Official Transcript of Proceedings

NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

Title: Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards

Radiation Protection and Nuclear Materials

Docket Number: (n/a)

Location: Rockville, Maryland

Date: Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Work Order No.: NRC-1071 Pages 1-154

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1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

2 NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

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4 ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON REACTOR SAFEGUARDS

5 (ACRS)

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7 SUBCOMMITTEE ON RADIATION PROTECTION

8 AND NUCLEAR MATERIALS

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10 WEDNESDAY

11 AUGUST 17, 2011

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13 ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND

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15 The Advisory Committee met at the Nuclear

16 Regulatory Commission, Two White Flint North, Room

17 T2B3, 11545 Rockville Pike, at 1:00 p.m., Michael T.

18 Ryan, Chairman, presiding.

19 COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT:

20 MICHAEL T. RYAN, Chairman

21 J. SAM ARMIJO, Member

22 DENNIS C. BLEY, Member

23 DANA A. POWERS, Member

24 HAROLD B. RAY, Member

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1 NRC STAFF PRESENT:

2 DEREK WIDMAYER, Designated Federal Official

3 ANDREW CARRERA, FSME/DILR

4 JIM DANNA, FSME/DILR

5 DAVID ESH, FSME/DWMEP

6 CHRISTOPHER GROSSMAN, FSME/DWMEP

7 DEBORAH JACKSON, Deputy Director, FSME/DILR

8 CHRIS MCKENNEY, FSME/DWMEP

9 GREGORY SUBER, FSME/DWMEP

10 PRIYA YADAV, FSME/DWMEP

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1 C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S

2 PAGE

3 Introduction by Chairman Ryan 4

4 Staff Opening Remarks by Ms. Jackson 5

5 LLW Disposal Site-Specific Analysis Rulemaking

6 Discussion: Analysis of Comments

7 Received on Preliminary Rule Language

8 By Mr. Carrera 7

9 Discussion: Guidance for Conducting Site10 Specific Analysis for Part 61

11 by Mr. Yadav 61

12 by Mr. Grossman 82

13 by Mr. Esh 126

14 Path Forward by Ms. Jackson 144

15 Subcommittee Discussion by Chairman Ryan 149

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1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

2 1:00 p.m.

3 CHAIRMAN RYAN: The meeting will now come

4 to order please. This is a meeting of the Advisory

5 Committee on Reactor Safeguards Subcommittee on

6 Radiation Protection of Nuclear Materials.

7 I am Dr. Michael Ryan, Chairman of the

8 Subcommittee. ACRS' members in attendance are Dr. Sam

9 Armijo, Dr. Dana Powers, Dr. Dennis Bley and Mr.

10 Harold Ray. The purpose of this meeting is to

11 continue the Subcommittee's discussion with NRC staff,

12 on proposed rulemaking language to amend 10 CFR 61 to

13 add site-specific analyses for low level waste

14 disposal.

15 The Subcommittee will gather information,

16 analyze relevant issues and facts, and formulate

17 proposed positions and actions as appropriate. The

18 Subcommittee plans on proposing a Letter of Report on

19 this matter for consideration by the full Committee at

20 the July --

21 MR. WIDMAYER: September.

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: -- I mean September, thank

23 you, full Committee meeting. I thought we would be

24 behind schedule already.

25 MR. WIDMAYER: We tried to do it in July.
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Derek Widmayer is the

2 designated federal official for this meeting. A

3 transcript of the meeting is being kept and will be

4 made available on the web. It is requested that

5 speakers first identify themselves, and speak with

6 sufficient clarity and volume so that they can be

7 readily heard.

8 We have not received any requests from

9 members of the public to provide comments, however, I

10 understand that there may be folks on the bridge line

11 who wish to listen in on today's proceedings.

12 Now would folks on the line please

13 introduce yourself, if you're on the bridge line now?

14 Very well, on the bridge line I assume there will be

15 nobody there. Thank you for that. We now proceed to

16 the meeting and I call on Debbie Jackson, Deputy

17 Director of the Division of Intergovernmental Liaison

18 and Rulemaking at FSME to open the proceedings.

19 MS. JACKSON: Thank you Dr. Ryan, and good

20 afternoon. Good afternoon to the Subcommittee members

21 and meeting attendees. I'm going to provide some

22 opening remarks before the staff begins their

23 presentation.

24 So I am going to start off on why we're

25 here today. We're here to provide an update on the
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1 Part 61 rulemaking to inform HRS regarding the

2 comments and the staff proposed rule text changes.

3 The staff has modified its approach to

4 enhance some of the flexibility and to address some of

5 the concerns the Subcommittee had during the last

6 meeting, and also to brief you on the draft guidance

7 documents.

8 We've had two previous briefings with

9 ACRS, one with the Subcommittee in June of this year,

10 and one with the full Committee in July. And we've

11 had the Commission direction, which is to proceed with

12 the rulemaking to require site-specific performance

13 assessment prior to the disposal of significant

14 quantities of depleted uranium and blended waste.

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And we, just for the

16 record, somewhere again today we'll define what

17 blended waste is, coming in the Commission's direction

18 may have mentioned that.

19 MS. JACKSON: I believe that, is that --

20 MR. ESH: We can, yes.

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That would be helpful, I

22 think.

23 MS. JACKSON: Okay.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Just so that we are all

25 clear that, you know, what we're talking about today,
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1 if it's evolved or changed or, clear, you know. Thank

2 you.

3 MS. JACKSON: Okay. So today's topics and

4 the presenters, Andy Carrera will follow me with the

5 draft proposed rule and analysis of the comments

6 received on the preliminary rule language, and he's

7 also going to talk about some of the rule changes to

8 address the flexibility.

9 And then Priya, Dave, and Chris will

10 follow with a discussion on the guidance for

11 conducting the site-specific analysis of Part 61, and

12 then I'll close with Path Forward. So with that,

13 Andy, we're going to change seats a little.

14 MR. CARRERA: Thank you Debbie, good

15 afternoon everyone. My name is Andrew Carrera, I'm

16 the project manager for the Part 61 rulemaking. Next

17 slide please.

18 And the last time that staff briefed the

19 Committee on the Part 61 rulemaking was while the

20 working group was in the process of reviewing the

21 public comments that we received on the proposed rule

22 language, I'm sorry, preliminary proposed rule

23 language for the Part 61 site-specific analysis

24 rulemaking.

25 And for this rulemaking, this fact follows
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1 Commission's direction in Staff Requirement Memorandum

2 SECY-08-0147 and SRM-SECY-10-0043, which is to specify

3 site-specific analysis requirements for the disposal

4 of large quantities of depleted uranium, and develop

5 a guidance document for such analysis. And also to

6 included blended waste into existing rulemaking for

7 depleted uranium. And Dave, do you want to talk about

8 what's your definition of blended waste, yes?

9 MR. ESH: Yes, sure. I'll just describe

10 it. The blended waste that you asked about is when

11 you take waste of one classification, say some amount

12 of Class C waste, and you blend it with lower class

13 waste to lower the overall classification of the

14 mixture. So blended waste would be taking a higher

15 class waste, mixing it with a lower class waste to get

16 the combination at the value of the lower class waste.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay. And that's allowed,

18 or the perception now is that it would be allowed over

19 all classes, A, B, C and Greater-than-C.

20 MR. ESH: A, B, C, a Commission gave

21 explicit direction to not allow it for Greater-than22 Class-C.

23 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Not allow it for Greater24 than-Class-C, okay, just so that everybody's clear on

25 what we talked about.
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1 MEMBER ARMIJO: What's the cutoff between

2 Class C and Greater-than-C, you know, specifically

3 what is Greater-than-Class-C and, I know high-level

4 waste, but --

5 MR. ESH: Yes.

6 MEMBER ARMIJO: -- is there something in

7 between?

8 MR. ESH: The Greater-than-Class-C is

9 defined by the weight of the Class C waste

10 concentration values that are provided in 61.55,

11 Tables 1 and 2 in Part 61, so it's concentrations that

12 were derived, where if you're above those

13 concentrations then it's considered Greater-than14 Class-C waste.

15 If it's not determined by language or

16 derivation to be high-level waste, because high-level

17 waste is based on where it came from, basically.

18 CHAIRMAN RYAN: It's interesting that

19 that's a classification that's based on the potential

20 for, basically, worker exposure during handling,

21 because it does involve both long- and short-lived

22 radionuclides.

23 MR. ESH: Yes.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And some Class C waste

25 will become lower than Class C fairly quickly, 50
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1 years for example, it's driven by cobalt. So it's not

2 only risk-driven classification for disposal alone, it

3 does take into account the questions of operational

4 management while they're being handled, and some of

5 which go away quickly after disposal.

6 And then the risks become those for

7 longer-lived radionuclides, and if it was classified

8 at that time it would be a much lower class of waste.

9 MR. ESH: Yes, there are two isotopes in

10 practice that drive it a lot, and those are cesium and

11 strontium.

12 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Right.

13 MR. ESH: So and Class A waste, the

14 concentrations are derived that they're quite a bit

15 lower than the concentrations of Class C waste.

16 Because Class C waste you basically have 500 years of

17 decay that you can take advantage of.

18 So you can dispose of much higher

19 concentrations. And the table for long-lived

20 radionuclides, the way it basically works is the Class

21 C waste is, the concentrations that are at the values

22 in the table, Class A waste is at 1/10th of the values

23 in the table for, to determine whether it's Class A or

24 Class C waste for the long-lived isotopes.

25 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you.
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1 MR. SUBER: Excuse me Dr. Ryan, this is

2 Gregory Suber. I do have just one clarification.

3 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, sir.

4 MR. SUBER: What something the doctors

5 said. The SRM said that greater than Class C should

6 remain a federal responsibility. As you know, waste

7 that is Greater-than-Class-C, the Department of Energy

8 is responsible for disposing of that waste, and the

9 Classes A, B and C are NRC or agreement state

10 responsibility. So what the SRM did is issue a mind

11 set that we want Greater-than-Class-C waste to remain

12 a federal responsibility?

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Absolutely. No, that's a

14 great classification, I appreciate that.

15 MEMBER ARMIJO: So for the purposes of

16 this rule, everything that, let's say the civil

17 nuclear programs deal with, A, B and C, they all can

18 be blended, right? And Greater-than-Class-C is a

19 federal thing, and we don't have to worry about it?

20 CHAIRMAN RYAN: One important aspect of

21 waste is, it's not waste until you declare it waste.

22 So if you create a package of waste, you can create it

23 in such a way so that it will be classified as A, B or

24 C, based on how you prepare those materials in the

25 commercial sector.
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1 But by definition I think, Dave has

2 pointed out correctly that those things that are

3 clearly large quantities of Greater-than-Class-C waste

4 are in fact a DOE obligation at this point. Thank

5 you.

6 MEMBER BLEY: I'm sorry, I just, I was

7 mixing other places I know with this. So if you have

8 a process estimate and you've accumulated something in

9 a tank that will end up as waste, it's not waste until

10 you package it and declare it as waste.

11 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And perhaps even treat it.

12 For example, a liquid waste you may solidify in

13 concrete, and that concreted waste is what you assess

14 for its classification as a waste.

15 MEMBER BLEY: But before it leaves the

16 process plant it's not waste.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Correct. It's material on

18 process and --

19 MEMBER BLEY: Materials.

20 CHAIRMAN RYAN: -- you know, if you

21 solidify it, obviously that'll have an impact on the

22 ultimate concentration, you know, those kinds of

23 things. Sorry David, but thank you for the

24 clarification. Andrew?

25 MR. CARRERA: Now, the staff is here again
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1 today to pick up where we left off, and inform the

2 ACRS of stakeholders' comments on the preliminary

3 proposed rule language, and revisions being considered

4 for the proposed rule language. Slide Number 3,

5 please.

6 Just to recapture the essence of the

7 processes on rulemaking, the Commission directed staff

8 to keep this rulemaking to a limited scope and that is

9 where the Staff's focus remained. And in this limited

10 scope rulemaking, the staff inserted several

11 approaches.

12 And one of the approach is to specify

13 site-specific analysis requirements for a

14 demonstration of compliance for the performance

15 objectives in Subpart C of 10 CFR Part 61. And these

16 site-specific analysis include performance assessment,

17 intruder assessment, long-term analysis as far as

18 update analysis at facility closure.

19 And these analysis will enhance the safe

20 disposal of low-level waste and would also identify

21 any additional measures that will be prudent to

22 implement. Next slide, please.

23 Staff also proposed additional amendment

24 to Part 61 regulations, such as adopting new

25 definitions and concepts as part of the program to
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1 facilitate the implementation of the site-specific

2 analysis requirement.

3 And during the proposal development

4 process, the staff made the decision to make no

5 explicit reference to depleted uranium or blended

6 waste. The proposed requirement would apply to total

7 waste inventories.

8 MEMBER ARMIJO: Is there any reason why

9 you wouldn't just make it very clear, where you have

10 issues related to DU or blended waste, you know, it

11 seems like the objective was to bring that into the

12 regulations and you don't, you say you're not going to

13 talk about it in the language?

14 MR. CARRERA: Well we may have special

15 reference to it, but while the working group was

16 formulating the approach to this rulemaking, we were

17 talking about looking at DU by itself, and then we

18 will see as uranium for, include blended waste in

19 there, and then we proceed to look forward to the

20 future where we're contemplating future waste streams

21 that were not part of the original Part 61 analysis.

22 And looking at those, we figure it would

23 be more prudent or more efficient if we were to make

24 this rulemaking apply to all waste streams, all waste

25 types.
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And I hear what you're

2 saying, but I guess I would add to Dr. Armijo's

3 comment that if you say something, that this

4 regulation now also applies to DU and blended waste

5 as long as you meet the performance objectives or

6 whatever it is, that's helpful.

7 And then if you want to deal with how to

8 do that and guidance, fine. But being silent on it

9 leaves the impression that it's not covered.

10 MEMBER ARMIJO: Or that everything is the

11 same. You see where I'm a little worried is that DU

12 may have special properties, special issues that

13 require different treatment. And if it's just kind of

14 buried in with all the other stuff, then we have to

15 apply the same treatment to all the other stuff when

16 it's not really justified.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And in fact the Commission

18 directed that that be considered, so why wouldn't you

19 add it to the things that are covered in the

20 regulation? I just think you shouldn't be silent on

21 it because it creates the wrong impression.

22 MR. ESH: Yes, I think the documentation

23 that will be produced with the draft rule, such as the

24 FRN and the Statement of Considerations will be clear

25 of what the rule applies to. And generally, I think
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1 if we don't explicitly state in say, the regulation,

2 that if you carve out special exceptions or criteria

3 for a certain material, then it's going to apply to

4 all low-level waste regardless of the type,

5 characteristics, or consideration.

6 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Right. I don't know, I

7 guess I'd just like to see what the regulation covers

8 in the regulation. I know the lawyers will tell you

9 it's how things apply and don't apply, but I think it

10 ought to be explicit.

11 MR. ESH: The two things that we struggled

12 with, or we discussed when we got to this point was,

13 one, the reason why we're at this juncture today is

14 because when Part 61 was developed they didn't

15 envision disposing of waste streams such as the two

16 that we're talking about here today.

17 And because they didn't envision them,

18 then the criteria, in particular the Waste

19 Classification Tables weren't designed to deal with

20 the situations that you may establish when disposing

21 of these waste streams.

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So they should be changed

23 to accomplish that.

24 MR. ESH: Well, that was an option that

25 was presented to the Commission in the SECY paper 08-
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1 147, and the Commission didn't tell us to follow that

2 option. They said to develop requirements for site3 specific analysis instead of changing the Waste

4 Classification Tables, because that's more risk5 informed.

6 You can develop then the actual

7 concentrations that a site may take of these types of

8 materials, instead of one number, that you would have

9 to build some conservatisms into and apply to all of

10 the sites. So that's one of the things we thought of

11 is, are we smart enough today to know all the waste

12 streams that are going to be generated in the future?

13 Well we weren't when we got to this point,

14 so what is there to say that we're that smart now

15 again, and that we're not going to be back in this

16 box again when the fuel cycle changes, and some new

17 stream comes online that wasn't envisioned in the

18 previous two steps.

19 And the other thing is what I just

20 mentioned, is that if we develop say table values, it

21 starts becoming very difficult to be risk-informed

22 when you do that, because there's a lot of variance

23 from site to site in particular, and conditions to

24 conditions, the risk that may be derived from the

25 material that's disposed of there.
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well now you're on the

2 right track with me, because a site-specific risk3 informed assessment is exactly the right way to go,

4 all radionuclides, forget about what's in the table

5 and what's not.

6 MR. ESH: Now the question that Dr. Armijo

7 mentioned of whether there are specific requirements

8 that you need for maybe these waste streams that are

9 special and different than other waste streams, that's

10 a different issue.

11 We didn't necessarily envision, hopefully

12 you'll see by the rule text that we discuss, and the

13 guidance document that there were things that stood

14 out that deserved regulatory requirements, but that's

15 a thing to discuss. Maybe there are something,

16 especially if you have some views that there are

17 special requirements that should be applied to those

18 waste streams.

19 MEMBER ARMIJO: And only to those waste

20 streams.

21 MR. ESH: And only to those waste streams.

22 MEMBER ARMIJO: Yes, that's concern I have

23 that--

24 MR. ESH: Yes, that's something we should

25 talk about.
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1 MEMBER ARMIJO: -- the DU is a particular

2 problem with long life issues like that.

3 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay, well let's --

4 MEMBER ARMIJO: We'll get to that.

5 MR. CARRERA: Slide 5, please. The

6 Stakeholder Involvement, the NRC published Part 61

7 preliminary proposed rule language in this regulatory

8 basis document, including the period of performance

9 paper that they developed on regulation.gov on May

10 3rd.

11 We also held a public meeting on May 18th

12 to present the documents and solicit early public

13 comments on these documents. The public commentary

14 ended on June 18th. The staff also received

15 stakeholders' comments from the previous ACRS meeting

16 of Part 61 as well. Slide number 7, please.

17 The comment that the staff received came

18 from a diverse group of stakeholders such as public

19 interest group, the industry, and other government

20 organizations, and their view were just as diverse as

21 the organization that they represent.

22 All comments were fully considered.

23 However, because we are not technically in a proposed

24 rule comment period, the NRC will not provide response

25 to these comments. In all we received 15 comment
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1 letters at the end of the comment period.

2 The staff reviewed all the comments,

3 including verbal comments provided at the public

4 meetings, and grouped them into nine separate issues.

5 And these issue are listed in the lasted bullet of

6 this slide, and I will briefly touch over each of

7 those issues and some of the flavors that you get from

8 these comments.

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay, thank you.

10 MR. CARRERA: Slide number 8, please. The

11 issue on performance assessment requirement, we

12 received comments in support and against the use of

13 Total Effective Dose Equivalent methodology, or TEDE.

14 Some thought that it's not an appropriate

15 dose methodology to use, and others thought it was a

16 good idea to be consistent with Part 20 of the

17 regulation which used TEDE dose methodology.

18 We also see comments related to

19 uncertainty involved in the performance assessment,

20 conducting a performance assessment. Some say the

21 performance assessment result would not be meaningful,

22 taking into consideration of the large uncertainty

23 that you get from the 20,000 years period of

24 performance.

25 Others suggest that in addition to
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1 evaluating the uncertainties in the assessment, we

2 should also apply a dose limit for the timed period

3 beyond the 20,000 years.

4 Intruder assessment requirement, some

5 comments support intruder assessment language, while

6 others suggest that the intruder dose scenarios is

7 burdensome. While some agrees with the 500 millirems

8 that the staff proposed as a dose limit for intruder

9 dose assessment. Others believe that we should lower

10 it to 100 millirem, and even lower it to 25 millirem

11 to be consistent with other regulations.

12 And some take issues with the requirement

13 to demonstrate that intruder barrier must be affective

14 for the duration of the period of compliance.

15 MEMBER ARMIJO: You know, this intruder

16 assessment issue, the question I think I raised at the

17 last Subcommittee meeting was whether it was even

18 justified. The number of people who might be exposed

19 far into the future is tiny. And their exposure would

20 not be catastrophic.

21 And yet so much of this rulemaking and

22 regulations are based on the need to protect, or

23 belief that someone has to protect some very small

24 population of intruders far in to the future, who are

25 unable to protect themselves.
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1 And so that I looked for, what's the legal

2 justification and it goes back to this concept of

3 intergenerational equity. So I'd like to ask when, is

4 there an NRC policy statement that uses

5 intergenerational equity as a basis for regulation?

6 MR. CARRERA: Dave?

7 MEMBER ARMIJO: Is there such a thing?

8 MR. ESH: Not that I'm aware of.

9 MEMBER ARMIJO: So it hasn't been really

10 been decided by some sort of a discussion among the

11 commissioners to decide, yes, we've really got to

12 regulate according to that concept. So we're doing it

13 sort of because we want to do it, it's our preference.

14 And I just don't see how that's justified

15 at all and particularly for 20,000 years. So at some

16 point we're going to have to get into that, but I'm

17 just looking for some sort of a rational justification

18 of why such an assessment is justified, either by law

19 or by real safety, or just by preference.

20 MR. ESH: No we have, I mean it is an

21 individual protection standard that's applied in Part

22 61, it's not a population-based standard. And the

23 intruder performance objective is not something that

24 we're adding here.

25 It's something in the regulation, we're
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1 just specifying that the intruder dose assessment

2 component of it, which is what was done to derive the

3 classification tables, we'll add it in since the

4 Commission told us not to change the Waste

5 Classification Tables, and that handles the intruder

6 protection for material that's not in the tables.

7 So I don't necessarily disagree with you

8 about the issue of the intruder protection but this is

9 a limited scope rulemaking, and I think we're

10 comfortable and we feel we're on firm ground with the

11 intent of the Commission to put this requirement for

12 the intruder dose assessment under 61.42 because it is

13 a limited scope rulemaking.

14 MEMBER ARMIJO: If it's just a simple

15 assessment, I could understand. Just do it just to

16 see what things are like. But if it brings all sorts

17 of other requirements into play, time scales, and

18 these reassessments, and barriers that'll last out

19 into the future, and assessment of the reliability of

20 those barriers, and it goes into all of that sort of

21 stuff, it starts looking more and more like Yucca

22 Mountain, high-level waste.

23 And I keep reminding myself we're dealing

24 with low-level waste and, you know, we've got to keep

25 that, we can't let the Yucca Mountain approach become
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1 the model for low-level waste.

2 MR. ESH: Yes, and I would agree with

3 that. I would say that for some of these materials

4 though, you have to look carefully at them, especially

5 over the longer time frames. So there's a big

6 divergence in the characteristics of the material and

7 the hazard that they have at today, when the materials

8 are generated.

9 So you put depleted uranium next to

10 commercial spent nuclear fuel, there's no comparison.

11 The radiation fields and how you need to handle them,

12 et cetera, they're way different.

13 But I would say, think of it this way. In

14 the high-level waste repository, if it had gone

15 forward it was going to take about 70,000 metric tons

16 equivalent of uranium. The amount of depleted uranium

17 that has been generated and needs a home for disposal

18 can be ten times that and more.

19 So it is a lot of uranium and whenever you

20 run those calculations out to long time, I saw an

21 interesting figure from a U.K. report that they had

22 looked at all different types of waste that are

23 generated over there, and did a comparison of

24 disposing of each type of waste in the same facility.

25 And at longer time, say after 10,000
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1 years, especially out at 100,000 years, the depleted

2 uranium was actually the highest risk. It was higher

3 than their spent nuclear fuel, and their defense high4 level waste, and all the other materials.

5 So the problem is, is how these things

6 change over time and to get thinking about it the

7 right way and in the appropriate context.

8 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You know, in addition to

9 those comments which I appreciate David, I think we've

10 also got to think about the notion that, you know, as

11 a system of regulation in the U.S. we take other

12 uranium wastes, put them on the top of the ground,

13 cover them up with a little topsoil and grow grass on

14 it. It's called uranium mill tailings. So, there are

15 lots of different strategies.

16 MEMBER POWERS: Can you explain how

17 depleted, how there's any risks at all? I mean, I

18 live pretty close to Grant, New Mexico, and we have,

19 ostensibly a mountain of undepleted uranium there,

20 have always had so. And there are a lot of very weird

21 people in New Mexico, but I don't think any of it

22 comes from genetic --

23 (Laughter)

24 (Simultaneous speaking)

25 CHAIRMAN RYAN: The point is now, I think
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1 they're making the same point, is that the quality of

2 distribution substrate from uranium and its

3 characteristics in terms of how it's disposed, and the

4 characteristics you assume from intruder and their

5 access, can now really change the basis you estimate.

6 MEMBER POWERS: Yes.

7 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So I think it's something

8 that if we're going to follow that path, it has to be

9 done very carefully to really be realistic. But one

10 thing I'm getting to is, very quickly an inadvertent

11 intruder which is what we are protecting, becomes an

12 advertent intruder.

13 He's not inadvertent for very long.

14 Sooner or later he's going to figure out, this isn't

15 Mother Nature and something's happening here. So, you

16 know, I struggle with how you allow a scenario to run

17 for lifetimes or longer, when sooner or later the

18 inadvertent intruder is advertent and knows what's

19 going on, or at least has recognition, this isn't

20 Mother Nature.

21 MR. ESH: Yes, and I would say those are

22 good points. It would be helpful if you could point

23 us to other analogous regulatory programs where those

24 philosophies are used, because then we could point

25 back to those from the waste area, okay, here's what's
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1 done in reactors.

2 They take into account some future

3 intelligence of the people that are, something's

4 happening to them in this scenario and they're

5 reacting this way. I mean some examples or analogues

6 would be helpful.

7 As to the point of mill tailings and

8 depleted uranium, they're tremendously different in

9 concentration space. Mill tailings in the U.S. are

10 about a tenth of a weight percent uranium or so,

11 whereas the depleted uranium is about 80 weight

12 percent uranium, as it's generated now and packaged

13 and this would --

14 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But there's hundreds and

15 hundreds of times more tailings than there are

16 uranium.

17 MR. ESH: Well I don't know. If you put

18 500,000 metric tons of uranium in a facility and

19 compared that to a mill tailings facility, I think if

20 you look at the total quantities disposed, you're

21 going to end up with hundreds of times more uranium in

22 the low-level waste disposal facility than you have in

23 a mill tailings disposal facility.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But again, the risk is

25 really related to a concentration-based metric, not
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1 necessarily the total quantity.

2 MR. ESH: But the risk for something like

3 radon exposure and/or groundwater exposure, if you

4 don't have a solubility limit or you have a high

5 solubility limit, is driven by concentration.

6 CHAIRMAN RYAN: All fair comments, and I

7 think that points to the case, you know, the point

8 that, I don't think there's one size fits all. So I

9 think that the requirement has to be really focused on

10 whether the site-specific conditions that you must

11 analyze to reach a competent evaluation.

12 MEMBER BLEY: I'd like to go back to the

13 argument before this one, and maybe you can explain it

14 to me a little better, but the idea that in thousands

15 of years the depleted uranium will be more of a hazard

16 than the current spent fuel doesn't make much sense to

17 me, because if the spent fuel were much lower than it

18 is, like it will be in many years, we wouldn't be

19 treating it the way we do now.

20 MR. ESH: Yes.

21 MEMBER BLEY: But is the risk of that, it

22 might be greater than this stuff that has decayed

23 completely down, but it's still probably not very

24 high.

25 MR. ESH: Yes, so is your question, is the
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1 risk of the spent nuclear fuel lower? Yes, I agree

2 with that, it is lower. The problem is the spent

3 nuclear fuel risk, for the transcriptionist, decreases

4 asymptotically or exponentially, whereas the depleted

5 uranium curve builds in over time, gets higher,

6 because of the ingrowth of lead-210 and radon in

7 particular, or radium-226, lead-210, radon that comes

8 in, in the decay chain.

9 But the uranium itself, you have enough

10 uranium itself that you have to be smart about how you

11 manage it, because it essentially is a concentrated

12 industrial metal. And I don't care whether it's

13 uranium, lead, mercury, whatever, you have to be smart

14 about how you manage a concentrated substance of some

15 sort.

16 MEMBER BLEY: Nobody would dispute that I

17 think, but this started from Sam's comment that we

18 don't want to treat this stuff the way we treat spent

19 fuel. When you say, well yes, but in thousands of

20 years uranium waste will be higher, and the fact is we

21 can't see that curve you drew, but the uranium curve

22 doesn't go up as far as the spent fuel curve.

23 MR. ESH: I'll make an action to send you

24 a reference to the U.K. report where they put all the

25 same materials in it and analyzed it, that's what I
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1 was referencing.

2 MEMBER BLEY: That would be great.

3 MR. ESH: We've done our own calculations

4 internally to understand the problem, but I don't have

5 a report I can send you for those. But that's a

6 report that's out there in the public, and you can

7 look at it and see what they did and see the curves

8 for yourself.

9 MEMBER ARMIJO: Of these hundred, these

10 large, large quantities of depleted uranium, how much

11 of that is DOE, or military, or defense-related waste,

12 not the civil nuclear program waste? Is it, I

13 understood the bulk of it was defense-related.

14 MR. ESH: Yes, I'm not exactly the right

15 person to answer it but I'll try anyway. There's a

16 large quantity of it now which I believe is considered

17 to be the DOE stockpile, but as you run the enrichment

18 facilities, the commercial enrichment facilities, then

19 they're going to generate material over time.

20 And as you go out a few decades, I think

21 the quantities are fairly comparable. You'll have

22 about the same amount from the DOE stockpile right now

23 as is going to be generated commercially.

24 MEMBER ARMIJO: Is the depleted uranium

25 that's come out of the U.S. enrichment for example, is
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1 that considered civil waste not DOE waste?

2 MR. MCKENNEY: It is owned by the

3 Department of Energy, and as one of their actions is

4 to -- sorry, this is Chris McKenney, Performance

5 Assessment Branch Chief. Then they either try to

6 dispose of it on their own sites, but they also have

7 the option to use commercial disposal and it tends to

8 save the government money.

9 There it is another commercial nor

10 anything else, it's just DOE waste. And so they have

11 looked at the option of using commercial disposal

12 options for a number of their waste types including

13 depleted uranium. And so that is why the potential

14 became part of the discussion. Of course this whole

15 issue raised because of a commercial developer --

16 (Simultaneous speaking)

17 MR. MCKENNEY: -- but the DOE is probably

18 the largest producer of commercial waste disposed per

19 a year now.

20 MEMBER ARMIJO: Yes, okay. So let's say

21 a new enrichment guide, LES or maybe the GE laser or

22 whatever it is. Those guides would generate DU,

23 pretty small quantities compared to USEC. But they

24 have no option except to go to a commercial disposal

25 site.
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1 MR. MCKENNEY: 1996 Privatization Act

2 makes that a little more complicated in the fact that

3 they have the option also of giving it to DOE. And

4 DOE --

5 (Simultaneous speaking)

6 MR. MCKENNEY: -- at cost to LES or

7 whatever has to pay the disposal cost, right.

8 MEMBER ARMIJO: Sure.

9 MR. MCKENNEY: DOE can take title to it

10 and then dispose of it through their means, which

11 would mean, also looking to get back at privatization.

12 MEMBER ARMIJO: This is a long way for me

13 to get around to the fact that DOE has their own

14 system, and regulations, and practices that they've

15 had in place, and I did get three of their comments to

16 the preliminary language which I thought were very

17 good.

18 And so I was trying to understand which

19 was the elephant, and it looks like the elephant is

20 DOE and the depleted uranium that they've got and

21 they're going to get. And so whatever we do for the

22 civil case should be, I would think consistent with

23 their practices, unless we see some terrible flaw in

24 what they're doing.

25 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Just for the sake of a
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1 number, there's 5,247 curies of uranium-238 disposed

2 at Barnwell as we speak. That's it. And it will be

3 there for a long time unless they add to it with some

4 more.

5 Most of it is, or a lot of it is depleted

6 uranium metal that's been used as counterweights,

7 shielding packages, those kinds of things, and has,

8 you know, been declared waste through DOD. So that's

9 a lot of, but that's the numbers, 5,247 rounded off,

10 curies.

11 MR. ESH: Yes, I believe we got numbers

12 like that. I don't remember what they are off the top

13 of my head, but from each of the disposal facilities

14 when we were starting this process, they gave us some

15 numbers for what they actually had disposed of to

16 date.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, that's as of

18 7/12/2011, from Barnwell. I didn't look at the other

19 sites because quite frankly they didn't take nearly as

20 much, that's most of it, was Barnwell.

21 MR. ESH: Now I believe the Clive facility

22 has more curies of uranium.

23 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Than Barnwell?

24 MR. ESH: Yes.

25 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay, I didn't know that.
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1 MR. ESH: Than Barnwell, yes.

2 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So anyway that's, I can't

3 imagine it would be a huge amount more.

4 MR. ESH: I think it was something like

5 17,000 but my memory is.

6 CHAIRMAN RYAN: 17,000? Okay, all right,

7 well that's fine.

8 (Off microphone comments)

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you. I guess we're

10 back to you, Andrew.

11 (Laughter)

12 (Simultaneous speaking)

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you very much for

14 your patience.

15 MR. CARRERA: Let's get to the last bullet

16 of number 8, Long-term Analysis, which is a new

17 requirement, and when we see a few comments along the

18 line of proposing a higher dose limit for the analysis

19 beyond 20,000 years.

20 We also received comments concerning what

21 was the purpose and uses of this long-term analysis,

22 and some comments also suggest that we should

23 eliminate the definition of long-lived waste.

24 Other propose turn it up where the limit

25 of the ten percent of the initial radioactivity, which
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1 is in the proposed definition of long-lived waste in

2 the preliminary proposed rule language, should be

3 stated as a requirement somewhere else.

4 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So in other words their

5 proposal is that no more than ten percent of the total

6 inventory should be long-lived?

7 MR. ESH: No, it's --

8 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I didn't quite understand

9 what he --

10 MR. ESH: Yes, the definition that we

11 derived was based on, if you look at the tables in

12 61.55, one of the isotopes that they identify as long13 lived is carbon-14. And if you decay carbon-14 after

14 20,000 years, you have about nine point something

15 percent of it left at 20,000 years.

16 So we figured a consistent definition with

17 that is, if you have ten percent or more of your

18 activity remaining at 20,000 years, we would call that

19 long-lived waste. It's consistent with the existing

20 table.

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: It's an activity-based

22 consideration, not a risk-based consideration.

23 MR. ESH: Yes well, I mean, the risk comes

24 into play when you do the assessment against the

25 various performance objectives, but the characterizing
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1 the material as to its longevity, I don't know how you

2 do that besides looking at its half-life for instance.

3 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, but that's not

4 necessarily risk-informed although, I agree it's a

5 metric you can use.

6 MR. ESH: It's kind of like whenever you

7 do a performance assessment, you may do in the

8 biosphere area, a screening evaluation to determine

9 what pathways you may need to include and which ones

10 you don't need to include.

11 I think this is kind of analogous to that.

12 You do some sort of processing up front to know how to

13 do the calculations for different types of materials

14 down the stream.

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And that's not dissimilar

16 than how physics rules of thumb, ten times the half17 life, and I don't have a health physics problem and,

18 you know, those kinds of things, but that's based on

19 practical limits for, you know, well established

20 scenarios as opposed to being risk-informed. It's

21 really not risk-informed to just use that kind of

22 rule. It can be very much not risk- informed.

23 MR. ESH: Well, and we looked at what

24 other people do to define long-lived waste and they'll

25 do things like say, if the half-life is greater than
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1 30 years, that's long-lived waste.

2 So we thought this approach was better

3 than that, but there's not a very eloquent way of

4 doing it that we could think of. If the Committee has

5 some ideas, we'd be happy to entertain them.

6 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thanks. But, you know,

7 again I think the emphasis shouldn't be on that

8 definition to drive the bus, and I think this is the

9 case you've certainly emphasized, is it that emphasis

10 should be on the risk-based performance assessment to

11 drive the bus. So that's the fact that I think gets

12 us over this hurdle.

13 MR. ESH: Well, hopefully you'll see that,

14 because the only place that this definition comes into

15 play is when you have long-lived waste and you hit the

16 61.13(e) criteria as we've developed it, to show how

17 your system is performing over time, and to provide

18 the number for what you think's going to happen at

19 very long time.

20 But we didn't assign a dose limit to that

21 number. It's basically a transparency for our

22 stakeholders, and I'd call it a engineering/scientific

23 criteria to demonstrate, or show how the various

24 components in your system are going to limit or reduce

25 the amount of, the release of long-lived waste.
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well we'll hold that

2 thought until we get into more detail.

3 MR. CARRERA: Slide number 9, please.

4 Period of Performance, which is a topic dear and near

5 to Dave's heart. David talked about it at great

6 length for the past couple of briefings.

7 We received comments supporting a range of

8 numbers for a period of performance, and the rule

9 language from 1000, to 10,000, to 20,000 years and

10 even out to peak dose. However, we see few or limited

11 technical basis supporting period of performance other

12 than the 20,000 years.

13 Others thought that the period of

14 performance should be specified though guidance

15 instead of regulation. We've also received comments

16 that the 20,000 years period of performance places

17 unnecessary burden to facilities that accept short18 lived waste, and I believe that's what we've heard

19 from the Committee as well last time, and we

20 appreciate that position.

21 That next bullet, agreement state

22 compatibility. Some comments suggest that we should

23 recommend the strictest compatibility level to ensure

24 a consistency in implementation among the agreement

25 states, while others suggest a more flexible level of
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1 compatibility, and to work with the states so that

2 there would be no unintended consequences.

3 MEMBER ARMIJO: Andrew, could you refresh

4 my memory of what you mean by compatibility?

5 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Look.

6 MR. CARRERA: Jim?

7 MR. DANNA: I'll take it. This is Jim

8 Danna, Rulemaker Branch. I'll take a shot at it. I'm

9 not an expert, but the compatibility category is the

10 way in which Agreement States have to adopt the NRC

11 regulations.

12 The strict compatibility category is like

13 a B, where the Agreement States have to adopt our

14 regulations as written. And a Category C would be

15 where they have to adopt something that has the intent

16 of the regulation, but they have some flexibility and

17 they can be stricter. And then there's other

18 compatibility categories, but --

19 MEMBER ARMIJO: But currently, let's say

20 facilities that aren't dealing with depleted uranium,

21 I get the impression that flexibility is one of the,

22 is pretty standard with the Agreement States.

23 MR. DANNA: It depends. For every

24 regulation, and the regulation is broken down into

25 different quantities of different compatibility
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1 categories, so it would depend on exactly what

2 requirement we're talking about.

3 MR. WIDMAYER: What's the compatibility

4 requirement for the performance objectives currently,

5 for Part 61? And that's the portion that you're

6 adding to, right, so you'd assume it would be stricter

7 compatibility?

8 MR. DANNA: It could be either way with

9 the way it's implemented, in which the different

10 requirement could be a C which provides flexibility in

11 the implementation. The objective could be the same,

12 but the implementation could be different.

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I think it's helpful for

14 the Subcommittee and the full Committee to recognize

15 that at least so far, all the low-level waste sites

16 are Agreement States. So this will be a state

17 regulation issue, at least at this point for the

18 foreseeable future. I don't know of any initiatives

19 to sites in non-agreement states at this point.

20 MR. CARRERA: Lisa, did you have anything

21 to add to the compatibility?

22 MS. LONDON: No, I think Jim covered it

23 well. Compatibility --

24 (Simultaneous speaking)

25 MS. LONDON: This is Lisa London from the
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1 Office of General Counsel. I think Jim covered it

2 well. Compatibility Level A and B are essentially

3 identical, they don't adopt our regulation, they adopt

4 regulations that are essentially identical.

5 MEMBER ARMIJO: To meet the intent, yes.

6 MS. LONDON: C is to meet the intent, but

7 A and B are essentially identical, so that was all I

8 wanted to add. Thank you.

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you.

10 MR. CARRERA: Thank you, Lisa. Moving on

11 to the last bullet of Slide number 9, Near Surface

12 Disposal. We received comments questioning whether

13 it's even appropriate to dispose of depleted uranium

14 at near surface facility, while others proposed a

15 minimum disposal depth requirement for it's disposal.

16 Others suggest that to limit changes in

17 this rulemaking is not protective of public health and

18 safety. Slide number 10, please.

19 We also received comments in the areas of

20 the Commission's direction, saying that this

21 rulemaking is consistent with the comprehensive

22 revision of Part 61, and this is not a limited scope

23 rulemaking as directed by the Commission.

24 Others suggest that depleted uranium

25 should not be classified Class A waste. And we
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1 received comments in the areas of the rule language

2 saying that it, at some sections, specifically

3 61.7(a)(1), 61.7(c)(2) and 61.55(a)(6) is confusing

4 and could be shortened, deleted, or clarified.

5 And speaking to the waste stream neutral

6 approach, there are support and disapproving comments

7 of this approach. The disapproval would suggest that

8 this rulemaking concentrate on DU rather than adopt a

9 one-size-fits-all approach, and that blended waste

10 should not be part of this rulemaking. Slide number

11 12, please.

12 As I mentioned earlier the staff

13 appreciate all the comments that we received from

14 stakeholders. As a whole we see the comments going

15 either way, in support and disapproval of what we

16 proposed, and overall the comments balance out pretty

17 well.

18 We didn't see any showstopper, and we are

19 okay and comfortable with the current direction that

20 this rulemaking is going. However, there are

21 instances where we felt that certain issues is not

22 balanced. In that case, we looked at the technical

23 aspect of the comments and considered revisions for

24 the proposed rule language.

25 And in the next few slides I will talk
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1 about the revision that the staff is considering for

2 the proposed rule language, resulted from the comments

3 received.

4 And on this slide, Slide number 12, we

5 received a couple of comments that we should include,

6 natural system and environment as part of the evaluate

7 uncertainty in a performance assessment. We thought

8 it was a very good comment and revised the language in

9 Section 61.13(a) to clarify that the evaluated

10 uncertainties in a performance assessment covers the

11 disposal system, which encompass the disposal

12 facility, natural system, and the environment.

13 And the staff is considering this revision

14 for the proposed rule language, and on the screen you

15 see red text with strike out and underline. The

16 strike out are the text that's in the preliminary

17 proposed rule language, and the underlined is the new

18 text that the staff is considering as a revision to

19 the already proposed rule language. Slide number 13,

20 please.

21 As I mentioned before, we received

22 comments regarding the requirement that intruder

23 barrier must be shown to be affective over the

24 duration of the compliance period, and we've received

25 comments saying that's unreasonable, it can not be
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1 done.

2 We appreciate the comments and revised the

3 language in Section 61.7(c)(7) to clarify that the

4 technical basis provided for the performance of

5 future, I apologize, of the intruder barrier, will

6 determine how long the performance should be credited.

7 And we crossed out that over duration of the

8 compliance period part.

9 And the Staff is also considering this

10 revision for the proposed rule language.

11 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay, that's a good step,

12 I think. I still struggle with the fact that an

13 inadvertent intruder becomes an advertent intruder at

14 some point. An example, I'm familiar with this bylaw,

15 there are brass plates stamped radioactive material,

16 do not dig into concrete, alarmed, concrete reinforced

17 barrier, over them is Class C disposal cells.

18 (Simultaneous speaking)

19 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Somewhere along the line,

20 our brass may rot somewhere down the line, but for a

21 while it's going to hold up for, you know, quite a

22 long while. Why can't some of those kind of things be

23 incorporated into the rule?

24 I think at some point we have to address

25 the idea that an inadvertent intruder, which we have
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1 an obligation to protect, I don't deny that for a

2 second, becomes an archaeologist and at some point,

3 you know, buyer beware, I mean they're --

4 MEMBER ARMIJO: Well, you know, I just

5 don't understand this obligation to protect someone

6 far into the future from low-level waste exposure, and

7 putting incredible burdens on people living today

8 where no safety benefit, you know, this whole concept

9 is, to me it is unjustified.

10 But the way you've changed the language of

11 these barriers, there has to be some barriers. And

12 they don't have to be evaluated over the period of

13 performance of the facility or 20,000 years. So that

14 means these are the barriers that probably exist today

15 in a low-level waste facility.

16 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Correct.

17 MEMBER ARMIJO: Which is great, you know.

18 I agree that they're buried, I mean, I think our job

19 is to protect people --

20 (Simultaneous speaking)

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And I'm adding to this

22 point by saying at some point we need to bring a

23 closure to the inadvertent intruder, because they are

24 going to become archaeologists at some point.

25 MR. GROSSMAN: Dr. Ryan, this --
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Once they intrude,

2 whenever they intrude. Yes, I'm sorry, Chris.

3 CHAIRMAN RYAN: This is Chris Grossman of

4 the NRC staff. The original Part 61 did envision such

5 a scenario. There were a series of what I'll call

6 generic scenarios that were used on a reference site

7 to develop the Waste Classification Tables in 61.55.

8 And one of those scenarios included a

9 variant which was an intruder discovery scenario in

10 which the original scenario was a construction type

11 scenario where someone may come onto the site to

12 develop a residence, begin excavation --

13 MEMBER ARMIJO: Love Canal. Okay, you

14 know, but I think we've learned a lot since Love Canal

15 and does that really apply today --

16 MR. GROSSMAN: Let me finish my thought,

17 please. The advantage of this is, the discovery is

18 that as they dig into the soil, some of this material

19 becomes recognizable. Operations stop. The

20 assessment examines the exposures to that point and

21 then is done. And that helped form the basis for some

22 of the values that are in the table at 61.55. We

23 envision continuing that philosophy in the intruder

24 assessment, that becomes site-specific.

25 We will talk a little bit more about some
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1 of the guidance that we would provide and how to deal

2 with that for a site-specific assessment, in terms of

3 demonstrating that the material would be recognizable,

4 et cetera, and we can discuss that further when we get

5 to that section.

6 But we feel we do incorporate that kind of

7 a philosophy into, well one, that it's already

8 incorporated into the rule, and that we plan to

9 continue that as we add to site-specific intruder

10 assessments.

11 MEMBER ARMIJO: So you would have very

12 strict constraints on what the intruder is capable of

13 doing? He's capable of reading the sign, or

14 recognizing he's dug into a waste thing and at that

15 point, he just can't keep going. He can't build an

16 orphanage there, or, you know.

17 MR. ESH: Yes, that's --

18 MEMBER ARMIJO: Somehow you've got to

19 truncate this thing or it becomes so open-ended.

20 MR. ESH: I think that --

21 MEMBER ARMIJO: There's no solution.

22 MR. ESH: The problem is that in that,

23 okay, in current disposal practices, they put material

24 in carbon steel drums for instance, maybe in some

25 cases cementitious packaging of some sort, and those
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1 sorts of materials have durability over, certainly the

2 tens of year time frame. And for cementitious

3 materials we do a lot of research on that in waste

4 disposal programs, and try to determine what sort of

5 durability they'll have over much longer time frames.

6 And we generally think that people can

7 take into account that sort of information if they

8 have it. In many cases we find that they feel it's

9 just easier if they don't credit that sort of

10 information, and just do the analyses, and set some

11 limits on what they take operationally, whatever to

12 get through the licensing process. They want to

13 minimize their pain in getting through the licensing

14 process --

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Another aspect is you have

16 to assume the failure of institutional controls, and

17 by that I mean, you know, there's huge amounts of

18 money in long-term care products --

19 MR. ESH: Yes.

20 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Wait a second. And those

21 funds are capable of going basically forever. Because

22 they're earning interest, and the amount that they

23 take out for maintenance every year is trivial

24 compared to the total amount in.

25 So, you know, we assume institutional
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1 barriers end at some point. Now I'm not sure that end

2 means, you know, 100 years, probably not, 300 years,

3 probably not. You know, so there's long periods of

4 time where the money's still there to make sure that

5 folks recognize it for what it is.

6 MR. ESH: Yes, and the institutional

7 control period was not pulled out of thin air. I

8 mean, when the regulation was developed in the early

9 '80s, they had a series of public meetings with, like

10 interactions like this where they got all sorts of

11 opinions, and that kind of reflects the consensus

12 opinion at that time. Now is there a different

13 opinion today? We didn't have a lot people comment --

14 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But at that time the

15 amount of money collected wasn't set at all.

16 MR. ESH: And that's probably a good

17 point. But I think that --

18 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Especially if there's lots

19 of money for the one site, I'm very familiar with,

20 there's lots of money in place at the Barnwell

21 facility, for example. Yes, sir?

22 MR. MCKENNEY: This is getting into the

23 territory --

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Could you?

25 MR. MCKENNEY: -- specificating
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1 performance assessment branch issue. Our limit to

2 rulemaking was not to change the entire framework of

3 Part 61. And the institutional control period, and

4 the use of institutional controls, and the inadvertent

5 intruder are all the major portions of the framework.

6 That is what the second rulemaking is supposed to

7 consider, is to changes to the overall comprehensive

8 change to Part 20.

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But it's very hard for us

10 Chris, to separate the dancer from the dance here. We

11 have to kind of understand the whole picture, the way

12 things are going, you know, in order to formulate an

13 opinion.

14 MR. MCKENNEY: You know, the staff has not

15 fully went to all of those hind positions and areas

16 for the briefing.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Fair enough.

18 MR. ESH: And the one point I would add

19 about, Dr. Ryan, your point about the inadvertent

20 intruder becoming an advertent intruder. For

21 something like depleted uranium, you do not have to

22 become an advertent intruder, ever.

23 Because if you bury it and it's below, say

24 the depth of where somebody puts in a foundation for

25 a home, you can run into technical problems with radon
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1 emanation without ever digging into the material. So

2 you could effectively put a house above it. You don't

3 know you put your house on a waste disposal facility,

4 and you get a lot of radon in your house. All of us

5 have radon in our houses today.

6 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I was going to say, that

7 happens anywhere in the eastern U.S.A.

8 MR. ESH: And it's derived from much lower

9 concentrations of uranium in the environment

10 surrounding our homes than what we're talking about

11 putting in the disposal facility here. So just an

12 additional point to think about.

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But that is so token, the

14 amount of land involved is very much smaller than the

15 amount of, or from the amount of concentrations are

16 right now. So there's populations in our society.

17 MR. ESH: Yes, I agree with that.

18 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay.

19 MR. CARRERA: All right, let's move on to

20 Slide number 14, please. Period of Performance

21 Language. The staff considers revision to the

22 language in 61.41(b) and 61.42(b), to provide

23 flexibility to facilities that only except short-lived

24 waste or low concentration of long-lived waste.

25 These requirements call for an estimation
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1 of peak annual dose that occurs within 20,000 years

2 following closure of the disposal facility. Staff

3 considered this revision based on comments received,

4 indicating that 20,000 years period of performance

5 placed unnecessary burden to a facility that accepts

6 only short-lived waste.

7 And as far as what the staff heard from

8 the Committee, this change reflects the requirement

9 for disposal facility to perform a dose monitoring out

10 to 20,000 years to find the peak annual dose. And

11 once you found the peak annual dose and it's less than

12 20,000 years, the facility has an option of justifying

13 why they don't need to do a full-blown assessment out

14 to 20,000 years for that particular case.

15 This helps alleviate the resources needed

16 to do a full-blown assessment out to 20,000 years if

17 your site that only accepts short-lived waste. And

18 there are the technical staff to my right will talk

19 more about this in their draft guidance document

20 presentation.

21 MEMBER ARMIJO: What is, you know, I'm

22 sure you understand the difference between what you

23 mean by evaluates and estimates, but to me it looks

24 like pretty much the same thing. And so is that

25 really a substantive change that you've made. So
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1 could you explain what this change really means, from

2 evaluates to estimates?

3 MR. ESH: That change is not significant,

4 it is just a word change. The second part of it I

5 think, we believe gives more flexibility for the

6 situation where if you have a facility that's only

7 taking short-lived waste, or they take low

8 concentrations of long-lived waste, they'll run their

9 calculation, estimate their peak, and then make an

10 argument as to why they've captured the peak. That

11 argument could be running their calculation out to

12 20,000 years and showing --

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: This is a subtle way of

14 saying, very little bit of uranium or a lot of

15 uranium.

16 MR. ESH: Yes, and it's a way that allows

17 somebody to make a risk-informed argument for their

18 specific facility performance, that they've captured

19 it in the evaluation. From a practical standpoint, we

20 don't see that there's a large additional burden to

21 needing to run your calculation out if you set up your

22 calculation.

23 There is a big additional burden if you

24 have to argue about what exactly is going on out at

25 those longer times, and you have disruptive processes,
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1 and climate change, and all those sorts of things,

2 that becomes a much harder problem. And we believe it

3 should be a harder problem for concentrated long-lived

4 waste. So that's kind of the approach we made. It

5 may look subtle, but we think it's more significant

6 than subtle.

7 (Simultaneous speaking)

8 CHAIRMAN RYAN: -- change from, I mean

9 it's a big difference if you're in.

10 MEMBER ARMIJO: Yes, at some point, I'd

11 appreciate it if you would address the difference in

12 the NRC's proposed rule language and the Department of

13 Energy's use of 1000 years and why you think they're

14 wrong. You must, because they've got the bulk of DU

15 and they're treating it one way, and you would propose

16 to treat it a different way, so that's got to be

17 resolved.

18 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay.

19 MR. CARRERA: Okay, thank you. Next

20 slide, number 15, please. We have received comments

21 in regards to the waste stability language in 61.7(c)

22 which we thought was very good comments. That

23 indicates that you can also get unstable waste from

24 mixing low activity waste with long-lived low activity

25 waste. So we went back and proposed revision to the
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1 language to clarify that point, and the staff is

2 considering this revision for the proposed rule

3 language. Slide number 16, please.

4 In the ambiguous language area we received

5 comments indicating that the language in 61.7(a) and

6 61.55(a)(6) is ambiguous wording and unnecessary. We

7 agreed, and the staff is considering deletion and

8 revision to the language in these two sections to

9 reduce ambiguity and improve readability. That's all

10 I have for today, thank you.

11 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you, Andrew. Your

12 brief introductory presentation went a little long,

13 but it was very helpful. I think we've covered a lot

14 of ground we may not have to cover later.

15 Derek, one comment I'd offer you is, again

16 I took a look at the existing site, and under it a top

17 20 radionuclides that are in the disposal facility, I

18 used, or I decay-corrected the inventory to July 12th,

19 which is the day I did it.

20 And there's just a few radionuclides that

21 are still around in any appreciable curie quantity.

22 Cesium is one, nickel-63 is another, very little

23 strontium, a little bit's left, uranium-238, 5000

24 curies, carbon-14, and Tech-99.

25 So I offer you that thought, not that I've
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1 got any particular, you know, interest in the number

2 here, but very quickly we're homing in on a half a

3 dozen radionuclides to the report.

4 And I just offer you the thought, that if

5 the guidance and not necessarily the rulemaking

6 language themselves, but perhaps yes, could really

7 focus on those radionuclides that are around after, I

8 don't know what the right number is David, whether

9 it's 300, 500, or 1000, some of those have changed a

10 little bit.

11 Cesium's gone, you know. Strontium is

12 gone in just 500 years. Maybe that's a way to focus

13 this a bit, just something to think about. So I offer

14 you that observation. But that's a real inventory for

15 a real site that's operated since '71. And has

16 covered a lot of evolution, so that's I think useful

17 data to evaluate.

18 MR. ESH: You know, we looked at that

19 data, we had those figures for the Committee in the

20 previous talk about the ratio of the inventories and

21 the activities. I think that all the facilities also

22 had what I would call a fairly significant amount of

23 thorium-232, I believe it was. We got the information

24 from the DOE MIMS database and also we looked at the

25 2005 Barnwell closure report, I believe it was the
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1 inventory numbers.

2 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That's inventory as of,

3 received as of, whatever the date was, I've got it on

4 the --

5 MR. ESH: One thing that a commenter made

6 at a public meeting and really got me thinking was, I

7 wonder if there's some unintended consequences of the

8 Waste Classification Tables, because then that drives

9 people to characterize and report those isotopes.

10 But there are other isotopes that aren't

11 in the tables that I would expect show up in waste

12 streams, that maybe go under-characterized or under13 reported, that I think if we take the, you know, a

14 unit concentration of a whole set of isotopes, and run

15 forward, and look at their dose conversion factors,

16 and their mobility, and the environment, and all those

17 sorts of things.

18 There are isotopes that aren't in the

19 tables that could cause a problem for a disposal

20 facility, so I would just throw that out as like, you

21 know, moving forward when we go to possibly a

22 comprehensive rulemaking, I think it would address

23 that issue, where the current regulation doesn't

24 really address it.

25 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That's one possibility,
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1 and the other that I know is true also, is that

2 there's a tendency to go in the other direction. The

3 last thing you want to have happen on a waste manifest

4 is to underestimate what's in the package.

5 So people will tend to use MDAs for hard

6 to detect radionuclides and report them as being

7 present, because they're required to report it

8 according to the MDA. So you now have an inventory

9 accumulating that's not real.

10 MR. ESH: Yes, and I --

11 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You know Jim Harris did a

12 very excellent study on power plant resin waste, you

13 know, that we had certain radionuclides were reported

14 that in fact were there in orders of magnitude less

15 inventory.

16 MR. ESH: Yes, and I don't know what the

17 cost may be associated with something like that, but

18 certainly the techniques that are available today are

19 tremendously more powerful and more available

20 technically so.

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: GE's study was in the '90s

22 so it's not too far away from, you know, real decent

23 detection technology. But, you know, from a

24 generator's point of view the last thing they want to

25 do is say, oh, what you've shipped is more than what
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1 you wrote on the manifest. That's a violation.

2 If I'm conservative and overestimate what

3 I shipped a little bit, I'm okay. So that's a very

4 important area, that the precision with which what is

5 accumulated in an inventory is an important point on

6 both sides.

7 MR. ESH: Yes, you'll see strange things

8 when you look at all the disposal sites. Like one

9 site may have a zero for a certain isotope and all the

10 other sites have it. And so you are scratching your

11 head like, was this a specific waste stream that

12 resulted in this isotope, or they just didn't report

13 it because it wasn't part of --

14 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I think it would be a

15 service to add some, and maybe it's in guidance, maybe

16 it's not in the rule itself, but to say, these are the

17 radionuclides that are in play from a performance

18 assessment standpoint, so the precision and/or

19 accuracy with which they are reporting might be

20 helpful to focus on, you know, early on.

21 MR. ESH: You know, I don't think we go to

22 that detail, but we do have a section on inventory in

23 Chapter 3 that we talk about the bulk of the inventory

24 that's --

25 CHAIRMAN RYAN: One thought is, why do we
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1 have these tables? We have these tables for

2 convenience because of Marcus, but now that we can

3 measure a wide array of radionuclides fairly easily,

4 why don't we just say what's the inventory? Write

5 that down.

6 MR. ESH: Yes, I think it was, at the time

7 it was, I mean the mind set was there were two

8 options. You could take this table approach and then

9 apply it to all sites, or you could allow each site to

10 generate estimates of what it can take, and people can

11 demonstrate what they've, the generators can

12 demonstrate what they've generated and then send it to

13 the appropriate site.

14 Well at the time that 61 was initially

15 developed, they thought there was going to be a lot of

16 disposal sites, and they didn't want to have a lot of

17 variance in how Agreement States or how people were

18 determining what concentrations they could take, and

19 so they took the table approach, one size fits all.

20 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I think the other part of

21 it is computing of power, and data collection, and

22 analysis power in computing was terrible compared to

23 what it is today. So these are very complicated

24 things to accumulate and measure and record in the

25 late 1960s.
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1 I mean, we didn't even have a PC in 1960.

2 So, you know, I think, again I just offer you the

3 thought that updating on the technological power of

4 data analysis, collection analysis, and computing

5 needs to be somehow recognized as offering some

6 economies here in this process.

7 And maybe the regulations can be

8 simplified to recognize that that's, you know,

9 collecting data is not nearly as hard as it used to

10 be. All right, sorry, go ahead.

11 MS. YADAV: Okay. All right, my name is

12 Priya Yadav, I'm a Project Manager for the Division of

13 Waste Management, Environmental Protection. I'm

14 managing this effort of just creating this guidance

15 document but Dave and Chris are doing all of the hard

16 work.

17 So I'm just going to talk for a couple of

18 minutes and just kind of give some context about what

19 the document is, what it's not, and then Dave and

20 Chris are going to go into more technical

21 presentations for each section of the guidance

22 document.

23 You heard from Andrew about, kind of the

24 first part of our SRM, which is to conduct the

25 rulemaking to require site-specific analysis prior to
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1 disposal of large quantities of depleted uranium.

2 So now you're going to hear about the

3 second part of our SRM, which is to develop a guidance

4 document that goes along with this rulemaking, develop

5 this for public comment that outlines the parameters

6 and assumptions to be used in conducting these

7 analyses.

8 So we see the purpose of our document then

9 is to provide implementing guidance to go along with

10 these rule changes, and specifically to assist

11 licensees and applicants in conducting their analyses

12 to demonstrate compliance with the performance

13 objectives in Part 61.

14 We've defined the term site-specific

15 analysis in our document to have these four

16 components, and Dave and Chris will go into specific

17 details about each of these components in their

18 presentations.

19 But we've organized it by performance

20 objectives, so performance assessments conducted to

21 perform compliance, to demonstrate compliance with

22 61.41, intruder assessment for 61.42, the site

23 stability assessment is for 61.44, and then the long

24 term analyses are only for long-lived waste, and that

25 extends beyond the compliance period.
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1 This Guidance Document is not an effort to

2 consolidate all of the guidance that currently exists

3 about conducting these analyses, simply because that

4 is a multiple-year effort and would take more people

5 than we have tasked to do this.

6 And so given the time that we have to

7 complete this guidance document, our approach has been

8 to include enough information that licensees and

9 applicants can conduct these analyses, but then refer

10 to other documents for sort of more background

11 reference information.

12 MEMBER ARMIJO: Somebody trying to comply

13 with the rule would have to go to these four

14 documents?

15 MS. YADAV: Well first they would go to

16 our document, and that would give them enough

17 information that they could conduct these analyses.

18 If they need any additional background information,

19 for example we have a chapter on performance

20 assessment, whereas this top document here took, you

21 know, like five to ten years to develop and it's a --

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I think it's fair to say

23 yes, Sam, they would have to go to all the documents.

24 They couldn't get it from the one document.

25 MEMBER ARMIJO: Yes, and, you know, I
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1 understand. I don't know what's in them, but if

2 they're conflicting guidance, if there's a gaps in the

3 guidance that might have been appropriate before the

4 rule was changed.

5 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well, I think it's fair to

6 say that we can not agree. That anybody that's

7 attempting to, you know, meet the requirements under

8 what's proposed and filed up here, will have to, you

9 know, develop a licensing plan, integrate in some way

10 all of these documents plus the new Guidance Document,

11 and make some kind of a proposal to the regulator,

12 whether it's in an Agreement State or the NRC, to say

13 here's what we plan to do.

14 So it's not something where I could just

15 pick a couple of handbooks off the shelf, and put

16 something together and have high expectation, I'll do

17 it in one pass. It's going to be a, you know, a time

18 consuming, expensive, and complicated interaction to

19 get any new application for any new site through the

20 system. Is that a fair, you would agree with that?

21 MR. ESH: Yes, I think that's fair. One

22 thing I would add is that, yes, we do intend for this

23 document to fill in any holes. So if we didn't fill

24 in any holes we would want to know that, so we can

25 fill them in.
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1 And the other thing is that two of these

2 documents on this list aren't directly applicable to

3 low-level waste. NUREG-1854 is for incidental waste,

4 new waste determinations, and NUREG-1757 is for

5 decommissioning.

6 But they are more modern efforts and cover

7 a lot of the same topics of some things that you might

8 deal with in low-level waste disposal. For instance

9 there is a Pendexter section in NUREG-1757 that has to

10 do with engineered barriers, and how you develop bases

11 for engineered barriers and demonstrate them, et

12 cetera.

13 So there is analogous information in some

14 documents, and as Priya said, ideally we would like to

15 consolidate the Guidance, but that effort at the

16 bottom to produce the Consolidated Decommissioning

17 Guidance was a very big effort, involved a lot of

18 people and a lot of time to produce that.

19 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well, I just offer you the

20 thought, it would be an asset in your document if you

21 had three or four pages of summarizing what you think

22 the key features are in these documents, that people

23 could emphasize over, say other parts of the document.

24 So if you kind of road-mapped that so, you know,

25 references for other --
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1 PARTICIPANT: Yes, we saw that.

2 CHAIRMAN RYAN: -- all the references for

3 yours, and here's the sections and parts that we think

4 are particularly useful and valuable in these four

5 documents, and any others you want to add to the list.

6 But it would give applicants and, you know, licensees

7 I think a leg up on getting the process.

8 MS. YADAV: That's exactly what we have

9 tried to do. We have a section called The Use of

10 Other NRC Guidance Documents that we call a crosswalk,

11 that we refer the reader to specific sections of these

12 Guidance Documents where we think that augment, you

13 know, in some of our sections if we couldn't

14 duplicate, you know, ten pages, 100 pages in these

15 other documents, we refer them to specific sections to

16 augment for, you know, specific topics. So we hope

17 that's a useful tool that, you know, and you can give

18 us feedback on it, and if it's a useful reference for

19 licensees and applicants.

20 MR. WIDMAYER: The Standard Review Plan

21 doesn't seem to be referred to here. Was that?

22 MS. YADAV: This is not a list of all the

23 documents. We have a whole chapter on the documents

24 that refer to, but this just four of the kind of the

25 main ones that we refer to also.
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1 MR. WIDMAYER: But the process that Mike

2 was just referring to, you would go to the Standard

3 Review Plan to generate your license application, so

4 it would seem like that would be the number one

5 reference you'd have.

6 MS. YADAV: These are specific to actually

7 conducting the analyses so these have a little bit

8 more meat on how to do a performance assessment, how

9 to do an intruder assessment. And these are kind of

10 more of the, a couple of the more recent documents,

11 but we definitely refer to NUREG-1200, which is I

12 think the one --

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes.

14 MS. YADAV: -- you're referring to.

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But again, I think tying

16 these back, I agree with Derek, tying those back in,

17 at least having them, you know, on the list in your

18 reference system, we talked about would help.

19 MR. ESH: Yes, and what I said about the

20 holes I would say, I think NUREG-1200 is very complete

21 in a lot of ways. When you add in these new materials

22 and the requirements, then you start dealing with some

23 issues that, and considering how things have evolved,

24 there are some things, there are some technical issues

25 that we had to cover in this Guidance that aren't
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1 really in NUREG-1200, such as uncertainty, and risk

2 dilution, probabilistic analysis.

3 I'm going to talk about that as we go

4 through this presentation, but those are all areas

5 that you will not find in detail or at all in NUREG6 1200, which are kind of things that apply today.

7 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you.

8 MEMBER ARMIJO: Okay, would the SRP have

9 to be changed at all in order to comply with this,

10 with the amended rule Standard Review Plan?

11 MR. ESH: I don't believe so. We looked

12 at the Standard Review Plan. Certainly there, you

13 could add, I think, new sections to the Standard

14 Review Plan. But that's part of what the purpose of

15 this document is intended to do.

16 Whenever we set out about it we said,

17 well, do we want to be prescriptive and make like a

18 Standard Review Plan, or do we want to be risk19 informed and afford some more flexibility as to how

20 you would go about the process?

21 And because of the site-specific nature of

22 a lot of the things we're dealing with, we thought it

23 was better to do the risk-informed approach which is

24 what we've used in our more modern, more recent

25 guidance like NUREG-1854, and even I would say the
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1 high-level waste Standard Review Plan is somewhat

2 risk-informed at least.

3 It covers topical areas, but then it gives

4 you flexibility about how you go about providing the

5 information within those topical areas. It doesn't

6 give you a punch list of, you know, lock down A, B, C

7 and then do 1, 2, 3, so.

8 MEMBER ARMIJO: All right, thank you.

9 MS. YADAV: As Dave mentioned, a key theme

10 that we've kept in mind as we were developing this

11 document is, how to implement the SRM in a risk12 informed manner. So as we're discussing the primaries

13 and assumptions to be used in these analyses, we've

14 been trying to kind of talk about them in a broad

15 sense and not be very prescriptive in saying

16 specifically what parameters need to be used.

17 So we've tried to do that in a way that

18 allows licensees and applicants to kind of adapt the

19 guidance to their site-specific conditions and allow

20 them some flexibility. So we have a lot of examples

21 in the document, a lot of flow charts, and Dave and

22 Chris are today in their presentations, going to give

23 you a few examples of how we've used this approach

24 throughout the document.

25 This is just an outline of our document.
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1 We're going to walk through all these sections today,

2 most of these sections today, and we'll walk through

3 by author. So Dave is going to cover kind of the

4 general technical analysis section, which covers

5 things like model support, model abstraction.

6 Chris is going to cover performance

7 assessment modeling, and then have a good detailed

8 section on the intruder assessment, and then we're

9 going to back to Dave for the site stability, long10 term analysis, talk about some other considerations

11 like setting inventory limits.

12 And then we have a section on performance

13 confirmation which includes things like when to update

14 the performance assessment, kind of a maintenance

15 plan. And that's it. But the last section is our

16 crosswalk section I just talked about. So I'm going

17 to turn it over to Dave and Chris now to go into kind

18 of more detail on each of the sections.

19 (Off microphone comments)

20 MR. ESH: All right. Thank you, Priya.

21 I'm going to start off with the general technical

22 analysis considerations, so what's covered in this

23 section of the Guidance Document is the scope of the

24 assessment, what we'll commonly in this field see the

25 terminology is features, events, and processes,
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1 scenarios.

2 It covers what we call general elements of

3 the assessment, and I'll show you what those are. The

4 period of performance, there's guidance provided for

5 it. I'm not going to talk in detail today about the

6 dosimetry section or the peer review and expert

7 elicitation section, but I'm prepared to discuss those

8 if you would like.

9 And then we also have, in this General

10 Technical Analysis section, we talk about uncertainty.

11 So first in the scope of the assessment, under the

12 scope of the assessment, we provide approaches or how

13 you may go about doing features, event and process

14 identification, screening, and implementation.

15 And what you'll see if you look at the

16 literature is, people will use formal or informal

17 approaches, and they'll take a top-down or bottom-up

18 approach. Commonly it's iterative, and all of this we

19 reflected in the Guidance.

20 The features, events or processes the

21 Guidance describes, may be eliminated based on a

22 probability argument, a bounding consequence, or a

23 physical reasonableness argument. And these features,

24 events, and processes form the basis of the scenarios

25 that you use in your assessment.
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1 So this issue, or this area is really

2 about, how do you determine the completeness of your

3 model, or the completeness of your analysis. If we

4 look at the example on slide 10, I don't intend for

5 you to read this, but certainly you can and we can

6 discuss it if you want to.

7 But basically this example is directly out

8 of the Guidance Document, and we've put material like

9 this in there to facilitate use of the document. It

10 basically, is the question, is my site simple or

11 complex?

12 And the reason why that is in the document

13 is because under the scope of the assessment, we

14 describe that if you have a simple site, then a more

15 informal process, or especially a top-down process may

16 be appropriate for defining the scope of your analysis

17 and the scope of your model.

18 Whereas if you're dealing with a complex

19 site, you're probably looking at a more formal

20 process, or a bottom-up type of approach to define the

21 scope of your assessment. That's what's done where

22 you take a database or what may be termed a FEP list,

23 and you go through some sort of screening process of

24 that database.

25 There's various databases that have been
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1 developed out there in the technical community that

2 people use for this purpose in the waste disposal

3 field. So that example we hope provides some ability

4 to be smart about determining the scope of your

5 assessment and tailoring it to the type of problem

6 that you're dealing with.

7 In the general elements area on slide 11,

8 this is where we describe the general technical

9 elements of the analysis. And we've broken them up

10 into system description, data adequacy, data

11 uncertainty, model support, model uncertainty,

12 integration and model abstraction.

13 These are kind of the building blocks that

14 form the performance assessment and the technical

15 analyses. So if we're doing a risk-informed approach

16 to developing a performance assessment and reviewing

17 a performance assessment, if you get these basic

18 building blocks right and you have adequate quality

19 assurance, then you should be able to have confidence

20 in a good product or a good outcome.

21 So this allows us by making up these

22 general elements to ensure that a proper model and a

23 proper review of that model, or a proper assessment is

24 done. These general elements comprise the framework

25 of the evaluation. And we provide guidance in each of
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1 these areas in the document.

2 Now if we switch to the period of

3 performance, what we have in the document is what we

4 think is risk-informed guidance. It discusses the

5 flexibility that you can be afforded for short-lived

6 waste or for low concentrations of long-lived waste,

7 and I'll show you an explicit example on the next

8 slide.

9 The staff views that the primary

10 differences are in the level of detail or

11 justification for the calculation, so if you can

12 demonstrate that I don't have a lot a long-lived waste

13 or I don't have any long-lived waste, I'm primarily

14 dealing with short-lived waste, then your

15 calculations, and the level of support that you have

16 to provide for your calculations are a lot different

17 than if you do have a lot of long-lived waste.

18 And we think that's an appropriate way to

19 go, and it doesn't induce an extra regulatory burden.

20 In fact, it allows people to be smart about their

21 analyses. The guidance also provides our expectations

22 for the long term analysis, what that looks like.

23 We had a number of stakeholders comment on

24 that, especially in our Agreement States, and we're

25 sensitive to the effect that this regulation will be
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1 applied, or an equivalent state regulation will be

2 applied in the Agreement States. So if they have

3 questions about how they would do it, then we haven't

4 delivered the mail on it, so to speak.

5 The period of performance example here is

6 directly out of the Guidance and it talks to the

7 problem of, if you only have short-lived waste or low

8 concentrations of long-lived waste, and in the example

9 we say 1/10th of the values listed in Table 1 of

10 61.55, which would be comparable to Class A waste.

11 Well you're going to do the assessments to

12 show that you can satisfy the performance objectives,

13 but you're not going to get into this business of the

14 complexity that comes in at later times. And so we

15 think our intent in the Guidance is very clear of what

16 we would expect from the analyses.

17 And I would remind everybody that it is

18 guidance, too. And people can and do ignore the

19 guidance as they choose. Not that we intend for them

20 to do that, we hope that they follow the guidance, and

21 it's very clear in what we intend and how we would

22 solve the problem if we were doing it in not an

23 Agreement State.

24 But the difference between regulation and

25 guidance, and why some stakeholders will comment so
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1 much on it about this should be in one place, or this

2 should be in another place, is because you do have

3 flexibility in guidance where you don't have the

4 flexibility in the regulations, basically.

5 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So, just to spend a second

6 on the key point, is that if you have 1/10th of the

7 table values for the long-run radionuclides, your

8 burden is really much lower, is what you're saying?

9 MR. ESH: Is what we intend to say, yes.

10 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I'm sorry.

11 MR. ESH: I mean, the text talks about

12 that. I mean, it's basically, that we want people to

13 be smart about it. So, you know, does it make much

14 sense if you say, I have a few parts per million of

15 uranium or whatever that I'm taking in my facility,

16 and the soil beside the facility has those same

17 concentrations, that you would want to spend a lot of

18 detail on a calculation to say what the risk from that

19 may be?

20 The person is not going to be spending, or

21 the community is not going to be doing any

22 calculations to demonstrate the risk from the natural

23 soil, so why would you distinguish that from the

24 disposal facility?

25 Unless if it was, of course, of a
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1 different form, different mobility, all those sorts of

2 things, that comes into play. But we expect, I mean

3 the philosophy in the guidance, and hopefully when you

4 eventually see it, is we expect people to be smart

5 about it and tailor their analyses to their problem.

6 Which means more complexity for the hard problems,

7 more basis, less complexity, less basis for the

8 simpler problems.

9 We have a section on uncertainty in this

10 chapter of the Guidance. It covers a variety of

11 topics, any one of these we could have a great

12 discussion on, I'm sure. We do say that probabilistic

13 approaches are preferred but deterministic approaches

14 are acceptable.

15 You can certainly for a number a problems,

16 do a deterministic calculation and that's perfectly

17 fine, and demonstrate that you meet the criteria.

18 Particularly when you have a simple problem or, you

19 know, limited concentrations of material, probably the

20 effort and the communication barrier that you run into

21 with a probabilistic analysis may not be worth it.

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Just to test that thought

23 a little bit, I mean one cut to me is, you have a lot

24 of radionuclides that will decay if you accept ten

25 times the half-life as completely. They'll decay
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1 within, certainly, you know, the operational period

2 plus the initial funded, you know, long-term care

3 period.

4 I'd take those completely out of play and

5 say they'll be detected by routine on-site and closure

6 period monitoring, and we'll deal with it if they show

7 up in a way that's unacceptable. Done. I mean is

8 that the kind of thing you would consider?

9 MR. ESH: Waste characteristics are one

10 thing that I would consider, yes. The one difficulty

11 with that is that the risk from the short-lived

12 material in these types of problems is derived by, I'd

13 say the discreteness of the features in the system.

14 So if you have a natural system with a lot

15 of heterogeneity and things like fractures, or dikes,

16 or some complex geology, that can even for short-lived

17 radionuclides cause you some challenges in your

18 performance assessment.

19 But in general I agree with you. If

20 you're dealing with short-lived waste, make the

21 analysis easy, focus the complicated analysis on the

22 concentrated long-lived waste.

23 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, and if you've got a

24 highly-fractured system you're probably not going to

25 site there.
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1 MR. ESH: You're probably not going to

2 site it there, but sometimes they learn things later

3 that they didn't learn initially, after all. Now for

4 the probabilistic analysis, we advocate the use of the

5 peak of the mean output to compare to the regulatory

6 limits.

7 We talk in this section about the

8 limitations of one-off analyses, especially for

9 deterministic analyses. In these types of systems you

10 usually have some pretty sparse information, and you

11 have a lot of uncertainties in the interpretation.

12 The robustness of the one-off analyses and the

13 interpretation of those can create some challenges.

14 So we talk about that in the Guidance. We

15 talk about risk dilution, which comes into play with

16 uncertainty and parameters, or features that typically

17 affect the timing of the releases from these types of

18 calculations. That's something we felt that there's

19 not, the example that Derek gave about the Standard

20 Review Plan, you won't find that sort of discussion in

21 it.

22 Model uncertainty, there is a expectation

23 that people will address model uncertainty. It's

24 usually addressed pretty weakly, I would say. If the

25 model support is good, then you're going to have less
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1 model uncertainty. But if the model support is

2 limited, which comes into play for lots of these types

3 of calculations, then you have more model uncertainty.

4 And there's not, even if you look at our

5 fields outside of waste management, there's not a lot

6 of robust ways that people deal with this model

7 uncertainty problem. They basically just keep

8 cranking on the problem and developing information

9 until they think they have enough confidence to move

10 forward, instead of taking model uncertainty and

11 developing some sort of propagation of it through the

12 system. We have a good data uncertainty example --

13 MEMBER POWERS: Have you ever seen anybody

14 do this model uncertainty?

15 (Off microphone comments)

16 MR. ESH: I'm sorry?

17 MEMBER POWERS: Have you seen someone deal

18 with model uncertainty?

19 MR. ESH: Not in low-level waste disposal,

20 no. In the high-level waste disposal program they

21 evaluated model uncertainty. They basically looked at

22 alternative conceptual models and the NRC guidance was

23 basically, you want to look at alternative conceptual

24 models that are consistent with your data.

25 So if you have very limited data, you
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1 might have a number of models that are consistent with

2 your data. If you have a lot of data you should be

3 able to hone in on one model.

4 The problem becomes if you have limited

5 data and you get into this issue of people dreaming up

6 models that are consistent with that limited data, and

7 then you put them all together and you may be way out

8 in left field in terms of, like the risk that you're

9 estimating. You still have to come back to some sort

10 of physical reasonableness, and some sort of ability

11 to constrain the results of those calculations.

12 CHAIRMAN RYAN: There is one example,

13 David, Barnwell is and I'll pick on it again, where

14 there was a tremendous effort previously, and even

15 currently today to calibrate the groundwater model

16 based on the entire system, which is precipitation and

17 all the rest of it.

18 So they actually have the ability now to

19 predict fairly accurately the response of the

20 saturated zone surface from various rain events.

21 MR. ESH: Yes they do. And generally I --

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So that's an example I

23 think that have been some significant effort to

24 calibrate.

25 MR. ESH: They do, generally I'd say
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1 people do much better in the groundwater pathway part

2 of the problem, because there's a lot of experience of

3 dealing with contamination problems and transport in

4 environmental media.

5 It's in the other parts of the performance

6 assessment that can be very important issues around

7 the source term, release rates, and the material

8 science, and corrosion of engineered systems over

9 time. Those areas, there tends to be maybe a little

10 more uncertainty in these types of problems that you

11 run into some more model uncertainty. So but the

12 Guidance covers a lot of different topics on

13 uncertainty. I think this is Chris' turn now.

14 MR. GROSSMAN: So what David talked about

15 were kind of general considerations in performance

16 assessment methodology that apply to many of the

17 analysis that the rule will require. What we're going

18 to get into now is just specifically performance

19 assessment modeling issues.

20 And this again, performance assessment

21 being the assessment to demonstrate compliance with

22 61.41. We won't spend a lot of time on performance

23 assessment today because a lot has been written on it

24 in the past, and so this Guidance really is intended

25 to supplement previous approaches and it points
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1 heavily to NUREG-1573's PA approach.

2 And we supplement that in a couple of

3 areas with the source term radionuclide transport. We

4 also point to some of the other documents in the

5 section, such as the Incidental Waste Guidance, which

6 is a little bit more modern PA methodology maybe than

7 1573, but they're consistent with each other.

8 So as I said, the Guidance here is

9 intended just to supplement in predominantly these two

10 areas. We outline site-specific parameters to

11 consider, and as Priya mentioned earlier, we don't

12 specify specifically what needs to be considered.

13 We talk in a general sense about some of

14 the processes and parameters that would need to be

15 considered in an analyses, and I've got some examples

16 here that pertain to specifically the DU issue, like

17 the radon, and modeling of radon in a performance

18 assessment, things like emanation, how do you account

19 for that, as well as migration through the subsurface

20 of the radon gas.

21 That's a little bit of a unique challenge.

22 That is tied to the uranium issue, and so we did spend

23 some time talking about some of the issues associated

24 with radon. In this Guidance on performance

25 assessment we did make some recommendations based on
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1 staff experience.

2 We have some guidance on how to treat the

3 evolution of the disposal system over time, as climate

4 systems may change for long periods of time and how do

5 you account for that? Particularly in areas like that

6 affect the geochemistry or potential radionuclide

7 transport characteristics.

8 And some of that evolution may also have

9 an impact on the engineered barrier system

10 degradation, that's EBS here. I forgot to define that

11 acronym, I apologize. And so things like waste

12 containers, waste forms, how do changes in a disposal

13 system over time affect the degradation rates of those

14 materials.

15 And finally we have guidance on primary

16 model support, and Dave talked a little bit about

17 this. Developing support for the models, in terms of

18 the, that you would use to characterize degradation

19 rates for waste forms and waste containers, as well as

20 migration parameters.

21 So next we're going to transition over to

22 the intruder protection, and--oh, there it is, okay,

23 can you still hear me if I am pointing back at the?

24 (Simultaneous speaking)

25 MR. GROSSMAN: I realized I pointed at the
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1 wrong people. Okay, so --

2 MEMBER POWERS: Before you get into this

3 question that I'm totally into figuring out, in this

4 intruder scenario, why did you bring that up? Do we

5 have data on lots of people intruding on disposal

6 sites that leads us to believe that they do so?

7 CHAIRMAN RYAN: No.

8 MR. GROSSMAN: I think Dr. Armijo brought

9 up one example that was kind of contemporaneous to

10 when Part 61 was originally developed, which was the

11 Love Canal example. That was a kind of a

12 contemporaneous example of things that were happening

13 at the time, that provided some impetus for the

14 protection of the intruder that was developed in the

15 original Part 61.

16 MEMBER POWERS: Usually, I write down

17 anything that Mr. Armijo says. I guess I missed his

18 particular example.

19 MEMBER ARMIJO: Well, you know this is a

20 very difficult thing for me to accept because of the,

21 it's a hypothesis and so the intruder can be a small

22 number of people, a large number of people, adults,

23 children, who knows what their capabilities are?

24 So to me, if I understood that the

25 intruder is a very well defined number of people with
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1 certain capabilities, he can read, he can write, he

2 can dig a hole so many feet deep, and that's it. Then

3 I can start to say, okay well, I can do an analysis on

4 what would happen to that person if he happened to

5 just land on top of my site and only did those things.

6 My concern is that this intruder can

7 develop, in time develop all sorts of capabilities,

8 and turn a hypothetical issue into something big, when

9 it shouldn't be a big deal.

10 MEMBER POWERS: One concern about the

11 origins, I mean, to me, somebody here can say, gee we

12 ought to develop these sites so that intruders can't

13 get to the material, then they must have been

14 motivated by something.

15 MR. GROSSMAN: There are, I think a couple

16 of considerations, and I'll talk, if I don't address

17 them, what he's thinking. One is, you're in the near

18 surface environment, and humans are much more active

19 in the near surface than they may be in other

20 environments, such as deep geological disposal.

21 And so that there's a recognition that we

22 are active in that environment. And I think the

23 second then is the concept here of low-level waste, is

24 your concentrating and containing waste and so you

25 have the waste there in the near surface, and because
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1 of that containment then, there is a need to protect

2 someone who may intrude into it unknowingly.

3 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You know, having been

4 involved when it was first regulated as a licensee, it

5 takes away the first 100 years, because there's

6 institutional controls, there's institutional control

7 funds.

8 And so everything like cobalt and the

9 other short-lived stuff is out of play. But what it

10 does address at least, and I'm not sure I agree and

11 like all aspects of it, but it does address those

12 radioactive materials that are there for 100s or 1000s

13 of years.

14 I mean I can give you the numbers right

15 here of what's around after 300, and it's, you know,

16 5000 curies of uranium and a few other odds and ends.

17 The part where I have seen it evolve to where I'm not

18 sure it's exactly as helpful as it could be, is that

19 pure calculations of radon doses at a house that I've

20 excavated on top of a waste trench, you know, and I've

21 got a basement, that quite frankly isn't realistic.

22 I mean, I'm going to hit stuff, like 10-

23 inch thick reinforced concrete pads over hundreds of

24 feet. They're going to tell me something's different.

25 So I wonder if it doesn't need to be revisited and
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1 refreshed with regard to what is a realistic

2 intrusion.

3 And I'm not sure how long it should be an

4 obligation. Is it 10,000 years into the future that

5 we should do it or not --

6 MEMBER POWERS: My thinking goes something

7 like this, Mike. If I look at the archaeological

8 evidence as was stated, man is very busy on this

9 shallow earth. But mostly he builds on top of things.

10 He doesn't really dig down into things, he builds on

11 top of things, that's why archaeologists can make a

12 living.

13 Because they go down and actually dig down

14 and, so I'm wondering what motivated somebody to think

15 that intruder, rather than somebody that paves over

16 the thing and builds on top of it, because that's what

17 we've done, historically.

18 Now I don't know if that's what we would

19 do now, but it's, I mean I've got, well we can't go

20 back 20,000 years, but I can go back 8000 years and in

21 99 percent of those cases people do build on top.

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But the thing I think

23 that's important is the assumption was at the time

24 that, for 100 years, you know, that's an institutional

25 memory that we'll fund and understand. And we have no
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1 other choice but to assume that everybody's going to

2 dig into it thereafter. And excavate it, that was the

3 APRA assumption, there was no discussion of these

4 kinds of points, but --

5 MEMBER ARMIJO: So, the 100 --

6 CHAIRMAN RYAN: -- just a second.

7 MEMBER ARMIJO: I understand you but you

8 say the 100 years says after that, the regulatory

9 people, the government, what, doesn't exist?

10 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Whatever dose assessment

11 I'm going to do, the assumption is 100 years plus zero

12 days is when I make the assumption of the intrusion.

13 MR. ESH: You know, I don't think that,

14 it's not that the government doesn't exist, it's that

15 you have things like government error in records or,

16 you know, financial challenge that then causes

17 somebody to take the nuclear waste fund for instance,

18 and use it for other purposes.

19 I mean it's like you have those sorts of

20 things occurring, it's not collapse of society that

21 gets you into that scenario. It's much more subtle

22 things that come into play. And I would say that the

23 purpose of it is what Dr. Ryan said, it's not a

24 calculation of, you expect this to happen.

25 It's a stylized regulatory construct that
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1 does a couple things. It deals with this, people

2 being busy in the near surface issue, and it provides

3 some limits for low-level waste disposal, as to what

4 you may take in that type of facility.

5 Because you can, material that maybe

6 doesn't pass the low-level waste analyses has other

7 places that it's supposed to be able to go. It's not

8 the last stop.

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: It is a good point to open

10 the conversation though and say, well, what's magic

11 about 100 years, and the answer is nothing.

12 MR. ESH: Yes, well as I said, it was

13 derived based on interactions with stakeholders when

14 the regulation was developed. It wasn't a number

15 pulled out of thin air. It was like people like

16 ourselves coming together.

17 MEMBER POWERS: Yes, that number it's as

18 good as any, yes, I mean I think it's historically

19 defensible, I mean, I tend to look at things like, how

20 much do you actually recall about what the potensive

21 formations were and were what. Exactly nothing, you

22 know.

23 MR. ESH: And that, one thing that we're

24 doing, or a couple of other things I would point out.

25 One in the intruder area, we're recommending or
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1 proposing a 500 millirem dose limit, which implies

2 that, you could interpret it as implying an

3 unlikeliness to the scenario.

4 Because if you expected the scenario to

5 happen, there'd be no reason why you wouldn't set the

6 dose limit the same as what you set in the 61.41 dose

7 limit. And we're proposing that it should be higher,

8 consistent with what was done when the table values

9 were developed.

10 So we think that is an appropriate way to

11 go in this area. The other thing that we're doing,

12 it's a work in progress, but I got to thinking and I

13 said, you know, instead of just arguing about this

14 topic with people, let's try to quantify it.

15 Because we have some things available to

16 us that maybe can help us at least get a rough

17 estimate of what we're talking about. So I'm working

18 with one of the individuals in my section who's a GIS

19 expert, to develop disturbance maps over space and

20 time to estimate the depth of the near surface that

21 has been disturbed as development has occurred. That

22 will give us some sort of number to know whether we're

23 in the ballpark or not.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: It's at least a framework

25 to think about it.
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1 MR. ESH: It's at least a framework to

2 think about it besides just this hypothetical number

3 of people arguing back and forth. But let's sharpen

4 our pencil a little bit and see if it yields anything.

5 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, and the other things

6 that could be taken care of with that kind of an

7 approach I think, David, are the fact that most of

8 these facilities will be in at least currently very

9 rural areas.

10 MR. ESH: Yes.

11 CHAIRMAN RYAN: They're not going to be in

12 areas of great disturbance and cities and all the

13 rest.

14 MR. ESH: There's a second requirement

15 that you're supposed to avoid areas of large

16 population growth when you pick a facility.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, so if you can somehow

18 calibrate a little bit of what, you know, what are the

19 disturbance rates, and loss of knowledge rates for

20 those kinds of, you know, facilities, areas, and what

21 not. That's a step in the right direction, I think.

22 MEMBER ARMIJO: I don't have a problem

23 with 100 years, I have big problems with 20,000 years.

24 You know, and does this inadvertent intruder

25 evaluation have to be done out to that time, and I'd
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1 say, why? You know, what obligation do we have today

2 to protect someone 20,000 years in the future?

3 I'm not talking about huge populations

4 either. We're just talking about the limited number

5 of people that might stumble onto these sites, and

6 when all memory has disappeared and no --

7 MR. ESH: And I would agree with you. If

8 in fact it was the intruder performance objective that

9 was going to be completely driving your decisions with

10 respect to long-lived waste. But the reality is for

11 some isotopes, you're going to be limited by 61.41,

12 the normal evolution of the system to release into

13 groundwater, et cetera.

14 And so for other isotopes you're going to

15 be limited by the intruder type assessment. Generally

16 for the short-lived isotopes, you're going to be

17 limited by the intruder assessment, and for the long18 lived isotopes you're going to be limited by 61.41,

19 not by the intruder assessment.

20 If in fact as we go forward, we're finding

21 that, okay the 20,000 year intruder results are

22 driving the decisions people are doing with their

23 material, then I think that would be a reason to look

24 at it and think about the point that you have is, you

25 know, is this the right thing to do?
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And I think that exact

2 point ought to be in the Guidance.

3 MEMBER BLEY: Well, that's what I was

4 wanting to ask, you know, the kind of things you were

5 talking about just a minute ago, about things you're

6 researching that could make this a cleaner process.

7 When is it likely that, that would be available to

8 people who are going to be trying to do these

9 calculations?

10 MR. ESH: I was hoping we would have

11 something that I could talk about to the Committee in

12 this time frame, but we're not there yet. It's turned

13 out to be a little more complicated. I'm always

14 optimistic about things like this.

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That's fair, I think,

16 you're in the process of developing, but I think this

17 very topic and these materials that you're developing

18 really should be in the Guidance.

19 MR. ESH: Yes, in this particular area, I

20 don't know whether it's going to yield results of,

21 well the probability is 1E to the minus 5, or it's 1E

22 to the minus 1. You know, I have no idea how it's

23 going to turn out, I just thought it's an area where

24 we should probably quantify a little better, and that

25 may give us some regulatory basis for whatever we
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1 choose.

2 And because this is a limited scope

3 rulemaking, we don't feel like we have to go head on

4 about this intruder performance objective right now.

5 As we go forward to the more comprehensive rulemaking,

6 we think that would be the opportune time to bring

7 some of this information into play and see if it's the

8 right framework or not.

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well it's certainly, you

10 know, if you bring this work to closure, it's

11 certainly a good way to, you know, risk-inform the

12 whole process in this area.

13 MR. ESH: Yes, this idea came, didn't come

14 early enough to me to allow --

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So you're seeing it better

16 late than never, David.

17 MEMBER BLEY: I don't have a good mental

18 picture of the overall rulemaking, this limited one in

19 the larger scale, and how the things you're trying to

20 develop would align with when people will have to do

21 something about these things. Are you going to talk

22 about that somewhere along the line here?

23 MR. ESH: I think --

24 MEMBER BLEY: I'm sure you hoped to have

25 things already, but are we going to have the chance
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1 that we have a rule out there that people have to

2 respond to, and you haven't been able to give them

3 really good tools yet?

4 MR. ESH: Well, I think that the rule that

5 we'll have, the staff will have confidence in this

6 rule, and its supporting basis, and its Guidance

7 Document at the time it goes out. If we're doing some

8 other efforts to prepare for a more comprehensive

9 rulemaking, I don't think that affects our decisions

10 about what we're doing in this limited scope one.

11 So I don't know if I answer your question,

12 but that's kind of how we feel about it. We aren't

13 going to go out with something now that we aren't

14 confident is the right thing to do.

15 MR. GROSSMAN: Okay, where was I?

16 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Slide 17.

17 MR. GROSSMAN: Not yet. I'm sorry. So I

18 don't, I'm not aware of how familiar the Subcommittee

19 is with the intruder protection requirement. We have

20 kind of three legs showing here to the intruder

21 protection, and this is under the proposed rule.

22 Two of the legs already exist in the

23 current rule, namely being that in order to

24 demonstrate protection of inadvertent intruders, you

25 have to demonstrate compliance with the waste
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1 classification and segregation requirements, so this

2 is going to the tables, determining your classes, and

3 making sure that they are segregated according to

4 class types, et cetera.

5 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes I might, just for

6 everybody's benefit, that's not only the generator's

7 responsibility, it's typically something that's fully

8 inspected before or as the waste is received for

9 disposal, so the Agreement States where the licensing

10 bodies like the NRC itself would certainly have a

11 thumb on that right at the front end.

12 MR. GROSSMAN: Right. And the

13 classification part was developed during the

14 development of the Part 61, through what I'll call the

15 reference analyses. And so they used a reference

16 site, they developed a set of reference scenarios for

17 an intruder assessment, and they used those then to

18 develop the Waste Classification Tables.

19 And so there is a set of kind of human

20 activities that could occur, that has been used in the

21 past, and we'll bring those forward in the intruder

22 segments.

23 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I think it's very

24 important for everybody to understand that those

25 intrusions were envisioned in systems that were much
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1 less robust than what's used now.

2 These were cardboard boxes, earthen

3 trenches, earthen covers and, you know, the idea that

4 you would build a house on a disposal trench,\ or have

5 some other kind of intrusive activity, did not really

6 recognize the robustness of waste forms, waste

7 containers, or currently technology that's in place

8 currently at the existing sites.

9 MEMBER ARMIJO: So would the tables be

10 different today?

11 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Oh yes.

12 MEMBER ARMIJO: If you generated those

13 tables today based on the way you're --

14 CHAIRMAN RYAN: In my opinion they would

15 be. Now they certainly would be for, I want to guess,

16 let's just pick a round number for the sake of the

17 argument, 500 years, but after that you could then

18 argue that concrete degrades, or reinforced concrete

19 degrades.

20 It would be in the longer term scenario

21 that David spoke about, but I think for a large

22 portion of the decay of the radioactive material, it

23 would be very difficult to be an inadvertent intruder

24 today.

25 MR. GROSSMAN: So part of mentioning that
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1 is to segue into what I'm going to spend the rest of

2 the time on, is the new part, the intruder assessment,

3 because that's largely what we deal with in the

4 Guidance.

5 But that isn't necessarily something

6 that's all that new, it's an extension we feel of this

7 part of the requirement that was originally there.

8 There was an assessment done. This is using the

9 Commission's direction to make that more site10 specific, and allow licensees the flexibility to

11 incorporate some site-specific information into that

12 assessment.

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: One key point though, is

14 I'm assuming, the probability of intrusion is still

15 one.

16 MR. MCKENNEY: Except for the fact that we

17 don't require 25 millirem, which would be true if we

18 had a probability of one, Dr. Ryan. Make probability

19 one then every intruder will be a member of the

20 public, and member of the public dose limit for Part

21 61 is 25 millirem.

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So I have a probability of

23 a new intruder, the probability of one where 60 out of

24 500 millirem dose limit?

25 MR. MCKENNEY: Yes.
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But the probability of

2 intrusion is still one.

3 MR. MCKENNEY: When you assume it's --

4 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You assume it's going to

5 happen, period. So that's a probability of one.

6 MR. MCKENNEY: Well, now that would be

7 saying that every --

8 MEMBER ARMIJO: Well that's a

9 deterministic analysis, then.

10 CHAIRMAN RYAN: It's a deterministic

11 number but they use a different dose limit for that

12 long term intrusion. You can split the hairs on how

13 it's viewed, but that's what happens. The

14 calculational rate's a probability of one.

15 MR. GROSSMAN: So since the intruder

16 assessment in terms of site-specific analyses is new,

17 this section of the Guidance is more of a stand-alone

18 section. It does draw upon, kind of the philosophy

19 that underlies 15.73, being it tries to be PA-like, as

20 much as it can given that it's a hypothetical

21 construct.

22 It also draws on 1854 for that reason.

23 1757 in terms of scenario development, we drew on that

24 heavily in terms of reasonable foreseeable scenarios

25 and how to develop those for a site-specific basis.
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1 And it does touch on the branch technical position on

2 concentration averaging.

3 MEMBER ARMIJO: Do you have a, just

4 definition of what the inadvertent intrusion

5 performance objective is?

6 MR. GROSSMAN: That's the rule language.

7 CHAIRMAN RYAN: It's the whole rule?

8 MR. ESH: No, no, 6142.

9 MR. GROSSMAN: 6142, it's that section of

10 the rule, that's the performance objective for

11 protection of inadvertent intruders. And so

12 apparently what it requires are the top and the left

13 bubbles. And the proposed rule would add the lower

14 right quads, intruder assessment.

15 MEMBER ARMIJO: I'm just going to keep on

16 reading and I'm trying to find out in words.

17 MR. ESH: I can read this to you if you'd

18 like. It's real short.

19 MS. YADAV: It's slide 14 from Andy's

20 presentation.

21 (Simultaneous speaking)

22 MR. ESH: All right. Design operation

23 enclosure of the land disposal facility must ensure

24 protection of any inadvertent intruder into the

25 disposal site who occupies the sites, or contacts the
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1 waste at any time after active institutional controls

2 over the disposal site are removed. The annual dose

3 must not exceed 500 millirems total effective dose

4 equivalent. That is something new we added.

5 MEMBER ARMIJO: So that the only number I

6 see is the 500 millirem, that's the only

7 quantitative?

8 MR. ESH: Yes, and in part A of 61.42 as

9 imposed.

10 MEMBER ARMIJO: And it's 500 millirem?

11 CHAIRMAN RYAN: TEDE.

12 MEMBER ARMIJO: TEDE for, okay. So that's

13 the number that you have to meet.

14 MR. ESH: Okay?

15 MEMBER ARMIJO: And if you didn't have

16 depleted uranium, if you did it at 100 years, it's

17 never going to get worse?

18 MR. ESH: Not, well not necessarily.

19 Other uranium goes into these facilities, as Dr. Ryan

20 mentioned, Barnwell has 5,248 curies of --

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Something like that, yes.

22 MR. ESH: -- uranium-238. They also have

23 thorium-232, so anything that has some ingrowth, and

24 if that material was in some way processed or purified

25 and then disposed of, so it's not a secular
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1 equilibrium, then you can get some ingrowth of some of

2 the daughters over time that can have a greater

3 propensity to cause risk than the parent.

4 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And those times are very

5 long compared to the --

6 MR. ESH: They're long for those low

7 specific activity nuclides, I guess you could probably

8 have some shorter ones that have similar behavior.

9 MEMBER ARMIJO: Okay, thank you.

10 MR. GROSSMAN: As I mentioned, we'll focus

11 on the intruder assessment for the rest of my portion

12 of the talk. And it's an assessment to estimate

13 potential doses to an inadvertent intruder. It's

14 required for 61.42.

15 We intend it to be a PA-like methodology.

16 There is some recognition that it's a hypothetical

17 construct, and that you are not explicitly considering

18 probabilities in this like you might in a more PA

19 methodology.

20 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well you are, the

21 probability of intrusion is fun.

22 MEMBER ARMIJO: That doesn't make it

23 probabilistic.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well I think it is a

25 probability they've assumed. I just want to make the
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1 point that it is a probability of one, period.

2 MR. MCKENNEY: So is the person at the

3 fence line.

4 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay.

5 MR. GROSSMAN: The Guidance though, does

6 bring in some qualitative ways to consider likelihood,

7 and I'll talk about this in scenario formation, ways

8 that you can develop site-specific scenarios that

9 might be more in line with your current site

10 conditions or practices.

11 And the intent really is to identify, are

12 there any additional site-specific design and control

13 measures that might be required for the site, given

14 the wastes that are taken and the characteristics of

15 the disposal system as a whole.

16 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You know, I can think of

17 at least one site where their site fence is inside a

18 very large reservation that doesn't have public

19 access. So which fence do I use? I mean, you have

20 the flexibility to allow those kind of patterns, you

21 know, of placement and all of that.

22 MEMBER ARMIJO: You're talking military

23 reservation?

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I'm talking about, yes,

25 the Hanford Reservation, it has a U.S. Ecology Site
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1 inside it.

2 MEMBER ARMIJO: Yes but, you know, if you

3 go way out in time and those things exist, and that's

4 --

5 MR. ESH: I think they would have to

6 shrink their footprints not maintain them, but there's

7 people from DOE here who could talk to that.

8 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well I'm just saying, I

9 mean you do have the flexibility to recognize the

10 particular physical realities of a given site.

11 MR. GROSSMAN: I'll talk about some of

12 that in the scenario analysis.

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay great, I didn't mean

14 to pick on you.

15 MR. GROSSMAN: No, that's okay, it's a

16 segue. So the PA-like methodology here, we draw a

17 lot, this was actually kind of co-authored from 1573,

18 which they used for the performance assessment and

19 then adapted to the intruder assessment, but a similar

20 process.

21 You form your scenarios that you may

22 expect to occur based on site conditions or your

23 practices. And then you conceptualize and abstract

24 the system or simplify the physical processes going

25 on, conduct your consequence modeling.
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1 And then you evaluate your site disposal

2 performance, at least the performance objective. If

3 the objective is met, fine. If not, then you may need

4 to develop some options. Some of the options may

5 include refining your analysis, maybe you've got to

6 sharpen your pencils and go back and collect more

7 site-specific data, et cetera. You may need to change

8 design, include additional barriers, et cetera, or

9 potentially set inventory limits.

10 MR. WIDMAYER: Does this allow you the

11 possibility of saying, okay I'm not going to have an

12 intruder?

13 MR. GROSSMAN: We'll talk about that in

14 the scenario formation, the guidance on that.

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You've made a very

16 important switch in what you just said, set inventory

17 limits. We've got a concentration-based receival

18 system, and we're switching to what I think is the

19 right way to deal with the site, which is the

20 fractional release from the inventory, is what the

21 performance assessment's all about. Now in France,

22 there's a paper out on it or several actually, where

23 they don't limit concentrations, they limit the

24 inventory of a given site.

25 MR. ESH: But they limit the inventory in
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1 a container volume, which is affectively a

2 concentration, too. It's just a concentration by a

3 different name.

4 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But that doesn't drive the

5 bus, though. What drives the bus is the site-wide

6 inventory.

7 MR. ESH: But they do both, they do the

8 site-wide inventory and the container limit, and they

9 can limit what the facility can accept based on

10 either, the container or the facility, not just the

11 total facility.

12 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Well, the total facility's

13 kind of the end point though, right. They can't

14 exceed that, but they can deal with packaging and

15 arrangements of packages to deal with different

16 concentrations of material.

17 MR. ESH: Yes, I think the issue is, you

18 have a limit on what you can put in one package,

19 potentially. But then you can have different limits

20 based on how much the facility can take.

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, and the package limit

22 is really designed for operational protection of

23 workers more than it is the long-term performance.

24 MR. ESH: I would guess so.

25 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That's true. So it's
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1 still the fractional release from the inventory that

2 drives the risk bus for a low-level waste site. It is

3 not a package by package inventory, except as that

4 aggregates up to some concept, and I know it could be

5 a complicated intricate one of fractional release from

6 that inventory to an environmental vector. That's

7 what drives the risk bus, and if we're heading toward

8 that, that's terrific.

9 MR. MCKENNEY: Always in the rule. 61.41

10 always existed.

11 MR. GROSSMAN: So in some cases for

12 existing sites, at the end of the life, if you're up

13 in PA you may need a performance mitigation or new

14 sites you may decide if your options don't work out,

15 selecting a new site, that's a kind of kick-out

16 clause.

17 If you need to sharpen the pencils or

18 maybe redesign the analyses, then you might go back

19 through the loop again. And so I'm kind of pointing

20 out the iterative nature of.

21 MEMBER ARMIJO: It would help me a lot if

22 you could just describe the starting point where this

23 scenario or scenarios, exactly what are they?

24 MR. GROSSMAN: Okay, that's a good segue

25 for what I'm about to talk about.
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1 MEMBER ARMIJO: And you're going to get

2 into that because, to me that sets, the result's going

3 to depend on what this intruder can do. and how many

4 there are. And how long they stay there, a bunch of

5 other stuff unrelated to the actual site itself. And

6 that's arbitrary, or defined in some way. And so I'd

7 like to understand that.

8 MR. GROSSMAN: So the first part of the

9 intruder assessment, very much similar to what you

10 might do in a PA, except in this case it's more

11 constrained. It is scenario analysis, and so this

12 would be evaluating what scenarios would result in

13 your greatest dose for compliance.

14 And here we're qualifying that by

15 reasonably foreseeable scenarios, and so we're not

16 trying to leave this open for unlimited speculation

17 about anything that could happen. We're trying to use

18 site information, site-specific information to

19 constrain that to some degree.

20 And so we do envision this process,

21 considering the site information, to allow licensees

22 the flexibility to define what reasonably foreseeable

23 is for their site. Now that provides them flexibility

24 in the near term, particularly when it comes to like

25 land use in a region.
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1 Like the example of, potentially it being

2 on a reservation in the near term, if that's

3 envisioned, I can foresee a licensee using that as a

4 rationale for limiting scenarios.

5 We ran into a problem at longer time

6 frames, when you go out further in time, site-specific

7 scenarios based on cultural information I'll call it,

8 and which I'll explain more on a later slide, things

9 like land use becoming more difficult to defend

10 because predicting human activity over long periods is

11 very difficult to do.

12 And so we felt that for longer time

13 frames, kind of falling back to the default scenarios

14 that were used or considered in the development of

15 Part 61, would limit endless speculation about future

16 human activities, because these activities are typical

17 activities that humans have been engaged in for

18 periods of time.

19 Things like residence building, living on

20 a site, you know, agriculture, those kind of

21 activities, and so we felt that would limit then,

22 endless speculation about what could occur for long

23 periods. And so that's described in the Guidance.

24 The default scenarios for those who may

25 not know. There are four that we'll pull out in the
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1 Guidance. Two of these come from the EIS that was

2 used to develop Part 61, that's the intruder3 construction/discovery scenario, and intruder4 agriculture scenario.

5 Intruder-drilling was developed later in

6 an update to that impacts assessment, and a later

7 NUREG/CR-4370. The intruder-well was actually

8 developed in the EIS, the impact assessment for Part

9 61, but it wasn't a major scenario.

10 And so I'll kind of run through kind of

11 the concept for each of these scenarios. Intruder12 construction is, someone has come on to the site to

13 construct a residence, was the hypothesis used in the

14 development of Part 61.

15 They began excavating a foundation for a

16 house that included a basement, and intruded into the

17 waste. That waste is brought up to the surface,

18 dispersed somewhat on the surface as they backfilled,

19 and spread around the area and then the workers were

20 exposed. So this is an acute exposure kind of

21 scenario.

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You're assuming though,

23 that, I mean again, this is fine for 1970 when it was

24 written. But wastes aren't going to be used as loam

25 for a lawn. I mean they're concrete, they're resins,
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1 they're things that, you know, would be recognized.

2 How do you, you know I think a lot of that kind of

3 public scenario assumptions really need to be

4 refreshed with what's reasonable.

5 MR. GROSSMAN: One of the assumptions was

6 that the waste forms were not recognizable. If the

7 waste forms were recognizable it kicked you into the

8 discovery scenario, in this case. And at that point

9 then, the excavator backed off, their exposures were

10 limited to the period that they were digging down to

11 the discovery and then stopped.

12 And so there is some recognition for that,

13 and we intend with the Guidance to carry that

14 recognition forward.

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: And if there have to be

16 intruder barriers, you will get a return on your

17 drill bit that will tell you this is not right, real

18 quick, like within three feet of the surface before

19 you hit any radioactive material.

20 MR. GROSSMAN: Right.

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That's all creditable.

22 MR. GROSSMAN: That's the intent, is if

23 you can demonstrate that, that could occur and for how

24 long it can occur, then we would envision that

25 licensees can use that information to limit scenarios.
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1 MR. MCKENNEY: And the Guidance also has,

2 you don't have to use the default scenarios. You can

3 use site-specific scenarios. And using even the

4 default scenarios still would take into account site

5 conditions which it would, what is the actual depth of

6 your burial compared to what the assumptions were

7 where the other thing --

8 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, okay.

9 (Simultaneous speaking)

10 MR. MCKENNEY: -- scenario, dug down three

11 meters, and you're well below that with your waste

12 starting at 15 meters, like WCS affectively after

13 covered, then that scenario would result in big zeros.

14 So you would be looking at the other scenarios for

15 what ones would intersect with your facility.

16 So it's a combination of the generic

17 structure of the original scenario, but still with

18 your site-specific conditions, and --

19 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, that sounds pretty

20 good. Because it's very clear that you can use site21 specific data to better inform the structure of a

22 given type of scenario, that's fine and dandy. Okay.

23 MR. GROSSMAN: So the intruder-agriculture

24 was kind of the chronic extension I think then of the

25 intruder-construction, this is the person who would
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1 live in the residence that was built onsite, and they

2 grow some of their food in the soil that was formerly

3 waste that was unrecognizable and spread on the

4 surface.

5 Intruder-drilling was later considered in

6 an update to the methodology of Part 61. In this case

7 you had a drill crew onsite, they may have been

8 installing a well or exploring for resources. And so

9 they drilled through the waste site unknowingly, and

10 in this case the drilling mud was put into a mud pit

11 and so forth and there was --

12 CHAIRMAN RYAN: You know, I guess in most

13 soils drilling that I've seen, you start hitting

14 something like what was disposed, one, it won't look

15 the same, again and up and to it, it's going to rattle

16 the, you know, the drill rig right off its feet.

17 MR. ESH: It depends, and the issue is, it

18 depends on your disposal system. So like, if you're

19 disposing of barrels and carbon steel in a trench and

20 you cover your trench up, and you advance forward 200

21 years, I don't know how much carbon steel, if it, say,

22 it's a human environment, how much carbon steel you're

23 going to find there.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: If I'm doing that within

25 the last 40 years, I'm going to have some kind of an
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1 intruder barrier on top of it. You know, I just think

2 that's a bit of a reach to, when is it unrecognizable?

3 MR. ESH: Well, I think what Chris said is

4 we allow people to provide a basis for when it's

5 recognizable and when it's no longer recognizable, so

6 that affords you flexibility to demonstrate what you

7 think you need to demonstrate.

8 (Simultaneous speaking)

9 MEMBER POWERS: I actually like what

10 you've done here. I like the fact that you constrain

11 speculation because that can quickly become rampant.

12 MEMBER ARMIJO: Well, if it's constrained,

13 well defined, prescriptive in my opinion, then you'd

14 say, that's the only thing you'd have to evaluate.

15 MEMBER POWERS: I think they are, once you

16 get out, the end of this kind of intermediate term

17 period that they've essentially, because of the

18 speculation problem, they've essentially made it

19 prescriptive.

20 PARTICIPANT: I mean, hopefully by --

21 MEMBER POWERS: But done with flexibility

22 to say, well, you don't have to do this.

23 MR. WIDMAYER: I still want to know if I

24 can flexibilize myself out of the inadvertent

25 intruder?
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1 (Simultaneous speaking)

2 MEMBER ARMIJO: That's a bigger issue

3 perhaps.

4 MR. ESH: I think if you, did you say

5 flexibilize?

6 MR. WIDMAYER: Yes.

7 (Laughter)

8 MR. ESH: Flexibilize yourself out of the

9 inadvertent intruder scenario completely, you're

10 affectively relying on controls for longer than the

11 100 years that's put in the regulation. So, because

12 I think you're always going to have some land use.

13 It might not be very disturbing, you might

14 not build a house, but you can have recreational use,

15 hunting, hiking, all those sorts of things that happen

16 that you should, at a minimum have that type of

17 scenario if you're not going to be doing the

18 disturbance scenario. But it becomes difficult to

19 argue you're not going to do the disturbance scenario

20 --

21 MR. WIDMAYER: If I put all of my long22 lived waste or anything that I have a problem with the

23 intruder, 100 meters or deeper, and I put it out in

24 the middle of nowhere where I don't speculate

25 anybody's going to build a house over the next 10,000
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1 years?

2 MR. ESH: Yes, I think that's fine, Derek,

3 I don't disagree that certainly disposal depth is a

4 very good way to mitigate this risk.

5 MR. WIDMAYER: I'm trying to give Dr.

6 Armijo a chance to figure out how to --

7 (Simultaneous speaking)

8 MR. ESH: But I would say what's the

9 likelihood, if I asked you 500 years ago, what's the

10 likelihood that there's a multi-million person city in

11 the middle of the desert in Nevada, what would you

12 have said to me? I think you would have said the

13 probability is zero.

14 CHAIRMAN RYAN: He's got you there.

15 MEMBER POWERS: People said that ten years

16 before it was built, they said that back when they

17 were trying --

18 MR. ESH: That's what you're dealing with,

19 with the human part of the process, is that --

20 (Simultaneous speaking)

21 MEMBER ARMIJO: But you always go back to

22 this thing if somehow, everything we know up to now,

23 all our technology, all our history, all our

24 regulatory practices, our government, has somehow just

25 been lost.
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1 And all of sudden we know nothing, and we

2 just are innocents wandering around the desert

3 deciding to drill a well. And 500 years from now,

4 1000 years from now, 20,000 years from now, and I

5 think current generations have no responsibility for

6 those people if society falls apart.

7 Now if society continues, we have a

8 government, maybe the right thing to do is we don't

9 close up a site at 100 years automatically. You do an

10 assessment then, and say should we close it up or not?

11 You know, the city's building around us.

12 It seems to me like there's a more

13 practical ways to deal with this as you go, rather

14 than trying to predict what may happen way out in the

15 future, based on an assumption that we're going to

16 close this thing down and then forget about it.

17 Society will fall apart, and then intruders will be

18 wandering around doing a variety of things.

19 CHAIRMAN RYAN: I think there is an option

20 for that, and that's in the institutional control

21 period. There certainly is for the sites I'm familiar

22 with. There's no guarantee it's going to continue,

23 and there's no guarantee it's going to stop.

24 It's based on the assessment of the

25 performance data and the environmental monitoring
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1 data, as that closure period marches on.

2 MR. MCKENNEY: Based on a current

3 experience of institutional controls is that they

4 don't really rely, they aren't reliable. We've had

5 many occurrences of failure of institutional controls

6 over the last 30 years just from Superfund sites, and

7 other sites --

8 MEMBER ARMIJO: From nuclear facilities?

9 MR. MCKENNEY: -- and underground sites,

10 and others where you're getting to a point in the

11 environmental monitoring where you're like going back

12 every five years. You don't have anyone there

13 anymore. That's when the intrusion can occur, in

14 between there, is if there is faulty maps or other

15 things like that.

16 And you can still have well drilling or

17 resource things, or you can just have people who go

18 through. And that is one of the things, not with a

19 full government's release, but there is a period in

20 time which there was access that was available and

21 that was, it will be done.

22 People doing construction all over the

23 place hit gas lines that should have been well known

24 about it, they're being used right now, but they hit

25 them now.
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1 MEMBER ARMIJO: I think the conditions --

2 MR. MCKENNEY: -- or obstruction

3 concentrations, so --

4 MEMBER ARMIJO: I would think that you can

5 go to the Los Alamos Laboratory and find periods where

6 they have encountered in reports of construction

7 discoveries from the late '50s that --

8 (Simultaneous speaking)

9 MR. ESH: No, I think that's what we're

10 talking about. I mean we work for government, and

11 we're much less confident putting faith in the

12 intelligence of government, so that's effectively what

13 we're talking about here.

14 MEMBER POWERS: But, I mean, still you had

15 built this in where you give them credit, and the

16 intruder runs into something, that he's going to

17 respond, he's not a complete idiot. And say, oh, it's

18 warm and nice and I want to get down here and cuddle

19 up into this stuff.

20 (Laughter)

21 CHAIRMAN RYAN: On the other side of that

22 coin, you can envision a site that has a very robust

23 institutional control fund in the tens, if not hundred

24 millions of dollars, or $100 million and, you know,

25 there's at least some form of government that's got
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1 cognizance and oversight of the facility that's funded

2 for, you know, very long-term care monitoring and

3 maintenance.

4 So, you know, you can go to the end of

5 that spectrum. I think the idea is if this, you know,

6 at least allows for a probability that's fairly

7 reasonable that the appropriate long-term care would

8 occur.

9 (Off microphone comments)

10 MR. GROSSMAN: Slide 21. We do allow

11 licensees in the Guidance the flexibility to consider

12 site-specific scenarios and this gets into much of

13 what we talked about already. They can account for

14 physical information, and so an intruder who

15 encounters an engineered form that's still intact and

16 recognizable would not be, we don't envision them to

17 be so stupid as to continue.

18 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Chris, somewhere on the

19 next few slides, I'll let you pick a place to take a

20 break, because we're scheduled for a break, and I

21 don't want to hold folks to long without.

22 MR. GROSSMAN: Okay, I forget, how many do

23 I have here? Let me finish mine and then we'll take

24 a break at site stability, and then Dave can come back

25 --
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That's at Page 21?

2 MR. GROSSMAN: That'll be slide 22.

3 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay.

4 MR. GROSSMAN: Okay. And so some of the

5 information that we talk about that licensees could

6 consider for physical information would be things like

7 waste characteristics. If my waste has disappeared,

8 no need for intruder assessment to go beyond that, and

9 so you can consider the time frame over which your

10 waste would produce a hazard for an intruder to

11 encounter.

12 Facility Design, do I have barriers in

13 place, et cetera. And site conditions, you know, is

14 it hospitable, or inhabitable environment, those sort

15 of things. Also for the near term, the Guidance

16 focuses on land use and that being acceptable for

17 constraining scenarios.

18 Longer term, as I mentioned, that becomes

19 more problematic and more challenging to do because

20 trying to predict what human land use would be over

21 long-term is difficult, if not impossible. And so the

22 Guidance, it does kind of specify that, that would be

23 used more for the near-term considerations.

24 And then the site-specific scenario should

25 consider changes in things like the site environment
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1 over time, the degradation of engineered barriers over

2 time, those kind of things.

3 So once you've formed your scenarios, and

4 then we would abstract your system or simplify it for

5 mathematical models. And in this case, intruder

6 assessment is similar to PA but probably more

7 simplistic than a PA. It's an onsite assessment and

8 so you're not looking at off-site transport in that

9 case.

10 What you're probably focusing on here are

11 intruder barriers, source term, what are the

12 concentrations that an intruder might encounter.

13 There may be some onsite migration, and then the dose

14 assessment itself.

15 And so we have guidance in terms of

16 extracting each of these areas, and how to represent

17 them in a model or ways that a licensee may take to

18 represent them in a model.

19 And so for like intruder barriers, there's

20 guidance on assessing the capabilities of the

21 barriers, how they'll degrade over time, and

22 uncertainties associated with that degradation in

23 their capabilities.

24 The source term, we kind of envision two

25 main source term scenarios, I'll call it, for lack of
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1 a better term right now, direct contact and then

2 potential for some onsite migration. The onsite

3 migration being like radon diffusion to the surface,

4 and which the intruder never actually contacts the

5 waste but may be exposed to it unknowingly still. And

6 then we get to the dose assessment. So with that, if

7 there aren't any questions, we can go to a break.

8 MEMBER ARMIJO: How about just living

9 there? That's the radon thing, you know. Somebody

10 decided he's going to build a housing development

11 right over the --

12 MR. GROSSMAN: So they never contact the

13 waste, but they say they still --

14 MEMBER ARMIJO: And you recount that they

15 live there forever. Do you have a scenario for that?

16 Would that be something that the depleted uranium is

17 the --

18 MR. GROSSMAN: Right.

19 MEMBER ARMIJO: -- the culprit.

20 (Simultaneous speaking)

21 MR. MCKENNEY: We're focused on annual

22 dose. Even I find now, that over a year that a member

23 of public lives there really does not come into the

24 equation that much, because it's an annual dose,

25 saying it's the contact is --
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1 MEMBER ARMIJO: Okay.

2 MR. MCKENNEY: -- largely, so for an

3 actual individual it doesn't really matter if he lives

4 there for five years, ten years, or anything else.

5 MEMBER ARMIJO: As long as you stayed

6 below the 500?

7 MR. MCKENNEY: Yes, right. Because any

8 long period of extra radon that you'd be getting, so

9 that a dose for that individual would actually go up

10 quite a bit, but not increase your volt during that

11 human lifetime because of the slowing growth of all of

12 the parents.

13 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Or 100 human lifetimes in

14 a row. You remember --

15 (Simultaneous speaking)

16 MR. MCKENNEY: Right, the lifetime dose

17 may be quite a bit different than the annual dose.

18 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Anyway, okay. Well that's

19 a good place to take a break, we're scheduled for

20 about 15 minutes so we'll reconvene at 3:40.

21 (Whereupon, the foregoing matter went off

22 the record at 3:23 p.m. and resumed at 3:41 p.m.)

23 COURT REPORTER: Come to order, please.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you. Okay, who's

25 up? Chris, are you up? Oh, David's up again. David?
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1 Thank you.

2 MR. ESH: Let's change gears now and we'll

3 start talking about the site stability assessment.

4 What you see on slide 23 here is a diagram of the

5 major components of the site stability assessment,

6 which involves the site characterization. So that's

7 where you're looking at the characteristics of your

8 site including the disruptive processes that may

9 affect it, mainly natural disruptive processes.

10 The technical assessment that you may

11 perform to evaluate the stability, and in this

12 Guidance Document we cover the approaches, tools, and

13 models, and associated uncertainty with the

14 assessment.

15 And then you may attempt to mitigate the

16 instability through engineered design, and we give

17 some guidance on developing engineered designs for

18 stability and talk about some long-term

19 considerations. And then how all of these things are

20 integrated or combined with evaluation and monitoring.

21 So the site stability assessment applies

22 to the stability of the waste facility and the site.

23 For something like short-lived waste, you're going to

24 be primarily focused on the stability of the waste,

25 and maybe somewhat the stability of the facility.
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1 For longer-lived waste, then it becomes

2 much more a stability of the site problem, unless you

3 went to a very robust engineered design, but those

4 typically aren't utilized for low-level waste disposal

5 in the present day.

6 Stability is required for 61.44 and what

7 we expect, and it's conveyed in the Guidance, is that

8 people will tailor their analyses to the types of

9 wastes disposed, as I discussed under the first

10 bullet.

11 Now the next three points are important,

12 and I'd like the Committee to think about, and if you

13 have some views, certainly express them or maybe give

14 us some feedback in the future. But one area that we

15 would like some feedback on is the disruptive events

16 cutoff frequency.

17 So in, say the high-level waste program

18 they defined what events you should consider down to

19 a low probability, cutoff frequency of 1E to the minus

20 4 chance of it occurring over the next 10,000 years or

21 implied 1E to the minus 8 per year annual frequency.

22 In this Guidance we didn't specify a

23 numerical value for the cutoff frequency. What we

24 basically say is that, include those events that are

25 probable of course, over your evaluation period
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1 consistent with the type of waste you're disposing of,

2 to unlikely.

3 So that implies a higher cutoff frequency

4 than, say, what was used for Yucca Mountain. And we

5 think that's appropriate because if we do have the

6 intruder assessment performance objective, 61.42, that

7 involves some sort of human activity at the site

8 and/or some form of disturbance, possibly.

9 That form of disturbance results in

10 usually higher concentrations and less dispersion than

11 would be associated with a very low frequency natural

12 event of some sort. So that gives you a kind of a

13 floor of where to set the cutoff frequency for

14 considering disruptive events.

15 MEMBER BLEY: You turned it to Yucca, what

16 did Yucca use? I don't remember.

17 MR. ESH: They used 1E to the minus 4

18 chance of occurring over 10,000 years, or affectively

19 1E to the minus 8 per year annual frequency.

20 MEMBER BLEY: And you just argued that you

21 want something lower than Yucca?

22 MR. ESH: No, higher.

23 MEMBER BLEY: Higher, okay.

24 MR. ESH: Higher, because we have the

25 intruder performance objective that results in direct
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1 disturbance and less dispersion than would be

2 associated with these very low frequency natural

3 events, is kind of the construct that we came up with.

4 MEMBER ARMIJO: David, what are these

5 disruptive events, is that a volcano, massive flood,

6 or?

7 MR. ESH: Yes, I'll show you in the next

8 slide here. The next point is the instability we're

9 recommending is defined by risk, not loss of material.

10 So you could have some situations where maybe you have

11 a large loss of material but you also have low risk.

12 Maybe there's very high dilution

13 associated with the event, for instance. But we do

14 recognize and some stakeholders expressed this in

15 their comments that hey, it's just not reasonable. If

16 you have a site and it's going to be completely

17 destroyed by some process.

18 They didn't come out and say that you

19 can't define the risk, but they said, that should be

20 exclusionary for taking that action. You haven't put

21 the site in a good place if it's going to be massively

22 disrupted.

23 (Off microphone comments)

24 MR. ESH: So for large loss of material,

25 the risk may not be able to be defined, is what we
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1 talk about in the guidance. So your question, what

2 sort of processes are you talking about? Well, in the

3 site stability assessment we are recommending that

4 it's tailored to the type of material you're disposing

5 of and to the particular site.

6 So if you're disposing of short-lived

7 waste or say low concentrations of long-lived waste,

8 then you're much more concerned with the shorter time

9 scales and smaller spatial scales than you're talking

10 about with higher concentrations of long-lived waste,

11 where you're worried about the stability of the site

12 itself, as opposed to stability of the waste or the

13 facility.

14 The types of processes that we're talking

15 about are things related to climate, tectonic, so

16 earthquake type events, faulting, igneous activity, so

17 volcanic activity, but mainly for near surface

18 disposal, the bottom three.

19 Erosion processes, which can be event20 driven, or kind of continual processes, biologic

21 effects, so disturbance of biota for instance,

22 disruption of barrier material for instance, and then

23 climate effects such as glaciation as you go out for

24 longer times.

25 So this figure is in the Guidance
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1 Document, and it's attempting to help risk-inform the

2 site stability assessment so people can tailor it, the

3 types of things they consider, and the time and

4 spatial scales that they consider for their particular

5 problem.

6 So the topics that we discuss in the

7 Guidance are disruptive processes, natural and

8 anthropogenic, what are available tools and models to

9 evaluate site stability, what are some approaches that

10 you can use for the assessment.

11 And in this area we do get a little more

12 prescriptive, we have some steps that you can walk

13 through to try to do the evaluation. We talk about

14 uncertainty, of course. We try to talk about that in

15 all our sections, where applicable.

16 And then there's guidance on engineered

17 barriers, especially engineered barriers for erosion

18 control, because that's one of the primary processes

19 we consider that may be affecting stability. And then

20 we also talk about some long-term considerations.

21 So there's a difference, if you need to

22 demonstrate an erosion control barrier for a few

23 hundred years compared to many thousand years, for

24 instance. You're talking about different problems.

25 And one of the things I would show you is
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1 from this figure in the document, which is taken from

2 NUREG/CR-2642, which shows that under different

3 climate conditions and different conditions at the

4 top, moisture availability, temperature fluctuations,

5 and how, basically organic matter production, you have

6 different processes that are going to really affect

7 your rock durability.

8 And in this case erosion control review is

9 primarily achieved by using durable rock. The types

10 of rocks you select and how you do that evaluation,

11 should be tailored to the types of material you want

12 to dispose of.

13 There's a lot of good, old NUREGs and

14 technical reports and guidance documents on this topic

15 and a variety of other topics, and as I said at the

16 outset, we attempted to evaluate this information and

17 bring forward a lot of it that we thought was useful

18 and important.

19 But ideally that's a much bigger effort.

20 There's a lot of material out there, and if we really

21 wanted to do a great job at it, it's going to be

22 something that we will do in the comprehensive

23 rulemaking. But I do feel that what we have now is a

24 very good product for the limited rulemaking.

25 So then the next section after site
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1 stability analysis that we have is on long term

2 analysis, and I want to make it clear it's only

3 required for the disposal of long-lived waste. And

4 the two analyses types that we're looking for are an

5 analyses of how the design and site are going to limit

6 the long-term impacts.

7 MEMBER BLEY: On the last one, could you

8 come to a conclusion about where you were thinking

9 about setting that limit, you said above, higher than

10 at Yucca?

11 MR. ESH: Oh, I see, the disruptive event

12 cutoff frequency. Yes, we didn't provide a numerical

13 value. What we basically said is, probable to

14 unlikely consistent with the material you're disposing

15 of.

16 So if you have short-lived waste that you

17 could argue, it's basically gone in 500 years, well

18 probable to likely would, in my interpretation would

19 be up to maybe a ten percent chance of occurring over

20 500 years, or ten times 500, one over ten times 500,

21 1 in 5000 type of frequency you would look at for that

22 type of calculation.

23 If you go out to 20,000 years, then you'd

24 be looking at 1 over 20 times ten, or one in 200,000,

25 is that, five even minus five, I believe, cutoff
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1 frequency.

2 MEMBER BLEY: Okay. Because I was

3 thinking of what we do with reactors for risk to

4 people alive today, not out in the future sometime,

5 and LERF I think, dose commission still sits at about

6 ten to minus six per year.

7 MR. ESH: Okay, so it would be somewhat

8 consistent with that.

9 MEMBER BLEY: And that's a bad, I mean

10 that's a bad release. That's very energetic and very

11 large.

12 MR. ESH: Yes, and so this issue comes

13 into play though, when you're dealing with the

14 extended time frames as how, what sort of events do

15 you want people to analyze and what sort of frequency

16 you think is appropriate for them to analyze.

17 MEMBER BLEY: And I was just kind of

18 reflecting on what Sam said earlier and I, whether we

19 totally discount the future, which is hard to buy

20 into, it seems protecting future better than we

21 protect today is a little hard to justify.

22 MR. ESH: Yes, that's a principle in the

23 transgenerational equity literature that you'll see,

24 that you have an obligation to protect the present

25 generation primarily, and then you also have an
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1 obligation to protect future generations, but not at

2 the expense of the present generation.

3 And that becomes very complicated if you

4 have to invest a huge amount of resources today to

5 afford that protection in the future.

6 MEMBER ARMIJO: They make it very clear

7 though, that you're, and I haven't bought into it,

8 it's a moral or legal obligation, but they argue that

9 your obligation is limited to catastrophic. Protect

10 people in the future from catastrophic situations that

11 you've created today.

12 MR. ESH: Yes.

13 MEMBER ARMIJO: And that's not

14 unreasonable. So but from a very low exposure, I

15 don't think that's really consistent with that

16 thinking. So that's where I have a problem with it.

17 Low-level waste, why are you protecting somebody

18 20,000 years out into the future from some limited

19 exposure, low dose of low-level waste. If it creates

20 a burden on present. It just doesn't make sense to

21 me.

22 MR. ESH: I mean, if you were purely

23 looking at the world from a risk perspective, you

24 would argue that almost all of our nuclear-related

25 limits are probably way too low, considering the risks
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1 that we accept in all sorts of other fields and

2 activities.

3 But that certainly is a good comment and

4 certainly in this limited scope rulemaking, we didn't

5 feel we had much ability to do anything drastic in

6 that area. In the more comprehensive rulemaking, it's

7 certainly an issue to discuss, but what you'll find in

8 other waste disposal programs or in other problems is,

9 they'll take it a step further.

10 In some cases they'll say, you have an

11 obligation to protect the future generation the same

12 as today. Not just catastrophic, but you have an

13 obligation to afford the same protection to.

14 MEMBER ARMIJO: And they have no

15 obligation to protect themselves, that what it

16 implies, and I'd say nonsense.

17 MR. ESH: Well I would say --

18 MEMBER ARMIJO: You know, first of all,

19 that's a philosophical point of view.

20 MR. ESH: Yes.

21 MEMBER ARMIJO: And a lot of people might

22 agree with it, a lot of people might disagree with it.

23 But the point is, it's not a law. It's not an NRC

24 policy as far as I can tell.

25 MR. ESH: No, and I think that we would
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1 benefit from, because the waste problems are a little

2 different or a lot different, especially with the time

3 frame, we would benefit from having something like

4 that then we could use to formulate the constructs

5 that we make on these types of problems.

6 So the site stability analysis we covered,

7 disruptive processes, available tools and models, the

8 approaches to the assessment, uncertainty, the

9 engineered barriers, and the long term considerations.

10 Two types of analyses that we expect are

11 analyses of how the design and site limit the long12 term impacts, and then a calculation of the peak

13 annual dose, and this is kind of a transparency with

14 stakeholders' requirement.

15 We think at a minimum, this first type of

16 analyses is your showing how your science and

17 engineering is going to limit the impacts from your

18 action. We don't think that's a high barrier to get

19 over. Do the best that you can based on your current

20 science and technology, and show us how your system is

21 working and your site is working.

22 The second part is calculation of the peak

23 annual dose. We don't assign a limit to it. What we

24 would do if the facility was in NRC space, if we were

25 doing the review and evaluation, is we would consider
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1 these longer term doses in the context of the site

2 environmental assessment.

3 And that way you can put them in the

4 right, you don't have to be obligated to a very low

5 dose value for a long period of time, the risk context

6 that's a lot different than that. You can put things

7 in the proper context and look at all the impacts, and

8 essentially I believe for these longer term things you

9 would want to make some sort of cost-benefit argument

10 as to what you're doing is appropriate.

11 So for the long-term analysis section, we

12 provide guidelines for long-term isolation, so those

13 are things that generally are favorable to achieving

14 waste stability and long-term stability, such as, you

15 know, there are some examples in the literature of

16 some very long-lived near surface environments.

17 And those that are generally hyper-arid,

18 and you want to have low relief, for instance, that's

19 just one example, a couple of features that attribute

20 to long-term isolation. Certainly depth, as I believe

21 Derek mentioned earlier, that's a good way to achieve

22 long-term isolation.

23 The Long-term Analyses section provides

24 the scope of the long term assessment, what should be

25 done in it and the types of analyses. And in it we
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1 discuss barrier and component analyses, so these are

2 types of things you can do to demonstrate how your

3 system is performing, both your engineered barriers

4 and your natural system barriers. And you can do

5 various approaches, one-on, one-off, or different

6 types of factorial analyses to demonstrate how your

7 system is performing.

8 So then moving on, our next section in the

9 Guidance is Other Considerations, and this is where we

10 talk about things like inventory limits, and

11 mitigation, and insignificant quantities. The

12 inventory limits we think is important that it is a

13 method to manage irreducible uncertainties.

14 So if you're getting into one of these

15 situations of like high technical argument or maybe

16 you have sparse data, one way to manage that is to

17 change the amount of material that you're taking.

18 That's a good way to mitigate your uncertainties.

19 Some uncertainties may be irreducible in

20 these types of problems, but the what you do with the

21 inventory is one that's under your control.

22 Mitigation actions that we don't expect, especially

23 for conservative assessments with a good technical

24 basis, but it's not unanticipated that it could occur.

25 Sometimes you get new information, new
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1 scientific and technical information, either in

2 general about how things work, or specifically at a

3 particular site, that may call into question your

4 previous assessment and cause you to need to take some

5 sort of action.

6 In most cases, usually a reassessment

7 technically might be the only mitigation you need, but

8 in rare circumstances you might need to look at

9 removing some material that we would expect and the

10 Guidance talks about, you should do a cost-benefit

11 analysis and look at some things like worker exposures

12 if you were in that sort of situation.

13 And then we think it's useful to define

14 insignificant quantities to help risk-inform the

15 process. Just because you have a few atoms of some

16 material doesn't mean that you necessarily need to be

17 performing a detailed technical analysis of it.

18 So the people do define some insignificant

19 quantities for their particular site, that may be a

20 good practice both operationally and from a regulatory

21 perspective, because for all the effort that we have

22 to spend reviewing something that is insignificant it

23 takes away from the effort that we can place on

24 something that is significant.

25 And I think that's lost when people argue
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1 about small details, and minutiae, and some of these

2 types of problems and reviews is, you simply have to

3 be risk-informed in order to be provide the most

4 protection.

5 So in the Other Considerations section, we

6 provide things like flow charts that, you'll see this

7 when you get to see the Guidance Document. It's not

8 intended to look at in detail on this slide. It's

9 just an example of, we provide tools to help the

10 people using the Guidance use the guidance to

11 facilitate implementation.

12 And then the last section before the

13 Crosswalk section of the Guidance is a section that we

14 call Performance Confirmation. It's basically

15 consolidating the information that you would provide

16 under the requirements listed here to ensure that the

17 facility performs as intended.

18 And basically, technical analyses we

19 expect may be updated during operation, and will be

20 operated at final closure based on our proposed draft

21 rule language. The technical analyses should be

22 updated when significant changes occur.

23 We aren't specifying in the regulation

24 that it needs to be done at a regular interval. At a

25 minimum, it needs to be done if you have some sort of
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1 significant change so that you can justify you're

2 taking material that you should take and you have

3 basis for it.

4 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Or you change your

5 disposal technology --

6 MR. ESH: Or change your disposal --

7 CHAIRMAN RYAN: -- or something like that.

8 MR. ESH: A variety of different things

9 you could do to alleviate the problem. We do place

10 emphasis on performance indicators rather than, say,

11 downstream monitoring in a well. NUREG/CR-6948 was

12 the NUREG that was developed by our research group a

13 few years ago, looking at monitoring of nuclear

14 facilities and especially waste disposal facilities.

15 And for them, there may be significant

16 contamination that could result by the time you

17 observe it in your monitoring well. If you're still

18 doing things at the facility, you want to learn about

19 problems early instead of late, so that you can take

20 some sort of action to mitigate them. So that's what

21 the basis for using performance indicators are.

22 So our conclusions on the Guidance

23 Document is, we feel it's risk-informed, there's a lot

24 of material in there that lets people do the right

25 thing with their analyses and it provides flexibility
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1 when warranted. We don't provide infinite

2 flexibility.

3 There's some things the staff have

4 opinions on about the right way to do certain things,

5 and the Guidance Document says, this is what we think,

6 the way you should do it.

7 We are considering development of

8 consolidated guidance after the second comprehensive

9 rulemaking. That would be a big effort that would

10 have to be budgeted and all those sorts of things.

11 And one thing we felt might be useful,

12 because as was stated, all of this regulation or

13 implementation of this regulation for the operating

14 disposal facilities happens in Agreement States

15 currently, is maybe we should put together a class and

16 training materials to go through some of this.

17 And allow the Agreement States ask all the

18 questions they need besides just sitting there and

19 reading a 160 page document. So we thought that might

20 be a useful thing to do. We haven't done that yet,

21 but that might be a useful thing to do. We'd like to

22 hear your thoughts on it, so I think that's all we

23 have on the Guidance.

24 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Oh absolutely. I think a

25 lot of the Agreement States that have to deal with
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1 this have, obviously limited staff. They usually have

2 one or two folks that have really dedicated their work

3 to the waste site. And, you know, those folks,

4 retired, get better jobs, they come and go, and so

5 it's kind of a constant.

6 PARTICIPANT: What could be a better job?

7 (Simultaneous speaking)

8 (Laughter)

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: But I fully endorse your

10 comment that having something to support the Agreement

11 States, particularly in this transitional learning

12 phase that will come, is critical as well as a great

13 idea. I mean, I think it really has to be done

14 because they'll be floundering. Is nobody not in an

15 Agreement State?

16 PARTICIPANT: Yes.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: So, okay. Path Forward.

18 MS. JACKSON: I'll just sit here. For the

19 Path Forward we have three points, if Stan wants to go

20 through it. We do plan on coming back in September to

21 meet with the full Committee to --

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That's five times the --

23 three times the fun that you're having today.

24 MS. JACKSON: Yes.

25 (Laughter)
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1 (Simultaneous speaking)

2 MEMBER POWERS: You need to think

3 carefully about when you come down here. Because

4 you're going to have to bring people up to speed in a

5 short period of time and things like that. And

6 there's a need to enter strong points early.

7 MS. JACKSON: Thank you, that's a good

8 point.

9 MR. ESH: We thought you would bring them

10 up.

11 MEMBER POWERS: Well, maybe with the

12 appropriate introduction from the Chairman, certainly

13 I can help you do that. But I think there are points

14 that certainly you helped me a lot today. But I think

15 that, that could appear very early in the discussion

16 of what you're trying to do.

17 The kind of conclusion statement that you

18 had that you, flexibility without infinite flexibility

19 and things like that, maybe that ought to show up very

20 early in your presentation so to kind of give them a

21 high sign, so they don't get too lost in the arcane

22 before they understand what you've been trying to do.

23 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, and early on I would,

24 you know, you've got the goals and objectives for this

25 work, and I would say key results to date. And have
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1 that key results to date right up front, and say we're

2 going to go through some of the background of these

3 key results and how we got there, but we wanted to at

4 least give you the outline of those key results --

5 MEMBER POWERS: Get your, your bottom line

6 is, in my mind, a lot stronger than your introduction

7 right now.

8 MS. JACKSON: Okay.

9 MEMBER POWERS: And you don't want to lead

10 that, the full Committee on, it's not a mystery. Hit

11 them with your best shot right up front, and then tell

12 us why you had that best shot, rather than building up

13 to the best shot.

14 MS. JACKSON: Okay, thank you for that.

15 MEMBER ARMIJO: One thing you may have

16 covered but somehow I missed, is the impact that this

17 rulemaking on the existing waste disposal sites, as

18 compared to a brand new site that's going to go into

19 the business.

20 You know, and under what conditions there

21 could be no impact, or if they start accepting let's

22 say depleted uranium, they've got to do something

23 else. And so that would help to put things in

24 perspective, at least for me it would.

25 MS. JACKSON: Okay. Did you want to say
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1 something?

2 MR. MCKENNEY: Oh, for, this is Chris

3 McKenney. Already we have this bias going into the

4 rulemaking, first of all. The State of Utah put into

5 place a rule that required Energy Solutions to create

6 a PA that they had to supply in June of this year to

7 the State of Utah for their, they have a performance

8 assessment covers a lot of these characteristics, a

9 different time line at the time for period of

10 performance.

11 But they do have a PA already in place, or

12 a PA that they've submitted. And the State of

13 Washington's did go back for an EIS in the past time,

14 that they would have to, of course redo an analysis

15 for if they want to take more uranium or depleted

16 uranium, but they did include uranium in that

17 analysis.

18 They went up to 100,000 years for total

19 length of time, 10,000 years point of compliance,

20 period of performance 100,000 years for others, did

21 intruder dose analyses for the site. WCS has just

22 gone through it's original licensing with a peak dose

23 of a 40,000 to 50,000 year time period, which is what

24 their analysis had to do.

25 They did not have significant quantities
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1 of depleted uranium in their original analysis so

2 they'd have to revise that. And I'm not quite up on,

3 eventually exactly what Barnwell tried to do. Oh, I'm

4 sorry about that. So I mean, so for --

5 MEMBER ARMIJO: You might just kind of let

6 people know up front, okay, in your presentation that

7 hey, this is where the impact is going to be, and this

8 is what's currently going on. It would help.

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Yes, that's something that

10 would be very helpful I think for the rest of the

11 Committee up front.

12 MS. JACKSON: Okay. And two more points.

13 We'd like to request a letter from the SRS after the

14 September meeting.

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: No problem.

16 MS. JACKSON: Thank you. Because they

17 planned on having the whole package up to the

18 Commission in early 2012.

19 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Okay.

20 MS. JACKSON: And that ends the staff

21 presentation, thank you for your time.

22 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you all very much

23 for an engaging session. I think it's been a real

24 beneficial conversation with the Subcommittee, and you

25 put a lot of work into organizing it for us today. We
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1 really appreciate it very much.

2 I think it will help us work with you and

3 with the full Committee, and come up with a draft

4 letter that we'll work on at that meeting and finalize

5 during that meeting week. So we'll keep you up to

6 date on our letter writing schedule and plans so that

7 you can --

8 MS. JACKSON: Okay.

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: -- observe that activity

10 as well. We're going on, Dr. Bley, any?

11 MEMBER BLEY: No, nothing. I look forward

12 to seeing the methodology when you get the --

13 MEMBER POWERS: I think I have to say that

14 I was very pleased at what I saw you trying to do in,

15 especially when you're trying to constrain rampant

16 speculation in the longer term. And that you were

17 still allowing good credit for barriers and defenses

18 and things like that.

19 I thought that was a very powerful concept

20 that you were trying to advance. I think I did not

21 appreciate as much before as I do after, that you were

22 working on a limited rulemaking package and that you

23 were constrained on what you could do here.

24 And that emerged as things went along. I

25 think you might want to lay that out pretty clearly at
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1 the beginning with the full Committee, understanding

2 they will not appreciate what that is, and you'll have

3 to explain what you thought the constraints were on

4 that.

5 I think, much of the stuff I like. I

6 mean, there were lots of mysteries to me like, why

7 20,000 years and things like that. You guys could

8 explain that and you're going to have to pick some

9 number, all right 20,000 is the number.

10 But the general strategy of trying to

11 bring risk into this field, but you can't go whole hog

12 because we don't have what the initiator frequencies

13 are and things like that is, and it was pretty

14 interesting. You know, I think, I'm quite favorably

15 impressed with what they have tried to do here, given

16 the constraints that they had.

17 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Excellent.

18 MS. JACKSON: Thank you, the staff has

19 worked very hard.

20 MEMBER POWERS: It shows. It definitely

21 shows that you've thought about these things. I mean

22 just in the way you answered the questions, you didn't

23 treat us as stupid. You kind of explained things as

24 though you'd thought about it broadly, and I was quite

25 pleased by that.
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1 MS. JACKSON: Thank you.

2 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Mr. Ray?

3 MEMBER RAY: Well, this is a learning

4 experience for me. I certainly look forward to

5 supporting the letter to the full Committee when it's

6 developed.

7 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Thank you.

8 MEMBER RAY: Based on --

9 CHAIRMAN RYAN: That you're satisfied with

10 our vigorous examination.

11 MEMBER RAY: What?

12 CHAIRMAN RYAN: If you're satisfied with

13 the Subcommittee's vigorous examination?

14 MEMBER RAY: Oh, well I'd --

15 (Laughter)

16 (Simultaneous speaking)

17 MEMBER RAY: Sufficient is the right word.

18 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Sufficient, okay. Dr.

19 Armijo?

20 MEMBER ARMIJO: Well, you can tell I'm

21 pretty apprehensive about, because I've seen, see a

22 lot of the language and the approaches that remind me

23 of what happened to the Yucca Mountain which I think

24 was excessive in so many ways.

25 But I think you present your case very
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1 well. I don't agree with the 20,000 years, I think

2 the Department of Energy has it right and I think we

3 would have an issue there.

4 And the intruder, I really got to do a lot

5 more about that intruder, you've helped a lot in

6 explaining what they can and they can't do, and the

7 extent to which you feel obligated to protect them.

8 And that's still debatable, but I understand where you

9 are now.

10 And I think your wrap-up slide gives me

11 more comfort than what I felt at the beginning,

12 because I just saw this is getting, we're going to

13 turn low-level waste into the Yucca Mountain model,

14 which is, basically was so open-ended, I don't know

15 how anybody could ever make that thing work. So I

16 think you're ready. There'll be controversy.

17 MS. YADAV: I just want to make the

18 comment. You weren't present at the briefing that we

19 did, I think in June, where we presented our rationale

20 for the period of performance and how we selected?

21 MEMBER ARMIJO: I was here. I think, I'm

22 pretty sure I was here. And I didn't like it then

23 either --

24 (Laughter)

25 (Simultaneous speaking)
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1 CHAIRMAN RYAN: All right. Dr. Armijo,

2 thank you. Let me add my thanks for again, a very

3 productive and I think engaging day. Everybody that

4 presented and those that were helping out, it's a, oh,

5 I'm sorry, we'll do that in a second, but I just want

6 to add my appreciation as well.

7 We do have time for any members of the

8 public or others that wish to make a comment? If

9 there are any folks who would like to make a comment

10 on the record, now is the time. Say none? All right,

11 great, so there's nobody else who wants to make any

12 additional comments at this time?

13 MEMBER ARMIJO: How about the bridgeline,

14 was there anybody?-

15 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Is there anybody on the

16 bridgeline?

17 PARTICIPANT: I don't think anybody

18 checked in.

19 CHAIRMAN RYAN: Nobody checked in at the

20 beginning, that's for sure. So if that's that, again

21 I want to thank the staff for a very engaging day,

22 we've learned a lot more. I've gotten a lot more

23 insight into the detail you presented today which

24 helped me a lot.

25 And it's been a good conversation, so with
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1 that I think we're ready for a productive full

2 Committee briefing and a letter thereafter, so we've

3 kind of met our goal to get prepared for that.

4 MEMBER POWERS: Again, you want to think

5 carefully about that presentation, because it could

6 descend into just lots of debates over what you call

7 minutiae, and miss the really salient things.

8 CHAIRMAN RYAN: All right, with that, if

9 there are no objections, we'll call the Subcommittee

10 meeting to a close. We're adjourned.

11 (Whereupon, the meeting in the foregoing

12 matter was went off the record at 4:16 p.m.)

13

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17

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20

21

22

23

24

25
1

10 CFR Part 61: 

Guidance for the Low-Lev

Waste Rulemaking

Priya Yadav, Chris Grossman, Da

Division of Waste Management and 

Environmental Protection

Office of Federal and State Materials and Envi

Management Programs

Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguar

Meeting of the Radiation Protection and 

Nuclear Materials Subcommittee

August 17, 2011
2

Commission Direction

• SRM-SECY-08-0147 (March 18, 20

– “...(2) to develop a guidance documen

public comment that outlines the paramand assumptions to be used in conducsuch site-specific analyses”
3

Purpose• Provides guidance on conducting 

analyses to demonstrate complianperformance objectives in Part 61– Performance assessment – Intruder assessment – Assessment of stability of dispo– Long-term analyses

• Provides implementing guidance i

rule changes
4

Overview

• Supplement existing guidance:

– NUREG-1573 , “A Performance Assessment M

for Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Fac(October 2000)

– NUREG-1854, “NRC Staff Guidance for Activit

US Department of Energy Waste Determinatio2007)

– “Issuance of Final Branch Technical Position o

Concentration Averaging and Encapsulation” (staff is currently updating)

– NUREG-1757, “Consolidated Decommissionin

(September 2006)
5

Overview

• Consolidates enough information to cond

– Provides crosswalk to other NRC guidance docu

background information
6

Risk-Informed Approach

• Discuss parameters and assumpt

used in analyses in a broad sense than a prescriptive manner

• Allows licensees and applicants fl

address site-specific conditions

• Examples of risk-informed approa

provided throughout document
7

Outline

• Main topics:

i. Introductionii. General Technical Analysesiii. Performance Assessment Modeling iv. Intruder Assessmentv. Stability Assessmentvi. Long-term Analysesvii. Other Considerationsviii. Performance Confirmation

ix. Use of other NRC Guidance Docum
8

General Technical Analysis Considerations

• Scope of the Assessment – features

processes (FEPs) and scenarios.

• General Elements• Period of Performance• Dosimetry• Uncertainty• Peer Review and Expert Elicitation
9

Scope of the Assessment

• FEPs – identification, screening, imp

– Formal or informal– Top-down or bottom-up– Iterative

• May be eliminated based on probab

consequence, or physical reasonab

• FEPs form the basis for scenarios.
10

Scope of the Assessment - Example

Example 2.1: Is my site simple or complex?Simple sites are generally characterized by few disruptive proce

transport pathways, relatively homogeneous geology, high stab

climatic conditions. Complex sites have higher uncertainty driv

processes (individually and with cumulative effects), complex g

pathways such as fractures, decreased stability and more highly 

conditions. When there are more processes that can lead to sig

there will likely be higher complexity in the performance assess

interpretation of site complexity will be influenced by the type 

Long‐lived waste disposal decreases the confidence that stabilit

increases the expected variability in climatic conditions (becaus

of longer timeframes). In addition, the longer timeframes mea

disruptive events will be more likely to be realized.
11

General Elements

• Describe the general technical elem

analyses:– System description– Data adequacy– Data uncertainty– Model support– Model uncertainty– Integration– Model Abstraction

• General elements comprise the fram

of the evaluation.
12

• Risk-informed, performance-based gu

- Discusses flexibility for short-lived w

concentrations of long-lived waste.

- Primary differences are in level of de

justification for the calculations.

- Provides expectations for long-term 

Guidance on Period of Performance
13

Period of Performance –Example

Example 2.3: A facility is expected to receive typical lowgenerated by commercial entities (e.g. limited concentrationwaste). The waste has concentrations of long-lived radionuone tenth of the values listed in Table 1 of § 61.55. Additioexpected to receive waste with long-lived radionuclides thaTable 1 of § 61.55 that is less than the natural soils surrounConclusion: A performance assessment should be codemonstrate compliance with § 61.41, § 61.42, and § 61.44waste is dominated by short-lived activity and long-lived colimited, specialized models and associated model support fprocesses (e.g., cycling of climate) are not necessary.
14

Uncertainty

• Probabilistic preferred, deterministic • For probabilistic, use peak of the me• Limitations of “one off” analyses.• Risk dilution.• Model uncertainty – consideration o

unreasonable and highly speculative should be avoided.

• Data uncertainty example: Transfer 

– Intra- and inter-site variability
15

Performance Assessment Modeling Issues

• Supplements NUREG-1573 PA app

– Source Term– Radionuclide Transport

• Outlines site-specific parameters to 

(e.g., radon, geochemistry, sorption, EBS 

• Recommendations based on staff e• Evolution of the disposal system ov• Parameter and model support
16

Intruder Protection

• Sta• Dra

NUNUNUBT
17

Intruder Assessment

• Estimate potential doses to an 

inadvertent intruder

• Required for § 61.42• PA-like methodology• Qualitatively considers likeliho• Identify site-specific design an

measures (i.e., risk insights)
18

Intruder Assessment

10 CFR 61.42

Performance

Objective is

Not Met

Form Scenario(s)

Conceptualize and

Abstract System

Conduct Consequence

Modeling

Collect Additional

Information and/or

Change Design

Evaluate

Disposal Site

Performance

Update Assumptions

and/or Parameters

Develop Options:

Refi

ne Analysis

Chan

ge Design

Set

Inventory Limits

Evaluate

Options

Pe

Mitiga

Existin

Select 

Compliance with

10 CFR 61.42 is

met.

• Ite• S• R
19

Intruder Assessment:Scenario Analysis

• Evaluate reasonably-foreseeab

resulting in greatest dose for co

• Consider site information• Flexibility to identify reasonably

foreseeable scenarios in the ne

• For longer time frames, default 

limit speculation about human a
20

Intruder Assessment:Scenario Analysis

• Default scenarios

– Intruder-Construction/Discovery– Intruder-Drilling– Intruder-Agriculture– Intruder-Well

• Hypothetical constructs• Provide reasonable bounds• Limit speculation about human activ• May not be appropriate at all sites
21

Intruder Assessment:Scenario Analysis

• Site-specific scenarios• Account for :

– Physical Information

• Waste Characteristics• Facility Design• Disposal Practices• Site Conditions

– Cultural Information

• Land Use

• Consider changes over time
22

Intruder Assessment:Model Abstraction

• Intruder Barriers

– Inhibit contact with waste and limit exp– Assess capabilities, degradation, and – Risk-informed

• Source Term

– Estimate concentrations accessible to – Direct contact vs. On-site migration

• On-site Migration• Dose
23

Site Stability Assessment
24

Site Stability Assessment

• Stability of waste, facility, and site.• Stability is required for § 61.44.

• Tailor analyses to types of waste dis• Disruptive events cutoff frequency – 

events that are probable to unlikely the compliance period.

• Instability defined by risk, not loss of • For large loss of material, risk may n

be defined. 
25

Site Stability Assessment
26

Site Stability Assessment

• Topics covered include:

– Disruptive processes– Available tools and models– Approaches to the assessment– Uncertainty– Engineered barriers– Long-term considerations
27

Site Stability Assessment

Figure 5-3 Macroscale Relationship Between ClimaEnvironments, and Rock Weathering Agents: OccurrencFunction of Climate (NUREG/CR-2642)
28

Long-Term Analyses

• Only required for disposal of long-liv• Two types of analyses:

– Analyses of how the design and s

term impacts

– Calculation of peak annual dose 

with stakeholders)
29

Long-Term Analyses

• Guidelines for long-term isolation• Scope of the long-term assessment• Types of analyses• Barrier and component analyses

– One-off– One-on– Factorial analyses (full or partial)
30

Other Considerations

• Inventory limits:

– Iventory limits is a method to man

irreducible uncertainties

• Mitigation actions:

– Not expected for conservative as

with strong technical basis

• Insignificant quantities:

– Useful to define to risk-inform the 
31

Other Considerations

[1] Site characterization, Collect data 

perfor

and in

f

[2] Complete 

performance 

period analyses 

Contain 

longlived 

waste? 

yes 

Mitigate uncertainties

Establish inventory limits - g

or 

Revise design - go to [1] 

or 

go to [1]

Results 

> 10% of 

compliance 

period PO’s? 

yes 

no

Uncertainties 

acceptable? 

yes 

no 

• Guidance provides 

flowcharts to step through.

• Intended to facilitate 

implementation of the guidance.
32

Performance Confirmation

• Various requirements are provided t

facility performs as intended [§ 61.7(

§ 61.12(l); § 61.28, § 61.53(d)].

• Technical analyses may be updated 

operation and at final closure.

• Technical analyses should be updat

significant changes occur.

• Emphasis placed on performance in
33

Conclusions

• Guidance is risk-informed.• Guidance provides flexibility.• Staff considering development of co

guidance after second (comprehensrulemaking.

• Development of training materials (c

considered.
10 CFR Part 61: 

Stakeholder Comments on the P

Proposed Rule Languag

Andrew Carrera

Division of Intergovernmental Liaison and Ru

Office of Federal and State Materials and Envi

Management Programs

Andrew.Carrera@nrc.gov, (301) 415-10

Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguar

Meeting of the Radiation Protection and 

Nuclear Materials Subcommittee

August 17, 2011
Purpose of rulemaking

• SRM-SECY-08-0147:

– Require site-specific analysis for disposal of large – Specify criteria needed for analysis

• SRM-SECY-10-0043:

– Incorporate blending issue into the existing rule• Develop supporting guidance

DU

+ Blending
Proposed Amendments to 

Part 61 Regulations• Remain focused on limited scope rulema• Site-specific analyses: 1. Performance assessment — to demonstrate compliance with 

objective for protection of the general population from release

2. Intruder assessment — to demonstrate compliance with the p

protection of inadvertent intruders (§ 61.42)

3. Long-Term analysis — to demonstrate how the design of the f

potential long-term radiological impacts (§ 61.13 (e))

4. Update analyses at facility closure — to be updated and includ

to amend the license for closure (§ 61.28 and § 61.52)
Proposed Amendments to 

Part 61 Regulations (continued)• Other supporting changes

1. Concepts, Definitions, TEDE.

• No explicit reference to DU or blended wa
Stakeholder Involvement 

• Preliminary proposed rule language and t

documents published for stakeholder comwww.regulations.gov web site on May 3rd

• May 18th public meeting. • Comment period ended on June 18th.

• Some stakeholders also presented their v

ACRS meetings on June 23rd and July 13
Stakeholder Commen
Stakeholder Comments 

• 15 Comment letters received.• Staff reviewed the comments and groupe

nine issues.

• Issues considered are:

– Performance assessment– Intruder assessment– Long-term analysis– Period of performance– Agreement State compatibility– Feasibility of near surface disposal– Commission direction (SRM)– Rule language– Waste stream neutral approach
Stakeholder Comments 

(continued)• Performance assessment requirement

– TEDE. – Should exclude radon exposures.– Should include PA maintenance plan.– Uncertainties. 

• Intruder assessment requirement

– Support of intruder dose assessment requirement.

– Intruder dose assessment scenario is burdensome.

– Suggests 100 mrem and even 25 mrem to be consistent 

– Intruder barrier.

• Long-term analysis

– A higher dose limit for 20K years and after (e.g.100 mrem– Eliminating definition of long-lived waste.– How to implement requirement.
Stakeholder Comments 

(continued)• Period of performance

– Support for 1K, 10K, 20K, and peak dose period of comp

– Limited technical support for other period of compliance.

– 20K places unnecessary burden to facility that accepts on

– Should be in guidance.

• Agreement State compatibility

– Strict compatibility level vs. flexibility.

• Feasibility of near surface disposal

– Propose minimum depth disposal requirement.– Question appropriateness of disposing of DU at near-surf

– Proposed limited changes are not protective of public hea
Stakeholder Comments 

(continued)• Commission direction (SRM)

– Proposed rulemaking is more consistent with a “compreh

61”.

– Objection to DU as Class A waste.

• Rule language

– Language in §§ 61.7(a)(1), 61.7(c)(2), and 61.55(a)(6) is 

shortened, deleted, or clarified.

• Waste stream neutral approach

– Support and disapprove of waste stream neutral approac– Blended waste should not trigger site-specific analyses re
Revisions Being Conside

Proposed Rule Langu
Revisions Based on 

Comments
Revisions Based on 

Comments (continued)
Revisions Based on 

Comments (continued)
Revisions Based on 

Comments (continued)
Revisions Based on 

Comments (continued)
10 CFR Part 61: 

Site-Specific Analyses for Demo

Compliance with Subpart C Perf

Objectives

Deborah Jackson, Deputy Director

Division of Intergovernmental Liaison and R

Office of Federal and State Materials and Env

Management Programs

Deborah.Jackson@nrc.gov, (301) 415-7

Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguar

Meeting of the Radiation Protection and 

Nuclear Materials Subcommittee

August 17, 2011
Why are we here 

today:

• Provide update of Part 61 rulemaking

– Inform ACRS regarding stakeholder’s comments an

rule text changes

– Staff has modified its approach to enhance flexibility– Brief ACRS on draft guidance document

• ACRS briefings

– June 2011 and July 2011

• Commission directions

– Proceed with a rulemaking to require a site specific p

assessment prior to the disposal of significant quantitie

blended waste 
Today’s topics and 

presenters:

Topic P

Draft Proposed Rule: Analysis of CommentsReceived on Preliminary Rule Language

AD

Discussion: Guidance for ConductingSite-Specific Analyses for Part 61

PDCGD

Path Forward D

F
10 CFR Part 61: 

Path Forward

Deborah Jackson, Deputy Director

Division of Intergovernmental Liaison and R

Office of Federal and State Materials and Env

Management Programs

Deborah.Jackson@nrc.gov, (301) 415-7

Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguar

Meeting of the Radiation Protection and 

Nuclear Materials Subcommittee

August 17, 2011
Path Forward

• In September, staff will brief ACRS full co• Staff requests letter from ACRS following 

Committee meeting.

• Staff expects to send the proposed rule p

Commission at the beginning of 2012.