PUBLIC MEETING
            OF THE
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

 
Taken on the date of:  Wednesday, November 17, 1999

Taken at the Bethesda Hyatt, Old Georgetown Road, Bethesda, Maryland

Starting time: 8:37 o'clock, a.m., Sandia National Laboratories, Sandia 
Corporation

Department 6141, MS-0718, Albuquerque, New Mexico  87185-0178, Phone number: 
505-844-4791

Reported by: Donna Hall, court reporter


P R O C E E D I N G S
 
MR. CAMERON:  Good morning, everybody. My name is Chip Cameron, public 
liaison within the Office of General Counsel's office at the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission, and it's my pleasure to serve as your facilitator for 
today's meeting.
 
I'd like to briefly cover what the objectives of this workshop are, what my 
role as        the facilitator will be and also some very simple ground rules 
to guide our discussion today.
 
As far as the objectives of the workshop, as you all know the NRC is planning 
to do an update of the spent fuel transportation package performance study, 
commonly called the          modal study that was done in 1987, and the NRC 
wants to insure that the new study addresses all the important issues related 
to package performance.  So with that in mind NRC has invited the public and 
knowledgeable representatives of the broad spectrum of interests that are 
affected by transportation issues to share their recommendations, their 
concerns on the scope and methodology of this new study.  The NRC hopes that 
this early input will help to insure that the design and implementation of 
the study will provide the best information for furthering the NRC's public 
health and safety responsibilities.  My personal objectives as facilitator 
today is try to assist you in three ways.  One is to keep the discussion 
organized, understandable and on schedule.  Secondly, to make sure that 
everybody has an opportunity to talk to express their concerns, their 
comments.  And third, to keep track of any action items or recommendations 
that might come out of this discussion.  I'll be using these flip charts to 
do that and for other purposes.  

In terms of the ground rules for the discussion, each of you has what's 
called a name tent in front of you and if you wish to speak during any of our 
discussion sessions, please turn that name tent on end like that and that 
will allow me to keep track of who wants to speak without you having to keep 
your hand up or waving your arms or whatever.  It will also help us to keep a 
clean transcript for the meeting.  Donna, our stenographer, is over here and 
she will be transcribing the meeting for us and those transcripts will be 
available to the participants and the public at this meeting and I believe it 
will also be posted on the NRC website.  I may not take all of the tents in 
the order that they were raised so that we can try to follow discussion 
threads on related points rather than jumping from one unrelated point to the 
other.  And from my experience I found that, there may be comments that don't 
fit neatly into the agenda item that we're discussing and so for those items, 
we're going to keep track of those and what people normally call a parking 
lot, what I call a paddock, and we will come back to those before we end to 
discuss any of those issues that were raised that might not fit into a 
particular agenda item.  Our focus is the issues related to the update of the 
package performance study.  I know that there are a lot of broader issues on 
transportation generally, and although the NRC is receptive to hearing 
comments on those, there may be issues that will need to be more fully 
addressed in other forums or through other means.  But I would note that 
there is a video being made by the NRC on spent fuel transportation and there 
will be some filming of our discussions just as a backdrop for other parts of 
that video.  We have Big Shot Productions here doing that for us today and 
they may, they would want to do some interviews not in here but during the 
breaks out there.  They may be asking some of you if you would like to do a 
five minute interview.  So I just wanted to warn you about that in advance.  

What I would like to do before getting to just a brief agenda overview, is to 
go around
the table and have each of you introduce yourselves to us and I should say 
the focus of the discussion is here at the table, but comments from the 
audience are also very important to the NRC and so after each discussion item 
we will be going out to those of you in the audience for any comments or 
questions that you might have.  We have a stand-up mike there but I will also 
bring this talking stick out to anybody who wishes to talk.  And in terms of 
the transcript, those of you in the audience who speak please give your name 
and affiliation if appropriate for the transcript.  For those of you up here 
at the
table, at least in the beginning stages, please give your name so that the 
stenographer knows who is speaking.  I think that Donna is going to get used 
to where you are and when she sees the card go up and you talk she'll -- at 
some stage we may be able to dispense of the names, but we'll give her a 
chance to get that down.  So let's go for introductions and let's start at 
the middle of the table right here with Susan.  

MS. SHANKMAN:  Good morning.  My name is Susan Shankman.  I'm the deputy of 
licensing and
inspection in the Spent Fuel Project Office which is part of the nuclear 
material safety and safeguards office in NRC.  MR. KAMPS:  Good morning.  My 
name is Kevin Kamps.  I'm the nuclear waste specialist at Nuclear Information 
and Resource Service here in Washington.  

MR. VANAGS:  Hi, my name is Uldis Vanags.  I'm nuclear safety advisor in the 
State of Maine.  I'm also representing the Northeast High Level Waste 
Transportation Task Force here today.  

MR. PRITCHARD:  Good morning.  I'm Ed Pritchard.  I am the staff director of 
the Hazardous Materials Division of the Federal Railroad Administration of 
the U.S. Department of Transportation.  

MR. FRONCZAK:  I'm Bob Fronczak.  I'm assistant vice president, Environment 
Haz Mat with the Association of American Railroads.  

MR. RESNIKOFF:  I'm Marvin Resnikoff, Radioactive Waste Management Associates 
based in
New York City.  We generally work for state and local governments on 
transportation such as the State of Nevada and Utah.  

MR. EDLOW:  Good morning.  My name is Jack Edlow with Edlow International 
Company, company for 42 years in the traffic management of nuclear materials.  

MR. HALSTEAD:  Bob Halstead, transportation advisor, State of Nevada, Agency 
for Nuclear Projects.  

MR. SHELOR:  Good morning.  I'm Dwight Shelor, the director of the Office of 
Transportation Waste Acceptance and Integration, Office of Civilian 
Radioactive Waste Management in the Department of Energy.  

MS. MUSTIN:  Good morning.  My name is Tracy Mustin.  I'm the acting director 
of the Office of Transportation within the Office of Environmental Management 
Department of Energy.  

MR. WANGLER:  Good morning.  I'm Michael Wangler.  I'm the director of the 
Package Approval and Safety Program within the Office of Environmental 
Management Department of Energy.  

MR. BOYLE:  Good morning.  I'm Rick Boyle with the U.S. Department of 
Transportation.  I head up the radioactive materials transport branch in the 
Office of Hazardous Materials Safety.  

MR. HOLDEN:  Robert Holden, National Congress of American Indians.  

MS. WESTRA:  Good morning.  I'm Heather Westra, coordinator for the Prairie 
Island Community in Minnesota.  Our interest in this workshop stems from the 
location of the nuclear power plant immediately adjacent to the tribe's 
reservation and rail lines going right through the reservation.  

MS. SUPKO:  Good morning.  I'm Eileen Supko, Energy Resources International.  
We're based in Washington, DC.  We're a energy consulting company.  

MR. KILLAR:  Good morning.  I'm Felix Killar with the Nuclear Energy 
Institute.  I'm also chairing the Nuclear Industries Task Force on 
Transportation.  We're looking on things such as the Modal Study, the 
implementation of ST1 and other international and national regulations.  

MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Amy Shollenberger with Public Citizen.  MR. RAWL:  Good 
morning.  I'm Rick Rawl.  I'm with the Transportation Technologies Group at 
Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  

MS. ENG:  Good morning.  My name is Patricia Eng and I'm chief of the 
Transportation and Storage Safety and Inspection Section.  It is my staff 
that will be overseeing the study we're going to be discussing later today.  

MR. HOLT:  I'm Mark Holt with the Congressional Research Service at the 
Library of Congress.  I'm head of the Energy and Mineral Section.  

MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you all very much.  We might as well include these 
last two here.  Charles, I didn't mean to slight you.  Go ahead.  

MR. MASSEY:  Good morning.  I'm Charles Massey.  I'm the manager of the 
Transportation Safety programs at Sandia National Laboratories.  We are the 
technical contractor who will be preparing the package performance study that 
we're here to talk about today.  

MR. EASTON:  And lastly I'm Earl Easton with the U.S. Regulatory Commission.  
I head a group of technical reviewers that does safety reviews for 
transportation and storage, packages, in the office of the Spent Fuel Project 
Office.  

MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you.  We are working on getting the microphones 
going here and I think the way the agenda works at the beginning here we'll 
have time to do that.

I just wanted to go over the agenda very briefly for all of you and I hope 
everybody got a copy of the agenda that was out on the front table.  What 
we're going to do is begin with four brief presentations by the NRC to 
provide you with a common set of information as backdrop for the discussions 
today.  At the end of those four presentations, we're going to go out to the 
participants around the table and also to the audience for clarifying 
questions.  I realize that the presentations could kickoff a lot of the 
discussion that we're going to have today.  What I would like to do is save 
that discussion for the discussion agenda items.  But to make sure that you 
do understand the information that was presented, we will have some 
clarifying questions after the completion of those four presentations and we 
hope not to go too long on all of those four.  After we do the clarifying 
questions, we're going to take a break and then we'll come back and start in 
on the first of our discussion items and these are accident likelihoods as 
you can see at the 10:30 spot on your agenda.  I will have a brief tee up, so 
to speak, by Charles Massey from Sandia Labs so that you will get an idea of 
what that particular discussion topic is all about.  We'll have discussion 
around the table.  We'll go out to the audience for questions or comments and 
after that first discussion area we're going to go to lunch and we're going 
to come back at 12:45, and we're going to continue with our discussion 
issues.  The first one after lunch is container performance during collisions 
and then we're going to go to container performance during fires.  We'll take 
a break, come back and talk about spent nuclear fuel assembly behavior and 
accidents, then testing and computer simulation methodology issues.  Then 
we're going to come back and address any issues that we haven't talked about 
so far, perhaps issues that have been up in the paddock, but also very 
importantly a process issue.  In other words, how do people think that the 
NRC should keep the public involved during this study?  I think we will get 
some good ideas on that.  Then we're going to wrap up and adjourn by 6 
o'clock.  Is there any questions on the agenda at this point before we get 
into the presentations?  As I said we can build agenda items in at any time.  
We'll keep track of them and put them in the proper place.  What I would like 
to do now is -- Susan, could you test your mike?  We're going to keep working 
on the mikes.
 
Our first presentation is Dr. Susan Shankman of the NRC.  Susan is deputy 
director for licensing inspection of the Spent Fuel Project Office at the NRC 
and Dr. Shankman has been with the Spent Fuel Project Office since 1996.  Her 
office is responsible for review and approval of designs for spent fuel 
storage systems and transportation package systems for the NRC.  Her group is 
also responsible for inspection in the development of regulations and 
guidance for spent fuel storage and transportation.  

Prior to joining the NRC, Dr. Shankman was an analyst at the U.S. Public 
Health Service and special assistant to the Maryland State Superintendent of 
Schools.  She received her bachelor of arts degree from Beaver College in 
Glenn Side, Pennsylvania.  Her master of science degree from Queens College 
City University of New York and her doctorate from the University of Southern 
California.  I would like to turn it over to Dr. Shankman.   

DR. SHANKMAN:  Good morning.  I want to begin by welcoming you all.  I'm 
happy to see you
here and I appreciate that you are here.  We have distinguished panelists at 
the table, but we also have a group of very interested people around the            
16   room and I hope we all get a chance to participate today.  As Mr. 
Cameron said, I am the deputy director of the Spent Fuel Project Office at 
the NRC.  The Spent Fuel Project Office has convened or assembled this 
meeting this morning with a very specific purpose of hearing your concerns 
about the transportation of spent fuel.  We are sponsoring a study that 
Sandia is helping us with and that study is to look at package performance.  
That's the container as well as contents of spent fuel packages that will be 
transported throughout the United States.

I want to emphasize that there are no middlemen here.  I am the deputy 
director.  I sign the papers that go out that approve designs.  We have with 
us today the members of our technical team who will also be working on this 
study.  The NRC and those people I will introduce later are the people who 
will make the decisions about what is studied and how it is studied.  For me 
this is not an abstract concept.  I live in Garrett Park.  It was started as 
a railroad town.  The main line that goes from Washington West, goes 300 feet 
from my house and I too am concerned about what's on those trains.
 
My job this morning is to give you a ittle background, so I will start by 
talking about what the NRC is and what we do, who we are.  The NRC is an 
independent federal agency.  Our mission, our job is to protect public health 
and safety.  Like other regulatory agencies we set standards and we enforce 
them.  The mission of the Spent Fuel Project Office is to set those standards 
and enforce them in the design and fabrication of packages for spent fuel 
transportation.  We don't actually move the fuel, we regulate those that do.  
We approve the designs of the package systems.  The other aspects of fuel 
transport are regulated by other agencies.  NRC is a very experienced agency 
since 1974 when the AE, Atomic Energy agency, was split into a regulatory 
side and a developmental side.  We have been regulating atomic agency at 
licensed activities.  We regulate nuclear power plants.  We regulate medical 
uses of materials.  We regulate waste and disposal issues and we regulate the 
transport of radioactive materials.  The staff at the NRC has more than, if 
you can subtract 1974 from 1999, it's many years of experience in regulating 
these activities.  We have been reviewing cask designs and their construction 
and fuel characteristics and observing nuclear power plant fuel operations 
for all these years.  We use that experience every day.  And we try to make 
sure that what we are doing results in safe transport of spent fuel.  Our 
mission, as I said, is public health and safety.  We make rules.  We approve 
what licensees plan to do.  We do that by issuing licenses and certificates.  
We review these things using standardized guidance with standard review 
plans.  We provide guidance to licensees and certificate holders on how to 
meet the requirements of the rules.  We inspect performance and then we 
enforce compliance with those rules.
 
NRC has several guiding principles in how we conduct our operations.  The 
first one is independence.  That does not mean that we are isolated.  Part of 
today's goal is to hear your concerns but we do keep an unbiased and 
objective approach to our work.  Efficiency is one of our guiding principles.  
We believe at NRC that the taxpayer, the rate payer and licensees are 
entitled to the  most efficient and effective management and administration 
of our activities.  Clarity.  Our regulations are meant to be coherent, 
logical and practical and we often need your help in making sure that that is 
accomplished.  Reliability.  Another of our guiding principles.  Regulations 
should be based on the best available knowledge and the reason we continue to 
do studies is our knowledge evolves and we look at the information we get 
from our studies and look at our regulations and our guidance to see if they 
are still effective and efficient.   

Openness.  Anyone who has dealt with the NRC for a while will know that we 
have evolved into, at this point in time, deeply believing that regulations 
are the public's business and that public involvement is vital to having 
regulations that meet our mission.  So transportation, safety of spent fuel 
is what brings us here today.  To give you a perspective I think most of you 
know that there are seven classes of hazardous material and radioactive 
material is just one of those seven classes that spent fuel is a small 
percentage of  the shipments that are made of hazardous material.  The study 
we are beginning today, I should say, will be on very technical experience 
and while Sandia National Lab is the contractor that we have selected to do 
the work, we will be
carrying out the study with NRC staff and I want to introduce them today 
because they will make the decisions with oversight by myself and my staff.  
They will make the decisions on how we conduct the study and what is studied.  
So let me start with Mr. Rob Lewis.  Mr. Lewis is a predicality expert, 
shielding expert, those areas, but he's also the project manager for this.  
By the way, everyone I will introduce has a name tag and I hope that at the 
breaks we will take a opportunity to talk to them personally as well as in 
the forum.

Ms. Sara Kopel is our expert on containment.  Dr. Henry Lee, structural 
expert.  Mr. Ron Parkhill who will be working on thermal issues and Mr. Jeff 
Ponset is our materials expert.  This is the team that will oversee this 
project from beginning to end.  The last few years NRC has been integrating 
risks into our decision making.  What that means in the area of 
transportation is that we make sure that on an ongoing basis that we 
understand the risks that we regulate.  If we learn something new, new data, 
we use that and we make sure that what we're doing every day continues to 
maintain safety.  That's what this study is about.  It's an effort to gain 
more knowledge than we have.  We  believe we have a continuous mission to 
keep learning more.  Earl Easton sitting to my right.  Mr. Easton is going to 
discuss the previous studies that we have done so that we can put this study 
in the context of where we are.NRC's goal is to conduct impartial and 
rigorous safety evaluations when we issue a certificate or a license.  
Another way to say that is we try to be effective and efficient and realistic 
how we use our guidance and our regulations.  We make decisions in an open 
way.  We try to include the public in the review of our rules that's 
mandatory, but we also have all of our meetings noticed and this meeting is 
also part of our effort to involve the public in our decisions.
 
We support our decisions with experience, facts, statistics as you know show 
spent fuel transport is safe and we want to maintain that safety.  Public 
involvement.  And I think I said this many times now this morning, but I just 
want to reiterate it, is an important part of our efforts.  You can help us 
and you can help us throughout this study and there are many ways you can 
continue to be involved besides today by telling us what you think, what you 
are concerned about and especially by being candid.  The more we know about 
what the concerns are, the better we can use our resources to be sure that 
regulatory requirements are met and that those requirements minimize risks.
 
There are forms on the table outside that you can send back to us.  Some 
people don't like to say what they want to say in a public forum.  You can 
either put them on the forms or leave them with us today or you can send them 
in.  They are already preaddressed but not prestamped.
 
After we have incorporated the feedback from this meeting into a 
comprehensive report, we will end phase one of this study in which we will 
recommend, with Sandia's help, will have a recommendation of how to proceed 
with the study.  At that point we intend to involve the public again.  We 
intend to have more meetings.  Everything that we are doing will be on our 
website.  How to get in touch with us through the website is also on a 
information sheet.  Really what I wanted to say this morning is as the deputy 
director of the division, I can tell you personally that all the ideas that 
we
have will be considered.  They will be evaluated and they will be explored.  
There is nothing that anybody says today that will not be on the transcript 
and therefore we have the ideas and I urge you if you don't say what you want 
to say today to write to us.  You can also contact us through the web.  Let 
me end by saying this study in particular cannot be done without your help.  
We need you to be candid.  We need you to express what is your concern.  We 
need you to tell us.  You can either write to us, call us or tell us in 
person today.  So thank you very much for being here.  I'll pass the mike 
back to Chip.  

MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Dr. Shankman.  We're going to continue with 
providing background information to you and go to our second presenter Ms. 
Patricia Eng from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff.  

Ms. Eng is currently chief of the transportation and storage safety and 
inspection section of the Spent Fuel Project Office and her part of that 
organization is responsible for developing the regulations for transport and 
storage, radioactive materials and she also oversees the inspection of 
facilities and organizations that are involved in a design fabrication, 
maintenance and operation of packaging and storage systems.  Before Pat came 
to the Spent Fuel Project Office she was, has been in a variety of positions 
at the NRC, including being the technical assistant to former Commissioner 
Gail Duplank (phonetic) and Pat has also served as a resident inspector at 
one of the NRC's licensed6   power plants.  She's a registered, professional 
mechanical engineer with a bachelors of science degree in nuclear engineering 
from the University of Illinois and Pat is going to give us an 10   overview 
of the regulatory framework.  Pat?  

MS. ENG:  Thank you, Mr. Cameron.  Good morning and welcome.  My name is 
Patricia Eng and I am the chief of the Transportation and Storage, Safety and 
Inspection Section.  I am responsible for the oversight, the study that Dr. 
Shankman referred to earlier and this meeting is very important to us.
 
We want to establish a dialogue, an open and candid dialogue with you so we 
can identify the issues that we need to focus on when we conduct this study.  
In order to help focus our discussions throughout the day, I would like to 
describe how the different federal agencies that are here today work together 
to oversee the safe transport of radioactive material.  There are three major 
players.  They are U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of 
Transportation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  I would like to 
discuss a little bit about the Department of Energy and we have three very 
qualified representatives from the department here with us today and they 
introduced themselves earlier.  

The department was given the assignment of identifying, characterizing and 
ultimately operating a long-term geologic repository for the disposal of our 
nation's high-level radioactive waste which includes spent fuel.  This was 
done through the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and subsequent amendments 
and I won't go through the legislative lesson, but that's where DOE was given 
this assignment.  At the moment the department is actively sight as the 
potential place for the repository and as part of the licensing process the 
department prepared a draft environmental impact statement that was published 
this past August by the office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.
 
One of the issues that's addressed in this draft environmental impact 
statement is the pact of transporting high level waste across the country 
from 77 different locations.  The nuclear regulatory commission is currently 
reviewing this draft environment impact statement and we hope to complete our 
review later this year.  In the meantime the department is holding a series 
of public meetings at various locations to get public input on their 
environmental impact statement.  The department is required to ship the high-
level waste in nuclear regulatory commission certified transportation 
packages and they have stated that they will comply with applicable NRC and 
Department of transportation regulations.
  
So today we're joined by Ms. Tracy Mustin, Mr. Dwight Shelor and Mr. Michael 
Wangler from the department.  Thank you so much for coming.  Next let's look 
at the Department of transportation.  The Department of Transportation is the 
regulatory authority overseeing transport of all kinds in the United States.  
As part of their job, they establish the requirements for the transport of 
all hazardous materials, and as Dr. Shankman mentioned earlier, radioactive 
material is a subclass of hazardous material.  The research and special 
programs administration of the Department of Transportation has issued 
regulations regarding the labelling and marking of transport packages, 
placarding of vehicles and defining what needs to go into the shipping papers 
that accompany such shipments.  They also established training requirements 
for both shippers and carriers and in the case of the Federal Highway 
Administration, they have established guidelines or selecting transport 
routes on our nation's highways.
 
Without going into a lot of detail, on the table outside there is a copy of 
those regulations regarding route selection.  With us today are Mr. Rick 
Boyle who is chief of the Radioactive Materials Branch of the Research and 
Special Programs Administration and Mr. Ed Pritchard who is the staff 
director for hazardous  materials for Federal Railroad Administration.  11   
Thanks for coming.  Now let's get down to my agency, the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission.  With regards to transportation, the NRC provides technical 
assistance to the Department of Transportation and we provide assistance to 
them in three ways.  First, we've established regulations related to the 
transport of missile material and large quantities of radioactive material.  
As Dr. Shankman alluded to a few moments ago, we also conduct inspections of 
transportation activities and enforce the regulations by imposing sanctions 
when necessary.  Second, we play a role in insuring the physical security of 
shipments along the transportation route.  This includes insuring that there 
are continuous communications capability with the shipment at all times when 
it's in transport, that the law enforcement agencies along the route are 
knowledgeable of the shipment and can respond if needed and that 
predesignated safe havens are identified.  So what if a driver needs to stop 
for any particular reason such as a flat tire or any particular reason?  A 
suitable location is already known where he or she can pull the vehicle off 
the road and response can be dispatched.  Today we'll focus on the NRC's 
third major responsibility and that is the certification of spent fuel 
transport package designs.  In order to certify a design for use, we do a 
thorough technical review of the proposed design and you've met the technical 
review team and we require that each design be tested prior to its first use.
 
Today's discussions will revolve around the scope and the content of these 
technical reviews.  First, why are we doing this study and why now?  Briefly 
let me describe our regulatory process.  The Spent Fuel Project Office is 
responsible for writing and enforcing regulations for the safe transport and 
interim storage of spent fuel.  Our regulations are based on sound 
engineering judgment, experience in the fast technical data we can get our 
hands on.
 
In a few moments Mr. Earl Easton will discuss the transportation safety 
studies that we have done in the past and hopefully you will understand how 
we based our regulations.  Since that time the computers that we used to do 
the analyses have shrunk in size and yet increased our calculational 
capability in amazing ways that we never foresaw.  We have much more detailed 
and powerful analytical tools at our disposal now than we did then and we're 
also starting to see that the industries proposing new transportation cask 
designs that are very different than the ones that we looked at back in the 
'70s and '80s.  So it makes sense to us that it is time for us to take 
another look at transportation and look at the regulations that we put in 
place, particularly before the repository opens its doors.
 
In order to make sure that we are providing for the safe transport of spent 
fuel, we need to evaluate how all these differences and calculational 
capability and new designs will perform.  Therefore it's very, very important 
that we hear from our stakeholders, which of course includes the public, so 
we can focus on the issues that are important to safety so that we can insure 
the transport of radioactive materials continues to be safe.  Thank you.  

MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Pat.  Our third presentation is going to 
be by Mr. Earl Easton.  Mr. Easton is the section chief of the Technical 
Review Section of the Spent Nuclear Fuel Project Office.  That section is 
responsible for review of shipping and storage packages and he's going to 
give us an overview on past studies that have been done and some background 
on spent fuel packaging and transport.  Generally, Earl has been with the 
agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, since 1982 and he has a chemical 
engineering degree from the University of Maryland.  Earl?  

MR. EASTON:  Thank you, Chip.  For those of you who do not yet know me, I am 
as stated Earl Easton, section leader in the Spent Fuel Project Office.  I 
have been involved in the area of transportation safety for about 15 years.  
Actually if I calculate the date from when Mr. Cameron said 1982, it's closer 
to 17 years.  My first assignment at the commission  was as a safety reviewer 
for spent fuel shipping packages.  Later as a section leader I was either 
directly or indirectly involved in many of the transportation risk studies 
completed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
Currently, I head a group of expert technical reviewers who are responsible 
for the safety review of both storage and transportation casks for spent 
nuclear fuel.  Many of those reviewers are in the audience.  Some have been 
introduced to you and I would also encourage you to take advantage of their 
expertise during this meeting.  As I look around this morning, I am 
particularly pleased to see the number of experts in the area of 
transportation sitting at the table and in the audience.  Many of you g I have been asked to say 
a few words about a subject very important to all of us.  That is the safety 
of spent fuel shipments.  It is an important subject.  Spent fuel is a 
hazardous material.  It will be transported through your communities perhaps 
or near your communities and as much as we do not like to admit the 
possibility, accidents do happen.  During my 15 years in this area I have 
witnessed many changes.  Today's casks are being designed to hold larger 
quantities of fuel.  We're taking advantage of new technologies and new 
material.  The capability of analytical tools for analyzing the safety cask 
have taken leaps.  And indeed the federal government's policy on where 
ultimately spent fuel will be transported and shipped is involved.
 
The latter change, of course, I think has a significant impact on the numbers 
and destination of future shipments.  But throughout my time at the 
commission, there is one thing that has not changed and I am proud to say 
that it is the NRC's commitment to protecting public health and safety.  How 
do we know spent fuel shipments are safe?  And how do we assure that spent 
fuel shipments will remain safe in the future?  We know that spent fuel is 
being shipped safely today because first, spent fuel casks are designed to 
meet fairly rigorous performance standards.  These standards consider the 
possibility of accidents and rather severe accidents.  

Second, the safety record of spent fuel shipments has been excellent.  Third, 
the NRC has conducted a series of safety and risk studies on shipping casks 
designed to its performance standards.  All of these studies have indicated 
that the risk of spent fuel shipments is low even when considering severe 
accidents.

The largest factor in ensuring the safety of spent fuel shipments is, of 
course, the robust nature of spent fuel shipping cask design.  All spent fuel 
cask are designed to meet a set of very rigorous performance standards.  And 
if I can direct your attention to the slide, this is a list, depiction of 
those rigorous standards.  These include a pretty severe impact test, 
followed by a puncture test, fire test and an immersion test.
 
At the conclusion of these tests packages have to retain the radioactive 
material with virtually no release.  These standards were developed in 
cooperation with other countries at the IEA.  They're world accepted and they 
have been in place for about 30 years with these basic requirements 
unchanged.  If I can go to the next slide.  Second, just let me briefly go 
over what is the history of spent fuel shipments.  From the time period 1979 
to 1997, there have been approximately 1300 commercial spent fuel shipments 
in the U.S. These shipments have taken place largely between nuclear power 
plants or between nuclear power plants and spent fuel storage locations such 
as West Valley.  The exact location and destination of these shipments along 
with the routes that are published annually by the NRC and are made publicly 
available.  Every year the NRC puts out a tabulation of spent fuel shipments.  
It gives where shipments originate, where they go to and what routes they 
take.  This is all a matter of public record and publicly available if you 
request.
 
Approximately 90 percent of the shipments or 1150 shipments were shipped by 
truck.  The remaining 10 percent went by rail.  So we have some experience 
with both rail shipment and truck shipment.  The total distance traveled for 
all these shipments approximately 900,000 miles.  However, in terms of the 
quantity of spent fuel shipped, 75 percent went by rail because of the much 
larger capacity of rail cask.  During that period a total of eight accidents 
were reported, and in fact to clarify, one of the accidents is outside of the 
1979 to 1997 range.  It actually occurred prior to 1979.  In four of these 
accidents, the casks were empty and the remaining accidents, casks had spent 
fuel in them.  Of the four accidents involving spent fuel, three were by 
truck, one was by rail.  But in all of these accidents there was no release 
of radioactive material.  Now I think it's an important point to bring up at 
this point what is 15   an accident?
 
You can tabulate accident rates and accidents in many ways depending on how 
you define an accident.  The definition that we use in counting these 
accidents is based on the reporting requirements under NRC regulations or DOT 
regulations.  Why do we use that  particular measure of accident?  Well, 
number one people are required to report it.  So we're fairly certain that 
we'll get the data.  And second it is a concrete definition.  When people 
exceed those limits they need to record it.  And those limits are basically 
loss of life, exceeding a certain amount of property damage or suspected 
damage or leakage.  Sometimes these, this data collected this way 
overestimates accidents because there are accidents that cause property 
damage over the amount that is reportable, but really not severe enough to 
challenge the cask or truck or route.  I would also like to note that in, and 
I hope I don't put many people on the spot, but in the report prepared by Mr. 
Holt, he also reported the experience of the British in which they reported 
over 8,000 rail shipments without any release of nuclear.  The final point I 
would like to make in this area is this is an area that the commission 
monitors very closely.  We count shipments and notified of all shipments.  We 
know where they're 43 coming from.  We know where they're going.  We know 
when there is an accident and we are looking to see if any difficulties 
develop.  So we monitor this area very closely.  We intend to keep this 
safety record intact.  Next, I would like to begin to discuss safety studies 
that the NRC has conducted.  The NRC has conducted a number of safety 
studies, some that came into existence in 1974.  I will briefly mention two 
that were done and two that are in the works.  But to put it in perspective, 
what are the things that we look at when we do these studies?  How are we 
attempting to measure this?
 
First, we look at the likelihood of accidents.  How likely is an accident and 
how severe is it likely to be?  Second, we look at the consequences.  What 
are the consequences that can result in any given type of accidents?  You 
take those two facts and taken together that gives us an estimate of risk.  
So the studies I'm about to discuss are really based on determining risks 
using these factors.
 
To put this meeting in perspective let me try to illustrate where we are.  My 
aim is a
little off.  

MR. CAMERON:  We may need to go to the nontechnological process here and 
point it out on the view graph itself if you could.  

MR. EASTON:  If you can move down between 1987 and the year 2000.  The study 
done, and keep your red dot there because that's where we are.  The study 
done in 1977 basically was the first study done by the commission as an 
overall look at transportation.  We followed that up with a specific look at 
how shipping containers or spent fuel performed in accidents.  Those have 
been published and publicly available for many years and we have gotten 
comments from many of the experts in the audience already on those and those 
have been actively under consideration for sometime.  In early 2000 we are 
going to release another study that is an attempt to update risk estimates of 
spent fuel shipments.  One of the purposes was to see whether the original 
study done in 1977 is still valid.  The conclusions drawn in that study are 
still valid.  Over and beyond that we try to get a realistic estimate of what 
the real risk of shipping spent fuel might be.  This study will come out 
again in February or March of the year 2000.  We encourage you to get copies 
of that study.  We will accept comments on that study, the methodologies 
used, the conclusions drawn, et cetera. MR. HALSTEAD:  Is this a draft that's 
going to come out in February or March that you are asking for comment on?  

MR. CAMERON:  Could we -- I know Bob.  What I would like to do is let's 
answer this quickly if we can and then let's come back at the, after Rob 
Lewis' presentation and go to all of these questions and I thank you all for 
your patience.  We're giving you a lot of background 46 information of which 
there is not only a lot of questions, but I'm sure a lot of difference of 
opinion on some of the things that might have been said.  Could you just 
answer Bob's question quickly for us?  

MR. EASTON:  Yes, Mr. Halstead.  Let me answer your question but bear with 
me.  I'm going to do it within the next couple of sentences. The purpose of 
this meeting today is 11 basically to get your concerns on our relook at 
shipping container response to severe accidents.  

Your concerns will again be discussed in public workshops next month.  At the 
same time we anticipate considering comments on the update, the 2000 study, 
we will consider comments also in workshops during the next summer, but this 
is a final contractor report submitted to the NRC.  But read it.  I encourage 
you to read it.  We will accept comments and those comments will be explored 
and considered in upcoming workshops.
 
Thank you, Dr. Shankman, she reminded me 47 it will be on the web.  So as 
soon as this study is released it will be made available on the website.  
Does that answer?  

MR. HALSTEAD:  I'll save comment.  Thank you.  

MR. EASTON:  Let me just briefly discuss three studies that we either have 
completed or have in the works.  The first we commonly refer to as NUREG 
0170, the correct title is given right below that, but this was the first 
comprehensive look at transportation safety undertaking the NRC after its 
formation in 1974.  Its objective was to determine whether package 
performance standards contained in the commission's regulations were adequate 
to insure public health and safety.  As such it addressed all radioactive 
material.  It was not limited to spent fuel.  It considered both routine 
aspects of shipment as well as accidents.  In analyzing the risk for 
potential accidents, the study made certain assumptions.  That was in part 
because of the analytical 48 capabilities present in 1977 could not model 
things in detail like you do today.  So largely accident analysis were based 
on good judgment.  accidents were basically grouped into the severities and 
judgments were made on which severities led to consequences.  These were in 
large part very conservative assumptions.  If a package was assumed to be 
significantly damaged, it is assumed that all of its contents were released.  
Given this, the study still concluded that the risk of shipping spent fuel 
was low, given that the likelihood of severe accidents and the consequences 
of severe accidents.
 
As a result, he likes to jump the gun, as a result the commission confirmed 
that its regulations were adequate and noticed that in the Federal Register 
and it committed at the same time to keep transportation standards under 
continuous review.  

As part of that continual review, the commission undertook a study about 1985 
to do a more detailed look on spent fuel cask response to severe accidents.  
This is commonly called the modal study.  The term modal comes from the fact 
that it considered both rail and highway modes of transportation that's used 
as a shortcut in the this area.  So when I say modal study I'm referring to 
the 1987 study on shipping container response to severe accidents.  

In this study, computer models were used to predict the behavior of shipping 
cask response.  What was done was generic models were developed for shipping 
casks.  That's an important point because we did not actually look at 
individual shipping casks.  We were looking at a generic cask that minimally 
met performance standards.  That is that they only met the performance 
standards given in a previous design.

Many cask designs exceeded those, but we were interested in the margins of 
safety provided 21   by the standards and not any particular package.  So 
this is why we developed generic models and 50 why individual packages do not 
show up in the study.  Although advances in computer technology allowed us to 
model casks in greater detail, there were some aspects of the cask that could 
not be modeled in detail we would have liked.  Those dealt with cask 
closures, impact limiters and fuel behavior.  Let me give a few words of 
explanation on those.  
 
Cask closures typically are bolted with many, many bolts, 40 or so bolts that 
hold the lid on the cask.  The stated computer analysis at that stage was not 
sufficient to model individual bolts on the lid.  Fuel behavior didn't 
actually model how fuel lines, which contained the fuel, would fracture or 
break or under severe impacts.
 
What was done was a number of conservative judgments were made so as to 
overestimate the actual consequences.  This was to compensate for a lack in 
detail of model.  Also the study looked at several real life, but I must 
emphasize nonspent fuel accidents, to see 51 how casks would perform for 
those particular type of accidents.  The reason we couldn't use spent fuel 
accidents is because there weren't any.  To give you an example the type of 
accidents we looked at, there was a pretty extensive tunnel fire which 
involved a three vehicle collision with a gasoline truck.  There was a fire 
for over three hours at 1900 degrees Fahrenheit and involved about 8800 
gallons of gasoline.
 
There was a bridge collision in which a pickup truck failed, was involved in 
a collision and fell 64 feet onto soil.  Those were the truck accidents 
looked at.  Two rail accidents that were looked at was a train derailment 
called the Livingston train derailment, which involved the derailment of 
petroleum tank cars, large fires over several days and there were two 
explosives.  There was also a derailment on the Alabama River in which the 
vehicle, the train cars involved plunged 75 feet into the water and mud 
below.52.
  
These real life accidents were translated into the computer modelling and 
from those simulated various impacts and thermal environment impacts.  What 
the studies show is that for all of these accidents, all four of those 
accidents, there would not be a release that significantly threatened public 
health and safety.  In fact the study concluded that the risk of accidents 
was low and lower than NUREG 0170.  It turned out as we were able to more 
accurately describe accidents, model accidents, the risks were found to be 
lower. This slide is concerning the upcoming study that would come out in 
March of 2000.  Why are we doing this?  Well, we want to keep up with change.  
We know that the number of shipments is changing.  When the repository opens 
that will significantly increase shipments.  We know that there are new cask 
designs with much larger capacity.  We would like to verify the performance 
and severe accidents.  We verify the 53 performance routinely to our 
performance standards, but we would like to go over and above that and verify 
what would happen in severe accidents.
 
We have enhanced analytical capability that we can do more detail models.  We 
can focus in on areas of the cask that before were not amenable to detail 
computer models.  This study will be published in March 2000.  I would again 
10   encourage you to read it and comment.
 
Conclusions.  Through a combination of the shipping records, through our 
knowledge of performance standards and how casks meet those performance 
standards, our history of doing risk studies, we know that spent fuel can be 
safely shipped today.  But we are not going to rest on that fact.
 
We are committed to maintaining that safety record completely and that is why 
we are doing the additional studies.  And the last point I cannot 
overemphasize, is your participation from both expert members of the public 
is you for questions in the audience.  Rob?
 
MR. LEWIS:  Thank you, Chip.  As the NRC staff's project manager for the 
upcoming package performance study, I did a lot of legwork for today's 
meeting and along with the help from the technical team and several NRC staff 
and also the Sandia staff, and I would like to thank you on their behalf and 
my own thanks for taking your time to be here today.  We all believe it means 
a lot to the success of this study.

There are three points I would like to make during my talk.  I would like to 
build on Earl's talk and describe our starting point both for today as well 
as for the package performance study.  I would like to describe how we will 
use the package performance study and the approach we are going to use which 
is a little different than the approaches we used on the past studies that 
Earl described.
 
This study that we're embarking upon has been called the modal study two, has 
been called the package performance study.  We're using the term today 
package performance study throughout the day because there is a lot of 
confusion when we first started calling it modal study two.  A lot of people 
believed we were starting from scratch and redoing modal study and that's not 
the case.  I will describe a little bit what we are actually doing.  Above 
all else as every speaker has mentioned, we are here today to listen to and 
understand any transportation concerns you have regarding accidents, cask 
performance in those accidents so we can take those concerns and fold them 
into our study and build the most effective study.  We want your ideas on not 
only the technical approach to the study, which I will describe and Sandia 
will describe through the rest of the day, but also we want your ideas on our 
approach we are using to involve the public.  I'll discuss that a little more 
in a second.
 
If you hear any issues today we're going to present several suggestions.  If 
you don't hear any issues that you believe needs to be part of this project, 
please mention that.  Provide your suggestions if you have any on how you 
would use analysis or testing to resolve those issues.  Now there are three 
factors that influenced our approach for the package performance study.  
These three factors are the way we use accident assessments, the possible 
role that physical testing might have in this project and the, our desire to 
use public involvement throughout this project as opposed to after we have 
performed some analysis and testing, after we have a draft or final report.  
Regarding accident assessments, what we're trying to do in the package 
performance study is to build upon our safety record that we established 
through the studies through our transportation experience and our starting 
point is, as it was for the modal study, is casks that meet our standards and 
Part 71, the four tests that were described by Mr. Easton.  We will update 
and improve our analysis using modern technologies.  We will use assumptions 
that reflect the newer cask designs and modern technologies and our whole 
approach is based on our desire to focus on those issues that are most 
important to safety during accidents.  During the past few years at NRC, 
there s an initiative to use risk informed techniques.  What that means to us 
we use accident assessments in all the areas we regulate to focus our 
resources and our licensees' resources on the issues that really affect 
safety the most.  We believe the result of that will be an overall safer 
system.

We will also build upon the 19, I'm sorry, the 2000 NUREG 0170 update that 
was mentioned by Mr. Easton.  Throughout the day Sandia will describe what 
they did in the NUREG 0170 update.  They're not done yet.  We are in the 
process of reviewing what they're doing. Their starting point for that update 
was the 1987 modal study and work that has been done since and each topical 
area for the rest of the day Dr. Massey from Sandia Labs will provide some 
information about their methodology.
 
The second main bullet on the slide shows the methodology that we plan on 
using to do the package performance study.  It's a step-by-step walk through 
of the way we approach accident assessments in transportation.
 
This is the same general methodology that appears in the original 0170, the 
modal study and the 0170 update.  The methodology is described much better in 
this blue brochure that we publish.  It's available in the back and I believe 
that we've mailed it to most everyone in this room.  You will note, by the 
way, that this methodology, this five steps generally follow today's agenda 
as well and there is a reason for that.  The reason is that once again this 
is the methodology that we propose to use for the package performance study.  
We're particularly interested in your thoughts on our continued use of this 
methodology.
 
Steps two and four in particular on this slide are some of the more difficult 
steps.  They involve to a greater extent engineering judgment, and 
conceptualizations of what happens.  They involve to a less extent the use of 
hard data and therefore we're also particularly interested in how we'll 
approach those two steps for the package performance study.  

It's reasonable to assume that physical testing of some sort will have a role 
in any follow on research to the original modal study.  Therefore, we 
selected Sandia Labs to start a  scoping study, if possible, follow on 
research from the original modal study.  They're currently under contract to 
do that.  Today is part of that contract.  You heard it mentioned as phase 
one.
 
We currently have one project for phase two or any future phases.  Those 
efforts would be decided upon next year once we are through with this phase 
one.  And the end product of phase one of Sandia's contract is issues and 
resolution options report.  That report will recognize any concerns you raise 
today and it's akin to a proposal for follow on research.  Sandia Labs was 
selected naturally because of their testing, existing testing facilities and 
their experience testing packages for radioactive material transport, not 
only spent fuel packages, they have done a lot of tests in the past on 
packages for transporting large quantities of radioactive materials.  Because 
physical testing will have a role, we adopted it in a public involvement 
approach that's a little different than the public involvement approach we 
used for the modal study for the 0170 update.  The public involvement, of 
course, is important to us in general.  But specifically for this project if 
we do do testing we need to be very efficient in doing that testing and we 
need to do it in a way that collects data that is most relevant to safety and 
most useful to guaranteeing the safety of these shipments during accidents.  

Final slide is a type of summation of many of the comments that you have 
heard today.  I will explain here how we are trying to involve the public for 
this project.  The best way to stay in touch with this project or to be 
involved is to use our website.  The address appears, the URL address appears 
here.  On that website we have several things:  background information, there 
is a form for comments and responses and there is a section in the website 
where we will provide the comments we receive along with each response.  

As the project progresses we will update frequently this website with project 
status, with new reports as they become available, including the reports from 
the sister project the NUREG 0170 reevaluation project that you will hear a 
little more about this afternoon.  The second way we are trying to involve 
the public throughout this project beginning today is through these workshops 
in this forum.  We will also have a workshop very similar to this  in 
Henderson, Nevada on December 8th.  That  workshop will be geared more 
towards western 63 interests; county governments, state and county 
governments and locals in the West that have a particular interest in spent 
fuel for reasons that everyone is aware of; the Yucca Mountain project and 
storage facilities and such.  As Mr. Easton mentioned we will be performing 
additional workshops next summer.  The additional workshops will cover both 
the NUREG 0170 update and the issues and resolution options report that I 
mentioned that comes out of the package performance study.  That should be 
available sometime around May and our goal for the 0170 update is sometime 
around March.  So shortly thereafter we will have these workshops to try and 
merge these two projects and move forward on the package performance study in 
particular and on all of our work on transportation safety.
 
We are also in the process of establishing a mailing list.  Sandia has 
produced for us these very nice forms that have name and address information 
at the bottom.  If you would
64 fill that out and leave that with us or mail it in to us we will provide 
you as the project progresses with updates.  If you don't like to use the 
website in particular, this is a good way to stay involved.  
 
As I mentioned, for the rest of the day Sandia will lead us through a 
technical discussion of each of the issues that we will look at during the 
package performance study where potential follow on work, and Dr. Massey will 
provide a kickoff, five minutes or so kickoff, of each topic to try to 
stimulate discussion.  We also have a handout in the back that has discussion 
pointers to stimulate ideas among the audience and the table participants to 
keep the focus of the discussions to that topic.  I'm looking forward to your 
input today and in conclusion I would like to thank you once again for being 
here and I feel that what you have to say will help us design the most 
effective project.  Thank you.   
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Rob. That's the last of the presentations 
and I know there is probably a lot of questions and perhaps even a few 
comments on those questions and we're going to go first to Marvin Resnikoff 
and ask everybody to use their name tents to signify if you want to make a 
comment.   

There is a loose wire that will need to be fixed at the break so I'm going to 
pass this mike to you and if you could use that one to respond.  Marvin?  
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  I have a list of questions.  I have been involved in 
transportation issues as you know since, before the NRC for Attorney General 
Lefwitz (phonetic) involving transportation of plutonium from Kennedy Airport 
that gave rise to NUREG 170 and we commented on NUREG 170 and I'm interested 
that you're doing an update on that, but I'm concerned that there is no 
public input in that update.  There should be public input.  You should issue  
as a draft and you should allow the public to comment on that draft.  That's 
not a question but if, you know, if you would like to comment on that.  I'm 
concerned that the previous authors of the modal study are not here.  Larry 
Fisher, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory -- I'm asking a question about the 
continuity between the past study and the present study.  Are they going to 
be involved?  Is Lawrence Livermore Lab going to be involved with Sandia?  I 
just have a few questions.  
 
That brings me to another issue which involves peer review of this study.  
Exactly how are you going to do peer review?  Who is going to do it?  Is 
Lawrence Livermore going to be involved in doing that?  I have a more general 
question which is, that's very confusing to me and to some of the states that 
we work with such as the state of Utah and that is what exactly is the 
relationship between, I know you touched on the subject, but what exactly is 
the relationship between this study, modal study, and other studies that you 
are doing?  For instance, you have done NUREG 1437 which is an update of 
table S3, which depends on, as I recall, on Wash 1238 an AEC publication.  
You are going to do an EIS for the BFS facility in the State of Utah.  How 
exactly does sabotage fit into this study?
 
Let me give you a suggestion as to how I think it's going to go and I would 
sort of like to know your comments on that.  This study is going to be input 
into the computer program which will estimate accident consequences and 
incident free consequences.  And that in turn is fit into the various EISs 
that you are going to produce in the future.  Is that what's going to happen 
and if that's so, this is my final point, my question is why are you 
bifurcating the process into little teeny pieces?  Why don't you produce a 
large EIS which addresses all the issues involved in transportation, involves 
the economic issues, the economic consequences of accidents, involves 
nonaccident situations.   
 
In other words, a full EIS which investigates the health and economic impact 
of transporting nuclear fuel.  

MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Marvin.  I'm going to go to Susan Shankman 
for answers to these and keep in mind that one of the purposes of this 
meeting is to get input on suggestions such as that and we will be discussing 
these issues in more detail during the discussion.  But Susan if you could 
provide some answers.  

MS SHANKMAN:  I just wanted to say that part of today is to get those 
comments and I agree that as Earl discussed all the studies, there have been 
many of them and each one has had  a particular goal and the integration of 
those studies is part of this package performance study.  The idea that you 
suggested about  sending out our update of the 0170 assumptions as a public 
report and putting it out as a contract report which is a final report, the 
goal is to have comments on that, put into this study so that concerns you 
have about that contractor report can be worked into the design of the study.  
We want to integrate it with the work that's been done on severe accidents in 
modal study.  So the idea is to have all that available before we have our 
public meeting in the spring and at that time we will look at the design of 
the study and whether it meets the goals that you have discussed.

We have not chosen to do a complete redo of the EIS that serves as the basis 
for our             transport activities.  If that's an idea you have.  would 
like you to explain why you think we need to redo the entire EIS.  The update 
on spent fuel transportation has meant and not to redo the EIS, it's not a 
redo.  So the EIS has been publicly available, was commented on and was a 
final document.  What we were looking at is whether we needed to reopen it 
and that's the update of 0170 is.  It's not a redo of EIS. Does that answer 
your question?  And if you think we need to redo the EIS I would like you to 
tell me today as we go through it what parts of the EIS or if you think we 
need to start all over again.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I'm listing issues that come out of these questions right now 
on the   paddock to make sure as we go to our discussion we come back and 
make sure there is a full discussion of the, the integration, what I termed 
the integration issue that Marvin brought up. Earl, did you want to provide 
some other information?
 
MR. EASTON:  Yes, I would like to respond to one of the questions raised and 
that is the role of Lawrence Livermore in peer review.  In what we are 
calling the reevaluation of 0170, it was done by Sandia.  That was sent to 
Lawrence Livermore for peer review.  We are just now getting the results of 
that peer review.  So unfortunately they couldn't be with us today but they 
are involved in that study. The other study that we're going to do on the 
update is still in its early phases. We're not really settled, I guess, on 
who is going to do the peer review at this point.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Lawrence Livermore was invited so their absence is not because 
they were not invited.  The other thing is as Earl said the design of the 
study, what I hear is you're suggesting that when we design this package 
performance study we should build into the design peer review.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Marvin is nodding affirmatively.  I know a lot of you are going 
tohave the same type of comments.  We're trying to do someder different scenarios up to 100,000 truck shipments of 
spent nuclear fuel and/or other highly radioactive materials.  So under other 
scenarios up to 20,000 rail shipments and possibly another five to10,000 
truck shipments. I very much appreciated Earl's comments, general though they 
were, reminding us that this is a hazardous material.  The 26-year-old 
reactor is a 17 by 17 Westinghouse LOPAR assembly, moderate burn up.  Even 
after 26 years of cooling time we're talking about a bundle of rods that has 
80,000 curies total activity.
 
I very much appreciate the attitude that the NRC is taking.  And I especially 
appreciate this effort because it is something that the State of Nevada has 
asked for for 10 years, a reassessment of the modal study with the type of 
stakeholder input that I believe you are making a commitment to here.

I further and especially appreciate the scheduling of the December meeting in 
Henderson, Nevada which is not only accessible to people of Nevada, but many 
areas in the west could not be at this meeting today.  I further appreciate 
the fact that an evening session has been scheduled in that meeting which 
will allow members of the general public who can't come because they're not 
paid to deal with this issue like most of us are.  And because I came here to 
say these good things, I'm going to try to not be upset if we don't get to 
review the NUREG 0170 update and I'm going to take you at your word that you 
are going to give our comments whatever respect they deserve on a final 
contractor report.
 
I do have a question because I've looked at the website that you have set up 
and I think based on our experience a website is an excellent way to handle 
communications.  I would ask that you add a number of materials to the 
website and I know you are just beginning this.  One is there are a number of 
reference materials in the past that have been critical.
 
I understand going into this trying to look at the new conditions, but there 
are some  lessons to be learned by rehashing, so we would like to see the 
materials generated by the Western Interstate Energy Board 1989 workshop  
which included Larry Fisher and C.K. Chew.  There is also a transcript of 
that meeting. There have been a number of letters and review comments to the 
NRC that reference the modal study and I personally have not done this 
literature search, but I know there are a of conference proceedings, 
technical reports, journal articles, many fine pieces of technical literature 
may disagree with some assumption results, but nonetheless respect all of the 
work that people at Sandia and Livermore have done I would hope that you 
would put someone to work doing good bibliography survey and having that 
accessible in a PDF format on the website is important because many of these 
documents are hard to access.  So really I'm asking you to make a commitment 
to go to what I see as the next extension with your website to allow that to 
be one point source of contact for all of us who going to be involved.  And 
thank you very much  allowing me this time.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob.  Let's get some response from NRC staff.  Rob 
Lewis?
 
MR. LEWIS:  Yeah, I just want to say that that's a fine suggestion and we 
have problem with putting them on the website and I think all along those 
documents were intended be part of this phase one literature search at least 
in coming up with this issues 

MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you.  We note various recommendations that we hear  
throughout the day on these flip carts.  I'm  going to go to Amy 
Shollenberger and come back over to Bob Fronczak.  Amy?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Thank you.  It may not be possible to answer my question 
right now, but I would like to just raise the issue of the Department of 
Energy's EIS and how that section of that EIS addresses transportation 
impacts, or claims to at any rate, and I would like to know how the review of 
the modal study will play the final EIS done by the Department of Energy, 
whether there are plans to incorporate the new information into the EIS and 
also whether modal study will be done in time.  Looking at your time on it it 
looks like it's pretty far out  there.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I appreciate your concern about the timing.  We are as a 
federal agency  making comments on the EIS and then we will need to look at 
that as we license the, whatever is proposed, and in that process we will use 
whatever information we have.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Janet?
 
JANET:  In the event that the department finds the Yucca Mountain site 
suitable for development of repository and develops a license application 
that the Nuclear Regulatory  Commission would review, it would be at that 
time that the commission would have available to the final update of the 
modal study.  You are absolutely correct.  It's not possible for us to factor 
the results of the study that won't be complete until 2003 into our comments 
early next year on the environmental impact statement, won't be available to 
others commenting as well. I would second Chip's request that Department of 
Energy representative also speak to that, but clearly in the consideration of 
a license application, the commission would take into account any additional 
information that had  become available and as I understand it the EIS will be 
updated in a timely manner over a certain period during a licensing process.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Janet.  That was very helpful.  Dwight Shelor from 
DOE.
 
MR. SHELOR:  My main comment is I think the answer you received so far is 
absolutely  correct.  The environmental impact, the final  environmental 
impact statement that we will have to accompany the side recommendation 
report unfortunately will be done prior to this conclusion of this study.  If 
there are at any time after that some license application the EIS will again 
be reviewed by NRC and if appropriate even updated by the department.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Next let's hear from Bob Fronczak and then we will 
see if there is any clarifying questions out there in  the audience before we 
take a break.  Bob?
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  Just two very questions.  If we would like to supplement 
comments today with written comments who do address those to and what time 
frame are you looking at for those?  Seems like we've got some time.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  In terms of timing, Sandia will be submitting their report to 
us in the late spring, early summer.  If we could get your comments through 
the month of January they will be factored in and you can do that through the 
website or you can write directly to me or to Rob Lewis.  All of our address 
is simple and it's on the sheet of paper.  You can call also.
 
Again, let me just encourage, and glad you asked the question, Bob.  Today is 
not the only chance to talk to us.  We will be  soliciting input in December 
and Las Vegas. have three meetings scheduled there.  One similar  to this 
evening meeting and then a follow meeting on Thursday.  So that's where we 
will physically be present to interact with people. We are all available 
through e-mail.  We are all available through the telephone.
 
MR. CAMERON:  And keep in mind I think the NRC would like to have a specific 
discussion at some point today about the process for keeping the public 
involved over the course of this study in whatever ways people have to 
suggest.
 
Let's go to the audience and see, does anybody have a clarifying question out 
here before we take a break on the presentations that you heard this morning?  
Steve, are you stretching or are you questioning?  Anybody?
 
MR. CRAFT:  Steve Craft.  I was struck by the presentations about the 
historical of the regulations and the one question I had I was trying to 
figure out how to frame it  correctly without implying something I didn't 
mean.  Is it safe to say that NRC has confidence  in its current set of 
regulations, that if they are followed they lead to safe transport?  Is that 
an accurate statement?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Yes.
 
MR. CRAFT:  So those of us who live near rail lines ought not fear 
radioactive cargo these rail lines; is that correct?  As long it's moved 
according to your regulations; is that correct?  I don't live terribly far 
from the same rail lines, Susan.  I'm sort of wondering what  you are telling 
me here.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I didn't mean to imply anything.  Yes.  The answer is yes.  We 
have confidence in our current regulations and in the   information that we 
have.  But it would be foolish not to continue to look at things and to see 
that we maintain that safe record.  And as Rob and Earl pointed out, I 
believe you know there will be a significant campaign coming up, so we want 
to make sure that our information is as current as possible.
 
MR. CRAFT:  That's why I hesitated asking the question because I didn't want 
to imply you didn't need to do the studies, I just  wanted to understand as 
you continue your regulatory programs, there are people who will be seeking 
cask certifications and there will be people moving these materials while 
these studies are ongoing.  This is not to imply that those shipments are 
somehow not safe.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Right.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Steven.  That's the type of issue that could spur a 
lot of   discussion at this point and what I suggest doing is we will hear 
one more comment or question from the table and then let's take a break and 
come back at 11 o'clock which will put us a half hour behind schedule, but I 
think we will be able to accommodate that during the day.  Kevin?
 
MR. KAMPS:  Thank you.  Sorry to delay our break.  I would be remiss not to 
make at 3   least a brief comment at this point.  I am from Michigan 
originally and I've only worked at Nuclear Information and Resource Service 
for two months.  But I've worked near the Palisades in Michigan the last 
decade and the main point I want to share with everyone in the room is that 
the casks, the ventilated storage casks at Palisades that have been used 
since the early '90s, have come with some surprises for everybody including 
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
The generation of hydrogen gas inside  these casks was not foreseen by all 
the experts  at the utility, at the NRC, at the gas  manufacturer.  And so 
our concern from the public  perspective is what surprises are in store with  
transportation?  And so I hear a lot of confidence and I here a lot of 
congratulations, but there is tremendous concern on the public level.
 
In Michigan the experience with the dry casks at Palisades has left the 
public -- I don't think it's an exaggeration to say bitter and very  upset at 
having been locked out of the entire decision making process from the 
beginning.  I  have a concern that this process, the transportation process 
is continuing that same pattern of locking the public out. And on a related 
matter of environmental impact statement, the draft from the Department of 
Energy, again most of the hearings are taking place in Nevada.  There is a 
handful of hearings outside of Nevada and major transportation routes are 
excluded from the public hearing process: Chicago, which is one of the major 
transport  routes in the country does not have a chance to  have a public 
hearing on that issue.
 
In Michigan again with the dry casks, the public has felt very excluded from 
any  significant involvement.  Another issue I wanted  to bring up is the 
German experience with the transportation of high level waste.  Far from   
being a routine and smooth operation, there have been huge public protests of 
the transport mostly because the dump site that was selected was selected 
with total exclusion of the public and  the people that lived there were very 
upset about that, and so when the transports actually began    there was 
tremendous protest that took place.
 
In 1998 the protest brought out 20,000 people and 30,000 police officers had 
to be  deployed.  It was the largest deployment of  police since the Nazi 
regime.  There were 500 arrests of people engaging in civil disobedience.  
There were close to 200 injuries  and the total cost for transporting six 
casks was $100 million dollars mostly because of the police involvement.
 
That was the next to last shipment that took place.  The one that took place 
after that was speeded up by a week.  The date that everyone had been told 
that it would take place was really  a smoke screen.  The actual transport 
took place a week early.  Even the police were not told until the very last 
minute the transport was going to take place so they were deployed in a rush.  
It was very chaotic transportation that took place and there was even a 
police officer that was killed.  He was struck by a train and I  attributed 
that myself to the chaos that was involved.  It wasn't the transport train 
itself but another train.
 
There is now tremendous resistance among the police forces in Germany to be 
involved in  this process at all not to mention the public. So I just feel 
that this issue is a lot more serious and dangerous than has been discussed 
up   to this point and I wanted to put some of the public input in there at 
this point.  Thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Kevin, and there will be an opportunity for all of 
you to  put your concerns on the table during the rest of the day.  I would 
just note two things.  In terms of what you said is that I think that there 
are going to be discussion, there is going to be discussion, there are going 
to be recommendations today from your colleagues around the table to, about 
the surprises as you called it.  Items should be anticipated when this study 
is done. So I think we're going to be hearing about those.
 
And also just note that your point about meetings and transportation impacted 
cities, I think that that's a recommendation that the NRC should consider and 
is considering also in terms of this particular study.  Let's take a break 
and be back at 11 o'clock and we'll have working microphones by that time 
hopefully.
 
 (Pause in the proceedings.)
 
MR. CAMERON:  There is a document that Bob Halstead recommended it be put on 
the NRC  website and it's a critique that the State of Nevada did of the 1987 
modal study.  Bob has put copies of that out on the table I believe.  So if  
you didn't get a copy of it it's out there.
 
One of the things that we definitely are  going to go back to that is in our 
paddock list, it was first brought up by Marvin and also was  referred to by 
Bob Halstead, that may be causing a little bit of confusion based on my 
discussions with people at the break, is what is the relationship between the 
0170 study to what's going on now?  And I think that we might need to have a 
more extensive discussion of that issue so that it's clear and I don't really 
want to do that right now, okay?  Because I think we want to get into the 
first discussion issue here but I just wanted to assure people that we will 
go back and discuss that in a timing so that it won't interfere with your 
understanding of the rest of the agenda.
 
Our first discussion item is highway and railway accidents likelihoods, and 
for all these discussion items we've asked Dr. Charles Massey of Sandia Labs 
to do a real brief set up for us in terms of some background information 
about that particular topic and he's going to do that for each one of these.
 
By way of introduction, Dr. Massey is the manager of the Transportation 
Safety and Security Analysis Department at Sandia National Labs and his 
groups are responsible for design, testing, analysis of all types of 
radioactive material, packages and the  performance of transportation safety 
and security assessments.  Dr. Massey has been with Sandia Labs for 10 years.  
Before he came to Sandia he was with Oak Ridge National Lab, the University 
of Pittsburg and a ship's officer for the United States Navy.  He got his 
bachelor's degree in marine transportation from the Merchant Marine Academy.  
 
He has a master's of science degree from the School of Engineering from the 
University of Pittsburg and a second master's degree from the School of 
Public Health at the University of Pittsburg.  And to top it all off his 
doctorate is in radiation health, again from the University of Pittsburg.
 
Dr. Massey, would you like to tee this first issue up for us?  Thank you.
 
DR. MASSEY:  Thank you, Mr. Cameron.  By way of introduction here, what I'm 
going to do I really have two functions during the day as we proceed with our 
discussions on the package performance study.
 
First is to present a little bit of background.  This may help also with 
these questions of how does the modal study and the NUREG 0170 reevaluation, 
how do those fit into the package performance study?  So I'm going to walk a 
little bit of the evolution of where we are in essentially our state of 
knowledge regarding accidents and performance of these casks and their 
contents during these accidents and give you some suggestions that we have 
proposed to the NRC as areas that we would suggest be looked at in a package 
performance study to essentially fill in the rest of the pieces of the puzzle 
that we believe still may exist.
 
The second function that I have is to make sure that I understand as you may 
make comments or suggestions about what should be included in looking at 
severe accidents involving these packages, I need to make sure that I 
understand what your comment or concern is by maybe asking you some questions 
because we want to sort of clarify the types of environments and scenarios 
and conditions that you would be interested in and I need to understand that 
so we can incorporate that in our issues that we look at for posing what 
would be done in the package performance study.
 
We are going to have six topical areas.  The first one that we're going to 
discuss before lunch is highway and rail accident likelihoods, but before I 
want to get into that I want to give a little bit of background.  Do this 
quickly since I think most people are fairly familiar with what we are 
talking about, but just in case I want to make sure everyone has some basic 
level of understanding.
 
Next to the individual in the white lab coat here, you can see these are the 
types of materials that we're looking at transporting into package casks.  
That's fresh fuel assembly.  

Now the cask itself, sort of highlight to you the features.  Here you have 
the spent fuel assembly typically bundled and the size of cask matters how 
many of the assemblies we can fit inside.  The cask walls itself are the main 
part of the cask.  On the ends you have impact absorbers that are sort of 
made of some sort of material that in the event of an accident hit one of 
these ends or a side sticking out, these would absorb some of the impact 
force and then these contents which Mr. Easton mentioned earlier some of the 
lids and bolts and seals and features to close the cask.   

To give a little perspective on the cask we also have, made a cutout.  If you 
were to look at that sort of the circular part of the cask and take a piece 
of that pie out, we have made a model.  This is an actual full size of the 
cask that's currently going over the road right now and I encourage you at 
the breaks or at lunchtime to come up and look at this and pick it up if you 
like, but this demonstrates this outer neutron shield that you have on the 
cask with the outer wall to contain whatever materials inside here.  Then 
really this inside piece is the cask structure that we're most interested in 
and how this performs in the event of an accident.
 
So as I go through I may refer to this cask wall piece here to help give some 
context of what exactly we're looking at.  
 
To bring us back to where we are in rail and highway likelihood and 
sequences, in the modal study they used 1985 truck and rail accident data 
from selected areas to determine on a per mileage basis what is the 
likelihood that the train or the truck transporting the spent fuel could be 
involved in some type of event that could possibly lead to release of 
materials, like a collision or derailment.  That's what they used was 1985 
data.  Modal study as you recall was issued in 1987.
 
Once they started they -- an assumption there was some derailment or 
collision.  Then they went through a sequence of events:  Collision, impact 
another vehicle, did it impact structure like a bridge?  Let's say it did 
impact a bridge structure, then was there a fire or not?  So they went 
through and developed a sequence of accident events or developing what could 
be the consequence from the accident.  As a result of their analyses, they 
essentially determined that there would be 20 accidents in categories where 
they would put mixes of collisions and thermal environments together to 
determine what would be the likelihood released from the spent fuel package.  
They also developed distribution.  They looked at how likely is it to be at 
certain speeds and forces and temperatures and how long would the fire last 
as well put into the response of the package.  
 
NUREG 0170 reevaluation that is under review at the moment.  We use 
essentially three year data than the modal study 1988 accident data on much 
more national average.  We did some modification to the accident sequences 
that were in the modal study.  Instead of having the 20 categories where you 
could essentially bend or place each of these thermal and collision 
environments, we developed 19 for truck and 21 for rail accidents and we used 
the modal study collision speed and fire duration distributions.  We did not 
develop new ones in the 0170 evaluation.
 
Now to stimulate a little bit of thought and discussion on package 
performance study, here are some of our suggestions of what we would propose 
to do.  First, we would like to update using the latest 1999 accident rate 
data.  We would like to go in, essentially relook at these train and truck 
accident sequences, how they occur.
 
One of the things we have now which we would like to take advantage of is 
with geographic information systems that are out there, ability to much more, 
more detail look at structures along roads, and roads are very small fine 
detail.  We can look at where bridges exactly are, where are their hard rock 
outcroppings along routes; where are there bridges that may offer if a truck 
or train were to fall off a bridge and fall a substantial distance.  We now 
have the capability to get much more route specific information that we would 
like to incorporate into our accident sequences and also when we start 
looking at distributions of how these events would take place and the 
likelihood of them, incorporate that into the package performance study.
 
Since we do not know yet how these sequences would fall out and what type of 
potential environments would be seen, the number of accidents or bins 
accidents could be placed in will really depend on what comes out of the 
study.  With that I'm going to turn back over to Mr. Cameron.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Dr. Massey.  I think it would be useful to leave this 
on for the discussion.  The objective here is to get your ideas on what 
should be considered in terms of accident probability sequences and 
scenarios.
 
Now Charles has talked about some of their ideas.  It would be useful to have 
comment on those ideas as well as anything else that you think should be 
considered in the relook, the update of this study and we're going to go to 
Bob Halstead, State of Nevada for first comment and Bob, they, the 
microphones are working if you could just press that button.  Let's see if 
they're working.
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  I won't be shy having asked for this opportunity to reopen 
this discussion.  I appreciate your introduction and let me give you a few 
responses from the State of Nevada's perspective.  We have been looking at 
these issues for a long time and hopefully will prepare an outline briefing 
paper for you by the Henderson meeting we weren't able to be at because of 
the EIS hearing schedule.
 
An observation on accident rates.  We have studied average and route specific 
and link specific accident rates on our own highway and rail system, although 
unfortunately we haven't had the funding like other organizations to update 
that analysis for about six years.  And one of the things we have found is 
that the more you go down to a route or link specific effort, the variation 
from year to year in accident rates is more apparent.
 
So as an opening thought I think you might want to rethink the notion of 
using single point accident rates.  If you use a single point accident rate 
you need to put some uncertainty number with it.  Our preference is to not 
try and put out a false sense of specificity that the data won't support.  
We're more comfortable now to using a bounding approach to accident rates.  
That's issue number one.
 
Issue number two, I very much appreciate the comment that you made about GIS 
technology developments, allowing us to do the finer look at, you know, what 
planners usually call unique local conditions.  Again, we have been doing 
this along the routes of Nevada partly pause we anticipate a very contentious 
debate over designation of state preferred alternative routes.  Particularly 
we need to designate a long sequence of two lane highways to avoid the Las 
Vegas Metro area and exactly the things that you mentioned, identifying the 
location, the characteristics of rock faces, rock outcrops, drops from 
bridges, critical side slopes, that's a really important part of this.
 
That was frankly one of the great limitations of the first modal study, the 
use of the California I-5 data on bridges, highways, soil types and so forth.  
We're certainly supportive of that and will assist in that effort.  
 
And thirdly, regarding the impact types.  There's a great deal to be said 
here but in looking at our state and some other western states perhaps 
peculiar vulnerability to earthquakes and particularly looking at the 
California system with elevated interstates and in our own case increasing 
frequency of the need to build overpasses over potential shipping routes, the 
whole area of crush impacts from falling bridge decks, falling overpasses is 
an area that needs to be added and a second category again important to us 
because of in particular if you look at the new construction of these 
overpasses and bridges in the Las Vegas area, there is some range in the 
types of support columns that are used.  Some are almost diamond shaped on 
the edge and others are round.  
 
I probably have to give Bill Rhine credit for raising this issue about the 
center midpoint impact on a support column and a consequent wraparound effect 
which obviously is equally serious, but different from corn like gamma 
shields as opposed to machine and weld gamma shields, but in addition to the 
things we will suggest later, we would like to see those two types of impact 
accidents specifically addressed.  

MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Bob.  I would like to see if anybody else 
around the table wants to add anything to the three issues that Bob brought 
up.  The bounding issue, the specific route information and the example of 
earthquakes and what that might augur in terms of types of impacts that you 
would use.  

SPEAKER:  Would you add midpoint wraparound?  Those key words some of us will 
know.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Midpoint under earthquake?
 
SPEAKER:  No, it's separate.  This is an accident not an actual disaster.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Midpoint wraparound.  I noticed that Marvin might want to 
comment on those so let's go to Marvin Resnikoff.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  I wanted to add just a few points to what Bob has said.  We 
are interested in information on accident severities, the severity 
distribution in different locations:  urban, suburban and rural setting.  In 
other words, how are accidents distributed in order of severity in these 
different locations in the United States?  Is it all the same?  Or does it 
differ depending on whether you are in urban or rural setting.  For instance, 
what about location of severe fires?  Do they occur more in urban settings or 
rural settings?
 
We would like bounding accident.  We would like sabotage to be considered as 
a bounding accident.  I don't know if this Sandia study wants to look at 
sabotage, but it's been suggested by the State of Nevada that  and they've 
introduced a petition to the Regulatory Commission that certain antitank 
missiles be considered as leading to major releases from a cask and we would 
like that considered as well.  
 
The sequence of accidents concerns us.  Generally the kind of accidents that 
are looked at -- well, just look at puncture, or there is a sequence 
involving impact and fire.  But we would like one of those sequences reversed 
to see whether that is more important.  Namely, whether cask heat up in a 
fire and then puncture is also a scenario that should be considered 
seriously.  That at least happened in the Sandia test in the sense that there 
was a fire and then the structure gave way and then the cask fell down.  So 
we would like that kind of puncture accident considered where the containers 
actually heated first.  We would like seasonal changes considered as well 
when looking at accident probabilities.
 
We would like a, how should I say it, a -- confidence intervals considered as 
well, not just one determined number but actually a range of numbers 
considered.  Those are my points.  
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Marvin.  I will put that last point up here.  But 
you can see we are getting a number of specific recommendations and we want 
to go and find out whether anybody has anything to add to the list, whether 
they have any comments on this.
 
I guess at this point I would want to ask the NRC staff or Sandia if they 
have any questions on what's been brought up so far and, Susan, you can use 
your microphone.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I just wanted to tell you that we do have a sabotage study 
that we're working on developing.  It is not under the Sandia contract but 
will be done in conjunction with the work that they're doing and right now 
we're working with the Germans and with some others who are looking at those 
issues and one of my staff members who was here earlier is going to an 
international meeting on that in a couple of months to frame the issues.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Who is doing that study?
MS. SHANKMAN:  We will be doing it but in fiscal year 2000.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Can I just remind everybody if you are going to make a reply or 
comment just turn your mike on and use it.  I think it might be useful for 
everyone if we just provide a little bit more information on something that's 
been mentioned twice already which is the petition for rule making that the 
State of Nevada submitted on the sabotage issue.  Is there someone here from 
the NRC staff that could just sort of give us a quick summary of what what's 
going on with that petition in terms of what it requested the NRC to do and 
what the status of the public comment period is.  I can try to do a little 
bit of that if that would be helpful and, Bob, you may want to, Bob Halstead 
may want to supplement that.
 
There is a process in NRC regulations that provides for any member of the 
public to send in a request, a petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
that commission regulations be revised and the State of Nevada submitted a 
petition that called for a change in NRC regulations address sabotage and 
also for an accompanying risk assessment of the risk of abotage in terms of 
spent fuel statements.
 
That petition was published for public comment.  The comment period closes 
November 29th.  

SPEAKER:  Just recently been extended to January 29 I believe that is a 
request from the national, from the transportation research board has a 
committee and certainly given the work load we have on other things, we are 
very supportive of that 60 day extension.  wanted to add that since wed if we see ones 
quite that big, but we're looking at the DOE proposal at the possibility of 
125 ton rail casks being heavy hauled on the originating end and some cases 
for distances as short as a couple of miles, but in half a dozen cases maybe 
up to 50 miles and those have -- again, I don't know how feasible that is, 
but because it's been identified in the draft EIS we all have to at least 
evaluate.  But having been on the other end and having worked on reactor 
shipments it's hard enough to do them by truck.
 
Issue number one is heavy haul truck and we have a clearer sense of how this 
might happen in Nevada.  Again, I don't think if there is no rail spur I 
don't think there will be a repository, but there is the possibility in 
Nevada some very tricky long hauls on big rigs, so heavy haul.
 
Secondly, barge transportation has long had some strong advocates both in the 
transportation community and in the environmental community.  We have had 
some recent experience with it.  There is at least a cursory overview of the 
issue in the Yucca Mountain draft EIS and I would propose at least for open-
end the discussion, there is some literature that goes back to the mid '80s 
that came out of Argon National Labs where it was a fairly detailed barge in 
Panama Canal transfer issue for the first repository.
 
Thirdly, a number of people have been discussing the possibility of running 
legal weight truck casks on flatbed rail cars.  I also think that's not a 
very good idea, my personal opinion, but it's something that might happen and 
it's something that we need to at least in a scoping sense identify here.
 
And certainly there is one other modal scenario that was mentioned to me as 
recently as last week, although I must tell you it occurred in the Little 
Alien Cafe, a lot of exotic ideas about aircraft occur, but a person there 
reminded me there was some experience with air shipment in one of the foreign 
research reactor movements and I believe it was out of Columbia Venezuela.  
This person said if we're going to do that, and this was an ex-air force 
logistics person, well maybe we need to look at air transport in some 
instances.  I think we've generally ruled that out as a, you know, large 
scale movement technique so I personally would not argue strongly for putting 
aircraft transport, but I would say those three we need to look at seriously.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Let me clarify something for all of us.  Bob, you said -- the 
petition on sabotage into some other types of transport that you think should 
be considered.
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  These are issues we are additionally going to raise in the 
sabotage rule making because, for example, we feel the security issues of a 
large rail cask on a heavy haul truck are different than the security issues 
and we have asked for dedicated trains as a condition for rail shipment.
 
Let me quickly say we identified about eight specific areas in the 
regulations at 10CFR73 and primarily we focused on expanding existing 
regulations.  For example, we've asked that the route approval process be 
made mandatory using the criteria identified in the guidance document.
 
This of course raises some problems with trade-offs between routes.  We've 
suggested upgrading the escort performance for both truck and rail and 
declined the current guidelines for heavily populated areas to the entire 
distance of the route.
 
We've asked for some minor modifications.  For example, extending some of the 
planning requirements for strategic special materials to schedule shipments 
to avoid civil disorders and natural disasters.  Some of these I don't think 
are going to be real controversial.  
 
Others like the suggestion that dedicated trains should be used for all rail 
shipments, we do expect to be controversial.  So we on the one hand said look 
at trends and terrorism, look at trends and the capabilities of the weapons 
available.  Look at the way that the larger number of shipments along the 
routes will create new opportunities and look at the new shipping cask 
designs which may or may not be more vulnerable to attack and based on what 
we already know we're asking for immediate relief in the way of changes in 
the current regulations.  We're also asking for a more detailed assessment 
because of various uncertainties that we may not have evaluated.  So that's 
the scope.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Bob.  Let me try to wrap this up a little bit before we 
go over to Amy and the rest of the panel at this point.  
 
It has been suggested, recommended by Marvin sabotage be considered.  Very 
clearly the sabotage issue is in front of the NRC and keep in mind that the 
end result of the update of the petition for rule making, all of this funnels 
into, should there be changes to the regulatory framework at NRC, so that 
there is a forum a mechanism for sabotage to be considered.  If you want to 
comment the comment period has been extended.  The commission will then 
consider whether to grant or deny or grant in part that particular petition.
 
Charles, do you have a specific question because I do want to go over to Amy, 
but go ahead.  
 
DR. MASSEY:  For the barge, dedicated train, these other different modes 
besides just truck cask going down the road, are you suggesting that in the 
accidents when we look at the overall package performance, that those be 
issues that we address as well, separate from any kind of be sabotage?
MR. HALSTEAD:  Let me answer it this way.  For the heavy haul truck I have a 
specific concern based on knowledge of roadway conditions on certain routes 
in the Nevada that there are actually greater potential for a fall impact 
scenario involving a large rail cask in heavy haul transport, than there are 
on any of the rail conditions that I'm aware of in Nevada.  That doesn't mean 
that there are not conditions outside of Nevada where the rail cask and rail 
environment is subjected to a greater impact.
 
Secondly, specific issue for us on the truck cask, the smaller mass of the 
truck cask in rail accident fire environment is a big concern to us.  We're 
basically working under the assumption that the regulatory fire has to run 
about 20 hours to cause large scale fuel degradation in the large rail cask, 
but only six to eight hours in the truck cask.  So putting truck casks in a 
rail environment may actually raise some different scenarios.

MR. CAMERON:  Thank you and a good clarification.  Some of these issues that 
Bob brought up in terms of type of transport also are important outside of 
the sabotage area.  Let's  go to Amy Shollenberger.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  First of all I would ike to say that I'm really happy to 
hear you are planning to use the GIS system to look at route specific data.  
That was one of the issues I was going to raise today.  Along with that I 
would really be excited that you would actually name those routes and state 
where they're going to be and say what routes specific data you are looking 
at with the GIS system.
 
I know we're in accident likelihood right now and not in public participation 
but I can't resist saying that I would be even more exited if you would allow 
the public access to your GIS system to look at those routes.  I think that 
would really show that the NRC is looking for public involvement.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Susan, do you want to just ask a question before you go on, 
Amy? 
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I'm not clear what you are asking.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I think that, first of all, I'm asking for the 
transportation routes to be named.  They are not named in the environmental 
impact study that the DOE has done.  I was in a meeting where the DOE said 
that they didn't feel they should name the routes because they may change 
over time.  But I think, you know, you could say potential routes or possible 
routes and still name them. 
 
And as far as access to the system, I think it would be really great if the 
public could somehow, I'm assuming it would be through your website, get into 
the GIS system and have access to maps of potential routes.  
 
MR. CAMERON:  The question, and I think we should try to clarify that for 
everybody, is  how will, how can the update consider the specific routes that 
might be taken in terms of accident scenarios and to the extent that it does 
or through some other mechanism is that information going to be available to 
the public?  Susan?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Yeah, I guess I'm having a hard time understanding.  Are you 
speaking about the to the repository only?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Not only but yes.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Because I think that most of the routes, potential routes of 
what you asked for are already fairly laid out in terms of where the plants 
are and where they move to.  In terms of rail lines I don't think we're going 
to have many alternative rail lines.  In terms of highway there are routes 
specific guidelines DOT requires to be followed in selecting the routes.
So it will be part of the proposal of Sandia to tell us the kind of route 
data that they're going to look at and at that point you can comment on.  

MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I would also like to like to follow-up on the earthquake 
comment that Mr. Halstead made.  I would like to see weather related 
scenarios for all the different areas with that in the study.  I think that 
earthquakes  are definitely a major concern.
 
I think there are some portions of the country that are very prone to 
flooding.  I think there are some portions of the country that are very prone 
to snowstorms, sudden squalls, ice storms, tornados.  I would really like to 
see that factored into your study of both accident likelihood and the impacts 
of, for instance, a truck, you know being caught in a flood or something like 
that.  
 
MR. CAMERON:  Note the relationship to Marvin Resnikoff's seasonal point.  I 
think there is a tie in there. 
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Also I would like to see human error factors addressed.  
I think that looking through the reports of not necessarily technically what 
you would call accidents, but maybe incidents with casks, there have been 
situations where a cask wasn't tied down properly and it slid a little bit or 
whatever happened and even there is -- would even be human error in the 
creation of the cask which was not addressed in your first study because you 
were using computer models and now you have actual tests.  And so I would 
like to see human error factored into both accident likelihood and potential 
impacts.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Not just the human error in terms of the cask construction 
that's been mentioned, but human error in terms of this particular issue, its 
application.

MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Right, all kinds of things that could happen.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Go ahead, Susan.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Can I frame that a little bit differently and say perhaps we 
should be looking at the relationship between operational controls and casks.  
Do you have do rely on some kind of operational control or human activity 
because of a weakness in the cask?  What's the relationship of that? 
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I think I would like you to look at that, but I think I 
would also like to see outside of that the, you know, you look at the number 
of accidents and say here's how likely an accident is.  You could look at the 
number of times the cask wasn't tied down properly and then say here's the 
likelihood of that happening and somehow combine that with the number of 
accidents and say here is the likelihood that a cask would be involved in an 
accident and it's not tied down properly.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Charles, is that clear?
 
DR. MASSEY:  Yeah.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Let's go to Felix and then Eileen and come over to Kevin and 
then Bob Fronczak.
 
MR. KILLAR:  I just want to make a couple of points along the lines that Bob 
and Marvin already brought up.  I think one of the things we have to be very 
careful of is that we do do bounding studies.  Charlie can retire doing 
studies but we need to have finite data to say this is the results.
 
Along those same lines we do have to have sensitivity studies as part of 
that.  If you say the temperature is going to be X and squat, if you go up 
two more degrees what difference does it make one way or the other?  So I 
think you need to take into consideration sensitivity  studies and provide 
that information.  And the final aspect you have to bring in reality.  You 
have to make sure that when you are done with your studies and come up with 
the results you have to bring in reality.  I think that's the one thing that 
the modal study particularly was very good at doing because they did look at 
actual accidents and put the cask in those type of accidents.  I think that's 
one of the things we need to be very careful of.
 
On the GIS system, I think it's important that you do this.  Once again 
concerned that you get too specific on routes and get too specific because 
then what happens is you get into a question of sensitivity and bounding what 
have you, and you say gee on my route that's coming through my area I have a 
bigger outcrop of rock than you do or the rock that you looked at was shale 
and I've got granite or vice versa and things on that line.
 
So I think you have to be very careful that you look at the bounding studies 
and look at the sensitivities and not get too tied down to the GIS studies. 
 
MR. CAMERON:  GIS is geographic information system?  

MR. KILLAR:  Sounds good to me.
 
MS. SUPKO:  Felix covered a number of points I was going to make.  I would 
also like to add that while you are looking at this growing laundry list of 
possible issues to address in the modal study that risk informed analysis 
take place, that we really look at what increases safety.  What can NRC do 
and assess that will help increase the safety of spent fuel transportation 
and protect the public.  I think that's the bottom line.  You did mention 
that was going to be part of the process and I think it's going to be a 
difficult exercise on the part of NRC staff to go through all these  issues 
that everyone is bringing up and try to apply those and get a result that 
everybody is satisfied.  But that has to be the end result is what increases 
safety.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Let me ask you a clarification on that.  It may be sort of a 
chicken and egg situation where the results of the update are going to be 
looked at by the NRC in terms of whether to increase, in terms of whether to 
change the regulations.  
 
Were you suggesting that Sandia should factor into the study in the first 
place what might decrease risk from a change in regulations?
 
MS. SUPKO:  No.  I'm not suggesting that the regulations need to be changed.  
The issue is there are a lot of public concerns related to spent fuel 
transportation.  What issues either through update of the modal study through 
testing or through additional analysis can we do to show the level of safety 
associated with transportation and possibly in Sandia's assessment of all of 
the things that it might choose to look at, it would probably be useful to 
try to assess certain pieces will add to the discussion more than others 
might.  There is only going to be a limited amount of time, a limited amount 
of money available to spend on this project.  I'm quite certain it's not 
unlimited.
 
So you are going to need to somehow or other address where do you get the 
most bang for your bucks, so to speak.  

MR. CAMERON:  What you are suggesting is that the NRC and Sandia may have to 
make choices in terms of whether to address certain issues or conduct certain 
types of tests and that that should be a risk informed decision.  All right.  
Let's go to Kevin.
 
MR. KAMPS:  I just wanted to follow-up on some things that I was hearing 
about operational controls and cask robustness and it gets back to something 
I mentioned before and someone asked me during the break what I was referring 
to about the surprise, the Palisades and other facilities that use the ESE 24 
casks.  What that was was unforeseen chemical reaction inside the cask, the 
generation of hydrogen gas which is combustible, highly flammable, explosive 
and the way that that was discovered was an explosion at the Point Beach 
Nuclear Plant VSE 24 in 1996.  And just the relationship to this discussion 
of likelihood.  I don't think anyone at NRC or the utility or the cask 
manufacturer would have seen an explosion in a VSE 24 cask as a likely event.
 
So in the discussion about likelihood about transportation of highly 
irradiated nuclear fuel, there are so many problems taking place with the 
casks that are stationary, these casks are going zero miles per hour at 
Palisades Nuclear Plant and the casks that we're discussing today are going 
to be on our highways and on our railways going at high speeds and so we're 
very concerned about the unforeseen problems that will take place with these 
casks.  
 
Another problem at the Palisades Nuclear Plant has been the manufacturing of 
the casks.  There are a number of defective casks at Palisades and so that 
needs to be considered in the likelihood of accidents, not only the severity 
of an accident, but also the likelihood of an accident taking place is how 
will defective casks enter into that?
 
Also about the likelihood of events taking place and it's been discussed 
already, but terrorism -- in their earlier study terrorism was not high on 
the priority list of considerations, but it's becoming more so unfortunately 
in this country and around the world.  And so I just would like to 
reemphasize the importance of terrorism as really taking a central place of 
the discussion of the safety of transporting highly irradiated nuclear fuel 
across the country.
 
And just to reemphasize, and I feel a lot of sympathy for the representative 
from Prairie Island, coming from the Palisades area the closest residents to 
Palisades in the dry casks are several sand dunes removed from that danger, 
but at Prairie Island the casks are how close are they to residents?
 
MS. WESTRA:  Approximately six hundred 15 yards.
 
MR. KAMPS:  I'm not sure how many hundred yards at Palisades the closest 
residents ae, but I just wanted to reemphasize that the transport of these 
casks will take the stationary casks at the present time and move them very 
close to the homes of millions of people in this country and I'm happy that 
the NRC is saying that there is an interest in involving the public, but I 
would really urge the NRC to involve the public in very meaningful ways in 
this process because millions of people being very concerned are going to 
change the dynamics of the discussion and it  will be removed from an 
academic or theoretical discussion into a very charged one and, yeah.  
Another point is a consideration needs to be made of even the safe and smooth 
transports of these materials and the exposure to workers and to the public 
of the gamma radiation that will flow out of these casks.  That's removed 
from an accident scenario and hearing that there is not going to be an 
environmental impact statement involved with this, that concerns me because 
there are environmental impacts to public health from even the smooth 
transportation accident free of these casks.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you Kevin.  Susan, did you want to respond.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I just wanted to make a clarifying point that the storage 
casks are not transport casks and even cask designs where there is a system 
where both the encased or contained spent fuel that has been stored, that 
container may be transported but it would not be transported in the same 
configuration as it is stored.  So the experience in storage is useful but it 
is not necessarily the same as transport.
 
I know your concerns about Palisades but I don't want people in the room to 
think that the Palisade casks as they stand on the pad will be put on the 
truck or rail and shipped.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you for that clarification.  
 
MR. KAMPS:  I didn't mean to imply that the same casks will be used for 
transportation, what I was meaning is that the history of our experience 
shows the problems and the NRC has recently decided to allow cask 
manufacturers to proceed without a certificate of compliance on cask designs 
and that was the very problem at Palisades, that the public tried to be 
involved in the process with those casks that had defects hat were not caught 
by the NRC and so the current policy of NRC is to allow the manufacturer of 
casks without a certificate of compliance?  And so the risks are too great, I 
think, for those unforeseen problems both transport and with storage.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I don't want to get us off on an extended discussion of this.  
Susan we may think about you coming back and presenting a clarification on 
that.  I guess what I infer from some of your comments, Kevin, is the idea of 
unlikely events should be considered throughout all of the issues that are 
addressed in the study and we hearken back to the hydrogen that you talked 
about.
 
MR. KAMPS:  And the definition of unlikelihood.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  We're going to try to get through some other cards 
here because we do have a little bit of time left here.  Bob, why don't you 
give us what your concerns are and we'll talk to other people.
 
BOB:  First of all, I would like to support some of the previous comments 
that were made.  I think you're going to be looking at a lot less accidents 
because the accident rate used in the modal study was a 1980 number 11.9 
accidents per million train miles.  
 
The other thing I would like to support Bob Halstead's comment about crush 
loads, train transportation by definition is multiple vehicles traveling 
together and I don't know if you ever been to a main line train derailment, 
that is a very real possibility in rail, so we support you looking at that. 
 
Another thing that Bob talked about the collision with structures and falls.  
In the modal study I think they evaluated highway wayside conditions and rail 
wayside conditions are very different than highway.  You have to go through a 
lot more cuts and fills  because you are very limited by rail transportation 
and it looks like you are going to look at that and you are going to look at 
wayside conditions.
 
A few other things I would like to bring up.  We felt that the force 
estimates that the modal study used were underestimated.  We looked at 
locomotive trains and just the standard rail car has to be able to withstand 
an impact of a million pounds force without defamation.  
 
A locomotive train can go to 3 million 8 to 10 million pounds so we would 
like to have you factor that in.  We think the frame impacts were 
underestimated in the modal study.  We think you ought to take a look at 
that.
 
I don't know if this is the time to bring it up, but we also think that the 
modal study took a less than considerable approach on thermal frequencies.  
So we think you ought to take a look at that again.  We just had one in 1996 
in Wisconsin where we had an 18 day fire and that was done by design.  

Twenty years ago those tank cars probably would have exploded and probably 
would have had some fatalities.  Now they're designed to vent and burn.  We 
think you ought to take a look at that too.  

MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob.  I would note that, and this is good, we're 
getting a list of items that should be considered here and we're not having 
much dialogue on some of those items which is fine.
 
We're going to go to the others that have their cards up but one thing for 
the group to keep in mind, is there anything that you heard in terms of 
suggestions that, that you have a disagreement with?  Not a -- and we're 
going to get to you right now as a matter of fact, but if there are things 
that you do disagree with, and I don't mean need to supplement, but if you 
disagree with that I think that would be useful for the NRC to know and Jack 
Edlow is going to give us a sample on this, I guess.  Go ahead, Jack.
 
MR. EDLOW:  I do wish to disagree with two items that I have heard suggested 
this morning but I will agree with one other.  I want to start first by 
talking about this issue with, that I've heard discussed as sabotage or 
terrorism or similar type issues.  
 
This is certainly an issue which needs to be addressed, that the NRC has 
addressed in the past, Part 73 regulations, which needs in the future to be 
addressed because sabotage, terrorism is real.  However, I don't think it 
needs to be part of this study.  I think it's an apples and oranges type 
issue.  This is my understanding related to accident conditions and the 
effect on the equipment and the vehicles related to accident conditions.  I 
think that is the specific purpose of it and that sabotage, terrorism are not 
accidents.  Although they do need to be addressed.  That's number one. 
 
Secondly, I disagree with Ms. Shollenberger about naming the routes.  I think 
it is counterproductive to name specific routes for a variety of reasons, not 
the least of which is I can name you a route today and it may not exist in 
ten years.  We don't know where you will live in ten years and it's difficult 
for us to focus on that.  
 
One should assume under existing DOT NRC regulations that material when 
properly packaged and when introduced into the transportation system of the 
United States, it can go on any route because that is the legal situation in 
this country.  So if the public wishes to know where the material can go, the 
answer should be it can go anywhere when it's properly packaged and licensed 
and ready for transport.  
 
The fact that states have the right to designate routes for this type of 
material means that they should discuss the matter with their state 
authorities or those who are responsible for establishing the route control 
within those frameworks.  Otherwise, assume it can go anywhere because 
frankly it does.   

Now the one thing that I will support and don't fall off your chair, Bob, I'm 
going to support the idea about the barge because while this is titled 
highway and rail accident probabilities, and maybe that's what you want to 
study, I do happen to think there is some reasons for you all to consider 
barge and even more so dedicated ship transports because it is in fact 
possible that there could be at some time in the future t he need to move 
this material coastally via water even using dedicated ships rather than 
barges which have their own particular reason.  So I would support that and 
there are lots of other things we could get into but it's almost lunch.  
Good-bye.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I'm going to make an assumption here, open the challenge by 
anybody to try to maybe close off on one particular point.  We talked about 
the concern over sabotage.  We have identified separate mechanism to address 
that and I'm sort of assuming that the important point is that the issue be 
addressed somewhere but doesn't necessarily need to be addressed as part of 
this update.
Jack gave us a contra in terms of the specific routes.  Other people may want 
to chime in on that if we have some time.  Let's go to Ed Pritchard and then 
we'll go to Heather Westra and come back to Uldis, the State of Maine.  Ed? 
 
MR. PRITCHARD:  I just wanted to first offer assistance in your studies 
dealing with any of the data from our accident reporting section and also a 
review of some of the severe accident derailments that have taken place since 
the study was done.
 
Today we did come to an agreement as to some of the things that need to be 
looked at and there were some severe rail accidents that took place since 
that study was done.  We had a train derailment caused by an earthquake this 
year which we never had recorded before and it happened to be an Amtrak 
train.  

The other thing I want to make available to you is our safety compliance and 
oversight plan for rail transportation of high level radioactive waste and 
spent nuclear fuel.  It's a partnership of the Department of Energy and the 
association of American Railroads and it goes above and beyond 49 CFR for the 
transportation of hazardous materials.  It's a proactive approach that we 
have taken.  My staff member, Kevin Blackwell, sitting behind me here is the 
author of it and I want to give him credit for it because he spent quite a 
bit of time putting it together.  In fact, the department has taken this, 
Department of Transportation has taken it.  They have expanded it to include 
highway and water so we're working on that with the Coast Guard and the 
Federal Highway Administration.  It's a flag ship initiative under Secretary 
Slater and we also have a dedicated train study report that is due out 
sometime next year.
 
MR. CAMERON:  There may be information that other agencies have reference to 
what's being done in other countries before -- this, I imagine, could either 
be factored into the update or supplemented, supplement the update in terms 
of what the NRC should do, if anything, in terms of regulatory change, Susan?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Right.  Part of the phase one is literature review and to look 
at expand    data that we could use and I'd also offer that as part of the 
website, although I don't think we can post everything, we certainly can post 
references to other websites and so that if you can't -- if you have a 
website where you have this then we can list that and what are our resources 
that someone can find them.  So I guess I'm agreeing that we're going to try 
to keep this as our website as informational as possible and Sandia is on the 
hook to be doing that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Susan.  Let's go to Heather Westra and then over to 
Uldis and then take a final comment from Amy and see if anybody in the 
audience has anything to say.  Heather?
 
MS. WESTRA:  One thing I see related to accident scenarios and I'm not sure 
whether or not it would be addressed in this study or is available in other 
studies, and it's regarding emergency response to the various accidents under 
various conditions under various scenarios.  Is any of that information 
available?  The notification time when something occurs.  How long it took 
the responders to get to the site.  How many responders per each given type 
of accident were on the scene?  Number of people potentially impacted by the 
various accidents?  And then the total time needed to resolve the accident.  
Clean it up.  That would be something we would be very interested in seeing 
as a jurisdiction that would be seeing those shipments and would likely have 
to respond to some kind of accident.  
 
MR. CAMERON:  I guess maybe perhaps two questions.  One is how is emergency 
response factored in, if at all, into the update of the modal study?  And 
secondly apart from the modal study, and this is one of those separate 
transportation concerns, is there a way to provide the type of information 
that Heather is talking about somehow?  Charles do you want to try to answer 
the first one?  What is the role of emergency response in trying to, in 
updating the study?  How do you treat that, if at all?
 
DR. MASSEY:  Sort of answer with a question.  Right now when we developed 
these accident sequences, we do not take credit in the scenarios for 
intervention, such as responders come on the scene, put the fire out quickly.
 
That is not in our distributions right now.  That is certainly something that 
could be considered to be incorporated, but we tend to try to look at it, 
let's assume there is no response?  How does the package perform under the 
conditions evaluated?  The whole emergency response once there is an 
accident, that's a separate issue than what we're planning to look at but we 
can certainly incorporate that as a suggestion in our accident sequence.
 
MS. WESTRA:  That would certainly be part of what the public want to know.  
Yeah, these shipments might be safe but how prepared are the jurisdictions to 
respond to these?  There are lessons learned out there that could be argued, 
incorporated into this analysis.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Let's gistic assumption though.  I can 
understand that it's a conservative approach.  Is that a realistic assumption 
that nobody would respond? 
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  No, I agree with you.  We'd have to look at how we'd factor 
that in given the variability of local response.  The emergency response 
system is developed with the Department of Transportation and FEMA and other 
agencies.  NRC is not involved in that specifically.
 
MR. CAMERON:  We may want to talk more about this off-line in terms of the 
information but I think the point has been made.  Earl, do you want to add 
something?
 
MR. EASTON:  Just a point of clarification what the NRC's role in emergency 
response is.  We have a formal policy statement issued by our commission 
somewhat dated goes back to 1985 on what the NRC's exact role in responding 
to emergencies.  That might be something you want to put on the website also.
 
Also we did a survey in 1990 on the capabilities of states to respond to 
emergencies done by the University of Indiana.  That might be of interest, 
but that was basically a survey of states.
 
The primary response to all accidents lies with the fire department, police 
department and that varies from locality to locality.  I don't know if there 
is any real comprehensive look at the response time and how it varies from 
county to county.
 
I think that a lot of programs related to repository have training funds to 
actually, in fact, upgrade and train people along proposed routes or 
suspected routes, and I don't know if it's addressed at that point, but it 
might be an avenue you might want to pursue. 

MR. CAMERON:  Final comment, Heather, before we move on. 
 
MS. WESTRA:  Sure.  I'm just stating that it would be helpful for potential 
responders to understand more, what all would be involved under these various 
scenarios.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Right, and I take your point.  We will look at that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Thank you very  much.  We're going to take Uldis 
and Amy and go on to the audience and, Felix, if we have time we will circle 
back to you.  Uldis?

MR. VANAGS:  My comment really follows what Heather was talking about.  There 
really needs to be a reality factor incorporated into the study.  It's 
unrealistic to think that spent fuel for Maine is going to be shipped during 
a snowstorm or an ice storm.  It's just not going to happen.  There will be 
state controls, and emergency planning response.  It's going to be monitored 
and regulated very closely.  Somehow those being incorporated, for instance, 
I'm looking at the accident rate data.  I can't help but think we have 
accidents, tractor trailers on 95 in Maine, I frequently travel that road.  I 
see the tractor trailers all turned over because they just don't want to slow 
down during the snow and ice.  I'm sure those accidents are in that data.  
That isn't going to happen.  They just won't be traveling.  We know the 
weather in New England quite well.  We know when it's okay to travel and not 
okay to travel.  So somehow there has to be a reality factor. 
 
MR. CAMERON:  That's a good point that I think we've heard from Felix and 
also it goes back to something that Amy said before and something that Marvin 
said in terms of, of weather.  Let's go to Amy for a final comment from the 
table and then see who has something to add from the audience.
 
MS. WESTRA:  I just want to respond to the comment Mr. Vanags just made.  
Actually it's a question that I have.  If I understand it correctly the 
states don't have any control over when the shipments happen.  That's not 
true? 
 
SPEAKER:  The states do have some control.
 
MS. WESTRA:  What is that?
 
SPEAKER:  There is a cooperation with the DOE.  Right now the North East 
Regional Transportation Task Force is having discussions now about these 
issues, about weather related issues and so forth.  All these factors will 
have to be taken into account.  They are big state concerns.  The DOE is 
being responsive to these concerns.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks for that clarification, Uldis.  Amy, the rest of your 
comment? 

MS. WESTRA:  I just have one other thing but I just want to mention it 
quickly.  I would like to see you all look at the likelihood of accidents 
after the loading and unloading of both the shipping casks especially at 
places like Palisades where they have problems with the casks and also just 
in general what's the likelihood of an accident when you are taking the cask 
off of the train onto a heavy haul truck or off of the truck onto a train or 
from a barge or whatever.
 
It seems like in my reading of the modal study I didn't see that addressed 
anywhere and I think that there probably is some likelihood of that 
happening.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Quick clarification on that from either NRC or Sandia in terms 
of how the point of transfer, the unloading point has been or is going to be 
or might be considered. Charles?  
 
DR. MASSEY:  No.  I think that's one of the things we want to look at that we 
have in our proposal is considering looking at especially transfer points, 
that's one of the issues of concern.  And are there environments that could 
be present that we'll need to analyze.  That's a good point to consider.
 
If you have specific issues at the loading facility or at an unloading 
facility or some set of circumstances that you can envision that you would 
like us to specifically consider then I would like to get some more detail 
about that.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I think it would be really important to look at, Dr. 
Shankman had mentioned the storage casks are not the transportation casks and 
so you have situations around the country where there are storage casks that 
are having problems and it's not at all clear that anybody knows how to get 
the rods out of those casks into the transportation casks and I would like to 
see you address that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Amy.  How about those of you in the 
audience?  Does anybody have a comment?
 
MR. HANNON:  my name is Dick Hannon.  I'm with U.S. DOT.  Continuing the 
reality theme, I think the reality is that I don't believe shipments would be 
dispatched in the teeth of a blizzard and so forth, but that's not to say 
that shipments if they went from say Maine to a far west state to be named 
later, that there wouldn't be some inclement weather somewhere along the 
line.  I think steps would be taken for safe havens.  This would be part of 
normal planning, but shipments don't just stop because of the inclement 
weather, but by regulation we don't ban clear precise thought.  People will 
not dispatch that way, but I wouldn't want to think that a state as far as 
the origin.  I think further down the line you could run into bad weather as 
defined by whatever the state wants to define it.
 
Another question or response to Heather, there is a large activity of 
emergency response training that's done year in, year out.  Section 180 in 
the NWPA Act to provide emergency preparedness training along the routes. 
 
I'm with DOT.  We have a grants program that is available to all states.  
There is -- always use more money.  There is an attempt we're making now to 
triple the amount of monies that are available to train the emergency 
response community.  But as Earl Easton pointed out it's essentially a local 
response, be it the federal level provided to the extent that it can to make 
them prepared at the various levels.
 
There is a comprehensive federal response plan that is coordinated by FEMA, 
but there are steps that have been taken previously and they would be 
implemented again I believe.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Mr. Hannon.  Yes, sir.  Please state your 
name and affiliation, if appropriate, for the transcript.
 
MR. HANSON:  My name is Allen Hanson.  I'm with a company Trans Nuclear.  
Trans Nuclear has been involved in the transport of radioactive materials for 
more than 35 years.  I just feel I need to make a comment in order the keep 
the record straight and this would be far more  appropriate coming from Dr. 
Shankman but she hasn't had the opportunity to fully respond.
 
As a company that is deeply involved in the fabrication of casks for storage 
and for transportation, I think the court would recognize two fundamental 
regulations.  First of all, no one is allowed to fabricate casks for 
transportation until they have the NRC approved quality assurance program and 
the NRC verifies that in fact they are using that program appropriately.
 
Secondly, no cask is put into service until it has issued a valid certificate 
of compliance by the NRC and the fabricators are responsible for building 
that cask in exact accordance with that certificate of compliance and the NRC 
is also very aggressive in making sure they inspect and enforce that part of 
the regulations.
 
I would not want to leave the impression in anyone's mind that fabricators or 
designers are in any case running off and building things without first 
getting all necessary approvals from at least the Regulatory Commission.  
 
MR. CAMERON:  I'm sorry.  I'm glad you added that and I know there may be 
other comments on that that I think we're going to have to deal with perhaps 
off-line and we'll talk about that.
 
Is there anybody else in the audience who would like to say something at this 
point about the issue of accident possibilities sequences scenarios?  Okay.  
We need to take a lunch break.  And I will talk to Kevin and Felix about 
their comments and how we might get that in.
 
(Luncheon recess.)
 
MR. CAMERON:  I think during our first discussion period we developed a lot 
of good ideas with NRC and Sandia to think about for incorporation into the 
study methodology.  There will be time during our final session, it's sort of 
an open session for us to revisit some, any lingering comments that we might 
have from earlier sessions.
 
What I would suggest that we do during this session after Dr. Massey, after 
Charles tees the subject up for us, is we'll go to our first discussant for 
an idea and let's see if we can test that idea or thought out among the rest 
of you before we go to another concept the danger of trying to do that is 
perhaps that there will be a whole lot of ideas at the end that we'll sort of 
have to rush to get them on to the transcript. Charles?
 
DR. MASSEY:  Good afternoon.  We're going to start off the afternoon with 
talking about container performance during collisions.  And to sort of get 
you up to speed on our knowledge base to date where we would propose areas of 
investigation for the package performance study, we'll start off with the 
original modal study, what it did and how it analyzed the performance of the 
spent fuel cask during collision environments.
 
First, it looked at a generic steel lead steel.  I will try to use my usual 
displayer as much as I can.  You have a stainless steel lead steel 
essentially intercast.  This is the structural strength of the cask.  It 
modelled that on a generic basis did not have a particular cask design we 
looked at.  Just looked at essentially a cask completely constructed that 
looked like this.  They did not take into account the impact limiters on the 
cask when they did their analysis.  They did not look at, this is probably a 
function of our computer capabilities after the time, did not take into 
account the cask closure mechanisms and design on the cask. 
 
To make up for that they made conservative assumptions about how much 
material could be released.  They did not model the cask  closure system.  
And finally for how much material could actually escape from the cask, what 
they looked at was the inner strain or the strain on this inner cask wall and 
by looking at how much strain was on this piece, hard to hold up, this is 
heavy.  But this inner wall is how they determined the leakage, properties of 
the cask in collision events.  They looked at how much strain was put on that 
piece.  
 
In the 0170 reevaluation we looked at the effects of essentially collision 
and chemical type loads on four different cask, generic cask designs and we 
started to look at in some detail cask closure mechanisms.  One thing I will 
point out on this one, so I remember to do it on our proposed suggestions, is 
that the bolts when we did the study we essentially modelled those as square 
bolts, not the round bolt that you would see in reality.  But that was partly 
a function of our computation capabilities at the time.  So again we had to 
make some conservative assumptions about how that square bolt was attached to 
the cask and help secure the lid. 
 
We looked at collision forces on the cask hitting an unyielding surface.  A 
hard unyielding surface is a, typically some type of a design or a feature 
that all of the impact when the cask would hit that is put onto the cask.  
Whatever it hits doesn't absorb any of the forces  from the collision.  
That's an unyielding surface.  So we looked at collision of other casks onto 
these hard unyielding surfaces. 
 
We looked at forced speeds, 30, 60, 90 and 120 miles per hour onto these hard 
and unyielding surfaces and looked at three orientations for each of those 
speeds:  a side, corner and an end.  We also took into account for weight 
purposes that there were impact limiters on the cask, but we assumed those 
were already crushed.  There was no absorbent fact or features left in the 
impact limiters so they could not take any of the crush force off of the 
package and finally we modelled that without this neutron shield.  This outer 
piece here, we did not model this on the cask at all.  This was considered 
structurally unimportant for us in the collision  environment.  That's what 
happened in our 0170 update that's under review.
 
Based on our examination of that's been done today and our analysis in the 
0170 update, what we're suggesting for the package performance study is that 
now we have even the increases in ins computer capabilities are amazing from 
point of view of how well we can do analyses now.  We would like to take some 
of that into account and do a much more detailed look at the cask closure 
system.  

For one, we can model the bolts now almost as they're exactly designed and 
how they fit into the cask.  Another thing we want to look at is if one bolt 
starts to fail, how does that impact other bolts that might be in the series, 
sort of like a zipper effect start to go down.  How does that impact the rest 
of the bolts in the system?
 
Little more detail look at the closure.  One of the things we're proposing to 
do is do an analysis again looking at a corner impact.  We want to explain 
something here, maybe use another slide.  When we talk about trying to do a 
test, an analysis of having the center of gravity of the package so 
essentially the weight in this test, the weight is centered over this point 
and what we'd like to do is look at a crash or drop test of the package that 
would be testing to compare with analysis, but have it over in the corner so 
we could inspect the most damage to the cask as possible.  

So when we get into the collision area we like to do this analysis of what we 
predict would happen in this type of environment and compare that with the 
test.  We're looking at some speed greater than 60 miles an hour and get some 
suggestions on.  What sort of speeds are people interested in and how can we 
get to those speeds?  And then again finally would like to do a pretest 
prediction, make that publicly available somehow so people can see how the 
models, how the accuracy, how that is in comparison to a test results.  With 
that I'm going to turn back to you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you very much, Charles.  There is a number of 
suggestions that Sandia is proposed to do in the study and I would open it up 
for comment either on those suggestions or on new items and we'll go first to 
Bob Halstead and, Bob, when you have your one major point on, let me see if I 
can get some reaction to it also.  Go ahead.
 
DR. MASSEY:  Can I interrupt one second for one thing I forgot to add on?  In 
the collision analyses I forgot one thing.  We would also look at having 
simulated fuel weight inside the cask during these collision events to take 
into account the momentum, forces caused by addition of fuel inside the cask. 
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  There were three things that I wanted to speak to so I will do 
them one at a time.  
         
MR. CAMERON:  I'll tell you what to be a little bit more efficient.  Why 
don't you put the three on the table and let's go get some discussion on that 
and then we'll come over to Marvin and Felix.  Do you still have your card 
up?  We'll go to Felix.  Go ahead, Bob. 

MR. HALSTEAD:  First of all, we endorse more attention to modelling the 
bolts.  Everyone knew that was a problem with the first modal study.  
Consequently discussions particularly we had with people from BNFL, based on 
their testing results led them to believe, and this is, you know, anecdotal 
that I'm passing on, that inner strain, inner shell strain as low as one 
percent might cause bolt failure based on analyses that they had done.  
That's certainly an area we would endorse paying attention to. 

Secondly, the speed issue is complicated by first looking at the speed of the 
transport vehicle and secondly the issue of whether you also want to consider 
speed as a factor for other vehicles being involved in a multivehicle 
collision.
 
As probably everyone around the table who has got an anecdotal experience 
with driving on the interstate these days can tell you, at least there seem 
to be and I haven't kept a hard count, but I seem to see a lot of big rigs 
passing me at over 75 miles an hour and I have seen fully placarded 1203 
gasoline tankers and exotic loads with liquid hydrogen  passing me at over 75 
miles an hour.  So in terms of other vehicles that might complicate the 
highway crash, I certainly think you need to look at the 75 mile per hour 
range.  With rail, and Bob I don't mean this to be taken as an aspersion on 
operating practices, but we have looked at a couple of runaway accidents.  
I'd like to think through a combination of good operating protocols, 
administrative controls imposed by regulations as well as the common sense of 
the railroads that we wouldn't have any runaway trains, but we do have some 
experience in this country with runaway trains derailing and in some cases 
colliding with nearby objects at speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour.  I 
would certainly argue that something in the range of 85 to 90 ought to be 
looked at.  And again I'm assuming that we would operate under train 
operations that are about 55 miles per hour in the western part of the 
country.
 
The third issue is the issue of multiple bolt failure.  I hadn't heard the 
word zipper effect before, but that actually captures an issue that we've 
been thinking about in the context of attempting to model human error.  There 
are all kinds of other ways to get at the human error issue, but I can think 
of about 20 different types of human error that might result in improper 
unexpected performance of the lid closure in an accident.  And so a question 
I pose to you, because I'm not sure whether this can be modelled in the cost 
effective way, but one way to approach the impact of human error in cask 
performance would be to look at a specific consequence of any number of human 
errors that might result in a condition like zipper effect around 50 percent 
of the closure creating a gap say of a half inch to an inch that would effect 
the block regions above 35 or 40 miles per hour or some -- obviously there is 
a certain amount of arbitrary judgment call in this.  But those are the three 
things I want to throw on the table but focus on bolts is good.  We'd like to 
see 75 miles per hour for truck and 90 mile per hour for rail speeds and also 
looking at the speeds of other vehicles impacting them and we'd like to look 
at some discrete ways of modelling the implications of human error for cask 
performance under absolute conditions.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks a lot, Bob.  Let's see if we can take the bolts and 
human error together and then go to speed.  I realize people have their cards 
up to throw other ideas on the table, but to sort of discuss this at one 
time, is there any gloss that anyone wants to add to the -- while it's a good 
idea we're modelling bolts issue?  How about this idea of human error? 

Ed, did you want to say something about that or are you waiting for the 
speed?  

MR. PRITCHARD:  I'm waiting for speed.  MR. CAMERON:  Anything on the human 
error?  We heard Amy bring this up before.  Let's go to -- Susan, do you want 
do make a clarification?

MS. SHANKMAN:  Can we frame that as human performance rather than human 
error? 
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  Human factors make it a little broader.  You're right.  I 
stand corrected.  I'm trying to learn to communicate better, Susan.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Rick, you want to talk to human performance?
 
MR. BOYLE:  Thanks, Chip.  Just to make one point which I think one of the 
speakers made earlier about the requirement for NRC approved quality 
assurance programs for design, fabrication, maintenance, use, reuse, all of 
those aspects of cask utilization.  So that Looking at human performance you 
should be done in a context of human performance under a rather rigorous 
quality assurance program.  
 
MR. CAMERON:  This is an interesting point even on emergency response that we 
had.  Should human performance be factored in assuming that there is an a 
rigorous and rigorously enforced quality assurance program is the question.  
Do we have any thoughts on that particular issue?  Susan, do you want to say 
something about that before, for the group? 
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I think we will look at it.  I guess I want to couch it in 
clarification that human performance and most other risk assessments that 
we've done has been shown to be as much a contributor as a savior, and in 
many ways it's human performance that has prevented an area and there are 
only maybe three ways to standardize human performance.  One of which is to 
engineer it, most expensive and most successful.  And the other is to 
proceduralize it which is less expensive and medium in success and training 
which the least expensive overall and the least likely to predict human 
behavior.  So we can look at it but I think that this is not, unfortunately 
my personal sense, that this is not so significantly different than any other 
activity in which humans perform a safety function.
 
I think we can use some of those insides from other venues and see whether 
they speak to us here and so I think we should include it in the study.  But 
I don't think we have any clearer sense of what somebody else does of danger 
that speaks to this particular activity.  We have some in nuclear power 
plants because it's recorded by procedural personnel in other ways, so if you 
know of the database I think we really need to know where that is.  

MR. CAMERON:  Let's explore this a little bit further.  The issue is is 
should the study be done with the assumption that rigorous QA program is in 
place?  Kevin, you want to add something on that particular issue?
 
MR. KAMPS:  Yeah, just the experience of Palisades bears on this again in 
that I've heard said that quality assurance was in place with the casks of 
Palisades and that certificates of compliance was in place, but there have 
been breakdowns at both of those at Palisades.
 
The quality assurance at CR Nuclear, Incorporation which manufactured the 
cask system was found to be very shoddy years after the fact upon going back 
and looking locking at it, inspecting it.  Yeah.  Just again a three year 
cessation in the loading of casks because of the explosion in Wisconsin and 
this summer, the summer of '99, in June Palisades went to load the first VST 
24 cask in three years and the whole idea for the three year suspension was 
to get everything in order and again there were inadvertent hydrogen burns 
with the casks and this was due to a breakdown in the administrative 
controls.
 
So definitely human error and breakdowns in these in these procedures and 
regulations are contributing factors to something that is unprecedented which 
is the consequence of an accident that releases radioactivity into the 
environment of this intensity that any mistakes that occur are long lasting 
permanent damage to communities and to the land.  So that is unprecedented 
the nature of the material we're talking about.
 
MR. CAMERON:  All right.  Thank you.  Anybody else on the QA issue?  Go to 
Felix and then Amy.
 
MR. KILLAR:  I think what you have to do when you start looking at things 
like this is you have to include this with other type things that could 
occur.  You can't single out human error.  Certainly we have very extensive 
quality assurance programs.  We have very extensive training programs to 
minimize human errors, but human are humans and things happen.  So I don't 
think you can avoid it.  But at the same time I don't think you need to 
single it out.  I think you can include human error such as other type errors 
or problems such as you get a bad set of bolts.  You have a straight spec 
maybe as far as a bolt but it wasn't tightened correctly or it was tightened 
correctly but it's the wrong bolt.  
 
I think things like that have to be grouped into a category of others or 
other impacts or what have you because I think if you try to focus on human 
error, it's going to be a continuum to where you will never come up with an 
answer that is satisfactory to all people.  Assuming human errors will occur 
and that's what we do in our industry, we assume human errors occur and so 
therefore we try to have back up systems and we try to have other things.  
But when you're doing your study and designs you've got to look at what type 
of errors can occur whether it's welding deficiency, a wrong bolt, wrong 
torque or the operator for whatever reason forgot to the put the seal in or 
whatever could have happened happened and see what impact it has and it's 
really the consequences of that action not the action itself.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Felix.  Amy, quality assurance?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I just wanted to say that it seems to me like all the 
other factors that we've discussed, we talked about conservative approach 
where Dr. Massey has suggested that the impact limiters weren't considered in 
a crash test because that was  the conservative approach.  And it seems like 
this question is the same type of question.  So it seems like in order to 
take the conservative approach you would not consider the  qualityassurance 
program because it's like impact limiters, it limits the impact of human 
error just like the impact limiters limits the impact of a collision.
 
So I think that in order to do a correct study, a conservative study, you 
should say yes there is a quality assurance program and yes there is an 
impact limiter but we're not going to consider those things in our test.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Amy.  Let's go to the speed issue and then we're 
going to ask Marvin to put some of his issues on the table.  Yes, Bob.
 
BOB:  Before you close that human error discussion, Felix did a really good 
job of stating some things that I didn't state very well.  I just want to 
clarify.  I just want  to make two points.  One is you have to look at human 
error in spite of the fact that you assume that you have rigorous NRC 
approved QA QC programs.
And secondly, as a modelling proposition I'd like to try and sum up a range 
of human errors, equipment problems, and focus on maybe one, two or three 
conditions that could result from any number of causes and then try to assess 
so that we have some quantitative handle on how those effect cask 
performance.
 
Felix, I really like the way you  when I said human error I was covering the 
whole broad range of things you wouldn't technically classify as human 
performance.  Thing like counterfeit parts.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Bob, for that clarification.  We're going to go to the 
points Bob made on speed.  One is don't just look at the speed of the 
transport vehicle, but consider the speed of other vehicles.  As speed 
figures to use 75 miles per hour truck, 85 to 90 miles per hour train.  I 
think that that got, Ed wanted -- did you want to say something about that?  
Go ahead Ed Pritchard and Bob Fronczak.
 
MR. PRITCHARD:  Just want to respond back to the about regulatory and runaway 
trains. The federal railway administration did take regulatory action after 
those accidents.  What the train device does for those nonrailroaders in the 
room, there's quite a few that are not railroaders here, it permits the 
engineer to apply the brakes from the back as well as the front of the train.  
And it's done electronically and it's required on freight trains over a 
certain size and weight and going over certain grade.  So we do have those 
regulations in place right now as a clarification.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  One of the advantages assuming, or with the use of dedicated 
trains, would be you could use electronic brakes and apply the brakes much 
more quickly at the speed of light instead of speed of sound and do that 
instantaneously you decrease your stopping distances or increase them by like 
30 to 50 percent.
 
As far as the speeds go you recommended 90 miles per hour.  I don't know if 
that's the right speed or not.  I think you are right.  I think we would like 
to see track speeds, normal track speeds for freighter approaching 70 miles 
an hour out west and you could have two trains doing that or you could look 
at 55 miles an hour for this shipment assuming that spent nuclear fuel would 
be transported at two trains speed and then another train coming in at 70 
miles an hour. 
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Bob.  That goes to a couple of issues.  One is the 
speed not only of the transport vehicle but the speed of the other vehicle 
and you said normal track speed in the west, so I guess that's a regional 
variation.  Much has been suggested along those lines looking at regional and 
seasonal variations.
 
Let's go to Dr. Lee for a comment.  We're on speed, Henry. 
 
DR. LEE:  I have a comment on speed because the study we are performing and 
also in the regulation is the impact and of course you know considering the 
two vehicles hit each other and the both have speed, but then this is a more 
realistic situation in the real world, but I think that the unyielding 
surface is not a realistic assumption and if we're going to look at this very 
severe impact with such a high speed, then we will really have to consider 
real objects and we'll have to -- impact energy has been shared by both 
objects and not just by one alone.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Henry.  Do we have other comments on speed before we 
go to Marvin?  One final or perhaps two.  Go ahead, Felix.
 
MR. KILLAR:  I just want to say on speed we agreed that I don't think we need 
to go any more than 90 or 100 miles an hour for speed on the rail lines.  The 
other thing I think we need to be careful of is you talk about head-on 
impacts either by trailers or head-on impact by trains.  While you don't want 
to see that happen they have happened from time to time.  But if you start 
looking at those type of scenarios you need to put them in relistic scenarios 
and that that cask is not out of the head of the cab of the train or out of 
the head of the cab of the truck and so you do have quote unquote impact 
limiters whether it be the locomotive or the cab.
 
You need to make these things realistic as you start looking at these 
analysis and don't go off on a wonderful analysis that don't make sense to 
life.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I think that that's a  point we're going to come back to as a 
general point.  How are these various accidents, other things that are being 
considered, how is the analysis supposed to be bounded?  Eileen was talking 
this morning about the risk in forming the setting of priorities.  Thaiation organization are all interested in package performance for their 
mode of transport.  There are studies underway for air transport, for 
example, to look at what are the forces transmitted to a package.  And so you 
end up recognizing that one has to consider impact velocity, angle, 
orientation, crush of the conveyance, softness of the target, and the 
relative stiffness of the package on the target.

So it's a very complicated and complex modelling and undertaking.  But I 
think as it's been said the important thing is using real world speeds to use 
real world targets and real world crash scenarios.  

The British, for example, crashed a locomotive at 100 miles per hour.  That's 
a real world speed in a real world scenario and the damage was minimal 
because there was nothing behind the cask so it went bouncing down the 
tracks.  So there are many different analytical techniques that can be used 
to predict performance, but in both cases you have to use apples and oranges 
if it's an unyielding target then the speed has to be modified to reflect 
what a real world target will be like.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you very much for that, Rick.  Marvin, would you 
like to put some issues on the table for us for discussion?  
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Yes, I have three more issues I want to put on the table but 
this relates to what was just raised about realism, but it goes in the other 
direction.
 
First, there is the issue of how heavy these containers are.  Do you just 
take into account the cask?  Do you take into account the cask plus the fuel 
plus the impact limiters?  Yes.  Or do you also take into account the rail 
carriage?  Does that also have to be taken into account?  
 
For instance, if you have a high star one hundred cask you're talking about 
the impact limiters 145 tons.  But if you include the entire  carriage 
including the, what do I want to call it, the skiff that holds the cask 
itself it goes up to 211 tons.  Is that the weight you should look at when 
you look at a collision?  I would argue that it is.  I would have that entire 
package in a sideways impact to a hard rock surface and that would be one of 
my bounding accidents.  Because it's a credible accident.
 
I want to bring up another issue which was raised at the National Technical 
Waste Board, a Nuclear Technical Waste Board meeting and that is the issue of 
where are these casks actually sitting in the train?  Are we having a 
dedicated train or are we having a heavy cask sitting next to the locomotive 
or are we having the heavy cask sitting at the end of the train with a bunch 
of light cars in between?
 
It's important to have the actual model of how the train is designed.  
Because if you have a heavy car at the end of the train and there is a, you 
know, derailment, then the whole cask can go flying if there are a bunch of 
light cars in between.
 
Finally, I want to raise an issue that was raised earlier which is cask wrap 
around an abutment.  The modal study looked at casks wrapped around an 
abutment and also more recent versions of the modal study, which should come 
out by Lawrence Livermore, which looked at a truck cask.  But they did not, 
they looked at the effect on strain, but they did not look at the effect on 
welds and bolts.  That's an important issue when you are looking at casks 
wrapped around an abutment.  What is the effect of that on that on the welds 
and the bolts?
 
MR. CAMERON:  Great.  Thank you,  Marvin.  And let's explore that first 
issue.  What weight is considered in the collision and Marvin was suggesting 
that the weight of the container should be considered, the weight of the 
under carriage or skiff, I'm not sure what the correct terminology of that 
is.  Are there comments on what weight should be used? 
 
Charles, do you want to give us  is there a usual assumption that is used in 
this case?
 
DR. MASSEY:  As Marvin noted there have been differences in what they have 
assumed is the weight.  What we are suggesting for the package performance 
study is that we assume or take into account the weight of the impact 
limiters, weight of the contents inside the package and then the package.  
 
We'll certainly explore your comment of whatever the transport vehicle is 
either for the    truck or rail car, that additional weight.  Then we also 
have to balance that against too in the consideration of now that cask may 
also be protected somewhat by the undercarriage.  It's not always cask is 
flying off, has all that weight of everything behind it if it's still 
attached to the rail car or to the --
 
If your suggestion is that we look at that whole envelope of activities, I 
think that's certainly something we'll take a look at.  
 
MR. CAMERON:  Other comments on what weight should be considered?  Rick?
 
MR. RAWL:  Thanks, Chip.  Just a consideration that the tie downs would play 
an important point because as the dynamics of the accident progress, the cask 
in all likelihood will be removed from the rail car because of failure of tie 
down and it would be relatively low G forces that would happen.  So 
considering whether to take the weight of the rail car into account is you 
know depended on the dynamics one is considering.  The skid that it's mounted 
on most likely is going to stay with the cask because it's typically very 
securely mounted in the skid, but that the skid is tied down to the rail car 
in a different way.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  I think Jack Edlow has a comment on that.  Go 
ahead, Jack.  

MR. EDLOW:  Is it not considered the design that the cask should break away 
from the car to move elsewhere as it's done in other packages that are 
supposed to eject from the vehicle so that they're removed from the accident.  
Is this not necessarily a design feature?
 
MR. RAWL:  It ends up being that way because the tie down attachments on the 
package itself has to meet the NRC requirements.  Whereas, the tie down to 
the rail car meets the DOT requirements which are not that stringent.  And 
you are right, in the end it's a good design approach because that avoids 
having the tie downs causing failure to the package.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Henry, do you want to give us a little comment?
 
DR. LEE:  Yes.  Regarding the weight of the cask, the content of the cask, 
and the impact limiters, they are all considered as part of the package so 
it's always considered.  Actually it may be a secret but most casks that were 
reviewed and certified was tested, at least simulated test.
 
Rick just said that the tie downs, the NRC requirement really is very 
stringent and actually probably is more stringent than any country in the 
world because this is one part we are not completely in compliance with.  So 
most likely it's going to break away from the vehicle in a severe accident.  
 
About those shipping skids, these things probably if it's attached towards 
the package probably will act as additional impact limiters and absorbing 
energy.
 
MR. CAMERON:  And thank you.  Everyone keep in mind that the suggestion that 
Marvin others are making, although there may be opinions  around the table on 
this, that suggestion, those suggestions will ultimately be considered by the 
NRC and Sandia in formulating phase two of the project.  Let's not lose sight 
of that. Marvin, do you have a follow up on your weight issues?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Actually I was hoping the moderator would be Jerry Springer 
and not you  so we could just have it out.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I'll try to create some hostility here.  I though you people 
would create it yourself.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  You're calming everyone down and we want to get at it.
 
I wanted to respond to what Dr. said.  The whole tech design that I have 
looked at, the one that has 145 ton cask and 211 ton package, are you telling 
me that it's only a 2G tie down?  Is that your knowledge, yes or no?
 
DR. LEE:  No.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  What is the force?  Is it 2G or more?  It's more is the 
answer.
 
 
 MR. CAMERON:  Is that the answer, it is more?
 
DR. LEE:  Yes, it is more than 2G.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  So why did you tell  everyone it's 2G force, it's all going 
to break away?  That's not true.
 
DR. LEE:  As you know I am NRC and I  don't know exactly what is the tie down 
of requirements for rail cars or highway trailers. I think they are more 2 
Gs.  NRC tie requirements is 10 Gs in the direction of travel, 5 Gs 
transverse the direction of travel and the 2 Gs in the vertical direction and 
all these three component of forces apply the same time simultaneously.  So 
at least to the attachment point of the package is this 10, 5, 2 G.  So these 
think about the weight of the package. These tie down forces are very, very 
large and have been criticized by many people that this 10, 5, 2 Gs 
regulation is not developed when we have such a big heavy cask, packages in 
mind.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Let me just -- Marvin, you get, did we get the correct answer 
out on the   table for you?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  No.  The regulations are one thing but actually how the 
design is is another thing.  I've looked at a design and I'm going to go back 
and look at the SAR and actually get the number and I'm going to send it to  
Dr. Lee.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Let's go to the next issue 
that Marvin brought up which is, I take it, a recommendation that the study 
should consider where the cask is cask located on a train.  I would imagine 
that the answer would be different for a dedicated  train, obviously I 
suppose, versus an undedicated train if I could use that term.
 
Ed and Bob, do you want do talk about that?  Go ahead.
 
MR. PRITCHARD:  The requirements on  train placement are the same for 
dedicated train and regular freight train service.  It's a one car train 
placement for an occupied caboose locomotive.
 
MR. CAMERON:  And, Bob, do you want to add to that?
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  I think in practice what we have seen is a buffer car between 
locomotive and first cask that's usually a gondola or car.  We think there 
are some things you can do. First of all that buffer car ought to be a 
similarly weighted vehicle and if it was a gondola let's say with some stone 
in it, it could  actually act to absorb energy in case of a derailment.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you.  Anybody else on the -- Bob Halstead?
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  Two aspects of this issue are -- again I hate to think of 
these casks being transported on general freight trains, but to the extent 
that that's still possible, even with buffer cars properly placed you still 
have to consider the possibility of interaction in a derailment with other 
hazardous materials.
 
We ship a lot of mining explosives west.  We ship, and I've had some 
experience, one horrific one in Roseville, California, humongous military 
shipment accident, bombs in this case.
 
There are other kinds of complicating hazardous materials.  They fall in a 
number of  categories.  Ones people usually think about are flammables or 
explosives but you also have to look at cargoes like PVC chips that can fuel 
a long sustained high temperature fire and chemicals like acids that might 
both complicate  the response which I know in this exercise maybe we're not 
looking at it, but may also have an impact for example on cask components 
themselves.  The last and probably less important  but certainly the 
flammables and explosives need to be considered.  I would argue that you have 
to look at these mixed loads two ways.
 
One, the interaction between these other cargoes and cask car if the cask is 
being shipped in a mixed freight train, but you also have to look at the 
possibility of a two train collision even if you are using the dedicated 
train for the spent fuel cask and the possible interaction and I'm 
particularly concerned about mining explosives and military weapons being 
shipped by rail also.
 
MR. CAMERON:  That's the similar point that you made in our first discussion 
about what    accident scenarios should be considered.  We're going to talk 
about Marvin's last point and then we're going to go over to Amy 
Shollenberger for her general comments on this.
 
Marvin's last point cask wrap around an abutment, don't just look at the 
impact on --       look at the impact on welds and bolts.  I see Bob Halstead 
is definitely shaking his head.
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  A minor clarification since that was my point.  Yes, when I 
brought it  up earlier we were talking about looking at the wraparound on 
different cask designs and materials, but Marvin is absolutely correct.  It 
might even be more important to look at the impact of the wraparound on the 
performance of the bolts, closures and seals.
 
 
MR. CAMERON:  Anybody have any other comment on that particular issue?  Let's 
go to Bob Fronczak and then Ed Pritchard.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  These are a few points I wanted to make anyway, but we do 
think that the original study focused too much on relating accidents to the 
regulatory test conditions and  not enough going to real accidents.  So we do 
think you ought to spend some time and look at what can happen.  And we 
already talked about what our real surfaces, rock surfaces, bridge abutments 
or whatever.  I'm sure you will address  that.
 
The other thing is a locomotive sill.  A  locomotive sill is a very strong 
structure.  It's going to be in every train that is transporting spent 
nuclear fuel, so it does have a real  possibility of impacting a cask.  And I 
think the modal study looked at that not on a point basis but on more of a 
distributed load basis.  We think you ought to look at it on point of impact.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Could you just say that  term again?  A locomotive --
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  Sill?
 
MR. CAMERON:  S I L L?
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  S I L L, yes.
 
MR. CAMERON:  What is that for those of us who don't know?
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  It is the structure of the locomotive.  It is the mainframe of 
the locomotive.

MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much.  Ed, do you want to add on the --
 
MR. PRITCHARD:  I just want to remind  NRC to look at our Part 174 for train 
placement requirements that covers not only the radioactive material next to 
locomotives and occupied cabooses but also next to explosives and other 
hazardous materials.  That's all.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay, thank you very much.  Eileen do you have a point on the 
wrap           around?
 
MS. SUPKO:  I think in trying to assess what have been termed real world 
accidents, whether it be the wraparound type conditions or others, the 
difficulty is going to be in saying  what's a real world accident?  Where do 
you set  your bounds?  What are the limits?  You can keep adding condition, 
upon condition, upon condition until you have something that is no longer 
real world but is extraordinary and isn't an accident
that could happen.  I think you need to be very careful about defining what 
those real world accidents might be.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Again, I think that underscores the need to perhaps have a 
specific  discussion of this whole idea of bounding real   world conservatism 
that we've been talking about.  There is a tension there and I think we  need 
to have a discussion on that.
 
Henry, do you have a quick comment on  the wraparound issue?
 
DR. LEE:  I think the impact wraparound accidents are very import.  We should 
look into  it, but I would like to point out that the cask  has many layers 
of protection.  We have inner shell one and a half inch thick and we have 
gamma shell several inches and then we have outer shell two and-a-half inches 
thick and then outside of that we have absorbing materials.  All these things 
in the real world will absorb energy and  even hit the real hard object.
 
The weight of the package is so great and it's hard to think that the object 
will stay stationary or no damage or no yielding.  But like  I say you know 
this is a good comment and we will look into it.  Besides the material we use 
to construct these packages very ductile and it can subject to a large 
deformation without breaking. So I think we have adequate protection.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Final comment on this before we go to Amy?  Go ahead, 
Bob  Fronczak.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  Follow-up to you Eileen.  There is a database, fairly  
comprehensive database that we've got that's got tank accident data for years 
and that's one of the ways we have improved tank cars significantly  over the 
years.  So that might be a place to look at what are real forces that are 
experienced in accidents.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  What we're going to do is go to Amy for her issues 
and then  I want to quickly go to the audience and then I want to go into 
collision by fire so that we can collision by fire.  You know what I mean.  
Go ahead, Amy.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I will be quick.  I just have a few points.  First of 
all, I just want to reiterate as often as possible that public citizens would 
like to see full scale testing done with real casks.  Just to make sure  
that's on the record.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Full scale testing with  real cask.  Can you just say a little 
bit more  about real casks?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  What I mean by real cask is one that has been constructed 
not a  computer simulated model.  I know you all say you  plan on doing that 
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  So you mean a physical  test?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Yes.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  As opposed to a computer model?
 
MR. CAMERON:  We have a whole discussion area on this issue so we'll bring it 
back then.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I'm not advocating  putting fuel rods in your -- also I 
would like to again say I think we mentioned route specific data but I would 
like to bring it up again in collision data. Also I have two questions and 
these are questions about whether this is a good idea or  not because I'm not 
sure.  I would like to see what would be, if it could be in the study what 
could cause the cask to create a release?  Rather than trying to think of 
accident scenarios and  then testing those scenarios, can you say here is 
what would compromise the cask.  This would have to happen.
 
And then the other question I have is I know that on the trains buffer cars 
are required in between the casks and I know in the study you have a picture 
where if the train crashes there is a thing with the couplers that makes it 
stop  before the casks run into each other.  My question is if the train 
derails and there is more than one cask on the train, can we look at 
likelihoods and impacts of cask-to-cask collisions?  Because as you said 
these casks are the various things that we make and maybe if they run into a 
bridge abutment it's not going to compromise it, but what's going to happen 
if two casks collide with each other and is that  possible?
 
MR. CAMERON:  I want to get the answer to the first question which I believe 
Charles could probably give us an answer to.  In other words, in the study 
Amy is suggesting look at  those accident scenarios that would create a 
release and this may get us back into the bounding issue again, but if you 
could just briefly give her some information on that and  then we'll hear 
something about the multiple casks colliding.  Do you want Jerry to answer 
that?
 
DR. MASSEY:  I think one of the things  that will come out of the study is we 
look at  these severe accident regimes, unyielding surfaces and go to some 
yielding surfaces of two  trains colliding.  One of the things that we will 
be able to tell is get better models that can predict cask performance and 
then we can start to get some feeling for where in these regimes might we see 
the releases of material from the package.  Something we can vision as coming 
out of the package performance study.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Bob, you want  to talk about the multiple train 
derailment, multiple cask.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  One piece of technology that we use all the time, and this is 
primarily on hazardous materials transportation, it's what's called shelf 
couplers where you have something restraining the couples from becoming 
uncoupled so the cars stay coupled in a derailment and that eliminates or 
greatly reduces the possibilities  of the vehicles impacting each other.  You 
see that commonly in an Amtrak derailment where the cars don't come apart 
because you don't want the cars impacting each other.
 
You bring up a good point and it goes back to the tie down requirements.  If 
you have loose tie downs where the casks come off, then the casks can impact 
each other.  We think that it's probably a better idea to keep the casks on 
the
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay, thank you very much.  We're going to have one last 
comment at the table in regard to your first point.  Amy and then I want to 
see if anybody in the audience has anything to say.  Go ahead, Eileen.
 
MS. SUPKO:  While I think that the exercise of attempting to test to 
destruction acask might be interesting academically.  I don't see the point 
of it under real life circumstances and I think that as, I mentioned earlier, 
we need   to keep this study focussed on what is real, what are the bounding 
conditions that a cask might actually meet under real transportation 
conditions and use that to frame the study.
 
Academics aside, yes, it would be interesting what would we have to do to 
this cask  in order to destroy it and cause a leak, but I  think everyone 
agrees as I mentioned earlier, the  current regulatory framework exists that 
makes  these casks safe for transport and we don't need  to push things to 
the limit in terms of trying to  see where the pie in the sky accident, it's 
not  going to occur, what that might result in.
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  I don't necessarily disagree on testing a failure mostly 
because it's             difficult to do that in the real world.  But I  
think modelling the failure, and I'm familiar with some of the work that the 
mechanical engineering group at the University of Reno did, University of 
Nevada at Reno did under DOE  funding to determine failure thresholds by say  
running the regulatory fire.  Actually I should  say that, make the general 
point here that determining failure thresholds, some of us feel is very 
valuable, but it doesn't necessarily have  to be done through full scale 
testing.  I like  full scale testing for other purposes but it isn't 
necessarily, I think, just an academic  exercise, because in public meetings 
with people when you tell them how robust the casks are the question always 
comes up just how good are they? Where is the failure point?  Some studies 
already  tell us where that probably is for thermal.  I   don't know where 
those points are for impact.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob.  Anybody in the audience who wants to comment 
on the  container performance collision issue before we go on to the 
container performance and fire?  Bob just talked about a failure threshold 
there so we're going to get into that.
 
Charles, would you set up the next topic for us and I believe that we're also 
going to
have another member, an expert from the NRC staff come up who we will 
introduce as soon as Charles is done with his set up.  Go ahead, Charles.
 
DR. MASSEY:  The next topic is the container performance during the fires.  
In modal    study there was a 1B (phonetic) [1-D] analysis of cask response.  
They looked at two fires, an 800 degrees centigrade fire which is the 
regulatory standard and a 1,000 degree C fire, very simplified version of 
cask response to the thermal environment.
 
On the outer edge of these casks where they have the neutron shielding 
material with some stainless steel layer on the outside, this was modelled as 
having this outer stainless steel wall in place.  Nothing inside here.  There 
was no water under -- neutron absorbing material.  But the existence of this 
couple inches of air gap, stainless steel does act as an insulator to 
decrease the heating of the cask in a fire.  But  that was essentially 
modelled on the cask.
 
They did look at, during thermal events, that this lead layer inside the 
structural strength of the cask, that there was some  deformation of melting, 
movement of the this lead which would increase the gamma dose, two people  
near the cask.  Really they focussed on response of the cask not so much of 
the contents to the thermal environment.
 
In the NUREG 0170 reevaluation, we looked at the fully engulfing chromium 
fuel  fire.  Essentially a fully engulfing fire as we look at a cask 
suspended in air, completely engulfed by the fire, so there's no heat loss or 
shielding or offset distance that would pass from the fire to try to get the 
maximum heat meet load that we could into the cask.
 
We looked at that thermal environment on the ordinary cask that we 
remodelled.  Again, we assumed that there was a neutron shield still on the 
container, but that it does not contain any water or other shielding 
material.  We again  modelled, tried to calculate loss of gamma shielding and 
the impact of that on personnel around the cask and we did take some steps in 
looking at inside thermal environment.  What   happens to the contents inside 
the cask?  A little more expiration of rod performance under thermal 
conditions.
 
For the package performance study, what we're proposing to do is use a fairly 
new three-dimensional thermal model that can go into much more detail looking 
at the thermal response of the cask and its contents to any fire scenario.
 
We're proposing to model optically dense.  What that means there is no heat 
loss  from the fire.  Essentially all that heat from  the fire is put into 
the cask a thousand degree centigrade fire.  Again, an empty undamaged 
neutron shield tank so there is some insulating effect of having an outer 
shield.
 
One of the things we would like to explore because we don't have a pretty 
good handle on what the impact of this is on a cask is have the cask lying on 
the ground.  So it has a fire but there is some contact with the cask on  the 
ground because most situations the cask is going to end up lying on the 
ground to be involved with fires.  We want to have a better idea of how the 
cask responds and is there really any impact of having it on the ground?  Any 
loss of heat to the ground?  Those sort of issues.
 
We also want to take into account that there is spent fuel inside the package 
and there's been some criticisms in the past that we haven't taken into 
account that there is heat  generated by that spent fuel.  That's something  
we should also take into account as we look at the temperature of the fuel as 
a result of a  fire.  We'd like to do those calculations then actually 
perform a full fire test and prepare  model predictions to the test results.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Charles.
 
I would like to introduce Mr. Ron Parkhill who is with the NRC staff, Spent 
Fuel Project Office.  Ron has a bachelors of science in mechanical 
engineering.  He's a professional  engineer.  Before he joined the NRC he was 
with the Commercial Nuclear Power Plant Industry and also an architect 
engineer for the industry. He's been at the NRC 15 years and he's the expert  
on thermal.  It's on the team for this particular project.
 
Let's do what we did the last time and go to those of you around the table 
who have    either comments on the Sandia suggestions.  We're going to keep 
going this, but I will let you do it or other things that they think that the 
study  should address in terms of container performance during fires and, 
Bob, can I turn to you again to  put a couple issues on the table for us?
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  Yes, umh-humh.  One category of fire impacts in addition to 
the engulfing fire that we continue to have some concern about and 
particularly this is, we have a  heightened awareness of this as a result of 
the potential for propane fires and also one of the Montana rail accidents is 
the potential for a torch impact.
 
Generally speaking, we would assume that that's more of a high temperature 
short duration  and I'm not really ready to give you the full -- this is one 
of the things I hope to address in more detail in Henderson.  One area we'd 
like to add to this is the torch fire impact.
 
Secondly, we will be looking at the  thousand degree C fire.  Again, I can't 
give you   an alternative value right now.  And thirdly, I  can tell you that 
we think much longer duration fires, particularly for the rail environment, 
need to be considered and I'm in the process now of looking at a select group 
of very severe rail  accidents involving fires that have occurred between 
1982 and 1988 and we'll be trying to give  you some more specific guidance on 
that.
 
Finally, I wanted to mention that the thermal testing that I referred to 
earlier, which for the benefit of the court reporter the principal 
investigators are Miles Greiner, G-R-E-I-N-E-R and Richard Wirtz, W-I-R-T-Z, 
at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno.  Their 
primary interest was in looking at fire impacts on fuel integrity.  I may mix 
that issue up.  They did some work on fire impacts on seal integrity, but 
looking at the thermal impact it's hard to  separate some of these issues, 
cask performance from fuel, and if I confuse that issue I hope I   clarified 
it some.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Three good issues for discussion.
 
Could you explain a torch fire as opposed to other types of fire?
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  Fire resulting from a puncture of a propane tanker or I'm not 
familiar with the full range of other materials that might  be involved in 
that kind of fire a fire in which a short duration, but very intense flame is  
applied to a very limited region of a cask and so  you are not looking at the 
distribution of that thermal input of the entire mass of the cask  because of 
the limited region of it.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Marvin, do you want to comment?  Anybody have anything to say?  
Bob, on  torch fire?  Some facts for the NCR team to consider in thinking 
about torch fires.
 
ED:  We do have requirements for tank cars on transporting PIH materials and 
flammable  gases.  There is a 30 minute torch fire requirement and 100 minute 
pool fire requirement so it's something you should take a look at and that 
will also go with the information I gave youthis morning on the fire test 
studies that we  did.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Amy did you want to  comment on the torch fire.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  No.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Second issue that Bob raised was the 1,000 degree centigrade 
value. Does anybody have anything to offer on whether it  should be -- yes, 
Marvin.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  I wanted to just generalize that a little.  I think the study   
should look at real materials that are being transported on rail and the 
flame temperatures  for those materials.  You should look at profane 
[propane].  You should look at materials that are really traveling the rails 
not just petroleum and  look at the flame temperatures of those.
 
DR. MASSEY:  Also take into account the  inventories or assume different 
inventories of material and if you look at the higher temperature burn for 
exotic chemicals and also  get some idea on the amount of those materials  
that are shipped.  We have inventory that will help us determine fire 
duration.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  If you're looking at probabilities too, you might want to 
look at what  materials would be transported; the amounts, yes.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Good.  Thank you. Felix, you have a comment on the 1,000 
degrees and then we'll go over to Bob.
 
MR. KILLAR:  The point I was going to make on what Marvin just brought up, 
it's important to look at the flame temperature of the various chemicals 
that's being transported, but it's also very important to look at the 
temperatures of vaporization to see how much of   that is going to evaporate 
rather than burn or  can this stay in a liquid form or gassy state? That 
makes a lot of difference how long your fire lasts.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Bob?
 
BOB:  I just want to follow-up on the probability deal.  You could look at a 
lot of  different materials acooler 
in the center than if you have a small pool because the  flame is oxygen 
starved.  So there are many different real world considerations that go into 
trying to determine the thermal flux to the package, other than just the 
maximum flame  temperature, much less the average flame temperature in other 
phenomena that go on.
 
Again, I guess it's just a matter of if the studies look at real world 
accidents it  should look at it in the real world situation as  well.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Look at the entire context I think is something that Felix was 
saying too. Bob?
 
BOB:  Quick add-on and point others have raised.  In looking at those real 
world fire  environments, it's also important to look at environments that 
may affect fire one way or   another such as presence of a fire occurring in 
a tunnel, fire occurring under a interstate overpass where there may be an 
depression  underneath that contributes to a pooling and also in terms of the 
way that the fire is fueled. It's important to consider a variety of sources.
 
It's possible that you could capture this or envelope all these in the 
construction of the pool fire, but it's important to remember  different 
sources of flammables which could be a tanker travelling either by rail or by 
highway. It could also be a stationary storage force like a petroleum storage 
tank located near a highway. Very common, for example, with liquefied  
petroleum gases and also you have to look at the  potential of fire being fed 
by a pipeline and you have some experience with accidents that have  occurred 
on top of pipelines co-located right of  ways and other cases where trains 
derail on top of pipelines.  One famous one in Las Vegas and  fortunately 
there was just enough soil to prevent rupture of a pipeline.  So endorse the 
concept at looking at real world but look at that broadly both in terms of 
sources of sources of the fuel for the fire and then the actually contributes 
to the duration and of temperature of the fire.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I was going to add not only refers to temperature but also 
duration.  Bob, you said particularly for rail. I think you are going to be 
developing some more  information on this.  Do other participants  around the 
table have comments on the duration of  the fire, types of fires that should 
be  considered or effects of fire by the NRC and Sandia?  Kevin Kamps.
 
MR. KAMPS:  Just a quick comment that came up when emergency response 
discussions took  place earlier and that is talking about  combinations of 
real world things that no one would think of.  If there is a material on the  
train, there may be different materials, some that are explosive in the 
presence of water where  the emergency responders try to put out a fire with 
water and cause a worse condition.  So these are the complications that need 
to be looked at.
 
MR. CAMERON:  That's an interesting one.  Felix, do you have one comment here 
on duration?
 
MR. KILLAR:  Well, actually mine is on responders which goes a little bit to 
duration. I think what you have to do is assume that the responders will not 
be there for a number of  reasons.  As pointed out earlier in the current 
situation they vent the fires and therefore don't  try and put the fires out.  
If you look at the forest fires in the West now, the idea is to possibly not 
put the fires out.
 
I did want to point out a little bit on responders and that when you started 
looking at  these instances, you can't look at responders as  completely 
separate study, things on that line. Responders can either be a help or 
hindrance. So clearly the responders in trying to help or  not make things 
worse best thing is not to consider responders in this particular analysis.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Is that the point that you were going to make previously?  
Okay.  Great. Amy do you have one point to add on what Felix just said or a 
question for him?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  One.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Well, first of all I'd like to say that it seems like the 
venting only is true on the trains.  It seems like if there is a truck 
accident where there is a fire, emergency responders are not going to get it. 
Just burn out.  Especially if it's on a highway where there are other people 
around that they're going to come and put out the fire.
 
What Felix said also got to the point and again this is just a question 
because I don't  really know the answer not being a scientist.
 
In the study I remember reading that even if the cask was compromised and 
rods exposed, they wouldn't go critical unless there was some material 
present such as water to allow the neutrons to interact with each other and 
it  seems like that could be a really important question around emergency 
response.  If something happens to the cask and it's compromised and a fire 
truck comes up and sprays water on it and  water goes in and the rods go 
critical and that could be a major thing.  I think it's something  that's 
worth looking at.
 
I would like to make one more quick comment and that is this is a public 
involvement question.  I think one way to involve the public is to really 
make sure all the information is easily understood.  You are trying very hard 
to  do that, but I would like to point out that both in the study and in the 
summary all of the  temperatures were in Fahrenheit.
 
MR. CAMERON:  That's a point well taken is to do a better job of 
communication of this  information.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Particularly 0170 update, we're going to have a summary like 
we did for the past modal study and the agency editors hopefully  will do 
what they have done in the past which is to insist that we give both values 
and more familiar  values, so familiar to you and me.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  The question is moot to me because I don't know what it 
is.
 
DR. MASSEY:  1,000 degree centigrade is about 1850 degrees Fahrenheit.  The 
800 centigrade is 1,475 degrees Fahrenheit.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Let's go to Jack, do you have comments on these?
 
MR. EDLOW:  Yes.  Thank you.  I guess I have a general comment about many of 
these points that have been discussed over the last hour or so.  I think the 
current standards that have been developed and have been accepted by the 
United States and the international community, were not arbitrarily selected.  
And the United States is part of a new national regime that has agreed on 
certain standards by which packaging is designed and tested and that accident 
conditions are applied for purposes of the package criteria. 

I'm not prepared to sit here today and urge you to redevelop the 
international standards  and I think that you have to bear in mind that the 
U.S. standards and international standards   are set on a basis that are used 
to qualify  existing packages.  Any discussion that these would be inadequate 
or that somehow we have to  test at a higher level, we have to design at a 
higher level, I think under cuts, potentially  undercuts international 
standards and U.S. regulatory situations.  So I would urge you to be  very 
careful how you go forward with this process  because this can be 
misconstrued in some ways by not just the public but by U.S. government 
officials that somehow what's been done up to now  is inadequate, which I 
think it is not based on NRC policy at this time.  Thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, and we're going to go to Felix and then we're coming 
back over the Marvin.  But the point you raised not only in terms of 
undermining the standard point, but I guess it is a legitimate question in 
terms of how you bound the feasibility of what happens.
 
Discussion, thread that's been running through these discussions is how do 
you consider  the existing regulatory structure including QA, etc., etc., in 
deciding what accidents you are going to look at.  I think we will revisit 
that. Felix?
 
MR. KILLAR:  I just wanted to bring up  two points.  As far as use of water 
putting fires, whether it be train or truck, the fire departments use their 
discretion.  We had a very good instance in Springfield, Massachusetts a 
number of years ago where we had a new fuel shipment that was on a truck 
involved in an accident on the interstate.  The fire department elected not 
to put out the fire but it was their  concern that the run off could cause 
contamination and what have you, which ended up being a worse fire for the 
container although it came out fine, but as a result of it they burned up a 
truck.  So whether they use water or not is certainly at the discretion of 
the fire department particularly chemicals we're carrying like PCPs.  The 
fire department will not use water or foam on PCPs because they're afraid the 
run offs will cause more of an environmental  impact and would rather let the 
stuff burn up. Assumption that you won't use or will use water is not, I 
think, a good assumption.  You're just looking for the worse situation.

Similarly with water and criticality for a fuel cask, whether it be new fuel 
or spent fuel, that is taken into consideration of design and the assumption 
is that in the event of an accident that the fuel will reconfigure into its 
most reactive form will be with water and it has to be assured it will not go 
critical under those circumstances.  So once again water is not an issue as 
far as criticality of a cask in an  accident.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I guess Amy's point really went to the criticality issue which 
is our next topic of discussion.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Two quick points I wanted to make.  With regard to this new 
study  that you are suggesting, and the neutron shield  tank, I note that the 
old modal study had used the neutron shield tank or water tank and assume  
that water was not in the tank.  The effect is that it served as an insulator 
in a fire and essentially reduced the effect of what the fire would be.
 
Similarly, you are going to take an  undamaged neutron shield tank and I 
think rather than that I will take a damaged neutron shield tank and in other 
words I would see exactly how the shield tank decreases the heat input into 
the cask and see whether if there were not, if the shield tank were damaged 
how that would effect the heat input to the cask.
 
The second point I want to make concerns fire, but it involves how one 
evaluates the consequences.  In some of these older studies they assume that 
deficient products that might get out of the cask plate out on the cask wall 
and it accounts for reduction in the amount of material that can get out of 
the cask.  I don't  think that's proper in case of a fire.  When you have hot 
walls, hot cask walls, whether the material will actually plate out on those 
walls.
 
That's an issue that I would also like you to look into whether there will be 
plate out  of fission products on the cask's walls.
 
MR. CAMERON:  That term was plate out.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Yes.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Charles, do you have a question for Marvin?
 
DR. MASSEY:  I just want to follow-up with Marvin for a minute.  When you're 
talking about the damaged neutron tanker, are you looking at, consider it 
being crushed so it's flat up against the inner container?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Precisely.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Ask the audience if there  are any questions or comments on 
container  performance in the fire area before we go to a  break?  Okay, 
let's take a break.  It's about 3:19 by my watch.  Let's be back and we'll 
start at 3:45 with the spent fuel criticality issue. Thank you.
 
(Pause in the proceedings.)
 
MR. CAMERON:  Can we have two more substantive topics, so to speak, before we  
revisit some issues from this morning on process, the whole relationship of 
the 0170 update to what's going on here suggestions from all of you on how 
the NRC can keep the public involved in this process.
 
The whole issue of what I'm calling the bounding issue that we mentioned and 
I'll talk to someone about trying to put that into perspective for us for 
discussion.  You will note that these two topics, the next two topics spent 
nuclear  fuel assembly behavior in accidents, physical testing and computer 
simulation that we already had a number of comments on, are shorter on the 
agenda and maybe even shorter in real life perhaps, because I do want to get 
you out of here  by 6 o'clock.  We will finish at 6:00 and note that you can 
submit written comments.  Rest assured, though, that the comments that you 
gave to the NRC today are just as good as written comments.  In other words, 
unless you have something to add, a finer point to make, don't worry that you 
need to follow them up with written comments because the staff will consider  
the comments that have been made today.  I want to do assure everybody of 
that.
 
Rob Lewis, who we introduced earlier today, he is the expert on criticality 
who is going to be sitting at the table with us to offer any information 
that's needed.  I'm going to ask Charles to set it up for us again.
 
DR. MASSEY:  Thank you, Chip.  Before I  even get started I would be remiss, 
I want to  make sure I point out so after this meeting if you like you can 
talk to them, there are two other individuals from Sandia with me here today  
Dr. Ruth Weiner and Dr. Jeremy Sprung, so if you do have other questions or 
clarifications or  comments please feel free to see them after the meeting as 
well.
 
What I want to very briefly introduce is a little topic session on the spent 
fuel assembly behavior itself in the event of collision or fire.  The modal 
study estimated the number of rods that could be damaged in a collision or a   
fire based on one more collision essentially the -- how much damage did they 
expect on the  inner cask wall and then they related that to some estimation 
of the number of fuel rods that  would be damaged.
 
Then once they assumed that they had some fuel rod damage they made 
assumptions based on some previous studies not particular to transportation 
to see how much material in the   fuel rod could get out into the cask.  Once 
the material was in the cask they assumed that all of that would be released 
into the environment.
 
In the 0170 reevaluation under -- Sandia calculated looking at the impact and 
thermal   forces calculated the fraction of the fuel rods inside the cask 
that would be damaged.  Then once we had some damaged fuel rods we then 
calculated how much material inside the fuel rod could be released to the 
inside the cask.  Then once we  had the material inside the cask we did 
calculations on how much of that material would  be deposited inside the cask 
and depending on the thermal or environment and then how much could be  
released in the environment.  So much more detailed calculations on fuel 
response in the  event of a severe accident condition.
 
For the package performance study we'd  really like to get into, instead of 
using some our best engineering judgement and calculations do some laboratory 
skilled experiments to get a much better handle on the fuel behavior itself 
in   the event of structural and thermal forces.
 
One thing we'd like to look at is the rod failure.  Try to get some better 
handle on how many of those could be expected to fail in collision and 
thermal environments.  Also, look at inside the fuel assemblies themselves.  
Inside the fuel rods are ceramic pellets.  What we'd like to look at is how 
did those pellets also  perform?  How much breakup could you get in those 
pellets particularly in a collision type environment, so we have some idea 
how many very small particles could be produced -- one could  partially get 
outside the cask.
 
Breakup of deposits on fuel rods, another criticism has been when the fuel 
rods are in the reactor in the storage pool, we get deposits on the outside, 
the CRUD.  In a collision environment or thermal how much of that CRUD that 
was on the fuel assembly, how much of that would come off?  So we'd like to 
get a much better definition on how much of that material would be available 
for potential release.
 
Also have on there the particle beds. There's been a lot of talk on if you 
have a fracture of the fuel rods and small particles build up, how much of 
that could come out, but  also realizing that there's other material at the 
bottom that has to be essentially filtered through that bed of material.  So 
we'd like to  get some data on the effect of particle beds.
 
Then I guess really the overall is to get a much better definition of how 
much material that's inside the rods in the cask is available  in the release 
mechanisms for a damaged cask under thermal and structural conditions?  So 
with that I will give it back to Chip.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Charles.  Does anybody have anything to add to what 
Sandia is proposing to do in the study in regard to spent nuclear fuel 
assembly behavior?  And let's go to Marvin.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  We've been considering these issues because they've have been 
to us in the PFS proceeding in Utah.  So I have four different points I 
wanted to raise concerning them.
 
One is Sandia should look at higher burn on fuel than the standard 33,000 per 
metric ton fuel.  It can be cooled for five years but it  should be higher 
burn on fuel than previously considered and more representative of fuel that 
may be shipped.
 
We're particularly concerned about the cladding.  You actually look at 
cladding which has been irradiated.  It has been in the reactor, you know, 
for the appropriate length of time rather than just to take unirradiated 
cladding.  We would want you to faithfully consider the properties of 
irradiated claddings when you do the studies.
 
We looked at the analysis that has been done previously by Lawrence Livermore 
Lab concerning breakup of cladding.  There is a paper that was done in 1987 
which is inconsistent with the modal study and shows that cladding is damaged 
when the G forces on the order of 60, 60 G., not 100s of Gs but a much lower 
amount.  You should look at that study.  I'm sure you are allowed to look at 
Lawrence Livermore work even  if they don't have the funding for this 
project.
 
Finally, there are two other points.  We would like you to do a dynamic 
analysis of what happens if cask is dropped sideways.  In other words, you 
ever cladding and then you have fuel pellets inside the cladding and when the 
entire rod drops, the cladding, the pellets inside may act as, I don't know 
how else to describe it, but  a hammer force.  An additional -- rather than 
consider simply the cladding weighing an additional amount to account for the 
fuel pellets inside the cladding, actually consider the cladding as a 
separate rod.  Actually consider the pellets as a separate rod inside the 
cladding and consider what would happen dynamically when the entire rod falls 
sideways.
 
Finally, the radionuclides that you consider inside the fuel assembly should 
and they weren't included in the original modal study, should include 
americium 241.  That wasn't included in the original study and chlorine 36. 
That also needs to be included.
 
DR. MASSEY:  Look at really a much more representative inventory inside the 
spent fuel assemblies representative of the higher burn up and higher 
enrichment fuels that we expect would be shipped.  Does that pretty much get 
to the  point?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Yes.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Let's go around to others to examine that point to see if 
anybody else has anything to say.  Bob Halstead?
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  I know probably everyone is getting fatigued like I am, but we 
have two specific values.  I'm sorry we have two specific types of spent fuel 
that we'd like to suggest for evaluation purposes.
 
While we have a lot of questions about the selection of the typical fuels 
that DOE has identified in the draft EIS, if we use a bounding approach to 
this we're comfortable saying that one of the spent fuel types should be the 
spent  fuel that DOE has identified as the quote unquote typical spent fuel 
to be shipped to the repository.  That fuel would be, and I'm trying to make 
this less difficult for the court reporter, Westinghouse 17 by 17 Lopar, L O 
P A R assembly, that has been cooled 26 years after withdrawal from the 
reactor that has a burn up history of about 40,000 megawatt days thermal. It 
has an initial enrichment of about 3.7 percent.  Now that's one fuel type 
that should use that all other things being equal may end up being typical of 
the fuel that is the predominate fuel shipped over the next 40 years or so if 
the Yucca Mountain goes forward.
 
On the other side, we would suggest as an upper bound the fuel 
characteristics that the commission accepted in NUREG 1437, which is a 
comparable type of PWR fuel, but in this it's only been cooled out of reactor 
for five years, it has an extremely high initial 
enrichment by current practices of five percent and a very high burn up by 
current practices, 62,000 megawatt days thermal.
 
Again, going back to the very earliest point that I made, we're uneasy about 
single  value analyses and document like this and we may  not always agree, 
Felix and I or Eileen and I, on the particular values on a bound, but I do 
think the issue we brought up we do want to try and take some kind of a 
bounding approach here because there is a lot of uncertainty about what will 
actually be shipped and the uncertainty has to reflect the utilities need to 
manage the fuel in their pools.
 
There are some utilities that are going to exercise their contract rights 
possibly and  ship very hot out of reactor fuel as opposed to shipping fuel 
from dry storage.  DOE may decide that it wants to receive some hotter fuel 
because they haven't decided on their thermal loading strategy.  And on the 
other hand, we all know that a lot of the fuel in the inventory is very old 
and less radioactive and less hazardous than the fuels I've just described 
that indeed it may turn out that the oldest fuel first philosophy is  
shipped, that fuel that's been cooled 30 years may be early in the queue.  So 
a bounding approach to the characteristics of the fuel that you select for 
analysis is absolutely important.
 
I'm going to waive the other comments that I have because it's late in the 
day and I  will get more into the subject in detail when we meet again in 
Henderson, Nevada.  Thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob.  Kevin, do you have a point on the type of 
fuel?
 
MR. KAMPS:  Yeah.  I just wanted to also address that point that what 
actually is going to be shipped needs to be taken into consideration. At the 
Big Rock Plant in Michigan that being an experimental reactor, there were 
fuel claddings that were experimented there, that were tested there; fuel rod 
types; plutonium fuels that were tested there.  And again with the Palisades 
cask defects, the deterioration of the fuel in those casks, what will the 
fuel be like that's actually transported?  If it is deteriorated to a             
significant extent, how will it behave in an accident?  So just to 
reemphasize that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Kevin.  Amy, do you have a separate point?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Separate.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Rick, are you on type of fuel or kind of?  Go ahead.
 
MR. RAWL:  In looking at some of the information that's presented to us, one 
of the things that always comes out first in an analysis of cask response are 
those radionuclides which are first available for release, the volatile out 
when the cask is damaged minimally.  They will come out when the cask is 
damaged more severely.  So the calculations of release are always building on 
the number or the amount of those volatile nuclides that come out.
 
So in the bounding scenarios that have been set, I just wanted to point out 
how important it is to have good numbers for the volatile radionuclides in 
order to ensure all the other radionuclides that come out as particulates are 
being added to an accurate  base.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Rick.  Bob, do you want to comment on the 
type of fuel or you have a separate point?  Let's go to  Marvin's second 
point and, Marvin, I'm not sure I captured this one.  You were talking about 
consider the properties of irradiated cladding and you were talking about use 
the 60 G force. I'm sure others understand what this means and I guess I 
would ask them if they had any questions  about it or -- does everybody 
understand what Marvin's point is there?  I don't need to  understand.  But 
is there anybody else who could use an explanation of it?
 
Marvin, could you just explain that, that one what you are trying to get to 
there?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  Some of the studies I have seen and I think it's the modal 
study, too, look at the damage done to fuel assemblies, to  fuel cladding in 
particular and they have forces that are up in the hundreds of Gs before 
cladding  is damaged.  On the other hand, there is a  Lawrence Livermore 
study that we have looked at which looks at cladding and looks at this 
particular fuel assembly that Bob mentioned, the  Westinghouse 17 by 17 fuel 
assembly and does a static analysis.  In other words, drop it and look at 
where the spacers are in the fuel assembly and look at the length between 
spacers and see what the force will be when you drop it, how much it will 
bend.
 
Those show damage for forces on the order of 60 G.  In other words you only 
have to drop the cask on the order of a couple feet to get that kind of 
damage level.  Even those   studies concerned us because we were concerned 
that the cladding itself may not have all the properties of irradiated 
cladding.  So we wanted Sandia in particular to particularly test cladding 
which has been irradiated to see if it becomes more brittle when it's 
irradiated particularly to higher levels and whether it would shatter more 
easily, you know, with a lower force.
 
            13            MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  I thank you for
 
            14   that.  I think that that's clear and I would just
 
            15   ask if anybody around the table who has any
 
            16   comments on that recommendation?  We do
 
            17   understand it.  All right.
 
            18            Marvin's third point was do a dynamic
 
            19   analysis of a cask that is dropped sideways.
 
            20   Treat the pellets as a separate rod inside the
 
            21   cladding.  Now Charles, Rob, do you understand
 
            22   the nature of Marvin's suggestion?  Okay.  Does
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
         235
 
 
 
 
1   anybody else have a comment on that particular
 
2   point.
 
3            The last one goes to the elements
 
4   americium and forget what the number was and
 
5   chlorine but those should also be considered.  Do
 
6   you want to give me those numbers again and I'll
 
7   put it up for people to see.
 
8            MR. RESNIKOFF:  Americium 241 and
 
9   chlorine 36.  Americium 241 was not considered in
 
            10   the modal study.  They looked at fuel essentially
 
            11   that came out of the reactor and americium 241
 
            12   builds up over time.  So in the decay of
 
            13   plutonium 241, americium 241 builds up and so if
 
            14   you can have fuel that's aged five years or
 
            15   longer you need to look at the build up of
 
            16   americium 241 and fuel.
 
            17            Chlorine 36 behaves similarly to iodine
 
            18   129 and that's why it's important because it is a
 
            19   volatile material.  It's important to look at
 
            20   that in accident situation.
 
            21            MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you.  Bob
 
            22   Halstead, comment?
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
         236
 
 
 
 
1            MR. HALSTEAD:  At this hour I'm not
 
2   going to belabor this by fishing the number out
 
3   of my briefcase, but I remember reviewing
 
4   particularly older fuel in the 20 to 30 year
 
5   range.  Marvin is right, americium becomes one of
 
6   the top six or eight of radionuclides in terms of
 
7   securing concentration.
 
8            MR. CAMERON:  Thank you for that
 
9   clarification.  Any other comments on the
 
            10   americium, of chlorine or related radionuclides?
 
            11            MR. KAMPS:  Just one I forgot before.
 
            12   The Department of Energy's proposal to burn mox
 
            13   fuel in U.S. reactors also introduces different
 
            14   quality of highly irradiated nuclear fuel that
 
            15   would be transported.  That needs to be
 
            16   considered.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Let's go Bob Fronczak for some points on 
criticality.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  Actually my points aren't as far as criticality.  It's the 
response of thecask including the contents.  Our understanding is that the 
modal study didn't consider the  contents of the cask or said that they would 
have little effect and it wasn't explained very well because there weren't a 
lot of details provided so we'd just like that that be clarified.
 
The other thing is that we felt the contents of the cask could also add 
stiffness to  the cask that wasn't considered in certain impact scenarios.  
So we'd like you to consider that  too.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Any comments on Bob's  suggestions?  Felix?
 
MR. KILLAR:  Just a clarification.  When you are looking at the contents of 
the reaction  
of the fuel, I assume you are going to take into consideration the space and 
the bundle containers as far as adding to the weight of the cask but  also 
adding to the structural strength and stability of the fuel itself. I also 
want to point out that americium  241 is very important because that's what 
you use in your smoke detectors at home.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Bob, you have a comment?  
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  I found that value.  It's 1,700 curies of americium 241 per 
pressurized water reactor of the reference type so while it  has many, many 
good uses, Felix, this is one we could do without.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Bob.  Amy?  I think we're ready for a different 
comment.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Again I have a  question about whether this is viable for 
the study or not.  My question is if there are accident scenarios where fuel 
rods get jostled where pellets come off, I wonder if the study could somehow 
consider then what happens after  that.  It seems like all of the scenarios 
in the  study ended with the accident.  Here's what happened.  This much came 
out or this much didn't come out, but it seems to me that at some point after 
the cask has fallen off the train or the  truck has fallen off the bridge and 
you have to  fish the cask out of the river and you have to  put it on 
another truck and you have to still take it to some point in the West yet to 
be named, and get it into the mountain which will be in a different container 
so it's got to come out  of the cask and into another container and I'm 
wondering if somehow the effects of that could be looked at in this study or 
if not in this study in another one.
 
MR. CAMERON:  The point is, and it may not be a point for this study, but 
nevertheless  an important point is if a cask is involved in an  accident how 
is that cask, if there is no I guess apparent damage or whatever, how is that 
cask treated when it gets to the repository?  Maybe the NRC could answer 
question although there may  not be a lot of experience with this is what 
would happen if a cask was damaged en route to the repository or if there was 
somewhere else.
 
Rod, do you want to do that or Susan?
 
MS.SHANKMAN:  I think the point of the study is to look at the dynamics that 
would  create that accident and the recovery from it has to take into account 
what would happen if there is no release and the cask is undamaged then you  
have a physically large heavy object that has be resited on its vehicle and 
moved exactly, but I don't think that that would be any different from 
another heavy object that has to be reaffixed to whatever it's transpthat cask still as described in your certificate?  If they 
verify that it is then that it could continue on more than likely than an 
different carriage, probably, whatever rail, vehicle or truck that it was on 
is no longer serviceable so it would be off loaded onto a different one.
 
If it is not as described in the certificate, then whoever the shipper is is 
going 
to have to come into the Department of Transportation and get a special 
approval we call
 
it an exemption, from the regulations, because if it's not approved by the 
NRC it's not allowed to be transported domestically under the regulations 
which will kick in a whole application process and a whole review process and 
consulting with NRC and in this case it would be the Department of Energy to 
say if it's not in accordance with the regulations, what special precautions 
are you  going to take?  And I think the Department of Transportation's view 
there is you will be better  to move it to a safe location.  That wouldn't be 
a siding on the road, it might not be the final  repository.  It may be the 
closest reactor to repackage it, but you are going to have to get it out of 
the community and the transport approval will take all that into account as 
to how it  should be moved.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you for that information, Rick.  Let's hear from Jack and 
then  Marvin.  Jack Edlow.
 
MR. EDLOW:  That's a very good question I appreciate your question about what 
happen in the case of an accident afterwards.  I would like to say that there 
are thousands of shipments of radioactive material every year and  millions 
of shipments of hazardous materials every year.  Of course there are 
accidents involving various materials hazardous and radioactives not 
necessarily spent fuel all that often, but other types of materials as well.  
So that clearly industry has already faced this kind of situation before both 
haz mats and for radioactives.
 
These kinds of procedures have been looked at and have been dealt with in 
accordance  with the way that Rick has said in the past.  For  spent fuel 
shipment it would be effectively no different in the process.  It's just that 
this particular type of material is viewed by some as  more hazardous and 
more heavier and somehow it's  special, but in any case it would be dealt 
with  in the same way.  But thank you very much.  It's very thoughtful.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I just wanted to clarify I wasn't suggesting you didn't 
have a way  to do it I was just asking if the study could address what the 
effects of it would be.  I wasn't saying you didn't know how.  I don't know  
if you know how or not.  What I was asking, since this is a study about the 
transportation of spent fuel, and so it should address the scenarios that can 
occur because of the transportation of spent  fuels.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  The study is meant to look at some of the factors that would 
be involved in the stresses that might lead to damage of the container or the 
contents.  It's not a definitive study of the transportation of  spent fuel.  
But it isn't, I mean may be another way in which we consider that and so I'm 
glad you bring it up.  But I'm not sure how we work that into this knowing 
what stresses we created and  what we would have at the end would help us 
understand what kind of response we have to prepare for.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Susan. Marvin?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  I think the point is well taken for a more a couple of 
reasons.  One              is my experience that in reviewing the BFSSAR in 
Utah, we've raised the issue what happens if a cask has surface contamination 
on it.  And the answer to that, which is in the SAR, is that cask is shipped 
back to the reactor.  No matter with the levels of contamination, the SAR 
says that cask goes back to the reactor.  Even if it's above DOT regs, there 
is no provision that the facility for actually cleaning the cask.
 
So the issue is I think well taken at least in that situation where a cask is   
contaminated.  You know, somebody has an idea how that's going to be handled, 
some private contractor coming in, I don't know, but BFS says it's not going 
to be their job.
 
The second reason I think the point well taken is that there actually was an 
accident.  Which isn't listed in one of the six or eight accidents that were 
listed previously,   which involved the shipment fuel to the Batelle, 
Columbus facility in 1980 in Ohio in which a fuel assembly was put in that 
was too hot.  Contrary to the certificate of compliance, the workers put a 
fuel assembly in that was too hot and the effect of that is the fuel oxidized 
and when they opened up the cask under water large amount of    radioactive 
contamination came out of the cask  and into the pool.  Of course it was 
evacuated, but workers were contaminated, workers were exposed in the process 
of decontaminating the entire pool.
 
I think the NRC also, I should say, has taken steps so that won't happen 
again and since  they now inert the cask, they have helium inside  the cask 
rather than oxygen as they had before or water, but I think point is well 
taken because there is one specific example that there was something that was 
shipped contrary to regulations and it led to certain consequences at 
Batelle, Columbus. 

MR. CAMERON:  I think we had some reaction to that, Marvin.
 
Before we go to Rick Boyle, PFS stands for private fuel storage and that is a 
licensing hearing before the NRC to approve a spent fuel  storage facility in 
the State of Utah and I hope that that provides enough information on that. 
Rick?
 
MR. BOYLE:  Thank you.  I completely disagree.  The packages that are not in  
compliance with DOT regulations are transported anyway, be that for 
contamination, labelling, anything else.  And it doesn't matter if the safety 
analysis report for the package does not address what would happen in this 
case. 
 
I think if you are looking at that, customs has stopped packages because 
they're hot  and then we have to deal with it from there.  If  you go to any 
scrap metal facility they have meters going in and when the rail car comes in 
and its hot, it's sent off to the side.  That scrap metal facility has no 
license to possess and we have to work out an exemption so it can be sent 
back.  The same is true of landfills.
 
It's just not true that if a violation is found it's marked return to sender 
and sent back.  That's no way.  No how.  I'm sorry, we just have to correct 
an inaccuracy in that  matter.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Marvin?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  I suggest that he direct his anger toward the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission, that he respond to the EIS and the SAR.  They come out 
as a cooperating federal agency.  You tell PFS, you tell the NRC that that's 
wrong.  I suggest you submit comments as a cooperating federal agency.  I 
encourage that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Apparently maybe there needs to be more exploration of this 
particular point that we don't necessarily have to explore it at this point.  
But thank you for those  comments and I would ask if there is anybody in the 
audience who wants to make a comment on spent nuclear fuel assembly behavior 
in accidents and  then we'll come back up to the front.
 
Final comment on this from Kevin and, Rick, I didn't know whether you wanted 
to say anything else at this point on this issue but you  can if you want 
after we go to Kevin.
 
MR. KAMPS:  Just wanted to bring up German experience again.  A transport of 
highly  irradiated nuclear fuel returning from France was found to be 3,000 
times the appropriate level or the acceptable level and so this is a very 
significant issue that needs to be addressed. And again that contamination 
event and the locking out of the public in Germany have led to a situation 
where the transport of highlyirradiated fuel has been stopped for reasons in 
Germany.  So it's a very significant  issue.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Kevin.  Rick?
 
MR. BOYLE:  I think that point is well taken because Kevin is completely 
correct that  there were high contamination shipments made in Europe and it 
highlights the point that once they were identified shipments stopped.  They 
didn't continue and say we know they're hot and we shipped them anyway.  And 
I think you would seein several European countries they aren't making 
shipments today because once the problem wasidentified, shipments were 
stopped.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.  Are we ready to move on to the next discussion 
point?  Yes?
 
MR. KAMPS:  Just that it took years for that information to come out to the 
public the cover-up involved is a pretty significant issue.
 
MR. EDLOW:  That's ludicrous.
 
MR. CAMERON:  There's some disagreement here about whether was a quote 
"cover-up" unquote  and I think we're just going to move on to the next 
discussion area which is the whole testing computer simulation methodology.  
Go ahead, Charles.  And I don't mean that I want to stop anybody from getting 
into these issues.  We can do that if that's what people want to do, but I 
think at this point it's most profitable to move on.  Go ahead and we're 
bringing our NRC expert up to the table who we'll introduce in a few  
minutes.  Charles?
 
DR. MASSEY:  Thank you, Chip.  The next topic area is physical testing 
simulation and   here I just want to give a little background, I think a lot 
of this we covered earlier, a little bit of background on the progression and 
the study regarding severe accidents and how we have calculated and predicted 
response to the cask.
 
The modal study was all computer simulation, mathematical models developed to  
permit cask response and collisions and fires. There was no testing done 
specifically for the  modal study.  The models were based on test data from 
other experiments and test that were done, but there was nothing specifically 
done for modal  studies.
 
For the NUREG 0170 update that we recently submitted to NRC for review, we've 
used improved computer models based on data that we've  gotten from other 
test and experiments have been conducted, but again there was no testing  
specifically conducted for NUREG 0170 reevaluation.
 
Where we sort of differ from that past history in the package performance 
study, we  would suggest that simulation and testing be done of some 
representative cask and we actually take a cask design, looking for comments 
on this, what  that would exactly be, but use our models that we  have 
developed, thermal and structural models, look at the collision and thermal 
scenarios that we have discussed, but do that sort of pretest  prediction on 
the cask response, then actually do the test.  And then compare that and see 
how well you can predict performance of the cask.  And with that I'm going to 
turn back to Chip and get moving.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Charles.  I just wanted to introduce Jeffrey 
Hornseth who is a materials engineer, an expert in metallurgy and is involved 
in this issue as are expert on physical testing.  He's been with the NRC 
since  1991.  He has a master's of science degree from George Washington 
University.  Let's go right  into this for comments.
 
Bob, you have your card up.  Do you have some points on the physical testing 
computer          simulation issue?
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  Yes.  As a person who has pursued this issue for 20 years, 
I'll give you a  short version and this is one the issues that we plan to 
discuss in detail at the meeting at Henderson.
 
First point, I think it would be a good ground rule to say in this discussion 
that we  separate the issue of cask testing for the purposes of this modal 
study update from the  larger issue of whether full scale testing should  be 
required as a condition of certification.  I think we'll eat up all the time 
we'd like to talk about if we try to resolve that larger issue about the 
desirability of testing, for licensing.
 
I would restate briefly the arguments for that larger testing issue.  The 
State of Nevada has argued in favor of full scale testing as a condition of 
certification which it requires full scale testing of a prototype of every 
cask that goes to the NRC.  We have developed cost estimates on it.  We have 
developed an outline of  what the testing protocols would be.  We  published 
a report by Dave Snediker (phonetic) who many of you know worked as a cask 
designer for many years, looking at some of the pros and  cons of full scale 
testing, documenting the past experience with it.
 
We are also cognizant of the improvements in the codes that allow us to 
address some of these questions through computer simulations and we're 
certainly open to a  discussion of a combination of something less than -- 
let me say before I say this -- we are  not satisfied with the current test 
requirements which allow one tenth and one quarter scale   modeling and 
generally combine simulations to provide the information required in the 
safety analysis report and constitute a basis for certification.
 
The question for us is given inadequacy of the system, do we need full scale  
testing and a lot of additional simulations or is it possible at least with 
some package designs that have scale model testing allows us to capture small 
details like performance of bolts, for example.  So we're open to a 
discussion there.
 
For technical validation purposes.  In  terms of public confidence we would 
argue that  (A) there is probably no substitute for full  scale testing; and 
(B) the full scale testing must be the boring, repetitive, laboratory  
condition testing that was conducted with the true pack two [TRUPACT-II] 
container rather than the kind of dramatic public demonstration testing which 
is what I would argue the Sandia test in the '70s  constitute.  I would even 
argue the testing in the U.K. of the mox fuel flask falls into that category 
because when they did the drop test, they actually found that the drop test 
did greater damage to cask integrity than the locomotive hitting the cask 
test.
 
In terms of what you do for this  particular effort, I'm just going to throw 
an issue out that I think as much as I would like to  see you take a 
particular design that we think is likely to be used, someone would have to 
pay to have GA4 constructed, for example, so that you could test it.  I 
hesitate to say this, but I'm  not sure it's a good idea for you to take on 
physical testing of a cask as part of this effort  if you think it's going to 
address the criticisms  that those of us who believe there should be full   
scale testing have raised.
 
I don't think it's possible within context of this study to take that issue 
on and  walk away leaving anyone satisfied.  And my primary concern is that 
the package that I think is most in need of testing in terms of meeting the 
concerns of most of the effective
stakeholders have is a GA4 cask, which is  probably, if anyone wants to pony 
up the money to have say 10 or 15 of them constructed, the cask  that would 
be used for early shipments to a repository for truck shipments to a storage 
facility.
 
It is true that there are some casks,   multi-canister and dual purpose 
canister that are certified like the GA4, and I'm not sure Marvin may know or 
someone from the NRC may know, if there is going to be one of those casks 
out.  I think it is an incredibly bad idea to test a cask which is not one of 
the actual casts that will be  used in the largest upcoming shipping 
campaign, i.e., Yucca Mountain, if the department decides  to go forward and 
submit a license application.
 
And so I think you really want to think very carefully about how you want to 
pose the cask testing question and I will certainly try togive you a little 
more guidance of our thinking about it when we meet in Henderson.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Bob.  You made a number of points there including the 
one that, there is separate issue here on cask testing in terms of the actual 
certification.  I think that you said that this mix of scale model simulation 
full scale testing would depend on type of package, but you gave us a caution 
on the, what the potential value might be of doing a full scale test for this 
study on a cask that's  not going to be representative of the major cask  
that's going to be used in shipping.
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  Slight clarification. You amazingly managed to get most of it 
pretty accurately.  In terms of Nevada's position right now the current 
requirements are inadequate. That is the combination of scale models less 
than  half scale plus simulations constituting sufficient evidence that the 
cask performance  criteria are met for certifications purposes, that to us is 
unacceptable.
 
The question of whether we would accept something less than full scale 
testing, suggested half scale testing, we're willing to consider that which 
frankly has not been our  position for most of the last 10 years, but I  
think I captured the other points very carefully.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much. Susan, do you have a question?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Little clarification. I'm interested in what other setting 
full scale testing is done of every design where you feel that it's been 
beneficial.  I'm not familiar with another industry that does that and if you 
know of another industry we could look at that and how it's proved its 
efficacy for safety if you know  of one.
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  I'm not going to address that larger issue right now because 
frankly I can  tell from the last discussion that a lot of people's tempers 
and attention spans are perhaps getting to a point where we need to wrap this 
day up and I think you need to consider planning for Henderson how you want 
to pace the day.
 
I think what we learned this is a very intense topic and since I just had a 
cappuccino I'd probably run for another 30 minutes, so I think we want to 
make sure if you have a real important question, I will pose it to you 
another way:  The only truly acceptable, politically and technically in my 
mind shipping campaign that's currently in progress is the Transuranic 
(phonetic) shipping campaign to WIEB [WIPP].
 
You may wonder how it is that states like Nevada that have very little good 
to say  about the Department of Energy, sometimes about the NRC and sometimes 
about the industry, have  generally accepted the WIEB [WIPP] program 
(phonetic)for transportation.
 
One issue is the operation of protocols for accident prevention and emergency 
response. That's an important part of it.  Those were  jointly developed by 
the states in DOE.

Another part has to do with routing.  I don't want to reopen that issue, but 
the bottom line is a different approach was used there.  The  routes were 
identified in the EIS.  It took 10 years to work them all out and it was a 
consensus  that the safest roads and routes were chosen.
 
Third issue, for a variety of reasons, not this one, the NRC decided to 
require full scale testing of the true pack two and indeed in the testing we 
found that things that hadn't been anticipated.  I can tell you that without 
making  this a largely theoretical issue, the very fact that those tests were 
subjected to rigorous full scale testing is (A) a major reason why governors 
of the western states based on the advice of   their technical advisors, have 
all signed off on  protocols in support of this shipping campaign. (B) It is 
a major reason why people like myself are willing to stand in front of a 
sometimes incredulous public, who is used to hearing us do  nothing but 
criticize the NRC and DOE industry, and say look you can like it or not like 
it.  I'm giving you my best judgment as a person who has worked on these 
issues for 20 years. The bottom line is I can stand up there with confidence 
and say not only on the technical  issue, but on the institutional issue the 
NRC and DOE were willing to demonstrate that.  That's not the best answer I 
would like to give to you, but it's the only example I can give you where 
both the people who give technical advice to political decision makers and 
the political decision makers have said okay we are satisfied with the safety  
of this program.  It's not all about full scale testing, but I'm willing to 
bet you that if there  had not been full scale testing to true pack two, 
there would still be enormous state government opposition in at least half of 
the western states.
 
The thing I want you to think about at the NRC is whether you want to risk 
hanging the validity of this modal study update on an issue as volatile and 
difficult to predict the outcome of as full scale cask testing, unless you 
are  willing to go to the great lengths of testing one  of the casks that's 
going to be used for the future shipments.
 
So I'm trying as a person who is a long time advocate of full scale testing, 
and I remain  an advocate of full scale testing, I really want you to 
seriously rethink whether you want to tie that issue to this particular 
undertaking which I think is very valuable and something that we're  fully 
supportive of.  I just don't know that you want to tie full scale testing 
into it.  I think that's the issue today, not whether full scale  testing is 
necessarily a good idea.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob, for both drawing the distinction between full 
testing and also for that caution for the NRC to consider.  Let's go to 
Eileen and to Felix. Eileen?
 
MS. SUPKO:  I had a different reaction to the possibility of testing than 
whether or not  we were testing, proposing full scale cask  testing or 
something else.  What I thought I  heard earlier in the day as part of the 
purpose  of physical testing is the fact that there are new cask designs that 
are coming out that may not be accurately reflected in the computer models 
and part of the testing program would be to benchmark your models, which is 
basically what  you said you would run the predictive models first, do the 
testing and find out how those components behave compared to what you  
predicted.
 
One of the things I would encourage in doing that is laying out very clearly 
prior to embarking on the testing program and whether it be individual 
components or scale models of casks, the stated purpose of your tests, what 
do you hope to accomplish, are you testing an individual component, is it a 
seal, is it a bolt, is it the behavior -- the fact that you have canistered 
fuel now instead of fuel sitting in an basket.  What the are the acceptable 
testing  requirements that would yield the results that  you want?  If it's a 
bolt do you need to do a full scale test on a bolt?  What analytical codes 
are you planning to use and is one of the end results possible changes to 
your analytical codes?  Because we have do have different designs that are 
potentially going to be used in the   future.  And then basically identifying 
the testing parameters that you are planning on doing.  You may not need to 
go through the thermal tests for all of the different  parameters, it may be 
drop tests, it may be something different, but laying all that out with what 
your stated objectives are and again I'll back to my initial statement about 
getting the most bang for your buck and looking at what it is  you are trying 
to achieve by doing the study.
 
I think that it may be that the issue isn't we're going -- trying to address 
the  concerns of groups, full scale cask testing, but   your purpose is 
something different.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much for that, Eileen.  Let's hear from Felix 
and then  let's hear from Mike Wangler over here on end.
 
MR. KILLAR:  My comments are along the same line as Eileen and also on the 
same lines as
Bob.
 
I think if you are looking at testing for this program you have to be very 
careful what  you use in testing because I think what the question will come 
up is that you tested this why didn't you test that?  And then you end up in 
an infinite dooloop and you're never solving and come to a final answer to 
the question.
 
I think what you have to do is identify where you have questions and where 
you need  testing to validate your computer codes and computer models and 
then do the testing  appropriately, but not just do testing for the sake of 
testing because what's happening you will never get to the end of your 
testing.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Your message, Felix, the  NRC is to be very cautious about 
getting into the  full scale testing area.  Mike?
 
MR. WANGLER:  I think I might be the fourth person to kind of support that 
idea.  I  think that you do have to be careful in how the  test data is used.
 
On the question of full scale testing I'm neither an opponent or proponent of 
full scale testing.  I'm one of the three groups within DOE that's authorized 
to approve radioactive materials packaging for the type A, type B.  For my 
type A packages I require full  scale testing before approval.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Mike, could I just stop you right there and just tell people 
what type A  packages include so there's no confusion?
 
MR. WANGLER:  Type A packages are the much lesser quantities of radioactive 
materials  that you might find being transported in the U.S. Spent fuel falls 
in a very, has a lot of radioactive material and falls into the so-called  
type B category.  Some medical isotopes and things of that nature fall in the 
type A  category.  Again, my point is for those type of packages I require 
full scale testing.  However, for the type B packages, I think full scale 
testing is one method of getting to the answer that you need or get to the 
answer that I need to certify a package.
 
I generally rely on engineering analyses to help me understand whether the 
package will  meet the regulatory requirements.  The use of the  engineer 
analysis means I use analytical tools for any confirmatory analysis.  These 
tools  facilitate my review especially on large  packages.  What these 
analytical codes allow me  to do is to look at multiple scenarios that one 
can't do with drop tests.
 
A drop tests generally can do at least  one scenario.  Let me back up.  I 
wouldn't even  call them scenarios.  I'm looking for data  points.  The drop 
test can be used to get you --  we have some data points.  Engineering 
analyses will let you run a series of analyses to see how  the codes will 
tell you that package would perform under various scenarios.
 
Now being part of the Office of Environmental Management that appeals to me   
because using computer codes means I don't have to worry about any 
environmental impacts from  having to deal with fires or even some impacts. 
So the engineering analyses gets me some of the  answers that I need.
 
Where I find testing would be helpful to me is if the testing was done to 
give  me data points to insure that my analytical codes do what they say that 
they're supposed to do.  A drop test, for example, at the regulatory test  
doesn't really -- it's one point.  It doesn't tell me how my code is going to 
perform either  beyond that range or within that range.  I'd like to know 
what my margins of safety are.  The analytical codes can help me determine 
what those   margins of safety would be.
 
If Sandia is going to be testing, what I would rather see is that the testing 
be used to support validation of the computer code or computer codes that we 
all use in this business to try to insure the performance of these large   
packages.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Mike, for that comment.  Earl Easton has a comment on 
that.
 
MR. EASTON:  I couldn't resist.  Having been around long enough I happen to 
have been the  project manager for true pack two [TRUPACT-II] certifications 
for the NRC and very instrumental in the decision to go ahead with the full 
scale test.  The reason  we did so for true pack two [TRUPACT-II] was because 
we did  not have faith in the existing computer codes to model that type of 
closure.  That type of closure was radically different than what we had seen, 
for example, in spent fuel where you had a bolted  lid and we felt that that 
was well understood and that we could rely on analytical tools.
 
True pack two [TRUPACT-II] had a large lid that had a closure around the 
outside much like an aspirin bottle.  We had an absolutely no confidence that 
we could really model that by computer.  So I agree with Mr. Wangler from 
DOE.  One of the good  uses of testing is to validate tools.  Because  when 
you do tests you can usually only afford to    do full scale testing in one 
or two different orientations.  Whereas, if you have some sort of reliable 
code, like Mike said, do very different tests and perhaps get a better 
insight where the real safety points are on that cask.
 
I just wanted to make that comment based on the experience why it was that we 
did choose true pack two [TRUPACT-II] as a candidate for full scale testing.
 
MR. CAMERON:  It confirms what Mike Wangler was suggesting then.  Let's go to 
Bob  Fronczak and then we'll come over to Amy.  Bob, I  don't know if you 
have something else to say? Let's go to Bob Fronczak.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  Unlike Bob Halstead, I didn't have cappuccino so I'm wearing 
out.  I'll  be very brief.
 
MR. CAMERON:  He's a strategic thinker. The rest of us failed.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  All I have to say is the computing capability has increased 
since the  study was done and I'm sure you are going to incorporate that in 
the work that you are going to do.  There is all kinds of things you can 
model that we have already discussed.  I'll follow-up with some written 
comments.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  I have a question. My question is, if I understand it 
correctly, and  this question is sort of directed at Mr. Edlow because I 
think he'll know the answer, if I understand it correctly there is a 
possibility  that the transportation cask can be used more  than once to 
transport fuel rods.  You know, come from the reactor to the repository and 
go back, and if that's true I'm wondering if the study is in any way planning 
to take into account sort of normal wear and tear on a cask and look at how 
many times can a cask be used before it gets to a  certain level or if the 
cask has been used say five dimes [times] and bounced around on a train, does  
that have any effect, for instance, on the bolts and how tight they are.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Those are good questions are the casks used multiple time us 
and is that   something that should be factored into the study.
 
JEFFREY:  The transportation casks are designed to be used multiple times.  
Part of the  certification process is a review of the in-service inspection 
program that must be  developed for each cask where all the components are 
routinely inspected before the cask can be either on a periodic basis or a 
time scheduled basis or on a per shipment basis so that each  time the thing 
goes out, it goes out in  acceptable condition; in condition that's up to 
compliance with the certificate.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Did we get to the point about whether that should be considered 
in the  new study?  All right.  Good.
 
I think Bob Halstead is correct in the sense that we have been at this for a 
while and  it's been pretty intense and I think maybe we  should switch gears 
a little bit and talk about  process.
 
One of the things that Dr. Shankman, Rob Lewis, a number of people have 
talked about is  how does NRC keep people involved in this process, this 
study update?  And of course there is going to be many different milestones 
along the way and we've heard peer review mentioned. That's one aspect.
 
I just wanted to open it up to people around the table to see if there is any 
suggestions about how the NRC should keep the public involved through the 
course of this study  and at what points that should occur and how. Does 
anybody have any suggestions to start us off with?  Heather?
 
MS. WESTRA:  Just a question regarding tribes.  How do you anticipate 
involving Indian  tribes beyond this meeting?  I understand you  have the 
meeting out in Nevada and I anticipate  that more tribes would be at that 
one, but often  times tribes are kind of left out of the loop and don were some  other ideas.  Susan?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  We've spoken about the fact that once we have phase one of 
this project  completed by Sandia, they have given us the  recommendation 
about the scope of the study and potential methodology and we've also talked 
about  the fact that that point the Sandia contractor report will be issued 
on 0170 with its peer review by Lawrence Livermore.  And so we're planning on 
having another series of meetings. What I would like is if somebody could 
speak to whether this format would be useful and whether  the sites that we 
choose for those meetings, particularly in response to what you are saying, 
perhaps we should be in -- thought about Atlanta, we thought about Chicago, 
Minneapolis.  There are other places that we could hold the meetings.
 
The NRC has been holding meetings in  Nevada because it is an area where 
there are a lot of concerns about this, if that's appropriate.  The meeting 
in Washington allows  people who are involved in the policy setting to also 
be part of it, but we're open to other  venues an other formats.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Let me just make sure that  we all understand.  The phase one 
recommendations -- in other words, Sandia is  going to and the NRC are going 
to take the  comments that come out of this meeting and the  meetings in 
Nevada, as well as any written comments we have, and they're going to put  
together a recommendation for how to proceed. Will that be the subject?  Is 
that what you are  referring, to the subject of future meetings? Future 
public comments?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Yeah, along with having  the information that is coming out of 
the contractor report that we have been talking about, the update of the 
assumptions in 0170.  So you will have two new pieces of information before 
we go ahead and contract or spend more money in this area because we don't 
want to say  okay we've heard you, we're going to design a study and we're 
going to do it.  We want to have another point where we get public comment 
and that will be after the study and designed but before we do it.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Does that perhaps explain the relationship between the 0170 
study and this  study is that they will be both looked at together.  I'm 
going to go to Robert Holden now  before we come over to this side to Bob  
Halstead.  Robert?
 
MR. HOLDEN:  I just want to go back for a second to a point Heather brought 
up and I guess from a policy standpoint Nevada is microcosm of this national 
meeting here and that's that tribes in that area have very little resources 
to come to Washington, DC.  Even Las Vegas can be a burden.  We have held 
meetings in Reno and we have held meetings, there is a halfway in between 
Vegas -- I can't remember what the name of it is -- but there are several 
options there and there are several tribes that  will be impacted by rail 
shipments up in the  northern part and you might even touch base with  Bob 
Halstead because he's quite familiar with the area and the tribes and the 
locations as well. But that also, to pick up on a policy point, that's some 
of the things I plan to be doing, talking with commissioners in terms of the 
outreach that NRC does on notice, on consultation as well as the technical 
assistance that you have  to offer in terms of breaking the issues down and  
providing that type of technical assistance to  help them better understand 
that that's part of NRC's duty as the tribes see it as those  governments see 
it.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Robert. Susan?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I was just going to say we'll be glad to work with you and 
we'll talk afterwards.  I'm sure you are familiar with the staff and our 
office and I agree that the outreach may need to be different and we are  
willing to work with you.
 
MR. HOLDEN:  That changes from time to  time.  I'm not sure whose is on first 
at this  point.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Bob Halstead.
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  On the issue of Nevada  Indian tribe participation 
representation, that's  a very difficult issue as Robert said.  First of  
all, the distances involved; travel just within our state is very difficult.  
And secondly, as  many of you know there is both an income and a  telephone 
connection issue in internet connection   and this is now a larger issue of 
isolation of  many people on the reservation.
 
Without belaboring the point you  going to have to make special efforts to 
get the  Nevada tribes involved and frankly you are also going to have to 
struggle as I have and many people working for the State of Nevada struggled 
with to develop a sufficient cultural sensitivity to know that when tribal 
representatives come to a meeting and they may be spiritual leaders, may be 
political leaders, they may be both, they may not feel comfortable fitting 
themselves in to the  tightly scripted meeting agenda which I think has 
worked very well in this meeting, but may be  considered offensive by many of 
them.
 
We don't need to belabor, but there are a number of things you can do and I 
appreciate your expressing sensitivity.  I don't want to bog  us down on that 
issue it's very important, but I  don't think we can resolve it around this 
table. I do think you have to show the same type of sensitivity you're 
showing today in dealing with  the counties in Nevada who have a very 
peculiar legal status because of their effective county status under the 
NWPAA and the litigation   enforced that.
 
And again I've spoken with many of the county representatives and most of 
them know Chip by name and you'll probably see most of them  involved in 
Henderson.  So I ask that in addition  to your continued sensitivity to the 
tribal participation issue, that you keep in mind the nine Nevada California 
counties that are  involved.
 
I don't want to belabor this again, but I will raise two points.  I think at  
the end of this meeting or the next meeting you have some serious 
stakeholders who will be  following the peer review issue as well as the 
conduct of the study.  One of the lessons learned  from the modal study and 
some of the other   studies that have been done over the last 20  years the 
practice is that the peer review has  not always been very impressive, to put 
it bluntly, and as a stakeholder I don't believe at  least involved in 
reviewing what's going on in peer review 
 
Secondly, while there are a number of mechanisms you have used and other 
agencies have used to continue participation by those stakeholders who will 
choose to be deeply involved, one mechanism might be a standard advisory 
group on the study in addition to  whatever public meetings you might want to 
have  to take input from the general public, but I'm sure there are a number 
of us around this table who are intimately interested in this.
 
I imagine the modal study two being as central to discussions of container 
safety as the  modal safety one has been, or the last 13, 14 years, and so I 
even though that three year time period is something that makes a lot of us 
gulp, I know half of Nevada would like to be involvedin an ongoing way.  
Thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob.  I would  ask you if there were standing 
advisory committee on this, I suppose the standing advisory  committee could 
sponsor public meetings, also. Thank you.
 
Let's go to Felix and Amy and I want to make sure that I get Marvin's input 
on some of these issues particularly the review of the peer  review that you 
brought up, Bob and advisory committee.  Felix?
 
MR. KILLAR:  I think the NRC has done an exceptional job of getting the 
information out to people making them aware of the meetings.  I've been 
involved with the NRC for 25 years and I feel that the last five to eight 
years the NRC has bent over backwards to try to get information  out.
 
Now being a governed bureaucracy is hard because sometimes understand how the 
public works versus not everybody reads the Federal Register over their 
coffee in the morning.  I think the  idea they go on through with the idea of 
the   postcards, the mailing lists, the internet, things on that line, I 
think the NRC needs to be applauded for their efforts.
 
The NRC is now having a tendency to beat up itself because it doesn't feel 
it's doing  enough.  I think there is only so much the NRC  can do in order 
to get the word out.
 
I think it's incumbent for people around this table -- I know that Sierra 
Club does it and I'm sure the Indian Federations do it as well and we 
certainly do it because we put information out on our internet, our members' 
website.  We also put information out on our publications and stuff about 
upcoming NRC meetings, location, contacts, things along that line.  You have 
got to rely on word of mouth to some extent because you can't  rely on every 
system there is because you will   never be able to reach everybody.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you very  much.  Amy?
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  First, I think the   advisory committee is a great idea.  
I think that would probably allow you to reach a broader  ripple effect of 
people because people sitting at this table represent a lot more people 
behind them so I think that would be a good idea.
 
Second, I'm glad to hear there is mailing list because I think the tendency 
with all federal agencies now is to rely on their websites a lot and I think 
that's very  dangerous.  Native Americans are mentioned as people who don't 
have access to internet and I think that lots of people don't have access to  
the internet.
 
I was at a meeting last week where I was  told you can just go to the library 
and then you will have access which is true in most communities.  However, I 
have printed this modal study out at work where we have a really nice big  
server and dedicated printer that's a really nice printer and it took me two 
days.  It's a huge PF file and PF files take a long time to print and  you 
can't do that at a library plus the cost is a  whole new factor.  So I just 
caution you to look for ways other than the web.  I fully enforce using the 
web.
 
Lastly, I would just like to say I think   it's really great following up on 
what Felix said.  I think it's great that you are making   this effort.  You 
know, definitely you are doing better than you have in the past.
 
I think the number one way that you encourage public participation is to show 
that it has an effect and I think that really what you could do is you could 
take the comments that are here today and comments that you will receive in  
the future, and you can do a modal study that addresses the public's 
concerns.  Then you can   take that modal study and do meetings like this. I 
think if we had to choose between Washington   and Chicago that would be 
great, but if we could  have it in both Washington and Chicago that would  be 
wonderful.
 
I think one more thing would really show
 
            16   in a big way that you are really committed and
 
            17   that is this summary is nice, it's a good summary
 
            18   and then I read the summary and I read the study
 
            19   and I felt like the summary did a pretty good job
 
            20   of summarizing the study.  However, this is still
 
            21   written to a certain level of education and
 
            22   certain level of knowledge about high level waste
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
         286
 
 
 
 
1   and transportation.
 
I think you need to go one step further if you really want the general public 
to  participate.  Either you can do another study.  I think there are 
technical communicators out there  that could write a summary from this one 
that would still be technically accurate.
 
I think also a week before the hearing, two weeks before the hearing you 
could have or  whatever you are calling this round table  discussion, you 
could have a work sheet where  schedule it in the evening, two or three 
hours, people can come and you do a presentation and you  say here is what 
the study says.  Here's what we did.  Here's what the results were now you 
have  two weeks or a week or however long to think about it.  Here are the 
questions we'd like you to address.  Please come back in two weeks and talk 
to us.  So that people aren't walking in, picked this up when they walked in 
today.  I was  lucky.  Mailed it to me a couple weeks ago.  A lot of people 
only get it when they come to meeting and to try and sit there and listen to 
the discussion, figure out what an irradiated cladding is and have a comment 
that's at all worthwhile is really difficult.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much for  those thoughtful comments.
 
I want to allow Dr. Shankman, the top manager from the NRC today to just 
close the  meeting for us.  Marvin, how about process  issues?
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  I want to say a word about this advisory committee 
suggestion.  You  stay around these issues long enough everything  comes 
around again and I was involved in one of these advisory committees between 
1978 and 1980  when the Regulatory Commission had Sandia do this TRUE study, 
Transportation of Radionuclides  through Urban Environments advisory 
committee for that.  And from that I have a couple of  suggestions that may 
be helpful.
 
You get out of the advisory committee as  much information as you give them.  
So the better advice you'll get is if you give the advisory committee a lot 
of information and then they can give you better advice.  If you give the 
advisory  committee nothing, you get nothing back.  It would be a useless 
committee.
 
Secondly, it would be important to have the advisory committee write up their 
own report
and have that attached to the modal study report.  And furthermore that 
advisory committee report should allow for minority opinions not just have a 
majority review.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Marvin.  I should mention in this regard that any on 
the advisory committee, the NRC as well as any other federal agency that 
wants to establish an advisory committee must meet the requirements the 
federal advisory committee act, which are all good requirements in terms of 
open meetings and minutes of the meetings and although it doesn't  
specifically flow from the Act, reports, minority   reports, all of this, the 
one requirement that sometimes can be daunting but not is the fact that the 
committee needs to be chartered and the charter has to be approved by, I 
think, GAO as well as O and B, which doesn't   mean that it's an 
impossibility by any means, but
time involved in that and I'm not trying to spread any skepticism about that, 
I just wanted  people to understand what the regulatory  framework was for 
that.  Thank you for those  comments on the advisory committee.
 
Eileen, do you have a comment?
 
MS. SUPKO:  I just wanted to follow-up on what Amy said.  I think that in 
putting  together the modal study obviously there were  different audiences 
for different documents.  The  audience for this is probably a technical  
audience.  This was written for more of a  nontechnical audience, but 
probably could be  worded a bit better and one of the things that I found 
talking about nuclear waste transportation  to the general public, there is 
not a good  understanding, for example, the hypothetical  accident tests that 
are done.  What do they mean physically?  What is a 30-foot drop to an 
unyielding surface?  I think there's not a good understanding of what an 
unyielding surface is.
 
And to the extent, not necessarily in the updated modal study itself, but 
maybe a public document to try to put some of those things in perspective.
 
Also use of cask testing and computer simulation.  Mr. Wangler mentioned 
earlier the  benefits that he sees from being able to use computer simulation 
in certifying the package and I think that the general public would probably 
benefit from understanding what those benefits  are.  Keep all those things 
in mind and who your  audience is for the different products that you  put 
together.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Eileen.  Bob Fronczak?
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  This is a real goodopportunity to discuss the issues.  The 
question is is Henderson -- you asked me if I participate.  Are we going to 
try to recreate what we did here today or do you want to address all new 
questions in Henderson?
 
MR. CAMERON:  Maybe I should leap into  that one and be corrected by the 
staff if necessary.
 
The idea was is that we would put together a similar format for one of the 
meetings in Henderson all day format and that we would  have mostly different 
people around the table in order to get their take on these same agenda   
items.  It may be that the take we got here is  going to be the same that we 
get in Henderson particularly if some of the people are similar.
 
But we also wanted to allow the people of Nevada the opportunity to see an 
exchange  among knowledgeable people in the area on this issue including 
their county representative, their state representative, their tribal  
representatives.  So there is going to be that  same format.
 
We're also going to do a public meeting after the round table that will be a 
simpler format in terms of the information that's presented by the NRC and an 
open questionand comment period from the public.  We're also going to do that 
same type of meeting on December 9th from 10 to 12 which is more information 
than you needed, I think.
 
But, yeah, we were going to do this same format for a couple of different 
reasons in   Nevada.  Susan, do you want to add anything to that?
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  Not a great deal just  that the idea was to have a different 
mix of  people, some of the same because of, because  they're unique or they 
represent a particular organization that doesn't have a representative in 
Nevada, but to expand and have a significantly different group that could 
speak to the issues  and maybe have different issues.
 
As Chip said the idea was to recreate this same format in the all day meeting 
which I  think we'll have to shorten the NRC talking little and make that a 
briefer introduction and so we'll have more time to talk about the issues.  
We were already thinking about that, so we are learning from this.  The other 
meetings will be more informational and less round table.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Susan highlighted an extremely important point which is that 
although we use this same format for one of the meetings in Nevada, we do 
want to learn from what happened  here.  And we know that, for example, Bob 
Halstead has already told us that he will have  some more detailed 
information on a couple of topics for discussion there.  So I think we're  
going to hear different types of information and  we need to plan for that 
also and how we do the agenda.  Bob?
 
MR. HALSTEAD:  A couple of things. First of all, without at all being 
critical of  the people who gave the opening presentations, who I think did a 
nice job, I think if you can shorten those to no more than 20 and preferably 
shoot for 15 minutes and have handouts for people  and handle some of that 
information in question and answer thing you will be well served by that.
 
Secondly, I think you should inform all of us who are participants today if 
you don't expect us to be at the table, at that meeting very shortly.  I made 
a commitment to be at this meeting because I think this is absolutely 
critical, but, for example, that means I will not  be providing technical 
assistance to people in the central part of the state the day before when  
there is Department of Energy all day EIS hearing  in Austin and that's 
caused some people to be angry.  Why did you have to schedule?  I  
understand.  I'm not trying to beat you up.  I'm  just trying to explain 
while you were in the  southern part of the state, on the 7th DOE has a major 
all-day meeting in Austin, and the 9th a major all-day meeting in Crescent 
Valley both of which are on a high priority rail corridor and also are the 
areas that people of the northern part of the state would go to and concerned 
about truck transportation.  You just need to know that for purposes.  I have 
to go to the airport and  I'm sorry I can't stay.
 
I would like to thank you for the way  this meeting was organized and 
conducted.  It's a  particularly important thing for me personally  and for 
the State of Nevada generally that you have approached this the way you have.  
Because as I said I don't want to belabor the negative, there has been a lot 
of bad feeling in the State of Nevada over the way another part of the NRC  
handled the transportation issue; such bad  feeling that there has been lots 
of talk about litigation and so I'm not saying this completely  eases the 
situation, but it's a very important  thing for you to demonstrate to people 
in Nevada who rightly or wrongly feel themselves more  affected by this issue 
than all the other folks  that are affected by it.
 
And so I appreciate the way you set up the table.  At first I couldn't 
imagine this            agenda was going to work and the way you set the 
agenda was good.  I want to thank you Susan because I know the way the 
federal system works that people take some political risks to even get 
involved in meetings like this.  Particularly Mr. Massey, I don't think I 
have ever seen anybody who had technical responsibilities to do as good a job 
of  standing in and dealing with technical and nontechnical fire from all 
directions.
 
While many people deserve congratulations on this meeting, you have certainly 
handled yourself today in a way that enhances the credibility of the study.  
With that said, I hope nobody will succumb to the atrophy of organizational 
vigilance, because the way you dealt with things today is the way we have to 
deal with things for the rest of us.  I'm very sorry I can't stay. Thank you 
very much.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob, for your comments and participation and I have 
already  talked to a number of people about the issue you  raised about 
Nevada and I will be in touch with all.  Amy, do you have one more?
  
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  It's a procedural question.  We check the box if we 
wanted a hard copy of the meeting transcript from this meeting.  I'm just 
wondering will we also receive transcripts December 8 and 9th meetings since 
most of us will not be at those meetings?
 
MR. LEWIS:  Yes.
 
MR. CAMERON:  That was the longest yes I ever heard.  Let me just ask if 
anything in the          audience has a comment on process?
 
MR. HOLDEN:  If I could I just want to revisit one particular point and 
ordinarily there are some things you say you don't want to belabor but I find 
myself having to belabor, belabor, belabor this particular point.  I 
appreciate that suggestions, you know, that the word of mouth is going to get 
things out to Indian country which we do and we do what we can to provide 
that type of outreach, but I guess the point is that not  everyone may be, 
totally understand, maybe not giving everyone their due credit, not everyone 
may understand this tribal federal relationship  And what the basis of that 
is and what's required in that context and that's to do that government to 
government protocol outreach.  It's mandatory.  It's something that is 
incumbent upon them and it has to be done regardless of how many numbers 
there are out there, how many tribes there are, regardless of how much it 
costs them, that's what is requisite, long standing and that's also the 
reason why Department of Defense has developed an Indian policy, which this  
organizational board helped with.  That's why  FEMA developed their Indian 
policy.  That's why in almost every major, almost every agency under the 
administration has developed an Indian policy.  NRC is the exception.  They 
have not gone the distance on that matter yet, but something I think they 
will embark on and that's why the organization I work with is redeveloping, 
reviewing, revisiting the DUE policy.  So there  is a basis for this and it's 
quite important. I don't think anyone was trying to belittle it but, I'm just 
trying to clarify what I was trying to say a while ago.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Robert.  That's a significant specific item to 
achieve what you are talking about.
 
Charles, can you talk to this and then we'll see if there is anything on this 
as well as this bounding issue and then have give, see if we can give people 
an opportunity to have final comment.
 
DR. MASSEY:  There are a few things we just wanted to use as discussion 
stimulators if  they hadn't come up during the meeting today. Nuclear 
criticality was brought up a couple times by Amy.  That was something that we 
were  considering for including as suggested areas for inclusion in the 
performance study.
 
What happens after these collisions and thermal environments, how does that 
impact criticality of considerations and also get into   an area that really 
hasn't been explored that well in the previous studies, look at sensitivity 
of results of the analyses so we'd have some idea  of the thermal conditions 
were a little different than what we looked at, how much of a difference does 
that make?  What's the impact?  Sort of go through the analysis that we will 
conduct and look at the sensitivity of the results to the different scenarios 
and parameters that we would  put into that analysis.
 
With that I just want to stress if you do have other thoughts on this or 
other issues either now or after the meeting, if you want to put them on the 
card or e-mail them or write into Rob or Dr. Shankman, please do that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Charles.  I wanted  to do give everybody a chance to 
respond on these issues, but we talked in a number of segments  today about 
what some call bounding; what Eileen called best bang for your buck point.  
Amy mentioned conservatism.
 
I just want to do give Mike Wangler and Mark Holt a chance to say a few words 
on that so that people can understand what that's all about, because there's 
been a lot of I credibly good suggestions that have come out of this meeting. 
But when the NRC and Sandia go to integrate that and consider it, there may 
come a point where not  all things can be done.  So how do you work with 
this?
 
Mike you had a comment that you made. You keep pointing at Mark Holt, but 
we're not going to let you do that.  Mike, how about a comment on the issue 
of bounding?  We'll go to Mark Holt and then open it up for everybody else to 
comment on bounding or these issues.
 
MR. WANGLER:  I'm not sure I remember any more what I was thinking about 
whenever I  made the comment.
 
I guess reminds me a little bit of a story.  When I started out in this 
business as a  health physicist some 28 years ago ICRP2 was the predominant 
publication on the, that provided those conversion factors that relate to 
various  environmental or radioactive pollutants as it got into the body 
converted that quantity into dose.
 
Some years later ended up with ICRP2  and 30 where we made some changes but 
what we  generally got was more decimal places behind the numbers that we 
already had.  Then five years ago, six years ago, we ended up with the ICRP 
50 and 51 which basically just reaffirmed everything that has been done for 
the last 30 years.  There were some changes in that one kind of went, kind 
one in ICRP 26 and went back to ICRP 2.
 
It's not really related to bounding per se.  What I want to express a concern 
about is  that we have the NUREG 0170, we have the Lawrence  Livermore NCR 
Modal Study.  We have some good information there that I hope we don't throw 
out  for the sake of a new study.  I suspect that what  we're going to find 
is that we've sharpened our pencil.  We've taken out our data which is going 
to go from four decimal places.  We can now take   that out to eight or ten 
decimal places and find out we're probably in the same ballpark and here  
we've just spent a lot of effort to reaffirm what  we've already done. 
 
What concerned me about the Livermore report concerns me about this one.  
Someone brought it up a little bit earlier was the uncertainty in the data 
that's used to generate our final numbers.  The Livermore report had  three 
significant figures.  Had one plus I think three decimal places, had three 
significant figures probably with data that was no better than one 
significant digit.  Yet there were no error bars, no uncertainties that were 
identified in the report as showing where that number fit. Was that number 
good to five percent, 10 percent? I suspect it's was probably good maybe 100  
percent, but there was no analysis that was done.  I'm hoping that perhaps in 
this report we  can get a little better sense of where these numbers fit.  
And in that sense I will use the  term bounding, in that if we know where the 
number is plus the margins that we have on either  side, we kind of know 
where our number lies.  We can have a little bit more -- we I guess in the 
scientific field can have a little bit more confidence in the numbers that we 
get.
 
I realize that probably the general public likes a single number that they 
can work with.  Unfortunately when you have systems with significant 
uncertainties and data, it's hard to  rely on just a single number.
 
I like the idea of looking at numbers that are risk informed so that you can 
kind of  figure out where you want to be.  You can do screening methods much 
like Livermore did in  their report to kind of say we've considered  these 
numbers but they fall outside of where we think they should be.  We're going 
to consider this subset.
 
It's still not clear to me from listening to the Sandia discussion how their 
going to actually present the data.  I realize there is some criticism in the 
way Livermore did their number of looking at strain at a certain  point and 
temperature at a certain point.  But in that regime they came up with a grid 
that had a, had some logic to it. 

With the discussions that have been done here, we talk about using analytical 
models and we can do some precise calculations on the responsive things, but 
it's not clear to me how we're going to put this thing in an order so that we 
can determine where the bounds are that we want to, we want to look at the 
transportation of  spent nuclear fuel.  Thank you, Chip.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Mike.  Mark, let's go to you for some comments.  
Mark, in case  we didn't mention it earlier, is the author of the 
congressional research service report on spent fuel transportation which I 
think was very  helpful to a lot of people in terms of putting this into an 
understandable perspective.
 
MR. HOLT:  From my perspective is certainly the perspective of trying to help  
inform the congressional debates.  This has been a very useful exercise, 
particularly because I would presume a lot of the issues were raised  today, 
if not all of them, would be issues that you would see when the nuclear waste 
bills come  to the floors of the House and the Senate probably next session.  
So I would I wouldn't  expect to see a lot of results from the study in time 
for that, but certainly for my own purposes and for purposes of Congressional 
policy makers, the more answers to these questions we can get or at least the 
more analysis you can see, everybody will accept the answers would be very 
valuable. But, of course, as was mentioned can every one of these issues be 
fully analyzed in the study and should there be some rebounding on some of 
them? Obviously you got to make the decision on how  much time and money you 
have available to do  that, but the more you can do the better it would be in 
my opinion.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much for  that.  Bob, do you have a comment on 
this?
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  We can throw a lot of money at it and we're trying to figure 
out what  really makes a difference before we decide where to throw our 
money, so we encourage that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you.  I see Halstead's cappuccino is still 
working.  His name tent is still up with us.
 
Why don't we start Rick Boyle and I want to give all of yoined to be  
such low consequence that they're discarded. Will we go in before we even 
start and stay if they are one in a million or less in probability  they 
would be discarded?  Should we do that up  front and possibly with public 
input or will we do this after the fact and say we can only do the top 10, so 
our probability becomes maybe 50 percent.
 
I wonder what the thought of both Sandia and the NRC are on such, where do 
you draw that cut off and do you do it before you start the  study or as you 
get into it and do it based on your funding?  Thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  I think that's an important point to consider and maybe that 
will  be something that's in the phase one recommendations and analysis.
 
Mike, do want to say anything more than you already have?
 
MR. WANGLER:  I want to support Rick on  his comment on looking at low 
probability  sequences.  I guess the parting comment I would like to make is 
that in the study we need to be very careful that the studies don't do 
anything  to undermine the regulations that we currently have.
 
We are operating under 30, 40 years of excellence, excellent transportation 
under very   similar regulations.  I'd hate to see that we'd have to revisit 
everything that we have done in those regulations.  Some of the impacts that 
would have is these regulations are worked through with the international 
community. Congress even binds the U.S. to be generally compatible with 
international regulations so that  we can insure commerce and be able to move 
things back and forth between the countries.
 
Along those lines it troubles me a bit I think that Jack Edlow made the 
comment earlier  about Sandia looking at a thousand degree C fire for the 
duration of one hour.  This is certainly  extra regulatory and it makes one 
wonder that if  we pass that, are we now going to ratchet the regulations 
toward a different number and if we fail that are we going to have to look at 
higher numbers?  So I think we need to be very careful  in what we look at 
and officially propose for these studies.  Thanks.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Mike.  Tracy?
 
MS. MUSTIN:  I'd would like to for including me an a learning experience.  I  
thought it was very valuable.  I think I agreed to what Rick and Mike said.  
I think the real challenge is going to be over the next few months  perhaps 
in the next series of meetings, how all this input, there was a lot of 
interesting and valuable input provided today, but how this input is sort of 
collated and then a study is proposed  that allows us to, whether the right 
term is address in a bounding way all the things that were said, all the 
input that was provided today, suggestions that were made.  I think we all 
have a vested interest in the study and the results will be used for years to 
come.
 
We'll see that the study does validate a system and a process that is 
conservative, and  has provided safe transport for years.  But it's  also a 
tool that we can use, hopefully help build confidence.
 
The suggestions that were made about taking the opportunity to explain to the 
public  what some of these things mean and what system is about is going to 
be very useful.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks.  I think we should all pay attention to the fact just 
what the importance of this particular study is.
 
Dwight, do you want to say something?
 
MR. SHELOR:  I certainly agree that there are, there is a cutoff on the low  
probability of that.  Need look at very carefully.  It would save you a lot 
of money when  you scope it.
 
I commend NRC, particularly Susan for starting this effort and getting 
involved in it. I personally believe that as Tracy said we will  use this for 
years to come, but the real value in this study is going to be the public 
involvement and personally I encourage you to go all over the country and 
talk to everyone because for the general public and those that are 
particularly interested to understand the safety case is  really important.  
That's our biggest struggle when we talk to the public and we want to 
convince them this is safe enough.  You have burden and I think you are doing 
a great job.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much.  Jack Edlow?
 
MR. EDLOW:  Three points.  First of all, I'd like to thank the Regulatory 
Commission for  the really superb job they've done today. There's a sense of 
openness in this meeting and the sense of decorum, and I think the term 
decorum is appropriate because I have been to  many hearings and I've been 
subjected to many hearings in the past and things where decorum was certainly 
not the issue.  I want to applaud everybody for the way they worked on this 
today. I hope that it can continue especially at Henderson.  That's the first 
point.
 
The second point is I would like to thank the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
for their   statement of confidence they made this morning in the existing 
regulatory framework.  I think it's very important that the public continue 
to get that sense from you and I hope that you will continue to make that 
point everywhere you go. Things are good and this is just a question of 
continuing your analysis of the circumstances.
 
Thirdly, I would like to make the point that many people are saying let's 
keep it real, deal with issues that can be dealt with and should be dealt 
with.  Let's try to do scenarios that are meaningful and not get hooked into 
all the what ifs that you can get into because even though Chuck would like 
to spend your money in  looking at all those things, I don't think the 
taxpayers should have to fund so many things that are on the outside bounds.  
Thank you very much. On to you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Marvin Resnikoff.
 
MR. RESNIKOFF:  I would also like to thank the NRC for doing this and for 
your openness.  I want to think about the question that Susan Shankman asked.  
This happened so long  ago this morning which was why should we do an 
environmental impact statement?  I'm going to think about that question 
because I'm comfortable with these technical issues and proceedings, but I'm 
a little uncomfortable in sort of excluding the public in holding sort of 
these what I think of as more back room meetings  involving a much larger 
constituency out there and the EIS allows certain legal safeguards which we 
don't really have sort of in this kind of setting.  And also allows more 
political element  to enter and this is, after all is a democracy, it's not 
being run by technical people in the  back room.  It's being run by people 
who are elected.  So I have some concern about this aspect of it.  And so I'm 
going to think about why an EIS -- the question you asked -- and I will send 
you a letter about that.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Marvin.  Let's go to Bob Fronczak.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  I think NRC did a great job.  Chip, I thought you handled the 
meeting real well.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you.
 
MR. FRONCZAK:  One thing I would like to follow-up on Mike's comments is that 
I think you said that the regulations that we have now are good.  We all 
believe that.  The only thing I would change about that is if something in 
the  analysis, let us look to a point where the regulations needed to be 
changed, and I think that ought to be done.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Bob.  Ed Pritchard.
 
MR. PRITCHARD:  Thank you, Chip.  I also want to thank the NRC.  I echo 
what's been said
by the other speakers here.  I would also like to  again make the Federal 
Railroad Administration available to you and I hope you do utilize us and our 
concerns about fire tests, crashes and what have you.  We will start 
gathering information on some of the more serious accidents as of tomorrow.  
So I again thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Ed, and thank you for that offer of assistance too.  
Kevin.
 
MR. KAMPS:  I would just like to you for the invitation to be here today.  I 
just like to echo the importance of environmental impact statement process to 
give  the public meaningful and legally binding part in the decision making 
process.  It's ironic that  the spokesman from the Department of Energy, Mr. 
Shelor, said that these meetings should happen all over the country because 
there is growing, there is a growing feeling along the transportation routes 
that they have not had, well, they're not getting public hearings along major 
transport routes in the draft environmental impact statement process.

For the Yucca Mountain repository places like Chicago, do not have a public 
hearing and so there is efforts on the grass roots level to to get public 
hearings on the draft environmental impact statement from DOE.  So I fully 
support  that idea that the NRC should take this to the  places that are most 
impacted by the study. Thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Kevin.  We're going to come back to Susan for last 
words.  So  we're going to go over to Mark Holt.  Mark?
  
MR. HOLT:  Thanks again for inviting me today.  I think this will definitely 
be helpful for me in helping to inform the Congressional Debate.
 
I just once again I'd reiterate that these issues that were raised today will 
be issues in the debate and any analysis that can be  directed at them will 
be extremely valuable.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Okay.  Thank you.  Do you want do say something since you are 
the project  manager?  I think you probably should.
 
MR. LEWIS:  I just want to say that these discussions have been very useful 
to me  same thing and I think those from Sandia will say  the same thing.  
For this issue report that we're going to produce next May or so, what I have  
learned today is we need to be very clear in our message and in particular 
regarding whether we  want to use bounding, but still representative 
assumptions in approach or whether we want to use  these more realistic 
assumptions and for both of those cases we need to think about how we're  
going to use sensitivity analysis to support these approaches.
 
We need to be very clear in this issues report about how we will use testing 
in this project and what we intend the testing to show. I think we need to be 
very clear in this issues report regarding whether or not we want to use some 
sort of risk to address lower probability accidents below some probability 
threshold where  the consequences may be great but the risk is small because 
probability is so small.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you much, Rob. Rick?
 
RICK: .  Well, it's always good to see the regulators are vigilant and 
interested in continuing to evaluate the level of performance. This is 
provided by compliance with the  regulations.  I think that's been going on 
since 1961 when the first regulations were set up and it's something that 
needs to continue because  every year we get smarter concerning accidents 
that have happened and understanding frequencies and forces involved in 
accidents and keeping that sort of information up to date is a necessary  
part of being rigorous regulators.
 
On another point, what I think really it  comes down to is an explanation to 
all involved of the system performance of the spent fuel cask.  It has 
contents inside of it, a lot of details about the pins, pallets, the 
cladding, cask, the seals, impact limiters.
 
In the end it's a system that performs and understanding how that performs in 
a  deterministic sense where the regulations have  said you must be able to 
withstand an accident up to this particular point, I think explains to people 
what they can expect, the level of safety they should be confident in each 
and every cask having.
 
The next step then is the performance  when it exceeds the regulatory 
requirements and  in some cases it's been called graceful failure and other 
cases it's the so-called graceful failure depending on how you view what the 
cask is going to do when it exceeds what it was designed to do.  If the study 
can explain how the system performs in the deterministic range and 
problemistic range, up to the point where you have drawn the bounds of it on 
a basis of probability perhaps, then that in the end will  help everyone, I 
think, leave with a better and more comfortable understanding of just what 
the safety is and transport spent fuel.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Rick.  Amy Shollenberger.
 
MS. SHOLLENBERGER:  Thank you for having this meeting and I particularly 
appreciate it  because it's not often that I get to ask questions and have 
request access to the people  who actually know the answers to those 
questions.
 
I think it's one thing being a member of the public as opposed to the 
industry.  That's a  real handicap because it's hard to get the answers to 
questions.  I appreciate a forum where I can get those answers.  I would also 
just like to follow-up on a couple things and just add my two cents.
 
First, I would like to thank Eileen for asking you to consider your audience, 
I think 
that was a really good point and I'm glad to agree with you.  I think it's 
really crucial that you consider your audience and you think about how to 
explain this stuff to people who are going to be watching the cask driving by 
their houses every day.  And so I just like to say I would also like to 
follow-up on what Kevin said and I was going to bring up the same point of I 
thought it was very ironic that the DOE was encouraging the NRC to hold 
meetings like this all across the nations when the DOE is refusing to do the 
same            thing, even though we are requesting it.  We being American 
citizens, taxpayers.
 
So I'd like to urge the NRC to encourage the DOE to do the same thing being 
partners and  all.  And just one last comment that I would like to make, and 
I hate to end on this kind of a note, one thing that kind of made me sad in 
the meeting is several people said we all agreed that  the regulations are 
good enough and I'm not sure that's true.  I think that, I know public 
citizens -- the regulations aren't good enough until they say zero release is 
acceptable.  Thanks for having us.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you, Amy.  Felix, go ahead.
 
MR. KILLAR:  I would be remiss if I didn't thank the NRC because everybody 
else did. But I do, I think these are helpful for the industry to also hear 
the issues that people who obviously share our view of perspectives have and 
help us understand this perspective so that we can help provide additional 
information and maybe address some of those concerns and certainly make 
changes where changes are needed.
 
The one issue that wasn't discussed, the one issue that's near and dear to 
our hearts is           that this program is basically funded from our fees 
we pay the NRC.  I know this morning Susan mentioned that she wants to do 
this thing effective and efficiently and we certainly endorse that.  There 
are limited resources out there and there are limited resources at the NRC 
and so I think one of the things is very incumbent upon the study is to find 
out where are the big issues?  What are the issue that need to be studied in-
depth and what have you, and spend the resources where you get the most 
benefit because you do have limited resources and it'sour resources you're 
spending and we want you to spend them wisely.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Felix.  Eileen Supko.
 
MS. SUPKO:  I think building on what Felix just said would be beneficial for 
the NRC and Sandia to focus on what's new and what's changed since the last 
modal study.  Talk about some of the things that have changed.  Cask designs 
have changed, some of the accident  statistics have changed.  They may have 
improved or degraded.  Also put in place the process such that the study 
doesn't necessarily get redone every 10 years just because 10 years have 
passed, but because something new that's significant has occurred.  I think 
that's an important thing to keep in mind and also the fact that you have 
enhanced analytical capability now and how does that factor in.
 
One of the things that I think everybody in this room agrees is that spent 
fuel transportation is an issue more important both to nuclear industry, to 
members of the public, to different groups and this type of a meeting where 
you get everybody's opinions and perspectives, I think is very important.  
This has been less painful than I thought it was going to be spending the 
whole day here.  The last comment is is I would love to know what they're 
doing next door.
 
HEATHER:  Thank you, Chip, and members of the NRC staff for organizing this 
meeting.  As usual I got a lot out of it.  Like many tribal environmental or 
technical staff, I deal with many issues, not just this one.  I appreciate 
all I heard today and take that information back and help the people that I'm 
here to represent.  Thanks.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thanks, Heather.  Robert Holden.
 
MR. HOLDEN:  Thanks to the NRC staff and Chip Springer for ramrodding the 
session, and   keeping us all awake.  But just in closing just to say that, 
you know, the folks I represent they're impacted by a lot of things in this 
program area.  The cask integrity can be important to cultural integrity.  In 
the event of an accident consequences are great, probability is small.  
However, that one consequence is, it's -- do tremendous, harmful everlasting 
damage to tribal lands and some of those folks live in areas where there is 
cultural sensitive matters where the things that set them apart and distinct        
from other folks, this being their homelands, is an integral to their 
culture.  These same scientist who have worked in these areas have a tendency 
to dispute the fact that there may exist phenomenon, that there may exist 
spiritual beings that exist there in which those native peoples communicate 
with.
 
It's my understanding that scientists aren't supposed to disprove anything or 
they   can't disprove they can eliminate certain possibilities.  However, you 
know, they discredit and discount many of the things that tribal people try 
to share with them.
 
In terms of sharing this information and developing the outreach materials, 
remember that   a lot of these folks may be second generation English 
speaking people so this is entirely a foreign language to them, not the 
mention the technical jargon that they will be hearing.  Just quite difficult 
for them to comprehend particularly when -- and to understand that this 
material that's traveling through homelands, which they have no place else to 
go if something happens there, that they set up these  lands in reserve for 
them a long time ago in exchange for other lands. 
 
Not only that, the resources that -- this uranium came from their lands, 
extracted from their lands and those places were not cleaned up in that 
mining and so forth and now it's coming back through their corridors and 
homelands, so be mindful of that and be respectful of that and I'm sure they 
will be respectful as you go down this path.  Thank you.
 
MR. CAMERON:  Thank you very much, Robert.
 
Before I turn it over to Susan for closing, I would just like to thank the 
group. You have been a very thoughtful group and constructive and courteous.  
Thank you very much.  Susan I will give it to you to close.
 
MS. SHANKMAN:  I want to thank you all for being here, for your patience, for 
your perseverance and I'm not going to get into any  issues.  We're going to 
look at the transcript. When we go to Nevada I'm sure we will get other  
comments.
 
The one thing I wanted to say is that we brought all the staff who are 
working on this project with us.  People from Sandia, people from my office.  
Janet came who is with the division of waste management.
 
The reason we are here is because we sincerely wanted to do this -- I won't 
say  right -- because we can all define it differently.  But we certainly 
want to do it in ain which people with different issues are fully considered 
and fully explored.  I told at the beginning of the meeting we will do that.
 
We will come back with the design our study.  We will get other comments.  I 
thank  you very much.  I imagine we all want to go home  and if you have any 
ideas, I get my best ideas when I'm driving home.  Please send them in to us.  
There is a lot of information we talked about today.  I hope maybe you don't 
go away with the sense we have any answers, but I hope you have a feeling 
that we have listened to the questions.  Thank you.

(Whereupon, at 6:15 p.m., the conference was concluded.)
 
 
 
 
1    CERTIFICATE OF REPORTER
 
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3            I hereby certify that the foregoing is a
 
4   true and accurate transcript of the proceedings
 
5   in the aforementioned matter this _____ day of
 
6   __________.
 
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DONNA M. HALL, Court Reporter
 
             
 
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