter of raising confidence, lowering uncertainty if that
work is done. We can\'t assess the likelihood or did not take on the
process of assessing what the impact of not doing some of that work was.

CRAIG: Yeah, another way to look at that would be your comfort level
that there will not be surprises.

PAYER: Again, the panel as a whole did not address that issue. I\'ve got
my thoughts on that, but I\'m not sure that that\'s worthwhile.

BULLEN: Debra Knopman, please?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

Joe, you know in our January 24th letter, we made the statement about
the data gap. We said data on aqueous corrosion for Alloy 22 above about
120 degrees C. under conditions relevant to Yucca Mountain are
essentially non-existent, creating a serious data gap. What is the
panel\'s view of that?

PAYER: We had a similar statement along the same sentiment, in that we I
think stated very clearly that testing for localized corrosion and the
other forms of corrosion above 100 centigrade is certainly prudent,
needs to be done.

KNOPMAN: Well, let me just extend that. That needs to be done. But in
its absence, from whence sprung confidence on the panel on the behavior
of the metal in the thousand years, or so, of high temperature
conditions likely to exist?

PAYER: These alloys have been tested in a wide range of environments. In
order to make them corrode, in order to de-stabilize the passive film,
you have to go to very aggressive environments, boiling ferric chloride,
high temperature autoclave type testing, and some other cases at high
temperatures. And, so, they truly are highly corrosion resistant
materials.

When we look at the kinds of environments that are likely to bound the
Yucca Mountain situation, we think there\'s a very good probability that
those other environments are on the extreme. But, I wouldn\'t license a
waste package on that. I wouldn\'t go forward on a Joe Payer thinks, or
any other group thinks. You want the data. So, we\'re not saying opt
out, don\'t get the data. But, to a certain extent, and this again is
now Joe Payer speaking, not the panel, I believe that those tests will
show again that these are highly corrosion resistant materials.

And then the big question comes where are the boundaries on realistic
environments, and where is this material behavior okay? Personally, I
think it\'s going to be inside that. But, you know, you don\'t know
that. So, you\'d better do the testing.

BULLEN: Last question for Priscilla Nelson. I know why they made me
Chair, so I wouldn\'t ask any questions. So, Priscilla?

NELSON: Is that how you do it? Nelson, Board.

You just talked about the characterization of the environment, and I\'d
like to understand exactly to what extent this panel considered how well
we do know the environment, and the water that when and in what
quantity, or to what concentration might impact the performance of the
drip shield, under the drip shield, on the waste package. How well is
that constrained? Did the panel actually consider that, or was it
receiving information from the project when asked?

PAYER: There\'s a couple issues. We looked at that water composition,
water chemistry a lot. We had one of our chapters in the report is
focused on the environment, the evolution of the environment. Two of our
subject matter experts addressed issues related to that. There were
sub-panel meetings with the project staff in that area. So, it\'s an
area that we took very seriously and looked at very seriously, again,
moving out to, again, what\'s Jared\'s statement here, anything I say is
my opinion and not what\'s in the panel report. I\'m not speaking for
the panel. But I would rate that as a work in progress, where the
progress has been significant and substantial, particularly in the last
12 to 18 months. Some of the work that Godowsky and some of the others
are doing on their drip tests and drying tests, we think that this
treatment of the water from a physical chemistry, if you would,
standpoint of the chemical divide sort of concept makes sense. So, we
think it\'s moving toward some boundaries. We think it\'s boundable.

But from the standpoint of having water, for example, in between the
drip shield and during the condensation mode or cooling mode, how well
constrained is that, and how important is knowledge of the water
chemistry to the performance of the waste package?

PAYER: Well, in a condensation type mode, our feeling was or is that
what will constrain the environment are the soluble species that are in
any sort of dust particulate deposits that built up, as opposed to water
coming through the mountain that could pick up and give off whatever it
does along the way.

The only source, I mean, what you\'re putting in this condensation mode
is pure water, and so anything soluble then, and any moderations that
occur on the package, so I think it\'s boundable by our knowledge of
what might be in those deposits, and sorts of things. So, if we look at
ground tuff, for example, you could make some estimates.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Actually, I look with trepidation at the afternoon schedule and realized
that there\'s absolutely no break for me to absorb extra time in. So, I
actually am going to ask one last question of Dr. Payer, so I lied, I\'m
sorry.

Your panel made a conclusion about Titanium, Grade 7. Could you, in
three sentences or less, tell us what that was?

PAYER: The panel\'s conclusion was that if the conditions that led to
stress corrosion cracking of Titanium, Grade 7 in the laboratory are
deemed to be realistic and likely in the repository, that we would not
recommend the use of Titanium, Grade 7 as a drip shield.

BULLEN: Thank you very much. Thank you, Joe.

Our next speaker, and I hate to rush into this, but I did realize our
Chairman points out there\'s no break this afternoon, guys, so our next
presentation is on near-field corrosion processes evaluation for the
State of California, and it\'s Maury Morgenstein. Is that correct?

MORGENSTEIN: Yes, Steen.

BULLEN: Steen, okay.

MORGENSTEIN: And you said State of California\--

BULLEN: Oh, State of Nevada. I\'m sorry. It will end up there in Death
Valley anyway. But, Maury, if you\'ll\--

MORGENSTEIN: Yes, I\'m going to try to get through\--

BULLEN: Don\'t hurry. We want to hear everything you have to say. You
don\'t have to keep us on schedule. I\'ll dictate my part of the
schedule to Richard. It\'s his fault, not mine.

MORGENSTEIN: Okay, thanks.

The State of Nevada program on the EBS deals essentially with the range
of service environments, which we\'re really concentrating on now, and
of course the behavior of metal within that range.

Don is going to turn slides for me, and I asked him up here just in case
you guys have some really neat technical questions that I can pass over
to him.

Very briefly, the range of service environments is essentially dry
environments during ventilation, moist dust/scale/bacterial
environments. You notice we plugged in bacterial because they likely
will be there. They\'re likely there now. Aqueous-dryout combination
environments, such as episodic drip, which we think is the most
important, and to a lesser extent, episodic flow, and these may be very
short period episodic flows that are responding to some sort of a
surface event. Surface condensate from humidity, which we think is
probably one of the most important aspects. Surface condensate
associated with hydroscopic salts that might be on the metal itself,
standing near-field water in various conditions. To put it down in
common terms, baby puddles. It may be very important for localized
corrosion effects, but in the overall sense and commonality, probably
not. But it\'s something that needs to be taken into account.

The range of service environments from a geochemical point of view, as
we see it, range from Vadose fracture zone water, and I\'m saying Vadose
fracture zone water and not saturated zone water, and you\'ll see why,
Vadose Matrix pore water, and a variety of other waters. But most
important I think in the whole list is condensate and mixtures.

I do have a biotic transfer water in there. And, very briefly, this is
an unknown. We\'re thinking that above the repository at about 45
degrees C., and so this is a function of repository heating, one might
acquire a zone where biotic action is active in the fractures, just
because we\'ve elevated the temperatures.

In many of the horizons in Topopah Springs tuff and higher up, there\'s
sufficient manganese oxyhydroxides and apatite, for example, that could
support as phosphates, containing phosphates, that could support
bacterial action. So, there\'s food. And if we perturbate the
environment sufficiently, we might have biotic transfer zones that are
above the repository. This is not something that we can go out and test.

We look at Yucca Mountain waters as waters that evolve, that have some
sort of a\--I hate to use the term\--maturity to them, real mature
waters that we think of when we think of water maturity are like brines,
oil field brines. And at Yucca Mountain, the surface waters that would,
you know, form from rain and snow on soils are very immature. They
don\'t have much CDS in them.

As they go down the system to the saturated zone, they interact and
react with the rocks. These are the reactions that commonly take place,
cation exchange with the zeolites and clays, hydration base exchange,
which is similar to cation exchange, of volcanic glasses, the weathering
of feldspars, pyroxenes, oxyhydroxides, oxides, and of course
evaporation and precip of calcite. These are the common reactions that
take place.

When we look at waters from the saturated zone, many of these waters,
for example J-13, undergo a long transport pathway, which is certainly
way north of Yucca Mountain where it starts, is added to as time goes
on, and it\'s more mature than the waters passing past the repository
itself.

When we look at a perturbated environment, we see a series of things
that I\'m not going to spend much time on that essentially Joe has gone
over just before me, and they are very similar. We have a tremendous
amount of agreement.

So, other than this area of incubator zones, which is a total unknown,
we bring it out just as something that we think about, because it might
have tremendous influence on the nitrate, sulfate chemistry.

The next cartoon with Wally down here at out, and the Roadrunner at in,
gives you some sort of a summary of our idea of how the water chemistry
matures through the system. And if this is the repository central,
near-field, you can see that we\'re really concerned about condensate as
a liquid left behind during evaporation, and as a liquid going into the
atmosphere of the repository. There\'s two different types of condensate
that we are concerned about.

When water gets to the saturated zone like J-13, it\'s dominated as a
sodium bicarbonate. But when water starts out in the Vadose zone, as
we\'ll see very shortly, it starts out as a calcium bicarbonate.
Experiments that are being done by the project are dealing with
saturated zone water, simulated saturated zone water, none of which goes
into the repository central.

To get at some sort of a chemistry balance in the system on what was
happening, the easiest place we could go to start collecting real water,
and this is with the assistance of the program, was to establish two
lysimeter holes, two lysimeter locations so far, one in Midway Valley,
one in Coyote Wash, which were in place this winter. They are in the
process of collecting surface water, which is Vadose water, on its way
down to meet the repository. The goal also is to collect surface water
of opportunity when it rains, when it snows.

We analyzed water when we collected for trace elements, for major
elements, for isotopes, as much as we could get, on as much water as we
can get. These are the locations for water sampling so far. These
locations are expanding as we\'ve just started the program.

Up near Mount Charleston, two locations. McWilliams and Dolomite,
Dolomite is not Dolomite the rock, it\'s the location of the campground.
One at Coyote Wash, and Midway for the lysimeter.

To give you some indication of the chemistry of snow waters we\'ve
collected this winter in various locations, these are pure snow samples
that have not interacted with the soil, and this is just a trace element
composition on them. The trace element composition varies, depending
upon what samples we are looking at. So, we can\'t come up with averages
at present, but we can tell you that, for example, this is in snow now,
so it\'s not, you know, there isn\'t much dissolve, there\'s very high
manganese, aluminum, barium, kinds of things we see in desert varnish.

So, what we think we\'re seeing in some of these samples is actually
desert varnish aerosol, dust being deposited along with snow that are
giving us a signal. So, we\'re not precipitating pure water on the
surface of the ground.

Here\'s a sample of snow we collected at Coyote Wash. But also we
collected the sediment underneath the snow, and we allowed, we ran the
snow itself, and then we allowed the water to contact the sediment as it
melted, and we ran the melt as a simulated first signal of what one
might see going into the fracture networks. And although this is very
similar to what we showed you before on the unreacted samples, what we
see also is when we react it, we get a much larger signal. What I\'m not
showing you on these diagrams is\--give me the next, and I\'ll come back
to this in about a minute.

We see a lot of trace elements that look like they\'re contamination,
human contamination, in the melted samples in particular, things that we
shouldn\'t really see that are that high in concentration. And what we
think we\'re going to be faced with is the fact that human contamination
in soil samples and in rain and in snow is what is normally happening
now, and we have to take it into account. It\'s not contamination. It\'s
real. We have affected the environment, and we need to consider that
when we look at the chemistry.

When we look at majors, the snow samples and reacted samples, actually
these are snow samples, they\'re essentially calcium bicarbonates. So,
these are not saturated zone samples. They\'re precursors to saturated
zone. They have to mature. They have to react with the surrounding rocks
on the pathway down through the system before they get to the saturated
zone.

The saturated zone waters are highly mixed because they have a host of
different source areas contributing to the flow log. These are not
highly mixed. They are dependent on much simpler flow paths, much
shorter flow paths.

When we look at the all-important ratio of chloride to sulfate plus
nitrate, we see that the snow samples are certainly under mature.
They\'re immature samples. They have, as anticipated, very low chloride,
and these are just snow, they have not been reacted with the soil. So,
the next stage in this evolution would be that the chloride would go up
a bit as they are reacted, and one would see in the soil zone, a little
bit more chloride. And as one matured these samples more and more, the
chloride content would go up and, so, the ratio would go up. And we see
that for other simulated J-13 waters, et cetera.

Turning our attention to condensate, we ran an experiment where we took
pore water, four liters, and boiled it. And what you\'re looking at is
not the condensate in the beaker left behind during boiling, but is the
vapor that has come off the condensate itself, and we measured the
chloride, sulfate and pH. And what we\'re finding is that as time goes
on, that vapor, if we chose droplet by droplet over time, would change
in composition, so that this chloride, sulfate plus nitrate is not a
fixed ratio, and experiments at fixed ratios probably don\'t represent
the real world.

Second, we find that we can get pHs that are unrealistically low,
frighteningly low, in the condensate. Now, of course, if you took all
that condensate, put it back in the beaker, collected it all back,
you\'d have about the same pH as you started with. But if those droplets
don\'t come back in the same beaker in the repository, then you pH is
going to be different.

This does not mean, and I underline this, this does not mean that that
condensate would drip on C-22 canisters. It\'s probably unlikely that
that would occur. If you\'re boiling from that location, if that\'s the
heat source, it\'s probably going to drip and precipitate out on
something like the drip shield, rock bolts above the repository ceiling,
and of course tuff, react with those items and change the chemistry of
the near-field waters.

So, we\'re not suggesting at all, and please be really clear on that,
that this, if you wish, and I hate to use the term, acid reflux as a
sickness\--I\'m sorry, I had to do that\--we\'re not using this as a
term which addresses the canister, but does address the near-field
environment.

If we look at the geochemists\' workbench modeling program, and we
choose an isothermal and polythermal condition, we see that the
chloride, sulfate, nitrate ratios are not static. They change. Again, so
that using static ratios for experimentation is probably quite
misleading.

Finally, as we\'re going through this hopefully within my time, I want
to show you a typical experiment on C-22. The reason for this experiment
is we\'re looking only at pH. We\'re not saying to you right now that
this is a service environment, although it\'s likely that it might be
one that was very specialized in a crevice under unique conditions.
We\'re not suggesting that this has anything to do with, at this point
in time, actual conditions.

We are suggesting, however, that under these kinds of conditions, pH
certain affects the behavior of C-22. And it does so in a fairly
remarkable way. So, if we\'re going to design service experiments that
need to address a variety of aqueous conditions, pH is one of those
conditions that we should be looking at, and we should be looking at in
ranges that are both within the service environment and just outside of
what we think the normal service environment would be.

Our conclusions are the saturated zone waters, although they\'re an
interesting composition, and certainly not wrong to play with in the
laboratory, are likely not going to be the waters of exposure, natural
exposure, to the Yucca Mountain near-field system. We\'re not going to
likely see a sodium bicarbonate flying down the fractures into the
system to start off these reactions.

And we should probably start looking at things that are more realistic,
that might happen at Yucca Mountain itself rather than what might happen
in a textbook example of how one makes precipitates by precipitating
calcium carbonate and gypsum and magnesium carbonate. It\'s more
complicated, and it doesn\'t lend itself to those easy generalities that
we\'ve been I think very conveniently falling back on.

We only looked at five samples of snow. So, I hesitate to make any major
conclusions, other than the fact that they are all, no matter where we
looked at them, calcium bicarbonates. They appear to have particulates
that are aerosol, that are going to find their way down the system, such
as what we interpret at this point very loosely as desert varnish type
materials, and they appear to be also affected to a fairly decent extent
by human involvement. And I don\'t want to use the term contamination,
because that indicates there\'s something wrong with the sample, and
there isn\'t anything wrong with the samples. They have just been
affected by us. We\'re part of the environment.

And then when we look at the chloride, sulfate, nitrate ratios, we see
that the experimentation uses ratios that are pretty low and static, and
we\'re suggesting that that may not be realistic, that one might want to
look at ratios that are more broad in composition, as is the natural
environment.

We see evidence for that when we just look at the workbench, and when we
boil water on hot surfaces, and when we look at condensates that have
extreme ratios, as well as extreme pH.

And then, of course, things like the corrosion of C-22, a pH has to be
considered, and the full ranges of pH should be considered in
experimentation, as they will be experienced in the environment.

Thank you.

BULLEN: Thank you, Dr. Morgenstein. Questions from the Board? Actually,
I have one.

If you would put Figure 15 back up? And I know I\'m eating into
Richard\'s time. I apologize for that. But I just had a quick question
on the corrosion data you showed there. You noted that it was a
relatively high fluoride concentration. The temperature at 160 C., was
this in an autoclave, or was this in a condensing surface?

MORGENSTEIN: It\'s an autoclave.

BULLEN: Autoclave. So that the pressure was on the order of about a
thousand psi? I don\'t know what pd equals rt equals, translates that
to.

MORGENSTEIN: About 1500.

BULLEN: 1500 psi. Okay, thank you.

The other question that I had dealt essentially with the fact that you
said it was a carbonate water that was coming in. But where does the
carbonate go? I mean, it was prompted by the fact that you had acid
reflux, and you said we needed a Yucca Mountain Tums, and I\'m thinking,
well, there\'s carbonate there. So, where is the carbonate in\--

MORGENSTEIN: The carbonate comes out as calcite.

BULLEN: So, it precipitates out first?

MORGENSTEIN: It comes out fairly early, and you\'ll see that the
fractures and fault zones at Yucca usually have carbonate, you know,
calcite coatings on them, especially high up in the system. When you
change the CO2 pressure, you know, you\'ll drop out calcite. You also
drop out gypsum up there in the soil zone. So, the bicarbonate starts to
mature, is one of the first things that goes on toward water maturity.
The other one that\'s very, very prevalent is actually CEC reactions.

BULLEN: Don Runnells?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

On your Slide 13, this is the chemistry of the condensate, you
emphasized three or four or five times that this water would probably
not be a water to consider in contact with the waste packages. Is that
right?

MORGENSTEIN: Yeah, I want to try to be conservative at this point.

RUNNELLS: But why would you emphasize that?

MORGENSTEIN: Well, the reason I was saying that is because and I\'m
emphasizing that because I think what might happen here first, and this
is, you know, a thought process, because we don\'t know, what might
happen first is that this\--your waste package is the heat sink, and so
that you could get this precipitating out on the waste package if you
had, for example, a lot of debris on top.

RUNNELLS: But why wouldn\'t it drip down onto the waste package and
leave a salt behind, for example?

MORGENSTEIN: It could drip down on the waste package, but when it
precipitates first, it\'s going to precipitate like on the underside of
the drip shield, and react with the drip shield. And, so, I can\'t tell
you what the chemistry of that is, because I didn\'t react it with the
drip shield.

RUNNELLS: Right.

MORGENSTEIN: And, also, I didn\'t react it with the country rock, which
is a tuff, which is going to buffer it.

RUNNELLS: Have you modeled this as well as experimentally determined
this chemistry?

SHETTEL: Don Shettel, GMI, for the State. No, we have not modeled this
data yet. We just got it late last week.

RUNNELLS: Okay. You know, it\'s a really surprising result, I would say,
to be talking about pHs of 1.5. And we\'re dealing essentially with
distilled water, so that the presence in the laboratory of a bottle of
acid is a concern, let alone opening the bottle. It would be very
important I think to go ahead and model this and see if you can come up
with an explanation for those kinds of extreme pHs.

SHETTEL: Well, we have chemical\--Catholic University has chemistry on
these condensates, and they actually, towards the end there, they do not
resemble distilled water. They have high concentrations of chloride,
nitrate, and from my looking at the data, it looks like the drop in pH
there is due primarily to nitrate, and to some extent, to fluoride.

RUNNELLS: I\'m not doubting what\'s in the water. I\'m trying to
understand why that stuff is in the water, the mechanism.

SHETTEL: Well, it can be volatile under these temperature conditions.

RUNNELLS: I just had experience with this kind of water, very, very pure
water, and then found out it\'s a laboratory artifact. If the modeling
scenario would, you know, verify what you just said, the volatile
halogens, for example, then that would be great to verify the lab data
for these low concentrations. I\'m sure they\'re low concentrations.

So, one last comment or question, your observations are sort of like a
bunch of red flags. I mean, they\'re important red flags, I\'m not
demeaning them, they\'re a series of observations that may be very
important. But it seems to me to be helpful to the project, or to be
helpful in any realistic way, you almost have to give specifics as to
what would be done next, so what, in other words. You said a broader
range of chloride to sulfate ratios. How broad? And why? I think that
would be extremely valuable.

MORGENSTEIN: We would love to be there now, and we\'re not there yet.

RUNNELLS: But you\'re headed there; is that right?

MORGENSTEIN: We\'re headed there, and as soon as we\'re there, we\'ll
let you know.

RUNNELLS: Okay, very good. Thank you.

BULLEN: I would like to express my thanks to both speakers for this
session, and apologize for the next session Chair for taking ten minutes
out of his time, and I\'ll turn it over to Jerry Cohon.

COHON: I took Dan\'s observation before about no break as a hint. We
will have a break after the next presentation, while a brief one, but
we\'ll get to that when we get to it.

Our next session focuses on the safety case, and Richard Parizek will
serve as Chair. Richard?

PARIZEK: We have four speakers on the safety case. There will be an
international perspective first given by Claudio Pescatore. That will be
followed by Tim McCartin of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on that
view. and then Joe Ziegler will give us the DOE version, and then Steve
Frishman will look at the State of Nevada issues.

So, if we could begin perhaps with our first speaker? We have a tight
schedule, but after the first speaker, we\'ll take ten minutes. So, is
Mr. Pescatore available?

I\'ll have to cut back on the introductions, due to the time
constraints. I apologize to the speaker for mispronouncing a common
name.

PESCATORE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I will start my presentation. I\'m Claudio Pescatore. I work with the
OECD/NEA. I will just spend a few moments about what is the OECD/NEA,
and perhaps also will show why perhaps I was invited to give this talk.

My presentation, again, will talk about the OECD/NEA, the NEA sources I
will quote. In fact, in the past 10, 15 years, I would say that our
organization is the one that\'s developed the concept of safety case, at
least at the international level, has defined it.

I will give some reading, my own reading of the trends, and especially,
I will talk about confidence. I will use NEA sources before I give
indication of NEA sources. You will be able to get the documents from
our website or by writing to me. And then I\'ll provide some
conclusions.

So, the OECD, NEA is a club, if you like, of 27 developed countries, or
developed economies. In fact, the OECD is an economic organization of
cooperation. It is unlike, let\'s say, the International Atomic Energy
Agency, which is based in Austria, which is in fact an agency of the
United Nations. It\'s a political organization.

The blue countries here are part of the organization. You will see that
it basically is the western world. The countries who do not have nuclear
programs, they\'re not really part of the NEA.

Within the NEA, we have several platforms for cooperation, for
information, and the idea is to try to help all governments or all
organizations who are part of the organization to go up to speed, and to
have the safe, similar understanding of what the key issues are, and
perhaps also to harmonize, if possible, what they do amongst themselves.

We, over the past ten years, have been working in the area of the safety
case especially. We have gone through three phases of a program called
IPAG, Integrated Performance Assessment Group. I will talk a little bit
about that.

This culminated also, there were a lot of things ongoing, with a
confidence document, which in fact is a safety case document, where the
safety case is explained in more detail, and others, so there was the
creation of a new group, the Integration Group for the Safety Case,
which is an ongoing group.

At the same time, part of what I will be telling you has also matured
through International Peer Reviews that we have given of PA studies. In
the past ten years, we did Holland. We did three International Peer
Reviews in Sweden, one of the regulator, Japan and the USA. In fact, it
was the NEA who led the peer review of Yucca Mountain, and early on, we
also led the peer review of the WIPP certification application.

It is interesting, the language here, because safety case does not
appear all of a sudden. Of course, it was in the NEA work, but was not,
as I understand, part of the language here in this country, and also I
would like to note that the WIPP PA was in fact a compliance
certification application. So, the real safety compliance is something
which probably is worth discussing, not necessarily in my presentation,
but I would like to reiterate the importance of this.

Just for, again, a little bit of data, I believe we have assembled an
analysis, a database of safety cases in the past ten years, and there
are three that I found. The first part was developing and documenting.
What is in this document? This document is a database of information.
And these questions are documented, and then of course there are lessons
learned through discussion.

And the second part, we looked at the regulatory experience of reviews
of the PAs, and 17 of the organizations responded, and we could see how
the regulator and the implementor felt about the review.

And then approaches and arguments for establishing confidence. Now, from
the beginning, you will notice that we talk about Integrated Performance
Assessment because PA used to be perhaps dominated from one discipline.
We really, from the beginning, wanted it to be an integrated type of
thing. And then later on, you will see we\'re talking about confidence.

My reading of the world trends is as follows. There\'s been a shift from
what can be called PA to what can be called the safety case, whereby PA
is only part of the safety case. It\'s not its driver. The safety case
should also have things like clearly stated strategy, within it, safety
assessment. So, safety is really the goal, and the statement of
confidence or the documentation of confidence.

The idea is that one of the problems that PA implies, validation, and of
course there\'s been a debate in the late Seventies and the Eighties,
well we cannot really validate these things, especially long-term
predictions, and in the end, we are not about performance of something,
we are about to determine whether this is good enough to make a
decision. So, we want confidence in our decision.

Also, PA in a way can be a science product independent of decision
making, whereas, the safety case is something which should be done by
decision making, and we should have to accept, in a way, the decision
informed by science, but is not a science product. In other words, I
cannot write a paper and ask all the people to validate what I did. The
best thing I can do, in fact, is to try to help people by doing my work
in a transparent manner so they can redo my calculations, or they can
recheck my assumptions, which is in fact what the one program especially
does in Europe, is the finished program, very thin studies, but people
are able to look at it and to redo all the analysis, which helps in fact
for confidence.

I believe also that the safety case is what society wants and what we
can do, in fact. And, for instance, in this country, in a way, when
Secretary Abraham announced his intentions to propose Yucca Mountain,
propose to Nevada, he did not say, you know, just we did some
calculations. I mean, he made many statements about the fact that the
research program was going on. For instance, he gave a lot of reasons
why he felt that things could go ahead.

So, we have introduced now another word in the game, and this word is
confidence, and we don\'t want it to be just another word, in fact. It
should be important. And confidence is to be somehow looked with an eye
with respect to uncertainty, and with uncertainty, of course, will exist
in any endeavor. Decision making has to take into account uncertainty.

However, the real issue is how confident we are about this decision,
about what we know at this stage. And decision making is not necessary
based on a value for uncertainty. Even the reactors in this country and
everywhere in the world are not based on a number for the uncertainty.
They are based on the fact whether they\'re safe or not.

However, of course we have to recognize that confidence does require
that uncertainties are being dealt with. But these are not only
technical uncertainties. They are also uncertainties for perhaps the
fact that the applicants have not had a good record of being open, for
instance. These are uncertainties which can also be taken into account
in the making of the decision. So, confidence is a broader concept.

So, when it comes to scientific uncertainty, this is what I said
earlier, there are means to deal with it, which are the typical ones
applied in the data analysis and model testing.

When it comes to long-term predictions, we get out from the narrow or
strict validation type scientific domain, and we have to get a mixture
of quantitative and qualitative analyses, and the arguments also can
still be science based, but are not the same strengths of reproducible
quantitative.

So, the reason for this confidence in support of the decision has to be
provided, both by the reviewer, of course, and also by the applicant.

So, I guess we engender confidence, is the way we get to a point, by
showing, for instance, various strategies to eliminate uncertainty, that
all viewpoints have been taken into account, that methods have been
applied to have quality assurance, that all the data and uncertainties
have been disclosed.

In fact, confidence we can say is a broader concept than validation. It
exposes the fact that the reasonable expectation is really what we\'re
after, and the context is for decision making.

Now, we cannot ask people to have confidence in us. This would be trust,
in a way. Basically, we should make sure that there\'s a rationale for
this confidence, and this is very important, I believe. So, confidence
must rely on a deliberate set of actions or procedures to achieve this
confidence.

Therefore, the safety case, or those who are providing for the safety
case, should create a framework by which confidence is not only a
criterion, but is a way to check on it. So there must be ways to
basically have criteria to evaluate, communicate and to enhance this
confidence.

And, therefore, in a way, confidence management is really the basis, one
of the important bases, for the safety case.

Management should be of confidence, in a way, and this is what we say
indirectly in our document, in the confidence document, and this is the
definition of the safety case we give. It is a collection of arguments
at a given stage of repository development, in support of the long-term
safety of the repository. A safety case comprises the findings of a
safety assessment, and a statement of confidence in these findings. It
should acknowledge the existence of any unresolved issues and provide
guidance for work to resolve these issues in future development stages.

I would say it\'s more than a statement of confidence; documentation of
confidence is more correct.

Now, about this rationale, how this can be shown, and how it should be
apparent in the safety case. This morning, there was somebody who said
well, you know, perhaps it was a joke in a way, but in fact it\'s not
that much of a joke, it was said, well, if the container did not
have\--there would be less uncertainty. But uncertainty with respect to
what? I mean, there cannot be uncertainty with respect to safety. We
know that if there is\--there is a container that\'s safer. So, we have
taken really perhaps this uncertainty in the way we do the calculation.
But it\'s something that does not have to do with safety.

Let\'s give another example. If we build something which eventually we
can do the calculation and say this is safe, and then we do the
calculation again, somebody else does the calculation, and it\'s not
safe. However, this does not change this thing being safe or not safe.
It is really the intrinsic, there is intrinsic safety about things, the
way we go about doing things.

So, in a safety case, there is a certain part which it is the higher
level, which is a combination of three things, basically, the safety
strategy, which is the strategy to help us to define what we mean by
safety, and that achieve safety, this thing which is there intrinsically
safe, and those are hard to demonstrate safety, so how do we go about to
construct, if you like, assessment cases to demonstrate that this is
true. And, of course, in trying to achieve this safety, we use
principles, we use criteria, so that we get the system concept which is
robust.

On the other hand, we also try to, depending on the level of
understanding we have at that moment in time, we construct an assessment
capability. That is, we look at which are the assessment cases, which
are the data, so that allows eventually to analyze also this concept.

And this of course is a loop inside this management perspective.
Eventually confidence, we would like to say, well, we have a robust
system concept. And robust, in fact, can be more than the technical
sense. The example is this one you have that\--and let\'s say the EPA,
it\'s found that the EPA criteria are not acceptable by law. Well, it
doesn\'t mean that it all should be thrown away.

Well, perhaps in that type of reasoning, where going for safety is taken
into account, perhaps there\'s no need for this. This is the case in
Sweden. In Sweden, they developed a container which will
last\--apparently nobody is able to fill them all over a million years,
and now they have extremely strict criteria from the regulators. Well,
they can still meet it, because they went through this idea of safety,
of robustness. So, eventually, you want to say that the system is
robust. There are some ways to say this is robust. It\'s analyzable for
those things, the type of materials we\'ve chosen have been accepted,
been chosen and accepted, and also the system, the quality of our data,
our models are good, and we pride them in a reliable manner. So, these
are the most important aspects of confidence.

And there are two things, robustness versus the analysis. I mean,
they\'re complimentary. We cannot say that we can compensate fully for
one or the other, not a robust impression, and then have more data, more
models, or vice versa. So, there is a balance here that has to be
reached about robustness and assessment capability.

Some examples when you want to argue safety basically, you have to
declare the role of the barriers and the system functions. We have to
identify and explain the assessment cases. We have to verify the quality
of tools, the data, the analyses. We have to explain that PA is for
testing the performance of the system. And it would be good also if we
analyze the system beyond its design basis, and beyond also the
regulatory compliance points. And also use other indicators of safety
and performance. This is for arguing safety.

And one example for achieving safety is try to apply principle by which
we avoid or forcing to low probability of consequences most phenomena
and uncertainties that can be detrimental to safety and its evaluation.

So, we look at the safety case as a larger thing in a way than
performance assessment, but, of course, you know, the definition varies
from place to place. Most likely, performance assessment in the United
States is not exactly this one. But, we look for the safety assessment,
which is part of something larger, which is a safety case, and within
the safety assessment is the performance assessment. So, in the safety
assessment, there should be the establishment of the assessment basis,
the safety strategies, as I mentioned earlier, the definition of the
system concept, and the idea why this system concept is to be built in a
robust manner. Perhaps there should be references to how we got there.

Then we carry out the performance assessment, which evaluated the
performance for the assessment cases, which have been explained before
why they are important. We can, of course, or we should, of course,
assess compliance with the acceptable guidelines, with the guidelines we
have. We also have sensitivity analysis, but still in the end, we should
say, you know, how good all this is, and criteria that we have
established to evaluate our safety in this. If this is good enough,
perhaps we can go to the next step, which is in fact compile the safety
case, which documents all of the steps, and also documents why one has
confidence at this point for the decision at hand.

The confidence statement is basically the fact that a rational
assessment procedure has been followed, following definite principles
and criteria, that all relevant data and information and their
uncertainty have been given consideration, that all models have been
tested, the results have been fully disclosed, and subjected to QA and
review procedures, that the safety strategy in fact remaining is
appropriate to handle remaining, not fully resolved safety-related
issues.

In fact, the discipline itself, by doing these things, also would
enhance confidence in the quality of the safety case.

If I have to assume the feedback from the IPAG exercises, I would say
that these are the key messages. There\'s been an evolution from
calculation to integration. Communication also to and with stakeholders
are important issues for building confidence in a safety case.
Traceability and transparency are extremely important, in fact, very
large improvements have been made over the years in these two areas.

The safety case is more than a report of technical results. There is a
need to describe clearly what it is, in fact. Terminology is very
important in this. It is important to clarify terms and the way they are
used in the safety case. We have a bunch of\--IPAG exercises have a set
of questions, so this could be used as a check list in fact for
producing future safety cases. And, of course, the identification of
weakness points should be part of the safety case.

We have a group which is called Integration Group for the Safety Case,
as I mentioned, and these are some of the feedback we have received from
them. Multiple lines of reasoning should include additional safety
measures and indicators. It is not possible to rigorously demonstrate
compliance. The only possible objective is to achieve adequate
confidence. The way in which different bodies of scientific opinion are
dealt with in the safety case is an important and outstanding issue.
This is true sometimes. This is the experience of eight peer reviews
now. It does not bode well, I mean, it does not give a good feeling when
one sees that there is a tension between the scientists and those who
have written this document.

And then, of course, it is important to accept or to present the fact
that there is disagreement on some of these issues, and why one path was
taken and not the other.

These are some of the other messages. The safety case involves mediation
with society. We should take a common sense definition of the safety
case. It looks pretty complex, the one we provided. It\'s a presentation
and linking of information and arguments on the safety needed to support
the decision making process.

It is also dependent, the safety case, of course on programs, and in the
regulatory context, and the implications of retrievability, perhaps that
should be part of the safety case. And, of course, different countries
are at different stages and, therefore, opinions can be expected to vary
on where the key issues remain.

In conclusion, I would say that the safety case is more than just the
safety assessment or performance assessment, at least the way we have
developed this concept. It must be seen as a basis for informing
decisions, and facilitating dialogue in the context of incremental
development of a repository, therefore, is for decision making.

The management of confidence should be placed high in the management
scheme. It must be forward looking, and many decision points in the
future. Regulations may change, so perhaps it\'s good to take that into
account. Regulatory environment may change. Science basis may change,
hence, the need to build a robust strategy based on safety first.

The safety case is about managing and integrating technical and
non-technical information. It is not, per se, a science product. It is
mostly a management challenge, requiring vision towards avoiding later
problems.

At the technical level, the most important issue is how to manage
dialogue with technical experts both in-house and outside. And some of
the key words are management, safety culture, strategy, confidence.

I started with some questions. Perhaps I could repeat them for you. What
is safety is something that is to be I think discussed when discussing
the safety case. And, also, who provides for a safety case? To me, it\'s
not so clear in the end. It depends really on the regulatory context.
The case of WIPP is one. It was a certification application. It was a
compliance certification. Then perhaps the regulator in that case did
the safety case for the applicant, or after the applicant provided the
application.

Thank you.

PARIZEK: Thank you very much for a clear presentation on a topic that\'s
evolved. That\'s one of the clearer presentations on the topic I\'m
familiar with. I read your paper, which is helpful to me. Some Board
questions? Norm?

CHRISTENSEN: Christensen, Board.

Thank you as well. It was a very helpful presentation. I think one of
the issues that we\'re faced with, and has come up today a number of
times, is the fact that at any given time, the knowledge base is going
to change, that at any given time, there\'s going to be uncertainty. And
it\'s clear that whatever process moves forward is going to involve the
need for some flexibility, the proposal for a staged or flexible
process.

And it seems to me that the concept of a safety case ought not to be
seen as an individual product, but rather an ongoing process. And I
wonder if you\'d comment on the challenge of doing this in a situation
where we never produce, or is it possible that we never really produce a
final safety case. Can the safety case, in fact, be the basis for
developing a meaningful and transparent process for developing, let\'s
say, a staged repository, or a more flexible kind of process?

PESCATORE: There are many components of your question. Let\'s see, I
followed at least one-third, and perhaps we can follow other later, if
you like. There are people who say, in fact, that because you are
building this step-wise decision-making process supposedly exists, then
only the final one should be the safety case. Basically, what you\'re
doing is you\'re updating your studies as well. This I think is
semantics.

But, in fact, you could build towards that. I have in mind, for
instance, in Sweden, they have constructed with this idea what is a
template, a template of documents, that they\'re going to update every
three years. So, how the safety case will look, the chapters, how the
science base is being documents, and basically every three years, or
even\--well, every three years for sure, because this is mandated by
law, they are updating this document. So, they have this common basis to
accompany them over the many years that the problem is going on, is
ongoing. And they plan to have these reviews of the safety case, even
not at regulatory decision points. So, it is in between. So, in guess,
in a sense, it\'s a way to progressively build something which is more
and more solid. Hopefully, this answers your question.

CHRISTENSEN: I think that\'s the kind of question that I was after.
Thank you.

PARIZEK: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Maybe you could share with us a little bit more of the international
perspective. One of the more successful programs has been Finland in the
development of their repository site. Could you tell us were they part
of the Integrated Performance Assessment Groups, and did they
participate? And how do you think they have developed their safety case
along with the entire siting process?

PESCATORE: Okay, they participated in this group, and the Chairman of
this group, in fact, the first IPAG-1 was in fact a Fin, was in charge
of the PA for this. And that was in fact one of the most interesting
phases, because for the first time, we\'re looking at this, and some
messages were very clear. For instance, the message of transparency and
traceability.

And, as I mentioned, the Fins have a specificity that others do not
have. That is they have made a choice that these PAs, and they are more
in the sense of PAs, and they think they will build a safety case. They
say, well, they do not have a safety case, but we have\--this is what we
call a safety analysis, but we\'re going to build a safety case, which
will come later.

They\'ve built in reproducability. For them, it is important that
somebody reads it and is able to reproduce what is written in there, and
then also to check. That has forced them to, of course, to utilize a
simpler model, at least in the final documents\--above the experience,
which is very, very wide. But that is how they achieved this. And I
believe they\'ve been successful in terms of\--I\'m not sure how to
reply to your question on site characterization.

It\'s a very small team, the Finnish team. And there\'s an enormous
degree of interaction between the modelers and the people who take the
data. I mean, we are talking at management level, 20 people, and the
rest of the country is like 70 people who working on this. So it is very
little, and highly integrated, and they can do even things which are,
because of this high cohesion, lately, for instance, the guy who was in
charge of site characterization has decided, well, enough. I\'ve done
this for 20 years, and now I want to be in charge of engineering. Now
he\'s in charge of engineering. And the guy who was in charge of PA, is
now in charge of I guess site characterization. So, it\'s a very special
program.

BULLEN: Thank you.

PARIZEK: Parizek, Board.

One question. You had Sweden mentioned twice in your listing of places
you visited with this in mind. Have you seen progress, a second
iteration? Because obviously, if a PA is updated, that\'s part of the
safety case. You\'d expect these to evolve. And, so, the concept is
somewhat new, but have you seen progress when you\'ve gone back a second
time?

PESCATORE: Okay. In Sweden, yes and no. To answer your question, because
in Sweden, what we did, of the three analyses, two were of the
regulator. So, did we see an improvement of the regulatory analysis?
Yes. In the case of the implementor, there was only one, it was, like,
two years ago. But, then, we watched what they had done afterwards, and
I do believe that they are moving in this direction, in the sense,
again, of having a stable basis of documenting things. For instance, the
questions they received, how they have been able to respond to them,
which are the open question, and so on, so they have these documents
which are there for update, and they are improving on this. So, this I
have seen.

PARIZEK: In think in view of the time, we should take a break. We have
ten minutes maximum, and we will start exactly on time, meaning in nine
minutes. We\'ll be back for the next three speakers. Thank you very
much.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

PARIZEK: Our next presenter on the safety case will be Tim McCartin from
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and will give the Regulatory
Commission\'s view on the safety case.

Tim?

MC CARTIN: Thank you. Good afternoon. I\'ll be presenting the Part 63
requirements for the safety case in relationship to the postclosure
performance. We won\'t be going into a lot of the other details
preclosure, et cetera.

And in that discussion, I\'ll go into two really main aspects of 63. One
is the roles and responsibilities of the DOE and the NRC, and then go
into the regulatory framework in a lot more detail.

In terms of the role and responsibilities, DOE and NRC have decidedly
different roles in this process. If the project goes forward, the
Department of Energy has the responsibility to design, construct and
operate the repository. NRC has the role to make sure that DOE obeys the
rules.

As was brought up this morning by Judy Treichel, NRC is an independent
agency. We take that role very seriously. We do not participate in
design. We did not have anything to do with site selection. We are an
independent regulator. And I think it\'s useful. I think NRC has had a
number of public meetings in Nevada. We\'ve participated at times at
Board meetings in Nevada. I think the citizens of Nevada, the citizen
groups, remind us of that independent role of the NRC, and I think that
is important.

In terms of the review of a potential license application, that scope of
our review is determined by what the Department of Energy submits. DOE
has the flexibility in that license application to present the analyses
they think portray the safety case, also the presentation of those
results.

The Board I think has interacted with the Department many, many times in
terms of what types of analyses, what needs to be presented, et cetera.
That\'s up to the Department of Energy to decide. It\'s their safety
case. It\'s not for NRC to dictate what should\--how to present the
results, what you\'ll see in the regulatory framework, what are the
types of information that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to
make the decision, but DOE does have that flexibility on how to present
it.

In going through the Part 63 requirements, there\'s really five aspects
that I\'d like to talk to with respect to the safety case. First, of
course, is the performance objectives. Next, the demonstration of
safety, which I think in a previous Board meeting, the last one, as a
matter of fact, I would call that the performance assessment. I think
we\'ve tried to at times characterize the performance assessment as
encompassing everything.

I think in terms of communication, I think the Board has suggested
performance assessment is one part, as you saw with Claudio Pescatore\'s
presentation. Performance assessment was one part. I think it makes
sense. I think in looking at the safety case, there\'s these five
aspects, performance objectives, demonstration of safety, or the
performance assessment, confidence in safety, what I\'ll call as forward
looking, and documentation. And I\'ll go into each of those five points
in more detail.

Performance objectives, there\'s really four performance objectives.
Three of them are quantitative. Individual protection is the 15 millirem
annual dose limit from all pathways. There\'s also the ground-water
protection requirements that have concentration limits for certain
nuclides, a dose limit for others. And the human intrusion calculation
is specified. Those are the three quantitative ones.

The fourth one is multiple barriers. The requirement for multiple
barriers is in the rule. It\'s required to have both a natural barrier,
as well as engineered barriers. And you\'ll see in the subsequent parts
that I present that that\'s a very significant part of the evaluation in
the safety case.

With those performance objectives, then going to demonstration of
safety, the regulation has a requirement to do a performance assessment.
For convenience, if you see a few of these funny numbers, it\'s Part 63,
and that Section 114, and I just put that if people want to go back and
look at exactly what\'s in the regulation. In some cases, I\'ve
obviously paraphrased for plain English purposes what\'s in the
regulation. But one can go back and check to see exactly what\'s in the
regulation.

In terms of the performance assessment, first, I\'ll say there\'s an
integration process. What\'s required is evaluation of FEPs, features,
events, and processes. These are the kinds of things that can both
adversely effect the performance of the repository, as well as things
that can enhance the performance of the repository. But a first step,
the Department of Energy is required to evaluate all these FEPs, and
explain what\'s in the performance assessment, what\'s not in the
performance assessment, and why.

Certainly there has to be then a technical basis for assumptions and
models used to represent the FEPs that are included in the performance
assessment.

Certainly any part of performance assessment requires some understanding
of uncertainty. And, obviously, there\'s an interesting aspect, I will
say uncertainty, the computers here do the slides differently than they
do at NRC. That should be indented, and they work on the NRC computers,
not here. Interesting.

Understanding uncertainty, there\'s a couple aspects. One is parameter
values. Certainly it\'s pretty routine to see a parameter sensitivity
uncertainty analysis. RECNW has used the word evidence based. I think
the Board has used similar kinds of words in terms of what is used for
parameter values and ranges should be based on evidence. The Department,
in a number of different reviews, has been cautioned against being
overly conservative, using evidence supporting whatever parameter values
and ranges.

Along the same lines, consideration of alternative conceptual models.
Clearly, we\'ve heard some discussion this morning and early this
afternoon. There is uncertainty in exactly the near-field environment
for the repository, be it the water chemistry, temperature, corrosion
rates, et cetera. There could be alternative models that need to be
evaluated.

I think the NRC tries to be cautious whenever the word \"realism\" is
used. And that\'s not to say we have to have a realistic model. You can
have simple approaches that still incorporate realism.

For example, I think the chemistry of the water is a good example, that
to realistically model the evolution of the repository chemistry,
temperature phases over time, it would be a daunting task. But as we\'ve
heard today, there are certain water chemistries, there are certain
minerals in the rock that need to be evaluated, and you would probably
get a set of different water chemistries that need to be evaluated to
look at the corrosion rates. And you might have some simple approaches
for looking at a set of water chemistries, rather than evaluating
accurately and realistically what the behavior of the repository
chemistry would be over time.

After having demonstrated safety in terms of meeting the performance
objectives, how do you get confidence in the safety? I think Claudio had
a number of useful slides in terms of its confidence in the safety, not
necessarily validation.

I think that a key part of the regulation is an overall understanding of
the repository system. I think we point to the capabilities of each of
the barriers as a very important part of getting that confidence.

Specifically, here\'s something I did put in quotes, but we\'re looking
at you can look at the degree of diversity of the barriers as giving you
some idea of the resilience of the repository to a variety of things
that could go wrong, could happen. And that kind of, as Claudio
indicated, isn\'t necessarily quantitative. It can be somewhat
qualitative. But we\'re looking at, in the safety case, certainly the
capabilities of each of the barrier.

Those barriers are evaluated, and most importantly, both the natural
features of the geologic setting, as well as the engineering. It
doesn\'t matter whether there\'s a 10,000, 50,000 year, 100,000 year
waste container. The natural features of the geologic setting must be
evaluated, and we are expecting capabilities from the geologic setting.

Also, as the Board at least a few years ago, maybe earlier, talked about
independent lines of evidence, we do not use the words \"independent
lines of evidence\" in the regulation, but we do point to how the
models, how you get some confidence in the safety, and we point to
comparisons with process level models, laboratory testing, field
testing, natural analogues, and there are all kinds of things that would
give you, I think consistent with the Board\'s recommendation for
independent lines of evidence, support.

Once again, as Claudio indicated, some of this will be qualitative.
Certainly some of the natural analog information may not be necessarily
that quantitative, but it will give some qualitative indication of
safety.

In terms of forward looking, in that context, the regulation does
specifically call for a performance confirmation program. There is a
plan, performance confirmation plan, that we believe needs to identify
the extent and nature of confirmatory information.

I think Dr. Cohon earlier today talked about challenging the safety
case. I believe that\'s what was intended by that part of the
regulation. Challenging the safety case. What are those assumptions, the
parameters, et cetera, that need to be confirmed more fully. What can go
wrong? And it\'s to challenge, truly challenge the safety case. By
performance confirmation, no one should get an idea that we\'re just
remeasuring measurements the Department made. But you\'re testing and,
as indicated, challenging the understanding.

Clearly, there\'s a number of activities, in-situ experiments,
monitoring, laboratory and field testing, et cetera. In the regulation,
there\'s words suggesting barriers are functioning as intended and
anticipated. And certainly in this regard, when you\'re looking at a
performance confirmation plan, you certainly have the results of the
performance assessment, the capabilities of the barriers. We would
expect the barriers that have the largest capability, most important to
performance, would be tested and challenged to the greatest extent.

That\'s the planning for performance confirmation. What do you do with
these results? Well, the performance confirmation program is intended to
confirm the basis for the prior decisions. If you look in the
regulation, there\'s really three primary decision points, construction
authorization, amendment to receive and possess, and closure.

The performance assessment would be updated. All this information
collected during performance confirmation brought in, analyzed to
determine has my basis for safety changed? And that update is required
at each of those steps.

Documentation. Probably the hardest part is to document a safety case as
complex as the Yucca Mountain repository. I\'ll say the regulation
provides a comprehensive list of the kinds of information DOE has to
provide us. That list isn\'t necessarily very useful, because everyone
could have a different interpretation of, well, what\'s really intended
there? I can provide, as the Board I think has had many questions of DOE
can present analyses, but, well, can\'t you present it a different way?
You\'ve left this off, et cetera.

The Yucca Mountain Review Plan does attempt to supplement how much level
of detailed information we\'re expecting in the safety case. And
there\'s things certainly in terms of the identification and description
of the barriers, there\'s some sections up front in the review plan.

Most notably, if anyone looks at our review plan, it\'s rather
extensive. But for the postclosure performance, the very first thing we
look at is the identification and description of barriers. For DOE,
that\'s really the last thing they can do. It\'s really the performance
assessment or analyses will have a better sense of the capability of
those barriers.

We, on the other hand, going into it, we want DOE to describe up front
what is this information. We want to look at that first, so that when we
go through our review, and sometime hear the term risk informed, well,
we want to know where they\'re getting the biggest bang for their buck,
as they say. And that\'s to inform our review up front. It doesn\'t
necessarily mean we agree with it. But as we go through the entire
review of their model abstractions, their results, their evidence, et
cetera, we have in mind what really was causing the major impact to
performance.

There\'s also integrated sub-issues. We\'ve identified 14 integrated
sub-issues that talk to particular technical areas, large areas, for the
performance of the repository.

And I guess if there\'s one thing that I feel the regulation has been
misrepresented is in terms of the dose curve. Some people have implied
that we would, look, it\'s either, oh, if it\'s below 15 millirem, DOE
gets a license or not. It goes far deeper than that, and you\'ll see in
the review plan a lot with respect to the calculation of the annual
dose.

We want to see the distribution of all the single realizations of the
runs, we want to see things as the Board has pointed out. You want to
see results with probabilities, without probabilities. There is a final
dose curve. There is no question about that. But how you got that final
dose curve, be it the consequences, the probabilities, et cetera, that
needs to be very carefully explained and laid out.

And I think in the review plan, we\'ve tried to give DOE a sense of
that. We\'ll certainly be\--our meetings with DOE are technical
exchanges, are ways that we continue to work with the Department to make
sure we get the type of information that we need to review the license
application.

And, in summary, the safety case, it includes a demonstration of safety,
the performance assessment. It includes information that provides
confidence in the expected performance of the site, and engineering.
There\'s a performance confirmation program that looks to the future as
information is continued to be collected, to confirm the basis for
safety. And, finally, clear documentation, and we think all those are
very important in terms of making a safety case.

And, with that, I\'m more than happy to answer any questions, if I can.

PARIZEK: Thank you, Tim. Right on schedule.

Debra Knopman?

KNOPMAN: Knopman, Board.

Tim, where in your safety case do you account for post 9/11 changes,
specifically in scenarios, human intrusion scenarios, for example.

MC CARTIN: Well, human intrusion is a stylized calculation. And, so,
that\'s done by the EPA standard specified, a single bore hole going
through a waste package, through to the water table. And that, for
postclosure, that is how human intrusion is evaluated.

In terms of 9/11, in terms of a preclosure, during operations, the
Commission is reevaluating its requirements for all facilities. And as
part of that reevaluation, if changes are needed, the regulation will be
changed. At this time, the Commission was not aware of any changes that
they felt were necessary. But that reevaluation has not been completed.
If necessary, the regulation will be changed.

But that is a preclosure operational phase, which my slides were not
intended to address that issue.

PARIZEK: Chairman Cohon?

COHON: I was wondering about examples of the sub-issues referred to in
Slide 12. Is that the 14 model abstractions on Slide 16, your backup?

MC CARTIN: Yes.

COHON: Okay. Actually, while I\'ve got the microphone, this slide that
you have up here where you talk about\--oh, no, I\'m sorry, not that
one. You talk about confidence in expected performance, and I appreciate
what you said before also about how though there is a final annual dose
curve, you\'re also very interested in all the detail under it and then
the full range of possible doses. And maybe I\'m just reacting to the
wording you chose here, it\'s confidence in performance, not just in
expected performance; right?

MC CARTIN: I put that as much to put in that, including the probability.
I mean, it\'s performance. We have used expected dose to imply a
probability weighted dose, but it\'s not to say, and maybe it was a
mistake, but it was put in there to\--we\'re interested in both the
probability of what can occur, and the consequences when they occur.

COHON: Okay, thanks.

PARIZEK: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Could you go to Slide 10, please, since we\'re flipping through slides
here? I was very interested in essentially, you know, you\'re looking
forward and you\'re taking a look at the performance confirmation plan.
And the second little barriers functioning as intended and anticipated
brings to mind, you know, some in situ experiments, some laboratory
experiments, maybe some field experiments.

What kind of things did you envision, particularly in light of the fact
that during the performance confirmation period, it doesn\'t look like
there\'s going to be much aggressive environment around, so what did you
expect to see in the performance confirmation plan that would address
those barriers functioning, you know, say 8,000 years from now when they
start to fail, or whenever their projection is? What kind of work would
you expect DOE to be proposing?

MC CARTIN: Well, those words actually are in the regulation, and
certainly it is very possible, once the repository is, if it\'s fully
loaded and it\'s ventilated, there won\'t be any dripping water, there
won\'t be much to see in a repository during this time period.

There could be other types of tests, laboratory tests, maybe other field
tests. They could do some tests to get some sense of how the barriers
might function. But, in the repository itself, I would agree that you
may not see anything.

BULLEN: Thank you. I expect the same. But I would have guessed that
there would be an aggressive test that they\'d do somewhere, maybe
laboratory, and maybe outside the repository, that would look at what
they would expect to have happen. And then when they want to make the
case that we would like to close it, this is our projection of the X
thousand year performance of the repository, and this is why we think,
you know, the dose will be such, based on the calculations.

MC CARTIN: Absolutely. And that\'s why I said, I mean, in performance
confirmation, we\'re looking for them to challenge the safety case. And
it isn\'t about just watching a dry waste package for 50 years and
saying, well, nothing happened, we\'re done. That is not what\'s
intended. And in that case, I think they will have to do tests outside
of the repository. We still would like monitoring in. You never know
what you might see, and it\'s always useful to monitor inside. But, I
think there will need to be additional tests outside of the repository,
absolutely.

BULLEN: Thank you.

PARIZEK: Paul Craig?

CRAIG: Craig, Board.

I\'ve got to follow that line of discussion. I\'m interested in
surprise. Claudio Pescatore talked about the management of confidence,
and I\'m interested in confidence, as it does relate to surprise. We
have this recent example with the reactor where there was apparently no
functioning way to detect unanticipated corrosion. Apparently the
detection process failed at both the level of the people running the
reactor, and at the level of the regulator, and there were signals there
that were missed.

So, I\'m just wondering how the concept of confidence in your ability to
detect surprises shows up in the concept of the safety case. I didn\'t
see it as an explicit item, and it seems to me that one does need to be
prepared for that.

MC CARTIN: Right. Well, I think part of that is the NRC licensing
process. And DOE will propose a performance confirmation plan that has
various attributes for it. We will comment on that plan. It will be the
subject in a public hearing. Other people will be able to comment on it,
and hopefully through that process, you have a comprehensive evaluation
of that plan.

Other than getting the full comment in the hearing process, in terms of
if there\'s something out there we don\'t know, you can\'t have a plan
that addresses something you don\'t know.

PARIZEK: Other Board? Alberto?

SAGÜÉS: Yes, this is a question that preoccupies many of us along the
lines of what Dr. Craig was saying. And along the lines of your last
statement, that, you know, you cannot anticipate that which you don\'t
know, and so on, that\'s fine, but if you go, for example, to materials
of construction, you have the choice in this particular case, of dealing
with materials of known, maybe not standard performance, for relatively
known performance, primarily through the evidence of analogues, say
plain carbon steel, some such thing, and there is a long-term basis of
engineering and human experience with those materials. In that case, you
have some direct evidence of how the material will perform.

Or, conversely, you may have a fantastic material, or, rather, a
material that looks fantastic based on a very short level of experience.

Now, in the first one, you have relatively mediocre performance, but
well known. And in the other case, we have the promise of fantastic
performance, but without any kind of long-term direct evidence that this
is working. How does that enter into this kind of analysis?

MC CARTIN: Well, generally, that\'s a design decision that the
Department will have to make. We cannot participate in those design
decisions. In terms of whatever the Department comes forward with, they
have to support. They have to have information to support their
assertions for the longevity, the corrosion rates for whatever material
they select.

I think from a regulatory standpoint, for those things that are newer,
for those things that potentially have very, very long lifetimes, our
review will be more focused. The scrutiny will be turned up in those
areas. But, it\'s the Department\'s safety case, they\'re the ones that
have to decide whether they believe they have sufficient information to
support their safety case in that regard.

As indicated, I think the NRC regulations, risk informed performance
based, part of that is providing to the licensee flexibility to decide
how they want to present a safety case. Risk informed for us means where
there are the largest risk contributors, that\'s where our regulatory
review will be the most stringent.

SAGÜÉS: Okay. But, nevertheless, you do end up with situations in which
the decision comes framed in the following way. We in the scientific
community cannot think of any way in which this material may fail over
the long-term, sort of a negative kind of information.

MC CARTIN: Well, the licensing board will weigh all the information
presented before them in making that decision, and it\'s a decision of
reasonable expectation.

PARIZEK: Norm Christensen?

CHRISTENSEN: Christensen, Board.

I just want to follow on, this is maybe an extension of both Alberto\'s
question and Paul Craig\'s question. I think history would demonstrate
that one of the great truisms is that surprise is inevitable, and that
there are unknown unknowns. There are things we don\'t know, and
they\'re going to happen out there. Which argues for a really explicit
consideration of safety margin, or some kind of buffer. And I wonder, I
don\'t see that as an explicit part of the consideration here. Or maybe
I\'m missing something in terms of how one builds that in.

MC CARTIN: There\'s no explicit requirement for margin in the
regulation, in that the limit is 15 millirem, and actually, DOE, you\'d
better come in at .1 millirem because we want two orders of magnitude of
margin. There is nothing in the regulation. The limit is 15 millirem.

Where margin may come in, there are other things being done in this
situation, and one would be the performance confirmation program. There
is no question that things are going to occur during construction,
during emplacement, and possibly a little bit beyond to the time of
closure. That performance confirmation program is there, once again, to
challenge the safety case, look at the soft spots.

And as was indicated, if this material hasn\'t been tested long, you
have potentially 50 to 100 years to further test it to look for
weaknesses in the assumptions, in the models, in the understanding.

There\'s also the requirement for multiple barriers, so that you\'re not
relying merely on an engineered waste package. You are relying both on
an engineered waste package and the properties of the site. And, so,
those kinds of things are\--if I had to say what gives you some margin,
I think it\'s the multiple barriers and the performance confirmation
program, that it will continue.

CHRISTENSEN: I would just say that from the standpoint of a relatively
well-informed citizen, it\'s those issues that are probably the most
critical issues, the issue of safety margin, defense in depth, and
multiple barriers, that are going to be most compelling. And, I think,
you know, the recent experiences with regard to failures of plan sort of
demonstrate and maybe reinforce that.

So, I would display that more prominently, and as a safety case issue,
that makes it something more than, considerably more than the
performance assessment.

MC CARTIN: Yes.

PARIZEK: No other Board questions. Staff? Dave Diodato?

DIODATO: Diodato, Staff.

Tim, on your Slide 10, you\'re talking about Part 63, Section 131. And
the bottom bullet there says identify risk significant assumptions and
uncertainties. And my question is how do you figure out which
assumptions are risk significant? You talked about performance
assessment. What tool or methodology do you use to discriminate between
which assumptions are risk significant and which are not risk
significant, or risk insignificant assumptions?

MC CARTIN: Well, generally, it\'s the performance assessment, is the
computational tool to assess that, although, and I think it\'s important
when we talk to risk significant assumptions, you are looking at a look
of aspects. You\'re also looking at not just the dose, sensitivity to a
dose. I think that is far too narrow a description for risk
significance. You are looking at capabilities of the barriers, et
cetera, and you\'re looking at what barriers have the potential to have
the largest impact on providing safety. And computationally, it is the
performance assessment that gives you that insight.

DIODATO: I mean, doesn\'t that necessarily imply in an infinitely
sensitive PA, that everything is in there and it\'s perfectly coupled
and you\'ve got all the critical processes that may or may not be
significant, and then afterwards you\--do you see where I\'m going with
that?

MC CARTIN: Right. Well, we are expecting that the performance assessment
has looked at a large number of FEPs, and has made a justification for
including, excluding all those FEPs, and that that\'s your best
quantitative information that you have. You have evidence for the
models. You have the independent lines of evidence that could also give
you some insights, that all need to be factored in.

That\'s why I didn\'t want to say that risk significance isn\'t just,
say, doing a sensitivity analysis and getting a set of parameters from
the sensitivity analysis, these are the important parameters and that\'s
it.

As I indicated, the corrosion of the waste package, there might be
different chemistries you look at, and a particular chemistry might
provide the most serious challenge to the waste package. You might look
at, well, how could that kind of chemistry evolve? And those are the
kinds of things that you might put into a performance confirmation
program.

I don\'t know if that helps, but it\'s not just the calculation of the
number, but you do need to understand, and this is the hard part in
explaining performance assessment. There are just a variety of
assumptions. The Department recently has tried to lay out some of the
assumptions in the models, conservatisms, et cetera. All that is
factored in.

PARIZEK: We have to go on now. We have two more speakers, and then time
for public comment. Thank you very much, Tim.

The DOE position will be given by Joe Ziegler. And this has to do again
with the safety case. It\'s their responsibility to present the safety
case, and so we know the national emphasis and we know the NRC is
looking for it, and so let\'s see what DOE has to say.

ZIEGLER: Thank you. I have some notes I want to use.

I, too, am going to focus, like Tim did, on the postclosure case,
although I would like to begin by saying that the heart of the decisions
that we ultimately have to make about, you know, the detailed design and
the path we go forward, may depend on preclosure safety and
environmental impacts as well. So, I don\'t want to discount the
importance of preclosure part of the analysis in presenting an overall
safety case.

The process that we use is basically defined in the Nuclear Waste Policy
Act and the NRC regulations as a step-wise development process. And each
step of the process that we have gone through already, and that we will
go through in the future, we have varying degrees of knowledge and an
ever increasing degree of knowledge, whether it was at the time of the
environmental assessment when it was decided to go ahead with site
characterization, or what we\'ve just gone through with a tremendous
body of data that was used and information for the site recommendation,
and then on to the next steps following that designation and beyond.

This process began many years ago, many sites, and it will continue to
move into the future. Our decision making requires that the safety case
being compiled give adequate confidence, and that decisions be made that
are adequate with the level of information and data that exists at each
step of that process.

We believe we\'re in general agreement with the international community,
and that the repository should proceed in stages. And that\'s steps in
many respects similar to staged development concept that Jeff Williams
will talk to you a little bit tomorrow.

This graph just shows a little bit about the step-wise process,
beginning, the first block here is the approval for site
characterization, but there were actually steps before that when we
looked at many sites and narrowed it down to a fewer number of sites.

The process leading to site recommendation, including an FEIS, updated
performance assessment, sensitivity analyses associated with those TSPA
analyses, the SSPA, other documents and analyses that we perform.

We\'re in between site recommendation and site designation. We\'ve had
the state\'s notice of disapproval. It\'s up to Congressional action
now. But assuming that we go beyond and the site is designated, then we
get into a license application phase. The information that we\'re
gathering, the tests, the analyses that we do, the input from both the
public, the state, the political processes will continue as we move into
license application and construction authorization.

A couple things that we\'re considering, and there will be more
discussion tomorrow, as far as going into construction authorization,
the possibility of modular construction or phases or steps, to go into
this process. If that takes place, and we first started looking at that
as a cost levelizing thing, looked at levelizing the annual cost,
because we\'re funded by Congressional budget authority every year, even
though the money set aside mostly comes from the utilities, but in
addition to levelizing costs, if we go into some sort of modular
development where we go into phases or steps, then surely then there
will be consideration of improvements or changes or enhancements between
the modules. And, again, in essence, that\'s staged development, and
that would take place during the construction, and even into operational
phases.

Then we get to the license and receive phase, and ultimately to closure.
At each of these steps, we go through additional analyses. There will be
additional not only performance confirmation, but additional tests and
analyses programs that may go beyond what\'s required for simple
performance confirmation.

The way our safety case fits in with NRC licensing decisions, basically,
we have NRC performance objections and evaluation requirements written
into Part 63. The regulations establish an acceptable and quantitative
level of safety for environmental protection.

The requirements are defined and the general evaluation methods and
information to be used for that presentation exist in the regulations.
But there are several things that are up to the Department of Energy as
the licensee. The degree of conservatism in the analysis, the body of
data, the tests, the analysis and the timing of the subsequent steps are
in DOE\'s control.

Also, the treatment of uncertainty and gaps in the data will have to be
addressed by DOE, because regardless, when you\'re trying to predict the
future for 10,000 years and beyond, there will always be uncertainty.
There will always be gaps and that it will never be a perfect dataset,
and the regulations and the law recognize that.

But the requirement for preclosure, reasonable assurance and postclosure
reasonable expectation are the tests that have to be met through the
regulations.

DOE will present a safety case that demonstrates compliance, and because
testing and analysis that are already going on, have continued for a
long time, will continue beyond license application, beyond receipt of
license, probably as long as the repository remains open, that the
requisite degree of confidence at each of those steps will have to be in
place at the time. That was true at EA, it was true at the time of the
SR, it will be true at the time of the license application, construction
authorization, and ultimately, the license and beyond.

We believe that the NRC requirements and the approach that DOE is taking
is generally consistent with the views of the international community
and of oversight bodies within this country, including yourselves and
the ACNW.

More is required than just a quantitative performance assessment and
comparing the result to performance, although it seems like the
quantitative results receive most of the focus. And at a lot of your
meetings that you\'ve had and a lot of what we present, and certainly in
a lot of the documentation that we present, we focus on TSPA.

But more than that is required. We need to show an adequate
understanding of the systems and components, that\'s both the engineered
systems and the natural systems and barriers that exist. We need to show
how that understanding is factored into the evaluation of performance.
That\'s the subsystem models, sensitivity cases, ultimately adding up to
a TSPA, but it\'s more than just the one answer that spits out the end
of the computer modeling.

And we need to provide requisite confidence in the basis for the
evaluation and the results, and that comes from several sources.
Recognized experts, primarily in our program, from the national labs and
the USGS are an important part of the problem, although not
quantitative.

We must show that we have been able to implement a rigorous quality
assurance program in performing our analysis, and that\'s a central part
in the safety case and in receiving an NRC license. And ultimately, we
must show reasonable expectation according to the regulations.

Multiple lines of evidence and argument we believe are required. And,
again, that can be qualitative or quantitative. We looked at alternative
conceptual models, sometimes in a quantitative sense, as part of our
TSPA analysis. We looked at multiple barriers. We looked at the degree
of diversity from the multiple barriers, whether they\'re engineered or
natural. Do we have dissimilar materials? You know, if we go with the
drip shield, Titanium versus a waste package made out of Alloy 22, is
there a difference there? Is it a discernable difference?

We have performance confirmation and ongoing tests and analyses programs
that go beyond the ultimate license application, and will continue to
evolve as more data and analysis are collected and analyzed.

We looked at natural analogues, and natural analogues in large part may
not fit into the quantitative analysis, and yet they may still provide
important qualitative information that gives us confidence in the
analyses that are performed.

I\'m going to flip the way I present this slide a little bit and talk
about the safety strategy first. Basically, we have defined the safety
strategy that is essential in defining our safety case. Our safety
strategy concentrates on the elements most important to performance.
That means it\'s risk informed. And how do you know what\'s most
important for performance? Well, we\'ve had different iterations of our
TSPA analysis. We\'re done sensitivity analysis. We\'ve done one-off or
barrier analysis, where we\'re removing this barrier or that to see how
the repository would perform taking those factors into consideration.

We look at multiple barriers. Even though it might not add specifically
to performance, the fact that we have multiple barriers should add to
confidence in overall performance being what it should be. We look at
the way uncertainty is handled by modeling the full range of possible
parameter values. We look at the basis for the stated considerations and
conservatisms, and we must clearly articulate how and why we know things
are conservative if we so state that they are.

And, ultimately, what\'s very important is that we be transparent and
that we be able to communicate this analysis, such that it\'s
understandable.

Within that framework, we need the flexibility to accommodate new
information and to update the safety case at future decision points, the
future now being at the time of the license application, construction
authorization, the license, and closure.

New information can come from a myriad of sources, testing, design,
analyses, policy changes. Work under the performance confirmation and
test program will be ongoing. the results of that work should be
factored in as we go, and we will add to the safety analysis and the
safety case at the appropriate stages of the process.

Just to give you a little bit of an idea of the evolution of the safety
case as we perceive it, we\'ve presented several iterations of the
repository safety strategy, the last being I think towards the end of
the year 2000. That showed the basis, our TSPA, the basis for our TSPA
results that existed at that time, and it showed sensitivity cases. It
showed barrier analysis where we removed one barrier or multiple
barriers to see how the repository would perform with removal of those
potential barriers.

DOE most recently has evaluated performance of the site in the site
suitability evaluation in preparation for the site recommendation. And
that was done in accordance with the Suite Suitability Guidelines under
our regulations under 10 CFR 963. But there were a lot of documentation
and analyses that went into that. The Final Environmental Impact
Statement was completed, the TSPA-SR was completed, the SSPA or
Supplemental Science and Performance Analysis were completed, and there
was a variety of information that went into that body of evidence that
supported the site recommendation.

The safety case for construction authorization will be presented in our
license application, and most of that will be contained in the safety
analysis report portion of that license application as far as our
quantitative analysis is concerned.

It will incorporate the results of these ongoing tests and analysis that
I\'ve already mentioned. It will be made in the context of the NRC
requirements under 10 CFR 63, and the Yucca Mountain Review Plan, and
our safety strategy for development of that safety case will be as I
just presented in the previous slide.

This next graph shows a little bit about the way\--graphically shows how
our safety strategy is structured, and I\'ll kind of work my way from
left to the right.

Basically, our strategy will be documented in our license application
and the supporting documents to support that application. The
application will also be accompanied by a final EIS, and any necessary
supplemental analyses that result as we define in more detail the design
that we go forward with, and we refine that moving into the license
application stage.

The safety analysis report will have both preclosure and postclosure
repository safety analyses and we\'ll talk about an R&D program to
resolve any outstanding safety questions that we see that need
resolution at that point in time. And it will discuss our performance
confirmation program.

Moving to the right of the slide, we talk about our safety strategy for
the safety case, and that\'s in an overall licensing strategy. And, by
the way, the licensing strategy is being documented right now. We should
have that strategy document complete within the next few weeks.

We go into our postclosure safety strategy as part of that licensing
strategy. And as I went over before, it includes various elements,
including performance objectives, multiple barriers, engineered and
natural, the performance assessment itself that will concentrate on the
most important factors so as to be risk informed, performance
confirmation program that will provide information for updates at
subsequent stages of the process. It will include alternate lines of
evidence, alternate conceptual models, and discuss natural analogues,
and the like.

And I\'d like to close with something that probably, and it may go
beyond, you know, shear requirements and the licensing regulations and
NRC\'s regulations. NRC will evaluate DOE\'s safety case in making their
licensing decisions. The license application will be written as an
applicant for the regulator\'s review, and it will be written in
technical terms for the most part. We believe that stringent
quantitative regulations are an important part of the safety case and
the licensing strategy.

Without a set of quantitative requirements, the desire for an even
better understanding and an ever better understanding of performance,
might just never to be able to get to the step of actually making a
license application.

The safety case will be available, and the license application will be
available to other parties to the licensing proceeding, the state,
intervenors, anyone else who desires to see the document.

But in addition to that, because our license application is basically
written for the regulator and written in technical terms that we know
they\'ll understanding, we\'re considering the need to provide
additional information to help other audiences understand the safety
case. And this additional information, one way to do that would be to
develop a simplified, plain language description of the safety case that
covers a lot of the things that were discussed here already today, and
basically develop that so that the general public can understand better
the case that we\'re making and how we\'re making it.

And, I guess with that, I\'d like to close and ask for any questions.

PARIZEK: Board questions? Don?

RUNNELLS: Runnells, Board.

I think just a clarification, please. Your Slide Number 6, down there at
the third bullet, I didn\'t understand the approach should be separated
from the result.

ZIEGLER: Let me try again. What we\'re trying to say is that if you
start and know the results, then that may affect your approach. In other
words, if I know I\'m going to depend on the drip shield for about 100
per cent of my performance, then I could, I shouldn\'t, but I could come
to the conclusion that the natural systems aren\'t important at all and,
therefore, I don\'t need to evaluate them.

But, if I go from an approach standpoint and concentrate on the elements
most important to safety, which is an iterative decision making process,
and I look at things like multiple barriers, regardless of what is most
important, then from that approach standpoint, then I know that I\'ve
got complete coverage, and then if something changes down the line or
new information comes to light that is unexpected, then the approach is
to make sure that I\'m covered across the board.

Does that help, Don?

PARIZEK: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Again, on Slide 6, I think I remember, or I wrote down here, that you
concentrate on the elements that are most important to performance as
you evaluate your safety case. And one of the examples that you used was
by doing the one-off analysis based on TSPA.

Any possibility there that a one-off analysis might mask some important
results?

ZIEGLER: Yeah, there is, and we\'ve been thinking about instead of
one-off, doing one-on, so that if you look at each element of the
barriers and see how much those elements of the barriers, how important
they are in and of themselves, and you\'re right, and we\'ve had that
discussion internally. So, that\'s a good point.

BULLEN: I personally think that\'s a great idea.

Now, if you could also go to I guess it\'s your second to the last slide
where you talk about general elements of the licensing strategy? That
one. Dr. Wong asked this question, so I\'ll ask it anyway, but what
design are we licensing for? Hot or cold? And does your strategy change
for either of those?

ZIEGLER: And I guess I would argue that the design is neither hot nor
cold, but we should go forward with a design that\'s capable of being
either hot or cold.

You know, clearly, if we put the material in the mountain and put it two
meters apart or three meters apart, and close the repository in 50
years, it would still be a higher temperature than if we closed it in
300 years.

So, I think the question is is what configuration are we going to take
to licensing. And you\'ll hear more about that tomorrow, but we\'re
considering a configuration that can easily be operated at higher or
lower temperatures.

BULLEN: So, your postclosure safety strategy, performance objectives,
and the multiple barriers, and all of the boxes that fall under that,
are encompassed by both operating modes, and so you have a broad enough
net that you can cast in all of your analyses for licensing strategy
that either operating parameter, hot of cold, works?

ZIEGLER: I think from a broad perspective, our strategy is to be able to
cover the range of possible operating modes, from a\--I use the work
all, that scares me, because you\'ll find an example where something
doesn\'t fit\--but from a practical perspective, is that the decision on
higher temperature or lower temperature may not need to be made right
now. So, to artificially make it, you know, before it needs to be made,
may lead us in the wrong path as well.

So, I think we have some work to do in defining the configuration that
we take into the license application, and I think we have a goal,
probably more than a goal, to make sure that we are able to reasonably
make whatever decision makes sense down the road.

BULLEN: Bullen, Board. Just one last followup question.

You said since the decision doesn\'t need to be made, when you finally
do decide what the operating mode is when you\'re going to ask for your
license modification to close, then will you have to have done all of
the appropriate calculations, analysis, safety case bases that would
address that issue? And are you confident\--I guess I\'m a little bit
concerned is it a license modification like you\'re changing your text
specs to operate in a different mode, or is it a significant change in
the actual operation of the postclosure safety of the repository?

ZIEGLER: Operation of the postclosure safety?

BULLEN: Well, performance\--I mean, you\'re not operating postclosure.
It\'s performing postclosure.

ZIEGLER: I think certainly our analysis has to be appropriate for the
case at hand. So, if that\'s the question, then it has to be. So, the
question then becomes is if I analyze the repository at a higher
temperature operation or a lower temperature operation, then how
applicable is that analysis to the other case, or something in between.
So, I think at the time before you close, certainly, hopefully we will
have made those decisions, or we will have at the time we close, because
the situation will exist then.

PARIZEK: Debra Knopman, Board?

KNOPMAN: Same slide. I find this really confusing, and maybe it\'s just
me. But the word safety, or the phrasing of safety analysis and safety
case appears under the box for license application. And then over on the
right side, and those boxes don\'t connect, you\'ve got safety strategy
for safety case. And I\'m left quite confused as to whether or not the
safety case is part of the license application.

Now, I heard Tim McCartin say that the NRC is going to be looking at the
safety case. I just don\'t understand why you have this arrayed this
way, and what you\'re actually trying to communicate to us. It\'s a
bifurcated process. You\'ve got folks who do license application, but
they don\'t do the safety case. You\'ve got folks who do safety case who
are not involved in the license application. And you\'re just going to
have all this paper kind of go in front of the NRC.

Can you explain this? It sounds like you\'ve got two significantly
different documents with two significantly different teams of people
working on these things.

ZIEGLER: Okay, let me, one, I don\'t think that\'s true. So, I\'ll
apologize for the confusion. And maybe this is an artifact of what
we\'re trying to do and to documenting our licensing strategy. Because
we have a licensing strategy document that\'s in preparation right now.

Part of that licensing strategy is the safety strategy. But the primary
part of the document is what it takes to put an adequate license
application together. But part of that is the safety strategy.

I believe I stated, and I would reiterate that I believe that our
license application in large part does contain the safety case. The one
element of that that may be missing, especially from an international
perspective, but I think it applies here as well, is that the license
application is written for a technical regulator, you know, to review
according to their regulations, and that to communicate the safety case
may require more than just the license application, something that\'s
written in plain English.

Does that help at all?

KNOPMAN: Well, I\'ll leave it at that right now. I think you have some
work to do in terms of communicating why they\'re not one in the same.

Now, if they\'re written in different languages, that\'s one thing. But
if they\'re substantially different sets of arguments or, you know,
different comprehensiveness, then, you know, I think that needs to be
explained further.

PARIZEK: Are there staff questions? Leon Reiter?

REITER: Leon Reiter, Staff.

Joe, a week or so ago, I heard a presentation of preclosure safety
strategy, I think that was the title of it, and in it, they talked about
specific quantitative safety margin for preclosure. And, in your old
discussions of safety case under repository safety strategy, at one
time, you also proposed having a safety margin for postclosure. I think
it was an order of magnitude below the criteria. Are you contemplating
having that, including that in the safety case, or something like that?

ZIEGLER: I wasn\'t at that meeting, but just knowing what our preclosure
strategy is is basically in development of our license application, from
a preclosure, but I think this would equally apply to postclosure
without a specific quantification on it, is that there are standards set
by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that have to be met as far as, you
know, meeting applicable safety requirements.

From a preclosure perspective, I think we use something like a factor of
two, but I can\'t remember. During our calculational process, as we\'re
preparing, you know, the analysis that will go into our license
application, from a preclosure basis, if we\'re starting to get about a
factor of two or a factor of one-half from what the regulation is, we
think it\'s of significant note that we should stand up and be concerned
about it and see whether or not our analysis is adequate, or maybe
we\'ve oversimplified and things are really better than that.

I think from a postclosure standpoint, and I\'m not going to give you a
number, but an order of magnitude maybe, is that depending on where that
order of magnitude comes from, we need to keep in mind if we start doing
preliminary performance assessment and the numbers we\'re coming up with
on a preliminary basis start to approach the 15 millirem standard, then
we should sit up and be concerned about it and make sure that our
analysis is adequate, or maybe we have built in or oversimplified and
have too many conservatisms in the analysis, or maybe we\'ve got a real
problem, and maybe there\'s a way to deal with it, and maybe there\'s
not.

But, that discussion I believe was in the context of giving us a head
start and not waiting to submit our license application. I guess
theoretically we could submit a license application that\'s got 14.99
millirem as the postclosure dose, although I don\'t think anybody here
from DOE\'s side would be comfortable in doing that. So, I think some
degree of margin is probably prudent.

PARIZEK: Jeff Wong? I bypassed you. Then Jerry.

WONG: Going to your Slide Number 3, I\'m trying to understand the
message that you\'re giving to us. Are you implying up there\--well,
mine are pink boxes, your\'s are orange boxes\--with increasing
confidence, are you implying that the threshold that the NRC is going to
apply of meeting reasonable expectation is going to increase with each
step?

ZIEGLER: No, I\'m not really trying to imply anything what NRC is going
to do. What I\'m trying to imply here is that our performance
confirmation and our test and analysis programs will be ongoing. And as
we gather more data and analysis, then the degree of confidence that we
have in our analysis should go up.

WONG: Okay. Then going back to the slide that we\'ve resting on, the one
with the gray, is it Number 8? Yes, that one. I\'m confused, and maybe
I\'m confused with Debra. In essence, are you preparing three safety
case documents with each row? Because, to me, it would seem that the
safety case, that a license application is going to be weaker than the
safety case related to postclosure safety. I mean, maybe that\'s what
you\'re implying there, the other diagram, because it looks like you\'re
going to have performance confirmation data to support the safety case
over there on the right, versus your application on the left.

ZIEGLER: Okay. And I\'ll never show this slide again.

WONG: It\'s all about confidence and communication transparency.

ZIEGLER: Right. And obviously this doesn\'t meet the test.

What we plan to do is we\'ve got a licensing strategy. That\'s a
document. It\'s about 50 or 60 pages, probably more than that by now.
And, so, no, at most, we will prepare our safety case and our safety
analysis within the safety analysis report part of the license
application. What we\'re saying as a communications tool, we may need to
do more, and it\'s simply to better communicate in plain language, which
a lot of our documents, I mean, we\'ve been out to public meetings all
over the place, and we get accused all the time that TSPA is not a
reader friendly document, you know, for members of the public, and you
probably feel the same way.

So, a simpler, more plain language description of the same safety case,
not two different safety cases, no.

WONG: Thank you.

PARIZEK: Jerry Cohon?

COHON: I don\'t have a question. I guess I have sort of a statement, a
mini-tirade. I\'ll try not to make it a tirade. And don\'t take it
personally, whatever I say.

I find nothing over here that I would care to criticize. I think it\'s
fine, though my colleagues have raised questions and expressed their
confusion about this particular diagram.

To me, the question is whether you\'ll do it, and what it will look like
when you\'re done. And maybe my problem has to do with communication
more than anything else, and I suspect it does.

The phrase or the idea, I won\'t give an exact quote, of confidence
appropriate to the decision at hand, makes great sense. But I don\'t
think DOE has been very successful in conveying the basis for that
confidence up to now at every decision point. So, I\'m thinking about
the Secretary\'s statement in which he conveyed his recommendation to
the president. In that, he offers the estimated mean dose, and he talks
about the volume of work that\'s been done, scientific and technical
work, but that\'s it. There is no quantification of the uncertainty or,
putting it in a positive way, quantification of his confidence.

Now, the confidence is more than just quantification of some measure of
uncertainty. But that\'s not to say that quantification isn\'t important
also. And DOE has not communicated that well, and this is true
throughout my history with the program, not just with the current
decision.

So, I worry that now projecting ahead to LA and beyond, that DOE will be
equally unsuccessful in communicating that part of its message. Now, it
may be that the uncertainty analysis and the plan for uncertainty
analysis and uncertainty communication just simply wasn\'t able to catch
up with the SR. I would hope that that plan is continued to be followed,
and it does catch up with LA. But, to date, you have not done a good job
on that.

PARIZEK: Paul Craig?

CRAIG: And I think I\'m probably even a little bit grumpier than Jerry.

COHON: I can get grumpier if you want.

CRAIG: Let\'s not compete. We\'ve managed to avoid it so far.

Looking at this same chart, there are boxes that hang out on the left
and on the right-hand side that aren\'t connected to anything else, and
I just observe that that seems to me to be an accurate representation of
my perception of importance in the DOE licensing strategy.

The environmental impact statement seems to have very little to do with
anything. It was done because the law said to do it. But it sort of hung
out there. And communications with the stakeholders seemed to fall into
the same category. So, I find that part of the document accurate. But it
doesn\'t make me feel comfortable.

ZIEGLER: Is there a question there I should respond to?

CRAIG: No, no, I just thought I was going to be grumpy. But, you know,
if you choose not to use this chart again, that\'s probably a good
decision.

PARIZEK: No other board questions. But Claudio Pescatore I guess has
asked for a chance to ask a question. I got the message that you might
want to ask a question. Because if you do, we could let the staff also
ask a question of you. I didn\'t give them time to cross-examine you.

PESCATORE: Since you\'ve given me this opportunity, I have a simple
question. Does the writing of the new safety case require a thorough
overall overhaul of the past documentation? Is this really something
that will require a big effort for you guys to put together a safety
case and a safety strategy? And, also, what is the fate of the old
repository safety strategy documentation you had and then it stopped?

ZIEGLER: Okay, the first question was will it be a big effort in putting
together the safety case under this concept I\'ve presented. And I guess
I think what we\'ve already done was a large effort, so, yes, it will be
a large effort, and I think we need to concentrate more on communication
is the message I\'m hearing.

And what was the second part of the question again? I can only think in
single digits.

PESCATORE: What\'s the fate of the document you already started on the
safety strategy, the repository safety strategy document that in fact
DOE started?

ZIEGLER: All right, let me try to address that. In the past on our
safety strategy documents that we put together tended to be analytical
based, and I guess the image I\'ve tried to project here is that instead
of the strategy being analytical based, it\'s more of a pointer as to
where we need to go into the future. So, again, and I think that really
actually is more of a strategy because it tells you how we should
proceed versus, or tells us how to proceed versus justifying where
we\'ve been.

So, no, there\'s not been a lot of work that needs to be redone there.
We\'re trying to look to the future and what it needs to be.

NELSON: Nelson, Board. I think he\'s referring to the repository safety
strategy, the RSS, that was around, what, a year and a half ago?

ZIEGLER: Yes, right at the end of 2000?

NELSON: Two years ago. And what its status is. You\'ve stopped working
on that, and the next document that will be seen is this document with
the LA? I mean, is that the strategy?

ZIEGLER: Right now, I don\'t think there\'s any plans to revise that
document in its current context, although it did provide a lot of useful
information, and that information is still very valuable in how we move
into the future. But, right now, I don\'t believe, and somebody correct
me from the audience if I\'m wrong, there\'s no plan on the books to
basically update that document in its current format.

NELSON: So, the next we see will be with the license application?

ZIEGLER: Yes.

NEWBERRY: This is Claudia Newberry, DOE.

I think there\'s a little bit of a confusion. The licensing strategy
that Joe has shown up here, and I\'m responsible for this slide, I\'ll
take all the blame, this is a document that we\'re producing that is the
strategy for approaching development of the license application itself,
which includes the safety case, and the safety strategy, which is a
strategy for developing the safety case that\'s going to be in the LA.

So, there are two parts of it, as he said, in the previous slide. We
separated the safety strategy from the actual safety case. And this
document, the licensing strategy lays out what the safety strategy is,
and tells us how to develop the safety case, if you will.

This licensing strategy document, as Joe said, is nearing completion.
It\'s in review and should be accepted and out this summer. So, you will
see a licensing strategy this summer. You won\'t see a safety case until
we develop a license application.

PARIZEK: Thank you. One more point of clarification for DOE?

MC COMBIE: Charles McCombie.

Actually, I wanted to defend this slide. I think the only thing wrong
with it, it\'s typographically wrong. The message that\'s in here which
says that into the safety case postclosure and preclosure goes all this
stuff on the left, if you turn the slide on its side, it would give a
very good message that the safety case is not just TSPA, but all of the
six elements should go on the right\--go into the block on the left. And
what Debra was bothered about, and I was, too, it doesn\'t show the
linkage the way that it should be.

So, I think the elements are probably okay. I do think they\'re okay.
But, it\'s just not showing connection.

PARIZEK: I think we should now allow time for the last speaker. Steve
Frishman from the State of Nevada giving a safety case view from
Nevada\'s perspective.

FRISHMAN: Well, thank you. For the record, it\'s Steve Frishman with the
State of Nevada.

I appreciate being asked to talk on this subject, since the last
discussion that went on gave me the opportunity to completely revise
what I was going to say.

But at the same time, it\'s just a revision. The same stuff is still
there. I\'m just going to present it in a different way. And I guess
what I hope to be able to do is help out with Debra\'s and Jeff\'s
confusion by explaining what I think is going on that that chart
represents, and why it doesn\'t represent it very clearly, and probably
when I\'m done, it never will appear again.

First of all, let\'s go through a little bit of what we heard that sort
of links into where I think all this is going. You had Tim\'s summary
slide that gave us essentially the four elements when he\'s talking
about the safety case, which is demonstration of safety, confidence in
the expected performance of the site, and engineering, performance
confirmation program, and clear documentation.

Well, that is essentially the requirement for the safety analysis
report, the safety analysis report being the operative part of the
license application.

Now, Joe says that DOE will present a safety case that, one,
demonstrates compliance; two, provides the requisite degree of
confidence for the decision at hand, the part that kept coming back up.
And what that is sort of supported by is the need for flexibility to
include new information, and an updated safety case at future decision
points.

Now, if you look at the difference in those two, it\'s really brought
home by something that Bob Card said this morning, and that\'s we
believe we have the operational period to fully explore the long-term
safety issues. And that\'s a paraphrase of what he said.

And, now, you link that to Margaret Chu\'s new emphasis on science that
will go on for as long as the repository is open, and then think about
the NRC\'s requirement for performance confirmation, but what do you do
with all this other testing, which is really a continuation of site
characterization that is incomplete now, plus anything new they can
think of. You have to put it in something. So, you put it in the new
sort of test and evaluation or science program, and that runs alongside.

Now, what does this all mean? What it means is the Department of Energy
is going to do a safety analysis report as required for license
application, but they\'re defining a safety case. The safety case is the
safety analysis report, plus the flexibility that they want to have in
the future to have improved confidence in the decision point at hand.

So, what that says is that the Department believes that at each stage of
decision for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, its construction
authorization, its amendment to receive and possess, and amendment for
closure, the Department is saying that at each stage, there is going to
be new information, as well as performance confirmation information,
that is supposed to improve confidence in the safety analysis report.

We have talked about this approach in very different language on many
occasions. What it comes down to is the Department expects that they are
going to be able to carry out a phased licensing program.

The NRC regulations do not permit that at this point, and it\'s more
than just an oversight or something that maybe you could fit in if you
read the regs differently. As I understand it, and I have been hammering
on this point for years, which some of you know, as I understand it,
it\'s intentional that Part 60 and now Part 63 were not a phase
licensing program.

The point of the licensing regulation is that a disposal decision is
made with the original license, the construction authorization, meaning
that you\'ve got to\--the Department has to demonstrate its case at that
time through the safety analysis report, and the idea of performance
confirmation is to essentially confirm, or at least challenge, the
validity of the information that was used for that original decision.

And I have looked at the NRC\'s Yucca Mountain Review Plan to make sure
that my understanding of this was still in line, and I believe it is,
because I was specifically looking for things like the license
application must be complete at the time it is submitted for
construction authorization.

So, what we have, at least from my observation, is another way to talk
about, or for the Department to talk about a phased licensing approach
that they think they can somehow legitimize to where, through time,
their assumption is that through time, we will find more things that
will make it better. So, give us a break at the beginning. We\'ll have
it maybe good enough at the beginning, but rest assured, it will get
better.

Well, experience over the last few years has shown that the more
information that is gathered, the more questionable some of the original
information really was.

So, the assumption that it\'s going to get better, and expecting the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission to give a license on something less than
what the Department believes to be its best shot is contrary to the
whole regulatory philosophy, and this will be at least one of the areas
that we\'re going to be very rigorous about.

So, I think that sort of explains why that diagram is confusing, and I
think it explains some of the language, and puts it in the larger
context of something that has been going on for a long time. I\'ve tried
to point it out. The evidence just keeps building, and I think it\'s
pretty compelling now, because we\'re right up to where things are going
to start happening, and the Department is ready to go off in a direction
of having things happen that are not in accord with what at least many
of us expected from a licensing approach and philosophy at the very
beginning.

Now, safety strategy. The safety strategy essentially provides is what
Tim said is one component that must be in the safety analysis report,
and that is the identification of barriers. And what the safety strategy
was very largely doing the last time we saw it was it was identifying
what the Department thought were the key barriers in the system, not
just in terms of okay, there\'s engineered and natural. They
identified\--well, the number kept switching around. I just took the one
that had five.

So, they identified five things that they think are essentially barriers
in the system, and many of you I think will remember that list when I
remind you of it. It\'s limited water entering the waste emplacement
drifts, long live waste package, and drip shields, limited release of
radionuclides from engineered barriers, delay and dilution of
radionuclide concentration by the natural barriers, and limiting general
dose\--or limiting annual dose, considering potentially disruptive
events.

So, this is what they thought was sort of the barrier function in the
system, the ones that they thought were most important to making a
demonstration in the safety analysis report.

There is no safety case per se that\'s required by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. Safety case is a word that is out there in the
international language that has a meaning, and the Department is trying
to borrow a piece of meaning that they want, which is the flexibility
for new information later, and asking for some flexibility on the part
of the regulatory to let me get by, because it\'s going to get better.
And I think you\'ve heard some of this before.

Now, if you go back to a couple documents that I\'ve been referring to
also, go back to like the original 1980 EIS that selected geologic
disposal. In there, there are some things that are, you know,
expectations that might lead to people\'s view that the site might be
safe. And they\'re very simple things, they\'re broad, but they\'re
really foundational to geologic disposal.

And, for instance, in the final environmental impact statement, and
I\'ve read these to you before, but here we are back in another context,
that\'s all, geologic barriers are expected to provide isolation for at
least 10,000 years after the waste is emplaced, and probably will
provide isolation for a millennia thereafter.

Engineered barriers are designed to assure total containment within the
disposal package during the initial period, during which most of
intermediate live fission products decay. The period might be as long as
a thousand years.

Tectonic stability and non-communicating hydrologic regime combine with
rock properties to maintain repository strength and isolation integrity.

Now, these are the foundations of geologic disposal. And without further
discussion, I ask you to compare that list in the safety strategy to
where we\'re going, or where the EIS said that we should be going, and
see if we\'re talking about the same thing. And I think you\'ll find
there\'s some disparity.

The Department, back in 1985, did its mission plan, and it wrote its
mission plan indicating that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act had been
written based on the 1980 EIS and its findings. So, we had the
establishment of geologic disposal as national policy. And then DOE,
reading this, states in their 1985 mission plan, which really was
intended by Congress to be the blueprint for all things into the future,
how the Department was going to carry out this assignment given them by
the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

And just a couple short statements from there. \"DOE intends to place
primary importance on the capabilities of the natural system for waste
isolation. In evaluating the suitability of sites, the use of the
engineered barrier system will be considered to the extent necessary to
meet the performance requirements specified by the NRC and EPA, but will
not be relied on to compensate for significant deficiencies in the
natural system.\" That\'s 1985.

So, I guess just one final point that I heard this morning from Margaret
Chu, and that\'s in response to the question about\--or the observation
that maybe the program has not been putting enough reliance on the
natural system, so, therefore, the engineered barrier looks like it\'s
vastly overshadowing the natural system and its capabilities.

Well, first of all, I think that the site hasn\'t changed. It\'s only
people\'s perception of how they want it to look. So, in the case of
giving more performance credit to the natural system, the example, when
there was a question, the example was, well, maybe we\'ve been too
conservative about the saturated zone. And that came up when there was a
question about, well, if you get more reliance on natural barriers, does
this somehow affect cost.

So, if you put more reliance on the saturated zone, what that means is
maybe you can put less reliance on, well, the drip shield she already
said may go away, and we heard other evidence today that suggested
probably they will, but if you put less reliance on C 22, well, maybe
you can use less C 22. So, you can cheapen it up that way. But at what
cost? At what cost is on paper, you\'re putting more reliance on the
saturated zone.

But what that\'s doing is it\'s putting more reliance on such things as
dilution in the 18 kilometer dilution zone that\'s out there, saying
that dilution will take place more than we expected, or more than we
want to account for in a conservative way. It also takes in diffusion,
takes in matrix diffusion, and all of these things that have come and
gone in the program, and they keep recycling as they\'re needed.

So, in the desire to get away from the I believe correct allegation that
the site for a repository relies extraordinarily highly on an engineer
barrier, or a system of engineer barriers, in order to get away from it,
what you do is you actually put further at risk the person that you\'re
trying to protect.

So, anyway, this is sort of an unwinding of the confusion part that I
saw growing this afternoon. And tomorrow, when I talk about staging,
I\'ll say a little bit more about what\'s wrong, from my perspective,
what\'s wrong with the concept of phased licensing, which is a form of
staging.

As usual, I\'m sure you have questions.

PARIZEK: Board members? Jerry?

COHON: How would you advise DOE to create a safety strategy or a safety
case? What do you think a safety case should include, and how should
they go about creating it?

FRISHMAN: It\'s too late. Claudio described what a lot of people have
put into thinking about what a safety case might be separate from a
safety analysis report, as we have in our regulation. And, for Yucca
Mountain, it\'s too late. There isn\'t any way that we could go back and
try to make this site a safer site. We know enough about it.

If that process had been followed, and if it had been overlayed with
Margaret Chu\'s approach to let\'s get some science on this thing that
is sort of ongoing and tells us about such things as, you know, how to
build confidence, real data which helps build confidence, and using
scientific approaches to looking at such things as model uncertainty,
then if we were starting at the beginning, I think we could lead to a
safety case that had meaning.

But as it stands right now, you can\'t make Yucca Mountain itself any
better than it is, and from our perspective, it\'s unacceptable as a
repository, and you can call it a safety case, you can call it anything
you want, but the site itself doesn\'t provide what many of us over 20
years ago thought we needed to have before we could get to a safety
case.

COHON: I\'m still processing what you said.

As I listened to Dr. Pescatore\'s presentation, I did not interpret that
to\--well, let me start a different way. I understand what you\'re
saying to mean that because of the heavy reliance on the package and
less on the site, that a safety case for the site cannot be created. And
if that\'s one valid interpretation of what you said, my response to
that is from listening to Dr. Pescatore, it didn\'t sound to me like a
safety case was just related to the natural system, it was for the whole
system.

FRISHMAN: Where it\'s too late, the information about the natural versus
the engineered barrier has sort of led me to the it\'s too late, because
the part about the international approach to the safety case that\'s
important is that it provides the flexibility to make sequential
decisions, and we\'re beyond that.

You know, we have a sequence of decisions, but the information, and in
the international case, the presumption is that you have a sound enough
basis to make a decision to continue, and we\'re past that. The decision
to continue has already been made by the implementer, and so now the
only decisions left are a primary decision by the regulator, and a
primary decision by the regulator that we know is going to be based on
information that is different and more favorable to the site than even
the site recommendation. So, we already missed the next step in terms of
taking a decision and then looking at the information for the next.

The Department is already exercising this flexibility to give more, and
what they then want to do is carry on with the approach of the
international program with its flexibility, where they want to for
receive and possess, they want to grow on what they provided to the
regulator at the construction authorization level. And they\'re relying
on being able to grow on that, because they want to be able to make a
better case, because they\'re concerned, and they rightfully are
concerned, that their first case may not be good enough.

COHON: Thanks.

PARIZEK: Dan Bullen?

BULLEN: Bullen, Board.

Actually, you just answered my question, but I want to make sure I get
this point correctly. One of your criticisms was that during the
performance confirmation phase, you\'re going to gain more information.
And I guess the question that I had was regardless of whether or not you
had the right safety case at the beginning, if you gained more
information, that would be a valuable piece of information. But what
you\'re saying was that the site wasn\'t suitable to begin with, or
excuse me, the site wasn\'t safe within whatever regulations to begin
with, and so now gaining more information isn\'t going to make it more
safe, even if I, you know, increase my confidence.

I was a little bit confused, because I looked here and said, you know,
my question is do you think performance confirmation will make PA look
worse, and I guess the follow-on is, you\'re predicating on the fact
that the site is not suitable to begin with.

FRISHMAN: Right. And performance confirmation could make it look better
or worse, but recent history shows that it\'s more likely it will make
it look worse than better.

BULLEN: Okay. And, so, you\'re predicating the safety case on that DOE
needs to make their case right now, that they\'ve got enough
information, regardless, I mean, enough information that the site is
safe, and not base it on a promise of future research or future
information or future performance, it should be safe now?

FRISHMAN: It should be safe at the time of site recommendation. But
that\'s behind us. So, now what I\'m saying is DOE must, if the program
is even getting to a license application, which it may not, but DOE must
make its case at the time of its license application, the case that
should have been made and that has been missed, but that\'s lost. But
the next place where they have to make their case is at the submission
of a license application for a construction authorization.

BULLEN: Okay.

FRISHMAN: And that case must be as good as they think it has to be to
get a license for disposal.

BULLEN: Okay. Well, I would argue that they would say it\'s safe enough
now because it\'s as good as it has to be to make this suitability
determination. But you disagree with that?

FRISHMAN: Well, that\'s back to the 90 day question. The Act intended
that there be a license application submitted 90 days after site
recommendation, which implies very strongly that it was intended that
the information used for site recommendation would be essentially the
same information about the safety that is used in a license application.
The Department has chosen not to go that direction because they\'ve
chosen only to follow the parts of the schedule that they wanted to.

BULLEN: Okay. Actually, a point of clarification. I think Bob Card said
this morning that was meant to not delay it, right, as opposed to drive
it forward? But one of the other. I guess I\'m confused about the 90
days in the law, too.

FRISHMAN: Everything in the Waste Policy Act is meant to not delay.

BULLEN: Okay, thank you.

PARIZEK: Board questions? Dave Diodato, Staff?

DIODATO: Yes, the questions were asked and answered. Thanks.

PARIZEK: Any other questions? We have a few minutes ahead of schedule,
so, one, did anybody from the staff have any questions at all for
Claudio Pescatore? Because we didn\'t allow them to ask him questions,
and we allowed him to ask a question. Leon Reiter?

REITER: Yes. Claudio, you mentioned there were other safety indicators.
Can you give examples of some other safety indicators aside from
performance assessment that are used in different parts of the world?

PESCATORE: Well, I can. The latest study that we are going to publish
officially, but it already available, so I can give this to you, there
is a list of multiple safety indicators, and at least multiple lines of
reasoning. There\'s about ten here. I can read some to you if you wish.

People have indicated the following. The comparison of dose rates with
natural background radiation levels is one. Two, corrected dose
calculation. Three, calculation of radionuclide fluxes from various
bodies to illustrate the relative effect in the release of different
radionuclides. Four, comparison with radionuclide concentrations at
selected points with naturally occurring levels. Assessment of chemical
toxicity impacts by comparing estimated concentration with naturally
occurring concentrations with the environmental increment, and so on.

So, these are a few. Calculation of the current evolution of selected
radionuclides in different components of the repository system. So,
there\'s a few. People have come up with some of them. And I guess if
they\'re written here, it means that one program or another has used
these different indicators.

REITER: Just a followup, Claudio. Have these listed in these
international countries, are they like criteria? Say dose requirement
and also at least some sort of other safety indicator, or are they just
as background kind of information? How are they used?

PESCATORE: I would say that they are used, besides the primary
indicators, the implementers use it to show additional assurance, and
the regulator uses them for additional assurance. It may be possible,
but I would not really bet my house on this, is that some new regulatory
regimes, which are coming up, are requesting for more than one, in fact,
but I would have to check on that.

For instance, probably the Canadians are coming up with something new
right now. They\'re revising the regulation. They may be asking for more
than one. And the Swedes also. But, again, I\'m not totally sure about
this.

PARIZEK: Thank you. That\'s I think the end of this session, and I want
to thank each of the four speakers. I\'m sorry? I\'m sorry.

MC COMBIE: I\'d just finish the day with a question that nobody has
asked all day, but it\'s still in the room. It sits in the room. It sits
like a cloud over everybody here. It has to do with the connection
between the site and suitability, license application and safety case,
and how they fit together. One is the safety case will be updated. It
should be good enough for the whole system in the beginning. I think
that\'s clear. You should be clear. If you\'re not sufficiently
confident that the whole system will be safe for the total foreseen
event at the beginning, you shouldn\'t be doing the job.

If you do the job and you get a total system which is judged by the NRC
to be safe, you then continue with the science program, which we\'ve
heard about a lot this morning in particular. And then there seems to be
like two schools of thought. In some people\'s head, there\'s a thought
that the science program can only bring good results. It can only make
you feel more comfortable. It can only bring confirmation, and so on.

But, of course, in the real world, the thing that\'s worrying lots of
people I guess is the worry that the science program will bring negative
results, maybe not now, maybe in ten years, maybe in 100 years.

And then the big question that nobody has asked, what if the results are
so negative that your site suitability determination turns out to have
been the wrong decision? That\'s the big question.

Now, we heard from Rob Card that we should be looking at scenarios with
probabilities of, I don\'t know how many zeros, but that\'s the kind of
open question\--that\'s the kind of question that people get asked all
the time, internationally and the whole world, and I\'m sure you get
asked it here. And what I\'d like to hear is one from the DOE side. How
do you answer the question when somebody in Nevada comes and says what
if in 50 years time, all these marvelous new science shows that Steve
Frishman, who probably be around then, was right and we shouldn\'t have
picked it? What do you tell them?

And the second part, just to make sure you\'re not the only one on the
hook, I\'d like to hear from Steve Frishman what he thinks to the
answer.

DYER: I think the key to this is making sure, we can call it steps or
stages or phases, that no decision point, no action that you take is
totally irreversible. I mean, our current concept of a repository is
that you could have an operating repository, and at some time in the
future, decades, perhaps a century in the future, if it\'s still
operational, and if you determine that there is some fatal flaw about
your understanding of the system, whatever that might be, you can
exercise the option to take everything out of the repository and do
something else with it.

Now, we don\'t know right now what that something might be. But you\'d
have to make a risk-informed decision as to whether taking it out and
doing something with it poses a greater risk than leaving it there and
experiencing whatever bad thing you\'ve become aware of.

So, I think the concept of reversibility and retrievability is central
to the concept of a repository system and building confidence in the
idea of a repository system.

PARIZEK: Again, I want to thank all the speakers for our stimulating
afternoon. Oh, Tim, you had a question or comment?

COHON: Tim. And we invited Steve, or Dr. McCombie invited Steve to
react. So, Tim, go ahead, and then we\'ll ask Steve.

MC CARTIN: Just one quick thing. Tim McCartin, NRC.

DOE isn\'t there by themselves. NRC is the regulator, and they\'re
required in the regulation, if they learn anything that suggests the
decision, the performance assessment is changed by information they have
learned, they are required to report that to the NRC. And, so, it\'s not
just, I guess I wanted to clarify that, it\'s not the DOE sitting there
by themselves. The regulator is looking over their shoulders. During
operations, we certainly inspect and we audit what\'s going on.

And, so, in addition to the DOE, there\'s an NRC looking over their
shoulder for that if there\'s any information that comes forward.

FRISHMAN: I guess it puts me in the terrible position of having to talk
about trust, because that\'s where Russ\'s answer takes us. We have to
believe that a decision about retrieval will be made at an appropriate
level of understanding of the risk. And I guess all we can say is that
we don\'t see any history that would support that type of a decision.

In fact, we see things going the other direction, and I\'ll give you
just the most recent example, which is the current proposal to grout the
bottoms of the tanks at Hanford instead of remove all of the waste and
glassify it as it was originally suggested. And that\'s based on a risk
and cost decision for Hanford workers as much as anything else.

Oh, I guess there\'s discussion at INEL, too, about the calcion just
being put in a container. So, you know, through time, the last thing
that we in Nevada are going to do is rely on DOE 50 years from now, or
their successor, making a decision that is based on values that they
violated in the beginning. And 50 years from now, there isn\'t going to
be a waste fund. One of the reasons that we predicted all along that
there would never be a drip shield is because once the waste fund has
run out, can you imagine Congress over a ten year period putting up \$8
billion for something the Department itself says is defense in depth,
which is essentially cosmetic in this case? It isn\'t going to happen.

So, it\'s hard to conceive of them finding anything in the repository in
50 years, just as one of the questions was earlier today, that would be
so compelling about the future performance assessment that they\'d want
to undo 11,000 containers in a repository, or 17,000 containers, when
they have no place to take them.

So, you know, I can\'t read the future any better than anyone else, but
I can tell you we would trust DOE to make a risk based decision to leave
it there.

COHON: Dr. McCombie, you raised an interesting specific question,
though, and that\'s the distinction between a suitability determination
and a license application. And we\'ve never had a good distinction
between those two things. That is in the law and in the regulations, in
the program. It\'s always been rather fuzzy. The things we know for sure
are that the LA has to come after the SR. The SR has to come before the
LA. There are times indicated in the law, as we\'ve heard.

But the most reliable definition is if the President recommends it and
the Congress overrules Nevada\'s veto, then it\'s suitable. Which is
very unsatisfying, especially when you\'re talking about decision
criteria, degrees of uncertainty, levels of confidence, and I\'m just
going to repeat my tirade if I go any further. But that is a real issue.

I don\'t mean to embarrass you, but you\'ve probably been told you
resemble a certain Scottsman who was the founder of a certain university
in Pittsburgh very much. It\'s kind of spooky, folks. I have a full
sized portrait in my office of one Andrew Carnegie, and I look at this
guy every day, every morning.

The only person who signed up for public comment is Don Shettel, and
I\'ll call him forward at this time.

SHETTEL: I\'ll change the subject somewhat here. But DOE has long
studied the high temperature option for the repository design, and we
heard this morning that they believe that this is a licensable option.

The problem with this is there\'s large thermal gradients in the
near-field environment, and I\'ve talked about this many times over the
past more years than I care to remember. But this leads to significant
mass transport in this thermal gradient, and this is very difficult to
model. As we\'ve seen, we can get refluxing zones above the repository,
boiling condensation fluid, and heat pipes.

This leads to changes in porosity and permeability in these zones. If
you look at any of the models I believe that DOE has shown on the
hydrogeology, they show no changes in porosity and permeability when
they model this region.

Part of this problem may be that you can\'t model this with isothermal
equilibrium type models, such as EQ 36 and other higher level models
that include this as a component or module. You really need to use
irreversible or non-equilibrium thermodynamics. This requires perimeters
that really can only be determined by experiments. They\'re not very
amenable to prediction. And, also, any changes in the systems that you
make require that you redo the experiments, because the perimeters are
essentially empirical and not predictable.

And, to support these accusations, such as they are, I offer to the
Board, just in case they haven\'t seen it, a reprint of a paper by Sun
and Rimstidt on silica transport and thermal gradients recently
published in February in the Journal of Environmental and Engineering
Geosciences.

COHON: Thank you. If you\'d give that to Bill?

Thank you, Don. Is there anybody else who would like to comment or ask a
question? Go ahead, Judy.

TREICHEL: At the risk of earning the Sally Devlin Award, Judy Treichel,
Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.

I find tremendous contradictions between just the presentations that we
had this afternoon. In the one that Tim McCartin did, he made the
statement that it was hard to document a safety case as complex as that
at Yucca Mountain.

And then we heard from Ron Ziegler that they\'re going to have a safety
case. It will go with the license application. And it will be available
to other parties to the licensing proceeding, and we\'ve been having
major debates about whether or not the public will be a party. And it\'s
very clear that they will not.

And, so, now it\'s being said that the safety case is so complex that
possibly one would be written in regular language. And I find that
really, really difficult, because there\'s a whole lot of terminology
that\'s used in these meetings that the public would have a real hard
time with, that are difficult to understand. And I\'ve had to be here a
long time to get most of this.

But safety is a word that they really don\'t have any problem with. They
know exactly what safety is. And when Claudio was speaking, he had one
slide that isn\'t in the presentation about the definition of safety,
and the public knows what that is. They know what they expect. And their
expectation isn\'t something that\'s very difficult to document, and it
isn\'t something that may or may not be available to them in its first
iteration when it\'s very technical and may be written later.

So, something is really strange here, and it seems as though we\'re back
to the cart and horse thing, because Claudio had said a safety case is
required as a basis for making decisions. Well, an awfully important
decision has already been made, and it\'s possible that other important
decisions will be made while safety decisions, or safety determinations,
or even definitions, are being put off.

And Claudio also said that a safety case is what society wants, and what
we can do. So, that\'s pretty easy, and that shouldn\'t be hard, and you
should be able to have something that\'s down on paper that people can
see and they either say it\'s acceptable or it\'s not acceptable, it
reasonable or it\'s not reasonable. But, to me, it represents safety,
and we don\'t have anything like that.

Thanks.

COHON: Thank you. Charles?

FITZPATRICK: I\'ll probably be quick. Charles Fitzpatrick, Egan and
Associates.

I had a comment about the issue of timing. Certainly I wasn\'t going to
argue with Under Secretary Card this morning, but the suggestion was
made that the recommendation was made when it was made this year as
opposed to 90 days before license application will be ready in 2004 to
keep the process moving, to not delay.

Well, if the license application isn\'t going to be until December 2004,
whether you recommend the site this past February, or whether you
recommend the site in the summer of 2004 when some more questions posed
by the Board have been answered, does not slow the process. The license
application still sticks at December \'04.

And as far as I think he also suggested that keeping the process moving
is more important than meeting the individual statutory deadlines, and
gave an example that the January \'98 deadline for having a repository
ready was exceeded, has obviously been exceeded, but that\'s less
important, this 90 day deadline is less important than keeping the
process moving.

I would only point out that courts have already found damages to
utilities in excess of \$10 billion, payable by DOE, for missing that
\'98 deadline, and estimates run over 50 billion as to what that
exposure will be before it\'s over.

So, when statutory deadlines are sacrificed and not met, there are legal
consequences, and DOE has met them.

The second thing was just a question for Tim McCartin. Tim emphasized
that there must be multiple barriers, even suggested that even if the
waste package were shown to be effective for 100,000 or indefinitely,
nonetheless, there would still be a requirement for multiple barriers.

And in the NRC regulation 10 CFR 63, there indeed are at least two
requirements that I\'ve seen. One to describe the multiple barriers in
one place, and another to I think analyze the contribution of the
multiple barriers.

But what I do not see in 10 CFR 63, and I have not heard, is any minimum
quantification or qualification of what contribution needs to be made by
any of the barriers. So, using that hypothesis, okay, make believe that
DOE demonstrates that the waste container will last 100,000 years, and
then the assessment turns to multiple barriers, what, if anything, must
be shown as far as the level of contribution of any of the barriers. To
describe it really is meaningless. To assess its contribution can be
meaningless if the answer is insignificant contribution.

So, although the regulation 10 CFR 63 uses words, redundancy, defense in
depth, multiple barriers, I don\'t understand what NRC will literally
look for beyond compliance with the dosage requirement, if that can be
met by the waste container. And I guess that\'s my question.

MC CARTIN: Yes, that\'s correct that there is no quantitative limit for
the performance of particular barriers. The NAS recommendations for
Yucca Mountain standards cautioned against using any type of sub-system,
quantitative sub-system requirements. The Commission took that
recommendation from the NAS seriously.

We did get comments during the comment period during the proposed 63 to
suggest using a quantitative value. The Commission evaluated that.
Ultimately, the Commission felt no, they would leave it qualitative.

The capabilities of the barriers need to be described, and that is the
only requirement in the rule. So, we would have the quantitative
information of what the barriers are doing. There is no requirement for
contribution to a dose, per se.

The Department needs to describe those capabilities. The barriers were
defined as having a significant effect on affecting the movement of
water, of the contact of water with waste, or the movement of
radionuclides or water. And, so, that would be the context of that
description.

It was a Commission decision. In terms of can there be an insignificant
contribution? I would say quite clearly no. The rule is very clear. It
has to be significant. What that level is, the Commission, by leaving it
unstated, it will be in a licensing hearing. And that information will
be presented to a licensing board, and it will be decided at that time.

COHON: Thank you. Any other questions or comments?

(No response.)

COHON: We thank you all for your comments and your participation. I
thank all the speakers and all the Board members who acted as Chairs
today.

We reconvene tomorrow morning at 8 o\'clock in this room. We\'re
adjourned.

(Whereupon, at 5:08 p.m., the meeting was adjourned.)