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Centers for Disease Control

National Institute for Occupational Safety and 

Health

Dose Reconstruction Review Methods Working 

Group

Thursday, September 13, 2018

The Working Group met in the Montreal Room at the 

Cincinnati Airport Marriott, 2395 Progress Drive, 

Hebron, Kentucky, at 8:30 a.m., Ted Katz, 

Designated Federal Official, presiding.
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Members Present: 

David Kotelchuck, Chair

Josie Beach, Member

David B. Richardson, Member*

Paul L. Ziemer, Member*

Ted Katz, Designated Federal Official

Also Present: 

Nancy Adams, NIOSH Contractor*

Bob Barton, SC&A*

Kathy Behling, SC&A

Grady Calhoun, DCAS

Rose Gogliotti, SC&A

Mark Griffon, DCAS Contractor

Stu Hinnefeld, DCAS

John Mauro, SC&A*

Scott Siebert, ORAU Team*

John Stiver, SC&A*

*Present via Telephone
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Contents

Centers for Disease Control National Institute for 

Occupational Safety and Health Dose Reconstruction 

Review Methods Working Group Thursday, 

September 13, 2018 1

Call to Order 4

Opening Remarks 5

Committee Discussion 8

Summary of Mark Griffon’s Report 72

Committee Discussion of Report 80

Adjourn 132
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Proceedings

(8:29 a.m.)

Call to Order

Mr. Katz: So, good morning, everyone.

This is the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker 

Health. It's the Dose Reconstruction Review Methods 

Work Group. We're just getting started here.

We are ready in the room. Let me check and see who 

I have on the line.

(Roll call.)

Dave Richardson is the other Member of the group. 

I don't know if he'll be joining us. He was expecting 

to.

And the agenda for this meeting is pretty open. It's 

really continuing the Board's discussion of how we 

might change, what we might have to -- should 

change for methods of doing the dose reconstruction 

case reviews.

And we have also in the room Mark Griffon, who has 

written a key report which is posted on the NIOSH 

website and has been discussed by the Board a 

couple of times, the Work Group and the Board, and 

it's sort of part of the meat for this discussion.

And I think that really takes care of preliminaries.

Folks on the phone, please keep your phones on mute 

while you can, when you're not addressing the group.

And I think we can get started with that.
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Opening Remarks

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. Very good.

First, let me say -- I mean, this is our first meeting 

since the passing of Dr. Melius, which was a 

tremendous loss to all of us. And he founded this 

Work Group in 2015. We met twice in 2015 and 

2016, and then Mark Griffon was tasked with doing a 

major report for us, which you gave us at our 

meeting in December, I think, of last year, 2017.

Mr. Griffon: Of 2017, yes. Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: So there are a number of different 

ways we can go about this. It may be worth -- we 

want to go over Mark's report, and I've certainly gone 

over it very carefully since taking over as Chair of this 

Working Group. I'm not quite sure -- this is a fairly 

loose agenda. We could -- one way of doing this 

would be to ask folks to give a sense from the 

Methods Subcommittee -- the Methods Working 

Group, of kind of where we are.

I, for myself -- we certainly talked about many 

different things, we really -- over the year where Jim 

was talking to us and talking about different areas 

that we might make improvements in the dose 

reconstruction process. Probably since we started, 

the Dose Reconstruction Subcommittee has certainly 

begun a new way of going through our cases by doing 

this Category 1 and Category 2, where, if you will, we 

take the cases where there is no longer any 

disagreement that things have been resolved at the 

level of NIOSH and SC&A.

But, in terms of how we might improve, there -- for 

myself at least, there was one issue that came up 

when I gave the last Subcommittee report about the 

blinds, and I believe it was in December also -- the 
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December meeting -- wherein we went through, I 

think by now, 32 blinds. I think that's where we're 

at. Somewhere close. And in the 32 blinds, we have 

had now only one case where the two groups had a 

different outcome in terms of compensation. No 

surprise. After all, we're now looking at blinds in the 

45-to-52-percent PoC category. 

So, of course, we would expect that there might be a 

few. So, we have perhaps, what, a 3-percent 

disagreement rate, which is really very good. I 

mean, the agreement is very impressive. 

But, when I gave the report to the Board, Dr. -- I 

found -- the PoCs, I found the average PoC was, I 

think, something like 2 percent and the confidence 

interval was 2.5 percent and included zero. So, I 

made the point that there is -- that that represented 

the level of agreement. That is, the agreement 

between the two groups doing the blinds were 

consistent with no difference. 

And Dr. Anderson at the time said, well, have you 

looked at the blinds and broken that down, and 

asked, well, where -- are there any places within the 

dose reconstruction process where there are 

consistent differences? That has not been done. It 

had not been done by the time of my report, and Dr. 

Melius also said that he felt that that was something.

In terms of my sense of agenda, that is something 

that needs to be done. But, beyond that, I did not 

have a sense of the many things that we could look 

into to improve the process; that at least Dr. Melius, 

in the course of time, I did not see from him, and 

maybe in a sense we couldn't -- we've never had a 

full discussion of your report by this group. There 

was no sense of there's one that really stands out. 

There are a few. You had a number of important 

suggestions.
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So, it is really, I think, up to us now to think about 

how to proceed. And I wondered if -- Josie or Paul, 

if you had any sense of where we're left with in terms 

of what we have done already. Do you have a sense 

of agenda or priority?

Member Beach: Well, in reading through and 

refamiliarizing myself with all this, it really stood out 

that NIOSH has a huge part in what sort of things 

they're going to start with. Because we do some of 

the evaluating, but NIOSH has a big part in -- it's 

their program and their evaluation. So, I was kind of 

thinking we were going to see something from our 

last meeting, maybe some things that the NIOSH 

team has looked at and maybe things that they can 

get started on. And I never saw anything. So, I was 

kind of curious where that leaves us also, because a 

lot of those points were -- I mean, we had a part in 

it, but NIOSH has a huge part in how --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Member Beach: So I don't --

Mr. Griffon: There were some recommendations to 

NIOSH or to NIOSH/ORAU or --

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, absolutely.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Absolutely.

Mr. Griffon: So -- yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: But the question of -- but we 

hadn't sorted -- at this point --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- we had not discussed priority 

issues or which ones --
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Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- we ought to focus on.

Member Beach: That's true.

Chair Kotelchuck: And frankly, there are so many 

different areas that have complexity that one can be 

concerned that, could there be a problem here? 

Could we make an improvement?

And obviously, one of the points of this meeting is to 

think about what we want to do and set some 

priorities, consistent with --

Member Ziemer: I didn't have a chance -- this is 

Ziemer.

I didn't have a chance to go back and look at the 

transcript of our last meeting, but were there some 

specific items that we had identified for follow-up? I 

don't know, Dave, if you had looked at that or Josie. 

But I was thinking that we should take a look at the 

transcript of our last meeting and identify any items 

that we had already discussed that we've agreed on 

following up.

Committee Discussion

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Yes. Well, I wish there was 

some sense of priority. My reading of the transcript 

--

Member Beach: There wasn't.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- was that we did not. We had 

not arrived at that point. There was -- well, we 

hadn't, and Josie seems to agree.

Member Beach: I read -- now, Paul, there were a lot 

of points made, but nothing really specific. We kind 

of left it at that point -- the last meeting was right 
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before the December Board meeting. And 

unfortunately, I wasn't able to look at those points 

on the December meeting, if the whole Board --

because I think Jim's sense was this wasn't a Work 

Group issue; it was more a Board issue.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Member Beach: And I don't recall if we had any 

specific recommendations out of our full Board 

meeting in December.

Chair Kotelchuck: I believe that Jim's intention, as I 

understood it, was that the first major initiative was 

to come out of Mark's report; that Mark's report was 

the working product, if you will, of where we were 

going or might go. But, unfortunately, sadly, we 

were not able -- Jim was not able to -- Jim's passing 

made us not able to get his judgment in terms of 

what he saw in his leadership post.

So, a lot of it, I think, will -- today, I do hope that 

we'll go over your report and maybe you might later 

want to consider coming back and talking to us again 

a little bit reacquainting.

I don't know if other -- Paul or Josie has had a chance 

to reread, I did -- your report, and I certainly read it 

in full before this meeting and tried to think of areas. 

But it seemed -- thinking about different areas of 

priority in it, I will admit it seemed to me a bit 

overwhelming.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: That is, there are many things one 

could do because there are many complexities.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And we have to fold that into the 
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ability of NIOSH to take on other tasks and other 

studies -- you have a pretty stiff agenda -- and, also, 

what SC&A can and should do. As I say, for myself, 

I really do think that one thing I hope will come out 

of this discussion was, in fact, looking at the blinds in 

a more careful way, in a more refined way, and 

seeing whether there are any trends within it other 

than the PoCs are the same consistently. Although 

that in itself is a very impressive finding, given that 

this is such a complex process of dose reconstruction.

Member Beach: Some of the simple things, Dave, 

like the timeline --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Member Beach: -- some dose reconstructors do a 

timeline; some do not. Some of the sites vary 

because some of them have templates that are being 

used; some of them TBDs. I mean, so there are such 

variances.

And there were a lot of good suggestions. I know 

you made a suggestion, Kathy, of using -- going into 

some of the smaller sites where Mark ended up going 

to an AWE --

Ms. Gogliotti: Linde.

Member Beach: -- Linde, and then, Savannah River. 

I mean, we have to get our head around some of that 

stuff, too, you know, doing some more comparisons 

to see if there's any other inconsistencies where 

we've -- I know Mark found some within those two 

sites he did. So, maybe that's a way to start? I'm 

not sure.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. The timeline, certainly there 

was much positive discussion about the timeline and 

putting the timeline in. It was in your report. And 

we did discuss that at the meeting. I mean, that's 
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more, I think, a question of going to the Board and 

saying, we would like -- or to NIOSH and saying, we 

would like this to be done on a consistent basis. And 

we should come back to that.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes. Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: I mean, that's good.

Mr. Griffon: I think this goes along with, I mean, 

years ago we asked for NIOSH to start putting the DR 

guidance into each case. Remember that, Stu?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: And that's done now regularly. So 

maybe that's -- I mean, it's up to the Board. You 

know, it would be up to the Board if you wanted to 

recommend that to NIOSH, but I think that would be 

-- obviously, in my report, I think the timelines and 

where there's professional judgments made, if they 

flag them and explain the basis for that judgment in 

their work, because I feel like in the audit function 

oftentimes there's this big debate about it's looking 

at it after the fact and trying to explain after the fact 

why the dose reconstructor did something. So, the 

better it's documented upfront, the easier it is to say.

And then, I think the other overall thing I wanted to 

say about this is that -- and I don't know if 

everybody's in agreement on this -- but my sense 

through this process was that I think the whole 

purpose of this would be to refine and improve 

systems as much as possible. That would be 

procedures, DR guidance, QA process. It's not 

intended to say this dose reconstructor clearly is 

more -- you know, does a better job than this. It's 

not looking at individual performance. It's looking at 

--

Member Beach: It's giving them the tools.
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Mr. Griffon: Right.

Member Beach: So that they have the tools to make 

better judgments --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, that's right.

Member Beach: -- or the correct judgments.

Mr. Griffon: Or the consistent judgments. I mean, it 

may be a fact that certain people are making --

maybe the guidance isn't completely clear, and some 

people err more conservatively than others, you 

know. But if the guidance was a little clearer, they 

might be more consistent in that respect.

Member Beach: And then, the CATI reports was 

another one.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Member Beach: The CATI reports can be difficult and 

challenging --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Member Beach: -- because they're vague.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Member Beach: So, maybe figuring out how to pay 

more attention. I mean, I don't have the answers, 

but the CATI reports seem like there's clues there. 

Some CATI reports are, of course, better than others 

also in the details.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, wasn't the recommendation 

about CATI reports sort of looking at an aggregate of 

CATI reports --

Member Beach: Yes.
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Mr. Hinnefeld: -- from a site, for instance?

Member Beach: Yes. That's correct.

Mr. Hinnefeld: See if it's informative about that site 

in terms of if there is information here that would 

affect essentially the Site Profile, you know, the 

approaches you use. That was the task it was 

assigned. 

To be honest, my reaction to all of this is that 

everything that we, NIOSH, commit to this from our 

staff detracts from doing dose reconstructions and 

doing site research. So, what we're saying, if we 

decide to do these things -- and that's not an easy 

task because, while CATIs are electronic, in order to 

get much sense out of them -- I guess you could do 

some keyword searches or something if you thought 

that it was going to be helpful. But, if you really 

wanted to do that and combine -- you know, look at 

a composite or a sampling of CATIs from a site to see 

if it was informative about Site Profile, you're going 

to have read them all. I don't think there's another 

way to do that. And that's really -- that's workintensive.

Member Beach: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And I think putting our staff on that, 

because we work so hard on site research anyway, 

and site research is all reviewed anyway. Everything 

we write in terms of technical documents is reviewed 

by the Board anyway. I don't see that paying off in 

the same way as maybe some other thing.

I think, Mark, what you were talking about I think 

was documenting judgments. I judge this person 

was not exposed to neutrons because -- something.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.
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Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And you talked about maybe putting 

that in the dose reconstruction report, right?

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Okay. So, I don't know the extent 

that we do that.

Mr. Calhoun: We do. We do.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: I think it's one of those things that's 

always been getting better.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.

Mr. Calhoun: But it's in there. Now is it in 100 

percent of them? Probably not, but it certainly is 

something that we instruct the guys to do.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. I will say I saw a degree of 

variability. It was done differently in different cases.

Mr. Calhoun: And also, one of the things that's really 

improved a bunch from the CATI is the incident 

things. Now, if there's a statement at all in the CATI 

report that there was an incident, it's got to be 

addressed in there. Say, Mr. Jones said that he was 

exposed to bad, nasty 147, and here's why we think 

he was or he wasn't, and here's the dose associated 

with that.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, that's good. It is very good.

Let me ask, let's first look at repertorial, the -- both 

the timeline and the justifications. I think it's implicit 

the advantages of that. As we go back over them, as 

the Subcommittee reviews some, those are there. 

So, the plus sign is fairly clear. The question in my 
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mind is, on the downside, how much additional work 

or how much of a problem in terms of putting yet 

another task on your plate would that be? I think, 

Stu, you implied maybe --

Member Ziemer: Guys, I have to go off the line for 

a few minutes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Sure. Absolutely. Thank you.

Mr. Hinnefeld: You know, I don't do dose 

reconstructions. And so, I'm not in a position to say. 

I don't know; you would probably have to get that 

information from ORAU.

I don't think Scott called. Did Scott call in?

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, I think that he was going to call 

in.

Are you out there, Scott?

Mr. Hinnefeld: He may not be prepared to say.

Mr. Calhoun: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: I don't know.

Mr. Calhoun: Right, right. And, you know, it depends 

on what the actual scope is that we ask them to do.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes. So, what we're talking about is 

the timeline of this person's employment, right? This 

person was hired for these -- worked for these years. 

In our interpretation, during these years, he was a 

millwright the entire time. You know, or something 

like that.

Ms. Gogliotti: Is this just the DOL determination?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Beg your pardon?
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Ms. Gogliotti: Is this just the DOL determination?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Of what? Of his employment period?

Ms. Gogliotti: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, the employment -- the covered 

employment period is a DOL determination. That's 

their decision.

Our decision has to do with did his job change over 

that time. So, if he were a millwright for five years, 

and then became a supervisor, does that affect his 

exposure and --

Mr. Griffon: A sun dose, right, right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- and did that affect the assumptions 

we made in his dose reconstruction?

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Those are the kinds of things you're 

talking about, right?

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. 

Mr. Hinnefeld: So, I really don't know.

Mr. Calhoun: Well, that's going to come from two 

different places. And the first place it comes from is 

the actual claimant.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: And so, you know, from the CATI --

Mr. Hinnefeld: What does he say?

Mr. Calhoun: -- you know, we ask that question, 

what was your job? And then, if there is a question, 

you can go down through some dosimetry records 

and other administrative-type records that we get, 
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and sometimes that information is there.

Now keep in mind, that almost doesn't matter if 

we've got dosimetry. If we've got internal and 

external dosimetry, it doesn't matter what they did -

-

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes, sort of.

Mr. Calhoun: Unless there's a mix of different 

energies or something that you've got to worry 

about. 

But, from an internal standpoint, it depends on what 

they're monitored for, unless they were monitored for 

something -- they weren't monitored for something 

that they potentially were exposed to.

Member Beach: So, what's the trigger now? Some 

of those are being done, and some of them aren't.

Mr. Calhoun: Some of what?

Member Beach: The timelines.

Mr. Hinnefeld: For what?

Member Beach: For dose reconstruction.

Mr. Calhoun: No, we don't lay out a timeline in the 

DR.

Member Beach: But in the judgments that are made 

or --

Mr. Calhoun: When a judgment needs to be made, 

they'll look through the CATI and the administrative 

records that we have.

Member Beach: But then they make notes of that, 

right?
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Mr. Calhoun: Not necessarily. In the DR, they may 

or they may not. But, when you say timeline, I'm 

thinking that, you know, I've got something like a 

table. But that's not the case.

Mr. Griffon: And, Grady, just to be clear, when you 

say DR, you mean the DR Report, right, the final --

Mr. Calhoun: The Dose Reconstruction Report, yes.

Mr. Griffon: Report, right. And what I'm talking 

about, the timelines I was seeing was in the 

spreadsheets as part of the tools. 

Mr. Calhoun: Okay.

Mr. Griffon: And the one I saw -- I mean, and it 

varies, right? I certainly didn't sample all of them. 

But Hanford, I found that there was a bunch of cases 

for Hanford that had very detailed spreadsheets with 

the timeline of the work, and then, the assumption of 

neutron, yes or no, or whatever. You know, it broke 

it all down. Whereas, other sites didn't do that, and 

I wondered, maybe that's something that should be 

done for the other sites as well?

Member Beach: For that, is that the dose 

reconstructor doing that or is there some guidance 

requiring that? I guess that's what I --

Mr. Calhoun: I don't dig down into those files.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, it's in the DR --

Mr. Calhoun: I see the finished product more than 

that.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.

Mr. Calhoun: So, I'd have to --

Mr. Griffon: It's in the DR guidance. For Hanford, 
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they have the DR guidelines that say --

Member Beach: So, it is in the guidelines?

Mr. Griffon: -- you should do the timeline. Right. 

For Savannah River, it --

Mr. Calhoun: Scott's on.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Siebert: This is Scott.

Maybe I can shed a little light on that.

Chair Kotelchuck: Sure.

Mr. Siebert: The reason you will generally see that 

for Hanford, the general thought process in the DR 

process is, if the dose reconstruction needs to create 

a timeline because it's a complicated case and they 

need to track the various locations where they're 

going to have to make a decision, is this person in A 

area, B area, C area, they have the flexibility to 

create those timelines to make it clear what they 

decided to do, what locations they were. So, the peer 

reviewer, the DCAS reviewer, and any further 

reviewers can easily find it.

And, Mark, Hanford is a good example --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Siebert: -- because it's a very complicated 

location. There's so many different locations, that it 

will depend on which location you assume as to what

the energies are and things like that. You will 

generally see those in the more complicated claims, 

especially as you hit the point where you need to 

start getting to the best estimate territory.

As Mark knows from looking at those, those are 
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relatively intensive documents listing all the things, 

and they take a pretty good amount of time to 

generate, which is the reason that it is not a 

requirement on our side to do that, but it's a good 

practice, when you're getting into complicated cases, 

to put that together.

And once again, on a site-to-site basis, it's going to 

be a very different determination as to whether you 

need that type of thing for those sites. AWEs 

generally are a very good example. You know, you 

don't have the complications of the many different 

places they could be or it's all treated the same.

So, does that help outline a little bit our thought 

process when we use those?

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, that's good, Scott. Thanks.

Chair Kotelchuck: It does. It does.

Mr. Griffon: And I think that I wouldn't necessarily -

- maybe it's a matter of -- I mean, we're getting into 

sort of -- anyway, I don't know my role versus the 

Board's role, but maybe it's a matter of just defining 

the triggers. You know, what triggers a timeline 

would be used? And if the worker had several 

different jobs in different areas, obviously, that would 

trigger -- you know, it's not hard.

And all this stuff is doing what we initially said, which 

is documenting professional judgments. In other 

words --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: -- you're documenting the work, and 

you're showing how you're assuming different 

exposures, because the job title changed and the 

areas changed.
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Chair Kotelchuck: Mark, two things. One is you said, 

I'm not sure what my role is because I'm not a Board 

Member, which is fine.

(Laughter.)

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: But let me say to all, this is a much 

more exploratory meeting than many we have had 

and many we will have, because of the loss of Dr. 

Melius and starting out again without totally clear 

sense of direction from him.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: I mean, we're essentially in a 

formative stage. And so, I would say in today's 

meeting, more than many, I think folks here --

whether staff or Board or Subcommittee -- or 

Working Group -- should feel a little freer to express. 

As time goes on, we'll probably go back into our more 

traditional roles.

(Laughter.)

Member Beach: And I have a question. So, Hanford, 

you saw a timeline. What about Savannah River? It 

seems to me that Savannah River would be such a 

place --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Member Beach: -- that would require that type of 

depth also, because of the comparison.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Member Beach: Did you see that there?

Mr. Griffon: You know, I'm fishing in the memory of 

reviewing all the cases. And Scott, correct me if I'm 
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wrong, but I didn't see it used as often or it wasn't at 

least in the case material -- you know, the materials 

in the case file, I should say, where I saw like a 

spreadsheet the same way as Hanford. They might 

have done it in a different fashion, but yes.

Mr. Siebert: Yes. As I said, this is the dose 

reconstructor's judgment as to whether they need 

that to keep the data clear in their mind as they're 

working through it. I know, as you say, Savannah 

River can be complicated.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Siebert: And I know there are some dose 

reconstructors in complicated cases, they create 

those type of timelines for their own use as well. So, 

I can't say that -- you know, we don't have any sort 

of required format or anything of the sort. It's just 

something that, if it helps you keep the information 

clear when you need it, individuals have done that. 

It may be useful for us to be more clear on the 

format. Because, like you say, with Hanford, we 

generally have a format that people have kind of 

fallen into. We could be more consistent on that type 

of a thing, you know, as required.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. In fact, it seems to me that 

maybe both Scott and Grady -- I mean, to my mind, 

I wondered about asking you, with trying -- talking 

with your people and thinking yourselves further 

about what might be a trigger. It's clear you're 

saying -- I mean, the AWE cases, where the timeline 

doesn't mean anything much. But in many of the 

complex places they do. 

If you folks would think about -- say until our next 

meeting, which will more likely be a conference call, 
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of course -- what might be a reasonable trigger --

that is, size or complexity of a plant such that, when 

you're dealing with these plants, you should do a 

timeline. And the trigger may not be an absolute 

one, but let's see if we can specify further, so that we 

don't have some people doing it and some people 

don't. And you say, hey, it's a good idea, but it isn't 

always done. To think about those places where it 

should be done --

Member Beach: It seems like you have a good model 

already in Hanford. It sounds like they have a pretty 

good handle on how that timeline is done, and dose 

reconstructors, as Scott just said, fall into that. 

Idaho is another site that looks like it's going to be 

large and complex, Savannah River. I mean, we can 

probably name a few that may benefit from having 

that type of a --

Mr. Calhoun: Well, I think it's probably worth looking 

into --

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Calhoun: -- and just seeing, you know, what 

we're doing and what's triggering it.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: Hanford went and were just saying that 

we're going to do for every case at this point. It's 

going to be subjective, you know, what triggers it.

Member Richardson: Just for the record -- hello?

Member Beach: Yes?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, Scott?

Member Richardson: No, this is David Richardson.

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, David, thank you. Welcome, 
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welcome.

Member Richardson: I've been on for the last 25 

minutes, but you guys haven't stopped talking.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Very good.

Mr. Katz: Thanks, David.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. Thank you. And we 

appreciate your being here. Are you in the Carolinas 

at this point?

Member Richardson: Yes, I'm in a basement.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. So, I thought about -- so, we 

have one Member in the hospital trying to participate, 

Paul. I don't know if you heard, but Paul's back was 

acting up and he is in the hospital. And he 

participated earlier and will come back.

Member Richardson: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: So, with four of us, one is in the 

hospital and one is trying to ride out a storm.

(Laughter.)

So, thank you for being here, since life has to be 

complicated with yourself and your family.

Member Richardson: Sure. Could I -- related to this 

discussion --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes?

Member Richardson: Does a worker ever -- or does a 

dose reconstructor ever refer to employment history 

information? That is, instead of trying to obtain job 
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and department or location information from a 

dosimetry record, do they ever get from the 

Department of Labor the employment history 

information, which would provide the administrative 

change to the job title and the exact date that that 

happened on? Because even trying to figure out 

when a job title changed based on the dosimetry 

records is going to depend on the badging cycle, I 

believe.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, I know that information is 

available, and I know we look at it. We, NIOSH, look 

at it especially when there's some question. I don't 

know if it's a matter of course that ORAU looks at the 

DOL information, if it's not in the DOE packet that's 

sent. 

Member Richardson: Right. Because the information 

that was just rehearsed was the CATI report and then 

the dosimetry information. And what was left off 

there was the employment history information for 

creation of this timeline.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: Oftentimes, that does appear in the 

DOE records.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, sometimes it does, and sometimes 

it doesn't.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, right.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, you're right, yes. Yes, I've found 

that, generally, well, at least oftentimes, it's more 

prevalent in the DOL records than in the DOE records, 

if it's just -- if it's not specifically rad-related.

Member Richardson: Yes. I mean, for these sites 

we've been talking about, Hanford, Savannah River, 

Idaho, there's going to be a pretty rich employment 
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history information, at least historically, that we 

could retrieve.

Mr. Calhoun: On the other hand, I think there's some 

pretty good indicators, especially at Savannah River, 

as far as areas, work areas, and rad reports, the 

radiation dosimetry reports, too.

I don't know, Scott, if you've got anything to chime 

in on that, or if I covered that okay or not.

Mr. Siebert: Sorry, I'm just jotting notes down.

Yes. I mean, we look at the DOL file as well. Now 

the caveat here is many of those DOL files are 

multiple thousands of pages long. So digging 

through those can take extensive time, which, 

obviously, slows down the time for a dose 

reconstruction.

So what we really are looking at is, I want to say, 

basically, the weight of evidence, if we have enough 

information from the DOE file, it appears that we 

have enough information from the information that 

went into NOCTS as to where people were working, 

what they were doing. We will generally use that 

information.

The other piece that would go into that as well is if 

we can overestimate and make an assumption and 

it's less than 45 percent, we may not go into those 

depths of details. Once we start getting into the best 

estimate territory, we will generally spend more time 

in the DOL file as well, if we need to dig out the pieces 

as to, well, maybe they were in this specific location 

for a certain amount of time and things like that.

Does that help you, Grady?

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, yes. That makes sense.
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Member Richardson: Yes. I mean, I have gone 

through those site records. I mean, I have seen 

workers who have, let's say, 100 lines of employment 

history changes. That would be a change in pay 

grade or an administrative change in a job title or 

department. I've never seen thousands of pages. 

And this is after reviewing tens of thousands of 

workers' employment histories. So that section of 

the DOL report should not be that long.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes, but, David, you can't necessarily 

find it. You have to look through everything DOL 

sends us in order to find those things.

Mr. Calhoun: And that's one file, one PDF file.

Mr. Hinnefeld: One PDF file is -- it comes over, the 

DOL file, everything they send comes over as one file.

Member Richardson: Okay. So you're just saying, 

physically, you just can't find that information?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Look, you have to look --

Mr. Calhoun: You can find it.

Mr. Hinnefeld: You can find it. You've just got to 

look through the whole file to find it.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes.

Member Richardson: Yes, but we've requested them 

in computerized form. I mean, we've gotten -- well 

either we've gotten cards, scanned, and then typed 

them in, or something. But I see your point. I mean, 

you're saying that things are --

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, that would be a request to the 

DOE site that we have not made in the program up 

to now. Because DOL makes their request.

Member Richardson: All right. I just wanted to 
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understand what you were saying.

Mr. Hinnefeld: We request our exposure history. 

We've not gone to any of these sites and asked for, 

you know, as part of -- we ask for exposure history. 

We don't ask for employment history when we go to 

these sites. And so it would be a new request to the 

sites.

Member Richardson: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And the sites, and they'll complain 

because they complain about the requests we make 

now.

Member Richardson: Yes, okay.

Member Ziemer: Okay. I'm back on the line here. 

Ziemer here.

Chair Kotelchuck: Wonderful. Wonderful.

Member Richardson: This discussion is pointing to 

the issue that employment history information is an 

important component for dose reconstruction at 

some sites and/or some areas.

Chair Kotelchuck: Certainly. Certainly.

Mr. Griffon: This is a little tangential, but it's actually 

something I raised on the other Board to the 

Department of Labor, which is that you gave us this 

file, there's got to be -- can you break these out into 

subareas before you -- how do you expect people to 

go through these files and review this stuff? So that's 

been brought up on the other side of the shop as well.

Member Richardson: So, Mark --

Mr. Griffon: Yes?

Member Richardson: -- in your review of those files, 
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is it just duplicate information? How do you end up 

with thousands of pages? Because I've gone 

through, again, for workers, and I didn't find 

thousands of pages.

Mr. Griffon: It's a lot of medical records. It's medical 

records stuff. And there is a lot of duplication, too, 

yes. I mean, I haven't reviewed -- I've reviewed tens 

of them. I haven't looked at hundreds of them.

Member Richardson: And you expect that the 

employment history page, basically, is somehow -- is 

not in a logical place between all the medical records 

that a site might hold?

Mr. Griffon: Yes, the ones I saw, it was inconsistent. 

It wasn't always right at the front, or whatever, yes.

Member Beach: Dave, it's not always just a page. 

Because if an employee spends 30 or 40 years at a 

site and they change jobs, there is going to be 

multiple employment records.

Member Richardson: Yes. I mean, I've gone through 

all those. Yes, it's page for page. What I'm talking 

about, once you look at it, it can be reduced to a few 

hundred lines of information.

Member Beach: Correct. Yes.

Member Richardson: It's basically when you get a 

change in pay or job assignment.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Member Richardson: And that's not hundreds of 

pages or thousands of pages, even for a 30-year 

worker.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.

Member Beach: Gotcha.
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Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Dr. Mauro: This is John Mauro. If it's okay for me to 

jump in with some thoughts --

Chair Kotelchuck: Please.

Mr. Siebert: -- I noticed that we're diving, you know, 

we're going vertical right now into really very 

particular timeline issues.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Dr. Mauro: I just had a thought to sort of step back 

up into the stratosphere a little bit and think about -

- you know, I went through the transcript and Mark's 

report and its recommendations. And I sort of sat 

back and thought about how do we institutionalize 

into the program a way to systematically identify the 

judgments that are either programmatically, as Mark 

broke them up into two major categories, which I 

think is perfect. One has to do with where were the 

programmatic judgments made and where were the 

individual discretionary dose reconstruction made.

And then I say to myself, okay, that's really what 

we're trying to do. And in order to institutionalize it, 

I was saying one of the ideas, of course, that came 

out the last time we discussed it was, well, that that 

could actually be a section in each DR report, which 

is a burden.

But there's another place that I thought of, and I 

wanted to throw this on the table, is when we go 

through our -- there's two places. There is the dose 

reconstruction issues resolution Subcommittee 

activities. I don't think we actually have a separate 

part of the meeting. You know, we go through 

findings. But I have a recommendation.
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We could make it structurally part of the meeting 

whereby, in addition to going through the findings 

and closing them out, maybe one of the things that 

could occur maybe toward the end of the meeting is 

to have a separate discussion, okay, folks, where do 

you believe in this particular case there were certain 

judgments made. And so they're itemized there.

Also during the one-on-one meetings -- and this is 

what came up recently, because I was involved in 

one, it could be institutionalized into the program 

during the one-on-one. And then what that does is 

it creates a record on a living basis of where, at least 

in the subset that we look at, we discussed these 

kinds of judgments. And then you could have -- you 

have sort of a list, a compendium, that is available to 

discuss at the Board meetings.

And almost like, I'm trying to say, how do you turn

this into something programmatic without it being 

overly burdensome? I just wanted to make that 

offering.

Chair Kotelchuck: John, so you're saying the Dose 

Reconstruction Review Subcommittee --

Dr. Mauro: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- we review 1 percent of all cases.

Dr. Mauro: That's correct.

Chair Kotelchuck: And that we might add on a 

discussion of personal and professional judgments 

involved in the cases that we look at?

Dr. Mauro: Yes. Yes, that's my suggestion.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, that's a thought. I mean, 

the Subcommittee, which I'm Chair of, is, as you 

know, the Subcommittee has been desperately trying 
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to catch up for a couple of years, but we're caught up 

and we're not having meetings for a little while. And 

I'm going to work on a new updated Secretary's 

report during that time.

But I think that is something that may be possible, 

and it may be something that we should talk about in 

the Subcommittee as to whether that's something 

viable that we could do. It would certainly give us a 

sampling.

Mr. Griffon: But I'm wondering what -- go ahead.

Member Beach: I was going to say, we still need to 

know what was a professional judgment versus a 

programmatic judgment. Is it intuitive? Can you 

guys see that when you're reviewing reports? I don't 

know that it is.

Ms. Gogliotti: Not always.

Mr. Calhoun: No, but it's come up frequently.

Ms. Gogliotti: Sure, sure.

Mr. Calhoun: It comes up in our current reviews. So, 

I don't know what we would be doing differently.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, that's what I'm not sure.

Mr. Calhoun: I mean, it comes up all the time.

Mr. Griffon: Unless you're just saying document it 

and track it.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, but, I mean, we've had 

discussions that said, "Look, why did you decide 

this?" And they said, well, it turned out it was 

professional judgment.

Mr. Griffon: Right.
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Mr. Calhoun: I've been in almost every one of these 

meetings and I know it comes up. I'm not sure if we 

would be doing anything different.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Member Beach: I'm just saying that what John 

suggested is okay, but it's kind of the cart before the 

horse because we haven't quite got to that point yet 

to where we can discuss them.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, yes, I admit, John, as you 

talked, to speak honestly, my sense when you said, 

"I'm coming in perhaps from a stratosphere," and my 

feeling internally was I'm an incrementalist.

(Laughter.)

I'm kind of eternally walking on the ground trying to 

step carefully each step. So that I was looking at 

extraordinarily modest things like timeline and 

justification and putting them in the files.

But, for myself just as a Subcommittee Member --

and you are, too, Josie -- maybe we should talk about 

that in the Subcommittee and begin to put those 

together. By the way, those discussions are in the 

transcripts. We have a transcript of everything we've 

done for years. But I don't think -- we were never 

directed --

Member Beach: I don't think we're ready for that.

Chair Kotelchuck: No. Also, I don't think we can go 

back and look at the old transcripts because we 

weren't thinking of collecting. So, it just kind of 

randomly appears.

Member Beach: I mean, that's separate --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.
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Member Beach: -- the Subcommittee. But I have a 

suggestion. Mark has given us a set of 

recommendations and observations. Is it possible to 

go through those and maybe decide what would be 

something that we could do, NIOSH could do, and 

just go to each of those recommendations to start 

with? Because we're kind of all, I mean, we're having 

a lot of good discussion, don't get me wrong, but 

maybe just to pinpoint each recommendation to see 

if it's something we can do or we can't do, for 

whatever reason on whatever site it is? Does that 

make any sense?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. No, I think that makes sense, 

and I was hoping that we would do that today. My 

sense in the discussion about timeline and 

justification is that they are mentioned in your report, 

but, essentially, prior to your recommendations. 

They are things that we ought to be reporting. It's 

more recording. And then, I would say let's get to it. 

Let's get to Mark's.

But could we finish up the other?

Member Beach: Sure.

Chair Kotelchuck: Kathy?

Ms. Behling: Just one other question, maybe 

something to consider, and not to change the subject 

completely here. But, in re-reading Mark's report, it 

occurred to me that one of the other things we are 

obviously focusing on is consistency. Because 

professional judgment, we're trying to determine is 

everybody thinking the same way.

When we do our reviews, either through dose 

reconstruction or through the procedures, we're 

looking at one specific case or one specific site. One 

of the things that the Board that I'm not aware of 
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that we've done in a real consistent manner is say 

let's look at a number of sites; let's go out and look 

at all of the different sites and see is there 

consistency between all the sites.

When we do our Site Profile reviews, we're focusing 

on just that review. I'm not sure how often we sit 

and look at, is this methodology being applied at all 

of the sites consistently? Or the same with the dose 

reconstructions, is this dose reconstruction 

methodology being applied consistently at various 

sites or at all of the AWE sites, or where it's 

applicable? So, rather than focusing on a single, you 

know, look at the universe.

Chair Kotelchuck: I think that's part of Mark's --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: I think that's included in Mark's.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, it's sort of cross-cutting, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: But, if I could, and maybe it's just 

me, but if we could just talk, finish up the timeline 

discussion and task.

(Laughter.)

And, Grady, I think we were pretty well -- and, Scott 

-- I mean, we were pretty well along the way of 

saying that you would try to gather --

Mr. Calhoun: We'll just take a look. We'll take a look 

--

Chair Kotelchuck: Take a look and talk --

Mr. Calhoun: -- at some of the big sites and see what 

kind of a burden that that would be, and if there's 

something that's actually triggering the DRs to 

actually do this --
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Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: -- and if it should be formalized. It 

may be that is shouldn't be.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: I do keep coming back to the fact that 

we're looking -- we've got so much oversight 

between ourselves and ORAU and this group and the 

DR Subcommittee, and we're looking at the cases 

that are most likely to flip, if there's even a small 

error, and we're finding almost none. The one case 

that we found, I believe we comped it and you 

thought maybe it shouldn't be comped. You know, 

how much more do we do?

Member Richardson: And part of it is each thing, 

each point that we go over, it has to be asked, then, 

how much of a burden does it put on the people who 

are doing the dose reconstruction.

Mr. Calhoun: And what's the budget?

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. And do a cost/benefit on 

that or think about it in cost/benefit terms.

Mr. Griffon: And I will just say, as you consider this, 

Grady, the triggers for the timeline, at least my sense 

would be that one trigger would be whether it fit into 

the 45-to-52. You know, if it's an overestimating 

case, I don't think -- I mean, again, this is your 

decision.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, it's certainly an underestimating 

case, too.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right, right.

Mr. Calhoun: If we've got based on internal dose --

Mr. Griffon: That's right. Yes, underestimating, 
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right, right. So, there may be ways, and then, you're 

down to like 5 percent of your overall cases. So, it 

might be less of a burden.

Mr. Calhoun: Eight percent.

Mr. Griffon: I'm sorry, 8 percent.

Chair Kotelchuck: Scott?

Mr. Siebert: Yes, I'm sorry, I just wanted to jump in 

on that.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly that makes sense. The 

difficulty is you don't know where it is until you've 

done the case. So, you may be able to cut out those 

that are clearly overestimated, clearly 

underestimated, but once you're outside the "clearly" 

ones, you know, there's a larger number of cases that 

we have to do more work than just clear 

overestimates and underestimates that you would 

still have to do this timeline. It wouldn't just affect 

the best-estimate case. I can't think of an easy way 

for it to just affect the best-estimate cases. I just 

wanted to throw that out there.

Mr. Griffon: Okay. Fair enough.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. And I --

Member Richardson: This is David Richardson.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes?

Member Richardson: I'd point out that this issue of 

whether it flips is one issue, and that's one way of 

viewing the cost/benefit. The other part is 

transparency, which is a component of fairness. If 

you're going to communicate back to a worker, I 

think it's useful if somebody else could look at it and 

make sense of what was done.
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Member Beach: That goes right back to your timeline 

and consistency amongst the sites, amongst the 

workers at those sites. I mean, it's all tied together.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. By the way, that 

philosophical question, I know it's how much do we 

need to do and how much more, and I do sympathize 

with that. I mean, trying to put myself in the position 

of understanding what other people are doing that 

I'm not doing, and I must say, with the 

Subcommittee, even when I gave my report about 

the blinds, and I was so proud that, hey, look at all 

these blinds; we agree. This is amazing. This is 

complicated dose reconstructions. And yet, process, 

and yet, we agree.

And then, others came, and Jim, among others, 

saying, "Well, maybe you could do more." And it 

really does at a certain point -- and I don't know 

where Jim was going, other than whatever we're 

doing, there are enough assumptions and educated 

guesses, professional judgments, that we can always 

do better. And I think it's appropriate for the 

Chairperson of the Committee to do that and to 

always keep in mind, can we be doing better?

But, at this point, absent a permanent Chairperson, 

it is hard to know. I think we, at least in this Working 

Group, should just try to keep that -- we will keep 

that in balance by always asking, what's being asked 

of people who are already doing other things and 

whose work needs to be finished, needs to be done, 

the dose reconstruction? So, that's a side.

So, I think we're going to get a report, we now are 

going to get a report on timeline. I'm not sure the 

issue of putting justifications into the report. So, 

we're still in reporting. I'm not sure if that's the same 

question -- it's not the same question as timelines, 

but you will be talking to the dose reconstructors, and 
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thinking as supervisory people within that, what 

would make sense. So, could you think about that or 

report about that? I'm not sure. The timeline is more 

--

Mr. Calhoun: Yes. Certainly, just at least some kind 

of summary description and what we're doing and if 

anything else makes sense.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Griffon: When I said that, I didn't necessarily 

mean in the DR report. I was talking about the 

supporting files.

Mr. Calhoun: Right. Sure. Yes.

Mr. Griffon: But, you know --

Mr. Calhoun: That's what I'm talking about, too.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right. Okay. Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: So, that's done, and I think that 

we should go to what Josie was saying, to look at 

some of Mark's suggestions.

Member Beach: Okay. Can I just get a clarifying 

question?

Chair Kotelchuck: Sure.

Member Beach: Grady or Scott, the Hanford 

timeline, that comes out of -- it's the spreadsheets, 

but in knowing to do that, that comes out of the 

guidelines to the dose reconstructors? Is that where 

that --
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Mr. Siebert: No. No, the decision to do that is a dose 

reconstructor decision based on their estimation of 

the complexity of the case.

Member Beach: And that's for Hanford as well?

Mr. Siebert: Well, that's what we do across the 

board, but you're focusing on Hanford.

Member Beach: Right.

Mr. Siebert: So, that's true for Hanford as well.

Member Beach: It was just more consistently done 

there? Okay. Is that correct, more consistently done 

at Hanford?

Mr. Siebert: I would say probably yes.

Member Beach: Okay. All right. Somewhere I 

thought that it was in the guidelines. I wanted to 

clarify that for myself, that it wasn't actually in your 

guidelines to the reconstructors.

Mr. Siebert: Correct.

Member Beach: Okay.

Mr. Siebert: We have no specific requirement for 

timeline.

Member Beach: That helps. Thank you.

Chair Kotelchuck: Does it make sense, let's go to 

Mark's recommendations? And we have the report. 

Let's go to the executive summary, where I think 

there are at least -- or how would you like to direct 

us to go into the report? And we'll go down --

Ms. Gogliotti: Can I make a suggestion?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.
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Ms. Gogliotti: I don't feel like we've established what 

the goals of the Work Group are in terms of 

consistency, but consistency is such a broad term. 

Are we aiming at just dose reconstruction 

consistency? Are we aiming at programmatic 

consistency within sites, between sites?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: Because I feel like we're nitpicking at 

small items. But, if we're not working towards a 

common goal, then we'll never achieve --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Well, I admit, though, first, 

I don't think I can answer that. And I sort of said at 

the beginning it seems a bit overwhelming to figure 

out, of all the many tasks, all of which, double our 

budget, give us more people, we could usefully do 

those things. So, I personally feel like I like to look 

at little things first, smaller things.

But the consistency across different sites involves a 

fair amount of work.

Member Beach: What I think got us here early on is 

we kept hearing that decision was made because of 

professional judgment, and I think that professional 

judgment just kept popping up, popping up, and 

we're like, well, wait a second; everybody's different. 

How does that professional judgment, you know, 

across the board how is it done consistently or not 

done consistently? And I think that's kind of where 

this started many years ago.

Chair Kotelchuck: That's within a site, and that 

consistency --

Member Beach: That was within all sites.

Chair Kotelchuck: It is, but --
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Member Beach: That was within all discussions.

Chair Kotelchuck: But, in general, the thoughts were 

that the way to look at it is to first start within a site 

and see whether things are consistent within a site, 

because they are dealing with the same radiation and 

structural situation. But, then, of course, the issue 

has to eventually come into what Kathy was saying, 

that we have to look at various sites.

But, in a sense, I think we have to start small. But, 

ultimately, where we're going, all I can say is, what I 

got from Jim Melius was, where we're going is we're 

going to make things better, we're going to improve 

the process. And there's ultimately no limit to that, 

other than the resources we have and the things we 

come up with.

So, we're certainly not working in different directions 

or I don't feel like there's a disagreement about what 

would be good. And I think, Mark, pretty much 

everything you said would be, "Wouldn't that be 

nice?"

Mr. Griffon: Maybe, yes. Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: But we're an operational 

organization and it might be nice, but we don't have 

the resources, or it might be nice, but we're not going 

to gain that much benefit and it's a lot of work.

Mr. Calhoun: And let me give you just an example 

here.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay.

Mr. Calhoun: I'm going to hide the name. This is 

just the very first case that popped up. I do tech 

review all the time.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay.
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Mr. Calhoun: So, I'm calling up -- this is real, okay? 

And this is, it says here, "Grady" -- I'm going to say 

my name -- "worked as a pipefitter and a welder, F 

Area, H Area, tank farms, 300 Area, 700 Area near 

the Burial Grounds, according to records received 

from DOL and information provided in the interview 

process."

Go down another paragraph and it says, let's see, 

"The record supplied by DOE and interview process 

indicate that Grady worked at various facilities as 

previously listed. Therefore, when a specific facility 

was known for a particular year, it was applied for all 

other years."

So, the very first one I look at, there is a breakdown 

of where this person worked, "where I worked," and 

the fact that when the facility -- it had looked at DOL 

records. We looked at DOE records. So, I'm not 

saying that covers everything, and this is a Weibull 

of 10 percent. Okay? So, we're still looking at that 

to that degree of detail.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: That is what is routinely done.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Do you feel comfortable with what 

I said or he said? I mean, respectfully --

Ms. Gogliotti: Yes, it makes me nervous because I 

think you are targeting solutions without identifying 

the problem. And I wonder, with limited resources, 

if there's a better way of identifying the bigger 

problem, and then, how can you address that 

problem, rather than picking small aspects?

Chair Kotelchuck: What do other people think?
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Mr. Calhoun: Is there a problem?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Is there a problem with the dose 

reconstruction?

Mr. Calhoun: I mean, we can always do better, but 

short of saying there is a problem and here it is, and 

here's several examples of that problem -- you know, 

we can always find something to improve, and we do.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, I guess I would say, from my 

point of view, yes, there's a problem. We are making 

grand assumptions for each person about where they 

worked and who they were near, and what they were 

doing, and, in particular, trying to decide about the 

doses that people are getting, when we don't have 

data. And so, we've got to do coworker. These are 

complicated things.

I accept that we have to do the best we can, and 

therefore, I mean, that's why we're here, and that's 

why I feel like I'm here. And we are going to do the 

best job that we can. But we do have to make major 

decisions about exposure based on limited 

information.

Mr. Calhoun: Sometimes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Sometimes.

Mr. Calhoun: Sometimes, and I would say rarely at 

these sites. You know, at these big sites that we're 

talking about right here, there's not a grand 

assumption, as you say, that we have to make. 

Because just this one -- and maybe it's an outlier, 

maybe just because it was the very first one that I 

picked -- but we have over this person's 

employment, we've got six or seven different 

locations. We've got dosimetry by year by location, 

and it's spelled out not in a hidden document that 

was used to develop the dose reconstruction, this 
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was in the dose reconstruction.

We don't routinely have to make grand assumptions 

to do a dose reconstruction. Sometimes we have to 

use professional judgment when data is lacking.

Member Beach: And that's what we're looking at.

Mr. Calhoun: And in many of those cases, when data 

is lacking, it's an SEC.

Member Beach: But not all.

Mr. Calhoun: Well, we're never going to get to all. 

We're never going to get to all.

Member Beach: I think that's where we started, is 

that professional judgment and why it was made --

Mr. Calhoun: Right.

Member Beach: -- how it was made. Was it right? 

Wrong? We don't really care about that. We just 

want to know if you can track back to that 

professional judgment.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, I feel, working with the 

Subcommittee, that we just see lots of assumptions 

that have to be made because the data is not there. 

And I will admit to you, the large facilities, things are 

just so much better. And then, I'm on the AWE 

Working Group, and there, you know, if there is 

anything I would like to look at as the group, it's 

probably AWEs. And one way of -- I'll come to that 

later -- but was to speak to Dr. Anderson and ask 

him, based on his experiences, what are some things 

we can do. But that's a diversion.

Member Beach: But, Dave, I have a question.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.
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Member Beach: You've asked NIOSH to give us kind 

of a summary or a report on timelines and different 

sites.

Chair Kotelchuck: Justification.

Member Beach: Is there something SC&A can help 

us with in pinpointing some of the questions that 

you're asking? Because I'm sure you have some 

answers to those questions, because you guys are 

responsible for doing the dose reconstructions. I 

don't do it. So, is there something that we can ask 

our contractor to provide for us to help us with this 

task?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, go look at the blinds and try 

to look more carefully at the 32 blinds that we have. 

That may not be a huge task --

Mr. Calhoun: Redo the blinds.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: No, no.

Member Beach: No.

Chair Kotelchuck: You've got all the data here.

Ms. Gogliotti: I just question if that's what you're 

really after, though. Because my team, I have a 

great team.

We're getting along, but we don't have access to the 

same level of training that NIOSH does. We don't 

work with the same sites every day. They have 

teams that are dedicated to SRS, and we're doing a 

broad -- we're doing the best we can, but, to the 

same point, I don't know that that is going to have a 

lot of meaning.

Chair Kotelchuck: No, I'm just thinking about, more 
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or less, statistical analysis. You have the data for the 

exposures, the exposure level, the internal exposure, 

the external exposure, the medical records, the 

environmental. They're all listed for all 33 or 32 

cases. And I want to take a look.

We know that there is, in the end, so many millirems 

difference and so much PoC difference.

Is there a consistent place where the differences 

seem to be occurring? How much weight do we give 

--

Ms. Gogliotti: It's pretty hard to see the impact of an 

individual IREP entry on the overall PoC because 

there are so many factors that go into the PoC 

determination. It's not only the type of radiation 

you're exposed to, but is it chronic exposure? What 

type of modeling are you applying to it? Is it a lognormal distribution? Is it a triangular distribution?

Chair Kotelchuck: Uh-hum, uh-hum.

Ms. Gogliotti: And pinpointing those exact things 

would be almost impossible.

Mr. Katz: Can I just say, I mean, you've gone 

through all of these blinds together. And it's very 

clear in my mind at least, and I think probably Rose's, 

too, I mean, the explanations for the differences, 

they've always been for the most part it's very 

simple. I mean, it's like Rose was saying this isn't 

their meat and potatoes every day, doing these dose 

reconstructions, compared to the volume that they 

do at each site at ORAU. So, there's a little bit of a 

gap between how they do it and SC&A does it 

because of the familiarity issue.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Katz: And then, there's like the different 
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distribution approaches that they use, because one is 

simpler for SC&A to do and one's routine for NIOSH.

And I think, when you take all of that out, because 

all of that gets discussed with each case, there's not 

much left.

Ms. Gogliotti: I agree.

Mr. Katz: There's not much -- I don't think there's 

much interest in the differences between the blinds

that SC&A does and the blinds that the program has 

been doing, because, again, it's more of a difference 

in approach for convenience and familiarity than 

anything.

Ms. Behling: Let me ask this, though: however, 

when we do go through the blind process, and we are 

stepping through it as NIOSH or ORAU is doing, we 

can say, here's where we have to make a professional 

judgment. And that could be perhaps pointed out a 

little bit more clear on the blinds. We could go back 

and say, yes, there was a gap here and we decided 

to use coworker data as opposed to data on either 

side of the records.

These are professional judgments that, with the 

blinds, we could probably sit down and identify those 

for you a little bit more clear than what we did in the 

original comparison reports.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, that's my impression of what 

--

Mr. Katz: There's not much there, but, yes, I mean 

--

Ms. Behling: But we could specifically say at that 

point, okay, here is where SC&A had to make a 

professional judgment.
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Mr. Katz: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. If we see differences, then 

we can ask where the professional differ. Was there 

something where the professional judgments differed 

rather consistently to cause --

Ms. Behling: Correct.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- the external or the internal 

exposure or the external exposure -- or the other 

aspect of it is that I think what I'm thinking of is a 

more modest task. I may be wrong because I haven't 

addressed it myself.

Member Beach: And I'm not thinking about going 

backwards. No, we've already done those. That's 

great for the future, but I wasn't thinking of the blinds 

when I was saying task you to help us with. Just 

where we could move forward to get a better 

understanding of what we want NIOSH to do and how 

to pinpoint some of those professional judgments 

that are made.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, I think I was, though, 

because I gave a report to the Board, and at least 

two senior Members of the Board said, "Hey, you 

didn't look carefully enough. You've got to look 

further." And I thought they were right, that I could 

perhaps look further. There may be -- there may be 

-- some more meat there. There may not be. I 

mean, I think it's quite possible we'll look at it and 

say, hey -- and if it becomes a huge task, right, if it 

ties a lot of people up for a long period of time, then 

are we getting much benefit in terms of asking SC&A 

to do it?

And so, I'm looking at the pieces that could be looked 

at quickly, and then, we can talk about whether we 

have to look further. And I think, frankly, it's the 
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statisticians at this point. The first task is a 

statistician's, which could be you folks.

Member Richardson: Dave?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes?

Member Richardson: My recollection of the process 

was that we had a small number of blinds, and they 

were sort of treated like case studies. We weren't 

expecting the number of those to be very large.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Member Richardson: And they were going to 

describe, almost qualitatively describe both 

agreement, but, then, this issue of professional 

judgment was going to be perhaps not a statistical 

issue, but places where we could provide suggestions 

for clarification and guidance where there was 

ambiguity.

Then, we had other sets of reviews that we were 

doing where the numbers were larger, and some of 

the things that were going to be flagged out were 

more routine than professional judgment, like 

agreement in abstraction of the basic data, 

reproducibility in that. I don't know that we've ever 

resolved those issues, either. But we were treating 

these as different sorts of information.

Chair Kotelchuck: I'm not quite sure --

Mr. Griffon: Can I step back --

Chair Kotelchuck: Please. Yes.

Mr. Griffon: -- to 5,000 feet, not 20,000?

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: All right. Okay.
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Mr. Griffon: I'm scared of heights anyway.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Griffon: No, I think Rose mentioned that we're 

trying to propose solutions and we haven't really 

identified the problems yet. In fact, I think over 14 

years we've identified a lot of the problems and how 

big they are. When I say "problems," you know, 

relative.

For instance, neutron exposures, I mean, how many 

times have we had a discussion on the Dose 

Reconstruction Subcommittee about, well, we 

assumed he worked here, and therefore, we assigned 

neutron dose? And ORAU comes back and says, well, 

we think what the dose reconstructor must have done 

here was this, you know. And so, that's come up a 

number of times. I think that's probably one area 

where you say, okay, why are smart people on either 

side making different assumptions, and can the 

guidance be changed to make that more consistent? 

I mean, maybe you say, no, but there are points like 

that.

I think another one is internal dose, you know, 

assumptions on when you started the intake, or 

whatever. So, there are some of these factors. 

Glove box is another one. Like was the person a 

glove box worker, and do we assign the glove box 

factor or not? And that's mostly tied back into work 

areas and job, and all that.

So, we have some of these areas. And then, I see it 

as sort of, within a site, first, and then, maybe crosscutting. And then, what I get into with the 

programmatic stuff is more the global. And I think 

that might be out of the realm of the Dose 
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Reconstruction Subcommittee, more into the 

Procedures, and, you know, wherever. And most of 

those recommendations I think fall more toward 

NIOSH.

And the reason I brought up the programmatic ones 

is I think the importance of that is sort of the overall, 

long-term documentation of this program. For 

instance, uncertainty and assumptions around 

uncertainty for external doses, or whatever, there 

are certain default factors. If you can't calculate 

uncertainties, sometimes there's default factors that 

go in. We've discussed at -- I can't remember how 

many meetings we've had this on and on discussion, 

but I don't think we have a document anywhere that 

summarizes how we came to all these conclusions.

And I pointed to one, a document that Jim Neton 

wrote up on the residual contamination thing. He 

said it was a lengthy process to go through and find, 

actually, how SC&A reviewed, the Board went over it, 

you know, all these steps. But it summarized it all 

there in one document and said, this is how we got 

here, and it pointed out, also, that it was thoroughly 

reviewed in this program and there's a lot of good, 

sound basis. And there's what we can point to for 

using these assumptions for years.

So, some of those global ones, I think it would be 

good to have that kind of documentation to support 

the program in the long term. But I would start with 

the site -- my feeling is start with the inside of the 

site and do targeted reviews of an issue, like neutron 

dose assignment, or something like that, or internal 

dose assignment, something like that.

That's sort of what I was envisioning. I know there's 

questions about, well, don't you need to pick workers 

that were in the exact same circumstances? I think 

if you're just looking for evaluating the guidelines and 
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how well they do it, and the system and how well it 

works, I don't think you need to have people in the 

exact same places and the exact same 

circumstances.

And you might be able to even go back and -- I 

haven't thought about this a lot -- but you might be 

able to go back to the old pieces that we have already 

out of our matrix and say, okay, here's five cases 

from Savannah River where the neutron question 

came up and work location, and let's look back at 

those, revisit those, and see why we have these 

inconsistencies, and maybe look at the DR guidance 

and see if it can be -- or whatever might improve 

that. And maybe it's just it wasn't clear to SC&A, and 

where there's a whole SRS team at ORAU that's 

talking about these cases all the time, the guidance 

was clear then, but it might not have been as clear 

to external parties. And that might be a simple sort 

of fix to put a little more verbiage in there to clarify 

it.

Dr. Mauro: Mark?

Mr. Griffon: Yes?

Dr. Mauro: Along those lines -- this is John again --

one of the interesting one with the guidance 

programmatically now, OTIB-70, which deals with 

the residual period, and Jim wrote up a very thorough 

guideline. But, in the guidelines, there were a 

number -- maybe five or so -- different strategies 

that can be used, and that's a judgment call. Which 

strategy is best? In other words, you have a number 

of different ways you could come at the problem, and 

it's left up to the dose reconstructor to make a 

determination that I think this approach is the way 

we're going to go. And that's it, and then, they go 

from there.
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So, therein lies, right, within the guideline itself, it 

provides a lot of different ways you can go. And 

sometimes, I notice that the DR, the dose 

reconstruction itself uses multiple approaches. A 

good example is chest counts versus bioassay. When 

you have both, what are you going to believe? And 

they do both, and then, go to the validity one. So, 

this is the good news part of it, I guess.

I'm noticing more and more that, when you do have 

a situation where the guidelines present you with 

options, and then, the judgment has to be made on 

which is the best way to go to be claimant-favorable, 

in some cases NIOSH often will run all of them, and 

then, go with the worst. But, in other cases, I've 

seen, and especially this goes to the residual period 

and AWE facilities, a particular strategy, which are 

among the options granted in OTIB-70, and there 

would be one that will be picked.

And quite frankly, in my experience, because I look 

at a lot of these, I always felt that they picked, most 

of the time they picked the right one. In other words, 

yes, that's the one you have to use.

So, even within what I would say the programmatic 

process there's a lot of guidance given on how you 

come at the problem. Like the surrogate data 

criteria, I mean, that's a perfect example. It's, okay, 

listen, if you guys are going to go use surrogate data, 

you've got to pass these five tests.

I'm almost flipping and saying, there's an awful lot of 

guidance out there that tells you -- there are tests 

that you want to go through. There's the internal 

dosimetry, the coworker model OTIBs, all of which 

really go toward consistency, to make sure that you 

go through a process to come out at the other end; 

that you pick the approach that meets all the criteria 

as laid out in some OTIB or as the surrogate data 
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criteria.

But there are some places where the guidance lays 

out a lot of options, and then, it's up to the dose 

reconstructor to pick the one. And that's why I 

mentioned like, when we go through issues resolution 

with the Subcommittee, absolutely embedded in 

that, there's always where there are findings, it's 

right there. I think Scott pointed that out, yes, it's 

always there, and it's in the record.

All I was suggesting is that's one place where we 

could plant it and actually a spot to collect it, and 

there's no work here. By the way, while you're 

discussing the finding and how you resolve it, you 

could say, oh, by the way, this is a place there was a 

judgment made. And just mark it, yes, a judgment 

was made, and you collect them and somehow keep 

track of them.

And then, you create a body of records, not going 

backwards now. I'm sorry, I didn't want to leave 

anyone with that thought. It's just want to start to 

collect information that's already there, but put it 

someplace so that you could go out and say, okay, 

we reviewed, like in the last year, we reviewed 30 

cases, and part of the documentation, as it should be 

right there, is that, yes, in those 30 cases that were 

reviewed issues came up regarding consistency on 

these, and these were the issues.

So, you start to build a record of where these 

judgments have been made, almost exactly what 

Mark did with Linde and Savannah River, where -- it 

was an enormous effort. But I'm saying that this 

almost becomes part of a process where, without 

adding any work, just at the end, you identify them. 

And you could actually somehow sort on them or 

track them, and retrieve them and say, okay, what 

did we learn over the last year in that 1 percent that 
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we looked at --

Mr. Hinnefeld: John?

Dr. Mauro: -- that indicates, you know, where there 

might be some problems.

Mr. Hinnefeld: John, this is Stu.

Before we get too far into this, I want to talk a little 

bit about what you said about OTIB-70. OTIB-70 

gives several options, and those options depend upon 

what data is available for that for a site.

Dr. Mauro: Yes. Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: So, OTIB-70 covers many sites. And 

the kinds of information you have that are 

informative about residual contamination period are 

different at different sites.

Dr. Mauro: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And so, it's selected for a site based 

on what data it has. The dose reconstructor doesn't 

make that selection.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: That's not a personal judgment.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. Thank you.

Mr. Hinnefeld: That is made because of the data 

there.

Dr. Mauro: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Now I'm not arguing against what 

you're saying to do.

Dr. Mauro: I think we would agree.
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Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, I'm not arguing on what you're 

saying to do, but I'm just saying let's make sure we 

understand what -- when you're talking about 

professional judgment, you're talking about things 

like this guy -- you know, at Savannah River, 

everybody got handed a badge that also measured 

neutrons, but this guy didn't have any neutron 

exposure because -- you know, that's professional 

judgment.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Okay. That's the kind of thing we're 

talking about, not OTIB-70.

Mr. Griffon: And for these personal judgments, 

there's definitely a finite list, I think, anyway.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: And I don't disagree with what you're 

saying, John; maybe more explicitly documenting 

going forward.

Dr. Mauro: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: But all I'm saying is that I searched all 

the matrices, and even ORAU's internal database, 

and I even keyword searched on "judgment," and I 

found tons of these, you know. I'm saying we've 

already done this. We've found -- you know, we 

know some of these at least. Maybe going forward 

we'll find some different ones, or whatever. But I'm 

saying you found some. Why not look at least at 

those, at some of those?

Dr. Mauro: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: And maybe you start incrementally, you 

know. I think the turtle approach, you know --
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Mr. Hinnefeld: Dose reconstruction review process -

-

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- that's what you're looking at.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: You've got a large body of information 

about the review process --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- with just the claims that have been 

done.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: So, that's what I think.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. I mean, don't throw out the --

Mr. Hinnefeld: Someone could do that now.

Mr. Griffon: I'm saying, don't disregard that 

information. A lot of it is there.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: And one, off the hand, all of us know is 

this work location thing, job location versus, you 

know -- that comes up constantly, right?

Member Beach: The titles.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right. So, why not look at that?

And then, another one I think lends itself to, you 

know, as you go forward --

Chair Kotelchuck: You mean going forward?
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Mr. Griffon: No, I'm saying you could even look, you 

could probably just, I mean, I think, Kathy and Rose, 

you guys could look through your past matrices and 

find these and flag them pretty easily. I mean, I did 

it on keyword searches, but you also could sort on 

the type of findings and stuff, and find them. I mean, 

I think they jump out at us. You don't have to go 

back to transcripts, is what I'm saying.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Right, right, right. Okay.

Mr. Griffon: Although I searched some DRs, so many 

transcripts, just on like "judgment," just to see how, 

and it comes up constantly. You know, it's constantly 

in there. So, it's been discussed a lot. I don't think 

we have to start collecting data going forward to find 

some of these area.

So, I'm not objecting to what John's saying. Maybe 

more explicitly, flag it and put a separate column 

saying, you know, judgment. It might be easier.

Ms. Gogliotti: That I could absolutely do, yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: It's super easy.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: And we could do the blinds also.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: Including the blinds.

Mr. Griffon: And including the blinds, right. Right.

Ms. Gogliotti: I like that.
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Mr. Griffon: But I'm saying, for some of these, you've 

got information that says we've at least flagged these 

as professional judgments; we've had these as 

findings which were resolved, I think 95, 99 percent 

of them.

Chair Kotelchuck: They're all resolved.

Mr. Griffon: Right, they're all resolved, but, 

nonetheless, is there something that we can look at 

to improve the system, is what we're saying on 

those, like so that the guidance is clearer.

The only hiccup I got into, too, is you have the DR 

guidance, internal, like first event, or DR guidance, 

and I think I counted, it was more than a dozen 

variations of DR guidance since the TBD had been 

changed. I mean, the TBD is sort of the control 

document versus the DR guidance is not an official 

control document. But I don't know if I'd get hung 

up with that. I would say, try to improve the 

guidance, whether it's in the DR guidance or a TBD. 

What can we do to maybe clarify to a more outside 

party?

Because I think a lot of it stems from the fact that 

the Savannah River Group has been working on these 

cases for years and they know; they sort of have an 

ebb and flow of how they're doing them. And some 

of it may be specified in the DR guidance, but some 

they just know. You know, they've done so many of 

these cases. Maybe adding a few paragraphs would 

just -- that's it, you know.

Mr. Katz: Mark, can I get some clarification --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Katz: -- about what you are suggesting with 

respect to retrospectively looking at cases where 

there were judgments? If you pull those all up, 
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you're going to have some portion of them where the 

judgments were fine. I mean, they were judgments 

--

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Katz: -- and they were discussed, and you 

decided, actually, these judgments were all 

appropriate.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Katz: So, I think, then, if you're asking to do 

that, look at that retrospectively, you want to know 

about the cases where we decided the judgment 

wasn't fine, right? I mean, that's the only ones that 

are relevant, right? I mean, why do you want to 

collect a bunch of data on judgments that you 

decided were perfectly appropriate?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, I guess --

Mr. Katz: That's the question.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: This goes to something that I've 

talked about intermittently over my tenure here. It 

is that, since we're making a decision for the 

Government, we should have a clear and 

unambiguous record of the decision.

Mr. Griffon: Right. Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And so, if the instructions to dose 

reconstructors are ambiguous enough so that there's 

discussion about whether the judgment was correct, 

is there a way to make it, the instructions or the 

guidance on making a professional guidance 

somewhat better? I think at some point you can't get 

any better.
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Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: I mean, there still may be differences 

in judgments. So, I think that's the question you're 

asking. Is there a way to essentially squeeze in the 

latitude that a professional judgment --

Mr. Katz: Is needed.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- actually reaches where there's not 

guidance to kind of guide that?

Chair Kotelchuck: So, in the matrix, if people use 

two different judgments, and then, there was a 

discussion and, say, SC&A was convinced that the 

NIOSH approach was good, and we've made an 

agreement -- but, remember, that's 1 percent of the 

cases. Ninety-nine percent of the cases, that would 

never be debated. And either one, I mean both are 

professional groups and both had people making 

judgments that were different initially. So, even if 

we've gotten agreement, that's still something to be 

marked down as professional judgment.

Ms. Gogliotti: It's not that. The goal is 1 percent, 

but we're nowhere near that.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well --

Ms. Gogliotti: There's been 40,000 and we're 

reviewed 500 cases.

Mr. Calhoun: Almost fifty.

Ms. Gogliotti: Sixty thousand?

Chair Kotelchuck: No, no, the last -- I did the report, 

and we had looked at 30,000 cases and we had 332 

that we had gone for the -- now we may not have 

kept up with 1 percent. I'm a little worried about that 

for the next report.
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Ms. Gogliotti: Well, you said 60,000?

Mr. Hinnefeld: No. Well, we had 50,000 claims. 

We've not done 50,000 dose reconstructions.

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right.

Mr. Calhoun: Well, if you count doubles, maybe we 

have.

(Laughter.)

Mr. Hinnefeld: Oh, you're talking about reworks?

Mr. Calhoun: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Oh, reworks, we've got to be over.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes. You know, it's 50,000 claims. A 

lot of those get pulled for SEC. And so, they're not 

done.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Well, I'm going to find that 

out soon because I made a commitment to update 

the report to the Secretary in the next few months.

Mr. Griffon: The other thing to highlight maybe in 

your report, Dave, is the percentage of best-estimate 

cases that you've done, because I think you've done 

a high percentages of those.

Chair Kotelchuck: Absolutely. We definitely have 

many.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes. We have a hard time finding 

them. We have to go outside the best estimates 

sometimes to do the case.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, that's my point, yes. Yes.

Member Beach: And so, is the goal also to be able to 

track a judgment that was made and why they made 
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it? Is there a way or an avenue to do that?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, I mean, that was one of the 

things that ORAU was going to report on, right?

Mr. Calhoun: We're going to look at what drives the 

timeline, is what the first assignment is.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes. Right. I thought what drives the 

timeline, and I thought weren't we also, didn't we 

also ask ORAU to say what would it take to --

Mr. Griffon: Document, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- to essentially always document 

professional judgment?

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Isn't that what the --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, justification.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, I'm not sure it's that clear, but 

yes.

Let's talk. We'll talk about it.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right, right.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, I'll give you a "for instance" on 

that. Some of the spreadsheets that I saw, 

workbooks, there were some cases where you had 

those little comment triangles in the corner, and you 

click on it, and the person wrote on out that, you 

know, for this dose, we assumed, we assigned 

coworker because dah-dah dah-dah-dah. Or for this 

dose, we assigned dah-dah-dah. You know, very 

detailed, but --

(Laughter.)
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But you don't see that all -- you certainly don't see 

that all the time. So, I'm not sure, there might be a 

balance between that level of detail versus -- again, 

that's a judgment for cost/time, all that.

Chair Kotelchuck: And, Grady, since this particular 

Work Group does not have an inherent schedule for 

meetings -- we function when we think we need to 

function -- when you do look things over, you will 

make a report?

Mr. Calhoun: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And then, we'll send out to the 

Subcommittee Members --

Mr. Calhoun: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- and the people who are here?

Mr. Calhoun: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: We'll probably send it to Ted. Okay?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Right. Right.

Mr. Katz: To everybody. We'll get it to everybody.

Chair Kotelchuck: That's good.

And then, we'll decide from there at what point we 

think we need to have a meeting. So, I'm not going 

to set a deadline for when you're going to have that. 

You'll do it --

Mr. Calhoun: Thank you.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- as you can do it, right?

(Laughter.)

Mr. Calhoun: Right.
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Chair Kotelchuck: But don't worry, I'll remember 

that you said you were going to do it.

(Laughter.)

Besides which I'll go over a transcript in a couple of 

months. And then, if nothing else, it will remind me.

But there are two things to say. It's a little after 

10:00. We normally take a little break, and maybe 

this is a good time, and then, come back and talk 

about, go through some of Mark's -- and how would 

that be?

Mr. Katz: That sounds fine.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. It's five after 10:00, six 

after 10:00. Let's come back, then, at 10:15, 10:20?

Mr. Katz: How about 10:20 --

Chair Kotelchuck: 10:20.

Mr. Katz: -- just to make sure everyone's back?

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay, 10:20. Very good.

Mr. Katz: Folks on the phone, we'll rejoin at 10:20. 

I'm just putting the phone on mute.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter went off the 

record at 10:06 a.m. and went back on the record at 

10:20 a.m.)

Mr. Katz: We're back. We're back.

And let me just check and see, do I have, Paul or 

David, are you on the line?

(No response.)

Either Paul or David on the line?
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(No response.)

How about Scott?

Mr. Siebert: Yes, I was just about to tell you the line 

is still open.

Mr. Katz: Yes. No, I did this earlier, too.

Mr. Siebert: And I apologize. I don't think we 

mentioned this for the court reporter, but this is Scott 

Siebert from ORAU.

Mr. Katz: No, but I filled her in on this. I asked 

earlier just on the open line who was on and thought 

I had captured most, but I know some people joined 

since. And so far, I think we're pretty good.

I don't know. If there's anyone else on the line that's 

newly on the line that you want to identify, let us 

know.

(No response.)

But, otherwise, I think we're okay with attendance.

Chair Kotelchuck: Now for the court reporter, there 

are two Davids, but one's on the phone --

Mr. Katz: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- and one's here. So, it's easy to 

separate.

Mr. Katz: Yes, they even get confused between 

themselves.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Katz: Paul, are you back on?
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(No response.)

Okay. Paul may be busy.

And, David Richardson, are you back on?

(No response.)

Not yet.

Do you want to start or do you want to wait? It's up 

to you.

Chair Kotelchuck: I think we should start.

Mr. Katz: Okay. Good.

Member Beach: Can I ask a quick question 

beforehand?

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay, beforehand.

Member Beach: Or, you know, during. During.

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, okay.

Member Beach: It's for the report.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay.

Member Beach: So, we have Mark's report. We have 

a number of observations, a number of 

recommendations. Can we put together or can 

somebody, NIOSH, SC&A, put together a matrix? 

Because we're going to start having memos and 

reports and stuff. So, we can track it easier. Is that 

something we can do with these?

Ms. Gogliotti: Like on the BRS?

Member Beach: On the BRS would be great, and just 

for our use, a matrix.
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Mr. Calhoun: That would be good to put that in the 

BRS, I think.

Member Beach: Well, just an official matrix --

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, right.

Member Beach: -- of all the recommendations that 

we decide belong on the matrix of this meeting, and 

then, that with tracking.

Ms. Gogliotti: So, just everything that we discussed 

today would be in there?

Member Beach: Yes, and all the recommendations 

that are within the report.

Ms. Gogliotti: So, you do want all of his 

recommendations?

Member Beach: All of them.

Ms. Gogliotti: Okay. Thank you.

Member Beach: I don't know about observations. 

That's for the group to decide, but recommendations 

for sure.

Chair Kotelchuck: Uh-hum.

Mr. Katz: Yes, let's start with that, and whatever gets 

thrown on the table that may not even be in his 

report.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: And it seems like the observations are 

kind of a little bit different than our dose 

reconstruction observations. It's almost like what 

Mark saw --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, yes.
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Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, yes.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Calhoun: -- rather than an issue.

Mr. Griffon: Right. It's not like an observation and 

finding, right.

Mr. Calhoun: Right. Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Katz: Okay. So, Rose, you'll handle that? Thank 

you. Okay.

Member Beach: Thanks.

Ms. Gogliotti: BRS is my baby.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Very good. Okay.

Member Beach: Love the BRS. It's great.

Chair Kotelchuck: Where should we go to follow in 

the text as we talk?

Mr. Griffon: Well, I think probably the best place, I 

mean, if you want to talk just from the executive 

summary --

Member Beach: Page 11.

Mr. Griffon: -- page iii.

Member Beach: And I just went right to your slides 

because you have them all nicely laid out in your 

slides.

Mr. Griffon: Does everybody have those slides, 

though?
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Member Beach: I don't know. I've got them.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: I've got the actual report.

Chair Kotelchuck: I have the report, but I don't --

Mr. Griffon: The slides are somewhere in here.

Chair Kotelchuck: The slides, they're not at the end?

Member Beach: They were from his December 

meeting, I think.

Chair Kotelchuck: I don't know. I don't --

Member Beach: Yes, December 13th.

Chair Kotelchuck: I don't have the slides.

Mr. Katz: I did actually distribute them at one point, 

but it doesn't really matter.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. Yes, maybe Josie's right, if you look 

in the body of the report instead of the executive 

summary --

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. Good.

Mr. Griffon: Page 10 and 11 start the overall --

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. Very good. That's very 

helpful.

Mr. Griffon: -- observations and recommendations, 

right.

Member Ziemer: Ted, I'm back on again.

Mr. Katz: Oh, great. Welcome back, Paul.

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, wonderful. Wonderful.
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Mr. Griffon: You sound better. Are you on good 

medicine? No.

(Laughter.)

Member Ziemer: I'm getting plenty of that.

(Laughter.)

Mr. Griffon: Sorry you're having troubles with the 

back.

Member Beach: You're setting the standard pretty 

darn high here, Paul, I want you to know.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. Very good. Yes, we are 

very impressed that you --

Member Beach: If anybody goes to the hospital, they 

have to still be on Work Group meetings.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: That's terrific.

Ms. Gogliotti: That's the precedent.

Member Beach: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Summary of Mark Griffon’s Report

Mr. Griffon: So, just to give an overview, and maybe 

with the document in front of us, it will make it a little 

easier, too.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, when I did this review just for 

purposes of review, I looked at two sample sites, one 
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DOE and one AWE. It ended up being Savannah 

River and Linde Ceramics. Out of those, I tried to 

identify -- mainly, I was looking for professional 

judgments. And quickly, as I was doing it, I ended 

up adding this category of what I call programmatic 

judgments. So, I make a distinction in the report of 

sort of dose reconstructor professional judgments 

versus programmatic judgments which have been 

made by the program, essentially, and they're in 

guidance or procedures or TBDs and, as such, are 

reviewed in other places, I would say, so the 

Procedures Subcommittee, et cetera.

But the first on page 11 goes into the 

recommendations on doing some targeted reviews. I 

actually gave options, several different options, 

because I think if you look down the idea of blind or 

focused reviews, I have different layers. And 

obviously, the first two are ORAU; the middle two are 

NIOSH, and then, there's the Board.

Because I thought some of these, it is beneficial, and 

I'm not sure where it stands now, but for a time 

period there, NIOSH was doing a certain amount of 

blind reviews of your own, right, Grady --

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, we were.

Mr. Griffon: -- of ORAU cases?

Mr. Calhoun: We have pretty much ceased that.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, resources, I mean it impacts 

resources.

Mr. Calhoun: That's right.

Mr. Griffon: Of course, yes.

But those sort of dovetail along with that idea.
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And then, the Board, you know, these are really the 

vehicles of looking at the reviews. So, blind or No. 6 

is really where I was talking before the Board, 

focused reviews. And that would be, if I had a 

preference out of these, the focused reviews at any 

level might be a place to start, you know. And the 

focused reviews would hit on, I mean, some of the 

areas, and I thought I had these laid out. I should 

have the slides, too, Josie.

Member Beach: Do you want --

Mr. Griffon: I have a copy here.

Ms. Behling: Can I ask a question?

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Ms. Behling: Because you brought up an interesting 

point. Does ORAU do any internal blinds?

Mr. Calhoun: No, no.

Mr. Griffon: No?

Mr. Calhoun: No.

Ms. Behling: Okay.

Mr. Calhoun: No, they've just got layer upon layer of 

peer review.

Ms. Behling: Okay. I was just curious.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. Yes, and that was another idea, 

was to have a case assigned.

The other thing I didn't know about -- you know, 

there's some questions about how these reviews 

would be done for ORAU. For instance, if you assign 
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the case to two people and let them do the dose 

reconstructions, do you take the higher one of the 

two? I mean, you know, yes, there may be some --

yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: In terms of functionality --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- there are more problems with 

asking ORAU to do blind reviews because everything 

is -- the dose reconstruction preparation review 

process is automated.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And so, when a case gets assigned to 

a dose reconstructor, it's all done on the computer; 

it all goes to review.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And it cranks through a fairly 

complicated system to move to the next spot. And I 

don't think there's a way to assign the same case to 

two people.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, right. Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: You have to go outside the system. 

It would clearly not be blind to the dose 

reconstructors --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- because somebody is going to know 

they're doing a duplicate.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right, right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Given the way the work process is, 

there's just no real way to do that.
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Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes. Right. So, that may be one 

that just doesn't make sense.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: And you guys may not see it like we 

do, but, like for the 45-to-52, if you ever looked at 

the approval, signature approval on the DRs --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: -- there's two.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.

Mr. Calhoun: And the ones that aren't in that range, 

there's only one, but there's two on the --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: It's not like they're doing it 

independently --

Mr. Griffon: That's right.

Mr. Calhoun: -- but it gets two different looks.

Mr. Griffon: Getting a good -- yes.

Mr. Calhoun: You've got to put your name on it.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right, right, which is good, yes, 

yes.

So, again, the focused reviews of the Board, I mean, 

for the purposes of, since you're talking about Board 

work --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: And the personal judgments, I'm trying 

to find out where I have those laid out, but some of 

those include -- and I think we've been through these 
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before -- the judgments regarding worker location for 

purposes of internal dose estimates or external dose 

estimates; judgments regarding job title, and the 

associated potential for exposure. So, 

exposed/unexposed, be in the 50th, 90th, 95th 

percentile issues there. What if you're using 

coworker models?

Member Beach: Wasn't that in your observations?

Chair Kotelchuck: That's in 10.

Mr. Griffon: Is that on page 10?

Chair Kotelchuck: That's on page 10, judgments.

Member Beach: If you look at 10 in your 

observations --

Mr. Griffon: Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. Oh, yes. Okay. So, it's laid out 

there. I'm sorry. Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. And judgments in the calculation 

of missed external and internal dose. And I think 

Kathy earlier had talked about filling in a gap with 

coworker versus the nearby data. There's different 

options.

Member Beach: So, Mark --

Mr. Griffon: Yes?

Member Beach: -- did your recommendations come 

out of the observations as well?

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
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Member Beach: Okay. So, that's good information.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. So, this is sort of what I saw.

Member Beach: Okay.

Mr. Griffon: And then, my recommendation would be 

to do some sort of targeted audit, and I was giving 

different options on that --

Member Beach: Sure.

Mr. Griffon: -- maybe too many, but different options 

--

Member Beach: Very thorough.

Mr. Griffon: -- of how that could be looked -- well, I 

mean, I do like the NIOSH blind review option, but I 

also understand that they've sort of cut back. You 

know, there's resource issues there, too. But, 

anyway, like I said, out of all these, if I had to pick 

one that I think works now best, and it might be a 

way to incrementally look at this, I would say No. 6 

with this focused review of the Board, and then, 

looking at page 10, some of those. And I would say 

to Kathy and Rose, here's where I say the database. 

This database exists, and, also, with Scott, they've 

been continuing to track internally. They've done 

reviews, and they've got a database that's been in 

effect since when, Scott, 2012? Am I right about 

that?

Mr. Siebert: Well, we don't have a database for these 

results. We have a database of returns from NIOSH, 

and that's, yes --

Mr. Griffon: Yes. So, NIOSH's comments back to you 

on cases. Yes, not necessarily on these, but I think 

some of these might be in there or others. What I'm 

saying is, between those two databases, you might 
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want to look at those databases and scan them to see 

if there's other professional judgments that jump out.

Ms. Gogliotti: I don't think we have access to that.

Mr. Calhoun: Uh-uh, we don't.

Mr. Griffon: Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: But, also, let me ask you, there 

are many judgments in here. I don't think you can 

go back to the matrix and -- you'll find some, but I 

don't know. We were talking before about coming 

back to the matrix.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: These are a good --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- collection of them. On the other 

hand, they're not going to be able to identify --

Mr. Griffon: You don't think so on the matrix?

Ms. Gogliotti: I could easily go through my 

documentation, since I took over as dose 

reconstruction on the SC&A side, and identify 

findings where we've said the word "judgment" in the 

resolution.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: That would take me a few hours to go 

through.

Chair Kotelchuck: That would be great.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And then, we'll see which overlap 

with these judgments?
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Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes. I mean, I did sort of that. I 

didn't do it completely, but I did -- and you said since 

you took over, that's a good point.

Ms. Gogliotti: I can only control what I've done.

(Laughter.)

Mr. Griffon: Right. Because I was looking for some 

of the earlier matrices. I think the first 100 cases, 

I'm not sure where that is. I know at one point, Ted, 

you asked me for those files from way back --

Mr. Katz: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: -- the matrices, the original matrices.

Ms. Behling: I think I have those.

Mr. Griffon: You have them? Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Did we do matrices for those also?

Mr. Katz: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: Before we --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, yes.

Committee Discussion of Report

Mr. Katz: Can I ask, Mark and everyone, you guys 

are looking at this report and speaking, looking at the 

report --

Mr. Griffon: Sorry.

Mr. Katz: -- but the record here is going to be terrible 

because no one knows what really anyone is talking 

about if they're just reading the transcript because 

you guys are looking at your screens. So, please 

flesh out what you're speaking to --
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Mr. Griffon: Okay.

Mr. Katz: -- before you, then, discuss it.

Mr. Griffon: Sorry, sorry.

Mr. Katz: Otherwise, it's going to be terrible figuring 

out most of all what's actually being said.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Okay. Yes. Thank you. 

Okay.

Mr. Katz: I mean the staff where they resurrect the 

discussion.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: That's a good point. A good point, 

yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: On the Advisory Board you need 

documents or decisions.

(Laughter.)

Mr. Katz: That's right, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: I can retire in peace.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: So, what we're seeing is on page 

11 --

Member Beach: Of Mark's report.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- of Mark's report are the 

recommendations, and there are seven of them, I 

believe.

Member Beach: And more specifically, Mark's report 
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of November 5th, 2017.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. And then, after that, we 

are looking at what are the judgments that we're 

talking about, and those were on page 10 and finish 

on page 11, observations.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: And these are judgments, also 

seven or eight different bullet points.

Mr. Griffon: These are the professional judgments -

-

Chair Kotelchuck: Professional judgments starting 

with judgment --

Mr. Griffon: -- of the individual DR, right, right.

Chair Kotelchuck: So, you actually started to say 

those, and I interrupted and said, "Could you get a 

page?"

Mr. Griffon: Oh, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: So, we could look at it --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- which was a mistake now in 

retrospect.

(Laughter.)

So, we started with judgments regarding worker 

location for purposes of internal and external dose 

estimates, and they go down through your final one 

--

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- which was "Judgments 
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regarding calculating dose associated with 

incidents/events noted in the claimant interview or 

DOE records." So, that's page 10 to 11 in Mark's 

November --

Member Richardson: This is David Richardson.

Member Beach: Hi, David.

Chair Kotelchuck: Hi, David. Good, good.

Member Beach: And so, if we do agree that we're 

going to start with No. 6 of Recommendation No. 1, 

SC&A will have the observations from Observation 1 

to use in putting your report together, based on that 

starting point 6 on page 6, the Advisory Board 

focused reviews? Okay. Is there anything NIOSH 

can do in that same venue or would that be too much 

of a -- like flesh out, like a certain point maybe flesh 

out some of the professional judgments that were 

made?

Mr. Calhoun: What I'd almost rather do is respond 

to the matrix.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Sure. I mean, it's far better --

Mr. Calhoun: You know, look at that.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- to select the universe of things that 

we want to talk about, and then, we will be able to 

talk about them.

Mr. Calhoun: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: I think that will work better.

Member Beach: Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: I agree. And we'll find some 

judgments that are just not going to be there.
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Mr. Calhoun: Once we get them into the BRS, you 

know, I kind of use that as a crutch, too. It's just so 

easy to go, here's the issue; here's our response, one 

by one by one.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right, right.

Mr. Griffon: And so, just looking at the first bullet on 

page 10 of the observations, the judgments, I mean, 

you can see that --

Chair Kotelchuck: Looking at 1, and then, for the 

record, "Judgments regarding worker location for 

purposes of internal dose estimates and external 

dose estimates, photon, neutron, electron, and 

assumptions regarding sources of internal exposure 

and assumed energy distribution". That is the first 

bullet.

Mr. Griffon: Right. And my point there was that --

and I was going to read that out -- my point there 

was that in that one bullet there's probably, if you're 

going to do a targeted, focused review, there's 

several -- I mean, obviously, there's six or seven 

different issues there, right? You could do, for 

instance, just pull out neutron doses and say, okay, 

let's look at Savannah River and neutron doses where 

worker location was a question. And so, all I'm 

pointing out is it is not simply run one 

recommendation in that or one set of issues to look 

at in each bullet. You know what I mean?

Member Beach: And this will be done not just at one 

site. Will you do this at an overall --

Chair Kotelchuck: At the 1 percent, it would be --

Ms. Gogliotti: When I do my tracking, it's just 

whatever we --

Member Beach: Whatever you've done? Okay.
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Ms. Gogliotti: Yes.

Member Beach: Perfect. Perfect.

Ms. Gogliotti: It will be everything, but I can't --

Chair Kotelchuck: We have a good 1-percent sample.

Member Beach: Good, good. Okay. Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: By the way, you don't think we 

have 1 percent?

(Laughter.)

Ms. Gogliotti: I think we have --

Mr. Griffon: You're not going to let that one go, are 

you?

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, that was very important in 

our original report.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: Well, we took four years off, too, of 

reviewing cases.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. Okay. We'll talk about that 

after the meeting because it's not actually related to 

this subject.

Mr. Hinnefeld: How many cases have been 

reviewed? How many have been reviewed?

Ms. Gogliotti: Five hundred and thirty.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, 50,000 would be 500.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, that's 1 percent.

Mr. Hinnefeld: That's 1 percent.
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Chair Kotelchuck: Okay.

Mr. Hinnefeld: All right?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. That was for the first 

Secretary's report. Actually, the first Secretary's 

report was made in 2010 or '09, and the goal was 2 

percent. And when I did the last report -- I wrote the 

last report for us, and we approved it -- it was we did 

1 percent. We agreed, the Board agreed that 1 

percent was good and adequate because we're doing 

more complex cases.

But, anyway, this was a side issue. Let's go back. 

I'm sorry, Mark.

Mr. Griffon: That's okay. That's okay, yes. No, it's 

fine.

So, I mean, what I'm trying to get a handle on is I 

think in SC&A, in the matrix of cases you've 

reviewed, I think you'll be able to pull out even cases 

--

(Off-the-record comments from the phone line.)

I would just say like, for instance, in the second 

bullet, we're talking about the --

(Off-the-record comments from the phone line.)

So, like in the second bullet, my point being, when 

you go through these matrix of cases, I think you can 

pull out just more than professional judgment. Like 

if you see 50th, 95th percentile, we'll know what 

issue it is.

Member Beach: Right.

Mr. Griffon: It's a coworker model issue, blah, blah, 

blah.
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Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: So, right, right. So, if you can, I think 

it would be worthwhile if you can outline those, like 

not just it's a professional judgment, but it's a 

neutron/worker location issue. It's a -- you know, 

some of them might be a little harder like the 

assumed energy distribution, but usually that is 

dependent on where they assign the worker, you 

know, where they put the worker, because different 

assumptions are made if you're working in different 

areas. Anyway, you got the idea, yes. Yes.

Now, for actual case selection, I mean, I don't know; 

that's something that the Subcommittee will have to 

think about. If you're going to do a focused review, 

do you want to just do it from whatever cases you 

previously reviewed? Does that make sense? I 

haven't really grappled with that idea.

Chair Kotelchuck: I think we do what we can do for 

the 1-percent sample, which was a good sample, 

right? It's a pretty representative sample of 40 to 52 

percent, yes.

Mr. Griffon: Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Best estimate cases. But the 

best estimate is important because these are where 

the judgments --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- come in most acutely.

And I believe that, once we get that report, as Grady 

said, once we get that report, we'll be able to see 

whether there is reason to go beyond it and to try to 

go back to some selection of files. But we'll see.

Mr. Griffon: Okay. Yes, yes.
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Chair Kotelchuck: We'll see, but I'm certain that we 

will not be able to -- we will not collect in that sample 

all of the many judgments that you're talking about 

here. I'm confident. There will be a lot of things that 

we may have discussed that didn't get into the 

matrix.

Ms. Gogliotti: And if the word "judgment" isn't there, 

it might not get --

Mr. Griffon: It might not jump out, right. Right. Yes.

Ms. Behling: But we can also scan for types of 

findings.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Behling: The other thing I will make mention of, 

I do have the data for the first 100 cases. However, 

let's remember, those were a lot of the efficiency 

cases, the overestimation.

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right. That's right.

Ms. Behling: So, I'm not sure how much we'll benefit 

from those.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Ms. Gogliotti: And that was very early in the program 

and things have changed quite a bit since then.

Ms. Behling: Right. Yes.

Mr. Katz: Well, I think you have decide whether you 

want this to just focus on best estimate or not.

Ms. Behling: Yes.

Mr. Katz: Because if you don't, then those are 
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perfectly relevant.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Katz: So, that's a decision you have to make.

Ms. Behling: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: I think the answer is to go over all 

of them, but to keep separate in two piles the first 

hundred and the other 232.

Mr. Katz: Well, no, that's not the distinction. The 

distinction is whether you're going for best estimates 

versus efficiency cases or not, not when they were 

done.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Katz: Because that's the real difference.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Right. And the first, I have 

it in my report. I may even have it in my computer. 

The profile of cases was just so different, and the first 

I think was less -- well below 5 percent. And then, 

the second set, the latter 232 that I reported in the 

last report, we had 8 percent.

Mr. Griffon: Eight percent that were efficiency cases.

Chair Kotelchuck: And then, an average -- yes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: So, it would average 6 or 6.5 or 

something.

Ms. Gogliotti: Well, and I think the first five sets, I 

don't know that the documentation even exists to 

that, unless Kathy knows more than I do.

Ms. Behling: I do. I have quite a bit of 
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documentation. I just don't know if that's something 

--

Member Beach: The question is whether we're doing 

best estimates or efficiency and --

Ms. Behling: Correct.

Mr. Katz: Or both.

Member Beach: Or both.

Mr. Katz: Yes, that's the question.

Member Beach: And I'm sure what is --

Chair Kotelchuck: I think we can straightforwardly 

do that, and that is, for the first set and the later set, 

that we separate -- we do those, and then, we 

separate them in cells into what are the bestestimate ones and what are the non-best-estimate 

ones.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, you can sort them out. Yes, you 

can sort them out.

Mr. Katz: So, you're saying do them all? Okay. That 

was my question.

Chair Kotelchuck: Do them all and keep them in 

separate trenches. Yes. Right.

Mr. Katz: Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: We'll learn a lot. We'll learn a lot 

from those.

Mr. Katz: Well, here's my second question, because 

maybe this is clear to Rose and Kathy, but it's not 

clear to me for this assignment. So, they're basically 

flagging cases that have this, where there's a 

professional judgment. So, you're going to get back 
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from them just these piles, basically, of cases, but 

what is the analysis you're asking for from them?

Mr. Griffon: Not piles of cases. You're filing --

Mr. Katz: Well, you're having cases organized by 

whether they used --

Mr. Griffon: What I would say is you're finding out 

how many, for instance, how many neutron worker 

location cases there were.

Mr. Katz: Right.

Mr. Griffon: And if there were a dozen of them --

Mr. Katz: But you just want to know the number 

there were, not --

Mr. Griffon: I think the number, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: The number out of the number of 

cases.

Ms. Gogliotti: We'll put together a summary and also 

have the data to support the summary.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Right.

Mr. Katz: No, I'm just trying to understand what you 

would do with that itself.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, ultimately, I would say you need 

to do the targeted review, right? But, if there's only 

--

Chair Kotelchuck: What it will tell us --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. What it will tell us is, first, 
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which ones come up and that we've done. It will also 

tell us which ones of Mark's we can't pick up, we don't 

pick up. That may be because we don't pick it up or 

because it isn't a problem.

Mr. Griffon: Right. And it might inform on 

prioritizing, too.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: If you're getting a lot of certain types --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: -- I would do those first, especially 

where resources --

Chair Kotelchuck: Each thing -- we'll ask Grady; we'll 

ask SC&A -- will allow us to think sensibly about how 

to go forward, if we need to go forward further, and 

what we should go -- and set priorities.

Ms. Gogliotti: So, this is very exploratory?

Chair Kotelchuck: It's exploratory.

Mr. Katz: Okay. So, you just want to know the 

number of cases that you could look at, if you want 

to, as the next step? Because like knowing --

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right.

Mr. Katz: Okay.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Katz: That's what I'm trying to understand, what 

the assignment is for.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, the hard part, what I was 

grappling with, too, is, if you wanted to select new 

cases for professional judgment in these areas, how 
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exactly would you select these cases without actually 

getting into the case so far that you're almost doing 

a review? You know --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Would it be easy to find them from 

NIOSH's, from ORAU's standpoint? Could we say, 

"Find the case where it involves this professional 

judgment."?

Chair Kotelchuck: And that --

Mr. Griffon: And I'm not sure about that.

Chair Kotelchuck: That would get into priority issues 

that Stu, who happens to be out of the room at this 

moment, that Stu would really weigh-in on, and 

Grady, in terms of --

Mr. Griffon: Right, right, right. Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- the workload.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Because we may look at things 

and decide that it's not a priority because it doesn't 

come up often enough or it's just too much to do.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. Yes. Because the other thing you'll 

get into, I think, I mean, if we say, well, let's drill 

down into some of the older cases for these and see 

why we've had these inconsistencies, I think you're 

going to deal with cases where you had Savannah 

River dose reconstruction guidance No. 1 versus No. 

16.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.
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Mr. Griffon: And you're going to say, oh, it's so 

different.

Mr. Calhoun: And oftentimes, what has happened is 

that we go through the individual dose reconstruction 

and we come up with, okay, a professional judgment 

was done here. Why was it done here? Well, it's not 

clear. Okay, we'll fix it.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: And so, what's happened is our 

procedures have evolved to try to minimize that.

Mr. Griffon: That's right. Clearly, yes, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: And Scott will come back and say, 

"Okay, we fixed that. We fixed this tool, so that it 

will only do this." Or "We fixed this document so it 

only does that."

Mr. Griffon: Yes. So, my point is that I don't think 

going back too far is going to be very useful because 

you're evolving --

Mr. Calhoun: Probably, if you want to look at that 

kind of stuff, I mean, I guess you could look at some 

of the stuff in the pay estimate. I mean, I would 

recommend that we just, as we're going through 

them, start flagging them rather than --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: -- trying to pick new ones.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Ms. Behling: I'm sorry. We are getting ready --

Member Richardson: So, for the recent records, how 

many best estimates are there to review?
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Chair Kotelchuck: We're working in a percent of the 

overalls from the beginning, including the first 

hundred. I think it's 6 to 7 percent. And we have 

50,000 cases, roughly?

Mr. Calhoun: Yes, yes, yes. We haven't quite hit 

60,000 claims, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Fifty thousand claims. Okay.

Mr. Calhoun: We've got over 61,000 dose 

reconstructions.

Member Richardson: Yes, but they're all in this past; 

they're all in the stack, but the recent ones?

Ms. Gogliotti: No.

Mr. Calhoun: Just the ones that you're looking at, 

that the Dose Reconstruction Subcommittee is 

looking at. And some of those are outside of it 

because we can't find as many as they want to look 

at.

Ms. Gogliotti: It's really quite a few.

Member Richardson: Yes, that's what I was asking: 

how big is that stack going to be?

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, you're talking about, yes, 

cases as opposed to review, yes.

Member Beach: Are we talking ourselves out of doing 

that first 100?

Chair Kotelchuck: No.

Member Beach: We're still going to do them? 

Because that's so far in the --

Chair Kotelchuck: That's hard. That's hard, and 

we've done it.
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Ms. Behling: It will tell us something anyway.

Chair Kotelchuck: It will tell us something, and we 

may decide -- I mean, where it takes us we don't 

know because we have to have the reports to have 

some hard evidence to base priorities.

Member Beach: Sure.

Mr. Katz: So, it sounds like it would be helpful, also, 

when you do that analysis, then to break it out by 

when the dose reconstructions were done, certain 

periods.

Ms. Behling: Yes.

Mr. Katz: Because if you go back to the very old 

ones, you're wasting your time really.

Ms. Behling: Right. And also, what kind of a dose 

reconstruction was it, underestimate, overestimate?

Chair Kotelchuck: So, let me ask you, then, let's take 

not the first -- the next 232. I think of them because 

in writing I thought of them as separate categories. 

Some of those that we did in the 232 were really old.

Mr. Katz: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: And they were done, by the way, 

before I was even on the Board.

Mr. Katz: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: So, does that mean that they 

should be keeping an eye on the date that the review 

was done?

Ms. Gogliotti: We definitely track that in our reports.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. But the question is, as you 

assemble your data, do you want to put that as a 
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column?

Ms. Gogliotti: I'll definitely have that as a column.

Ms. Behling: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay, fine. That's good.

Mr. Calhoun: And it's probably even more important 

to see when the DR was done.

Mr. Griffon: When the DR was done, right, right.

Mr. Calhoun: Because, then, we can compare that 

back to when --

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right. Yes, the case.

Mr. Calhoun: -- any changes were made. But both 

of them couldn't hurt, you know.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.

Mr. Calhoun: Because the review may have triggered 

us to make a change.

Mr. Griffon: A change, that's right.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. So, we're engaged in 

modest efforts to gather information from what we've 

already done, and therefore, limited additional tasks. 

But, then, they will allow us -- while you were out of 

the room, Stu -- I mean, they will allow us to make 

decisions about priorities, about things to do in the 

future or things to look at.

Member Beach: Kathy's been waiting.

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, I'm sorry.

Ms. Behling: Just one question because SC&A is in 

the process of doing a next set of blind reviews, and 

the comparisons are just getting started. Should we 
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be adding something to the comparison reports about 

areas of professional judgment? Is that something 

that --

Member Beach: I was going to ask that same 

question. I think so. Why not? Why not?

Ms. Gogliotti: All right, but we haven't started them 

yet. I mean, you haven't seen a memo.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Member Beach: Why not if you're already --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. No, I think that if we are 

looking at them --

Mr. Calhoun: I think that's probably the best way --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: -- because, then, we have specifics, 

and it's not that it's already planned, you know, and 

if it's not increasing resources at all --

Chair Kotelchuck: Exactly, exactly. Okay.

Mr. Griffon: I was actually going to build on what 

Grady said, which was -- and maybe this was what 

John was getting at before, which I didn't agree with 

when he first said it, but I'm coming back to it now, 

John, if you're still on there.

(Laughter.)

Yes, the idea of, in the cases you review going 

forward, not only the blind reviews, but I don't know 

if you have another set of cases, blind. Has another 

set of cases been planned or not?
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Mr. Katz: The blinds are ongoing.

Mr. Griffon: The blinds, but what about --

Mr. Katz: They're in the middle of the one-on-ones 

with Board Members on the last set.

Mr. Griffon: Okay. Oh, okay. Okay.

Mr. Katz: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: So, anyway, with those cases, maybe 

the emphasis on the review can change to look at 

these issues of judgment. And when I say that, not 

just flagging that a judgment was made, but getting 

into the specifics of the best guidance we had to 

make this judgment included this DR guidance. You 

know, you clip out the section of the DR guidance that 

addresses that. And therefore, we made this 

conclusion. And then, when you review it with 

NIOSH, if they made a different conclusion, then you 

can see why didn't we come to the same place, or 

whatever, you know.

Ms. Behling: Perhaps we could add a section to our 

dose reconstruction review procedure --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Ms. Behling: -- to add a section exactly on that topic, 

professional judgment decisions --

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Behling: -- and then, how they were --

Ms. Gogliotti: Are you talking about in the blinds or 

in the --

Ms. Behling: No, in the dose reconstruction.

Mr. Griffon: No, in any of the cases.
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Chair Kotelchuck: What that would be was a request 

for the Subcommittee, the DRR Subcommittee to 

begin to look at those moving forward.

Ms. Gogliotti: Correct.

Chair Kotelchuck: And I would say it happens that 

we've stopped the regular cases. You folks are doing 

the blinds now, and we're still taking care of what we 

had done in the past. We'll have the reports by the 

time our Subcommittee meets again I think.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Calhoun: I know what you're getting at, Rose, 

because you can't do it on the blinds. You can only 

document --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: -- SC&A's professional judgment.

Ms. Gogliotti: Uh-hum, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: You won't be able to do professional 

judgment unless it's ones that have already been 

completed. So, I think that's what you were thinking, 

isn't it?

Ms. Gogliotti: Yes. And some of my initial blinds are 

just getting completed.

Mr. Calhoun: Right. Because you don't know what 

we did.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, yes. Right.

Mr. Katz: They will know additions as they do the 

comparisons.

Ms. Behling: As we do the comparisons.
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Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right.

Mr. Katz: So, they still can address it with those.

Ms. Behling: Oh, absolutely, yes.

Mr. Griffon: You can talk about it and, then, address 

it later in the review process, right?

Ms. Behling: Right, in the comparison.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, in the comparison.

Member Beach: And then, for me, the question is the 

recommendation. Doing that, can we answer the 

question on determining if the consistency was there 

or not? Because the recommendation is the 

assessments should be performed in the areas 

identified where professional judgments were made 

by individuals, reconstruction staff, to determine 

consistency of judgment.

And then, he just gave us the how we could 

accomplish that. So, I don't want to lose focus of, 

are you able to make that determination? I know you 

can pull out there was a judgment made there, but 

can we answer that question? Is that possible or not?

Ms. Gogliotti: We can't necessarily answer the 

consistency because --

Member Beach: Okay.

Ms. Gogliotti: -- it's not comparing to NIOSH to 

NIOSH; it's comparing NIOSH to SC&A.

Member Beach: Uh-hum. So, that would come later 

maybe?

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right.
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Mr. Calhoun: One thing, just thinking off the top of 

my head, you could look back and see, well, was 

there some document there that helped to drive that 

professional decision?

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Member Beach: Yes, I want to just keep in focus why 

we're doing that work, so we can answer that 

question.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Calhoun: But, again, unless we find out that the 

reviewers believed that the professional decision that 

was made was wrong, how could we go back --

Member Beach: How would they know that it was 

wrong unless they knew why it was made?

Mr. Calhoun: Well, everybody's got an opinion. 

Everybody's got an opinion.

Member Beach: But you would have to know why it 

was made to determine if it was right or wrong.

Mr. Calhoun: Right. And that's very often either 

documented in the dose reconstruction report or 

we've gone through significant discussions about 

them in our fast reviews, case-specific reviews 

actually.

Mr. Griffon: And the other way I think you could get 

an inconsistency is in the batch of cases you have, 

you're going to now, going forward, be looking at, 

you know, if you decide to implement this, you would 

be looking at these issues for all the cases. And out 

of every batch, you always have a half a dozen 

Savannah River, a half a dozen Hanford. You know, 

they're the big sites. They come up, right?
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Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Griffon: So, then, you might have multiple cases 

that you can look at for a certain --

Member Beach: Or half a dozen neutron or half a 

dozen --

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.

Member Beach: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Calhoun: That's true.

Member Beach: So, it needs to be pinpointed a little 

--

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Member Beach: -- or defined.

Mr. Griffon: So if you're keeping track of that along 

the way, then you'll be able to make -- then you can 

do the drilldown later.

Chair Kotelchuck: Do I understand you're suggesting 

that after we look at the matrix or after we look at 

the comparison, we look at the blinds, we can go back 

to the 32 cases and look at their files or look at the 

decisions that were made?

Mr. Griffon: I'm not sure what the 32 is.

Chair Kotelchuck: They're the blinds.

Ms. Gogliotti: We're not going to --

Mr. Griffon: Oh, no. No, no, no. I meant the regular 

--

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay.
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Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, this was just talking about going 

forward.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. Good.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, maybe when some of this starts, 

I think you'll be able to clarify it, too, you know. But 

the vision I would have is that several of these 

judgments are going to come up in several of the 

cases you review in your first batch, and then you're 

going to say, well, we got four instances where we 

had a judgment on the energy distribution at 

Hanford. And then, even to go a step further, you 

might have six or seven cases that involve 

professional judgment on internal dose, and it might 

be Savannah River, but it might be other sites.

And you might be able to do the cross-comparison 

that we were talking about.

Ms. Behling: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: But that's -- start small, yes, you know, 

start with the --

Ms. Behling: In fact, because it is a small subset, I 

don't think it would be unreasonable to go back to 

the 32 blinds that we've done.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Behling: And there again, you do have a 

comparison of what NIOSH did and what SC&A's 

decision was.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Ms. Behling: And so, it's not a problem to go back to 
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the 32.

Mr. Griffon: Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, that's my thought, but we'll 

see.

Mr. Griffon: And they're all fairly recent, too, right? 

They're all fairly --

Ms. Gogliotti: No.

Mr. Griffon: No? Some of them are older?

Ms. Gogliotti: Some of them are pretty old.

Mr. Griffon: Okay.

Ms. Gogliotti: But I have the records of them.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Member Beach: And then, moving forward with this, 

if there are questions that arise -- and this is for you, 

Ted -- can memos be sent out or questions or 

technical calls? Or how would we address questions, 

if you guys have questions?

Mr. Katz: Well, just like we always do. We just send 

an email.

(Laughter.)

Member Beach: Send an email? Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: But answer -- after we get -- it's 

clear to me that after we get both reports, both sets 

of reports, that we'll need to have a conference call, 

have another meeting.

Member Beach: Yes. I just thought, in the interim, 

if there were questions about process or if something 

-- because something's going to crop up. I mean, 
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there's been a bunch of stuff pop up just in this 

discussion.

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, sure. Sure.

Member Beach: We should be able to --

Ms. Gogliotti: Okay. Well, if we're doing a working 

matrix and the BRS, I would suggest that I send out 

the working matrix to everyone here. You can 

comment on it, make changes to it, whatever you

would like. And then we can finalize that. And then, 

with that completed, then I'll move it into the BRS.

Member Beach: Sure.

Ms. Gogliotti: Does that sound reasonable?

Member Beach: That makes sense.

Chair Kotelchuck: Wonderful. Wonderful. Yes. Well, 

this is good.

Mr. Griffon: Can I be in on that distribution, Stu?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Okay. I didn't know.

Chair Kotelchuck: Surely. And by the way, I 

realized, before David came online, I had mentioned 

that two of us in the room were on the Dose 

Reconstruction Subcommittee, but David is also on 

the Subcommittee. So there are three of us. 

Because we're going to have to bring that back to the 

Subcommittee --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: -- which has only one or two more 

people.
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Member Beach: You certainly are going to have to 

do that.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: I'm going to ask for help. Okay.

Let me ask where --

Member Beach: Have we got done with one yet?

Mr. Griffon: You've got a plan.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. We have a plan. I think 

this is useful in moving us ahead and allowing us to 

think about priorities. And there's no point in setting 

a date for a meeting. To my mind, is there something 

else that we need to talk about today right here?

Member Beach: We need to go through all the 

recommendations, don't we?

Mr. Calhoun: There's a lot of them.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Okay.

Member Beach: There's Recommendation No. 2 on 

page 13.

Chair Kotelchuck: He was going into six, right? 

Okay. All right.

Member Beach: That's what I thought we were going 

to do.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, the question is whether --

Member Beach: This one is program.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.
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Chair Kotelchuck: In my mind, the question is there 

are three agencies which ORAU, NIOSH, and the 

Board, three groups that have the same set of 

questions are asked, the blind reviews and the 

focused reviews. We've taken -- we've looked at six, 

five and six, right? Is there -- I guess -- okay. I'm 

not sure what the first four --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, I think the ORAU option, I think Stu 

pointed out the problems with that, with doing that.

Mr. Hinnefeld: It would be very difficult for ORAU to 

do blinds.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, yes. And then the NIOSH 

reviews, I think this capacity right now is going to be 

problematic.

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right. That's right.

Mr. Griffon: So I think we targeted No. 6 because of 

that.

Chair Kotelchuck: And also, organizationally, these 

are going to be Board decisions. That is, they need

to be --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Changes need to be approved by 

the Board, go to the Board and be approved. And 

our function is to make recommendations to the 

Board, make decisions, and then go to the Board with 

them.

Mr. Griffon: Dave, I will point out --

Chair Kotelchuck: Sure.

Mr. Griffon: -- I'm on page 11 of the report again.

Chair Kotelchuck: Good.
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Mr. Griffon: Recommendation 1.7, I guess, the 

seventh item under Recommendation 1. That may 

be something that NIOSH wants to consider.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Katz: Can you read that?

Mr. Griffon: Yes. It says -- refine current peer review 

conducted by NIOSH to assure a greater percentage 

of best-estimate cases undergo a comprehensive 

review.

And I think, Grady or Stu, if I'm wrong on this, you 

can tell me, but the current procedure, I think they 

do a 5-percent random sample. Now this might be 

generated in NOCTS, too. So there might be some 

problems on how to do this --

Mr. Calhoun: This was our blinds.

Mr. Griffon: Yes. Oh, this was your blinds?

Mr. Hinnefeld: I thought this was where they got --

the reviewer had to put out the --

Mr. Griffon: I thought this was peer reviews. Yes, 

this is peer reviews, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Mr. Griffon: This is peer reviews, yes.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes. That's the automatic one that 

pops up.

Mr. Griffon: Right. And I was saying it might be 

worthwhile to bias that toward best-estimate cases, 

if possible. That's the only recommendation there. 

So, I don't know if that --

Mr. Hinnefeld: Okay. We can look into it.
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Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Member Beach: Well, with that same question in 

mind, the consistency, right?

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, I mean, those are the ones you 

really want to focus --

Member Beach: Sure.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- additional review on. And so rather 

than randomly select 5 percent --once you try to 

select ones between --

Mr. Griffon: Right. Since the professional 

judgments, since those judgments tend to affect 45 

to 52 percentile cases most, you know, the logic

would be that you're getting another set of eyes to 

look at that. Just like Grady said, at the ORAU level, 

you have two signoffs on that.

Chair Kotelchuck: I'm not quite understanding that, 

what we're -- because NIOSH is already doing 

additional work on the best estimates, right? You 

said you have two people --

Mr. Calhoun: ORAU does.

Mr. Hinnefeld: ORAU does.

Chair Kotelchuck: ORAU does?

Mr. Griffon: ORAU does. That's what I'm saying, this 

would add another set of eyes.

Mr. Calhoun: And then, the one thing that you don't 

see that we're talking about is that this is an 

automated system. And so when our HPs go in and 

approve, actually put their signature on it and 

approve the dose reconstruction --

Mr. Griffon: When you say our HPs, it's NIOSH.
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Mr. Calhoun: NIOSH.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Calhoun: NIOSH. What happens is there's a 

program that runs behind the scenes, and then 5 

percent of those claims, all of a sudden, you get this 

screen that pops up, and it asks, I don't know, 10 or 

12 different questions.

Mr. Hinnefeld: There's a checklist of items that you 

have to verify that these things were checked on this 

dose reconstruction. You know, go through this --

Mr. Griffon: Another level of peer review, right?

Mr. Hinnefeld: So, it's more than -- other than 

having that checklist pop up, the DR reviewers can 

just read it and, from his memory, this sounds right 

to me, essentially. That's how they can do that with 

questioning.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay, okay.

Mr. Hinnefeld: But, in 5 percent of the cases, a 

checklist pops up.

Mr. Griffon: And then, they've got to do a little more, 

yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And you've got to say external dose 

was done, such and -- I forget exactly what they say. 

It's been a long time since I've seen it.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: It's been more than 10 years.

Mr. Calhoun: There's a bunch of them. They go 

down even to like, were the margins right, was the 

external right, was the internal right.
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Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes. And so what the suggestion is, 

rather than have a random 5 percent pop up, have 

that checklist pop up when they're best-estimate 

cases or in that --

Mr. Griffon: Or at least bias it towards best-estimate 

cases.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Bias it toward that. Mr. Griffon: 

Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And so the question we'll have to ask 

our TST people, the people who fix our computer 

applications --

Mr. Griffon: Is can they do that, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- is the PoC from the draft ER loaded 

in NOCTS, so that we are going to be able to make 

that selection? I don't when -- because the PoC does 

end up there, but I don't know when it gets loaded.

Mr. Calhoun: I think it gets loaded after you approve 

it and it goes to tech review.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Yes, so in which case it wouldn't be 

able to do that.

Mr. Griffon: All right.

Mr. Calhoun: But there's other things we can look at, 

too.

Mr. Hinnefeld: We might be able to do something 

else.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: Okay.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. That's very good.
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Mr. Griffon: Yes. Well, great. So, we got through 

one.

Member Beach: Well, and we dropped off page 11, 

and some of your bullets went over to page 11, that 

last one.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Member Beach: Is that something, judgments 

regarding calculating dose associated with 

incidents/events note in claimant interview or DOE 

record.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Member Beach: Are those available to you? It's on 

page 11 in the file where those --

Chair Kotelchuck: Matrices include discussions about 

whether or not there was an incident here. Many 

times there are incidents, they're just -- we talk 

about them.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: But they're not special notice.

Ms. Gogliotti: We don't track that.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Ms. Behling: Not if it's not a finding.

Ms. Gogliotti: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Ms. Gogliotti: If it was a finding because we thought 

it should have been mentioned or something, then -

-

Mr. Griffon: I think you probably stopped tracking as 
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many of those because, early on, we had that as a 

finding a lot.

Ms. Gogliotti: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: And then, NIOSH, as Grady said, yes, 

fixed it, put it in the DR report, and addressed it 

upfront in the DR report.

Mr. Calhoun: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: So that made that sort of go away.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: But the underlying thing is there's still a 

judgment. If you see incidents in the CATI, the dose 

reconstructor has to somehow --

Chair Kotelchuck: Address it.

Mr. Griffon: -- address it.

Chair Kotelchuck: You address it.

Mr. Griffon: And if it's like an internal exposure 

incident, a lot of times there's so little information 

about it, as Scott has mentioned before and in 

reports, that it's hard to, you know -- but if you have 

a full set of bioassay records going until the time they 

left the plant, you know, they can demonstrate that 

it was bounding oftentimes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Griffon: So that's how they'll address it, right? 

Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Griffon: But, again, they can look at --

Chair Kotelchuck: I don't think that will be picked up.
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Mr. Hinnefeld: That's going to be hard to find.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, it is going to be hard.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Other than, very typically, people will 

say that --

Mr. Griffon: Earlier on, they probably came out a lot, 

yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- well, since I worked at Fernald, at 

Fernald they always had these furnace blowouts.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And a lot of them were --

(Simultaneous speaking.)

Chair Kotelchuck: That's right, CATI reports.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And they say that in the CATI. You 

know, a siren would go off and we would evacuate. 

They had airborne. Well, those people are on a 

bioassay.

Mr. Griffon: Well, yes, right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: So, okay, yes, we know what your 

intakes were because you're on a bioassay program. 

So despite the fact that they were evacuated out 

because of furnace blowouts or mag flashes, they 

were monitored. So they are included in the 

monitoring records.

Mr. Calhoun: I'm pretty sure that's one of the 

questions that pops up on that screen, too, were 

incidents --

Mr. Griffon: Addressed.

Mr. Calhoun: -- addressed?
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Mr. Griffon: And they mean was it addressed in the 

report, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: So, the specific question, in time, you 

may say, well, this incident would not have affected 

the exposure beyond what -- or it would have been 

captured by monitoring or it wouldn't have been --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- affected the outcome because of 

the thing with favorable aspects.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: That might be written in there 

sometimes.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And those are going to be hard to 

find. Those are going to be hard to find.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. But we do address 

incidents where people don't have badges, a lot of 

them. And as a Subcommittee Member, it is 

troubling. I mean, when we're reviewing, being 

satisfied that we're doing the best we can, but 

whether that's really adequate, but that's --

(Laughter.)

(Simultaneous speaking.)

Mr. Griffon: This one may also overlap with sort of 

one of those global issues that I talked about, which 

is that --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yeah.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, early on in the program, many 

were here, Kathy, I know Hans, and we had some 
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good dialog about this issue. But it was this question 

of like a series of acutes versus one long chronic, and 

if you had a sample at the end of their work period, 

could it really bound these acutes? And I remember 

Jim Neton and some lively debates about this. But I 

think we all came to the conclusion that a lot of these 

-- and I shouldn't, but I think the cases, then, we 

were talking about uranium. So, it might be different 

for different types of exposures.

But that sort of became a global issue that we sort of 

put aside. We all accepted because NIOSH 

demonstrated that, in fact, these were bounded by 

the chronic. So it might fall under that, too.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: But I know that some people, some 

claimants were frustrated because they say, how 

could they -- they didn't have any records of that 

incident that I was involved in; they didn't even give 

us a urine sample afterwards, and blah, blah, blah, 

blah, you know. We know, but you're communicating 

with the outside as well.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Heard that at Rocky a lot.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- at Rocky a lot.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: These really high air samples, they 

never even pulled a bioassay.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: But, I mean, all these people were on 

routine bioassays.

Mr. Griffon: Right, right.
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Mr. Hinnefeld: And the dose reconstruction approach 

should have --

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- been bounding for their exposure.

Mr. Griffon: Should have still caught that dose, right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- even grab one -- if there was an 

incident.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: There are many things, and we'll 

have to figure out priorities.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Whether this should be high on 

the list to address or something that happens --

Mr. Griffon: Yes. No, I get it. I'm also thinking of 

what Stu said about that record long term for, you 

know --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: -- unambiguous sort of record of how 

things were approached.

Mr. Hinnefeld: I've said it periodically for a long time.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

(Simultaneous speaking.)

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- decision, there should be a clear, 

unambiguous record.

Mr. Griffon: Right.
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Chair Kotelchuck: And one of the things I think that, 

when I indicate things are troubling sometime, it's 

that, as a newer Board Member -- I mean only five 

years now or six, but that's new.

Mr. Griffon: A newbie, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. No, but there are things that 

have been decided that are within the OTIBs and 

that, you know, I -- and certainly Wanda would say, 

hey, we have talked about that for 15 years.

(Laughter.)

And therefore, I accept that those were discussed.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: I was not part of that discussion. 

So, seeing the after-effects, sometimes I'll look at it 

and I'll say, gee, I really wonder if they looked at 

that, you know, that way.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And also, as time goes on, of 

course, we lose older Members like Wanda, who was 

also an institutional memory, and others who have 

been onboard for a long time.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And, of course, you were yourself 

as Chairperson of the Subcommittee.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, I was the one that had that DR 

Subcommittee moving very slowly.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: Well, that was fine. No, no, that 

was fine.
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Mr. Griffon: I didn't have any efficiency measures.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. We're --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes. No, I'm teasing.

So, should I go through the other -- all the others fall 

under the programmatic thing.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, I can go through them. We 

don't have to --

Member Beach: It's interesting, because on your 

slides you have them listed under Professional, but, 

then, when I look back here, they are under 

Programmatic.

Mr. Griffon: Well, yes, okay. I sort of considered 

them all professional judgment, but some are 

personal, some are programmatic, you know. That's 

the --

Chair Kotelchuck: You know, there's a part of me 

that thinks that we've bitten off some big chunks here 

today, and whether we should --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, maybe we just want to start --

(Simultaneous speaking.)

Chair Kotelchuck: -- whether we should because 

we're not going to be able to --

Mr. Griffon: I'm not saying to act on any of them. 

I'm saying maybe just --

Member Beach: For the record.

Mr. Griffon: -- for me to discuss them --

Member Beach: For the record.
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Mr. Griffon: -- and clarify them, if people, you know 

-- or maybe some you can dismiss right away and 

say there's no need to do this, or whatever.

Chair Kotelchuck: No, no. The question is, though, 

I mean, if you read them, there should be an ability 

for people to respond. Otherwise, we've all read or 

we can read again.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: So I think there's no point in going 

over them, unless we have the time to talk about 

them. And I'm less worried about the time than 

keeping a grasp of everything.

(Simultaneous speaking.)

Mr. Griffon: No, I agree.

Mr. Hinnefeld: I would just say, in terms of 

programmatic assumptions -- and I haven't 

familiarized myself with --

Chair Kotelchuck: Yeah.

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- recently, so I'm not sure how this 

applies generally. But many of these programmatic 

assumptions are written into technical documents 

which are reviewed.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: And so I think that is a different 

question than an individual dose reconstructor having 

to exercise professional judgment because that is --

I realize I have to have them, but it's a nightmare 

because I have always said it is more important to be 

consistent than to be right.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yeah.
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Mr. Hinnefeld: I mean, you can argue about, well, 

this dose reconstruction, we're giving it more -- I 

hear this from staff all day, these dose reconstructors 

should not be this high.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: But I don't care as long as everybody 

gets the same answer.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Yes.

Dr. Mauro: Yes, Stu, this is John.

I want to second that. I could imagine us revisiting 

MDL over 2. That was a programmatic judgment. I 

mean, do we really want to go down that road?

(Laughter.)

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: This stuff has been hashed out. It's 

been reviewed. It's in technical documents that get 

reviewed. And so, there may be some cases of things 

that say, oh, well, this one, maybe it's not -- you 

know, it was just accepted and never really -- and it's 

just been put in there and not really thought about 

and discussed. There may be some of those, but I 

think in most part these have been out there and 

considered enough that I feel like, programmatically, 

were very carefully reviewed.

I can walk out proudly with that. Hey, we were 

programmatic. And I'm also proud that that review 

occurred in public. It's out there on our website, and 

all these meetings were public. So that's something 

to really be happy about.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: But I think the focus, though, is more 
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on not what has the program decided, but what do 

we have to rely on individual people to decide. To 

me, that's the real vulnerability.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, and I agree. Because I don't 

know, although I visited ORAU and I've talked to the 

staff, at least we had conversations once when I was 

new to the Board, but I worry about variability among 

staff, and I don't know really their -- I depend upon 

the other staff to know that they are professionally 

up-to-speed and responsible, but that does not mean 

that they have similar judgments, just as all of us 

who were professionally trained have different 

judgments at times.

So, sorry, I -- go ahead.

Mr. Griffon: I mean, I agree with what you said, Stu. 

Actually, we don't have to go through them. It's 

whatever your agenda is. But my point is that most 

of these recommendations don't -- we're not -- I'm 

not asking or I'm not recommending that review be 

done. Rather, I think one big point for me is, because 

I tried to do this on my own and I tried to track down 

one of these -- I forget which TIB it was, but it dealt 

with uncertainty and this whole, you know -- and 

we've discussed it for 15 years on the Board, on 

Subcommittees, and I think some of these issues, 

like Jim did with the residual, might warrant a good 

summary document, so that all of us can point to it, 

and it's a legacy for the program.

Because you said it's all on the record, it's all out 

there. But who's going to dig through transcripts to 

piece together how they came to this conclusion? 

And I think for some of these global issues it's 

warranted to have one summary document to explain 

how, you know --

Chair Kotelchuck: You've said that finding --
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Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: I'm going to interrupt you, I mean 

if I may.

But, to put it down, that takes work.

Mr. Griffon: I know. No, I know. I know.

Chair Kotelchuck: That takes a fair amount of work.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, and I'm not minimizing that.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Dr. Mauro: Because Jim said that took a lot of work 

to do, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Well, we have a consultant who might 

be able to do that.

(Laughter.)

Mr. Griffon: And there is one task on there that I am 

working on. So, yes. But, anyway, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. All right.

But do other Subcommittee Members --

Mr. Griffon: I mean, I'm not prioritizing now, but I'm 

just saying that's an important thing for some of 

these.

Chair Kotelchuck: Well --

Member Beach: I agree, yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: On the specific question about 

uncertainty, we say in a number of technical 

documents, for this measurement and this use, this 

uncertainty.
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Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: But there's no bible that says in these 

conditions.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Mr. Hinnefeld: Like on TIB-70, there's a bible that 

says, if you have this data, you use it.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Mr. Hinnefeld: But there's no bible out there that 

says in these conditions, for this type of data, use 

this distribution.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

(Simultaneous speaking.)

Mr. Hinnefeld: -- that might be true.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Member Beach: So does that fall under 

Recommendation 7, Mark, where it says, tt is

recommended that a tracking mechanism should be 

developed to the extent possible to consider findings, 

comments, from all reviews, peer reviews, NIOSH 

reviews, the Advisory Board, or --

Mr. Griffon: That's a little different.

Member Beach: That's a little different?

Mr. Griffon: That's a little different, yes.

Member Beach: Okay.

Mr. Griffon: And I'm not sure that --

Mr. Hinnefeld: I think you're talking about 

Recommendation 2.
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Mr. Griffon: Yes, 2 is what I was talking about, yes.

Member Beach: Is it 2?

Mr. Griffon: The global issues, yes. It's on page 13 

--

Member Beach: Okay. Yes.

Mr. Griffon: -- of the report.

Chair Kotelchuck: Page 13.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And if you would just read that?

Mr. Griffon: Yes. Recommendation 2 says a 

summary document should be developed for several 

of the program assumptions, including, but not 

limited to, what NIOSH has defined as global issues. 

A document similar to that produced by NIOSH 

regarding the treatment of residual contamination 

seems appropriate.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Griffon: And I reference the Jim Neton report, 

the Advisory Board review of residual period. Jim 

Neton, and that was November 15th, 2016.

Chair Kotelchuck: Okay. Right.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And I think the way I look at it is 

that our focus, as we start our personal judgments 

and what assessment we can make and consideration 

of change from procedures that we do, this is 

certainly an important task. It's different.

Mr. Griffon: Right.
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Chair Kotelchuck: It's a rather different kind of task.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: And that should come at some 

point to talk about.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes. And it may be not be a 

pressing -- I agree, you don't want to stop your case 

production for this, you know, right, right.

Chair Kotelchuck: But you are correct, I believe, in 

your report that, ultimately, the program 

recommendations, the programmatic 

recommendations are probably the more important 

one because they apply to all cases.

Mr. Griffon: Right. Or maybe a lot of cases anyway, 

yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right.

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: But I think we have to start out 

with what the personal judgment issues will pay off, 

if you will, that is, will result in changes quickly that 

should be addressed.

Mr. Griffon: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And there's a certain urgency to 

that.

Member Beach: So these recommendations will all 

be on the matrix? Would it be too difficult for NIOSH 

to go through and look at these recommendations 

and maybe put a note in that, no, this isn't possible, 

we can't do it? Or we can certainly look at this and 

maybe at a future -- is there a way to kind of go --

Mr. Hinnefeld: I think we can put out a response.
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Mr. Calhoun: Yes, I think that's the plan.

Mr. Hinnefeld: We'll provide a response. We'll 

provide a response.

Chair Kotelchuck: Good, good, good.

Member Beach: For each one of these? Okay.

Mr. Calhoun: Sure.

Chair Kotelchuck: That's great.

Mr. Calhoun: I think that's easier than, you know, a 

free form kind of --

Mr. Griffon: Yes, yes, yes.

Member Beach: And then figure out a path forward 

from there?

Mr. Griffon: Right, right, right.

Member Beach: There may be more work for Mark 

down the road.

Chair Kotelchuck: Are there other things that we 

should be discussing right now, either mundane or 

profound?

(Laughter.)

Mr. Katz: Those aren't mutually exclusive.

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: All right. But I think it sounds to 

me as if we're pretty well finished for this. And I 

certainly leave the meeting feeling much better than 

when I came in this morning.

(Laughter.)
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No, because, as I said right from the beginning, 

reading your report again and trying to really go over 

it more carefully, that I -- it just seemed 

overwhelming in terms of there's such a vast array of 

recommendations, almost all of which seem to have 

some merit in terms of, yes, it would be nice.

Mr. Griffon: Right.

Chair Kotelchuck: But, for lots of reasons, they may 

or may not be able to be dealt with.

Mr. Griffon: Right. Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: So, we've started.

Ms. Behling: Can I just go back to --

Chair Kotelchuck: Sure.

Ms. Behling: -- the blind discussion for one second?

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Ms. Behling: As I mentioned, we are in the process 

of starting blind comparisons. And it seemed as if 

you all are in agreement that there should be a 

section added to our blind comparison. Does that 

have to be approved by the full Board before we 

make --

Mr. Katz: I think it's a trivial amount of effort to pull 

out -- I mean, you already looked at the whole case 

--

(Simultaneous speaking.)

Mr. Katz: -- and addressed everything that needs to 

be addressed. This is not really new material.

Ms. Behling: It's highlighting.
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Mr. Katz: This is an organizational issue.

Ms. Behling: Yes. I got it.

Mr. Katz: So I don't think that's a problem 

highlighting it, no.

Ms. Behling: Okay.

Mr. Katz: I think you go ahead and do that.

Ms. Behling: Okay. Thank you.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes.

Mr. Katz: Thank you.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. But I appreciate your raising 

it because those are --

Mr. Katz: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: And it's always easy for any 

Working Group or Subcommittee to make sure that 

we go to the Board, that the Board decides, not the 

committee. We recommend.

Okay. Well, thank you, all, and we are finished.

Mr. Griffon: Tell Paul or is anyone on the line?

Chair Kotelchuck: Oh, yes.

Member Ziemer: Oh, yes, I'm back. I am on the 

line. I was off there for a second.

But I just wanted to say that my main interest in 

being aboard today was just to keep up-to-date on 

the conversation. I haven't been in a position the last 

few weeks to address the information in the reports 

themselves in any coherent way. And in fact, my 

doctor told me, don't get involved in making any

important decisions.
131

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

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

(Laughter.)

Chair Kotelchuck: And don't drive a car.

(Laughter.)

Member Ziemer: So, I'm just listening today, and 

I'm not offering any motions or recommendations.

(Laughter.)

But thank you for helping me stay up-to-date.

Chair Kotelchuck: Right. Very good. 

Mr. Griffon: Paul, feel better.

Chair Kotelchuck: And thank you for helping us both 

being in the hospital and participating. And, also, you 

are a very important part of the institutional memory 

of this Board. And so your -- as time goes on and 

your health permits, your contribution becomes more 

and more valuable.

Member Ziemer: Yes. Well, thank you.

And I would say that I'm quite in agreement with the 

plans going forward here that have been discussed 

today. So I'm good with that.

So thank you.

Chair Kotelchuck: Good.

Mr. Griffon: Feel better, Paul.

Chair Kotelchuck: Good.

Member Ziemer: Yes.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes. Thanks.

Okay.
132

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

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

Member Beach: Is David Richardson there?

Chair Kotelchuck: David Richardson?

Member Richardson: I'm here.

Chair Kotelchuck: There we go, yes. I figured you 

were on mute.

Member Richardson: My doctor recommended that I 

make no large decisions either.

(Laughter.)

Adjourn

Chair Kotelchuck: All right. And do you have 

anything that you want to say or is there anything? 

We're getting ready to close up now.

Member Richardson: Yes, no. I'll just second Paul's 

comments. I agree with the direction that we're 

going, and it's very useful, and it's been a long time 

coming. So it was a great discussion.

Chair Kotelchuck: Very good. Thank you.

Member Beach: Good luck weathering out the storm, 

too, Dave.

Chair Kotelchuck: Yes, indeed.

Member Richardson: Well, thanks.

(Whereupon, at 11:32 a.m., the meeting was 

adjourned.)