108th ACNW Meeting U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, March 24, 1999

                       UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
                     NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
                                  ***
               108TH ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON NUCLEAR WASTE
                                (ACNW)
     
                        Nuclear Regulatory Commission
                        Room 2B3
                        Two White Flint North
                        11545 Rockville Pike
                        Rockville, Maryland
     
                        Wednesday, March 24, 1999
     
         The above-entitled meeting, commenced, pursuant to notice at
     8:31 a.m.
     
     MEMBERS PRESENT:
         DR. JOHN B. GARRICK, Chairman, ACNW
         DR. GEORGE W. HORNBERGER, Vice Chairman, ACNW
         DR. CHARLES FAIRHURST, Member, ACNW
         DR. RAYMOND G. WYMER, Member, ACNW.                         P R O C E E D I N G S
                                                      [8:31 a.m.]
         DR. GARRICK:  Good morning.  I believe it's Wednesday, March
     24th, 1999.  Our meeting will now come to order.
         This is the second day of the 108th meeting of the Advisory
     Committee on Nuclear Waste.  My name is John Garrick, Chairman, ACNW. 
     Other members of the committee include George Hornberger, Ray Wymer and
     Charles Fairhurst.
         We will re-welcome and re-introduce our two consultants, Dr.
     Otto Raabe and Dr. Kim Kearfott -- and we also continue to welcome the
     member of our sister company and that is the Chairman of our sister
     company, Dr. Dana Powers.
         Today the committee will continue our discussions on low
     levels of ionizing radiation and allow the public to hear their views on
     the presentations we heard yesterday.  We have some other business to
     do.  We will meet with John Greeves, NRC's Director, Division of Waste
     Management, to discuss developments at Yucca Mountain, rules and
     guidance under development, resources and other sources of mutual
     interest.  We will review progress on the development of a clearance
     rule for materials and equipment having residual radioactive
     contamination, and we will review the status of the Decommissioning
     Standard Review Plan.
         Mr. Howard Larson is the Designated Federal Official for the
     initial portion of today's meeting and as usual this meeting is being
     conducted in accordance with the provisions of the Federal Advisory
     Committee Act.
         Aside from the announcements we made yesterday regarding
     people who wish to make remarks and comments, we have received no other
     written statements or requests from members of the public regarding
     today's session.
         Should anyone wish to address the committee, please make
     your wishes known to some member of the Staff and as usual we appeal to
     you because of the need for recording your valuable words to use a
     microphone, identify yourself, and speak with clarity and volume so that
     we can hear your message.
         So I think where we are today we are going to continue our
     discussion, continue to hear from selected numbers of people and
     hopefully advance this thing to a point where we have a basis for
     developing some sort of a letter or report for the Commission, and with
     that I will turn it back over to our lead member on this subject, Ray
     Wymer.
         DR. WYMER:  Thank you, John.  I think the appropriate way to
     start this out for the benefit of the people who may -- there may be a
     few -- who weren't here yesterday, to state what the purpose of this
     meeting is, what we hope to accomplish.
         The purpose of the meeting is to update the Advisory
     Committee on Nuclear Waste with respect to the research and some of the
     debate regarding the linear non-threshold hypothesis so that the
     Advisory Committee can advise the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on
     actions related to the LNT as applied to radiation risk of low level
     ionizing radiation.
         That is our purpose and in addition we wanted to maintain a
     high level of visibility of this very important topic in the Commission
     and in the public at large because we think it is a very important
     issue, one with profound financial implications as well as health
     implications.
         This morning we will continue with discussion from the
     audience with respect to their points of view and their interests and
     points they want to make in this area of LNT and following up on the
     procedure of yesterday, I want to turn it over to Michael Halus, who was
     facilitating yesterday's panel discussion and who will also facilitate
     the discussions this morning.  Mike?
         MR. HALUS:  To reidentify the purpose for this particular
     portion of the meeting, that is, the panel discussion, the purpose is to
     further explore the issues associated with LNT with a view towards
     searching for gaps in the research and identify further actions for
     consideration and recommendation to the Commission.
         We have invited people to make presentations on it.  I would
     ask people to constrain their remarks to a 20-minute time period so
     everyone who chooses to present will have time to do that -- so is there
     anyone in the audience who would like to make a presentation?  They are
     certainly welcome to do that.
         Who would like to go first?
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Theodore Rockwell.
         DR. GARRICK:  Ted, you may want to go up here -- we can see
     your wonderful physique better that way.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Thanks.  First of all, I want to say that Ted
     Quinn, who is the President of American Nuclear Society wanted very much
     to be here and he called me at midnight last night.  He was still trying
     to get a later flight out to Rochester, which I guess there aren't a lot
     of them, and he didn't make it, but he asked me to convey the concern of
     the American Nuclear Society on the importance of this issue and the
     tremendous burden that it puts on nuclear technology to have to concern
     itself with these minuscule levels and defend the fact when we are in a
     position of saying we don't know whether we are killing people at one or
     two MR per year.
         Incidentally, I got an e-mail last night from Zbignieu
     Jaworowski of the Polish Central Laboratory in Radiation and he told me
     the 48th UNSCEAR session will be held in Vienna from 12-16 April.  I am
     preparing myself for it 100 percent of my time and he is -- they are
     going to consider Cohen's work is specifically on the thing and other
     epidemiological subjects relating to LNT and the whole basis for the
     assumption of accumulating dose and so forth, and he has got a paper
     here that he wants us to look over that he wants to send out to the
     committee members ahead of time for their consideration on this whole
     business of collecting LNT doses and pointing out how absurd it is, and
     the way the thing is worded now and the way they are doing it is that
     they want the sum of all annual doses over all the years in which
     exposures continue over infinite time to account for exposures occurring
     to all future time from the average individual dose over all
     generations.
         He plays this thing out all the way back to homo erectus and
     homo habilis --
         [Laughter.]
         MR. ROCKWELL:  -- and points out that the billions and
     billions of manrem that have been built up over that situation and the
     .00000 contribution of anything we can do, and says for gosh sake,
     fellas, let's knock this off.
         I hope that any consideration you give you will recognize
     that you are not alone in this thing.  There are a lot of people -- the
     concern is building up that this is -- I mean there comes a time when
     you have to say that the thing has reached a ridiculous point.
         The other question -- this contract for this report, as I
     understand, was under Regulatory Research, is that right, John?
         DR. GARRICK:  The NCRP --
         MS. THOMAS:  Yes, the NCRP 1.6 was through Research.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Yes.  Is there anyone here from Research that
     is responsible for this report?  Has anyone been here to say whether --
         MS. THOMAS:  Shlomo?
         DR. YANIV:  I know that Vince Holahan --
         MS. THOMAS:  Yes, Vince Holahan is on military assignment at
     this point in time.  He was the PM for this project.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Well, do we know whether the people who paid
     for this report feel that it answers the concerns that they had that
     were expressed in the '96 meeting that the thing would consider all of
     the data and that the questions that have been raised in the past have
     been satisfactorily answered and so forth?
         Is anybody here to answer that question?
         DR. YANIV:  I can answer my personal --
         MS. THOMAS:  Shlomo?
         DR. GARRICK:  Use a microphone.
         DR. YANIV:  My name is Shlomo Yaniv and I am with the Office
     of Research.  Now the comments that I am going to make at this point are
     my personal ones, having read the draft report.  I have not prepared any
     remarks.
         I was impressed by the scientific quality of the report, the
     depths of analysis and I consider the report to be a report on the state
     of the art of science in all aspects of radiobiology from molecular to
     human epidemiology including animal research, et cetera.
         Obviously it cannot answer all the questions that we would
     like to have the answer for reasons that have to do with the nature of
     the science and the state of the science, but it is an extremely good
     picture of the state of the knowledge for the professional.
         It is not an easy read and my personal opinion, that the
     conclusions drawn in the draft report are correct.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Are you satisfied that the concerns that were
     raised three years ago by this committee and others that have come in
     where specific questions were raised that this is not valid because,
     this is not valid correctly handled -- are you satisfied that all those
     concerns that have been specifically raised on the record have been
     handled?
         DR. YANIV:  As I said, I have not prepared, I have not
     reviewed anything prior to our conversation and I am not familiar with
     the specifics that you right now ask or maybe don't remember at the
     moment so I cannot answer that in an affirmative nor negative.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  But before the report is finally approved for
     issuance, is anyone going to look over -- these concerns have been
     presented before to this committee, to the NCRP.  People have gotten up
     and testified.  Matter of fact, we have had concerns expressed to us
     that we have heard all this stuff before.
         You have.  The question is has it been responded to and if
     it is not going to be responded to now, do you plan to go over these
     things and assure yourself --
         DR. YANIV:  I cannot answer that question.  I am not the
     Project Manager.  I am a Staff member and as I said I am expressing at
     this point my personal opinion.  You are getting into policy which I
     cannot answer.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  John, I assume that that will be addressed in
     your letter?
         DR. GARRICK:  Well, we are going to review everything we
     have heard and it will be the basis for our letter, that's right.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Okay.  Well, let me turn this over to Jim
     Muckerheide or to Myron -- either one -- whichever of you guys want
     to -- what we want to do is to try to make clear the nature of the
     concerns that we have and specifically why -- I mean yesterday we only
     had minutes and what we said was these things, these comments that we
     have made have not been concerned and Arthur Upton got up and said sure
     they have, and then he went on to the next topic.
         We would like to get more specific as to why we feel that
     these have not been raised, why they are substantive, and why they
     should be approached.
         MR. HALUS:  For timekeeping purposes, we will go ahead and
     start the 20 minute time period with the new speaker.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  I wasn't so much anticipating making a
     presentation as pointing out some of the questions that we would like to
     pursue.  In responding to the presentation yesterday by Dr. Upton, it
     seemed to me that we have the classic example of having a number of
     slides that represent the linear response that you get when you hit
     cells with radiation, and they are cells in petri dishes that have no
     biological systems that are immune-response, et cetera, and so you bring
     out that data and say, see, it is a linear response.  It doesn't include
     cells that show non-linear responses.
         A lot of the slides start at a relatively high dose, even if
     it is only 1 rem per day, which is very low dose in high dose studies,
     but there is no data that goes below the 1 rem per day.  And so you end
     up with this presentation that says here is another straight line.
         In addition, the data that shows cell and chromosome
     effects, we know from the radiation workers in the U.K. that have been
     followed from the wind scale fire, the high dose group, they can see
     chromosome effects in that population.  There is no associated health
     effects.  That is true in general, high doses are going to have more
     chromosome aberrations, but, in general, a chromosome aberration is a
     dead end and it doesn't necessarily mean there are health effects.  In
     fact, in animals that show beneficial effects, you can see excess
     chromosome aberrations.
         So the fact that they presented a lot of data from the
     biology literature that shows these kinds of effects, and yet it still
     comes out with the same old straight line selected data continues to
     exist.
         He made a statement about double-strand breaks as being
     normal activity is one in 25 years or something like that, on one of the
     slides.  Unfortunately, we didn't get any handouts, so I am not sure
     that I remember this accurately, but I was thunderstruck at that number. 
     It is clearly not part of what biology represents, although radiation
     has a higher percentage of double-strand breaks than single-strand
     breaks compared to normal biological metabolism, it is certainly nothing
     like one per 25 years.  Double-strand breaks are frequent in normal
     metabolism and representing that they aren't is clearly contrary to the
     current knowledge of biology.
         We had a number of presentations that showed responses from
     neutrons, et cetera.  That is, of course, not really relevant to
     anything that we care about in low dose radiation response.
         There was a statement I thought that was very instructive
     about radium-226 as being the one thing we really know has a threshold,
     and, of course, we have all known since the late '60s, early '70s, that
     the threshold is about 1000r, and in this case we have radium-226 as a
     threshold.  I was interested in asking Dr. Pushkin about why the fact
     that we already have radium-226 limits that are 125,000 times lower than
     that threshold, why they are now still going through a rulemaking to
     further reduce radium-226 limits in drinking water and why we went
     through a whole exercise with radium-226 groundwater contamination in
     New Jersey, with fears that were going to be damaging people because
     they had more than 5 picocuries per liter.
         The State of Wisconsin, the high dose, where the high
     concentration area is in Wisconsin, Iowa, et cetera, are going through
     now the fact that they may spend additional millions of dollars to deal
     with the fact that they have radium in drinking water that is higher
     than the limits, and the new limits would add more millions of dollars,
     and, yet, in this presentation yesterday, we acknowledged that that is
     one of the very specific cases where the linear threshold doesn't apply,
     or the linear nonthreshold doesn't apply.
         You were going to say --
         DR. GARRICK:  No, no.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Oh, I'm sorry.  There was a presentation
     on leukemia in the atomic bomb survivor studies that typically ignores
     the low dose data point that was left off of one of the 1988 studies and
     has consistently in the literature been pointed out that the actual
     leukemia data in the lifespan studies is inconsistent with how it was
     presented in Shimizu '88.
         The fluoroscopy data that was presented ignored the
     fluoroscopy study of the Canadian women, except for the high dose group
     in one part of the study, but not the other part of the study.  It has
     been pointed out for years, since Ted Webster pointed it out on
     publication of the original article, that the data is highly indicative
     of hormetic response for breast cancer.  It is also highly indicative of
     a response for lung cancer.
         It was known at the time of BEIR V, and yet it is the -- in
     the actual summary of BEIR V, it is the second most significant study
     after the lifespan survivor study in the document in terms of a person
     rem year, and is relied on enormously for a straight line that is
     generated, has straight line over a low dose decrement of one-third for
     the breast cancer rate in that population.
         More reference was made to the Cardis study of the U.K.,
     U.S. and Canadian workers, a study that basically misrepresents its own
     data.  The study authors, after having published the study, and finally
     gotten some criticism for the fact that they had come out in saying this
     shows a linear response, several of the authors refused to make that
     statement, yet the NCRP has continued to make it, and even to
     characterize it as vindicating the linear model.  And in that study, it
     is clear that the only one cancer of the couple of dozen that is in
     there, in a 1 out of 20 test, has 6 cases of leukemia versus 2.3
     expected for greater than 40r dose group, and on the basis of that one
     data point, draws a straight line to zero, discounting all of the data
     in between.  We show no such indication, and, therefore, the Cardis
     study, in its own presentation, misrepresented its own data.
         And as Myron has always pointed out, as long as you take 1P
     values, then you essentially ignore all the data points below the line. 
     Out of the seven groups, you only have three that are above the line,
     and it happens to be that the one at the end is high, so in 15,000
     deaths, you have 6 versus 2.3 in a greater than 40 rem dose group, and
     now the whole study demonstrates and proves the linear model, and it
     gets referenced as though it does.  And that has been documented, it is
     documented in the Los Alamos Science magazine.  It has been documented
     in the literature.
         I mean it is not as though this is, you know, somebody's
     underground railroad, this material was presented to NCRP, and they are
     well aware of.  It has been presented not just for this report, but
     before that.  It came out in meetings that we had in '95.
         I want to pass over the Cohen data.  I did want to make one
     point though about the characterization of Cohen's data as though it
     were an anomaly and somehow the result of one man's extraordinary
     treatment of this data.
         If we go back to '87 when Cohen first took a look at
     Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and found that this highest-radon
     county in his neighborhood had very low lung cancer rates, and he
     compared seven other studies that indicated -- around the world that
     indicated similar kinds of results -- those kinds of studies were then
     published in a number of places, and so we've really known about this
     since before '87 really.
         Cohen kind of pulled this together in '87 in the Health
     Physics Journal.  He did two or three other interim studies, not all of
     which just literally led to the 1995 conclusion by the time he had all
     of the data that was so dramatic, but a number of studies are included
     and all consistently reflecting the same kind of relationship.
         But in addition to Cohen, you know, small studies and minor
     efforts, but looking at the whole U.S. population all shows the same
     relationship.  You know, there's a tendency to think well, Cohen went
     out and did all these measurements and there may be some self-selection. 
     Well, last year Bogen at Lawrence Livermore looked at just the EPA's
     data on the radon based on the environmental measurements, and those
     environmental measurements were correlated with residential radon
     concentrations.  But if you take the environmental measurements over the
     whole U.S. and correlate it with the American Cancer Society's
     statistics on lung cancer, and he looked at the women lung cancer
     deaths, 1950 to 1954 as another set, but because the women from 40 to 80
     years old had 11-percent smoking frequency and 4-percent smoking
     frequency in the women 60 to 80 years old, and when he looks at that he
     gets another curve just like Cohen's, totally independent in any way,
     shape, or form from Cohen's analysis and the way he got his data and the
     way he made the analysis.
         When Jaeger published and simply said hey, we're going to
     take the high-dose States and the low-dose States and see this enormous
     discrepancy, and it's very highly statistically significant.  Sandquist
     at Utah in '96 did a cut at the data just on the EPA regions and looked
     at radiation in terms of the EPA regions based on the EPA's own cut at
     the radon in the country, and they got the same results.  They found
     that the lung cancer rate at the highest-dose region was 14 percent of
     the EPA predictions, and the lung cancer rate at the lowest-dose region
     was 390 percent of the EPA prediction, and that if you take each region
     in between it's a consistent relationship.
         I mean, this is not an anomalous kind of situation.  And yet
     BEIR VI itself treats Cohen as a nut on the fringe and misrepresents his
     data in the curve and characterizes that in a paragraph to simply say
     well, some people would think this might represent that there isn't a
     significant effect, and they leave it at that.  And then they go about
     and they say we do a model that basically draws a straight line and
     that's the end of it.  And so this whole process continues.
         I commented yesterday that Norm Frigario, who I knew in the
     seventies, and one of the reasons I got exposed -- no pun intended, I
     guess -- to this whole subject was when we were paying attention in '72
     to Calvert Cliffs and Appendix I, Appendix D, all the initial efforts
     because of the new NEPA standards and writing environmental reports.  I
     was working for Bechtel at the time.
         AEC contracted with Argonne to do a low-dose study
     specifically in response to Calvert Cliffs and a court's decision that
     you didn't do a good enough job, and as a licensing initiative they made
     a contract and Argonne did a study just to say here we have a population
     that's exposed to low-dose radiation in the same terms and conditions
     that we're concerned about in terms of chronic exposure at low rates,
     and we have significant differences or significant enough differences,
     but we don't have nitty-gritty detail data, we only have fairly coarse
     numbers about radon -- or radiation.  So just not including the lung
     cancer dose, just looking at the radiation -- external radiation
     numbers -- this characterization that of course Colorado is lower and
     the Southeast of the U.S. is higher in terms of all cancers, and doing a
     number of socioeconomic confounding factors assessments, this first cut
     at the data was a negative.
         Well, that report was issued by Argonne to AEC in '73, and
     that project was killed by Regulatory Research or the equivalent of
     Regulatory Research in the AEC at the time.  And Norm Frigario
     eventually got that "published" by going to an IAEA conference on
     low-dose radiation, because he couldn't get it published otherwise, and
     it came out as a proceedings paper.  So it was a brief kind of form. 
     And that was referred to in BEIR III, and dismissed in two paragraphs. 
     It was brought up as an UNSCAER 1977 document that was suppressed at
     UNSCAER by the UNSCAER process that said well, we really don't know if
     this is serious.  But nobody went back and looked at the fundamental
     analysis that was done on the Argonne study, they all just said well, we
     got this one little paper in a proceedings and that's what we're going
     to build our decision on.  And before Norm died in '78, '79, he was
     completely convinced that the characterization and the inability to get
     the document published was simply a result of the commitment to LNT.
         At this meeting in '96, that meeting of the subcommittee in
     '96, Charlie Willis, who recently died here at the offices as I
     understand actually being here overnight made a statement --
         MR. HALUS:  You have five more minutes.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Made a statement that said I came to
     hormesis fairly late.  In 1958 I was at Oak Ridge -- or he didn't say
     Oak Ridge -- I was at the lab, and they had potassium without
     potassium-40, and they were doing cell studies.  And the cells looked
     good but they didn't function.  And it was the LNT -- and he made the
     additional statement -- it was the LNT that kept that work from being
     published.  Now we know that the potassium-40 was removed from potassium
     through the calutrons at Oak Ridge to do biology experiments through the
     fifties.  There was a 1962 dated bottle of the stuff that was used at
     Argonne in 1982.  And that material was recovered from animals, in fact
     it was contaminated because it had been recovered from animals because
     it was so valuable, and Argonne actually got another kilogram or
     something of it made up, about $75,000 sometime around '80 or '82, and
     yet you can't find any of the published results of that in the
     literature.
         And reports of people who were around the biology community
     at the time said oh, yes, we did mice experiments with that, and when
     the material was there, we had seen the detrimental effects on animals. 
     But that work couldn't get published.  In fact, you can't find it.  You
     do a search in the literature, you can't find anything about biology
     experiments.  And you look at this in the context of what's going on
     today and realize that for 40 years this process of basically denying
     that the data exists is part of our legacy.
         It became important in the fifties partly because it was the
     argument against allowing the military to have control of the bomb and
     some of the argument against above-ground tests in order to pursue the
     issue of public fear of fallout, and some of it was public fear enough
     to work against the post-Korean War period of the Atomic Energy
     Commission and the Army basically trying to say hey, with tactical
     nuclear weapons we can get into the battlefield, and there was some
     concern that this thing would get back under the umbrella of the
     military, especially after a lot of the successful experiences with
     putting the soldiers in the field with weapons.  So part of the campaign
     was to create public fear about fallout, part of the official government
     campaign of people I know who were involved in the time, Robley Evans
     said he was involved at the time.  One of the great mistakes we ever
     made.
         But now we're stuck with this, and it's, as I said
     yesterday, whether you think of it in terms of the biology of the LNT
     and its fraud, or the actual consideration of how much radioactivity
     you're putting into the environment and whether or not it has an effect,
     you can't justify spending the hundreds of billions of dollars we're
     justifying other than to say the public is being misled.
         And the one last statement I intend to make just on this
     point is I thought Greta Dicus' comments were quite salient about this
     significance about what we have to do about protection and why it ought
     to be cost-effective, but there's an element that keeps coming in in her
     remarks and subsequently that says well, it's the public demands it.
         I'm here to tell you as I kind of said yesterday that the
     public only demands it because they've been made afraid by the kind of
     promulgation of a misrepresentation of the nature of radiation health
     effects that this agency as well as EPA and DOE and others are directly
     accountable for because they promulgate this stuff, and it's the
     promulgation of an NCRP report in an unexamined way that leads us
     directly to the point that we're at.
         There is a lot more on the presentations of others that I
     would address.  I don't know how you are going to run the meeting
     itself.
         DR. WYMER:  Well, we'll give other people a chance next.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  I appreciate that.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Could I ask just one question?
         DR. WYMER:  Sure.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Jim -- I'll try to phrase this carefully. 
     In your view, if we had a completely neutral, unbiased group of
     scientists look at all the data, would they inevitably come to the
     conclusion that there is a threshold for an effect?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  It's inevitable.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  And do you have any idea as where that
     threshold might be in a regulatory sense?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Ten to 20 rem.
         DR. WYMER:  Thank you.
         DR. GARRICK:  Can we have some more questions?
         DR. WYMER:  Go ahead.
         DR. YANIV:  I would like to make just a brief comment to
     bring to the attention of the committee a fact that the speaker
     addressed NRPB, British standard of nuclear workers.  Just two weeks ago
     an expansion of this standard has been published with a much longer
     follow-up and greater statistical strength.
         Now I have not read this standard.  All I know about it is
     what I read in the latest issue of Nucleonics reported on this study.
         I want to make an additional personal comment.  The speaker
     indicated that the threshold might be within about 20 rads of, say,
     effective dose equivalent.  Now this is a level coming up -- about from
     natural background and medical procedure over lifetime, and let's just
     assume that he is perfectly correct and that there is no linearity above
     natural background, et cetera.
         Now just imagine the regulatory scheme under those
     circumstances.  First of all, we won't be able to discount natural
     background or medical irradiation because the cell doesn't care, it
     doesn't know what it comes from, manmade or non-manmade.
         Secondly -- so once we reach the threshold from whatever
     source it might be, every milli or microrem is not equal to another
     microrem and on top of that we do not avoid the linear scheme.  I don't
     think I have to continue to imagine the nightmare, the almost total
     impossibility to do anything.
         Basically, I would just say be careful what you wish for,
     you might get it.
         [Laughter.]
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Well, I find it --
         DR. YANIV:  I will underline this is my personal opinion. 
     It is not anyone else's position.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  It strikes me -- two things.  Number one,
     we have many toxic materials that we put in our vitamin pills that we
     are able to manage quite well.  The idea that we become into a nightmare
     because we give up a straight line doesn't seem to me valid.
         On the other hand, if you want to have a straight line, have
     a straight line, but the issue is not to cook the science to help you
     prove it and not to pretend that it is a scientifically based straight
     line.  Make it a policy-based straight line but don't bias the science
     in order to justify it.
         DR. YANIV:  The question is who is cooking the science.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  NCRP.
         DR. YANIV:  That is your opinion.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  No, that's a fact.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  That's a fact.
         MR. HALUS:  If we can, there are other people I think that
     want to have comments and presentations.
         We have noted a disagreement on that, but let's move the
     process forward, please.
         DR. POWERS:  I wonder if I could ask the speaker a question.
         I think you have made some sort of a case that Dr. Upton has
     acknowledged that maybe you didn't do a real good job in taking into
     account some fraction of the data, and has made a commitment to do
     something better.
         Do you think that is going to change the outcome of the
     report, which to my mind basically says there is a lot of data out
     there.  It doesn't yet have a consistent interpretation.  We need to do
     more research.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Do I think it will change it?  No.  The
     data has never changed the reports in the past.
         DR. POWERS:  No, no, I'm -- I will concede a certain
     disinterest on the part of the authors of this and say that having
     examined the studies very carefully, would it change the conclusion of
     the report?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Oh, yes.  Oh, yes.
         DR. POWERS:  You think that these studies that were
     neglected are so persuasive that even in the face of the stringent
     statistical justifications that you have to have that they would lead
     to -- there would be no need for any additional research, it would just
     become obvious?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  It would become obvious.
         You look at it in one sense and this isn't the only way to
     approach it, but in Japan in the early '80s up to about '85, '86, '87
     they did a series of experiments with mice that if we look at what we
     are doing today in molecular biology and by the time you get two
     experiments people are ready to do clinical trials -- well, they did a
     whole series of experiments and showed the stimulatory effects of
     radiation at 10 to 15 r that was enough to start clinical trials and the
     stimulatory effects of radiation in mice was dramatic.
         They in 1986-87 were treating cancer with stimulatory
     effects.  They got into the same bind that the medical establishment
     here has gotten into, because they couldn't get public funding for it
     because, as one of the Japanese research managers said, ICRP was against
     it and we couldn't get government money to support it so only a little
     private money was available, but they started a clinical trial on
     non-Hodgkins lymphoma anyway and found a dramatic improvement in the
     success rate of treating non-Hodgkins lymphoma patients, even though the
     only point at which they got to treat the patients was at the point
     where they were pretty much beyond hope in terms of normal procedures,
     and if you are going to try to stimulate the immune system ideally you
     would do it a little earlier but out of that population of patients they
     saved a number of patients over the five year survival rate and now in
     the last year or so the 10 year survival rate.
         To end up, here is Ted Quinn.  Welcome, Ted -- and so if you
     are in a mode where people are actually treating cancer successfully by
     stimulating immune function then you have got that kind of underlying
     science, but the issue is whether or not that science is acknowledged
     and recognized when it comes to the subject of radiation protection, so
     part of the disconnect here is that a lot of the biological sciences and
     a lot of the interest in some of this information is not considered in
     this process.
         A similar situation of not being able to get at the data
     exists in the Cobalt-60 contaminated buildings in Taiwan.
         DR. POWERS:  Well, I guess what I am saying is that you have
     a lot of point studies.  Other people have a lot of point studies. 
     There are viewgraph after viewgraph after viewgraph of point studies. 
     There still isn't a model that connects all these results that says ah,
     yes, I can explain why this guy got this and this other guy got this
     other thing.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  I don't agree.
         DR. POWERS:  In that kind of an environment, people will say
     gee, we need more research.  I mean it is not the most novel outcome of
     the study -- and I don't see how additional point models -- point
     studies change that conclusion.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  But you swing from the fact that I make
     one example and treat it as though it is just a point.  The fact is
     there is a whole spectrum of studies and part of why we ended up putting
     some of this documentation together, even though it kind of became just
     contributions from a number of people, is that there is a wealth of
     data.
         In fact, in 1980 the first book on hormesis had 1269
     references.  It has been going on since the turn-of-the-century.  I mean
     Calabrese referred yesterday to the debate at the early part of the
     century was whether or not it is a direct stimulation or whether it is a
     damage response.
         I mean this isn't new information.  There's literally a
     world of information that just is not considered.
         DR. POWERS:  But what I don't see is one of these plots that
     has dose across this thing -- the horizontal axis -- and something on
     the vertical axis with a curve coming in and then some sort of a
     threshold mark on it and I have got lots and lots of point studies.  I
     just don't have a model that puts everything together.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Now, wait a minute.  We are asking you to
     do that.  The only reason it doesn't exist --
         DR. POWERS:  You're not asking me, trust me.  I am the wrong
     person to make that plot.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  I will ask the ACRS or the NRC or however
     you want to look at it, but those of us who have commented on this since
     the '70s have said the only reason that doesn't exist is because we can
     spend $100 million to do a Hanford health study, $100 million on Hanford
     and we can't spend money doing an assessment of the real data.
         We can clean up Hanford for billions but we don't have that
     job.  That job is with the NCRP.
         DR. GARRICK:  Let me ask a question in connection with that.
         You make the point of the dangers of doing research and
     analysis from the point of view of a single cell and chromosome effects
     without biological interaction.  You were here yesterday when we heard
     about the DOE research program.
         What is your view about that program in relation to that
     issue, in the relation to tying the phenomena at the single cell and
     chromosome level with the biological systems?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  The world of doing that research is very
     important.  It needs to be done.
         The idea that somehow it is a de novo program I think is
     false.  There is a lot of data.  There's the data that hasn't been
     considered -- in fact, we don't even have computerized Russell's data,
     spending $100 million over however many years in the early '50s to the
     '90s, doing the mega-mouse studies at Oak Ridge.  That data hasn't been
     computerized and for about a half a million dollars it can be
     computerized and there is an enormous amount of data there that is worth
     recovering, and yet we always seem to treat this as though, hey, there's
     new work to do, and in fact there isn't even really a substantial
     pursuing of the issue that Russell's data was cooked in 1951 and that
     that was stated -- in fact, what was interesting yesterday, one of the
     points, was well, you know, we are concerned about the genetic effects
     not of genetic effects so much as genetic related diseases.
         Well, what is not really said there is that when it was
     identified that Russell's data in 1951 that talked about a doubling dose
     of 100 r was not including the cluster of mutations on exposed
     population it became clear that the actual genetic damage had a doubling
     dose of between 500 and 600 r, which is virtually a lethal dose, and so
     that the whole idea that there could have been genetic effects went out
     the window and so since that came up and those records were sealed in
     1995, by the way, and since that came up the whole ICRP process has
     shifted away from, you know, we don't have genetic effects but we are
     concerned about genetic diseases -- and we have never identified a
     genetic disease associated with radiation, but now that is where all
     their genetics research money is going because we no longer have a
     genetics problem.
         But nobody has pointed out that it is because somebody, you
     know, opened up the files and said, hey, you know, the data stinks.
         DR. GARRICK:  Let me ask another question, a follow-up about
     research institutions.
         You have also sort of made the point that there seems to be
     an institutional commitment to the LNT by those bodies that are normally
     entrusted with being the experts on radiation effects, such as the NCRP. 
     Maybe you include in that the NRC and maybe you include in that the
     National Academy of Engineering -- because of the BEIR reports --
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  No -- actually the National Research
     Council.
         DR. GARRICK:  National Research Council.  What is your view,
     and this question was presented yesterday, of creation of bodies or
     institutions where you think that there would be a high likelihood that
     the total database of merit would get reasonable consideration?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  I don't have a conclusion.  My one view
     has been that we have an NCRP and an ICRP and they have tended to have a
     focus on radiation protection and they are funded by the radiation
     protection agencies and as a result we really don't have a full
     consideration of biology, medicine and health sciences, physiology, et
     cetera, that a lot of the literature that exists is in biological
     sources that are not generally considered to be part of the radiation
     protection establishment.
         One of the comments, for example, well, some of these
     sources are, you know, publications that are remote.  And I look at, for
     example, last year there was a publication in "Gerontology," in May of
     '98, in France they took 300 mice controls, all in one room, 300 mice
     with thorium under the cages, 7 mr per year, 300 mice -- 14r per year --
     14r per year.  The two exposed populations lived statistically
     significantly longer than the control population, which is what we have
     always seen when you have whole animal exposures.
         But that data, I didn't even really pick up on it, but that
     data certainly doesn't get to the radiation protection establishment. 
     But there are dozens, hundreds of studies.  I mean this is where the
     literature exists that is almost excluded.  If it is not part of the
     establishment science mainstream, then they tend to ignore it.
         And it is easy for anybody from that side of the aisle --
     and one of Don Luckey's problems, for example, biochemistry, head of the
     department in a school of medicine, concerned about nutrition, concerned
     about antibiotics, developed the understanding of the stimulatory effect
     of antibiotics in chickens and small animals, and it is used in
     agriculture.  He established the principle of insecticide hormesis
     because if you -- and we all know that you have got to take your full
     course of antibiotics because otherwise germs get stronger.  I mean all
     of this is part of the same biological mechanism.  But when he published
     it on radiation, even though he had already done it on heavy metals in
     toxicology, well, wait a minute, he is not a part of the radiation
     business, so he is over there.  And when he tried to get funding, just
     like the guys in medicine who tried to get funding at Johns Hopkins or
     the University of California at San Francisco, there is no funding.  If
     it is radiation, you have to go over there.
         And Professor Kondo in Japan basically concluded only in
     China is public health controlling studies of radiation effects.  All
     the other countries of the world, essentially, treat radiation separate
     from the public health establishment, and so we value these things
     differently.
         So my argument conclusion is you need to move it into an
     arena where the public health establishment, that doesn't have a vested
     interest in radiation and radiation biology, can apply the normal
     standards that they apply to whether or not there are effects and what
     those effects are.
         MR. HALUS:  We have had a good discussion on this particular
     topic.  I believe there are other people who would also like to make
     comments.  Should we provide them an opportunity to do that, or are
     there further questions that we need to ask at this time?
         DR. FAIRHURST:  I would just like one point of
     clarification.
         MR. HALUS:  Please.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  I think -- let's say I have got your message
     anyway.  I wasn't here unfortunately, but apparently Dr. Land yesterday
     gave a statistical assessment and what I heard was sort of the
     statistical impossibility of extrapolating very low doses with obviously
     concurrent very, very large populations.  And then I heard somebody say,
     well, you expect you will get a result supporting LNT, more or less, if
     you use one-sided P values.  Is this your position?  I mean the position
     that if you included the data that you have and had a totally
     independent statistical assessment of that, you would see a threshold? 
     Is that what I am hearing?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Yes, I think that is correct.
         MR. HALUS:  Are there any further questions from the
     committee?  Is there another presenter that would like to make comments?
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Could I point out that Ted Quinn, the
     President of the American Nuclear Society, did make it.  I don't know
     when his plane has got to leave, but if he could talk now, I think that
     would be appreciated.
         MR. QUINN:  I would very much like to speak.
         DR. GARRICK:  Okay.  Please.  Please take the time now, Ted,
     to go ahead and address -- if you would, step to the front and put on a
     microphone.
         MR. QUINN:  Good morning, Mr. Chairman.  Good morning,
     panel.  I am pleased to come before you for just a few minutes to
     represent the American Nuclear Society.  I have a number of messages
     from the American Nuclear Society, and then I have a couple from myself.
         The first is I thank you for a couple of minutes to have the
     chance to come before you.  I would like to recognize that I believe
     today you have a very distinguished panel sitting at the table, with the
     experience and credentials that can address this position.
         The position of the American Nuclear Society is this is a
     very serious issue, and I am proud that the ACNW has taken it on the
     table to address it.  It affects the future of our nation, it affects
     the future of how we perform everything in nuclear science and
     technology, and I believe you at the table, and with the input from
     these experts that have provided it, are well qualified to address it.
         The ANS is developing a public policy statement on the issue
     of the effects of low level radiation.  We are not ready to release it
     yet, we are still in the works of developing the policy, but I think it
     has elements in that have a short-term and a long-term nature to it.
         The long-term nature addresses the importance of molecular
     studies in science, as has been proposed by the DOE, and is working
     through.  And I believe those studies have great potential in the
     long-term to address the issues that are so critical to us -- whether
     there is a threshold, what is the process of cell reconstruction to
     support the resistance from toxicity, resistance from radiation,
     resistance from any other cell damage mechanisms?  And I am very pleased
     with that long-term progress and the fact that DOE is funding.  We
     certainly support continued DOE funding to make this work.
         In the short run, I think this group, and I think our nation
     has a responsibility to develop limits that are fair and equitable.
         Now, I would like to step out and say what is my own
     personal opinion.  My own personal opinion is that the limits of 100
     millirem are fair.  I believe the statement of the Health Physics
     Society, and I support it myself, is very fair and equitable.  And that
     is all I am prepared to say, Mr. Chairman.
         DR. GARRICK:  Thank you.
         MR. HALUS:  Do we have any questions from the committee?
         DR. GARRICK:  Ted, when do you expect the policy statement
     to be finished?
         MR. QUINN:  I would say within the next three weeks.
         DR. GARRICK:  Is there anything you can say about?  Pardon?
         DR. FAIRHURST:  I was just surprised that it would be
     available so quickly.
         MR. QUINN:  We have been working on it for over a year, and
     it is such an important subject, and somewhat controversial, that it
     takes that long for us.  And I apologize that we didn't have it to
     present to you today.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. QUINN:  What does it say?  The thrust of it, again, it
     addresses the importance of molecular science.  As we go down the road,
     it is critical to us that the human genome and other issues that are
     doing so great in the technology of the future have the potential to go
     in and address a threshold level in a scientific approach for molecular
     science.  That doesn't in a way denigrate or take away from some of the
     other studies that are occurring, have occurred in the past, to provide
     you with data from a scientific approach that can give an earlier
     answer.  But I believe in the long run, those studies are critical.
         DR. POWERS:  How did you arrive at 100 millirem was fair and
     equitable?  It just seemed like a good idea or --
         MR. QUINN:  I believe the current -- and this is, again,
     what I believe and not what is a position of the American Nuclear
     Society.
         DR. POWERS:  I understand.  How did you come up, arrive at
     100, not 200, not 50?
         MR. QUINN:  I am a power plant engineer, and I spend all my
     time and days in the power plants.  I am not a molecular scientist or a
     health physicist.  I would say my belief is based on the people that
     work for me, or out there in the field that have stated -- or the
     position of the Health Physics Society and others that have stated that
     experts believe this is a fair and equitable limit.  I can't tell you
     myself, based on any personal experience, other than that.
         DR. POWERS:  You are in the same position I am.
         MR. QUINN:  Okay, sir.
         DR. POWERS:  Have to believe the experts.
         MR. QUINN:  Yes, sir.
         DR. POWERS:  But the experts have been called into question
     here.
         MR. QUINN:  Okay.  Well, I will reinforce the importance of
     this particular group.  It is an enormously serious question, and I am
     very proud that your group is taking a straightforward approach and
     looking at it.  It is critical to our future.
         MR. HALUS:  Other questions from the committee?
         DR. WYMER:  We do want to thank you for making the effort to
     get here.
         MR. QUINN:  Yes, sir.
         DR. WYMER:  Through a difficult traffic situation and
     probably other problems.
         MR. QUINN:  It is, but the importance is that you are
     looking at it, not me.  The importance is that you are doing this, and
     there are 250,000 people or more out there in the industry that depend
     on your deliberations.  So I look very much forward to the results of
     your deliberations and I hope that all the scientists that you need to
     help support this provide input to you in an appropriate manner.
         MR. HALUS:  Kim and Otto, do either of you have questions?
         DR. RAABE:  I have a question, Ted.  The Health Physics
     Society came out a couple of years ago with the position statement,
     "Radiation Risk in Perspective."  I am sure you are familiar with it.
         MR. QUINN:  yes.
         DR. RAABE:  Basically saying that there is no basis for
     quantifying risk below an exposure of 5 rem or a lifetime exposure of 10
     rem, but that we don't have any mechanism for quantifying it.
         MR. QUINN:  Okay.
         DR. RAABE:  What is the position of the American Nuclear
     Society with respect to this position statement?  Has the Society
     discussed it in any way, --
         MR. QUINN:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  -- or do you have something to say about it?
         MR. QUINN:  Okay.  It provides great input to the
     development of our public policy statement on the effects of low level
     radiation, we refer to it in there.  The issue is we haven't signed it
     yet today.  So when you ask me what is the position, it is in advance of
     my ability to say, Dr. Raabe, and the committee, that this is the
     position of the American Nuclear Society.  I spoke to my own experience
     and not --
         DR. RAABE:  I guess what I am asking, do you see anything on
     the horizon that would suggest that the American Nuclear Society would
     contradict this or go with this?
         MR. QUINN:  No, absolutely not.  No.
         DR. POWERS:  What is the position statement supposed to
     accomplish?
         MR. QUINN:  Good question.  You are asking good questions. 
     The issue of the position statement is that today, in the scientific
     community, there is a tremendous amount of discourse in addressing this
     particular issue.  And I suppose maybe I could personally say the data
     of that discourse, is I have had experts within the American Nuclear
     Society working overnight, many nights to address the development of a
     public policy statement in this issue, and some even present have spent
     that.  And the issue becomes it is significant, it requires, on the
     behalf of scientific societies, a scientific approach.
         If I was a representative of a trade association or -- I
     mean I would take a different position relative.  But we believe that
     the scientific community can provide answers, and that there's two parts
     to it.  From the Wingspread Conference results, I am sure you are all
     much more familiar with that than I am, there are two responsibilities
     in our country we saw, that scientists that support this committee and
     others come up with a scientific solution, and that the public policy
     arena address the issue of setting up appropriate standards, and that
     the public is made aware of those appropriate standards.  All of those
     issues are addressed in our public policy statement, sir.
         MR. HALUS:  Any further questions?
         [No response.]
         MR. HALUS:  Thank you for your comments.
         MR. QUINN:  I would like to thank you again, Mr. Chairman,
     and the committee for this time.
         DR. GARRICK:  Thank you.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Can I just make a comments about Ted's --
     and stay there, Ted, so you can adjust this if I misspeak at all. 
     Having worked from the perspective of the Chairman of the Low Level
     Radiation Health Effects Subcommittee at the ANS, my sense of where we
     were driving over the last four or five years is that we are not -- we,
     the ANS, speaking now, are not the experts, and signing on to the Health
     Physics Society statement was not something that the ANS, through its
     own Society, its own wisdom, if you will, as the engineering and
     technology people, could or should really do.
         Our issue is the debate is strenuous, it tends to not get
     recognized very much, and it must be addressed by our institutions.  And
     I think, you know, reading into all of that, you have got to accept
     that, in one sense, the ANS can't make a scientific decision on this
     because it is really up to the Health Physics Society, the Radiation
     Research Society and others where that debate goes on.  On the other
     hand, the emphasis we have had is we can't let the institutions continue
     to set it aside it or ignore it.  We have to urge that it be undertaken
     in a serious scientific vein and not just as a matter of policy.
         MR. HALUS:  Thank you for your comment.  Are there other
     presentations that people would like to make from the floor?  I guess we
     have another one coming up now.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well, again I appreciate the opportunity to
     make essentially a couple of comments about the future and what should
     be done.
         First I would like to address the question of the molecular
     biology and the models and so forth.  I think that this is very
     important because I believe that much of the resistance to departing
     from LNT is stated very, very explicitly in the NCRP Report 121.  They
     have a biophysical presumption.  They know that the damage done to DNA
     is proportional to the radiation it receives, whether it's low LET or
     high LET.  They know that that damage isn't all repaired, and therefore
     proceed to the conclusion that there must be an incremental risk for all
     amounts of radiation.
         Again, they state it in a very succinct and truthful manner,
     and I don't disagree with any of the statements that I made so far. 
     That's all true.  And Ted read this yesterday.  So that any of these
     effects as due to radiation of cancer, suppressor genes and oncogenes
     being expressed and so forth, any of these effects could result from the
     passage of a single charged particle causing damage to DNA, and we know
     that damage is proportional, that could be expressed as a mutation or
     small deletion.
         It's the result of this type of reasoning that a linear
     nonthreshold response relationship cannot be excluded.  When you have
     that firmly in the back of your mind, you're going to view all evidence
     that supports this view as being scientifically correct and all evidence
     that contradicts this as being some hidden flaw in it, there's something
     wrong, because this is -- how can this be right and how can that be
     right at the same time?
         Now, it is this presumption -- and I use the word
     "presumption" correctly -- it is this presumption that as a result of
     this type of reasoning, that a linear nonthreshold dose-response
     relationship cannot be excluded, it is this presumption based on
     biophysical concepts -- and again, it's absolutely true -- it's based on
     biophysical concepts, not biological concepts, not on an intact organism
     responding with homeostatic principles.  This is -- I could not -- this
     is absolutely correct.  It is this presumption based on biophysical
     concepts which provides a basis for the use of collective dose in
     radiation protection activities.
         Now how can you justify any more strongly the necessity for
     molecular biological models based on biology to explore this and find
     out indeed if linear damage to DNA is translated into a linear risk to
     the organism.  This is exactly this question that is so valuable to the
     DOE effort now.
         Now that doesn't mean that one should then exclude
     epidemiologic evidence that contradicts LNT.  There's been a great
     chorus of support.  We don't want any more of epidemiologic studies like
     Cohen.  We don't know what's wrong with it, but it must be wrong.  We
     don't know what's wrong with the nuclear shipyard worker, but there must
     be some mismatch in the controls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
         Well, I think that if a model, a biological model that can
     explain how at the same time you can have damage that's proportional to
     radiation, and you see, even if you repair the damage in a constant way,
     and that's admitted, let's say 99 percent of the damage is repaired or
     10 to the minus 6 is all that's left over, only one part in a million
     remains, still this concept is absolutely correct.  If you have a
     constant repair of the damage, then LNT follows as night the day.
         So we have to go to the molecular biology, and it's for this
     reason that I began about a year and a half ago to work on a biological
     model.  And it was for this reason that we pulled together international
     experts in a meeting in Berkeley to which Marv Frazier referred in June
     of last year to discuss this whole topic, including endogenous damage. 
     There's no endogenous damage, and it's not affected in any way except in
     a constant manner by the -- still it's LNT.  So the endogenous damage
     has to be taken into account, and these adaptive responses have to be
     taken into account, and show the great high probability that these
     mechanisms of prevention, repair, and removal operate on the endogenous
     damage as well as the radiation damage.  And from an evolutionary
     standpoint this makes sense.
         At any rate, so on this basis that the model was developed
     that Marv Frazier felt was if all the experts can agree, and these
     include experts on radiation damage, if all the experts on damage and
     repair and so forth can agree on the model, then this furnishes a basis
     for targeted research to see if some of the assumptions in the model
     based on what we know now indeed are valid or whether they need to be
     modified and so forth.  So this is really why I think this molecular
     biological research is so important, because we have to see whether this
     biophysical presumption actually materializes as a correct biological
     function.
         Okay.  Now there are many points in the NRC report that I
     think demonstrate -- how shall I put it? -- the lack of impartial
     treatment of both sides of the issue.  And to focus on one only, with
     the time that's available, I would like to just focus on Bernie Cohen's
     work, because Evan Douple referred to that that the BEIR VI committee
     gave it great attention, spent a great deal of time, in fact there was
     even a BEIR VI workshop that we had for two days in preparation for
     dealing with Bernie's data.  So it did get a great deal of attention,
     and was dealt with specifically in the BEIR VI report.  It was also
     dealt with specifically in the NCRP report which came out about a year
     later after the BEIR VI report.
         Now from the -- and I'll distribute this letter -- from the
     Central Laboratory for Radiologic Protection, the director, Dr. Stavomir
     Sterlinsky, wrote this letter to Dr. Meinhold, and he thinks that this
     report is very important and certainly deserves an in-depth reviewing. 
     However, we received it relatively late and time limits restrict us to
     only a few comments.
         And I will only excerpt the comments that he makes, and then
     show the data which was shown in the BEIR VI report which Evan Douple
     put on the screen yesterday and contrast that data which was shown as a
     justification for discarding Bernie Cohen's data with Bernie Cohen's own
     data in his own report, which they refer to.  All right.
         Now, general comments.  Papers quoting as supporting LNT
     often contain data to the contrary, and evidence against LNT is often
     downplayed.  Ecological studies and epidemiology cannot be regarded as
     trustworthy and should not be relied upon to study low-dose effects --
     page 156.  If they provide evidence against LNT, e.g., Cohen, 1995, yet
     they are acceptable otherwise -- and specifically Dimidchik et al.,
     1996, on page 180.
         Page 154 to 156, ecological studies, this is an
     exceptionally biased discussion -- now maybe biased is a harsh word,
     Otto, but he uses it anyway --
         [Laughter.]
         In which the arguments of only one side are presented. 
     Cohen, 1995 study demonstrates LNT predictions of lung cancer mortality
     due to residential radon -- and this is all Bernie claimed -- is not
     confirmed by epidemiology.  He says I'm not trying to prove hormesis or
     anything else, I'm just saying that the predictions that are made by the
     mine workers study and EPA are not confirmed when you actually go out in
     the field and see what goes on.
         Now, so, in this chapter five papers are cited in support of
     statements that ecological studies such as performed by Cohen are
     intrinsically biased.  Cohen refuted most of these arguments in his
     publications, none of which were even mentioned here.  In other words,
     they don't cite the Cohen responses to these criticisms.
         A striking example of the biased treatment of this subject
     is at the paper of Lubin, 1998, in which Cohen's work is criticized, is
     cited here twice.  However, the arguments from Cohen's reply in the same
     issue of Health Physics, pages 18 to 23, and information that the
     so-called Lubin's effect contributes very little to the huge discrepancy
     between Cohen's data and LNT predictions, and offers no plausible
     explanation of this discrepancy, are not presented.
         A similar biased treatment of the available information is
     continued on page 197, lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 15, 17, 18.
         On page 158 -- sorry, that has to do with the atom bombs in
     Japan.  Let's continue with the Cohen.  Here we are.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Page 197.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  On page 189 again this has to do with lung
     cancer and cigarettes and downplaying.  All right, here we go.  Page
     193-197.  This is a continuation of an attack on Cohen.  Study
     demonstrating that residential radon cannot practically be a causal
     factor for any lung cancers in the United States.  In this attempt to
     disqualify the methodically meticulous work of Cohen four papers are
     cited here.  Cohen responded to this criticism, refuting most of the
     arguments against his work, and he cites the Cohen and Colditz, '94,
     Health Physics '64-'65, your reference Cohen '95, Cohen '97, Cohen '98,
     Health Physics 7518, Cohen, ibid, page 23, Cohen '97, Health Physics --
     none of these Cohen papers are even mentioned.  A statement on page 197,
     line 28, the results of Cohen's study cannot be relied upon should
     perhaps end with "because it does not support LNT."
         [Laughter.]
         This is another example of a biased approach to NCRP SE 16
     report.
         Now let's look at the slide that Evan Douple -- here we
     are -- in the front, here we go, good -- showed yesterday.
         MR. HALUS:  We have about five minutes remaining.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Okay.  This will be very quick.
         I want to point out that the bars are shown on the cohort
     studies.  The cohort study shown -- the average in a solid line, the
     mean of about 9 cohort studies, that solid line.  You can see the points
     and you can see the bars on it.  And then below it we have this sort of
     figment of the imagination, misplotted, the points should go through
     those lines, so it looks steeper and more ridiculous than it really is,
     and no bars, no bars at all.
         Now -- oh, thank you.
         So anyone looking at this would say well, you know, here's
     solid data with statistics and here is a fantasy.  Well, what actually
     does this curve look like?  You see how small the bars are.  They're
     very tight.  These don't begin to approach no effect, let alone theory. 
     Now perhaps they were annoyed by the fact that the theory is shown in
     the dotted line.
         [Laughter.]
         But there are no points up there.  There are no bars up
     there.  So they said well, we'll do the same thing to Bernie.  But
     Bernie has very tight, very tight.  It's very interesting to note that
     from four picocuries per liter on how big the bars get.  Of course, the
     reason for that, there relatively few homes that have that high radon
     concentration.  And that explains exactly why EPA set this -- there's no
     scientific basis for setting the remedial level at four picocuries per
     liter.  No, you set it where you're going to get the least public
     resistance.  No science.
         DR. RAABE:  Myron?
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  Can I say something about this.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Sure.
         DR. RAABE:  While you have it up here?
         Myron and I participated in the hearing for the NCRP
     committee meeting, and we were both present when Bernie Cohen presented
     this to the committee, and Jay Lubin got up and criticized it.  And what
     it really came down to, Jay Lubin, who is really the author of this BEIR
     VI model, he gave a very, very strong condemnation of the whole
     methodology from a mathematical basis.  It appeared to be quite a
     rigorous mathematical derivation, with lots of equations on the board.
         That went through because this being an ecological study,
     Bernie Cohen did not know the dose to anybody.  All he knows is the
     average concentration in homes in these counties, so no particular
     person's exposure is known.
         Okay, so this is what you call an ecological study for that
     reason.  Now what Lupin did, he convinced the committee from a
     mathematical argument that if there were a presumed unknown cross-level
     confounder, mathematically the slope of this line could be anything, and
     the committee accepted that.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  I know.
         DR. RAABE:  That's what it comes down to.  You were there.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Yes, I was there.
         DR. RAABE:  It was a devastating presentation.  He took 30
     minutes to condemn this methodology --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  But it was on a theoretical basis and
     Cohen's response to that and show that even if that were true and the
     smoking were completely inversely related to the radon concentration --
     in other words, you had more radon, the less smoking -- it still
     wouldn't bring it up to the horizontal.
         DR. RAABE:  The point I wanted to make though is that the
     committee heard both sides and they made a decision to accept Lubin's
     argument.  Now I don't personally accept it but I don't see the
     committee as having some sort of sinister type of reason for rejecting
     it.
         They accepted the Lubin argument and it was a very strong,
     well-presented argument so when the committee sat down to go over it,
     the way I look at it, they said, well, if Lubin is right, then Cohen's
     slope is meaningless, because that's what Lubin said.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Then what is the point of not plotting
     Bernie Cohen's curve correctly and dropping the bars and all of that? 
     That has nothing to do with theory.  That has to do with scientific
     integrity.  That is my point.
         It's not a linear model.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Put that back up there.  That's an
     exponential model?
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  No --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Plotted on semilog.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  This is plotted on semilog, right.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  That's an exponential model.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Right, right.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  It's not linear -- it's not a linear no
     threshold model.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  No, that's right.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Just a point of clarification when you have
     that up there.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Oh, sure.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  I think I know the answer but --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Right.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Are the indoor studies and the miner
     studies -- I assume that they are also corrected for smoking?
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Yes, presumably, although you see, the
     smoking of the miners I don't know how that was objectively determined. 
     In fact, I don't even know how the exposure of the miners was
     objectively determined.
         Many of these miners were people who worked 16 hours shifts,
     although they only considered 8-hour exposures every day they worked,
     and some of them slept overnight in corners which had enormous stasis
     and collection of radon, so that the dosimetry of the miners study was
     far worse than the dosimetry on the counties where they actually
     measured the residential, average residential radon exposure in the
     homes and assumed they were in so many hours a day, and even the ones
     where they did individual and the case control studies, there was no
     telling exactly how many hours each member of the household spent in and
     out of doors so that the exact dosimetry was very difficult, but it was
     particularly loose in the miners.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Yes, well, one of the reasons I asked -- as
     you know, I am not an expert --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Right.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  -- but I served on a committee with
     somebody who did some of these miner studies and I recall, I may be
     recalling incorrectly, but I recall him telling me that it was a very,
     very strong correlation with smoking, that basically --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Oh, yes.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  -- basically that miners who did not smoke
     basically were not affected by the radon exposures.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  That's right.  In fact, that was the
     response of the BEIR VI committee when they were asked, well have you
     checked the radon in you home?  The only one that responded -- everybody
     stonewalled on it except Roger McClelland, and he said well, no, I
     didn't check it but I don't smoke so it doesn't make any difference.
         DR. WYMER:  Do we have other questions about the
     presentation?
         DR. RAABE:  Just one comment on this one.  Those so-called
     datapoints are not actually data.  They are the result of a very
     complicated, maximum likelihood logistic -- as Charles Land described to
     us yesterday and those are the estimated means and the standard -- and
     the 95 percent confidence range for those means.
         The actual data, which I have here, is a scatter plot.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Right.
         DR. RAABE:  It's a scatter plot, okay?  So this is generated
     by a computer program with a log linear model and it is anchored at the
     zero dose point.  There is no zero dose point.  That was created by the
     computer.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Right.
         DR. RAABE:  Now if I would suggest that that zero dose point
     which creates the relative risk of one was off by just 10 percent, you
     can suddenly get a straight line across there that has no dose response
     relationship at all, so there is a lot of things going on in this --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Right, and even these, every one crosses the
     no effect line.
         DR. RAABE:  I have to make one more comment and that is I
     did my doctoral research on radon in the '60s.  I think I know something
     about it.  Now these case control studies, yes, they correct for smoking
     because they match the case control so that they have smokers, but how
     would the figure out the dose to radon over the lifetime of these
     people?
         Now I studied radon, you know, and I know a lot about it I
     do not think I could estimate my personal lifetime radon dose.  Now can
     they get it by looking at somebody's home where they happen to live at a
     certain time?  It is a very difficult problem, to get these doses, so
     there is a tremendous uncertainty in the doses and there is the
     structure of the regression -- so there are real questions.
         DR. POWERS:  You were persuading me that the argument that
     the slope of the line could be anything is essentially true.  I don't
     think that either study proves anything anyway.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well, this study shows that the predictions
     of EPA that if you live in a high radon residence that you have more
     chance of having lung is incorrect, and that is all Bernie Cohen
     claimed, that they -- with tremendous statistical power he showed that
     people who live in homes with higher concentration of radon have less
     risk of cancer when using the same correction for smoking that the BEIR
     IV and the BEIR VI use and even if you assumed that there was an inverse
     relationship you still couldn't get this line to be horizontal.  That is
     what he showed.
         DR. WYMER:  Kim, did you have a question you wanted to ask?
         DR. KEARFOTT:  No.
         DR. POWERS:  It strikes me it is of limited predictive
     value -- that is, I would not reduce my rate of lung cancer by injecting
     radon into my house.  I have to inject in radon plus engage in all of
     the other activities that might affect my --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well, all the other activities you can think
     of -- he has expanded this to 150 socio-economic factors and shown how
     each of these will change the slope, and none of them got to zero, and
     they flip-flopped around the average, and when you take 90 percent of
     the population, these other factors will bend one way or another but
     statistically the only way you can get this kind of effect, and as I
     said this was not only seen by Bernie but seen by many others.
         In fact, let me tell you how objective Bernie was.  For the
     first few years that he was looking into this, he believed that radon
     produced cancer.  He installed a ventilation unit in his home.  He got
     rid of the stuff out of his basement, but by the time the data piled up
     into the
     '90s he turned the switch off.
         [Laughter.]
         MR. HALUS:  Chairman, I believe you had a question.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.  Before Myron leaves, I want to ask him
     one overarching question.
         Given what we have heard the last two days, and assume for
     the moment that you are the ACNW, what single recommendation do you
     think would best reflect -- what single recommendation to the Commission
     would best reflect what we have learned?
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well --
         DR. GARRICK:  If you want to make two, that's okay.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well, first of all, I would say that we
     learned that -- in my own personal opinion -- we have learned that there
     are tremendous biases built in because of the focus on radiation damage
     and the acknowledgement that for all practical purposes -- this is a
     little slight change -- but for all practical purposes that radiation
     damage of DNA indeed is proportional to the amount of radiation, period,
     and because of this firm concept, as stated in their own NCRP
     publication, they feel that it is illogical even though they don't have
     any data, they say they have no data to support it and some data
     contradicting it with high statistical power, it's all admitted in that
     one summary, nevertheless that this has to be adhered to, and so
     therefore this report demonstrates this bias.
         They want to stay with what they understand, with what is
     clear and logical, and what supports that they highlight and what does
     not support it it must be flawed, and they tend to -- so it is not an
     impartial, because there is this strong basis not being impartial.
         Okay.  So what I think is needed is, as was suggested
     yesterday, is to have an entity, and perhaps the Surgeon-General is not
     the best but on first blush it would seem that here's somebody that is
     impartial, that can get a group of scientists that have not been
     identified.  In other words, even though these people are expert, they
     should not be included because they have demonstrated repeatedly that
     they are going to cling to this central viewpoint -- people that are
     more biologically oriented, that have not been associated with the
     radiological protection.
         As pointed out, recently it came to my attention that in
     Japan there's a study that has been going on for over six years.  In the
     first three years they gave tritiated water for a lifetime to mice and
     showed indeed that there was a great increase in cancer as the dose went
     up.  Then after they did that study, they went to very low doses, by low
     doses meaning about in the order of 100 mr per day, which is low dose. 
     That is what we get in a year these mice got in a day.  They showed that
     at these very low doses that cumulative, over a lifetime, these mice
     showed marked decreases in cancer.  For instance, all cancers were
     reduced to 40 percent of the controls and with a P value of .0007.
         Now that study was not cited in the NCRP report and yet
     another study, another revision by Jeffrey Howe, the Canadian breath
     fluoroscopy study, was cited even though it hasn't been published and it
     was cited as being published in 1998 in the American Journal of
     Epidemiology, and hasn't been published yet in 1998, so they reach every
     shred of data that they feel can invalidate the Canadian breast
     fluoroscopy study.
         I am just saying that because of clinging to this point of
     view that you need to get people who have not been familiar and active
     in this and perhaps selected by somebody that is impartial and
     scientific from the biologic community and not the radiation protection
     community.
         DR. GARRICK:  So basically the recommendation would be
     because of biases in the NRCP report we need another study?
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Right, right.
         DR. GARRICK:  And it should be biologically based rather
     than --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  That's right.
         DR. POWERS:  I guess I am struggling with what that
     accomplishes.  You would have a bunch of studies over here, and I find
     your arguments on the biophysical very persuasive -- if I have that
     mindset then linear follows as night follows day -- and then on the
     other hand I find persuasive also the arguments that say cells in petri
     dish don't have the full amino and biological response and so the
     biological thing could give you a different model and in fact I have
     been fiddling around -- can I create a model that does something here? 
     Stay tuned.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well, we hope it will be published this year
     in either the National Academy of Science or Science so we will have
     something out front.
         DR. POWERS:  But here is the problem I see is that now I've
     got another study that says now things go not linear.  Okay.  Do I stop
     there?
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  No.
         DR. POWERS:  I got to get in another study that doesn't have
     the prejudice that's there.  I have got more and more studies.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well, it's not a prejudice.  If you gave
     tritiated water to mice in varying doses, and you just find out what
     happens, and you find out that at the high -- they did the high dose
     studies first and they found out that indeed the cancer increased
     proportional to the dose and lifespan was shortened proportional to the
     dose, and when they went to the lower dose tritiated water study for a
     lifetime, they found that they lived longer and they had less cancer.
         Now I don't see why that is prejudicial.
         MR. HALUS:  Okay -- do we have further questions from the
     panel?
         DR. POWERS:  Well, I would still like to understand how
     having this study helps.  I mean it seems to me the far bigger help is
     to have, yes, a model that doesn't have this biophysical basis on it --
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  I agree.
         DR. POWERS:  -- and say here are the experiments one can do
     that would say yes or no.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Precisely.  That is where I started.
         DR. POWERS:  I think that is a far more valuable
     recommendation to you than yet another study with a different group of
     people.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  It's hard to understand, it is hard to
     accept things that you don't understand.  In fact, your understanding
     contradicts those results.  It is hard to accept that.
         MR. HALUS:  Are there other questions or comments?
         DR. RAABE:  Just one quick comment.  I think the committee
     is starting to get the feeling here that nobody really understands the
     mechanisms by which radiation produces cancer.  If they did, they would
     get the Nobel Prize, so they're all guessing.  We all know DNA is
     involved but cells are involved, tissue, organ systems, cells talk to
     each other.  Nobody really knows all the pieces and so this is why there
     is such a disagreement in the scientific community and if someone is
     concentrating on the biophysical piece, then they will project that and
     say well, this represents it.
         Also, the things that are published are not all of equal
     quality.
         And I have looked at a lot of papers that supposedly show
     things, maybe it is a mouse study -- I didn't look at this one, all
     right -- but I go in there and look, as a researcher who has worked with
     animals, and I know there are real serious problems in how you set up
     your controls in these experiments.  And I look at these studies, and I
     have talked to people, and I say, my goodness, they could get any result
     they wanted by misrepresenting the controls, you know.
         And one laboratory actually took a bunch of mice that came
     in and exposed the first batch to the radiation, and then they wanted
     some controls, so they ordered another batch, and those were the
     controls.  That was actually reported at a national meeting.  And they
     found hormesis, believe it or not.
         Now, I am not saying that represents all -- I am just saying
     each study has to be looked at very carefully.  And, also, when a
     scientist looks at these studies and sees an observation that disagrees
     with his, perhaps his model that he has, based on other work that he has
     done, he also realizes that there are chance observations that occur in
     studies that may agree or disagree, and the standard of acceptance is
     always going to be higher for some unusual results, results you consider
     to be unusual.
         If I send up -- some of my papers, I have trouble getting
     published because some of my results are unusual.  But the standard is
     higher in science.  Scientists say, well, you got an unusual result, you
     have got a bigger task to prove it.  You have to do a lot more.  And it
     is not that you are biased or there is some conspiracy against it, it is
     just that the bar gets higher if you come up with something that is
     different and doesn't quite fit the model that everyone is working with.
         MR. HALUS:  Are there other questions for the speaker?
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Can I just ask one question?  Myron, you
     pointed out the fact that radiation damage to DNA is linear.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Yes.  Essentially linear.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  You didn't mention the relationship to the
     level of background, normal metabolism and whether or not linear would
     necessarily result in health effects if you are in the large background. 
     Can you just give a little bit on that?
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Well, I alluded to the fact that if you only
     consider radiation damage and not the response of the organism to the
     damage as Ed Calabrese dwelt on yesterday, then it follows inescapably
     that if damage is translated one to one into life-shortening and cancer,
     then it is inexplicable that low doses could have the opposite effect. 
     And it just turns out that when you take into account the adaptive -- I
     am sorry, I am not addressing your question.
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Right.  I wanted to put that in the
     context of normal oxidative metabolism breaks.
         DR. POLLYCOVE:  Okay.  Well, yes.  Well, I didn't want to go
     into the model itself.  It turns out that when you look at the amount of
     damage that is caused by radiation at low doses, per day, continuous, to
     the damage that occurs endogenously from the free radicals that are
     caused by oxygen metabolism, it turns out there is an enormous
     discrepancy, so that even when you take into account that there are 2
     percent of the damage that is done by low LET radiation is -- performs
     -- results in double-strand breaks, and that only one in 10 million --
     we did a statistical analysis which the radiation damage gurus and these
     experts agree with, that only one in 10 million of the random damage
     done by free radicals produces a double-strand break.
         There are so many that occur each day that it turns out,
     surprise, that there are more double-strand breaks, far more
     double-strand breaks per day from endogenous damage than there is from
     the low level radiation damage, and not in the one in 25 years, and so
     forth, and so on, which is just some wild guess, I don't know where that
     came from.
         But anyway, I think this is what -- but this is all part and
     parcel of the model that we are working on, nearing a final draft, and I
     really don't want to talk about that any more than ANS wanted to talk
     about the policy, President Quinn wanted to speak about the policy of
     ANS, until all of us authors, or seven of us, sign off on it and submit
     it for publication.  Once we get to that point, I am willing to talk
     about it.
         MR. HALUS:  Thank you very much for your comments.  Thank
     you very much for your presentations.  Let's go ahead and take a break
     at this time, say, a 15 minute break.
         DR. WYMER:  Yes.  And when we come back, then we will go
     into a discussion of our report based on this meeting and the discussion
     period is essentially over at this point.
         MR. ROCKWELL:  Can I just make a quick answer to John's very
     important question about what should you recommend?  One, I think that
     it is important to point out that serious questions have been raised
     about the basis for many of the conclusions in this NCRP, and those
     should be responded to because the report is not -- should not be
     considered accepted and valid until some of these very fundamental
     questions that have been raised, time and time again, and ignored time
     and time again, are responded to.  That would be the first thing that I
     think is important.
         And then, second, whether or not the LNT as a model is
     repudiated is less important, really, than facing the question of how
     low down are we going to continue to insist that we are killing people. 
     The idea that we now say we are killing people at 100 millirem, at 10
     millirem, at 1 millirem per year, we have got to face up to that
     practical question, which is the real burden on us right now.  And to
     say we don't know and, therefore, we are going to assume that we kill
     people, and actually have the Department of Energy send out a report
     that says they are going to murder 23 people by shipping shielded casts
     of rad waste around, as long as we are saying those things, I think we
     are not in realm of science, and we are really just killing this
     industry.
         MR. HALUS:  Okay.  Thank you for the comments.  We will take
     a break at this time.  And would you still like to start at half past or
     25 till?
         DR. WYMER:  Twenty-five till.
         MR. HALUS:  Okay.  We will start 25 till, and that concludes
     the discussion from the floor.  Thank you very much, everyone, for
     participating.
         [Recess.]
         DR. GARRICK:  Okay, I guess the meeting should come to
     order.  Ray, I think what we want to do now is have a discussion among
     the committee members, the consultants, et cetera, on what we have heard
     and what it means, and see if we can begin to flush out some of the
     nuggets that might be the basis for us to make some recommendations to
     the commission.
         DR. WYMER:  That's right.  I think we have, both you and I
     have independently suggested to our consultants that we really want them
     to do all the work.  So I guess we would like to hear, as a starting
     point, what each of you, in turn, have to say about what might
     constitute recommendations and input into a report.
         DR. RAABE:  Before we get into that, I wanted to make one
     sort of observation about what we have heard over the last
     day-and-a-half.  To me, as a radiobiologist, there is a big gap and what
     we have heard.  And there is a big gap in what BEIR VII is trying to do,
     and there is a big gap in what the NCRP report does, and that gap, I
     think is crucial.  That gap is inadequate treatment of the effects of
     protracted radiation.
         In fact, I could even justify recommending that we should
     have a report where the committee is asked only to look at protracted
     radiation instead of --
         DR. WYMER:  Protracted low level or just --
         DR. RAABE:  Protracted, it doesn't make much difference
     whether it is low, you have to put the high level -- as a scientist, you
     have to put the high level in with the low level to see what the shape
     of the dose response curve looks like.  But protracted radiation, for
     example, -- it is really what we are talking about within the nuclear
     waste issue, really, internally deposited radionuclides.
         You heard in the BEIR VII presentation yesterday, they said,
     no, we are not going to cover internally deposited radionuclides.  So
     that means they are going to emphasize the acute high dose rate, atomic
     bomb survivor studies and other related medical data, and very little --
     they won't touch on what probably is the most important issue.
         Also, they work with a very simplistic model to take all
     these analyses they do of acute high level radiation and try to predict
     what is going to happen from protracted radiation, and the model can be
     shown easily to be wrong, by looking at actual data on humans and
     animals with protracted irradiation.
         So I just see that as a gigantic gap, you know, we just
     didn't get it.  Some people touched on it a little bit, but only a
     little bit.  And the whole basis of protecting the public with regard to
     radioactive waste is probably low doses of radiation protracted in time. 
     And if there is a significant difference in the shape of the dose
     response curve, then we should know that.
         Now, I actually have worked for about 20 years in analyzing
     protracted radiation studies from internally deposited radionuclide,
     looking at about 12 radionuclides, and both high LET and low LET, and I
     can tell you that from my studies, I always found a very pronounced
     effective threshold.  Very pronounced.
         Now, that is just, you know, that is my observation of data. 
     But I think the whole point is, if there is a true difference in
     response, and there is an effective threshold associated with protracted
     irradiation, we need to pull together the information about protracted
     irradiation.
         DR. WYMER:  Okay.
         DR. RAABE:  The other one little point, just a technical
     point that came up a couple of times, and I mentioned it at the very
     beginning yesterday, and some people asked, well, what did I mean by
     this?  Linear no-threshold has two parts.  It has the linear part and
     the no-threshold part.  Now, to some people, when you say there is a
     threshold model, they think, oh, that means there must be some dose at
     which the risk is zero.  Well, we can prove there is no zero risk
     because, you know, as Art said yesterday, there are some DNA changes
     that aren't repaired.
         When I talk about a threshold model, I call it an effective
     threshold model, I just talk about the risk going down to very low
     levels.  And when I calculate a risk of 10 to the minus 20, at some low
     does, for all practical purposes, I ignore that.  It is probably the
     chance the ceiling will fall in this building because some engineer
     miscalculated some stress on some beam.
         MS. THOMAS:  Don't say that.
         MR. LARSON:  That's 10 to the minus 4.
         [Laughter.]
         DR. RAABE:  So, you know, to some people, when you say
     threshold, they say -- it clicks in their mind, zero, zero risk.  Well,
     I don't know if we can -- we can't find zero risk, and I am not sure we
     need to.
         DR. GARRICK:  I like to call that the speed limit mentality.
         DR. RAABE:  And so the other thing -- and if you read -- I
     read the whole NCRP report and this is a very important part of the
     first several sections, that they come to the conclusion that since
     there are DNA changes that are not repaired, that, obviously, you cannot
     have a threshold.
         Now, the linear part is interesting, too, because they also
     say, therefore, the linear is the best model.  Well, why linear, you
     know?  Curvilinear responses are very common in biological studies. 
     And, so, could it be curvilinear with no-threshold?
         So those are all questions that just popped in my mind as
     things were going on yesterday.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  I could give a summary of my impressions if
     you want it.
         MR. HALUS:  That would be great.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  We have time.  I just want to start out by
     saying I am not a toxicologist, I am not an epidemiologist, I am not a
     biologist, I am not in risk analysis, but I feel like a voyeur about to
     become a target in an interdisciplinary scientific spitting match.  I
     shouldn't have said that publicly, but I am prepared to get wet, so my
     comments are only from someone in a closely-allied area looking at what
     I have heard in the last day.
         I view there as being three problems associated with this
     whole issue, credibility, certainty and creativity.  Credibility, we
     have a two-pronged problem. The first part of that problem is acceptance
     by the public.  The second part is acceptance by the scientific
     community.  Certainty, we need to know what is really possible to answer
     and how well can we answer it.  We need to be realistic about what we
     can know, what is needed to change things, and the need to proceed in
     the public interest needs to inform our interpretation of certainty.
         The third issue, creativity, I am struck by a lack of new
     approaches.  The approaches appear to be the same old types of research,
     although I was given some hope with the humane genome project.  There
     seems to also be some dissonance among the results that is based upon
     disciplinary lines.
         I would like to see somebody, and it is probably not NRC,
     but someone with timeframes for action, to try to look at radical
     advances, the Manhattan Project, broad and forward thinking individuals
     who would be unrestrained and unfettered in looking at what are the
     fields and technologies, et cetera, and DOE has started to do that, that
     can inform this better.  That is probably beyond what this particular
     committee can do.
         I want to make some brief comments about what I viewed as
     each of the research areas and then make some recommendations to you
     about that.  First, is the epidemiology, and I am going to also lump in
     there, and I will get wet doing this, both the human, animal
     epidemiology, and the non-human animal research, which I realize is much
     more controlled.  It seems that that is where the human endpoints
     reside.
         The results of epidemiologists' studies will also help us
     with workers in accidents, but may not be that helpful because of the
     dose ranges that are practical in looking at public stuff, these two
     types of research are very useful for testing low dose models.  The work
     on this data will help us, give us a better launch point or
     extrapolation point, the lowest point at which we have data about
     endpoints, and it will help us understand the confounding factors that
     may be involved in the inductions of cancer and other effects.  We might
     need new studies along these lines, but we have to be very careful about
     what type of studies are done.
         I also get the sense, and I will address this with one of my
     recommendations, is that there is not really a reanalysis of older data
     and good quality control of datasets when trying to combine them to make
     a result.
         The cellular biological research is the second category of
     research.  I think these are important in giving us the models to go
     below where the animal and non-human -- the human and non-human animal
     research takes us.  It will help us understand the possibility, the
     validity, et cetera, of hormesis and is the basis of all our models.
         We have to be very careful with the cellular research,
     though, that we don't confuse damage and significant response.
         I think with these areas of the human epidemiology, the
     nonhuman animal research and cellular there are other issues that affect
     those that are holding them back, for example, the way that we're
     analyzing things.  Secondly, different things like what dose quantity is
     being used and is it appropriate for the type of study.  And I have some
     basic questions about that.
         I also hear things like well, the absolute doses measured
     will not really affect the results, they just shift the curve.  Well, if
     you have a nonlinear curve, having an error in your jumping-off point
     will have a very serious effect on the results.  For example, if you had
     an exponential model, then where you're setting the doses and what
     quantities you're using for doses are going to completely confound
     things.
         The third broad area is about regulatory research, how do
     you regulate and perform operations in the presence of uncertainty?  I
     think the risk-informed approach is something that there's probably
     research, it's not scientific, but policy-related research on regulatory
     mechanisms.  That might be something that NRC staff should be encouraged
     to absolutely continue.
         The fourth area would be in risk communication and how we do
     things, and in fact it informs how we treat the results of the other
     research, and that's both to the scientific community and to the
     nonscientific community.  How do we get acceptance, how do we put
     through a change and get that accepted?  And how do we get scientific
     consensus among fields?  Certainly risk communication and how to run
     meetings and making sure there's open and how we do this is beyond my
     expertise, but I identify that as an area of research.
         The last area is something that struck me in all of this,
     and this has to do with the synthetic methods of analysis by which we
     integrate data from different disciplines in order to get a result.  And
     I'm going to speak to that a lot.  I do not believe that we have
     necessarily institutional bias by NCRP, NAS, or NRC.  There is something
     more subtle going on that's affecting the acceptance of this work, and I
     will address that.  Areas of this sort of synthetic methods analysis
     include items like interdisciplinary peer review of what's happening and
     are there -- what are the limits of science itself and to how we're
     reviewing things.  Secondly, how you link disciplines together to inform
     policy.  And the third thing which we actually were hearing a lot of
     this veiled today, the third thing is how to analyze and build models
     with data from different disciplines.  So that's probably the area that
     should receive the greatest effort at this point if you want to do a
     fast result.
         I have several recommendations that fall out of that
     perspective.  Some are -- they're on different levels.  Some appear
     trivial and some appear sort of more broad sweeping.
         First of all, before hearing Otto's comments, I was struck
     that not only were a lot of the data that were flashed before us very
     quickly -- not only were the dose ranges not going anywhere close to
     what we're interested in, subcentigray, and -- or wherever you want to
     pick it -- that they were not the right type of data.  These are all
     external exposures, except for the radon base, and I'll privately
     discuss my opinions on that with anyone who will give me ten minutes. 
     They are primarily external exposures.  They exclude for the most part
     not only sort of protracted or low-dose-rate things, so we have no low
     dose, we have very little low dose rate protracted exposure information,
     but we're also missing high LET data.  And those are exactly the effects
     and things of concern when we're talking about decommissioning,
     decontamination, low levels in the environment.  We're talking about
     internally deposited radionuclides.
         When you open that, there are things that aren't even being
     looked at, like dose distributions within organs.  I've done a bit of
     work in nuclear medicine, internal dosimetry, and they found out that if
     you take an organ and you divide it into the different cell types, in
     vivo, that you assign dose quantities that relate to those cell types,
     and you use dose distributions on that to recalculate things, you get a
     much better correlation between dose and effect.  And I think they're
     just starting to do that in nuclear medicine and radionuclide-based
     radiotherapies, which are right out at the front of the map in those two
     disciplines.  So there's a lack of internal data, which are the most
     important, and if anything, you would serve the scientific enterprise by
     supporting strongly, even though NRC may not do or fund this, but
     supporting strongly research in that area.
         Secondly, we need to continue the biological research
     support, DOE's program, and allow high-risk innovative research.  Along
     that line, because of the policy implications of that research, it is
     imperative that NRC be engaged, even as an observer, in the interagency
     reviews of research in these areas.
         The policy issues, as we heard, are quiet strong.  The
     industrial issues, as we heard from President Quinn of ANS, are quite
     strong.  So in research being conducted and things going on with NAS,
     DOE, NASA, DOD, NCI, et cetera, in particular the new DOE program, NRC
     should at the very least have active observers following what's going on
     so that NRC can stay in touch with changes, advances, while they pursue
     concurrently what they need to do in terms of other issues.
         I'm just going to put in a plug for this, as we cannot
     ignore the need for research aimed at cost reduction in measurements and
     remediation activities despite trying to look at our limit, I think cost
     reduction is something that will actually help the industry.
         My last point is probably the most controversial, and it
     sort of has two parts.  I don't believe in a conspiracy theory, but in
     hearing how BEIR and NCRP are working, and we've heard their consensus
     process, I think these are very noble efforts to do a proper consensus
     process, but you think about it, you have 16 experts on a BEIR report,
     and there will be one person who actually is the person who is figuring
     out how to tie together all the data and derive the result.  This might
     be a mathematician or statistician or someone.  The same thing with
     NCRP.
         You have 60 council members.  There are not very many of
     these data-synthesizing people involved who are council members of the
     NCRP.  When the BEIR and NCRP reports go out to comment, they go out to
     the stakeholders.  They go out to the specialists in radiation
     protection, they go out to the radiation biology specialists who may
     favor, just by virtue of being scientists, they're going to favor
     theories that support their own work.  And it's not going to go out to
     mathematicians, the statistical society, to the people who are scattered
     across disciplines who are actually bringing together the work.  So I
     would favor something that said there needed to be independent research
     in the synthesis of this data and analysis by which these models get
     derived.
         And I would further wildly speculate that there have only
     been a handful of individuals involved historically with that in the
     past.  Which I then sort of as a slightly more wild recommendation would
     say the following which actually supports (e), which is that we need to
     have because of the historical mistrust by both the public and the
     scientists, and this is a large undertaking I recognize, some
     independent new group or groups that will start doing two things.
         I mean, one thing, you could totally revise the NAS and the
     NCRP process.  That's one approach.  The other is to try to find a new
     group or groups that will do two things.  No. 1, they will rereview and
     attempt to synthesize the existing data, making sure there's peer review
     of the experts who are doing the synthesis.  These are people from math,
     statistics, et cetera, who happen to have specialized in radiation.  But
     they're not getting peer review necessarily by people outside the
     radiation field in the synthesis.
         And, secondly, there might be something to be gained by
     taking all the data that we have, doing quality assurance or quality
     control in reanalyzing it.  When you do that, you have to be very
     careful you don't miss 75 percent of the data, and, secondly, that
     there's an independent judgment, interdisciplinary independent judgment
     of the quality of the research.  No matter how nice your data bases are,
     if you don't do that, you're not going to get results that are totally
     credible.
         So I think I've said more than I should have, and that
     summarizes my impression of this meeting.
         DR. GARRICK:  Thank you.
         Otto?
         DR. RAABE:  Okay, back to me.
         Well, I don't have quite as elaborate a presentation
     prepared, but I made the point about protracted radiation, which is
     something that's very near to what I'm thinking about, and I wanted to
     just point out a few things that we do know really well about protracted
     irradiation.
         For example, a lot of people in this century have been
     exposed to radium-226, and this has been under study for a long time. 
     This book "Radium and Humans" written by Bob Rowland out of Argonne
     Laboratory summarizes all the data, the effects data and the dosimetry
     data, on some 2,000 people, 1,450 of them who were exposed to
     radium-226, very high levels, mostly earlier in the century.  Radium
     was -- I think Marie Curie got the Nobel Prize for separating radium in
     1905 from uranium, and after that it was used for all kinds of things,
     medical potions, put in drinking water, and for luminous dials.  And by
     1909, just four years after she got the Nobel Prize, you could buy a
     watch with a luminous dial or a clock with a luminous dial with radium. 
     And the workers who worked with that material got exposed at high
     levels.  But also chemists got exposed, and it was used in medicine.
         Well, the studies of these people have gone on for at least
     50 years.  Robley Evans was a big investigator in this at MIT, and then
     it was taken over by Argonne.
         What do these data tell us about high LET irradiation of the
     skeleton from radium?  That's the question that we have human data. 
     Well, Robley Evans in 1972 went around the country and pointed out in
     lectures he was giving, he was president-elect of the Health Physics
     Society at the time, he went around and said hey, there's a practical
     threshold.  The reason I know this is because no person whose dose to
     the skeleton was less than 1,000 rad, which is 20,000 rem after you
     correct for the quality factor for alpha particle, developed bone cancer
     or had any other effects that we could observe.  That was 1972.
         Okay.  Now we have Rowland's report just a few years ago
     summarizing the final data -- that it will get.  There were a lot of
     people still alive in their eighties and nineties in good health that
     didn't get into the final report when the study ended.
         What is Rowland's conclusion?  No person whose dose to the
     skeleton was less than 10 gray, 200 sievert, 20,000 rem, developed bone
     cancer.  We're talking about a gigantic dose.  Is this a fluke, or is
     this real?  Okay.  So you look at animal studies with radium.  Well,
     it's easy to show why this occurs with protracted exposure.  It occurs
     because when exposure is protraced over a lifetime, there isn't a linear
     response, nothing happens for most of the person's lifetime, and there's
     a long induction period until you actually have the bone cancers
     develop.
         As the dose rate goes down, which is the concentration of
     radium in the skeleton, and you have to remember that when people were
     exposed to radium they had it in their skeleton for their lifetimes,
     yes, it was cleared over time, and it was reduced, and it went down as a
     power function with time.  So that when they were very old, they had
     very little left.  But they got irradiated almost over their whole
     lifetime after initial exposure.  And so this means that when you look
     at the data from the human studies and the animal studies, they turn out
     to agree.  And I published this in 1980 in "Science."
         They agree very well, and also the mouse studies.  What they
     show is that as the average concentration of radium in the skeleton gets
     smaller, called the dose rate, if you will, the time required to develop
     cancer gets longer and longer and longer.  Now it turns out it takes
     less total dose to produce the cancer at low dose rates.  This is what
     always confuses people.  They say well, you know, lower dose rates are
     more dangerous.  They look at this.  You heard this yesterday.  It's
     absolutely true.  It takes one-tenth as much total dose to reach a point
     where there's cancer in people and the dose rate is lower.  But the time
     keeps getting longer and longer.
         Eventually a finite population of people die of age related
     illnesses.  They die of old age or something else.
         When the time required to produce the cancer exceeds the
     lifespan, you get no cancers.  We are talking about competing risks.
         Now if medical science were to extend the life expectancy of
     people we would probably have to lower some of our radiation standards,
     because what we are talking about to my way of thinking for these
     protracted exposures is that in our normal lifespan we don't live long
     enough for some of these low doses to have any effect, and that is
     exactly what we see in these people and it is exactly what we see in the
     animal studies.
         They agree exactly and also the distribution of the cases of
     bone cancer from radium is not a broad distribution.  It is very narrow.
         In fact, in the biological system a coefficient of variation
     of only 20 percent is kind of a minor miracle, and that is what it is
     for the animal studies.  It is about 30 percent for the people.  When
     you plot this up, the average radium in the skeleton versus the time to
     development of cancer the coefficient of variation is only about 20 to
     30 percent.  It is really tight, and all it shows is that as dose rate
     goes down people have to wait longer to get the cancer, even though the
     radiation is more effective on a total dose basis, but you end up with
     this lifespan effective threshold.
         But it is real so you look at these people below 10 gray,
     200 sieverts, 20,000 rem, over their lifespan -- they don't develop bone
     cancer, they don't have any other effects that we can see, and the same
     is true in the beagle studies and the same is true with plutonium and
     the same is true with Strontium-90 is a low LET radiation.  We studied
     that at my laboratory and -- non-linear.  It is a threshold type
     response again.
         When I say it is a threshold type response, I don't mean
     that there's some dose here below which the risk is zero.  I don't mean
     that at all.
         Okay, so what we are dealing with then is perhaps this
     range.  Now when I started in this field in the '50s and I went to
     graduate school at the University of Rochester, they said oh, we are
     going to use this linear model for radiation protection.  Now we know
     that it is probably wrong but it probably overestimates the risk, so if
     we are just going to worry about radiation protection and we want to set
     up some standards, we'll use this linear model.
         I think the problem came in the '70s when the ICRP started
     writing things into some of the reports that suggested that they
     believed they could really count bodies with these models, so you use
     this linear model.
         Now what if we had a standard of 100 millirem per year for
     the public and people actually got exposed to an extra 100 millirem per
     year for their whole lifespan -- 70 years?
         The linear model would predict an increase in lifetime
     cancer of about .3 percent -- .3 percent.  On the other hand, if you
     look at this type of result from these data with several radionuclides,
     every one I have looked at comes out this way.  It is not a fluke.  It
     doesn't make a difference which laboratory or which radionuclide.  They
     all turn out this way.
         If this is more representative of those protracted
     exposures, then the risk is considerably less than .3 percent, so the
     uncertainty we have is somewhere in that range.  It is probably lower
     than .3 percent.  It could be so small that it's almost meaningless --
     certainly not measurable.
         Now from the point of view of the statistician such as
     Charles Land, whom we heard yesterday, if you just go out -- even when
     Charlie talked -- Meinhold -- if you just go out and say, you know, you
     can't find that, you're right.  You cannot just de novo go out there and
     try to find a .3 percent increase in cancer rates in the general
     population where 30 percent of people are developing cancer.  You just
     can't find it, so there is no statistical test and no study you are
     going to do that makes any sense that will ever find that if it is .3 or
     to be able to provide that it is not .3 but .1 or .01 or .001 or 10 to
     the minus 20.  There is no way that you can do that directly.
         So what we are stuck with then is that we have got to look
     at what we do know, which is mostly high doses and see if we can figure
     out what the processes are involved.
         Now why does this occur?  Well, to my knowledge nobody has
     figured out how to tie together the acute exposures which are much more
     effective at causing cancer with the protracted exposures, because we
     know that at one sievert we can increase in an obvious way the cancer
     rate in people from the atomic bomb survivor data.
         These studies with Strontium-90 or radium, we cannot see
     anything at 1000 rem if it was spread out over the whole lifetime, but
     we know if we give them instantaneous exposure to 100 rem there will be
     a 60 percent increase in all kinds of cancers so there is a big
     difference, and one of the problems is the model that is -- the paradigm
     model that is in the minds of the people we heard who are promoting the
     basic linear model.
         The paradigm is oh, well, you know, the protraction lowers
     the slope.  You just need a correction factor.  It is still linear but
     we are going to lower the slope -- but it doesn't look like it is linear
     anymore.
         So in other words, we don't understand the mechanism that
     gets us from radiation exposure to cancer.  If we can't explain these
     data as well as the atomic bomb survivor data.  If we understood the
     mechanism we could explain both sets of data -- so there is a big hole
     in our understanding.
         As long as there is that hole in our understanding there
     will be disagreement among scientists on this issue.  I am not sure how
     we can get away from that.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.  Reaction to the public if they took that
     out of context could be very negative.
         DR. RAABE:  Of course.
         DR. GARRICK:  That we don't understand the relationship
     between radiation exposure and cancer --
         DR. RAABE:  We don't know the exact mechanism.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  We know that you get -- you expose at certain
     levels, you get some increases in cancer.
         DR. GARRICK:  But it seems that the concept of looking at
     the issue not in terms of a threshold but in terms of a curve, if you
     wish, that can give us insight on what the likelihood is of getting
     cancer is a much more logical representation of the science than the
     debate about a threshold.
         DR. RAABE:  I agree with you.  I agree with you.  Yes,
     absolutely.  It is curvolinear, you know, and I mean it's easy to show
     that with human data -- now of course the human data that throws a
     spanner in the works, as the British would say, is the radon stuff that
     we heard, because they fit this log linear model which they call a
     linear model and the people who did that really believe that it is a
     true model so you have this case where you have protracted exposure.
         Now personally I believe that there is an effective
     threshold for the radon stuff too but it hasn't been well demonstrated,
     and you have these data which are very hard to interpret because of the
     uncertainties in dose and other factors.
         DR. GARRICK:  It also seems that a lot of progress could be
     made if we think more in terms of radionuclide specifics about
     thresholds --
         DR. RAABE:  Absolutely.  Absolutely.
         DR. GARRICK:  Than mixes, and this is kind of appealing,
     because in the nuclear waste disposal issue we usually end up talking
     about a very few, very few radionuclides, and in fact you can almost
     generalize it.  You can almost say that for low-level waste because more
     of it's uranium contaminated than we ever anticipated that the driver
     for long-term exposure will be uranium.
         For transuranium waste we have seen that the driver over the
     compliance period of the repository is principally plutonium.  And for
     the Yucca Mountain waste, we now know that for periods beyond 10,000s of
     years that the driver is going to be things like neptunium-237, with the
     early dominance provided by iodine and technetium.
         So the truth is maybe we're just not taking advantage of the
     characteristics of the problems that we're having to deal with with
     respect to getting the most mileage out of what we do know.
         DR. RAABE:  Yes.  And there are some holes in what we know
     about those things, too.  Plutonium, for example, I've done a lot of
     work with plutonium in my career, and I've measured plutonium at the
     Nevada Test Site in the fifties, and I've done modeling, and I've made
     particles of plutonium, and I've gone to fuel fabrication plants and
     studied the plutonium particles that were produced during fabrication
     processes, studied the solubility of plutonium in different forms, and
     have worked with and was involved in experiments where we exposed
     beagles to plutonium particles that we made specifically to find out
     about effects on the lung.
         And I've modeled the results of these studies. 
     Unfortunately the studies, they were all funded by the Department of
     Energy, and at the time when the last beagles were dying, they took away
     the money, so the final complete analysis -- they got more interested in
     genome work at that time.  So the money got, you know, shifted, because
     they thought the genome work had a bigger payoff.
         So the analysis was never totally completely done, and data
     are still available for that, but I have done these analyses of
     plutonium, and again you find this threshold phenomenon, for the same
     reason.  So I then estimated by a scaling process that I developed what
     the human risk would be from inhaling plutonium.
         So then I said well now I find some human data to try to see
     if it fits the lung risk from inhaling plutonium.  There isn't any.  Not
     in the United States.  Because although thousands of people have been
     exposed to plutonium by inhalation in the nuclear industry in the United
     States, we've got no documented cases of the lung cancer being produced
     by anyone exposed below the standards -- or above the standards -- in
     the United States.
         Now they tell me the Russians are going to supply the data,
     and they actually have been, because they weren't being as careful as we
     were.  And so they had people exposed to very high levels.  But those
     data are very complicated, because they didn't get exposed to just
     plutonium, they got exposed to neutrons and external radiation, gamma
     rays, and all kinds of things.
         But they have two papers been published out of Russia on
     this, and one was published in the Health Physics Journal in December,
     and it shows that -- it states in this paper that there were no
     effects -- well, I should point out before I get to that that I
     estimated that the effective threshold, the place where the risk would
     drop quite precipitously, was at about one gray to the lung, which is
     about 2,000 rem.  So -- because with the alpha particles from plutonium,
     but one gray.
         Well, the paper that was published in the Health Physics
     Journal from the Russian data.  They found that below eight-tenths of a
     gray they had no effects that they could identify, no lung cancer.
         But to confuse the issue, another group at the same
     institute published a paper in Radiation Research where they fit a
     linear model to it.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  The same data.  Fit a linear model to it and
     claimed that you could describe it with a linear dose-response model.
              Well, that's not new in our industry.  The reason that
     it works so well is that when you actually plot up the data -- I've done
     this many times -- when you actually plot up the data as a function of
     cumulative dose and look at the shape, what I call the threshold region
     or the region where the risk gets very low is very tiny, it's right at
     the origin.  It's smack up against it, because all -- it's down there
     below one gray, and all the effects are 2, 3, 4, 5 -- and so it gets
     shoved over in the corner, and you've seen that on some of these plots
     yesterday.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  And it's just a little squiggle, because it's
     not caused by the radiation, it's caused by the life-span limitation. 
     See, it's not -- the radiation is causing this straight line to appear
     that maybe it's a straight line, I don't know in this kind of plot, it
     looks curvilinear to me, but you can put a straight line through it. 
     The radiation's causing that straight line.  But that little squiggle,
     which is the life-span limitation, is caused by something else.  People
     are dying of old age.
         Well, you can draw a straight line through it and it looks
     great.  In fact, the year that Evans came around the country and
     promoted this model, Chuck Mayes and Ray Lloyd took the very same data
     and they regrouped it, plotted it on a linear scale, and drew a straight
     line and declared there's a linear dose-response.  Same data.
         DR. GARRICK:  It's amazing what you can do with the least
     squares fit.  You can make almost anything.
         DR. RAABE:  And it does look good.  It looks very good.  You
     look at it and say hey, yes, that's a straight line.  Well, that
     threshold there, this is a log plot, that threshold is way down here in
     this little squiggle at the bottom, but it's a very important squiggle
     if you're only exposing people to a few millirem per year -- or a few
     hundred millirem per year.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  I just have a question for Otto.  It seems to
     me another source of data, there are the animal data, but another new
     source of data, a long-term thing, are the Chernobyl data.  It sounds
     though like what you're saying is you're not going to see an effect
     there anyway.
         DR. RAABE:  Well, as you know, they have been studying,
     looking for effects from Chernobyl, and the last reports I heard, which
     were I think a year ago when I was in Vienna, basically said that they
     haven't found leukemia that was predicted by the linear model from the
     atomic bomb survivor data, they didn't have any of that leukemia; what
     they did find was thyroid problems with children.  That conflicts with
     some other data that's around, but, you know, still it doesn't sound
     unreasonable that high doses of I131 to children could increase their
     cancer rates, and it's not unreasonable, but I've heard people say that
     that data is a little bit hard to interpret too because they don't have
     any good baseline information about the number of nodules in the thyroid
     and so forth, and suddenly they come in with this team of people looking
     at all the children, and so forth.
         But I think that's believable, that the I131 exposures to
     children did produce this effect.  They were high doses, very high
     doses.  But nothing else has come out of it, and certainly leukemia
     did -- they expected it would appear within ten years, you know, they
     didn't find it.
         DR. GARRICK:  I wanted to ask a question.  We've discussed
     this several times, and I'm becoming convinced more and more of the
     problems with it, but one thing that I've never really felt that I could
     completely resolve in my mind was we have at all our nuclear
     installations since the late forties been wearing film badges and
     dosimeters and monitoring ourselves quite carefully and health physics
     and radiation protection in the various reactors and also the
     laboratories have been tenacious in seeing to it that we do that, and
     also supplementing our own measurements with their own measurements in
     areas where special kinds of work were being conducted.  And yet I get
     the sense that this enormous data base is relatively useless.
         What seems to be terribly disappointing because it's low
     dose, most of it, and it's very population oriented, but I guess it's a
     combination of confounding factors and issues having to do with
     identifying the individuals and how they died and what have you.  Why is
     that tremendous data base not more valuable in addressing this issue?
         DR. RAABE:  Well, the workers in the United States have been
     under study at various laboratories, and the Cardis study that
     was discussed --
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  Is a very comprehensive, complete study, and,
     you know, what it showed, we heard some comments this morning about it,
     what it shows is that when you really look at the workers, you can't
     disprove the hypothesis that there's no risk, and you can't disprove the
     hypothesis that the linear no-threshold model is correct, because the
     uncertainty, even when they have thousands, tens of thousands of workers
     in this composite study, the uncertainty is great.  And you saw the data
     presented yesterday.  There is a couple leukemia cases -- there are two
     labs that have high leukemia and the others did not.  In fact, at Oak
     Ridge leukemia is lower in the exposed people than --
         DR. GARRICK:  Well, we may not be able to --
         DR. RAABE:  You know, so it's --
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes, but --
         DR. RAABE:  You can't reach conclusions --
         DR. GARRICK:  Okay.  But you did this, you broke the problem
     down into a linear problem and a threshold problem.  Maybe you can't
     address the issue of linearity, but can't you say something on the basis
     of this data base about threshold?  I mean, the fact that we can't do
     anything --
         DR. RAABE:  No.  No.
         DR. GARRICK:  Suggests to me that there's --
         DR. RAABE:  What this largest study of these data, the
     Cardis study, has shown, international study, is that you can't say
     anything about the threshold.  You can't disprove the hypothesis that
     the dose response is linear, and you can't disprove the hypothesis that
     there was no effect at low dose.  You can't disprove either hypothesis.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Well, it depends on what your null model
     is.
         DR. RAABE:  Beg your pardon?
         DR. HORNBERGER:  It depends on what your null model is.  He
     is saying if your null model is no effect, then there is a threshold.
         DR. RAABE:  Well, I'm saying that the uncertainty, I mean,
     you have to compare it to something.  So they compare it to people at
     high dose or low dose.
         DR. GARRICK:  Well, there's an uncertainty because you
     didn't observe anything.  I mean, you didn't see --
         DR. RAABE:  There's not much happening.  That's right.
         DR. GARRICK:  But to me that's --
         DR. RAABE:  As Keith was saying yesterday, we don't know the
     risk.
         DR. GARRICK:  What am I missing here?  To me that's
     extremely valuable information.
         DR. RAABE:  It is, but it doesn't -- you can't reject the
     LNT on that basis, and so you'll always have somebody --
         DR. GARRICK:  No, but again if I look at it in its component
     parts, and in this case look at threshold, rather than linearity --
         DR. RAABE:  We have a fantastic record of radiation safety
     in this country.  It's too bad that we can't tell the public about it.
         DR. GARRICK:  Go ahead.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  This goes back to what I was attempting to
     articulate and which I think Keith Dinger yesterday was trying to do but
     were not the right specialist.  Isn't there something in risk where you
     have a study like this that you can say that the study shows that within
     uncertainty sigma that the risk must be less than x under a certain
     dose.  Isn't there a way you can make a statement like that?
         DR. GARRICK:  Sure.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  And isn't that what should be coming out of
     this?  And why aren't we getting this?
         DR. GARRICK:  That's my perspective.  That's --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  But again, as Land said, what you're going
     to be able to say with that kind of study is an upper bound, and the
     upper bound you can't discard the LNT.
         DR. GARRICK:  Exactly right.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  Which is fine.  That's fine.  Who cares?
         DR. RAABE:  That's why I started off.  I said 100 millirem
     per year, you can calculate from the ICRP model, three-tenths percent
     increase in cancer over the lifetime if someone's exposed to 100
     millirem every year for 70 years.  It's probably not that high.  It may
     be effectively zero.  We don't know, and we can't prove it.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Right.  But, see, my point is that, you
     know, statistically, if you start with your null model being that the
     slope is zero, the data can't refute that.
         DR. RAABE:  That's right.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  I mean, that's just an alternate way to
     look at it.
         DR. RAABE:  The data cannot refute that.  That's right.  You
     cannot disprove that hypothesis, that it's zero.
         Now, we're not talking at all about -- I'm not talking at
     all about any beneficial effects.  I mean, if there -- we heard about
     beneficial effects, and if there are beneficial effects that affect
     carcinogenesis, that will alter the findings.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Yes, but most of the worker studies show
     the healthy-worker effect.  Certainly the Oak Ridge study showed it.
         DR. RAABE:  I think they all do.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  They all do.
         DR. RAABE:  And yesterday we heard that the atomic bomb
     survivors showed it.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Right.
         DR. RAABE:  The healthy survivor effect.
         I've never gotten an answer to this question, because I
     heard this rumor, and I presented it as a rumor to Charles Land
     yesterday, and I don't think he bit on it.
         DR. GARRICK:  I see the jokes now.  The bad news is you're
     going to be bombed tomorrow by an atomic bomb; the good news is if you
     survive, you'll be healthier.
         DR. RAABE:  Well, --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  You didn't say that, did you?  That's going
     to look terrible in the official transcript.
         DR. RAABE:  The Japanese kept very, very good records of
     where people lived, and when they were born, and when they died, they
     kept extremely good records.  And I heard a rumor that there was a
     control group that consisted of people who did not -- were not present
     in Japan, or in Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, and
     they decided not to use it, the rumor, because the people -- most of the
     people who were exposed had much lower mortality and lower cancer rates.
         Now, I have never been able to prove that to myself.  I have
     never found that.  And that is why I asked Dr. Land, and he didn't say
     anything against it.  He did say there was 26,000 people that were taken
     out of the study because they didn't like the way they looked.  You
     know, as a scientist, I worry about these things.  I don't like
     censoring the data because you don't like the way it looks.
         DR. GARRICK:  One of the things I -- oh, excuse me.  Go
     ahead.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  Oh, no, it's off.  It's a slightly different
     topic.
         DR. GARRICK:  One of the things that, and this is maybe a
     slightly different topic, too, but you reminded me of it, that I wanted
     to raise yesterday, is that I recall, in the last two or three meetings
     we have had on this issue, that one of the arguments given against some
     of this data that we are hearing hasn't been adequately considered, one
     of the arguments given is that part of the problem is that it was not
     done under controlled experiment conditions, or that it was not
     supported with a quality assurance standard of some sort.
         Is there a way to take old work and put a quality template
     on it of some sort and move it out of the zone of not being useful
     because of that, and into the zone of being accepted?
         DR. RAABE:  Every paper I read, I try to evaluate the
     quality of it because there are so many things that can happen. 
     Experiments are very complicated.  And I think in some cases, and I
     can't, you know, pick -- as I say, every paper sort of has to be looked
     at separately.  You have to look at the study and figure out what the
     potential flaws are.  Sometimes there are big ones.  And those flaws can
     lead to great uncertainties, which makes you doubt whether the results
     are meaningful.  That is why repeated studies that show the same thing
     are so important in science.
         You know, we know about cold fusion, for example, you know. 
     Whatever happened to cold fusion?  Well, it wasn't repeatable.  And you
     could go through the original paper and say, well, you know, it looks
     right.  Okay.
         So, this is the thing, there are all kinds of pitfalls that
     even the best scientist can fall into these pitfalls, even trying to be
     careful.  And so, yes, every time you see a result, you have to say,
     well, what -- you know, is this correct, or are there other problems? 
     And you try to evaluate that.  In some cases you can see there are
     problems.  And, usually, the kind of problems you see, for instance,
     animal studies is the author does not tell in any detail how they
     selected the controls.  That is one of the big problems that occurs in
     so many studies.  Controls are so important.
         In the case control study, you have to know something about
     the controls if you want the confounder situation to be stable.  And,
     typically, you know, I have just got to get on to this, there are lots
     of studies that come out.  Here is the Rocketdyne study, you probably
     heard about this, it made the news last year, out of UCLA, where they --
     lots of studies like this, small studies, where they are looking at
     nuclear workers, and they are finding, in effect, and they are saying
     that radiation is much more dangerous than we ever believed because they
     found a statistically significant effect at a very low dose.  The
     exposure of these people was very small, but there was a statistically
     significant effect to higher exposed people versus lower.
         And we look at it and say, well, -- and there are lots of
     these.  There is the Steve Wing paper, several of them.  What is going
     on here?  How -- you know, because this is going to happen.  You are
     going to see this kind of alternative paper in the literature.  I am
     sure this is published in some statistical journal now.
         Well, there is a big problem with these epi studies.  The
     problem is that the confounders are very difficult to work with.  The
     other kinds of exposures that occur are very difficult to quantify, and
     when the study is done, the only good measurements that the researcher
     can find about these workers is the radiation exposure, because it has
     been documented perfectly.  You know, if you are doing any kind of
     fitting of data which has multi-factorial data, one of the principles of
     regression is the measurements that are made with the greatest precision
     tend to dominate the response, even though other factors are actually
     causing the response.  So you get the impression that the best
     measurements have a cause-effect relationship when all they have is an
     association that is related to the way which they are done.
         But we have -- okay, what are the confounders?  Well,
     cigarette smoking.  In this case, I talked to the author.  He based his
     conclusion on four cancer cases in the high dose group.  One was a
     Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is not believed to be radiation sensitive
     anyway, one was leukemia, and two were lung cancers.  And I said to the
     man, the two that were lung cancers, were they cigarette smokers?  And
     he said, I don't know.  Well, what about cigarette smoking?  Well, we
     took some side groups and we tried to balance it and it looked like
     about the same number of people were smokers in the control group as the
     exposed.  But he didn't -- but they didn't do it, it was a side study. 
     They didn't actually do it in the main study.
         So he was basing this -- you know, okay, well, the principle
     of confounders is that if your control group has the same percentage of
     smokers, obviously, there is also dosimetry there.  How much do they
     smoke and so forth?  But if they have the same number, the
     biostatistician thinks he has got it covered.  But if there is only four
     cases, or two cases that you are dealing with, forget it.  The normal
     proximation doesn't work for two cases.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  If there are four cases in the high group,
     how many in the low group?
         DR. RAABE:  Oh, well, there are lots, I have the numbers.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  No, no, no.  But four cases --
         DR. RAABE:  A lot.  Lots.  But the low group is a big group
     of people and the high group is only 20, or 17 people.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Gotcha.  Gotcha.
         DR. RAABE:  But this comes out, you know.  They had a big
     press conference.  Let's see, they -- I don't have them all here, but
     they had a big press conference over, you know, 17 workers, two cases,
     in the high group.  Three cases in 210 workers, lower down, and six
     cases in 723, and then at the lowest group, three cases in 1,333.  Well,
     that becomes statistically significant -- two cases in 17 workers.
         Well, you say, well, okay, well, leukemia is involved there. 
     Well, what about their exposure to organic solvents?  Well, we didn't
     measure that.  There are no objectives for that, we couldn't figure that
     out.  Did they smoke cigarettes?  Well, I don't know, we don't know. 
     Did those two cigarettes?  We don't know.  Didn't you look?  No.  But
     this makes the news.
         Steve Wing came out with a study that was the classic in
     epidemiological fishing expeditions, where you look through all of the
     data, you know, 40 different kinds of cancer, and find one that seems to
     be increased with dose.  This was multiple myeloma that he found. 
     Actually, it wasn't increased with dose, which is kind of interesting. 
     There's four labs.  He took Battelle Northwest, Oak Ridge, I think -- I
     am forgetting what the other two labs were, but he had four DOE
     laboratories that he was working with.  And he look at this multiple
     myeloma.
         Battelle Northwest, in 1979, Ethel Gilbert reported that
     there was an anomalously higher level of multiple myeloma in workers at
     Battelle Northwest.  This didn't occur anyplace else.  And you can have
     all kinds of random things happen with 40 different kinds of cancers in
     your list.
         Well, so, he had this as a starting point.  And when he did
     the case control study, he found no radiation effect on multiple
     myeloma, but that didn't stop him.  Then he partitioned the people into
     the age at which they started working, only he grouped people lower than
     40 years and higher than 40 years.  Bang! His computer program gave him
     a significance.  And he ended up making a videotape that was shown to
     all the workers, you know, I am saying, you know, you have got this
     higher risk of multiple myeloma.
         You know, so, on the other side, I mean we have to -- we
     have got one side here with people coming in and saying, well, you know,
     radiation is really not that dangerous and maybe even beneficial
     effects.  Then you have these other papers coming out from scientists
     who are recognized in way or another saying, oh, it is even worse than
     we thought.  So that goes into the pot.
         What does the public hear?  Well, the public heard this. 
     They had a big press conference.  It made all the newspapers in
     California.  The public heard about Steve Wing.  They hear these things,
     you know, multiple -- you know, this cancer occurs up there.  And the
     workers all had to watch this tape to tell them that they have an
     increased risk.  It is a faulty study, it is very obvious.
         DR. GARRICK:  While we have you here, because we have to
     break for lunch here pretty soon, but what in your opinion, both of you,
     has been the most important advancement made in, say, the last five
     years in the arena of understanding low dose response, if anything?  If
     you want to pick a different time period --
         DR. RAABE:  Twenty years?
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Well, that answers your question.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  If you go by the NCRP's newest report, there
     hasn't been much new because they basically are saying --
         DR. GARRICK:  Because this seems to be a point of debate
     too, between the LNT supporters and the nonsupporters, where the
     nonsupporters seem to think that there's been quite a bit of work done
     that would be evidence of a nonlinear --
         DR. RAABE:  Some of the studies that are cited by some
     people who say that you can't believe the linear no threshold are
     studies that just show you can't discount the possibility of no risk. 
     They don't disprove the linear no threshold and there is a big
     difference between saying your statistics are such that I can't rule out
     zero and saying that LNT is wrong.
         Of course the Cardis study is the biggest one that has been
     done with the most workers that I know of in one study and I think very
     carefully done overall in terms of the epidemiology and the best
     biomathematical methods, and I know Ethel Gilbert personally.  I think
     she is a very good biomathematician.  She was involved in that.
         And what do they show?  And I heard Ethel Gilbert -- they
     say, well, I am repeating myself, it doesn't show anything particularly. 
     I mean we have a very good record.  We can't prove or disprove anything
     within the limits of statistics.  They do believe there is a leukemia
     effect but when I look at leukemia effects and I see it is not
     consistent, it only occurred at two places, one in Canada, one in
     Europe, didn't occur in the United States, sounds like it wasn't
     radiation.  Sounds like a confounder.
         DR. GARRICK:  Charles?
         DR. FAIRHURST:  A couple.  In that period what has been the
     support?  Is there support gaining for hormesis or is that something
     that was not considered significant 15, 20 years ago and it is seemingly
     getting greater attention or greater credence?
         DR. RAABE:  Well, I don't -- I haven't personally worked in
     the area of hormesis.  I work with data and try to fit models and so
     forth.  Now sometimes you see things that look like a beneficial effect. 
     Yes, the dogs in our studies with Strontium-90 that lived the longest
     were the ones in the lowest dose group.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  But we are talking about advanced in the
     last 20 years.  Is there a scientific sort of credibility growing or
     greater evidence that it is real based on basic mechanisms or basic
     understanding?
         DR. RAABE:  There are a number of studies that have been
     pointed up in the last few years that suggest a beneficial effect of --
         DR. FAIRHURST:  That is what I was pushing Art Upton about
     yesterday and he seemed to agree to it.
         Could I ask quickly the other question?  It seems to me that
     you alluded to it yesterday somewhat.  This great variation in
     background, and seemingly no effect, I mean what can you do with that? 
     Apparently you can't treat it statistically but there must be some way
     that evidence shows there's a variation.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  That background is extremely variable.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  I agree --
         DR. KEARFOTT:  Hundred foot dimensions --
         DR. FAIRHURST:  With no apparently correlation to cancer.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  That's possible.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  That is what I am hearing.
         DR. RAABE:  Well, let me give you some real numbers, okay? 
     I did the calculation for the 100 millirem per year, okay?  Most of us
     get about 300 millirem per year, so that would predict about a one -- if
     you believe the linear no threshold, if you believe it is the upper
     limit that would predict, upper limit of about 1 percent lifetime risk
     from cancer from this background level.
         Now the average person in the United States, what? -- 35
     percent of the people get cancer?  You can't find that in the noise.  I
     mean if you go to Utah, where people don't smoke very much, the cancer
     rates go way down but their radiation level goes up.   Well, even if
     there was a special increase of a couple percent in their risk due to
     the radiation, the drop in 10 percent that occurs because they don't
     smoke overwhelms that.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Right.
         DR. RAABE:  In Colorado the average dose to people,
     effective dose to code, is about 900 millirem, about three times higher. 
     Colorado is 48th in cancer in the United States.  I have the numbers
     here if you want to see them.
         Lung cancer, Colorado is down.  Only Utah is lower than
     Colorado in lung cancer.  Most of this extra dose is from radon and Utah
     is down there.  D.C. is 48 cancers per 100,000 and Colorado is 35 --
     this is lung cancer in 1995.
         So let's take the 900.  Well, that would predict about a 3
     percent lifetime risk of cancer.  We are still looking at this
     background level.  It is lower in Colorado than here but I don't know if
     you could statistically ever see if that 3 percent were real.  Can you
     see it amidst the confounders?
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Yes, but can't you come to a conclusion that
     given all of the cancer-causing agents that are bounding in the world
     today, radiation is not a significant component.
         DR. RAABE:  Absolutely right.  Even if you believe LNT.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  The public heard that.
         DR. RAABE:  Even if we believe LNT, the people who are
     arguing LNT are arguing for a very low risk and low dose and the people
     who are arguing other things -- are arguing for a lower risk.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  But can I turn it another way and say you
     are throwing billions of dollars at the LNT hypothesis or protection
     against radiation and say for god's sake put that money into stopping
     people from smoking.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  You're too rational.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Commissioner Dicus yesterday said what is
     the public willing -- if they are willing to pay it, we'll pay it.  I
     think we are not serving the public by not -- I think it was one of your
     points -- I know your risk information and risk doesn't work but there's
     got to be some way you can inform the public of the stupidity of some of
     these allocations.  Maybe I am still --
         DR. RAABE:  One response I have gotten from the public, I
     like to use comparisons.  The risk of a few extra millirem is the same
     risk as moving up a thousand feet, you know, so you if you move to the
     mountains you are going to get the same dose, but in a discussion with
     the public one thing I wanted to bring up was if you come up with these
     numbers, these numbers that we play with, they are pure speculation,
     mind you.
         The Health Physics Society is right.  Below 5 rem you cannot
     come up with a quantitative value that doesn't have such gigantic
     uncertainties that it is almost meaningless, but if you take these
     numbers to the public and say well, you know, the risk is only
     three-tenths of a percent of getting cancer -- "Well, what about those
     people who get the cancer?"
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Oh, sure.  Sure.
         DR. RAABE:  That is what I have been told -- but what about
     those people who actually get those cancers?
         DR. GARRICK:  Just to push Charles' proposal a little
     further, if you took a place like Central City, Colorado, where --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Where some of us have claims.
         DR. GARRICK:  -- where some of own mining property --
         [Laughter.]
         DR. GARRICK:  -- and it's 1000 millirem or whatever, and
     another similar location, similar population, full time residents of
     course, where it is about 100, are we saying that we still couldn't
     control the analysis well enough to do a credible comparison?
         DR. KEARFOTT:  Only a good epidemiologist I think could give
     you that answer.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  Yes, you are asking an epidemiological question.
         The question is whether you can do a case control study
     where you can control enough factors to reduce the background level or
     to control for the background level of cancer and we know about
     cigarette smoking.  That is easy.  But we don't know about other things
     and so I don't know.  That is an epidemiological question.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  But it sounds like a hard one.
         DR. GARRICK:  But they have pretty good information on some
     of these things, like you say -- like cigarettes.  We seem to know
     everybody that smokes in the United States.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Yes, but my suspicion is that perhaps if
     Central City were the size of New York City that you might have a chance
     but when you have a few hundred people living in Central City, even on
     the sample size basis you are going to be really -- it's tough, and that
     is not the hardest part of the problem.
         I still think they have these controlling for lots of other
     things.
         DR. GARRICK:  Well, it's unfortunate that we have a
     phenomena that is so easy to measure as radiation and we have so many
     measurements as we do on it that we can't do a better job of answering
     some of these questions, but I guess you have convinced me of the
     problems.
         All right.  I guess the other thing I would ask is sort of
     in closing of this session are there any other comments that you would
     like to make, nuggets that you have rethought?
         You have given us an excellent discussion of what you have
     observed from the discussions of the last day plus, and it looks like it
     is pretty much now up to the committee to figure out what we want to say
     about this, but before we do adjourn this segment, I appeal to you if
     there is any other parting observations or comments that would help us.
     
         DR. RAABE:  I would like to repeat one thing that I
     mentioned in passing.  You asked earlier if we needed another study.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  If someone said, you know, do you need another
     study, I'd say well, you know, I would really like to see a study where
     the Committee has a charge to look only at protracted radiation and try
     to piece together all that you know about protracted radiation exposure. 
     I think that's the target of our problem, it's the source of our
     problem.
         I also like the idea of doing some targeted analyses of
     specific radionuclides.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  All that we know about plutonium, and don't
     leave out the animal data, because there isn't any human data.  It
     always puts me in shock that we spend all these multimillions of dollars
     on very elaborate animal studies, and when you read the reports that are
     being produced, to a large extent that information is not used.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  And usually it's this hidden idea well, you
     know, human data is more appropriate, you know, animal data is animal
     data, you know.  So although the animal data are really well controlled
     and the human data are not, and the animal dosimetry is very precise and
     the human data dosimetry is very imprecise, to not use the animal
     data -- anyway, that was my main thing about the protracted and the
     targeted radionuclide.
         DR. GARRICK:  Kim.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  I tend to be naively optimistic in that there
     must be some opportunity, somewhere, to break the box.  And I was very
     sort of captured by Dr. Fairhurst's comments about the public and, you
     know, can't you do this another way.  So somehow there has to be a way
     of taking a different approach to analyzing and presenting the data that
     we already have and have a truly independent group figure out how to
     synthesize things.  And I think that's the only way we'll break a box in
     which one of the walls in the box is the public and the other wall in
     the box are the technical people.
         DR. GARRICK:  And I think that complements exactly what Dr.
     Raabe just said, and all we have to do is figure out who.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Could I throw out --
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  One even more extreme thing.  You, I've
     actually talked -- do you know a fellow named Crowe at the University of
     Wisconsin who is looking at projections?  It's always interesting to me
     to see how people project data, et cetera, and if it has a negative
     effect, you keep it in, and if it seems to have a positive effect, you
     say well, you know, that's a bit too -- let's push it out, because --
     one of the things that's interesting, that if you're -- there's a big
     stimulus now to do fundamental biological research on the causes of
     cancer or the effects on DNA, et cetera.  Now presumably if you discover
     this research is fruitful, not only will you be understanding perhaps
     the causes of cancer, but possibly ways to reduce its impact, or I
     wouldn't call it a cure, but somehow to put preventative.  And so -- and
     the next thing of course is, as you say, that people ultimately die of
     old age, and if you push the age out, presumably you're eliminating
     other diseases and leaving one of the most intractable cancer to -- tend
     to increase the percentage of people dying.
         But if you start using similar sorts of logic, if you like,
     or illogic, to extend, what's the reality that the causes of cancer will
     be a major component of a problem 50 or 100 years from now?  Do you see
     what I'm saying?  If we are pushing this research, and it should be
     done, and if it's successful, then you're eliminating the problem, or
     partially the problem, even if you do have -- you find out that there is
     a high consequence of a dose 50 years from now, you may be able to offer
     that person some remedial treatment.  And I'm trying to figure out how
     you put that into --
         DR. RAABE:  It's sort of like the case with thyroid
     exposure.  We know that people might have gotten high doses of I131
     years ago, but thyroid cancer's almost 98 percent curable.  Is that what
     you're saying?
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  And presumably for other kinds of cancers there
     are going to be even more fantastic methods for treatment.
         DR. GARRICK:  In fact, the health effects models that we've
     used before the NRC got into the risk business were based on essentially
     that, that 90 percent of the thyroid cancers were recoverable.
         It sounds like the ode of the radiation researcher is to
     want to live long enough to have died from radiation-induced cancer.
         [Laughter.]
         DR. RAABE:  When I give the talks on the studies I did with
     internal radionuclides, I always point out that if you removed all other
     causes of death, you would eventually die of radiation-induced cancer.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  I just wanted to comment that the treatments
     depend on understanding of the mechanisms, and so that's why I support
     continuing sort of biological research, because that's where those
     answers are going to come from.
         DR. GARRICK:  George?
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Yes, a question again, sort of a
     hypothetical -- well, it's not hypothetical, but it follows a little bit
     on what Charles said.
         One of the things that we're grappling with right now is of
     course Yucca Mountain, and here we're talking about setting standards
     out at 10,000 years and beyond.  Currently the draft standards call for
     a 25-millirem all-pathways standard, and as you've heard, there are some
     arguments with EPA as to whether or not that is or isn't the right
     standard.  Could you just give us your -- even if it's a gut-level
     feeling -- on what a standard -- a reasonable standard, radiation
     standard, should be for that kind of problem over that kind of time
     frame.
         DR. RAABE:  Well, there is no basis for saying that 25
     millirem is different from 15, that is for sure.
         The Health Physics Society's position statement is that you
     can allow 100 millirem per year, and I stand with that.  I don't think
     there is any known or expected risk at all.  Protracted exposure --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  So, 100 millirem at 10,000 years, that
     seems reasonable.
         DR. RAABE:  Sure.
         DR. GARRICK:  All pathways?
         DR. RAABE:  All pathways?
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         DR. RAABE:  Yeah.  I don't think there is any known expected
     risk associated with that kind of exposure.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  I also support Health Physics Society's
     statement in there.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  You know that the significance of that with
     Yucca Mountain is that DOE's own studies show that the risk is -- or the
     does is rising beyond 10,000, even though we set our standard at 10,000. 
     And so the public is going to go jumping through the roof if you, say,
     set it at a time when it is not the worst.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  I have a terrible problem with this whole
     sort of long-term waste stuff, and that I view internal dose assessments
     and the number I can give for you next year has an order of magnitude
     uncertainty in it, when you take everything into account, and then you
     tell me to extrapolate 10,000 years, I mean that is the problem I have
     with all that.
         DR. GARRICK:  Well, that is a valid problem.  What I would
     like to do is invite our consultants to enjoy this afternoon with us if
     you like, in a slightly different position.  We are going to hear some
     presentations on the clearance rule and also on the decommissioning
     standard review plan.  I don't know what your travel plans are.  I just
     want to indicate that you are welcome to be here if you are going to
     still be in town.
         Any other parting comments before we adjourn for lunch? 
     This has been an excellent session and I think it has coalesced a number
     of ideas and points that gives us a basis for trying to work up some
     sort of rational report.
         Dana, have you got a parting remark?
         DR. POWERS:  I guess maybe a couple of questions.  One
     question, a lot of research was outlined that could be done.  Have you
     any idea why it is that the industry that bears such high costs is not
     an active sponsor of research in this area?  The second question would
     be, have you seen anything that refutes the logic that we can set a
     standard of what is safe enough, utilize a linear hypothesis that may or
     may not be bounding, and set risk standards based on that?
         DR. RAABE:  The first question was --
         DR. POWERS:  Industry.
         DR. RAABE:  The industry.  I don't know anything about that.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  I suspect that it might be because industry
     doesn't want to fund very long-term purely scientific research,
     particularly an industry whose main focus is power.
         DR. GARRICK:  Why don't we ask Ralph to make a comment? 
     What you got to say about that, Ralph?
         MR. ANDERSON:  My name is Ralph Anderson with the Nuclear
     Energy Institute.  I am sorry I couldn't join you this morning, I was
     very busy at our offices help prepare our final testimony on
     appropriations for this year for DOE and NRC, and the reason I had to
     stay behind is because we were completing our section of the testimony
     that is supportive of the DOE research funding and encourages continued
     research in this area.
         So, first of all, I think the statement is incorrect.  And,
     in fact, last year and the year prior, we had many interactions with
     Senator Domenici's office in which we were very supportive of his vision
     for research in this area.  So I think that is a misunderstanding of
     industry's position.
         Also, through EPRI, which is our research arm, we have, in
     fact, invested money in the past to do feasibility studies of
     epidemiological studies, and primarily because of economic reasons, and
     because we also reached the conclusion that the studies would not be
     definitive, we determined not to go forth.  But I think that is
     reasonable in any mode of research, you don't proceed with research that
     you don't expect to be fruitful, especially at a potentially high cost. 
     So I think that there is a misunderstanding of industry's position on
     such research.
         DR. KEARFOTT:  The second question --
         DR. POWERS:  Am I misunderstanding that you are not funding
     any research in this area, especially this litany that was given to us?
         MR. ANDERSON:  I beg your pardon?
         DR. POWERS:  Am I misunderstanding that you are not funding
     research, especially in this litany of research suggestions that we have
     had?
         MR. ANDERSON:  When you say we funding, I am not sure what
     opportunities for funding we specifically have.
         DR. POWERS:  Well, it seems to me that there are apparently
     a large number of people in the academic community wiling and anxious to
     conduct studies ranging from cells in petri dishes up to epidemiological
     analyses.
         MR. ANDERSON:  I am sure that is probably true, having
     worked once upon a time in the research community, and not to make light
     of what you say.  I suspect there are probably thousands beyond those
     that we are aware of.  If you are suggesting would we directly fund such
     research through the universities, I suspect not.  We might encourage
     such funding through federal funds, and let me tell you why.
         What we ascertained in '92 when we looked at going forth
     with an industry funded large scale effort on epidemiology, one of the
     conclusions that we reached after talking with a lot of the people who
     were so-called stakeholders out in the public community was that any
     study that we funded would be found highly incredible unless the results
     were that all radiation kills all people.  And so, in that sense, we
     have done indirectly, we support the NCRP, we have for years.  We have
     given money to specific efforts at NCRP.  As I mentioned, we have
     supported primarily literature reviews through EPRI, subsequent to our
     '92 decision.  And then we work through the Congress, because we think
     that an understanding of the issue actually is a little broader than,
     quote, "just the industry."  We think in the public interest to have
     better answers to the questions.  And, you know, we have been very
     supportive of research through federal monies.
         But I think we would shoot ourselves in the foot if we were
     to try to pass money directly over into the research community.  It just
     seems to pollute the well.  I would be happy to talk further about it,
     but that's --
         DR. GARRICK:  Okay. I think we want to -- I guess, James,
     you have one final --
         MR. MUCKERHEIDE:  Over the last 20 years or so, I have
     talked to the industry about funding research.  It has always struck me
     as very surprising, but quite rational why industry does not research. 
     As a regulated utility environment, two things were fundamentally true. 
     In their regulatory process, they got some money to support EPRI in the
     early days, but compared to chemical industry or oil industry, or any of
     the other private industries, they didn't have the same approach, nor
     did they have the same incentives.
         Number two, they were party to a government ownership,
     essentially, of the nuclear enterprise.  They were licensed and
     regulated under very rigid conditions, the ownership and the
     responsibility under the licensing regime, and the authority for
     byproduct materials and lots of other issues were all very -- pretty
     much closely hidden by -- held by the government, and so there wasn't a
     sense that there was something to do.
         Thirdly, it was very clear that if we have to spend a great
     deal of money to meet a requirement, we pass it through to the rate
     payer, so some of the issues that we addressed in the '70s and in the
     early '80s were pretty much set aside as, well, if we have to pay
     another $100 million, we just put it in the rate base.
         And, finally, in more recent times, I think if we begin to
     see this industry become more privatized, the potential that they will
     join the arena of industries that actually fund research, I mean we have
     a chemical industry Institute of Toxicology.  There is no nuclear
     industry Institute of Radiobiology.  There is an entire world of
     programs that chemical industries and other industries fund relative to
     their own self-interest, but being a quasi-governmental regulated
     enterprise, primarily, it just never really was in their interest.  So I
     think one of the things we hope to see change is under the new tendency
     to be more privatized, that the interests will begin to revert to having
     more self-interest and seeing long-term research and long-term interests
     come to the fore.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes, and I think, fundamentally, unlike the
     chemical industry, the automobile industry, many other industries, the
     nuclear power industry had its beginning in a government arena where
     most of the research was performed by the government.
         Okay.  I think we will break now for lunch.
         [Whereupon, at 12:05 p.m., the meeting was recessed, to
     reconvene at 1:02 p.m., this same day.].                   A F T E R N O O N  S E S S I O N
                                                      [1:02 p.m.]
         DR. GARRICK:  The meeting will come to order.
         We are now going to shift into a little different area of
     activity.  We are going to hear about the Clearance Rule and also about
     the Decommissioning Standard Review Plan this afternoon.
         It is my understanding, Frank, that you are going to lead
     off the discussion and I will look to you to introduce the subsequent
     speakers, okay?  Frank Cardile.
         MR. CARDILE:  Go ahead and put the next slide up, Giorgio.
         Basically this is just an introductory slide on page 2.  We
     are here to talk about -- we are here to kind of lay out the progress of
     where we are in development of a Clearance Rule, basically, as it
     indicates here, give some background, indicate where we are, the recent
     activities that we have gone through and completed, what are our
     upcoming steps, what is coming up next that we, the activities that we
     are going to be conducting.
         Then we will get into some specifics of an issues paper that
     we have completed and that we are going to be sending on to the
     Commission shortly, and then Tony Huffert, to my left here, will discuss
     some particulars with regard to development of a technical basis that we
     are going to use to support any rulemaking effort that we get into.
         We are trying to let you know where we are.  We have made a
     lot of steps here fairly recently and we have got a lot of steps going
     on in the next few months and year and we want to let you know what is
     going on.
         On the next slide, on page 3, to give you some background on
     how we got to where we are, in SECY-98-028, which was sent up about a
     year ago in February of 1998, the Staff went to the Commission and
     requested Commission guidance or direction on three options for how we
     should proceed with regard to clearance, that we could either continue
     with our current regulatory structure, which basically relies upon the
     use of regulatory guidance, or we could support EPA in their efforts at
     issuance of a standard on clearance, and then follow them up by issuing
     a conforming rule or we could proceed independently to issue a NRC rule
     for NRC licensees.
         The Commission came back in June of 1998 and directed us to
     proceed with the third option that you see up there, the third bullet,
     and that we should promulgate a dose-based rule on clearance, we should
     begin in FY 1999, and that we should use an enhanced participatory
     rulemaking process similar to Part 35, the process that they have gone
     through and also similar, although they didn't mention it or they didn't
     specifically delineate it, similar to the process that we went through
     on the decommissioning rule or the cleanup rule in 1992-93 timeframe.
         So with that direction, if you go on to the next slide, on
     page 4, the Staff received that SRM in June of 1998 and proceeded with a
     number of steps to get started and then on January 27th of this year,
     1999, we sent up to the Commission a SECY paper, SECY-99-028, describing
     to them our rulemaking process that we envisioned for clearance.
         Included in that process, and not specifically noted on the
     slide here, is that we were forming a working group and a steering group
     on clearance, on the clearance rulemaking effort.  The purpose of the
     working group and steering group is obviously to assist in the
     preparation of the document.  The working group would be made up of
     working staff from NMSS, NRR, Office of State Programs, OGC, and
     Research.  Obviously this is a wide effort going across both licensing
     offices, NRR and NMSS, also the Office of Research plays a role in
     assisting with the development of the technical basis to feed into the
     rulemaking.
         OGC of course provides the legal input and OSP provides
     input with regard to compatibility and other areas.
         The steering group -- in addition to those members of the
     working group we also have a working group member from an Agreement
     State, from the state of Texas.  We also set up a steering group made up
     of management from those particular NRC offices to give us early
     management direction on some particular areas and also to expedite the
     concurrence process.
         This working group-steering group process has been used and
     was used also on the cleanup rule, which was completed a couple years
     ago.
         We also have a steering group member from the state of
     Illinois, an Agreement State, so we have some state representation on
     this panel, on both of these panels.
         We also are proceeding with not only -- as part of our
     rulemaking process not only the standard rulemaking procedure but we
     also, as the Commission directed us to do, are supplementing the process
     with an enhanced participatory rulemaking process the object of which is
     to obtain early and meaningful public input into any rulemaking that we
     would conduct.
         As noted there then, on the first bullet, really this first
     bullet describes some of the specific plans with regard to this enhanced
     participatory process.  Two of the key components of that process are
     that we would publish an issues paper in the Federal Register.  I will
     talk about that some more as we are going on to the next slide.
         Basically this issues paper will go out there and be
     published in the Federal Register and its intent is to foster discussion
     on the issues associated with any rulemaking early on, so that we
     know -- we can get some information.
         We also hold four facilitated public meetings at different
     geographical locations.  We anticipate those beginning in August of this
     year and going through November of this year.  Right now we anticipate
     those meetings being in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Washington,
     D.C.  The last one would be in Washington, D.C.
         We would invite the ACNW members to attend any of those
     public meetings and in particular we also anticipate that in the
     timeframe of those public meetings, either in amongst them when we can
     reflect what we have been hearing, or perhaps when we are done with --
     when we are completed with the public meetings we would hold a meeting
     with you to go over your views on the specific content of the issues
     paper.
         The idea -- you may be familiar with a facilitated meeting. 
     The idea of facilitation is to not only just hold a meeting and say what
     are your views, but to broaden participation to make sure that different
     views are represented and to make sure that the view that are
     represented are presented at the meeting, so it is not just open up the
     door and hold a public meeting but there is a process that we go through
     prior to that where we invite specific interests and then we let them
     know early on what the questions are and bring these interests into the
     meeting.
         We are in the process right now.  That process of
     facilitation will be one in which we both contract out some of that work
     and also use a person here, Chip Cameron, who has done this type of work
     at Part 35 meetings prior to this.
         The second bullet on the page, going back to the content of
     that Commission paper, we discussed the specific technical basis that we
     will still need for this rulemaking the schedule for developing that
     technical basis.
         Tony Huffert later in this paper, Section 4 your notes here
     today, will be talking to some of the details about that technical
     basis.
         In broad terms, we are right now in the process of getting
     on board the contractors that we need to assist us in that process.  We
     plan to have those contractors on board -- there's four separate
     contracts and four separate contractors.  One is a competitive bid.  One
     is a task order on an existing bid.  Two are with Government contracts. 
     But we plan to have them all on board and running shortly and certainly
     completed by either June or July of this year that they would all be on
     board.
         Finally, the last bullet on this page, the SECY paper
     indicated that following completion of the public meetings that in
     probably February of next year we would bring the Commission another
     paper indicating the results of the meetings, where we stand on the
     meetings themselves, and what we learned from those meetings, and then
     also where we stand on the development of the technical basis and where
     we would go from there.
     Okay.  The next slide as the first order of business are preparing this
     issues paper.  The point of the issues paper is to, as I said, foster
     discussion on the issues before we would get into any rulemaking.
         This paper has been completed.  It's currently in NMSS
     office, concurrence process, the various offices and the steering group
     members have concurred on the paper.  We plan to send it to the
     Commission for information this month, and then we plan to publish it in
     the Federal Register for public comment next month, in April.  We would
     invite written and electronic comments on it.  We will indicate in it
     how it can be obtained, both electronically and how paper copies can be
     obtained from the staff.
         The comment period of the paper will remain open until of
     course the last public meeting in November, and then we would also note
     in the FRN notes that the issues paper not only being available for
     people who have sent in their written comments but it will be the format
     of holding the public meetings.
         Following the public meetings of course we'd be in a better
     position to decide what direction to proceed.
         So getting into the details of a little bit of what's in the
     issues paper, on page 6, the next couple of slides, what we did in the
     issues paper is we had a background section in which we try to lay out
     in as direct and clear a manner as possible where we are now, why we're
     doing what we're doing, why this is different than what we've ever done
     before, and what we plan on doing, some of the context of why we're
     doing what we're doing.  That's Part A of the issues paper.  Part B of
     the issues paper is ask some specific questions -- it raises four
     specific issues, lays out alternatives under each issue, and then asks
     some specific questions to foster discussion in these public meetings.
         So this first page here that you see, page 6, is part of the
     background, discusses some of the rationale for why the NRC is
     considering rulemaking in the area of clearance.  Basically it notes
     that Part 20 already contains criteria on the amount of radioactivity
     and gaseous and liquid releases that may be released from a nuclear
     facility to the environment.  Also subpart (e) of Part 20, which was
     recently added, has criteria on the release of decommissioned lands and
     structures.
         This part focuses on protection of persons -- focuses on
     protection of persons coming on the site and using a decommissioned
     structure or using decommissioned lands after license termination.  It
     does not focus on release of metals or other equipment or other things
     from the decommissioned structure to the public.  So it was focused on
     the structure and the lands.
         However, unlike -- like I point out here, the existing
     criteria for liquid and gaseous releases and lands and structures, there
     are no specific criteria in Part 20 governing releases of solid
     materials.  Now I don't get into this here, but the issues paper
     discusses in some amount of detail or provides some information about
     what these solid materials are.  It notes that the solid materials are,
     for example, metals, equipment, furniture, and any other material that
     could be at a nuclear site.
         It also points out that some of this material would have no
     radioactive contamination, for example, many, many of the NRC licensees
     or sealed-source users have equipment and materials that have no
     contamination because their source is a sealed source and there's no
     contamination on site.  But it points out that other materials obviously
     at some other facilities can become contaminated because they're in
     perhaps like a reactor facility or a laboratory facility where there's
     contamination which may leak from a pipe and particular equipment may be
     there and become contaminated, or obviously if a piece of equipment is
     part of the radioactive system, like a tank or piping or pump systems,
     those would obviously become contaminated.  So the paper tries to point
     out that there's a difference in levels between the amount of
     contamination that any particular piece of material can have.
         The bottom line or the bottom tick on this page is that the
     Commission's thought is that in order to provide -- the rationale is
     that to provide consistency in the framework for releases of all
     materials we're considering this rulemaking.
         This would put us in a better position to avoid
     inconsistencies between standards and also allows us to deal with
     requests from licensees, especially in the future.  As more facilities
     reach decommissioning, there may likely be increased requests for
     clearance.
         On the next page, on page 7, again this is more background,
     the issues paper notes that anytime the Commission proposes a rule or
     considers proceeding towards rulemaking, it considers alternative
     courses of action.  Three of the courses that we lay out in the issues
     paper as possible courses of action, and again this paper is intended to
     foster discussion.  It says that these are the things we've thought
     about based on our knowledge that we have, and obviously this is a
     jumping-off point for anyone else -- or for anyone to say either changes
     or suggestions or permutations to these courses of action.
         Basically the three alternatives that we lay out are permit
     release of the materials for unrestricted use if potential doses are
     below a certain level.  This level obviously would be worked out during
     the rulemaking process.  The process that we've been using this word
     "clearance" and "unrestricted use" back and forth a little bit so far
     today, and it has been used back and forth.
         As you may well know, internationally the definition of
     clearance is release of material for unrestricted use, so that clearance
     would be restricted to the -- or would be used for this first
     alternative.  Because this rulemaking is proposing or this effort is
     proposing alternative courses of action besides just unrestricted use,
     we have to be careful not to just call the whole thing clearance.  But
     anyway, unrestricted use or clearance of materials could include recycle
     or reuse of this material into either consumer products or industrial
     products, or you could just release material for unrestricted use and it
     could wind up in a landfill.
         A second alternative that we note is that perhaps rather
     than just putting the material out for any use, we could restrict its
     use to certain authorized uses which would probably result in the public
     receiving -- the general public receiving lower doses.
         And a third possible option is that neither unrestricted nor
     restricted use would be permitted, but any material that had been in
     radioactive service or had become contaminated because it had been in an
     area where material was used -- licensed material was used or stored
     would just not be permitted to be released.  This is a third option
     which we indicate in the paper.
         Going on to page 8, again in background this is something
     that we obviously are aware of.
         There have been previous Commission efforts to address
     release of solid materials.  In particular the BRC policy from July
     1980, you know, you can read the details of what the BRC policy was
     intended to do, but it basically was a broad policy statement saying --
     put out as a way around which to formulate future decisions regarding
     regulations or licensing decisions.
         It has four principal components, one of which was
     decommissioning lands and structures, and another one of which was
     setting a standard for release of solid materials for recycle.  Notice
     that it only talked about recycle, didn't talk about clearance in
     general, which can mean also general release or where material could
     wind up in a landfill.
         However, based on, you know, public concern with this
     policy, some of that public concern being just the nature by which it
     was developed and some of that public concern being the content of that
     paper, the Commission decided that a more extensive public involvement
     process should be followed with regard to the policy, but before that
     larger process could occur, the -- and so the Commission put a
     moratorium on the policy.  Before any additional work or public
     involvement could be conducted, Congress enacted the Energy Policy Act
     of 1992 which revoked the BRC policy statement.
         Moving on to the next, on page 9, continuing with regard to
     the BRC policy, it's our thought that what we're doing now is not just
     the BRC policy -- that was a broad policy-setting approach -- this
     effort would aim at establishing some specific requirements and would
     aim at using the procedural requirements of the Administrative
     Procedures Act or the APA, as noted in the second check here.  The APA
     of course requires us to go through the NEPA process, which would
     include an evaluation of the environmental impacts associated with any
     clearance rulemaking, which would include a full assessment of potential
     scenarios and pathways of exposure by which people might become exposed
     to clearance pathways.
         The APA or our process also involves doing a regulatory
     analysis consistent with Executive Order 12991.  And as a supplement to
     the EPA process, we would conduct an enhanced participatory rulemaking
     process.  This APA/EPR enhanced process was conducted in a similar
     manner following -- has been previously conducted -- following the BRC
     policy being revoked, one of the components of that policy, namely the
     decommissioning lands and structures component, was -- we went through a
     rulemaking -- enhanced participatory rulemaking process on that in which
     we held public workshops.  We put out a proposed rule -- an early draft
     of a proposed rule for public comment, and then went through the
     rulemaking process so that in July of 1997 we issued a final rule on
     decommissioning of lands and structures which now gives NRC licensees as
     well as NRC clear direction on how to review decommissioning of lands
     and structures, and it also gives the public clear information on how
     NRC conducts its business with regard to decommissioning lands and
     structures, and also what avenues are available to the public with
     regard to being involved in an individual licensing situation or case
     for decommissioning of a particular facility.
         So the point being that this APA/EPR enhanced process was
     conducted for the decommissioning process, and the process was completed
     in 1997.
         Moving on to the next slide, that was all background, we
     finally now get to the four broad issues that we are going out to the
     stakeholders with to get stakeholder views on.  Again we want not only
     stakeholder comments, but we're also asking for stakeholder information. 
     If people have some information about some of the things that are in
     here, and we'll talk about them a little bit, that's part of what we're
     going out to get also.
         And again, as I noted earlier, this comment period on the
     issues paper will be open through November.  The paper we hope will be
     in the Federal Register in a few weeks, after going through the, you
     know, sending it to the Commission.  If, again as I noted earlier, we
     would probably come back to you and get your specific views on
     particular issues, today our hope is that we can point out what we are
     laying out there is what some of these issues and what some of the
     questions that we're raising are, but after you have more time to digest
     them, we could come back to you later this year in amongst the public
     meetings and have another meeting.
         Again, the structure of the issues paper is that it lays out
     the issues, it lays out a couple of alternatives under each issue, and
     then it asks several questions under each alternative or each issue
     seeking advice or information or input from the stakeholders.
         The first issue on this page, issue number 1, is the broad
     question of whether we should even have a rule.  There's some
     question -- there are questions raised as to well, we don't want a rule
     or, you know, why should there be a rule at all in this area.  And so
     the first issue, even though the Commission directed us to prepare a
     rule, we thought it was important to address this issue by laying out
     the pros and cons of whether we should continue with the current
     case-by-case approach or conduct a rulemaking under the APA.
         Moving on to the next issue which gets to needing a little
     more detail.  This is where we have the substitute page, I don't know if
     everybody got it.  Basically, all the substitute page does is it tries
     to be less busy than the page that was in the stapled package.  It is
     the same information, it just cuts it in half, or puts one thing on each
     page.
         As you can see here, Issue Number 2 asks, what are the
     principal alternatives for rulemaking that should be considered?  It
     lays out, again, as we did earlier in the background, three potential
     alternatives, one being unrestricted use at different potential dose
     levels, or above background, or even no dose above background.  These
     laying out of different alternative dose levels, including, basically, a
     background level, is similar to the process that we did for the cleanup
     rule, which we analyzed -- which we asked for public comment and also
     analyzed in the Environmental Impact Statement, both a return to
     background at the site, as well as different alternative dose levels
     that a site could be released at.
         We also list here the other alternative of releasing
     material for unrestricted use or not permitting any release of solid
     materials.  And the third check is other as suggested by comments. 
     Actually, when they went out with an issues paper for the cleanup rule
     back in 1992, one of the things that came back -- when they put out the
     issues paper, there was not a restricted release option, so that is why
     this other check here is important, because we may get some options,
     suggestions made in public comments that would add to the list of
     alternatives.
         Going on to the next page, that gets into -- tries to get
     into some of the details about what factors should NRC be using in
     making its decisions between alternatives.  The first being the human
     health and environmental impacts.  We talk about -- the paper talks
     about looking at assessment of, obviously, impacts to individuals, but
     also assessment of impacts to different population groups, and the paper
     also talks about the fact that there can be competing impacts, so that
     just by having a lower dose criterion, which obviously lowers -- a lower
     dose criterion for cleared material, while that obviously lowers the
     dose impact for exposure to that material, there could be a competing
     impact, that because you have to -- now, all that material, rather than
     going into clearance goes to, say, low level waste, the replacement of
     that fresh material, or that material with new mined material would have
     impacts associated with that.
         So we had a similar -- I keep referring to the cleanup rule,
     but we had a similar situation there.  And so what we tried to do in the
     Environmental Impact Statement was balance both impacts that went down
     against impacts that go up.  So that would be what we would be doing and
     we would be asking -- the paper asks specifically, what are suggestions
     for making this balance and what are some of the other impacts that are
     competing, both radiological and non-radiological?
         We also will be doing a cost benefit analysis using NUREG
     BR-0058, which is the guidelines for -- NRC's guidelines for complying
     with the Executive Order.  We would be looking at all -- we would be
     looking, as part of this balancing, we would be looking at the costs of
     the whole process by which material would be cleared.  We would be
     looking at the cost of surveys at the different dose levels that you see
     here.  We would be looking at possible impacts, economic impacts on the
     scrap metal industry.  Is there a potential that we would -- that alarms
     would be going off causing material to be rejected and sent back, and
     what possible economic impacts are associated with that.
         We would be looking at implementation considerations.  Tony
     will be getting into some of this in more detail in a few minutes.  The
     implementation considerations, of course, would include -- what are the
     questions or concerns about surveying large quantities of metal at these
     low dose levels, or even at dose levels near background or at
     background?
         As I just noted, some of the answers to these questions,
     like on the implementation or the environmental impacts, we will be
     developing in our work, but we are also asking the public to provide
     input to help answer some of these questions.  And we will be looking at
     other international, national and state standards.
         Going on to the next slide on Issues 3, we will be -- Issues
     3 in the paper tries to flesh out a little bit more information, or a
     little more detail about the potential for restricted use on releasing
     metal.  One option being we could release -- or, I'm sorry, we could
     restrict the first use of solid materials to some authorized use,
     particularly, as it notes here, you could perhaps make steel beams that
     you would use in a structural support.
         We were at a meeting a couple of months ago where a
     gentleman suggested we could make military equipment.  He was talking
     about tank treads, so, you know, rather than consumer products.  So that
     can question can come up, or that is a potentially valid alternative
     which we should consider.
         A question that is associated with restricted use would be
     that because of the uncertainties in controlling material flow or where
     the material goes, we may need to require that the processing of the
     material into this first use be licensed by the NRC.  So a question that
     is raised in the issues paper is, should NRC license the -- I guess, the
     manufacturer, for example, of the bridge structure?  And, so, that would
     be -- that is a question that is raised.
         There are several questions that are raised in the paper, I
     could run down what they are, related to that, related to how long the
     restrictions should stay in place, what are candidate materials.  What
     is a good set up for restricted use?
         An interesting question in the cleanup rule which we just
     issued, there is a restricted -- there is some parallelism, there is an
     unrestricted and restricted use of buildings and lands in the cleanup
     rule, and if there is restricted use, there is an opportunity for public
     involvement in how these restrictions are set up.  In the cleanup rule,
     if you restrict use of a building or lands, you terminate the NRC
     license because it was decided that the public deed process of how a
     particular piece of land or building would be used can be satisfactorily
     covered by the existing deed process, just the local land set up.
         So, the cleanup rule for the lands and structures allows NRC
     to terminate the NRC license when the dose level is reduced to a low
     enough level and then the whole process of the restricted use, and the
     deeds and the lands only being allowed to be used for, say, industrial
     purposes, not a farmer, that is all an unlicensed use.  Here, you may
     have, because, like I say, there is no -- I don't know if there is a
     deed process for tanks and pipes as they leave a reactor, so you may
     have to license how this material is handled until it winds up in a safe
     form.  So that is the difference between the two rules.
         Also, the cleanup rule had a public involvement process
     where how these lands were used could be reviewed by the local populace
     so they could provide input as to how these lands and structures were
     used in a restricted way.  Here, because you have metal that will come
     out of the plant and go anywhere in the country, having a public
     involvement process at a particular site maybe is different or may be
     more difficult.  So these are questions that are raised in the issues
     paper.
         The second alternative that we list here is that we would
     restrict release of the metal to only a landfill site rather than
     allowing any consumer or industrial use at all.  The rationale for that
     would be that this would cut out any direct public usage exposure
     pathway and limit exposure pathways to only what you might get from any
     landfill exposure, which is generally thought to be at least fairly well
     -- it can be fairly well defined, unlike perhaps consumer uses, which
     can be fairly broad.
         So those are two restricted uses that we indicate as
     potential alternatives.
         Finally with regard to the issues that we list, issue number
     four, which is on page 13, the Commission directed us in their SRM. 
     Their other point that they made was that the rulemaking should cover
     all materials unless there was some factor that would cause us to limit
     the number of materials covered, namely that it would delay -- if we
     expedite the rulemaking to limit the materials covered in the scope, we
     should do so.
         Our technical basis that we have developed and which Tony
     will get into a little bit is basically right now limit it to metals,
     concrete, and to some extent soil, so one alternative is to limit the
     rulemaking to a select group of materials, namely metals, concrete and
     soil.  Another alternative is to apply it to a wider group of materials,
     as you can see here, and another alternative would be to conduct the
     rulemaking on this wider group of materials at a later date and there
     are specific questions on that in the issues paper.
         The next page goes into the development of the technical
     basis and I will let Tony proceed from here.
         MR. HUFFERT:  Thank you, Frank.  I would like to point out
     some of the requirements that the Staff were given from the Commission
     in its June 30th, 1998 SRM on how to proceed with this rulemaking.
         They told us to develop a dose-based regulation as compared
     to a detectability based regulation, so we have been pursuing rulemaking
     at different dose levels, as Frank mentioned, from basically background
     up to 10 millirem with values in between.
         They asked us to focus on clearance levels above background
     for unrestricted use, which means do not include background doses or
     background concentrations of radionuclide in this rulemaking when you
     are doing your dose assessment, and they also asked us to consider
     existing work being conducted by the IAEA, other contractor analyses
     that have been performed, for example the Environmental Protection
     Agency has been working in this area and has done a substantial amount
     of work to date that we can draw upon.
         Also, speaking of EPA, we have been directed to look into
     NORM and NARM practices. Specifically they asked us to take a look at
     the practice to take coal ash and recycle it into building materials. 
     We think that that would be a fairly interesting benchmark to consider
     when we are developing our own analysis.
         We have been asked to use realistic scenarios when we are
     developing the rule as compared to using really conservative analyses,
     and also to consider the materials that have been analyzed so far, which
     is iron, steel, copper, aluminum, and to some extent soils.
         On the next page I would like to talk briefly about some of
     the work that has been conducted so far by the Office of Research.  They
     have been working for several years with other Federal agencies
     developing a draft report, NUREG-1640.  This document covers iron,
     steel, aluminum, copper, and concrete.
         The reason for these materials being selected was that
     initial studies indicated that these materials would be of economic
     value and that these would likely be released from not only the NRC
     licensees but also DOE as well.
         These materials have been studied by other Federal agencies
     and we can draw upon that work also.
         They took a look at 79 scenarios for clearance and they
     specifically identified 85 nuclides to analyze.  The 85 nuclides were
     obtained from looking at manifests, Class A waste, and then comparing
     that listing to work being done by the Environmental Protection Agency.
         DR. GARRICK:  Are you going to say something about the basis
     of the scenarios?
         MR. HUFFERT:  I can, yes.  Would you like for me to do that
     at this time?
         DR. GARRICK:  Well, if you are going to later, that's fine.
         MR. HUFFERT:  Let me go to the next bullet and then I'll
     talk about that.
         We are planning on issuing this draft NUREG-1640 this month. 
     Currently there is a Federal Register notice being developed by the
     Office of Research. We are hoping that we will have a fairly long
     comment period on that report so that it will extend well into the time
     that we have our public meetings, which will be running through the Fall
     of this year.
         About the scenarios, the 79 scenarios were arrived at
     through trial and error basically.  The Office of Research looked at
     clearance, meaning there could be direct disposal of material, there can
     be direct reuse of material, and there also can be recycle of material. 
     Recycle would involve materials being released from a nuclear facility
     as scrap.  It would then be handled at a scrap facility where it would
     then get back into a steel mill where it would then be processed and
     then put back into use.
         DR. GARRICK:  And that is what you mean by a scenario?
         MR. HUFFERT:  There are actually two different models that
     were used to develop these scenarios.  There's a material flow model in
     NUREG-1640 which has different scenarios of how this material is
     basically moving once it is released and there is also a dose assessment
     model and the dose assessment model has scenarios in there.  These are
     basically exposure scenarios so the combination of those, it is my
     understanding, represents the 79.
         As far as the limiting scenarios, it turns out that consumer
     products are not the limiting exposure pathway and in many cases it is
     truckdrivers or it is workers at processing facilities.  The workers at
     processing facilities would be, for example, a worker in a steel mill
     where the material can become airborne through different metallurgical
     processes and the material can be potentially concentrated so these are
     the sensitive scenarios that have led to the critical dose conversion
     factors.
         Further work is needed to develop our technical basis. 
     NUREG-1640 really was focused on identifying realistic critical groups
     and calculating dose factors for each critical group.  It did not get
     into collective dose assessment.  It did not get into soils.  As Frank
     mentioned, there has been some work done on soils for the
     decommissioning rule, and we can benefit from some of that work already
     done.  But NUREG-1640 does not specifically address soils.
         We will have to develop more scenarios for the noncritical
     individual dose scenarios that are needed for estimating collective
     doses in population groups.  We think that we have to take a look at
     population behavior.  We have to take a look at the probability of a
     number of persons being exposed to both processing and the end products
     itself.  NUREG-1640 does not cover that.  So we are currently in the
     state of we have developed a statement of work.
         We are going to go out for competitive bid to a contractor
     to further refine that work.  And we're also going to be doing more work
     in the area of cost-benefit analysis.  The EPA has done work in this
     regard.  However, the NRC has not.
         The third bullet on this page talks about some of the
     progress made by the EPA in developing the technical basis.  In 1997
     they released two reports.  One was a draft technical support document
     entitled "Evaluation of the Potential for Recycling Scrap Metals from
     Nuclear Facilities."  This is basically a data compilation report that
     discusses supporting analysis for a second document they prepared which
     is called the preliminary cost-benefit analysis and radiation protection
     standards for scrap metal.  The NRC Office of Research has been working
     closely with EPA on these documents and I think it's a very good
     resource for us to use.
         We will continue to develop our technical basis in order to
     develop a generic environmental impact statement, a regulatory analysis
     to analyze the different regulatory options, and, as Frank mentioned, we
     have four statements of work that are being developed right now.
         Two of them have to do with implementation.  I'll be
     intimately involved with those, as I'll be working on a draft regulatory
     guide.  We are planning on going to national labs for that support.  We
     will be focusing one contract on survey methodology, and we'll be
     actually focusing another contract on the detection of radioactivity,
     the actual radiation physics involved, since we are going down to such
     low concentrations of radioactive material in matrices --
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes, at some point I'd like to hear you
     comment a little bit about the problems that I can envision when you
     start talking about complying with the one-millirem requirement, the
     instability that -- the radiation instability that exists in some of
     these sites.  It sounds like that's a tough challenge.
         MR. HUFFERT:  We faced a similar technical challenge when we
     were working on the decommissioning rule, and I was involved in that. 
     We were given a task to go from on the order of 30 millirem per year all
     the way down to basically background.  We contracted with some experts
     in the field.  We took a look at what was needed, and we actually came
     up with new survey approaches that were incorporated into MARSSIM.  And
     that's been widely accepted.
         I think that we're going to be facing a similar problem
     here.  The differences that the material that was analyzed for the
     decommissioning rule was basically on lands and structures, and in this
     case it's going to be incorporated in metal.  And detecting alpha and
     beta contamination when it's found in a matrix of steel is almost
     impossible to do with the survey instruments.  You might have to use
     other methods, for example, taking samples in order to do that.
         We don't have any answers for you today.  This is under
     development.  We started working on this in October, and we are
     currently in the stage of getting our contractors on board and looking
     at this problem.  I can tell you that the staff has been involved in
     recent workshops in this area.  I've attended a couple of them where
     this was discussed.  And there is a lot of work going on both nationally
     and internationally in this area that we can draw upon.
         MR. CARDILE:  Also I think the two contractors that you're
     planning on using are the ones that assisted you on the --
         MR. HUFFERT:  Yes.  Well, we're hoping for that.
         MR. CARDILE:  Okay.
         MR. HUFFERT:  We're in the stages right now of trying to get
     contractors on board, and the one in particular is extremely good at
     radiation physics, and I think they would be invaluable to have on
     board, because they could help us in that area.
         The next slide was put together to present a snapshot of
     where we are today in our technical basis development and the work ahead
     of us in order to complete this rulemaking.  On the left-hand side of
     the table we have basically the NEPA analysis, which is referring to our
     generic environmental impact statement that we'll be developing, the
     regulatory analysis, the draft reg guide, and then public participation. 
     The middle column discusses the regulatory requirements or procedures
     that we would be following in the development of our technical basis. 
     For example, under NEPA, we have fairly clear guidance on how we should
     proceed in our own 10 CFR Part 51.
         Under the regulatory analysis, as Frank mentioned before, we
     have Executive Order 12866, an SRM, and also a brochure report on how to
     conduct that.  We just talked about the draft regulatory guide, how we
     need to develop practicable instrumentation methods, and as far as the
     public participation, we would be holding four public meetings during
     this year throughout the country, and that will be satisfying two
     requirements.  It's not only going to be satisfying the 10 CFR 51
     process but it will also be satisfying our own enhanced participatory
     rulemaking process.
         To the right we have the technical information needed, and
     to give you a feeling of where we are today, we have items A through L
     listed.  We only have item A and item K at this point.  Item A is
     NUREG-1640, which talks about the individual dose factors for four
     materials.  We need to develop items B through G in order to do our EIS. 
     Items H and I are more involved in the costs.  We need to find out more
     information on the actual source inventory.  That has not been well
     defined.  We need to find out economic impacts that will be given to
     industry with this rulemaking.
         And as far as the issues papers is concerned we're getting
     that out for public comment next month, and I already discussed the
     public workshops.
         It's also important for you to understand what the staff is
     involved in amongst other Federal agencies.  I alluded to work with the
     EPA, but we're also working with the Department of Energy and other
     Federal agencies on the Interagency Steering Committee on Radiation
     Standards.
         We recently had a subcommittee meeting in February where we
     talked about our rulemaking efforts and other work that's being done in
     the Federal Government in this area.  There is a Department of State
     initiative called the International Radioactive Source Management
     Initiative.  It is something that is fairly recent in its development. 
     We have many different Federal agencies participating on that
     initiative, private industry, we have the Conference of Radiation
     Program Control Directors, and the focus is not only on clearance, but
     it's on source tracking internationally.
         The NMSS and research staff have also been participating
     internationally with meetings at the IAEA, and we have one group of
     people going from the EPA, NRC, and DOE over to Vienna next month to
     work on one of the technical basis documents called Tech Doc 855.  So
     the staff is quite busy in this area.
         That concludes my presentation.
         DR. GARRICK:  Further comments?
         DR. WYMER:  Yes.  I am glad to see you working on this.  I
     think it is an extremely important issue and I think there are hundreds
     of millions of dollars at stake here, depending on how this thing comes
     out.  I had one specific question.  It seems to me, I am sure you have
     good reasons, that you are limiting yourself quite a bit when you talk
     only about ferrous metals, aluminum, copper and concrete.  I suggest
     that maybe you might want to consider the strategic and critical
     materials list that the Department of Commerce puts out, since these are
     strategic and critical materials, and they have a definite definition of
     what those terms mean.
         So it seems to me that this rule will be applied broadly
     eventually.  No matter how you initially decide you are going to direct
     it, it will be applied as broadly as people choose to apply it.  So I
     have that one comment specifically.
         MR. CARDILE:  Yeah, I think -- and that is one of the
     questions in the issues paper.  It lays out the material or the
     equipment and material we have information about now, the database we
     have now, and then it requests, well, what other suggestions are there
     for materials?  And we would certainly take that under advisement.
         DR. WYMER:  Any other comments?
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Yes.  Can you give me an idea -- you say
     are going to develop a dose based regulation considering from background
     up to 10 millirem.  Why 10?  Why not 100?
         MR. CARDILE:  I will start and then you can jump in.
         MR. HUFFERT:  Sure.
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, it lays those I guess three or four as
     what we think are probably potential alternatives.  The opening paper,
     for the cleanup rule, started at 100 and suggested 100, 25, you know,
     15, 10, 1 down to background, and we wound up having a dose standard of
     25 millirem for the cleanup rule for a land and structure based on, to
     some extent, on the fraction of 100 millirem as the appropriate value.
         The initial thought in preparing this paper is that,
     because, potentially, these materials can be more dispersed in the
     public usage than perhaps one fixed decommissioning site, or
     decommissioned site, that a value less than the 25 millirem from the
     cleanup rule was probably more appropriate here.
         Numbers that have been, you know, used or talked about in
     international circles, for example, for clearance, have been the range
     of 1 to 3 millirem, so at least as an opening suggestion here, we listed
     10.  Again, the question in the issues paper, are these appropriate
     values or not?
         DR. HORNBERGER:  So sort of your rationale is that because
     these would be sources that could move around, that they would somehow
     be potentially more dangerous than a source that was fixed?
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, not more dangerous, but perhaps a person
     could be exposed, whereas, a person would not likely be exposed -- well,
     not more likely.  The dose calculation coming up with the 25 millirem
     for a decommissioned site is a person, a resident farmer or a resident
     person living or working at that site.  That is kind of the limit as to
     what they would get.  Whereas, here, it is not that it is more
     dangerous, but there is potential for, I guess, more multiple exposures
     in that --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  So it is a collective dose argument rather
     than an individual dose?
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, it is also an individual dose argument
     to an individual, if we have to watch that you don't get more than this
     dose level from a particular -- that you can't get exposed to several
     pieces of equipment, or former pieces of equipment --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  If steel goes into a car and you drive
     around a car for your life, and that is worse than being a farmer living
     at the site?
         MR. CARDILE:  No, but the steel could go into the car, and,
     you know, the material building your house, and the material, you know,
     in your car, your bed frame or whatever, things like that.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Has anyone worked out the probabilities
     that those multiple things would happen?
         MR. HUFFERT:  Actually, that is one of the things that is
     going to be looked at in our statement of work for the continuation of
     the NUREG-1640 work.  We are looking at exposures to multiple sources
     and population behaviors.  That has not been done so far, and it is
     going to be a large piece of work to get that accomplished.
         DR. GARRICK:  Have you done the cost -- implementation cost
     studies as a function of different standards, different clearances?
         MR. HUFFERT:  We will be working on that.  How we did it for
     the decommissioning rule was we chose different dose levels and we then
     took the dose levels, converted it to picocuries per gram by using a
     dose conversion factor, and once we had these levels of radioactive
     contamination present, we then did studies to figure out what is the
     cost of surveying to different dose levels.  We would just take
     different concentration values.  We set up studies where we would use
     very crude instrumentation, all the way to extremely sophisticated
     methods that are almost impracticable to use to try to figure out where
     the state of the art was.
         And from there, we basically came up with cost curves, and
     we could see where certain radionuclides were very difficult to measure
     and it helped us in our generic Environmental Impact Statement.  And a
     similar thing would be done here for this rulemaking.  The statement of
     work that I have been working on with the Office of Research has that
     stipulated, that we would go from a return to background or background
     level, all the way up to 10 millirem or more.  We think we have a handle
     on what the dose conversion factors are from NUREG-1640 and other work
     done by the federal agencies, so we can start applying that work -- I'm
     sorry, those dose conversion factors to our study.
         DR. GARRICK:  What about pilot applications as a rule, is
     this planned?
         MR. HUFFERT:  As far as implementation?
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. HUFFERT:  That is in the statement of work.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. HUFFERT:  Not to sound like a broken record here, but
     when we did this work for the decommissioning rule, we did pilot studies
     at large decommissioning sites.  We also set up a maze, if you want to
     call it, at one of the national labs, work surveyors were required to go
     in and survey against walls to find out how well they could detect
     different radioactivity levels, and that also helped us as a pilot to
     understand what -- how implementable our rule really was.  And we are
     planning something similar to that here.
         DR. GARRICK:  What have been the operators' reactions to the
     program you have made so far, the people that have the facilities?
         MR. HUFFERT:  I haven't talked to anyone yet about that.  I
     have talked to people in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation about
     it, since they are the group regulating the reactors and they are on the
     working group, they are on the steering group, they haven't raised any
     concerns yet.
         We don't know where the dose standard is yet, it is an open
     book right now.  If it is a higher level, it probably will not present a
     problem.  If it is much lower, it would be more difficult to implement.
         DR. WYMER:  How much attention are you paying to the
     international standards in this area?  They have already gone through
     this, at least some of the countries, and they have established
     standards, and they have methodologies established.  How much are you
     taking that into account?
         MR. HUFFERT:  The Office of Research -- in fact the
     technical manager for NUREG-1640 is a member of the working group who's
     developing Tech Doc 855.  He'll be going there next month to refine that
     document further.  He has been a very good resource for the agency, and
     we are kept aware of what's going on through him, and also our Office of
     International Programs.
         As far as implementation is concerned, I can talk to that a
     little bit, if that would help.  There are studies going on
     internationally in this area not specifically related to clearance, but
     illicit trafficking, and for example there's a study being conducted
     right now at the IAEA that is -- they have set up a portable monitor at
     one of the -- I think at the Austrian borders.  They are evaluating
     instruments from France, Germany, the United States, England, I think
     Sweden.  They're evaluating the ability of these equipments to detect
     radioactivity in scrap or some type of confined geometry.  There will be
     a workshop next month at Los Alamos on this, and I can tell you I just
     recently participated in a workshop with the steel industry on detection
     of radioactivity in scrap which will actually be very close linked to
     what we're doing here.
         DR. WYMER:  Fine.  Thanks.
         DR. GARRICK:  I take it that this is a status report, that
     you're not looking for anything specifically from us except the
     discussion.
         MR. CARDILE:  That's right, and as I pointed out, a good
     time to -- we'd be interested in -- the point of the issues paper and
     the public meeting is to get feedback to feed into some of these
     contracts as we go forward.  And we'll be reporting back to the
     Commission in hopefully February of next year based on the results of
     all of these public meetings.  So a good time to get some strong
     feedback would be in amongst the public meetings that we're holding in
     the fall, either while we -- or, you know, during that period of time or
     maybe immediately after that time we'll probably be in a position to
     report back some preliminary results about the meetings and also receive
     your input.
         DR. GARRICK:  I guess that the real key here is that not as
     what you end up with is the actual clearance limits, clearance level. 
     Is that right?  And so the process by which you get to those levels. 
     And you say that those have not really been established yet.
         MR. CARDILE:  The clearance levels?
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. HUFFERT:  No, not at all.
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, I'm sorry, yes, the process for us doing
     this rulemaking has been laid out, and it's laid out in management
     directives, in our regulations, et cetera.  But as far as what the
     actual value is going to be, no, we don't have -- we don't know if it's
     going to be 10 or 100 millirem or zero.
         DR. GARRICK:  Now are you satisfied that the way you're
     proceeding that everybody that has involvement in this process, the
     stakeholders, the public, et cetera, are in a position to contribute
     information for you to make -- for that decision to be made?
         I'm always thinking a little bit about the smaller operators
     who don't always have the resources to handle these kind of projects.
         MR. HUFFERT:  I can tell you that when we do an analysis
     we're required in our regulations to look at the economic impact of a
     proposed rule on small entities under the Regulatory Flexibility Act, we
     need to do that.
         DR. GARRICK:  Um-hum.
         MR. HUFFERT:  And as Frank had mentioned, we are actively
     involved with the States in our working group and steering group, and
     certainly the public meetings, the Federal Register notices, we're going
     to have a Web site set up for comments on this.  We're asking for a lot
     of public participation.
         MR. CARDILE:  I expect that one of the participants in the
     public meetings will be, for example, the scrap dealers or the steel
     manufacturers, and they'll come back to us with a lot of information
     about what's practical and not practical, what impact this could have on
     their industry and not.
         With regard to -- that will represent both the large and
     small people who will be receiving this material.  In terms of the large
     and small NRC licensees, that'll be -- I presume that'll be part of what
     we're getting at with some of these contracts that you do on survey
     abilities and capabilities and what are the costs to survey material,
     whether it's a reactor licensee or a small hospital.  So --
         DR. GARRICK:  What do you consider to be the most difficult
     technical issue?  Is it the surveying part of the problem?  When you're
     dealing with these low levels?
         MR. HUFFERT:  I think it's going to be a tremendous
     technical challenge if we are required to go to zero.
         [Laughter.]
         I don't mean to be facetious, but if you're at 10 millirem
     per year, it's a much easier target, but if you're at a small fraction
     of 1, it could be very difficult now.  Maybe we can come up with some
     innovative methods of surveying.  I don't know yet.
         DR. WYMER:  In inferred, perhaps wrongly, from something
     that was said, that maybe you'll be making these permissible doses on
     these various kinds of materials radioisotope-specific with respect to
     the contaminant, and in particular with respect to the half-life of the
     contaminant, since obviously if it's a short half-life, it's not so
     important that it have a low a dose, because after a little while you
     won't have so much.
         Is that in there, or did I read something more into it than
     you said?
         MR. HUFFERT:  Go ahead.
         MR. CARDILE:  I'm going to let you answer.  I was just going
     to say one point I may have made which may have been confusing was that,
     for example, a restricted use might be something that's beneficial where
     a half-life -- an isotope had a short half-life because obviously it
     goes away.
         I don't think we're planning on setting a dose limit based
     on --
         DR. WYMER:  On specific --
         MR. CARDILE:  Specific isotope.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  How will you know where to look for this?  I
     mean, there's certain pathways you can follow, you know, where something
     started out, but you're talking about scrap yards and things like this. 
     How would you -- were you going to have a blanket requirement on all
     scrap dealers that they must check?  Or am I --
         MR. CARDILE:  Are you talking about in general or about this
     restricted use possibility?
         MR. HUFFERT:  The surveys would be conducted at the point of
     release of the nuclear facility.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Okay.
         MR. HUFFERT:  I think before the material was released from
     the nuclear facility, you'd have to survey it, assay it, whatever,
     before it gets out --
         DR. FAIRHURST:  All right.
         MR. HUFFERT:  To the general public.
         MR. CARDILE:  But once it was released -- once it was
     surveyed at that point and released for unrestricted use --
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Then you don't worry about it.
         MR. CARDILE:  It can go anywhere, and the hope is that these
     dose models that have been done in NUREG-1640 would sufficiently
     represent these pathways.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  There's no need for concern?
         MR. CARDILE:  Yes.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  I don't --
         MR. CARDILE:  And that's why the restricted use is in --
     because it says that while if it's decided that -- to limit where this
     material can go, then you have questions of well, how do you do that? 
     And it's something we'll have to face.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Is this an issue that when you're talking
     about public meetings that there will be a broad spectrum of public
     involved or just people who feel like have some sort of business or -- a
     business reason for --
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, I think, as I was saying, there would be
     the nuclear industry or the licensed industry, not just sometimes when
     we talk about nuclear we think about, you know, power reactors, but it
     would be the whole licensed community.  I mean, people from small walks
     of life with regard to licensees.
         It would also be the people who then receive the material,
     they have a business interest, but they also have a from what we've
     heard somewhat they also have an interest in terms of we're a steel
     manufacturer or where a scrap dealer, and we either can or can't deal
     with this material.  So there would be that spectrum of people.
         But then there would also be -- and I think that's the
     process of the facilitator is to go get other, you know, public groups
     to say we're concerned or not concerned about this material coming into
     general commerce or general public consumer use, and if it does, what
     are the dose levels and that type of thing.  So the hope is that the
     facilitator sets up these meetings so we get kind of people along this
     step of this process of where this material could wind up.
         MR. LARSON:  Is your question in some of the past
     participatory rulemakings, you know, the agency has provided funds to
     some people that are unable to get to the thing otherwise.  Are there
     plans in this one to do that?
         Is that what you're asking, Charlie?  Like the Native
     Americans --
         DR. FAIRHURST:  What I'm trying to say well, if you have to
     go down to one millirem, or .1, it would seem to me that you're going to
     have a lot of pressure in any public meeting to keep going lower and
     lower and lower, and at some point you have to say look, this doesn't
     make either risk sense or financial sense or whatever.  I don't know.  I
     just --
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, one of the things that -- well, one of
     the things that the issues paper points out that the public meetings are
     intended to foster discussion, obtain advice, obtain data or
     information, perhaps not to reach -- and point out things like competing
     impacts, point out things like implementation problems like going to
     zero, but not necessarily to reach consensus.  So --
         MR. HUFFERT:  That analysis will be performed in our generic
     environmental impact statement and regulatory analysis.  There's a
     process set up for weighing the different factors.
         MR. LARSON:  If a clearance level is for unrestricted use,
     then why are you going to go through a collective dose analysis, which
     sort of amplifies the situation that -- I don't understand.
         MR. CARDILE:  I can start.  Again, for example, these
     cleanup rules, for example, we went through a process of saying all
     right, well here's the exposure to an individual, but, you know, on the
     other hand, especially in the case of clearance, you might, while the
     exposure to an individual may be low, the exposure to a large number of
     people because there's a lot of equipment available could be higher.
         The guidelines of NUREG or BRO-058 in complying with the
     cost-benefit regulatory analysis guidelines talk about balancing costs
     and impacts.  So we'll be looking at both individual dose and collective
     doses.
         DR. GARRICK:  That likely introduces -- doesn't that
     introduce a real complication as far as accountability is concerned?
         MR. HUFFERT:  What do you mean by accountability?  Do you
     mean as far as defining the population?
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. HUFFERT:  Yes.  I think that what would happen is we
     would have to give it our best shot of not only understanding population
     behavior, but also try to estimate the uncertainty in those numbers. 
     And when we are collective doses, I think we should be checking the
     uncertainty in those numbers carefully.  And if we follow NCRP 121 we
     would be categorizing our uncertainty estimates for the collective dose.
         MR. CARDILE:  An additional uncertainty in trying to
     estimate collective doses is, if you are just calculating individual
     dose, you just need to know if such-and-such concentration gives you
     such-and-such individual dose.  In order to calculate collective dose,
     we have to go back and make some estimate as what is the volume of metal
     at a power plant available at these levels.  And that is something that
     is going to be part of these contracts, but it is not easy to put a
     handle on.
         DR. GARRICK:  It sounds like a nightmare to me.  Doesn't
     this run the potential of forcing you into the equivalent on an
     individual dose that is --
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Minuscule.
         DR. GARRICK:  -- minuscule and infinitesimally small?  Isn't
     there an allocation problem here of great proportion?
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, an experience we had in -- I keep
     referring to the cleanup rule, but an experience we had in the cleanup
     rule was that we tried to do the same thing.  We looked at, what is the
     collective dose from people either coming on and using these structures
     or lands for different possible uses down the road?  That was a little
     easier because there is perhaps a limited number of ways you can use a
     building.  But we actually looked at the building and said, all right,
     this building could be used for a certain type of usage, and the lands,
     or it could be used for an apartment building, you know, where there is
     a lot of people, but a lower dose because you only -- you know, there is
     a limited number -- a limited amount of usage of the land, as compared
     to, say, a resident farmer who is growing the crops.
         So we tried to look at alternate collective doses, and we
     had several different alternatives.  And what we -- if you go back to
     the statement of considerations for the final cleanup rule or
     decommissioning rule, we, in essence, said that, look, there is not an
     absolute -- I forget the word we used, but there is not an absolute,
     definitive answer with regard to where the best ALARA number or the best
     cost benefit number is.  It can vary, you know, based on the
     circumstance, based on uncertainty.
         The cleanup rule wound up saying we think that 25 millirem
     is the right fraction of 100 millirem.  We think that this is
     sufficiently supported by the regulatory an and collective dose analysis
     that we think this is the appropriate number.  So that is a long way
     around answering your question that, you know, in that case, we
     basically looked at the individual dose and said we think this is the
     appropriate number.  We looked at the regulatory analysis and balancing
     of collective doses and benefits, or costs and that said that, you know,
     we can't make the decision based on that.
         We think we are right here with the right number.  The same
     thing could happen here.  We could decide upon an individual dose that
     we think is an appropriate constraint below 100 millirem, an appropriate
     fraction of 100 millirem.  We could look at the collective -- we could
     say that implementation-wise, you know, you can measure this in a
     reasonable way.  And with regard to the collective dose, given all the
     uncertainties of quantity of metal, following people around, how they
     might use this material, that, you know, that we think whatever this
     individual dose value we have set is reasonable.  So that's two years
     ahead of where we are right now, but --
         DR. GARRICK:  It seems that we work very hard to make this
     as complicated as it can be.
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, of course, we are required, as Tony's
     slide points out, to do a NEPA analysis, to do a regulatory analysis
     using the guidelines of the NUREGs.
         MS. THOMAS:  Wait, wait.  If you are not going to account
     for the material once it gets released for unrestricted use, how are you
     going to determine collective dose?  That just doesn't -- it doesn't
     follow.
         MR. CARDILE:  Well, we are going --
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  I think you have it just backwards.  What we
     have to do is decide what criterion we will use.  In order to see the
     cost benefit of using the different criteria to set clearance, we have
     to sort of know what the cost is going to be, both in terms of health
     effects and in terms of the commercial impacts and such.  And, so, sort
     of the other way in that.  Once we have set the clearance criterion and
     everybody accepts it, who cares what happens with all that?
         You know, at this point we are taking the lead from other
     organizations who have gone a little bit ahead of us, like IAEA, where
     they have tied it traditionally to the idea of trivial dose, which is
     the 1 to 10 millirem range from Safety Series 89.  And that is basically
     why it factored into our range of numbers that we selected for the dose
     considerations.
         And then other people will say the difference between 10
     millirem and 30 millirem is really inconsequential.  So the idea is
     perhaps in that range, we will cover enough that it might be below,
     let's say, the D and D standard of 25, that we have, in effect, tried to
     cover the spectrum a little bit at the lower end.
         DR. GARRICK:  So given what we have heard from the health
     physics experts about the effectiveness of 100 millirem standard as
     assuring the protection of the public, given that kind of information,
     what is your view with respect to risk and safety if we eliminated the
     collective dose requirement in the rule?
         MR. CARDILE:  We are not anticipating having a collective
     dose requirement in the rule, of course.  I mean we are only using it as
     a tool.  The rule would be --
         DR. GARRICK:  Well, to calculate the dose.  Yes.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  What is the basis for the IAEA 1 to 10 as
     being trivial, is that --
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  It is out of Safety Series 89.  They went
     into it to some degree -- there is a discussion in Safety Series 89 on
     setting that.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  No, but I mean was that based on sort of
     idea that a collective dose, no matter whatever material it was, you
     could never do any harm with 10 millirem?
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  I really don't remember.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Or did you just pluck it out of the air?
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  Actually, it would have been a number of
     experts plucking it out of the air, that's the way they work.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  I think most people would agree that 10 is
     trivial.
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  Right.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  That doesn't mean that 10 is a justifiable
     number.
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  Well, the idea -- I don't doubt that there
     are practices and activities with higher possible dose levels that would
     be okay.  The idea over this triviality aspect is it would be applied
     across the board to any activities so you wouldn't have to think about
     it.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  Right.  I understand.
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  But in things above those levels, it may
     still be perfectly safe, but they would have to be looked at
     site-specifically.
         DR. FAIRHURST:  It is like shooting yourself in the foot.
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  Yes.
         DR. GARRICK:  One of the things that I think that is a
     hopeful advantage of a risk-informed approach to regulatory practice is
     simplification, is, you know, the idea of getting away from subsystems
     requirements over prescriptive, intermediate results, et cetera.  So
     that is an aspect that we are looking for.
         One of the things I was curious about here is, given that
     you have guidance from the commission level with respect to regulations
     and the development of new regulations to adopt a risk-informed,
     performance-based perspective, what have you done here to do that?  As
     best I can tell, the only thing you have done is the so-called
     probabilistic exposure scenarios.  Is that it?
         MR. CARDILE:  I guess -- don't forget, we are at the very
     early stages.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. CARDILE:  As Tony mentioned, we are planning on making
     sure that this thing is implementable, any dose level we pick is
     implementable.  The other thing is we are looking at what is the
     appropriate individual dose level, what is the appropriate risk that we
     are looking at here.  So, I think, you know, obviously, this rule is
     going to be based on both the risk to an individual and the ability --
     the capability to implement whatever rulemaking we come up with.
         DR. WYMER:  I have a --
         MR. CARDILE:  But we may be -- I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
     cut you off.
         DR. WYMER:  Go ahead.
         MR. CARDILE:  I was just going to say that that is the idea,
     the point of the issues paper is to say, is this the appropriate set of
     factors to be using in the consideration of setting the standard?
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. CARDILE:  I mean here is alternative dose standards
     which we could use, here are some of the factors that we would consider
     in developing them, namely, health and environmental impacts, cost
     benefit implementation, other countries' standards.  What guidelines
     would you give, you know, the collective you, as we proceed?
         The point of the issues paper is to foster this kind of
     discussion, but we don't have the answers to these questions.  We're
     trying to formulate what our questions that we can go to the public with
     and -- both the general public and the regulated public and the steel
     manufacturer public would, you know, wherever they fit in the spectrum
     and talk about these kinds of questions.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.  Well, we sort of believe, I think, as a
     committee, that the strategy with respect to regulatory development, if
     indeed you're going to go in the direction of risk-informed
     performance-based, is to make them very tough with respect to
     performance and risk requirements, but allow a lot of flexibility with
     respect to how you get there, and move away from overprescriptiveness of
     the intermediate steps.  And I take it that's what you're trying to do
     with a dose-based approach.
         MR. CARDILE:  Definitely.  I think, for example, if you go
     back to the cleanup rule, it's fairly unprescriptive in the sense that
     it lists a dose standard.
         DR. GARRICK:  Right.
         MR. CARDILE:  And that's basically it.
         DR. GARRICK:  But I'm a little worried about this issue of
     what you end up with as dose levels, number 1, and how that is
     allocated, number 2.
         MR. LARSON:  Are you alluding then that you'd like to see
     the issues paper and the technical basis document rather than towards
     October and November, sooner than that?  Because supposedly a technical
     basis doc can be out -- you're saying June, right?  And of course the
     SECY says the issues paper was out in January, but it still hasn't got
     out yet.
         MR. CARDILE:  No, the issues paper said that it would be
     sent to the Commission in March, and that's what we're planning on
     doing, and then we will publish it in April for comment until November. 
     The NUREG-1640 is scheduled for publication in March.
         DR. WYMER:  Yes, that sort of gets at what is the extent of
     the responsibility of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in these kinds
     of matters.  In a way it gets at that.  It also relates in a way to two
     points I raised earlier on strategic and critical materials and whether
     or not you're radioisotope-specific in this thing.
         Although I kind of inverted the last one now, and I'll say
     what materials are you going to pay particular attention to, if any, and
     let me tell you what I mean when I ask that.  I'll give you a trivial
     example, but there probably are better examples.
         I know, for example, that there was a great deal of concern
     in the people doing very-low-level background counting that we don't
     crud up the copper that's used in the instrumentation, and there are
     probably other similar examples that can be found in specialty uses of
     materials that might be contaminated with low levels of radioactivity
     that would be deleterious to scientific investigations or health studies
     or things like this.
         So are you going to try to pick out, you probably are not,
     but pick out specific materials that have known specific sensitive uses,
     uses that are sensitive to radioactive contamination and put them into a
     special class with special requirements?
         MR. HUFFERT:  No, not to my knowledge.
         DR. WYMER:  The answer is no, huh?
         MR. HUFFERT:  So far what we're doing --
         DR. GARRICK:  Simple answer to a long question.
         DR. WYMER:  Yes.
         MR. HUFFERT:  We are focusing on copper, aluminum, iron,
     concrete.  That's what was done.  We will be including soils at the
     Commission direction.  And for this proposed rulemaking, I don't think
     we're going to be including any more materials unless we're directed
     otherwise.  It's one of the issues that are contained in the issues
     paper, should we be doing this.  So --
         DR. WYMER:  Copper of course is one of the --
         MR. HUFFERT:  Right.
         DR. WYMER:  Sensitive materials.
         DR. GARRICK:  I guess one of the things that would help the
     committee a great deal on this whole issue is to get a better sense of
     the world into which this thing is going to be applied, because it would
     be easier for us to visualize what kind of problems might develop if we
     better understood the variety and spectrum of applications in the kinds
     of facilities you're talking about and the size, shape, et cetera.
         I'm sure we can dig that out, but I think that it's
     important to understand the operational implications when you're looking
     at any kind of future development of regulations.
         That's why we ask the questions about participation, who
     participated in developing source material that you use to move forward
     with the documentation.
         I don't know whether it's practical for us to at some point
     in time get a little better overview of how this thing is going to be
     used or not, Howard.
         DR. GARRICK:  I think -- part of my concern about a lot of
     these things is I think we sometimes -- the committees are handicapped
     unless they're really operationally involved and can get overacademic
     about their consideration of some of these things, and I think we need
     to be a little educated on the field and what's going on out there in
     order to better visualize some of the problems that you might run into.
         I don't know if that makes any sense to any of my colleagues
     or not.
         DR. WYMER:  I don't mind being called academic.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Howard can brief us.
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  One of the things that really wasn't
     discussed a whole lot is the fact that the United States may be faced in
     the future with importation of materials, and there's very close work
     with the State Department on that.  There's -- we are aware that perhaps
     the extent that you are addressing can be described as pervasive.  It's
     almost in every --
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  You know, aspect of our society, and maybe
     we're putting too much stock in this enhanced participatory rulemaking
     process.  But it is our hope that we will glean more and more of a
     picture as time goes on with people telling us you don't have the idea
     of what's going on, what about this and this and this?
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes, one of the bodies that I like to hear
     from of course are the people that are going to be affected by this.
         MR. GNUGNOLI:  Did you say infected?
         DR. GARRICK:  Affected, and particularly because the
     standards seem to be very, very low that we're talking about, and it's
     not clear that there's much anxiety here as far as health and safety is
     concerned.  But I think the view of the licensees that have to live
     under these rules is very important for us to also hear.
         Because they can speak the kinds of problems that I am
     alluding to with direct experience, and that as background information
     has always been very helpful, to me, anyhow, in offering any kind of
     advice on these kind of issues.
         MR. CARDILE:  I am sure that with regard to the licensees
     who are going to have to face these dose levels, that they will be well
     represented at these public meetings.
         DR. GARRICK:  yes.
         MR. CARDILE:  And also from the experience of the cleanup
     rule, I am sure we will get plenty of letters or comments.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         MR. CARDILE:  Written comments on whatever stage we are in,
     including I am sure when the issues paper goes on the streets, we will
     get some written reaction from the nuclear industry, the NEI, you know,
     the various industries saying we have no material, this is a waste of
     time.  These doses you are talking about are too low.
         We got -- you know, like I say, the cleanup rule, steps
     along the way generated quite a bit of information, you know, written
     letters to us letting us know what is reasonable, what is not
     reasonable.  So that aspect, I have no -- that piece of the world, I
     have no doubt, will let us know what is going on.
         I also have no doubt that the steel, given what we have
     heard at a couple of meetings, that people who are going to be the
     immediate recipients of this material will let us know that these doses
     are too high or too low, or are going to cause havoc in their industry
     or not.
         And then I have no doubt that, you know, at least convening
     the process to get public involvement, you know, the general public,
     they will let us know whether they think these doses are too high or too
     low.  That was certainly our experience in the cleanup rule, and I
     expect that this facilitator for this rule, both the internal -- well, I
     can't speak to the external facilitator, but the internal facilitator
     for the cleanup rule is the same person who worked on the -- for this
     rule is the same one who worked on the cleanup rule and is familiar with
     the parties and how to get representation of the different parties and
     how to bring that, you know, their views forward, so we should be pretty
     well served.
         In terms of looking at trying to give you better information
     about what is the universe of materials out there, and the situation out
     there, there was -- an earlier draft of this NUREG-1640 had a discussion
     of a literature survey of materials that were covered, you know, that
     would be covered by something like this.  I don't know if that was ever
     published, but I would suspect in succeeding documents that we are going
     to have that type of information available to you.
         DR. GARRICK:  Okay.  Any other comments from members, staff?
         [No response.]
         DR. GARRICK:  We are grateful to your time management in
     allowing us plenty of time to ask the questions that we wanted, so we
     like that.  Thank you very much.  I think that completes this topic.
         MR. HUFFERT:  Okay.  Thank you.
         MR. CARDILE:  Thank you.
         DR. GARRICK:  Thank you.  Okay.  What I would like to do is
     maybe, given it is a long afternoon, is take -- rather than one 15
     minute break, we may take two 10 minute breaks, and I would like to
     declare one right now, a 10 minute break.
         [Recess.]
         DR. GARRICK:  We will come to order.  We are now going to
     hear from Nick Orlando on the decommissioning standard review plan.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Thank you, Dr. Garrick.  What I would like to
     talk about today is just to give you all a little update on the standard
     review plan.  I think the first time I talked to you about this was
     about six months ago, and in that discussion I showed you a schedule
     where we had incorporated some ACNW briefings and some requests for
     input, and this is actually the briefing or request for input that I was
     supposed to have for you a couple of months ago, but we have supplanted
     that with just an overall program presentation, so that is what I am
     here to talk to you about today.
         Just to give you a little bit of background information,
     remind everybody, back in July of '98, the commission gave the staff
     some direction to go forward with some guidance that the staff had put
     out, specifically the DG-4006, said send that out for a two-year comment
     period and maintain a dialogue with the public during the comment
     period, develop a standard review plan that incorporates the
     risk-informed iterative approach in NUREG-1549, and also provide clear
     guidance on what we mean by ALARA when we develop the SRP, review the
     potential conservatism in the D and D screening code, and test the D and
     D model on some sites and use that as a test bed for developing your
     standard review plan, and, finally, use the probabilistic approach in
     calculating the total effective dose equivalent to the average member of
     the critical group, which is the dose target in the new license
     termination rule.
         My little portion of that world is the development of the
     standard review plan.  The purpose of the SRP is to allow the staff to
     evaluate information that is submitted by licensees, to support the
     decommissioning of their facilities.  We want to be able to do this in a
     timely and efficient manner.  We have had concerns from licensees that
     our reviews take too long and that they tend to be disjointed.
         We also have to make sure that the decommissioning can be
     conducted in accordance with all of our criteria and at the end of the
     day, the licensee will have submitted all the information the staff
     needs in order to make the judgments about the standard review plan.
         We had given you a description of the contents of the
     standard review plan.  If you are familiar with NUREG-1199, where it
     talks about -- or where it sets out acceptance criteria, and resources,
     and analysis requirements and whatnot, the standard review plan will
     follow that same basic format and content.
         And then the very last bullet on the slide indicates that we
     will use this to review not only decommissioning plans but also other
     information.  One of the things that has come up since we started
     developing this, at least from my perspective is the interplay of this
     with the activities in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.  And I
     think because of the process we have been going through, and because of
     the discussions we have been having, that, at least for me, has gelled
     up very nicely and we can talk about that a little later on when I get
     to the question and answer period, so I will give you one question you
     can ask me.
         Okay.  One of the things that the commission said to do is
     make sure that we continue having stakeholder input, and to do that the
     staff has and will continue to have a series of workshops on different
     aspects of the standard review plan.  Now, we had the first workshop
     back in December, the 1st and 2nd, of last year, and in that workshop,
     we discussed specifically dose modeling.
         We had a second workshop in January and we talked about dose
     modeling and restricted use scenarios -- or license termination under
     restricted use.  I recognize that these workshops are intended to
     facilitate a two-way dialogue between the NRC staff and licensees.  They
     can raise issues to us, we can talk about them in an atmosphere of
     trying to figure out what the questions and the possible solutions are. 
     We can't go to the licensees or to the participants in the workshops and
     ask them for solutions because we run afoul of FACA if we do that, the
     Federal Advisory Committee Act.
         So, in some of the workshops we have had a lot of data
     presentations.  The last one, in particular, was extremely
     symposia-like, but everybody seemed to enjoy that.  We talked a lot
     about some of the issues facing the dose modeling group.  The last
     workshop in March was actually on dose modeling the first day and ALARA
     issues the second.  The way we have set it up, at least the last three,
     one day was dose modeling and then the other day was another issue.
         In June we are going to have this third -- or the fourth
     workshop, and if you look at your old schedule, that was actually slated
     for I think the 18th and 19th.  We got bumped because of the annual NRC
     awards ceremony, the Presidential awards, and so we had to move that
     back to the 23rd and 24th.  And in that workshop, we are linking that to
     a workshop that Tom Nicholson and Research is having on groundwater, so
     there will be four days of groundwater modeling issues being discussed.
         The August workshop, we are going to talk about comments
     that we have received to date on the D and D screen, and either discuss
     surveys or discuss questions or issues that are identified by the
     agreement states.  One of the persons who is -- or one of the
     participants in the workshop has been Dave Zamori from the New Jersey
     Department of Environmental Protection.  He is representing the Council
     of Radiation Control Program Directors, and he has requested a day for
     the states to come in and present what they think the issues are and
     questions and problems they see having.  So I am not sure if we are
     going to do that in August or October.  Originally, we thought we would
     do it in October, but the agreement states are kind of indicating they
     would like to do it earlier as opposed to later.  And then if we don't
     do agreement state issues in October, we will do surveys.
         Now, as far as some of the milestones --
         DR. GARRICK:  Are you going to tell us a little bit about
     what you have learned from the workshops?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Well, one of the other handouts I gave you was
     a list of issues that had been identified.  Some of those are issues
     that came out of the workshops.  Some of those are staff generated
     issues.  I can discuss a little bit about some of the observations I
     think that we saw in the workshops.
         DR. GARRICK:  I am especially interested in anything that
     led to changes or revisions or anything that was significant enough that
     it changed your way of doing business.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Okay.  And to remind you, the milestones that
     we have established or set up so far, we are still on track pretty much. 
     We have established the work groups.  We have developed the default
     tables and published that in November of '98.  And we have identified
     the issues needed to comply -- or to start developing the draft SRP
     modules.
         We still hope to finish development of the drafts by June
     and then close -- and then revise those by May of next year, and then
     submit the final draft SRP for review in the summer of 2000.
         We have had several challenges, as you may or may not be
     aware.  Specifically, we lost some folks, Dave Fauver has moved on to
     private industry.  He was one of the group leaders for the surveys
     module.  He was also heavily involved in the dose modeling group.  To
     offset that, we have contracted with the Oak Ridge Institute for Science
     and Education to help us develop the surveys component.  In addition,
     Tim Harris is going to be working with the dose modeling group -- Tim
     Harris is in my section -- is going to be working with the dose modeling
     group to take up some of the work that Dave had been doing.
         Richard Tretill, who was originally slated to head up the
     group on financial assurance has rotated out, and I am not sure when he
     is going to come back, so we have asked ICF, Kaiser, who does a lot of
     our decommissioning, financial assurance reviews, to come in and write
     that portion of the standard review plan.  It will be written by those
     folks but overseen by NRC folks.
         In addition, there have been some other staff moving around
     a little bit, but we think we can still catch up and get done what we
     need to get done.
         The -- let's see, I seem to have lost my issues one.  The
     very last slide in your packet is a list of issues requiring resolution. 
     Instead of taking all of the issues on the second handout and trying to
     make slides on them, what I thought I would do would be to give you
     those, let you look at them at your leisure.  You can think about them. 
     We can discuss a little bit some of the thoughts that I am having, or
     that some of the work groups are having.
         Bobby Eid is in the back -- or on the side.  He can talk
     about some of the issues associated with dose modeling.  I can talk
     about restricted use and some of the other modules.  And, you know, we
     can talk about that a little bit if you would like, or we can just talk
     about the workshops, as you have indicated, or just about anything else. 
     I just wanted to give you an update as to where we were with everything.
         We have met the milestone of identifying the issues and one
     of the things we said we were going to do when we did that was give them
     to you and let you all think about them, too.  So that, believe it or
     not, concludes my formal presentation and maybe you will thank me, too,
     for giving you all kinds of time to ask questions now, till 5:30.
         MR. LARSON:  You have prepared some answers that you have
     given in some of these public workshops to some of the questions on
     these issues.
         MR. ORLANDO:  We have thought about some of the answers,
     yes.
         MR. LARSON:  Well, I have been at some of them, and so has
     Dr. Wymer, where you have talked about -- you have given the questions
     in writing and given the answers orally.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Verbally.
         MR. LARSON:  But I mean you have got answers to some of
     these.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Yes.
         MR. LARSON:  So if the members had some questions, they
     could ask.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Certainly.  But, of course, you know, those
     are, as I said in those venues, those haven't been translated into
     actual draft standard review plan acceptance criteria or anything yet,
     they are just sort of the staff's working thoughts on a lot of them.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Which do you consider the most sticky
     wickets on this list of issues that is behind you?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Dose modeling.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Dose modeling?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Without a doubt.  The most work, the most
     technical issues.  Quite frankly, for health and safety plan surveys and
     financial assurance, I think, in general, those are going to be pretty
     easy to do.  I mean it is just the process of writing down what we want.
         It is kind of interesting, for health and safety plans,
     there is guidance out there on what we want.
          There's a lot of health and safety plans that have been
     written.  There are some very good health and safety plans.  Financial
     assurance -- there's just so many things that we're going to accept: 
     surety bonds, statements of intent by federal facilities, you know,
     external sinking funds, things like that.  We don't have a whole lot of
     wiggle room.  The regs are pretty clear.
         Dose modeling?  You know, we have a code, and, you know, how
     are you going to move from specific -- excuse me -- from screening to
     site specific, how are you going to factor in these difficult cases,
     things like that.
         I'm writing a lot of the modules that aren't on here, for
     example, facility operating history, you know, things like that, and
     those you have to generate from whole cloth.  But clearly from a
     technical standpoint, dose modeling is going to be the tough one.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  I would be interested in hearing some more
     discussion about dose modeling, but before we do that, do you have a
     gut-level feeling about how you're going to handle ALARA?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Chris McKinney unfortunately is not here, he's
     out in New Mexico today, but he has identified some of the issues.  The
     principal issue with ALARA is making sure that it's an a priori kind of
     an assessment.  There is a lot of concern -- ALARA can kind of be
     handled two ways.  I mean, you know, sort of traditionally, you can look
     at it and say, well, here's my dose and that's the amount of material in
     the dirt or that I'm shooting for, and the dose I'm going to get from
     that, and if I clean up six more inches, how much is that going to cost
     and what's the dose benefit.
         There's also what Chris likes to think of as rolling ALARA
     assessments where you're doing those kinds of things as you're looking
     at imbedded pipe and as you're looking at each -- as you come across
     individual situations at the site, where perhaps you would maybe not
     have as good characterization as you need.  So you start chasing
     contamination through the soil.
         Well, all of a sudden, you've got to start making ALARA
     assessments at that point, because if you thought it was going to take X
     amount of money to clean up to a certain level -- don't forget, ALARA is
     below 25, so we're already, you know, safe.
         If you wanted to take it to 23, all of a sudden, if you've
     got to dig 75 more feet or 75 more cubic feet of dirt out at a cost of a
     couple of thousand dollars a cubic foot, all of a sudden, you've got to
     start making ALARA assessments at that point, and those are the kinds of
     things that he's having -- wants to get, you know, down.
         MR. LARSON:  Yes, but the SRM on ALARA said that in
     addition, if the licensee complies with the 25 millirem dose criterion
     using the screening, the licensee will emit the intended ALARA
     requirement and additional demonstrations may not be necessary.
         MR. ORLANDO:  That's for soil.
         MR. LARSON:  Okay.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  But as far as the dose modeling goes,
     you're first overhead related to the D and D code and testing it at a
     complex site, et cetera, et cetera.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Yes, sir.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Tell me a little about the dose modeling
     and to what extent does it cover what was on the first of your overheads
     and to what extent does it go beyond it for more complex sites.  You
     mentioned site specific.  How is this all going to play out?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Okay.  If I can, I would like to turn it over
     to Bob Eid.  He's the project or the group leader for the dose modeling
     group.  If that's all right with you all since he's the one who --
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.  I think that would be good.
         MR. EID:  Good afternoon.  My name is Bob Eid.  I am here to
     answer your questions about dose modeling.  I will try.
         As you know, dose modeling is very complex, lots of issues. 
     We try to deal with the issues as much as we can.  We try to interact
     with the users also to look into what are the issues that they face when
     trying to use the current tools that we have or the tools currently
     available for dose modeling.
         As you know, the current tools for dose modeling, most
     licensees, they use -- they have two options.  They have the D&D version
     1 code that we have, and this is the NRC code, and we said this is a
     screening code, it's for a two-year period.  We found that also the
     license, mostly they use RESRAD.  The licensees tend to use more RESRAD
     rather than D&D screen.
         Now, you asked the question about what are the issues in
     dose modeling.  There are so many issues -- where to start?
         Let's first see, just to give you two or three or maybe four
     issues, for the current code that we have, version 1, we have the issue
     regarding alpha emitters for surface contamination.  The alpha emitters
     for surface contamination, DCGL, those guidelines -- currently they are
     very low.  They are not detected at all within the limit or with the
     fluctuational background.   That's an issue.  We struggled with that
     issue early in the process.  We tried to generate default tables for
     licensees to use.  We were successful in generating default tables on
     D&D version 1 for beta and gamma emitters, but we were unsuccessful in
     developing default tables for alpha emitters.  That's the first issue.
         The second issue that we have about the methodology of D&D
     version 1.0, the methodology we tried to -- NMSS staff expressed their
     concern from the beginning that the current methodology tended to
     exaggerate or to be conservative, such that there would be a dose,
     higher dose that maybe is not needed -- in other words, to increase the
     risk -- and the answer was, well, this is screening methodology and we
     understood that.  But I guess there were presentations also in this
     regard, and everybody understood yes, it is screening and we like to
     take it as screening methodology and we should accept that excessive
     dose.
         Now, working with the code, we found that from this
     workshop, they were very usual, that the licensees, they did use the
     code, and they came with numbers, and they found that for certain
     radionuclides, these doses, they are practically unacceptable for them,
     and they called them anomalies.  An example for those, they are the
     cesium values and the strontium 90 values.
         To put you in perspective, if you are interested in knowing
     numbers, the current version 1.0 produces doses for unit concentration,
     one pico curie per gram, of about around 60 millirem per pico curie per
     gram.  However, if we use, you know, the Sanuleta report where they
     listed single radionuclide source, they assume not all radionuclide
     source, all come back to the reason behind this extra dose, that it is
     -- you will find that the value could be 14 millirem for strontium 90. 
     For cesium, the unit concentration dose currently in D&D version 1 would
     produce about 28 millirem, whereas in the report using single
     radionuclide value, would produce -- also be around fraction of
     millirem.  So you could see the difference in the doses.
         The reason for having these extra doses currently, because
     the methodology tends to be over-conservative and tried to assume that
     you have all radionuclides listed in the table at your source.
         So in other words, just to articulate this, to be honest in
     my giving you the presentation to reflect also research point of view
     according to what they said, okay, these anomalies in the version 1.0
     for some radionuclides -- again, not for all radionuclides -- they're
     related to the high dose values generated using version 1 as compared to
     using single radionuclide input, and they are called both artifact of
     the current methodology to select a solution representing the single
     default set for all radionuclides.  That's what the have.  And this is
     -- I guess it's a significant issue.  The question, is this such kind of
     high difference in the dose, and everybody recognize that extra dose
     there is not needed, because at the end, you have a default parameter
     that's indeed for when you have all radionuclides to establish single
     set or default parameter for all radionuclides sources, you will end not
     with the 90th percentile of certain parameters, you will end with the
     99.9 percentile of that parameter.  So this is -- that's, you know, I
     think a serious thing that we need to consider, whether to -- you to
     accept whether the licensee can accept this extra dose between one
     millirem or 28 millirem or between 14 and 16 millirem or not.
         If we agree that it is not -- it is an excessive dose that
     is not needed, then maybe you will need to modify the methodology
     currently and D&D.
         The answer to the question of what to do about it already
     exists, and it was realized earlier that the -- possibly this excessive
     dose could be resolved by having the Monte Carlo version, where in the
     Monte Carlo version, you try to avoid -- you put your single
     radionuclide or the mixture of the radionuclides that you have and then
     develop default parameter, see if that corresponds to these kind of
     scores.  So by doing this, you will minimize this kind of excessive dose
     that's currently in D&D version 1.0.
         Another third issue also, the input parameters in the
     current code, and we talked about it and we said this represents all
     kind of conditions across the United States, represents all
     radionuclides, and these input parameters, they are conservative
     somehow.
         We found there are certain parameters that are quite
     conservative.  Almost there is consensus among the group that they need
     to be changed.  An example of those is the mass loading factor for plant
     reposition, and this is a number almost everybody agreed that needs to
     be changed.
         Another factor which we spent lots of time in the discussion
     in the dose modeling group is the resuspension factor for indoor.  The
     resuspension factor for indoor, we find the PDF is constructed on data
     which was taken in 1964, published data, and the number of data points
     here are two, although they were also data points for that specific
     reference that was quoted.
         We tried to look at the PDF again to look critically at what
     kind of data we have, and we find we understand that yes, it is
     conservative.  We were at first with the situation, okay, what to do
     about it, what alternatives we have.  We found that we need additional
     data.
         We tried to look at additional data, and the workshops, they
     were very successful trying to communicate with the industry and plead
     for them to give us whatever site-specific data they have.  I would like
     to record that we were very successful on the one that -- the industry
     cooperated at the workshop.  They were so successful in getting actual
     data that were measured over years by the licensee that they were not
     aware of, and there were several presentations about resuspension
     factors by industry.  There were honest and true presentations by us and
     new suggestions.
         I think possibly, if -- still we are not in complete
     agreement within the group.  If we agree, we have consensus agreement,
     we could move forward to modify resuspension factor.  If we do that,
     based on our recommendation that not everybody agrees, of course -- as
     you know, this is technical discussion not everybody agrees on.  If we
     move forward this that, we could modify the alpha surface contaminations
     by possibly a factor of 18 to 20, and we will be now in the working
     region, the measurable region of dose.
         Those are some of the issues.  There are other issues that,
     you know, I would like to give you more time if you would like to ask
     any other questions.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  Just a short follow up perhaps.  What
     you've described, you're right, I mean, these are interesting technical
     issues.  It appears to me that you have your ideas well in hand for how
     you're going to collect data and perhaps modify the code and change
     default settings.  In other words, you've given us a good indication
     that you have the road pretty clearly mapped out in front of you as to
     how you're going to solve these technical problems.
         Do you see any technical problems din the dose modeling that
     you don't have a clear idea of how you're going -- that is, are there
     some big questions that really aren't even resolved conceptually?
         MR. EID:  Really, I do not know specifically.  The only
     problems that I know, that the licensees are using one code and we have
     another code, and we are trying to use and to improve our code as much
     as we can to make it more useful for screening.  Our code has
     limitation, as I said before, and we tried to balance to see what are
     the limitations and to what extent we can use our code, and to what
     extent that we could allow the licensees to use our other codes and how
     we evaluate that.  
         We found that RESRAD, as you know, is a very popular code
     used by the licensees.  Now the question is, when the licensees, they
     submit RESRAD to us, we have no information about how to assist the
     conservatism in RESRAD, how to assist these parameters.  We are working
     on that.  But also, we need to start with this -- the Commission, they
     told us to have risk-informed, you know, based regulations, so try to
     look at RESRAD, and currently it's more deterministic.  They are working
     on a probablistic version, which is not workable.  So that's the reason
     we tried to develop -- we developed a scope of work for RESRAD, a RESRAD
     probablistic, and we tried to have some kind of similar approach which
     we adopted, actually, the probabilistic approach.  That's one of the
     issues that we struggled at the beginning, to go to probabilistic or
     deterministic.  We agreed that we would like to go to the probabilistic,
     although we cannot completely say, if licensees submitted deterministic
     with sufficient justification, just ignore it completely, but we've said
     that's the route we'd like to see.
         Therefore, we are working on it such that if licensees, they
     submitted RESRAD for site-specific analysis so we could have a feeling
     and we could have the tool to assist what kind of conservative
     assumption they have.  The question is, can you use other codes for
     screening analysis.  Then the issue will be, you have two default
     values, for example, and how you deal with that.
         I think if we succeed in modifying our code currently and we
     have trust that yes, the numbers are workable, they are good and they
     are prudently conservative rather than excessively conservative, I could
     say that it is a step forward.
         Possibly we may find out that there are some comparable
     results between -- if we have probabilistic RESRAD -- between RESRAD and
     D&D.  So if we do that and they are comparable within, say, 10, 20
     percent, I mean, okay, we will accept that.  We could say you could use
     any code even for screening.  But currently, because we do not have
     sufficient confidence in the level of uncertainty and confidence in the
     dose levels that are derived, we say we will use D&D screen for
     screening.  However, for site specific, the licensees could use any
     other code, but they have to do, you know, the uncertainties and
     additional justification based on site-specific conditions.
         DR. GARRICK:  Can you say a few things about what you're
     actually doing to make the analysis probabilistic?
         MR. EID:  Yes.  What we are doing, already, as you know, D&D
     is a -- it is originally probabilistic but currently version 1, it is
     not probabilistic, it is deterministic, because the input parameters,
     they are single default data, they are inputted in the code.  So the
     PDFs for the different parameters were selected based on probabilistic
     approach; however, they are single values currently in version 1.  But
     we are doing work -- I guess there was a previous presentation by
     Research about developing a Monte Carlo version of D&D.  It's called
     version 2.0.  So we are hoping this version will be accessible to use by
     the staff and the licensee as soon as possible.
         Our information, that this will be within six to nine
     months, that would be produced assuming that the contract is placed.
         DR. GARRICK:  How are you going to obtain the PDF input
     parameters?
         MR. EID:  For RESRAD or D&D or --
         DR. GARRICK:  D&D, yes.
         MR. EID:  For D&D, already there are PDFs, but they were
     used for, you know, at the beginning, to start with, for singular
     radionuclides.  And then we tried to generate PDFs by having mixing
     those -- all of these radionuclides, mixing them together.  I tried to
     generate a dose which is, say, the 90th percentile of the dose based on
     those PDFs.  So the version -- this is version one.  version two will
     try to input the PDFs that they could respond to that radionuclide
     mixture or to that specific radionuclide.
         For example, currently, the code will assume all
     radionuclides that you have there and will try to modify those PDFs
     slightly in order to accommodate the 90th percentile level confidence
     for all radionuclides, regardless whether it does exist or does not
     exist.
         The version two, it will only account for the PDS that
     correspond only to the radionuclide present at the specific site.
         DR. GARRICK:  So is that how you deal with the site
     specificity?
         MR. EID:  Right.
         DR. GARRICK:  Because the screening -- when it's screening,
     it's really not probabilistic because it's a table of PDFs, right?
         MR. EID:  That's correct.
         DR. GARRICK:  All right.
         MR. EID:  That's correct.  So hopefully, possibly if we find
     that -- from Monte Carlo version, we may look at, say, fuel cycle
     facilities, they have specific radionuclides, could be five, six or ten
     radionuclides, so you run the code and see those correspond to this kind
     of source term; or if you have a nuclear power generator facility that
     has a specific source term, you only consider radionuclides for that
     specific source, you do not need to consider other kinds of
     radionuclides, that they may be an outlier causing the dose to be very
     high.
         DR. GARRICK:  Yes.
         Ray?
         DR. WYMER:  Well, I did attend the January working group
     meeting, and I thought there was a lot of good interplay between the
     industry and the staff and found a lot of receptiveness in the staff to
     the ideas that the industry came out with.
         One thing that struck me, however, was that there seemed to
     be, at least among a few of the industry people who stood up and talked,
     a strong tide running for why we're fooling around with D&D when we've
     got RESRAD, we know it works, we've been using, we're happy with it,
     we've got experienced people with it.  So we're still in that sort of
     dilemma of having two different approaches.
         What can you say about that now, Nick?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Well, I'll say what Cheryl Trottier said at
     the last workshop whenever a question was asked, and that's that D&D was
     an NRC staff code, it was developed, and it was -- since we had it, it
     was put on the street for use.
         I think Bobby indicated that, you know, it's appropriate for
     screening right now, and that if licensees want to use that or RESRAD,
     they can come in and just negotiate with the staff on which one they're
     going to use.
         DR. WYMER:  I have a recollection that the two codes didn't
     always come up with the same answer for the same situation.
         MR. ORLANDO:  And I think that's one of the things the dose
     modeling group is looking at, is trying to make sure that, you know,
     when the program version comes out or other versions of RESRAD come out
     or the input parameters that would go into the RESRAD, the doses will be
     coming out closer or, you know, within --
         DR. WYMER:  Within acceptable --
         MR. ORLANDO:  Within an acceptable range, I should say.
         MR. NELSON:  This is Bob Nelson from Division of Waste
     Management.  I would like to address that question, RESRAD versus D&D.
         We've said this several times during the workshops and it's
     important to stress that D&D was only intended originally as a screening
     code.  Because it was intended as a screening code, the default
     parameters set were set at a very high confidence level to achieve -- so
     that you would achieve a 25 millirem dose, and they were set based on
     probability distributions of the various input parameters, and because
     it was a screening code, the ultimate numbers were chosen, had to
     consider already nuclides.
         So regardless of what radionuclide you put into the code,
     you're going to come up -- the default parameters stay the same.  That's
     one of the problems with using it in a site-specific way that Bobby has
     talked about.
         The RESRAD -- the basic difference between RESRAD -- one of
     the basic differences between the two codes is the defaults that are
     used.  They were not determined the same way.  The default parameters
     for RESRAD were determined deterministically based on expert judgment.
         So one of the things that we are doing is developing under a
     contract -- Mark, maybe you can -- with Argonne to develop a same type
     of probabilistic default parameter set for RESRAD as was developed for
     D&D so that we have basically an apples and apples comparison rather
     than an apples and oranges comparison.  I think that will eliminate some
     of the confusion between the two codes.
         As Bobby talked about, we're developing the Monte Carlo
     front end to D&D to eliminate this problem of not being able to look at
     specific radionuclides and getting a more realistic dose out of the
     code.
         Both of these, of course, require time to implement.  The
     D&D Monte Carlo version won't be even at a beta -- test version won't be
     ready until, right, nine months, sometime in the Fall, and a final
     version won't be out until about a year from now.  So we have this
     interim period where we still have what we've got.
         DR. WYMER:  How will it impact your two-year
     let's-see-what-it-does period?
         MR. ORLANDO:  That two-year is -- that's for the dose -- the
     draft guidance GG-4006.  That was put out, and the comment period on
     that closes this year, August of this year.
         DR. WYMER:  But the trial runs will be done with the
     existing version.
         MR. ORLANDO:  I guess what I'm saying is there was no
     Commission-directed two-year time frame for evaluating the code.
         DR. WYMER:  Okay.
         MR. NELSON:  One other point I wanted to make, that even
     once we have these -- so we are on a path to getting better -- code
     working tools out there, but we still have another issue with the codes. 
     Once -- even if you have these probabilistic determined defaults in both
     codes that are similar, how do you change to go from a -- the default to
     a site-specific parameter?  And if you change one parameter, how does
     that impact the other parameters?  What linkages are there and what
     other parameters do you have to consider when you consider changing a
     parameter?
         That's another issue that the dose modelling working group
     will be addressing during this development period, and some of the
     guidance we're going to have to put out is how do you change default
     parameters, what justification do you have to supply to change from
     default parameters to site-specific parameters.
         DR. WYMER:  That does a good job of answering my question.
         DR. GARRICK:  I guess I'm still struggling a little bit with
     the merit of a Monte Carlo calculation at the screening level where, you
     know, uncertainty and probabilistic has meaning if you're talking about
     a specific situation.  But when you're talking about a generic
     situation, I'm having trouble rationalizing what that means.  I mean, if
     you're just trying to demonstrate that Monte Carlo can do probabilistic
     arithmetic, you know, we know that, but what's the significance of it?
         MR. EID:  I agree with you.  I think the -- at the end, if
     you think that you have all sorts of mixtures of radionuclides at your
     site and all sorts of environmental conditions and then you need to go
     look at the 90th percentile, and then when you apply it, you find that
     you are not at the 90th percentile, you are at the 99th percentile, you
     will have excessive dose for sure.  The question is what to do about it. 
     This issue was raised and there was a suggestion for a grouping.
         I guess there was also a suggestion by the ACNW, by the way,
     about almost -- how many months? -- nine months ago in the presentation
     about the grouping of radionuclides, for example, uranium and thorium,
     or other kinds of radionuclides.  This way, you could reduce the extent
     of conservatism in this process, grouping possibly on -- based on soil
     types, that you don't need to have KD value that corresponds to all
     kinds of soil types and all types of geochemical conditions, a grouping
     possibly based on environmental conditions like rainfall.  So those are
     the possibilities that, you know, we could do as far as screening.
         MR. EID:  This is Mark Thaggard.  Would you like to add onto
     that?
         MR. THAGGARD:  Yes.  I think your question is why are we
     trying to calculate the probability on this.  I think the original idea
     was to try to come up with the confidence that at any given site, you're
     going to see the dose criteria, so that if you -- the idea was that if
     you go into the dose assessment analysis with no information about the
     site, these -- PDF is supposed to be based on national data, so if you
     take any site in the country, just randomly pick a site no know nothing
     about that site, and you run a dose assessment, what is the probability
     that you're making a mistake by releasing this site when, in fact, you
     shouldn't be releasing it.  This was the original idea of trying to come
     up with a probability.  It was to give us some level of confidence in
     terms of whether we are releasing sites that we shouldn't be releasing,
     and there's some debate as to whether or not we are correctly
     quantifying that, but that was the original intent.
         I don't know if that answers your question.
         DR. GARRICK:  I think that's an expression of honesty.
         MR. NELSON:  I would like to follow up on that, because
     Bobby brought up an example during his discussion of an existing problem
     where, if you run RESRAD as it -- or D&D as it is now for strontium and
     cesium, you get ridiculously high numbers.  They don't make sense.  And
     that's because the default parameters set has been established based on
     all radionuclides rather than given radionuclides or a given mixture.
         What the Monte Carlo version will be able to do is you'll be
     able to put in a specific mixture, it will calculate the default
     parameter set for that specific mixture and give you a screening value
     for that mixture.
         We have done that.  Bobby has looked at that for the
     strontium and cesium, and have compared it to RESRAD, and the values,
     once -- when you do this for a specific radionuclide mixture, they come
     much closer to what RESRAD would give you for the same calculation. 
     They're not exact, but they're within an order of magnitude closer.
         So that's the value.  It's still a screening tool, but it
     gives you a better screening value, a more realistic screening value
     based on the radionuclides you have rather than assuming that every
     radionuclide that -- is there.
         DR. HORNBERGER:  When you say it gives you a more realistic
     value, more realistic compared to real data or more realistic compared
     to RESRAD, which we don't know what the result means anyway.
         MR. NELSON:  Well, when I say realism, I guess it's a
     subjective realism.  When you look at what D&D gives you for strontium
     90 at a pico curie per gram and it says that your dose is going to be 60
     millirem per year, that, to me, is unreasonable.  Okay.  So by lowering
     the number, that becomes to me more realistic.  Whether it's the exact
     right number or not, I don't know, but it certainly gives you an answer
     that you don't say, well, that answer is worthless, 60 millirem.  Of
     course it's not 60 millirem.
         So in the calculations that we ran, and these were
     preliminary numbers, but the strontium dose went from 60 under current
     D&D to a little under 15 with the Monte Carlo approach, and that's
     compared to about five for RESRAD.  So it's a significant change for
     someone who is doing a screening review.  I mean, if they can pass it at
     15, but they've got -- if they've got 15 or somewhere in that range and
     they're stuck with trying to screen 60, I mean, there's just -- you
     know, it seems a significant difference there.
         So I think it's -- I think the code -- the improvement is of
     great benefit in the screening area because it's going to give numbers
     that are tailored to the radionuclides that are of interest.
         MR. LARSON:  I didn't think it was two codes that were
     similar for each different radionuclide.  That's for some radionuclides,
     one was higher than the other, and depending -- you know, so -- it
     sounds like there was a lot of changing that you had to do to get
     similar realistic or unrealistic results for each of the radionuclides.
         MR. EID:  I believe the two models here are different.  They
     would yield somehow different values.  However, if you try to adjust the
     source term to make it similar, say make RESRAD, the top 15, the
     contamination the top 15 centimeter, and the thickness of the
     unsaturated zone around one meter, that's one thing to try to shape your
     source term, to make it similar to D&D, and then try to input a default
     value similar to what we have in D&D, you will get, somehow, some
     comparable values.
         An example for cesium, I found that the -- after -- you
     know, for a single radionuclide, if you do that, you will get 2.27 and
     2.3.  It is not a joke, those are real numbers.  I ran them.  They are
     so close to each other.
         So the models possibly -- yes, we had differences in the
     models, and we may have differences in the peak dose at the time, I
     guess.  You know, this is also another difference because one model
     tends to retard, other model tends to have infiltration and the material
     moves much faster through the aquifer.
         However, at the end, it looks like the numbers are similar
     if you adjust the source term, the default values, and if you look at
     the right time for the peak dose.
         DR. GARRICK:  Do you want to say anything more about the
     workshops themselves and how they went?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Well, as Boby said, based on the comments that
     we got from the participants, they were extremely appreciate of the fact
     just in general that the staff is doing this outreach before we write
     down what we think the answers are.
         There is concern from the industry on exactly some of the
     issues that you raised -- you know, why do we have two codes?  You know,
     what's going on here?
         The industry, my impression, and this is just my impression
     from the workshops and it may be rather simplistic observations, but the
     industry, especially the nuclear power industry, is extremely concerned
     right now about costs.  They always have been, but with deregulation, I
     think they're even more concerned.  They are concerned about making sure
     what they do is being done cost-effectively in decommissioning.
         For example, they are very interested in seeing if they
     can't take their thousand-acre site that is 95 percent buffer zone and
     getting it down to something that includes the parking lot, the reactor
     building, and the areas that actually have been impacted by operations. 
     They don't want to be in a situation where they're out surveying via
     MARSSIM woods.  So that's things that they've come to us and talked
     about.
         In addition, they are interested in making sure that when
     they do the assessments that we're going to ask for -- and one of the
     reactors have indicated they're going to come in for restricted use.  In
     fact, Paul Genoa from NEI has said that's not going -- that none of them
     are planning that right now.  But they have come in and I think they're
     concerned about finality.  They realize that, you know, the license
     termination rule is relatively new, the Part 50 rule is relatively new,
     they're struggling with sending in the first post-shutdown facility
     decommissioning activities report, the PSDARs are just starting to come
     in.  That's the first thing that comes in when you shut down a reactor,
     or after the certification.
         Nobody sent in a licensed termination plan yet.  They're
     interested in the interlink between the decommissioning plan standard
     review plan and the license termination plan review.
         One of the things we did at the last workshop was very --
     this question came up, and we did a very quick sort of ad hoc overview
     of the interaction between NMSS and NRR with respect to reviewing
     license termination plans and decommissioning plans, and I'm not sure
     that the industry understood that, at least the power plants didn't.
         On the materials side, their concerns are the same.  They
     see -- they're more used to dealing with decommissioning plan concepts
     and things, so it's not too bad, but they still have the concerns that
     the power industry has, finality, making sure that what they send in is
     done, doesn't generate reams and reams and reams of requests for
     additional information and additional justification and everything else.
         One of the things that my management has told us is that
     they want to see us start limiting the numbers of requests for
     additional information to one.  Have the interactions with the industry
     during the reviews of the plans, publicly notice it, publicly -- make
     that information publicly available, but don't have ten or five or
     three, you know, sets of 60 questions going back and forth.
         Then there are the technical questions, looking at -- you
     know, finding alpha emitters, measuring that under the MARSSIM, partial
     site release even for fuel facility plants, things like that.
         So I think, to sum it all up as far as the workshops, I
     think they've been good.  I think the industry appreciates the fact that
     we're doing this.  I think they are slowly -- probably not by this time
     -- they're comfortable with coming in and talking to the staff about
     things that they find and problems that they have.  So I think they've
     been good.
         That's just sort of my observations on the things that have
     come up and the things that I heard while I'm sitting there in the
     workshops.
         MR. EID:  I would like to add to Nick that in addition, the
     data that is generated by the licensee and then we use, it is really
     invaluable.  The data is so important we do not find it in a published
     paper or in a journal, and that is we -- after going through the QAQC of
     the data and we feel confident using the data that they have, this will
     give us one step further in moving towards using the right thing.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Yes, as Boby said, you know, for resuspension
     factors, really the only study was what -- that's the '66 data, I think? 
     '64 data?
         MR. EID:  The reference we use is '63, '64 data, and we have
     some skepticism from the beginning about the data, how it was used and
     so on, but because it is the only reliable data -- it was published in
     the Journal and has lots of data points, so we use references, and we
     are updating this information.
         DR. WYMER:  There is a sort of a sleeper out there with
     respect to this decontamination and termination of license and
     restricted license termination that has to do with the potential
     ultimate role of NRC and what are now DOE's problem.
         You know, if you take over regulation of the DOE sites, what
     thinking have you done with respect to that?  And the kind of thing I'm
     thinking about in particular is when you look over the DOE sites and
     their potential long-range problems, one of the big things you see is
     there's a lot of -- an awful lot of pump and treat going on forever,
     essentially, because you never really do get the activity down.
         Have you done any thinking at all or is it too premature? 
     You've got too much on your plate to even worry about that right now if
     you do take over the DOE problems?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Well, officially, my understanding is that
     Secretary Richardson has kind of pulled back from that a little bit. 
     There's not --
         DR. WYMER:  Yes, but secretaries come and go, you know?
         MR. ORLANDO:  Yes, that's true.  Congress has not finally
     spoken, so I'm not sure where that is going to go.
         To be honest with you, no, I haven't -- or I don't think we
     have thought about how we would manage a DOE facility other than if it
     were to remain, you know, pump and treat forever, then it would remain
     under some kind of license or some kind of regulatory control.
         It seems, just off the top of my head, it would be
     relatively easy to impose the restricted use criteria on that facility
     in a 25 millirem, 100 millirem if there's a -- if loss of control, or a
     500 millirem under the alternate criteria.  Maybe a DOE facility -- you
     could never terminate a license.
         DR. WYMER:  Yes.
         MR. ORLANDO:  And maybe there wouldn't be -- again, just my
     opinion -- maybe there would not be any utility in ever terminating
     whatever regulatory hook we have at a DOE facility if it's that badly
     contaminated, or if they're continuing those kinds of operations.
         DR. WYMER:  Yes, but surely you're not turning your
     attention to that problem until it becomes your real problem.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Right.  Right now, we're just, again, trying
     to -- at least for restricted use, we've enough things to do with the
     fuel cycle facilities and other folks.
         DR. WYMER:  Yes.  Okay.
         MR. NELSON:  This is Bob Nelson again.
         I agree with Nick, we really haven't factored potential of
     overseeing DOE into this development process, but DOE has --
     representatives have attended the workshops and they have commented on
     various issues as we go through them.  So they have been a participant,
     and we hope they will continue to be a participant in the workshops.
         So we value their input, but we're not, within the scope of
     with document, trying to -- looking at it as potentially encompassing
     DOE sites.
         DR. WYMER:  Are you making sure you're not building yourself
     into a hole?  If that does happen -- I don't see anything in it that
     would indicate that you are constructing a situation that you won't be
     able to dig out of if you do take over the DOE stuff.
         MR. ORLANDO:  I don't think so.  I mean, if they're going to
     go for unrestricted use, they can --
         DR. WYMER:  Well, unrestricted, there's no problem with it.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Yes.
         DR. WYMER:  It's the restricted use.
         DR. GARRICK:  At DOE, it's a problem.
         MR. LARSON:  At the last workshop, the DOE guy got up and
     said, I don't care what anybody else is using, but we're using RESRAD.
         MR. ORLANDO:  That's true.  That was a DOE guy, yes.
         MR. LARSON:  One question on the schedule.  I ought to
     remember it, Nick, but I don't.  You're coming back into the committee
     after you get the public comments and gin them up so -- isn't that
     towards the end of the year?
         MR. ORLANDO:  I believe so, yes, or we can come back at some
     other time if you're interested to discuss some of the issues after
     you've had a chance to think about them.  I think -- I would have to go
     back and look at the actual time line that we did.  I mean, I can't
     answer it --
         MR. NELSON:  We're scheduled to issue or complete the draft
     modules with the exception of dose modeling in June, so if we're no
     schedule, everything should be done but the dose modeling guidance in
     June.  If you'd want to have a brief in the late -- I don't think you're
     meeting in August or September, so if you -- if you want to have a
     briefing in July on the SRP up to that point, we could probably do that,
     but we would have to look at the specific schedule.  But it might be too
     close to actual completion of the SRP to do that.  Maybe the early Fall
     would be a better time.  We'd have completed most of the workshops by
     that time and could probably -- and would be a lot further along on some
     of the dose modeling issues at that point to give you a better status
     report.
         DR. GARRICK:  Any other comments, questions, discussions?
         Thank you for the update.
         MR. ORLANDO:  Thank you for letting me introduce the people
     who sat over there who did most of the updating.
         DR. GARRICK:  And I think we'll take our second break at
     this point, and I guess we'll go off the record for the rest of the day.
         [Whereupon, at 3:50 p.m., the recorded portion of the
     meeting was concluded.]

 

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