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: teleconference 

Date: Thursday, November 12, 2015 

Work Order No.: NRC-2018 Pages 1-75 

NEAL R. GROSS AND CO., INC. 

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 1323 Rhode Island Avenue, N.W. 

 Washington, D.C. 20005 

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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 

+ + + + + 

THURSDAY 

NOVEMBER 12, 2015 

+ + + + + 

The meeting convened via 

teleconference at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Chip 

Cameron, Facilitator, presiding. 

PRESENT

CHIP CAMERON, Facilitator 

ADAM GENDELMAN, Office of the General Counsel 

CHRISTINE PINEDA, Office of Nuclear Material 

Safety and Safeguards 

JAMES RUBENSTONE, Office of Nuclear Material 

Safety and Safeguards 

 
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A-G-E-N-D-A 

Meeting Opens 

 Chip Cameron......................................3 

Introduction 

 James Rubenstone..................................7 

Overview of Supplement 

 Christine Pineda..................................8 

Opportunity for Clarifying Questions..............18 

Opportunity to Provide Oral Comments..............19 

Meeting Closes....................................75 
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1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S 

2 2:04 p.m. 

3 MR. CAMERON: Good afternoon, 

4 everyone. My name is Chip Cameron, and I want to 

5 welcome you to today's meeting, and the topic for 

6 the meeting is the draft supplemental 

7 environmental impact statement on groundwater 

8 issues at a Yucca Mountain repository for high 

9 level waste. The draft EIS - that stands for 

10 environmental impact statement - was prepared by 

11 the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission 

12 which we will refer to as the NRC, and the NRC would 

13 have licensing authority over any repository that 

14 might be proposed for Yucca Mountain in the future. 

15 It's my pleasure to serve as your 

16 facilitator for today's meeting, and we are 

17 conducting this meeting by phone. We do not have 

18 a live audience here in Rockville, Maryland. 

19 As you probably know, the NRC has held 

20 three previous public meetings on this subject in 

21 front of live audiences in Rockville, Maryland, in 

22 Las Vegas, Nevada, and in Amargosa Valley, Nevada. 

23 So today is the final opportunity for members of 

24 the public to orally comment on the draft 

25 environmental impact statement, and that's the 
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1 primary objective of the public meeting today is 

2 to listen to your comments. 

3 Other important objectives are to give 

4 the NRC staff an opportunity to clearly explain not 

5 only the EIS process to you, but also to tell you 

6 about some of the information and findings in the 

7 draft EIS, and I always like to emphasize that term, 

8 "draft." 

9 This EIS will not be finalized until the 

10 NRC has considered all of the comments from this 

11 meeting today, as well as the meetings from the 

12 three other live audience public meetings, and the 

13 meeting by phone that we did on October 15 of this 

14 year. 

15 The NRC is also taking written 

16 comments, and the NRC staff will tell you about how 

17 to submit those comments and when later on in the 

18 phone call. 

19 In terms of the format for today's 

20 meeting, we're going to have some brief NRC 

21 presentations, then we're going to go out to you 

22 to see if there's any clarifying questions on the 

23 EIS process. So we're going to start with 

24 questions on the EIS process, then we're going to 

25 go to comments from whomever wants to make them. 
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1 And during that comment portion of the 

2 meeting, the NRC staff is not going to be engaging 

3 in any back and forth, any dialogue with you on your 

4 comments, but they will be listening carefully to 

5 your comments, and they'll consider those in 

6 preparing the final EIS. 

7 However, if you reference a document in 

8 your comments today, or a map, the NRC staff may 

9 ask you to make sure that you submit a comment, or 

10 a copy of that document or map to them with your 

11 comments. 

12 Ground rules are very, very, simple. 

13 After the staff presentation, we'll go out to you 

14 for your clarifying questions and comments, and as 

15 Jennifer explained and I'm sure she'll explain 

16 again, if you want to speak, you press star one on 

17 your phone and you'll be placed in the queue to make 

18 your comment or ask your, ask your question. 

19 And as always, I would just ask you to 

20 be crisp in your comments to make sure that we do 

21 get to everybody who wants to comment today, and 

22 we usually have a five-minute guideline for your 

23 oral comments. And fortunately, you'll have an 

24 opportunity to expand on comments in writing. 

25 So the focus of the call today is the 
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1 draft EIS on groundwater issues at Yucca Mountain, 

2 and we know that you may have broader concerns about 

3 Yucca Mountain. It's been a long and complicated 

4 process with many issues, and the NRC staff is here 

5 to listen to all of your comments and concerns, but 

6 any comments related to groundwater issues would 

7 be the most helpful for the staff. 

8 We are transcribing this phone call, 

9 and that transcription will be available to you as 

10 a record of this meeting. It will be the NRC's 

11 record also. 

12 In terms of who will be speaking to you 

13 today, we have first of all, Jim Rubenstone. Jim 

14 is the Acting Director of the Yucca Mountain 

15 project directorate here at the NRC in the Office 

16 of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, and 

17 he'll give some welcoming remarks to you. 

18 And then we're going to hear from 

19 Christine Pineda. Christine is the Senior Project 

20 Manager for this draft EIS, and she is in the Yucca 

21 Mountain project directorate also. 

22 And finally, we have Adam Gendelman 

23 from our Office of General Counsel. He's not going 

24 to be speaking unless we need him to answer a 

25 question about a legal issue, but he is the Counsel 
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1 to the NRC staff on this particular EIS. He's from 

2 the NRC Office of General Counsel. 

3 And with that, I'm going to have Jim 

4 Rubenstone to lead it off for us. 

5 MR. RUBENSTONE: Thank you very much, 

6 Chip, and let me extend my welcome as well to 

7 everyone on the line for this, our fifth and final 

8 public meeting on our draft supplement. As Chip 

9 said, I'm the Acting Director of the Yucca Mountain 

10 effort here in NMSS. 

11 I think, as all of you know, the NRC 

12 released this draft supplement for public comment 

13 in August on the 21st. The comment period was 

14 originally for 60 days, but we have extended it for 

15 an additional month, so the comment period now 

16 closes a week from tomorrow on November 20. This 

17 is to allow time for folks to review our relatively 

18 limited document, but also keep us on schedule to 

19 wrap this up in a timely manner. 

20 We scheduled today's teleconference to 

21 receive additional comments during this extended 

22 period. And as I've said many times, public 

23 comments are important to the NRC, and one of our 

24 purposes is to accept your comments. And as Chip 

25 said, we are recording this call and will be 
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1 transcribing it to make sure that we accurately 

2 capture all of the comments. 

3 I could also remind you that in addition 

4 to providing comments today on this call, or 

5 comments that have come in through other public 

6 meetings, you can submit comments to the NRC by mail 

7 or through the regulations.gov website. 

8 More details on how to submit these 

9 comments are available on NRC's public website 

10 under the heading, "radioactive waste, high-level 

11 waste disposal, key documents," and our previous 

12 meeting summaries, transcripts, and the handouts 

13 we used at the public meetings are also available 

14 at the same location on the NRC website. The 

15 transcript for this meeting and a meeting summary 

16 will be posted on the same page as soon as they're 

17 available. 

18 So I'll now turn it over to Christine 

19 Pineda. As Chip said, she's our Senior Project 

20 Manager in the Yucca Mountain directorate, and 

21 she'll introduce the draft supplement and discuss 

22 the opportunities for providing comment. 

23 MS. PINEDA: Thanks, Jim. Hi, 

24 everyone, and thanks for your interest in the NRC's 

25 supplement to the Department of Energy's 
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1 environmental impact statement for the proposed 

2 Yucca Mountain repository. 

3 The agenda for this call is similar to 

4 the agendas for our public meetings in September 

5 and our call on October 15. First, I'll provide 

6 some background about the NRC's environmental 

7 review process for the Yucca Mountain repository 

8 and describe the areas that are covered by the draft 

9 supplement. 

10 And I will be following the order of the 

11 slides that we used for the September meeting, and 

12 you can access those slides by going to the NRC's 

13 web page as Jim just described. You go to 

14 radioactive waste, and then high level radioactive 

15 waste disposal, and then key documents. And on the 

16 key documents page, you'll see the list of the 

17 public meetings that we have had and the meeting 

18 materials from those meetings. 

19 After my overview of the supplement, 

20 we'll have an opportunity for you to ask clarifying 

21 questions, and then we'll go to the public comment 

22 portion of the call. And as Chip mentioned, try 

23 to keep your comments to about five minutes. 

24 So how did we get to this point in the 

25 NRC's environmental review process for the 
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1 repository? The framework for the NRC's 

2 environmental review process is defined by the 

3 National Environmental Policy Act, and that Act 

4 requires that federal agencies consider the 

5 environmental consequences of their proposed 

6 actions. 

7 The NRC's proposed actions are 

8 licensing actions or rulemakings, and the NRC 

9 develops environmental impact statements or 

10 environmental assessments for these kinds of 

11 actions. 

12 The Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires 

13 that the Department of Energy prepare the 

14 environmental impact statement for the proposed 

15 repository, and it requires that the NRC adopt the 

16 Department of Energy's environmental impact 

17 statement to the extent practicable. 

18 A number of events or activities have 

19 occurred over the last several years that relate 

20 to the NRC's environmental review process. The 

21 Department of Energy published its final EIS in 

22 2002, and it submitted that EIS along with its site 

23 recommendations to the President in 2002. 

24 In 2008, the Department of Energy 

25 published a final supplemental environmental 
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1 impact statement which supplemented the entire 

2 2002 repository EIS. And in 2008, the Department 

3 of Energy submitted that EIS, along with its 

4 original EIS and its license application to the NRC 

5 for review. 

6 The NRC staff reviewed the Department 

7 of Energy's EISs and issued what we refer to as our 

8 adoption determination report, and issued that in 

9 September of 2008. What did the staff find in the 

10 adoption determination report? We determined 

11 that the Department of Energy EISs could be 

12 adopted, but that supplementation was needed. 

13 The adoption determination report 

14 describes the scope of the need of analysis stating 

15 that further characterization was needed of how the 

16 groundwater moves through the aquifer, especially 

17 beyond the post-closure regulatory compliance 

18 point. 

19 The staff also determined in the 

20 adoption determination report that an assessment 

21 was needed of the potential impacts from the 

22 repository that could occur beyond the regulatory 

23 compliance point. 

24 So these would be the potential impacts 

25 on the aquifer from contaminants coming from the 
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1 repository, as well as the impact at locations 

2 where groundwater discharges to the surface. 

3 Staff also concluded in that report 

4 that this further characterization of the aquifer 

5 and the potential impacts should account for both 

6 radiological and non-radiological contaminants. 

7 You may be wondering why the NRC staff is 

8 supplementing the Department of Energy EISs, and 

9 it is a complicated chain of events that lead to 

10 this point. 

11 In 2008, when we issued our adoption 

12 determination report, the NRC requested that the 

13 Department of Energy produce the needed 

14 supplement, but at that time the Department of 

15 Energy deferred to the NRC. 

16 In 2011, the Commission directed the 

17 NRC staff and the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing 

18 Board to seek its license review and hearing 

19 activities related to the repository in response 

20 to a lack of continued funding for the project. 

21 In 2013, the Court of Appeals for the 

22 District of Columbia Circuit ordered the NRC to 

23 continue its licensing activities as long as it 

24 still had funds available from appropriations that 

25 were made in previous years. In response to the 
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1 court decision, the Commission directed the staff 

2 to complete its safety evaluation report, which it 

3 finished in January of this year. 

4 The Commission also requested that the 

5 Department of Energy complete the needed 

6 supplementation for the environmental impact 

7 statement, but again the Department of Energy 

8 deferred to the NRC, so the Commission directed the 

9 staff to develop this supplement, which we began 

10 to work on after completing the safety evaluation 

11 report in January. 

12 The scope of the supplement, as I 

13 mentioned earlier, is described in our adoption 

14 determination report, and the scope is limited 

15 because the staff determined in that report that 

16 the EISs were otherwise acceptable to be adopted 

17 by the NRC. 

18 A potentially affected area that we 

19 cover in the supplement is the area of the 

20 groundwater flow path that could include 

21 contaminant releases from the repository. The 

22 focus is on the area beyond the post-closure 

23 regulatory compliance point. 

24 From that point onward, the groundwater 

25 flows through the Amargosa desert and ultimately 
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1 to the Furnace Creek and Middle Basin areas of Death 

2 Valley. The groundwater reaches the surface both 

3 at irrigation areas and natural discharge areas. 

4 For example, in the Amargosa Valley area, 

5 groundwater is pumped for the irrigation of crops. 

6 As its primary model of the regional 

7 groundwater flow system, the NRC staff used the 

8 Death Valley regional groundwater flow system 

9 model developed by the United States Geological 

10 Survey. 

11 You can see the area encompassed by the 

12 model if you click on the poster titled "Regional 

13 Groundwater Flow System" that's on our "Key 

14 Documents" page, or it's also on slide eight of the 

15 presentation from the September meeting. 

16 The resources that we determined could 

17 be affected by potential contaminants from the 

18 repository entering the groundwater include the 

19 groundwater itself which we refer to in the 

20 supplement as the aquifer environment, and we refer 

21 to it that way because we consider the rock that 

22 the groundwater is flowing through, whether it's 

23 bedrock or sediment, because some contaminants can 

24 become attached to rock particles while others may 

25 flow along with the groundwater. 
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1 We also looked at impacts on soil at 

2 locations where the groundwater discharges to the 

3 ground surface, and impacts on public health if 

4 members of the public were exposed to contaminated 

5 soil or groundwater, and impacts on vegetation and 

6 wildlife. 

7 We looked at the potential for 

8 disproportionate impacts on minority or low-income 

9 populations that may be located in areas of 

10 groundwater pumping or natural surface discharge. 

11 The framework for the analysis, or the 

12 key elements of the analysis, are the consideration 

13 of radiological and non-radiological 

14 contaminants, and consideration of the potential 

15 impacts from those contaminants for a period of one 

16 million years after the repository would be closed. 

17 The NRC staff analysis builds on the 

18 Department of Energy's model of repository 

19 performance that the NRC staff assessed in its 

20 safety evaluation report. In our supplement 

21 analysis, we considered different groundwater 

22 pumping and climate cases so that we could identify 

23 a reasonable range of potential impacts. 

24 For groundwater pumping, we assumed in one 

25 case that groundwater would be pumped as is 
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1 currently occurring at Amargosa farms for 

2 irrigation. And for that case, we conservatively 

3 assumed that all of the contaminants that enter the 

4 groundwater from the repository and flow to that 

5 point would be drawn up through the pumping. 

6 In another case, we assumed that no 

7 groundwater pumping occurs. And in that 

8 situation, all of the groundwater would be left to 

9 flow to natural surface discharge locations. And 

10 for each discharge location, we assumed that all 

11 of the contaminants would reach the ground surface. 

12 We also looked at two different climate 

13 cases. In one case, we assume a hot and dry climate 

14 similar to today's climate, and this case also 

15 encompasses the conditions of a hotter climate that 

16 we might see in the near future. 

17 In other case, we assume a cooler and 

18 wetter climate, and this would experience more 

19 precipitation and result in more water entering the 

20 groundwater system, and this could affect the 

21 concentrations of the contaminants flowing through 

22 that system. 

23 Both the amount of groundwater pumping 

24 and the climate could also affect where groundwater 

25 would reach the surface. For example, in the case 
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1 of a wetter future climate, ancient springs that 

2 are now dry areas could become active again. If 

3 you happen to be looking at the slides from the 

4 previous meetings, you can see how these former 

5 springs look on slide 12. 

6 What conclusions does the staff make in 

7 the supplement? The supplement concludes that the 

8 potential direct and indirect impacts from 

9 contaminants entering the groundwater from the 

10 repository would be small, and the NRC defines 

11 small as the environmental effects would not be 

12 detectable, or would be so minor that they would 

13 not noticeably alter important attributes of the 

14 resources that we assessed the impacts for. 

15 Likewise, we conclude that the 

16 potential cumulative impacts would be small, and 

17 these are impacts from the repository alone when 

18 combined with the potential impacts from other 

19 activities in the region, such as activities on the 

20 Nevada test site. 

21 The staff also has determined that our 

22 impact conclusions are consistent with the staff's 

23 understanding of how the potential contaminants 

24 would move through the aquifer. That summarizes 

25 our draft supplement. 
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1 The next steps are that the - as Jim 

2 mentioned, the comment period closes on November 

3 20, and that's next Friday. We will then take all 

4 of the public comments we have received, read them, 

5 and summarize them, and provide responses to the 

6 comment summaries. The responses will be in an 

7 appendix to the final supplement, and we will 

8 publish that in the first half of next year. And 

9 now we can take some clarifying questions about the 

10 NRC's process. 

11 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you, Jim, and 

12 thank you, Christine. I know that all of you are 

13 eager to make your comments today, but we want to 

14 see if there are any clarifying questions on the 

15 EIS process that we should address before we move 

16 to comments. 

17 And Jennifer, can you see if anybody out 

18 there has a clarifying question for us? 

19 THE OPERATOR: If you would like to ask 

20 a clarifying question, please press star and the 

21 number one. Again, that is star and the number 

22 one. 

23 MR. CAMERON: Okay Jennifer, it 

24 doesn't sound like we have any clarifying 

25 questions. Maybe we'll move to commenting. 
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1 THE OPERATOR: Okay, would you like to 

2 take the first one that we have in queue here? 

3 MR. CAMERON: Yeah, who is the first 

4 one in queue, John LaForge? 

5 THE OPERATOR: Yes, your line is open. 

6 MR. LaFORGE: This is John. I 

7 understand that in June of 1997, the Department of 

8 Energy research announced that rainwater had 

9 seeped from the top of the Yucca Mountain 800 feet 

10 into the repository in a mere 40 years. That was 

11 as dated by chlorine-36. 

12 Government scientists had earlier 

13 claimed that rainwater would take hundreds or 

14 thousands of years to reach the waste caverns. 

15 Now, federal guidelines have long required that the 

16 existence of fast flowing water would disqualify 

17 the Yucca Mountain site. I understand that these 

18 regulations have been weakened as challenges have 

19 come up to them. I would suggest that those 

20 guidelines be adhered to. 

21 In August of 1999, evidence that the 

22 inside of the mountain is periodically flooded with 

23 water came in the form of zircon crystals that were 

24 found deep inside. The crystals did not form 

25 without complete immersion in water according to 
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1 Jerry Szymanski, formerly the Energy Department's 

2 top geologist at Yucca Mountain. That would mean 

3 that hot underground water has invaded the mountain 

4 and might again do so in the time when the 

5 radioactive waste would still be extremely 

6 dangerous. The results could be catastrophic. 

7 At the time of Szymanski's findings 

8 that deep water rises and falls inside Yucca 

9 Mountain, the finding was disregarded by 

10 Department of Energy. I guess that I'd take these 

11 warnings more seriously this time around. 

12 Also in August of 1999, the Energy 

13 Department reported that leaving the waste in 

14 storage at reactor sites where it is, is just as 

15 safe as moving it to Yucca Mountain as long as the 

16 waste is repackaged every 100 years. I suggest 

17 that the Department of Energy reconsider this as 

18 an alternative to moving it all over the country 

19 on roads, rails, and barges. Thank you very much. 

20 MR. CAMERON: Thank you, John, for 

21 those pertinent comments, and we're next going to 

22 go to Marvin Lewis. 

23 THE OPERATOR: Your line is open. 

24 MR. LEWIS: This is a personal issue, 

25 and I hope I'm not interrupting with some personal 
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1 issue. But I used to get a little disc that you 

2 put in the computer. It was read on the screen 

3 without writing for it or requesting it. Have you 

4 thrown out that list of Yucca Mountain commenters? 

5 I've commented on this many, many times 

6 over the decades and I thought I was on that list, 

7 and this time I think I've not gotten that draft 

8 you're talking about, but that doesn't matter. I 

9 pulled it up somehow anyway. 

10 Let's go onto some of my comments which 

11 I will not go over all of my comments, I'm going 

12 to put them in writing, but I think a few of them 

13 are appropriate. We seem to have forgotten there 

14 is a place called Fukushima, fair beach, or fair 

15 cart, whatever you want to call it in English, but 

16 Fukushima. Fair fields might be another way of 

17 saying it. 

18 Anyway, there is apparently three or 

19 four reactors that have melted down over there, and 

20 we're getting a lot of new data as to how dangerous 

21 and how pyrophoric, spontaneously combustive, 

22 this, the cladding is on this spent fuel. And I 

23 do not see any recalculation from - on the - I've 

24 been also following the near term stuff in the key 

25 FF - I forget. I've skipped all these 
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1 abbreviations. 

2 Yes, I've been following the other 

3 things on Fukushima, but I do not see the data 

4 that's coming out of Fukushima used to recalculate 

5 the information we're getting out of Yucca 

6 Mountain. 

7 Now, it might be that I'm not following 

8 it correctly. I listened to two or three public 

9 meetings on it though from the NRC daily and I have 

10 followed every piece of literature, at least their 

11 titles, and I do not see this. I do not see any 

12 recalculation using the data that is obviously 

13 coming out of Fukushima. Is there some ban on 

14 recalculating using new data? 

15 In fact, I do not see any new data going 

16 into it. I mean, in the last 20 years we've learned 

17 about epigenetics and we have not done any - and 

18 I have not seen any studies of how radiation affects 

19 the epigenetics cloud. 

20 So I mean, your whole idea of how much 

21 radiation causes death is based only on maybe 

22 perhaps one or two generations, not the 2,500 or 

23 so generations that can be damaged by epigenetics 

24 damage due to radiation. 

25 These are only a few things. I will be 
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1 putting them into my comments. I hope that they 

2 are looked into. Thank you. 

3 MR. CAMERON: Thank you again, Marvin, 

4 for being so steadfast and joining us at all of 

5 these teleconferences. And Jennifer, we're going 

6 to go next to Mr. Kenneth Freelain. 

7 THE OPERATOR: Your line is open. 

8 MR. FREELAIN: Hello, can you hear me? 

9 MR. CAMERON: Yeah. 

10 MR. FREELAIN: Hi, how are you doing? 

11 MR. CAMERON: We're doing fine. How 

12 are you doing? 

13 MR. FREELAIN: Fine, thanks. 

14 MR. CAMERON: Good. 

15 MR. FREELAIN: Nice talking with you 

16 again. As you pointed out earlier, my name is 

17 Kenneth Freelain, P.E., and I became involved with 

18 the Yucca Mountain nuclear controversy as a result 

19 of the fact that I am licensed as a registered 

20 professional engineer. 

21 I can be reached by telephone at area 

22 code 301-891-0496, and my email address is 

23 engineering.tribute@gmail.com. Later on towards 

24 the end of my comments, I will repeat that telephone 

25 number as well as that email address. 
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1 I'm now delivering an open invitation for 

2 individual technical experts, private 

3 corporations, and for governmental agencies to 

4 appear on television and play an active role in the 

5 engineering tribute to the presidential 

6 inauguration of January 2017. 

7 Although my undergraduate or 

8 bachelor's degree is in mechanical engineering, my 

9 professional experience includes a combination of, 

10 in alphabetical order: civil engineering, 

11 electrical engineering, and mechanical 

12 engineering. 

13 Because of my age, I am now regarded as 

14 a senior citizen. However, I can remember the fact 

15 that when I was growing up as a very young engineer, 

16 there were some people who predicted that one day 

17 nuclear power would make electricity so cheap that 

18 it would not be worth metering. 

19 Perhaps some of the people who will read this 

20 document one day, as well as some of those who are 

21 listening to today's teleconference might also 

22 realize that there was such a time. Nuclear 

23 technology has certainly changed over the years. 

24 Today, the disposal of nuclear waste 

25 material has become one of the major constraints 
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1 which hinder the expansion of nuclear power. 

2 Approximately one year from today, a presidential 

3 election will take place in this country. 

4 Now, let us fast forward through the 

5 time when I was a young engineer, and through the 

6 presidential election of November 2016, to the 

7 presidential inauguration of January 2017. The 

8 new president will have to consider a wide range 

9 of issues which are related to nuclear power, as 

10 well as to energy and power in general. 

11 Fossil fuels are associated with global 

12 warming and the carbon footprint of the United 

13 States. Many of the dams which produce 

14 hydroelectric power are associated with barriers 

15 which obstruct the natural migration routes which 

16 fish attempt to follow. Various problems are 

17 associated with different forms of energy and 

18 power. 

19 The engineering tribute to the 

20 presidential inauguration of January 2017 will 

21 represent an excellent opportunity to address this 

22 complicated combination of problems which will 

23 await the next president who takes office. 

24 There are so many complicated issues and 

25 problems associated with the Yucca Mountain 
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1 nuclear controversy that I can only begin to 

2 scratch the surfaces of those problems if I try to 

3 address them here in this short presentation which 

4 we're discussing here today. 

5 What I do have time to emphasize is the 

6 fact that the engineering tribute to the 

7 presidential inauguration of January 2017 offers 

8 this country an excellent opportunity to summarize 

9 the issues during a series of television 

10 broadcasts. During the videotaping of that 

11 series, we will not face the difficult limitations 

12 on time which we must be concerned with today. 

13 So once again, my telephone number is 

14 area code 301-891-0496, and my email address is 

15 engineering.tribute@gmail.com. So thank you for 

16 your time and attention, as well as for this 

17 opportunity to address the Yucca Mountain nuclear 

18 controversy, and thank you for your interest in the 

19 engineering tribute to the presidential 

20 inauguration of January 2017. Thanks again. 

21 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you again, 

22 Mr. Freelain. And if you want to make a comment, 

23 I'll just remind you to hit star one and Jennifer, 

24 the operator, will put you through to the meeting 

25 room here in Rockville, Maryland. 
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1 Hi, everybody, Chip Cameron here, and 

2 I'm just reminding people if you want to make a 

3 comment, just hit star one on your phone, and 

4 Jennifer will place you into the call. Thank you. 

5 Hi, Jan, are you on the phone? 

6 MS. BOUDART: I am. 

7 MR. CAMERON: Okay, go ahead with your 

8 comment, please? 

9 MS. BOUDART: Actually I have a 

10 question about Yucca Mountain. My understanding 

11 was that Yucca Mountain was permanently closed and 

12 that, and that it was determined that there was too 

13 much water flow in the interior of the mountain to 

14 even consider using it as a repository. 

15 And I also heard that once it was found 

16 that there was so much water flow inside the 

17 mountain and dripping that they were considering 

18 putting a titanium shield around the potential 

19 nuclear dump. Now, if the - if there was a flood, 

20 the titanium shield would not help. 

21 And I also thought that the knowledge of 

22 contamination of the aquifer and surrounding 

23 rivers had vetoed the idea that Yucca Mountain was 

24 going to work. And then I also heard something 

25 that I cannot confirm, and I would love to get a 
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1 confirmation, that the Native Americans there in 

2 Nevada actually had a nickname for Yucca Mountain 

3 and it was creeping mountain. I haven't been able 

4 to confirm that, and I haven't - and I'm wondering 

5 if any of these questions could be answered. 

6 Plus, it seems that rather than have a 

7 Fukushima freeway all over the country bringing in 

8 high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain by 

9 barge, road, and rail, it would be better to have 

10 the waste stored in dry casks at the source of the 

11 waste of which I think there are nearly 200 now in 

12 the United States. 

13 And - okay, so I keep - my mind keeps 

14 going. I'm looking at Big Rock which is a plant 

15 that was closed and decommissioned, and the waste 

16 is being stored at Big Rock, and there is only one 

17 storage method there, which is dry casks, and that 

18 is something that is very dangerous because if the 

19 dry casks fail, there has to be an alternative. 

20 In particular, if the dry casks are 

21 going to be replaced in 100 years, what - a pool 

22 is needed to put the fuel into while the new dry 

23 casks are prepared, and then this would have to be 

24 done every 100 years for 10,000 years? It just 

25 sounds, well, I'm sorry to use a slang term, but 
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1 it just sounds nuts. So these are my comments, and 

2 I have zillions of questions which I think are 

3 incorporated in the comments I have made. 

4 MR. CAMERON: Okay, Jan, thank you for 

5 those comments and questions, and I'm going to ask 

6 Jim Rubenstone to address the questions - the issue 

7 of the status of Yucca Mountain. I don't think 

8 we'll be able to help you out with the Native 

9 American question, but Jim will tell you what the 

10 status is of Yucca Mountain. Go ahead, Jim. 

11 MR. RUBENSTONE: Yes, thank you for 

12 your comment, and I just wanted to clarify the 

13 questions you had at the beginning. The 

14 Department of Energy did submit, as Christine 

15 noted, an application for a construction 

16 authorization in 2008, and the review of that 

17 began, and then was halted, and then began again. 

18 And the NRC staff did issue a safety 

19 evaluation report on the DOE's application. There 

20 are five volumes to that, and the final volumes came 

21 out in January of this year. Now, the review will 

22 probably not be proceeding beyond the next year or 

23 so of activity because of the lack of funding, but 

24 the application is still pending before the NRC. 

25 And we'll treat the rest of your 
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1 comments as a comment, and address those as part 

2 of our finalization of the environmental impact 

3 statement supplement. 

4 MR. CAMERON: Great, thank you. Thank 

5 you, Jim, and for others who want to comment, please 

6 press star one. Okay, we have Bette Pierman on the 

7 line from Michigan State Energy Future, and is that 

8 the correct way to pronounce you first name, Bette? 

9 MS. PIERMAN: That's fine. It'll 

10 work. 

11 MR. CAMERON: It'll work? Okay, good. 

12 MS. PIERMAN: It'll work. 

13 MR. CAMERON: Go ahead. 

14 MS. PIERMAN: Thank you for the 

15 opportunity for the public to respond to these 

16 issues. My comments and response is going to be 

17 in a much more detailed communication to you before 

18 the deadline. I am - I have several serious 

19 concerns about decisions that the NRC is making 

20 regarding nuclear waste. 

21 I don't understand how you think that 

22 you have a working crystal ball that can determine 

23 what things are going to be like on this planet in 

24 100 years, let alone a million years, and the fact 

25 that you think that you can safely store highly 
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1 toxic radioactive nuclear waste for any amount of 

2 time just boggles my mind. 

3 And then if you get into the situation 

4 of you were talking about doing this on, and near, 

5 and around sacred Native American lands which is 

6 a complete disrespect to their water source, and 

7 I compare that to if we were to take sanitation 

8 waste and dump it on the front yards of any church, 

9 synagogue, or mosque across this country. 

10 It's the same kind of disrespect, and 

11 I don't understand why you think that this is some 

12 sacrificial land that you can now take this highly 

13 toxic waste and dump it and store it. That may have 

14 serious consequences for the people on that land, 

15 and the neighboring lands, and to our planet. 

16 This is the only planet we have, and we 

17 need to start respecting our environments, and 

18 respecting the land, and stop producing toxic 

19 garbage that cannot be taken care of, cannot be 

20 eliminated, and is going to have devastating 

21 effects for many years to come. 

22 My concern is future generations. My 

23 concern is what legacy you are leaving those future 

24 generations. And the simple and easy way to 

25 eliminate any further production would be to stop 
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1 producing it. So we've got some dilemmas ahead of 

2 us. 

3 I've listened to your rail experts talk 

4 about how safe it would be to transport this waste 

5 across the country on rails even though we watched 

6 two rail trains derail in Wisconsin this past 

7 weekend, and some dumped stuff in the Mississippi 

8 River again. 

9 We've watched them explode and burn 

10 down cities, and I can't even fathom what kind of 

11 problems you would cause all of us if a train 

12 carrying highly toxic radioactive waste across 

13 this country were to derail. 

14 So you just - I just - I shake my head. 

15 I shake my head every time I listen to another one 

16 of these public hearings where you attempt to 

17 whitewash the situation. It shouldn't be 

18 whitewashed. You do not have a crystal ball. I'm 

19 sorry. You don't have one where you can predict 

20 what things are going to be like 100 years or a 

21 million years from now, and I really wish that you 

22 would stop insulting our intelligence by claiming 

23 that you do. Thank you very much for the 

24 opportunity to speak. 

25 MR. CAMERON: Okay, and thank you, 
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1 Bette, very much. And please press star one if you 

2 want to make a comment. Okay, we next have Ace 

3 Hoffman from California. Ace? 

4 MR. HOFFMAN: Hi, Chip. 

5 MR. CAMERON: Hi. 

6 MR. HOFFMAN: Thanks for taking my 

7 call. 

8 MR. CAMERON: Absolutely. 

9 MR. HOFFMAN: I wanted to mention that 

10 I'm working on a little report here on Darrell 

11 Issa's recent, in September, a bill or a statement 

12 that he's introducing a plan for building an 

13 interim storage site, or several interim storage 

14 sites. 

15 And in the first paragraph of his 

16 statement he says that Yucca Mountain has been 

17 stalled because of political problems, and I just 

18 wanted to point out that the fact that we're holding 

19 this hearing on water intrusion issues, and that's 

20 only one of hundreds, if not thousands of issues, 

21 strongly suggests that it's not really political 

22 posturing as Mr. Issa claims, Congressman Issa 

23 claims, from my district, that we have real 

24 problems with Yucca Mountain, and I suppose I could 

25 go into some of those, you know, the volcanoes, and 
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1 the earthquakes, and so on and so forth. 

2 Also, two weeks ago I was in Las Vegas 

3 to attend the Atomic Veterans' reunion. There 

4 were about a dozen atomic veterans who have been 

5 involved in either watching the blasts, or putting 

6 equipment down to study the EMP or the x-ray bursts, 

7 and some of them were involved in the cleanup. 

8 And it seems that one thing that was 

9 universal is that they were not properly protected 

10 from the radionuclides and they're dropping like 

11 flies now. I guess that's two things that seem to 

12 be universal. So I wanted to make sure that that 

13 got noted, that that's a very traditional method 

14 of dealing with radiation here in America. 

15 I mean, story after story about the 

16 inadequacy of the - and disposal was pushing this 

17 stuff out to sea or putting it in a pit and covered 

18 it with a couple of feet of cement, and that's 

19 totally inadequate for plutonium with a 25,000 year 

20 half-life. 

21 So I hope that if the Yucca Mountain 

22 project does move forward, that things are very 

23 different from the testimonials that I heard two 

24 weeks ago. Thank you, and taking my call, I think, 

25 is part of things being a little different. Thank 
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1 you. 

2 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you. Thank 

3 you, Ace. And I would just remind everybody to 

4 press star one. And we are scheduled to be here 

5 from 2:00 to 4:00, and we will continue to see if 

6 anybody else wants to make a comment until the 4:00 

7 closing time. Hi, Ethyl? 

8 MS. RIVERA: Hello? 

9 MR. CAMERON: Hi, Ethyl Rivera. 

10 MS. RIVERA: Yes, sir. 

11 MR. CAMERON: Please tell us what's on 

12 your mind. 

13 MS. RIVERA: Well, I am reading the 

14 safety evaluation report related to disposal of 

15 high-level radioactive waste with respect to a 

16 Yucca Mountain repository that was discussed many, 

17 many years ago, and was ultimately decided after 

18 several years of study, careful study, I might add, 

19 and it was determined that that is a very, very poor 

20 site for disposal of any kind of dangerous 

21 elements. 

22 And I am calling to find out why once 

23 again the NRC and others that are supposed to be 

24 responsible for these dangerous elements have not 

25 paid attention to the determinations that were made 
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1 previously, and have now all of a sudden determined 

2 that the huge amounts of radioactive waste that 

3 have been allowed to be generated from the nuclear 

4 industry now must find a home, and that the people 

5 that are - have been studying these options have 

6 all of a sudden decided that Yucca Mountain should 

7 be resurrected. 

8 Congress should support the people of 

9 Nevada, and the people of the states that are - that 

10 have this nuclear waste on their doorstep right 

11 now, and through whose territories, neighborhoods, 

12 areas, farms and other lands they would be exposed 

13 to in the transportation of such waste. 

14 It is unconscionable to risk the lives 

15 of residents in the area transporting nuclear waste 

16 through our communities just to dump it at Yucca 

17 Mountain where we know it will leak anyway. We 

18 need real solutions to nuclear waste, and we are 

19 never going to get there until Congress abandons 

20 Yucca Mountain. 

21 Until then, the waste can be stored more 

22 securely where it is now using hardened onsite 

23 storage without putting it on our roads, our 

24 railways, and our great lakes, traveling through 

25 our communities. 
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1 It is almost ludicrous that such a plan 

2 is being pushed through by people who have a little 

3 disregard for the safety of the citizens of this 

4 country, and I thank you for taking my comments. 

5 MR. CAMERON: Well, thank you for those 

6 comments, Ethyl. And again I'll just remind 

7 people, if you want to comment, please press star 

8 one and you'll be, you'll be placed online here, 

9 and we'll just wait to see who is next. 

10 Hi, everybody, this is Chip Cameron 

11 again, and I'm just reminding people that if you 

12 do want to make a comment, press star one, and I 

13 think we probably can take some brief second 

14 opportunity comments also if anybody wants to make 

15 them. 

16 But if at any time we get a new speaker, 

17 we're going to put them right at the top of the list, 

18 so does anybody want to make a second comment? For 

19 example, Mr. Freelain, if you want to, please press 

20 star one and Jennifer will put you through. 

21 THE OPERATOR: Mr. Freelain, your line 

22 is open. 

23 MR. FREELAIN: Yes, hello, can you hear 

24 me? 

25 MR. CAMERON: Yes, we can. 
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1 MR. FREELAIN: Can you hear me? 

2 MR. CAMERON: Yes, go ahead. 

3 MR. FREELAIN: I just wanted to say 

4 that I think it's good that you have these 

5 opportunities for people to provide you with 

6 scientific input and to give you a range of varying 

7 opinions on the subject. 

8 If I'm interpreting this correctly, see 

9 my line went dead, and so I couldn't tell whether 

10 that was a disconnection or whether or not there 

11 was just a scarcity of people who were sharing their 

12 comments. So I wasn't quite sure what was going 

13 on, but for a while right after I finished my 

14 comments, my line went dead. I don't know, was 

15 that a technical problem? 

16 MR. CAMERON: We're not exactly sure. 

17 This is Chip, Mr. Freelain. We're not exactly sure 

18 what happened to your line, but we know that you 

19 closed off your original, your first comment with 

20 your telephone number and with your email address. 

21 MR. FREELAIN: Right. 

22 MR. CAMERON: We got all of that, so 

23 you're on loud and clear with us right now, so that 

24 if you want to add anything else about the 

25 engineering tribute or anything else, please go 
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1 ahead. 

2 MR. FREELAIN: Yes, I will just say 

3 that in a situation like this when you are planning 

4 an event, you estimate the length and time that you 

5 think would be appropriate, but then if you don't 

6 have that many speakers who call in, there will be 

7 some extra time left over. Is that what happened 

8 to us here today? 

9 MR. CAMERON: Exactly, we don't have a 

10 whole lot of people who are wanting to comment at 

11 present, but we are going to be here until 4:00. 

12 So we thought that while we're waiting, if anybody 

13 who has already commented, such as yourself, wanted 

14 to make - add additional information, that it would 

15 be appropriate to listen to that. 

16 MR. FREELAIN: Okay, I just wanted to 

17 add a general note here just to follow-up. There 

18 is a - what is that website, something dot gov, of 

19 comments or - it's a website where you can submit. 

20 MR. RUBENSTONE: Regulations.gov. 

21 MR. FREELAIN: Right, right, right, 

22 that's it. That's it. So I presume we can 

23 contribute our comments to that website, right? 

24 MR. CAMERON: Okay, that's great, Mr. 

25 Freelain. And we do have, we do have a new 
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1 commenter on the line if we could, if we could go 

2 to that commenter? And if you have something else 

3 to say and we still have time, then we'll give you 

4 another opportunity, okay? 

5 Okay, we're going to Susan Carpenter. 

6 Susan? 

7 MS. CARPENTER: Yes, is it too late to 

8 ask a clarifying question? 

9 MR. CAMERON: No, you go right ahead. 

10 MS. CARPENTER: Okay, I had some 

11 comments, but I am wondering - I am not a scientist 

12 and I did not read the entire report, but I am 

13 wondering if in the calculations you used, if you 

14 considered at all a catastrophic event underground 

15 during this time or if you were just looking at 

16 normal radiation escaping? 

17 MR. CAMERON: That is a process 

18 question in terms of whether a federal agency such 

19 as the NRC is obligated to look at worst-case 

20 accidents like that, and I guess that I'll turn it 

21 over to Jim Rubenstone to try to clarify that for 

22 us. 

23 MR. RUBENSTONE: Yes, as we discussed 

24 in the supplement, we used the output from DOE's 

25 performance model as a beginning step to look at 
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1 the effects downstream from the regulatory 

2 compliance point, and that model was evaluated in 

3 our safety evaluation report, the last volume of 

4 which was published in January. 

5 But the most relevant volume is 

6 probably volume three which came out in October of 

7 2014 that considers the post-closure performance. 

8 And within that model, in accord with our 

9 regulations, DOE treated what we call off-normal 

10 or catastrophic events in a probabilistic manner 

11 such as they included things like major seismic 

12 events, or volcanic disruption, other events of 

13 that sort, weighted by their likelihood of 

14 occurring, and the evaluation of that is in that 

15 volume three of the safety evaluation report. 

16 So the impacts on the groundwater that 

17 we discuss in the supplement flow from the analysis 

18 that was done using that model. 

19 MR. CAMERON: Great, thank you. Thank 

20 you, Jim. I think that answers Susan's question. 

21 And Susan, do you have a comment that you'd like 

22 to add while we have you? 

23 MS. CARPENTER: Yes, first of all, it 

24 seems to me like rather than being a scientific 

25 decision to look at Yucca Mountain, it's been more 
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1 a political decision. So people can say, "Well, 

2 we have a solution. This is it. Don't worry about 

3 - you won't have a nuclear dump in your state," and 

4 it's one big experiment. 

5 I wonder what would happen if - well, 

6 I guess the casks haven't been developed yet for 

7 transport from what I've heard, and supposedly they 

8 will be made to last 100 years since that's how long 

9 they will be underground before they're rechecked. 

10 And I'm wondering how it will be 

11 determined that these will last for 100 years 

12 because already the Holtec casks used for dry 

13 storage are having issues and that hasn't been that 

14 long. 

15 But another thing, the transport 

16 concerns me, moving huge amounts of radioactive 

17 waste across this country. It poses, to me, a big 

18 danger to anyone who is along the way. 

19 From what I understand, the train would 

20 have several cars between the engine and the 

21 radioactive waste to protect the engineer. Well, 

22 if he needs protection from that, I wonder what's 

23 happening to the people who live along the way where 

24 these are passing through. 

25 I feel this is something that we haven't 
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1 admitted, and I think we need to admit we don't know 

2 what we're doing with radioactive waste. We have 

3 never found a solution. We keep passing it down. 

4 You know, the next generation will find a solution, 

5 and it hasn't happened, and it's time to say we 

6 can't yet, and perhaps never. Thank you. 

7 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you, Susan, 

8 for those comments. And if anybody else wants to 

9 comment, please hit star one. 

10 MR. RUBENSTONE: And as we said, we 

11 will stay on the line. There may be some periods 

12 of quiet as we are waiting for people to comment. 

13 MR. CAMERON: Okay, we have Lorie 

14 Cartwright from the New England Coalition on. 

15 Lorie, are you on the phone? 

16 MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. 

17 MR. CAMERON: Okay, please comment. 

18 MS. CARTWRIGHT: Hello, thank you for 

19 hosting this call. I am calling from Vermont, and 

20 I'm calling to voice my opposition. Actually, I'm 

21 calling to request support for an alternative 

22 location to deposit our high-level nuclear waste 

23 at a site other than on top of a magma pile, and 

24 I'm referring to Yucca Mountain. And also, that's 

25 not even raising my concern and many others' 
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1 concern for the environmental justice issue with 

2 respect to the Native Americans and their 

3 relationship with Yucca Mountain. 

4 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Lorie. 

5 And please hit star one if you want to make a 

6 comment, and we'll check and see. I think we have 

7 a previous commenter who we'll listen to at this 

8 point, Marvin Lewis. Marvin? 

9 MR. LEWIS: Thank you. Again, I do 

10 appreciate the fact I'm being allowed to a second 

11 bite of the apple. Actually, I don't have any 

12 right of a second bite of an apple because that's 

13 the way your rules are set up, and there's a hell 

14 of a lot of issues that are just being brushed 

15 aside. I know this call is supposed to stick to 

16 the issue of water. Well yes, but it's kind of hard 

17 to stick to an issue. What happens when we bring 

18 a load of radioactivity into this area, heading for 

19 Yucca Mountain, and it happens to get struck by a 

20 load of Bakken crude and goes up in flames? That 

21 goes into the water, too. It doesn't have to be 

22 in the Yucca Mountain site to get into the water, 

23 and this is the sort of thing that the NRC says oh, 

24 under PRA, that's a chance of 10 to the minus 8, 

25 or 10 to the minus 6, and the PRA says with that 
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1 kind of a percentage, we can ignore it. Well, you 

2 can ignore it, but the guy dying of cancer doesn't 

3 ignore it. 

4 Furthermore, this business of Bakken 

5 crude shipments being a danger to everything on the 

6 tracks and the radioactive transport also is a 

7 danger to everything, because trains are flipping 

8 over. Right where I stand, within a mile of where 

9 I stand here in northeast Philadelphia, we had a 

10 train flip over; over 100 cars, eight dead, 100 

11 people in the hospital, and that was a passenger 

12 train. That had nothing dangerous, nothing toxic 

13 that was in it. And what got it was a bunch of 

14 teenage boys or teenage boys and girls --let's not 

15 leave them out; I don't want to be considered 

16 sexist--throwing projectiles of some kind at the 

17 train, getting through a window, and putting out 

18 the operator, the driver out of service for a few 

19 seconds. 

20 These are not far-fetched. You can put 

21 a number on it; sure you can put a number on it and 

22 say oooh, it's 10 to the minus 8, we don't have to 

23 worry about it; oooh, it's one in a million, we don't 

24 have to worry about it. I've got news for you. 

25 There's eight people six feet under the ground that 
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1 ain't worrying about it no more, and there were 100 

2 people going to the hospital; I don't know how many 

3 were kept. That's just one time, and let's hope 

4 that one time isn't somewhere like the Hope Bridge 

5 crossing the Great Lakes carrying HE, highly 

6 enriched uranyl nitrate from 98 percent enriched 

7 uranium-235 across the Great Lakes; the Great Lakes 

8 containing over 20 percent of the potable water in 

9 the world. 

10 Now, take a look at what we're talking 

11 about with these aquifers. We're talking about a 

12 very dry area; some of these aquifers have water, 

13 the same water in them for 100,000 years. They get 

14 pulled down, and there ain't nothing to drink. You 

15 get these contaminated one time, and there ain't 

16 nothing to drink. And L.A. is beginning to feel 

17 that with this recent drought. Look, there are 

18 thousands and thousands of examples like this that 

19 I am sure, because I read the safety reports; in 

20 fact, I am so obnoxious as to get some of them in 

21 hard copy, not just on the ADAMS. And I can tell 

22 you right now, they aren't there. Take a look at 

23 Yucca Mountain, take a look at what started Yucca 

24 Mountain. There were people that went out in a 

25 pickup truck to pick up core samples or borings, and 
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1 they threw them in the truck without writing down 

2 which core boring came from which spot. 

3 To this day, I don't know if those core 

4 borings have been adequately corrected; I only know 

5 it happened because the NRC and Department of Energy 

6 admitted to it, and you can look it up in the papers. 

7 And if you can't look it up, I can send you around 

8 to somebody at the LPDR and the library at the NRC 

9 who would gladly research it for you so you don't 

10 have to say hey, Marvin said this; therefore it's 

11 right. Well, it may be right, but we have plenty 

12 of references to it, and these references go on and 

13 on. And what worries me is as much effort--and I 

14 do think the NRC does put effort into getting people 

15 to be interested in your group power, to make 

16 comments, to read the Federal Register notices, to 

17 read the SERs, to read this and that, and very, very 

18 few comments come in. 

19 As far as I'm concerned, when I see 

20 33,000 comments on something like the waste 

21 hearings, I am not impressed. We have 300 plus 

22 million people in the United States as far as I know 

23 nowadays; they all will be in danger. Now maybe not 

24 all of them at the same time hopefully, and some of 

25 them all the time, but some of them will be in danger 
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1 a little too much to live. 

2 MR. CAMERON: Okay Marvin, thank you 

3 for those additional comments; we have some other 

4 people who want to comment, so I think we're going 

5 to go to them now, but we did hear your comments. 

6 How about Jan Boudart? 

7 MS. BOUDART: Hi, can you hear me now? 

8 MR. CAMERON: Yes, we can hear you now. 

9 MS. BOUDART: This is my second 

10 comment. I have written an article for a little 

11 newspaper that I write for called--the article is 

12 called "The Mobile Chernobyl," and it is an analysis 

13 of a hearing that was heard on October 1 that was 

14 called by Fred Upton, a Republican of Michigan. It 

15 was also some kind of an analysis of transportation 

16 of nuclear waste; in particular with a focus on 

17 Yucca Mountain. And the nation's cache of spent 

18 nuclear fuel is about 72,000 metric tons, which is 

19 80,640 U.S. tons; it's at 75 sites in 33 states where 

20 it was generated, and so what we're looking for is 

21 where is a geologically suitable site that nobody 

22 cares about? 

23 Now the testimony at that hearing that 

24 really impressed me was the testimony of a man named 

25 Robert Quinn, and I won't go into his background, 
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1 but he's on the Revolving Door, he worked for the 

2 United States for 25 years and now he works for 

3 Energy Solutions; that is a parent plant of the 

4 company that is decommissioning the nuclear plant 

5 that is closest to me within probably less than 50 

6 miles at Zion, Illinois. Now I was shocked by his 

7 testimony because nuclear waste and nuclear 

8 packages have been transported around the United 

9 States for 70 years, starting with the Manhattan 

10 Project, and he said that there were three million 

11 shipments of radiation packages per year in the US, 

12 including high-level nuclear waste from nuclear 

13 power plants and research reactors, plus the U.S. 

14 Navy has made 850 shipments totaling 1.6 million 

15 miles; since the mid-1970s, there have been 1300 

16 shipments from nuclear power plants. 

17 Mr. Quinn cited 60 shipments of more 

18 than 250 foreign reactor fuel casks by sea, land and 

19 air from 1990 to 2012, and he mentioned--this was 

20 October 1--he said two just arrived at Savannah 

21 River in South Carolina. Globally, 7,000 metric 

22 tons of spent fuel in the UK, France, Germany, 

23 Sweden, et cetera. He said no failure of a package 

24 or release of radioactive materials ever. Now he 

25 didn't discuss the gamma rays that beam out from 
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1 these packages; he just said that none of the 

2 packages had ever failed in transport. He said 

3 shipping casks designed and built to provide 

4 shielding from radiation prevent release, even in 

5 a serious accident. Standards are enforced by the 

6 federal law and Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

7 Then Mr. Quinn produced a piece of 

8 propaganda--which that's my opinion--he said the 

9 facts speak for themselves in more than 70 years of 

10 nuclear material transport in the United States and 

11 worldwide, no member of the public has ever been 

12 harmed from a radioactive release. Now that is 

13 impossible because if these things are traveling 

14 all over the country, people are getting gamma 

15 radiation from them because nothing can stop it, and 

16 to say that he knows that no person has ever been 

17 harmed is just crazy. So I made a list of things 

18 that he had ignored. First, no structure can 

19 totally contain gamma radiation beaming from a 

20 source, be it high, medium or low level. Two, no 

21 amount of radiation is not harmful to animals, do 

22 I have to say like us and the environment, and 

23 there's an argument going on now about hormesis, and 

24 I think you can tell what side of that argument I 

25 would be on, because Alice Stewart in I think 1979 
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1 proved that there is no low level--no lowest level 

2 of radiation that is not harmful. 

3 My third point was no rock, concrete, 

4 salt, wild volume of metal will withstand 

5 bombardment forever; the radiation will be in our 

6 offspring's world. Number four, casks 

7 contaminated on the outside have been allowed 

8 transport; number five, transportation of waste in 

9 Europe has an abysmal history. Greenpeace 

10 activists got corroded barrels of beaming waste off 

11 the floor of the Channel; one practice was to sluice 

12 the unspeakable filth in a pipe down into the sea. 

13 Number six--and that comes from a movie called De 

14 Chaix; the movie is in French, but it has English 

15 subtitles and it is totally revealing about 

16 transportation through the North Sea to Siberia of 

17 this compound called uranium fluoride, so fluoride 

18 is not one of my favorite things, nor is uranium. 

19 Number six, the truckers, railroaders 

20 and sailors who handle packages, are they protected 

21 and compensated for the risks that they are being 

22 put into, and number seven, shipments need more 

23 shielding from terrorism, a point emphasized in the 

24 Q&A by a Republican from Ohio; his name is Bob Latta, 

25 and Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear fielded the 
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1 question citing the tests at Aberdeen, Maryland 

2 where an anti-tank weapon blew a hole the size of 

3 a grapefruit in a German castor forged carbon steel 

4 cylinder, and that cylinder had walls that were 11.8 

5 inches thick. And this article goes on and on; as 

6 long as nobody else is waiting, I'm just going to 

7 finish going through it. Kevin Kamps stated-- 

8 MR. CAMERON: Jan, could I interrupt 

9 you a minute? 

10 MS. BOUDART: Sure. 

11 MR. CAMERON: It would be helpful I 

12 think for the NRC if you sent that article in as a 

13 comment. We do have another person waiting on the 

14 line, so if we could just go to him, and then maybe 

15 we can get back to you later for a summary, depending 

16 on what's going on, okay? Okay, good. We're going 

17 to go to Ace Hoffman. Ace? 

18 MR. HOFFMAN: Hi, Chip. Hi again. 

19 MR. CAMERON: Hi. 

20 MR. HOFFMAN: I wanted to go over three 

21 things, and there will be plenty of time for Jan to 

22 continue. The first one is I wanted to use Darryl 

23 Issa's words, who answered those people who think 

24 that it's safe to keep the waste on site. In that 

25 same act that I mentioned before, the Interim 
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1 Consolidated Storage Act that he's been proposing, 

2 he states--and he's been very supportive of San 

3 Onofre as long as it was operating, so he's hardly 

4 an anti-nuclear voice, but he says the failure of 

5 the government to make Yucca Mountain has "littered 

6 communities across the nation with high level 

7 nuclear waste stored in less than ideal 

8 conditions." And then he goes on to say that 

9 maintaining the status quo is not an option. 

10 The waste from the closed San Onofre nuclear 

11 plant sits near an active fault line adjacent to the 

12 heavily-trafficked Interstate 5 and the Pacific 

13 Ocean, and sandwiched between densely populated 

14 Orange and San Diego Counties. And then--so this 

15 is one example out of 120, that's his quote for how 

16 many sites there are, and continuing to do nothing 

17 while the can is perpetually kicked down the road 

18 is no longer an option, so he's trying to--and it 

19 says "make Americans safer in the process by having 

20 interim storage," which I don't agree is a solution, 

21 but storing it on site is also not a solution, and 

22 Darryl Issa has made that clear. 

23 

24 The second point I wanted to talk about 

25 was when I was at the National Atomic Testing Museum 
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1 event two weeks ago, one of the people that I met 

2 was Peter Livingston, he was a Ph.D. physicist, 

3 chemist and inventor with over 40 patents and a 

4 witness to some of the bomb blasts, and he's the 

5 inventor of the laser on a chip, the next generation 

6 of ultra-small, ultra high-powered lasers. And 

7 Dr. Livingston told me that they are working on and 

8 expect to be able to invent--it hasn't been invented 

9 yet--a proton laser which can be used according to 

10 Dr. Livingston to neutralize, at least to some 

11 extent, the radioactive wastes, the spent fuel. If 

12 we put the stuff in Yucca Mountain, we're not going 

13 to be able--should this proton laser be invented as 

14 he hopes and expects--we won't be able to use it to 

15 reduce the volume of the waste. And also he stated 

16 that the amount of energy that could be extracted 

17 if this laser gets invented would be enough, from 

18 current amounts of spent fuel, would be enough to 

19 power the entire United States for about seven 

20 years. So it's a net positive energy idea, and if 

21 we put the waste in Yucca Mountain and close it up, 

22 we're not going to be able to retrieve it in order 

23 to reduce its volume per this method, and there's 

24 of course a few other ideas, and maybe none of them 

25 work, but we ought to at least prepare for that. 
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1 And then the third thing that I wanted 

2 to mention was that the standard for a dry cask is 

3 apparently that it can withstand an F-16 crashing 

4 into it; I don't think that they really withstand 

5 that, but an F-16 weights about 37,500 pounds and 

6 carries about 1,000 gallons of fuel, and if it has 

7 external fuel tanks, another 750 gallons of fuel. 

8 The standard that we should be working towards, and 

9 this would be for transport to Yucca Mountain as 

10 well as interim storage sites and onsite storage and 

11 the reactors themselves is something more like a 

12 jumbo jet, which can weigh a million pounds and 

13 carry 65,000 gallons of fuel. Now there's no dry 

14 cask on earth that can withstand a crash like that, 

15 not just the size of the airplane crashing into it, 

16 but also the length of time it would take 65,000 

17 gallons to burn would be plenty enough to destroy 

18 the dry cask. So all of these issues need to be 

19 handled before we can determine that Yucca Mountain 

20 is going to be the best solution, and also before 

21 we move forward with any nuclear reactor anywhere. 

22 I think they all need to be shut down because these 

23 are--they're either unsolvable, or at least they 

24 haven't been solved yet and we have no idea whether 

25 or not they are going to work or anything else. So 
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1 those are my additional comments, and thank you 

2 again for the time and opportunity. 

3 MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Ace. We're 

4 going to see if we have any new people on who want 

5 to comment. If you want to comment, hit star one. 

6 And as we mentioned, we're here till 4:00, and so 

7 there may be times when you won't hear any 

8 discussion because we're waiting for someone to 

9 call in, and we do have someone, Maureen Headington 

10 from Stand Up Save Lives, and we have also Lissa 

11 Weinman from the World Policy Institute, and we're 

12 first going to go to Maureen. Maureen, are you on? 

13 MS. HEADINGTON: I am here. Thank you, 

14 I appreciate the opportunity. I'm not a scientist, 

15 I'm not paid for what I do, I'm a grass-root 

16 activist, have been for the last 20 years. A lot 

17 of focus--I served on the board of the Illinois 

18 Environmental Council as the director for six 

19 years; I was the Vice-President the last two of 

20 those, focused on old coal plants, toxic waste 

21 incinerators, napalm shipments and now nuclear 

22 matters. And one thing I've learned over the years 

23 in this is while I appreciate people being smart, 

24 smart does not always equate with common sense, and 

25 just this entire focus on nuclear, it seems to me 
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1 that it's a backwards approach to work from where 

2 you're going to be putting it, and it seems that 

3 Yucca is what you're intent on, but a very backwards 

4 approach. I feel that what it'll take to get us to 

5 Yucca, and I do take exception to it being a good 

6 choice anyway, if it's just the easy choice, that's 

7 also a mistake for something like this, because you 

8 can't go back and fix it once it's broken. 

9 

10 But what concerns me is the transport of 

11 this material through our towns and communities; 

12 it's not just a matter of the people in that area, 

13 in Arizona agreeing to it, it's all of the people 

14 throughout the country, so many of us that will be 

15 exposed to this. Illinois seems to be a given in 

16 terms of being a crossroads, and all the projects 

17 that I've focused on in my 20 years haven't 

18 been--they're not the "not in my backyard" type of 

19 issues. If I don't want it in my backyard, I don't 

20 want it in yours, either. I just think that we're 

21 really blinded by the prospect of getting rid of it, 

22 and yes this is really a big experiment. It hasn't 

23 been done anywhere successfully, and I think that 

24 it's just a tinderbox. Last evening, I happened to 

25 turn on Rachel Maddow; she's--I'd encourage you, 
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1 it's probably online, to check out this segment. 

2 But there were two train derailments in Wisconsin 

3 just in this last weekend, and she made specific 

4 note of one of them were 100 cars derailed because 

5 it was the Bakken crude business, but she pointed 

6 out the transport route, and it was right through 

7 territory where there is a lot of nuclear that is 

8 being--it's either buried or I don't know, 

9 apparently the government has many sites where 

10 there are nuclear being stored, and she pointed out 

11 how the proximity in this was just unacceptable. 

12 I don't know if one hand knows what the 

13 other hand is doing, and I know you all do things 

14 that are important, but I think that from the 

15 standpoint when I came online, I heard a fellow say 

16 how, you know, if you count comments, the fact is 

17 that most people don't know what's going on. It 

18 shouldn't be a matter of how many public comments 

19 you get, it should be about giving us the 

20 opportunity to know what's going on. I know I use 

21 --I work, but I take my time on my own to participate 

22 in this and learn about this, but I find that our 

23 mayors are clueless; they don't know anything. 

24 They should know, and I think it's incumbent on 

25 government to let all of our elected officials know. 
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1 We will all be impacted; you have the names, 

2 addresses, the ability to electronically make our 

3 village halls aware. Here in Burr Ridge, Illinois 

4 where I reside, we have two interstates that cross 

5 right in Burr Ridge; for sure there will be nuclear 

6 waste traveling. In fact, during the GNEP years, 

7 we were told of the transport routes, and they 

8 mentioned I-55, 294 here in Illinois; our mayors did 

9 not know that. 

10 So I think if you truly want to do a 

11 service for the country, and not just for the 

12 nuclear power industry, that you must take a broader 

13 perspective, because I just don't buy it that a 

14 keeping your fingers crossed approach is the way to 

15 go into something like this; saying there won't be 

16 accidents when you know there will be. Lastly, I 

17 would like to point out, and I do this at a number 

18 of public hearings, but until you get rid of 

19 Price-Anderson, you can't convince me that there 

20 won't be a cost to the public. And Congress, until 

21 it's out there and transparent what our elected 

22 officials are getting in the form of campaign 

23 contributions from the nuclear power industry, I 

24 can't buy that either. And until you end the 

25 revolving door of people from government going into 
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1 working in the energy sector and pulling in big 

2 bucks and using all of their connections, the public 

3 has so much stacked against it, I wish there were 

4 an agency that totally would represent the people. 

5 I don't--with all due respect, I don't think the NRC 

6 is that agency, I don't think the Department of 

7 Energy is that agency, we need to have that agency 

8 because it shouldn't rely on people like me or the 

9 poorly paid people who work out of passion to try 

10 to get the right things for this country, get the 

11 right things for people. We deserve better, we 

12 just do, and I thank you for your time and for 

13 listening to me. 

14 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you Maureen. 

15 We're going to go to Lissa Weinman at this--Lissa? 

16 MS. WEINMAN: Hi, can you hear me? 

17 MR. CAMERON: Yes. 

18 MS. WEINMAN: Thanks for this 

19 opportunity to comment on the draft environmental 

20 impact statement at Yucca Mountain; I appreciate 

21 the opportunity to voice my opinion and hope that 

22 there will be more future discussion. Firstly, I'd 

23 like to say that I oppose the placement of any kind 

24 of nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountain site; I've 

25 read some of the materials from different groups and 
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1 I think the risk to local area groundwater is 

2 unacceptable. I also have a particular interest in 

3 the maintenance of Native American traditions in 

4 the area, and I understand the Native American 

5 communities are very against the project, and I 

6 would like to lend my voice in support of them as 

7 well. 

8 Regarding the scope of the 

9 environmental impact statement, there really was no 

10 consideration about the impact of moving 

11 radioactive waste; the vastly increased number of 

12 movements of radioactive waste across the United 

13 States through our cities, I'm very much opposed to 

14 the transportation of such wastes. Even if there's 

15 been no incidents so far, the number of shipments 

16 would be radically increased, and it's just a folly 

17 to think there would not be an unacceptable type of 

18 incident that would occur from this type of 

19 movement. I would say also I'm opposed to the idea 

20 of consolidated waste storage; I believe that the 

21 waste that is currently sitting at the former 

22 nuclear power plants and in other areas should be 

23 better protected, and that communities that are 

24 hosting that waste, as with my community here in 

25 Brattleboro, Vermont, should be getting federal 
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1 subsidies, help for emergency services, and other 

2 economic incentives that make us the place to keep 

3 the waste until such solution is found in the 

4 future. But storing it in a much, much safer way 

5 that will imply more jobs for the community and 

6 potentially even fabrication efforts in local 

7 communities for dry casks, et cetera. 

8 I would also like to say that I in 

9 general believe that the Price-Anderson Act should 

10 be rescinded and that the nuclear industry should 

11 be made to take responsibility for its waste, not 

12 the U.S. taxpayer. I'd like to point to the recent 

13 experience with the Waste Isolation Pilot Project; 

14 no one knows when that's even ever going to open 

15 again or what occurred there. This idea of 

16 consolidated storage is another pie in the sky thing 

17 that should not occur. And lastly, in general, I'd 

18 like to voice my opinion that we should not be making 

19 more nuclear waste if we currently do not have a 

20 solution for the waste product that we have already 

21 generated. Thank you for your time, and have a nice 

22 day. 

23 MR. CAMERON: Yes, you too. Thank you 

24 Lissa. If anybody else wants to comment, please 

25 hit star one. We have Kevin Kamps on the line from 
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1 Beyond Nuclear. Kevin? 

2 MR. KAMPS: Hello Chip, thank you. 

3 MR. CAMERON: You're welcome. 

4 MR. KAMPS: Yes, okay, let me open my 

5 notes real quick here, please. So I just have 

6 several areas I would like to touch on, and the very 

7 first one is something I brought up at the 

8 Rockville, Maryland headquarters public meeting 

9 many weeks back, and it has to do with environmental 

10 justice, environmental racism, radioactive racism, 

11 and I just wanted to bring up the Beatty, Nevada U.S. 

12 Ecology so-called low level radioactive waste dump 

13 trench, which during torrential rains and flash 

14 floods on October 18 and 19 for some reason, yet to 

15 be explained as far as I know, underwent explosions, 

16 very forceful explosions that ejected material some 

17 60 feet into the air according to some media 

18 reports. There's a 40 second long video taken by 

19 a U.S. Ecology official at the hazardous waste dump 

20 next door, because U.S. Ecology has offloaded this 

21 radioactive waste dump onto the state of Nevada at 

22 this point; they don't officially own it anymore. 

23 This 40 second video showed the explosions; reports 

24 of a fire underground with lots of smoke coming out 

25 lasting for 12 hours, shutting down the highway for 
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1 a stretch of 150 miles for 24 hours, the main highway 

2 between Las Vegas and Reno. 

3 And the reason I bring this up is in the 

4 context of the Beatty, Nevada low level radioactive 

5 waste dump, and in the context of the Nevada nuclear 

6 weapons test site, and in the context of the 

7 proposed Yucca Mountain dump site, this is 

8 environmental injustice. This is environmental 

9 racism; this is radioactive racism. This region of 

10 the country is being treated as a nuclear sacrifice 

11 zone for the rest of the country, and it just so 

12 happens to be Western Shoshone Indian lands 

13 according to the Peace and Friendship Treaty of Ruby 

14 Valley dated 1863 that the United States Government 

15 signed. It's the highest law of the land, 

16 equivalent in stature to the U.S. Constitution; 

17 it's a treaty with a sovereign nation. And so this 

18 isn't okay, and I know one of the environmental 

19 impact statement's study points is 

20 disproportionate impacts on people of color 

21 communities or low-income communities. Believe 

22 you me, this is one of the worst examples of that 

23 in the entire country, or best examples of 

24 radioactive racism I guess you could say, and it's 

25 got to stop. And you know the focus of this 
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1 particular environmental impact statement is 

2 radioactive releases from the proposed Yucca dump 

3 into groundwater, which happens to flow into Death 

4 Valley, California; happens to be the place where 

5 the Timbisha Shoshone Indian Nation lives; there 

6 are other Western Shoshone communities elsewhere in 

7 the watershed. So it just isn't right; it's got to 

8 stop. 

9 Another area I wanted to mention was 

10 just learning from the wisdom of our elders, and so 

11 kind of a segue to Corbin Harney, the Western 

12 Shoshone spiritual leader who passed away a number 

13 of years ago. I remember him speaking at a 

14 Department of Energy Yucca Mountain environmental 

15 impact statement public comment meeting in Salt 

16 Lake City around the year 2000 or 2001, and he said 

17 that if he--he called them the "DOEs," so I guess 

18 he was referring to the staff people of the 

19 Department of Energy--if they wanted to destroy a 

20 planet, why don't they go up to Mars and destroy that 

21 one, but leave this one for the people who love the 

22 earth, who love Mother Earth. And so I guess I 

23 would remember Corbin's words to the Department of 

24 Energy and share them with the Nuclear Regulatory 

25 Commission; this destruction of Mother Earth has to 
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1 stop. It's our home, and we are poisoning it, and 

2 in the context of the Yucca Mountain dump, we would 

3 be poisoning a precious and irreplaceable 

4 groundwater system that is of course vital to those 

5 semi-arid areas downstream that are thriving as we 

6 speak. 

7 Amargosa Valley, that's one of the 

8 biggest farming communities in the state of Nevada, 

9 the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, where 

10 highly endangered species live, including the 

11 various species of pupfish as they're called, 

12 minnows that live in hot springs that seems to defy 

13 biological bounds. The desert hole pupfish that 

14 lives in water at 104 degrees Fahrenheit; you know 

15 the only other places I can think of where life takes 

16 on such high temperatures would be like in deep sea 

17 trenches. So these are very special places being 

18 put at unacceptable risk and ultimate ruination if 

19 Yucca Mountain ever opens and radioactive waste is 

20 buried there, because it's going to leak massively 

21 into the groundwater and poison all those living 

22 communities downstream. 

23 And another elder whose name I would 

24 like to invoke in memory is Dr. Rosalie Bertell, who 

25 founded the International Institute of Concern for 
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1 Public Health in Toronto, did a lot of her 

2 anti-nuclear work in the Great Lakes bio region, but 

3 her wisdom certainly applies at Yucca Mountain, and 

4 just to quote her, "dilution is not the solution to 

5 radioactive pollution." In fact, there's so 

6 little groundwater flow out there that there won't 

7 be much dilution, and hence the reason for the 

8 11-mile downstream buffer zone that is part and 

9 parcel of the Yucca Mountain project, to try to buy 

10 enough dilution in 11 miles of groundwater that 

11 people who then pump drinking water at a well at that 

12 11 mile mark would not be killed in a short period 

13 of time. So that's unacceptable. 

14 Another elder is Grace Thorpe of the Sac 

15 & Fox Indian Nation in Oklahoma, who served in the 

16 Women's Auxiliary Corps in World War II. So here 

17 we are just past Memorial Day, and her assignment 

18 at the end of the war was Nagasaki, Japan, which had 

19 just been bombed with an atomic weapon. And she saw 

20 what happened, and went back to Oklahoma and was 

21 living her life until the Department of Energy's 

22 nuclear waste negotiator showed up in the 1980s and 

23 convinced the tribal council there to consider 

24 becoming centralized interim storage site for 

25 commercial high level radioactive waste. And it 
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1 took Grace Thorpe just a matter of days before she 

2 got all of those elected officials on the tribal 

3 council replaced. They were ousted in emergency 

4 tribal elections, replaced with anti-dump tribal 

5 council members, and Grace Thorpe did not stop 

6 there. She took her show on the road so to speak, 

7 and she helped 60 other Native American reservation 

8 communities fend off these parking lot dumps for 

9 high level radioactive waste targeted at them. And 

10 she was honored by President Obama in March of 2009 

11 during Women's History Month, and he placed her 

12 right up there with the likes of Rachel Carson, and 

13 he called them women defenders of planet Earth, and 

14 it is very true. And that was another example of 

15 the U.S. federal government, in that case the 

16 Department of Energy, engaging in environmental 

17 racism, radioactive racism. And it needs to stop. 

18 And another elder I will mention is 

19 Margene Bullcreek of the Skull Valley Goshutes in 

20 Utah, who led the effort to stop the parking lot dump 

21 for commercial high level radioactive waste 

22 targeted at her tiny community of 125 adult members, 

23 which the NRC by the way licensed for construction 

24 and operation. So this is radioactive racism; it 

25 must stop, and Margene was active on the Yucca 
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1 Mountain issue, working with the Native Community 

2 Action to stop Yucca Mountain as well, and we lost 

3 her a few years ago as well. So I invoke all of 

4 these elders to say that this radioactive racism 

5 must stop. 

6 Another area I'd like to touch on is 

7 transportation, that the previous two callers who 

8 I was able to listen to also brought up, and I wanted 

9 to focus my comments about nuclear waste 

10 transportation on what the Department of Energy 

11 has already identified back in its February 2002 

12 final environmental impact statement for the Yucca 

13 Mountain dump, and these are the barge shipments on 

14 surface waters across the country, which is not very 

15 widely known, and some of the surface waters involve 

16 include the Chesapeake Bay, the James River in 

17 Virginia, Delaware Bay, the various surface waters 

18 surrounding New York City, including the Hudson 

19 River and the Jersey Shore, the Atlantic coast, as 

20 well as Long Island Sound. In the Massachusetts 

21 area, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts Bay and Boston 

22 Harbor. Also Lake Michigan, as well the 

23 Mississippi River in the states of Mississippi and 

24 Louisiana; also the Tennessee River in Tennessee 

25 and Alabama, the Missouri River in Nebraska, Kansas 
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1 and Missouri; California's Pacific coast and 

2 Florida's Atlantic coastline. 

3 So these barge shipments would be 

4 necessary if rail-sized casks are used for 

5 transport, which is Department of Energy's 

6 preferred method, mostly rail. But there are some 

7 26 reactors in the United States that lack direct 

8 rail access, so the only options for exporting those 

9 rail-sized containers of high level radioactive 

10 waste would either be heavy haul truck, which is 

11 very complicated and difficult and has many 

12 downsides, or barge shipments. And the dangers of 

13 barge shipments are many. For example, if one 

14 barge shipment were to sink in Lake Michigan and 

15 release its contents, even a fraction of its 

16 contents, that would be an unprecedented 

17 radiological disaster in the drinking water supply 

18 for 40 million people downstream in eight U.S. 

19 states, two Canadian provinces, and a large number 

20 of Native American First Nations throughout the 

21 Great Lakes Basin. If water gets in and there is 

22 a critical mass formed in the accident, then there's 

23 enough fissile material, uranium-235 and 

24 plutonium-239 still present in the irradiated 

25 nuclear fuel that a chain reaction could be sparked 
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1 on the bottom of Lake Michigan, which would make 

2 emergency response a suicide mission, because as 

3 the emergency responders, if they were even able to 

4 locate the highly specialized crane on a boat to 

5 lift this 100 ton or heavier weight from the bottom 

6 of the lake, as it came to the surface of the water, 

7 would still be emitting nearly instant fatal doses 

8 of gamma radiation and neutrons by the way. 

9 So the releases of course, if a nuclear 

10 chain reaction were to take place on the bottom of 

11 Lake Michigan, would exacerbate the radioactive 

12 releases into the lake water, into the drinking 

13 water supply. So these proposals are 

14 unacceptable, and they are part and parcel of this 

15 Yucca Mountain plan, and it's not okay for NRC or 

16 any other agency to segment or isolate various 

17 aspects of this proposal, as this proceeding has 

18 been doing for the past several weeks, because 

19 transport is not being looked at at all; it's just 

20 looking at the dilution or lack thereof of 

21 radioactivity in the drinking and irrigation water 

22 downstream of Yucca. 

23 MR. CAMERON: Okay. Kevin, we have one 

24 more person who wants to talk, and I would thank you 

25 for all that information, particularly the 
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1 recitation of the elders that you did for us. So 

2 thank you Kevin. And we're going to see if Ethyl 

3 Rivera has anything more to add for us. Ethyl? 

4 MS. RIVERA: Yes, thank you very much. 

5 And just tacking on with what Kevin has just said, 

6 I live in Michigan, and I understand that the 

7 majority of the waste shipments within and from 

8 Michigan would be via rail. I want to point out 

9 that along these routes, there are many, many 

10 millions of people that would be affected, mainly 

11 because something that has not been mentioned 

12 earlier is the fact that we have numerous watersheds 

13 within the state, all of which drain into the Great 

14 Lakes. So even the rail shipments would 

15 have--would be exposing many thousands of people 

16 and millions of people via any kind of accident that 

17 might occur via rail. We have many bridges going 

18 over many waters; as I said, many major tributaries 

19 all draining into the Great Lakes. 

20 A couple of years ago, there were many 

21 comments made at a hearing up in Kincardine, Ontario 

22 about the OPG's plans to build a deep underground 

23 dump for radioactive waste there. The fact that we 

24 are contemplating a similar scenario where the 

25 Great Lakes, which provide 20 percent of the world's 
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1 fresh water here, and would affect millions of 

2 people, is totally unacceptable. Neither one of 

3 these plans are, in my opinion, taking the public's 

4 interest at heart, and I believe that it is 

5 deplorable that our government is allowing such 

6 plans to continue. Any dose of radiation, no 

7 matter how small, can cause cancer. There are 

8 many, many areas where these rail cars and other 

9 transportation would be traveling through areas, 

10 and many of these areas have volunteer fire 

11 departments that have no training for this kind of 

12 huge disaster. No matter what this environmental 

13 impact statement may provide in the way of 

14 reassurance that safety is a primary consideration, 

15 I take great issue with that and I believe that many, 

16 many thousands of Americans will also take great 

17 issue of this when they find out what kind of a 

18 poorly written, poorly configured plan this is. 

19 And I thank you for the opportunity to make these 

20 comments. 

21 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you Ethyl. 

22 We're going to go to one more person who has not had 

23 an opportunity for a second comment, and that's 

24 Susan Carpenter, and then I'm going to turn it over 

25 to our senior NRC official here, Jim Rubenstone to 
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1 close the meeting for us. So Susan, can you give 

2 us some additional comments? 

3 MS. CARPENTER: I just would like to put 

4 things in perspective. We're talking about 

5 storing for long term, as if we know what society 

6 will be like at the time, and I just want to remind 

7 people that we were in the Stone Age between 8,000 

8 and 4,000 years ago, and that the Industrial Age 

9 began with the steam engine 240 years ago, and we're 

10 talking much longer than this for storing the waste, 

11 and I just think we need to look at it in that light. 

12 And thank you for this hearing. 

13 MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you Susan, 

14 and thank all of you for your comments and we're 

15 going to go to Jim Rubenstone now to close the 

16 meeting out for us. Jim? 

17 MR. RUBENSTONE: Yes, thanks Chip for 

18 facilitating this meeting, and a special thanks to 

19 all of our commenters; we appreciate you 

20 participating and letting us know your thoughts on 

21 our draft supplement for the DOE's environmental 

22 impact statement. This is the final public meeting 

23 that we had scheduled; the comments close on 

24 November 20, one week from tomorrow. I would 

25 remind you once again that you can submit comments 
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1 in writing through the regulations.gov website, or 

2 by mail to NRC, and the information on how to do that 

3 is on NRC's website; if you follow the links from 

4 the front page for radioactive waste high level 

5 waste disposal e-documents, all that information is 

6 there. The information on our previous public 

7 meetings and the draft supplement can also be found 

8 on that page, and we will strive to get the 

9 transcript and the meeting summary up from this 

10 meeting as soon as they are available. 

11 So once again, thanks to everyone who's 

12 participated in the process on this draft 

13 supplement. NRC will take all of the comments and 

14 go through them, and we will be taking those into 

15 account as we publish the final version of this 

16 supplement in the first half of 2016. So thanks 

17 once again to all our commenters; we very much 

18 appreciate it, and please stay tuned to our website 

19 as we move forward with this process. Thanks 

20 again. 

21 THE OPERATOR: That concludes today's 

22 call, thank you for participating. You may 

23 disconnect at this time. 

24 (Whereupon, the proceedings were 

25 concluded at 4:02 p.m.) 
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