Official Transcript of Proceedings 

 NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION 

Title: Public Meeting on the NRC Staff's Draft 

Supplement to the Environmental Impact 

Statement for the Proposed Geologic 

Repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada 

Docket Number: N/A 

Location: Las Vegas, Nevada 

Date: September 15, 2015 

Work Order No.: NRC-1891 Pages 1-109 

NEAL R. GROSS AND CO., INC. 

 Court Reporters and Transcribers 

 1323 Rhode Island Avenue, N.W. 

 Washington, D.C. 20005 

 (202) 234-4433
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

 NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION 

 + + + + + 

PUBLIC MEETING ON THE NRC STAFF’S DRAFT SUPPLEMENT TO 

THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT 

FOR THE PROPOSED GEOLOGIC REPOSITORY 

AT YUCCA MOUNTAIN, NEVADA 

 + + + + + 

 TUESDAY 

 SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 

 + + + + + 

The Public Meeting was convened in the 

Ambassador Ballroom of the Embassy Suites Convention 

Center, 3600 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, Nevada at 7:00 

p.m., Chip Cameron, Facilitator, presiding. 

PRESENT: 

CHIP CAMERON, Facilitator 

ADAM GENDELMAN, Office of the General Counsel 

CHRISTINE PINEDA, Office of Nuclear Material 

Safety and Safeguards 
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JAMES RUBENSTONE, Office of Nuclear Material 

Safety and Safeguards 
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 P R O C E E D I N G S 

MR. CAMERON: Good evening, everyone. My 

name is Chip Cameron, and I’d like to welcome you to 

the public meeting tonight. 

And our subject for the public meeting 

tonight is a draft supplemental environmental impact 

statement that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has 

prepared on groundwater issues related to Yucca 

Mountain. And it’s my pleasure to serve as your 

facilitator tonight and, in that role, I’m going to 

try to help you all to have a productive meeting. And 

we’re not going to use a lot of acronyms with you 

tonight, but two that you will hear are EIS for 

environmental impact statement and NRC for Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission. 

And I just want to go over some items of 

the meeting process so that you know what to expect 

tonight and I’d like to tell you about the objectives 

of the meeting, the format for the meeting, some simple 

ground rules to help us have a productive meeting, and 

to introduce the NRC staff that are going to talk to 

you. 

In terms of objectives, there’s two primary 

objectives; and one is to ensure that the NRC staff 
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gives you clear information on the EIS process and also 

on some of the information in the draft EIS. 

The second objective is to allow you the 

opportunity, give the NRC an opportunity, to listen 

to any comments and concerns that you might have on 

the draft EIS. And I’m emphasizing that word, draft, 

because it’s not going to be finalized until the NRC 

considers all the comments that it gets on the draft. 

 Comments from this meeting, a meeting at Amargosa 

Valley -- and I’m hoping that I’m pronouncing that 

correctly -- on Thursday, and a meeting that was held 

in Washington, DC on September 3rd, and written comments 

that the NRC has asked for. 

So it won’t be finalized until all of that 

happens. And what’s related to a third objective, is 

that the NRC does these meetings before the formal 

comment period closes. And the NRC staff, who I will 

introduce in a minute, will tell you when that comment 

period closes. But they have these meetings before 

the comment period closes so that you can get some 

information that might help you to comment if you want 

to send in a written comment; and not only what you 

hear during this formal part of the meeting, but what 

you’ve learned out at the poster session beforehand 
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or what you might learn talking to the NRC staff after 

the formal part of the meeting. 

And I should say that anything that you 

say tonight is going to have as much weight as any 

written comment. Okay? And you should note that if 

you were talking to the NRC staff during the poster 

session, if you want that -- what you said to them to 

be on the record, okay, to be formally considered by 

the NRC, then you should say it here on -- on the record. 

 

And format, we really have three segments 

to the meeting; and one is going to be presentations 

by the NRC staff. The second segment is we’re going 

to see if there’s any clarifying questions on the EIS 

process that we can answer. That will be a short 

segment. And then we’re going to go to the most 

important part of the evening, which is to hear from 

all of you. And I have a set of cards that people signed 

when they came in indicating that they wanted to make 

a formal comment. And when we get to that final 

segment, which will take most of the meeting, I’ll ask 

you to come up here to give your formal comment. 

Now, I heard that some people had taken 

cards, they wanted to speak, but they didn’t leave the 
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card with us. And if you have a card that you have 

with you and you wanted to speak, if you could just 

raise your hand, Miriam will come and get that from 

you. Okay? 

But at any rate, we’ll have you come up 

here and give us your comments. And the NRC isn’t going 

to be engaging in a discussion with you after you give 

your comment, because we probably would never ever get 

out of here with that. And so they won’t be engaging 

in a conversation, but they will be listening carefully 

and they’ll consider your comments in preparing the 

final EIS. And they’re going to hear your comments 

here, and so after the meeting, if you’re around, they 

might come up and ask you, talk to you about the comments 

that you -- that you gave. 

In terms of ground rules, I would just ask 

that only one person speak at a time. And most 

importantly so that whoever has the floor at the moment 

can -- we can give our full attention to that person, 

but we also want to get what I call a clean transcript. 

 Our stenographer Jennifer Gerold is right here and 

if only one person is speaking, then Jennifer will know 

who that is and that will be clear on the transcript. 

 And that transcript will be publicly available within 
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a few days, but we’ll clarify how long it will take 

for that to be available. But that’s the NRC’s record 

of the meeting and that’s your record of the meeting. 

 

Second ground rule, I’m going to ask you 

to be crisp and concise in your comments tonight. And 

we have a lot of people who want to talk, which 

is -- which is fantastic that we have people who want 

to comment, but I want to make sure that we get to 

everybody, so I’m going to ask you to follow a 

five-minute guideline, nothing untoward or terrible 

is going to happen to you if you’re a little bit over 

five minutes, but I would like you to follow that 

guideline. And luckily, there is a written comment 

period available where you can submit a written comment 

that amplifies on what you said here in your five 

minutes. And I apologize in advance if I have to ask 

anybody to just wrap up so that we can go on to the 

next person. 

And one ground rule, and I almost don’t 

need to mention it, but I would just like all of us, 

everybody, the NRC staff, me, all of you, to just be 

courteous to one another. You may hear viewpoints 

tonight that differ from your viewpoints on these 
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issues, and I just would ask you to respect the person 

who’s giving that -- that particular comment. 

And the focus of this meeting is on this 

draft supplemental EIS, which is on groundwater issues. 

 And the NRC staff will explain what’s in there. And 

I know that there are broader concerns about Yucca 

Mountain. This has been a long and complicated process 

and some of us are still here working in this vineyard. 

 And the NRC staff is going to try to put this draft 

supplemental EIS on groundwater into context for you 

with this long history on Yucca Mountain. 

And with that let me introduce the NRC 

staff. We have Jim Rubenstone here. He’s going to 

give you a welcome in a minute. He’s the acting 

director of the Yucca Mountain Directorate at the U.S. 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Rockville, Maryland 

in the Office of Nuclear Material, Safety, and 

Safeguards. 

Then we’re going to get to the heart of 

the matter with Christine Pineda, who is the senior 

project manager in Jim’s Yucca Mountain Directorate, 

and she’s going to tell you about the draft EIS. 

We also have Adam Gendelman here at the 

table and he is the staff counsel from the General 
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Counsel’s Office at NRC. So he’ll be at the table. 

And I would just say that, you know, the 

emergency exits are well marked if there is any type 

of an emergency. And there is something called -- that 

the NRC calls a feedback form. Okay? And this helps 

the NRC to try to improve public meetings that it does 

and it’s already franked so that you can fill it out 

and put it in the mail if you want. And if you have 

a comment on the substantive aspect of this, you can 

put this on the feedback form too and mail it in or 

you could fill it out tonight and leave it here. 

And I think I’ll get off and I’ll turn it 

over to Jim. 

MR. RUBENSTONE: Thank you, Chip. 

First of all, let me welcome everyone this 

evening to our second public meeting on the NRC’s draft 

supplement to the Department of Energy’s environmental 

impact statement for a geologic repository for spent 

nuclear fuel and high-level waste at Yucca Mountain. 

 I know that’s a mouthful. 

As Chip said, I’m Jim Rubenstone. I’m the 

acting director of the Yucca Mountain Directorate and 

NRC’s Office of Nuclear Materials, Safety, and 

Safeguards. 
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Again, welcome to all who have come. We 

appreciate you coming out. Comments are an important 

part of the process. Welcome to our elected officials, 

Mayor Goodman, Representative Titus, and we have some 

other elected officials with us as well. 

As Chip said, we will be having another 

meeting on Thursday at Amargosa Valley. 

As you know, NRC released this draft 

supplement for public comment. The comment period 

began on August 21st, and it was originally for a period 

of 60 days. In response to requests from the State 

of Nevada, from Inyo County and from several other 

groups and individuals, we have added an additional 

month to the comment period, so the comment period now 

closes on November 20th. 

This allows, in our opinion, we have ample 

time for comments on this relatively limited document 

while still keeping to our obligation to complete the 

supplement in a reasonable time and within a fairly 

limited budget. We have scheduled an additional public 

teleconference to receive comments. That will be 

November 12th in addition to the already scheduled 

teleconference, which is October 15th. If you picked 

up outside, we have a handout that has all the 
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information about the commenting opportunities. 

As I mentioned, public comments are very 

important to the NRC and one of our purposes today is 

to accept your comments. We want to make sure that 

they’re properly recorded so they can be addressed by 

the staff. And today’s meeting is being recorded and 

will be transcribed, as Chip mentioned. 

And let me also remind you that in addition 

to providing comments at our meetings, we’re happy to 

accept written comments by mail to the NRC or through 

the regulations.gov website. The regulations.gov 

website also allows you to either enter the comments 

in or upload a document if you would like to rather 

do it that way then, with a prepared statement. 

The handouts that we have outside, as I 

mentioned, we have one about how to comment, we have 

one that gives some background on the Yucca Mountain 

project, one which summarizes the recently completed 

safety evaluation reports that the staff did. All of 

those handouts, the posters that we have in the back, 

the meeting summary for this meeting and the previous 

meetings and such are available on the NRC’s website. 

 If you go to the www.nrc.gov home page, there’s a 

drop-down that will get you to high-level radioactive 
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waste disposal, and just follow that through to key 

documents. 

As Chip mentioned, we have the second 

meeting this week in Amargosa Valley. The presentation 

will be the same. We’ll have the same handouts, but 

of course we’re looking for the opportunity to get the 

comments provided by those attending that meeting. 

So that’s all I have to say in the way of 

opening remarks. I’d like to now turn it over to 

Christine Pineda, who is a senior project manager in 

our Yucca Mountain Directorate. She’ll introduce the 

draft supplement and the process for providing comment. 

 

MS. PINEDA: Hello, everyone. Thank you, 

Jim. Good evening. I’m Christine Pineda. I just 

wanted to make, really quickly, a quick correction that 

the posters will be on the website next week. They’re 

not up there just yet, but the handouts are there. 

So as Jim mentioned, tonight I will be 

describing to you the environmental review process for 

the Yucca Mountain repository, the NRC’s environmental 

review process, and describing the content of the draft 

supplement that we published for public comment. So 

first I will give you some background about the 
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environmental review process and go over some of the 

activities and events that have occurred over the past 

several years. And then I will talk about the draft 

supplement, and then we’ll have an opportunity for you 

to ask clarifying questions about our process, and then 

we’ll go to the public comment section of the meeting. 

 

So the environmental review -- NRC’s 

environmental review process is defined primarily -- or 

defined by the National Environmental Policy Act. And 

that act requires that federal agencies consider the 

environmental consequences of their proposed actions. 

 And the NRC puts out environmental documents for its 

licensing actions and also for its rules and 

regulations. 

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires that 

the NRC -- that the Department of Energy produce the 

environmental impact statement for the proposed 

repository and it requires that the NRC adopt the 

Department of Energy’s EIS to the extent practical. 

And just to give you some background, in 

the -- under the National Environmental Policy Act 

some -- if two agencies have proposed actions that are 

very similar, they can choose to -- one agency could 
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choose to adopt another agency’s environmental impact 

statement, but in this situation, it’s a requirement 

by the law. 

Some of the activities that have -- the 

major activities that have occurred over the past 

several years. The Department of Energy produced its 

final environmental impact statement for the repository 

in 2002 and it submitted that EIS with its site 

recommendation to the President in 2002. And then in 

2008, the Department of Energy produced a supplemental 

environmental impact statement that supplemented the 

entire 2002 EIS. And it submitted the 2002 and 2008 

EISs with its license application to the NRC in June 

of 2008. The NRC staff reviewed the Department of 

Energy environmental impact statements in 2008 and 

issued what we call its adoption determination report 

in September of 2008. 

The staff determined in that report that 

the EISs could be adopted, but that supplementation 

was needed. And that report describes the scope of 

the needed supplementation and the key points are that 

anaysis, more analysis was needed. The NRC staff 

determined that more analysis was needed to assess the 

groundwater flow environment beyond the regulatory 
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compliance point; and to assess the potential 

groundwater impacts beyond that point; and also to look 

at how the groundwater flows and eventually reaches 

the ground surface; and what the environmental impacts 

could be at those locations, either at areas were 

groundwater is pumped or areas of natural discharge; 

and that the analysis needed to include -- account for 

radiological and non-radiological contaminants. 

You may be wondering why the NRC staff is 

supplementing the Department of Energy’s EISs. In 2008 

when we produced our adoption determination report, 

we -- at that time, we requested that the Department 

of Energy develop the -- prepare the necessary 

supplement, but the Department of Energy at that time 

deferred to the NRC to prepare the supplement. 

Subsequently, in 2011, the Commission -- as a result 

of not having further appropriations for the project, 

the Commission directed the NRC staff and the Atomic 

Safety and Licensing Board to cease activities related 

to the project. So the hearing activities that were 

going on as well as the technical activities were 

stopped. 

But in 2013 a Court of Appeals decision 

in Washington, DC directed that the NRC should continue 
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work, and the Commission directed the staff to complete 

its safety evaluation report, which it completed in 

January of this year, and also to do the supplement. 

 And we did -- the NRC did request, again, that the 

Department of Energy prepare the supplement. And, 

again, the Department of Energy deferred to the NRC. 

 So this -- so we began work on the supplement in the 

spring after completing the SER. 

The scope of the supplement, as I 

mentioned, is described in the adoption determination 

report and it is limited, because the NRC staff found 

that the EISs otherwise could be adopted. So, as I 

mentioned before, it evaluates the potential impacts 

on groundwater and the impacts associated with the 

discharge or pumping of groundwater to the ground 

surface for radiological and non-radiological 

contaminants. 

The potentially affected area is the area 

of the groundwater flow path that could include 

contaminant releases from the repository. And, as I 

mentioned, that focuses on the groundwater flow path 

beyond the regulatory compliance location. And I’m 

referring to the post-closure regulatory compliance 

location, which is approximately at 11 miles south of 
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the site. 

So groundwater flows -- beyond the 

regulatory compliance point, groundwater flows through 

the Amargosa Desert and then, ultimately, flows to the 

Furnace Creek and Middle Basin areas of Death Valley. 

 And then, of course, there are points where the 

groundwater reaches -- reaches the ground surface at 

springs or it can be pumped, such as the pumping that 

occurs in Amargosa Farms. 

This is the Death -- a map of the Death 

Valley regional groundwater flow system, which is a 

model of the United States Geological Survey. And this 

is the model of groundwater flow for this region that 

the NRC staff used to assess groundwater flow impacts 

associated with the repository. And the map represents 

the area that’s encompassed by the model. 

The resources, the impacts -- we looked 

at impacts on certain resources. And the resources 

that we determined could be affected by potential 

groundwater contamination are, of course, the 

groundwater itself -- and in the supplement, we 

referred to the aquifer environment, because it’s not 

just the groundwater, it’s the host material for the 

groundwater, whether it’s bedrock or smaller particles 
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before you reach the bedrock. And that’s because 

depending on what the environment is that the 

groundwater is traveling through and depending on what 

the contaminants are, contaminants may flow with the 

groundwater or they may be slowed down by the other 

materials in the aquifer. 

We also looked at impacts on soils at the 

locations where groundwater could discharge to the 

ground surface and impacts -- potential impacts on 

public health or people who might be exposed to the 

soils or the groundwater at those locations, as well 

as impacts on the vegetation and wildlife at those 

locations and the potential for disproportionate 

impacts on minority or low-income populations if those 

populations exist where there are either -- either 

pumping locations or natural discharge locations. 

Key aspects or key elements of the analysis 

are, of course as I mentioned, we looked at impacts 

from radiological and non-radiological contaminants 

and we looked at the impacts for a period of one million 

years past repository closure, trying to determine at 

what point in that time period the contaminants would 

reach their greatest concentration in the groundwater 

or at the surface discharge locations. And our 
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analysis builds on the Department of Energy’s model 

of repository performance that the NRC staff assessed 

in its safety evaluation report. And you may know it 

as the total system performance assessment. 

To capture a good range of potential 

impacts we -- there are two key variables, and one is 

the groundwater pumping. In one case, we assumed that 

there would be pumping for irrigation at Amargosa Farms 

and we assumed in this case that all the contaminants 

that would be released from the repository would be 

drawn up through that pumping at that location. And 

that’s a conservative assumption. 

In another case, we assumed that there 

would be no pumping and in that case all the groundwater 

would flow to the natural discharge locations. And 

we assumed for each discharge location or each potential 

discharge location that’s similar to the pumping 

location, that all the contaminants would be -- would 

reach that location. 

And we looked at two different climate 

scenarios. One is the hot and dry climate, which is 

similar to today’s climate and that also would encompass 

a warmer climate that we might see in the nearer term, 

and also a cooler and wetter climate, which may be a 
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climate that could be observed in the -- further into 

the future. And a cooler and wetter climate would 

produce more precipitation, which then would lead to 

more water entering the groundwater system, so that 

could affect the concentration of contaminants; and 

also it could also affect how -- along with the 

groundwater pumping, it could affect where groundwater 

reaches the surface. 

And this relates to the next slide, which 

is there are some locations where we call them paleo 

discharge locations or prehistoric spring discharge 

locations that were formerly springs greater than 

30,000 years ago. And they’re now not active, but in 

a situation of a cooler and wetter climate they could 

become active again. So these are potential discharge 

locations. 

The supplement concludes that the 

potential direct and indirect impacts from the 

repository would be small. And that means that, the 

NRC’s definition of small is that the environmental 

effects would not be detectable or would be so minor 

that they would not noticeably alter any important 

attribute of the resources that we analyzed the impacts 

for in the supplement. Also that potential cumulative 
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impacts would be small. 

And cumulative impacts are the impacts of 

the repository itself when taken together with 

potential impacts from other activities in the region, 

such as potential impacts from what we used to know 

as the Nevada Test Site. And these impact conclusions 

are consistent with the NRC staff’s understanding of 

how contaminants would move through the aquifer. 

So the next steps are, as Jim mentioned, 

we have a public meeting in Amargosa Valley in Nye County 

and that’s on Thursday at the same time also with an 

open house. And then we will have two teleconferences, 

one on October 15th, and one on November 12th from 2:00 

to 4:00 p.m. Eastern. And the comment period closes 

November 20th and we should have -- we will then be 

reading the comments we’ve received and developing 

responses to those comments. And the responses will 

appear in an appendix to the final supplement. 

So with that we will now have an opportunity 

for clarifying questions. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, 

Christine. Thank you, Jim. 

We do have some time for clarifying 

questions on the process and let’s go to Bob, Bob 
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Halstead. 

MR. HALSTEAD: I have a question about the 

definition of small as it applies to impacts. 

Looking at the impact statement on the 

continued storage rule and other documents, small has 

been defined in a variety of ways in the NRC NEPA 

documents. And the definition of small that we’ve seen 

also uses the phraseology that small means that the 

expected radiological doses are within the limits 

established by the regulations. So are there -- are 

there a variety of definitions of small in the NRC 

regulations? Because I did check the other EISs that 

those of us who work on these issues are familiar with. 

 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Adam, are we going 

to go to you for that one? 

MR. GENDELMAN: Okay. Thanks for the 

question. The definition of small is as used in NRC 

guidance on the preparation of environmental documents. 

 It’s NUREG 1748. I don’t know if that’s helpful, but 

that’s where the term is used -- is defined. 

MR. HALSTEAD: You know, we won’t resolve 

this tonight, all I’m telling you is if you look at 

other very recent and final EISs, you’ll find a 
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different definition of small impacts. And it does 

not necessarily mean that they’re inconsequential, it 

means that they are below the thresholds established 

by the regulations of the NRC, or in this case the EPA. 

 

MR. RUBENSTONE: I don’t think there’s any 

contradiction in the definitions that are used. I 

think we’re trying to use the consistent one, as Adam 

noted, that’s from our guidance for NMSS EIS documents. 

 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Anybody else with a 

clarifying question on the process? And thank you, 

Bob, for that question. 

Yes, sir. 

MR. MACK: Good evening. My question is 

I really didn’t understand the relationship between 

the NRC and the Department of Energy and how one agency 

can defer to the other agency. Does that mean, like, 

they don’t want to do it or they don’t have the budget 

or they don’t have the staff, or how does that get handed 

off? 

MR. CAMERON: Can we explain that, either 

Jim or Christine? 

MR. RUBENSTONE: I’ll take a shot at it. 
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MR. CAMERON: Okay. 

MR. RUBENSTONE: The Yucca Mountain 

situation is a little bit -- maybe the word unique does 

apply in this sense, because the Nuclear Waste Policy 

Act sets specific requirements on how the environmental 

pol -- environmental documents would be prepared. DOE 

followed through with as it was described, going through 

their initial final EIS and then the supplement issued 

in 2008. The situation that evolved subsequent to 

2000 -- the 2010, 2011 time frame, I think it’s safe 

to say, was not fully anticipated by the Nuclear Waste 

Policy Act. 

In those conditions, DOE basically had the 

first responsibility to prepare that, but if DOE chose 

not to, then in order to move forward with potentially 

the eventual hearings, it was incumbent upon NRC staff 

to prepare the supplementation. 

So I think this is a somewhat out of the 

ordinary situation, but it’s fully within and is 

recognized within NRC’s regulations as applied to this, 

that the staff could provide the supplementation if 

needed. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. 

Anybody else have a clarifying question 
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on process? 

Okay. Thank you. Let’s go to public 

comment. And I’m going to call three or four names 

so you know two to anticipate. And we’re going to start 

with Congresswoman Titus, okay, and then we’ll go to 

Mayor Goodman, Senator Bryan and Senator Parks. 

Congresswoman. 

CONGRESSWOMAN TITUS: I was taking a lot 

of notes, so I hope that I can follow this. 

First, I thank the NRC for holding this 

public hearing. It’s very important that they hear 

from the people in Nevada what our concerns are. And 

I thank all of you for coming out on a Tuesday night 

here in the heart of District 1 to express those 

concerns, especially Mayor Goodman, who has been a great 

partner in mounting opposition to Yucca Mountain and 

Senator Bryan, who has worked on this issue for many 

years. 

I represent Nevada’s 1st District and I’m 

a longtime resident of southern Nevada, so I’m here 

to speak in opposition to reviving the failed Yucca 

Mountain project and also the NRC’s wasteful, 

politically motivated, court ordered exercise in 

developing this supplemental EIS. Yucca Mountain 
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remains an unstable site for a geologic depository and 

this supplemental EIS does nothing to ameliorate the 

many structural, geological, or logistical concerns 

associated with this boondoggle. So I want to repeat: 

 There’s nothing in this supplemental report that 

changes those facts. 

Let me also say that while I appreciate 

them giving us an additional month, I’m very 

disappointed that the NRC rejected the State of Nevada’s 

simple request for an additional 60 days for public 

comment. This is just too important of an issue to 

short-circuit. There’s a lot to be discussed, a lot 

that we need to study. And just to dismiss this routine 

request for a little additional time reinforces 

Nevada’s feelings that you just want to ram and jam 

it down our throat regardless. 

Some of the additional factors that I think 

are important to note is that, as Ms. Pineda said, this 

second supplemental study is based on previous models 

and its estimates and its studies are based on things 

that have been in previous models. They are not new 

information and they are not independently derived, 

so that makes it suspect to start with. 

Third, the NRC itself recognizes the fact 
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that Yucca Mountain can’t move forward without the land 

and water rights granted to them by the State of Nevada 

and, thankfully, our governors over time have refused 

to capitulate on that. 

And, finally, since 2009, Congress has not 

appropriated any money for the continuation of this 

project. And more recently, the courts have stopped 

the payment of the surcharge from the power companies 

to subsidize the depository, so I don’t know how you’re 

going to pay for it. 

You have heard over the years, many of you, 

we have been together in this fight, make the simple 

arguments of why this is a bad idea. We don’t have 

a single nuclear power plant in Nevada. We don’t 

generate any of this waste, yet nearly all the materials 

from all the plants from California to Connecticut are 

going to come right here through the heart of Las Vegas 

to go out to this disastrous repository if it comes 

to fruition. 

Also, the plans for Yucca Mountain utilize 

unproven technologies to transport this hazardous 

material and it puts millions at risk of exposure to 

deadly levels of radiation as it travels across the 

country on the highways and byways, through 
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neighborhoods, by churches, by schools, exposing people 

along the way. 

Third, Las Vegas is a major destination 

center, a tourist attraction, a convention area. We 

attracted 42 million visitors last year. One, even 

small, by whoever’s definition, accident would 

devastate our economy in perpetuity. 

Another argument that we have said is most 

importantly, perhaps, the geology of the proposed site 

is not stable. It’s full of faults, it’s susceptible 

to earthquakes, and it’s accessible to the water table 

or to some of these groundwater flow patterns; and that, 

again, puts people’s health and safety at risk. 

Finally, going back to the non issue, the 

proponents of this project think it’s going to be some 

great source of revenue for us, but it doesn’t take 

too many people or many jobs just to watch some nuclear 

waste once it goes in out there. Furthermore, it will 

cost an additional 65 billion, billion with a B, dollars 

to complete the project as currently designed. 

Now, these funds have to come from 

somewhere. Congress can’t even find the money to do 

a highway bill. They’re talking about shutting down 

government instead of funding it for one more year. 
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I don’t know where they’re going to get $65 billion. 

So, in short, I would say this project has 

been flawed from the beginning and it remains so today, 

even with this supplemental information. 

If I can quote Lillian Hellman, who 

paraphrased Shakespeare, a rose is a rose is a rose, 

a dump is a dump is a dump. I don’t -- I don’t care 

how many -- how many studies you try to have, you cannot 

hide that fact. This is a result of bad politics, not 

good policy. And instead we should pass the bipartisan 

Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, which comes from 

the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendations that where 

you want to put this site should have the involvement 

and the consent of the people who live there. 

So I thank you for listening. I thank you 

for being here. Appreciate being able to express my 

concerns and those of the constituents I have in 

District 1, who say Nevada is not a wasteland. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. We’re 

going to hear from Mayor Goodman and then we’re going 

to hear from Dr. Leonard Kreisler and then Senator Bryan 

and Senator Parks. 

MAYOR GOODMAN: That was magnificent. 
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You said it and got every piece of it. And it’s 

wonderful to have this wonderful Congresswoman, who 

is so articulate and fighting for us all the time, 

because this is our home and this is where we live. 

But members of NRC who are here tonight 

and for all of you who have come out, this is such a 

critical time for us. And my name is Carolyn Goodman 

and I am the Mayor of Las Vegas. In fact, there has 

been a little dynasty of Goodmans here. My husband 

was going to lie down on 95, which I’m sure you heard 

about several years back; and I hope I don’t have to 

do that as well. 

But I am aware that the State of Nevada 

has submitted comments on the draft supplement to the 

U.S. Department of Energy’s environmental impact 

statement for a geological repository for disposal of 

spent nuclear fuel and high-level -- high-level, not 

low-level, high-level radioactive waste at Yucca 

Mountain. The comments request an opportunity to have 

experts review the findings and respond accordingly. 

 Our citizens, all of us, deserve to have that request 

fulfilled. 

We appreciate the Commission scheduling 

a hearing in Las Vegas to allow our residents and 
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businesses to express their voice about the travel to 

and storage of nuclear waste in southern Nevada, as 

more than two million people reside here and are 

directly impacted by any decision, directly impacted 

by any decision regarding Yucca Mountain. 

The Yucca Mountain debate is over. 

Leading experts who participated in the Blue Ribbon 

Commission agreed that we need a consent-based process 

to locate a nuclear waste site. Nevada never consented 

and Nevada never will. 

Transport and dumping of nuclear waste at 

Yucca Mountain would be dangerous for our citizens, 

our visitors, for countless Americans across the 

country who live, work, and play near shipment routes. 

 Nevadans are not negotiating. Nevada will never 

accept waste. 

Sending as many as 10,000 truck shipments 

of nuclear waste to Nevada across ageing and 

deteriorated infrastructure throughout this nation of 

the United States is a disaster waiting to happen and 

a chance that we cannot take, nor would any constituency 

want that. Nuclear waste on trains would pass near 

the world-famous Las Vegas strip, government centers, 

downtown Las Vegas, and within one-half mile of tens 
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of thousands of residents. The stakes are beyond too 

high to risk any incident of failure or accident. 

As a former member of the Las Vegas 

Convention and Visitors Authority, I know the impact 

on Las Vegas’ tourism and convention business. It 

would be catastrophic and the impact would be beyond 

severe to the nation’s top tourist destination. With 

42 million visitors annually, Las Vegas would become 

an immediate ghost town. 

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, 1,200 mayors 

of cities of 30,000 or greater, twice has voted 

unanimously for the Department of Energy to focus on 

the treatment, repurposing, deactivation, rather than 

the movement and/or storage of waste on site and avoid 

further health and environmental impacts from the 

transportation of any waste in Nevada. 

We should listen to the nation’s mayors, 

who represent millions of citizens as well, who do not 

want nuclear waste traveling through any of their 

neighborhoods and none wants storage in their 

backyards, so why in heaven’s name should Nevada be 

the guinea pig? 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NRC’s 

own safety evaluation report concluded that because 
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the Department of Energy, the DOE, does not have the 

land or water rights needed for Yucca, the Commission 

should not license this project. The NRC is wasting 

time and taxpayer dollars by updating old studies for 

a site that will never be used for storage of nuclear 

waste. 

The NRC study is fundamentally flawed and 

its conclusions are illogical, nonsensical, and moot. 

 The DOE’s application requires the installation of 

titanium drip shields 100 years after the repository 

is closed, with no guarantee the technology or taxpayer 

dollars will even be available to install these drip 

shields. It also assumes the nuclear industry will 

transfer nuclear waste into obsolete storage canisters 

that the industry itself says it won’t use. Because 

the NRC study relies on assumptions about the 

applications that are not grounded in reality, it 

reaches dangerous conclusions that should not even be 

in the public domain. 

I would ask the Commission to listen to 

the Nevadans and hear our concerns. Please don’t put 

our communities in harm’s way and protect our tax 

dollars by opposing licensing of Yucca Mountain. I 

want to thank you, however, for coming to Las Vegas 
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and hearing our concerns. At the best, we are a 

passionate group of people and this is our home and 

we want to make sure it is safe for our future 

generations. 

Thank you very much. And thank you all 

for coming. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Thank 

you, Mayor. 

We’re going to hear from Dr. Leonard 

Kreisler, then we’re going to go to Senator Bryan and 

Senator Parks. 

This is Dr. Kreisler. 

MR. KREISLER: Recognize me this time, 

Mayor? Where’s Dina? She left? Dina, you still 

here? Dina, you don’t remember 1984 Midas Myth 

Milagros. You brought a class out to Nevada Test Site 

because we had a major screw-up. If you want to refresh 

your memory I put it all in a book. 

CONGRESSWOMAN TITUS: If you want to give 

me a copy, I’ll read it. 

MR. KREISLER: Give it to you? Come on. 

 You’re like all the other politicians. 

CONGRESSWOMAN TITUS: All right. I’ll 

buy one. 
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MR. KREISLER: Good. You could -- 

CONGRESSWOMAN TITUS: Do you want a copy 

of my book? 

MR. KREISLER: I didn’t know you wrote a 

book. 

CONGRESSWOMAN TITUS: I’ll give you a copy 

of my book. 

MR. KREISLER: And, Ms. Mayor, we came 

out -- 

MAYOR GOODMAN: (Inaudible.) 

MR. KREISLER: We came out at the same 

time, 1973 more or less. 

MAYOR GOODMAN: Wrong. ‘64. 

MR. KREISLER: You came out in ‘64? Okay. 

 Well, you predated me, but I remember you from 1973 

and you don’t speak for me, with all due respect. 

I was medical director at the test site. 

 I’m just a simple doctor. I was the first one Board 

certified in occupational medicine in the State of 

Nevada in 1980. I also took the first course in medical 

care in radiation accidents in Oak Ridge, the Mecca, 

so I think I know -- I don’t think, I know I know what 

I’m talking about. 

Eighteen years I drank the water at the 
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Test Site. We monitored it every day. They call it 

an alluvial tuff, the ground. After an atomic 

explosion -- this is not just a cast, this is atomic 

explosion, you get a liquefied thing and it doesn’t 

leak out, and if it does it’s minute. And I wish the 

NRC would quit bubbling. 

My thing to you, you present a very good 

thing. For example, the water flow here and here. 

Half the people don’t even understand, I guarantee you, 

what you said. In simple terms, if you go out to Indian 

Springs, from there on the water flows north, it doesn’t 

come here. Unless you get a water czar who wants to 

steal it for Las Vegas, then they’ll pump the water 

from the Nevada test site, which shouldn’t be coming 

here in the first place, because naturally it flows 

north into the Amargosa Valley. For 18 years, to make 

it simple, I drank the water, we never had any 

contamination. There were about 900 nuclear 

detonations in the ground. And if you think you’re 

going to get contamination, I think that would do it. 

We also had NRDS, nuclear rocket 

development, in place. Beautiful engineering. I 

mean, it was wonderful. We had the shortest railroad. 

 The jackass in Westin or something like that where 
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they developed a nuclear powered engine that generated 

more power in six hours than Hoover Dam could generate 

in three or four months, it was that powerful, but we 

were very smart, we didn’t put it into space like the 

Russians did. So we do things right. 

In my 18 years out there, there was not 

one nuclear accident, not one nuclear injury, not one 

nuclear death. In fact, when you look at -- and now 

I’m going to go global. The water is no problem to 

me, because I know how the casts are made. And what 

you should be doing, the NRC, the NEI, they always forget 

about it, it depends who’s in charge at the time, you 

never know what they’re going to do, or the EPA. But 

the NEI, Nuclear Engineering Institute is supposed to 

be the lobbying thing. They’ve got an office in 

Henderson. When I asked to meet with him, he sent me 

out a secretary to interview me at I think it was the 

Claim Jumper. Isn’t that nice? Here I am, I’m a 

medical director, why are you taking me to the Claim 

Jumper with a secretary? It’s an insult. 

But I want to give you some of the -- you 

know, you talk about exposures. I heard the 

Congresswoman. The words were totally, totally 

incomprehensible to me, because I deal in facts. 
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That’s what I was trained in. I’m a physician. I take 

a history, I take a physical, I come up with a diagnosis. 

 I can -- you know, they’re talking about dangerous 

transport with horrendous exposures. I’d like to be 

in the debate, do they really know what the LD-50 is 

and what are they talking about? Are they talking about 

partials? Are they talking about gamma rays? What 

are they talking about? They don’t know. It’s 

politically motivated. 

And, you know, if I get emotional, that’s 

me. You know, I’ve got a little Trump in me, even though 

I wouldn’t vote for him as president. But you know 

I -- because $15 billion, you could have done this whole 

study in a year or two and get on with it. Get on with 

it. 

If we had to develop the nuclear testing 

area like they did back in -- you know, when Truman 

said do it or whoever was in power, you know, we’d never 

get it done the way we do things today. It’s 

impossible. There is no danger with the Yucca Mountain 

project. It is so close to zero I would give you better 

than any odds in a casino. Any odds. Why do you have 

to do it for 100 million years, yet the casts right 

next to the generating plants, they don’t have to be 
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okay for 100 years? In other words, it depends on 

whether, you know, you’re on this side or that side, 

you know, and how you want to make it, and you want 

to brainwash the public. 

The people I speak to in Nevada, the people 

that are engineers, the people that have education, 

real education in the sciences, are not opposed to Yucca 

Mountain. I don’t care what you say. 

Now, I had a discussion with a former 

governor, Michael O’Callahan. Great guy, great guy. 

 And he said “Len, I just want the people to vote on 

it.” I said “I’m with you, but at least let’s give 

them the facts, not let’s skew it.” 

For example, let’s go back and look and 

it’s not a dump. These are partially spent fuel rods, 

which can be recycled. They’re valuable material. 

The rest of the world does that. So -- and they don’t 

explode. Now, I would have the NRDS as a regular 

visitors place and show them how you put these partially 

spent fuel rods into a canister, how you put it, again 

into another container and another container, and 

another container. And if you watch the movie, the 

NRC knows all about it. School kids should be talking 

about this. They should be taught from the day they 
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can walk. 

MR. CAMERON: And, Dr. Kreisler -- 

MR. KREISLER: Yes? 

MR. CAMERON: Can I ask you to wrap it up, 

please? 

MR. KREISLER: Okay. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. 

MR. KREISLER: But to boil it down, I’d 

really like to get into, because the statements that 

are being made from a political aspect have nothing 

to do with reality, they just don’t. And I’d be happy 

to talk to any group that is really interested in the 

facts and want to get on with it. It is important to 

the nation. It’s important to Nevada. And the $30 

billion that’s sitting there that was collected by order 

of Congress should be coming to Nevada to put that 

repository out there and eventually get recycling of 

this valuable material, clearly. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. 

We’re going to hear from Senator Bryan and 

Senator Parks and then we’re going to go to Governor 

Sandoval’s representative Bob Halstead is here. 

SENATOR BRYAN: Thank you very much, Chip. 

 
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For the record, my name is Richard Bryan 

and I appear here as the Chairman of the Nuclear Projects 

Commission. This is a commission established by the 

State Legislature. 

In 1982 when the Nuclear Waste Policy Act 

was enacted, I was a newly elected governor. And at 

that time I believe that the legislation appeared 

facially to be fair and balanced. It contemplated that 

the country would be searched for nuclear waste sites, 

that three of those would be recommended to the 

President and they would make the decision based upon 

those site characterizations. 

Dr. Kreisler said something about 

politics. Politics was involved here. No sooner had 

the President signed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 

1983, than those states that had granite in the 

northeast said hey, take this off the table. In a wink 

and a nod, the administration said you don’t have 

anything to worry about. The states of the southeast 

that were a part of that was also taken. And I must 

say that I became very suspicious and highly skeptical. 

 

And then in 1987, the screw Nevada 

legislation. No one could fairly contend that that 
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decision, which was to make only the Yucca Mountain 

the site, was based upon science. It was raw, naked 

political power. Nevada’s delegation was junior at 

the time and, in effect, we were steamrolled. 

So the original premise for Yucca Mountain 

was welded tuff. And we were told at the time that, 

look, the nature of that type of geologic formation 

eliminated the need for engineering barriers, that is 

the rock formation itself. No one today, no one, would 

argue that Yucca Mountain and its formation 

self-contains the potential radiation that migrates 

from the site. So the latest in these Rube Goldberg 

attempts to contain that is what was mentioned briefly 

by Her Honor the Mayor. And that is several hundred 

years after the waste canisters are in place, then 1,150 

titanium drip shields, costing billions of dollars, 

assuming that Congress would ever do so, each weighing 

about five tons would be added. I don’t want to take 

that kind of risk with the public health and safety 

of the people in Nevada. 

Now, nowhere in the history of the planet, 

nowhere, nowhere -- I’m going to say nowhere has it 

ever been proposed as I continue to call it, because 

I do think it’s a dump, but let’s use a neutral term, 
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repository, has ever been proposed to be built 

overlaying a water table. A water table. And, 

thirdly, the canisters that the good doctor mentioned, 

the original canisters are much, much smaller than those 

that are being contemplated today and there has been 

no study as to whether those canisters would be 

sufficient. 

So my view is that the public health and 

safety is paramount. There are some who see at the 

end of the nuclear rainbow a pot of gold. I served 

in the Congress for some 12 years. In fact, I left 

my position as governor because of my interest in 

opposing the nuclear waste dump in 1988. 

Let me just add a couple things. It is 

popular to say let the scientists decide this. Let 

them. They know more about it than those of you who 

are lay people. I am not a scientist. My background 

was in history in the liberal arts. All right. 

In 1951 I was 13 and when the first atomic 

detonations occurred, they were dropped out of the sky, 

airplanes and we were assured, I was in the eighth grade, 

nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about, it will 

be just fine. We’ll take care of all of this. Two 

years later I was in high school and our high school 
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yearbook proudly displayed on its cover, you know, the 

nuclear bomb, you know, with the full tower of flame. 

 Is there any scientist today who would have any 

credibility whether you’re for the site or against it 

to say it’s safe to drop an atomic bomb from an airplane 

65 miles from Las Vegas? The people who paid that price 

were the people downwind. And the Congress ultimately 

provided some -- 

Do you think the people at Fukushima, which 

were assured by their scientists nothing to worry about, 

absolutely nothing to worry about, we’ve got this under 

control. Well, we all know what happened at Fukushima 

and you can go on with what occurred at Chernobyl. 

So when they say let the scientists -- Dr. 

Kreisler says let me talk about the facts. No one can 

categorically indicate that any of those proposals to 

remediate against the possible migration of 

radionuclide that would exist for thousands -- hundreds 

of thousands of years, nobody can categorically assure 

us that that would be safe. So put me down in the 

skeptical and doubtful category. 

I would associate myself with the comments 

made by Congressman Titus and the Mayor and not repeat 

that. But this may be a gambling state and I’ve lived 
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here since 1942, so I’ve had some experience in this 

state. I’m not prepared to gamble on the health and 

safety of Nevadans based upon these assurances that 

are given today that there’s really nothing to worry 

about. 

And for those who see this nuclear pot of 

gold at the end of the rainbow, I’m here to say it’s 

not there. No Congress can bind a successive Congress. 

 Each Congress has the right to make that determination. 

 Even if you thought that the financial benefits 

outweighed the risk, the $30 billion, that’s money that 

went into the nuclear waste trust fund to, in effect, 

take care of all of the potential problems that may 

occur with respect to storage, not Yucca Mountain per 

se. 

So I would respectfully suggest that 

there’s some misguided conversation here about science 

versus politics. We are in this room tonight because 

of the politics of 1987. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Thank you, 

Senator Bryan. 

We’re going to go to Senator Parks and then 

we’re going to hear from the governor’s representative 

Bob Halstead, and then we’re going to hear from Shannon 
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Raborn, if I have that correctly, from Senator Reid’s 

office. 

Senator Parks. 

SENATOR PARKS: Thank you, Mr. Cameron, 

and -- for allowing me to speak and thank you for 

bringing this public hearing to Las Vegas. 

My name is David Parks. I represent Senate 

District 7 here in southern Nevada in the Nevada 

Legislature and the Senate. I also serve on the 

Legislative Committee on High-Level Radioactive Waste. 

 I’ve been the chair of the committee as well as the 

vice chair of the committee. I’m also here tonight 

representing my Democratic colleagues in the Nevada 

Senate who strongly voice their opposition to Yucca 

Mountain. 

The Department of Energy’s proposed rail 

transportation route for nuclear waste is unworkable. 

 And even if it could be built, nuclear waste trains 

would still have to travel through downtown Las Vegas, 

and nuclear waste trucks would still have to travel 

on the Las Vegas beltway. This is of particular 

concern, because the DOE’s proposed national 

transportation plain ignores the 2006 safety and 

security recommendations of the National Academy of 
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Sciences and grossly underestimates routine radiation 

impacts and the consequences of severe accidents and 

possible successful terrorist attacks that could cause 

release of radioactive materials. 

If the Department of Energy cannot build 

a rail line to Yucca Mountain, tens of thousands of 

truck shipments would be required on our surface streets 

and highways. DOE’s environmental impact statement, 

which are part of the DOE’s license application to the 

NRC, propose to route these shipments through Clark 

County and Las Vegas using Interstate 15 from Utah and 

Arizona and from California, connecting with the 

eastern and western portions of the Las Vegas beltway, 

which is Clark County’s Interstate 215, then continuing 

north along U.S. Highway 95 to Yucca Mountain. 

Even if a rail line could be built, the 

DOE would still ship a number of truckloads of 

high-level nuclear waste through the Las Vegas valley 

along these roads that I’ve mentioned every week for 

probably the next 50 years. A single accident near 

Las Vegas could wipe out tourism and devastate the 

economy, as you heard from the Mayor and Congresswoman. 

 

In addition to the above, I’d like to point 
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out that the environmental impact statement is based 

on a big lie. It assumes the Department of Energy will 

install titanium drip shields, as the Senator 

mentioned, using tax dollars that have not been 

appropriated and in all likelihood never will. 

I thank you very much for allowing me to 

speak. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Thank 

you, Senator Parks. 

We’re going to hear from Bob Halstead now 

for the Governor and then we’re going to hear from 

Shannon Raborn and then we’re going to Ian Zabarte of 

the Western Shoshone government. 

This is Bob Halstead. 

MR. HALSTEAD: Thank you, Chip. 

For the record, I’m Bob Halstead, executive 

director, Agency for Nuclear Projects State of Nevada. 

 The State of Nevada will be submitting detailed 

technical comments by November 20th. Those comments 

will address groundwater and health effects impacts 

and the NRC staff’s assumptions about the repository 

and waste package design that affect groundwater 

impacts and the computer models and data used in the 

staff’s evaluation of groundwater impacts. And we will 
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also challenge the limited scope of this draft EIS 

supplement. 

Tonight I’d like to read the letter that 

Governor Brian Sandoval will be submitting for the 

record tomorrow for all of you. This letter, like 

hopefully yours, will be addressed to Branch Chief 

Ms. Cindy Bladey. And the Governor’s letter begins: 

“I appreciate the efforts of the U.S. 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff to conduct public 

hearings and seek public comment on the draft 

environmental impact statement supplement for the 

proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, but 

as Governor of Nevada and as someone who has been closely 

involved with the federal nuclear waste program for 

many years, I am concerned that Nevadans and the nation 

are still being forced to deal with an unsafe repository 

site and an unworkable nuclear waste management plan. 

 The time and resources being spent on the NRC Yucca 

Mountain licensing proceeding could be much better 

utilized by focusing on workable, forward-looking 

solutions to the country’s nuclear waste problems, as 

recommended by the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission 

on America’s nuclear future. Even the U.S. Department 

of Energy has given up on Yucca Mountain, has terminated 
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the DOE program, and has sought to withdraw the license 

application. 

“I recognize that the decision to go 

forward with the Yucca Mountain proceeding was not made 

by the Commission, but, rather, was the result of an 

order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District 

of Columbia circuit. Yet, that same court acknowledged 

that NRC has inadequate funds to complete the legally 

mandated proceeding, with the chief judge in that case 

writing in dissent that it was a, quote, ‘useless 

thing,’ unquote, to resume the proceeding. This 

dilemma is reflected in the task confronting the NRC 

staff in this draft DIS supplement. 

“As you’ll hear today and in written 

comments from Nevada representatives and others, the 

site is unsuitable and infeasible due to changes in 

storage and transportation requirements. And as NRC 

staff has already pointed out in its safety evaluation 

report, DOE does not possess the land and water rights 

necessary to receive a construction authorization. 

“Moving beyond the failed Yucca Mountain 

nuclear waste repository is essential if our country 

is ever going to safely solve the problem of spent 

nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The 
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continuation of the NRC Yucca Mountain licensing 

proceeding actually impedes progress towards finding 

workable and expedient solutions by diverting our 

focus. 

“Sincere regards, Brian Sandoval, Governor 

of Nevada.” 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Bob. And thank 

the Governor for that. 

And Shannon. I’m sorry. And then we’ll 

hear from Ian Zabarte and Dan Schinhofen from Nye 

County. 

MS. RABORN: Shannon Raborn on behalf of 

Senator Harry Reid. I have a statement from the 

senator. I’m going to read it for you for the record: 

“The draft supplemental EIS for Yucca 

Mountain was completed because two years ago the U.S. 

Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 

directed the NRC to continue wasting limited remaining 

funding the Commission had for Yucca licensing. 

Completing the draft supplemental EIS was a waste of 

time, because the Yucca Mountain project was terminated 

in 2009 and zero funding has been appropriated for over 

five years. 
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“Furthermore, the NRC has already 

acknowledged that the license application cannot be 

approved, because the federal government does not have 

the water it needs, nor control the land necessary to 

build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada. These are just 

a few reasons why the Yucca Mountain project will never 

be built. Congress should instead focus on 

consent-based solutions that don’t shove nuclear waste 

down a community’s throat over the objections of its 

people. 

“That is why Senator Heller and I have 

introduced the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, 

which would require the Secretary of Energy to secure 

written consent from the governor of the host state, 

affected units of local government, and affected Indian 

tribes before a nuclear waste repository may be built.” 

 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Thank you, 

Shannon, and thank the Senator. 

And Ian. This is Ian Zabarte and then 

we’ll here from Dan Schinhofen and then we’re going 

to go to Dr. Jacob Paz and Kevin Bell. 

MR. ZABARTE: On the record, I am the 
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principle man for foreign affairs for the government 

of Newe Sogobia and have the legitimate authority to 

speak on all matters subject to tribal law and custom. 

The exterior boundaries of Newe Sogobia 

are defined by the 1863 treaty of Ruby Valley, which 

includes Yucca Mountain. I am a board member of the 

Native Community Action Council, a party with standing 

in the licensing proceedings that contends the 

Department of Energy cannot prove ownership to Yucca 

Mountain. The significant encumbrance -- this 

significant encumbrance precludes the licensing by the 

NRC. 

I am a board member of Poo-Ha-Ba, a Western 

Shoshone religious institution situated along the 

Amargosa river at Tonopah as it turns towards Timbisha 

at Ferns Creek. Now spiritual practices and ongoing 

life way of Poo-Ha-Ba are impacted and further 

threatened by the proposed Yucca Mountain project. 

We received no funding for our participation. 

The government of Newe Sogobia does not 

consent to the inclusion of any part of our treaty 

defined property into the boundaries or jurisdiction 

of the United States or any state or territory. The 

Newe are spiritual people that combine religious belief 
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and government; and as such the government of Newe 

Sogobia is the embodiment of the Western Shoshone land 

and people. Our ethnic identity is Newe Sogobia, 

literally translated, the people’s mother earth. 

We informed the United States Department 

of Interior that Newe Sogobia is not for sale and the 

Yucca Mountain is not BLM land. We informed the EPA 

that the environmental radiation protection standards 

for Yucca Mountain are not protective of Newe Sogobia, 

and that our exposure would be significantly higher 

because of lifestyle differences. 

Our living life ways that include 

longstanding religious practices, tribal laws, 

customs, and our traditions. We informed the 

Department of Energy through spiritual leader Corbin 

Hardy that our land and people are being destroyed by 

testing of weapons of mass destruction and the 

development of Yucca Mountain as a high-level nuclear 

waste repository. 

Newe Sogobia cannot endure an increased 

burden of risk from any source because of our past 

exposure to fallout from nuclear weapons testing. Our 

understanding is borne out by the National Academy of 

Sciences biological effects of ionizing radiation 2005 
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report that states there’s no minimal 

threshold -- minimum threshold for radiation 

carcinogenics. 

Currently, the United States Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission is the agency to assume the 

responsibility for the policies and practices and the 

resultant impact to Newe Sogobia, our very existence 

as a people. 

The central issue that impacts the Newe 

result from the destruction of our property that impair 

our treaty-reserved right to use our land and 

life-giving water. Nothing in the treaty of Ruby 

Valley ever contemplated the destruction of Newe 

Sogobia by American nationals through their agency the 

U.S. government. 

I and many Newe expressed alarm at the 

systematic policies and practices that placed a 

disproportionate burden of risk upon Newe practicing 

traditional religious life ways that require water for 

praying, cleansing, and healing, with no response. 

Ethnographic studies conducted by the 

Department of Energy failed to identify the Newe as 

we actually exist, as a people governed by our own 

traditional form of government. Instead, the 
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Department of Energy substitutes many tribal 

governments created by the United States and invited 

organizations for the purposes of site characterization 

at Yucca Mountain. These groups are known as the 

consolidated group of tribes. The traditional Western 

Shoshone government of Newe Sogobia was not invited 

to participate. From our perspective, the process 

employed by the Department of Energy is environmental 

racism designed to systematically dismantle the living 

life ways of the Western Shoshone people in relation 

to our land. 

The cultural resource study protocol of 

cultural triage justified for use in the Yucca Mountain 

site characterization process is an attack. I can’t 

imagine is used in response to natural disaster or 

declared war. There is no war or natural disaster that 

might employ the use of triage. What was created and 

used by the Department of Energy is an immoral act forced 

upon the ethnic Western Shoshone people for the benefit 

of the United States and the profit of the nuclear 

industry. 

This meets the minimum threshold of 

genocide under the Proxmire Act, the Genocide 

Convention Implementation Act of 1987. It is our 
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intent to stop, correct, and prevent these acts from 

ever happening to our people in the future. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Thank you, Ian. 

And Dan Schinhofen and then we’ll go to 

Dr. Paz, Kevin Bell, and Phil Klevorick of Clark County. 

 

MR. SCHINHOFEN: Thank you for the time. 

 Thank you, NRC, for being here. I’ll read my prepared 

statements and hopefully, I’ll have a minute to answer 

a couple of other things. 

The National Environmental Policy Act in 

its implementing regulations of the Council on 

Environmental Qualify exists to ensure the 

environmental information is available to public 

officials and citizens before decisions are made and 

before actions are taken. Moreover, federal agencies 

are to the fullest extent possible to facilitate public 

involvement in decisions that affect the quality of 

the human environment. 

In crafting the Nuclear Policy Act and the 

amendment that singled out Yucca Mountain in Nye County, 

Nevada as the sole site to be studied as a location 

for a repository, Congress took care to ensure that 
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the affected units of local government had the means 

to review activities with respect to Yucca Mountain 

for purposes of determining any potential economic, 

social, public health and safety, and environmental 

impacts of a repository on a unit of local government 

and its residents. Section 116 of the Nuclear Waste 

Policy Act directs the Secretary of Energy to make 

grants to any affected unit of local government for 

this purpose. The Act defines the term, quote, 

“affected unit of local government,” unquote, to mean 

the unit of local government which -- with jurisdiction 

over the site of the repository, in other words Nye 

County, of which I am a Commissioner. 

Under the act, the Department of Energy 

was assigned responsibilities to prepare the license 

application and supporting environmental impact 

statement. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was to 

adopt the environmental impact statement to the extent 

practical. 

Beginning in 2010, a series of deliberate 

actions were undertaken by the Administration to try 

to destroy the program. The Department of Energy 

attempted to withdraw the license application. The 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to overturn the 
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Atomic Safety and Licensing Board rejection of the 

attempted withdrawal. The Nuclear Regulatory 

Commission unilaterally stopped work on the review of 

the license application and a number of affected parties 

took the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to court and 

were successful in obtaining a writ of mandamus to force 

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume review of 

the license application. 

Previously to these actions, Nye County 

and other affected units of local government received 

grants from the Department of Energy and actively 

participated in the license application process. When 

this site was designated in 2002, the Nye County Board 

of Commissioners passed resolutions that Nye County 

would constructively assist the United States in 

fulfilling the commitment to provide a geologic 

repository to protect the safety of its citizens. 

The hearing tonight, ultimately, is the 

consequence of a commitment by the Department of Energy 

to supplement its environmental impact statement to 

address certain questions raised by the Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission staff. However, the Department 

of Energy reneged on its commitment and left it to the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff to answer its own 
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questions. Whether or not there was an explicit 

collusion of two federal agencies is immaterial, the 

consequence is the same. If the Department of Energy 

had done the environmental impact supplement, there 

can be no doubt that Congress would have intended for 

the affected units of local government to receive grants 

and would allow them to participate in preparation of 

this document. Because the Nuclear Regulatory 

Commission staff prepared the supplement, the 

Department of Energy can argue that because it was not 

doing any work, the affected units of the local 

government had no right to receive grant money. 

I have no comments to offer tonight on the 

environmental impact statement; however, Nye County 

will provide limited comments based on a cursory review 

of the document by the close of the public comment 

period. Without the Section 116 funds, Nye County and 

other affected units of local government cannot afford 

to hire technical experts to help them critically review 

the document. 

Unless and until affected units of local 

government receive grants sufficient to allow them to 

participate in the finalization of the supplemental 

environmental impact statement, any action of the 
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Nuclear Regulatory Commission to finalize the document 

makes a mockery of the intent of the National 

Environmental Policy Act, the implementing regulation 

to the Council On Environmental Quality, and the intent 

of Congress and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act for the 

Secretary of Energy to provide funds for such review. 

 

A couple of important facts: Nevada 

already has a nuclear dump. It’s sited in Nye County. 

 It’s called Area 5. 

Recently, the Governor did sit down for 

a year-and-a-half and talked with the DOE and decided 

that U 233 235 was okay 40 feet in the ground, but they 

still oppose Yucca Mountain, saying it’s unsafe. It’s 

so much easier to oppose something than it is to work 

for solutions. That’s all we’re asking for, and eight 

other counties. So nine of 17 counties have asked the 

NRC and DOE to move forward with the licensing so the 

science can be vetted. The State has 218 contentions, 

it was 229, and we welcome them and we hope they get 

a chance to have them heard. 

As to whether we’ll trust the government 

to do it, we trust the government every day when we 

go into a grocery store, when we buy fast food, when 
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we fly in an airplane, when we drive highways. 

Suddenly, we can’t trust them to do this? It seems 

silly to me. 

Thank you very much. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Thank 

you, Commissioner. 

We have Dr. Paz coming up and then Kevin 

Bell and Phil Klevorick and then we’re going to hear 

from Ace Hoffman, Sharon Hoffman, Rod McCullum, and 

Judy Treichel. 

MR. PAZ: Good evening. I just was 

surprised that this hearing is the eve of my holiday, 

and they should be more sensitive when you schedule 

a hearing, not a major holiday. 

My comments are the following: 

Number one, NRC in the supplement estimated 

that the radiological dose would be small. What is 

small? Do they take into account the bystander effect 

or are they going to hold meetings? Nobody knows. 

Second, based on 300 milligram background 

radiation, at Yucca Mountain we have alpha radiation 

high energy. I don’t know who likes to drink the holy 

water of Yucca Mountain and get cancer or to sell it 

on eBay as a cure for cancer. 
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Second, they’re using unapproved EPA 

model. How you can make a statement it’s small. 

Something is wrong scientifically. I contacted, it 

was 15 years ago, or ten years ago, I cannot remember, 

and I said there is an issue of synergism interaction 

between the metal and the radionuclide. DOE simply 

give me the runaround. I got a message we don’t 

regulate it. We don’t need it to do it. We’re not 

authorized. On what ground, scientific and legal, they 

can come and stand? 

I just can mention three Supreme Court 

decisions. One is Kleppe versus Sierra Club in 1976. 

 It’s very clearly stated when -- I’m sorry -- the U.S. 

Supreme Court suggested then when a number of proposals 

of correlated action that will have cumulative or 

synergetic environmental impact upon the region are 

pending currently before the agency, the environmental 

consequence must be considered together. 

Then we have Citizens of Preserve Overton 

Park versus Volpe Secretary of Energy say how it look. 

 What’s meaning how it look? It’s meaning what does 

the Congress meant? And the Congress meant that we 

should study it. Then we have another one is Baltimore 

Gas versus Natural Defense Council. And very simple, 
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while the agency must allow significant environmental 

risk to be affected into the decision whether they 

propose action, it may determine its risk insufficient 

as long as the determination is not arbitrary and 

capricious. Up to now, DOE refused to do the study 

and NRC followed their footsteps. 

Second, groundwater contamination. There 

was a lack of scientific evidence to be into put the 

DOE model and why? Number one, we don’t have a resolve 

issue of canister corrosion both DOE and state of Nevada 

opposed. Scientifically, they have failed to 

represent the matrix. They ignore sulfate. Why are 

they including all the chloride and nitrate? I don’t 

know. 

Second, what puzzles me is why chromium 

is disappeared from groundwater in Amargosa Valley? 

None. About 42,000 are going to be deposited at Yucca 

Mountain. 

We don’t have scientific data study and 

the competition between radionuclide and heavy metals 

at the near field. We don’t know where there’s a KT. 

 What’s going up, it doesn’t fall down. It doesn’t 

make any sense. 

What’s interesting here is the groundwater 
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should have been based upon credible scientific 

evidence, but rather than to use assumption and 

calculation, it can lead to very serious area of 

groundwater. 

MR. CAMERON: And, Dr. Paz, could you wrap 

up for us, please. 

MR. PAZ: Okay. 

MR. CAMERON: I think you’re out of time 

now, but if you have one more important thing. 

MR. PAZ: I want to submit a written 

comment. This is just bits of the iceberg. Thank you. 

 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Thank 

you, Dr. Paz. 

And Kevin from California Energy 

Commission and then we’ll go to Phil Klevorick from 

Clark County. 

MR. BELL: I didn’t need reading glasses 

when I started with this case. 

My name is Kevin Bell. I’m a senior staff 

counsel with the California Energy Commission. I 

represent the Energy Commission in the Yucca Mountain 

proceedings. Can you hear me? 

On behalf of the California Energy 
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Commission, thank you for the opportunity to offer 

comments today on the NRC staff’s draft supplemental 

environmental impact statement that purports to cover 

impacts to California’s groundwater resources from 

contaminated groundwater originating from the proposed 

Yucca Mountain high-level waste repository. 

The California Energy Commission was 

admitted as a part of the Yucca Mountain nuclear 

repository proceeding before the Atomic Safety 

Licensing Board on May 11th, 2009. California’s 

original petition to intervene and contentions 

challenge the adequacy of several aspects of the 

Department of Energy’s various environmental impact 

statements regarding the Yucca Mountain repository. 

The Atomic Safety Licensing Board admitted California’s 

contentions related to the transport of radioactive 

material in and through California by truck and rail 

and to potential radioactive contamination of 

groundwater in California by radionuclides released 

from Yucca Mountain. 

California’s contentions challenged 

whether DOE’s environmental documents are adequate 

statements under NEPA and are therefore practical for 

adoption by the NRC. After, as originally proposed, 
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DOE’s environmental documents failed to properly 

analyze the risk to California’s precious groundwater 

resources from the repository, DOE thereafter declined 

to supplement its environmental documents in any 

meaningful way in this regard and the NRC supplemental 

environmental impact statement has been submitted in 

an effort to address the deficiencies in the analysis 

to those groundwater impacts. 

The California Energy Commission will be 

filing detailed written comment on the SEIS. Our 

agency’s technical staff are conducting a thorough 

review of the draft supplement to ensure that 

California’s concerns have been addressed with respect 

to California’s groundwater resources. 

The California Energy Commission has 

joined in the State of Nevada and Inyo County’s request 

for an extension to file those comments. We had joined 

in the original request for a 60-day extension. We 

do appreciate the NRC’s willingness to extend the 

deadline to November 20th by 30 days. In the meantime, 

California remains concerned. 

Again, thank you for your consideration 

and for the offer to submit comments today. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Thank you, 
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Kevin. 

And this is Phil Klevorick, Clark County. 

MR. KLEVORICK: Thank you, Chip. 

For those who don’t know me, my name is 

Phil Klevorick. I’m the program manager for Clark 

County Nuclear Waste Division. I welcome the NRC for 

hosting two of those meetings in southern Nevada and 

including Las Vegas. As you can tell from the turnout, 

there’s a significant level of interest. 

I just want to start off, I have no prepared 

comments at this time. I will be preparing some 

comments prior to the deadline, so I’m just going to 

be speaking off the cuff for quite a bit of this. 

For those who have not read this document, 

this is a supplement to the existing document. It was 

back in 2008 or ‘09, whenever it was submitted. Clark 

County is disadvantaged because of the NRC’s review 

of this. And it’s not because of the NRC, I’ll be 

perfectly clear in this. You guys were put into a 

position by the judge in a court decision. The 

Department of Energy are the ones who should have 

supplemented this document. Because they didn’t 

supplement it, as Commissioner Schinhofen presented 

in his comments, we have not received funding to 
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significantly or seriously review a scientific and 

technical document. That needs to be done. 

Now, Clark County has no contentions on 

groundwater currently under the submitted EIS or the 

submitted license for Yucca Mountain back in 2009. 

That doesn’t mean that we won’t. And the reason why 

I say that is because it’s very clear and it’s very 

well known to probably everybody in this room that 

southern Nevada and, particularly, Las Vegas, Clark 

County needs water. That doesn’t mean we’re not 

seeking out water resources in other counties and rural 

areas. And I know that the rural areas are not happy 

to hear that, but we have a sustainability issue. And 

that doesn’t mean that the groundwater that is available 

or around that area, that Las Vegas or Clark County 

won’t be seeking out to try to acquire. 

So I want to be clear that even though we 

don’t have a contention on the groundwater currently, 

there could be something that could come up from that. 

 As a result of that, I have to seek other ex -- or 

an expert or experts or somebody of technical knowledge 

inside a southern Nevada water authority agency, an 

independent agency from mine to try to give us a review. 

 First of all, they have to go back and review the 
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original document and compare it to this supplement 

document and do an analysis. 

The other thing is that -- and again, I’m 

not trying to be disrespectful to the NRC, it’s kind 

of like the fox guarding the henhouse. Back when this 

whole process started, the NRC was supposed to remain 

entirely impartial and review a document and a process 

of a separate applicant and I think they crossed a line 

on this. 

Now, I don’t know if they crossed the line, 

because I have not gone through this, but it gives the 

perception to the general public of independent review 

and being forced to do this or, actually taking on the 

responsibility of doing this, I think it probably 

crosses to some point. 

My final comments on this it gets back to 

the Section 116 funding. Back when the funding was 

eliminated back in 2010 by the President and in a 

subsequent note to the AULG, the affected units of local 

government, several of the offices have shut down. 

I am the only person left in my office. I don’t have 

a technical knowledge background for groundwater 

review. 

I would have to find those in an expert 
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through contracts or exterior consultants. So I think 

that there -- that’s something that needs to be done. 

 And I was very disappointed and I would support the 

State of Nevada and the State of California and Inyo 

County when they were asking for a 60-day extension, 

because there’s a lot of us out here who are not able 

to do that in such a short period of time. We’ve 

expressed these concerns in previous EIS documents. 

Sometimes they’ve been heard and most of the time they 

haven’t been, particularly by the Department of Energy. 

 All these short timelines that are created create 

advantages for the regulators and not for the 

oversighters. 

And again, I’m going to put more of this 

in comments, in written comments, and I appreciate the 

time. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Thank 

you, Phil. 

And, Ace, are you ready to come up here, 

and then we’ll go to Sharon Hoffman and then Rod McCullum 

and Judy Treichel. 

MR. HOFFMAN: Hi. I came up from 

Carlsbad, California. We have a nuclear waste dump 
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about 15 miles from where I live. It’s called San 

Onofre. It used to be an operating reactor. Harry 

Reid felt that storing the waste on site would be the 

solution rather than Yucca Mountain. It’s not a very 

good solution and one of the reasons is because those 

canisters are about a half inch thick and they’re made 

out of stainless steel and in our case they’re sitting 

on a coast where there is salty water. Diablo Canyon, 

the northern reactor, the one that’s still operating 

in California, not the one that had an illegal and 

unauthorized experiment that blew it apart. 

Diablo Canyon is dry casks are already 

experiencing conditions that are conducive to 

chloride-induced stress corrosion cracking. And it’s 

only been about -- it’s only been a couple of years 

and that wasn’t supposed to happen really at all, but 

certainly not anytime soon. 

So if they move these 10,000 loads of waste 

to Yucca Mountain, they’re probably going to be sitting 

outside for a long time before they even get into 

the -- into the hole. And once they’re in the hole 

there’s water dripping down from the ceiling, that’s 

why they’re going to need those drip shields that 

they’re going to put in in 100 years. A five-ton drip 
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shield, is that what I heard it was? Maybe it was 5,000 

pounds, so two-and-a-half tons. That sitting on top 

of a half-inch thick canister scares me. I can’t 

guarantee that they’re going to install those 

correctly. 

And we’re talking about groundwater here. 

 Well, if there’s an accident in the transportation 

routes anywhere in America, the groundwater is going 

to be affected at the accident site. So how come these 

hearings are only being held in Nevada? We need 

hearings near San Onofre. We need hearings about what 

we’re going to do with the waste. 

Now, I heard somebody say that the Nevada 

test site never released any radiation. They were 

underground tests. Well, the truth is about one in 

eight, one in eight, of those tests breached the 

surface. And that’s why there are downwinders and 

that’s why those downwinders are dying. 

The DOE’s estimate of how much leakage 

there’s going to be from one of these casks -- okay. 

 There’s little pellets about the size of the tip of 

my pinky, and there’s maybe, I don’t know, 50,000 of 

them in each cask. One teeny tiny little bit of one 

little tiny pellet is all they estimate is ever going 
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to be released, even if a jumbo jet crashes into them. 

 And, believe me, they are not going to survive a jumbo 

jet crashing into them. 

An A-10 Warthog pilot went crazy in Utah 

about 15 years ago, flew the jet all over the place. 

 He could have gone anywhere and he could have shot 

depleted uranium bullets at these dry casks. They 

can’t survive anything like that. 

The Blue Ribbon Commission. The Blue 

Ribbon Commission was only trying to decide on an 

interim waste storage site, not a permanent repository. 

 And I guarantee those 1,200 mayors who don’t want waste 

anywhere near them, there’s not going to be a place 

where they want the waste. 

One other problem -- okay, there’s a lot 

of other problems and I have about eight of them listed 

here. But one other one that I wanted to mention is 

if you look at the documents that they handed out, this 

waste repository is only going to hold about 63,000 

tons of the 74,000 or whatever. The numbers are in 

there. They’re printed. It’s not even big enough for 

the waste that already is in existence. So where are 

we going to put the next one? Is it going to be south 

of Las Vegas, maybe? We can bracket Las Vegas? Is 
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it going to be in Death Valley? There’s just -- we’re 

not done even, if you decide to approve this thing. 

I’ve been working on this a long time. 

My eyes were a lot better. I’d look at my notes more 

carefully, but I didn’t bring the glasses. Oh, yes, 

I did. 

But I wanted to mention that 15 years ago, 

12 years ago, when I was up here opposing Yucca Mountain, 

Oscar Goodman got up and he said -- I don’t recall him 

saying he was going to lie down on the highway, but 

I do recall him saying he will arrest and throw in jail 

any trucker caught driving nuclear waste through Las 

Vegas. 

And I don’t think the -- the new Goodman 

is going to be any easier and I don’t blame her. This 

is a dangerous plan and you should not let it happen. 

 We have a problem, we have a problem with nuclear waste 

and we don’t know what to do with it and we can’t let 

it sit there. So your solution is to shut the reactors 

down, because at least then the problem isn’t getting 

any bigger. So we’re in the wrong -- you’re in the 

wrong business. 

You’re not going to be able to build this. 

 You don’t have this money, you don’t even have the 
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money for the hearings, how are you going to get the 

money for the reactors? For the trains? For the 

transport casks? To dig the hole for the titanium? 

I mean, come on, this is just ridiculous. 

Let me put these on for just a moment. 

Okay. We talked about funding, we talked 

about groundwater. I guess I covered just about 

everything on my list. 

Okay. Thank you very much. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Ace. 

And this is -- this is Sharon Hoffman. 

MS. HOFFMAN: My name’s Sharon Hoffman. 

And as they said, we came from California. I have to 

say what a great pleasure to see the elected officials 

participating in this process so actively and speaking 

out against Yucca Mountain. 

It is proof positive that nobody wants the 

waste. And I think what Mayor Goodman said is something 

we should all take to heart. We -- nobody wants it 

and there’s a good reason why nobody wants it. 

But I want to talk specifically about 

groundwater today. Ms. Pineda talked about a million 

year projection of what that groundwater would do. 

I don’t think we can project a million years in the 
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future. We have no manmade things that have been around 

for a million years. We don’t know what the geology 

will do, we don’t know what the hydrology will do. 

It’s ridiculous to think we could project 

what’s going to happen a million years from now. And 

this is part of the reason you hear lots of solutions 

that -- solutions, supposed solutions that talk about 

100 years or 300 years. A hundred years is a blink 

of the eye in the lifetime of nuclear waste and I don’t 

believe they’re going to put the titanium shields on 

either, but even if they did what’s going to happen 

in 10,000 years? Nobody knows. 

So Yucca Mountain doesn’t make any sense, 

because we cannot project like that. So the only thing 

that could possibly be done is to stop producing waste 

and then to monitor the waste that we have. But we 

can’t even begin to look at a solution until we stop 

making it. 

I want to talk about groundwater, since 

that’s the main subject of this hearing. According 

to the National Groundwater Association, which is the 

organization of professionals that deal with the 

quality of groundwater and drilling wells and making 

them safe and all of that, 26 percent of all fresh water 
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in the nation is groundwater, that is, all the fresh 

water we use, there’s actually a great deal more; and 

44 percent of the U.S. population depends on 

groundwater. If we don’t protect the groundwater, we 

are not protecting the lives of future generations and 

really that’s what it’s all about. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Sharon. 

Rod and then Judy and then we’re going to 

go to Joe Kennedy and Holly Woodward and Eddie Jim. 

MR. MCCULLUM: Thank you, Chip. My name 

is Rod McCullum. I’m here on behalf of the Nuclear 

Energy Institute. I’m neither a lobbyist nor 

secretary, I’m a nuclear engineer. I work in the 

regulatory process. 

NEI is the trade association of the U.S. 

nuclear industry. We represent the owners and 

operators of the 99 commercial nuclear plants in this 

country as well as those who are building the five under 

construction and work on those plants. We bring safe 

and reliable electricity to millions of Americans 

including many, if not most, of the 42 million people 

who visited Las Vegas in the last year. 

We are very interested in this process. 
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We are going to file detailed written comments by the 

deadline. I’m not here to present the comments of NEI, 

but I do want to say just a couple of things. 

I first of all, I want to thank NRC for 

holding these hearings and for taking up this task of 

completing this very small but important step in the 

licensing process. I also want to thank all of you 

for coming out here tonight and participating in this 

process and to your elected officials for participating 

in this process. As someone who works in the nuclear 

regulatory process for a living I can attest to you 

it is a very rigorous process. I could recount and 

regale you with stories of my interactions with NRC, 

but indeed they are a very tough regulator and I think 

you all think they should be. 

Those processes only have credibility to 

the extent there’s public participation. It is one 

of the great things of American democracy. It’s what, 

in spite of how we may feel about our politicians, makes 

us great is that we have democratic processes that are 

well established, rigorous, and tested. 

So, again, this is -- this is a small step 

forward in this process. It is a rigorous 

analysis -- updates using the latest information from 
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yet another group of people, the groundwater analysis 

comes to the conclusion that the impacts are small. 

This conclusion is consistent with a lot of the other 

science out there. 

Of course the most rigorous part of the 

process yet lies in front of us and has been mentioned, 

we’ll need Congress to support it moving forward and 

we’ll need an active Department of Energy to support 

it moving forward, that is the licensing process. 

In that licensing process, the science gets 

challenged, it gets tested. But it’s more than that. 

 I’ve heard the words used in the Blue Ribbon 

Commission, the word consent mentioned a lot. And I’ll 

tell you what it means to us. There’s as many 

definitions of consent here as there are people in the 

room, but I’ll tell you what it means to us in the nuclear 

industry. 

Consent is not something you’re given, 

consent is not a piece of paper, it’s not a statement 

by a politician. Consent is something we have to earn 

every day by the way we safely operate our plants and 

our safety culture, the way we demonstrate that, the 

way we are citizens of our communities. And our track 

record there speaks for itself. People who work in 
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some of these technical disciplines -- the jobs in the 

nuclear industry are among the most sought after jobs, 

because it is a very safe working environment. 

So consent is something that must be 

earned. And I would say to you if the licensing process 

were to continue, the we were to go forward to take 

this small, narrow look at updating the groundwater 

analysis and go forward into challenging the science, 

there is an opportunity for consent to be earned here 

in Nevada. It’s all about how those 219 surviving 

contentions, 218, how are they resolved? 

I want to echo the words from the 

representative from Nye County, it’s about working for 

solutions. It’s not just about challenging the 

science. It might be opportunities to do additional 

science, to give Nevada a stronger role in assuring 

the safety of their citizens. But I’m getting ahead 

of myself, this is about a groundwater supplement. 

A lot has been said. A very broad and, 

frankly, entertaining set of statements has been made 

and I’ve kind of enjoyed sitting there, despite me being 

on the other side of some of these issues. And all 

I can say at this point is I look forward to enjoying 

that debate. I look forward to the next step in the 
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process. I’m hoping that Congress will fund them. 

I’m hoping you and your elected officials will continue 

to participate and to engage. 

So, again, thank you, NRC, for taking this 

step. Thank you all for participating. And I hope 

to have opportunities in the future to continue to move 

this process forward. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Thank 

you, Rod. 

We’re going to put a couple of people on 

that do have some family constraints. But we’re going 

to go to Virginia Valentine and Jenna Morton and then 

go to Joe Kennedy, Holly Woodward, Eddie Jim, and Judy 

Treichel. 

MS. VALENTINE: Thank you very much, and 

I’ll be very brief. 

Thank you for holding these hearings here 

and giving us the opportunity to participate. My name 

is Virginia Valentine. I represent the Nevada Resort 

Association, which is about 68 resort hotels in Nevada. 

 As Mayor Goodman mentioned, we have about 40,000 -- or 

40 million visitors a year here. 27 percent of the 

state’s general fund comes from taxes on games and the 
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resort industry, and we employ hundreds of thousands 

of people, about 37 percent of the workforce. 

We are strongly, strongly opposed to the 

siting of a nuclear repository in the State of Nevada; 

and I would agree completely with what Representative 

Titus just said about this just being a supplemental 

study on something already that didn’t make it any 

better. I also am -- I don’t usually make this point, 

but since Dr. Kreisler said that educated people and 

engineers would support this, I have to say I’m an 

engineer and I’m opposed to it. 

My earlier career -- thank you. 

Earlier in my career, in fact, I started 

the Clark County Regional Flood Control District, so 

I do have some background in hydrology. And I’ll tell 

you one thing we know about water is that it moves, 

it migrates and I think all of you who live here and 

those of you from California I appreciate you coming 

over and sharing your stories with us. We don’t have 

one precious drop of water to spare or to contaminate 

in anyway, so I am -- again, we are a tourism-based 

economy here. 

Even the perception of things that don’t 

go well here, when they show something on the national 
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news, even if it rains and it floods here, people cancel 

their reservations, they don’t come here. We are very 

vulnerable to anything that impacts Nevada, the 

perception of Nevada. It wouldn’t take much of an 

accident or an incident to happen here at all. And 

when you say -- so when you say “small,” to me even 

something that is very, very small can have a very 

amplified impact on this economy. 

So, again, I would -- I don’t know -- we 

just have shown if nothing else in this great recession 

that we are not a very resilient economy, we’re very 

vulnerable. I don’t think anything that I have heard 

recently has changed any of the science, any of the 

concerns, or any of the risk about this project and 

I would just tell you that we are very opposed. 

And thank you, again, for allowing me to 

comment. 

MS. MORTON: Hi, I’m Jenna Morton and I 

am representing my friends who could not be here because 

they’re tucking their children into bed. And I thank 

you for allowing me to speak and thank you for all of 

you who have not come from Las Vegas. We welcome you 

all and we’re thrilled to have you here, so thank you 

for allowing me to speak. 
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I guess it’s just obvious, nuclear waste 

is deadly. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission study 

is fundamentally flawed, it’s obsolete, and in the words 

of my good friend Mayor Goodman, it’s illogical, 

nonsensical, and moot. The study is based upon 

assumptions that are not current. 

And I’ll be brief, I know we’ve heard a 

lot tonight. But if transporting tens of thousands 

of tons of deadly material through several major 

metropolitan areas with the risk of accident were 

logical, given that the fact that the transport and 

storage containers to be placed in Nevada do not yet 

exist, it’s impossible to even study the risk to the 

groundwater on the site. 

As a businesswoman, the mere consideration 

of such a plan so close to the livelihood of Nevada’s 

family -- families -- sorry -- baffles me. 

As a taxpayer, I say that not one more penny 

of our money should be spent on this bridge to nowhere. 

 The $15 billion spent so far could have funded 15,000 

years of after school programs for Las Vegas children. 

 That $15 billion could have funded after school All 

Stars programs for 90 million children. 

Let’s start spending on a viable solution. 
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 We know we need a solution, let’s start spending on 

something that’s reasonable or at least more relatively 

reasonable than what we’re talking about here. 

As a mother, one iota of risk to our 

groundwater or any risk at all is too much for our 

children and the children of our future. Nuclear waste 

is deadly. Let’s move on. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks. Thanks, 

Jenna. 

And let’s hear from Joe Kennedy, Holly 

Woodward and Eddie Jim. And I have to thank Judy 

Treichel for her forbearance on this. 

Joe. 

MR. KENNEDY: Good evening all, I’m Joe 

Kennedy. I decided to come down here last night, so 

I’m not totally prepared, but I wanted to come in and, 

you know, say a few things here, you know, about the 

water and about what’s going on with the transportation 

and other things and our feelings about, you know, who 

we are. As I said, I’m Joe Kennedy. I’m Timbisha 

Shoshone of the Western Shoshone nation, so I’m an 

indigenous person in this area and Yucca Mountain is 

a very spiritual place for the Timbisha Shoshone and 
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the Western Shoshone nation. 

First of all, you know, I kind of wanted 

to touch on something about what the good doctor said 

earlier about 18 years, which is a drop in the bucket, 

which isn’t very long, because when we look at life 

we look at thousands of years ahead. And -- you know, 

so you know, his words of saying that things are safe 

are not always as they seem. So I just wanted to comment 

on that. 

First of all, you know, the connection 

between the water, the water’s just -- there is just 

one water. My father told me of a story that his father 

told him, which was my grandfather, that they put a 

vessel in the water in Fish Lake Valley when Fish 

Lake -- when they had a lake, and they sent it to Devil’s 

Hole and so they know the water is connected. So all 

the water is connected, if water is connected from Fish 

Lake to Walker Lake, from Fish Lake to Deep Springs, 

and our people knew all of that. So I think we need 

to keep that in mind, that there is only one water. 

And as our people always have talked about that is very 

sacred to us that we need to, you know, keep that in 

mind. 

You know, and as far as trusting the 
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government, you know, on certain things, when they did 

the atomic tests out there and they told people that 

it was going to be safe, you know the downwinders were 

affected. So that was another thing the doctor 

mentioned that it was safe. But it wasn’t really, 

because we had a lot of folks that got, you know, cancer 

and stuff. 

And a lot of Shoshone and also Timbisha 

did some studies also looking where that nuclear, you 

know, the fallout fell. And a lot of it fell on our 

lands, on where the Timbisha Shoshone have trust lands 

now. And so, you know, it’s all over in every county, 

every state across this country, so and around the 

world. So it’s -- it’s pretty much went around the 

world. 

Also, you know, they told the Navajo and 

assured them that it was safe to mine plutonium and 

get that stuff. And so I think we’re leaving out that 

first part of it, because if you go and look at what 

happened with the Navajo Nation and mining and, you 

know, their water and how it affected them and them 

being told that it was safe, I mean, there’s just the 

story right there. I mean, it wasn’t safe. People 

were dying, people were getting cancer and all of those 
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things. 

Also the water being very important, you 

know, in our part of the country because it’s so scarce. 

 Endangered species like the pup fish in Devil’s 

Hole -- like I talked about the vessel coming from Fish 

Lake, so the water is connected and it could affect 

those animals, those fish, those reptiles, those plants 

that are nowhere else in the world and that you may 

only find here around this country. You know, with 

as much water as we have, we don’t have very much. 

And as far as, you know, time goes, the 

Mother Earth can change at any time and we can see wetter 

times, we could see drier times, we could see 

earthquakes, we could see volcanoes, so looking into 

the future, you know, a million years, that can’t be 

predicted. There’s no way it can be predicted. 

Our people have stories of wetter times 

in Death Valley when there was a lake and there was 

big animals running around and those kind of things. 

 So, you know, they’ve talked about those stories 

already, so those things are important and respecting 

things, because if you don’t respect things in a good 

way, those things can disappear, they can change in 

a way that will wreak havoc upon us as we know it and 
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make a change. The earth could live without us, but 

I don’t think we could live without the earth. 

The earth is very important to us. We as 

Shoshone people look at the earth as our mother and 

we look at the sun as our father, you know? But then 

there’s a higher power that created the earth, the moon, 

the stars, the planets out there, that created all those 

things, so our religious beliefs, you know, tell us 

that we have to listen to those old stories that we 

have and that we had in the past. 

Our people have faced, you know, a lot over 

the years since European contact. We’ve faced germ 

warfare, used smallpox-infected blankets and, you know, 

brought to our people. And the government’s saying 

hey, this is -- you know, we’re going to keep you guys 

warm, you’re okay with us, but then it wiped out a whole 

population. 

Those of you that don’t know the, you know, 

history around here, probably over 98 percent of the 

population eliminated within ten years or less, you 

know, by these tactics, you know, besides the rapes, 

the murders, you know, the massacres. And that’s our 

American Holocaust that isn’t talked about anywhere 

else. It’s something that should be talked about, you 
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know, and I think Ian touched on genocide and that’s 

what it was. I mean, it was something that went through 

so fast, so hard, the Hopi Nation disappeared. Because 

I heard stories of the thousands of the people in the 

valley that I live in, Fish Lake. And when the 

Europeans came there, there were so many Indians they 

called it Indian Valley. But now when you go there 

it’s just a couple of families. 

In Lida, close by in the 19 -- 1890s, there 

was over 500 Shoshones and they had their own butcher 

shop and store and stuff like that and then they were 

just wiped out from smallpox-infected blankets in just 

ten years, and there are only pockets of Shoshone. 

So I know my elders, we made comments on 

the SEIS, on the water, because we know that the water 

is just one water. It’s very important. And we’ve 

watched spring after spring after spring be destroyed. 

 Over at the Navy, Coastal Hot Springs, the water we 

can’t use over there because of the construction of 

the geothermal. Other springs in Death Valley have 

been affected that once were hot water and now they’re 

not. 

In the past 150 years we’ve seen so much 

change that it’s unbelievable for Western Shoshone to 
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conceive. 

So anyway, I know you’re getting ready to 

tell me to wrap up, so I’m going to go ahead and wrap 

up a little bit and just let you know that the earth 

can change at any time and it can change for the worse 

or for the better for us, but, like I said, the earth 

doesn’t, you know, have to have us around. 

And I also want to say that, you know, we 

look at law and the laws for us and we look at land, 

air, water, and the sun, and maybe we should look at 

the sun on the end of laws, you know, the S, as something 

to get the power from for each individual house instead 

of letting, you know, the power companies control at 

all -- you know, getting the money. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Thank you, Joe, 

for that perspective. Thank you. 

And Holly. Is Holly still here? And we 

have a few more speakers, but we should be -- we should 

be done by 9:30 at the latest. 

Holly. 

MS. WOODWARD: Hi, I’m Holly Woodward, and 

I’m a citizen here in Las Vegas. And I did want to 

comment that I thought this draft supplement to the 

EIS is too narrow in scope. But it looks like the only 
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thing that the NRC found to critique was the land 

ownership and water rights. 

But what I’d really like to talk to 

today -- or tonight about is ecology. And Nevada is 

number three behind California and Hawaii in 

biodiversity, so I think you should keep that in mind. 

You did mention or, you know, in the handout 

it does have ecology and that’s really important and 

it’s all conducted to the water, so I hope you really 

take that seriously. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Holly. 

And Eddie. This is Eddie, Eddie Jim. And 

then we’ll go to Judy Treichel, Dennis Bechtel, and 

Forrest Darby. 

MR. JIM: I’ll make it very brief, since 

we’re running out of time here. 

Hi, I’m Eddie Jim of the Pahrump Paiute B. 

I’m actually chairman of the Pahrump Paiute Tribe and 

the tribe opposes this project. 

Since this is a water issue, I will stay 

on the water issue. Water is life to the Pahrump Paiute 

Tribe. It is sacred, it is religious. The Tribe is 

not willing to play Russian roulette with the water. 
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 Wildlife is very important to the Tribe. Water is 

needed for our existence. The Pahrump Paiute Tribe’s 

ancestral homeland is not -- is very large, it does 

not concentrate on the Pahrump Valley only. 

The closure of Yucca Mountain, we won’t 

have to worry about contaminants in the water from this 

project. If these nuclear dumps continue, Nye County 

will be known as gateway to nuclear waste. That’s 

something to be very proud of. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Chairman. 

And Judy, then Dennis Bechtel, and then 

Forrest, and then we have four more speakers. 

Judy Treichel. 

MS. TREICHEL: Thank you. My name is Judy 

Treichel. I’m the executive director of the Nevada 

Nuclear Waste Task Force. 

We’re told that this has a very -- that 

this meeting is to cover a very narrow scope, but I 

don’t accept that that’s right. At Yucca Mountain it’s 

all about groundwater. A Yucca Mountain repository 

will either work or it will not because of the 

groundwater. The only question to be answered is can 

waste placed in Yucca Mountain be isolated and not 
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contaminate the groundwater? And the answer to that 

is no. 

Soon after site characterization began, 

it was established by the State of Nevada scientists 

that the DOE guidelines for groundwater travel time 

were violated at Yucca Mountain. Groundwater moves 

from the repository footprint to the accessible 

environment in less than 1,000 years. 

Even with the keyhole-shaped adjustment 

that was created specifically for Yucca Mountain by 

the EPA, which went from five kilometers to 11 

kilom -- or to 11 miles for dilution, the groundwater 

travel time disqualifiers was still violated. So in 

1989, Governor Bob Miller wrote to the Department of 

Energy saying that the site should be disqualified, 

but it was not. 

And then in 1999, ten years later, outgoing 

Governor Miller and incoming Governor Guinn again wrote 

stating the reason for disqualification and, again, 

they were denied. But their arguments weren’t ignored 

and, in fact, they were acted upon two years later when 

in 2001 the Department of Energy guidelines 

disqualifying conditions for the repository were 

eliminated. The problem was solved. 
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With the guidelines no longer a problem, 

the DOE submitted the Yucca Mountain site 

recommendation in 2002 along with the EIS and we’re 

here to give statements regarding that supplement. 

Six years later, then required by law, in 2008 DOE 

submitted a license application for construction 

authorization to the NRC with an EIS supplement again. 

 Both the site recommendation and the license 

application were based on a repository that had both 

commercial and defense waste. The design was based 

on a specific package called a TAD, which stands for 

transportation, ageing, and disposal of the waste and 

with that TAD it would regulate the heat and, ultimately 

affect the relays from the repository to the 

groundwater. 

Today in 2015 there is no TAD. Those very 

specific containers never got off the design drawing 

board, they were never built, but the release rate of 

the radionuclides to the groundwater is estimated in 

the total system performance assessment that is totally 

dependent upon the TAD waste package. Also, it is now 

six months since the presidential memorandum that 

President Obama signed, which has the force of law and 

it was issued stating that defense and commercial waste 
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cannot be placed in the same repository, but the design 

of Yucca Mountain hasn’t changed, even though the cooler 

defense waste is relied upon in the release estimate 

to moderate the heat output. 

So without the TAD and the cooling effect 

of the defense waste, the NRC’s EIS has no credible 

technical basis to analyze the impacts of radioactive 

contamination on the groundwater and the groundwater 

discharges to the region. 

If Yucca Mountain is to be considered for 

a license, there needs to be a new site core 

recommendation, a new EIS, a new license application 

from the Department of Energy, and then a new acceptance 

review, for each of those must be done by NRC and also 

a new safety evaluation report. 

Finally, Nevadans and the people in reactor 

communities know and communicate with each other. NRC 

keeps assuring all of us that we can trust their complete 

objectivity and dedication to long-term safety. But 

just in the past few days people living near reactors 

have learned that the NRC has cancelled a study to 

examine for the first time since its flawed 1990 study, 

the long-term cancer risk to the community’s residents. 

 NRC said that the eight million dollar study was too 
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much. That’s the same amount NRC just recently 

expended on doing the Yucca Mountain safety evaluation 

report that’s known to be based on incomplete 

information and obsolete assumptions. Nevadans can 

learn all we need to know about NRC’s actions by just 

watching the reactor communities. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Thank 

you, Judy. 

And Dennis, and then we’ll go to Forrest 

and then we have Jim Hadnot, I’m not sure, and then 

we have Paul Moradkhan. I’m not sure, sorry, I probably 

mispronounced that, and then Leonard -- Webster Mack 

and Leonard Willoughby. And this is Dennis Bechtel. 

MR. BECHTEL: Thanks, Chip, and thanks to 

the NRC for holding the meeting in Nevada here. I’ll 

try not to convey too many redundancies here. Just 

about everything has been said, I think. 

A couple of comments. One is with regard 

to the time extended for review. And while the NRC’s 

30-day extension for SEIS review is welcome, I believe 

there strong arguments to justify a 60-day extension. 

 Many of the important participants, and I’m referring 

to affected units of local government and tribes, have 
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almost no resources with which to undertake the 

analysis. Phil got into this a little before. Review, 

therefore, will probably have to be undertaken by staff 

with other speedometers and probably not the technical 

background to be able to do it. 

Given the many delays that have been 

experienced over the life of the Yucca Mountain program, 

I don’t feel an extension of 60 days is unreasonable, 

in fact it probably should even be more than that. 

A few other comments. Judy mentioned and 

I will reiterate that the -- the total program has 

been -- is significantly different from when it was 

originally envisioned; and I feel the NRC needs to 

acknowledge in the final SEIS that there are recent 

developments that may serve to change the program 

significantly and create a need to revisit the EIS and 

SEIS. 

One, based on recommendations from Energy 

Secretary Moniz in January of this year, the President 

authorized the development of the sole repository for 

the disposal of high-level radioactive waste resulting 

from atomic energy defense activities. And Judy 

mentioned that. Subsequently, Dr. Moniz indicated 

that DOE would begin identifying and vetting a defense 
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waste repository on separate sites for one or more 

interim facilities for spent fuel from shutter reactors 

requiring, of course, a Congressional approval. 

The construction of the independent 

defense waste repository could change the character 

of a permanent repository. What EIS and SEIS would 

then no longer reflect the current state of the nuclear 

program. 

And I’d also add that there’s been a lot 

of talk about the transportation of the waste. Well, 

the one alternative was to have waste transported by 

rail from Caliente around the top of the test site to 

the repository. Currently, there’s a monument that’s 

been proposed, the Great Basin National Monument, which 

would be right in the middle of that. So what that 

means is that there would be, probably, the need to 

revisit transportation. And it may mean that more 

waste would end up on the highways, which may mean the 

reconfiguration of canisters and things that would end 

up in a repository that would be totally different; 

and that’s not reflected in the current documents. 

Finally, and this gets into the small issue 

that’s come up a couple of times, the NRC has accurately 

noted that unsupportable assumptions about human 
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activities, and I’m quoting, “Far in the future will 

result in correspondingly unsupportable conclusions 

about potential impacts.” Notwithstanding the great 

uncertainty of future activities, climate, et cetera, 

the document is replete with statements that “the 

impacts will be SMALL” -- in capital letters -- many 

times. Small from releases of radioactivity, the 

accessible environment. 

We don’t know what the impacts would be. 

 The time frame is just totally unreasonable to even 

think about that. It may therefore be more prudent 

to recast these small, medium, or large impacts to 

intermittent or uncertain, because we really don’t know 

what the impacts are going to be. 

But, anyway, I mention this in part because 

some in Congress may consider the conclusions reached 

by NRC and the SEIS as the affirmation that Yucca 

Mountain is a more than adequate site for a repository, 

a conclusion that is obviously premature. 

To be realistic, we need to remember the 

recent experiences with a waste isolation pilot 

project, WIPP site in New Mexico. WIPP was touted as 

a repository that would isolate waste from the public 

for centuries. Needless to say, it hasn’t worked out 
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that way and it’s probably the same for Yucca Mountain. 

 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Dennis. 

And Forrest. 

MR. DARBY: Over the past 20 years or so 

I think this is my, I don’t know, third or fourth or 

fifth one of these meetings that I’ve attended. And 

I’ll take less than five minutes. 

I’m just going to hit all the notes where 

I was writing down things that people were talking 

about. I’m strongly in favor of restarting the Yucca 

Mountain project. My condo was paid for by work that 

I did out at the test site. I was an electrician on 

the TBM, made over 100,000 a year. That was a long 

time ago. 

The -- Dina mentioned there’s $65 billion 

worth of work left. That’s a lot for our workers. 

A lot of them are out of work right now. 

We’re talking in figures like one million 

years and so forth. There’s been a lot of scientific 

conversation in this room. I would suggest to anybody 

who really is interested in these scientific subjects 

to look at where the earth is going to be in 300 years. 
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 Forget about one million or 500 years. A lot of work 

is being done in that area with global warming, ocean 

pollution, overpopulation. We’re going to be in a real 

tough spot by 300 years, a real tough spot here in the 

world. 

Also, nuclear power provides -- has no 

carbon footprint, so if you do it right, it’s not a 

bad thing. I hear a lot of -- the previous speaker 

just talked about having to change the casks and all 

of that because the trains aren’t viable. The new train 

route would come from the north, it wouldn’t go through 

the monument. If it ever went to Yucca Mountain, 

there’s a train route already set up. 

So it would stand -- I don’t see any trucks 

going through Las Vegas. I think if it ever started 

up, all of it would be by train and all of it would 

come in from the north. 

Everyone, Senator Bryan, lots and lots of 

people talked about, you know, is it a political 

decision or not? I think it’s totally a political 

decision. We’re going to find out pretty soon, because 

Cresent Hardy, I’m a strong Democrat, he’s running 

against four Democrats in CD-4 who all opposed Yucca 

Mountain. He’s in favor. I think Cresent’s going to 
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be re-elected on Yucca Mountain alone, just like Steven 

lost his seat because of Yucca Mountain. These are 

just my thoughts. 

Anyway, it was old home week to me, because 

I’ve worked at virtually all of the places, many of 

the places that were talked about. I worked at San 

Onofre, I worked in Area 5. There’s a story, I worked 

all over the Test Site, I worked at Yucca. Area 5, 

I could talk for an hour on that. One of the speakers 

talked about all the waste coming in. Hello. A lot 

of it comes into Area 5 every day, every day, folks. 

 

Yucca was selected primarily -- one of the 

criteria was what they call overburden and underburden. 

 We talk about the water coming down and I can’t 

remember, it has to go through about 1,500 feet of dirt 

before it gets to the repository and then another 1,500 

feet to get to the groundwater. But, anyway, that was 

one of the main criteria, it was in between and one 

of the few places in the world, really, like that, where 

it would have to go with a lot of protection on both 

sides of it. 

Anyway, I think that’s probably about it, 

but the big thing is the time frames. Really look at 
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where the earth is going to be in 300 years with the 

amount of pollution and global warming. This planet’s 

in trouble and it’s not for Yucca Mountain. We’ve got 

a problem. 

Thank you. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks. Thanks, 

Forrest. 

And Jim, then we’ll go to Paul Webster, 

Leonard and we’re going to finish up with Andrew 

Lingenfelter from Senator Heller’s office. 

Jim. 

MR. HADNOT: My name is Jim Hadnot. I am 

a Clark County resident. I’ve lived there for about 

13 years. I’m definitely in the minority, I think, 

in the group. Well, I have a unique background. I 

have a civil engineering degree. I practiced here in 

Las Vegas for seven years. My licenses are still 

current. I now work for a company that manufactures 

radiopharmaceuticals. So I understand groundwater and 

I understand what radiation is. 

I think a lot of the dissent comes from 

the general population, which just doesn’t understand 

what nuclear waste is. So I -- I guess my real point 

is I am a proponent for this project. I can’t fathom, 
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you know 300 years from now having this stuff spread 

across 100-plus, sites in the U.S. I can’t understand 

why all the opposition has no other plan. The plan 

is just don’t do it. Well, what are you going to 

do? But nobody has another plan. I find that very 

frustrating. 

It’s good that we come together and we talk 

and I think that’s very important, but the science is 

there and if you don’t understand the science, then 

find someone to help you understand it. 

I guess, in summary, I support the project. 

 Thanks. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks. Thanks, 

Jim. 

And Paul. 

MR. MORADKHAN: Good evening. I’m Paul 

Moradkhan with Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce. 

First, I’d like to thank the NRC for 

providing an opportunity to speak tonight. I’d also 

like to thank Congressman Titus, Senator Reid’s office, 

Mayor Goodman, Senator Bryan and Senator Parks for 

expressing many of the points the Chamber has also 

agreed with over the years. 

In regards the releasing the supplemental 
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draft, the Metro Chamber is the state’s largest business 

community -- and there are thousands of our members 

throughout this community employing almost 230,000 

Nevadans -- is adamantly opposed to Yucca Mountain. 

This has been our position for almost two decades and 

that has not changed with release of this information. 

 Many of our concerns rely on the environmental factors 

and the use of water and the contamination of potential 

water issues at hand, as have been discussed tonight. 

 

Our leadership of the Metro Chamber was 

in Washington, DC just last week and shared with members 

of Congress their continued opposition. Our Chamber 

believes that Las Vegas is the economic engine of the 

state. Our residents, our employers, and our employees 

must be listened to and for that reason the Metro Chamber 

is in continued opposition to Yucca Mountain. This 

draft supplement does not resolve or mitigate any of 

our existing concerns and long standing opposition to 

the Yucca Mountain. 

Thank you for your time. We will be 

sending formal comments before the November 20th 

deadline. 

Thank you. 
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MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Paul. Thank you. 

And Webster. 

MR. MACK: Good evening. My name is 

Webster Mack. I’m a resident here in Las Vegas. I’ve 

lived here for over 35 years. 

MR. CAMERON: Could you just speak into 

the microphone, Webster. 

MR. MACK: Okay. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. 

MR. MACK: I’ve been here for over 

35 years, so that almost makes me a lifer. I had a 

career with the Environmental Protection Agency and 

my background is I’m a geologist and I’m currently 

teaching geography and geology. 

So I want to be sort of neutral on this 

and say that we are sort of rearranging the deckchairs 

on the Titanic and you’re worried about whether or not 

someone is going to get an ocean spray. We’re talking 

about groundwater, okay. 

In my opinion the planet has a more serious 

problem; it’s called global warming and climate change. 

 And long before the repository even gets built or even 

becomes an issue about groundwater, Planet Earth is 

going to be in so much trouble that we’re all going 
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to look back on this and laugh. 

We all like electricity and I personally 

think nuclear energy as a clean, non-carbon burning, 

non-fossil fuel source of energy, needs its day in the 

sun, so to speak. We need nuclear energy, even though 

we hate the fact that it creates nuclear waste. Which 

begs the question, the question is not what are we going 

to do with this waste, the question is we have no 

long-range nuclear energy plan and this 

repository -- notice the word repository means you can 

go back into the place and pull the stuff out. It’s 

not a dump. It hasn’t been isolated from man’s ability 

to go in there. The repository means you’re holding 

the hope alive that you can go in some day when the 

political climate changes and reprocess the fuel and 

let it run for another 1,000 years. There’s a lot to 

be said about nuclear energy and the fact that it’s 

a clean source, non-polluting atmosphere, CO2, carbon 

warming, global greenhouse gas. 

So the problem is, in my opinion, there’s 

no long-range plan for nuclear energy. As you know, 

there’s a fuel cycle. There’s a front end fuel cycle 

and there’s a back end fuel cycle. If you want to use 

the word cycle. Because we do not have a long-range 
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energy plan, we’re dumping everything into this 

repository and we’re kicking this problem down the road 

for a million years or 10,000 years. God help us, I 

don’t think Planet Earth will be inhabited by humans 

within the next hundred years or so because of the 

pollution that we’ve created. 

So I salute you for sitting through this 

meeting and listening to these arguments and railing 

against the repository and railing against Yucca 

Mountain. I think that’s just -- you can’t see the 

forest for the trees. So I salute the Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission for holding these meetings. 

They got dumped on to sit here and take this abuse from 

the public, but this is a public forum. We’re 

exchanging ideas. We’re trying to understand the 

problem. With many heads and many minds, we’ll 

possibly get solutions. 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission I 

thought was doing to regulate the Department of Energy 

and the Department of Defense unless the Department 

of Defense got a pass and they don’t have to answer 

to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

The Department of Defense recycles fuel 

today. France made a decision many years ago, they’re 
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running nuclear power plants. They’re recycling their 

fuel. They don’t have a long-term repository problem. 

 We need to recycle the fuel in my opinion. We need 

a long-range nuclear energy plan that addresses the 

front end of the fuel cycle and the back end of the 

fuel cycle. 

I salute you for sitting through this long 

evening. 

Thank you for being forbearing. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Thank you, 

Webster. 

Leonard, Leonard Willoughby, and then we 

have one last speaker, Andrew Lingenfelter. 

MR. WILLOUGHBY: Hi. My name is Leonard 

Willoughby. You probably recognize me, my name. But 

I only have one comment and that’s on models. How did 

you validate your models and did you use current 

parameters that are now available to validate those 

models? And that’s it. 

MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you Leonard. 

And Andrew. 

MR. LINGENFELTER: Thank you, Chip, and 

thank you to the NRC for being here tonight. I know 

it’s way past midnight on the East Coast and so I’m 
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sure you guys are ready to go as well as the folks here 

in the audience. With a two-year-old at home, you know, 

now is about my bedtime as well. 

So just to be quick, I just want to express 

very much, you know, the gratitude is beyond words for 

all of you showing up here tonight to express your 

concerns; and I think the NRC will find that these are 

well informed concerns, very valid concerns. And I 

think the gist of this meeting is just to take local 

governments, tribal governments, and the State into 

consideration when making these decisions. And even 

with the extension of the notice for comment, these 

things are vitally important and you can’t really begin 

to get this process even moving without the consent 

of local and state and tribal governments. And so I 

think that’s really where this discussion ought to be 

had, is where those folks feel and are on these issues. 

 

And so thank you very much for being here 

and for coming to Las Vegas and to Amargosa Valley on 

Thursday evening and to the folks who showed up here 

tonight. 

MR. CAMERON: Thank you. And from Senator 

Heller’s office. 
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And I would thank all of you for your 

patience and your interest and I’m going to turn it 

over to our senior NRC official Jim Rubenstone to close 

the meeting out for us. 

Jim. 

MR. RUBENSTONE: Thank you to everyone. 

 First, I’ve heard some applause tonight. I will step 

out of my role and ask for some applause for our able 

facilitator, Mr. Chip Cameron. And as long as you’re 

clapping, I would say give yourself a round of applause. 

 

I’ve been to a number of NRC meetings. 

This is in the top ranks for people being passionate, 

but also being courteous and respectful of other 

speakers. We very much appreciate the great turnout 

and we very much appreciate all of the comments that 

have been raised today, and we will consider all of 

these as we move forward to finalize this supplement. 

Again, just reminders, the comment period 

is open until November 20. We welcome your written 

comments. We welcome your attendance at the meeting 

on Thursday at Amargosa Valley and we have, as we said, 

two more telecoms where you can provide comments on 

October 15th and November 12th. 
 114 

NEAL R. GROSS

 COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 

 1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W. 

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 (202) 234-4433 

So, once again, thanks to everyone for 

coming out. We very much appreciate the comment 

process and have a good evening. 

(Whereupon, the session ended at 9:36 p.m.)